faith
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18 linked references
September 6th, 2026
- value schemas are a type of schema that involves modelling the relative importance of stuff
"dogs are friendly" is a value schema
"emotions are more important than reason" also
"dog has 4 legs" is not a value schema
value schemas condition your salience
March 18th, 2026
- another essay of Scott's that vibes with some of the faith / stabilizing stuff
- core thesis from claude > Arguments often operate not through direct logical engagement with specific claims, but by manipulating the emotional valence or "karma" attached to vague concepts that can encompass multiple distinct positions. When someone defends "God" as merely the order and beauty in the universe, they're not primarily making a theological claim but rather loading the concept of "religion" with positive associations that can later be leveraged to defend entirely different religious propositions like supernatural creation. This works because people develop generalized positive or negative feelings toward broad conceptual clusters—a "General Factor of Pro-Israeliness" that influences attitudes across dozens of unrelated Israeli policies, or a "General Factor of Feminism" that determines reactions to any argument labeled feminist regardless of its specific content. Once these emotional associations are established, arguments become battles over conceptual territory rather than evidence or reasoning: connecting your preferred policy to positively-charged concepts while linking opponents' positions to negatively-charged ones. This transforms political discourse into a kind of neural network where ideas gain or lose support based on their proximity to other popular or unpopular concepts, creating a system where winning definitional battles ("Is opposing Israeli policy anti-Semitic?") becomes more important than addressing the underlying empirical or moral questions, and where the same person might simultaneously hold that "racism is wrong" and "discrimination against group X is acceptable" simply by successfully keeping those concepts emotionally disconnected.
January 23rd, 2026
- faith & unstable fractal coalitions
December 12th, 2025
- faith example - gods are real and will give you boons for your devotion
November 12th, 2025
- general notes on faith - on trust and faith
- “...cause the group to have faith that conflict is resolvable, which is different from having trust that conflict is resolvable"
- (Not yet sure exactly how. Attempting to unpack that would probably yield lots of clarity)
- (I think this was in the context of Brendan Fong’s thing?)
- “distrust is not the problem, lack of faith is”
October 20th, 2025
- true = if you point your learning apparatus at it, you'll find it (given skill, time, etc)
- truth
- trust, n
- trust, v
- non-naive trust
- forced trust
- stable
- stabilizable
- stabilize
- ~= choose, commit to, adopt faith in
- often when people use "trust" in the imperative, they are actually trying to say this
- but it has huge implications
- ah yeah but this is also kind of the unquestioned attitude!
- faith, n
- "suppose someone has stabilized a faith"
- "key features of their faith"
- [some good usage examples in NNTD Virality Squad doc - gonna pull it out tho]
August 11th, 2025
- thinking about faith and got Claude to name examples of leaps of faith
- historical examples of someone taking a leap of faith, with different outcomes. really emphasize the part where (A) they believed in something without enough evidence and (B) their conviction was part of the mechanism by which it was intended to work
3 categories:
- some of which paid out
- some of which were just a total fuckup
- some of which were a mess, hard to evaluate, good benefits but at great cost / side effects, etc
April 6th, 2025
- I've been thinking about faith, and it seems to me that it relates quite interestingly to commitment/choice is a confused way to relate to stances/mindsets
May 12th, 2023
- good take on faith by Patri Friedman
- > Saw an interesting angle on the benefits of something that could be called faith - trusting something larger than yourself which you don't understand (a "Higher Power" in 12-step parlance).
Often we aren't able to see possibilities because our mental models are incomplete or misapplied; we have limiting beliefs; etc - our mind is in a certain state, that can imagine and understand certain things, which are a small subset of what is true.
Hence, even with a strong focus on personal growth & lots of research, one can be working within an impoverished possibility space without even knowing it. A way out is to choose some source of wisdom - it could be a person (therapist, wise friend), a community of practice, or a spiritual higher power, and follow their advice even when - especially when - it doesn't make sense to you or seems slightly wrong. (But perhaps not when it makes sense and seems clearly wrong!)
This is very difficult for me, since I've been independent to a fault (I literally only started reading directions in the last 5 years - before that I would just always assume I knew how many seconds to foozle the whatsit before letting it dry or whatever). Surrendering my judgment feels like a move that is just barely, painfully available to me.
So, I'm doing my best to lean into this growth edge. My higher power is a community of practice (ie following the advice of a group of people who have worked together to change in the ways I want to change, while developing & refining principles & practices).
I'm also working to cultivate a connection to a more spiritual, godlike higher power - I'll always be an atheist (unless god appears), but I'm finding great benefit in treating this connection as an emotional stance - a form of what Buddhists would call "Deity Yoga". (I might record some meditations, or give an online talk on this - leave a "Care" if you're interested.)
April 2nd, 2022
- interesting take relevant to faith and commitment