Lol. But it is true. It is the reason the great gay fruit flies debate of the early 2000's felt so stupid, but was spoken about so seriously.

What do I care how fruit flies fuck?

Maybe the world of evolution and animal behavior is not the best place from which to rely for an ethical north star.

> Studies have shown that having ideas challenged which you associate with your identity, and in turn your group identity, are responded to neurologically in the same manner as physical threats, short-circuiting logical thought processes and exacerbating tribalism.

Agree, psychology textbooks and papers are informative - however, I think it's much more interesting if you observe the overwhelming amount of available evidence first hand: internet arguments. What you describe here is not surprising if one is considering people's System 1 powered, realtime intuitive reaction. But more interesting is that people regularly (and on some topics, usually/always) are literally not able to release themselves from a belief, or often even question their belief - individually, or with assistance. And even more hilarious: very often this occurs in a scenario where the individual in question is mocking the intelligence of other people...and often the people they are mocking are literally artifacts of their imagination.

Were this not so common[1] and therefore taken for granted as an unavoidable part of reality like the weather, I think it would get massive amounts of attention. And that it doesn't get hardly any attention (other than people complaining about it incessantly) suggests to me that there is something very, very strange about "reality".

> I would say it comes down to intentionally constructing processes of interrogating our beliefs as a culture. What's much more important than your base level of intelligence entering into a conversation is your willingness to actually explore concepts within that conversation. To truly engage in a dialog. To not feel threatened by entertaining conflicting beliefs. If that itself can become part of our group identity, this process is no longer existentially threatening.

Ah....now this is something I rarely encounter. Isn't it weird that with all the "experts" in the world, many of them on payroll in relevant positions, and with all the calls for "more critical thinking" we hear in the media, *no one seems to have put two and two together? I mean, you and I are surely not dummies, but are we that much smarter than others? Or is there perhaps something else going on?

> Again though, I'm not saying there is actually a "one true way" to view the world objectively. It's a process we can choose to attempt to engage in, which we will never perfect, but brings much better results over time.

Maybe aiming for objectivity is not the correct goal? If the problem space is fundamentally subjective (I believe it is), aiming for objectivity will fail indefinitely. I think is is perfectly plausible that our success and obsession with science may now be causing net harm to us, and maybe has been for quite some time with no way for us to realize it (since that would at the very least require thinking, and that topic has become as taboo as questioning religion was a hundred years ago - it is literally enforced at several levels, including the government and mostly all media).

[1] There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water"?

No, I’ve just seen nature shows.

I'm widely regarded as an authority in the design of smoke detectors. Yet nobody regards me as the smoke detector authority.

Also, I'm not really an authority on smoke detectors, but I have used it as a disguise before. Turns out most people really don't know anything about smoke detectors so you can sound authoritative with a minimum of research.

>nature is nothing BUT domination—strength having its way with weakness.

lol, did somebody drink too much redbull and listen to too much black metal today?

If I had a nickel for every time someone wrote, "That's not what Nietzsche meant" I'd be a billionaire.

Thanks for that more erudite response than I was able to muster.

I conform to this non-conformity.

Therein lies the dilemma. Ooh, NEW traditions!

Define the integrity of your own mind, Are you different when you wake up every morning? No. You're the same you. When you change your mind about something - say, I no longer think Ralph Waldo Emerson has a valid point about the integrity of the mind and self-reliance- am I being less me or more me by denying his definition of me?

His confabulation of mental states and the physical, real-world reality of many people seem to be at odds.

What does greatness mean? World's biggest serial killer? Celebrity? Wealth? Loving my girlfriend more than you love yours? Most greatly questioning Emerson's aphorism?

What does self-reliance mean? The government produces (nearly) all the money in circulation. Even if you refuse to use money the value of the things you are exchanging comes down to dollars or pounds or euros, whether you use them or no except in a few teeny tiny circumstances.

I'm not sure whether this comment is intended to be a critique of Emerson or simply a note about a thought process that you might expect would arise when trying to embody Emerson's philosophy, but either way, I think it's worth noting that blind rebellion would not be something that Emerson advised.

The point of Emerson's philosophy is that one ought neither slavishly prostrate oneself in service of an institution, nor become obsessed with attempting to eradicate institutions.

>And so Emerson tells us to shun the words in the books, to shun the words of authorities and to attune ourselves to this inner voice to what our heart tells us to do. Following the course of this inner star you may appear inconsistent to those around you — today you are doing this and the next day you are onto something else. But, in an image that has been lodged in my mind since I first read Self-Reliance Emerson writes:

>“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions.”

There's no mention of tearing down existing authorities. The prescription is merely shunning them; that is, ensuring they remain external to you. One needn't tear down institutions if the goal is merely to ignore them (unless it becomes clear endeavoring against a particular institution is something that resonates with your sense of self).

In other words: above all, follow your intuition, your Aboriginal Self. Rejecting institutions need only go so far as what would be necessary to extricate yourself from them, so you might have the freedom to follow that Aboriginal Self, but getting caught up in remaking society in your own image would be just as false as remaining trapped within society. After all, you'd still be turning to something external to yourself as your guiding principle, rather than your own natural connection to your internal wisdom.

Studies have shown that having ideas challenged which you associate with your identity, and in turn your group identity, are responded to neurologically in the same manner as physical threats, short-circuiting logical thought processes and exacerbating tribalism. Our identity and status within groups is as essential to our survival as access to food and water. This response often forces doubling down on existing beliefs even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. I'd imagine that's a big part of the effect you're describing. It's the same fight or flight response we experience when we perceive a tiger on a path in the jungle, and the same evolutionary pressures apply in many ways.

I would say it comes down to intentionally constructing processes of interrogating our beliefs as a culture. What's much more important than your base level of intelligence entering into a conversation is your willingness to actually explore concepts within that conversation. To truly engage in a dialog. To not feel threatened by entertaining conflicting beliefs. If that itself can become part of our group identity, this process is no longer existentially threatening.

Again though, I'm not saying there is actually a "one true way" to view the world objectively. It's a process we can choose to attempt to engage in, which we will never perfect, but brings much better results over time. It doesn't mean we're all going to agree, but we're at least going to be able to exchange ideas and move towards a better understanding of the world, together.

Okay, and I generally agree with this, but the issue seems to emerge when we're talking about organizing a society in a way that those with "merit" have undue power over those who supposedly don't.

Does Elon Musk have more merit than his Tesla or Twitter employees?

Does Joe Biden or Donald Trump have more merit than most of the US?

What even are the merits of Exxon? The Federal Reserve? The World Bank? The CIA? NATO? Do they have justification for the immense power they have over so many people's lives?

It's simple when we're talking about simple roles like a doctor or a janitor, but it gets far more complicated when we structure entire governments and massive national and transnational organizations around vague ideas of "merit". Can we even justify the existence of many of these organizations at all? What do we even mean by "merit" with reference to them?

Most of the discussion surrounding the failures of these organizations concerns the idea that the "wrong" people are at the top of them. If only Trump were president, then X would happen. If only Biden were president, then Y would happen. Yet the same system elevates both equally. Perhaps the fact that the wrong people keep getting into power comes down to the system simply working as it's supposed to work and that the ideas that went into the system are what's at fault. This would be the anarchist critique.

Merit is simply effectiveness at whatever task you are doing. A janitor who is on the ball and keeps everything spic and span is a meritorious janitor. A doctor who repeatedly gets the best medical outcomes for his patients is a meritorious doctor. A CEO who maximizes profit and makes his company millions is a meritorious CEO. Some qualities tend to make people more meritorious across a wide variety of tasks - being conscientious, hard working, intelligent, etc., especially in combination. And I don't think it is particularly insane to want doctors who are good at doctoring, or politicians who are good at politics, or chefs who are good at cooking. It is probably impossible to have a pure meritocracy, given our tribal tendencies, but some systems are more meritocratic than others, and we should prefer those.

Definitely agree with all of that. Tradition is almost always a bad reason to continue to do something unless it's harmless fun like Christmas or New Years. Even then things like New Years fireworks are actually really bad for the environment and public health.

> I honestly don't think it takes an extraordinary degree of intelligence to systematically view the world through an objective lens.

Well I disagree passionately! lol

The world is highly subjective and illusory, as a consequence of it largely running on top of the human mind whose behavior is a function of millions years of evolution (in conditions highly dissimilar to the present), as well as distortion due to culture, propaganda, and various other issues. I mean just take this philosophy subreddit for example - getting anyone to seriously discuss the truth value of a proposition is very often like pulling teeth!

> Your example of r/politics is unfortunately a demonstration of furthering political tribalism, in my experience at least.

The mind is naturally attracted to the extremes of any situation - discussions in politically oriented subreddits are a train wreck, but I propose what's even more interesting than that is that political discussions in most any community, regardless of average intelligence level, will also be a trainwreck. The classic example I always use is https://news.ycombinator.com, a forum populated by mostly highly intelligent programmers, engineers, etc - in technical threads, people are smart - but pop into a political thread and observe how IQ's and logical capabilities have been cut in half, at least. I believe there is something about certain topics that the mind just cannot compute without constantly generating errors.

I very much agree with you on culture though - I wouldn't find ot hard to believe that culture could count for half or more of the problem.

I'm not saying that people in past generations were wrong on everything.

The problems arise when there's these extremely common justifications of "well they knew what they were doing" or simply, "it's tradition/how it's always been done", which are huge issues.

A lot of tradition is either originally arbitrary, arising from social contexts that no longer exist, or basically tools of control, and I think that we keep giving tradition too much credit.

Yeah I mean reddit is a political echochamber and can't handle disagreement so it's unsurprising. Either way this comment exists and will hopefully pique at least someone's interest. It's a fantastic book

The classic revolution vs revision debate. I'm also on your side, people forget all the good things institutions provide us and focus solely on the bad. I do think however that we need a little more revolutionary changes right now specifically to tackle climate change as that is an externality that we have to fix quickly.

I think that indoctrination is more multifaceted than that. For example, how can there be Christian physicists and cosmologists when basically all scientific findings counteract the bible? It's because people can have cognitive dissonance to be a indoctrinated fool in one aspect while being a free thinker in another.

Yes almost everyone in the past were indoctrinated into stupid, illogical traditions but that didn't prevent them from being wise and accurate in other areas of knowledge. We shouldn't take past wisdom as gospel but we should learn from it.

Large numbers of very rich, very biased people feeding you shit to suit their own ends at your expense.

I find it's much more helpful to look at the policies you would be in favour of and why, rather than trying to find a name to label your political philosophy with. After all, there very well may not be a name that actually encompasses your personal views yet.

Even the two main streams of thought in "liberal" and "conservative" just indicate a desire to move forward or backward, or stay the same, whatever those concepts mean to you - and as polar concepts in the US in particular, they completely reversed within living memory anyway. Time was Republicans abolished slavery, yet later opposed Civil Rights, etc.

There's also the apparent fact that young people seem to begin more "liberal" and end their lives more "conservative", potentially making a farce of any attempts to assign objectivity to either viewpoint outside our relative distance from death, or identifying with concepts we found appealing in our formative years. As the world itself consistently always moves to the "left" over time, unless we each also move to the left throughout our lives we will inevitably simply become more "conservative" in comparison to current culture.

So to me it does much more come down to how you would actually like to see political structures built and executed rather than how you label that: ie. in the most practicably comprehensive sense, what are your preferred policies, and why?

What is a conformer but someone that acts solely based on how others act? If you're always counter-culture then you're just conforming in a different magnitude. The real non-conformity is not caring about if you're conforming or not but actually doing what you think is best.

Back in the 1970's I was thinking of doing a PhD with the title "The concept of justice in anarchist political theory" then I read The Dispossessed and realised anything I was going to write would not come close to what she achieved. So she saved 3 years of my life.

Got a link to a single read that does that? Not everyone is a PHD on the guy or has the time to read all of his work, but I get your point…

The more I learn about him the more I see how he can be taken out of context (partisan sometimes). Even he was worried with how his ideas would land.

Nietzsche and the Nazi’s was an interesting look into the ideas of his were the formative inspiration of the 3rd Reich and many intellectuals of the time; whether the actual “death of an artist” would had matter or not, who knows. So times ideas take on a life of their own outside the hands of their maker.

Also how you end up with Trump or here in the UK Brexit.

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