@vgr Morality suffices to navigate well-defined ethical domains. It fails, and may be worse than useless, when facing “wicked problems”—nebulous ones, in my terminology.
“Being a good person” is the essence of the culture war. Y’all should stop that. It’s profoundly destructive.
@vgr Strong analogy: both ethics and technical rationality fail in the face of nebulosity.
@vgr Here @vgr describes a phenomenon I’ve increasingly observed recently. People I respect, who like my work and to whom I seem to be a mostly-good person, are disappointed, and also baffled, because I am not on their side in the culture war. breakingsmart.substack.com/p/good-people-…
@vgr I appear “weirdly confused, weak-willed, morally compromised, and inconsistent” and maybe it seems my politics are incoherent or ignorant or bland middle-of-the-road normie. I have, actually, strong political views, but they are not mappable if you seek moral “dry ground.”
@vgr When rationality fails in the face of nebulosity, it’s tempting to say “oh, then we need the other thing, which is emotions and spirituality and intuition and stuff.”
@vgr .@vgr and I are often cited as “postrationalists.” True inasmuch as we were rationalists at one time (PhDs in control theory & AI respectively) and no longer are.
I don’t use the word, because “postrationalism” often means “emotions, yay!”
Going through the gigantic _Meaningness_ draft and removing numerous sections that are currently just notes and which, realistically, I will never get time to write.
Most are “archaeology of meaningness,” i.e. histories of where current popular bad attitudes came from.
These are illuminating, but it takes an enormous amount of research to do a good job, and SUPPOSEDLY there are academics whose actual responsibility this is.
Quantum woo is dire stuff, but it’s partly the fault of the original quantum physicists, who were infested with German Romantic Idealism and Hindu monism:
The Tibetan energy practices ("tsa lung," tummo) were adapted from a non-monastic Indian context to Tibetan monasticism, which is the reverse of what's needed in modernity.
“Philosophical beliefs” aren’t beliefs in any normal sense, nor in any useful sense, afaics. This is question #1 in the survey; what could any answer possibly mean?
Philosophy is Actually Bad, and everyone should stop it.
Many lay people apparently adopt “Philosophy!” as a quasi-religion, just as others adopt “Science!” as a quasi-religion.
This is a cultural/social phenomenon worthy of investigation. Studying it sociologically might be meaningful where “experimental philosophy” surveys aren’t.
Is this a surprising outlier, or have things gotten worse than I thought? (Elsevier Science Direct peer-reviewed publication: gene for ESP discovered, N=10). sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Ah, hmm, I see? Elsevier is expanding into the lucrative New Age quackery market? They’re going to face stiff competition from established players, and risk their main market positioning, though.
OTOH, maybe they can see the writing on the wall: scientific publishing is over.
Why does this happen? Explanation #1: scientists don’t understand statistics. Definitely true, but doesn’t explain the magnitude or directionality of the effect, I think, and efforts to correct it don’t seem to help much. Stats are hard but scientists aren’t that dumb…
Explanation #2: distorted career incentives to publish “positive” results lead scientists, consciously or unconsciously, into misuse of methods (garden of forking paths, etc.)
Definitely true, but who is setting those incentives and why? Mostly other scientists…
Whoa! So De Gandillac, who supervised the PhDs of all the significant pomo pioneers, was concerned with the preeminent value of technological progress, as advocated by Nicholas of Cusa (who I knew only as a the name of some vague Medieval theologian)…
Now imagining de Gandillac reading Derrida's _Of Grammatology_ and thinking "Oh god, what did I do to deserve this, another pomo thesis, my field is Medieval philosophy of technology but somehow I am personally responsible for the collapse of Western civilization"
Why had I heard of Nicholas of Cusa?
Figured out: he’s discussed repeatedly in Thomas Kuhn’s _The Copernican Revolution_ as one of Copernicus’ inspirations.
(This book is much less well-known than his _Scientific Revolutions_, but it is excellent and should be more widely read)