Via rationalism, "Mental stopsigns" are real, they are words or ideas that cause you to turn back and not journey down a particular line of reasoning. They exist everywhere. Some common ones: "Capitalism" "The Corporations" "Racism" "Oppression" "the Jews" “the Patriarchy”
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Scapegoats quickly turn into mental stopsigns. Whether you are left or right, you will always be an NPC if you instinctively turn away from avenues of heretical thought. The instinct to not have wrong thoughts is danger-avoidance. NPCs are above all, safe.
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Bad versions of ideas vaccinate you against good ones. Ridiculous conspiracy theories prevent you from considering plausible ones. Unflattering caricatures of right wing thinkers prevent you from listening to them
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Another consideration is fashion: In Scott Alexander's unusually good essay, Right is the New Left, he explores the idea that ideological alignments come down in large part to fashion.http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ …
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We all "honestly pursue truth", sure, but that truth is the truth that flatters us, the truth that is advantageous to us. And why shouldn't it be? Your non-conformist beliefs are in large part driven by your need to signal your originality and independence
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"Not me, I'm not driven by fashion, I'm a humble truth-seeker." You're deluded. If you want to see a humble truth-seeker, you have to look all the way down to invertebrates. Presumably nematode worms have no illusions
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Epistemology is downstream from self-interest, Honesty is just what we call it when they are visibly aligned
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There is no new thing under the sun. You don't have to have a unique thought, you just try to have one that no one else put there. It's not actually easy, but it's a skill you can train.
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Of course, there are degrees of independent thought. If you pay attention to the noosphere many things will yet occur to you even as they occur to many others, but it’s better to read the signs yourself than have them read to you
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Having good thoughts is sublime; curating the good thoughts of others is still a noble calling. Creativity is 90% synthesis and 10% chaos. Originality is more a question of novel assembly than spontaneous generation
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this is basically the artist's creative process expressed statistically.
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