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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If your informational diet is game of thrones and Harry Potter, you are at risk of being an npc. Porn is npc operant conditioning. If you think the Handmaiden’s Tale is an insightful critique (it’s actually a bdsm fantasy), that’s a red flag
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Replying to @0x49fa98
1. Handmaid’s Tale, like many of these products-esp the women who dress up as handmaids in “protest”— is a calling for that regime to come into existence. The people who claim to be afraid and terrified secretly want the Republic of Gilead to exist.
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2. This is because these people know, deep down, that feminism and the social revolution of the sixties was a wrong turn. They are waiting for “daddy” to come back. Everyone ignores the genuinely terrifying Atwood dystopia: Oryx and Crake. This is because O&C is too real.
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3. It’s not inconceivable that Atwood was willing Gilead into existence through her writing. She doesn’t consider herself a feminist. Everyone who watches HT or reads it is secretly thrilled by the dictatorship etc. But we’re close to O&C at the moment.
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