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TimS comments on [Link] Nerds are nuts - Less Wrong Discussion

25 [deleted] 07 June 2012 07:48AM

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Comment author: Multiheaded 08 June 2012 09:53:30AM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: TimS 08 June 2012 02:36:24PM 0 points [-]

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.