{"id":40189,"date":"2011-04-30T11:32:07","date_gmt":"2011-04-30T19:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=11392"},"modified":"2011-04-30T11:32:07","modified_gmt":"2011-04-30T19:32:07","slug":"the-loss-of-sacred-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/30\/the-loss-of-sacred-belief\/","title":{"rendered":"The loss of sacred belief?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over at the <i>Less Wrong<\/i> blog there is a post, <a href=\"http:\/\/lesswrong.com\/lw\/5h8\/so_youve_changed_your_mind\/\">So You&#8217;ve Changed Your Mind<\/a>. This portion caught my attention:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>So you&#8217;ve changed your mind.<strong> Given up your sacred belief<\/strong>, the one that defined so much of\u00a0<em>who you are<\/em> for so long.<\/p>\n<p>You are probably feeling pretty scared right now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I reflected and realized that the various issues where I&#8217;ve held relatively strong opinions and then changed my mind were generally cases where I relied on received wisdom, looked more closely, and felt that there was some misrepresentation among the orthodox gatekeepers of wisdom. But there&#8217;s one &#8220;big&#8221; issue that I guess I have changed my mind: <strong>I used to view all utility calculations on the scale of the individual, and accepted that all entities above or below the scale of the individual were useful only as a means toward individual well being.<\/strong> I probably wouldn&#8217;t defend this position anymore, though I think it has a logical coherency and may still be viable in some places and times. I&#8217;m not a &#8220;communitarian&#8221; or anything like that, rather, I have an impulse to just disavow these sorts of formal constructions of how best to attain and maintain human happiness in a time and &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at the Less Wrong blog there is a post, So You&#8217;ve Changed Your Mind. This portion caught my attention:<br \/>\nSo you&#8217;ve changed your mind. Given up your sacred belief, the one that defined so much of\u00a0who you are for so long.<br \/>\nYou are probably&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,152],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40189"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40363,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40189\/revisions\/40363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}