You see behaviour like this constantly, if you really look.
My friend has spent decades shouting down the largest available megaphone that we're all going to be fucked if people don't learn to make better political choices.
Often at great cost to himself.
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So, perhaps rather few people are genuinely principled, or perhaps rather few of the principles people claim to have are really true. But they're there.
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Yet on Twitter and elsewhere, I often see a particular form of rationalism that prides itself on applying terms like "ingroup" and "outgroup" to every imaginable situation.
The standard seems to be "anything people say they believe is really just aesthetics or selfishness."
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You can see that this has stopped being a pragmatic belief and become, somewhat ironically, an article of faith, in some cases.
You see it when people project convoluted, selfish intent onto others because nothing in their earnest behaviour is really beneficial to themselves.
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"Oh see, but they just say that to justify their belief that their ingroup has X beneficial characteristic, or they're signalling, or they're playing an angle I can't see.
I know this because I can literally read minds, btw."
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Ok they don't say that last part, but I wonder how else they might be so confident...
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The way it gets really dangerous and corrosive is when it goes beyond mere snarking.
When you earnestly believe (lol) that all beliefs are BS, morals and ethics become passé.
It becomes a form of ingroup-oriented signalling to say 'look at how nihilistic I am'. This propagates.
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By the way, I myself absolutely do believe that *most* of what anyone, including me, says they believe is nonsense.
If you want to know what someone believes, look at behaviour across situational variables. There is truth.
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Uh. Better get back to work. Spent my overtime break already.
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thank you for this! I really appreciated reading it. I would describe it in my words as, "narrow, oversimplistic, overdeterministic, procrustean assumptions about other people's beliefs are convenient, dehumanizing, dispiriting" – and likely to set off a cycle of conflict"
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Oh yeah. I covered "they don't believe X", but "they do believe Y" is just as dangerous, obviously.
circling back to the QT'd thread – I think scrutiny, second-guessing, thought-experimenting, devil's-advocating, flipping, reversing, doubting, etc can all be super healthy to do introspectively if you can be playful about it – but doing it with someone else requires their buy-in
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and doing it AT someone, ABOUT someone, etc – is absolutely toxic behavior. I guess the lines blur with public figures, but even there I think it's good to be tentative, acknowledge uncertainty, and be clear that any hypothesizing we do always reveals more about us than them
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