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I am watching John Vervaeke's lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. In episode 3 at around 5:00 (linked below) Vervaeke says: > Myths are not false stories about the ancient past. They are symbolic stories of perennial patterns that are always with us. This take is not unique to Vervaeke. I have seen similar claims many times before - that myths supposedly encapsulate some eternal and valuable truths. These claims are seldom accompanied by examples, nor does Vervaeke provide any. (At least no clearly understandable examples in his first 4 episodes.) If you think the claim is reasonable, can you give some good examples?
I recently read this article (linked by David Chapman): JOINT REVIEW: Philosophy Between the Lines, by Arthur M. Melzer (by Jane Psmith and John Psmith). The article talks about esoteric writing, i.e., where writers will sometimes not state their entire message explicitly but leave some important messages only implied, in...
Effective altruism (EA) is a big topic here on LessWrong, but for some reason I seldom see environmental causes get more than a trivial mention here. Can anyone recommend me some good reading about environment-focused effective altruism? (If anyone can explain why no one on LW seems to talk about...
Like many here, I want to support effective altruist (EA) causes - by giving money, buying ethical products, voting, et cetera. But nowadays the world appears to be more full of misinformation than ever. This seems to be a problem when I want to choose EA causes to support. I...
I have been interested in effective altruism since before I knew the term. I have long done things like give money to charity, buy products that seem ethical and avoid products that seem unethical (such as factory-farmed meat). I do not derive much joy from any of this, though. It...
I recently had a discussion with a fellow rationalist about the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarianism. We realized that our disagreement was at least in part one of words: * When he said utilitarianism, I gather that he meant "trying to predict and calculate utility as precisely as possible for...
I tend to tell myself that I am not affected by advertising. But I suspect that most people think that. So I ask myself: What am I not seeing? I have heard that many ads are designed to sell you a "lifestyle". I do not care about lifestyle, and I...
Gordon Seidoh Worley Hey, SpectrumDT! You wrote a post asking what David Chapman means by "meaningness" and "meaning". I'm quite familiar with Chapman's work, so I gave a reply. We've been having some productive back and forth in a thread over there, and I thought we should try to elevate...