Advice from a person who doesn't care about you and makes money when you follow it is useless at best, and likely harmful. Advertising from a friend who wants what's best for you might be beneficial, if such a thing existed.
It doesn’t seem generally true that communication requires delicate maintenance. Liars have existed for thousands of years, and languages have diverged and evolved, and yet we still are able to communicate straightforwardly the vast majority of the time! Like you said, lying loses its effectiveness the more it is used, and so there’s a counter-pressure which automatically prevents it from taking over.
It seems to me that there are numerous instances, from the Challenger o-rings to Iraqi WMDs to Lysenkoism, where telling lies has become normalized. Usually followed shortly by catastrophe. You could argue (and I would agree) that such catastrophes are simply part of the "automatic counter-pressure" that allows language to continue to exist. But there's an understandable desire to find other mechanisms that don't require as much suffering and death.
Yes, but only in the sense that by my best efforts, using the brain I actually have, I believe the thing to be the case.
This all seems to rest on an idea that an empty box labeled "truth" was dropped in my lap in the platonic land of a priori mental emptiness, and I'm obligated to fill it with something before I'm allowed to begin thinking. But obviously, that's not what happened. Rather, as I grew up, the abstract label called "truth" was invented and refined by me to help me make sense of the world and communicate with (or win approval from) others. So I end up at the same answer, pragmatism, but I deny that there was ever any problematic circularity. The problem instead seems to come from a notion of transcendent epistemic justification which is unmotivated and flawed--what good does this idea of justification do? What's the problem if I do something without justification?
This seems like it would be pretty easy to DIY with small drops of superglue.
GreaterWrong has the ability to automatically collapse comments from a given user. I could make it hide posts too if there's a desire for that.
Do you feel that way about all the themes? Ideally I'd like it to have something for everyone.
I really dislike the central example used in this post, for reasons explained in this article. I hope it isn't included in the next LW book series without changing to a better example.
Is it possible to insert a question using the markdown editor, or does it require using the new editor?
It's actually worse than that -- the way the manipulation works is to induce you to compare the people in the ad with your own life, causing you to feel ugly, unlovable, like you're missing out on life, etc. and then to propose the product as a relief from this deliberately induced misery.