Okay, I think I understand what you mean that, since it’s impossible to fully comprehend climate change from first principles, it ends up being a political and social discussion (and anyway, that’s empirically the case). Nonetheless, I think there’s something categorically in the physical sciences than the the more social facts.
I think perfect knowledge of climate science would tend towards convergence, whereas at least some Social Issues (Ukraine being a possible example) just don’t work that way. The Chomsky example is Germane: prior to 92, his work on politics was all heavily cited and based on primary sources, and pretty much as solid academically as you could ask for (See for example “The Chomsky Reader”) and we already disagree on this.
With regards Ukraine, I think intelligent people with lots of information might end up diverging even more as to their opinions on how much violence each side should be willing to threaten, use, and display in an argument about squiggly lines on map blobs, given more information. Henry Kissinger ended up not even agreeing with himself from week to week, and he’s probably as qualified an expert on this matter as any of us. I think it’s fair to suggest that no number of facts regarding Ukraine are going to bring the kind of convergence you would see if we could upload the sum of climate science into each of our human minds.
Even if I am wrong in the Ukraine case, do you think there are at least some social realities that if you magically downloaded the full spectrum of factual information into everyone’s mind, people’s opinions might still diverge? Doesn’t that differ from a hard science where they would tend to converge if you understood all the facts? Doesn’t this indicate a major difference of categories?
Another way of looking at it: Social realities are not nearly as deterministic on factual truth as accurate conclusions in the hard sciences are. They are always vastly more stochastic. Even looking at the fields, the correlation coefficients and R2 for whole models in Sociology, at it’s absolute best, are nothing at all compared to the determinism you can get in Physics and Chemistry.
I think that the people who are truthseeking well do converge in their views on Ukraine. Around me I see tribal loyalty to Kremlin propaganda, to Ukrainian/NAFO propaganda, to anti-Americanism (enter Noam Chomsky) and/or to America First. Ironically, anti-American and America First people end up believing similar things, because they both give credence to Kremlin propaganda that fits into their respective worldviews. But I certainly have a sense of convergence among high-rung observers who follow the war closely and have “average” (or better yet scope-sensitive/linear) morality. Convergence seems limited by the factors I mentioned though (fog of war, poor rigor in primary/secondary sources). P.S. A key thing about Chomsky is that his focus is all about America, and to understand the situation properly you must understand Putin and Russia (and to a lesser extent Ukraine). I recommend Vexler’s video on Chomsky/Ukraine as well as this video from before the invasion. I also follow several other analysts and English-speaking Russians (plus Russian Dissent translated from Russian) who give a picture of Russia/Putin generally compatible with Vexler’s.
do you think there are at least some social realities that if you magically downloaded the full spectrum of factual information into everyone’s mind, people’s opinions might still diverge
Yes, except I’d use the word “disagree” rather than “diverge”. People have different moral intuitions, different brain structures / ways of processing info, and different initial priors that would cause disagreements. Some people want genocide, for example, and while knowing all the facts may decrease (or in many cases eliminate) that desire, it seems like there’s a fundamental difference in moral intuition between people that sometimes like genocide and those of us who never do, and I don’t see how knowing all the facts accurately would resolve that.
What you are actually making is something like a “lesser of two evils” argument or some bet on tradeoffs paying off that one party may buy and another may not. Having explored the reasoning this far, I would suggest this is one class of circumstances where even if you beamed all the facts into two people’s minds, who both had “Average” morality, this is one of the situations where there would still tend to be disagreement. This definitely doesn’t hinge on someone wanting something bad, like genocide, for the disagreement. People could both want the same outcomes and diverge in their conclusions with the facts beamed into their minds in this class of situations (which, to my original argument, differs tremendously from physics).
I hadn’t seen old man Chomsky talk about Ukraine prior to your video above. I think though, if you look at his best work, you might be able to softly mollify the impact, but it’s not like he’s pulling his ideas about, say, every single US action in South America and the Middle East being very bad for the people they claimed to help, out of some highly skewed view. Those border on fairly obvious, at any rate, and your video’s recasting him as a “voice of moral outrage” hinges on his off-the cuff interviews, not his heavily cited work (as I mentioned The Chomsky Reader, which is a different man than the one in the video)
Even setting him aside as a reference, looking at the recent history of US war, at the most generous, considering Russian badness and US badness, any “moral high-ground” argument for the US being good in this case will boil down to a lesser-of-two-evils assessment. Also looking at US history, you lose some of the “this is just an annexation” because US proxy war since 2014 would fit the pattern of pretty much everything the USA has done both recently and for the past 100 years.
Your point about also looking at Putin/Russia is fine, and it should be considered as well as practical solutions to the matter. I think we all would call Putin a criminal, this isn’t a question at hand. The question is if another US adventure, this time in Europe, is actually going to turn out all that well, or if Russia as a failed state will turn out well for Ukraine or Europe, or if this will turn Nuclear if you refuse to cede any ground, or if the Russia/China alliance will break or not, or for how long the US can even afford and support more wars, etc, etc. These are mostly practical matters that are indeterminate and make the intervention questionable. In practical senses, they present different good/bad tradeoffs and better/worse odds bets on outcomes to different parties that amount to weighing different “lesser evil” projections in the outcome. They don’t hinge on our moral intuitions differing at all.
(And again, all this differs in category and the way it behaves from Physics)
I don’t know what you are referring to in the first sentence, but the idea that this is a war between US and Russia (not Russia and Ukraine) is Russian propaganda (which doesn’t perfectly guarantee it’s BS, but it is BS.)
In any case, this discussion exemplifies my frustration with a world in which a site like I propose does not exist. I have my sources, you have yours, they disagree on the most basic facts, and nobody is citing evidence that would prove the case one way or another. Even if we did go deep into all the evidence, it would be sitting here in a place where no one searching for information about the Ukraine war will ever see it. I find it utterly ridiculous that most people are satisfied with this status quo.
Okay, I think I understand what you mean that, since it’s impossible to fully comprehend climate change from first principles, it ends up being a political and social discussion (and anyway, that’s empirically the case). Nonetheless, I think there’s something categorically in the physical sciences than the the more social facts.
I think perfect knowledge of climate science would tend towards convergence, whereas at least some Social Issues (Ukraine being a possible example) just don’t work that way. The Chomsky example is Germane: prior to 92, his work on politics was all heavily cited and based on primary sources, and pretty much as solid academically as you could ask for (See for example “The Chomsky Reader”) and we already disagree on this.
With regards Ukraine, I think intelligent people with lots of information might end up diverging even more as to their opinions on how much violence each side should be willing to threaten, use, and display in an argument about squiggly lines on map blobs, given more information. Henry Kissinger ended up not even agreeing with himself from week to week, and he’s probably as qualified an expert on this matter as any of us. I think it’s fair to suggest that no number of facts regarding Ukraine are going to bring the kind of convergence you would see if we could upload the sum of climate science into each of our human minds.
Even if I am wrong in the Ukraine case, do you think there are at least some social realities that if you magically downloaded the full spectrum of factual information into everyone’s mind, people’s opinions might still diverge? Doesn’t that differ from a hard science where they would tend to converge if you understood all the facts? Doesn’t this indicate a major difference of categories?
Another way of looking at it: Social realities are not nearly as deterministic on factual truth as accurate conclusions in the hard sciences are. They are always vastly more stochastic. Even looking at the fields, the correlation coefficients and R2 for whole models in Sociology, at it’s absolute best, are nothing at all compared to the determinism you can get in Physics and Chemistry.
I think that the people who are truthseeking well do converge in their views on Ukraine. Around me I see tribal loyalty to Kremlin propaganda, to Ukrainian/NAFO propaganda, to anti-Americanism (enter Noam Chomsky) and/or to America First. Ironically, anti-American and America First people end up believing similar things, because they both give credence to Kremlin propaganda that fits into their respective worldviews. But I certainly have a sense of convergence among high-rung observers who follow the war closely and have “average” (or better yet scope-sensitive/linear) morality. Convergence seems limited by the factors I mentioned though (fog of war, poor rigor in primary/secondary sources). P.S. A key thing about Chomsky is that his focus is all about America, and to understand the situation properly you must understand Putin and Russia (and to a lesser extent Ukraine). I recommend Vexler’s video on Chomsky/Ukraine as well as this video from before the invasion. I also follow several other analysts and English-speaking Russians (plus Russian Dissent translated from Russian) who give a picture of Russia/Putin generally compatible with Vexler’s.
Yes, except I’d use the word “disagree” rather than “diverge”. People have different moral intuitions, different brain structures / ways of processing info, and different initial priors that would cause disagreements. Some people want genocide, for example, and while knowing all the facts may decrease (or in many cases eliminate) that desire, it seems like there’s a fundamental difference in moral intuition between people that sometimes like genocide and those of us who never do, and I don’t see how knowing all the facts accurately would resolve that.
What you are actually making is something like a “lesser of two evils” argument or some bet on tradeoffs paying off that one party may buy and another may not. Having explored the reasoning this far, I would suggest this is one class of circumstances where even if you beamed all the facts into two people’s minds, who both had “Average” morality, this is one of the situations where there would still tend to be disagreement. This definitely doesn’t hinge on someone wanting something bad, like genocide, for the disagreement. People could both want the same outcomes and diverge in their conclusions with the facts beamed into their minds in this class of situations (which, to my original argument, differs tremendously from physics).
I hadn’t seen old man Chomsky talk about Ukraine prior to your video above. I think though, if you look at his best work, you might be able to softly mollify the impact, but it’s not like he’s pulling his ideas about, say, every single US action in South America and the Middle East being very bad for the people they claimed to help, out of some highly skewed view. Those border on fairly obvious, at any rate, and your video’s recasting him as a “voice of moral outrage” hinges on his off-the cuff interviews, not his heavily cited work (as I mentioned The Chomsky Reader, which is a different man than the one in the video)
Even setting him aside as a reference, looking at the recent history of US war, at the most generous, considering Russian badness and US badness, any “moral high-ground” argument for the US being good in this case will boil down to a lesser-of-two-evils assessment. Also looking at US history, you lose some of the “this is just an annexation” because US proxy war since 2014 would fit the pattern of pretty much everything the USA has done both recently and for the past 100 years.
Your point about also looking at Putin/Russia is fine, and it should be considered as well as practical solutions to the matter. I think we all would call Putin a criminal, this isn’t a question at hand. The question is if another US adventure, this time in Europe, is actually going to turn out all that well, or if Russia as a failed state will turn out well for Ukraine or Europe, or if this will turn Nuclear if you refuse to cede any ground, or if the Russia/China alliance will break or not, or for how long the US can even afford and support more wars, etc, etc. These are mostly practical matters that are indeterminate and make the intervention questionable. In practical senses, they present different good/bad tradeoffs and better/worse odds bets on outcomes to different parties that amount to weighing different “lesser evil” projections in the outcome. They don’t hinge on our moral intuitions differing at all.
(And again, all this differs in category and the way it behaves from Physics)
Maybe if we also included WW2 Germany and Japan to this reference group, the outcomes would be more of a mixed bag.
Then again, the argument might be that American foreign policy became bad after WW2.
I don’t know what you are referring to in the first sentence, but the idea that this is a war between US and Russia (not Russia and Ukraine) is Russian propaganda (which doesn’t perfectly guarantee it’s BS, but it is BS.)
In any case, this discussion exemplifies my frustration with a world in which a site like I propose does not exist. I have my sources, you have yours, they disagree on the most basic facts, and nobody is citing evidence that would prove the case one way or another. Even if we did go deep into all the evidence, it would be sitting here in a place where no one searching for information about the Ukraine war will ever see it. I find it utterly ridiculous that most people are satisfied with this status quo.