4 ms·

What you shouldn't think

29 points by aizyuval 4y ago

hprotagonist 4y ago
There's roughly one thing you actually shouldn't think. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Wasn't Kant's "critique of reason" the original sin of this kind?
  - qsort 4y ago
    Kant was about as far from radical skepticism as you can get.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      I didn't mean to imply Kant was the sinner, just that his words are heretical today. When he was saying it, it was to the applause of his peers in the spirit of that age. Try criticising the moral supremacy of rational prediction (for example algorithmic policing) now, and they'll nail you to tree and set it on fire.
      - AstralStorm 4y ago
        There is no such thing as rational prediction of any sizable length of time for a complex system, so it is trivial to criticize. How long can you accurately predict a relatively simple system of weather? Climate only works because our forcing is big and the forces are highly predictable. Social movements, moral ideas... good luck even setting an equation. Every attempt will be so approximate as to be worthless.
        nonrandomstring 4y ago
        > There is no such thing as rational prediction of any sizable length of time for a complex system, You know that. I know that. Anyone with an IQ in double figures knows that. But they want it don't they. Or rather, they want to believe in it. Because otherwise what else is there to put faith in but men, minds and meetings? We'd have to sit down and talk to each other like savages.
- yasp 4y ago
  > One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the naturalistic worldview].... The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.... [U]nless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    Failing at reasoning makes the above paragraph even more funny. Our human application of reason is never perfect. Even mathematical and logical truths are as useful as matter to which we apply them. There is no need for intent in anything either. Even reasoning can be done unintentionally.
- the_af 4y ago
  I admire Chesterton and I agree that the thought that brings inaction and paralysis is unwelcome. That said, > That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed Well, that's very debatable. "All religious authority"? "All" is doing some heavy-duty work in that sentence. > It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own Whenever you read this sentence, this is the most decadent age. This one, the one you're living in!
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  "I have a right to think for myself" ---> "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." ---> "I think therefore I am".
- bena 4y ago
  This seems like just a complete misunderstanding of scepticism. And of thought. It's an absurd extreme and they try to claim that any movement towards scepticism must land at that extreme or it's "faith-based". I looked up the quote and it's from G.K. Chesterton, a Christian apologist. Also the man for which the fence was named. But that's beside the point. It totally tracks that an apologist would want to cast aspersions on scepticism in general. In a way, it's a tacit admission that religious thought is not rational and can never be defended on the basis of rationality or logic. So they stop trying and start trying to make the claim that rationality and logic just don't exist. That even acceptance of reality requires irrational faith. The idea is that once you accept that premise, you have to accept the premise of a deity also based on irrational faith. But we can demonstrate that there is a shared reality that is not capable of being "thought" away. You can take any relatively sharp object and stab it through their hand. Now, if reality were subjective and based on irrational faith, he could trust in his faith to make his hand not stabbed. But we both know that's not going to happen, what's going to happen is that he's going to hurt. Solipsism is all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
  - hprotagonist 4y ago
    you can't argue with a (p-)zombie, i suppose.
  - d0mine 4y ago
    There is a fun experiment about stubbing an arm https://youtube.com/watch?v=3DwVsjC_wIw https://youtube.com/watch?v=3DwVsjC_wIw
nonrandomstring 4y ago
A measure of precarious mental health is the distance between the person you really are and the person you present. I think it was Erik Fromm who said that. My sense is that the hyper-normative "correct" credo presented by mass media and social media is an equal and opposite response to something. The paradigmatic selfie-taking "successful professional" who says and does all the right things has never seemed more a neurotic wreck underneath. The soul must pay for the energy it takes to maintain that appearance. But also on a societal level, governments mobilising against hate speech and fake news, and the power of niche outrage groups, is proportional to the explosion of diversification and difference under the surface of "post-modern" society. In other words, people act more normal than ever, but underneath feel more deviant and alienated than ever. That's somehow connected with the real roots of "imposter syndrome". No doubt it's a well recognised phenomenon amongst sociologists and probably has a name I'm ignorant of.
- lanstin 4y ago
  I can’t identify one monolithic hyper-normative “correct” credo in mass media. In my lifetime I have seen the variety of speech (US based tho I understand it is a global change) conveyed thru mass media explode in variety. From three TV stations and the newspaper to hundreds of channels, espousing everything from Yoga being salvific to Yoga being demonic to the science of infrared absorption being simple to elaborate theories about how climate science is a plot to control the citizens, from Elvis music to Public Enemy in the grocery stores’ Muzak. People write a lot about how they can’t express their beliefs anymore, but you can be a flat earther and be on YouTube and have conventions. There might be, in the US, less people willing to listen to the racist, sexist, and homophobic views that were so popular in the past without protest, but that response is because that is speech directed against people, not for an idea. https://ifunny.co/picture/conservative-i-have-been-censored-for-my-conservative-views-me-chcfqIYF8 https://ifunny.co/picture/conservative-i-have-been-censored-...
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > I can’t identify one monolithic hyper-normative “correct” credo in mass media. Not monolithic but compressed. And not in actuality but in expectation. > In my lifetime I have seen the variety of speech (US based tho I understand it is a global change) conveyed thru mass media explode in variety. Yes! 60 years ago you had one job for life and dressed accordingly. Today you've been a Punk who works at Tesco, an Emo in IT, a Greaser in sales and a management suit by the time you're 25. The acceptable expectation is that you "advance". Restive variety of expression is de rigueur. > From three TV stations and the newspaper to hundreds of channels, espousing everything from Yoga... I disagree here. While the manifest variety of (mainly user generated) content has enriched, late capitalism has compressed meaningful choice via consolidation. There were 60 newspapers only couple of decades ago, scores of media companies... now we talk about the Big Five (or is it the Big Three now?) > People write a lot about how they can’t express their beliefs anymore, but you can be a flat earther and be on YouTube and have conventions. Indeed, that's part of the paradox around expectation. Writing about being oppressed by the man is normative. A "flat earther" could even work for NASA doing orbital calculations, and nobody would bat an eyelid, provided they did "flat earth stuff" in a respectable, acceptable way. What is allowed and what is "expected" (and most cruelly expected of/by ourselves) are different things.
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
Pre selecting a category of things that "you should not think"? How isn't that sentence insulting to the reader's intelligence?
- aizyuval 4y ago
  I’m a bit puzzled by this question. My main goal was to approach underlying social norms. I didn’t mean to point out that others do not know them and I do. I’ve tried to generalize examples that we all might notice and reason with. How could’ve I done that better?
  - neonate 4y ago
    It's not obvious what the title has to do with the article. And it's a bit clickbaity.
  - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
    Noticing that the proposal doesn't come from modesty or from nurturing intelligence but from an arrogant imposed informational design. That scales to propaganda and censorship creating a new invariably catastrophic set of social norms (imposed instead of emergent).
lanstin 4y ago
I can guarantee you that neither Einstein nor Steve Jobs ever worried about why so many other people have conventional thinking. Just be curious if you want. Daydream if you want. You are an adult, that means you can continue playing even if it is dinner time if that’s what you want. You might of course have goals that work better with specific actions, but goalless play is surely something you, as an adult, can make time for. And most thoughts are not thought not because of crushing conventionality but because the space of possible thoughts is so large and complex and not all thoughts are useful. Having some dreamers around to generate less constrained ideas is fine, but having a few practical folks around to make the ideas more conventional is also useful. In general, if you see a segment of society doing something that makes no sense to you, it is your understanding that is lacking; it is usually not that their apparent irrational thoughts serve no function in society.
- aizyuval 4y ago
  I agree. I do see an ideal where those different thought segments will not override each other.
csours 4y ago
A deeper dive into this is "The Righteous Mind" by Haidt. In brief, the brain seems to have affinity for different types of morality. The actual content of that morality is filled in by people you have respect for. The flavors of morality he uses are The Care/Harm Foundation The Fairness/Cheating Foundation The Loyalty/Betrayal Foundation The Authority/Subversion Foundation The Sanctity/Degradation Foundation The Liberty/Oppression Foundation These should not be used as absolutes. Humans have always formed tribes. It took me a month to finish the book and that wasn't because the words were hard, the concepts take a lot of emotional bandwidth.
WallyFunk 4y ago
I don't have the source, but I remember reading a study that noticed we are more open to strangers than we are to immediate friends and family. Like, the things people say on a first encounter with a stranger are truly honest and reveal a lot about our character. You would think it's the opposite (keep your head down, don't divulge too much) but it's not.
- human_person 4y ago
  I’m actually not all that surprised by this. Strangers are easy to talk to, most likely you’ll never see them again and they’ll forget you 5 minutes after you leave the room. You can be anyone with them. Why not be your truest self? Friends and family are more complicated, there are layers of expectations and history that put you in a box in their eyes and it can be hard to break out of that box even if it no longer fits. You need to see them again in the future and most people avoid conflict with the people they care about further limiting your ability to be fully honest.
- smiley1437 4y ago
  I think it's because the stranger is more likely to be inconsequential to your life. Accidentally saying something unusual\upsetting\strange to family and friends is more likely to have blowback for the rest of your life

29 points by aizyuval 4y ago

There's roughly one thing you actually shouldn't think. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Wasn't Kant's "critique of reason" the original sin of this kind?
- qsort 4y ago
  Kant was about as far from radical skepticism as you can get.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    I didn't mean to imply Kant was the sinner, just that his words are heretical today. When he was saying it, it was to the applause of his peers in the spirit of that age. Try criticising the moral supremacy of rational prediction (for example algorithmic policing) now, and they'll nail you to tree and set it on fire.
    - AstralStorm 4y ago
      There is no such thing as rational prediction of any sizable length of time for a complex system, so it is trivial to criticize. How long can you accurately predict a relatively simple system of weather? Climate only works because our forcing is big and the forces are highly predictable. Social movements, moral ideas... good luck even setting an equation. Every attempt will be so approximate as to be worthless.
      - nonrandomstring 4y ago
        > There is no such thing as rational prediction of any sizable length of time for a complex system, You know that. I know that. Anyone with an IQ in double figures knows that. But they want it don't they. Or rather, they want to believe in it. Because otherwise what else is there to put faith in but men, minds and meetings? We'd have to sit down and talk to each other like savages.
yasp 4y ago
> One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the naturalistic worldview].... The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.... [U]nless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  Failing at reasoning makes the above paragraph even more funny. Our human application of reason is never perfect. Even mathematical and logical truths are as useful as matter to which we apply them. There is no need for intent in anything either. Even reasoning can be done unintentionally.
the_af 4y ago
I admire Chesterton and I agree that the thought that brings inaction and paralysis is unwelcome. That said, > That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed Well, that's very debatable. "All religious authority"? "All" is doing some heavy-duty work in that sentence. > It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own Whenever you read this sentence, this is the most decadent age. This one, the one you're living in!
SuoDuanDao 4y ago
"I have a right to think for myself" ---> "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." ---> "I think therefore I am".
bena 4y ago
This seems like just a complete misunderstanding of scepticism. And of thought. It's an absurd extreme and they try to claim that any movement towards scepticism must land at that extreme or it's "faith-based". I looked up the quote and it's from G.K. Chesterton, a Christian apologist. Also the man for which the fence was named. But that's beside the point. It totally tracks that an apologist would want to cast aspersions on scepticism in general. In a way, it's a tacit admission that religious thought is not rational and can never be defended on the basis of rationality or logic. So they stop trying and start trying to make the claim that rationality and logic just don't exist. That even acceptance of reality requires irrational faith. The idea is that once you accept that premise, you have to accept the premise of a deity also based on irrational faith. But we can demonstrate that there is a shared reality that is not capable of being "thought" away. You can take any relatively sharp object and stab it through their hand. Now, if reality were subjective and based on irrational faith, he could trust in his faith to make his hand not stabbed. But we both know that's not going to happen, what's going to happen is that he's going to hurt. Solipsism is all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  you can't argue with a (p-)zombie, i suppose.
- d0mine 4y ago
  There is a fun experiment about stubbing an arm https://youtube.com/watch?v=3DwVsjC_wIw https://youtube.com/watch?v=3DwVsjC_wIw

nonrandomstring 4y ago

A measure of precarious mental health is the distance between the person you really are and the person you present. I think it was Erik Fromm who said that. My sense is that the hyper-normative "correct" credo presented by mass media and social media is an equal and opposite response to something. The paradigmatic selfie-taking "successful professional" who says and does all the right things has never seemed more a neurotic wreck underneath. The soul must pay for the energy it takes to maintain that appearance. But also on a societal level, governments mobilising against hate speech and fake news, and the power of niche outrage groups, is proportional to the explosion of diversification and difference under the surface of "post-modern" society. In other words, people act more normal than ever, but underneath feel more deviant and alienated than ever. That's somehow connected with the real roots of "imposter syndrome". No doubt it's a well recognised phenomenon amongst sociologists and probably has a name I'm ignorant of.

lanstin 4y ago
I can’t identify one monolithic hyper-normative “correct” credo in mass media. In my lifetime I have seen the variety of speech (US based tho I understand it is a global change) conveyed thru mass media explode in variety. From three TV stations and the newspaper to hundreds of channels, espousing everything from Yoga being salvific to Yoga being demonic to the science of infrared absorption being simple to elaborate theories about how climate science is a plot to control the citizens, from Elvis music to Public Enemy in the grocery stores’ Muzak. People write a lot about how they can’t express their beliefs anymore, but you can be a flat earther and be on YouTube and have conventions. There might be, in the US, less people willing to listen to the racist, sexist, and homophobic views that were so popular in the past without protest, but that response is because that is speech directed against people, not for an idea. https://ifunny.co/picture/conservative-i-have-been-censored-for-my-conservative-views-me-chcfqIYF8 https://ifunny.co/picture/conservative-i-have-been-censored-...
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > I can’t identify one monolithic hyper-normative “correct” credo in mass media. Not monolithic but compressed. And not in actuality but in expectation. > In my lifetime I have seen the variety of speech (US based tho I understand it is a global change) conveyed thru mass media explode in variety. Yes! 60 years ago you had one job for life and dressed accordingly. Today you've been a Punk who works at Tesco, an Emo in IT, a Greaser in sales and a management suit by the time you're 25. The acceptable expectation is that you "advance". Restive variety of expression is de rigueur. > From three TV stations and the newspaper to hundreds of channels, espousing everything from Yoga... I disagree here. While the manifest variety of (mainly user generated) content has enriched, late capitalism has compressed meaningful choice via consolidation. There were 60 newspapers only couple of decades ago, scores of media companies... now we talk about the Big Five (or is it the Big Three now?) > People write a lot about how they can’t express their beliefs anymore, but you can be a flat earther and be on YouTube and have conventions. Indeed, that's part of the paradox around expectation. Writing about being oppressed by the man is normative. A "flat earther" could even work for NASA doing orbital calculations, and nobody would bat an eyelid, provided they did "flat earth stuff" in a respectable, acceptable way. What is allowed and what is "expected" (and most cruelly expected of/by ourselves) are different things.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

Pre selecting a category of things that "you should not think"? How isn't that sentence insulting to the reader's intelligence?

aizyuval 4y ago
I’m a bit puzzled by this question. My main goal was to approach underlying social norms. I didn’t mean to point out that others do not know them and I do. I’ve tried to generalize examples that we all might notice and reason with. How could’ve I done that better?
- neonate 4y ago
  It's not obvious what the title has to do with the article. And it's a bit clickbaity.
- sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  Noticing that the proposal doesn't come from modesty or from nurturing intelligence but from an arrogant imposed informational design. That scales to propaganda and censorship creating a new invariably catastrophic set of social norms (imposed instead of emergent).

lanstin 4y ago

I can guarantee you that neither Einstein nor Steve Jobs ever worried about why so many other people have conventional thinking. Just be curious if you want. Daydream if you want. You are an adult, that means you can continue playing even if it is dinner time if that’s what you want. You might of course have goals that work better with specific actions, but goalless play is surely something you, as an adult, can make time for. And most thoughts are not thought not because of crushing conventionality but because the space of possible thoughts is so large and complex and not all thoughts are useful. Having some dreamers around to generate less constrained ideas is fine, but having a few practical folks around to make the ideas more conventional is also useful. In general, if you see a segment of society doing something that makes no sense to you, it is your understanding that is lacking; it is usually not that their apparent irrational thoughts serve no function in society.

aizyuval 4y ago
I agree. I do see an ideal where those different thought segments will not override each other.

csours 4y ago

A deeper dive into this is "The Righteous Mind" by Haidt. In brief, the brain seems to have affinity for different types of morality. The actual content of that morality is filled in by people you have respect for. The flavors of morality he uses are The Care/Harm Foundation The Fairness/Cheating Foundation The Loyalty/Betrayal Foundation The Authority/Subversion Foundation The Sanctity/Degradation Foundation The Liberty/Oppression Foundation These should not be used as absolutes. Humans have always formed tribes. It took me a month to finish the book and that wasn't because the words were hard, the concepts take a lot of emotional bandwidth.

WallyFunk 4y ago

I don't have the source, but I remember reading a study that noticed we are more open to strangers than we are to immediate friends and family. Like, the things people say on a first encounter with a stranger are truly honest and reveal a lot about our character. You would think it's the opposite (keep your head down, don't divulge too much) but it's not.

human_person 4y ago
I’m actually not all that surprised by this. Strangers are easy to talk to, most likely you’ll never see them again and they’ll forget you 5 minutes after you leave the room. You can be anyone with them. Why not be your truest self? Friends and family are more complicated, there are layers of expectations and history that put you in a box in their eyes and it can be hard to break out of that box even if it no longer fits. You need to see them again in the future and most people avoid conflict with the people they care about further limiting your ability to be fully honest.
smiley1437 4y ago
I think it's because the stranger is more likely to be inconsequential to your life. Accidentally saying something unusual\upsetting\strange to family and friends is more likely to have blowback for the rest of your life