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"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
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13d ago
...yeah, if that's all correct then it would be hard to call it Christianity.
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13d ago
I was looking for examples of specific theological beliefs or other aspects of Mormonism that might render Mormonism incompatible with Christianity as it's traditionally conceived. Looks like Quantumfreakonomics has it covered though.
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14d ago
But can you provide a more detailed explanation?
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14d ago
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians.
...how come?
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14d ago
Can I ask where you live and your cultural background?
I live in America and I like anime.
This makes sense when meals lack value beyond base nutritional requirements and expedience.
Can a meal -- particularly a certain type of meal, repeated by custom on a certain schedule, with the appropriate pomp and circumstance, etc -- be imbued with deep ritualistic significance? Indubitably. But then, it's not just the literal food that acts as the "bearer" of culture alone in this case, but the body of ritual surrounding it, and the network of social and historical relations that that ritual exists in.
Immigrants coming to the US to sell their wares like any other fungible anonymized commodity on the free market would then represent the destruction of culture rather than its continuance, because the network of human relations that constituted the actual center of culture has been obviated. (At the very least, people who think that eating lasagna is the same thing as "experiencing another culture" are actually doing nothing of the sort.)
What other lens would they use at that point?
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14d ago
Aside from language, what is more foundational to the lived experience of a culture than its food?
Off the top of my head: attitudes and practices surrounding religion, childbearing (are you encouraged to even have kids at all, or at you an antinatalist?), cohabitation with immediate family and/or extended family, career choice (are you encouraged to stick with the family business, or do you have an individualist culture where "doing your own thing" is an aspiration?), different types of long-term planning (are you a square if you refuse to blow your paycheck right away, or are you an idiot if you do blow it?), respect towards elders and superiors (how unthinkable would it be to challenge your boss's ideas during a meeting?), freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression, sexual ethics, etc.
To be clear, there is no "lived experience of a culture" for a tourist on a one week vacation, that's an absurdity. The "lived experience of a culture" can only unfold over a lifetime. A culture is a concrete mode of life, as distinguished from other possible concrete modes of life.
Food is not culture. Foot binding, widow burning, jus primae noctis -- that's culture. To the extent that we increasingly find genuine cultural difference to be unimaginable, this is only a statement about the shrinking horizon of our imagination, and not a statement about the nature of culture.
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14d ago
Why does it always come back to food?
No, I don't believe that this is just an idiosyncrasy of Yglesias, or just a fun example that he picked for no real reason. This is a recurring pattern. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard throughout my life "we live in a world with a large diversity of cultures, for example, different people eat different types of food...". Food is the first thing you think of when you think of "culture"? Really? The "we need immigrants for their food" argument is not unique to Yglesias, this is a known talking point.
Just last night I was having a conversation with a woman who claimed that she had a low opinion of Italy because when she went there on vacation, she didn't like the food. It's utterly mind-boggling to me that someone would judge an entire country based on such superficial criteria, but, here we are.
(I mean, frankly I should already know why it always comes back to food: Nietzsche suggested in GoM that a people's philosophical outlook is an epiphenomenon of their dietary choices. Perhaps this is the grug-genius alliance in action, and I am the seething midwit who insists on being unnecessarily contrarian. I dunno man... it just strikes me as an obliviousness of the fact that people even have a psychological or spiritual existence that extends beyond their material means of sustenance.)
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14d ago
I told someone ages ago I was going to write an effortpost on horror and then I never did, but if there are multiple interested parties then that might motivate me to finally get around to it...
Long story short is that the sublime is intrinsically horrific.
Most "contemporary horror films" are pretty bad (for many of the same reasons that formulaic genreslop in general is bad). But there are many works that have horror "elements" (David Lynch films are my go-to example) that are brilliant.
Even the most hardcore fans of mainstream horror movies tend to look down on jumpscares. They're fun every once in a while, but ultimately a jumpscare is just a pure physiological response, like pinching someone on the arm; it's the lowest form of horror, there's nothing conceptually interesting about it.
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14d ago
…bot post? (Sorry to be suspicious!)
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15d ago
I'd be much happier if philosophers kept it to themselves.
There are plenty of other types of academics (in both STEM and the humanities) who are also doing work that has roughly the same level of impact on you and your life (~zero). Philosophers don't seem to be much different from those guys. Why single philosophy out for such ire?
Have you ever been in any "philosophy" circle?
Several (both online and irl).
It quickly becomes unreadable because every single person will come up with their own definition for already defined words to match one of their theories, and then will use them in concert to try to make their thesis a mathematical proof.
I don't believe I've ever seen anyone actually do this. I can imagine what it would look like, but I've never actually encountered it. The greatest and most common danger is that you run into people who are just kind of dumb and don't have anything interesting to say. But that happens in everything, not just philosophy.
There are a number of papers in the analytic philosophy literature that try to present themselves as having achieved a "mathematical" level of rigor. Maybe this is what you're talking about. But you're incorrect to say that those papers are "unintelligible". Usually it's just a matter of understanding how the key terms are defined; hopefully the author will define terms that they're using in an unusual or idiosyncratic way, and if they don't, it's probably because they assume that you already know the definition of the term based on prior experience with other relevant literature (physicists do not use the word "work" in the way that people do in ordinary conversation, but that doesn't mean they're obligated to define it for you every time they use "work" in the physics-sense).
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15d ago
The purpose of the public school system is to 1) provide state-funded daycare, and 2) force kids to socialize with each other and give them hands-on experience with navigating social hierarchies. The "teaching" and "learning" of objective information, to the extent that it occurs, ranks at a distant third (or it might rank even lower, depending on how much weight you assign to "Pavlovian conditioning with regards to how to follow orders" and "repeated IQ testing and sorting based on future potential", and how tightly interwoven you think those things are with the actual teaching/learning).
So in order to fulfill (1) and (2), you still need to gather all the kids under one roof with adult supervisors.
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17d ago
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17d ago
I share Nietzsche's opinion that the OT makes for better reading overall.
Do you have a favorite Gospel of the New Testament? It has been suggested that the four Gospels correspond to the four Keirsey MBTI temperaments (SP artisans, SJ guardians, NT rationalists, NF idealists) and were written to be persuasive to different audiences:
"The reason there are four Gospels in the Bible has, since antiquity, been argued by Christians to be be because there are four different kinds of people. The Gospel of Mark portrays Jesus as an action-oriented doer, or as we would say, an SP type. The Gospel of Matthew recounts Jesus's heritage and lineage within the Jewish community and shows us why he is the rightful heir to the messianic throne, just as it focuses intensely on the proclamation of laws in the Sermon on the Mount; that's to say, the Gospel of Matthew shows Jesus as an SJ type. Then there is the Gospel of Luke, which recounts the story in a more critical and detached way, emphasizing abstraction and intellectualism, or as we would say, Jesus as an NT type. Finally there is the Gospel of John, which emphasizes the spiritual qualities of Jesus. It is much more ideal-oriented, concerned with identity, and contains more theological deliberations than the other three. This Gospel shows Jesus as an NF type."
Conveniently, you can also draw a parallel here with the four Hippocratic temperaments (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic).
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18d ago
don't understand the effect weird porn ("toaster fucking") has on the younger generations, especially since they get squeamish if you discuss details.
I’m usually skeptical of the “porn made me do it” explanations.
I was having AGP fantasies before I had ever even been on the internet. And when I first discovered the porn, there was no “rabbit hole”, there was just an immediate reaction of “damn this shit is lit”.
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19d ago
Only boring people have nothing to hide.
We're all monkeys, cops are the dominant monkeys (in at least a certain restricted sense), and yes, they do in fact have the right to make you eat a certain amount of shit. Civilization could not function otherwise. (Arguably, ceding that the state has a legitimate monopoly on violence already constitutes cuckoldry in a certain sense; but it's a necessary cuckoldry.)
(I made this comment because I’m interested in how notions of pride and honor are “centered” differently in different individuals, and I’m hoping that further responses will provide illumination in this direction…)
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22d ago
If he is Turok then we should be thankful that he has been gracious enough to return, as Turok never should have been banned in the first place.
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22d ago
The best things in life are pointless.
Masturbation is pointless too, but damn if it doesn't feel good.
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22d ago
Maybe because there is in fact a fact of the matter one can appeal to.
There is (seemingly) no (obvious) empirical fact that will settle the debate over whether MTF transsexuals are women, and yet the claim "Caitlin Jenner is still a man" would be censured very aggressively in lefty spaces.
The same goes for religious claims, ethical claims, all sorts of claims for which no empirical verification is possible.
The claim was that there's at least some theoretical yardstick some evidence that could be offered on many issues or some prediction that could be validated.
I previously argued that a sentence need not be empirically verifiable in order to be meaningful or truth-apt in general. So, if you're trying to assert that "being able to answer to a ground truth" just is the same as "being empirically verifiable", I would reject that.
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22d ago
I don’t think you would get any disagreement on questions like “Does Caitlin Jenner have testicles?” or “Does Caitlin Jenner have a considered, sincere belief that she is supposed to be a woman?”
Oh but you would!
Mereological nihilists deny the existence of testicles because they deny the existence of compound physical objects in general (often because of the same Sorites-style arguments that people use to attack conservative ontologies of gender in the first place).
Eliminative materialists deny the existence of beliefs, so they would deny that anyone believes that they are a man or a woman.
So, it turns out to be rather difficult to cleanly divide sentences into two groups of "these are the nice empirical truths that we can be certain of" and "these are the nonsensical philosophical claims that just come down to verbal disputes", because it turns out that almost every sentence you can think of is ultimately the subject of philosophical disagreement.
If you think there is a ground truth of the matter over whether testicles and beliefs exist, in spite of the philosophical disagreement concerning their existence, then it's not clear why you wouldn't think that there is a ground truth of the matter over whether women exist too (along with, presumably, some sort of criteria for determining whether an entity counts as a woman or not).
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22d ago
The overwhelming amount of theory has always been apologetics - start with a desired bottom line, derived from vibes which were absorbed from or imposed by the environment, and reason backwards until a good theory that just so happens to prove the bottom line
Sure. But, what else is there to do but press onward anyway?
In order to get an actual understanding of the Culture War, which is this forum's raison d'être, you have to theorize about the psychological and material motivations of different factions and individuals, you have to produce a unified narrative of historical causes, you have to take an accounting of the ethics and implied metaphysics of different positions, you have to have some notion of the aims of political activity in general... in short, you have to do philosophy.
Without a theoretical account of the Culture War and its constitutive elements, the forum is reduced to simply giving a factual account of current events, along with perhaps some strategizing and some sentimental commiserating with people who are on the same "side" as you. In other words, you'd just be fumbling about in the dark without any understanding of what's going on. A mere subject of historical forces rather than someone who might hope to know them.
unlike scientific theories
Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is. Researchers get invested in their own theories all the time even when there's no overt political content, "science advances one funeral at a time", etc.
philosophical theories have no ground truth to answer to
We just went over this. It certainly seems to be the case that philosophical claims are either true or false, just like most of the other ordinary types of claims that we're familiar with. MTF transsexuals are either women, or they aren't. There are either mind-independent ethical facts, or there aren't. There is either at least one conscious entity, or there isn't. The ground truth that these claims answer to is the same ground truth that everything else answers to: the facts of reality.
Of course, there have been many attempts throughout the history of philosophy to show that individual philosophical questions or classes of questions are in fact meaningless (in the neither-true-nor-false sense), contrary to initial appearances. But these types of arguments too depend on their own non-trivial assertions about reality.
However, this requires an actually diverse set of people willing to theoretise; and neither society at large, nor this forum in particular, has done anything to rein in the forces that compel people to just assimilate to one or another existing bottom line rather than hold onto their idiosyncrasies alone and weather hostility from all.
It's true, our present lack of intellectual diversity isn't really conducive to good discussion. But we still have substantial disagreements on this forum regarding AI, race and immigration, the ethics of sexuality, etc.
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22d ago
There's certain content -- certain types of gore, certain furry content, etc -- that gives me "the ick".
Sometimes I remember that many people get the same "ick" feeling from anime art in general, particularly the type of anime art that gets criticized as "overly-sexualized".
What are some times when you were reminded of the unbridgeable gap between different modes of perception?
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22d ago
No one talks philosophy or has a dignified intellectual persona.
The number of living humans who are actually interested in "talking philosophy" is minuscule. Even among people who are otherwise highly intelligent and capable. Even TheMotte these days is more interested in the concrete play-by-play of current events than anything theoretical. (Although frankly, this is probably not too different from the historical norm on TheMotte. Current events have always dominated the discussion. We went through an anomalously philosophical period around 2022-2023 due to the advent of AI, and since then have regressed to the mean.)
Be the change you want to see. Share some hot takes.
Talking about the same thing (the CW) for 10+ years gets old eventually.
I enjoyed the discussion we just had about Mormon theology. That was interesting and informative.
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