On Fanaticism and Fear
This post was originally going to be a question about children--at what age is it OK to expose children to dissenting viewpoints?--and you can ask me about some things I've done recently that in one case did and in one case did not expose children to dissent, and how both choices caused me pain because of the reactions of adults. (I have no idea
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Shortly after they become self-aware--for some people, this means roughly puberty, for others 18, or never, but obviously exposure can't really be controlled in this way at all.
> fanatic along some axes. Why? What makes a person fanatical?
Self-reinforcing ideas that deal in absolutes, at a rough guess. Or do you mean what causes someone to become fanatical? Upbringing, I think; restricted or narrow exposure to media or culture; trauma; recursive thought/philosophical loop traps, maybe?
> magic way to modulate your speech to your audience so that they're unaware they're being persuaded
Rhetoric.
> how do you discover which unpopular opinions are actually correct?
What is "correct"?
> a revolutionary humanist congregation. Maybe Less Wrong?
I really don't think that's what Less Wrong is.
> voicing ineffectual support is a reasonable course of action as a way to mark that there are horrible things in the world that we're not going to change.
But that isn't action at all. It's placebo at best, a crutch or an outright impediment to true action at worst.
> Sometimes you intervene and you're wrong and everything gets worse. Religion seems to me to be a way to deal with that.
I don't quite see where religion has a function here at all.
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2) Are there belief systems that are not self-reinforcing and do not deal in absolutes? Give me an example. I think part of what makes a fanatic is respecting the opinions of a limited group who think alike--there's an amplification effect. But I like my definition better, because there are fanatics AND non-fanatics in most groups.
3) Right.
4) Exactly. How do you choose which ones to act on?
5) Yeah, me either. All I know about it is its echoes in things Misha does.
6) Sometimes true action is unreasonable because of limited information and the possibility of making things worse, but doing nothing is callous, so you say "sorry." When no one can hear your apology, you pray. It's an OK habit to be in.
7) Religious communities try to create reinforcement for actions based on a value system, so that if the consequences turn out horribly they can reassure you that you did the right thing by switching to a deontological framework. Also, pretending that prayer is efficacious and that there's a benevolent intelligence filtering your interventions helps to overcome limited-information paralysis and allows non-sociopathy in the face of powerlessness. Which can be good or evil.
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4 - Some combination of logic, research, and democracy seems like a good way to make decisions. But that's just this one pseudorandomly generated position speaking.
5 - You should probably check it out.
6 - > When no one can hear your apology < but do most people use it that way? I have never prayed earnestly, not to a deity, and not in decades, so I can't really be sure, but that doesn't sound like the common definition of prayer.
7 - Fair enough.
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I know some people who assume that their own logic and research is always superior to everyone else's. I generally find them insufferable. Democracy is the problem here. What if you're pretty sure that a group you're standing in has democratically adopted a wrong position?
I will take that under advisement.
There's also asking for things you don't have any other way to try to get, and experiencing gratitude for things there's no one available to say thank you to. When one of the greatest social actors in your world is chance and not a person, anthropomorphizing it is probably psychologically healthy. Or at least semi-unavoidable and not inherently harmful.
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