= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eugine_Nier comments on What bothers you about Less Wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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 (160)
I don't know how the cult alarms work, they're intuitive. I know all those things and indeed it's probably a false alarm but I thought I should mention it anyway.
Still, if religious orgs have anything to say to rationalists about rationality then somehting, somewhere, is very very wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not the case or that we shouldn't listen to them, but at the very least we should have noticed the stuff they're saying on our own long ago.
I never actually stated that I accepted what the feeling said, only that I HAD the feeling. I am in fact unsure of what to think and thus I'm trying to forward the raw data I'm working from (my intuitions) rather than my interpretation of what they mean. I should have made that clearer.
Besides, regardless of if the feeling of being creeped out is justified or not the fact they creep people out is a problem and they should try to communicate the same ideas in ways that don't creep people out so much. I don't like being creeped out.
Nick Szabo has a good essay about why we should expect (religious) traditions to contain valuable insights.
seconded. tradition as a computational shortcut is a very important insight that I have tried (and mostly failed) to communicate to others.
more generally, memes take advantage of consistent vulnerabilities in human reasoning to transmit themselves. the fact that they use this propagation method says nothing about the value of their memetic payload.
we should pay attention to successful memes if we want to generate new successful memes.
Your first and second paragraph somewhat contradict each other - I agree that some traditions may be undervalued by people who'd prefer to reinvent things from whole cloth (from a software engineering perspective: rewriting a complex system you don't understand is risky), but as you say, traditions may have been selected for self-relication more than for their actual value to humans.
If you consider selection at the family, village or tribe/nation level, maybe tradition's "fitness" is how much they help the people that follow them, but many traditions are either quite recent, or evolved in a pretty different environment. So I don't know how much value to attribute to tradition in general.
More than a teenage atheist typing in all caps, less than an evangelical :p
But seriously, I think us geeky types tend toward the a priori solution in far too many circumstances. We like things neat and tidy. Untangling traditional social hierarchies and looking for lessons seems to appeal to very few.