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Just figured out a test for figuring out someone’s religion. Look fo the dead words (words used strictly with unexamined negative or positive valence) at the highest active level of abstraction.
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Silly example: I’m talking vegetables and how I like or dislike various dishes based on various vegetables. But one vegetable only has mentions in the context of dishes I dislike. That’s a dead vegetable. My “vegetable religion” is hatred of that dead vegetable.
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Why: The highest level of abstraction is where we tend to be least sure of ourselves and resort to reasoning from values rather than facts. Most words will end up being used in both positive and negative ways if you collect enough samples. They are live words.
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Thought inspired by a long thread and very smart thread I just read that made many insightful points about crypto stuff, but used a few words — market, competition — in valence-stable ways. Clear tell of a market fundamentalist.
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Typically if you engage a person on such topics and challenge the valence, like assert “markets are bad” you’ll encounter solid resistance and retreat to idealization. They might acknowledge “badness” as a rare/exceptional thing but that’s it. The default valence won’t shift.
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These are “derp hot buttons.” If you push them you’ll trigger pure derp, and disengagement or attacks if you persist.
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The electrochemistry sense of ‘valence’ is interesting here as a metaphor. A person’s positive and negative valence dead words are like the terminals of their intellectual batteries. Powers all their thinking.
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this crystalizes a category of abstract nouns that get abused in science - “social capital,” “trust,” “prosociality” seem specific but are hard to distinguish from vague “good/bad” in practice
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Yeah, so you have “church is social capital, keeps communities together and fights drug gangs” then the next priest child abuse scandal breaks and they’re like “well obviously _that’s_ not social capital” It’s post hoc No True Scotsman games with conveniently rescopable nouns
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I love this framing, even though it doesn’t generalize well I should track words that I sustain the same gestalt or directional emotional sentiment towards
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Lacan called those point de capiton or “quilting points”. Chains of signification have to stop somewhere, and some words serve to anchor the rest. They are part of the language of the Big Other, the quasi-person you act as if you’re always being watched by & want to impress.
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