soticism

came across an interesting post on reddit discussing the characteristics of a stoic and thought them to be interesting enough to share them here.

mentioned are the criteria for what a stoic is, or more importantly the characteristics of a stoic

• the "Sufficiency Thesis": virtue is the only good

• the "Indifferents Thesis": externals do not affect human happiness

• the "Herculean Thesis": a life with hardship is preferable to an easy life

• the "Rationality Thesis": one should attempt to remove (not moderate) the "wrong sort of emotional activity"

• the "Oikeiotic Thesis": virtue entails realizing (both in the senses of understanding and becoming) ones place in the universe as a whole, and helping other to do the same

and further

• a cluster of doctrines traceable to the central elements of classical Stoicism

• eudaimonistic: happiness, flourishing, and excellence all entail each other

• intellectualistic: virtue and reason are identical 

• naturalistic: "facts about the natural world" are the "substance of practical deliberation"

• a "profound formal unity of the virtues"

• an emphasis on the "full particularity" of each individual, and each persons role on the "grand system of nature."

• an emphasis on self-mastery

Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.

As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?

What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.