Maybe it needs further explanation? Ink being the object with which books are created, and knowledge put down for others to use, you must be careful to avoid using that object directly and believing you have gained knowledge from it.

The blog post itself isn't the great insight, nor is the Reddit software it's running on, or the comment system, or the upvoting and downvoting. Insight can only come from the mind, and understanding the words and how they all link together into the idea being presented. The idea isn't in the text; it's an abstraction of the human mind.

Perhaps better summarized as, "Don't just read: think."

I think I surf the internet because I'm lonely.

One thing that caught my eye is the presentation of "Universe is not filled with technical civilizations..." as data against the hypothesis of modern civilizations being probable.

It occurs to me that this could mean any of three things, which only one of which indicates that modern civilizations are improbable.

1) Modern civilizations are in fact as rare as they appear to be because they are unlikely to emerge. This is the interpretation used by this article.

2) Modern civilizations collapse quickly back to a premodern state, either by fighting a very destructive war, by high-probability natural disasters, by running out of critical resources, or by a cataclysmic industrial accident such as major climate change or a Gray Goo event.

This would undermine an attempt to judge the odds of modern civilizations emerging based on a small sample size. If (2) is true, the fact that we haven't seen a modern civilization doesn't mean it doesn't exist; it's more likely to mean that it didn't last long enough to appear on our metaphorical radar. All we know with high confidence is that there haven't been any modern civilizations on Earth before us, which places an upper bound on the likely range of probabilities for it to happen; Earth may be a late bloomer, but it's unlikely to be such a late bloomer that three or four civilizations would have had time to emerge before we got here.

3) The apparent rarity of modern civilizations could just be a sign that we are bad at detecting them. We know that alien civilizations haven't visited us in the historic past, that they haven't colonized Earth before we got here, and that they haven't beamed detectable transmissions at us, but those quite plausibly be explained by other factors. Some hypotheses come to mind for me, but I removed them for the sake of brevity; they are available if anyone's interested.

Anyway, where I was going with all this: I can see a lot of alternate interpretations to explain the fact that we haven't detected evidence of modern civilizations in our galaxy, some of which would make it hard to infer anything about the likelihood of civilizations emerging from the history of our own planet. That doesn't mean I think that considering the problem isn't worthwhile, though.

So to objectify someone is to think of him in a way that doesn't include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood?

According to this definition, I objectify the bus driver, the cashier at the local Walmart, and just about everybody I interact with on an average day.

This is an actual dream I once had. I was with an old Chinese wise man, and he told me I could fly - he showed me I just had to stick out my elbows and flap them up and down (just like in the chicken dance). Once you'd done that a few times, you could just lift up your legs and you'd stay off the ground. He and I were flying around and around in this manner. I was totally amazed that it was possible for people to fly this way. It was so obvious! I thought this is so great a discovery, I can't wait til I wake up and do this for real. It'll change the world. I woke up totally excited and for just a fraction of a second I still believed it, then I guess my waking brain turned something on and I realised, no, that can't work. damn.

So I'd offer: being told that human beings are capable of flying in a way that's completely obvious once you've seen it done.

One of my favorite books, but do you think it's appropriate for this list?

The main problem is viewing this warm fuzziness as a "mystery." This warm fuzziness, as an experience, is a reality. It's part of that set of things that doesn't go away no matter what you say or think about them.

I'm not sure I agree with this. How you feel about religion is very strongly driven by what you think about it. If you think it is the truth then religion is awesome and profound, if you think its a constructed mythology then probably not so much. I'd suggest even the very fact that it is a "mysterious truth", adds to the enjoyment of believing it.

Sure I agree that the human potential for warm fuzzy experiences exists independently of religion, but in the end the fact may remain that religious stories are better at generating them than any formulation of the truth is.

If we're going to be rational, we have to accept this possibility is open, and being rational may be a trade-off in terms of what you might feel throughout your life. On the other hand it's possible through future psychological and brain science discoveries we may find its possible to get more warm fuzzies than religion might give us without resorting to false beliefs, but I don't think we know that yet.

Objections to this statement seem to be 1) the highly loaded descriptions of the rich and the poor and 2) the juxtaposition of the descriptions without an explicit relationship.

While an examination of word choice might allow you get to a less loaded formulation of its content. eg. The rich, who have much, enjoy luxury while the poor suffer. It doesn't get to the fact that the statement is an attempt to draw us into an implicit connection between the two descriptions. The statement is only connected by a "while", which might connect any two facts, but in practice we only bring the facts together in order to contrast or compare them. This is a nice set up for the rhetorician because the connection we make is ultimately our own, and often not explicitly known to ourselves. The capitalist objects, but is not sure to what, precisely, because he can't find it in the statement.

Now if I object to the statement of the grounds that it is emotionally loaded, I am not directly addressing this implicit point of the statement. I could fall into the trap of being seen as an apologist for the rich if I only object to their description but not the implication.

But I wonder if I should object that statement is not untrue as such, but that the point of it isn't clear, would that be taken to mean that I just don't get the implicit point of it? That I'm simply unsympathetic to the emotions of the statement?

Why not make the implicit explicit (as it can be)? Why not treat the statement as if was an explicit statement of what it tried to be implicitly?

I think that point of the statement is to assert either that the rich are directly responsible for the condition of the poor, or at least that the rich fail in their moral obligations toward the poor; response:

Sorry, are you saying that the rich are directly responsible for the condition of the poor, or just that the rich fail in their moral obligations toward the poor?