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Plans you're not supposed to talk about

• bradhe 5y ago
  man that was painful to read
  • 63 5y ago
    Can you expand on that? There were definitely some parts I didn't understand or agree with, but the main idea seemed interesting.
    • Supermancho 5y ago
      In some cases it tried to make observations in an objective or granular way, while at the same time mixing in sweeping generalizations and hand waving, > You’re in love. > Critically, you get everyone to agree that it’s gauche to discuss the strategic logic of all this. I'm thinking no. Lots of people talk about the expense of marriage. Some go so far as to say "it's just a piece of paper". Everyone doesn't agree there is strategic loss or that "you're in love" is a singular recognizable concept to justifies anything in particular. > You secretly guess that the group is sustained by a minority of true believers who make up critical mass for a larger group of people you, but you never talk about this and neither does anyone else. Nobody talks about this except every atheist from high school forward. Rather than have a nuanced or an informed insightful analysis we get these short statements that both seemed lazy and misrepresenting a supposed underlying zeitgeist. etc It's like reading an antivax manifesto.
      • vmception 5y ago
        I got something different out of both of your examples. Its not that many people talk about the expense of marriage, its that people would invalidate the people who talk about the financial intertwining and folly of marriage as both a cultural institution or contract. Just like you pointed out that only people in the religion of anti-religion are the ones who talk ad nauseum about it, instead of just being non-religious people.
    • Karawebnetwork 5y ago
      To me, this reads like smugness and egotism. The author clearly passes off his personal opinions as detached explanations and "neutral" contextualizations, while writing in a way that places him above the rest of the human population, as if he were looking through a lens over the anthill. Sometimes I like to collect some of my online comments into documents so I have a reference the next time I need to repeat myself. This article reads the same way. The difference is that I wouldn't publish them in an article, because online comments rarely do an issue justice. My first thought was that these were the personal thoughts of a stranger whose values I do not share and who does not do a good job of sharing or explaining those values. I don't know who the author is, I tried to find out but I couldn't find anything interesting. On the other hand, I did find the Reddit and Twitter links in the header of the site. It turns out that indeed, most of his tweets are of identical quality. In fact, each of the points in this article was posted as a thread on Twitter. Looking closer at their Twitter, it seems that the author of this article just read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons and decided to write his own version, using the same format. However, his version lacks depth and is too transparent about his own beliefs and not exploratory enough. I believe that this format should be used to challenge the writer and thus the reader. It should not be about finding stories to explain your deeply held moral principles. I honestly wonder why this content has received so much attention on HN. Linking to the Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons on says, archive.org, would have generated a much better conversation.
  • recursive 5y ago
    I felt nothing, except intrigued.
• dv_dt 5y ago
  This seems more like the hubris and false choice fallacy list. Where you keep quiet because you don’t want the criticism.
• chernevik 5y ago
  It's very clever. But if you think Mao was some benevolent genius modernizing his people with a sly trick, you need to read more history.
• h2odragon 5y ago
  So when you find yourself reading "They're internment camps, not 'concentration camps'" as a serious, honest defense of involuntary quarantine, just relax, go with the flow, and hope your betters are following one of these plans. Surely everything will turn out OK and my individual reservations are not just meaningless, but possibly ultimately antisocial...
• jollybean 5y ago
  Like discovering the ancient concept of 'Public Communications' by accidental recourse of self aware rhetoric. Every single thing we do, if the public were to have access to the raw facts, it would cause 'outrage'. The entirely of leadership is putting the difficult facts into the difficult context and making the trade offs. We 'don't talk about' the fact that we don't give medical aid to COVID patients past a certain point because we have to put a dollar figure on it (i.e. triage), similarly the fact we have $1200 'solutions' to COVID that could probably wipe it out without vaccines if we could get everyone the tech, but we can't 'afford' it, or that masks do not protect you like wearing a gas mask through a chlorine cloud, rather, they're minimally protective but nevertheless we believe 'do make difference' and we want people to wear them, so we don't talk about it in detail, rather, just suggest or require them as policy in some locales. Because people make decisions based on the emotive strength of the rhetorician, the magnitude of impressions, emotions, group consensus, 'opposition', politics, their instinct for the validity of the source ... and not conscientious and dispassionate civic reasoning ... we worry about what is said on 'mass media'. People will do largely what their favourite 'talking head' say to do ... so we have to be careful about what 'talking heads' say, at least in some situations.
  • newaccount74 5y ago
    I think Covid handling is an example where the public has extensive access to the raw facts; it's quite surprising just how much data is available to the public. I can get time series of covid cases, hospitalisations, vaccination rates, by area and by age... It's really surprising how much info we have.
    • motohagiography 5y ago
      What I can't quite tell is whether the mental alarm bells of people with ostensibly responsible mainstream views legitimately aren't going off at all, or they too know what this whole thing is, and they just think their complicity will spare them.
    • jollybean 5y ago
      We do, but at the same time, we can't contextualize it very well necessarily. For example 'spikes' can mean all sorts of things. CFRs and test positivity rates have to be hugely contextualized. We also have 'studies' about Ivermectin some of which are good, some of which ar flawed, that lack context i.e. 'study shows Ivermectin works! - if that's all they see, well, then they might be inclined to believe it. And a huge amount of anecdotal data that is very misleading as well. It's good the data is out there, but we also need sources to make sense of it.
• kelseyfrog 5y ago
  The real fun is talking about other peoples' plans they aren't supposed to talk about. That's the best part about the internet -- there aren't any real consequences for doing so.
• crmd 5y ago
  They lost me at the dangers of ultrasonic humidifiers.
  • not2b 5y ago
    I think you misinterpreted that part. It's talking about how cults who believe in weird stuff grow, despite there being no real danger of ultrasonic humidifiers or whatever.
    • rkk3 5y ago
      There is a non-zero risk of aerosolizing bacteria/mold etc if you don't maintain an ultra-sonic humidifier properly, which doesn't exist with other methods. Of course with a boiling humidifier, you've got a container of scalding hot water laying around.
    • the_pwner224 5y ago
      The author is a part of that 'cult': - https://dynomight.net/air/ https://dynomight.net/air/ - https://dynomight.net/humidifiers/ https://dynomight.net/humidifiers/ So from context I think that the Hobo-Dyer projection and using bromine are both supposed to be superior to current common approaches, but, like ultrasonic humidifiers, normies don't accept these superior new facts even though the arguments for them are strong and flawless. I still don't get the point of the last two paragraphs in that part.
      • not2b 5y ago
        I hadn't realized that.
  • mikewarot 5y ago
    If you put tap water in an ultrasonic humidifier, there actually is a level of danger created. Here's what appears to be a fair and balanced google search result - https://www.childrenscolorado.org/conditions-and-advice/parenting/parenting-articles/danger-of-humidifiers/ https://www.childrenscolorado.org/conditions-and-advice/pare...
• calibas 5y ago
  >Cutting back on CO2 emissions would clearly work, but it’s expensive and painful. This is so painfully backwards. "Saving the Planet" doesn't mean spending tons of money and doing tons of work, quite the opposite. The absolute best thing for the Planet would be for every human being to do nothing at all. Stop driving, stop working, stop eating entirely, and then things will quickly recover. Obviously that's a bit extreme, but it's to illustrate that less activity, not more, is what's best for the Planet. It's so odd that all our frantic doing is what's thrown the Planet out of balance, and for some reason we think we're going to fix things by doing even more. The less active and industrious human beings are, the less they obsess over money and work, the less taxing we are on the Planet.
  • sushisource 5y ago
    IMO this is technically true in a totally uninteresting way. People aren't going to stop doing stuff. That's just fairly obviously not really on the table, despite the minority of people who are into ideas of going back to some pre-modern agrarian societal model. So, how do we let people continue to do stuff without totally messing up the planet? That's the crucial question humanity is interested in solving (or, maybe more accurately, needs to solve).
    • LAC-Tech 5y ago
      I mean we could do less. COVID showed that (a lot of us ) really don't need to be commuting and flying all that much. It's tragic that 'society' wasted a perfectly good pandemic by not learning any of the things it showed us.
      • rkk3 5y ago
        If anything I was more surprised at the lack of impact. Emissions only fell by around 6.4% https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3
      • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > COVID showed that (a lot of us ) really don't need to be commuting and flying all that much. It's tragic that 'society' wasted a perfectly good pandemic by not learning any of the things it showed us. I'm flying a lot more post Covid. It showed me how precious travel and meeting people face to face and experiencing new cultures is. Based on current air travel statistics, I'm not alone.
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
  Stop with the chemtrails already! That isn't engineering, that's pollution.
• jvanderbot 5y ago
  The underlying issue, and one that bugs the hell out of me, is Policy vs Truth. You can say true things all day, and convince nobody. You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science), and completely fail. People don't care about Truth, they care about what changes they need to make, and who is asking them to make them. Good policy is only partially based on truth, it's more based on easy implementation and high acceptability. In the article, you don't talk about the real reasons (truth), you do what you need to do to steer the ship. That probably includes bullshitting, compromise, apparent-hypocrisy, etc. I'm afraid we've completely forgotten to separate the means from the end goal. I've tried to explain this to people, and I've been met with blank stares from even the most intelligent folks. As suggested though, it works wonders if you're at least a little good at magical thinking or self deception. (If I run these 3 miles, I'm much more likely to get that raise)
  • 63 5y ago
    >I've tried to explain this to people, and I've been met with blank stares from even the most intelligent folks. That's definitely an experience I've had with similar topics. I particularly remember talking to a friend who I generally respect and admire about something that isn't socially acceptable for no obvious reason, and upon explaining my thoughts and asking what the deal was with it, they completely shut down and acted like I was totally insane. It's just particularly annoying that so many people claim to be for truth or actions based on some ultimate moral value, but then act totally differently because all they were ever really for was tradition which includes hypocrisy about what it's for.
    • rmckayfleming 5y ago
      >...about something that isn't socially acceptable for no obvious reason... What was the thing?
      • 63 5y ago
        Being a furry. It seems like they get a lot of shit for no good reason.
• tpoacher 5y ago
  This reminded me of today's Dilbert strip: https://dilbert.com/strip/2021-12-14 https://dilbert.com/strip/2021-12-14
  • JabavuAdams 5y ago
    I had no idea there were still Dilbert strips. What!?
• mjlawson 5y ago
  This reminds me of a set of poems, Knots, by R.D. Laing, the first of which goes: > They are playing a game > They are playing, at not playing a game > If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. > I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game. It's a lovely collection, and though I haven't thought about it recently, I think there's a lot of value in considering these kinds of unspoken self/group contradictions.
  • not1ofU 5y ago
    I shall break the rules and they will punish me ~Julian Assange Edit: To the downvoters, :wave: - if I was to change the name to Chelsea Manning would you have downvoated anyway? If so why, educate me. I dont see the problem here. https://scheerpost.com/2021/12/13/hedges-the-execution-of-julian-assange/ https://scheerpost.com/2021/12/13/hedges-the-execution-of-ju... Lets discuss this ^ Edit 2: already flagged, oh well I did try. Maybe I should have just put: I shall break the rules and they will punish me - Me.
  • yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
    I lost the game.
    • janlaureys 5y ago
      Same here. Had such a long streak going as well.
    • AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
      sorry, can you clarify what you mean by you lost the game?
      • timy2shoes 5y ago
        The game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)
        • 5y ago
• bsedlm 5y ago
  this is the best explanation I've even seen for a positive aspect to secrecy. yet I still distrust secretive practices on principle, because evil deeds require secrecy 99% of the time
  • vmception 5y ago
    transparency is a deflection and most of the implementation is based on lies many forms of good deeds also rely on secrecy
    • bsedlm 5y ago
      > transparency is a deflection and most of the implementation is based on lies transparency(openness)-opacity(secrecy) are not the same as honesty-deceit. all language-based 'explanations' can be argued to be lies by nitpicking with increasing precision. For example, consider whether the circle constant PI is equal to 3? well yes it is but in fact it's 3.1 well yes but it's actually 3.14159... and so on in any case, this article is playing around the distinction between transparent and honest and opaque or secret and deceitful. the difference can be very blurry
  • reactspa 5y ago
    > You consider telling everyone “OK, here are some promises that we’ve designed to maximize how embarrassing it would be for us to break up”, but decide it’s better not to make that explicit. I didn't understand this sentence. Anyone care to clarify please? (E.g., what would be an example of a promise that would be embarrassing?) Thanks.
    • reducesuffering 5y ago
      It's talking about wedding vows during a marriage ceremony where the couple says in front of many people about how much they will do for the other person "for better or worse, in sickness and health", "til death do us part." If you divorce, it's embarrassing because you betrayed all those public exclamations.
• mherdeg 5y ago
  Reading this gave me a kind of horrifying idea that goes something like: You know about a deadly disease whose most serious outcomes can be avoided by getting a shot. Many members of a group in your society have decided they don't want to get the shot. You are annoyed by the way they talk about a lot of things, including the way they talk about avoiding the shot. They, in turn, call you "smug" for the way your group talks about having everyone get the shot. You realize that if the other tribe keeps acting this way, a lot of them will die -- 1% of them overall, and as many as 10-15% of the oldest members of the tribe, with them having a fresh chance to die with every mutation and reinfection every 12 months. You realize that smugly insisting that those people should "get the shot" will make them dig in their heels and insist they will never do any such thing. This will, in turn, kill them. This will diminish their tribe's size and political influence. Is this a plan? Is it a thing you are doing on purpose?
  • vmception 5y ago
    1% decrease doesn't diminish their size and political influence substantially, even of the disproportionate elderly population. Then only a fraction of the remainders that lose a loved one would re-evaluate, a large fraction of them would still be bounced back when they realize the other ideas "your group" inherits is even harder to accept as a personality trait. Most of them will inherit just enough to not think further about the matter.
    • jfrunyon 5y ago
      It's 1% of the whole population, but a much larger percentage of certain political ideologies.
      • vmception 5y ago
        well, sure yeah. far left spiritualists and naturopaths are a tiny population, far right people occupy sparsely populated areas. funny application of horseshoe theory.
    • lowbloodsugar 5y ago
• didibus 5y ago
  Most of these seem to imply you don't remember the plan while still following it, so in a sense, you don't have a good reason not to talk about them, since you actually wouldn't know what to talk about. That means the only thing I take from this is that you get really good followers by indoctrination which is a combination of leading by example, shaming/rewarding people at a social level, and possibly force or power, and that requires you to be sleazy about it, by never divulging the real motives to others. Maybe you can get yourself to believe in it as well to a point and forget, but that seems less likely to me, most likely you just got others indoctrinated to follow your plan without knowing the real reasons why, which eventually get forgotten to history.
• vmception 5y ago
  I keep my tax plans secret. A) Because I paid alot for the CPAs, tax lawyers, private letter rulings and case law. B) Actually talking about it to those struggling with taxes would result in them noticing they can't participate any more than driving to the neighboring municipality for cheaper gas tax, instead of anything more convenient, and could result in the tax laws changing from their widespread annoyance. C) tax clickbait publishers like ProPublica won't figure it out for them for another two decades, which is long enough.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    I don't talk about my side gig for the same reason. If it was widely hyped among the people who have the capital to enter it all the money would be driven out of it.
  • Noumenon72 5y ago
    I am very susceptible to this kind of thing. Most of my life I have read articles about most tax shelters being dodgy, watched by the IRS, and concluded all I can really do is 401k and tax loss harvesting. But now that you mention it, this feels the same way as me not realizing all the effort people to to look better on camera, because they don't really talk about it. So I end up not competing in the areas of tax avoidance, presentability, or clout, giving those who kept their plans secret an even bigger advantage.
    • vmception 5y ago
      Sadly it is a factor of exposure. There are many odd and noncompliant strategies out there, and many compliant ones.
• danblick 5y ago
  The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!" I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have." One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False": """This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him.""" https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/ https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/
  • jfrunyon 5y ago
    > At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty LOL okay I literally can't go any further than the first sentence. Very good much wow so projection. I like the document title, though. "Microsoft Word - Document1". Very classy.
    • generalizations 5y ago
      Didn't even bother to read the citation for that statement? > This has now been true for over a century, and as early as 1855 J. S. Mill could say (see my John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor [London and Chicago, 1951], p. 216) that "almost all the projects of social reformers of these days are really liberticide." > I like the document title, though. "Microsoft Word - Document1". Very classy. Textbook example of an ad homenim.
      • 5y ago
• imwillofficial 5y ago
  This article is a sad way to look at the world
  • Noumenon72 5y ago
    Executing strategy #5, I see.
    • imwillofficial 5y ago
      No, it’s empathy. There is something human about our irrationality. Rising above that, we lose a bit of that magic that makes us unique.
      • tomcatfish 5y ago
        That's neither true (humans are less irrational than chimps) nor inspiring (screwing up and letting people die is bad, not good)
        • imwillofficial 5y ago
          The ways we are irrational is a difference in kind to a chimp
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
• javajosh 5y ago
  Regarding plan 1, the prenup is the most romantic idea of all. Why? Because you stay together not out of fear, but out of love. Sadly, there are limits to what prenups can do (they can't apply to time-sharing the children, in most states). Note that not getting married is not enough; common law marriage applies if you live together long enough. As for the rest, it's disturbing and I don't want to think about it. So I won't.
  • reducesuffering 5y ago
    I agree. I don't understand how people could want to be with someone who's only there because of ulterior reasons to love: public embarrassment, finances, messy legal proceedings. In a relationship, you are purely there because you want to be with another person. I get that a marriage adds stability, but it's because it makes extends a relationship into situations that only exist because of other reasons.
• reducesuffering 5y ago
  You're the (US) government. You want to prevent deaths from Covid. Research keeps generally concluding that previous Covid infection natural immunity is roughly as good as vaccine induced. You realize if you message this to the public and allow equality to vax-passes, never-vax people will be incentivized to now try and get covid so they can be restriction-less without being vaxxed, further spreading covid. You decide not to message this, leaving some astute researchers perplexed.
  • seoaeu 5y ago
    Is anyone really surprised by this? All evidence suggests that getting the vaccine strictly increases your immunity to Covid, even if you've already had the disease.
    • reducesuffering 5y ago
      Definitely but unfortunately minimally. In a hypothetical world of 67% vaccine induced and 80% previous infection (hard to know the actual), we would have people more fearful of being around the 80%'s than the 67%'s. If so, we have a similar noble lie situation as the Mar 2020 "masks don't work", where we are so focused on getting the 80% to 85% (and other dilemmas alluded to by my previous comment) we are damaging trust with possibly worse knock on effects.
  • zaik 5y ago
    Natural immunity might be as good (or even better) than vaccine induced, but comes with a risk of hospitalization or death. If you're cynical, this means lost tax revenue for your government.
    • reducesuffering 5y ago
      1/6 confirmed (up to maybe 1/3 unconfirmed?) of Americans already had Covid. They aren't facing the no-immunity hospitalization or death anymore.
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  As an authorial technique starting off with a just so story about how marriage came to be that lasts several paragraphs and is obviously not at all how marriage came to be and doesn't even have the excuse of referencing some sort of supernatural source for being wrong might seem interesting but bored me too much to continue. I'm supposing the rest of it is also wrong and badly argued.
  • npsimons 5y ago
    > just so story Thank you, this is the term I was looking for, and indeed, pretty much all of the "plans" the author lays out are "just so stories", untestable and with the implication that they are the true reasons things are as they are.
  • gipp 5y ago
    It is not talking literally about how marriage came to be. It is just laying out a set of incentives that probably play a role in the success of marriage as an institution.
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      yes I realize it is not literal, but the structure of that part of the text as you progress from two people in love come up with a plan to always stay together ends up a just so story about how marriage was created. Does it work as a list of incentives for how marriage came to be a successful institution? Well since it structures it as an origin story of marriage that you realize is an origin story of marriage at the same time you realize this is obviously not at all how marriage came to be, no it does not work. And I mean - for how marriage came to be a successful institution even has the phrasing came to be inside it. How do you explain the lasting success of an institution based on a fairy tale of it's creation - well lots of things are explained as fairy tales but not rationally. This document has a style that argues the author believes they are making a rational argument, which grates. It's frankly idiotic the more I think about it! Which I guess would be ok if it was something you told your 5 year old when they asked hey how did marriage come to be. Fairy tales can be charming and funny, but I think the author thinks they're being clever and serious. So now I went back to read more just to be sure they didn't deal with the fairy tale aspect better further in, but it was a waste of time.
• mrfusion 5y ago
  Neat article. I don’t understand what he’s saying for number 4 though.
• xupybd 5y ago
  As one of the church goers that genuinely believes in God and the afterlife I'm surprised and saddened to hear people attend in disbelief. It's a shame the same community can't be found amongst others that hold similar beliefs. It's sad that someone can't be true to their own beliefs.
  • reducesuffering 5y ago
    > It's sad that someone can't be true to their own beliefs. Have you considered how strong of a vortex it is to not sway from a close groups' (including your entire family) belief about the most important thing in the entire world? A spouse could lose their marriage. A child could estrange from their parents and siblings. A pastor that loses faith would lose his job, marriage, and entire community.
    • xupybd 5y ago
      Yeah I come from an agnostic and atheist friend and family group. Many don't want to have much to do with me anymore. I became a Christian over a decade ago. It was a big change for me. I'm in a very secular county here in NZ.
  • psyc 5y ago
    Among my atheist friends, a number of them have been quite involved with churches, for the social support, and because they thought it was good for their kids. I once dated an atheist who was appalled almost to the point of deal-breakage that I didn't want to teach my kids the Bible. She couldn't imagine where else they'd learn morals from.
    • MagnumOpus 5y ago
      Hint - that was not an atheist. (And not widely read either, because Aesop or De la Fontaine are fabulists with much more easily digestible morals for kids than the bible...)
  • ars 5y ago
    Google "orthopraxis" for more on this. People who do all the actions, but do not have the belief.
• satori99 5y ago
  Neal Stephenson's latest novel Termination Shock, is largely related to point number two -- Geoengineering the atmosphere using sulfur filled bullets fired from really big guns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)
  • xupybd 5y ago
    Does that cause a problem with acid rain?
    • satori99 5y ago
      According the (fictional) Texan billionaire who is championing the project -- not if you can launch it high enough.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• czbond 5y ago
  Even if G*d didn't exist, one probably can't prove either way. So, from a risk/reward payoff, it seems believing is a higher payoff than not. And from a purely emotionless approach, if you're a Western religion (Christian) you don't have a high bar to cross. Just believe, no deeds or acts are required. That is a high ROI trade either way. <shrug> [Edit: I am not endorsing a specific Western Religion, I'm giving an example. I don't know Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc enough to say what the bare minimum is]
  • corndoge 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
  • alasdair_ 5y ago
    What if believing in one specific god pisses off the “real” god when you die and you go to hell for believing in the wrong god, while not believing in any god gets you a free pass? If we’re making up unfalsifiable claims then this seems just as likely to happen as not.
    • czbond 5y ago
      Any enlightened G0d would know that humans minds are limited, and thus the worship of any G*d is actually meant for them. Thus no problem. [Italics are being inserted by HN]
      • imgabe 5y ago
        God is not a swear word. You don't need to censor it.
      • timeon 5y ago
        If it is enlightened do you even need to be believer?
        • czbond 5y ago
• taraskuzyk 5y ago
  I would really appreciate it if someone could help me understand what the last few sentences of it meant, it kind of flew over my head: "So I guess this is kind of an argument in favor of humility, or against open-mindedness. If you have high openness to experience (and if you read this without a gun to your head, you probably do) you might wonder why so many people have low openness. Maybe this is part of why." What is "this is part of why" referring to, the entire article? I just don't really see how any of it would lead people to be less open minded
  • imgabe 5y ago
    People might be less open to questioning certain things, because those things work well for them, and they work well because they aren't questioned. There is an adverse selection for questioning them. For example, let's say everyone in your society has an arranged marriage. The marriages produce children who then get arranged marriages themselves. This keeps the society going by providing a steady supply of new people. If someone starts to question it, they don't get an arranged marriage, and don't have any children. The questioner does not get promulgated. (Note this is not an argument for or against arranged marriage. There are obviously many ways to arrange society and raise children.)
  • norswap 5y ago
    A big part of "the normal way" things are done is related to subtle (and by-design, unspoken) social reasons. If you are open-minded, you're open to considering that the normal ways things are done might not be the best way -- which it is not along all axes, but it does incur some advantages for reasons that must remain unspoken for the advantages to be incurred. This has two potentially bad consequences: (1) you might come to miss the advantages provided, and (2) you might erode the effectiveness of the deceitful mechanism. An easy example is open relationships. They're difficult to navigate and often end in drama. (Personal opinion: they're awesome but require a ton of emotional maturity, and some time, to make work.) The lie here is that romantic commitment is a sacred value -- in reality it's a way to bind yourself to avoid the instability and hurt that can easily result from open relationships. If you're not able to handle open relationships, your open-mindedness will have hurt you. And if you want to return to monogamy, your lack of belief in romantic commitment might be an impediment too. People get burned by their open-mindedness a few times, or see examples of people getting burned around them, and they shut that part down. It's the essence of conservatism: a belief that it's easier to break something that works than to improve things. (Forget politics, you can just think about this at the personal level.)
• throwawayhaxor 5y ago
  You know that your vote doesn't matter in large-scale elections. Being a busy person, you don't go out of your way to vote. When discussing an election with a friend, you mention you didn't vote. Your friend and others in the group socially ostracize you. You don't understand why, but after a few times you just say that you voted. In all future elections, you leave work early and indicate to your friends that you voted. You know your vote doesn't matter, but you also know expressing that sentiment has no benefit. You secretly wonder if the pressure to vote is a social norm engineered by one side. After some time, you hear a new friend indicate they did not vote. You publicly scorn them, for the social benefits.
  • evandwight 5y ago
    Does your vote not matter? I agree in most cases your vote won't change the result. But, it does act as a signal. Also, not voting puts you in the group of people politicians don't need to care about.
    • throwawayhaxor 5y ago
      Who says I don't vote? I do vote ;)
      • evandwight 5y ago
        I didn't say you didn't. I was trying to show what would happen if you didn't vote and therefore why your vote matters.
        • throwawayhaxor 5y ago
          Yeah I'm sure the politicians will notice the 1 person difference
• jonstewart 5y ago
  Who is the author? I read the About page but it offered few details, just links to some articles. It’s fair enough to say that the work should stand alone, but it’s also fair enough to apply Sturgeon’s Law when encountering a new blog.
• analog31 5y ago
  I was skimming through a translation of Seneca, and one of the dialogs starts out with an agreement amongst the participants, to the effect of: "Of course we believe in the stuff that the philosophers believe (about death, the afterlife, etc.), not the stuff that the people believe."
• throwaway3b03 5y ago
  Why does it take me something like one paragraph to recognize that someone is from the Lesswrong sphere? (I was myself a part of the community at one point, before it became a cult)
  • carrolldunham 5y ago
    Before clicking the article I read your comment and guessed that the article might start with a lazily-technicalizing analogy, like "So what does shame feel like? Well, imagine you have two beehives, named A and B, with hive A having A_n bees..." and it more or less does. I say its lazy because when you write there's work in translating your mind-pictures into prose but the lesswrongs are content to describe the sketch. It's like reading someone's pre-verbalized verbal reasoning "So the hmph goes on the blah which is nnh so it's ok".
  • koningrobot 5y ago
    Because rationalists gonna rationalize. They like deep-sounding stories that justify the things they are emotionally invested in.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  This part sort of looks like a real life SCP-style [0] anti-meme: Even more interesting are plans that work best if you yourself don’t understand them. For these, your best hope is that you inherit a culture that’s figured them out for you (and also forgotten about the reasons for you) so you can get the benefits just by going with the flow. [0] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
• divbzero 5y ago
  This reminds me of rhetoric used in politics on many levels.
• malwarebytess 5y ago
  Conservatism: the article. Kinda shit, tbh. Philosophical suicide and just so stories. Disgusting.
• disambiguation 5y ago
  This is like abstract art for the overly analytical mind.
• fartcannon 5y ago
  Number 5 is the 'He who smelt it, dealt it' world view.
• AceJohnny2 5y ago
  This reminds me of CEO-speak. A CEO cannot speak their true mind or their true assessment of a situation. They can't say "wow we're in trouble here" because then people will jump ship and then the company will be even more in trouble (and the CEO would get sued for breaching Fiduciary Duty) What a CEO says is merely wishful thinking for a goal they want people to follow. They can never speak their true plan. (And of course, it's all just game theory, a more elaborate version of https://youtu.be/S0qjK3TWZE8 https://youtu.be/S0qjK3TWZE8)
  • csours 5y ago
    That was surprisingly intense!
  • zwkrt 5y ago
    This reminds me of the Wallfacers in the Three Body Problem, the (totally contrived) leaders of humanity that for plot reasons must plan to save humanity from the aliens without ever elucidating what the plan is so the aliens can’t figure it out.
    • axby 5y ago
      To give a bit of credit to the book (hints of a spoiler ahead), the aliens were different from humans in a few ways, so it made a little more sense than what someone might think from your description. But yes, "contrived" is a great term for a lot of it. I loved the descriptions of how humans would react to aliens and in the future, the build up was amazing (or maybe I hyped it up in my head), but I felt like some of the physics got a little unbelievable, and I did not find the ending satisfying. Overall I'd recommend it though. I had meant to read it for years, then accidentally read the 2nd book (Dark Forest) and got hooked because of the first few pages, which explains the "differences" that I'm referring to above.
      • mst 5y ago
        The book contains a lot of fantastic thought experiments, and the contrived-ness of certain things required to set up those thought experiments was a price I was happy to pay. I suspect whether the books are something a given person would enjoy are significantly down to said person's comfort with that in their taste in fiction. (though also I suspect my father would've hated them because he wouldn't've found the characters sympathetic, and if you need to actively like the protagonists of something to enjoy it that's probably also a good reason to spend your reading time on something else)
• omalleyt 5y ago
  The relevant concept here is what’s called “common knowledge.” Systems behave differently is everyone knows that everyone knows that… (repeat ad infinitum) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge
• divbzero 5y ago
  There seem to be many more examples along the same lines: – Managers not talking about potential M&A or layoffs to avoid distracting the team. – Leaders not talking about their backup plans to avoid demoralizing their organizations. – Athletes not talking about strategy and tactics to avoid tipping off opponents. – Investors and traders not talking about ideas and methods to maintain their edge. – Business owners not talking about outsized returns to avoid attracting competition. – Economic leaders not talking about systemic risks where widespread awareness would increase likelihood of occurrence. – Politicians not talking about policies known to be ineffective but implemented to placate voters. – Members of exclusive groups not talking about internal dynamics to maintain exclusivity.
  • gxt 5y ago
    These are only examples of security through obscurity. They likely have a better open alternative.
• kevinwang 5y ago
  Can someone explain why marriage works better if the parties don't talk about the game theory aspect? I don't understand why that would change anything.
  • MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
    Based on the tone of the marriage section of the article, I suspect that the author thinks that marriage is silly and that people do it only out of willful ignorance.
• type-r 5y ago
  > Force everyone to solve the problem entirely by reducing CO2 emissions. I know it's not the point of the post but that's not the only other option. We can also keep CO2 emissions high, or even increase them. We just need to recapture them later. This is already being worked on, supported mostly by companies like Stripe and Microsoft. If we just invested more into this, we wouldn't have such a rough choice.
  • paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Recycling was once proposed not because it was a viable mitigation but because companies knew it would be an effective distraction. [0] I'm not saying recycling or carbon capture is all bad. But they should be last resorts. That's why it's reduce, then reuse yourself, then recycle if there's no alternative. [0] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
• phailhaus 5y ago
  The author is not making these arguments. Look: > This might be a bad plan [...] But I emphasize that I know nothing and I’m just parroting the opinions of others. If you're posting about how these plans aren't accurate, you've missed the point. The author is making a broader observation, that you can conceive of plans that actually benefit from secrecy, and lead to all sorts of interesting human behavior. The particulars are irrelevant, it's about how the parts fit together.
• themodelplumber 5y ago
  Nice job author :-) > You secretly guess that the group is sustained by a minority of true believers who make up critical mass for a larger group of people you, but you never talk about this and neither does anyone else. When you have kids, you feel weird about explaining your thoughts about all this to them, but you don’t parrot back what the religion says when you’re talking about the meaning of life either. Bahaha. Maybe author doesn't know that these people (like them) make up the outer candy coating to many a cult. They aren't super committed, but they can't really rule out the core truth possibilities. So they stick around, and their don't-push, don't-pull style kind of encourages others to stay in a loose orbit like themselves. (To outsiders they are definitely cultists; to core insiders they are seen as weak; I've been in cult leadership) To me, here's a, maybe _the_ big issue with people in this profile: They believe in being open-minded and actively avoid being closed minded. So they end up with this kind of question of vacillation on their hands. But IMO their problem is not best framed as avoidance of closed mindedness, it's better framed as a problem in developing and testing new, fresh alternatives. So they end up stuck in a troubling, secret dichotomy like that. Stay OR go...A OR B. There is no C, no D, and no, they don't really think about, or plan for that issue often enough. So many times the best options are found down in C-Z territory. Just my experience. Thoughtful post, I enjoyed it.
  • _ykl9 5y ago
    I've been in cult leadership That sounds interesting. How'd that happen? Is the experience something you're able to talk about, and if so how would you rate it?
  • andrewflnr 5y ago
    > I've been in cult leadership Um, wow. Do you want to talk about that, or have you written about it elsewhere? No shade if you don't, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested.
    • themodelplumber 5y ago
      I would share more but for now it goes very deep, I was raised in a religious fundamentalist family and trained to be in leadership from childhood. There are soooo many stories and lessons that I'm probably going to have to start putting them in one place so I can link people. Wish I had time to go into it more here.
• godDLL 5y ago
  If you're out on a trail, where your environment is the trail, and your compadres are your compadres, sure talk to them. You have shared goals, your adversity comes from the non-sentient or sub-human sentient environment. Truth is clarity, clarity is action, action is goal. But then you're not out on a trail, your environment is other people, and your compadres are transient. You need to have a public face, a policy for your sentient environment. And you want to save the truth and clarity for when you have a thing to do with someone that shares your goals. Obfuscation leads to non-interference, leads to less adversity, smoother action, closer goal. There are many levels and gradations to this. Push it too hard for the situation at hand, and you get confusion that leads to demoralization, and mass hysteria that drives harmful public policy. First we farm the land, then we domesticate the animals, then we govern the people. The toolkit is the same toolkit. At any given time some people are your land, some are your animals, and some are your compadres or adversaries. You don't owe any truth to your enemy, nor your sentient environment. This is indeed very difficult if you're high in openness, but that's how it was before you got here and it keeps on rolling like that. There was no reason it should change, so it didn't. It's not like deception came into disuse at any point. Lying is what it is, human. Part of the way communities work, and social dynamics develop. What was the point of the article? Acceptance? That's an individual thing. A situational thing. You shouldn't just roll with deception, but you should expect it everywhere.
• deleted 5y ago
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• Manheim 5y ago
  There's so much here to argue. I disagree with the fundamental idea that there are good reasons to not talk with the intent to let misconceptions and delusions thrive in a society. Society and the progress of humankind hugely benefits from increased knowledge and understanding of facts acquired through scientific method. I think Richard Dawkins makes a convincing argument on this with his book "The God delusion" in regards to the article's "dilemma number 3".
• fargle 5y ago
  emphatically agreed. ssshhhhhhh...
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  The Global Warming one was weak. The inherent contradiction in modern life is that you participate in the economy as part of "modern life". But that is unquestionably leading to a future such that if this were coalesced to a single (rational) person and telling them they will certainly get painful, awful cancer if they do X anymore that any sane person will stop doing X. You can't change the sheer inertia, and even if you did, there is a powerful set of people (this would be, say, the part of the brain addicted to a drug that will kill you with painful awful cancer) whose influence over society is far more powerful. So you either become an "edgelord" and pick rational sanity but everyday life is so bad it is functionally insane, or you go along with the flow and pick rational insanity, but everyday life is a lot better and therefore really the sane choice.
• skinkestek 5y ago
  Regarding number 3, I should probably be in the same place since I hang around here and have had a bit of both biology and astronomy and astrophysics in school, except 2 things: - Besides it being massively useful[1] I've experienced too many weird coincidences now. So many that I cannot in good faith say I think it is just placebo or just survivorship bias. - Recently I have also realized that if I were to leave my religion and believe in Big Bang as the sole explanation that would also be a belief. Just because it is now as common as Catholicism once was doesn't mean it isn't also a set of more or less fundamentally unprovable beliefs. Do I recommend it to others? Well. I don't recommend hasting into something. Definitely not letting others use it to assume power of your life. But if anyone experience the same as I did, that life just doesn't work, yes, my life has massively improved, and if you wonder how to start, ask the $deity of your tradition in private and say you are seriously interested. If that doesn't work try mine (I just asked "God" in the language of my childhood.) [1]: A framework for delaying gratification is massively useful. Also I married someone with a long history of the same belief and there are so many problems I don't have to worry about.
  • hanspeter 5y ago
    I hope noone _believes_ in Big Bang. It's a hypothesis about the origins of the visible universe with a lot of observational data to support it. Nothing more. It creates just as many questions as it answers, and it's as useful for an explanation on our greatest existential questions as the hypothesis that we live on a spherical body suspended by gravity in vacuum and not on a flat disk supported by four giant turtles.
    • skinkestek 5y ago
      Exactly. And if anyone goes back and checks my comments they will not find any comments denying Big Bang, in fact I can comment fine on both evolution and big bang, my religion doesn't quite care exactly how the world was created and after all "all models are wrong, but some are useful". What I meant is that a number of people will believe Big Bang as a form of magical creation story that somehow proofs nothing else can be true way stronger than the average Muslim or Christian around here it seems.
• beardedman 5y ago
  Is this supposed to be laced with opinion & personal philosophy? If so fine, but if it's meant to be objective then it fails quite badly & quite obviously.
• Kosirich 5y ago
  Some people have pointed out that this article makes case for "traditionally" conservative issues and I agree. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm greatly influenced by Taleb way of summarizing knowledge in his books and how he deals with this issues, so I'll give it my take: - if something existed through out cultures, it was probably tested and it exists for a reason(1,3,4) - word used today in English might not have completely (etymological) different meaning (3) - question of progress is not a yes/no question but "at what speed" (4,6) - high value signals have "value" if there is skin in the game(1) - you don't experiment on complex systems(2) - the idiot-yet-intellectual (5) - it's the outcome that matters (6)
  • DarylZero 5y ago
    Society traditionally is overall a mechanism of farming slaves, so that elites don't have to work. If you don't know the reason for something in society, it's usually that. (You aren't going to find democratic or moral reasons for things in society, but exploitative strategies.)
    • Kosirich 5y ago
      So I'm guessing you don't see a connection between your comment and point 5 of the author, nor the closing paragraph at the end?
      • DarylZero 5y ago
        Nothing edgy about what I said. Just injecting some realism. Slavery was abolished less than 200 years ago. Jim Crow was abolished less than 100 years ago. This kind of bullshit about "society has reasons" cannot ever play in black communities because they have living memory of these historical experiences.
• _xnmw 5y ago
  In religion this is nothing new: it's known as hypocrisy, which is despicable because a hypocrite inevitably ends up exploiting true believers, taking advantage of their trust and goodwill. It's a well-studied phenomenon in religious literature (at least from what I know of Christianity and Islam). Tolstoy wrote much about the hypocrisy of the Orthodox leadership in the Russian Empire, and hypocrisy is a central theme of the Koran. Religious people are well aware of the fact that many of their fellow practitioners (including leaders) do it for societal/family/community/health/power benefits without actually believing in any of the rhetoric. Hence the classic clergy child-abuser, for example. Talking about hypocrisy is not forbidden, rather it is necessary for a person to regularly question themselves to recognize hypocrisy and remain true to their beliefs. Someone who doesn't believe should leave, because otherwise they may inadvertently or knowingly turn into "a wolf in sheep's clothing".
  • weregiraffe 5y ago
    >Someone who doesn't believe should leave Which was basically (and in many cases literally and directly) death for most human history.
• edpichler 5y ago
  Is there anyone married here that use jewellery, signed contracts with the state and threw a big wedding party as a strategy to be very embarrassing and costly to you, the couple, to break up?
  • elcapitan 5y ago
    Or "joined a religion" at the age of 30 for that purpose.
• ListeningPie 5y ago
  Is is possible to have some kind of vote, how many actually agree with his unsaid plans. For me,2 captures why I don’t join a church. It seems hypocritical. One day I will ask who really believes the tenants of the church and what is the churches stance on being a member without believing them.
• unixhero 5y ago
  I didn't understand the premise or point this article was making. I have some college level credits in philosophy. Maybe it has been too long.
  • npsimons 5y ago
    I'm not any sort of expert, but the topics TFA article covers are many that weigh upon my mind, and quite frankly, the author comes across as smug and egotistical, ironically the traits he seems to rail against in the "edgelord" section. For one thing, there is a lot of begging the question going on in most of these "plans that shall not be named", with a side order of heavy cultural colorings the author does not even appear to realize they operate under.
• wnoise 5y ago
  Hobo-Dyer? That's clearly inferior to either the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection or it's oblique aspect, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyou_hemisphere-in-a-square_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyou_hemisphere-in-a-square_p... .
• avgcorrection 5y ago
  You are you. You read book reviews on Slate Star Codex [since renamed] which are half the length of the books themselves. You write essays which are both satirical and completely sincere where you lampoon social practices using the Alien Describing Human technique (again, to good effect). You are too rational and intelligent to make sense of the world in other ways (but you don’t talk about that (directly)). You have had oddball interests and hobbies your whole life, but sometimes you feel like something is missing. Eventually you come to the conclusion that everything which you thought was irrational is in fact that. You pat yourself on the back for the humility that you have displayed. Then you go back to reading that book review on Slate Star Codex [since renamed].
• joejohns 5y ago
  If you have a big plan, you don't need to say it aloud to different people. Do it in silence and let your action speak for it.
• greyhair 5y ago
  Nice philosophical expressions here, but I'll give you two, short takes. My wife and I happily lived together before marriage, and discovered that there are a number of legal advantages to just getting a civil marriage that are doable with a bunch of paperwork, but largely untested in court. I won't go into the details, but it particularly convoluted if you want to have children. The legal issues are an exercise left to the reader. Hint: They all hinge on whether you want your significant other at the helm if something bad happens to you, or your family. If your answer there is "my family" you have other issues to think about. I was born and raised on a family that went to church. As was my wife. I grew up with a bunch of doubts that only increased. Same with my wife. We are atheists now, and have been for some time. We raised our kids as atheists. We don't feel any shame in that, even though some people think we should. My kids are completely comfortable in that as young adults. We talked about it regularly as they grew up, we didn't want to be quite about it. There, I just talked about it. And not for the first time. And likely not for the last.
• _theory_ 5y ago
  This is all a pretty good argument in favor of conservatism, especially the last bit. There are plenty of cultural practices that preserve or promote something valuable in society, and maybe we don't even know why they work. But they do. Kind of like NNs...sure, maybe if you spent enough time, you could figure out exactly how each one is doing what it's doing. Or, you could accept the general principles and enjoy the results.