I think a lot of rats have this idea that they arrived at their views and values solely by thinking really hard (and being really really smart). Which means that anyone who doesn’t share their same basic views is simply a mouthbreathing NPC who doesn’t have any curiosity in “the way the world works” - when in reality, people just have a lot of other shit on their minds, and tend to care about less abstract problems than [insert sci-fi trope here].
It’s funny that the commenter talks so much about how people should just try to understand things, and in the same breath fails to try to empathize with people who think differently.
Not to mention that even people who do think about those abstract problems can come to different conclusions than them.
A lot of the stuff in the tip of the rationalist iceberg, the obsession with intelligence and logic, the quasi-dogmatic faith in exponentially improving technology, even stepping my toes into the eugenics territory and getting burned, these are all things I remember from my tween years. I have been in that headspace, thinking of all the same questions every single self-appointed child genius LessWronger is obsessed with. And yet, I came out of it all as a leftist SJW with a raging disdain for the techno-financial-idustrial complex.
What happened is that I grew up, had my views challenged, met and befriended more diverse groups of people, learned about alternative views and synthesized them with my own, gaining a more nuanced understanding of issues I thought I had “solved” in my head by the age of 15. The worst thing that could have happened to me is convincing everyone who disagrees with me is an NPC and walling myself in a bubble full of other insecure logic bros all firmly locked in the adolescent mindset of having figured everything out forever.
https://xkcd.com/610/
I think a lot of rats have this idea that they arrived at their views and values solely by thinking really hard (and being really really smart). Which means that anyone who doesn’t share their same basic views is simply a mouthbreathing NPC who doesn’t have any curiosity in “the way the world works” - when in reality, people just have a lot of other shit on their minds, and tend to care about less abstract problems than [insert sci-fi trope here].
It’s funny that the commenter talks so much about how people should just try to understand things, and in the same breath fails to try to empathize with people who think differently.
Not to mention that even people who do think about those abstract problems can come to different conclusions than them.
A lot of the stuff in the tip of the rationalist iceberg, the obsession with intelligence and logic, the quasi-dogmatic faith in exponentially improving technology, even stepping my toes into the eugenics territory and getting burned, these are all things I remember from my tween years. I have been in that headspace, thinking of all the same questions every single self-appointed child genius LessWronger is obsessed with. And yet, I came out of it all as a leftist SJW with a raging disdain for the techno-financial-idustrial complex.
What happened is that I grew up, had my views challenged, met and befriended more diverse groups of people, learned about alternative views and synthesized them with my own, gaining a more nuanced understanding of issues I thought I had “solved” in my head by the age of 15. The worst thing that could have happened to me is convincing everyone who disagrees with me is an NPC and walling myself in a bubble full of other insecure logic bros all firmly locked in the adolescent mindset of having figured everything out forever.
Aumann’s Agreement Theorem says that I’m right so therefore you’re wrong
I mean it seems to me these people just copy what they think a smart person on the internet says, and theres little actual thought about things.
Yeah, except instead of copying what a smart person says, they’re copying Eliezer Yudkowsky.