I don’t understand. It seems to me that it would be very easy to make rationality seem like a (religious) cult. Wearing dorky clothes, knocking on people’s doors to spread the joy, and handing out pamphlets praising our savior Rationality. We could even send volunteers to beg for money at airports: “Hello sir, would you like to help prevent the coming end of the world?”
I just don’t associate T-shirts with religion as strongly as you do, I think.
This might be because I see a lot of people wearing nerdy T-shirts, or T-shirts associated with various interests/groups, like DnD, heir fraternities, or professional groups (chemical engineering society, etc.). From that perspective, having a rationality T-shirt just falls into one of those categories, and is therefore OK. It’s just another medium that some people with certain interests use to signal to each other.
Like I said: do you see it differently? Are most of the T-shirts with slogans you see people wearing religiously-related?
Religion was an example, coming from the general category of social subgroups that carry a large impact on identity and create a sense of exclusivity, which also includes every group you described.
I would rather not see rationality marginalized into such categories, in anyone’s mind.
So, you think it is bad for rationality to be a) strongly associated with a person’s identity, and/or b) create a sense of exclusivity, or belonging to a group. Is that right?
Maybe I’m missing something obvious here, but… why do you think this is a bad thing?
I don’t understand. It seems to me that it would be very easy to make rationality seem like a (religious) cult. Wearing dorky clothes, knocking on people’s doors to spread the joy, and handing out pamphlets praising our savior Rationality. We could even send volunteers to beg for money at airports: “Hello sir, would you like to help prevent the coming end of the world?”
I just don’t associate T-shirts with religion as strongly as you do, I think.
This might be because I see a lot of people wearing nerdy T-shirts, or T-shirts associated with various interests/groups, like DnD, heir fraternities, or professional groups (chemical engineering society, etc.). From that perspective, having a rationality T-shirt just falls into one of those categories, and is therefore OK. It’s just another medium that some people with certain interests use to signal to each other.
Like I said: do you see it differently? Are most of the T-shirts with slogans you see people wearing religiously-related?
I guess there are huge geographical (and age-cohort) variations in this kind of stuff.
Religion was an example, coming from the general category of social subgroups that carry a large impact on identity and create a sense of exclusivity, which also includes every group you described.
I would rather not see rationality marginalized into such categories, in anyone’s mind.
So, you think it is bad for rationality to be a) strongly associated with a person’s identity, and/or b) create a sense of exclusivity, or belonging to a group. Is that right?
Maybe I’m missing something obvious here, but… why do you think this is a bad thing?