#rationalizing — Public Fediverse posts

Are coincidences real?

I am an unequivocal rationalist and yet I still want to see something strange and wonderful in life’s weird coincidences

How should we understand the weird experience of coincidence? | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-should-we-understand-the-weird-experience-of-coincidence

#psychology #rationality #coincidences #coincidence #Rationalizing

@Dianora @noself @rmkelly @philosophy

Hmm, well, I THINK I understand the words you are saying, so in that sense what you say makes sense. However, I don't know that I agree that calling it anarchy or focusing in any way on anarchy is the path to the world you describe, or at least to the one I hope your are describing.

(1) People are what they are. As Robert Heinlein noted, "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal." So pretending we could all be enlightened is just a way of lulling people into seeing real and intrinsic dangers that must be accounted for.

(2) Even if you could repair the social contract to codify things like infrastructure and some degree of manners and basic notion that there are crimes that are unacceptable to society, that would fight the branding of anarchy.

The notion of an absence of rules or leaders as a successful theory seems to me dead in the water. Billionaires operate under such a theory now, both exploiting many and risking the death of the human species by pursuing short term wealth instead of long term survival. In my personal view, there are times when coordinated action seems essential or there just won't even be a species to debate this.

My 2009 essay Hollow Support seems relevant here. http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/03/hollow-support.html

The term "anarchy" is permanently and irrevocably damaged because to many it connotes chaos and, by implication, danger, and also because it creates a goal of somehow being minimal, which I think is at odds with the goal being to live together compatibly. That's an unforced error in the sense that using another word would not cause this problem. The push to make people think anarchy is anything other than an absence of rules feels to me like an attempt to woo people who oughtn't be backing the idea. Anarchy has, almost by definition, no mechanism to back up any promise made about how it will behave. Might as well be explicit about the incompatibility between anarchy and a society based on minimal rules.

#anarchy #terminology #branding #rational #rationalizing #HumanNature #politics #sustainability #climate #capitalism #society

@TheChrisPaduan I'm buying it, no matter what. Looks like it'll be $70, but I get a LOT of joy out of it, so...
#RATIONALIZING

“Effective Altruism Promises To Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has A Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment And Abuse”, Time (https://time.com/6252617/effective-altruism-sexual-harassment/).

Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34646361

#EA #EffectiveAltruism #SexualHarassment #MeToo #Polyamory #Rationalizing #BayArea #Grooming