3 comments
The elevation of the individual as supreme to the communal is inherently anti-child rearing, the most communal of acts
I wouldn't have offspring because I don't want to have anyone be born into this world; it's awful. On the other paw, I <i>would</i> adopt if it could help someone already having to exist in this world to lead their best life.
But then the next generation is all made of the people who turned this world awful. What about being the change you want? I guess if you gave an orphan a good life, that would count though.
They are there awaiting you to act
This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."<p>Unless we're literally having a debate about raw statistics, the data likely adds nothing to either side of the debate; because the data is not answering any actual questions and you can draw opposite conclusions from the same data. Just because the data appears to fit nicely to a particular mainstream narrative, that doesn't make the narrative true because one could come up with an infinite number of different narratives which provide a better fit for the data...<p>Which narrative is more likely to be right? The one narrative which you happen to have inside your head or the infinite number of other narratives (and twisted variants of your narrative) which you haven't even heard of?<p>My experience is that the mainstream narrative is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator amongst the masses... Which nowadays is made up of a lot of highly educated people... But the narrative is nonetheless simplistic. There are many people out there who have had exposure to enough different data points in their lives that the mainstream narratives don't make sense to them.<p>Your understanding of the world is narratives + data. When you say that you make decisions "entirely based on data," you're probably missing some crucial aspect because you're almost certainly using a narrative to fill in the many gaps.<p>Not to mention that a lot of correlations are self-reinforcing feedback cycles without clear causality...<p>The very idea that causality is simple and unidirectional is itself a narrative... And I would argue an incorrect one! Yet many scientific fields are founded on this narrative!