Personality Cafe banner

The Danger of Fact-Based Beliefs and the Self-Professed Rational

[INTJ] 
3K views 38 replies 15 participants last post by  jtour 
#1 ·
Like any good nineties kid in the English speaking world, I grew up eating cereal and watching cartoons on the couch every Saturday morning. Among my favourite programs was Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill entertained my sister and I for hours with his satirical science-based songs, his accessible pedagogical approach, and his colourful experiments. Though I inevitably grew out of the show's prime demographic, I continued to like and respect Bill Nye well into adulthood. When I heard that he was doing a televised debate with creationist crackpot Ken Ham I made a point to watch, expecting Bill to mop the floor with his opponent. Unfortunately, the experience was far less entertaining and much more embarrassing than I had anticipated.

It turns out Bill Nye is a really, really, really bad debater.

Curious what Bill is up to these days - and perhaps eager for some sort of intellectual redemption - I did a bit of Googling and watched a few videos Nye had posted on YouTube responding to questions submitted by his fans. It was... well, it was not good. Actually, it was downright cringe-worthy. With every minute that Nye spoke, he dug himself deeper and deeper into the hole. And as he did so, he denigrated religion. He denounced philosophy. He disparaged opposing political views. And why? Because according to Nye, he's a rational science guy who only espouses fact-based beliefs.

Read that again: fact-based beliefs.

The claim that rationality is a superior approach to decision making - and indeed, to life in general - will not be a contentious one in the NT subforum. Emotional arguments, irrational behaviour, and antipathy for empirical facts are anathema to most self-identified INTJ's. It should therefore come as no surprise that Kiersey dubbed us the Rationals of MBTI, for that is how so many of us see ourselves.

It would be egregious to suggest that reason has no value, or that we oughtn't utilize our rational faculties to our benefit and ends. No. My criticism here is not of reason per se, but of the self-identification as a rational - outside of MBTI context - and the preposterous hubris of the term "fact-based belief". Such terminology demonstrates, at best, a misunderstanding of reason and the role of rationality. At worst, it represents a psychological erasure of axiomatic foundations. In other words, it denies the inherent nature of bias and suggests a kind of cool objectivity which is impossible in actuality. Be very suspicious of anybody - anybody - who refers to themselves in this fashion.

Yes, Bill Nye, I'm looking at you.

I wish to stress that the problem with claiming an objective high ground is not merely incidentally arrogant, but runs contrary to the foundations of epistemology. Reason is dependent on axioms, but we cannot justify an axiom without referring to another axiom - lest we invoke a paralyzing infinite regress. If we consider "rational" to be "that which can be arrived at through logical deduction or external verification", then we cannot consider these underlying assumptions to be rational in any usual sense of the word. Therefore, the foundations of our reasoning must be irrational.

Can we call these irrational values facts? Eh, maybe. But they're not scientific facts, which is what I think Bill Nye was advocating for as the foundations of our beliefs. Scientific facts differ very much from values, and the two do not fulfill the same function. For example, water is made up of H2O molecules is a very different statement than kindness is good. But nobody - not even the Science Guy - bases his beliefs, political affiliations, or philosophy on facts like the former. Even a respect for facts like "water is H20" is based on an underlying value for information or respect for a certain interpretation of objective reality.

When the Science Guy derided Pro-Life advocates for not basing their belief systems on fact - the way that he purportedly does - he was making a very serious error. First of all, based on his response to the question about abortion I can only conclude that he misunderstands the nature of the Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate. I can think of no other reason that he would have spent half his time giving a simplistic overview of reproductive biology, without ever addressing the philosophical problem that is the crux of the issue. This is, of course, also the second problem. Bill did not address the underlying values or axioms which the two groups utilize and which are responsible for the resulting political polarity. At best, both Pro-Life advocates and Pro-Choice advocates are being equally rational and they are both equally utilizing scientific facts - they just aren't starting with the same assumptions. And they will never be on the same page until they start speaking the same language.

Many will consider my thoughts on this matter rather banal and self-evident, but if Bill Nye can get away with this level of intellectual laziness I don't find it unfathomable that there are others in need of a reminder as well. Nobody wants to consider that underlying all of their carefully reasoned arguments and heaps of empirical data are irrational assumptions, and I include myself in this camp. Absolutely. But I do firmly believe that it is important to keep in mind for the sake of intellectual integrity. When we deny the basis of our knowledge, we close ourselves off from alternative possibilities. It is really the ultimate psychological bias.

[HR][/HR]
This thread is more or less my train of thought on a topic that I think is highly relevant to INTJ's and MBTI. I've noticed a tendency for NT types to really embrace the Rational identity, and it's something I've certainly been guilty of in the past. Spending more time in the subforums lately got me thinking about this again, which in turn reminded me of Bill Nye. I'm not sure whether there is a debate to be had here, but I would be interested in hearing people's thoughts.

If not, that was just a ramble. Oh well.
 
See less See more
#5 ·
Spock was actually humble.

It's like the stereotype that ENTP are funny. They aren't. lol. George W Bush is an ENTP. They are "funny" in that kind of way.

Like George Carlin being a Ne dom. lol. My God.. Clearly Se valuing. Sarah Silverman is another example. Typed as ENTP. ENTP are not so rambunctious and rowdy. She is an ESTP or ENTJ. Ne is mild compared to Se.
 
#3 ·
I didn't read all that but Bill Nye is bad philosophy dressed up as science and needs to be called out. He is anti-intellectual. Like science says abortion is wrong. Science is like God now. Always on the side of the just. Science doesn't give a fuck who lives or who dies. Or what humans do at all. It is just another way for people to propagate their beliefs with authority. As Heidegger said, worshipers of facts need to understand that their idols only shine in a borrowed light.

Chomsky made the point that scientists are some of the worst philosophers and critical thinkers. That wasn't always true but seems to be now. The philosopher-scientist is dead. Now they are just small minded specialists.
 
#13 ·
So Science killed God, and now Science is God. But God doesn't exist.

Something I find interesting about Dawkins, Krauss, Nye, and all their ilk, is how they seem to conceptualize science as being necessarily oppositional to theology. As though science is rational and religion is irrational. This is really modern thinking. Science has pretty well always been a theological enterprise, and the most towering figures in the history of science were those that sought to glorify God by supposing a universe that is a) rational and able to be understood by the human intellect; b) simple and elegant, thanks to God's supreme wisdom; and c) governed by laws which were as constant and powerful as God himself.

Dawkins seems think science rose up out of the Dark Ages in spite of Christianity, rather than because of it. This is how he manages to come out with a straight face and claim that Darwinian natural selection is a death-blow to religion, or how internet atheists can bring up the Big Bang as proof that science doesn't need God. There is something very fundamentally wrong with all of this thought. It needs reworking.

Heidegger also said that the essence of truth is freedom. I think everybody needs to sit down and really ruminate on that.
 
#4 ·
Here is a great example of a philosopher scientist taking down a scientist who hates philosophy. And most people interested in science have heard of Lawrence Krauss. Who knows David Albert? Who destroyed him so bad that Krauss refused to be at the same conference as him. Cuz it may affect his book sales when critical thought is applied to his bullshit.

‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss - The New York Times


Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not.

The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.


But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-*theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
 
#6 ·
Krauss is embarrassing. That's another guy who gets absolutely schooled by theologians all the time. And who is awkwardly unaware of his own biases.
 
#15 · (Edited)
There used to be a lot of philosopher scientists in the past, but now things are so fragmented and specialized that they don't really engage with the philosophical assumptions of their methodology.
I heard someone describe modern day scientists as being like the guy on the factory floor working on the cars, his knowledge only needs to go as far as doing his job. He doesn't necessarily have broader knowledge of his company's workings. Those who are on the production line for knowledge are quite philosophically illiterate. Some less so than others, but it's a sad state for many fields, particularly if the're hostile to philosophers and the value of their points. Think scientists would have a greater respect for philosophy considering how much a lot of scientific fields like quantum mechanics rely on math, models and not any empirical evidence. Where the sort of philosophical assumptions one adopts have serious implications.

Fortunately there are some pretty intelligent folks out there that do a good job in synthesizing fields and aren't like the science popularizers who are no doubt good at their jobs but often make great deal of error in thinking they understand things when they move outside their field of knowledge.
 
#17 ·
There used to be a lot of philosopher scientists in the past, but now things are so fragmented and specialized that they don't really engage with the philosophical assumptions of their methodology.
I heard someone describe modern day scientists as being like the guy on the factory floor working on the cars, his knowledge only needs to go as far as doing his job. He doesn't necessarily have broader knowledge of his company's workings. Those who are on the production line for knowledge are quite philosophically illiterate.
This is the way it has to be. We're not longer in an age where Science is new and a single person can push the boundaries of a half dozen subjects within a lifetime. We are in an age where the entire length of a human life and the entire processing ability and storage capacity of a human brain are necessary just to get to the leading edge of a small slice of one individual field. I think we're reaching a point where there are physical human limits constraining knowledge from advancing any further and the only way to keep pushing those limits is through Eugenics or AI. People like to think we live in an age of innovation, but in reality innovation is down from where it was 50-150 years ago and the reason is precisely because simply reaching the boundary of human knowledge takes a very intelligent person decades and few people make it that far, let alone are able to push further beyond that boundary.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ninjahitsawall
#16 · (Edited)
Ugh. Everyone here agreeing so I feel like it's necessary for me to disagree or else this threads going nowhere.

It turns out Bill Nye is a really, really, really bad debater.
Even if we remove your belief that Bill Nye may be very biased it's hardly a shock that he would be a terrible debater. The skills needed to be a good rhetorician and a good scientist have very little overlap. I recently watched a great debate between Ted Cruz (literally a champion debater) and Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz completely moped the floor with Bernie despite the fact that Ted was full of shit most of the time. So to get back to the point, scientists are on average terrible public speakers and that fact should shock no one.

Read that again: fact-based beliefs.
You seem to imply this is an oxymoron, but it is not. Nothing in this world can be known for sure. I'm sure you're aware of the problem of induction (often called any of a dozen other names like the "grue paradox", "black swan paradox", etc). A scientist may observe 17 million white swans and formulate a belief that all swans are white based on the facts he has gathered. This is an entirely reasonable way to generate a belief. However we now know that the belief is wrong and that black swans exist. It is virtually guaranteed that things you and I currently take for granted as fact will 100 years from now be known to be false. Anyone who ever thinks they have a perfect objective sense of this world is wrong, but at the same time there is a big difference between beliefs based in fact and beliefs based in dogma. The former are far less likely to end up proven wrong than the later.

The claim that rationality is a superior approach to decision making - and indeed, to life in general - will not be a contentious one in the NT subforum. Emotional arguments, irrational behaviour, and antipathy for empirical facts are anathema to most self-identified INTJ's. It should therefore come as no surprise that Kiersey dubbed us the Rationals of MBTI, for that is how so many of us see ourselves.
I just want to point out that INTJs are not a strictly-speaking logical sort of person. INTJs rely far too heavily on intuition and intuition is by its very nature illogical. INTJs are actually not all that great when it comes to logic because they place their own personal experiences and beliefs over statistical evidence.

Can we call these irrational values facts? Eh, maybe. But they're not scientific facts, which is what I think Bill Nye was advocating for as the foundations of our beliefs. Scientific facts differ very much from values, and the two do not fulfill the same function. For example, water is made up of H2O molecules is a very different statement than kindness is good. But nobody - not even the Science Guy - bases his beliefs, political affiliations, or philosophy on facts like the former. Even a respect for facts like "water is H20" is based on an underlying value for information or respect for a certain interpretation of objective reality.
Anyone who tried to claim a certain system of morals was based in objective facts would certainly be wrong, but at the same time that doesn't mean some some moral systems aren't objectively better than others. For instance many moral systems are not logically consistent. You can't necessarily prove one right, but you can certainly prove one WRONG by proving that it is logically inconsistent. I guess you could liken this to the ideas of soundness and validity in formal logic. You can never prove a moral system to be sound, but you can certainly prove it to be valid (or not valid as the case may be). I think when it comes to most people's moral systems it's actually quite simple to prove them invalid and so it's not even necessary to attempt to attack the premises because the argument has already fallen apart whether they are true or not. Additionally even if you can't prove one system right I think it should be readily obvious that a system which seeks to optimize human happiness is more correct than a system that seeks to optimize human hairiness. The former makes sense on at least some level, the later makes sense on no level.

At best, both Pro-Life advocates and Pro-Choice advocates are being equally rational and they are both equally utilizing scientific facts - they just aren't starting with the same assumptions. And they will never be on the same page until they start speaking the same language.
I have to disagree. The primary pro-life argument is based on a book written 2000 years ago, not science. Even if you put considerable weight on what that book says it still is pretty trivial to prove the pro-life argument invalid because that book itself has ~150 self-contradictions and those who follow it have far more (for instance having no problem killing in war or capital punishment despite that fact that the commandment they base their pro-life stance on makes no such exemptions). There are logically consistent pro-life argument, but they are NOT the ones used by most pro-life advocates.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ninjahitsawall
#26 · (Edited)
Ugh. Everyone here agreeing so I feel like it's necessary for me to disagree or else this threads going nowhere.
Admit it, you just like pulling my pigtails.

Even if we remove your belief that Bill Nye may be very biased it's hardly a shock that he would be a terrible debater. The skills needed to be a good rhetorician and a good scientist have very little overlap. I recently watched a great debate between Ted Cruz (literally a champion debater) and Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz completely moped the floor with Bernie despite the fact that Ted was full of shit most of the time. So to get back to the point, scientists are on average terrible public speakers and that fact should shock no one.
It's not just that Bill Nye wasn't good at communicating in a formal-style debate, he just made really weird and bad points. He frequently side-stepped questions or gave answers which were total non sequiturs. It was really disappointing for me because frankly Ken Ham's creationism is about as low hanging as fruit gets. He should have been able to be a subpar debater and still mop the floor with the guy, but he made very few good points when there were plenty he could have made. Which frankly makes me question whether he even understands what he believes.

He also used the debate to rant about his political views that were entirely irrelevant to the subject matter, which made me suspect he was using the debate as an excuse to get on TV again. It just all left a very bad taste in my mouth.

(Bill Nye still probably won the debate by the way, but only because his opponent is batshit insane. It was still a bad performance.)

You seem to imply this is an oxymoron, but it is not. Nothing in this world can be known for sure. I'm sure you're aware of the problem of induction (often called any of a dozen other names like the "grue paradox", "black swan paradox", etc). A scientist may observe 17 million white swans and formulate a belief that all swans are white based on the facts he has gathered. This is an entirely reasonable way to generate a belief. However we now know that the belief is wrong and that black swans exist. It is virtually guaranteed that things you and I currently take for granted as fact will 100 years from now be known to be false. Anyone who ever thinks they have a perfect objective sense of this world is wrong, but at the same time there is a big difference between beliefs based in fact and beliefs based in dogma. The former are far less likely to end up proven wrong than the later.
I did not imply it was an oxymoron - well, I mean, sort of but not in the way I think you're saying - I was poking fun at the audacity of the statement, particularly in the context in which it was said. He believes, for instance, that his stance on homosexuality and abortion are rooted in facts and the only reason other people could disagree with him is ignorance of the relevant science.

As proof he was right about abortion he said that miscarriages happen. I think everybody knows that. That doesn't make abortion morally licit anymore than the fact that humans die of old age makes murder okay. He thinks these facts are underlying his beliefs, but there are values beneath them which he is ignoring.

Hence my overarching point that you shouldn't trust somebody who claims they have only fact-based beliefs. They probably lack awareness.

I just want to point out that INTJs are not a strictly-speaking logical sort of person. INTJs rely far too heavily on intuition and intuition is by its very nature illogical. INTJs are actually not all that great when it comes to logic because they place their own personal experiences and beliefs over statistical evidence.
Whether or not they actually are very logical is not important. A lot of them think they are.

Anyone who tried to claim a certain system of morals was based in objective facts would certainly be wrong, but at the same time that doesn't mean some some moral systems aren't objectively better than others. For instance many moral systems are not logically consistent. You can't necessarily prove one right, but you can certainly prove one WRONG by proving that it is logically inconsistent. I guess you could liken this to the ideas of soundness and validity in formal logic. You can never prove a moral system to be sound, but you can certainly prove it to be valid (or not valid as the case may be). I think when it comes to most people's moral systems it's actually quite simple to prove them invalid and so it's not even necessary to attempt to attack the premises because the argument has already fallen apart whether they are true or not. Additionally even if you can't prove one system right I think it should be readily obvious that a system which seeks to optimize human happiness is more correct than a system that seeks to optimize human hairiness. The former makes sense on at least some level, the later makes sense on no level.
I agree with you that morality is a rational enterprise and as such cannot be logically inconsistent. A logically inconsistent moral system is a bad one. Whether or not any moral system (outside of this) can be more right than another is more tricky, because that depends on whether morality is objective or subjective. You seem to be making the claim that it is objective, since there is some kind of standard which optimizing human happiness gets closer to than optimizing human hairiness.

Though the hairiness thing did make me laugh.

My point about the irrational assumptions extends beyond morality, too. Take the classic problem of solipsism for example - I have no way to ever prove that other people have minds, but I intuitively sense that they do. I "knew" it long before I was old enough to understand that things need to be proven in order for me to believe they are true. The idea that there are other minds besides my own is something I take for granted, and it isn't a lame belief just sitting there somewhere in my subconscious. It underlies a lot of my other beliefs. My life would be a lot different if I decided to give that assumption up.

I have to disagree. The primary pro-life argument is based on a book written 2000 years ago, not science. Even if you put considerable weight on what that book says it still is pretty trivial to prove the pro-life argument invalid because that book itself has ~150 self-contradictions and those who follow it have far more (for instance having no problem killing in war or capital punishment despite that fact that the commandment they base their pro-life stance on makes no such exemptions). There are logically consistent pro-life argument, but they are NOT the ones used by most pro-life advocates.
I don't know if I want to even quibble over this. The Pro-Choice arguments can be just as logically inconsistent as the Pro-Life ones. If we get rid of the fluff though, they are starting with some different philosophical assumptions about the value of human life, the value of choice, the value of government intervention, when life begins, what life even means, and so on and so forth.

Some people mistakenly like to think that more science will solve these disagreements, but it just won't. I know perfectly well how an egg is fertilized and how a human develops. It doesn't make me any more pro-abortion.
 
  • Like
Reactions: luemb
#21 · (Edited)
The OP reminds me of Sam Harris vs William Craig. We were on another forum watching this and most people by far were on the side of Harris. But as the debate rolled on almost every atheist was disappointed with Harris and admitted Craig cleaned his clock.

'There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.'

-Lao Tzu

I think evolution has kind of hurt science and made it lazy. Darwinizing of the gaps as Nagel put it.

I watched a lecture series on The Science of Color. Informative. Tells us how humans react to certain colors. There are facts and science there. Like yellow is the most visible color. Why is that? That is where science ends. They just start concocting scenarios where seeing yellow would offer a selective advantage because that is what is everything is about. How does this trait of ours get us to fuck more. Everything is an appendage of the genitalia.

I mean, take all colors that humans can recognize and their responses towards these colors, then try to think WHY humans respond to colors that way. That is storytelling, not science. And I was watching another series on major transitions in evolutionary history. I mean this stuff is true and happened but the vast amount of it is speculation as to how/why. There are no experts on why yellow is most visible, red scares us, etc. Anyone can come up with stories as to why. They so easily mix science with speculation. Richard Dawkins made a fortune telling these just so stories.

Like Chomsky made the point: Humans are altruistic because it helps spread our genes. Or we could say that eliminating rivals helps spread our genes. So does war or peace spread genes? Arguments for both.

An evolutionary biologist wrote a paper a few years ago how humans were meant to punch. We are naturals at throwing punches. Our bodies are made for it. Has this guy ever boxed before? lol. Why do you think they tape their hands and wear gloves? To protect their hands. Gloves exist to protect hands not heads. You bareknuckle punch something you will break your hand quick. It still happens often with tape and huge gloves. Throwing bare knuckled punches does not offer a selective advantage. It cripples you.

oh, and it will give me an excuse to post this:

 
  • Like
Reactions: luemb and BlackDog
#23 ·
Well, my response to this is that 90% of the time people say they are using "facts" in a debate, but 100% of the time those facts are shackled to the narrative that is being put forward. Bill Nye isn't the only one subject to this; it's any time someone says something to the tune of "but facts show ___."

Having worked with MBTI and interacted with quite a few people over the theory, including many INTJ, it has not been my experience at all that INTJ are all that "fact" obsessed. Facts really only serve the purpose of describing a thought. Our type will occasionally cite external sources, quote reputable sources, or maybe give numbers now and then but when you really, really chafe down to what most INTJ are rhetorically doing when they speak, they are typically talking about the externalities of an impression they have had - not using actual logic, or even necessarily facts. It stands in stark contrast with more purely logical types such as ISTP and INTP, who break down, clarify, summarize, associate, etc.

The OP didn't say it this strongly, but I'll go ahead and say I find most "INTJ" who raw raw how rational and logical they are to be quite the opposite. Given a certain mindset, it is easy to see that most of these people are more motivated to be acknowledged as intelligent and superior than they are actually logical; paradoxically, they would be much more logical to say they are not such, given Jung classified all Ni Base types as "Irrational," and MBTI types were formed from Jung. Or, if they just said they consider themselves pragmatists, rational ones or not. To be fair, they're usually either quite young, or still kind of basking in some of the over-enthusiastic type descriptions that float around. Also to be fair, some of these people may actually be very intelligent too.

I think most INTJ's, and people in general would be very well served to do the work needed to fact check their own assumptions. It's a doable area of self improvement that INTJ in particular have the potential to do for themselves well.
 
#24 · (Edited)
I feel like people are being more than a little unfair to Science here for several reasons.

1. Using an entertainer with no Science degree like Bill Nye as being representative of how Science operates or how scientists act.
This individual holds a degree of authority in some of our eyes because we watched him do Science experiments on TV as kids, but he holds no more real authority than a high school Science teacher. It's a pretty serious strawman to use him or any other sort of pop-sci entertainer to attack Science. It would be like using some wannabe YouTube Philosopher to attack Philosophy.

2. Using the remarks of some self-styled intellectuals on the internet to attack Science. I don't' really even think I need to explain this one.
There are a lot of idiots on the internet and they come in all shapes and sizes. Appealing to Science is one possible logical fallacy that a person might commit in an attempt to win an argument online, but it is far from the only one and it's unfair to compare someone using a fallacious argument to someone actually backing up an argument with facts.

3. Assuming that Scientists should be polymaths who also have a deep understanding of Philosophy and perhaps also Political Science.
We don't expect a Philosopher to know a lot about Chemistry, so why expect a Chemist to know a lot about Philosophy? Experts in any field are very rarely much better than novices in every other field. The whole "appeal to authority" fallacy applies just as well to ACTUAL authorities if they are talking about things outside their area of expertise. If a Scientist is making claims about Politics they shouldn't be seen as an authority and their opinions should carry no more weight than an actor's or pilot's.

4. Not understanding the difference between confirmation bias and actual factually-derived beliefs.
There are two ways to use facts to support a belief. One is to try and find facts that support your belief and the second is to try and find beliefs that support the facts. Anyone doing the former is not constructing a strong argument, but you can't say the same about the later group as they have no such bias to try to confirm.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ninjahitsawall
#28 ·
@SolonsWarning

Nobody is bashing science. I certainly am not anti-science, that would be a really silly position to take. At worst we are discussing the limitations of science, which should be no more threatening to science as a method of inquiry than the existence of chemistry is a threat to biology.

I used the experience with Bill Nye as an anecdote to open the topic I wanted to speak about. It was supposed to be a springboard. It's not supposed to be some kind of proof that Bill Nye is stupid and therefore science is stupid. But Bill Nye and those like him (Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, etc.) do have influence, whether we like it or not. They are in the public eye, they talk about politics, they write popular books, and run popular blogs. They make it their job to represent science to the public, so I'm going to call them out on it when they're doing a shitty job.

Just an aside, but most philosophers do make it their business to educate themselves in whatever field they spend a lot of time writing about. A philosopher who writes about physics probably has a physics degree, for example, like the author of the article linked earlier where he is criticizing Lawrence Krauss for his book on cosmology. I do believe that there needs to be some overlap there.
 
  • Like
Reactions: luemb
#32 ·
not that i've got any dog in this fight - in fact, not that i've even read most of the comments on it. religious faith seems to me like such a pointless thing for people to argue about, i can't help suspecting most of the people who do argue about it think they've found themselves an easy base.

but off the top of my head, i don't strongly associate 'debate' with thinkers anyway. that's because to me debate is a lot more like a sport than an, idk, intrinsic activity. it's got team a and team b, and there are prescribed-but-arbitrary [if you ask me] parameters, and a prescribed-but-arbitrary [if you ask me] object as well - 'winning'. it's a construct - at least, that's what it is to me.

so, whatever. idk what the other 'rational' types are like but i guess that is one of the mistakes we do make at times. it's the old thing of bringing a knife to a gunfight, seems like.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Wellsy
#33 ·
You got me curious so I looked up Bill Nye. I found him here:



and here:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator/ENTP


What exactly do you have against him? He's not a good enough debater?

He may have inspired millions of little boys & girls to take up science, a worthwhile broadcast if could stand to watch the insipid commercials that came with it.

Facts by themselves lead nowhere. You need abstraction to connect them and draw useful conclusions. Maybe you just don't like the conclusions?
 
#35 · (Edited)
Krauss is really the worst offender. Sam Harris is way more tolerant. I remember at one of their atheist conferences Krauss called out Harris for finding some ideas in Buddhism and Eastern religions interesting and perhaps valuable. Krauss's response? "It's all nonsense. Stop acting like it isn't." I doubt Krauss has ever read anything on Buddhism but feels safe in totally wiping the entire history of its thought off the table with one swipe. Buddhism is nonsense. His total take on the subject. That is anti-intectuallism.

Harris like actually understands the appeal of spirituality and such things. Krauss is baffled by such notions.

Oh, God. Forgot about the time that Krauss was trying to sell his ideas in front of Nobel Winner in Physics, David Gross. Gross had no patience for his shit and you could tell Krauss was scared.

He said about Krauss that his ideas "smell of angels". Meaning they are as baseless as religious ones. lol. But the look on his face while Krauss is talking. You can tell he is getting grumpier. Shaking his head as Krauss is talking. Showing no respect for him. I would like Gross to be in every audience Krauss speaks to but I am sure he has better things to do.





Gross has to be a Te user/TJ. Frank Wilczek, a student of Gross who shared the Nobel Prize with him said his motto for science came from something a Priest or the Church taught him at a young age. "It is more blessed to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission." And that is like a maxim he always applies in science and attributes much of his success to.

I actually have his book on my hard drive so I will just quote it:

Father James Malley, S.J., taught me a most profound and valuable principle of scientific technique. (It has many other applications as well.) He claimed that he learned this principle at seminary, where it was taught as the Jesuit Credo. It states:


It is more blessed to ask forgiveness than permission.

I’d been following this credo intuitively for years without realizing its ecclesiastical sanction. Now I use it more systematically, and with a clearer conscience.

In theoretical physics, there is a wonderful synergy between the Jesuit Credo and Einstein’s “make things simple, but not too simple.”
Together, they tell us we should make the most optimistic assumptions we dare about how simple things are. If it turns out badly, we can always count on forgiveness and try again—without pausing for permission.
 
#36 ·
The spirit of the rational is not that it basis belief on facts, but rather it rejects whatever is contrary to the fact. A rational approach to life is possible; it just has to be in accordance with facts not in the sense that all of it must be based on fact, but that none of it is contrary to fact.

We are only partly rational creatures. And I want to take that fact not as a proof of the inadequacy of reason as our primary mode of thought, but as an invitation to keep on learning so I can continue being more and more rational. When I say I'm rational, I basically only say that I'm becoming rational. Just like how a series which approaches infinity is said to be an infinite series.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ninjahitsawall
#38 · (Edited)
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/The Psychology of Concepts.pdf
The fragmentation of science has gone way beyond division of labour, since division of labour presupposes at least some form of cooperation, exchange and shared objectives. The branches of science today have developed such distinct views of the world that they do not even ask questions, the answers to which would be of interest to those outside the discipline. Universities are organised along lines resembling Set Theory with an intellectual life that increasingly resembles niche marketing.
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/concepts-language.htm
Linguists and cultural critics working in their departments, the social behaviourists and sociologists in their departments, and historians and psychologists in theirs, each focus exclusively on just one aspect of concepts. The absence of an integrated theory and the dominance of one-sided approaches is a result of the modern fragmentation of science along disciplinary lines. Imagine if you had two different departments, one studying keys, the other locks. Each can describe the constitution of their subject perfectly well, but self-evidently no sense could be made of either locks or keys. Only if the systems of activity in which individuals participate, the constellation of artefacts used and constituted in that activity and the individual human actions are taken together as aspects of a single, indivisible whole, can we understand any one side of a concept.
 
#39 ·
There's a problem in this thread.

There are five or six book-length analyses that are trying to be condensed into one post after another.

But since apparently everything in the world of man that ever existed is a good subject for a thread, I guess, maybe somebody could make a single point and try to work from there.

The above post by Wellsy makes a first attempt, which should probably be encouraged, but the, I suppose abstract of the piece cited is not something that strikes me as a serious statement.

In a paper which briefly outlines theories of mind based on a computational model, which, I don't know, you can look up on Wikipedia or something, in this context, philosopher and information science ontologist Barry Smith summarizes a perspective that introduces nuance to what is, as wielded by various technicians, very often a blunt, and incorrect instrument.

The citation is Barry Smith, "The Ecological Approach to Information Processing," a report submitted to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, whose full text can be found here.

I chose an extract from this paper, instead of one of many dozens of peer-reviewed, often collaborative articles and books on similar scientific and philosophical topics by the distinguished author, because it provides a handy overview of the field and it adheres to standards of clarity and precision that characterize mainstream discourse in science and philosophy.

Barry Smith said:
To understand cognition we should study the moving, acting organism as it exists in its real-world environment, but now taking account of the fact that for human organisms this is a social environment which includes records and traces of prior actions in the form of communication systems (languages), storage systems (libraries), transport systems (roads), as well as legal and financial and political systems of a range of different sorts. The attunement of different groups of specialists to these externalized symbolic memory devices then allows a range of different, new sorts of activities on the part of humankind, via a vast division of cognitive-ecological labour.
So, the thesis is simple: the author and countless others propose an alternative to a computational theory of mind, which is grounded in empirical psychological research by J.J. Gibson, for example, and is theoretically described using the formal tools of mereology, and informatic ontology.

This thesis proposes that an embodied, situated consciousness better characterizes the relationship of the human to its particular perceptual "slice" of the real world than the simplified, if not outright reductionist, notion of the material brain as a thing whose functions can be described without reference to its host or carrier, or what is usually called the body.

I'll elaborate slightly that this view has led to productive, real-world applications, in the fields of robotics, as, for example, Rodney Brooks' projects bear out, and in the construction of ontologies, especially in the biomedical fields.

An introductory text published by MIT Press by co-authored by Smith, called Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, aims to provide and succeeds at providing a brief introduction to the current state-of-the-art in interdisciplinary philosophy and information science, together with the subfields of philosophy of applied logic, applied mereological and set-theoretic analysis of categories and concepts.

So, the question is simplified to: do you think this is right, or wrong?

True?

False?

Those are the questions philosophers who aren't cranks ask, and sometimes answer.

That's a broad question, isn't it?

Well, which aspect of the thesis should be attended to first?

That would depend on which is of most interest to a respondent.

I recommend a discussion of the ontology of fiat boundaries -- for example, the manner in which national borders, or state lines, in politics or in real estate can be considered as created entities which, however, exist really -- note the word, "real" in "really" -- and can be altered through some more or less complicated arrangements of man and perhaps geography.

Does this notion of a fiat boundary resemble anything else?

For example, do you think the distinction between the material brain and its embodiment in a cranial carrier, and a physical environment through which it is "attuned" to navigate might be similar?

I think it is similar.

Why don't you tell me why.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top