It’s a story you either love or hate. I happen to love it, but that’s probably because (a) I already agree with the ideas, and (b) I have met people expressing the silly ideas in real life, so I know what it is about. -- In other words, it is a bit like an applause light for the believers. Not a good introduction.
I also happen to love the “twelve virtues”… so I am curious whether people have mixed reactions to that one, too. Unlike the simple truth, the twelve virtues is short. (More precisely, the individual twelve points are short; but the total length is still acceptable.)
I neither love nor hate it. It’s pretty good. The concept is great; the execution is a bit too injokey and unstructured. Perhaps the main problem is that you need to be pretty savvy and experienced regarding pop philosophy to know what the point of the allegory is (without expending a fair amount of effort), but the sorts of people most likely to make the crude errors The Simple Truth is correcting aren’t likely to be particularly savvy.
I do love The Twelve Virtues, though I think they could easily be compressed to something cleaner and easier to remember (e.g., with less built-in redundancy). For instance, Relinquishment and Humility seem to just be special cases of Lightness and Evenness (with a dash of cog-sci Empiricism/Scholarship, mayhap).
If I were redoing the list, I’d go with Ten Virtues, something more like: Curiosity, Daring, Attentiveness, Lightness, Evenness, Simplicity, Precision, Rigor, Community, The Void.
(‘Argument’ breaks up into Daring and Community, ‘Empiricism’ breaks up into Daring and Attentiveness and Simplicity and pretty much all of the other virtues, ‘Scholarship’ breaks up into Rigor and Community, etc. I’d still want virtues like Scholarship explicitly talked about, but as more complicated practices that come out of the primary-color virtues.)
It’s a story you either love or hate. I happen to love it, but that’s probably because (a) I already agree with the ideas, and (b) I have met people expressing the silly ideas in real life, so I know what it is about. -- In other words, it is a bit like an applause light for the believers. Not a good introduction.
I also happen to love the “twelve virtues”… so I am curious whether people have mixed reactions to that one, too. Unlike the simple truth, the twelve virtues is short. (More precisely, the individual twelve points are short; but the total length is still acceptable.)
I neither love nor hate it. It’s pretty good. The concept is great; the execution is a bit too injokey and unstructured. Perhaps the main problem is that you need to be pretty savvy and experienced regarding pop philosophy to know what the point of the allegory is (without expending a fair amount of effort), but the sorts of people most likely to make the crude errors The Simple Truth is correcting aren’t likely to be particularly savvy.
I do love The Twelve Virtues, though I think they could easily be compressed to something cleaner and easier to remember (e.g., with less built-in redundancy). For instance, Relinquishment and Humility seem to just be special cases of Lightness and Evenness (with a dash of cog-sci Empiricism/Scholarship, mayhap).
If I were redoing the list, I’d go with Ten Virtues, something more like: Curiosity, Daring, Attentiveness, Lightness, Evenness, Simplicity, Precision, Rigor, Community, The Void.
(‘Argument’ breaks up into Daring and Community, ‘Empiricism’ breaks up into Daring and Attentiveness and Simplicity and pretty much all of the other virtues, ‘Scholarship’ breaks up into Rigor and Community, etc. I’d still want virtues like Scholarship explicitly talked about, but as more complicated practices that come out of the primary-color virtues.)