Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
What are your 'load-bearing beliefs?' The ones that, if they were disproven (to your epistemic satisfaction) would actually 'collapse' your worldview and force a reckoning with your understanding of reality.
I'm definitively talking about the "is" side of the is/ought distinction. Not your moral beliefs or 'hopes' for how things will turn out.
And not focused on such dry, mostly undisputed facts like "the earth's gravity pulls things towards it center" or "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
Ideally beliefs that you consistently use to make predictions about actual events, despite not having sincere certainty about their accuracy.
One that I've been leaning on a lot lately: "Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."
This is probably the one thing preserving my general optimism for humanity's future.
There are definitely high-IQ sociopaths running about, but I strongly believe that the world would be in a much worse place if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.
People are terrible, a person can be great.
People will do the right thing after first exhausting every other available option.
The stock market is completely divorced from productivity, profit, market share and consumer satisfaction.
For all the good the internet has done, many load bearing systems in society were not prepared for the effects of globalism and the information superhighway, and we have been suffering from the network effects and scale effects of the internet ever since.
Racism is a form of bias, and bias is impossible to truly eliminate as long as differences exist. It can be mitigated, but never truly removed.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes. People want to think in binary, they want absolute X and absolute Y, hard reality, a right answer and a wrong answer they can die on a hill over. Unfortunately, when the binary solution doesn't work, people lose their minds.
Any system of government works under a certain amount of people. I am uncertain as to the exact number but it's probably lower than Dunbar's.
Societal paradigms and dominant modes of thought take hold because they advantage the people, not because they are correct.
Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity; however, JJ's razor applies. If you can't tell the difference, what does it matter?
Sadly, Porn is the most important TLP idea, even more than narcissism, and it explains modern consumerist hyperculture. We are all buying or consuming facsimiles of things to approximate or satiate the need for the thing we actually want, and numbing that need sufficiently is one of the great triumphs and tragedies of modern civilization.
Do you think Sadly, Porn is worth reading in its totality?
I would recommend reading Scott's and Rob Henderson's reviews of it, and if it piques your interest*, give it a try. But fair warning: it's probably the single most impenetrable book I've ever read in my life.
*Which is to say, if you feel personally attacked.
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Absolutely the hell not - he wrote it as a didactic exercise that also functions as part of his "if you're reading it, it's for you" idea. If you already get his ideas, there's not much new there. Only someone who is interested in self-flagellation as the sort of person who looks critically at themselves would read such a book; better to better yourself through doing the actual work.
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