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All belief is self-delusion. Here's an idea at the other end of the spectrum: You are an assembly of atoms floating around pointlessly. But of course truly bel

All belief is self-delusion. Here's an idea at the other end of the spectrum: You are an assembly of atoms floating around pointlessly. But of course truly believing something like that would make your life difficult. So you create stories for yourself, "missions".

slothtrop 7y ago
To the extent that we lie to ourselves when we hold something to be absolutely true, yes. Everything is just a guess based on patterns and expectations.
ARandomerDude 7y ago
> All belief is self-delusion. Do you believe that?
- coralreef 7y ago
  Yep, but I'm not selling a thought system like Deepak Chopra :D
munchbunny 7y ago
> You are an assembly of atoms floating around pointlessly. I mean... I do believe that. I also believe fervently that all of humanity's existence is an insignificant stray mark in the book that is reality. For some people that's a fundamentally depressing idea, followed by "well then why do we even exist?" For others that's liberating. For me... that line of thinking doesn't lead to any practical conclusions about what you should do, so I tend to keep my thinking at levels of abstraction that are somewhat more Earth-sized (or smaller) in scope. But more broadly, the point I was getting at is that I don't think people in general spend much time thinking about the multiple possible perspectives/beliefs that can be held about their actions, or about the second order effects of their actions, and my personal plea is for more people to do that. Even more specifically, this time speaking about conversations I've actually had, if you are one of the thousands of engineers whose job is to crunch data ever more efficiently, perhaps it's worth spending some time mulling over why it's not kosher to just pull that customer data into the training data for a new ML model without getting consent first. I promise it's not because stupid laypeople want to make your job difficult.

slothtrop 7y ago

To the extent that we lie to ourselves when we hold something to be absolutely true, yes. Everything is just a guess based on patterns and expectations.

ARandomerDude 7y ago

> All belief is self-delusion. Do you believe that?

coralreef 7y ago
Yep, but I'm not selling a thought system like Deepak Chopra :D

munchbunny 7y ago

> You are an assembly of atoms floating around pointlessly. I mean... I do believe that. I also believe fervently that all of humanity's existence is an insignificant stray mark in the book that is reality. For some people that's a fundamentally depressing idea, followed by "well then why do we even exist?" For others that's liberating. For me... that line of thinking doesn't lead to any practical conclusions about what you should do, so I tend to keep my thinking at levels of abstraction that are somewhat more Earth-sized (or smaller) in scope. But more broadly, the point I was getting at is that I don't think people in general spend much time thinking about the multiple possible perspectives/beliefs that can be held about their actions, or about the second order effects of their actions, and my personal plea is for more people to do that. Even more specifically, this time speaking about conversations I've actually had, if you are one of the thousands of engineers whose job is to crunch data ever more efficiently, perhaps it's worth spending some time mulling over why it's not kosher to just pull that customer data into the training data for a new ML model without getting consent first. I promise it's not because stupid laypeople want to make your job difficult.