So far as I can tell, my resilience in this way is not an acquired defect but rather than an acquired sophistication.
When my working philosophic assumptions crashed in the past, I learned a number of ways to handle it. For one example, I’ve seen that when something surprises me, for the most partit all adds up to normality and crazy new ways of looking at the world it are generally not important in normal circumstances for daily human life. I still have to get dressed every morning and eat food like a mortal, but now I have a new tool to apply in special cases or leverage in contexts where I can control many parameters and apply more of an engineering mindset and get better outcomes. For a specific example, variations on egoism put me in a state of profound aporeia for about 3 months in high school, but eventually I worked out enough of a model of motivational psychology with enough moving parts that I could reconcile what I actually saw of people’s pursuit of things they “wanted” and translate naive people’s emission of words like “values” and “selfish” and “moral” and so on in ways that made sense, even if it sometimes demonstrated philosophic confusions similar to wish fulfillment fantasies.
It helps, perhaps, that my parents didn’t force some crazy literalistic theism down my throat but rather tended to do things like tell me that I should keep an open mind and never stop asking “why?” the way most people do for some reason. Its not like I suddenly starting taking the verbal/theoretical content of my brain seriously in an act of parental defiance and accidentally took up adulterer stoning because that had been laying around in my head in an unexamined way. I was never encouraged to stone adulterers. I was raised on a farm in the redwoods by parents without college degrees and sent off to academia naively thinking it worked the way that it does in stories about Science And Progress. If I have such confusions remaining, my guess is that I take epistemology too seriously and imagine that other people might be helped by being better at it :-P
Eliezer’s quoting of Feynman in the compartmentalization link seems naive to me, but it’s a naivete that I shared when I was 19. His text there might have appealed to me then because it whispers to the the part of my soul that wants to just work on an interesting puzzle and get the right answer and apply it to the world and have a good life doing that. The same part of my soul and says that anything which might require compromises during a political competition for research resources isn’t actually about a political competition for resources but is instead just other people “being dumb”. Its nicer to think of yourself as having a scientific insight rather than an ignorance of the pragmatics of political economy. Science is fun and morally praiseworthy and a lot of people are interested in doing it. But where there’s muck, there’s brass so it is tricky to figure out a way to be entirely devoted to that and get paid at the same time.
It helps, perhaps, that my parents didn’t force some crazy literalistic theism down my throat but rather tended to do things like tell me that I should keep an open mind and never stop asking “why?” the way most people do for some reason. Its not like I suddenly starting taking the verbal/theoretical content of my brain seriously in an act of parental defiance and accidentally took up adulterer stoning because that had been laying around in my head in an unexamined way. I was never encouraged to stone adulterers. I was raised on a farm in the redwoods by parents without college degrees and sent off to academia naively thinking it worked the way that it does in stories about Science And Progress. If I have such confusions remaining, my guess is that I take epistemology too seriously and imagine that other people might be helped by being better at it :-P
The stoning adulterers part is an extreme hypothetical example of taking a Christian meme to its logical conclusion. As PhilGoetz mentioned in the post, secular memes can also have this problem. The same even applies to some of the ‘rationalist’ memes around here.
So far as I can tell, my resilience in this way is not an acquired defect but rather than an acquired sophistication.
When my working philosophic assumptions crashed in the past, I learned a number of ways to handle it. For one example, I’ve seen that when something surprises me, for the most part it all adds up to normality and crazy new ways of looking at the world it are generally not important in normal circumstances for daily human life. I still have to get dressed every morning and eat food like a mortal, but now I have a new tool to apply in special cases or leverage in contexts where I can control many parameters and apply more of an engineering mindset and get better outcomes. For a specific example, variations on egoism put me in a state of profound aporeia for about 3 months in high school, but eventually I worked out enough of a model of motivational psychology with enough moving parts that I could reconcile what I actually saw of people’s pursuit of things they “wanted” and translate naive people’s emission of words like “values” and “selfish” and “moral” and so on in ways that made sense, even if it sometimes demonstrated philosophic confusions similar to wish fulfillment fantasies.
It helps, perhaps, that my parents didn’t force some crazy literalistic theism down my throat but rather tended to do things like tell me that I should keep an open mind and never stop asking “why?” the way most people do for some reason. Its not like I suddenly starting taking the verbal/theoretical content of my brain seriously in an act of parental defiance and accidentally took up adulterer stoning because that had been laying around in my head in an unexamined way. I was never encouraged to stone adulterers. I was raised on a farm in the redwoods by parents without college degrees and sent off to academia naively thinking it worked the way that it does in stories about Science And Progress. If I have such confusions remaining, my guess is that I take epistemology too seriously and imagine that other people might be helped by being better at it :-P
Eliezer’s quoting of Feynman in the compartmentalization link seems naive to me, but it’s a naivete that I shared when I was 19. His text there might have appealed to me then because it whispers to the the part of my soul that wants to just work on an interesting puzzle and get the right answer and apply it to the world and have a good life doing that. The same part of my soul and says that anything which might require compromises during a political competition for research resources isn’t actually about a political competition for resources but is instead just other people “being dumb”. Its nicer to think of yourself as having a scientific insight rather than an ignorance of the pragmatics of political economy. Science is fun and morally praiseworthy and a lot of people are interested in doing it. But where there’s muck, there’s brass so it is tricky to figure out a way to be entirely devoted to that and get paid at the same time.
The stoning adulterers part is an extreme hypothetical example of taking a Christian meme to its logical conclusion. As PhilGoetz mentioned in the post, secular memes can also have this problem. The same even applies to some of the ‘rationalist’ memes around here.