âthink for yourselfâ as a piece of advice is discriminatory against people who arenât good at thinking, which is nearly everyone, including and especially me
Conversation
thinking should be a team sport, which is unfortunately exactly the opposite of the way thinking is introduced in school: as a way to impress your teachers and outcompete your classmates
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obviously we all depend constantly on each otherâs thoughts, stretching back to the beginning of writing. nobody has ever thought for themselves. itâs impossible to be isolated from other peopleâs thoughts, even if those people have been dead for centuries
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the problem with cults is not that people have âstopped thinking for themselves,â as if that were something they would otherwise be doing. itâs that people are trusting some person or idea which is not actually trustworthy, and which is *unusual* to be trusting in that way
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when you trust something which is not actually trustworthy, but which everyone also trusts, we donât call that âliving in a cult,â we just call that âbeing a well-adjusted member of society.â being in a cult is exactly like this, except that âeveryoneâ is a smaller group
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canât believe ndt mansged to get a rant out of me. of all people. i really was trying not to have opinions on twitter anymore
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society be like âwhy are you in the small cult, way over there? shouldnât you be in the big cult, over here, with the rest of us? where itâs safe? we have caaapitalismâ
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in the small cult you might give all your money to some guy who kinda looks like jesus or commit mass suicide in guyana
but in the big cult youâll get a *job*
and maybe if youâre lucky one day youâll get to *retire*
*after* giving up your health and youth
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itâs not that the big cult wonât hurt you. itâs just that the ways the big cult will hurt you are normalized. small cults are also exactly like this. the ways you get hurt get normalized. and you find a reason to pretend they donât matter
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Good point. So turn out what they sell as "think for yourself" is really "reproducible thinking using heuristics processed on your own, preferably on first principle".