Ah yes, the danger of thinking you can think for yourself.
The danger is that it avoids regression to the mean. For that reason, yes it is the most dangerous dogma, but it also has a lot of potential. I’d trust someone like this more than I’d trust your average “agreeable” neurotypical who can at any moment be convinced by a charismatic enough charlattan cult leader to do just about anything if the neurotypical is down on their luck. Yes, some people like this have dangerous beliefs and a dangerous tendency to act on them but at least you can usually see them coming.
Also, what if they are free from dogma? What if they just think better than you or I? Depending on how free they are from dogma the danger may just be that they are excellent rationalisers. If someone who I think is mostly someone who thinks for themselves: they view every claim critically and insist on rederiving every conclusion before they believe it, if they tell me theythey are totally free from dogma and the masses are brainwashed idiots they’re probably wrong about the “entirely”. But, more or less, they are right. The only danger here is you can’t talk them out of things, if they think you are one of the brainwashed masses and they might be angry about most people being brainwashed.
If they are a typically dogmatic thinker then they are really good at believing things which aren’t true which presents a whole different kind of danger. Also they probably think of people who disagree with them as evil mutants and themselves as noble saints.
It’s not dangerous for someone who is better at thinking undogmatically than people in general to found their philosophy on this difference, or even the overestimation of it that you propose.
Can you link the scary moment of dogma from the blog of a certain locally famous software engineer? Is it paul graham?
In a comment below you say “intolerance for “blindness” or “delusion”, the insistence that there’s one calculable right way to run things is culturally destructive.” You sound like you are talking about something completely different. I suspect thinking they are free from dogma is simply something people who think there’s one calculable right way to run things happen to tend to do and you are throwing out the baby (okay, maybe a crocodile) with the bathwater. Thinking that demonstrates blindness to the facts. Thinking that one’s preferences are objective pronouncements on how the world should be in some fuzzy non value dependent way demonstrates that you mistake your feelings for facts. Believing you don’t do this does intensify the danger such people pose massively but it isn’t the source of the danger. And for people who don’t do this, or don’t do it very much, or who are just not abnormally vindictive or aggressive or callous enough to come up with a right way to run things that hurts people, or accept that their right way to run things will not be implemented are not a danger.
Ah yes, the danger of thinking you can think for yourself.
The danger is that it avoids regression to the mean. For that reason, yes it is the most dangerous dogma, but it also has a lot of potential. I’d trust someone like this more than I’d trust your average “agreeable” neurotypical who can at any moment be convinced by a charismatic enough charlattan cult leader to do just about anything if the neurotypical is down on their luck. Yes, some people like this have dangerous beliefs and a dangerous tendency to act on them but at least you can usually see them coming.
Also, what if they are free from dogma? What if they just think better than you or I? Depending on how free they are from dogma the danger may just be that they are excellent rationalisers. If someone who I think is mostly someone who thinks for themselves: they view every claim critically and insist on rederiving every conclusion before they believe it, if they tell me theythey are totally free from dogma and the masses are brainwashed idiots they’re probably wrong about the “entirely”. But, more or less, they are right. The only danger here is you can’t talk them out of things, if they think you are one of the brainwashed masses and they might be angry about most people being brainwashed.
If they are a typically dogmatic thinker then they are really good at believing things which aren’t true which presents a whole different kind of danger. Also they probably think of people who disagree with them as evil mutants and themselves as noble saints.
It’s not dangerous for someone who is better at thinking undogmatically than people in general to found their philosophy on this difference, or even the overestimation of it that you propose.
Can you link the scary moment of dogma from the blog of a certain locally famous software engineer? Is it paul graham?
In a comment below you say “intolerance for “blindness” or “delusion”, the insistence that there’s one calculable right way to run things is culturally destructive.” You sound like you are talking about something completely different. I suspect thinking they are free from dogma is simply something people who think there’s one calculable right way to run things happen to tend to do and you are throwing out the baby (okay, maybe a crocodile) with the bathwater. Thinking that demonstrates blindness to the facts. Thinking that one’s preferences are objective pronouncements on how the world should be in some fuzzy non value dependent way demonstrates that you mistake your feelings for facts. Believing you don’t do this does intensify the danger such people pose massively but it isn’t the source of the danger. And for people who don’t do this, or don’t do it very much, or who are just not abnormally vindictive or aggressive or callous enough to come up with a right way to run things that hurts people, or accept that their right way to run things will not be implemented are not a danger.
The certain software engineer is Mencius Moldbug, of course.
Are you using this to mean “non-autistic person”, or something else?