21/ Platonic forms, by the way, are - IMO - just another example of nerds taking things too literally. Random Greek: man, that's a nice table. It's really almost the ideal of what a table should be Plato: You're saying that there is an IDEAL of a table, that exists somewhere?
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32/ If you let yourself first ponder whether you're the kind of guy who will { cheat on your wife | run into a burning building to save a child | keep the money in the wallet you find | etc } when you are presented with the choice, your chance of choosing poorly is, IMO, high.
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33/ There's a reason that we decouple selling a movie ticket from redeeming a movie ticket - it means that neither the seller nor the redeemer has an incentive or approach to pocket the money.
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34/ This works when there are two agents (two employees at the theater). Likewise, decoupling, in time, the two agents inside your own head: the decision maker and the decision follower, is a cognitive / social hack that makes collusion harder.
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35/ so, in the individual case, you get to decide which heroes you want to study and emulate. Heracles? George Washington ? Isambard Kingdom Brunell? Malcolm X? However, this is not an unbounded person decision. The menu of heroes you see is curated by society.
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37/ It will not surprise you to learn that I (a socialcon, a rationalist (broadly speaking, not Big Yud trademarked version), and a Catholic) am absolutely appalled by the post-civilization / anti-civilization slate of heroes and tropes that our current cultural betters prepare.
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38/ I talked earlier about fixed points in computations. Societies can not be static, and so they will always evolve, and their tropes and heroes and gods will change over time. We have seen, in the New Ideology, a huge act of myth/hero/god-making in just a few decades >
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39/ Stonewall Riots, Summer of Love, 1960s radical nubian goddess activist, etc.pic.twitter.com/vD8egBpeyO
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40/ the right has created far fewer new hero-gods during this period, but it has done one or two e.g. Tony Starkpic.twitter.com/lK2Eiazf5c
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44/ I suspect that the left's new gods, while much louder and bigger, are not fixed points. childless-gay-sports-woman seems like she can peel off a lot of believers from older gods in societal iteration #498, but I'm not sure how many believers she'll have in iteration #499
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