there is a style of tweeting that for lack of a better word i'll call "stating honest beliefs that undermine other people's coping mechanisms" and i feel more conflicted about it now than i used to
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most of the time when you do this you'll just produce resistance and inoculate people against the belief in the future and sometimes you might produce existential despair instead idk it's tricky business
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has "load-bearing beliefs" as a concept / meme spread around these parts yet? it's a really useful handle. very vivid imageery. conflicts between opposite load-bearing beliefs are a major source of online tension, maybe the primary one idk
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I'd expand that to "load-bearing conceptions", as that also includes interpretations of reality that can be true/false.
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makes me thing of this
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Some ask why I support “load bearing” & “adult-level” fictions over the truth & request examples. Here’s one: it’s likely structurally important that Supreme Court Justices continue performing in costume to suggest they’re spiritually superior druids of unfathomable legal genius.
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Load bearing positions in the “culture war”:
“God exists / does not exist”
“Evolution is true / false”
“We are/are not blank slates”
“Freewill is/is not an illusion”
“Morality is relative/objective”
Most other questions are just disagreements about these (there are more)
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