From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Aug 09 2003 - 12:52:18 MDT
Rafal contributes
> On page 42 of the article (" Tetlock, P.E., Kristel, O., Elson, B., Green,
> M., and Lerner, J (final revision process/2000). The psychology of the
> unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical
> counterfactuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology"), I
> found the following:
So this is not on-line anywhere?
> "Greenberg et al.'s (1994) terror-management theory posits that people who
> are reminded of their mortality seek out the existential comfort of a
> collectively shared world view that transcends their mortal life spans and
> endows their lives with moral significance. Linking this alternative theory
> of people as intuitive theologians to the SVPM leads to the hypothesis that,
> agnostic Bayesian libertarians excepted, people reminded of their mortality
> should be especially outraged by taboo trade-offs,
Is anyone willing to elaborate on what might be meant by
"taboo trade-offs"?
> forbidden base rates,
What do you think this is?
> and heretical counterfactuals that de-stabilize their worldview,
> and especially inclined to moral cleansing"
I guess that moral cleansing includes any effort to make a
group's views more uniform by exerting pressure on the
iconoclasts. (By "pressure" I mean anything in excess of
rational criticism, including dismissals as "uninformed",
"illogical", etc., even when we believe those to be true.)
> ### I am an agnostic Bayesian libertarian, and Tetlock's
> findings are an incredibly powerful synthesis of what it
> means to be me,
I.e., if we copy an object and the copy turns out not to have
these traits, it is not Rafal
> as opposed to non-agnostic, non-Bayesian non-libertarians.
Or perhaps any one of the three!
> Explains among others why I reacted to intimations of my own
> mortality by signing a cryonics contract,
sounds more prudent than suddenly espousing collective yearnings
for humankind or embracing theology
> how my long process of psychological self-modification
> could lead to the almost complete removal of the three
> Fiskean schemata from my mind,
What are these, and how does one tell if he's been successful
at their removal?
> and how these internally inconsistent elements could be
> supplanted by a unified, volition-based ethical construct.
Well, one does wish for consistency inside one's value system.
I sort of hope that you are not saying more than that here.
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Aug 09 2003 - 13:01:25 MDT