SisterY

Years before I read any Moldbug, I became fascinated with the way that sacredness affects social life and cognition even in ostensibly non-religious groups. Since my work challenged the sacredness of life, I was able to notice how that particular sacredness was (non-rationally) socially supported against challenges, and this helped me to see the same patterns in other areas of thought. Human cognition and behavior only make sense when analyzed religiously, and the neoreactionary idea of "The Cathedral" is one of several fruitful analyses along th... (read more)

From Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms:

"The intervening factor that kept [Roman] Egyptian birth rates lower than we would expect was again social custom. In northwestern Europe younger widows commonly remarried, but not in Roman Egypt. Furthermore, divorce was possible in Egypt. But while divorced husbands commonly remarried younger women, divorced women typically did not remarry. Thus while in Egypt almost all the women got married, the proportion still married fell steadily from age 20. Consequently women surviving to age 50 typically gave birth to only 6 children rather than 8."

I highly recommend Daniel Dennett's (and a couple other guys') Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-engineer the Mind (MIT Press 2011).

Hurley, Dennett, & Adams argue that humor is not coterminous with laughter, and is very much post-verbal and inextricably connected with the human faculty for abstraction and imagination. In short, the authors propose that humor is a reward mechanism for catching errors in abstractions imagined and projected by the mind. We have become connoisseurs of this reward our brains give us for a necessary cognitive cleaning fu... (read more)

Actually, the first happiness studies that found that having children massively decreases happiness were using involuntarily infertile couples, not voluntarily childfree folks, as their comparison group; the authors were very surprised that involuntarily infertile childless couples were happier than their child-having peers!

A few of these early studies: Glenn, N.D., & McLanahan, S. (1982) Children and marital happiness: A further specification of the relationship. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 44, 63-72 (great quote: negative effect of offspring... (read more)

Possibly more realistically, the person may realize - from observing the world - that the only way he or she will be able to maintain monogamy is through social (not just government) enforcement of the marriage contract - not that his or her life literally depends on it, but that his or her social death will result from violation of the contract. And people care a whole lot about social death. This aspect of social support of marriage is already gone from all but a few recent immigrant communities in the United States. Even if marriage were government-enfo... (read more)

Re: "prenups": did you happen to read Konkvistador's links and the other comments explicitly discussing, with citations, the (lack of) enforceability of such premarital agreements? I.e., citation needed. ;)

Traditionally, "divorce" was a cause of action with a plaintiff and a defendant - a winner and a loser, an aggressor and a victim - and alimony (in the form of cash payments) was the prize the victim/winner won for proving one of the limited grounds for divorce (generally desertion, adultery, or cruelty).

Changed it to link to the Google Books result for "cuckold" within the Billion Wicked Thoughts book: http://books.google.com/books?id=jwU8_m8y5X0C&q=cuckold#v=snippet&q=cuckold&f=false

As far as I know, the book is the only place the data are reported, sadly. I agree, it's juicy if true!

"Possibly the best statistical graph ever drawn" http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters

In grade school we learn that "X is like Y" is a simile, and "X is Y" is a metaphor, and that there is some crucial difference between the two. Perhaps there is, but I haven't seen an argument to that effect. Mainly, we call both of these "analogy" or "metaphor."

So the argument for tabooing The Worst Argument in the World is that, since many analogies are unusually powerful and people may not recognize that they're analogies rather than perhaps identities, every analogy is The Worst Argument in the World. Even though... (read more)

Again, the objection seems to be more about the particular USE of the argument than the nature of the argument itself (what I call above "non-responsiveness"). I would genuinely like to understand why analogies of the kind you call the Worst Argument in the World are so harmful (and I appreciate your engaging on it). Is it your claim that people are particularly likely to take analogies seriously as arguments, more than other arguments? Is it their very power that makes them so bad?

Rhyming and other poetic tricks, like showing a picture, make st... (read more)

From that example, it sounds like mindless repetition (non-responsiveness) is the worst argument in the world, whether or not it contains an analogy. What is the special harm of analogy that makes it worse than other kinds of mindless repetition? (Worse than, say, other kinds of seductive, poetic language like rhyming words, a la "if it doesn't fit you must acquit.") And is an analogy still "the worst argument in the world" if it's NOT mindlessly repeated?

Great, clear statement of the position. Wouldn't the "worst argument in the world" taboo apply just as strongly to any use of figurative language in the context of an argument? Instead of making an analogy, for instance (e.g., "X is the mindkiller"), why not just use literal language? No danger of connotative contamination, then. Instead of making a joke, why not just explain what you mean, rather than requiring your audience to grasp for the insight it contains? (Apparently hyperbole is allowed, as it's incorporated into the NAME of th... (read more)

Since we think largely in words, pointing out similarities between Thing We Think Is Bad and Thing We Think Is Good requires us to examine the connotations of the words we use. We should be doing that all the time. Just as this alleged "worst argument in the world" can be used to sneak in connotations, it can also be used to force examination of connotations that have previously been sneaked in.

Feeding tubes are life extension technology and we force those on people all the time. It ends up being really hard to enforce battery causes of action against forced medical care when you'd die without the intervention.

Making a point to show that a point is not a point is not as good as making a nonpoint to show that a point is not a point.

-Chuang-tzu

In "Self-poisoning of the mind" Jon Elster uses the Thales olive incident as an example of a perverse cognitive bias:

In his retelling of the [Thales olive] story, de Montaigne (1991, p. 153) explicitly asserts that when he condemned money-making, Thales ‘was accused of sour grapes like the fox’. Although Thales wanted to ‘show the world’ that the accusation was unfounded, one could also imagine that he had made a fortune in order to demonstrate to himself that his philosophy was not the product of sour grapes. Not content with thinking that he