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Rationalists shouldn’t bother considering ideas with which they disagree because checking whether they’re right is too much work (https://np.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/b56kwa/_/ejtj5xb/?context=1)
32

The whole conflict-mistake dichotomy is one of the most stupid memes in this community, usually deployed as nothing more than consensus building.

oh my god what’s a perceptive person like this doing in an awful place like that

It’s not just irrational but antirational: instead of engaging with people’s ideas you lump people into categories based on imaginary irreconcilable differences, thus appealing to the irrational instinct of tribalism. And that works so well on gullible Rationalists who never met an oversimplified-shibboleth-that-confirms-their-biases-while-making-them-feel-superior that they don’t like.

Rationalists are entirely above tribalism, unlike all other tribes.

It’s such a fucking dumb idea. Sometimes people are mistaken and sometimes people are malicious, you don’t have to subscribe to one side or the other 100% of the time you nimrods. It can even be the same person at different times or topics!

It’s so blindingly basic I struggle to understand why it’s taken such a strong hold.

Rationalists just really, really like binary paradigms that divide the world into two groups, one of which is smart and brave and awesome and the other a bunch of stupidheads: Mistake / Conflict theory High / Low decouplers Farmers / Foragers Survive / Thrive Far / Near distinction Inside / Outside view Systemizing / Empathizing Grey Tribe / non-Grey tribe Meta / Object level It's just tribalism. They get an in-group to feel solidarity with and an out-group to blame for everything.
Mistake/Conflict theory in particular is also a way to turn Scott's crippling terror of interpersonal conflict into a kind of virtue.
>It's just tribalism. They get an in-group to feel solidarity with and an out-group to blame for everything. It's interesting the only criticism they can muster of this sub is tribalism. Another factor is that polar categorization allows one to feel smart and superior without doing all that nasty work of digging through all that pesky information to arrive at a conclusion. This can be assessed easily by looking at whether one of the proposed sides of the binary has a built-in negative connotation.

greyenlightenment chiming in with a completely backwards and incorrect interpretation of Marx; no sources, of course.

>Marx is much worse than many critics of Marx realize lmfao
Very charitable
Also the historical ignorance of the authors he reads that is revealed by the claim that most of them don’t know that *Marx* was a *revolutionary* is basically as hilarious as the Quillette piece claiming that the period known as the Reign of Terror was somehow [airbrushed from history. ](https://quillette.com/2019/03/10/the-french-genocide-that-has-been-air-brushed-from-history/)
Nobody could possibly think both "biological essentialism isn't true" and "living as the gender they were assigned at birth causes some people intense visceral discomfort"; thus, the feminists I disagree with always argue in bad faith because they're conflict theorists. I am very smart. Also, I am a good mistake theorist and not a bad conflict theorist, which is why I believe the people who don't agree with me are bad lying feminists on the opposite side of something I *literally refer to as "The Culture War"*. My beliefs are entirely consistent, because of how rational I am. (Ironically, despite my continual march from "woke liberalism" to "full-on Marxism/Tabbyism" and thus my obvious conflict theorist status, this post made me believe a little more in mistake theory because the poster clearly has no fucking idea what non-TERF feminists actually think.)
>Tabbyism Wait! "Tabbyism" is a thing now? Cuz really?
I was... kind of joking? But only kind of? Like, I couldn't describe the tenets of Tabbyist thought or anything like that; call it a shorthand for "socialism that makes room for not taking itself seriously 100% of the time," I guess.

(Post inspired by reading Singer’s Wikipedia page to find out his views were once equated to Nazism in Europe’s largest weekly news magazine Der Spiegel.)

Those dastardly conflict theorists at Der Spiegel! How dare they compare a guy who advocates for euthanizing disabled infants to people who actually euthanized (murdered) disabled people.

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Unless the threads are connected at a level I can’t see in the link, I think you mean to comment on [this post.](https://reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/b7vczl/this_is_your_brain_on_states_rights/)
I did! You are correct, thanks.

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Wrong account mate