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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3560 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This is because postmodernism is a framework by which one could conclude, quite rationally, that the Marxist mission and the Marxist historical narrative (ie. dialectical materialism) were wrong or at least substantially irrelevant and/or not necessary.

Well of course , because it can criticize anything and its conclusions are arbitrary.

I would say Postmodernism is a revolt against enlightenment rationality, not a continuation of it, but the lineage of the idea doesn’t matter to me. Postmodernism is more than a criticism of grand narratives (bailey).

There are important questions that I deny and @FCfromSSC , @DaseindustriesLtd , @SecureSignals, the woke affirm (you probably too). Questions like:

[Do you agree] that available evidence pertaining to a given issue in some way is effectively infinite ?

That all beliefs we talk about here, ideological, political, religious, philosophical, are fundamentally not like our belief in Gravity?

That the Truth’s influence on people’s belief very rapidly tails off to nothing?

That belief in God is an axiom? [all FC, paraphrased]

That popular opinion is downstream of deliberate political forces molding it (I add the comment: as opposed to downstream from truth)? [Dase]

Dase’s bizarre “power worshipper” insult, as far as I can tell, comes from the foucauldian idea that truth is just a mask for power. So he hears power when I speak of Truth.

In that conversation, you were saying that if some body of myth won out in the public consciousness, it must have had the most merit. You were making the "might makes right" argument, as in "those narratives won, so they must have been the best." That is not my criteria for whether a narrative has merit:

Okay? Who cares? If people enjoy Superman more than conan the barbarian, if anti-hitler arguments win out in the court of public opinion in New York 1945 as well as in practice in Berlin 1945, if ‘jewish science’ produces better results than ‘purely aryan science’, then that is a far better test of their worth than to try to divine the ulterior motives of the creators through their identity. Everyone has an identity and ulterior motives.

Notice you concede the argument "everyone has an identity and ulterior motives." Yes, they do. So why not try to understand them when it comes to something like Captain America or Superman? You are saying the ulterior motives don't matter, all that matter is that they won in the marketplace of ideas. But why did they win? Because they created effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, not because they were "right." What is right does not always win in the court of public opinion, which anyone here should admit.

I also put science in there. So are you saying that science produced by jews 'won'(ie, worked) because it was effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, and not because it was right?

And again, I do not believe that might makes right, or that what is right always wins in the court of public opinion, but it is correlated with it (that's why you cited american public opinion in 1939 to defend your isolationist views).

I also put science in there. So are you saying that science produced by jews 'won'(ie, worked) because it was effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, and not because it was right?

I am about as far from SS in views as it is possible to be, and do not wish to support their argument, but you are so obviously wrong I cannot restrain myself.

Drop the Jewish part, I have zero interest in that.

We know for a certainty that "science" that is not in any way factual or true can "win", in the sense of being adopted as scientific fact society-wide, purely because of effective propaganda and memetic power, while being absolutely false in its factual claims. Fucking Freudianism did exactly that! Lysenkoism was forced at gunpoint, but Freud's bullshit rewrote vast chunks of our society, based on fucking nothing beyond a story people were primed to believe. His disciples continued the scam, and their disciples continued the scam, and it's still fucking going!

I am about as far from SS in views as it is possible to be

I would dispute that, obviously, given the battle lines in this discussion. So you refuse to proclaim that HBD is true out of fear it might help people like him, but have no compunction agreeing with him on the cornerstone of his epistemology. Looks like you have 'axioms' in common. And even though you can "choose to believe" less distateful things, your opinon, like his, will remain a lifeless copy of the real thing (an opinion guided there by the truth and subject to updates).

Fucking Freudianism did exactly that! Lysenkoism was forced at gunpoint, but Freud's bullshit rewrote vast chunks of our society, based on fucking nothing beyond a story people were primed to believe. His disciples continued the scam, and their disciples continued the scam, and it's still fucking going!

He had and has his detractors. But more importantly, why does an error invalidate the whole system? It is absurd to deny the signal because it wasn't strong enough that one time. Last time, you tried to put a barrier in your epistemology between ideology-like and gravity-like knowledge, but postmodernism burned through it as I expected, and now you're questioning gravity.

So you refuse to proclaim that HBD is true out of fear it might help people like him, but have no compunction agreeing with him on the cornerstone of his epistemology.

Strong «I smoke to spite Hitler» energy.

Alternatively, @FCfromSSC just disagrees with him on race and probably other more weighty object-level matters (disagrees with me too), but most everyone accepts that social reality is socially constructed, in precisely the sense that it can systematically deviate from implications of honest scientific investigation, both on the level of a domain-specific narrative and on the meta-level of occasionally prioritizing narratives over evidence and narratively compelling beliefs over epistemically sound ones.

There's no smoking gun here, buddy: it's your epistemology that is the conspicuously deviant sort.

And it's not even consistent, I've pointed out a number of trivial holes and you just angrily shout to not notice them.

But more importantly, why does an error invalidate the whole system?

Because there is no principled way to delineate «the whole system». History is not a laboratory, everything is a one-off, nothing is truly replicable. Early 20th century psychology had happened exactly once, and got dominated by Freudian bullshit. At the same time, Communism with its blatant lies had dominated much of Eurasia, and in Germany this was countered by you-know-who. If anything, this shows us that grand narratives patently work. And this is indeed fucking strong evidence to ask whether you might also be living in the middle of one such grand narrative – or more. No matter how much it vexes you to adopt the «postmodernist» mindset.

«Postmodernists» actually make a strong, evidence-based point – because modernism fucking sucked for their generation.

and now you're questioning gravity.

Questioning gravity is good. That's how we can study anything nontrivial at all. It's just there are no sound reasons to conclude that gravity doesn't exist (whatever that means), so this questioning, normally, ends with (perhaps qualified) affirmation. This is not in any way a guarantee for any topic.

Strong «I smoke to spite Hitler» energy.

I wouldn't hide the truth or choose arguments by associates anyway, so the FC 'directed ideological cleaning' process is a mystery to me. Who knows what you guys smoke.

but most everyone accepts that social reality is socially constructed in precisely the sense that it can systematically deviate from implications of honest scientific investigation, both on the level of a domain-specific narrative and on the meta-level of occasionally prioritizing narratives over evidence and narratively compelling beliefs over epistemically sound ones.

Original motte and bailey. Motte is ‘reality is partly socially mediated’.

Because there is no principled way to delineate «the whole system». History is not a laboratory, everything is a one-off, nothing is truly replicable.

Okay I disagree, it's just a weaker signal of the exact same process as science in a laboratory. It is by categorizing and linking distinct events that we can understand the world.

So according to you, if you quote history, it's just meaningless. No conclusions are allowed if a hostile head of state repeatedly violates the terms of the appeasement he gets, while another doesn’t? All completely independent events, no predictive value?

«Postmodernists» actually make a strong, evidence-based point – because modernism fucking sucked for their generation.

I see postmodernism does exist as a distinct concept when you want it to. Please just fucking tell me what term I am allowed to use for the sweeping epistemological changes you demand.

I’m ready to compare the achievements of modernism against postmodernism anytime you want.

Grasping at straws.

More effort than this, please.

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