Mage: The Ascension, Technocracy and science

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I'm idly searching for crimes committed wherein the perpetrator thought themselves to be a wizard. There are several examples of 'vampires' breaking the law, and I knew one asshole who honestly believed he was a werewolf, but I have to believe no one has bombed an abortion clinic on behalf of the Celestial Chorus. Maybe someone playing In Nomine, though.

[Username17]

Xenologer--I agree with the spirit of your argument, but Sam Harris views on ethics are rank hypocrisy and largely bullshit. I can elaborate in another thread if you want, as I just had a really frustrating discussion about this on another site.

I haven't delved deeply into Sam Harris because he seems to be largely preaching to the quire. But his basic supposition is that Good can be investigated scientifically the same way that Light and Gravity can be. You can make hypotheses, test them, and get results that falsify those hypotheses or validate them. That part seems pretty self evidently true.

We genuinely can investigate what makes life better and what makes it worse. Harris' acknowledgement that there may be multiple maxima of the good with substantially different societies and that improvements to society may well be based on ideas that haven't been thought of yet seem to cover his ass very well. He might make some specific claims that are hard to justify, but his works from the talks I've seen seem to be pretty much unassailable. While they don't make any claims that appear to be particularly contentious, the fact is that the god squad is still a majority of the planet - so saying that the answers we get from social science can falsify presuppositions we get from bronze age texts is just as contentious today as Galileo saying that answers we get from physics could falsify presuppositions we got from bronze age texts was in his day.

-Username17

[K]

This was just an attack at people like fectin and K recoiling in horror at the dreaded relativism. Turns out there's obviously no such fucking thing as an objective morality in the real world anyways, and everyone seems so worried about the effects that Mage's supposed 'morality' will have on people RL.

You see, I don't think you actually understand the philosophy. Here is a little primer on moral relativism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

You see, your very statement is just the kind of bullshit you get when someone is pushing normative relativism, a completely incoherent position that actually is offensive to anyone who believes even in some version of subjective morality or just simply reason. It's the same hipster "I am so much smarter than everyone" BS touted by sociopaths and opiate-users for ages in an effort to get people to excuse their bad behavior.

Of course, no game or media should get credit for altering anyone's moral compass. That gives too much credit to the medium.

The original point stands, however, that WW makes offensive games with offensive philosophies and ideas. I personally find it humorous that their joke "dark-side company" Black Dog Games actually made less offensive games.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Anyway, this video will clear up the whole 'why does K, Lago, and Frank have sand in their sandginas' for those who aren't completely clear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8

It came about as a criticism to creationism, but it pretty much applies to all anti-science philosophies.

[Orion]

Frank,

I watched Sam Harris' Ted Talk. I twas incoherent. His intro suggested that he was making an impossible argument, then he went and made a trivial one instead. Sam Harris Spiel goes like this:

Resolved: Science can informs us about moral questions; in fact, there is such a thing as a "scientific morality," in that science produces moral facts as well as physical facts.

Evidence:

--Some actions are more conducive to universal peace, prosperity, and contentment than others.

--Scientific study can tell us what those actions are

(Implied, he didn't bother to say this--Peace, prosperity, and contentment are the final human goods)

Conclusion: Therefore, science can tell us what is moral.

The only thing Sam Harris actually proved is that once you have an axiomatic set of moral values, science can help you implement them. This is dog bites man. It's a far weaker and less interesting point than what he promised, which is that science could discover moral facts.

Whenever I've interacted with one of his followers, they have insisted that it is self-evident that peace, prosperity, and happiness are the highest goods. This is blatantly false. I agree that those constitute the human good, but living in reality, I can see that it is not "evident" at all. Many people believe in retributive justice. They believe that for a murderer to suffer is a moral good, and for a for a murderer to be happy is a moral wrong, regardless of any external effects of his experience. Many people are Catholic, and many Catholic mystics and some Catholic philosophers believe that pain and suffering are final goods. CF Mother Theresa.

Yes, Frank, science *can* tell us how to maximize human happiness. What it can't do is tell us that maximizing happiness is *good*. (I happen to believe that it is for faith-based reasons.)

[DoNotFeedTheHipsters]

As people have explained in this thread, that concept is the crown jewel in the bullshit crown of anti-science even if people advocating that policy don't particularly mean to push anti-science. If you're going to do such a thing you should go out of your way to say that you're just recreating a fictional setting and that you don't really mean anything by those implications.

I find anti-intellectualism and anti-science just as important to combat as racialism and sexism, because it creates just as much harm and it's a requirement towards truly defeating the latter. Of course it's a testament to how backwards we are as a society that someone can describe themselves or their philosophy in these terms and not be a pariah.

Eh... This here is tricky ground. The argument over whether post-modernism is actually anti-intellectual is well-worn goddamn ground. That it's anti-science I'll grant you. Now, whether WoD can actually be judged as pushing, even implicitly or un-intentionally pushing, a post-modernist worldview is a whole other bag of drowned cats. On the one hand, the punk aesthetic of oWoD was naturally antagonistic to pretty much all authority. But WoD, as a set of construction tools for groups of nerds to create stories in, was self-aware about that aesthetic, and told GMs about it explicitly (ie, sections saying 'This is how the WoD universe is different from ours' and others saying 'These are the tropes of the genre and how to use them'). That's a very important thing that puts an enormous barrier between most RPGs flavoured in many sort-of-objectionable worlds, and those worlds themselves.

For example, David Brin has criticized Lord of the Rings for being elitist and anti-enlightenment. You can still find his big essay on the topic at Salon.com if you haven't read it yet or lost it or whatever. His big points are that Big Fancy Heroes With Quests And Ancestors are anti-democratic or even fascist and he also hates all Romantic literature since it doesn't portray pastoral settings as cholera- and incest-ridden hellholes.

So maybe he has a point, maybe he doesn't, but the point is, I would never find fault with D&D for portraying an extremely idealized medieval world (especially when most of the settings have the majority of countries banning slavery and such already) where kings are generally wise and noble and players take on the roles of Big Fancy Heroes Etc.

Frankly, it would be piss-easy to call D&D a terrible anti-science Fascistic Experiment in Phallic Worship Etc, because, well... I really think that in role-playing games, where the players are specifically and knowingly putting on the airs of a genre, and the books delineate the difference between that world and ours, there's a barrier in the ideas. I mean, this theory kind of frays at the margins where FATAL shows up, but you get what I mean. I don't think RPGs really influence peoples' real-world opinions in any way but the way any medium could, ie, young insecure nerds who would be worshipping Japanese girls if they weren't worshipping some other fantastic thing they found in books.

Now, admittedly, I haven't thought much about this, so that theory I put up there is pretty rough. On some level it depends on lots of things. Do you consider The Matrix offensive for its themes? LoTR? Star Wars? Aside from the Matrix sequels wasting its premise away I don't find any of them to be really objectionable, even if a hard, deconstructionist critique of any of them could make them either brilliant or the equivalent of Stalin.

Moreover, there's a difference between, say, Starship Troopers, which was written because Heinlein was angry at some communist dude and wanted to write a tract about it, and it shows, or Lewis' apologetics in the Narnia series, and Mage. I mean, in ST you know it's about the politics because of how much of the book is dedicate to explaining the nature of his weirdo political system. In Narnia, by the time you get to The Last Battle it's just Lewis talking about Christianity, and that's the point, and we know from both authors' lives and other work that that was their point. The point of a Mage game will probably be to mindfuck and/or blow up some other dudes and save the world and maybe angst about for a while and have DRAMA. And it's absolutely not clear that Mark Rein*Hagen wrote Mage because he wanted everyone to know that There Is No Truth And Everything Is Permitted. If you could find the subtext in Mage that was about how Russia is an evil, imperialist country, I'd find it more believable.

I dunno, I'm just kind of idling around at this point because I'm taking another Literary Theory class right now and I find the vicissitudes of this kind of analysis interesting and want to find out what standards are or ought to be used.

I never said that moral relativism was offensive; I said anti-intellectualism is. That's you putting words in my mouth.

Fair enough. I wasn't really aiming at you with that comment, just sort of generally attacking stuff, but to be fair you were also touting what 'people here' were saying.[/i]

[DoNotFeedTheHipsters]

Anyway, this video will clear up the whole 'why does K, Lago, and Frank have sand in their sandginas' for those who aren't completely clear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8

It came about as a criticism to creationism, but it pretty much applies to all anti-science philosophies.

I just watched a not-too-coherent video that didn't seem to know whether it wanted to be an intro to epistemology, a precis of Carl Sagan, or a soft hand creeping up the Scientific Method's thigh, but it doesn't really work.

[fectin]

Yes, Frank, science *can* tell us how to maximize human happiness. What it can't do is tell us that maximizing happiness is *good*. (I happen to believe that it is for faith-based reasons.)

Only after you've defined happiness in some way. And even then, unless it's a trivial form of "happiness" (dopamine for everyone!), it's not neccesarily maximizable. It's exactly like an economy, with the same sort of wierdnesses Pareto described (Pareto improvements/optimization, not the 80-20 rule). Then, even assuming you have a mechanism, you get into questions about whether it's okay to decrease an individual's happiness to increase overall happiness (I tend to think not, but mostly by analogy to the economics).

I think the Catholic position on a lot of things is somewhat more nuanced than you described.


More generally germane to the discussion, I can find the moral principles of games/books/whatever offensive and still enjoy playing them. DnD is a game about killing sapient beings, putting their stuff in sacks, and selling it all to have money to blow on booze and whores. This isn't exactly the acme of virtue. Is that moral system offensive? Yes. Do I get the vapours and have to go lie down because of it? Fuck no!
A game is just a game. It is intellectually dishonest to pretend that real-world results (or lack thereof) are in any way related to the palatability of principles embraced by or embodied in any RPG.
Similarly, I can oppose slavery, and ethics systems condoning it, but still like Spartacus. I can dislike ideas about divine mandates and racial superiority, but still enjoy Exalted. I can even disapprove of vigilantism and still be okay reading Batman. There isn't even a hint of dissonance there either (well, maybe for Exalted, but that's separate).

[CCarter]

On some level it depends on lots of things. Do you consider The Matrix offensive for its themes? LoTR? Star Wars? Aside from the Matrix sequels wasting its premise away I don't find any of them to be really objectionable, even if a hard, deconstructionist critique of any of them could make them either brilliant or the equivalent of Stalin.

The Matrix's authors are heavily influenced by the ideas of the cult Landmark Education - I did some of their courses awhile back. There may be other influences but its basically attempted mindrape, as much as Narnia or Starship Troopers.

[souran]

[You see, your very statement is just the kind of bullshit you get when someone is pushing normative relativism, a completely incoherent position that actually is offensive to anyone who believes even in some version of subjective morality or just simply reason. It's the same hipster "I am so much smarter than everyone" BS touted by sociopaths and opiate-users for ages in an effort to get people to excuse their bad behavior.

Finally, somebody points out the reletivism is an untenable philsophy practically invented to be served up and dissected by freshman philsophy students before making them jump into the deep end of enlightment philsophers like Mills, Kant and Neitzche.

Reletvism has not proponents among modern philsophers who don't eat paste and it has the intellectal standing of white supremesits or Ayn Rand.

[tzor]

Okay then, prove to me that the WoD writers specifically wanted their readers to believe that the real world was governed by consensual reality and science is a bad thing and their point in writing Mage was to impart this message and not to, I dunno, write a game about playing wizards in modern-day Los Angeles. It's easy enough to prove that Heinlein and Lewis were writing with a message, so it ought to be equally plain for the WoD writers.

Sometimes a thing is not written to push a philosophy. It is written to tie together somewhat impossible things and to take advantage of the buzzword of the moment. Things in the WoD didn't quite logically mesh well together. Vampires and Werewolves didn't quite fit, especially in the area of magic and the supernatural. Mage doesn't try to "solve" the paradox, it revels in and and creates its own.

Another thing was the buzzword of the time, the "paradigm." It was literally everywhere. Mage sort of reflects the notion that instead of shifting the paradigm, just make your own up.

[Xenologer]

Xenologer--I agree with the spirit of your argument, but Sam Harris views on ethics are rank hypocrisy and largely bullshit. I can elaborate in another thread if you want, as I just had a really frustrating discussion about this on another site.

Actually, that would be really awesome. I haven't gotten much of a chance to get the other side of it because the book's relatively new, but I would definitely join you in another thread about it if you were willing. Or I guess we could derail this thread! Also valid, and since we're doing it anyway...

Harris' acknowledgement that there may be multiple maxima of the good with substantially different societies and that improvements to society may well be based on ideas that haven't been thought of yet seem to cover his ass very well. He might make some specific claims that are hard to justify, but his works from the talks I've seen seem to be pretty much unassailable.

That's my feeling on it, but like I said to Orion, the book is relatively new, so I haven't had much of a chance to chew it over with someone else and pick holes in it.

Whenever I've interacted with one of his followers, they have insisted that it is self-evident that peace, prosperity, and happiness are the highest goods. (...) Yes, Frank, science *can* tell us how to maximize human happiness. What it can't do is tell us that maximizing happiness is *good*.

There's pretty much a whole chapter on the idea that "wellbeing" as a value is the only value that can be logically justified and reasonably understood as being what (nearly) everybody is actually working toward (although introducing things like fickle gods and eternal punishment/reward skews notions of what accomplishes "wellbeing," which creates notions like the whackadoodle shit Mother Theresa believed). This gets a little bit Lincoln-Douglass Debatey here in structure, but as a core value, one could do worse than Wellbeing with a value criterion (way of defining and measuring) of the Scientific Method.

The idea of the book so far (and I'm only about 3/4 of the way through it) seems to be that questions of morality and wellbeing are questions of problem-solving, and that problem-solving is seldom better-served by faith-based convictions than by evidence-based conclusions, and that this seriously undermines the alleged monopoly on morality that theologies tend to be granted.

As far as Mage, though, and its ridiculous relativism, I actually know real human beings who believe that reality is consensually-built. They believe that there is no reality external to human convictions and observations, and that therefore belief shapes reality. See also: Everyone who purchased The Secret.

Now, do I think that the WoD writers--who cannot even think long and hard enough about their math to create a system that works--are actually some kind of relativist-evangelist cabal seeking to undermine the scientific establishment? No. I don't give them enough credit for that. However, that doesn't mean it's a pointless exercise to wonder what weird philosophical memes are being enabled by the setting premise. Intent isn't magic, and the fact that they didn't intend to encourage credulous pseudo-solipsist mushheads doesn't mean they aren't doing it.

[Orion]

The people who wrote mage would probably assert that the math works, iff you *believe* it does. That's what every RPG's fans say anyway.

Xenologer. I haven't read Sam Harris' book. I listened to his TED talk and read a number of blog posts inspired by him. Neither of those sources went into any detail about how he decided that "wellbeing" is the good, it was just sort of assumed. So it's entirely possible that he has some brilliant construction I haven't read. I will try to get a copy to check it out.

My feeling, however, is that he almost certainly just defines wellbeing as "the highest good" without proving anything about it's content. Wellbeing is a literally infinitely fuzzy concept, you don't get anywhere that way.

[Xenologer]

Well, you could say the same thing about defining "health," and yet we have an entire medical establishment dedicated to achieving this nebulously-defined value. We don't have to be able to perfectly define "health" to say that vomiting all the time probably doesn't get us there, nor do a reliance on homeopathy or pre-frontal lobotomies.

As far as how he defends his selection of "wellbeing" as a value, if you can get ahold of the introduction, it might give you a good idea of where he's going with it. As Frank mentioned, though, Harris mentions that there would obviously have to be multiple peaks and valleys for any measurement of wellbeing, which is a pretty effective counter to accusations that he's some kind of "my way or the highway" moral absolutist zealot.

My background's in anthropology, which has a strong bent toward cultural relativism (and which, for many anthropologists, has meant moral relativism as well, though not necessarily), so I was definitely wary of the possibility that he was just going to set up another definition of "civilized" and "moral" that has to be enforced on all the lesser savages for their own good. Stating that there are multiple potential peaks and ways of doing well on the "measure of wellbeing" scale is, to borrow Frank's phrasing, a pretty good way of covering his ass.

[Username17]

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

That definition was decided upon 63 years ago and holds up remarkably well. I'm pretty sure that if we really put some effort into it, we could put up a definition of "well-being" that was equally solid.

Getting upset that if you keep demanding definitions of words you will eventually start to become circular in your definitions is pretty much pointless sophistry.

-Username17

[Orion]

It's not pointless sophistry, because I accept that eventually you reach a definition which is completely arbitrary. It's the other team trying to cover up that fact.

The medical community doesn't spend all its time agonizing about what "health" is (although let's get real: they do spend *substantial* time agonizing about it) because it just so happens that almost everyone agress on the broad strokes of what "health" is and almost everyone wants to be "healthy." Let's look at how you can build your model.

A: You could start by defining "health" arbitrarily. "Health is having all your limbs attached, and not gangrenous." Then you could go out and do empirical research and discover whether having all their limbs is something people want. (It is.)

B: You arbitrarily define health as "whatever people want from their doctors." Then you do some polls to find out what that is.

So yes, on some level the meaning of "health" is arbitrary, just like all language. That doesn't make it *unuseful.* But when you get to moral philosophy, it gets a bit trickier. If you're going to assert that well-being is the highest moral good, you can start in one of two ways.

A: Begin by defining "well-being." "Well-being is being physically healthy free, educated, wealthy, etc." Then all you have to do is demonstrate that those qualities are moral goods. The trick is, you can't appeal to definition again, you actually have to present evidence that those things are good.

B: You can start by defining well-being as "the quality which is maximised when humans act morally." In that case, well-being is now a term of art, not a natural word. You have to prove by evidence that something is in that category, you can't lean on common-language definitions.

--------------

Bottom Line: I, as a utilitarian, want to maximize universal happiness for no reason. I am okay with that. I do not need to pretend that I am maximizing happiness "because science told me to."

[Xenologer]

Begin by defining "well-being." "Well-being is being physically healthy free, educated, wealthy, etc." Then all you have to do is demonstrate that those qualities are moral goods. The trick is, you can't appeal to definition again, you actually have to present evidence that those things are good.

Or you keep just as nebulous a definition of "well-being" as health professionals have of "health" (which still works pretty damn well for them), and then use things like our knowledge of medicine, psychology, anthropology, and biology to determine which means are better than others for getting there. The premise seems to be that we know enough about what makes us tick that using that knowledge can now do more for us than relying on anything faith-based.

From that perspective, questions of wellbeing are just as much questions of problem-solving as questions of medical health are. When it comes to questions of problem-solving, there may be many right answers, but that isn't the same thing as there being no right answers or wrong answers (which is what a lot of moral-relativist philosophizing seems to assume).

[Orion]

The health professionals definition works out for them it is isn't controversial. More or less everybody agrees on what health is, and that they want it. This is not true of moral claims. Millions of people in the world honestly believe that pain and suffering are, in some cases, morally good. And not just instrumental goods, acual final goods. Does Sam harris present any evidence against that position? Can you?

[Xenologer]

The health professionals definition works out for them it is isn't controversial. More or less everybody agrees on what health is, and that they want it. This is not true of moral claims. Millions of people in the world honestly believe that pain and suffering are, in some cases, morally good. And not just instrumental goods, acual final goods. Does Sam harris present any evidence against that position? Can you?

Yeah, he directly addresses that. For example, I have a very different idea of what constitutes "wellbeing" than people who believe a single act of unmarried lust will condemn me to eternal separation from the grace of their fickle deity. This doesn't mean they aren't valuing wellbeing; they're just factoring in some things that I don't (such as anything which occurs after death, and the existence of a god who can enforce its preferences by deliberately and directly impacting mortal wellbeing).

Another example! There are people who believe that suffering itself brings people closer to god, which is something that many people who revere a deity see as being very very good for a person. I mean, if heaven is a place where you lie about and bask in the warm, glowing, warming glow of YHWH, getting closer to it must be pretty frickin' keen. These people are also valuing wellbeing, but they're working from some different premises than I am. If I shared their premise that there is such a creature as YHWH and then decided that proximity to this deity was basically the greatest bliss conceivable, I would also see "short-term" sacrifices that'd get me there as being pretty great.

The difference between these means toward achieving our common value of wellbeing and my own preferred means is that I do not accept certain claims that people of faith take as a given, which means my cost-benefit analysis will come to a different conclusion.

My preferred means of getting to "wellbeing" would also be different if for some reason I believed that things which are blue are evil spiritual mana leeches that suck away all my creative energy. There is no empirical reason why this should be an important factor in my problem-solving, but it would mean that even if I went on some kind of mad crusade against All Things Blue, I would still be valuing wellbeing. I'd just have accepted a lot of garbage that made it difficult for me to make effective decisions as to how to get there.

This is not unlike people who, while they do value "health," believe a lot of ridiculous horseshit about what works to get it for them. See: homeopathy, reiki, etc. People who waste their money on pseudoscience and quack medicine are not any less interested in health; they're just not working from great (or any) empirical data, which causes them to make decisions we can fairly and accurately call wrong.

[DoNotFeedTheHipsters]

Here's the thing. I have no way of evaluating or knowing other peoples' brain states. The only 'happiness' I can provably induce is my own. So what if I decided to maximize my own wellbeing, as opposed to everyone's? Why shouldn't I?

Hell, even take out all the giant Philosophy Of Mind problems Harris ignores in positing his wellbeing thesis and say I can somehow know others' brain states. Why should I care about the wellbeing of other humans? If I do care about them, why shouldn't I care about the wellbeing of the lizards and the beef-producing cattle? Is it a matter of some truly arbitrary cut-off in 'sentience'/'sapience' between one species and another? Should we then cull the developmentally disabled if they're below this cut-off and we wanna? Something else? Is it one of those 'Humans are naturally altruistic, I'll wager, so being nice to our species is evolutionarily profitable!' things, leaving me to wonder if I should only maximize my bloodline's happiness?

Yeah. Harris has no logical reason why I should care about the Human Race. Its why his infantile, and ill-developed pseudo-Positivist Utilitarian Scientism is very poorly-thought in modern Philosophy of Ethics.

[Xenologer]

Here's the thing. I have no way of evaluating or knowing other peoples' brain states.

Yeah, if only we had some way of evaluating what was going on in other people's brains. That technology will always be beyond us, though. Alas.

Is it one of those 'Humans are naturally altruistic, I'll wager, so being nice to our species is evolutionarily profitable!' things, leaving me to wonder if I should only maximize my bloodline's happiness?

I dunno, is it? Maybe you could read the book. I bet you'd find the answer there.

[K]

Here's the thing. I have no way of evaluating or knowing other peoples' brain states.

Actually, you can. It's called "asking them." Of course, that assumes that you have some kind of autism and can't actually notice human emotion.... the rest of us have a pretty good idea what other people are feeling and are capable of asking when we don't.

The only 'happiness' I can provably induce is my own. So what if I decided to maximize my own wellbeing, as opposed to everyone's? Why shouldn't I?

Because that makes you a douche.

Yeah. Harris has no logical reason why I should care about the Human Race. Its why his infantile, and ill-developed pseudo-Positivist Utilitarian Scientism is very poorly-thought in modern Philosophy of Ethics.

Those terms don't actually mean anything when you mash them up like that, especially since Scientism rejects natural law and Positivism embraces natural law and Utilitarianism is specifically about ethics and not knowledge like the other two.

It's like you are doing a damned philosophy mad-lib. Using the terms incorrectly is worse than not using them at all.

The term you are looking for to describe Harris is "Humanism." It's been around for quite some time. Read a book sometime.... you really are coming off like someone who is possibly failing his Intro to Philosophy course. Heck, even a few hours with Wikipedia might be useful.

Now, if you want a critique of Harris you can say that he is basically restating basic Humanist principles without applying any of the very excellent experimental data of the last fifteen to twenty years that has been produced by the social sciences. His greatest crime is that he doesn't take affirmative and original positions, but basically restates things that guys have been saying since the Enlightenment.

So yes, you are correct in that he has given no affirmative argument for something like altruism or cooperation. That is a real criticism.

[Archmage]

His greatest crime is that he doesn't take affirmative and original positions, but basically restates things that guys have been saying since the Enlightenment.

And yet, as Frank stated earlier in the thread, these ideas are SHOCKING REVELATIONS to half of America. He may, in fact, be preaching to the choir, but at least he deserves a bit of credit for articulating ideas that a surprising number of people wouldn't want to get up in front of a crowd and say.

[LR]

Here's the thing. I have no way of evaluating or knowing other peoples' brain states. The only 'happiness' I can provably induce is my own. So what if I decided to maximize my own wellbeing, as opposed to everyone's? Why shouldn't I?

Maximizing your wellbeing at society's expense causes society to turn against you. When society turns against you, your wellbeing is minimized. Selfish strategies work only for a few lucky parasites who can be ruined by society at any moment.

[K]

His greatest crime is that he doesn't take affirmative and original positions, but basically restates things that guys have been saying since the Enlightenment.

And yet, as Frank stated earlier in the thread, these ideas are SHOCKING REVELATIONS to half of America. He may, in fact, be preaching to the choir, but at least he deserves a bit of credit for articulating ideas that a surprising number of people wouldn't want to get up in front of a crowd and say.

That is true. Rationality and science have few popularizers, and considering that this is a constant battle for the hearts and minds of the youth, there do need to be more people who can promote reason as the basis for society (of course, one of our more vocal board members once vehemently debated against rationality by saying "I don't want a society run by Vulcans", which is a position so crazy I don't know if anyone could ever argue against it).

Unfortunately, Carl Sagans don't grow on trees. Society would be better off if they did.