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Philosophical Landmines - LessWrong
www.lesswrong.comRelated: Cached Thoughts Last summer I was talking to my sister about something. I don't remember the details, but I invoked the concept of "truth", or "reality" or some such. She immediately spit out a cached reply along the lines of "But how can you really say what's true?". Of course I'd learned some great replies to that sort of question right here on LW, so I did my best to sort her out, but everything I said invoked more confused slogans and cached thoughts. I realized the battle was lost. Worse, I realized she'd stopped thinking. Later, I realized I'd stopped thinking too. I went away and formulated the concept of a "Philosophical Landmine". I used to occasionally remark that if you care about what happens, you should think about what will happen as a result of possible actions. This is basically a slam dunk in everyday practical rationality, except that I would sometimes describe it as "consequentialism". The predictable consequence of this sort of statement is that someone starts going off about hospitals and terrorists and organs and moral philosophy and consent and rights and so on. This may be controversial, but I would say that causing this tangent constitutes a failure to communicate the point. Instead of prompting someone to think, I invoked some irrelevant philosophical cruft. The discussion is now about Consequentialism, the Capitalized Moral Theory, instead of the simple idea of thinking through consequences as an everyday heuristic. It's not even that my statement relied on a misused term or something; it's that an unimportant choice of terminology dragged the whole conversation in an irrelevant and useless direction. That is, "consequentialism" was a Philosophical Landmine. In the course of normal conversation, you passed through an ordinary spot that happened to conceal the dangerous leftovers of past memetic wars. As a result, an intelligent and reasonable human was reduced to a mindless zombie chanting prerecorded slogans. If you're lu
Seems like a lot of these have been poping up lately. Stuff like “censorship”, “e2ee”, “privacy” to a large extend and so on. IMHO worth thinking about when engaging people here on Lemmy or elsewhere.
Thanks that’s very relatable.
Like talking to almost anyone about covid. Issues like virus safety, herd immunity, the value of a decrepit person’s life versus a child’s etc. People are afraid to start thinking critically, for various reasons. Instead they have a jumble of dogmas.
People seen happy to have the same conversation over and over, where they comfortingly repeat the slogans back to each other.
I usually take the opposite tack. Force the issue. Talk about the elephant in the room.
Avoiding important subjects, or beating around the bush with euphemisms, it is worse in the long run.
Well, yes. But this isn’t really what this article is about. Often what you think is the “elephant in the room” is very much such a metaphorical landmine. It just derails any sensible conversation, and there is very little you can do to not fall into such a trap unless you carefully think about where such metaphorical landmines might be.