= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Punoxysm comments on Politics is hard mode - 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 (107)
"Hard mode" sounds too metal. The proper response to "X is hard mode" is "Bring it on!"
Therefore I object to "politics is hard mode" for the same reason I object to "driving a car with your eyes closed is hard mode". Both statements are true, but phrased to produce maximum damage.
There's also a way that "politics is hard mode" is worse than playing a video game on hard mode, or driving a car on hard mode. If you play the video game and fail, you know and you can switch back to an easier setting. If you drive a car in "hard mode" and crash into a tree, you know you should keep your eyes open the next time.
If you discuss politics in "hard mode", you can go your entire life being totally mind-killed (yes! I said it!) and just think everyone else is wrong, doing more and more damage each time you open your mouth and destroying every community you come in contact with.
Can you imagine a human being saying "I'm sorry, I'm too low-level to participate in this discussion"? There may be a tiny handful of people wise enough to try it - and ironically, those are probably the same handful who have a tiny chance of navigating the minefield. Everyone else is just going to say "No, I'm high-enough level, YOU'RE the one who needs to bow out!"
Both "hard mode" and "mind-killer" are intended to convey a sense of danger, but the first conveys a fun, exciting danger that cool people should engage with as much as possible in order to prove their worth, and the latter conveys an extreme danger that can ruin everything and which not only clouds your faculties but clouds the faculty to realize that your faculties are clouded. As such, I think "mind-killer" is the better phrase.
EDIT: More succintly: both phrases mean the same thing, but with different connotations. "Hard mode" sounds like we should accord more status to politics, "mind-killer" sounds like we should accord less. I feel like incentivizing more politics is a bad idea and will justify this if anyone disagrees.
Personally, I think mind-killer is jargony, hard mode less so, and hard mode can also convey the idea that you should be humble when approaching that discussion, that you should take more seriously an "I think we're getting off track" or "I think we are talking around some fundamentally different assumptions" from other discussants.
And no, the consequences of talking about politics are not that grave. I mean you seem to blog about politics all the time and you have not yet imploded.
The consequences of talking about politics have historically made empire-sweeping changes about religion, slavery, gender, warfare, welfare, culture, honor, social stigma, social divide, economics, prosperity, technology, and even politics itself!
Talking about politics has also started wars and made people start involving themselves in the slave trade and other such unhappy things.
And because the Internet Law calls for it: Talking about politics is what caused Hitler to become propped up by other people to the authority he had and what caused other people to listen to him and do those things I don't need to mention.
Every political fanatic you've ever heard of, who showed up in a newspaper because he burned down a preschool in the name of [insert ideology], got to the point of doing that because of people talking about politics (or sufficiently politics-like topics).
I think the consequences are grave enough to warrant Yvain's level of concern.