EY "Politics is the Mind Killer" sighting at Washington Examiner and Reason.com

buybuydandavis

Original at Washington Examiner

http://washingtonexaminer.com/down-with-politics/article/2508882#.UGSscI0iYZm

...

Politics makes us worse because "politics is the mindkiller," as intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it. "Evolutionary psychology produces strange echoes in time," he writes, "as adaptations continue to execute long after they cease to maximize fitness." We gorge ourselves sick on sugar and fat, and we indulge our tribal hard-wiring by picking a political "team" and denouncing the "enemy."

But our atavistic Red/Blue tribalism plays to the interests of "individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them," Yudkowsky writes.

...

Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."

Repost at Reason.com

http://reason.com/archive/2012/09/25/why-politics-are-bad-for-us

Original at Washington Examiner

http://washingtonexaminer.com/down-with-politics/article/2508882#.UGSscI0iYZm

...

Politics makes us worse because "politics is the mindkiller," as intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it. "Evolutionary psychology produces strange echoes in time," he writes, "as adaptations continue to execute long after they cease to maximize fitness." We gorge ourselves sick on sugar and fat, and we indulge our tribal hard-wiring by picking a political "team" and denouncing the "enemy."

But our atavistic Red/Blue tribalism plays to the interests of "individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them," Yudkowsky writes.

...

Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."

Repost at Reason.com

http://reason.com/archive/2012/09/25/why-politics-are-bad-for-us

Or you might pretend to be good, and push on us in nefarious ways we wouldn't even notice so that we end up saying things like "Go Eliezer".

I've heard you are in the possession of fully general mind-hacks. Just like painting asteroids and poisoning tigers, right?

Go Eliezer! Save us from the Forces of Bad. (ha ha only serious).

I've heard you are in the possession of fully general mind-hacks.

If so he must have been using them on us in order to make his argument that such a thing is not theoretically possible so compelling. ie. Eliezer needs to be operating from outside our physical reality in order to have fully general mind-hacks and in that case the mind hacks are the least of our worries. (Unless that is what he wants us to think.)

7Shmi14y

How would you tell the difference between him pretending to be good and being good, whatever you mean by good? (This is the basic question of rationality.)