Cause of Bias?

The Watercooler
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It’s curious how the more a term is talked about, the less it seems to gain meaning.

This term, “bias” has all this baggage now, which instead of meaning more, to me means less.

Are we now discussing cultures? Biology? Bowling balls? Bad/Good arguments?

It’s sorta like a moral injunction; thou shalt have no bias.

Huh?

Shall both my legs be operated on so that each step I take it perfectly spaced, shall I studiously practice everything with my right hand to correct my left handed bias?

Can one culture actually have some beneficial aspects, or is that now a no-no, and all cultures are equally suspect?

It seems that as far as the usefulness of the word “bias” in any conversation, it carries a different definition.

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One could say we are biased as to the meaning we ascribe to the word “bias” depending on the context and our experiences :smile:

In any case there’s no contradiction. Richard writes he is biased in the sense of any organism being biased to its own existence at least. This is a more eloquent way of putting what some people wrote in this thread, that this is a feature/not a bug and it’s impossible not to be biased in some way in this sense.

Then Richard reported he’s not biased in the sense of for example having an “ethnocentric viewpoint”. So he doesn’t automatically have a bias based on belief of living in an advanced western society with all that entails, or of being of a particular affiliation such as the UN being a source of good and right and truth and therefore climate change is indisputably settled and it’s a sin to even question it. Instead he is free to evaluate it and any topic with just the intrinsic-to-being-alive-bias (such as one that would make one interested in looking into what’s happening to the planet in the first place).

Also on a separate note I think some of the criticism leveled at Richard and Vineeto is essentially that they don’t understand nuance, they can’t comprehend something that has multiple effects/causes, or a complex system that involves more than one thing, or they don’t understand models or probability etc. I think this is very far off the mark and essentially amounts to considering them simpletons / unintelligent. It’s not that they aren’t capable of comprehending these things … and when they are valid I am sure they would recognize it … it’s just that they are able to prevent themselves for “falling for it” when it doesn’t actually make sense or conclude what it purports to conclude.

It’s like there can be a simple mistake upon which a very complex multi-layered model is built. Everyone is busy being in awe at how complex and intricate the model is, and of course it must be this way. When someone correctly points out the simple mistake , they are criticized for being too dumb to understand the whole thing. But they do understand. The understanding is that it’s based on a false premise :smile:. Speaking in generalities here but I think this explains some of the dynamic. And of course they could be mistaken about the simple thing being wrong , but I’ve never seen a conversation that actually hones in on it.

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This is a great way of putting it @claudiu, I remember there was a correspondence somewhere where Vineeto makes a simple observation for why a God cannot exist and the correspondent responds by saying that her argument is on a level of a school kid and therefore cannot be right.

I always found this interesting because in the real world it seems that sophistication is confused with wisdom. Which means that if one makes a simple argument one is immediately a simpleton.

And the funny thing is that it is as Richard says - one has to be gullible to be sophisticated in the first place, it is often the naive individual that can see the situation much clearer and thus describe it in simple terms.

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Agreed. It’s a sorta sophisticated word like that. I feel (as only a feeling being will) a certain moral weight in it. As if a “bias” is kin to racism, or nationalism, or some extreme stance.

Besides, it’s also interesting that it’s not Richard’s writing that introduces the word, but rather those asking questions or otherwise discussing topics.

It has a modern weight to it. Almost on par with the hallowed “objectivity” of science.

One could go further and say it’s a purely human invention, up with “order & chaos” in the pantheon of “go to” appeals to apparently obvious intractable questions. Which inevitably lead to the age old injunction “one can never truly know”. The Unknowable.

Yet, things are known. Progressively.

The more I think about it, is the “leap” that is made which we are discussing. It’s considered acceptable for example, that physicists conclude that time and space have a beginning, because they are physicists.

I had this discussion a couple of weeks back with my current partner, funnily enough. She is a double doctorate physicist.

I had to back track very quickly when I was trying to explain a point and had brought up the big bang. Not because she was upset, but because it was clearly obvious that I am not qualified in that company to discuss it. That was actually very obvious. Is someone biased? It’s really a completely irrelevant point most of the time, because it is very rarely that a discussion is taking place between equally educated people.

I remember Richard putting forth the “Electric Cosmos” theory. For a while I was rather enamoured by it. However, the more I looked into it, the more I could see I had no way of assessing it intelligently.

Which brings up what I regard as a common theme in some of the things Richard has commented on; being free to explore and even argue a point of view is an aspect of freedom. One doesn’t have to be right, it’s in the wondering and exploring that the pleasure is found.

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Without a doubt. And most things are too big to know completely. Hence the brief model discussion last night. And we’ll never know if those models are accurate. That said there are still explanations based on objectively verifiable criteria and explanations based on hearsay, conjecture or falsehoods.

100%. When I spoke with them, I was impressed with their complete lack of tension while talking about these issues. They obviously weren’t afraid of being wrong in any way. They probably had a ‘prove it’ mentality. They had their opinion and simply required evidence if they were going to change it. No new evidence, no change of opinion, no big deal either way. But I was also impressed with how flimsy the reasonings were. They didn’t seem aware they were flimsy. But they may have and just didn’t feel the need to elaborate at the time. Which also makes sense in the context of the gathering. There were multiple individuals, none of whom had any expertise in the areas, no idea they’d be discussing those matters beforehand and each gathered there for another reason altogether.

@Kub933 Right but it doesn’t explain the bad arguments. Reading your observation has me think back to my example where she said it’s hubris to think humans can change the climate because the Earth is so big. It was and is my impression that she was literal. It’s my opinion she literally believed that. But she’s not right because it’s simple. Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s a quality explanation. I’m sure actual freedom doesn’t incur upon you an innocence that makes you gullible and you suddenly lose your ability to vet information well, spot logical fallacies or use deductive reasoning. But I now think that if your skill set didn’t include those thing before actual freedom then it won’t include them afterwards.

@claudiu

I think some of the criticism leveled at Richard and Vineeto is essentially that they don’t understand nuance…essentially amounts to considering them simpletons

In the poker world there are countless examples of genius and near genius people who simply can’t understand the fundamentals of no-limit or deep stack pot limit poker. I play with a guy who graduated top of his class in chemistry and worked for Bayer for decades: Doesn’t understand shit. Another graduated from medical school at 20 and doesn’t understand the game. Another guy is one of the top corporate lawyers in the country: Clueless. To use me as an example, I was a terrible student. Just the dopiest knucklehead kid you could find. But in Alegebra 1 freshman year of high school, I got B’s without ever opening the book before quiz day. In Geometry sophomore year, I got D’s while studying as hard as I was then capable of. And in Algebra 2 junior year, I went back to getting B’s without opening the book before quiz day. Same guy. Same broad subject matter almost: Mathematics. Yet I had a knack for one and was a complete blank for the other. I think some people are bad at deductive reasoning. Maybe they’ll never be able to remember the common logical fallacies, identify good argument vs bad arguments, vet information. Whatever the fatal flaw(s) may be.

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Well I decided to actually ask her about all this in an email, linking her to this thread, and this is what she replied:

VINEETO [2023 Feb 15]: I find it interesting that three or four people have an argument about something Richard and I allegedly said, and I am pleased that you [Claudiu], the only one, is writing to us for clarification of what really took place in the conversation […]
[…] Now to Jon’s argument -

  1. The assertion that George Soros is a socialist and George Soros donates to “global warming causes” is a straw-man. Neither Richard nor I have any idea whether or not George Soros is funding climate research, it never occurred to us that he might be. Our understanding is that he is massively funding his “Open Society” projects to the tune of 18 Billion dollars. So we certainly never used George Soros as an argument in the topic of anthropogenic global warming.

    It is a classic straw-man argument where one invents something the other never said and then argues against it.
    […]

  2. I happened to mention in passing a cautionary note about the earth’s atmosphere being so big that it could be hubris to automatically assume that human activities can and will change the climate. It was never presented as, let alone intended to be, an argument against the belief in global warming that Jon has turned it into - hence Jon’s insistence on this being an argument is a red herring, he is making a mountain out of a mole-hill.

    As for the cautionary observation I can refer you to the fact that air consists of many components.

    [Richard]: The atmospheric gases of steady concentration (and their proportions in percentage by volume) are as follows:

    • nitrogen (N2): 78. 084
    • oxygen (O2): 20. 946
    • argon (Ar): 0. 934
    • neon (Ne): 0. 0018
    • helium (He): 0. 000524
    • methane (CH4): 0. 0002
    • krypton (Kr): 0. 000114
    • hydrogen (H2): 0. 00005
    • nitrous oxide (N2O): 0. 00005
    • xenon (Xe): 0. 0000087

    Of the gases present in variable concentrations, water vapour, ozone, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide are of principal importance. The typical concentration ranges of these gases (in percentage by volume) are as follows:

    • water vapour (H2O): 0 to 7
    • carbon dioxide (CO2): 0.01 to 0.1
    • ozone (O3): 0 to 0.01
    • sulphur dioxide (SO2): 0 to 0.0001
    • nitrogen dioxide (NO2): 0 to 0.000002 ([www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/listbcorrespondence/listb22a.htm#25Jul98](Mailing List 'B' Respondent No. 22](http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/listbcorrespondence/listb22a.htm%2325Jul98)) )

    That means only 0.01 to 0.1 percent of the atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide.

    It is estimated that 3.6 to 5 percent of that amount can be attributed to human activity, of which 57 percent is reabsorbed by natural processes.

    Hence my cautionary note, the atmosphere being so large, to automatically assume that human activities can change the climate, could be bordering on hubris. In other words, any such proposition needs clear and unequivocal evidence.

So who has the “bias” here - Vineeto, or Jon, who misremembered and made a strawman, a red herring, and a mountain out of a molehill all at once? :wink:

And it seems some are bad at memory and recollection …

However I’ve found there are certain patterns some people show where they tend to forget/misremember things in a particular way (as opposed to a random way). I’ve observed that some employees at work always misremember conversations and magically they always recall it more like the way they wanted to do something in the first place – i.e. the more interesting and less work-intensive way (as opposed to the most effective/often less-interesting/more rote work way). My business partner observed with his kids that they often forget or “misinterpret” past convos such that they somehow recall that daddy said they could do that thing they wanted to do even when he was actually saying they couldn’t :laughing: .

If it were really purely a case of faulty memory then there would be an equal distribution of misremembering things in favor of one side or the other. But a pattern emerges… or, a bias, if you will :grin: . Perhaps a similar pattern is happening here?

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Hehe now isn’t that common sense in operation :laughing:

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For somewhat similar reasons, I prefer and also enforce as much as possible my conversations n discussions with colleagues at work in text instead of doing it over a call.

Just yesterday, I could easily track back all the sequential conversations over a certain goof up at work where it appeared that I didn’t do some task…but because of that text convo, I was able to justify hehe

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@claudiu

Tx man. So Vineeto is good at deductive reasoning after all. Or at least not as bad as I suspected. Not that it matters. But her clarification is still appreciated.

For the record, I neither misremembered or presented a straw man or red herring. Vineeto seems to have remembered it the same as I did with the addition of a few clarifying words that may or not have been actually been said. Memory is faulty let alone memory to that precision. And my argument/conclusion had very little to do with global warming.* It was just the subject matter of one my examples. (My main example as it were.) My point was about a possible physical reason for people being bad at deductive logic.

*Out of everyone here, you should know this so I’m not sure why you thought this was a discussion about global warming.

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It’s interesting that instead of being curious enough to do a two second Google search Vineeto is satisfied with calling it hubris and leaving it there.

Tyndall and Foote showed that nitrogen and oxygen, which together account for 99 percent of the atmosphere, had essentially no influence on Earth’s temperature because they did not absorb heat.

Rather, they found that gases present in much smaller concentrations were entirely responsible for maintaining temperatures that made the Earth habitable, by trapping heat to create a natural greenhouse effect.

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It’s interesting that instead of being curious enough to give Vineeto the benefit of the doubt and wonder what she means by this, you assume she’s so ill-informed that a 2-second Google search is enough to dismantle her position. I’m not sure whether this is an ironic example of hubris in action :joy: .

This is demonstrably false, though. Just start a fire in a fireplace. The air (99% of which is nitrogen & oxygen) warms as a result of contact with the fire. All of it warms, not just 1% of it.

Alternately turn on a heater that heats the air near the floor. The hot air will rise to the top. Then stand up and wave your hands in the air. You’ll feel the heat. The air as a whole (99% of which is nitrogen & oxygen) warms up. It is absorbing the heat from the air below. All the air is hotter, not just 1% of it.

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I don’t assume anything I’m simply giving a counter-argument to what she wrote.

If you read the article this is about absorbing radiating heat from the earth not if air can get hot:

Since the Sun is hot, it gives off energy in the form of shortwave radiation at mainly ultraviolet and visible wavelengths. Earth is much cooler, so it emits heat as infrared radiation, which has longer wavelengths.

Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases have molecular structures that enable them to absorb infrared radiation. The bonds between atoms in a molecule can vibrate in particular ways, like the pitch of a piano string. When the energy of a photon corresponds to the frequency of the molecule, it is absorbed and its energy transfers to the molecule.

Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases have three or more atoms and frequencies that correspond to infrared radiation emitted by Earth. Oxygen and nitrogen, with just two atoms in their molecules, do not absorb infrared radiation.

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Firstly I have to reiterate that she didn’t present an argument (such as would necessitate a counter-argument) but rather a “cautionary note” that one shouldn’t “automatically assume that human activities can change the climate”. i.e. she was just pointing out that you need “clear and unequivocal evidence” to support such a claim.

Upon reading what Vineeto wrote here, there are two possibilities:

  1. She never looked beyond this to see why people say that humans cause climate change, shut her mind and ears to any and all arguments against it, and therefore never came upon an argument explaining how humans can cause climate change despite the atmosphere being so big, even one a 2-second Google search would find.
  2. She did actually look into the presented evidence, thoroughly enough to conclude that they do not have “clear and unequivocal evidence” to support the claim.

Contrary to your reply… you did assume #1. Whence this assumption?

That being, said we can move on to see if the 2-second Google search article provided the necessary clear and unequivocal evidence.

I was replying to what you quoted the article as stating which is that nitrogen and oxygen do “not absorb heat”. It is false, they do absorb heat.

Further, as the earth lets off heat not only via radiation but also via conduction and convection, the entire atmosphere does absorb heat that is coming off of the surface (and not just 0.04% of it).

That is true, but it’s only part of the picture. The Earth also emits heat via conduction and convection. The question is, which is a larger effect, the heat lost via conduction & convection or the heat lost via radiation?

Regarding the effectiveness of heat loss via radiation I’ll direct you to this reddit thread that addresses the question of how the International Space Station loses heat:

zx7: If there were one or two people on the ISS, their bodies would generate a lot of heat. Given that the ISS is surrounded by a (near) vacuum, how does it get rid of this heat so that the temperature on the ISS is comfortable?
robo_reddit: Hey I worked on the ISS thermal control systems. The station is essentially cooled by a water cooler like you see in high end PCs. All of the computers and systems are on cold plates where heat is transferred into water. This is necessary because without gravity air cooling doesn’t work well. The warmed water is pumped to heat exchangers where the energy is transferred into ammonia. The ammonia is pumped through several large radiators where the heat is “shined” into space via infrared. The radiators can be moved to optimize the heat rejection capability. The reason the radiators are so large is that this is a really inefficient method but it’s the only way that works in space.
[link]

i.e. losing heat via infrared is “really inefficient” – that is, compared to conduction & convection.

So to put it in perspective, 100% of the atmosphere is busy being heated up from the surface via conduction & convection, which by the way is also re-radiating infrared back down towards the planet, while 0.04% of the atmosphere is contributing to a reduction of the “really inefficient” radiative heat-loss.

So it’s not clear or unequivocal at all that if this 0.04% jumps to 0.08% and the contribution of the ‘really inefficient’ radiative heat-loss is made even more inefficient, that this would contribute significantly to the warming of the whole atmosphere. Further evidence is required.

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VINEETO: That means only 0.01 to 0.1 percent of the atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide.

It is estimated that 3.6 to 5 percent of that amount can be attributed to human activity, of which 57 percent is reabsorbed by natural processes.

Sounds like an argument to me…

And no one is “automatically assuming” anything, there are plenty of studies done on climate change, just check Google :wink:

Do I only get two options? She did present her argument (above) and not an argument on what evidence is missing (for example), which is what I found interesting.

Which is why I asked you to read the article for context, since this is about absorbing heat that would otherwise leave the atmosphere via radiation.

But not out from the atmosphere…

If all that contributed to the temperature of the Earth was the incoming, absorbed sunlight then the temperature of the Earth would rise nearly 1 million degrees Celsius over a billion years.[4] Thus, it is critical that planets have a means to lose some energy to outer space. Since Earth is surrounded by the vacuum of outer space, it cannot lose energy through conduction or convection. Instead, the only way the Earth loses energy to space is by electromagnetic radiation.

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Earth's_heat_balance

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You do realize we are talking about something Vineeto said to Jon “in passing” some years ago? This was not “Vineeto presents her case against Anthropogenic Global Warming”. This was Jon telling us that Vineeto is “biased” because she makes “bad arguments” such as the “earth is too big”, and Vineeto replying that she wasn’t saying that to make an argument at all, she was just pointing out it’s not necessarily a given that humans can affect the climate (which is a “given” in many circles) due to the size of the atmosphere and that it might be hubris to assume so.

Somehow this morphed into an assumption that Vineeto was satisfied with “leaving it there” and wasn’t even curious enough to have ever done a two second Google search on the topic. You do realize Richard spent weeks researching this topic and that they most likely have discussed it at length? How can you give them so little credit to assume they aren’t even aware of the contents of the arguments of the most basic Google searches on the topic while simultaneously being confident in what they say?

Indeed, but there’s a few critical pieces that are missing to complete the picture.

Firstly you left out the next bit:

At typical planetary temperatures, this energy being shed to space is in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, all objects with a temperature [i.e. including oxygen & nitrogen] emit some form of radiation, and the infrared emission to space results from contributions by the planetary surface and atmosphere.

That is, the warm atmosphere (all 100% of it, not just 0.04% of it) is also emitting IR to space (and therefore contributing to the Earth losing its energy to space), not just the surface of the Earth.

But then, one might ask, could not some extra CO2 trap this IR and heat the entire (surface plus atmosphere) as a whole, more than it otherwise would be, since the IR now cannot escape to space?

The key to resolving this is in understanding the mechanism by which the CO2 is said to ‘trap’ IR, and from there putting the magnitude of this effect into perspective.

The way in which CO2 in the atmosphere is said to ‘trap’ the IR is none other than by being heated up by it:

Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping [sic(!): radiation-trapping] gases have molecular structures that enable them to absorb infrared radiation. The bonds between atoms in a molecule can vibrate in particular ways, like the pitch of a piano string. When the energy of a photon corresponds to the frequency of the molecule, it is absorbed and its energy transfers to the molecule.

The “energy transfers to the molecule” is a way of saying that it heats up. This link puts it more explicitly:

When photons bump into other atoms, some of their energy can get the electrons in those atoms resonating or moving faster than they were before - that’s what we call heat. The properties of these molecules and their bonds determine if a gas in the atmosphere will absorb infrared radiation or not.
[link]

That is, the claim is that the CO2 that makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere, is being heated up by the IR it absorbs from the surface of the Earth, and afterwards re-radiated (just like anything else that gets hot), some back into space (therefore cooling the planet) and some back towards the surface (therefore warming the planet).

But… no matter the means by which a gas is heated, regardless it will emit IR due to being an object that is hot! This applies to oxygen and nitrogen as well. If the oxygen and nitrogen gets heated – which it does by conduction and convection, and more efficiently than the CO2 does by radiation – then it, too, will thereafter emit IR in the same manner that CO2 is said to do it, some back into space (therefore cooling the planet) and some back towards the surface (therefore warming the planet). Not to mention that the CO2 itself is also being heated up far more by the convection & conduction than it is by the IR!

This is why it was critical to correct the misrepresentation earlier that oxygen and nitrogen “did not absorb heat”. They do, and far more of it than the CO2 does. The only way this claim can appear to be credible is by this conflation of heat and infrared radiation.

To perhaps belabor the point a bit – 100% of the atmosphere contributes to being heated by the surface of the Earth and thereafter re-heating the surface due to IR emissions – not just 0.04% of it. So if we take it as a given that the stated mechanism of the planet being hotter than it would be with no atmosphere is due to the atmosphere being heated up by the surface and re-emitting IR radiation back to the surface — then the magnitude of this effect is far, far greater from the 99.96% of the atmosphere than it is of the 0.04% of the atmosphere.

This is the point. The entire claim is predicated upon the 0.04% being responsible for the entire effect of heating the surface – and therefore couldn’t even a simpleton see (:wink:) that increasing that 0.04% to say 0.08% could lead to drastic effects since that’s the only way the Earth ultimately loses heat to space?

But the point is that it’s really the 99.96% that is responsible for the vast majority of the effect of heating the surface. The effect of the 0.04% is much smaller than it’s made out to be. The premise of the magnitude of the effect of the 0.04% is unfounded. So it’s not clear or unequivocal at all that increasing this will net increase the temperature of the planet. Further evidence is required – and models and predictions and evaluations and computer simulations with this false premise as a basis do not constitute further evidence.

[EDIT: Note that the discussion about global warming/climate change continued on another thread.]

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So refreshing to see people having a debate about something someone else said, all of whom without any qualifications in the subject when you could otherwise been out murdering, raping and pillaging.

Let it never be said that Actualism counted for nothing!

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I was too insistent on the AF people can be stubbornly irrational thing. I didn’t really need to establish any examples. I could have just left it open ended and moved on to the meat of the conversation. I tried a few times but by that time the damage was already done. Then again the whole question got derailed right of the bat through no fault of my own. So whatever. Better luck next time I guess.

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It was an interesting question. It got me thinking about a lot of things. I still think being free doesn’t mean you won’t be subject to bias. Though you have the best opportunity to break out of any biases at least.

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Regardless of how the discussion developed, I think that it can be really useful for many people to open up topics like this, and to have a record of this kind of aspects related to actually free people. Of course, the first potential beneficiaries are the present forum members.

In your particular case, @JonnyPitt, to perhaps better analyze the topic itself, to observe your own biases, but also to observe and deal with your emotions during the debate, as it is not easy or pleasant to suddenly find oneself in a terrain one would like to get out of, to be the focus of attention of “the community”, the recipient of opposing and/or convoluted opinions, etc.

For the rest of us it provides an opportunity to observe our own biases, our potential insecurities/discomfort about your points, the way we react emotionally when responding to you, etc.

In the end all of this can be useful and positive. It’s up to us. :slightly_smiling_face:

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B It is all quite risible. And yet, according to ‘JonnyPitt’ on the “Cause of Bias” thread at the Discuss Actualism Online forum – who apart from currently being in a state of denial[](javascript:void(0)) [](javascript:void(0)) and rank absurdity[](javascript:void(0)) also appears to have plugged that hole in his superiority complex[](javascript:void(0)) of 2013 vintage – it is both Richard and Vineeto who have cognitive limitations similar to “tone deafness” or “dyslexia” [](javascript:void(0)) and are (allegedly) on the record with some “verifiably bat-shit crazy” opinions[](javascript:void(0)) as well as, of late, being “stubbornly irrational” to boot[](javascript:void(0)), and not those mathematically abstractive guys-n-gals at Quantumville.

Sheesh. Tx @Claudiu. Maybe next time don’t misrepresent me so poorly. I was merely trying to get to a physical reason for extreme cognitive bias. Only using examples of poor arguments made by Vineeto and others to establish why cause of extreme bias may be physical and not psychological. At other times I noted how even those examples weren’t necessary when I asked how people (AF or not) use poor arguments when good ones are readily available. I don’t recall ever saying no good arguments exist to support their conclusions. I wasn’t even questioning their conclusions.

At any rate, when it comes to global warming - To me it’s a public policy question and I’ve always put policy questions in probability terms. Is GW probably made-made or is it probably not? If the probability of it being made-made are greater than zero than some percentage of GDP should be used to reduce emissions and thus reduce the odds of global warming getting worse. Not being a scientist, I simplified the variables. Is it a coincidence the ice caps are receding during the same geological era of human population explosion and the industrial revolution? My dumb brain says that since 200 years is not a long time at all, geologically speaking, it’s probably not a coincidence. Therefore, I would support more rather than less emission control. As it stands, here in the USA, one group says zero percentage of GDP should be transferred by the government over to emission control and the other group says a tiny little bit should.

Here’s my quote containing the verifiably batshit crazy comment:

So if that’s what he meant then how can AF person think like that? And here’s the deal, I’m not saying that what he meant when he said New World Order. I don’t know what he meant. But I can see him have such an opinion. Craig too. I can see him having such an opinion. Because they both are on the record with some verifiably batshit crazy opinions.

I agree that is superiority complex-esque. In fact, my thread helped me greatly with putting my various opinions into the far-from-certainty category. Many of them were already there but some of them like “Trump is a completely unprincipled con man” or “the CCP sucks big time” were still very much in the complete certainty category. And it will take time for them to move out of there into a less superiority complex space. My global warming opinion was never in that space, however. Can I note how I said that on February 6th and our private conversation started on February 11th? Our private conversation deserves more consideration than you gave it.

I was too insistent on the AF people can be stubbornly irrational thing. I didn’t really need to establish any examples. I could have just left it open ended and moved on to the meat of the conversation.

That was my quote containing the “stubbornly irrational” comment. Not even remotely dogmatic, I don’t think.