Many of you have contempt for people like @samharrisorg and @richarddawkins but their accomplishment 10 years ago is worth understanding, and over time they have shown they lack a certain je ne said quois that true believers of the left demand https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1024772128569221122

Whatever your ideological alignment is, you have to be impressed by how many people they convinced to stop calling themselves Christians. They instigated a mass deconversion*, and it was organically evangelical. They didn’t even tell people to spread it.

So how did it work? How do you flip someone’s ideology with this one weird trick?

The argument works like this: you think you are [ideology-1], but in fact you are confused. You believe (1) and (2) and (3), and these are not things [ideologians-1] believe. You are in fact already [ideology-2], Stop fooling yourself

Astute readers will recognize this as a highly specialized false consciousness argument. To pull it off, you have to produce a pessimistic picture of [ideology-1]. It’s not a wrong picture, but it’s not a flattering one. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1019567614580801536

@slatestarcodex thinks you have to evaluate an ideology based on its strongest variant, something he calls a “steelman”. This is noble but wrong. People don’t deliberately choose their beliefs, but if they did, the way to evaluate them would be this:

Bucketize people into std deviations of IQ, imagine the ideology as it appears in each bucket, then average them together using the number of people in each bucket as a weight. Do a little “manual” smoothing to maintain coherence, but not too much since real ppl aren’t coherent.

I call this the “realman”of an ideology, and it is the technique that is implicitly employed by the new atheists, because they argued against Christianity as it was on average, not as it is idealized.

If you want to change the mind of the average person you have to meet them where they are.

There was some luck involved for the new atheists; secular liberalism had already hollowed out most Americans’ actual understanding and practice of Christianity. so when they said “you aren’t really Christians”, they sort of had a point.

Cognitive dissonance is how you boot into the BIOS and load a new memeplex.

You create cognitive dissonance by deconstructing concepts in the existing memeplex, and critically, you do it by activating dormant concepts in a rival memeplex that person already carries.

The principle does generalize. Everyone has partial models of hostile memeplexes in their brain. Memeplexes frame truth and buttress their frames with tautologies protected by levels of indirection. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1024007277206896640

The way you move someone into your ideology is to convince them that they are ALREADY a part of it, and then to assist them with a little rectification of names.