(That sound you hear in the background is a strained metaphor snapping. Sorry.)
Actually I think you were doing quite well with it. Sadly, I’m about to break it on purpose. The trouble is that talking politics is worse than speaking French. If I speak a sentence in French which you do not understand, your verbal subroutines usually do not return bad data, they return “error” (In fact you may well commit a mind-projection fallacy and think that I am speaking gibberish. This is an interesting case of “how the algorithm feels from the inside” on which I may write later.) If I start talking about whether the Palestinians deserve their land, and you become politically involved, you do not return “error,” you return a somatic marker which feels from the inside like a fact about the world. Thus, unless we are extremely confident of our development as rationalists, talking about politics seems risky precisely because we may underestimate its effects on our understanding.
But this leaves rather open the question of how we are supposed to develop as rationalists in this regard. Is practice always too dangerous? Or is it just practicing in a public forum like a community blog? What if it were only a minimally controversial political topic? What if it were pitched explicitly as an “overcome politics as the mind killer” training exercise? Could that help?
Actually I think you were doing quite well with it. Sadly, I’m about to break it on purpose. The trouble is that talking politics is worse than speaking French. If I speak a sentence in French which you do not understand, your verbal subroutines usually do not return bad data, they return “error” (In fact you may well commit a mind-projection fallacy and think that I am speaking gibberish. This is an interesting case of “how the algorithm feels from the inside” on which I may write later.) If I start talking about whether the Palestinians deserve their land, and you become politically involved, you do not return “error,” you return a somatic marker which feels from the inside like a fact about the world. Thus, unless we are extremely confident of our development as rationalists, talking about politics seems risky precisely because we may underestimate its effects on our understanding.
Agreed. And maybe it’s not worth the risk.
But this leaves rather open the question of how we are supposed to develop as rationalists in this regard. Is practice always too dangerous? Or is it just practicing in a public forum like a community blog? What if it were only a minimally controversial political topic? What if it were pitched explicitly as an “overcome politics as the mind killer” training exercise? Could that help?