This seems like a community that requires every user to agree with its particular beliefs. If that’s wrong, correct me, but that’s the impression I got from reading the introductory post.
So my question is, do you have no place at all for people that might disagree with you?
And if not, doesn’t that allow for the possibility of being stuck in an echo chamber and keeping out people who might understand things better than you?
Also, please direct me to another place online where I might simply discuss my disagreements with others without having to sign up to their beliefs, if you know of any. And either way, I advise you to create a space for that here. You can very easily separate one part of the community from the other, unless you fear that the one I’m describing would prove to be popular even with those currently satisfied with the older.
You’re also proving yourselves to be very unapproachable to the average person that doesn’t want to read a bunch of documents before they can talk to people or be policed by upvotes(Jesus). Does it not occur to anyone to maximise some level of good ethos among the population that wouldn’t sign up for accepting what amounts to a religion?
No matter how bad faith this will surely be construed, it is in fact meant to be constructive and Socratic, but doubtless no community that moderates itself in this way could easily conceive of the virtues of open discourse of the kind I am both attempting and encouraging here. I am curious as to any answer from whomever it might be. Thank you.
This seems like a community that requires every user to agree with its particular beliefs.
That’s not true, this community has people disagreeing on most beliefs. You don’t need to agree with any particular belief. However if you want to argue against a position it’s useful to understand the position you are arguing with well enough that you can make an interesting argument against it.
My issue is with the implicit expectation that to hold a successful conversation with someone here you have to first do your own research on their positions. This is not how I understand a Socratic conversation to work, and I hold such a conversation as the ideal. Socrates did not ask his interlocutors to go familiarise themselves with his arguments. He simply made them in real time.
Is this not the ideal? Is this not an expectation here?
Basically, you are saying that scientific conversations don’t follow your ideals because you need to do work to familiarize yourself with the existing knowledge to take part in a scientific conversation.
If you want to create a community that develops specialized knowledge of any kind you run into problems when you spent too much time dealing with people who are ignorant of the discourse. That’s especially true for online communities that don’t have other filters.
Larry McEnerney does a good job of explaining how to participate in a written discourse in general.
No, I think that conversations in general don’t happen as they should for the sake of doing philosophy, which is a lot more important than doing science, such as I imagine you to understand it.
There is no science of persuasion so evolved as to convince the entire world of what it should do, or indeed, for discovering what it should do. That is the domain of philosophy, and in fact always will be. That doesn’t mean that science can’t help, only that it can’t actually do the most relevant part. That’s because the very nature of our experience will always evolve, and our problems and ability to talk meaningfully about them as well. Science seeks to establish the nature of things that for all intents and purposes stay the same, or at least remain stable for a very long time. In any case, it’s a different sort of project. That doesn’t mean the two can’t coincide, it is really a matter of how they should be done that differs.
To approach a question of meaning or politics scientifically in the way you describe is to assume that you know the answers from the start. What if your methodology is inherently flawed, and particularly in such a way as to be blind to the very ways in which it is flawed?
Let us suppose for the sake of the argument that the parameters which you choose for conversation don’t allow either for those who understand what should be done better than you to actually demonstrate it to you, or that it doesn’t allow for persuading as much of the world as you require insofar as what you believe is in fact more adaptive. How would you know? If you take it for granted that this couldn’t possibly happen, aren’t you inherently arguing that this approach to the problem is implicitly perfect? Should we ever act like we know anything with that level of certainty? And what if we’re wrong?
Where is the harm in engaging in simpler conversation? Wouldn’t that allow us to both make sure that we’re not missing anything and to better persuade people of things they don’t yet understand?
To approach a question of meaning or politics scientifically in the way you describe is to assume that you know the answers from the start. What if your methodology is inherently flawed, and particularly in such a way as to be blind to the very ways in which it is flawed?
If a method is inherently flawed understanding the method and the reasoning for it’s use important for making a good argument that it’s flawed. If you take physics, there are plenty of people who don’t understand special relativity and you want to argue that it’s flawed. Engaging with those people is not useful for physicists. To the extend that there are flaws in physical theories it takes a lot of understanding of existing physics to make an argument that’s actually useful to bring forward the field of physics.
In philosophy actually understanding the position of the people you want to convince matters as well.
By that same token, this entire forum should understand my position rather than me its. Except I don’t ask anyone to read things to have a conversation with me, I can make my arguments in real time because they’re real arguments and not false ones that get lost in such obfuscating requests.
Also, please note you’re comparing the way you have conversations to physics. That is rather ludicrous to say the least.
Your philosophy is not that complex. You don’t know how to have conversations. That is transparent from the very fact that you refuse to have them. You are the ones that need to have conversations with people and study them, and yet you reject them, treating access to you like some sort of privilege. This is completely opposite from what you should be doing as people who are incredibly worried about the future and need the rest of the world’s help in that regard, which I assume most of you are, but you have been corrupted by your own ridiculous and arbitrary rules to have turned out to be actively alienating the world instead, even when it comes at your doorstep(you do the same to it elsewhere).
Do consider that you are not as a whole as smart as you think and assume some of Socrates’ simplicity in that respect.
By that same token, this entire forum should understand my position rather than me its.
Why would anyone care about your position? You seem to care about the position of people in this forum given that you are here. If you don’t care, go somewhere else. Write your own blog.
The point of a forum is to facilitate a shared discourse. If you want to join that discourse the forum is there. If you want to start your own discourse, you are free to set up your own forum or blog.
Your philosophy is not that complex.
It takes less work to familiarize yourself with the philosophic positions of this forum than it takes to develop the physics knowledge necessary to engage in academic physics.
The fact that this needs less work is no good argument for the work not needing to be done.
Humans having finite time means that they should be perpetually open to criticism to make sure that they’re not doing the wrong thing, and not preselect that criticism in such a way as to make it extremely hard for any meaningful sort to go through, and be sincere in this matter, or otherwise put, what I urge people to do.
This seems like a community that requires every user to agree with its particular beliefs. If that’s wrong, correct me, but that’s the impression I got from reading the introductory post.
So my question is, do you have no place at all for people that might disagree with you?
And if not, doesn’t that allow for the possibility of being stuck in an echo chamber and keeping out people who might understand things better than you?
Also, please direct me to another place online where I might simply discuss my disagreements with others without having to sign up to their beliefs, if you know of any. And either way, I advise you to create a space for that here. You can very easily separate one part of the community from the other, unless you fear that the one I’m describing would prove to be popular even with those currently satisfied with the older.
You’re also proving yourselves to be very unapproachable to the average person that doesn’t want to read a bunch of documents before they can talk to people or be policed by upvotes(Jesus). Does it not occur to anyone to maximise some level of good ethos among the population that wouldn’t sign up for accepting what amounts to a religion?
No matter how bad faith this will surely be construed, it is in fact meant to be constructive and Socratic, but doubtless no community that moderates itself in this way could easily conceive of the virtues of open discourse of the kind I am both attempting and encouraging here. I am curious as to any answer from whomever it might be. Thank you.
That’s not true, this community has people disagreeing on most beliefs. You don’t need to agree with any particular belief. However if you want to argue against a position it’s useful to understand the position you are arguing with well enough that you can make an interesting argument against it.
My issue is with the implicit expectation that to hold a successful conversation with someone here you have to first do your own research on their positions. This is not how I understand a Socratic conversation to work, and I hold such a conversation as the ideal. Socrates did not ask his interlocutors to go familiarise themselves with his arguments. He simply made them in real time.
Is this not the ideal? Is this not an expectation here?
Basically, you are saying that scientific conversations don’t follow your ideals because you need to do work to familiarize yourself with the existing knowledge to take part in a scientific conversation.
If you want to create a community that develops specialized knowledge of any kind you run into problems when you spent too much time dealing with people who are ignorant of the discourse. That’s especially true for online communities that don’t have other filters.
Larry McEnerney does a good job of explaining how to participate in a written discourse in general.
No, I think that conversations in general don’t happen as they should for the sake of doing philosophy, which is a lot more important than doing science, such as I imagine you to understand it.
There is no science of persuasion so evolved as to convince the entire world of what it should do, or indeed, for discovering what it should do. That is the domain of philosophy, and in fact always will be. That doesn’t mean that science can’t help, only that it can’t actually do the most relevant part. That’s because the very nature of our experience will always evolve, and our problems and ability to talk meaningfully about them as well. Science seeks to establish the nature of things that for all intents and purposes stay the same, or at least remain stable for a very long time. In any case, it’s a different sort of project. That doesn’t mean the two can’t coincide, it is really a matter of how they should be done that differs.
To approach a question of meaning or politics scientifically in the way you describe is to assume that you know the answers from the start. What if your methodology is inherently flawed, and particularly in such a way as to be blind to the very ways in which it is flawed?
Let us suppose for the sake of the argument that the parameters which you choose for conversation don’t allow either for those who understand what should be done better than you to actually demonstrate it to you, or that it doesn’t allow for persuading as much of the world as you require insofar as what you believe is in fact more adaptive. How would you know? If you take it for granted that this couldn’t possibly happen, aren’t you inherently arguing that this approach to the problem is implicitly perfect? Should we ever act like we know anything with that level of certainty? And what if we’re wrong?
Where is the harm in engaging in simpler conversation? Wouldn’t that allow us to both make sure that we’re not missing anything and to better persuade people of things they don’t yet understand?
If a method is inherently flawed understanding the method and the reasoning for it’s use important for making a good argument that it’s flawed. If you take physics, there are plenty of people who don’t understand special relativity and you want to argue that it’s flawed. Engaging with those people is not useful for physicists. To the extend that there are flaws in physical theories it takes a lot of understanding of existing physics to make an argument that’s actually useful to bring forward the field of physics.
In philosophy actually understanding the position of the people you want to convince matters as well.
By that same token, this entire forum should understand my position rather than me its. Except I don’t ask anyone to read things to have a conversation with me, I can make my arguments in real time because they’re real arguments and not false ones that get lost in such obfuscating requests.
Also, please note you’re comparing the way you have conversations to physics. That is rather ludicrous to say the least.
Your philosophy is not that complex. You don’t know how to have conversations. That is transparent from the very fact that you refuse to have them. You are the ones that need to have conversations with people and study them, and yet you reject them, treating access to you like some sort of privilege. This is completely opposite from what you should be doing as people who are incredibly worried about the future and need the rest of the world’s help in that regard, which I assume most of you are, but you have been corrupted by your own ridiculous and arbitrary rules to have turned out to be actively alienating the world instead, even when it comes at your doorstep(you do the same to it elsewhere).
Do consider that you are not as a whole as smart as you think and assume some of Socrates’ simplicity in that respect.
Why would anyone care about your position? You seem to care about the position of people in this forum given that you are here. If you don’t care, go somewhere else. Write your own blog.
The point of a forum is to facilitate a shared discourse. If you want to join that discourse the forum is there. If you want to start your own discourse, you are free to set up your own forum or blog.
It takes less work to familiarize yourself with the philosophic positions of this forum than it takes to develop the physics knowledge necessary to engage in academic physics.
The fact that this needs less work is no good argument for the work not needing to be done.
Because humans have finite time
Humans having finite time means that they should be perpetually open to criticism to make sure that they’re not doing the wrong thing, and not preselect that criticism in such a way as to make it extremely hard for any meaningful sort to go through, and be sincere in this matter, or otherwise put, what I urge people to do.