From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Sat Aug 09 2003 - 10:44:28 MDT
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:
"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, forbidden base rates, and
heretical counterfactuals that de-stabilize their worldview, and especially
inclined to moral cleansing"
### I am an agnostic Bayesian libertarian, and Tetlock's findings are an
incredibly powerful synthesis of what it means to be me, as opposed to
non-agnostic, non-Bayesian non-libertarians. Explains among others why I
reacted to intimations of my own mortality by signing a cryonics contract,
how my long process of psychological self-modification could lead to the
almost complete removal of the three Fiskean schemata from my mind, and how
these internally inconsistent elements could be supplanted by a unified,
volition-based ethical construct.
Really good stuff.
Rafal
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