Nor joke warfare

Yes, but you would never turn down the offer in the first place, so it's moot.

So my brother was watching Bullshit, and saw an exorcist claim that whenever a kid mentions having an invisible friend, they (the exorcist) tell the kid that the friend is a demon that needs exorcising.

Now, being a professional exorcist does not give a high prior for rationality.

But still, even given that background, that's a really uncritically stupid thing to say. And it occurred to me that in general, humans say some really uncritically stupid things to children.

I wonder if this uncriticality has anything to do with, well, not expecting to be criticized. If most of the hacks that humans use in place of rationality are socially motivated, we can safely turn them off when speaking to a child who doesn't know any better.

I wonder how much benefit we'd get, then, by imagining ourselves in all our internal dialogues to be speaking to someone very critical, and far smarter than us?

One more thing -- there's actually three bedrooms that will be available for the rest of July. If anyone needs a place to stay just until the start of August (or heck, even for just a few days), we'd be happy to have you, probably at reduced rent.

Data point: After years of having the correct arguments in my hand, having indeed generated many of them myself, and simply refusing to update, Eliezer, Cectic, and Dan Meissler ganged up on me and got the job done.

I think Jesus and Mo helped too, now I think of it. That period's already getting murky in my head =/

Anyhow, point is, none of the above are what you'd call gentle.

ETA: I really do think humor is incredibly corrosive to religion. Years before this, the closest I ever came to deconversion was right after I read "Kissing Hank's Ass"

Can we go further than this and declare a blanket moratorium on "1 and 2" or "a and b" taxonomies?

One person not believing in the existence of another is relatively new to humans, and our social rules are not set up to handle it.

I think the idea that one human not believing in the existence of another is in some way rude or disrespectful has already been somewhat established, and is often used (mostly implicitly) as reason for believing in God. (ie, a girl I dated once claimed that she imagined herself becoming an atheist, imagined God's subsequent disappointment in her, and this convinced her somehow of the existence of God)

That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.

(On the other hand, Michael Vassar often claims that this quote is as disingenuous as a strong man saying "That which can be destroyed by lions should be.")

Did the evil overlord list exist publicly in 1991? I was actually a bit confused by Harry's laughter here. Eliezer seems to be working pretty hard to keep things actually in 1991 (truth and beauty, the journal of irreproducible results, etc.)

Carl:

Three cheers for Tricycle!

=P