@vgr Reading about sociopathy today. It’s a spectrum and a syndrome—a loose collection of traits—not binary.

I was always sure I’m not a sociopath—as far from it as one could be. Today I’m recognizing some tendencies in myself… cool experience in shadow-eating 👻
@vgr A stage 4 ethics, which by definition prioritizes principles and procedures over emotions and personal relationships, always appears sociopathic to those at stage 3. You probably can’t transition to stage 4 without developing your own psychopathy a bit.

vividness.live/developing-eth…
You can’t have a stage 4 social system without some slightly sociopathic people at the top, who don’t care so much about people’s feelings.

Someone has to enforce “NO, you can’t burn the scapegoat just because you feel bad she violated your meaningless community taboo.”
An institutional norm that pointing out that other people’s science was done culpably wrong is nasty and shouldn’t be allowed: feels very nice and results in 97.3% of science being false. Could we have a bit more sociopathy here please?
Sociopaths are blind to morality.

I am hostile to the culture war because both sides are fighting over supposed moral issues that appear to me either trivial or entirely hallucinatory.

Stop being so moral! You are lemmings about to go over a cliff.

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More from @Meaningness

13 Sep
For the first time, listened to JBP lecturing on his Maps of Meaning work from before he became famous. I was impressed. And, I now see why people compare our stuff. Considerable overlap in approach as well as content.

Am I redundant, then? I don't know what he covers beyond the first lecture, but let's suppose as a thought experiment that everything I will say he already has. Is it worth going on and saying it anyway? People who know both have said yes... meaningness.com
Slightly different presentation styles may be understandable for different readers/listeners/students, so that variation is worthwhile. But I think our styles are pretty similar too! That's probably not what might make the alternative valuable.
Read 12 tweets
5 Sep
Reflecting on the regularity that for people who “have a personal philosophy” it’s usually a half-baked existentialism: realized this is almost tautological. Existentialism is the theory that “a personal philosophy” is something you can have.
Imo: don’t do this. Impersonal philosophy is quite bad enough. A personal philosophy is a conceptual prison, and existentialism is a catastrophe. There’s a reason its main proponents repudiated it 60 years ago.
Camus and Sartre both explained in their last major works that existentialism’s central claim, that we are free to choose our own values, is false. We have some wiggle room, but we are constrained (and also rely on) society, culture, biology, our engineered environment,…
Read 4 tweets
3 Sep
Pieces fitting together... I just realized that my recognizing my own (mild) psychopathic traits two weeks ago...
... provides the missing piece for this essay on "a genial criminal" I promised four years ago, but did not understand quite well enough to write up then... it will be the seventh installment of my shadow-eating series... buddhism-for-vampires.com/we-are-all-mon…
... and I promised another, final essay, "Between Zero and Two Wise Old Men," which I am not yet quite old enough to write. Another few years perhaps...
Read 5 tweets
27 Aug
I would guess that most Christians would agree that Jesus had a normal human body and a divine mind? Apparently this renders them heretics, with this error having been condemned by all theologians since 381.

Religions get weirder and weirder when you look at details.
Judging from replies, I may be empirically wrong about this… OTOH, people who read my tweets probably have a more detailed and accurate understanding of theology than most Christians.
I found out about this because Apollinarism was recently resurrected by William Lane Craig, an apologist who DISMANTLES Atheist after Atheist: mademanministries.com/2021/07/willia…
Read 6 tweets
19 Aug
Crackpot theory du jour: Shantideva's ethical theory was influenced by Christianity. Shantideva is counted as the most important Buddhist ethicist by many Buddhist lineages. I find his stuff nauseating: a holier-than-thou, self-obsessed slave morality.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantideva
Is it historically possible for Christianity to have influenced mainstream Indian Buddhism during Shantideva's time (the 700s)?

Yes: Christianity was well-established in India at the time, especially along the west coast. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian…
Is there internal evidence of influence? Shantideva's work is considered a major breakpoint in Buddhist ethics, as the first to attempt coherent philosophical arguments for it. Christianity was doing that for a long time; not previously found in Buddhism. vividness.live/traditional-bu…
Read 4 tweets
9 Aug
🏴‍☠️ Post-rational nihilism (Kegan stage 4.5): the only academic study I know of.

Strongly recommended for postrats, and for rationalists who wonder what that’s all about.
∮ Rationalists’ stubbornness in the face of evidence that rationalism doesn’t work is based in a well-founded fear that letting go of it could cause catastrophic personal disintegration.

That is short-term wise, but retards more sophisticated integration by parts longer-term…
I have speculated about whether the stage 4 (systematic) to 5 (meta-systematic) transition has awful, what makes it more or less awful for different people, and what we could do to help: metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-…
Read 12 tweets

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