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FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

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joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

				

User ID: 675

FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

20 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 675

I was just surprised to learn you once thought as I do. "we're all mad here" after all.

On that note, and to provide a little more detail, I think it's pretty clear that ~all people have an easier time believing things they want to be true, than things they want to be false. Above, there's the idea brought up that I'd paraphrase as "I don't know it's impossible, so I'm going to presume it's possible", and this is usually a standard applied to something people want to be true.

I think I wanted brain emulation to be true, because I consumed a lot of sci-fi that presented it as super cool, and because I was young and had a young person's perspective on death as being some super-scary thing to be avoided at all costs. I wanted more cool things and I didn't want to die, so I wanted brain emulation to be real, and there was no conclusive evidence it wasn't possible, so I assumed it was.

Because my assessment of the facts was driven by preferences in this way, the easiest route to changing my mind was to attack the preference, not the evidence that preference was driving the assessment of. Spending a decade wanting to die removed a lot of the "death is scary" motive. C.S. Lewis's Abolition of Man provided a heaping helping of the less pleasant implications of such technology, and also provides the historical counter-evidence in retrospect, and entirely from within the materialistic frame as I recall. The short story Lena provides a shorter and more visceral illumination of the downsides, without even the second-hand association to anything beyond Materialism.

I think mortality is a pretty good deal under present conditions, and if I am wrong about God I consider annihilation a reasonable consolation prize. I'll be convinced that brain emulation is possible when I see actual evidence of brain emulation being possible. If it turns out to be possible, I will do everything in my power to avoid being emulated. If determinism can be proved, it's hard to see how that would improve the world in any way.

We've asked, and it's apparently not practical. We try to fish them out as quickly as possible.

What is going to happen when we can simulate all of this stuff in a few years? Are you going to admit defeat or are you just going to come up with a new laundry list of reasons why a fully simulated human brain explains nothing?

If someone can actually demonstrate read/write on a human mind, I'll absolutely concede that read/write on a human mind has been achieved. Why would I do otherwise? My entire argument, here and previously with you, is that direct evidence should be weighted higher than axiomatic inference. Further, it's difficult to get a better example of madness than "I believe X because of evidence, and also it is impossible for evidence of !X to exist, even if it by all appearances does in fact exist."

What caused you to abandon materialism for spiritualism?

At no point in our previous debate did I advocate for spiritualism in any form. I am entirely willing to concede that Materialism might be entirely correct, and that belief in it is as rational as any other axiom one chooses. I simply note that it appears to be unprovable, since we know for a fact that significant parts of it appear to exist where we cannot access them, even in principle. I further note that the standard arguments lean heavily on isolated demands for rigor, as I believe our last exchange demonstrated quite well.

I stopped being a materialist because being a materialist did not deliver results. I have not seen a way in which abandoning Materialism has compromised my reason or my ability to engage with the material world; it did not force me to believe in a flat earth or in faith healers or to doubt empirical reality in any way. I think the change has removed a number of blind-spots to my reason that I previously suffered from, and it helps me better understand why so much of "rationality" is so self-evidently irrational, why those who claim to claim to believe only in what they can see and touch and quantify nevertheless adopt absolute belief in tissue-thin fictions; the history of the field of psychology is my go-to example, but there are plenty of others.

In any case, if I am mad, it should be easy to refute my arguments, no?

Is this essentially correct, or am I missing a key distinction here?

You nailed it. And specifically this part here:

This fundamentally changes things because it means you cannot neglect my will; I am in control of how things pass into/out of my mind, and until you can go around my normal IO channels you need my buy in unlike with ships and planes who don't get a say in things. As a result, the normal paradigm of engineering ain't gonna work.

...And further, that this view is supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence from every facet of human behavior, and every claim to the contrary is either unfalsifiable or has been falsified, yet people continue to insist otherwise, in a way identical to Sagan's invisible dragon. This isn't because they're stupid, it's because Sagan's invisible dragon is describing something irreducible about how humans reason. Reasoning is not simply doing math on accumulated evidence. The evidence is weighed and assessed in reference to axioms, and those axioms are chosen. You can choose to uncritically accept one provided to you by others, or you can choose to look at an arbitrary amount of arbitrarily-selected evidence until you arbitrarily decide that no more evidence is needed and a conclusion can be drawn, or you can take certain positions as self-evident and then prioritize the evidence that is compatible with them.

That last option is how people end up believing in Determinism, despite zero direct evidence in favor of determinism and a lot of evidence against it: they've adopted Materialism as an axiom, and Materialism requires Determinism. Any evidence against determinism is likewise evidence against Materialism, but because Materialism is an axiom, evidence against it is simply deprioritized and discarded. This is not objectionable in any way, and it is the only method of reason available to us. The problem comes from people ignoring the actual operation, and substituting it for some fantasy about reason as deterministic fact-math, as though their choices were not choices, but predetermined outcomes, and anyone who doesn't choose the same axioms is simply not reasoning properly.

There's a lot of gray area out there, and some of it quite dark.

I'd be interested on the grey you see. Torture regimes observably fail. Totalitarianism observably fails. Power slips through the fingers, despite all efforts to the contrary. People have been trying to reduce humanity to an engineering discipline for three hundred years running, and they've failed every time. Again, that's not conclusive proof that they'll continue to fail indefinitely, but looking at the historical record, and accounting for my understanding of technology that actually exists, I like my odds.

I don't actually disagree with your disagreement. My point is that the police don't exist to "protect right wingers from scary things". Right wingers can and will do that on their own. The police exist to provide that protection in a codified, formalized, legible, purportedly neutral fashion.

We are happy to abolish the police and handle their functions ourselves, individually and as a group. The police are a peace treaty with the rest of you, who prefer to avoid the realities of that arrangement.

There are reasonably robust theoretical reasons to suppose that reactionless thrusters do not work.

There are theoretical reasons to believe that Brain emulation won't work either. Whether they qualify as "reasonably robust" is a question beyond my purview, but your answers so far lean me more toward thinking so.

There is a popular belief in neuroscience that we are primarily data limited, and that producing large, multimodal, and complex datasets will, with the help of advanced data analysis algorithms, lead to fundamental insights into the way the brain processes information. These datasets do not yet exist, and if they did we would have no way of evaluating whether or not the algorithmically-generated insights were sufficient or even correct. To address this, here we take a classical microprocessor as a model organism, and use our ability to perform arbitrary experiments on it to see if popular data analysis methods from neuroscience can elucidate the way it processes information. Microprocessors are among those artificial information processing systems that are both complex and that we understand at all levels, from the overall logical flow, via logical gates, to the dynamics of transistors. We show that the approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the amount of data. Additionally, we argue for scientists using complex non-linear dynamical systems with known ground truth, such as the microprocessor as a validation platform for time-series and structure discovery methods.

...As I understand it, this is a paper where some guys took your proposed approach and applied it to a microprocessor, to see if it would work on a system where there were no appreciable unknowns. With a perfect map of the microprocessor and the general tools we have for investigating the brain, the deeper structure of the chip's processes were completely inaccessible to them, even in principle.

We can reliably produce different sensations and even cause muscular movements. The tech isn't at the point I can make you see HD pictures. The tech isn't at the point I can make you see HD pictures.

Even if it were, my argument would be the same: showing me a picture by passing data through the visual wiring is not writing to the brain. Giving me a memory of seeing the picture would be writing to the brain. Ditto for the sensations and muscular movements. I can make you feel sensations and make your muscles move without poking the brain at all.

Once I get to the temporal lobe, I can promise meeting God Himself or your money back (and you don't even have to die, temporal lobe epilepsy or stimulation causes religious ecstasy).

We can already induce the sensation of religious ecstasy through a variety of analogue means. Why would doing it with a needle be significant? Can you make an atheist into a Christian, or a Christian into an atheist? Can you make someone love a specific person, or hate them, in a durable, continuous way?

Mind reading and mind control exist. It's not a psychic phenomenon, it uses Bluetooth.

"Mind reading", as in accessing the self, tapping the internal monologue, viewing memories. "Mind control", as in controlling the self, editing memories, changing how someone thinks.

This A.I. Used Brain Scans to Recreate Images People Saw

If I'm understanding the article's description correctly, they are reading sensory intake data live. That is indeed a very neat development, and not something I would have expected, but it still appears to be in the general input/output regime rather than the read/write regime.

This is a terrible argument. You are likely using an electronic device that was "fictional" when first imagined to make it.

When the guy tried to parachute off the Eiffel tower, he did so because he'd tested the idea with models first and had some direct evidence of the thing he was attempting to harness. My understanding is that we do not have anything like that for the self, the mind, the me inside the brain. We can access the data going in and out of the brain, but to my knowledge we have no insight at all on the actual computation, its operation or its mechanisms. We have matter and energy patterns, and we presume that these must add up to consciousness not because we have any insight into the details of the mechanism, but because Materialism requires that all other theories be discarded. But even if this is true, that is still not evidence that the patterns and structures are tractable under the conditions of the material world, for the same reason that it is probably not possible, even in principle, to accurately predict the weather in St. Petersburg a year from now. In my experience, arguments to the contrary amount to saying that we don't know what the obstacles might be, so there probably aren't any. That is not an example of reasoning from evidence.

Watson?

John Watson, the father of Behaviouralism. His thesis was admirably succicnt:

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”

Like you, he had "evidence" that this was possible: psychological experiments demonstrating conditioning, habit formation, etc. He naïvely extrapolated that evidence well outside its domain, and ignored all evidence to the contrary, and so in time his core claims were thoroughly falsified.

But what's your point? I invite you to show me what I have in common with Marx, Freud, Watson and Crick.

You all share the conviction that the human mind is arbitrarily tractable, controllable, malleable, that Selves can be engineered with no regard to their own will, and despite all evidence to the contrary. Marx thought it could be done through engineering social conditions, Freud through manipulation of the psyche, Watson and Skinner through fine-grained manipulation of the environment, and you think it will be done through nanotech and emulation. A lot of people have believed this idea, especially over the last century or two, based on no testable evidence at all, and a lot of very serious efforts have been made to actually do it, all of which have failed. None of those failures have done a thing to shake the confidence of those who hold to this idea, because the idea is not derived from evidence, but rather from axioms.

I think you're wrong. But I care a lot less about whether you're wrong, than I do about pointing out the mechanics of how beliefs are formed. It should in principle be possible to get you to recognize the difference between "I know how this works because I've personally worked with it" and "I know how this works, because I have a theory I haven't managed to poke holes in yet". But the most recent version of this conversation I had resulted in my opposite claiming both that Determinism was demonstrated by evidence, and that it was impossible even in theory for evidence against Determinism to exist, because it was true by definition. So who the fuck knows any more?

The record as it stands has long exceeded drosophila and roundworms, and the current SOTA is either an entire rat brain or 1% of a human brain.

Are you are claiming that scientists can, right now, emulate an entire, active rat brain? That seems pretty implausible to me, but I stand to be corrected. I'm not confident that "1% of a human brain" is even a coherent statement, that the phrase means anything at all. 1% of what, measured how?

If you disagree, please make it clear you're exceedingly confident in what I deem to be a very insane proposal that we will not have OOMs more raw compute in a few decades*, or that scanning techniques will not improve even modestly, given that new advances come out every year or two.

No, I think you're straightforwardly wrong about what is possible right now, and especially about what it shows. I don't think scientists can "emulate a rat brain", meaning create a digital simulacrum of a rat that allows them read/write access to the equivalent of a live rat brain. I certainly do not believe that scientists can emulate "1% of a human brain", under any reasonable interpretations of those words. My argument isn't that compute won't improve, it's that the mind is probably intractable, and that certainly no evidence of tractability is currently available. I have not looked into either the WBEP or EBRAINS, but I'm pretty confident they don't do anything approaching actual emulation of a human mind.

But nothing in my knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology or engineering rules it out, and the EU has enough confidence that it's possible that they spent a billion euros on the Whole Brain Emulation Project and are now working on its successor, EBRAINS.

Behavioralism probably got a whole lot more than a billion, all told. Marxism got trillions. These ideas ran the world for more than a century, and arguably still run the world, based on zero actual validity or utility.

I was a big fan of transhumanism, once upon a time. I was very big into the idea of brain emulation. I too crave the strength and certainty of steel, much to my wife's chagrin. I used to believe that the brain was obviously a computer, and science would equally obviously reduce its structures and contents to engineering problems in time. But looking back, I think it's pretty clear that this belief came from inference, not evidence, and from some pretty shaky inferences too. As you put it, "nothing in my knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology or engineering rules it out", and I wanted to believe it, and it fit neatly with other things I wanted to believe, so I discarded the contrary evidence and ran with it. That's what people do.

"nothing in my knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology or engineering rules out" my belief in God. Of course, my understanding of God has been shaped by my understanding of all of these, so I effortlessly avoid pitfalls that observably trapped some of my predecessors. In the same way, your belief in the nature of the mind is shaped by your understanding of all these, and so you effortlessly avoid the traps that caught many of your preceding mind-engineer transhumanists. The fact that I don't attempt to argue for young earth creationism doesn't mean I actually have any better an understanding of the reality or fictitiousness of God than those who came before me. In the same way, the fact that you don't think the brain can be engineered by psychoanalysis or socialist revolution doesn't mean you understand the mind better than Watson or Marx or Freud; we didn't derive our understandings from first principles, but from learning from the painful experience of others. Nothing about that indicates any significant ability to get novel answers right ourselves.

Please, please, recognize the difference between "I know this is so" and "I don't know why this shouldn't be so". Both are useful; I argue that both are entirely necessary. But it pays to be clear about which one you're using in a given situation, and to not mix the two up.

Luckily even noisy signals like external EEGs provide useful data.

...People have claimed to have developed reactionless thrusters before. A test I've heard proposed is to hang the thruster and its power source from a pendulum, inside a sealed plastic bag, and then show it holding the pendulum off-center. In a similar vein, here's some proposals for similar tests of read/write access to the human mind: a working lie detector, love potion, mind-reader, or mind-control device would all be obvious demonstrations of the basic capability. Do you believe any of these exist, or that they will exist in, say, the next few years? If not, why not?

ttps://youtube.com/watch?v=vpzXI1hlujw is a conclusive rebuttal.

It certainly doesn't seem to be. I'm all for it, but this is reading output, not even input/output, and certainly not read/write.

We can reproduce imagery from dreams and even capture the mind's eye with surprising clarity, with non-invasive techniques to boot.

Could I get a cite on this? I would like to see some actual captures from dreams or the minds eye, because I'm pretty sure such things don't exist in the sense I understand the terms. I'm interested in being proved wrong, though.

I can write to your brain right now, just give me a scalpel, a needle, an electrode and medical indemnity documents.

You can damage my brain right now, or possibly jam it. You can't write on it in any meaningful fashion, as far as I know. Again, if you could, that would necessarily imply the present existence of mind reading and mind control, correct?

No. Or at least I don't know of any such people, I have no affiliation with them, and their failures do not impede progress in the field.

Marx? Freud? BF Skinner? Watson? As for affiliation with them, do you think the "God of the Gaps" is a reasonable criticism of Christianity? If so, is it just Christians who shouldn't collectively retreat to unfalsifiability, or are such collective retreats in the face of contrary evidence generally bad whoever is doing them?

No. If we emulate a human being, via brain scan or some high bandwidth side channel, and it works, then voila.

If. As in, in the future. As in, not in the present. You recognize that we not only can't emulate a human being, but we aren't anywhere close to being able to, right? That the capability you are reasoning from is, at the moment, entirely fictional?

What of it?

All direct evidence available to us shows that the human self has free will: we experience its operation every minute of every day, and can examine that operation in intimate detail. All engineering we do on humans operates on the assumption that free will exists, from education to law to navigating interpersonal relationships. Determinism makes no predictions that can currently be tested. Determinism's previous testable predictions have all been falsified. No engineering we currently do on humans operates according to deterministic principles. All these are facts, to the extent that "facts" can be said to exist.

The fact that all of the above can be so easily ignored can teach one important things about the operation of human reason, and particularly the prime role that free will takes in that operation. You can't be made to draw a conclusion by presented evidence, because the individual will has veto on what is even considered evidence. All beliefs are chosen by distinct acts of the will.

hence the quotes on "gun" above. Both are weapons, which is the point under discussion. The comment above assumes that big weapons invalidate small ones and numerous weapons invalidate sparse weapons, but neither is actually true. The advantage bigger or more numerous weapons provide is entirely contextual, and the contexts in question are not universal.

You mistake the difficulty in unpacking the blackbox of human cognition as evidence that it can't be unpacked. That is a grave error indeed.

Can you at least agree to the following:

  • that "unpacking the black box of human cognition" would involve the practical ability to have granular, read/write access to an actual human mind.

  • That no read/write access to a human mind has ever been demonstrated, nor has any meaningful progress toward such a capability ever been demonstrated.

  • That many people have previously claimed to be capable of demonstrating such access, or else of generating the capability to demonstrate such access, that their claims have been taken seriously, been tested rigorously, and have uniformly failed those tests.

  • That current iterations of the claim, such as yours here, no longer make straightforwardly testable predictions of the sort that were common from prominent scientists and "scientists" over the last century.

  • That the actual engineering we do with humans in fields like teaching, law and order, political organization and so on, all operate as though the self is not bound by physics in the way you believe it must be. That is to say, when a machine does something wrong, we go for the person who programmed it, but when a person does something wrong, we punish them directly. When we try to shape humans, we do so with techniques working from the assumption that the individual is autonomous and possessed of their own free will in all practical senses of the term.

If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger.

It does not seem to me that you understand how guns work. The government has nukes, which are the biggest "guns" in existence. Why do they persist in buying rifles? They have the biggest guns, why do they need the small ones? ...And the answer, of course, is that strife is not decided by whose guns are "bigger". That's why we spent twenty years and a couple trillion-with-a-capital-T dollars losing in Afghanistan, to a rabble of poorly-educated, poorly-armed, and notably nukeless militant farmers.

It seems to me that non-God AI should operate in a similar way. In the period before the AI God arrives, human conflict and cooperation is still the name of the game, and people still care about the outcomes of that cooperation and conflict being good from their perspective. We care about the here-and-now more than a nebulous future, and further it is appropriate and necessary for us to do so. It is still necessary to maintain the capabilities of self-defense and deterrence, because predators obviously still exist.

At that point it seems like we either have to hope that the AI god is benevolent, in which case we'll be fine either way, or it won't be, in which case we're all screwed. But it's hard to imagine such an entity being "owned" by any one human or group of humans.

I would be happy to trade complete restrictions on public AI research for complete control of society until the AI God arrives. Would that be a trade you'd be interested in?

Does this model explain why his rube-whispering was ineffective prior to 2016, leaving him a joke candidate in the two previous elections where he tried to run?

As an alternative, consider the idea that Trump is a product of policy starvation, not a generator of it. The previous system lost credibility because it was unable to deliver on its core promises and purposes. The credibility it lost flowed to the less-credible, more extreme fringes, Social Justice for the Blues and Trump for the Reds. Should they be discredited, it will continue to flow further to the fringes unless the center can find a way to present a credible alternative, which is not easy to do given the dysfunction and lack of trust.

The idea here would be that the source of the instability is Trump himself, and that once he's removed things go back to normal?

So let's say the big bang happened. Who cares what caused it?

I do, because it demonstrates that at least one unobservable cause clearly exists. If the universe and everything in it can have an unobservable cause, I don't think it's too unreasonable to claim that the self can have an unobservable cause as well, given that no observable cause is available.

You are free to assume that the unobserved cause of both the universe and the self are just more physics, but this belief is neither empirical nor falsifiable. It is simply a statement of faith, an axiom you have adopted to direct your reasoning and to filter evidence.

And of course, further evidence can change all this. Demonstrate mind reading and mind control, and I'll agree that Determinism appears to be correct. In the meantime, I'll continue to point out that confident assertions are not evidence.

There is nothing outside of what exists (because their literally by definition, can't be), everything is causal (as we agreed), and thus there is no free will.

Free will does not violate causality any more than the big bang does. We observe the big bang, and you ask "who cares what caused it". We likewise observe free will and the self, and I ask "who cares what caused it?" Why is that answer fine from you and a problem from me?

If I were to grant that this was true, then what is the state of our universe caused by? and let's cut to the chase and go with the Big Bang, which is the back of the chain as far as I'm aware. What was the big bang caused by? What causes the physical laws to exist?

Further, I don't grant that this is true. I've agreed that all effects have causes. I have not agreed that any specific thing causes anything else. I believe in physical laws because I can see confirmation of them. I haven't seen confirmation that physical laws cause consciousness or an illusion of free will.

No, the cause of my free will appears to be me. You can then ask what the cause of me is, and I don't know.

What's the alternative? According to you, the cause of my "free will" is the physical laws. Cool. What's the case of the physical laws?

Happily.

There is no apparent existence of free will. That is what I am saying. All evidence is explicitly to the contrary if you have even a passing understanding of physics at an observable scale.

Then use your understanding of physics at an observable scale to demonstrate that the human mind is deterministic and not possessing free will. All it would take would be a practical demonstration of either mind reading or mind control. I'm pretty comfortable claiming that neither you nor anyone else can do that, but I stand ready to be proven wrong.

Absent such a demonstration, physics at an observable scale doesn't answer the question. I observe gravity and thermal conductivity in exactly the same way I observe free will. My confidence in my understanding of gravity and thermal conductivity is reinforced by experience, exactly the way it is for free will.

I ask again, do you not accept cause and effect?

I don't accept a claim of cause and effect when the relationship of cause and effect can't actually be demonstrated. I certainly don't accept it in cases where the demonstration has been repeatedly attempted and has repeatedly failed.

The point of the universal fire quote above is that you can't appeal to the tightly-laced reality of nature if you can't actually point to the laces. If you want to claim that a cause leads to an effect, you have to actually demonstrate the linkage. You don't get to just say "well it has to be this, what else could it be?"

You can believe what you want!

One can indeed. As Bertrand Russell puts it:

I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can [...] be generally believed. Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the State. Of course, even when these beliefs had been generated, people would not put the kettle in the ice-box when they wanted it to boil. That cold makes water boil would be a Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life. What would happen would be that any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be "frozen" at the stake. No person who did not enthusiastically accept the official doctrine would be allowed to teach or to have any position of power. Only the very highest officials, in their cups, would whisper to each other what rubbish it all is; then they would laugh and drink again. This is hardly a caricature of what happens under some modern governments.

Your belief in Determinism is observably a "Sunday Truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life." It makes no testable predictions, and it directs no useful actions. It has no connections of any kind to the real world. Maybe it will not be so in the future, but appeals to the future are not part of empiricism.

More frustratingly, my entire point in this discussion has not been to prove why you should believe in free will or stop believing in Determinism.

The whole point is that evidence doesn't stop being evidence when it goes against a theory you don't like. Under the Empirical framework we have both been claiming at every step of this discussion, evidence must be explained rather than handwaved. You cannot explain the evidence of free will under a materialistic framework, and Determinism is very explicitly a handwave. And this means, inescapably, no matter how much you would rather not admit it, that the apparent existence of free will is evidence against materialism. Further, evidence doesn't force conclusions, in exactly the way it's not forcing this conclusion on you!

You don't have to accept that evidence as conclusive, but I'm not really interested in a discussion based on Empiricism with someone who insists on ignoring the rules of empiricism when it suits them.

At no point have I argued that the behavior Hlynka engaged in that led to his banning was acceptable in this space. My assessment is that past a certain point he didn't care, and was happy to eat a ban if that was the price for expressing his contempt for the proliferation of what he considered fundamentally wrong and evil memes.

I'm discussing a long-standing point of debate that precedes the flameout.

Amusing I'm sure, but do you have a more substantive answer?

I'm more inclined to say that there is no inside. There is only outside.

Hmm. Let's try it this way.

A: I returned and saw under the sun...

B: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion...

The former admits appropriate subjectivity: I saw frames the sentence as the author's personal experience, which you are implicitly invited to measure against your own. The later inappropriately claims objectivity: Objective consideration, with no mention of who is doing the observing, is the language of a textbook, presenting information to be ingested uncritically. It implies a comprehensive system of knowledge, of which this is one piece.

...Or I can make it even simpler, and hopefully divorced from any political or social connotations.

A: It seems obvious to me that...

B: Everyone knows that...

Both strongly assert a position. The latter bakes in an inherently inappropriate social claim to reinforce the point. You see that, right?

In this case, A is speaking from "inside" themself, about a perceived reality they recognize as outside them. B is speaking from "outside" themself, about a "reality" that almost certainly does not exist. It seems to me that there is nothing that "everyone knows", most especially because the phrase is usually deployed at someone who evidently doesn't know the thing in question.

Likewise:

A: "but time and chance happen to them all"

B: "but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account"

...Are not equivalent either. The former frames time and chance as something to be accepted. The latter frames them as something to be managed, if not outright overcome. But the whole point of the passage is that they are to a considerable extent unmanageable; the A version is highlighting this, and the B version is minimizing this, perhaps even denying it.

It seems to me that the A version presents itself as inside a box, the self, looking out at the world, while the B version presents itself as Systematized Knowledge, looking into a box, which is the world. That is what I mean by inside and outside. I'm further asserting that there is no Capital-S Systematized Capital-K Knowledge, though to really chase that point down will probably require a lot more drawing of definitions. Suffice to say, the implicit claim I'm pointing to is false.

Does that make more sense, whether you agree with it or not?

On the most literal reading, this seems straightforwardly false. Otherwise how could we explain the possibility of lying, or the ability of authors to write convincing dialogue for characters who think differently from themselves?

Lying is difficult, and simulating is likewise difficult. No one can do either perfectly, and we're talking here about conversation, not fiction. I'm asserting that how people argue, especially when they argue well and forcefully, reveals a lot about how they think.

but I'm not sure what all this has to do with the question of the equivalence between the contemporary far left and far right

Because the assertion that I am endorsing is that the appropriate way to group ideologies is not by position statements, which observably change with some frequency, but rather on core axioms and values, which do not. I've argued previously that the core of Enlightenment/Progressive/Left-wing thought is the axiom "we know how to solve all our problems", with the point being that it is a false axiom, and anyone who uses it is making the same fundamental error, regardless of what specifically they think the problems and solutions are. With the example above, I'm trying to show how that thought iterates out into even basic statements about observable reality, like "chance exists".

Conservative is a lifestyle choice, not an innate identity. Editors control more newspaper columns than surgeons, that's not a social injustice, that's just people doing their thing.

How can we tell without a few centuries of affirmative action?

The writeup is still in progress, but I want to try to at least communicate some portion of the insight in the meantime.

Let's leave aside "Red" and "Blue" as labels, and substitute "A" and "B". From Orwell's "politics and the English Language", here's an example of the same idea written written two different ways:

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Let's call the first style "A" and the second style "B". Obviously the two are quite different, and Orwell, being a master of composition, has intentionally written the second to be bad and wrong. Let's ignore aesthetics completely, and not care at all about which is more pleasing to the eye or ear.

I think there's a significant and irreducible difference between the two formulations, and a way to try to begin describing it would be to say that "A" presents itself as on the inside looking out, and "B" presenting as from the outside looking in. I would say further that the former is better than the latter, because there is no "outside", and presenting as though one is "outside" is fundamentally dishonest. In this way, the passage shows that the way one talks about something reveals the way that one thinks about something, and that some ways of thinking are better than others.

Does that description make sense to you?

Ah, thanks much. None of those are the actual exchange, but they are part of the lead-up to it, as he and I started poking at each other more and more. This and this are close preludes, and probably contain most of the information, but it took an actual head-on argument about it to drive the point home.