= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on [Link] Nerds are nuts - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (44)
See? Looks like I haven't been talking gibberish after all! Or, at least, someone wise shares some of my paranoid delusions. He even points to the two most infamous technocratic states specifically.
A pity that he hasn't mentioned another important thing: that being convinced of one's total freedom from dogma (and founding your philisophy on this "difference" between you and the brainwashed masses) is the most dangerous dogma of all, and nerds are very likely to be convinced of just that.
(It's easy to glimpse some scary moments of that dogma on the blog of a certain locally famous software engineer... although, as I said, he's far from the worst of it.)
I doubt it. A more dangerous dogma probably involves something to do with killing.
Um, how to put it... it leads to stunning intolerance for other kinds of "dogma", including wholesome, psychologically healthy ideology or religion. Religious fanatics might hate infidels, but at least they can understand & admit vital human feelings like faith; intolerance for "blindness" or "delusion", the insistence that there's one calculable right way to run things is culturally destructive, throwing the baby out with the bathwater in literally all cases - even iif it might spare individuals, it enroaches upon the complex, often beautiful patterns of their culture.
I hope you wouldn't deny that the "rationality" of RAND, RAF Marshal Harris, Kissinger or their Soviet/Chinese counterparts - the "rationality" of Dr. Strangelove - has been like a grey, soulless plague upon civilization. They all would've said that it produced slightly less misery than the alternatives they've considered, but I maintain that the indirect damage to humanity has been off the scale, and needn't have happened if our cleverness hadn't outstripped our sanity.
Go read Orwell's or someone else's notes about how we lost a gentler, less callous way of thought in the early 20th century, one that was so entwined with Christianity as to rot away and leave a gaping hole with the advance of aggressive materialism.
No. I think you are failing to understand the difference between the meanings of the phrases "I express disapproval of" and "the most dangerous of all".
I'm telling you, IMO it's an enormous memetic threat to human civilization as a whole, and not just to the well-being of individual lives.
Which notes of Orwell's are you referring to? Orwell has seen tyranny and cruelty since boarding school. I really can't see him succumbing to wistful nostalgia.
Notes on the Way
That's for a start. I already linked to that essay in the quotes thread. Also, one more in the same vein.
My Country Right or Left:
There's other such bits of left-conservative, anti-pragmatist sentiment sprinkled throughout his essays. Hell, it's not a stretch to call him a National Socialist. I suggest that you take a fresh look, without the conventional view of Orwell - a petit-bourgeois view, I'd say - coloring your perception.
Also!
Oh, but he did. Read Coming Up for Air.
What sort of fanatics do you mean? Most fanatics that I'm familiar with think that the equivalent virtue in service of a different ideology is not analogous simply because it is in service of the opposing ideology.
Crusaders didn't tend to say that jihadists were like them, only Muslim. Only we who use the outside view can see the parallel.