I was raised evangelical fundamentalist Baptist, and I am sure that nearly everyone in those circles believes that the things they say they believe are literally true. Some beliefs have plausible wriggle room; they may say that the 6 days of creation are not Earthly days, and that Earth is very old. Some have inexplicable wriggle room: the Bible has a complete genealogy from Adam to Jesus which isn't long enough for the Neolithic. Many say they believe the Bible literally, yet don't deny that humanity is more than 6000 years old. But many do stick on that point, and come up with AND BELIEVE explanations such as that humans before Adam didn't have souls. I have far too much experience with these people to think that all of them are faking it.
The way these Christians plan their lives does not make sense if you take their beliefs as aspirational. They believe literally that Heaven is a place, and that they will be there after they die. MANY of them are willing to risk death to spread these beliefs, and many have died rather than perform some symbolic act of disrespect towards their God. If the people who "believe" the sexes are the same were like Christian fundamentalists, you wouldn't find people covering up the fact that they are different; you'd find HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of professionally-published books with long, detailed, scientific-looking arguments against all of the evidence that men and women are different, as you do books attempting to scientifically rebut evolution. These people really believe they have the truth, and sufficient scientific study will prove it.
"Belief as aspiration" is a thing, but I think it's a distinctly elite thing. In ancient Athens or Rome you could have found many elites who didn't believe the gods existed, but thought it was good for other people to believe in gods. There's also "belief as pragmatics", and this is common outside the literalist churches. You find pragmatics in "religious" people who don't deep down believe in anything, but believe everyone would turn to raping and murdering each other if society stopped saying it believed in a god. (This is not quite "belief as aspiration"; the aspiration people are revolutionaries; the pragmatics people are conservatives.) And there's "belief as aesthetics": "I don't really believe this absurd thing, but how beautiful it is! If it's untrue, I don't want to know it." That was C.S. Lewis' ultimate argument for "believing in" Christianity in /The Silver Chair/.
"Belief as literal belief" is probably the oldest, and still co-exists alongside these others. What is new about the modern beliefs is actual altruism. Altruism is not a part of any conventional religion. Every time you find a religion that preaches self-renunciation, love of your neighbor, and so on, you'll find that it teaches that the person who does that will be rewarded. They are all carrot-and-stick. Ones that aren't, don't last.
Humans do naturally have actual altruism, but it is not useful for religions in an evolutionary sense. (You should apply evolutionary psychology to religion. Religions and philosophies are just self-replicating meme sets.)
My mother literally believes that I will burn in Hell for eternity unless she prays hard enough for me. The pain this causes her is not faked. She knows that she is risking her relationship with me every time she recites the same reasons why she is a Christian. She isn't doing this because she believes religion will have some good effect on me or on the world. She knows I would be the same person and do the same things in the same way if I "accepted Jesus as my savior", except for going to church, praying for missions, praying before meals, and doing other things that would have no impact on anything if her beliefs are not literally true.
She, and all my religious relatives, literally cannot understand any of the simple and obvious reasons why their beliefs are false. She never, ever comprehends what I say in reply, nor remembers it the next time around. I know her well enough to say this is a sincere lack of comprehension, or even a lack of ability to translate my statements into her internal representation. Plato's ontology, which is basically what Christians have, was constructed so that the claims which disprove Plato's theology can't be expressed in it, and thus can't be comprehended or remembered.
Take the fact that you can't explain the complexity of life by saying "God created it." This just leads to infinite regression: Who created God? And who created the one who created God? I've argued this point many times with many people, and they really, really, cannot understand it. Some roadblock in their brains shatters it before it reaches their consciousness.
Religious systems--the kind that last--are self-consistent. So is post-modernism, Nazism, and the Social Justice movement. They come with their own epistemologies, which provide ways of dismissing all evidence that the system is false. They are logical and self-consistent, so that once a person literally believes all the major points of this system, rationality keeps them IN the system rather than breaking them out of it. Rationality is the problem, not the solution. Empiricism is the solution.
I'm the same kind of person, the one who literally believes stuff. I have a lot more respect for the people who actually literally believe in god than those who do it for social reasons. I think they're wrong, but at least they aren't polite liars.
Yeah, similar here. With actual believers, we can "agree to disagree" and then move on to different topics where perhaps we will find more agreement.
With social believers, I never know what game we are playing, and I don't know whether it's still the same game as we change topics from religion to politics or economics or humans or weather...
I think you need to listen to a Trent Horn podcast. Many of your statements on the faith seem to be prefaced on your own faith in oversimplified understandings of evolution or logic. Take, for one example, the infinite regress point. Have you not confronted the very famous argument of Aquinas? God is literally the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause, precisely because infinite regress is the problem you face in your own view of reality.
To have an infinite-regress-of-causes problem, first you need to know what a cause is. As far as I know, the laws of physics don’t actually need such a concept. I’ve never gotten anyone to explain theirs to me, either; the most elaborate answer I’ve received so far consisted of shaming me for needing an explanation.
I only know causation as a not very consistent simplification that encapsulates very complex systems, especially those, like us, with that no less strange thing we call free will. Beyond this, causation seems one of those ideas you’re supposed to “socially believe”, but don’t try too hard to understand it or your interlocutors will show you their teeth.
What exactly did you do under the assumption that there's no material differences between the races that they got mad at you for because they don't actually believe that and were just politely pretending to?
That any skill one race can master, any other race can also master. I didn't believe there was some special thing intrinsic to any race that makes them the only ones able to perform a certain task/skill, and when I expressed that (via a stated belief that non-asians could also learn and do Fung Shui) I became Problematic.
In this case I'm pretty sure your issue was that you disagreed on cultural appropriation discourse. I'm not sure anyone believes Asians are genetically better at Feng Shui; if anything, this strikes me as a similar "fake belief" someone might endorse because they don't think non-Asians *should* learn Feng Shui.
I was about to post a comment saying "Dude... you are SO autistic" (as a fellow autist, game recognizing game); but this is DOUBLE autism XD
There are indeed no fundamental differences in ability between the races; the disagreement you seem to have misunderstood is, as another commenter explained, about cultural appropriation.
And here I was afraid from the way you worded that footnote that you had somehow become a racist, when it turns out you were being autistically antiracist! For what it's worth, you're far from alone on that front. Allists make all kinds of miscalculations about us from projecting and then trying to parse through all the lies they tell each other; the solution, simply put, is to stick to autistic company as much as possible, at least for any "real" relationships. Allists simply cannot (reliably) understand us well enough to accept us completely.
Since this is a post about inconvenient truths, I’ll point out that there are in fact differences between the races.
It’s wise to treat individuals as individuals but it’s foolish to believe there aren’t important average differences between human populations. Race is a very rough categorization but it does work very well in many contexts.
> There are indeed no fundamental differences in ability between the races
To read a post where someone is talking about how much they've been hurt by political gaslighting, and go into the comments to immediately try to gaslight them some more in the exact same way, is truly depraved.
Since I'm unconvinced by the evidence that Quambale Bingle provided against this point, here's why I believe it is true:
There are massive, statistically significant gaps in the IQs of different racial groups, even when you control for income.
I suspect that a lot of this comes down to non-genetic factors, such as lower quality nutrition, but seriously doubt that all of it does. Am I happy the world works that way? No. But my emotional response to it doesn't change how the world is.
>The same year the e-mail was sent, an American Psychiatric Association taskforce released a high-profile report on the state of the science of intelligence, with the title “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.” The report claimed:
> "African American IQ scores have long averaged about 15 points below those of Whites, with correspondingly lower scores on academic achievement tests. In recent years the achievement-test gap has narrowed appreciably. It is possible that the IQ-score differential is narrowing as well, but this has not been clearly established…. The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socioeconomic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential."
> While it is certainly possible for mainstream academics in a field to be wrong, trusting in an apparent academic consensus should not be treated as beyond the pale or interpreted as a serious indictment of one's character. In my view, the fact that Prof. Bostrom has held this belief does not, in itself, warrant condemnation.
> Another reason people cite for not talking about genetically mediated group differences, even if they exist, is that bringing people's attention to this kind of inequality could make the disadvantaged feel terrible. I take this cost seriously, and think this is a good reason to be really careful about how we discuss this issue (the exact opposite of Bostrom's approach in the Extropians email), and a good reason to include content warnings so anyone can easily avoid this topic if they find it upsetting.
But this is the exact topic of this article, and it's point is that we should be able to admit such things.
> Race differences in average brain size are observable at birth. A study by
Rushton (1997) analyzed recorded head circumference measurements and IQ scores from 50,000 children in the Collaborative Perinatal Project followed from birth to age 7 (Broman, Nichols, Shaugnessy, & Kennedy, 1987). Using the head circumference measures to calculate cranial capacity at birth, 4 months, 1 year, and 7 years, at each of these ages, the Asian American children averaged larger cranial volumes than did the White children, who averaged larger cranial volumes than did the Black children. Within each race, cranial capacity correlated with IQ scores. By age 7, the Asian American children averaged an IQ of 110; the White children, 102; and the Black children 90. Because the Asian American children were the shortest in stature and the lightest in weight while the Black children were the tallest in stature and the heaviest in weight, these average race differences in brain-size/IQ relations were not due to body size.
Another excerpt:
> The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, the largest and best-known
transracial study, was designed specifically by Sandra Scarr and Richard Weinberg to separate genetic factors from rearing conditions as causal influences on the cognitive performance of Black children (Scarr & Weinberg, 1976; Weinberg, Scarr, & Waldman, 1992). It is also the only transracial adoption study that includes a longitudinal follow-up, with testing at ages 7 and 17 years. Scarr and Weinberg compared the IQ and academic achievement scores of Black, White, and mixed-race Black/White children adopted into upper-middle-class White families in Minnesota by adopting parents whose mean IQ was more than 1 standard deviation above the population mean of 100 (see Table 2). The biological children of these parents were also tested.
> The first testing of 265 children was carried out in 1975 when they were 7
years old and the second in 1986 when the 196 remaining in the study were 17 years old. The 7-year-old White biological (i.e., nonadopted) children had an average IQ of 117 (see Table 2, 2nd column), similar to that found for children of White upper-middle-class parents. The adopted children with two White biological parents had a mean IQ of 112. The adopted children with one Black and one White biological parent averaged 109. The adopted children with two Black biological parents had an average IQ of 97. (A mixed group of 21 Asian, North American Indian, and Latin American Indian adopted children averaged an IQ of 100 but were not included in the main statistical analyses.)
> Scarr and Weinberg (1976) interpreted the results of the testing at age 7 as support for the culture-only position. They drew special attention to the fact that the mean IQ of 105 for all “socially classified” Black children (i.e., those with either one or two Black parents) was significantly above the U.S. White mean.
> The poorer performance of children with two Black biological parents was
attributed to their more difficult and later placement. Scarr and Weinberg also pointed out that this latter group had both natural and adoptive parents with somewhat lower educational levels and abilities (2 points lower in adoptive parents’ IQ). They found no evidence for the expectancy effects hypothesis that adoptive parents’ beliefs about the child’s racial background influence the child’s intellectual development. The mean score for 12 children wrongly believed by their adoptive parents to have two Black biological parents was virtually the same as that of the 56 children correctly classified by their adoptive parents as having one Black and one White biological parent.
It's also pretty obvious that black people are on average stronger. There's not a secret cabal of pro-black racists who is ensuring that over half of every major sports team is black. Just blanket assuming that there is no differences is incorrect, though it would have been the best way for the world to be.
Unfortunately, we have to repeat the litany of Tarski and move on in the world we do live in.
also
> Allists make all kinds of miscalculations about us from projecting and then trying to parse through all the lies they tell each other; the solution, simply put, is to stick to autistic company as much as possible, at least for any "real" relationships. Allists simply cannot (reliably) understand us well enough to accept us completely.
The fury with which you respond to a non-central line comment about how there are no “fundamental” differences in “ability” between “the races” is odd to me. I think it’s clearly true that White Americans, on average, test higher on IQ than Black Americans, although the extent to which this can be attributed to testing methodology, culture, environment, and heredity is pretty hotly debated.
But no, it’s not depraved to say that there are no “fundamental” differences in “ability” between “the races,” especially when all of these terms are poorly defined, and the statement speaks of broad groups instead of averages.
I don't know whether it's true, there's certainly a lot of scientific misconduct and motivated reasoning on both sides of the issue, which makes it very hard to know anything for sure. But it's quite plausibly true; I'd put it above 50%.
That's messed up. You were Not The Asshole. Feng Shui is basically bullshit anyway, but, seriously, WTF are they thinking when they say people can't learn it?
In conclusion, although they were presumably perfectly nice people in other contexts, when it comes to this, f--k them and the horse they rode in on.
Really enjoyed this, thanks for writing it. I'd like to note one additional phenomenon that also plays a role here. Once an aspirational truth is widespread enough, the actual truth can become what Scott Alexander calls a hyperstitious slur:
>True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. “Black people commit more crime” is a hyperstitious slur, in the sense that racists talk about it more than non-racists, this helps it become a signal for racism, the fact that it’s a known signal for racism causes non-racists to talk about it even less than they would otherwise, and the vicious cycle ends with it being a very strong signal for racism and non-racists avoiding mentioning it. This leads to another sort of vicious cycle: half of people understand it’s a true fact that they’re not supposed to say for signaling reasons, the other half have never heard it before and assume it must be a vicious lie, and you end up with situations where someone notices that some police department arrests more blacks than whites, accuses that specific police department of racism, and everyone is afraid to explain what’s going on. I think the accepted way around the problem in these very few situations where it’s absolutely necessary to talk about it is by adding “. . . but obviously this goes away when you adjust for poverty” at the end. Even though this statement is false, it successfully avoids the hyperstitious slur and lets you mention the fact in that one special-purpose case.
I think that there are many people who would prefer to say the actual truth but choose not to because most people saying the actual truth are either bigoted or low status, and no one wants to be associated with them by saying it.
I never stop yearning for a religion that includes a ritualistic ways to say uncomfortable true things in a way that repels racists/sexists/gaybashers/whoever. Dunno if it would help in the extreme cases, but I think it would carve out a small niche in some domains.
> I never stop yearning for a religion that includes a ritualistic ways to say uncomfortable true things in a way that repels racists/sexists/gaybashers/whoever.
Do you have a definition of "racists/sexists/gaybashers/whoever" that doesn't boil down to "people willing to say uncomfortable true things" and take them seriously?
Yes! “People willing to say uncomfortable true things and take them seriously” are rationalists! They are my ingroup and I love them and I’m upending my entire life just so I can be closer to them later this year. :)
Racists/etc are the people who are generally unthinking, have an emotional dislike of those groups, and take comfort in hurting them. It goes both ways, there’s a lot of leftists that are racist against whites, or men, or etc. Taking ideas seriously means you have to remove these sorts of people because they will poison the discourse even when they bring up things that are true and that the rest of society has been hiding. Since they aren’t saying these things because they are true, but rather out of animus, the fact that they are true in this case is coincidental and they can’t be trusted.
FWIW, since true things often overlap with things racists say, it’s important to acknowledge that everyone is a little bit racist and that’s mostly fine. People aren’t so fragile they can’t shoulder a little racism, and having some resilience to prevent purity inquisition cascades is important.
> Yes! “People willing to say uncomfortable true things and take them seriously” are rationalists!
Except they're rather bad at doing that in practice. Frankly many of the people you seek to dismiss as "racists/sexists/gaybashers/whoever" are much better at it.
And, of course, most people who just tell the truth, like we’re usually taught from childhood to do, without pondering first whether we’ll be associated with bigots or with low-status people, are low status, and very easy to scapegoat as bigots if you feel like it to boot.
It's worth minding that we live in a time where all sorts of people deny reality for all sorts of reasons. They will not tell you theybare doing this, of course, and they will not feel like they are lying because "everybody knows". But everybody does not know. You can never be too careful to believe your own two eyes--or to heed the voice in the back of your head that doubts, even if it just seems like vague, unjustified, dissatisfaction with a "proven" answer.
I only skimmed the "believe in" piece but I'm glad someone else is speaking to rationalists along these lines. I've always thought of "belief in" as a kind of trust. If I believe in you, that means I trust you to come through for me. I'm sorry the people you've believed in haven't always come through for you.
I think that the leftist reliance on continental philosophy has led them to turn politics into a Stage 3 simulacra, like Kayfabe in pro wrestling, or (more likely) a Stage 4 simulacra, in which those In the Know treat the entire dialogue as the kind of language game described by Derrida and Barthes, in which "true" means "repeated by many people".
I recently had several "arguments" with mobs of leftists in which they said nothing at all of substance against me, but merely flung insults and illogic at me, then went away convinced they'd proved I'm a Nazi. The only way I can interpret their performance is that they believe that establishing consensus /is/ establishing truth.
I think this blog post makes a good point. However, there are two related points where I am not sure whether I understand it correctly.
I sometimes get the impression that if some author makes a point that resaonates well with the rationalist community's vibes, then the community accepts that the author
1.) writes things that s/he doesn't mean literally, used as rhetorical figures to support the author's message,
2.) uses words in ways that may have a certain meaning within the community but people outside of the community would understand it differently.
Therefore, I am unsure about
1.) your quote of what the "left-wing commentator" said (‘—is what one would say if one is a right-wing deplorable that just wants to laugh while humiliating those that are already oppressed. Naturally none of us would ever propose such a thing, we aren’t horrible people. Here’s what they get wrong…”). Is that exactly and verbatim what the commentator said, or is it an approximate, distorted representation?
2.) your usage of the word "lying". Do you really believe that Jehova's Witnesses in fact do not believe what they say and deliberately mislead others?
I'm genuinely unsure at this point and would like to make sure I'm not also "not getting a joke".
omg stop with the passive-aggressive bullshit and just say what you mean.
1. Gee, I wonder if I recalled the exact words spoken while my world was being shattered in the car 3 years ago. You sound like exactly the sort of person no one can trust, by pretending to saying something other than what you mean. Just come out and say "This obviously isn't a direct quote, I think you're misrepresenting what was said." See how much better it feels to be direct?
2. God is a lie. Yeah, of course many believers actually believe the lie. You are trying to imply I'm being deceitful for referring to it as a lie *because* many people are fooled by it. Congrats, you are correct in the way that doesn't matter to the conversation. Would you like to engage with the substance of the post, or do you want to go around throwing veiled accusations of bad faith on my part via pathetic hints of contamination?
Eneasz, I certainly didn't mean to offend you, upset you, or be passive-aggressive. You know what you mean with your own writing. But I was unsure about it. I then prefer to ask rather than throw accusations around. I was trying to be polite and actually thought it would help me understand what you're saying. It might also be a question of cultural and language translation.
With respect to the NPR radio commentator, maybe I would have felt more confident at another time, but when I wrote my comment I wanted to ask if that part of your post was meant to be a quote/paraphrasing. It is not always easy to distinguish between caricatures and accurate representations of reality in blog posts. I actually do not know whether radio commentators in the United States use words like "right-wing deplorable" in such a context, because my knowledge of American politics is filtered and indirect. I get it from reading blogs and newspapers/websites. I don't think I've ever listened to political comments on a US radio station. When someone uses quotation marks, I consider what is in between them to be a quote. I think I missed the word "roughly" and was confused. Therefore, I am sorry for the words "exactly and verbatim"; I think I added them after some back and forth trying to formulate my question. I understand that an exact memory of an emotionally distressful situation is nearly impossible. However, the paraphrasing seemed like a caricature. I was unsure, therefore I asked, and maybe my impression I was wrong. Sorry.
The second point was about the word "lying". No, I did not try to imply that you are being deceitful for referring to the behavior of JW as a lie, but I wanted to know what you meant by using the word "lying". But maybe my caution was unjustified and that's why it came across wrong. Considering your answer now, yes, your usage of words is misleading because you claim that religious people lie when they are only saying what they believe. The problem is not that "many people are fooled" by religion but because I see no real lying (“to intentionally give false information” according to wiktionary), and it seems you just use the word because you want to let these kinds of behavior to appear identical. Yet at the same time, you say that JW very literally say what they believe to be true. Your accusation against them seems to be that their beliefs are wrong, but you blur the concepts by calling that "lying". I don't really know what Jehovah's Witnesses exactly believe or do, I'm just drawing conclusions based on what you write. Based on that, your writing (that is, how you use the word "lying") seems closer to the wiktionary definition of "lying" than their behavior. I'm still confused by this, sorry.
Now I tried to be more direct, as requested. And while we're at it, I would like to add that I was surprised by your ad hominem and the patronizing advice, found both unnecessary and I think if you want more direct criticism based on fewer questions and clarifications, you can just say that.
With respect to the substance of the post, I am not sure there is ONE "substance of the post".
I already recommended it to people a while ago because I found the "Reality Keeps Shattering" part (Section 3) to be a very good illustration of a concept I'd like to have a better gears-level understanding of. Something like "political milieus having a groupthink belief-in-belief". However, it is not easy to identify such beliefs. The interesting question would be how they arise and who knows what about the nature of these beliefs. Could the radio commentator really know how his listeners would understand the concepts?
I think the other sections don't really fit together very well.
Section 1) Your accusation against Jehova's Witnesses doesn't make sense against the background of the rest of the post. I understand your post's message that you demand that everybody behaves honestly and tells the truth, but JW seem to do that (from their own perspective).
Section 2) I think the concept of "aspirational beliefs" in the section "'Believing In' is Aspirational, Unless You’re A Child" section is useful, even if it seems more like the beginning of a concept.
Section 4) About the last section "Believing In Anti-Santa", even though my own behavior is less consistent than the behavior you advocate, I still find the call to action to be positive. In a sense, reading that you call for "fighting to be as honest as possible" etc you can imagine me "mentally pumping my fist in the air and cheereing". Then I was confused by, well, see above. Piecemeal disillusionment is not as shocking as your world being shattered, of course, but it is still disappointing. I may not be consistent in all my actions, but I understood the message of your post to be that you are calling for exactly this kind of consistency.
I appreciate you trying to make sense of this. I do think you do better for yourself if you were more direct and honest about your feelings. Couching them in so many niceties to avoid offense comes across as deceitful, and honestly I think it damages one's mental health to be in such a constant state of self-policing. Trust that your peers have some measure of reliance and don't need to be protected from your every non-complimentary emotion -- you don't want peers that are that fragile anyway.
To be fair - I lived this way too, and it was pretty awful, which is one reason I encourage people not to live this way when I can. Sometimes with a bit of... vigor? ^^;
The NPR commenter absolutely began with the proposition that the men's and women's teams play each other, sparking that joy and relief in me, and immediately proceeded into explaining that that position is one the bad people on the Right hold.
When you say "Could the radio commentator really know how his listeners would understand the concepts?" I'm not sure what you're referring to. Probably the commentator didn't think that her rejection of the two teams playing each other would come as a shock to me.
(Though nowadays I'm not even sure about that, it very well could have been a "We've always been at war with East Asia" moment where the NewThink was both blatantly contradictory and expected to be adopted immediately and without question. I have a hard time modeling a human as being THAT morally depraved, though. (even one on NPR ;) ))
re my accusation against Jehovah's Witnesses - this reduces to a blanket accusation against all normie theists. They say they believe something which would have massive ramifications if they ACTUALLY lived like they believe it. But they don't. They live like they don't take their own beliefs to be true at all. I don't care if they have managed to mangle their epistemology so badly that they can literally *think they believe* what they say while living as if someone with completely different beliefs controls their bodies. A human with a care for truth would not end up like this. Malicious negligence doesn't absolve one of guilt, and the things such people say are lies.
PS: A minute after hitting reply, I better understood the relationship between sections 2, 3, and 4, but it's still hard to see how section 1 is supposed to be an introduction for them without changing the meaning of the word "lies." (There is a biographical connection, but not a logical one.) Maybe I'm still missing something.
" I almost want to say that parents SHOULD tell their children that Santa is real. That way they learn very quickly in life that everyone will lie to them without hesitation for the most trivial of reasons. "
I guarantee you that there are realms of our culture in which lying to children (e.g. the "tall tale," or the "snipe hunt") is taken as almost obligatory, and I expect that you have put your finger on the unspoken justification: kids should learn to figure out when someone is lying. I didn't bring my kids up with religion, but Santa made an appearance, as did multitudes of smaller fictions.
I don't want to talk too much about my charming, suspicious, and sarcastic family, but here's a case example: how do you expect children to figure out that the respectable people (teachers, pediatricians...) who tell them that not acting like stereotypical members of their sex might mean they're secretly the other sex inside (and thus require medical sterilization) are full of crap without having encountered respectable people telling them arrant (yet otherwise harmless) lies before?
Naïveté makes children targets. Lies like Santa may be ways to make their lives safer without exposing them to actual harm.
I don't think this is remotely necessary. People will run into others lying to them A LOT. There is no shortage of chances to practice being lied to. Knowing that at least the two people who you rely on for everything, and who supposedly love you more than anyone, will NEVER lie to you is extremely important when dealing with an epistemically hostile world IMO. My gf and her husband raised their son on the iron-clad rule that they would never lie to him on any matter regardless of size. He's in college now and is probably the most well-adjust person I've ever met in my decades on Earth. It's incredible.
Just the sheer trust of knowing that if someone says "you might be a girl!" he can come to his parents and ask and get their dead-ass honest answer, informed to the best of their knowledge, with his best interests at heart, is a massive inoculant against all sorts of lunacy.
It sounds to me like your girlfriend and her ex-husband did a great job raising their son when he was a kid. I applaud their choices, but they could never have been mine. I think it's neither in my culture nor in my nature.
I appreciate a good fiction, some of my friends are very good liars, and I think kids have to figure out many things for themselves. One of my favorite maxims handed down in my family is "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer." On the one hand, it conveys that even a parent has no obligation to give full information about anything unless the asker can understand how to properly ask a question. It's an example of the 'good practice' concept. My son has gotten pretty good at not getting turned around, hornswoggled, or fobbed off with incomplete answers.
How did the lad do with individuation during the teen years, when his developmental task was to differentiate himself from his parents? Has he managed to moved on to other relationships well?
Yeah, all families are different, and yours sounds delightful as well. :) Kinda love the rough spirit, I imagine it builds robustness/resilience. :)
He's done well! I'm totally serious when I say he's the most well-adjusted person I know, even among significantly older people. You can tell he's his parents' kid, he's got the nerdy computer interests of his dad and the empathy of his mom. :) But he's forging his own life, and has been growing into adulthood smoothly. He had a girlfriend in high school, and has a girl friend in college now. One who also loves creating video games, they are working together on a project right now!
Also, fwiw, not ex-husband, they're still together. <3
I think another important motivation to lie to children is to avoid respecting them too much intellectually; i.e., a matter of status. At the end of the day, they have to learn, too, that when others can get away with not respecting you, they usually won’t, and that when they can afford to treat you like a moron, they usually will.
I think the law of jokes is that if you don’t get the joke, the joke is on you. This behavior pattern wouldn’t have evolved if there weren’t some advantage for the group in getting rid of people like us.
I was raised evangelical fundamentalist Baptist, and I am sure that nearly everyone in those circles believes that the things they say they believe are literally true. Some beliefs have plausible wriggle room; they may say that the 6 days of creation are not Earthly days, and that Earth is very old. Some have inexplicable wriggle room: the Bible has a complete genealogy from Adam to Jesus which isn't long enough for the Neolithic. Many say they believe the Bible literally, yet don't deny that humanity is more than 6000 years old. But many do stick on that point, and come up with AND BELIEVE explanations such as that humans before Adam didn't have souls. I have far too much experience with these people to think that all of them are faking it.
The way these Christians plan their lives does not make sense if you take their beliefs as aspirational. They believe literally that Heaven is a place, and that they will be there after they die. MANY of them are willing to risk death to spread these beliefs, and many have died rather than perform some symbolic act of disrespect towards their God. If the people who "believe" the sexes are the same were like Christian fundamentalists, you wouldn't find people covering up the fact that they are different; you'd find HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of professionally-published books with long, detailed, scientific-looking arguments against all of the evidence that men and women are different, as you do books attempting to scientifically rebut evolution. These people really believe they have the truth, and sufficient scientific study will prove it.
"Belief as aspiration" is a thing, but I think it's a distinctly elite thing. In ancient Athens or Rome you could have found many elites who didn't believe the gods existed, but thought it was good for other people to believe in gods. There's also "belief as pragmatics", and this is common outside the literalist churches. You find pragmatics in "religious" people who don't deep down believe in anything, but believe everyone would turn to raping and murdering each other if society stopped saying it believed in a god. (This is not quite "belief as aspiration"; the aspiration people are revolutionaries; the pragmatics people are conservatives.) And there's "belief as aesthetics": "I don't really believe this absurd thing, but how beautiful it is! If it's untrue, I don't want to know it." That was C.S. Lewis' ultimate argument for "believing in" Christianity in /The Silver Chair/.
"Belief as literal belief" is probably the oldest, and still co-exists alongside these others. What is new about the modern beliefs is actual altruism. Altruism is not a part of any conventional religion. Every time you find a religion that preaches self-renunciation, love of your neighbor, and so on, you'll find that it teaches that the person who does that will be rewarded. They are all carrot-and-stick. Ones that aren't, don't last.
Humans do naturally have actual altruism, but it is not useful for religions in an evolutionary sense. (You should apply evolutionary psychology to religion. Religions and philosophies are just self-replicating meme sets.)
My mother literally believes that I will burn in Hell for eternity unless she prays hard enough for me. The pain this causes her is not faked. She knows that she is risking her relationship with me every time she recites the same reasons why she is a Christian. She isn't doing this because she believes religion will have some good effect on me or on the world. She knows I would be the same person and do the same things in the same way if I "accepted Jesus as my savior", except for going to church, praying for missions, praying before meals, and doing other things that would have no impact on anything if her beliefs are not literally true.
She, and all my religious relatives, literally cannot understand any of the simple and obvious reasons why their beliefs are false. She never, ever comprehends what I say in reply, nor remembers it the next time around. I know her well enough to say this is a sincere lack of comprehension, or even a lack of ability to translate my statements into her internal representation. Plato's ontology, which is basically what Christians have, was constructed so that the claims which disprove Plato's theology can't be expressed in it, and thus can't be comprehended or remembered.
Take the fact that you can't explain the complexity of life by saying "God created it." This just leads to infinite regression: Who created God? And who created the one who created God? I've argued this point many times with many people, and they really, really, cannot understand it. Some roadblock in their brains shatters it before it reaches their consciousness.
Religious systems--the kind that last--are self-consistent. So is post-modernism, Nazism, and the Social Justice movement. They come with their own epistemologies, which provide ways of dismissing all evidence that the system is false. They are logical and self-consistent, so that once a person literally believes all the major points of this system, rationality keeps them IN the system rather than breaking them out of it. Rationality is the problem, not the solution. Empiricism is the solution.
I'm the same kind of person, the one who literally believes stuff. I have a lot more respect for the people who actually literally believe in god than those who do it for social reasons. I think they're wrong, but at least they aren't polite liars.
Yeah, similar here. With actual believers, we can "agree to disagree" and then move on to different topics where perhaps we will find more agreement.
With social believers, I never know what game we are playing, and I don't know whether it's still the same game as we change topics from religion to politics or economics or humans or weather...
I think you need to listen to a Trent Horn podcast. Many of your statements on the faith seem to be prefaced on your own faith in oversimplified understandings of evolution or logic. Take, for one example, the infinite regress point. Have you not confronted the very famous argument of Aquinas? God is literally the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause, precisely because infinite regress is the problem you face in your own view of reality.
have an infinity regress problem? Posit a dad that loves you and is the solution to it. No problem! 😉
To have an infinite-regress-of-causes problem, first you need to know what a cause is. As far as I know, the laws of physics don’t actually need such a concept. I’ve never gotten anyone to explain theirs to me, either; the most elaborate answer I’ve received so far consisted of shaming me for needing an explanation.
I only know causation as a not very consistent simplification that encapsulates very complex systems, especially those, like us, with that no less strange thing we call free will. Beyond this, causation seems one of those ideas you’re supposed to “socially believe”, but don’t try too hard to understand it or your interlocutors will show you their teeth.
What exactly did you do under the assumption that there's no material differences between the races that they got mad at you for because they don't actually believe that and were just politely pretending to?
That any skill one race can master, any other race can also master. I didn't believe there was some special thing intrinsic to any race that makes them the only ones able to perform a certain task/skill, and when I expressed that (via a stated belief that non-asians could also learn and do Fung Shui) I became Problematic.
In this case I'm pretty sure your issue was that you disagreed on cultural appropriation discourse. I'm not sure anyone believes Asians are genetically better at Feng Shui; if anything, this strikes me as a similar "fake belief" someone might endorse because they don't think non-Asians *should* learn Feng Shui.
I was about to post a comment saying "Dude... you are SO autistic" (as a fellow autist, game recognizing game); but this is DOUBLE autism XD
There are indeed no fundamental differences in ability between the races; the disagreement you seem to have misunderstood is, as another commenter explained, about cultural appropriation.
And here I was afraid from the way you worded that footnote that you had somehow become a racist, when it turns out you were being autistically antiracist! For what it's worth, you're far from alone on that front. Allists make all kinds of miscalculations about us from projecting and then trying to parse through all the lies they tell each other; the solution, simply put, is to stick to autistic company as much as possible, at least for any "real" relationships. Allists simply cannot (reliably) understand us well enough to accept us completely.
Since this is a post about inconvenient truths, I’ll point out that there are in fact differences between the races.
It’s wise to treat individuals as individuals but it’s foolish to believe there aren’t important average differences between human populations. Race is a very rough categorization but it does work very well in many contexts.
Silence, troglodyte
he was being civil, you don't really bring anything to the conversation by just throwing out insults
There are two races: humans, and troglodytes. The difference between the races is that troglodytes are racist.
> There are indeed no fundamental differences in ability between the races
To read a post where someone is talking about how much they've been hurt by political gaslighting, and go into the comments to immediately try to gaslight them some more in the exact same way, is truly depraved.
Since I'm unconvinced by the evidence that Quambale Bingle provided against this point, here's why I believe it is true:
There are massive, statistically significant gaps in the IQs of different racial groups, even when you control for income.
I suspect that a lot of this comes down to non-genetic factors, such as lower quality nutrition, but seriously doubt that all of it does. Am I happy the world works that way? No. But my emotional response to it doesn't change how the world is.
>The same year the e-mail was sent, an American Psychiatric Association taskforce released a high-profile report on the state of the science of intelligence, with the title “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.” The report claimed:
> "African American IQ scores have long averaged about 15 points below those of Whites, with correspondingly lower scores on academic achievement tests. In recent years the achievement-test gap has narrowed appreciably. It is possible that the IQ-score differential is narrowing as well, but this has not been clearly established…. The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socioeconomic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential."
> While it is certainly possible for mainstream academics in a field to be wrong, trusting in an apparent academic consensus should not be treated as beyond the pale or interpreted as a serious indictment of one's character. In my view, the fact that Prof. Bostrom has held this belief does not, in itself, warrant condemnation.
Further reading:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GqD9ZKeAbNWDqy8Mz/a-general-comment-on-discussions-of-genetic-group
> Another reason people cite for not talking about genetically mediated group differences, even if they exist, is that bringing people's attention to this kind of inequality could make the disadvantaged feel terrible. I take this cost seriously, and think this is a good reason to be really careful about how we discuss this issue (the exact opposite of Bostrom's approach in the Extropians email), and a good reason to include content warnings so anyone can easily avoid this topic if they find it upsetting.
But this is the exact topic of this article, and it's point is that we should be able to admit such things.
An interesting review of research:
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
> Race differences in average brain size are observable at birth. A study by
Rushton (1997) analyzed recorded head circumference measurements and IQ scores from 50,000 children in the Collaborative Perinatal Project followed from birth to age 7 (Broman, Nichols, Shaugnessy, & Kennedy, 1987). Using the head circumference measures to calculate cranial capacity at birth, 4 months, 1 year, and 7 years, at each of these ages, the Asian American children averaged larger cranial volumes than did the White children, who averaged larger cranial volumes than did the Black children. Within each race, cranial capacity correlated with IQ scores. By age 7, the Asian American children averaged an IQ of 110; the White children, 102; and the Black children 90. Because the Asian American children were the shortest in stature and the lightest in weight while the Black children were the tallest in stature and the heaviest in weight, these average race differences in brain-size/IQ relations were not due to body size.
Another excerpt:
> The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, the largest and best-known
transracial study, was designed specifically by Sandra Scarr and Richard Weinberg to separate genetic factors from rearing conditions as causal influences on the cognitive performance of Black children (Scarr & Weinberg, 1976; Weinberg, Scarr, & Waldman, 1992). It is also the only transracial adoption study that includes a longitudinal follow-up, with testing at ages 7 and 17 years. Scarr and Weinberg compared the IQ and academic achievement scores of Black, White, and mixed-race Black/White children adopted into upper-middle-class White families in Minnesota by adopting parents whose mean IQ was more than 1 standard deviation above the population mean of 100 (see Table 2). The biological children of these parents were also tested.
> The first testing of 265 children was carried out in 1975 when they were 7
years old and the second in 1986 when the 196 remaining in the study were 17 years old. The 7-year-old White biological (i.e., nonadopted) children had an average IQ of 117 (see Table 2, 2nd column), similar to that found for children of White upper-middle-class parents. The adopted children with two White biological parents had a mean IQ of 112. The adopted children with one Black and one White biological parent averaged 109. The adopted children with two Black biological parents had an average IQ of 97. (A mixed group of 21 Asian, North American Indian, and Latin American Indian adopted children averaged an IQ of 100 but were not included in the main statistical analyses.)
> Scarr and Weinberg (1976) interpreted the results of the testing at age 7 as support for the culture-only position. They drew special attention to the fact that the mean IQ of 105 for all “socially classified” Black children (i.e., those with either one or two Black parents) was significantly above the U.S. White mean.
> The poorer performance of children with two Black biological parents was
attributed to their more difficult and later placement. Scarr and Weinberg also pointed out that this latter group had both natural and adoptive parents with somewhat lower educational levels and abilities (2 points lower in adoptive parents’ IQ). They found no evidence for the expectancy effects hypothesis that adoptive parents’ beliefs about the child’s racial background influence the child’s intellectual development. The mean score for 12 children wrongly believed by their adoptive parents to have two Black biological parents was virtually the same as that of the 56 children correctly classified by their adoptive parents as having one Black and one White biological parent.
It's also pretty obvious that black people are on average stronger. There's not a secret cabal of pro-black racists who is ensuring that over half of every major sports team is black. Just blanket assuming that there is no differences is incorrect, though it would have been the best way for the world to be.
Unfortunately, we have to repeat the litany of Tarski and move on in the world we do live in.
also
> Allists make all kinds of miscalculations about us from projecting and then trying to parse through all the lies they tell each other; the solution, simply put, is to stick to autistic company as much as possible, at least for any "real" relationships. Allists simply cannot (reliably) understand us well enough to accept us completely.
lmao
The fury with which you respond to a non-central line comment about how there are no “fundamental” differences in “ability” between “the races” is odd to me. I think it’s clearly true that White Americans, on average, test higher on IQ than Black Americans, although the extent to which this can be attributed to testing methodology, culture, environment, and heredity is pretty hotly debated.
But no, it’s not depraved to say that there are no “fundamental” differences in “ability” between “the races,” especially when all of these terms are poorly defined, and the statement speaks of broad groups instead of averages.
I don't know whether it's true, there's certainly a lot of scientific misconduct and motivated reasoning on both sides of the issue, which makes it very hard to know anything for sure. But it's quite plausibly true; I'd put it above 50%.
Silence, vile troglodyte.
very convincing!
O_o
That's messed up. You were Not The Asshole. Feng Shui is basically bullshit anyway, but, seriously, WTF are they thinking when they say people can't learn it?
In conclusion, although they were presumably perfectly nice people in other contexts, when it comes to this, f--k them and the horse they rode in on.
Really enjoyed this, thanks for writing it. I'd like to note one additional phenomenon that also plays a role here. Once an aspirational truth is widespread enough, the actual truth can become what Scott Alexander calls a hyperstitious slur:
>True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. “Black people commit more crime” is a hyperstitious slur, in the sense that racists talk about it more than non-racists, this helps it become a signal for racism, the fact that it’s a known signal for racism causes non-racists to talk about it even less than they would otherwise, and the vicious cycle ends with it being a very strong signal for racism and non-racists avoiding mentioning it. This leads to another sort of vicious cycle: half of people understand it’s a true fact that they’re not supposed to say for signaling reasons, the other half have never heard it before and assume it must be a vicious lie, and you end up with situations where someone notices that some police department arrests more blacks than whites, accuses that specific police department of racism, and everyone is afraid to explain what’s going on. I think the accepted way around the problem in these very few situations where it’s absolutely necessary to talk about it is by adding “. . . but obviously this goes away when you adjust for poverty” at the end. Even though this statement is false, it successfully avoids the hyperstitious slur and lets you mention the fact in that one special-purpose case.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way
I think that there are many people who would prefer to say the actual truth but choose not to because most people saying the actual truth are either bigoted or low status, and no one wants to be associated with them by saying it.
I never stop yearning for a religion that includes a ritualistic ways to say uncomfortable true things in a way that repels racists/sexists/gaybashers/whoever. Dunno if it would help in the extreme cases, but I think it would carve out a small niche in some domains.
> I never stop yearning for a religion that includes a ritualistic ways to say uncomfortable true things in a way that repels racists/sexists/gaybashers/whoever.
Do you have a definition of "racists/sexists/gaybashers/whoever" that doesn't boil down to "people willing to say uncomfortable true things" and take them seriously?
Yes! “People willing to say uncomfortable true things and take them seriously” are rationalists! They are my ingroup and I love them and I’m upending my entire life just so I can be closer to them later this year. :)
Racists/etc are the people who are generally unthinking, have an emotional dislike of those groups, and take comfort in hurting them. It goes both ways, there’s a lot of leftists that are racist against whites, or men, or etc. Taking ideas seriously means you have to remove these sorts of people because they will poison the discourse even when they bring up things that are true and that the rest of society has been hiding. Since they aren’t saying these things because they are true, but rather out of animus, the fact that they are true in this case is coincidental and they can’t be trusted.
FWIW, since true things often overlap with things racists say, it’s important to acknowledge that everyone is a little bit racist and that’s mostly fine. People aren’t so fragile they can’t shoulder a little racism, and having some resilience to prevent purity inquisition cascades is important.
> Yes! “People willing to say uncomfortable true things and take them seriously” are rationalists!
Except they're rather bad at doing that in practice. Frankly many of the people you seek to dismiss as "racists/sexists/gaybashers/whoever" are much better at it.
https://images.app.goo.gl/8vSzkbxtDo7iSyTx7
aw, it doesn't show the gif. Lebowski Opinion Meme
Abandoning all pretense of caring about reality, I see.
And, of course, most people who just tell the truth, like we’re usually taught from childhood to do, without pondering first whether we’ll be associated with bigots or with low-status people, are low status, and very easy to scapegoat as bigots if you feel like it to boot.
Related: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/everybody-knows
It's worth minding that we live in a time where all sorts of people deny reality for all sorts of reasons. They will not tell you theybare doing this, of course, and they will not feel like they are lying because "everybody knows". But everybody does not know. You can never be too careful to believe your own two eyes--or to heed the voice in the back of your head that doubts, even if it just seems like vague, unjustified, dissatisfaction with a "proven" answer.
I only skimmed the "believe in" piece but I'm glad someone else is speaking to rationalists along these lines. I've always thought of "belief in" as a kind of trust. If I believe in you, that means I trust you to come through for me. I'm sorry the people you've believed in haven't always come through for you.
"Honestly, any sort of theism should have massive repercussions on how lives." - typo?
Also the YouTube link doesn't work for me (based in the UK)
I think that the leftist reliance on continental philosophy has led them to turn politics into a Stage 3 simulacra, like Kayfabe in pro wrestling, or (more likely) a Stage 4 simulacra, in which those In the Know treat the entire dialogue as the kind of language game described by Derrida and Barthes, in which "true" means "repeated by many people".
I recently had several "arguments" with mobs of leftists in which they said nothing at all of substance against me, but merely flung insults and illogic at me, then went away convinced they'd proved I'm a Nazi. The only way I can interpret their performance is that they believe that establishing consensus /is/ establishing truth.
Continental philosophy and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Yeah, it was very disturbing when I stumbled into it. :( Expanded my view of the possible variations in human mind-space (to put it charitably).
I think this blog post makes a good point. However, there are two related points where I am not sure whether I understand it correctly.
I sometimes get the impression that if some author makes a point that resaonates well with the rationalist community's vibes, then the community accepts that the author
1.) writes things that s/he doesn't mean literally, used as rhetorical figures to support the author's message,
2.) uses words in ways that may have a certain meaning within the community but people outside of the community would understand it differently.
Therefore, I am unsure about
1.) your quote of what the "left-wing commentator" said (‘—is what one would say if one is a right-wing deplorable that just wants to laugh while humiliating those that are already oppressed. Naturally none of us would ever propose such a thing, we aren’t horrible people. Here’s what they get wrong…”). Is that exactly and verbatim what the commentator said, or is it an approximate, distorted representation?
2.) your usage of the word "lying". Do you really believe that Jehova's Witnesses in fact do not believe what they say and deliberately mislead others?
I'm genuinely unsure at this point and would like to make sure I'm not also "not getting a joke".
omg stop with the passive-aggressive bullshit and just say what you mean.
1. Gee, I wonder if I recalled the exact words spoken while my world was being shattered in the car 3 years ago. You sound like exactly the sort of person no one can trust, by pretending to saying something other than what you mean. Just come out and say "This obviously isn't a direct quote, I think you're misrepresenting what was said." See how much better it feels to be direct?
2. God is a lie. Yeah, of course many believers actually believe the lie. You are trying to imply I'm being deceitful for referring to it as a lie *because* many people are fooled by it. Congrats, you are correct in the way that doesn't matter to the conversation. Would you like to engage with the substance of the post, or do you want to go around throwing veiled accusations of bad faith on my part via pathetic hints of contamination?
Eneasz, I certainly didn't mean to offend you, upset you, or be passive-aggressive. You know what you mean with your own writing. But I was unsure about it. I then prefer to ask rather than throw accusations around. I was trying to be polite and actually thought it would help me understand what you're saying. It might also be a question of cultural and language translation.
With respect to the NPR radio commentator, maybe I would have felt more confident at another time, but when I wrote my comment I wanted to ask if that part of your post was meant to be a quote/paraphrasing. It is not always easy to distinguish between caricatures and accurate representations of reality in blog posts. I actually do not know whether radio commentators in the United States use words like "right-wing deplorable" in such a context, because my knowledge of American politics is filtered and indirect. I get it from reading blogs and newspapers/websites. I don't think I've ever listened to political comments on a US radio station. When someone uses quotation marks, I consider what is in between them to be a quote. I think I missed the word "roughly" and was confused. Therefore, I am sorry for the words "exactly and verbatim"; I think I added them after some back and forth trying to formulate my question. I understand that an exact memory of an emotionally distressful situation is nearly impossible. However, the paraphrasing seemed like a caricature. I was unsure, therefore I asked, and maybe my impression I was wrong. Sorry.
The second point was about the word "lying". No, I did not try to imply that you are being deceitful for referring to the behavior of JW as a lie, but I wanted to know what you meant by using the word "lying". But maybe my caution was unjustified and that's why it came across wrong. Considering your answer now, yes, your usage of words is misleading because you claim that religious people lie when they are only saying what they believe. The problem is not that "many people are fooled" by religion but because I see no real lying (“to intentionally give false information” according to wiktionary), and it seems you just use the word because you want to let these kinds of behavior to appear identical. Yet at the same time, you say that JW very literally say what they believe to be true. Your accusation against them seems to be that their beliefs are wrong, but you blur the concepts by calling that "lying". I don't really know what Jehovah's Witnesses exactly believe or do, I'm just drawing conclusions based on what you write. Based on that, your writing (that is, how you use the word "lying") seems closer to the wiktionary definition of "lying" than their behavior. I'm still confused by this, sorry.
Now I tried to be more direct, as requested. And while we're at it, I would like to add that I was surprised by your ad hominem and the patronizing advice, found both unnecessary and I think if you want more direct criticism based on fewer questions and clarifications, you can just say that.
With respect to the substance of the post, I am not sure there is ONE "substance of the post".
I already recommended it to people a while ago because I found the "Reality Keeps Shattering" part (Section 3) to be a very good illustration of a concept I'd like to have a better gears-level understanding of. Something like "political milieus having a groupthink belief-in-belief". However, it is not easy to identify such beliefs. The interesting question would be how they arise and who knows what about the nature of these beliefs. Could the radio commentator really know how his listeners would understand the concepts?
I think the other sections don't really fit together very well.
Section 1) Your accusation against Jehova's Witnesses doesn't make sense against the background of the rest of the post. I understand your post's message that you demand that everybody behaves honestly and tells the truth, but JW seem to do that (from their own perspective).
Section 2) I think the concept of "aspirational beliefs" in the section "'Believing In' is Aspirational, Unless You’re A Child" section is useful, even if it seems more like the beginning of a concept.
Section 4) About the last section "Believing In Anti-Santa", even though my own behavior is less consistent than the behavior you advocate, I still find the call to action to be positive. In a sense, reading that you call for "fighting to be as honest as possible" etc you can imagine me "mentally pumping my fist in the air and cheereing". Then I was confused by, well, see above. Piecemeal disillusionment is not as shocking as your world being shattered, of course, but it is still disappointing. I may not be consistent in all my actions, but I understood the message of your post to be that you are calling for exactly this kind of consistency.
Happy New Year and no offense.
I appreciate you trying to make sense of this. I do think you do better for yourself if you were more direct and honest about your feelings. Couching them in so many niceties to avoid offense comes across as deceitful, and honestly I think it damages one's mental health to be in such a constant state of self-policing. Trust that your peers have some measure of reliance and don't need to be protected from your every non-complimentary emotion -- you don't want peers that are that fragile anyway.
To be fair - I lived this way too, and it was pretty awful, which is one reason I encourage people not to live this way when I can. Sometimes with a bit of... vigor? ^^;
The NPR commenter absolutely began with the proposition that the men's and women's teams play each other, sparking that joy and relief in me, and immediately proceeded into explaining that that position is one the bad people on the Right hold.
When you say "Could the radio commentator really know how his listeners would understand the concepts?" I'm not sure what you're referring to. Probably the commentator didn't think that her rejection of the two teams playing each other would come as a shock to me.
(Though nowadays I'm not even sure about that, it very well could have been a "We've always been at war with East Asia" moment where the NewThink was both blatantly contradictory and expected to be adopted immediately and without question. I have a hard time modeling a human as being THAT morally depraved, though. (even one on NPR ;) ))
re my accusation against Jehovah's Witnesses - this reduces to a blanket accusation against all normie theists. They say they believe something which would have massive ramifications if they ACTUALLY lived like they believe it. But they don't. They live like they don't take their own beliefs to be true at all. I don't care if they have managed to mangle their epistemology so badly that they can literally *think they believe* what they say while living as if someone with completely different beliefs controls their bodies. A human with a care for truth would not end up like this. Malicious negligence doesn't absolve one of guilt, and the things such people say are lies.
Happy New Year to you too :)
PS: A minute after hitting reply, I better understood the relationship between sections 2, 3, and 4, but it's still hard to see how section 1 is supposed to be an introduction for them without changing the meaning of the word "lies." (There is a biographical connection, but not a logical one.) Maybe I'm still missing something.
" I almost want to say that parents SHOULD tell their children that Santa is real. That way they learn very quickly in life that everyone will lie to them without hesitation for the most trivial of reasons. "
I guarantee you that there are realms of our culture in which lying to children (e.g. the "tall tale," or the "snipe hunt") is taken as almost obligatory, and I expect that you have put your finger on the unspoken justification: kids should learn to figure out when someone is lying. I didn't bring my kids up with religion, but Santa made an appearance, as did multitudes of smaller fictions.
I don't want to talk too much about my charming, suspicious, and sarcastic family, but here's a case example: how do you expect children to figure out that the respectable people (teachers, pediatricians...) who tell them that not acting like stereotypical members of their sex might mean they're secretly the other sex inside (and thus require medical sterilization) are full of crap without having encountered respectable people telling them arrant (yet otherwise harmless) lies before?
Naïveté makes children targets. Lies like Santa may be ways to make their lives safer without exposing them to actual harm.
I don't think this is remotely necessary. People will run into others lying to them A LOT. There is no shortage of chances to practice being lied to. Knowing that at least the two people who you rely on for everything, and who supposedly love you more than anyone, will NEVER lie to you is extremely important when dealing with an epistemically hostile world IMO. My gf and her husband raised their son on the iron-clad rule that they would never lie to him on any matter regardless of size. He's in college now and is probably the most well-adjust person I've ever met in my decades on Earth. It's incredible.
Just the sheer trust of knowing that if someone says "you might be a girl!" he can come to his parents and ask and get their dead-ass honest answer, informed to the best of their knowledge, with his best interests at heart, is a massive inoculant against all sorts of lunacy.
It sounds to me like your girlfriend and her ex-husband did a great job raising their son when he was a kid. I applaud their choices, but they could never have been mine. I think it's neither in my culture nor in my nature.
I appreciate a good fiction, some of my friends are very good liars, and I think kids have to figure out many things for themselves. One of my favorite maxims handed down in my family is "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer." On the one hand, it conveys that even a parent has no obligation to give full information about anything unless the asker can understand how to properly ask a question. It's an example of the 'good practice' concept. My son has gotten pretty good at not getting turned around, hornswoggled, or fobbed off with incomplete answers.
How did the lad do with individuation during the teen years, when his developmental task was to differentiate himself from his parents? Has he managed to moved on to other relationships well?
Yeah, all families are different, and yours sounds delightful as well. :) Kinda love the rough spirit, I imagine it builds robustness/resilience. :)
He's done well! I'm totally serious when I say he's the most well-adjusted person I know, even among significantly older people. You can tell he's his parents' kid, he's got the nerdy computer interests of his dad and the empathy of his mom. :) But he's forging his own life, and has been growing into adulthood smoothly. He had a girlfriend in high school, and has a girl friend in college now. One who also loves creating video games, they are working together on a project right now!
Also, fwiw, not ex-husband, they're still together. <3
I think another important motivation to lie to children is to avoid respecting them too much intellectually; i.e., a matter of status. At the end of the day, they have to learn, too, that when others can get away with not respecting you, they usually won’t, and that when they can afford to treat you like a moron, they usually will.
I think the law of jokes is that if you don’t get the joke, the joke is on you. This behavior pattern wouldn’t have evolved if there weren’t some advantage for the group in getting rid of people like us.
that’s getting a bit too dark for me tbh. I think it’s too edgy to be credible