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TheOtherDave comments on Lonely Dissent - Less Wrong
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ooh - neat. So the joining mechanism doesn't necessarily have to go one way... that's a useful life-hack to know. Talk yourself into it by talking somebody else into it.
I can also see how this mechanism can be abused. Think of all those religions that require their members to evangelise. I'm sure it helps them to believe more strongly in the rightness of their cause.
(nods) I've seen, though I cannot currently cite, studies to this effect about Mormon missionaries... that is, that missionaries don't convert many outsiders, but that the experience of being a missionary increases many people's commitment to the faith.
More generally, acting on an idea makes it easier to believe that idea.
Investing in X increases X's stakes......
Also, as Dennett would point out, you are more likely to defend something for which views are polarized, than something for which they are almost all the same. We do not spend much time discussing shoes wearing, but abortion......
Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" discusses this notion. His conclusion being that if you want to value something, start investing time in it. ie - you can bootstrap your own life-interests... which is kinda cool if you're the kind of person searching for "meaning" in life. It means you can do something about it by simply picking something and running with it.
well, I'd argue that some people spend an awful lot of time discussing such things ;) but I agree. Mostly we talk about things that we disagree on.
I guess that for certain topics, we don't have anything left to discuss - so it's considered a done-deal. We only get heated up where there's something left to hammer out.
More converts are obtained then are born into the church. Since missionaries are in pairs then last year there were an average of 10 converts per missionary pair. Does this count as many or few?
That surprises me. But if that's a typical result (as opposed to an artifact of averaging conversions from other sources over number of missionaries) over a relatively short time-interval, then yeah, I simply stand corrected. Can you cite?