This is part of your previous points about experience/facticity trumping deductive reasoning. We know conspiracies exist. We know bad actors exist. We may know this from people experience and we definitely know this from the historical record. But we also know that cause and effect exist. And that scientific conclusions can be accurate. Those are also both in our experience and in the historical record. So we use deductive reasoning to figure out if such and such is a likely conspiracy or a fair assessment. The climate change deniers use poor arguments, usually inductive. Why would an AF person hold on to a poor argument after it’s explained to them why and how it’s a poor argument?
Wait, why is deductive reasoning better than inductive reasoning?
I think you’re still overrating how easy it is to tell ‘what’s going on’ with these types of things.
For an example of how science can be manipulated, I could ask you: is chocolate good for you? What about red wine? Or milk? Why has fat been blamed for weight gain for decades, when it’s more likely (as far as I can tell) sugars?
It’s not very difficult to alter scientific conclusions via funding certain studies, throwing out results you don’t like, and then winning the argument via sheer volume of agreeable results. You could also fund universities, ensuring that agreeable professors were in place to teach the classes in the way you want. The most common thing in the world is for the established authorities to ostracize anyone with different results
Isn’t deductive more mathematical? So you can prove it’s logically consistent from an original premise. Whereas with an inductive argument, it’s kind of a common sense thing. i.e. the sun will appear tomorrow because it always does. IDK. I shouldn’t use terms I’m not 100% sure about.
That’s fine but you’re ignoring the examples I gave showing how much ambiguity I allow. Re-read the economic example and the global warming example. And I also clarified that it’s the arguments that I am confused about. When someone brings up George Soros, for example, to argue against anthropogenic climate change; well that’s a poor argument. And an unbiased person wouldn’t hold it for very long.
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You seem to be biased against poor arguments Jon. Why are you biased against poor arguments?
Thou shalt have no bias.
The problem with deductive reason & all reason is that it still depends on the premises involved being correct. Additionally, there is room for errors in determining what precisely is ‘logical.’ In the end it is a person - and most often a feeling being - sitting in the dark by oneself & attempting to draw conclusions.
The entirety of Western philosophy has been drawing from this system, with extremely mixed results.
It is not a dependable way to tell what is going on in the world.
@rick when it comes to conspiracies, those who laugh them off are in as nonsensical a position as those who believe them. There is no way to know for sure what is a conspiracy and what isn’t. We can only make estimations based on our experiences.
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This depends on the suppositions that the EU model is actually more stable. If the whole thing collapses next week then was it really so stable? These premises may be based on our experiences, but attempting to draw them out into the future always brings us onto increasingly uncertain ground.
History is littered with ‘experts’ making suppositions & drawing conclusions that were later disastrously incorrect. In fact, economists are one of the best possible examples of such people
Maybe.
But Jon’s trying to figure someone without emotion can be biased. I think he thinks that there cannot be bias in the actual world. Lawn bowls demonstrate otherwise! (as I tried to show earlier)
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I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here, the type of bias he’s talking about has nothing to do with lawn bowls
It has everything to do with lawn bowls
There very clearly is. I wonder why.
The bias of a lawn bowl and one’s personal bias are two different things. Be respectful.
They are entirely the same thing. I mean that with all due respect.
Care to explicate?
But there are still good arguments and bad arguments. And this is regardless of eventual outcomes. It has mostly to do with the consensus behind the original premise and the logical consistency that stems from it. That George Soros donates to “global warming causes” and the Earth is too big for humans to effect is a very very very poor argument against anthropogenic climate change. There is no consensus that George Soros is delusional or a sociopath. And no logical chain that shows his contributions are influencing scientific thought. There is no consensus that planets have a magic size where greenhouse gasses can no harm. And no logical chain that the Earth is too big to be effected by human activity. Why do AF people hold on to poor arguments?
Just like the weight of a lawn bowl is unevenly distributed. No judgment or opinion can ever be perfectly balanced. It can never process all variables perfectly evenly, in perfect balance.
Also, every human is partial to something over another. That demonstrates a bias towards that something. Bias is inescapable.
Jon is bias towards “good arguments” over “bad arguments.” Jon is biased.
He is partial. He is prejudice. Predisposed to favor one over the other.
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(assuming in arguendo that they are in fact “poor” arguments)
They answer is: because they are biased.
But so what?
Consensus doesn’t help us one whit, as it’s simply a bunch of feeling-beings agreeing about what is ‘correct.’ How do they know what is correct?
I agree that that is not a very good argument
My basic stance is that I can see that I am far more reasonable and sensible and clear when I’m free, so I’ll go over there and see what I can see.
When I’m ‘me,’ I’ve seen myself again and again distort and get confused and draw false conclusions and so on. It’s very consistent.
Actually there’s nothing in existence that is perfectly balanced. Nothing perfectly symmetrical. It’s one of those abstract ideals.
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Can I amend the title. Why do AF people hold on to bad opinions. I do alternate between being colloquial and explicit. But really. Can you allow me to be colloquial sometimes. It’s a burden to always being explicit and exact.
Balance implies a dichotomy
Maybe it’s most accurate to say everyone has different experiences, a different mind, and different preferences. Different ways of operating. Just because someone is free doesn’t mean that they’re instantly the optimum - other than that the universe is operating optimally.
What’s a bad opinion? Ill informed, miscalculated?
You might as well ask why do AF people miscalculate things?