As soon as you judge—say, a person's behavior, a political idea, or something that happened to you—you have cut yourself off from the well of understanding. For in order to understand, you need an open, observing, and questioning mind. What exactly is the person doing and why might he be acting that way? What exactly does the idea imply and where might its implementation lead to? What exactly happened and how might the event have come about? Judgments, by contrast, are closed assertions that … [Read more...]
Catastrophizing Spiritual Teachings
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...]
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...]
Why You Can’t Define Words As You Like
A word is a way to point at a concept. Let's say you want to communicate the concept of a cat. You can say 'cat', say 'meow', write 'cat', draw a cat, or point at cats with your finger. These are different ways to point at the concept cat. Technically speaking, you could use any string of letters to label that concept. 'Braufani', 'katze', 'eztak', or even 'dog'. Still, there are good reasons why you can't just define words however you like: Words have communicative consequences. They … [Read more...]
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