2026-08-24 21:03 UTC
Replies (3)
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@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol 2026-08-24 21:06
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality doesn't need to make sense. It exists in much the same way as an ultracheap mass printing of the Christian Bible: it's a sacred text so sacred that nobody needs to read it. "In here resides all Truth™," the true believer says of the Bible (no matter how corrupt and degraded the text itself) or of Yudkowsky's solitary creative achievement. (not much more)
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@SomeVeganCheeseIsOk@mastodon.social 2026-08-24 21:09
@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol my understanding of empathy is that it's a function that we evolved to promote cooperation. Our mirror neurons make us, as a species, capable of achievements we could never make alone without cooperation. Empathy is how we have built literally everything human.
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@memewarrior@hear-me.social 2026-08-25 04:15
@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol You mentioned Nietzsche & suicidal empathy separately. There is actually a connection between the two. "Christianity is called the religion of pity. – Pity is the opposite of the tonic affects that heighten the energy of vital feelings: pity has a depressive effect. You lose strength when you pity. And pity further intensifies and multiplies the loss of strength which in itself brings suffering to life. Pity makes suffering into something infectious; sometimes it can even cause a total loss of life and of vital energy wildly disproportionate to the magnitude of the cause (– the case of the death of the Nazarene). That is the first point to be made; but there is a more significant one. The mortal dangers of pity will be much more apparent if you measure pity according to the value of the reactions it tends to produce. By and large, pity runs counter to the law of development, which is the law of selection. Pity preserves things that are ripe for decline, it defends things that have been disowned and condemned by life, and it gives a depressive and questionable character to life itself by keeping alive an abundance of failures of every type."(The Antichrist, Aphorism 7) Nietzsche leaves out the following: 1. A depressant effect is not necessarily undesirable. Open chloride channels have a depressant effect. A deficit of open chloride channels, as occurs in alcohol withdrawal, is disastrous. An excess, as in alcohol overdose, is equally disastrous. Nietzsche forgets the need for balance in this case. Earlier, he says not that pity is dangerous in excess, but that "the weak and the failures should perish: first principle of our love of humanity. And they should be helped to do this. What is more harmful than any vice? – Active pity for all failures and weakness– Christianity . . ."(The Antichrist, Aphorism 2) 2. This depressant effect is of a disinhibiting sort. It prevents us from allowing the weak & the failures to perish. The weak & the failures may one day be strong. We were all born weak infants & Nietzsche talks extensively about how much good we get out of the failures, such as the grand style of architecture out of astrology mentioned in the preface to Beyond Good & Evil. He also criticizes, in Beyond Good & Evil Aphorism 2, the belief that truth can't emerge out of error. What is an error if not a failure of truth, & as knowledge is power, a form of weakness. We have a contradiction "What is good? – Everything that enhances people’s feeling of power, will to power, power itself. What is bad? – Everything stemming from weakness."(The Antichrist, Aphorism 2). Except doesn't power itself stem from weakness. This is an antithesis of values. Perhaps Nietzsche did consider this, & The Antichrist wasn't a collection of Nietzsche's actual views. We know it was the first part of an unfinished set of books. Perhaps The Antichrist represented the master morality & the later volumes, one of which was "The Free Spirit"(probably against the antitheses of values of the sort common in The Antichrist, given the way the term is used in Beyond Good & Evil) would have overturned The Antichrist's worst inconsistencies. This is pure speculation, however. Nietzsche developed dementia(probably not from syphilis https://www.leonardsax.com/Nietzsche_Articles.htm) just months after The Antichrist was written & before he could finish his planned magnum opus including The Free Spirit, which also might have or may not have abandoned.