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wedrifid comments on Politics is hard mode - Less Wrong Discussion

27 Post author: RobbBB 21 July 2014 10:14PM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 22 July 2014 10:41:18AM 2 points [-]

While "politics is hard mode" is technically closer to the truth than "politics is the mind killer", it fails to serve the phrase's social function as well.

I concur with the problem assessment: its social function in practice is to assure the group that other people's politics are mindkilled, whereas their own politics are just the normal background.

This has a number of fairly obvious problems.

Being mindkilled feels from the inside like clear thinking.

Comment author: wedrifid 22 July 2014 12:39:04PM 4 points [-]

Being mindkilled feels from the inside like clear thinking.

Not exactly. Clear thinking often has all those telltale feelings of humility where I change my mind and learn new things. Unfortunately most of our conclusions are cached and being mindkilled makes us incapable of (or uninterested in) distinguishing between cached clear thoughts, cached mind-killed conclusions or new mind-killed reasoning created on the fly.