Closer to the object level, I like the post aesthetically, it’s somewhat beautiful and well-crafted. I didn’t find anything useful/interesting/specific in it, it only makes sense to me as a piece of art. At the same time, it fuels a certain process inimical to the purpose of LW.
Compare this with Scott Alexander’s Moloch post or even Sarah Constantin’s Ra post. There’s specific content that the mythical analogies help organize and present.
The positive role of the mythical analogies is the same as in your post, but my impression was that in your post the payload is missing, and the mythical texture is closer to functional anti-epistemology, where it’s not yet ground down to the residue of artistic expression by distance from the origin and distortion in loose retelling.
discussion of religion in a positive light
Discussion in a negative light has its own problems, where instead of developing clarity of thought one is busy digging moats that keep an opposing ideology at bay, a different kind of activity that involves only a very pro forma version of what it takes not to drown in the more difficult questions that are relevant in their own right.
my impression was that in your post the payload is missing
Okay, that seems fair. It is true that just from that post, it’s unclear what my point is (see hypothesis 1).
I think it matters how we construst our mythical analogies, and in Scott Alexander’s Moloch, he argues that we should “kill God” and replace it with Elua, the god of human values. I think this is the wrong way to frame things. I assume that Scott uses ‘God’ to refer to the blind idiot god of evolution. But that’s a very uncharitable and in my opinion unproductive way of constructing our mythical analogies. I think we should use ‘God’ to refer to reality, and make our use of the word more in line with how more than half of humanity uses the word.
Is your point about “functional anti-epistemology” about it being clear from Scott Alexander’s and Sarah Constantin’s posts that they’re not sympathetic to “actual” belief in Moloch or Ra, while in my post, I sound sympathetic to theism?
It doesn’t matter if a discussion is sympathetic or not, that’s not relevant to the problem I’m pointing out. Theism is not even an outgroup, it’s too alien and far away to play that role.
Anti-epistemology is not a label for bad reasoning or disapproval of particular cultures, it’s the specific phenomenon of memes and norms that promote systematically incorrect reasoning, where certain factual questions end up getting resolved to false answers, resisting argument or natural intellectual exploration, certain topics or claims can’t be discussed or thought about, and meaningless nothings hog all attention. It is the concept for the vectors of irrationality, the foundation of its staying power.
Closer to the object level, I like the post aesthetically, it’s somewhat beautiful and well-crafted. I didn’t find anything useful/interesting/specific in it, it only makes sense to me as a piece of art. At the same time, it fuels a certain process inimical to the purpose of LW.
Compare this with Scott Alexander’s Moloch post or even Sarah Constantin’s Ra post. There’s specific content that the mythical analogies help organize and present.
The positive role of the mythical analogies is the same as in your post, but my impression was that in your post the payload is missing, and the mythical texture is closer to functional anti-epistemology, where it’s not yet ground down to the residue of artistic expression by distance from the origin and distortion in loose retelling.
Discussion in a negative light has its own problems, where instead of developing clarity of thought one is busy digging moats that keep an opposing ideology at bay, a different kind of activity that involves only a very pro forma version of what it takes not to drown in the more difficult questions that are relevant in their own right.
Okay, that seems fair. It is true that just from that post, it’s unclear what my point is (see hypothesis 1).
I think it matters how we construst our mythical analogies, and in Scott Alexander’s Moloch, he argues that we should “kill God” and replace it with Elua, the god of human values. I think this is the wrong way to frame things. I assume that Scott uses ‘God’ to refer to the blind idiot god of evolution. But that’s a very uncharitable and in my opinion unproductive way of constructing our mythical analogies. I think we should use ‘God’ to refer to reality, and make our use of the word more in line with how more than half of humanity uses the word.
Is your point about “functional anti-epistemology” about it being clear from Scott Alexander’s and Sarah Constantin’s posts that they’re not sympathetic to “actual” belief in Moloch or Ra, while in my post, I sound sympathetic to theism?
It doesn’t matter if a discussion is sympathetic or not, that’s not relevant to the problem I’m pointing out. Theism is not even an outgroup, it’s too alien and far away to play that role.
Anti-epistemology is not a label for bad reasoning or disapproval of particular cultures, it’s the specific phenomenon of memes and norms that promote systematically incorrect reasoning, where certain factual questions end up getting resolved to false answers, resisting argument or natural intellectual exploration, certain topics or claims can’t be discussed or thought about, and meaningless nothings hog all attention. It is the concept for the vectors of irrationality, the foundation of its staying power.