It’s dehumanizing according to nerd standards, but, then again, we’re familiar with the kind of social status afforded nerds.
Which I don’t mean in a “we can hit them ’cuz they hit us” sense, but merely to say that they don’t think it’s dehumanizing to think their way.
Normal people are the majority after all, the ones who are political through and through are both the mob and its leaders, whereas nerds tend to be political only about...most things? A lot of things? Even if they’re not political for humans, they’re still quite political.
Rationalists are nerdier than nerds, in this sense, since they try to take the nerd mindset into everything, essentially undoing their political instincts (politics is the mind-killer?). Does that make them more or less human?
Well, I remember how political I used to get. I feel like I’ve improved; I feel that undoing my political instincts and overwriting them with cold nerd reason has been good, so, according to these standards, normal people who have even more political drive than I ever did are indeed worse off.
At the same time, nerds are often called cold and...inhuman, aren’t they. Which is more human, nerdiness or politics? Well, normal people think it’s that political nature that defines them as humans. In a sense, they’re right. Nerds are trying to do instrumentally what would be correct for any species. Truth and (non-social) power would work as well for aliens as humans, so you can’t really say that nerdiness is an especially human quality, quite the opposite.
Why, then, do I feel better having nerdified myself? Well, it may be less human, but I feel it’s more alive, more aware, more powerful. It’s only since I’ve become a stronger kind of nerd that I’ve become powerful enough to understand why nerds have the disadvantages they do, how they come about, and (I’m working on it), how to overcome them and give nerds the best of both worlds. Learning this required becoming more nerdy, not less. Ironically, the result is that I now appear less nerdy to those normal people who only ever judged nerdiness according to social terms, because I’m undoing the tell-tale social signs of nerdiness by understanding and correcting them. So, I think it’s great!
But, a lot of this learning has come from banging my head on the wall that is trying to communicate truth to normal people and realizing that they really don’t care. Well, that makes us different. C’est la vie. They’re not going to grant me any more social power on the basis of any of this stuff, but will do so only insofar as I learn to swim in their waters and speak their language. They, in contrast to me, think it’s great to not do these things I’m so obsessed with.
As for them having no concept of truth, it’s not quite as bad as all that, it’s just that when we say “beliefs” or “truth,” those are about social signals to them. They do have real nerd-beliefs about the weather and traffic and their jobs and so on; they have them wherever they need them to properly navigate the world which is, to them, a social world. On the other hand, they don’t have them about (almost) anything if having them would decrease their social powers. They don’t really care about economics (that shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise, should it? And it shouldn’t sound like any great insult, either; I assure you they don’t think it does; they might even take pride in not being interested in such an obviously dry, weird, nerdy subject) for all that it sounds like they do as they assure us that their ingroup’s economic plan will produce well-being for all and can recite the party script as to how that should function (even if it contradicts itself).
It’s dehumanizing according to nerd standards, but, then again, we’re familiar with the kind of social status afforded nerds.
Which I don’t mean in a “we can hit them ’cuz they hit us” sense, but merely to say that they don’t think it’s dehumanizing to think their way.
Normal people are the majority after all, the ones who are political through and through are both the mob and its leaders, whereas nerds tend to be political only about...most things? A lot of things? Even if they’re not political for humans, they’re still quite political.
Rationalists are nerdier than nerds, in this sense, since they try to take the nerd mindset into everything, essentially undoing their political instincts (politics is the mind-killer?). Does that make them more or less human?
Well, I remember how political I used to get. I feel like I’ve improved; I feel that undoing my political instincts and overwriting them with cold nerd reason has been good, so, according to these standards, normal people who have even more political drive than I ever did are indeed worse off.
At the same time, nerds are often called cold and...inhuman, aren’t they. Which is more human, nerdiness or politics? Well, normal people think it’s that political nature that defines them as humans. In a sense, they’re right. Nerds are trying to do instrumentally what would be correct for any species. Truth and (non-social) power would work as well for aliens as humans, so you can’t really say that nerdiness is an especially human quality, quite the opposite.
Why, then, do I feel better having nerdified myself? Well, it may be less human, but I feel it’s more alive, more aware, more powerful. It’s only since I’ve become a stronger kind of nerd that I’ve become powerful enough to understand why nerds have the disadvantages they do, how they come about, and (I’m working on it), how to overcome them and give nerds the best of both worlds. Learning this required becoming more nerdy, not less. Ironically, the result is that I now appear less nerdy to those normal people who only ever judged nerdiness according to social terms, because I’m undoing the tell-tale social signs of nerdiness by understanding and correcting them. So, I think it’s great!
But, a lot of this learning has come from banging my head on the wall that is trying to communicate truth to normal people and realizing that they really don’t care. Well, that makes us different. C’est la vie. They’re not going to grant me any more social power on the basis of any of this stuff, but will do so only insofar as I learn to swim in their waters and speak their language. They, in contrast to me, think it’s great to not do these things I’m so obsessed with.
As for them having no concept of truth, it’s not quite as bad as all that, it’s just that when we say “beliefs” or “truth,” those are about social signals to them. They do have real nerd-beliefs about the weather and traffic and their jobs and so on; they have them wherever they need them to properly navigate the world which is, to them, a social world. On the other hand, they don’t have them about (almost) anything if having them would decrease their social powers. They don’t really care about economics (that shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise, should it? And it shouldn’t sound like any great insult, either; I assure you they don’t think it does; they might even take pride in not being interested in such an obviously dry, weird, nerdy subject) for all that it sounds like they do as they assure us that their ingroup’s economic plan will produce well-being for all and can recite the party script as to how that should function (even if it contradicts itself).