Surely that would depend on the passage and how he uses it. However, wasn’t arguing with Yudkowsky here, just pointing out that the little late discussion here was spinning off on that particular piece of unexamined exposition. I reread the piece, and I do come to something that may be interesting.
Yudkowsky is ascribing an “ur-mistake” to that passage, but he generalizes it, into a rigid adherence to a dogma or tightly-defined mission or, most importantly, group identity. That qualifies as an ur-mistake to me, at least for our time. It disables us from seeing the world-as-it-is, and that is now precisely our mission, our task as humans.
It leads us into the “affective death spiral,” and in some of the examples that came up, it’s literally a death spiral.
If so many people were not so harmed by it, it would be funny, the similarity between the fanatics in the world of Islam and the fanatics in the world of, say, fundamentalist Christianity. They are, from my point of view, on the same side, the side of hatred. In religious language, the side of Satan, whose goal is precisely that we fight each other, in order to demonstrate what pieces of dirt we are. (That’s almost a literal translation from the Qur’an.)
Surely that would depend on the passage and how he uses it. However, wasn’t arguing with Yudkowsky here, just pointing out that the little late discussion here was spinning off on that particular piece of unexamined exposition. I reread the piece, and I do come to something that may be interesting.
Yudkowsky is ascribing an “ur-mistake” to that passage, but he generalizes it, into a rigid adherence to a dogma or tightly-defined mission or, most importantly, group identity. That qualifies as an ur-mistake to me, at least for our time. It disables us from seeing the world-as-it-is, and that is now precisely our mission, our task as humans.
It leads us into the “affective death spiral,” and in some of the examples that came up, it’s literally a death spiral.
If so many people were not so harmed by it, it would be funny, the similarity between the fanatics in the world of Islam and the fanatics in the world of, say, fundamentalist Christianity. They are, from my point of view, on the same side, the side of hatred. In religious language, the side of Satan, whose goal is precisely that we fight each other, in order to demonstrate what pieces of dirt we are. (That’s almost a literal translation from the Qur’an.)