= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
brazil84 comments on Stranger Than History - 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 (329)
Those who advocate that the world is going to hell, do they point to a certain era as the most rational time, and what would have caused the downturn?
EDIT: Mainly asking this question in order to find out how they measure rationality, as right now I find the point of view rather surprising.
I don't think the world is going to hell, but I do think that wealth and power can give you more luxury to hold irrational beliefs. So perhaps people were more rational back in the days of our noble savage ancestors and it's been downhill ever since. :)
Since holding irrational beliefs tends to result in eventually loosing one's wealth and power, this tends to work as a negative feedback effect.
I'm not sure this is true because of standby-rationality mode. Also known as hypocrisy.
Agreed. Powerful people (especially politicians) seem to hold plenty of irrational beliefs. Of course we can't really tell the difference between lying about irrational beliefs and hypocrisy, if there's a meaningful difference for the outside observer at all.
The problem is that the politician who honestly holds a popular irrational belief (assuming said belief isn't directly related to the mechanisms of election campaigns) is better able to signal it and thus more likely to get elected than the politician who merely false claims to hold it.
I'm not sure about that. As Granny Weatherwax points out in Wyrd Sisters, "Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things."
Or, to put it a different way, if one concentrates on the signalling, and if one is reasonably competent at acting, and isn't caught in the act of breaking character, one can signal a belief a lot better than someone who merely holds said belief.
That depends on whether you're trying to fool outsiders or fellow believers.
Deliberate intent is more likely to produce a superstimulus than chance, yes. Stack the modifiers. Politicians tend to be those who happened to already hold something close to the ideal belief, then deliberately took steps to refine their faith in it as well as their ability to present it to others.
Faking sincerity isn't easy. The person who seems like he's putting effort into proving that he has a certain belief looks different than the person who isn't out to prove that he's holding the belief and simply believes.
Presenting a belief as an unspoken assumption in a very light way is something that usually happens with a true believer but not with someone who acts like he believes.
You can tell a joke in a way that the person who listens laughs for a few seconds. You can also tell it in a way that the person suddenly get's a realization when he comes home after a few hours. The subtlety that you need for the brain spending hours processing the joke is a hard skill.
It's not impossible to learn. I don't know excatly what Obama does to get the kind of emotional effects in his audience he does. That's more than just being reasonably competent at acting. On the other hand not every politician is at that rhetorical level.
I'd expect politicians to be much better at occlumency than the general population, though.
Standby-rationality mode isn't nearly as good as actual rational reasoning. Also hypocrisy creates cognitive dissonance (both in individuals and institutions) that tends to be resolved by actually adopting the (false) beliefs one is claiming to believe.
Can you give me a couple concrete examples of this?
Same question. TIA