Arda, Middle Earth is Earth, our world. Just because Tolkein considers it an imaginary epoch in our history (he put it at 6000 years before his time), nothing in the works themselves bars me from ascertaining a truth or false value for statements they make about the past of our world.
:P
But the dwarven song in the example can easily be replaced by the old Nordic songs that inspired it or a moving verse from the Iliad, which even the authors (probably) considered to semantically refer to our world. My point however was that true, false or bjorn, is irrelevant to most people when enjoying a piece of art. Its much more probable that they are not really bothered by the falsehood but bothered by the art being tagged in their brain as “something people from other tribe like”.
I know the phenomenon you refer to—I experience it with political art from “the others”. But I actually have established a compartmentalization of religious music where it’s like “okay, I totally disagree with this person, but the gulf of worldview is so huge that I can enjoy it anthropologically and perhaps even appreciate the underlying ideas that prompted them to develop that worldview, even if I think they went about it wrong.”
Very well, if you know about the phenomena and have upon introspection found the feeling to be different I’m going to update in your direction. I still think it is the more likley explanation though.
I do appreciate that you have apparently given these concerns some thought, I’ve put some weight to that in my mind.
But generally I think one can’t craft these memes without value altering applications. I don’t agree with Unitarian Universalism and this seems to be slowly reaching into their niche in both the social as well as ideological sense. Not everyone here is a “humanist”, whatever that means and those that aren’t might feel excluded by such language.
Adding ritual also I think reduces the “applicable rationality” to “save the world” ratio. This might not seem like a bad thing (who dosen’t want to save the world, for particular values of variable “save”?), but I think it should be acknowledged it is a step in the opposite direction that we find useful and proper when it comes to the relation between the organization of SIAI and the future unnamed rationality organization (presumably thus inheriting SIAI’s close connection to LW).
Why is the SIAI better off spinning off its rationalism promoting activities to a different separate organization? Why isn’t therefore the community better off enacting clear borders between when its happy spiralling around “rationality” and when its spiralling around “reducing existential risk” or slightly more dangerously “altruism”? This was basically done at an early point where all mention of “SIAI” and even talk of AI was temporarily banished from the community as a measure.
Was this a mistake? Or is the community more mature, not in its seed stage any more? If the latter dosen’t this mean LessWrong is basically done growing and expanding? If it will still do significant growing why don’t the same concerns that prompted the taboo, still applicable if to a lesser degree?
The dwarven song isn’t false-of-our-world because it doesn’t semantically refer to our world.
Arda, Middle Earth is Earth, our world. Just because Tolkein considers it an imaginary epoch in our history (he put it at 6000 years before his time), nothing in the works themselves bars me from ascertaining a truth or false value for statements they make about the past of our world.
:P
But the dwarven song in the example can easily be replaced by the old Nordic songs that inspired it or a moving verse from the Iliad, which even the authors (probably) considered to semantically refer to our world. My point however was that true, false or bjorn, is irrelevant to most people when enjoying a piece of art. Its much more probable that they are not really bothered by the falsehood but bothered by the art being tagged in their brain as “something people from other tribe like”.
I know the phenomenon you refer to—I experience it with political art from “the others”. But I actually have established a compartmentalization of religious music where it’s like “okay, I totally disagree with this person, but the gulf of worldview is so huge that I can enjoy it anthropologically and perhaps even appreciate the underlying ideas that prompted them to develop that worldview, even if I think they went about it wrong.”
Very well, if you know about the phenomena and have upon introspection found the feeling to be different I’m going to update in your direction. I still think it is the more likley explanation though.
The followup post goes into some more detail, as well as related issues. Was curious if it addressed your concerns or raised new ones.
I do appreciate that you have apparently given these concerns some thought, I’ve put some weight to that in my mind.
But generally I think one can’t craft these memes without value altering applications. I don’t agree with Unitarian Universalism and this seems to be slowly reaching into their niche in both the social as well as ideological sense. Not everyone here is a “humanist”, whatever that means and those that aren’t might feel excluded by such language.
Adding ritual also I think reduces the “applicable rationality” to “save the world” ratio. This might not seem like a bad thing (who dosen’t want to save the world, for particular values of variable “save”?), but I think it should be acknowledged it is a step in the opposite direction that we find useful and proper when it comes to the relation between the organization of SIAI and the future unnamed rationality organization (presumably thus inheriting SIAI’s close connection to LW).
Why is the SIAI better off spinning off its rationalism promoting activities to a different separate organization? Why isn’t therefore the community better off enacting clear borders between when its happy spiralling around “rationality” and when its spiralling around “reducing existential risk” or slightly more dangerously “altruism”? This was basically done at an early point where all mention of “SIAI” and even talk of AI was temporarily banished from the community as a measure.
Was this a mistake? Or is the community more mature, not in its seed stage any more? If the latter dosen’t this mean LessWrong is basically done growing and expanding? If it will still do significant growing why don’t the same concerns that prompted the taboo, still applicable if to a lesser degree?
Also curses upon you Eliezer Yudkowsky! My count for that particular time wasting super-stimulus is now 28.
Thanks to your comments, I am looping that song, too. :p
I am sure there are ways of correcting this behavior if you really wanted to.
Oh my god I hate you.