Ultimate List of Irrational Nonsense

Pacifism is the disavowing of all violence, even if it is used proportionally and in self-defense. This only works in cases where the power difference between parties is so huge that violence is not necessary for ending conflict (Ghandi's India for example). This is hardly ever the case.

If the goal is to limit the total amount of violence (and therefore self-inflicted suffering) a limited form of violence is still necessary to keep abusers of the social contract in check. But as individual and groups of countries have already shown, it is possible for human societies to be peaceful without war. The police may have to restrain individuals but wars are not necessary.

I would never initiate a fight; that would be, simply, evil. But I'll kill somebody without hesitation or guilt who starts a fight with me, and more, think somebody who meekly responds to violence by meeting the demands of the violent is encouraging and creating violence. As a society, we cannot cooperate with defectors. People who cooperate with defectors enable and encourage defection.

Likewise on a global scale.

I don't think communism is immoral---I see totalitarianism as the thing which is immoral, and you can have totalitarianism with or without a market economy;

The correct question to ask is whether you can have communism without totalitarianism.

I believe the problem people have with this is that it isn't actually helpful at all. It's just a list of outgroups for people to laugh at without any sort of analysis on why they believe this or what can be done to avoid falling into the same traps. Obviously a simple chart can't really encompass that level of explanation, so it's actual value or meaningful content is limited.

Thinking about it some more, I think it could. The problem with the chart is that the categories are based on which outgroup the belief comes from. For a more rational version of the diagram, one could start by sorting the beliefs based on the type and strength of the evidence that convinced one the belief was "absurd".

Thus, one could have categories like:

• no causal mechanism consistent with modern physics

• the evidence that caused this a priori low probability hypothesis to be picked out from the set of all hypotheses has turned out to be faulty (possibly with reference to debunking)

• this hypothesis has been scientifically investigated and found to be false (reference to studies, ideally also reference to replications of said studies)

Once one starts doing this, one would probably find that a number of the "irrational" beliefs are actually plausible, with little significant evidence either way.

Original thread here.

Haha the "pointless and counterproductive" was a joke actually, since well, all irrational ideas are pointless and counterproductive. As you already mentioned giving detailed explanations for all ideas will make into a four volume work so obviously I can't do that.

But to come to Ubuntu, I think we definitely should see this as a bad idea. Although admittedly it has had a large net positive effect in South Africa so I should probably just delete the last column. The central tennet of Ubuntu "A person is a person through other people", can be very easily corrupted into a form of communitarian dictatorship, as has in fact happened in Zimbabwe. The fact that a philosophy allows itself to be used by Mugabe does not make it look good. Of course just because Mugabe uses it doesn't mean it is a bad idea, it could just be his one good trait, but it probably isn't. The idea has more negative facets. It includes a form of philosophical innatism which is just factually wrong (see for example:Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil) and it also has as a third central tennet "that the king owed his status, including all the powers associated with it, to the will of the people under him". I think it strange that any modern philosophy would take monarchy as a basis. One positive side is that under "unhu" children are never orphans since the roles of mother and father are by definition not vested in a single individual with respect to a single child, so no orphans.

Also moral relativism is kind of a bad idea.. Just because North Koreans think concentration camps are a good idea does not mean they are suddenly moral.