Crossposted from my Substack and my Reddit post on r/SlateStarCodex I often think that memes, thought-terminating clichés, and other tools meant to avoid cognitive dissonance (e.g. bingo a la Scott on Superweapons and bingo) are overly blamed for degrading public discourse and rationality. Bentham's Bulldog recently wrote a post on...
Has anyone written an essay about how to fight against/correct for Trapped Priors? I would like to do something like that, but I want to make sure that I’m not reinventing the wheel here. Thank you!
This is a great point. Making the "breakthrough" from that poster's meditation retreat last is less about maintaining a single realization and paradigm shift, and more about distilling the 8+ hours of daily meditation into a single 5-30 minute daily practice that still confers the majority of the benefits. Instead, as you point out, people end up chasing the feeling of finding a revelation over actual progress.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water
As I understood it, Paul's initial role in the story during Dune and Dune: Messiah was one of being coopted by all the great forces playing out around him. It's a very sneaky framing—Herbert makes him seem like one of the Great Men of History, but as he futilely realizes towards the end of the first Dune novel, his life or death during the final fight in the throne room would not have changed anything. Had he died, he would've been the martyr who sacrificed himself to free Arrakis from the Harkonnens, and the Jihad would be carried out in his name. Since he lived, the same thing happened (save for the... (read 584 more words →)
I think your distinction makes a lot of sense here. IIRC Kitten argued somewhere else that the dunk was self-evident—taking morality too literally leads you to strange places and unintuitive conclusions, which I don't necessarily agree with—but I agree with you in that it was more of a semantic stopsign (what a nice term) than a proper laconic takedown of an idea (which is really hard to do).
Funnily enough, politicalcompassmemes is the literally epitome of Scott's bingo card idea, but it hasn't seemed to result in the full Ostrich effect "head in sand" phenomenon he was worried about. Instead, it's sort of fragmented into an inside joke community, which was sort of my point about memes serving the purpose of communicating humor/in-jokes.
Crossposted from my Substack and my Reddit post on r/SlateStarCodex
I often think that memes, thought-terminating clichés, and other tools meant to avoid cognitive dissonance (e.g. bingo a la Scott on Superweapons and bingo) are overly blamed for degrading public discourse and rationality. Bentham's Bulldog recently wrote a post on this subject, so I figured it was the perfect time to make a response and write my thoughts down.
TLDR: People try to avoid cognitive dissonance via whatever means available to them, and have been doing so for millennia. Removing the tools they use to avoid cognitive dissonance won't stop this behavior: the dissonance is still there, along with the urge to avoid it,... (read 2790 more words →)
It definitely is trading off with comprehension, if only because time spent thinking about and processing ideas roughly correlates with how well they cement themselves in your brain and worldview (note: this is just intuition). I can speedread for pure information very quickly, but I often force myself to slow down and read every word when reading content that I actually want to think about and process, which is an extra pain and chore because I have ADHD. But if I don't do this, I can end up in a state where I technically "know" what I just read, but haven't let it actually change anything in my brain—it's as if I... (read more)