Today’s common knowledge may fade to psychological trivia in a thousand years. If humanity has systematically got its shit together, will this be because everyone understands the biases that let us do terrible (if, arguably, occasionally necessary) things, or because we are simply systematically denied the opportunities to enact them? I hope and expect the former (insofar as I expect humanity’s future to be bright at all, which is to say, not much), but I cannot rule out the latter.
rntz
Karma: 51
Hi. CS undergrad at CMU here. More interested in decision theory specifically than rationality in general. Might post more if I had more time.
Nice to see you both.
Another CMU student here. I’ve only been lurking on this site for a couple of weeks thus far, and can’t say I wholly understand everything said or fully identify with the community yet, but I’d be interested.
On the “Political” question: I identify with none of those. I understand the question is about which I identify with most, but all of the options have views on both social permissivity and economic redistribution. I am socially permissive, but have no belief one way or the other on redistribution/taxes. I simply have insufficient knowledge of that area to make a judgment. Perhaps it would be better to have two different questions—one for each of social views and economic views?
For “Religious views”: I am an atheist but would not self-identify as either “spiritual” or “not spiritual”. If a person asked me which I was, I would ask them what they meant by spiritual. I answered “Atheist but not spiritual”, on the very weak grounds that I suspect I do not satisfy most other people’s conceptions of spirituality; but really, the word is very ill-defined.