[audio available here courtesy of AskWho] The Core of Civilization In Children Believe Every Lie I wrote about Aspirational “Believing In” versus True Belief. To recap: Many beliefs are aspirational and everyone knows that saying “I believe this thing” really means “it would be good if this was true, and acting like it is true will help to get us there, so we’re all going to pretend it is (as much as possible) in order to make that happen.” Children (and autists) don’t “Get The Joke” — they observe everyone proclaiming an aspirational belief but don’t know that it’s aspirational, and so they believe it is actually true. Having a world model this deeply wrong can have devastating consequences. It also
I'm just gonna repost a comment I made a few days ago on a Signal group talking about the elimination of gifted & talented programs from Seattle's schools because they underrepresent minorities. It involves Plato, of course.
> It's probably a category error to say they [the woke] have a coherent view that smart is bad, more like they don't care about that vs superficial fairness stuff
I think they do believe smart is bad. Not because they have anything against smartness in particular, but because their worldview is based on a Platonist metaphysics in which all people are the same in every way.
Social Justice morality goes hand-in-hand with Marxist economic policy. Both demand that everyone has the same abilities, the same gender, the same needs, and the same desires. Every item on their agenda will fail if people aren't fundamentally identical. It's necessary for people to be identical if their rationalist-Modernist (in the "Seeing Like a State" sense) approach to managing society is to work.
Weird niche connection- in C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," Lewis uses the demon Screwtape to address what he regards as a misunderstanding or misuse of a principle of democracy: The false belief or demand that people are literally equal rather than having equality in a legal or moral sense.
Maybe I'm weird but I have always interpreted 'equal' in this context as only meaning 'deserving equal moral consideration'. It literally never occured to me that this should imply we are the same or even very similar. More like an affirmation that we should count the same _despite_ our many differences...
Can you explain what you take "All people are created equal" to mean? It doesn't seem like a well-defined term to me, I have no idea what it actually implies. I've always taken it to just mean that legally the government applies laws to all people in the same way.
I think the recent craze for Rene Girard is due entirely to the way it takes this Marxist/Woke claim that everyone has the same preferences to the next level. Girard says that no one has /any/ preferences; we just imitate what we perceive as the preferences of other people. This bullshit paves the way for attributing absolutely everything to social construction.
To actually go beyond equality we need some subtle thinking that distinguishes everyone's innate value as a human being -- "equal before god" etc -- vs their actual capacities and capabilities in a given context (maybe not so equal if we are talking about playing NBA basketball or designing a rocket ship).
The reason we get so het-up about equality is that differences in capabilities have ended up (partially) correlating with power and resources.
AI reading
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/the-lie-that-made-the-west-by-eneasz
I'm just gonna repost a comment I made a few days ago on a Signal group talking about the elimination of gifted & talented programs from Seattle's schools because they underrepresent minorities. It involves Plato, of course.
> It's probably a category error to say they [the woke] have a coherent view that smart is bad, more like they don't care about that vs superficial fairness stuff
I think they do believe smart is bad. Not because they have anything against smartness in particular, but because their worldview is based on a Platonist metaphysics in which all people are the same in every way.
Social Justice morality goes hand-in-hand with Marxist economic policy. Both demand that everyone has the same abilities, the same gender, the same needs, and the same desires. Every item on their agenda will fail if people aren't fundamentally identical. It's necessary for people to be identical if their rationalist-Modernist (in the "Seeing Like a State" sense) approach to managing society is to work.
Weird niche connection- in C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," Lewis uses the demon Screwtape to address what he regards as a misunderstanding or misuse of a principle of democracy: The false belief or demand that people are literally equal rather than having equality in a legal or moral sense.
Maybe I'm weird but I have always interpreted 'equal' in this context as only meaning 'deserving equal moral consideration'. It literally never occured to me that this should imply we are the same or even very similar. More like an affirmation that we should count the same _despite_ our many differences...
Can you explain what you take "All people are created equal" to mean? It doesn't seem like a well-defined term to me, I have no idea what it actually implies. I've always taken it to just mean that legally the government applies laws to all people in the same way.
I think the recent craze for Rene Girard is due entirely to the way it takes this Marxist/Woke claim that everyone has the same preferences to the next level. Girard says that no one has /any/ preferences; we just imitate what we perceive as the preferences of other people. This bullshit paves the way for attributing absolutely everything to social construction.
You may like https://lifeitself.org/blog/2019/12/01/blind-spot-3-the-equality-complex
To actually go beyond equality we need some subtle thinking that distinguishes everyone's innate value as a human being -- "equal before god" etc -- vs their actual capacities and capabilities in a given context (maybe not so equal if we are talking about playing NBA basketball or designing a rocket ship).
The reason we get so het-up about equality is that differences in capabilities have ended up (partially) correlating with power and resources.