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 those lines, along with, say, the ideas of Emile Durkheim, Jonathan Haidt, and Roy Baumeister. Human institutions and behavior must be analyzed religiously and folklorically. I'm more interested in human flourishing, ritual, and cultural evolution than regular politics, but the neoreactosphere has been extremely friendly to these kinds of discussions.

My family and most of my friends are extremely liberal and I was a good liberal for most of my life.

If you don't mind my asking, when you ask "what led you to accept the basic premises of the movement," what do you see as its basic premises, and what causes you to describe it as a "movement"?

But we did it with effective birth control and safe abortions. What did Rome use? Was it infanticide?

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 function. Hurley et al. are the ones to beat and if you haven't read the book you definitely should.

In Rachels' paper, comparing the happiness of parents to the happiness of voluntarily childless people seems wrong, because childlessness hurts most when it's involuntary. (See how much people spend on fertility treatments.) That said, I don't know if deciding to donate instead of having kids would be more similar to voluntary or involuntary childlessness. That depends on how strongly you feel the urge to have kids. And in the long term, if we view the paper as a call to social engineering, it depends on whether that urge is biological or social.

Even if the individuals in question want badly not to be adulterous, but the only way they expect to be able to hold themselves to that commitment is by the knowledge that their life literally depends on it?

In any realistic human society, there are huge limitations on what sorts of contracts you are allowed to enter

If you shouldn't be allowed to sign a conventional contract with those terms, why would you be allowed to enter a marriage on those terms? Are there any particular terms marriage should allow but contracts should not?

Suppose for example that a couple voluntarily sign a marriage contract stipulating death penalty, or even just flogging, for adultery.

I've heard there are prenups that say that if you commit adultery, you pretty much lose all your money. Unless you're very poor, that's probably worse than flogging.

Sure — what you're saying is that you don't like the specific judgments, or standards of judgment, used by the enforcing party known as the state of California. Which (as you note) is not the same thing as saying that you don't want an enforcing party to make any judgments.

FWIW, it is not clear to me that "receiving $50,000 if the other spouse sleeps around" is actually one of "the rights marriage traditionally gave them", so I think the essayist is stretching the truth there.

(Further, there are n different "traditions" of marriage going into a multicultural society: Catholic marriage is not the same as Anglican marriage, that being one of the major reasons there exists such a thing as Anglicanism ....)

And what about the fact that cuckolding is the second most common heterosexual interest in pornography, after (the unquestionably adaptive characteristic) youth?

links to http://www.billionwickedthoughts.com/ipad/index.html If that data really can deliver, that would be fascinating and the most valuable part of that post for me. (An endorsement from Pinker does carry weight with me.)

We are particularly likely to chew nicotine gum despite never having smoked cigarettes (which only scratches the surface of our drug use).

:) As far as I know, there are maybe 4 or 5 LWers total who ever use nicotine gum without having previously smoked. (Although I have no idea how common we are in general.)

It is now clear to us what, in the year 1812, was the cause of the destruction of the French army. No one will dispute that the cause of the destruction of Napoleon's French forces was, on the one hand, their advance late in the year, without preparations for a winter march, into the depths of Russia, and, on the other hand, the character that the war took on with the burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe aroused in the Russian people. But then not only did no one foresee (what now seems obvious) that this was the only way that could lead to the destruction of an army of eight hundred thousand men, the best in the world and led by the best generals, in conflict with a twice weaker Russian army, inexperienced and led by inexperienced generals; not only did no one foresee this, but all efforts on the part of the Russians were constantly aimed at hindering the one thing that could save Russia, and, on the part of the French, despite Napoleon's experience and so-called military genius, all efforts were aimed at extending as far as Moscow by the end of summer, that is, at doing the very thing that was to destroy them.

• Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace", trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky

I wonder if what you really want to destroy are "things effectively masquerading as arguments that aren't really arguments." That class is not exhausted by inexact analogies (which is to say all analogies), nor are all inexact analogies members of that class.

This sounds like a fair summary. I stick to my assertion that what you're calling analogies (and which I would specify are analogies that are not phrased in analogy form and which the overwhelming majority of people never recognize as analogies) are more common and more convincing than most other members of this class.