I wish we had a dozen or so people here with these skills and specializing in different fields. We would be the the go to source for all things that need research.
I love everything about that article.
But I haven’t figured out what to do when the majority of a population is emotionally bound to what the cranks are selling. What do you do when the majority could not care less about critical thinking and they believe that their “facts” are being covered up? When emotions override critical thought.
I try to keep in mind something Michael Moore pointed out, that women got the right to vote when they couldn’t vote.
For me, it might be a symptom of having grown up in a time when it appeared young people’s ideas were being embraced, when the human cost of war was talked about just as much or more than the glory of victory and I thought that was how the world would continue to grow. I thought things would just keep getting better and got discouraged and looked for blame when that didn’t happen.
Some of those values have survived, like how we have avoided a third world war so far, and actually dismantled some of the weapons that were built for it. Some of the “crank” ideas have also survived, like partriarchy and authoritarianism.
So, what we do is the same things that have been done for centuries. Science and enlightenment didn’t solve everything, and in fact they were not implemented well and had problems almost immediately. Science is designed to recognize our limitations and enlightenment is the realization that we are what we are. That might sound like complacency, as if I’m saying nothing can be done about anything. But I started this with a comment on how progress is made, not on how we are screwed and can’t change anything.
You get Jan 6 insurrection.
The parolees are now exploring the potential for suing the government for civil rights violations.
Now the movement that sprang up around the defendants, who often call themselves “J6ers,” isn’t finished. Some said they’re planning to sue for money, claiming civil rights violations. They also want investigations into the former officials who prosecuted the cases — probes that are already underway from congressional Republicans and from another of Trump’s Day 1 executive actions.
Apparently these peopledo not believe in voting anymore. You want to change government, just go hang some people like the vice-president and kill some cops.
If you land in jail and get pardoned by the guy who got “voted” in , you can sue for “civil rights violations”. This is some twisted logic.
They say the same thing about you. Blaming them is like blaming Vietnam soldiers for the war. They were told by authorities that their vote was stolen. Their core value is belief in voting. The problem is not the outcome of the insurrection, that’s a symptom. it starts with propaganda, that is possible because of bad education, allowing everyone from their grandma to millionaire “journalists” to blast the same message, and make it seem normal.
You and me fighting with the moron with a gun is exactly what the sources of the propaganda want.
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I like to say there are no non-trivial absolute truths. I has something to do with the access problem. We don’t have direct access to physical reality so we cannot know the thing itself. The same problem exist within the cultural space. We don’t have direct access to intentions. We have mirror neurons that give us a sense of what other people are feeling but feeling what some one else is feeling does not tell you that much about intentions in complex social relationships. What you call the non-trivial aspects. The areas where something is not obvious.
One of the reasons mirror neurons evolved is it is useful in telling what a predator is likely to do. If a lion feels full and just walking by the antelope knows it can just keep grazing. If the lion is hungry and tense that is a danger sign. They also evolved for infant care because infants have little communication ability. In this kinds of simple relationships mirror neurons are fairly reliable. Of course mirror neurons are also useful in social organization. Who you can trust and who you can’t. Along with these system we could describe as empathy however evolved systems for lying. Cryptic sexual selection and conflict being excellent examples. You can in a way say people are lying all the time consciously or subconsciously. It turns out the best lies are those the person telling them believes. You can see a bit of this in manners. If manners are sufficiently habituated they smooth social interaction without either party knowing the intentions of the other and in a way from knowing their own intentions in the moment.
I recently have been playing with ChatGPT and I made an unpleasant discovery. We are like best buds. The system rationalizes whatever I say. It does so better than I do. It makes you feel almost as if you are a robot talking to a robot. If you don’t see the connection to the above here it is. We often confuse rationality with confirmation. We evolved to conform to whatever social environment we find ourselves in without consciously evaluating it. In my relationship with the bot my beliefs are confirmed by it’s highly rational architecture.
Expanding on this idea you can see instincts as highly rational. They evolved to increase fitness in the environment they evolved in. The problem is we do not live in that environment. Our emotions are out of sync with the environment we do live in. A good deal of confusion arises out of the idea we are wet robots. Just as DNA is not an instruction set for building a robot but rather a set of chemical instructions to reproduce the environment in which an organism reevolves our instincts are not a set of instruction for the robot. Depending on the complexity of the organism there is a good deal of behavioral flexibility built in. The instincts however are fixed in a sense, they don’t update to the current environment. They are designed to not evolve but to primarily maintain behavioral reproductive fidelity. To overcome conscious introduction of variants that may interfere with something like reproduction. In a way to remove the focus on self preservation.
The implications are self evident. Do not trust that you know what your own intentions are.
But it was not the authority that told them so. It was the propaganda machine of the loser who told them so, in spite of the assurances by the authority that there was NO fraud.
How many court cases were filed that lost on the merits?
The vote was not stolen but they believed it !!!
I think you misunderstood what I meant by authorities. I mean anyone they consider above them, anyone with a title or position that assumes to be correct. That’s distinct from facts and demonstrable data. Authority as in power and control, not an expert or qualified source.
I appreciate that progress has been made over time. But progress ebbs and flows. Since the recent global trend is authoritarian populism , and strictly authoritarianism (Russia/North Korea), it is difficult to see progress while we are utterly incapable of controlling our rape of the planet, pollution, and AGW, while hate crimes continue to grow and income inequality runs rampant as republicans continue to coddle the insanely rich.
That “propaganda machine” is their perceived authority.
Edit to add: you can’t say the POTUS is not an authority!
I understood but wanted make clear that the perceived authority did not come from true authority but from “falsely assumed authority”.
Trump insisted that he lost because the election was rigged and he was still president.
Some pardoned convicts are contemplating bringing suit for civil rights violation, can you believe it?
Look up the definition. The first one is like “police”, they aren’t judges but sometimes they carry out executions and are allowed to do it. The law says you can’t run from them, that’s a crime, it doesn’t matter if they truly believe you committed a crime or not, if you run, that’s a crime. It’s extremely difficult to prosecute abuse of their powers. Currently, we having a Constitutional crisis over this definition.
The authority of an expert in a field might be more commonly used in intellectual discussions like on CFI but it is the less common definition. Neither definition is “false”.
Like an investment, past performance is not an indication of future returns. Human capacity for compassion is not a guarantee of survival beyond any reasonable measure of the survival of any species. For me, it is a reason to hope. Hope however it’s not blind to reality.
People can be both compassionate and ignorant.
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