I just realized what bothers me about this quote. It seems boil down to Elster trying to admit that he was wrong without having to give credit to those who were right.
seer
Depends on whether your goal is to convince the person you’re talking to, or convince outside observers.
The correspondence theory of truth stopped making sense to me because there is nothing for it to correspond to.
It corresponds to reality.
As for what reality is, I like Philip K. Dick’s formulation: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
- 29 Mar 2015 17:50 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Request for Steelman: Non-correspondence concepts of truth by (
Yes, he does. The whole claim underlying the argument is that atheists on some level know rape and murder are wrong, they just can’t explain why.
Read this and count how many times you feel like you are being subjected to vacuous windbaggery: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Zero.
Also given your hangups about believing anything that could be perceived as “racist” you would do well to study that article more carefully.
It is easy to be safe as a conformist who just obeys.
Not necessarily. That depends on whether the social rules contains good advice. For example, in the Soviet Union blindly obeying all the official commands may very well cause you to starve. Hence most people cheated the system any way they could get away with. While as you observed they wouldn’t openly question the official doctrine, their actions tell a different story.
The problem is he starts with false premises that it is impermissible (or at least impolite) to question in public, such as that homeless people are perfectly normal people who are down on their luck. (Most homeless, especially long time homeless have a mental illness.) And then he proceeds to reason from them and expects people to agree.
I’m guessing that in practice means ranking websites by the popularity of their delusions. The problem is that you can’t distinguish facts from fictions without reference to the external world. Furthermore, given how bad wikipedia is at getting its “facts” wright about any vaguely controversial topic, I don’t have a lot of confidence in the ability of the internet to settle on the truth.
Edit: speaking of bad sources of “facts”, why are you treating New Scientist as a reasonable source?
I am afraid that if you start a political thread, you will get many comments about how “Cthulhu always swims left”
Just out of curiosity, I looked at the latest politics thread in Vaniver’s list. Despite being explicitly about NRx, in contains only two references to “Cthulhu”, both by people arguing against NRx.
and anyone who reacts negatively will be accused of being a “progressive” (which in their language means: not a neoreactionary).
Rather anyone who isn’t sufficiently progressive gets called a neoreactionary.
As it manifests in my country, it seems closer to literalism and fundamentalism than to any sort of theological sophistication. People’s religious practices around holidays and such, especially in rural areas, get heavily mixed with magical and superstitious practices; old and sickly people form huge queues for the better part of a day, in hostile weather conditions, to worship and kiss encased saint corpses which they believe have magical healing properties; nothing “sells” a saint’s biography better than miracles performed and extreme acts of abstinence.
That’s not literalism. If you look in the bible you will find nothing about the healing properties of saints’ corpses or nearly all of the superstitions you observe. These traditions are in fact examples of a paganized legacy.
but the actual intuition in most people’s heads is just to assign utility to the suffering of “bad people” in some proportion with how bad whatever they’ve done is.
Of course, for the incentives to work you need a precommitment to punish, but once the person has defected, that’s done and punishing him no longer benefits you. Hence the requirement to assign utility to the suffering of bad people.
1) It is illegal. It is a violation of criminal statutes that do not appear to be sourced, either directly or indirectly, from the Bible.
So if a law was passed saying its OK to kill members of group X, you’d have no problem killing them. My point is that the “it’s illegal” argument is a total cop-out.
Given what Harry has done up to this point, he hardly qualifies for the “innocent child” special moral dispensation.
The problem with this argument, is that it boils down to, if we accept intuitive axioms X we get counter-intuitive result Y. But why is ~Y any less worthy of being an axiom then X?
You don’t solve coordination problems by being blindly trusting and you certainly don’t do this by spreading “noble lies”. You do it by becoming trustworthy, i.e., not defecting against those who haven’t defected against you.
In fact all a “noble lie” will do is make it harder to determine who is or isn’t trustworthy, thus making it harder to punish defectors.
So if something to qualify as a philosophy or theory you need to try to build from scratch?
Not necessarily, but that is certainly the currently fashionable approach. Also if you want to convince someone from a different culture, with a different set of assumptions, etc., this is the easiest way to go about doing it.
For instance, a bitcoin detractor could argue that the reference class should also include Beanie Babies, Dutch tulips, and other similar stores of value.
The difference is that it’s easy to make more tulips or Beanie Babies, but the maximum number of Bitcoins is fixed.
So what would you describe as the cause of the correlation in the orbits calculated by myself and the alien?
If so, how do those objects causally relate to my assertion that 2 and 2 makes 4,
Because they cause there to four apples in a box if you put two apples in, and then put two more apples in.
If both you and a sentient alien in another galaxy write out addition tables, the two tables will be highly correlated with each other (in fact they’ll correspond). Which means that either one caused the other, or both have a common cause. What’s the common cause, the laws of mathematics.
Mary Catelli