elfvillage
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Compare the skilled butcher, who, with no wasted movements, cuts his meat just where the joints are, and the flashy butcher, whose flourishes make for less skilful and efficient cutting but send a more impressive signal.
I agree that the flashy butcher could became engaged in his cutting and lose consciousness of the crowd and his impression on it without decreasing his signalling behaviour. If he did so, he might become more sincere, but his signalling behaviour would remain. For signaling is not a conscious addition to his art, which might strip away: skill at cutting and skill at signalling are woven confusedly together in it.
What I had in mind, though,... (read more)
I take it that the point of this thread is to find activities which exemplify a low-signalling "mental mode".
Most of the commentators have pointed to activities, as topics, which feature more or less often in our signalling conversations. My attempt to point to the manner in which we do activities, in which signals least pollute our thinking, was voted into oblivion.
Again, however, I would like to suggest that activities characterized by ecstasy and intense engagement are good examples of what RH called "a more honest mental mode".
When I talk about music or logic, for example, I fall inevitably into signalling. My thinking becomes less "honest" as it becomes less responsible... (read more)
Love-making and music-making seem to me to have the capacity to transcend signalling. We can get lost in sex and song, pulled out of our usual patterns of broadcasting and receiving, taken up into something altogether free and fresh.
Of course, sex and song are also deeply interwoven with signals, and plenty of people mimic rather than make love and music; but that is over there, and over here—in the moment of rapturous love- or music-making—those things fall away, mostly, and for a time.
Eliezer,
Personally, I liked the Babyeaters. At the outset of your story, I thought (1) that their babyeating would be held up as an example of the triumph of rationality (around population control), and (2) that their refusal to modify themselves would be based on their recognition that the specific act of babyeating nurtured and protected a more general capacity and respect for rational thought. I thought that Babyeating was being proposed as a bootcamp for overcoming bias. Maybe this idea would be interesting to explore?
In general, an interesting story. I did not find it possibly coercive or deceptive, as some other commentators did, and despite wide disagreement with what I take to be your own views; like your piece on truth, -- "The Simple Truth", I believe it was, -- I found it clear, deftly-made, and thought-provoking.