FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
It looks to me like the main evidence is:
- Justin Trudeau looks very much like Castro did at a similar age, while bearing no resemblance to Trudeau Sr.
- Justin's mother and father were unquestionably sexually adventurous swingers who were legendary for engaging in coitous with their friends. Seperately, Castro was a close friend of theirs, who was likewise extremely sexually adventurous.
- Justin's parents were enjoying a honeymoon in the Caribbean and made a visit to one particular island whose identity they insisted on keeping a secret roughly nine months before Justin's birth.
- Justin's parents subsequently acted like Castro was someone they already knew when they supposedly met him for the first time on a subsequent visit to Cuba.
The first bullet point seems pretty decisive to me.
There is just too much of the Bible that is objectively false at this point that I don't know how a Mottizen would go about gaining faith.
I'm your huckleberry.
The popular understanding of Materialism is obviously bogus, and is protected from a rapid descent into absurdity by nothing more than irrational social consensus effects. It is exactly as ridiculous as flat-earth or young-earth creationism, for exactly the same reasons.
Note that the above does not apply to Materialism itself, which is an entirely reasonable position, but is considerably less attractive and persuasive. The difference between the two is that the popular version derives its force from a circular argument about the nature of epistemology, evidence and belief. The popular formulation holds that belief in Materialism is derived strictly from an impartial assessment of the evidence, and also evidence against Materialism can't possibly exist, so if evidence against Materialism appears to exist, it can be discarded without explanation.
Without this circular argument, Materialism is merely another faith-based argument that has retreated into the gaps of unfalsifiability. With this circular argument, of course, Materialism is obviously true by definition, and anyone who disagrees has volunteered for mockery. As long as people don't twig to the circular nature of the argument, the social effect is self-reinforcing. The many legitimate benefits Materialism claims to encourage, by contrast, are in fact equally available to non-Materialists, whose faith generally does not prevent them from designing rockets and microchips in any way.
"Objectively false" is an interesting phrase. I'm not aware of anything in the Bible that is "objectively false". On the other hand, I'm pretty sure everything Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is in fact objectively false, and yet people bought it entirely for a hundred years, and many people believe it to this very day. It seems obvious to me that Determinism is as close to "objectively false" as you can get, and many people here still believe it. It seems to me that belief in "objectively false" things is actually pretty common, and examining the phenomenon can teach you a lot about how human reason actually works and what its limits are.
The short version is that belief is not driven by evidence, but by acts of individual will. All significant beliefs are chosen. This is as "obviously true" as anything can be, but choosing not to believe it makes it easier to choose certain other beliefs that some consider desirable, and so those people generally do that. This is not to say that reality is as we wish it to be, only that our beliefs about reality are under our direct, willful control, and always will be.
naw, it's a repeat of a repeat of a repeat. Wouldn't have made it if it weren't a direct response to a question. It'll come back up in the main thread soon enough.
[Didn't realize this was the small question thread, reply was more appropriate to the Culture War thread.]
The term "sheep" is inescapably condescending, because it implies that a "sheep" is all someone is, and that generally is not true. A more accurate way to put it would be that with regard to some things, especially very complex things that generate a lot of epistemic learned helplessness, people can get pretty sheep-like. In any case, the people in question almost certainly are not accurately described as sharks, or any other form of predator.
The people quoting John Stewart to each other generally are not ideologues, and they certainly aren't pod people looking to point and shriek at the first identified heretic. They're doing a pedestrian social thing, and if you're at the point where it's grating, it's easy to play along more or less seamlessly, or duck out. The problem isn't that they're witch-hunting, the problem is that if you're in this situation, you probably are an ideologue of some description, and your instinct is to start an argument. They aren't looking for an argument, they're doing a pedestrian-normie-carebear thing. Just dial down the autism for two whole minutes, and everything will be fine.
(It should be obvious, but the above is self-description of past-me, so please don't think I'm saying anything about anyone in this thread that I wouldn't say about myself. I know full-well how hard it is to turn off the autism, but learning to do it is a critical social skill. Also note that the above is very explicitly about Stewart and Oliver and similar CNN-Chyron-tier normie-feed. If they're quoting Kendi or bell hooks or the SCUM manifesto, or Trotsky, etc, etc, dive dive dive. Those are the actual sharks, and they are actively dangerous to interact with.)
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
23hr ago
lol, that makes a lot more sense, thanks for the explanation.
They're not engaging in analysis, right.
They aren't, though. That's an observable fact to me, and I'm okay if you disagree with that, but I'd be interested in seeing what arguments you'd present to support that disagreement.
Neither John Oliver nor Jon Stewart nor Steven Crowder nor Sean Hannity are optimizing for truth. All four of these people are entertainers, and their schtick is to offer a just-so story where their tribe is obviously correct and the other tribe is some combination of stupid or evil. All of them build their argumentation around isolated demands for rigor, cherry picking, motte-and-bailey, and the rest of the dark arts. The talking points they generate are frequently absurd, and require complete ignorance of the facts of the matter to maintain any significant persuasive value. They sell low-information politics to (politically) low-information people for whom politics is essentially a spectator sport, similar to football or baseball. The version of "politics" they present has only the most minimal connection to the realities of how our system apportions and exercises power.
It is not pretension to point out that every four years, both major presidential candidates give a speech on how they're going to fix the education system, and every four years both speeches are remarkably identical both between the candidates, and between all previous candidates in living memory. Meanwhile, the educational system has been obviously broken and getting worse throughout living memory, has been repeatedly "reformed" every few years, and not only have those reforms failed, some of them have failed two or even three times, the failures being recorded, forgotten, and then recapitulated in a system without memory, accountability, or even direction. That is not a result that serious, thoughtful, dedicated people will produce. And many, perhaps even most political matters observably operate in this fashion. If the economy improves, the incumbent's supporters will say he did it, and his detractors will say it was the last guy. If the economy declines, his supporters will say it was the last guy and his detractors will say he did it, and they will do this regardless of what they previously said and regardless of the evidence. Ditto for most other areas of domestic and foreign policy. We were "winning" the war in Afghanistan for twenty years across three separate administrations, until we abruptly lost it upon the arrival of the fourth, in an event that was absolutely predictable fifteen years in advance. Pick your favorite issue of policy, and I'd wager a similar situation is what you'll see when you dig in. The captain's wheel of Democracy does not appear to be linked to the rudder of concrete policy; spin it left, spin it right, take your hands completely off, it doesn't actually matter much.
I guess if your idea of analysis is pseudo-scientific half-readings of social science papers (which isn't a real field unless the paper supports your conclusion btw)
My personal standard is admission against interest, actually. If the findings make the researchers extremely unhappy and unpopular with their peers and co-tribals, but they can't find a way around the data, the data's probably worth considering.
... inability to separate personal bias from the external world, and a strong superiority complex then it should be painfully obvious why no one wants to engage with you IRL.
I had a lot more trouble engaging with people back when I took them all seriously. Now when I get hit with a low-information call-and-response, I just give them a milktoast-moderate version of their preferred ping and it's all good. If they actually are trying to engage in analysis but lack the background, I give them a step past wherever they are, and then shrug and say "but who knows, really" to offer a non-threatening exit, that tends to work pretty well. If they're a serious person with a serious interest, it's not hard to tell and then we can have a serious conversation, but that's relatively rare.
I do not concede that everyone who considers themselves "serious about politics" is actually serious about politics. I do not require that people agree with me about politics to consider them serious. I do require that they have a decent grasp on political history, and a grasp on the relevant facts over the last several decades for the issues they claim to care about. If they "care" enough about a subject to want to talk about it, but don't care enough to actually read up on the relevant information beyond the talking points their preferred partisan pre-packaged for them, and if they are more interested in those talking points than in making actual predictions based on the available evidence, it seems to me that their actions speak for themselves. If they "care" about politics the way an NFL fan "cares" about their team, I see no reason why "caring" more than them would lead to better outcomes. And indeed, my experience is that it does not.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
First time?
Everyone in the Culture War has this experience sooner or later. It sucks, but eventually the realization settles that this is how it is and it's not going to change, so you make your peace with it and move on with life.
For me, it helped to realize that most people who talk about politics and culture aren't actually engaging in analysis, but rather an informal group-bonding game built around call-and-response meme-trading. This doesn't make them stupid or irrational, any more than posting dogespeak memes means they don't understand proper grammar. They aren't trading John-Oliver-tier (or steven crowder tier) talking points because they're interested in pursuing objective truth, they're doing it because it generates a feeling of togetherness. Sure, it's alienating to you, because the pings they're generating are pings your brain rejects, but that's not really their fault. People are different, is all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
shoot, I mangled the link. here's the correct version. For what it's worth, my understanding of hypnotism is the same as yours, but @jimm has a very, very different perspective.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
So I don't exactly disagree with you, but the things that give me pause are things how people change after brain damage. So I think at the very minimum the material medium in some way constrains or shapes free will.
The brain damage examples give me pause too, but we've had two centuries since Phineas Gage, and for a good portion of the last one people were actively attempting to make progress of psychosurgery. As I argued in the threads linked above, my position is not a dogmatic one, and I'm entirely willing to admit that I'm wrong if Determinism could be demonstrated. I will even readily admit that it's entirely possible that determinism will be demonstrated within my lifetime. I'm betting it won't be, though, and I'm very certain that all attempts to demonstrate it to date have failed.
I'm also certain that people who believe in Determinism, and further believe that their belief is based entirely on direct evidence that proves Determinism, have made a serious error in their reasoning.
I might not consider hitting my wife, but jam a needle in my brain and I might choose just that. And I will probably think it is my own free choice.
It is entirely possible that this is true, but I will believe it when I see this process actually demonstrated under controlled conditions, and not before. What I notice is that a lot of people seem to easily slide from the hypothetical of a needle in the brain, to a belief that the needle in the brain is an actual, verifiable reality right now. Worse, a lot of people seem to be completely unaware of the numerous, well-funded failures to actually design needles for the brain, in a sort of crowd-based file-drawer problem. Massive, well-funded efforts to develop Determinist methods of controlling or engineering individual humans repeatedly fail, and those failures not only do not cause an update on peoples' priors, but are completely forgotten.
This seems like a pretty serious failure of rationality to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I observe different levels of restraint depending on hunger, thirst, whether I've taken my stimulants, how many of the voices inside my head agree.
I've experienced hunger and thirst. I've done fasts in the past; eating and drinking is absolutely a choice.
I've experienced wanting to do something I know I shouldn't do many times as well. I still want to do it, and I still choose whether or not I'm going to do it. I've never experienced being forced to do something against my own will. I don't think you have either.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
You and Lewis are basically arguing against the weakest possible version of the anti-egalitarian position. No one thinks we should beat old men because they can't cross the street fast enough. That's just silly.
It's Chesterton, not Lewis, and the argument explicitly is not that people should beat old men because they don't cross the street fast enough. The argument addressed is:
Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual.
and
you must allow for a certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type.
and
Just as the sight of sin offends God, so does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and...
For this particular brand of argument, it doesn't get more sophisticated than that. There is no stronger version. That's the position, one can either accept it or reject it. @BurdensomeCount wrote quite a lengthy and well-argued post hammering on this exact thesis not too long ago. It's the point of view people argue from here when they cite Nietzche and start throughing around terms like "slave morality". It's the steeliest man of this particular viewpoint that there is.
There's a lot of hilarious edge cases that proposal invokes
"Constructive Possession" should create lots of hilarious edge cases as well. They become less hilarious when the government simply deploys a YesChad.jpg.
To be clear, this is not an endorsement, but rather an attempt to highlight the fact that the "struggle" inherent in law enforcement is not an innate feature of law enforcement, but rather a choice the enforcers are making. The truth value of the statement "This would be impractical to enforce" often smuggles in a number of assumptions about the nature of enforcement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist.
It's less strange if you consider that far-left and far-right are not polar opposites, but instead something approximating Stalinists and Trotskyites: members of a coherent ideological tribe, sharing basic values in common, driven to mutual hatred by surface details.
Do you have an experiment to determine if an individual exhibits free will as opposed to just making decisions based on its incentive landscape plus perhaps internal sources of randomness?
I don't think I do, no. All I can do is observe my own internal mental states, and compare those observations to other peoples' descriptions of their internal mental states. The result is, as I said, the appearance of free choices being directed by individual will, and that appearance is seamless. It may well be an illusion masking deterministic mechanisms, but if so, the mask is impenetrable under current conditions.
I observe myself exercising my will without apparent restraint, and making choices through the exercise of that will. Near as I can tell, this is what everyone else observes as well. All effective methods of human social organization assume that humans have free will, and then proceed with methods to either convince them to choose cooperation, or trick them into cooperation, or else nullify their choices through the exercise of power against them. No effective methods of social organization have been found that allow one to simply engineer cooperation from the uncooperative, and this despite many trillions of dollars and millions of human lifetimes spent explicitly trying to achieve that exact objective.
If humans have free will, do dogs too? LLMs? Frogs? Insects? A ball travelling through a Galton board?
The ball travelling through a Galton board certainly does not. We can predict when it will fall (when we drop it) and we can predict the statistical probabilities of its travel. We have a good understanding of the mechanics involved, and there do not appear to be any great mysteries involved.
Dogs, LLMs, Frogs and Insects, I don't know. I have no access to their internal experience. Is their behavior deterministically predictable and manipulable? If so, then clearly we have grounds to say that they're deterministic. If not, then it may be deterministic and simply too complex for us to grasp, or it may be something else.
For humans, I do have access to the internal experience, and it certainly is not deterministically predictable. I have no reason to assume that my observations, and those of all other humans, are mistaken, and they uniformly indicate free will. The direct evidence we have on the question in hand is that Free Will exists.
How is free will compatible with a physics world view?
It isn't. So either our understanding of physics is wrong, or our observation of free will is wrong. As it happens, we know for a certainty that our understanding of physics is wrong in other places, so it being wrong here too is not entirely unexpected.
It has been frequently claimed that Materialism should be the null hypothesis, and that there is no evidence against materialism. But if free will appears to exist, and free will cannot exist according to Materialist axioms, then the apparent existence of free will is evidence against Materialism in the same way that Materialism is evidence against free will. Likewise, the falsification of Determinist theories is evidence against Materialism. It is obviously not conclusive evidence, and it's still possible that further technological development will salvage Determinism at some indeterminate point in the future, or that Determinism is correct even if we can never prove it due to intractable complexity. But if one claims both that their position is evidence-based, and that contrary evidence must be discarded because it contradicts their position, they have left the bounds of rationality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
and the state would struggle to dispute a claim by a gay couple that they fastidiously avoided that particular act
Are you familiar with the gun-law term "constructive possession"?
The "struggle" involved in proving a crime exists because the authorities in question want it to be a struggle. if they decide they don't feel like struggling any more, they can simply remove the struggle and go straight to enforcement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
nope. The only workaround is apparently to just manually empty the filter as often as possible.
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true.
Every human has a lifetime of direct experience of something that appears in every observable and testable way to be free will. Complex predictions can be accurately made on the assumption of free will's existence.
Neither statement is true of Determinism, which, if it exists, can neither be observed nor tested in any way. Entire generations of scientists claimed otherwise, and their claims were dramatically falsified over the course of the last century. Belief in Determinism is axiomatic, not evidence-based.
To the extent that "true" is a meaningful term, free will is true. It is true in all the ways that gravity is true, and rejecting it involves exactly the same sorts of commitments and actions that rejecting gravity involves: namely, discarding huge portions of one's moment-to-moment experience as fundamentally unreliable, without any compensatory increase in predictive power.
well, between you, @AhhhTheFrench and this in-depth discussion I'm hoping to continue with @jimm, We've now covered all the possible positions on the subject of hypnosis. I'd certainly be interested to see more discussion about the facts of the matter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
That escalated quickly. What's the logic here? I don't take it particularly personally, but it seems a bit out of left field.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news.
I think both the addict and the rich philanderer have, through their intentional choices, crippled their capacity to feel shame. I don't think this happens automatically; people who haven't intentionally crippled their own capacity for shame continue to feel it. Those who do cripple their capacity for shame in this way have damaged an important part of their own mind, making them less sane in a meaningful sense.
That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part.
I would argue that the boyscout part is a subset of the rational part. Shame is deeply rational. Those who have crippled their capacity for shame are less rational, not more.
Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.
Some fears can be vestigial nonsense, depending on the specific environment. Fear itself remains rational, and always will so long as humans survive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Shame is a low class cultural marker.
Shame is a human constant in all social classes.
If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame.
No human has ever or will ever exist in a state where nothing is a threat to them.
The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat.
For every shameless rich person, I can point to ten drug addicts shitting themselves on a sidewalk without apparent shame. Further, it seems to me that the absence of shame is the marker of defeat, when one is no longer even trying for goodness and virtue.
It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.
This at least is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, fear is a necessary and entirely rational response, because there are better states and worse states, and many of the worse states are extremely wretched. Rational fear is a motive force, a protective force. Its absence is a sign of insanity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Consider the time immediately before the Russian Revolution. Everyone has a bone to pick with the Tzar. Does the Tzar represent Culture or Counter-culture?
"Socially dominant but clearly on the way out" seems like a coherent social category to me.
I think you have. Consider the following:
When someone presents you with a belief, you can choose to either accept or reject it uncritically. Either is a conscious act of the will.
If you choose not to do either, you can instead inspect the proposed belief critically. This involves comparing it to the evidence available to you. The consensus model is that you collect the available evidence for and against the belief, weigh the two groups against each other objectively, and allow yourself to be guided by the result. There are serious problems with this model:
When we examine a proposed belief critically, what actually happens is that we collect the evidence that is immediately convenient to us, prune it subjectively to the subset that seems weighty and relevant by our subjective, personal standards, sort it into "for" and "against" piles, and then compare the two to get a preliminary result. We then assess this result, and if we decide we like it, we keep it and draw a conclusion. If we don't like it, we go looking for more evidence. Either is a conscious act of the will.
Nor does anything require that this process ever terminates. Even if no "sufficient" evidence can be found to justify the conclusion we desire, we are free to
assumeinfer the existence of such evidence from the conclusions we chose in previous iterations of this reasoning process. The end result is that we choose to search through a small portion of an infinite chain of evidence until we find the support we're looking for, and then we choose to stop.But what if we wanted to go deeper? What if we wanted to try for something beyond subjective, piecemeal assessment of evidence? The last option is to reason about evidence by way of axioms. A given chain of evidence can fit within or contradict a given axiom, logically speaking. This process seems to be objective, or as close to it as humans can get. But all it tells you is whether a given chain of evidence fits or contradicts a given axiom, not whether the axiom is actually correct. There are still infinite evidence-chains, meaning that there are an infinite number of evidence chains that fit neatly into a given axiom. Choosing an axiom is a conscious act of will, and choosing which evidence-chains to compare it to is likewise a conscious act of will.
All consequential beliefs any of us hold are formed by one of the processes described above. All of these processes involve a conscious act of will. Therefore, all beliefs are arrived at through conscious acts of will.
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