I guess every drop of water counts in eroding the rock...
Raw_Power
Karma: 1,050
Speaking in long term terms, what is the mechanism by which societies secularize themselves, and are there ways to trigger it? For instance, the Jews too have a very explicit, canonic policy of stoning proselytizing apostates to death. When did they stop doing that, and why?
Now that you mention Rushdie, another topic comes out: how not to appear to be a Westernized sellout? I don’t know much about Rushdie himself, but the image I got of him from popcultural osmosis is that of a professional traitor attacking Islam for the sake of getting accolades from Westerners. Regardless of how much of that is true, this is obviously an image one needs to avoid at all costs.
I would compare it to the amalgamation of “Socialist” and “Servant of the USSR” that took place during the Cold War.
People can have interesting perspectives on the topic of religious conversion. I remember a Muslim apostat getting asked, in all innocence, whether they’d be converting to Christianity next, as if it was the logical next step. Yet another argument for “people actually think of religion as a tribe, not as a set of metaphysical beliefs with moral prescriptions attached”
That is the conclusion to which I had come, though I was hoping for an alternative. Now the question remains:
How can a rationalist pretending not to be a rationalist help spread serious rationalism without them and the people they inluenced getting caught (in early stages) or triggering a witchunt (supposing they were somewhat successful)?
Oh. So it does work, the propaganda.. Morocco is only a consitutional monarchy on paper. The power resides in the Palace, and it is absolute. Parties have been proven, time and again, to be utterly impotent before the King. That is why people don’t even bother to vote. That is why you will often spot people sleeping during parliament sessions: those simply don’t matter.
People have picked up on this. Now, when they make protests, they address the King directly, ignoring the Ministers. Their tone is very deferential, but that’s one fuse that’s burned out.
And the most popular contenders, were the regime to change, are the Islamists...
The Problem Of Apostasy
Explaining and rationalizing/justifying are two different things. Pleading the “humanity is insane” is, to put it bluntly, unproductive and lazy. If you want to say “don’t think about it too hard, it’s not worth the effort”, then say that, and spare us the theatrics.
That’s a bit of a non-explanation: it predicts anything, and nothing. How about, instead, you name three specific patterns of craziness (you know, fallacies, errors in judgment, bad heuristics, and so on) that are decisive factors in this state of affairs.
Thank you very much for sharing these. I am very glad to find out that such organizations exist.
Name three.
How does that work out?
Edited that mistake out. It might also be a matter of external perception. When one sings “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “We Are The World”, people treat it as fake fuzzy drivel that tastes like diabetes at best. “Darned Beatniks (or insert some other inaccurate label here), they don’t understand how the world works!”.
Religious people, on the other hand (especially those belonging to very popular religions or religions you are supposed to believe in), seem to be exempt from this perception: no matter how outlandish and naïve they can get, people will admire them for believing in the face of overwhelming evidence, and for not letting failure and injustice and persecution bring them down.
Martyrs are a particularly extreme version of this, one Abrahamics seem to love.
Perhaps a part of the source of the humour of “The Book Of Mormon” is that Mormonism is “mainstream” (that is, Christian) enough to be recognized as something that it’s noble to believe in, yet unorthodox enough that some of its tenets will seem absurd to most other denominations. If it were a religion that we, the audience, were not familiar with at all, and that had no connection to the faiths, the affiliations, that we were born unto… No matter how otherwise popular, it wouldn’t be nearly as funny. In fact, it would be perceived as a cruel mockery.
And now you’ve made me imagine a “Book of X”, where X would be an especially strange and obscure Islamic denomination with ambitions of proselytism (in Africa, sure, why not), and how other Muslims would react to such a show...
“The Book Of Mormon” or Belief In Belief, The Musical
I think he did the right thing there. He did it badly and clumsily, but had I been in his place I’d have had a hard time getting a grip on my emotions, and we know how sensitive and emotional he is.
Rational Wiki are great guys. We try to watch our own step, but it’s nice to have someone else watching us too, who can understand and sympathize with what we do.
Learned Helplessness
if health care is free people will seek it even when it is not needed
You have paid for your private insurance. Do you go to the doctor as much as you possibly could? When you are healthy, you have better things to do with your life, than travel the city from one appointment to the other.
1.You mean they incur in the exact same kind of legal practices as private groups, with the same frequency? Given the difference in position, methodolgy and resourses, I doubt it, but I don’t have any evidence pointing to either side about the behavior of Universal Health Coverage systems. I’d need time to ask a few people and find a few sources.
2.I don’t think it’s a matter of “layers” so much as one of how those layers are organized. The exact same amount of people can have productivity outputs that are radically different in function of the algorythms used to organize their work. Your post seems to imply that State services have more bureaucratic layers than public ones. I’d think that’d be something to decide case by case, but I wouldn’t say it’s a foregone conclusion: private insurances are infamous for being bureauratic hells too. Ones deliberately designed to mislead and confuse unhappy clients, at that.
Human rationality can be trained and improved, it’s not an innate feature. To do that is part of the entire point of this site.
I hope you enjoy it. It is very interesting. Beware of generalizing from fictional evidence… but fiction is sometimes all we have to explore certain hypotheticals...
Well, given that the government’s allledged goal is to provide the service while the private organization’s alledged goal is to make a profit, one would expect the State (I like to call the organization the State or the Adminsitration: the Government should simply mean whoever the current team of politically appointed president/minister/cabinet are, rather than the entire bureaucracy) to be less likely to “weasel out of” paying for your treatment, a risk I (in complete and utter subjectivity and in the here and now) deem more frightening (and frustrating) than the disease itself.
And yes, risk mitigation is always negative sum, that’s kind of a thermodynamic requisite.
Democracy and social mobility… and the ability to alter one’s circumstances.… What if those were red herrings?
There is a fair number of Lesswrongers that challenge the notion that “Democracy is Good”.