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David Chapman Profile picture
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4 Oct, 9 tweets, 4 min read
I like and agree with both these people. The prerational/rational/meta-rational framing may help understand their apparent disagreement...

Heying argues for the value of rationality and functional systems against what I've called "pseudo-pomo": pre-rational tribal politics, driven by incoherent emotions and real or fictitious kinship, dressed up in the jargon of postmodern critical theory. meaningness.com/metablog/stem-…
Fighting on behalf of rational systems is critically important now as major institutions we depend on, constructed original on rational foundations, appear to be disintegrating.

Pseudo-pomo seems to be one major cause. meaningness.com/metablog/stem-…
Systematic rationalism overlooks the non-rational work that relates formal systems with concrete reality (circumrationality), and the non-rational work of creating rational systems (meta-rationality).

This blind spot limits and distorts its functioning... meaningness.com/eggplant/credi…
There is a new meta-rational revolution in statistical practice. Statisticians increasingly understand that there are no true or correct answers. The effectiveness of methods relating numbers & reality depends on context & purpose.

Carr, a statistician, articulates this view...
The failures of modernity—which began cracking fifty years ago and now is shaking apart before our eyes—are the failures of rationalism.

I believe we can, should, and will remodel society, culture, and ourselves on a meta-rational basis.

But... meaningness.com/eggplant/credi…
You can't understand meta-rationality without already being rational.

Hooray for Heyting and other rationalists for teaching the value of rationality, and for insisting on maintaining systematic institutions during the transition!

meaningness.com/metablog/ratio…
Hooray for Carr and other meta-rationalists for leading us into a better future by figuring out how meta-rationality works in diverse domains, and for communicating the viewpoint to the rational public!
meaningness.com/eggplant/appli…
[I do not know either Heying or Carr's work as well as I should; I hope I have not mischaracterized either of their views. Also, tbc, they might not recognize or accept "rationalism" or "meta-rationalism" as describing their standpoints.]

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More from @Meaningness

David Chapman Profile picture
29 Sep
When I first learned about the Filioque—the supposed “controversy” about whether the Holy Ghost “proceeds” from only the Father or the Father AND the Son—which supposedly split Eastern and Western Christianity—I was incredulous for about thirteen seconds…
And then I thought “oh, right, presumably this is just a pretext for alpha monkeys fighting for money, sex, and power,” and I looked it up, and of course I was right.

The relevant Wikipedia articles are 50,000 words of ferocious edit warring….
If you think you care passionately about some principle, consider the possibility that you are a dupe enlisted as a foot soldier in an army controlled by men who have no ideology and are motivated by mundane self-interest.
Read 4 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
27 Sep
🚫🎶 I’m worried what it MEANS is that there is no apparent future for teenagers.

🎸 For decades, music gave kids their first sense that something NEW was HAPPENING that they could be part of, and it was exciting to see what would happen NEXT

This 2011 essay by @jdrever makes a similar point.

“the political implications of retromania are disconcerting… we are kept contented by access to a vast museum of musical memories that used to signify, among other things, rebellion and invention.”

@jdrever I appreciate all the suggestions of things to listen to sent in replies. I spent much of yesterday evening going through them and listening, and enjoyed many of them!

My original tweet was off-the-cuff and unclear…
Read 11 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
16 Sep
“To be is to be the value of a variable”
—Willard Van Orman Quine

“To be is to be a value of a variable (or to be some values of some variables).”
— George Boolos

cambridge.org/core/journals/…
I only twice attempted to take philosophy classes. Both were mistakes, in different ways. Maybe if I had not made those mistakes, I would not now have such a low opinion of philosophy… nah, it’s objectively rubbish.

Anyway. George Boolos…
Read 16 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
12 Sep
🎙 @_awbery_ with @JaredJanes, introducing a distinction between "method" and "technique" in meditation; and using that to contrast the principles and functions of some superficially similar meditation approaches.

Vajrayana Buddhism is explicitly meta-systematic—unlike any other religion, afaik. It contains many dissimilar approaches that blatantly contradict each other.

This is a pervasive difficulty for understanding when initially approaching it. approachingaro.org/yanas
"Truth" is the conceptual foundation of both great Western ideologies: Christianity and rationalism. Encountering any contradiction, doubt, or nebulosity, we ask "which is True"?

That's an absolute impediment to making sense of Vajrayana. approachingaro.org/truth-and-meth… Image
Read 12 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
2 Sep
“Rationalism”: whenever I use the word on twitter, I get replies—often but not always angry ones—from people who think I’m talking about a particular tiny, recent subculture.

Rationalism has existed for 2600+ years and is one of the two dominant Western ideologies.
So, I thought, wow, maybe this tiny subculture has been amazingly effective at marketing itself? So now everyone thinks “rationalism” means them, not the Western cultural mainstream?

That would be a remarkable achievement.
So I did a google search for “rationalism.”

In its first ten pages of results, zero concerned the LessWrong/Berkeley subculture.

(N.b. google gives you results it thinks will be personally relevant, so if you have any connection to that subculture, your results may vary.)
Read 10 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
26 Aug
Ideological “beliefs” seem to work quite differently from factual ones, in ways we have no good vocabulary for. Roughly, it’s common to be mistaken about whether you hold an ideological belief, and that’s rare for factual ones.
This language is misleading because it tacitly assumes believing is a uniform, well-defined phenomenon, so there is a fact of the matter about what you believe, and therefore you can be unambiguously mistaken about whether you believe something.
There seem rather to be diverse, qualitatively different relationships one can have with “beliefs”; and these have distinct causal powers. Ways of believing license different modes of inference, emotional feelings, and actions—irrespective of the content of the belief.
Read 4 tweets

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