That’s interesting. I’m reading Thus Spake Zarathustra right now and noticing a couple things that don’t exactly jive too well with our rationalist paradigm here. Still, I didn’t expect a comment like this to be downvoted this much based on what I’ve read from Nietzsche so far.
Is it mostly because of the antisocial tone of this comment, or is it Nietzsche himself that caused the downvotes?
Is it mostly because of the antisocial tone of this comment, or is it Nietzsche himself that caused the downvotes?
I didn’t vote on the grandparent comment, but I probably would’ve downvoted it if it wasn’t already far into the negatives, because it gives advice that would be terrible and destructive. While there may be an interpretation of
Practice exercising your will, over yourself at first, then over your pets, your friends, family, co-workers and so on into the larger world
which is reasonable, the naive default interpretation of this, and the one that might actually be followed, caches out to “attempt dominance moves over your friends, family and co-workers”. Doing that without sufficient skill (which the person this advice was directed at almost certainly lacks) will simply alienate them. And actively seeking “challenge, danger, conflict and conquest”—well, two of those (challenge and conquest) are good things to seek, but the other two (danger and conflict) are stupid and destructive.
Oh, and also, using a throwaway account with “Sith Master” in the name suggests to me that the advice might have been bad in a way that wasn’t accidental.
And actively seeking “challenge, danger, conflict and conquest”—well, two of those (challenge and conquest) are good things to seek, but the other two (danger and conflict) are stupid and destructive.
Not to play apologist, but I’d say that people’s intuitions for danger and conflict are far too broken to justify blanket acceptance or rejection of actions carrying those emotional tags. Playing chicken with a 300-pound Sumatran tiger is a dangerous act tagged correctly, granted, but ancestral instincts don’t often do that a good job of carrying over: people’s intuitions for social, technological, or habitual dangers are often completely out of whack relative to their actual importance, and habituation might well be indicated in many cases. Conflict being more of a social construction, I can’t make blanket statements about it as easily, but I strongly suspect similar considerations would apply.
I can agree with this. There was a time when I considered ‘a conversation with a random person’ to be more or less a dangerous situation. It took a lot of brain hacking to get myself out of THAT.
(Upvoted, not for agreement—I don’t know enough about the topics at hand to agree or disagree—but because this sounds like the start of an interesting conversation that I’d like to read.)
Yes Nietzsche is the Western world’s Dark Side philosopher par excellence. People here seem to have an irrational fear of these ideas, probably because they are the shadow of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s absurd universe-saving religion of rationality. Fear is indeed the mind-killer, but as Ra’s al Ghul advised Bruce Wayne: “To conquer fear, you must become fear.” Or as Darth Vader said to Luke: “if you only knew the power of the Dark Side!”
The point being, if you think you can only acquire knowledge or power by rational, utilitarian calculations and Light Side thinking, then to quote Emperor Palpatine: “Oh, no, my young Jedi. You will find that it is you who are mistaken...about a great many things.”
To counter a spiteful and inimical jumble of appeals to fictional evidence, I must become a spiteful and inimical jumble of appeals to fictional evidence...you have clearly succumbed to irrational mind-killer charged-term-that-I-don’t-understand-but-use-because-it-sounds-good fear, just like in Lord of the Rings when...wait, what’s this?
My arm...it...it’s translucent, just like in Back to the Future...I am turning insubstantial by becoming fictional evidence...nooooooooo!!!!!!
Sheer cached-thought pattern matching produced “To conquer politics, you must become politics.” and then I threw up in my mouth a little, so thanks for that.
Nietzsche’s language may be controversial, but his points are quite benign. Take Will to Power for example. As I’m interpreting Will to Power right now with my limited exposure to his writings, Will to Power is just his explanation for why living beings don’t just stop at mere survival. Think about it: Evolution does not favor those who do the mere minimum for survival, it favors those who excel. Will to Power is therefore the foundation, basis, and cause of all life in an ultimate sense. You could say Richard Dawkins restated Nietzsche’s point when Dawkins coined the term ‘The Selfish Gene’ and elaborated on how life really works at a basic level.
The following is running the risk of stepping into mere speculation because, like I said, I haven’t read all his works yet:
Since we are ‘gene machines,’ and we are programmed by them in countless ways, it follows that we are inherently selfish; that we have a Will to Power of our own. Sit down and watch people sometime and you’ll find this plays out fairly nicely. It’s not perfect of course, but who are we to say that the deviant behavior of selflessness is ‘good’ if the true cause of life is selfishness? This plays into his arguments concerning ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and how transient they both are. All cultures, Nietzsche says, have had different values and the cultures of the future will have values different from us. Perhaps what we should be doing is exercising some of our power to ‘revalue all values,’ something that he admitted he was not up to the task of. To be honest, I think he was mostly thinking in the same direction the transhumanist community of today largely thinks in. We DO need to revalue all values. We need someone SMARTER than us to do it...
Though I probably should have said this at the beginning, I still highly doubt Nietzsche’s methods. He does not seem to have followed the rationalist’s path. He was a classical philologist by education and an artistic biographer for much of his writing career. What I’m saying is, maybe he didn’t have rigor at the heart of his philosophy. It’s easy to get the impression from his writing style that this is all just stuff he ‘made up.’ But I don’t know. I plan on finding out.
P.S. SithMasterSean, Nietzsche’s writing has been praised by Nazis. You wouldn’t want to be a Nazi, would you?!
Sorry, that was a bit of a dense quip on my part. Let me deconstruct it.
I got the impression SithMasterSean was deriving his idea of Nietzsche’s writings from other people’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings. Typically those ideas seem to be flat wrong. From what I understand, the Nazis seem to be the most famous misinterpreters Nietzsche, so I thought I’d make a bit of a joke about that, and also try to make a bit of comedic use out of argumentum ad hitlerum while I was at it.
Really, I was just joking around.
What really seems to pay off on LW is clarity, clarity, clarity. I kick myself every time something like this happens. Sorry.
That’s interesting. I’m reading Thus Spake Zarathustra right now and noticing a couple things that don’t exactly jive too well with our rationalist paradigm here. Still, I didn’t expect a comment like this to be downvoted this much based on what I’ve read from Nietzsche so far.
Is it mostly because of the antisocial tone of this comment, or is it Nietzsche himself that caused the downvotes?
I didn’t vote on the grandparent comment, but I probably would’ve downvoted it if it wasn’t already far into the negatives, because it gives advice that would be terrible and destructive. While there may be an interpretation of
which is reasonable, the naive default interpretation of this, and the one that might actually be followed, caches out to “attempt dominance moves over your friends, family and co-workers”. Doing that without sufficient skill (which the person this advice was directed at almost certainly lacks) will simply alienate them. And actively seeking “challenge, danger, conflict and conquest”—well, two of those (challenge and conquest) are good things to seek, but the other two (danger and conflict) are stupid and destructive.
Oh, and also, using a throwaway account with “Sith Master” in the name suggests to me that the advice might have been bad in a way that wasn’t accidental.
Not to play apologist, but I’d say that people’s intuitions for danger and conflict are far too broken to justify blanket acceptance or rejection of actions carrying those emotional tags. Playing chicken with a 300-pound Sumatran tiger is a dangerous act tagged correctly, granted, but ancestral instincts don’t often do that a good job of carrying over: people’s intuitions for social, technological, or habitual dangers are often completely out of whack relative to their actual importance, and habituation might well be indicated in many cases. Conflict being more of a social construction, I can’t make blanket statements about it as easily, but I strongly suspect similar considerations would apply.
I agree with the rest of your comment.
I can agree with this. There was a time when I considered ‘a conversation with a random person’ to be more or less a dangerous situation. It took a lot of brain hacking to get myself out of THAT.
(Upvoted, not for agreement—I don’t know enough about the topics at hand to agree or disagree—but because this sounds like the start of an interesting conversation that I’d like to read.)
Yes Nietzsche is the Western world’s Dark Side philosopher par excellence. People here seem to have an irrational fear of these ideas, probably because they are the shadow of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s absurd universe-saving religion of rationality. Fear is indeed the mind-killer, but as Ra’s al Ghul advised Bruce Wayne: “To conquer fear, you must become fear.” Or as Darth Vader said to Luke: “if you only knew the power of the Dark Side!”
The point being, if you think you can only acquire knowledge or power by rational, utilitarian calculations and Light Side thinking, then to quote Emperor Palpatine: “Oh, no, my young Jedi. You will find that it is you who are mistaken...about a great many things.”
To counter a spiteful and inimical jumble of appeals to fictional evidence, I must become a spiteful and inimical jumble of appeals to fictional evidence...you have clearly succumbed to irrational mind-killer charged-term-that-I-don’t-understand-but-use-because-it-sounds-good fear, just like in Lord of the Rings when...wait, what’s this?
My arm...it...it’s translucent, just like in Back to the Future...I am turning insubstantial by becoming fictional evidence...nooooooooo!!!!!!
Sheer cached-thought pattern matching produced “To conquer politics, you must become politics.” and then I threw up in my mouth a little, so thanks for that.
You are most welcome.
Okay. I think that perhaps you could benefit from reading R. J. Hollingdale’s biography, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy
Nietzsche’s language may be controversial, but his points are quite benign. Take Will to Power for example. As I’m interpreting Will to Power right now with my limited exposure to his writings, Will to Power is just his explanation for why living beings don’t just stop at mere survival. Think about it: Evolution does not favor those who do the mere minimum for survival, it favors those who excel. Will to Power is therefore the foundation, basis, and cause of all life in an ultimate sense. You could say Richard Dawkins restated Nietzsche’s point when Dawkins coined the term ‘The Selfish Gene’ and elaborated on how life really works at a basic level.
The following is running the risk of stepping into mere speculation because, like I said, I haven’t read all his works yet:
Since we are ‘gene machines,’ and we are programmed by them in countless ways, it follows that we are inherently selfish; that we have a Will to Power of our own. Sit down and watch people sometime and you’ll find this plays out fairly nicely. It’s not perfect of course, but who are we to say that the deviant behavior of selflessness is ‘good’ if the true cause of life is selfishness? This plays into his arguments concerning ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and how transient they both are. All cultures, Nietzsche says, have had different values and the cultures of the future will have values different from us. Perhaps what we should be doing is exercising some of our power to ‘revalue all values,’ something that he admitted he was not up to the task of. To be honest, I think he was mostly thinking in the same direction the transhumanist community of today largely thinks in. We DO need to revalue all values. We need someone SMARTER than us to do it...
Though I probably should have said this at the beginning, I still highly doubt Nietzsche’s methods. He does not seem to have followed the rationalist’s path. He was a classical philologist by education and an artistic biographer for much of his writing career. What I’m saying is, maybe he didn’t have rigor at the heart of his philosophy. It’s easy to get the impression from his writing style that this is all just stuff he ‘made up.’ But I don’t know. I plan on finding out.
P.S. SithMasterSean, Nietzsche’s writing has been praised by Nazis. You wouldn’t want to be a Nazi, would you?!
I’m struggling to figure out what this was meant to communicate.
Sorry, that was a bit of a dense quip on my part. Let me deconstruct it.
I got the impression SithMasterSean was deriving his idea of Nietzsche’s writings from other people’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings. Typically those ideas seem to be flat wrong. From what I understand, the Nazis seem to be the most famous misinterpreters Nietzsche, so I thought I’d make a bit of a joke about that, and also try to make a bit of comedic use out of argumentum ad hitlerum while I was at it.
Really, I was just joking around.
What really seems to pay off on LW is clarity, clarity, clarity. I kick myself every time something like this happens. Sorry.