Richard Dawkins falling in love with an imaginary being in the form of his AI chatbot is genuinely funny, pitiable, and ironic.
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Sometimes we're accused of spending too much time in "echo chambers". But perhaps the opposite is more dangerous— Twitterlike spaces where everything becomes simplistic takes, points scoring, and tribal allegiances. That is to my mind just as, if not more, likely to lead to thought-terminating behaviour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9(There are plenty of atheist-coded thought-terminating clichés! Can you name some?)
6/@Tattie gods are imaginary friends.
Religion is a hallucination, a prop or a social disease.
Do you mean this sort of thing?
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@Tattie gods are imaginary friends.
Religion is a hallucination, a prop or a social disease.
Do you mean this sort of thing?
@laguiri yes! Great examples!
Each of those I notice equates the other person to a child, mentally ill person, disabled person, or infectious person respectively— so that you can feel superior to/disdainful of them and not have to care what they think.
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@Tattie I still remember "elevatorgate" and a few other occasions where the YouTube atheist community discovered we weren't all as rational, objective and enlightened as we would like to think we are.
@rozeboosje it had a profound effect on me; I think that was when I stopped self-describing as an atheist.
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@Tattie I don't know that I can name a single popular figure who is good at turning that skepticism inward.
I wonder if that's because it's just so rare, or if it's because we label people who do so publicly as waffles and deny them notoriety.
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@Tattie What an excellent thread. For me, the frustrating thing about Dawkins is that he was once a serious thinker and has done good work, in his time, but seems now to have become the thing he set his face against. John Cleese Syndrome, you might call it. Or Germaine Greer Syndrome. Either way, a tragedy, really.
@hedders thank you! And yes, a lot of figures have fallen in similar ways.
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@Tattie I still remember "elevatorgate" and a few other occasions where the YouTube atheist community discovered we weren't all as rational, objective and enlightened as we would like to think we are.
@Tattie Yeah I can understand that. While I wouldn't stop calling myself an atheist as such, it did prompt me to explore my theological noncognitivism ("ignosticism") much more, and I put in a lot of effort putting as much daylight as possible between myself and the "thunderfoots", "pat condells" and others of that ilk.
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@hedders thank you! And yes, a lot of figures have fallen in similar ways.
@Tattie Yeah. You live long enough, all your heroes will disappoint you, I guess.
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@Tattie Yeah. You live long enough, all your heroes will disappoint you, I guess.
I think this is part of why I find myself thinking lately that skepticism needs to become an academic discipline -- because (as I understand it) a discipline is something that you apply first to yourself before attempting to teach others.
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@laguiri yes! Great examples!
Each of those I notice equates the other person to a child, mentally ill person, disabled person, or infectious person respectively— so that you can feel superior to/disdainful of them and not have to care what they think.
Another thought-terminating cliché is "I just believe in the null hypothesis" and "you have burden of proof".
No. You have plenty of beliefs about the nature of the universe, reality, truth, self, etc, and it's your responsibility to inspect and justify them.
I've long noticed how the "burden of proof" is general put upon the minority, with the white, cishet, middle-class Western dude's beliefs held as somehow "default".
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@foolishowl @woozle @Tattie Indeed. And it's a shame, because it has dulled what was once a sharp and critical mind.
