For every job in the world, you will find competent and less competent people doing it. Spiritual teachers are no exception. What I particularly have in mind here are spiritual teachers who imitate the Freudians of previous generations by reducing the human psyche to a struggle of the ego that fanatically keeps building mechanisms to defend itself. Our common state, so their story goes, is one of suffering and absentmindedness. We live in pain and distraction, detached from our true nature, … [Read more...]
Political Eclecticism
In political discussions, I used to define myself as a centrist, and I did so because I thought that by not putting myself in obvious opposition to the people I talk to, I learn more about their honest opinions,a one-dimensional spectrum between left and right cannot adequately describe a phenomenon so complex as politics,my thinking would automatically be biased by tribalism were I to class myself as belonging to a specific political camp. Today, I prefer to describe myself as … [Read more...]
To explore, or to exploit, that is the question
Would you rather stay where you are and get the most out of your current situation, or move ahead to put yourself in a different situation from which you could get more out of? We face this question in many areas of life: In learning, we can choose to either specialize in a certain field and hone specific skills to become a masterful expert, or broaden our horizon and explore unknown territories to become a well-rounded generalist. (We know from artificial intelligence that the best approach … [Read more...]
On the Marketplace of Ideas 2
In addition to my prior post on the marketplace of ideas, here is another decidedly non-epistemic reason why some ideas are more successful as memes than others: I am thinking of the ease at which a person can say something (seemingly) smart for or against it. An idea with no epistemic value might still spread in the marketplace of ideas, merely because it is easy for people to debate on it, and to signal their intellectual abilities in doing so. A prominent example is the irritatingly boring … [Read more...]
What It Means to Say ‘Neo-‘
Is criticizing capitalism and campaigning for redistributive justice with an oppressor/oppressed narrative equivalent to endorsing the revival of ethnic cleansing, forced deportations to Gulags, political purges, and terror-starvations for the sake of a classless, communist society? Is preserving one's ethnicity and not wanting increasingly more tax money to be spent on social benefits for immigrants equivalent to wanting to expand the Third Reich by invading neighboring countries while … [Read more...]
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