Everyone needs faith in their life and the special magic of theological religions is to invest that faith in a belief that is fundamentally beyond the reach of empiricism
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Faith is a rallying point, or a schelling point if you like subculture jargon. (Lexicons are uniforms we put on). If we all agree to loudly believe something that is obviously false, then we are sending an expensive signal of group allegiance
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When you are using a belief in this way, the thing you absolutely can’t do is question it or try to verify it, since that breaks the spell.
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If for example you place your faith in something obviously falsifiable, like, “the sky is purple,” or “every human is equally valuable”, then you raise the price of entry to the faith group
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If your obviously false belief forces you to act in ways that contradict reality, in ways that force you to pay other costs, not just in sanity but in damage to health or property, then you raise the price even more
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I can think of at least one group of people who make literal, physical self-harm a barrier to entry. Can you?
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Zero HP Lovecraft Retweeted Zero HP Lovecraft
We are living in times of insanity inflation, where, in order to stand out, groups must demand increasing levels of harmful contradictory belief in order to be expensivehttps://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025739010533076998 …
Zero HP Lovecraft added,
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I would rather make people pay other costs: physical fitness, mental agility, wealth. These are good barriers to entry but they have a drawback: they are all much more expensive than sanity. Anyone, even a crazy bum, can pay a sanity price to join a religion
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I don’t write much about biodeterminism, or the limits that physiology places on psychology, not because it’s untrue, but because it’s unhelpful
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Everything is 50% heritable also means it’s 50% not. Crass generalization, sure, but I think correct beliefs can yield huge marginal benefits even to people of exceptionally low genetic quality
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Replying to @Outsideness @0x49fa98
... 50% if "Dad practicing machete on your skull" counts as environmental influence.
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