Many big-L Libertarians I've met - along with those who consider themselves to be trench-fighters for Ayn Rand-ian Objectivism - seem to want to conflate "selfishness" with "enlightened self-interest" for the positive connotations of the latter... yet their rationale for various big-L proposals (such as "let's turn over national security to corporations, who will certainly never abuse the power to force decisions upon people") tends to be of the extremely rosy, happy death spiral, declare-anything-that-doesn't-fit-an-"externality" variety. That seems somewhat removed from any meaning of "enlightened" that approaches sensibility; and that's coming from a mild, little-l, "A free society means you need a reason to make things illegal" libertarian framing.

Ultimately, I can understand the "It's So Simple! (tm)" appeal of claiming that selfishness itself is good as an absolute, but delivering that advice only appears to hold true - at either a societal OR individual level - if the scoreboard is measuring relative altruistic effects. A benefit to oneself that derives from (having helped propagate) a mutually self-interested society only qualifies as a benefit relative to 1) a society of self-sacrificial lemmings (which is a bit of a straw man); or 2) no society at all, where there really ARE no externalities and self-interest can be truly self-referent. ...I feel I may not be explaining this clearly, so I'll simply request suggestions and wrap up this comment.

It seems that, instead of trumpeting "selfishness!" as a counterintuitive moral panacea, all that's really needed for altruism to symbiotically cohabitate with "selfishness" is to use the phrase "rational self-regard" instead, since it doesn't require you to engage in Ethical-Egoism-esque displays of unnecessary dickishness towards one's fellow man. ...And I feel I may have to try to write an article on that subject if one does not yet exist.

Racism and sexism are pretty good candidates as well. Prejudice in general would be even more inclusive; one could even consider religion to be a special case of prejudice against reality.

"And what would be the analogy to collapsing to form a Bose-Einstein condensate?"

...All of them moving into the same compound and acquiring an arsenal seems about right, particularly when you consider the increased chance of violent explosion.

Yes I realize steve won't be perfectly unbiased every time or perfectly rational or make the right choices but then again, neither would I and there's nothing special about me making my mistakes.

A good principal in general. If more people realized this, the world would be a better place, I should think.

Hmm, I wonder if there's some snappy Wise Saying -esque way of formulating this

This immediately brings to mind the old adage about it being better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. I'd imagine, from the pig's point of view, that the loftiest height of piggy happiness was not terribly dissimilar from the baseline level of piggy contentment, so equating "happiness" to "contentment" would not be an inexcusable breach of piggy logic. Indeed, we humans pretty much have to infer this state of affairs when considering animal wellbeing ("appearance of sociobiological contentment approximates happiness"), as we don't yet possess any means of engaging animals in philosophical conversation on the subject.

Yet it seems that those who would have us believe that "blissful ignorance" is a good thing as an absolute are confusing contentment with happiness unnecessarily. Happiness registers more as a positive, aspirational value within the context of the human experience range; contentment seems more a negative, absence-of-dissatisfaction value that indicates only that things aren't going poorly. Doublethink and willful ignorance do not seem to be able to positively provide qualia that contribute to happiness; they can only obscure knowledge of things that are actually going poorly, thus creating a false sense of contentment.

That's my general counterpoint whenever people speak positively of the "happiness" created by things like religion and opiates. Nothing is being added; your knowledge of reality is being obscured. It's difficult to see how that approach could be considered a mature option.

It may be useful to the cause of avoiding one's own potential happy death spirals (HDSs) to actively attempt to subvert the "my ideas are my children" trope. Perceived ownership of an idea or mental tool may be a prime contributor to HDS thinkery, giving rise to the kind of protectiveness we humans tend to provide our offspring whether or not they deserve it. The fact that our child started the fight with another child doesn't prevent us from stepping in on OUR child's side; the fact that our child is demonstrably average doesn't prevent us from telling complete strangers how intelligent, sweet, talented, beautiful, etc. OUR child is, was, and shall always be, forever and ever, amen.

So too it seems to be with the ideas we feel we own, particularly the ones we ourselves have generated. This impulse is entirely understandable within the context of a species whose primary survival trait is intelligence, with opposable thumbs taking a distant second. Yet to feel ownership of an idea to the point that we feel protective of it seems rationally contraindicated: an idea - anyone's - should only be valued insofar as it can stand on its own in the uncaring realm of reality... in a making beliefs pay rent kind of way.

So perhaps a good solution to the "How?" of resisting HDSs would be to try to view ideas and mental tools as being both fundamentally borrowed and potentially disposable upon breaking. It's a nice way of avoiding even the temptation to indulge in ad hominem, as well.

I'm wondering if this is the kind of confusion that can be cleared up by tabooing the right words.

I believe it can be taken as obvious that the image in the muslim woman's head upon hearing the phrase "monkey's transformed into humans" isn't at all similar to the image in the mind of someone who understands evolution, as even to my ear it comes across as, at best, misleading.

Thus my response would be more along the lines of:

I don't believe monkeys can change into humans. I believe that both monkeys and humans belong to a larger category of creatures called apes, and it seems very suspicious to me that if a hypothetical omnipotent being created humans in His image, that the image would be just another species of ape rather than anything unique.

With greater time and preparation, I don't think it would be too hard to demonstrate how a human body and a chimp body are almost the same machine, just shaped a little different. In the 'explain in twenty minutes' scenario, I think the critical insight is scope insensitivity. It is legitimately difficult to imagine the number of generations involved. You'd have to describe a family tree, point out how the less distance up you need to go to find a common ancestor, the more similar any two individuals will look, and then... zoom out, massively.

Even if your non-evolutionist then believes that family tree will eventually lead back to Adam and Eve or whoever, rather than connecting to the animal kindgom once you go far enough back, it moves the competing suppositions out of the realm of absurdity and creates an actual disagreement rather than merely a confusion.

It is hard to argue that magic was not involved in the origin of the human species when the other person cannot conceive of the possibility that humans could even exist or function without magic being involved. And that is not a trivial thing. Even many of today's educated people, who pay lip-service to the idea that humans are biology and nothing else, still believe in souls-and-elanvital-by-another-name. There are modern martial arts that still believe in Ki. You can't trip over your own feet without stumbling on "science" fiction that treats sentient thought as something ontologically fundamental. Likewise, "science" fiction where things like age can be disconnected from people and moved around. And just try to ask the Worm fandom what the difference between telepathy and precise telekinesis acting on the brain, is.

Racism and sexism are pretty good candidates as well. Prejudice in general would be even more inclusive; one could even consider religion to be a special case of prejudice against reality.

"What on Earth makes you think monkeys can change into humans?"

It seems - based upon personal experience - that the difference between the rational and the irrational is that the rational at least attempts to present a cogent answer to such questions in a way that actually answers the question; the irrational just gets mad at you for asking.

The most useful skill I've developed has been in meeting immaturity (both in rationale and delivery) with maturity (ditto). I work in a heavily right-wing workplace that refuses to allow anything but Fox News on anything resembling a television. This is my training environment. Even in the presence of highly irrational and emotionally charged convictions, I've found that the ability to maintain an uninvested calm and slowly help my partner to make their argument better (through gradual consilience with reality) can result in ACTUALLY CHANGED MINDS. The first step seems, invariably, to point out those counterfactuals that back them away from absolute confidence; when presented as potential improvements ("You'd probably see greater success at decreasing the actual number of abortions if you could find ways to enable people to only purposefully conceive a child.") even a position they once reviled can seem outright tasteful. The key appears to be presentation of oneself as a potential ally, so as to avoid the "I must engage on all fronts" mentality that prevents meaningful engagement at all.