Lol. Guys. Well maybe she really didn’t mean it, pure intent, you just don’t understand innocence, what about goats… Give them the benefit of the doubt. That’s cool. It strikes me as bending over backwards to avoid seeing an issue. But’s that not my business.
I always thought feelings, principally fear, destroyed objectivity. After encountering Vineeto and Richard, I had to conclude that it might not just be feelings and feelings only. But I didn’t understand what else it could be. A year or so back, I came up with the tone deaf analogy to help me understand. But it didn’t resonate with me. Facts/logic are different than tones. But after making this thread, replying daily and thus being forced to keep the idea in my head, I’ve come around to it. It actually makes sense now. After all it’s easy to see that just being bad at math could make one unable to see the logical inconsistency of a statement. And if one didn’t have a good grasp of logical consistency then seeing the relevance or irrelevance of a fact would be difficult too. Then add in selection bias to counter doom in gloom attitudes. The thing could even snow ball and pretty soon they entertaining some ahem interesting notions. I really don’t have a need to pretend that they are reasonable in all their opinions or this or that argument isn’t bad. And much less so now after thinking it through.
No bending over here – although I was surprised to arrive where I did. I wasn’t planning on getting there when I started writing the latest reply. I find this often happens when I start off from a contrarian/contradictory position to something Richard or Vineeto wrote – eventually I see that they actually have a point haha. Sometimes months later.
An actually freed world will be truly interesting to see how science and development changes and continues.
Claudiu, I find it curious that you always find yourself agreeing with Richard and Vineeto. Is there a small chance here that you might not be comfortable with idea that they could be wrong about some things? While it’s often easy to go along with mainstream views, I think it’s more a question of identity and tribal affiliations that would affect receptivity to views – be it mainstream or alternative. Accepting that ones heroes do not have the whole picture isn’t easy.
We talk about facts a lot in actualism, but in a world where information is a chaotic soup full of complexity, unknowns, politicking and the sort of eye-watering technical detail we find impossible to make sense of, facts can be difficult to ascertain. I don’t think sense-making is an entirely logical process. There is social dimension to it and that’s where it gets tricky - for anyone actually free or not. The facticity vs feeling of this moment, of living, of this body and the infinitude of the universe is quite a different matter from assessing the facticity of e.g. public health policy or global warming – although no doubt, the absence of feelings does confer advantages.
But we shouldn’t over-estimate that advantage. I think a certain amount of epistemic humility is necessary here. I think its cool that an interested solitary amateur wants to do their ‘own research’ on a highly technical subject, which has thousands of post-docs and profs. puzzling it over – but there are some real drawbacks with going it alone and untrained.
When I met with Vineeto recently she did noticed disapprovingly (I think) that I was open to leaving things open, to not knowing or to questioning what can ultimately be known with certainty. I think she’s right there. I suppose I’m post-modern in that specific senses. It probably does have its downsides no doubt.
The advantage of very dug-down binary positions on complex matters e.g. warming vs no warming is that there is certainty and apparent clarity - at the expense of getting rid of the whole picture which might be somewhat ambiguous.
I think the key difference for me here is exactly what the intent is. Am I using the questioning as a vehicle to become more happy and harmless or am I purely interested in an academic type discussion.
For example my mum has a PHD in statistics and nutrition so she goes balls deep on the academic side of those things. I often talk to her about nutrition and of course I do not pretend to understand the intricacies of the studies etc and I don’t want to anyways, that is not my interest. What I can see though is that her entire endeavour is polluted by belief and emotion. So for example she is concerned on whether this kind of food is more likely to lead to cancer, I am concerned in why she is so obsessed with this fear of cancer which is clearly having a damaging effect on her well being. I am poking around in an area where I clearly do not have the competence to but I do it for a different reason, with a different focus.
I would agree that if we are talking about the specifics of a field that it is not so simple, but as an actualist, as someone looking into these areas only as a means to expose my own doom and gloom worldview then I am indeed inclined to take the route of - the universe is doing just fine, why do I continue to insist that something is fundamentally ‘wrong’.
Actually the one area where I can see that I potentially disagree with the opinions of Vineeto. I remember she wrote somewhere that in an actually free world there would be no more competitive sports. And I am inclined to agree there might not be competition but I do not see why there wouldn’t be any more sports. That is my area of expertise, martial arts. And it’s something I wrestled with initially, should I give up martial arts because I am an actualist? It is all about fighting after all.
And yet my personal experience is that it is certainly possible to be a happy and harmless martial artist, enjoying the intricacies of what this body and mind is capable of - it can be so fun.
But it seems the majority of the points they are making is to point out the fact that the doom and gloom worldview is just a belief system and it is deeply worked into all areas of life. So for an actualist the key is to expose those things, I have always used their opinions as a direction to look for exactly that within myself. Without ever claiming to be an expert in the field itself. It’s like you mentioned a while ago @Srinath am I concerned with knowing the ins and outs of my car or am I concerned with knowing how to drive it to get to work in the morning.
As I said I literally start to write replies where I disagree with them and then I have to go back and edit it cause I end up agreeing.
I am certainly not comfortable with the idea that they are cognitively impaired, which is what this topic is about.
I’m ok with them being wrong about things.
Sure, but again I haven’t seen anything to suggest they simply aren’t able to see a bad argument when it hits them in the face.
Also they have turned out to be right – or at the very least to have a reasonable point – whenever I dug into something that I initially thought they were nuts about.
For example, Richard literally says he doesn’t know what half the symbols mean, in the context of physics. Yet he wrote confidently that electrons, photons, subatomic particles, etc., don’t exist. Initial reaction: WTF? How can you say they don’t exist? We can’t make computers without knowing about this stuff, etc. etc.
Dig into it a bit. Turns out there is more nuance than I thought. He is not denying that phenomena occurs that has been modeled with electrons etc. Richard just points out these are things that are postulated to exist, not proven to or necessarily exist.
Dig into it more. Although at the common talking with people level of it everyone believes that these subatomic particles exist, at the highest levels , scientists in the field actively debate it. Some say they are certainly real. Others say electrons don’t exist, it’s just ‘fields’. Others say fields don’t exist. Others say we can’t know but it matches the models. etc. So it turns out even scientists don’t disagree per se. In short, the flaming of saying that electrons don’t exist, is unwarranted. The “WTF” reaction is foundationless.
All this without Richard knowing what half the symbols mean! It’s because he’s able to see the gist or the principles of what is being said, without needing to understand all the math. There’s certainly a lack of certain type of ability or skill – if he could understand all the math he would be strictly more capable than he is. But it doesn’t detract from being able to see the high level.
Probably the biggest ‘detraction’ to not having the ability is not being able to converse with a sophisticate who believes it’s necessary. Example on physics stackexchange I pointed out how Bell’s theorem can be reduced to / doesn’t depend on hidden variables. Someone who from what I could gather was a at least not beginning physics student (he mentioned introductory courses and such) wasn’t able to see it, even though it was a logically simple point. I have enough math ability so I was able to do the (simple enough) derivation, after which he saw the point. But if I wasn’t able to he probably would have just dismissed me for a fool .
From what I see – and maybe I give people too much the benefit of the doubt – the nuance is not lost on them. It’s just that despite all that it’s not relevant at the end of the day.
I think this thread can all be explained by the reaction of a sophisticate with a touch or more of hubris interacting with someone coming from a simple/naive/innocent background. It seems stupid, lacking in ability, foolish, narrow-minded, short-sighted, lacking in ability, etc., at first, but then you see that there actually is a point there, and that point actually has the power to demolish the entire edifice.
Not unlike actual freedom itself .
Can all be completely wrong I suppose. If Richard and Vineeto definitively state there is no man-made global warming – I wouldn’t say the same. But I certainly don’t see evidence of lack of cognitive ability in what they say. To the contrary, whenever I dig in there is plentiful cognitive ability (e.g. Richard’s post on Buddhism).
@Kub933 Yeah, definitely researchers and medics are impassioned feeling beings with ideological axes to grind. But the sort of research, models and evidence presented by Richard and Vineeto were originally also the product of research and ideas by other feeling beings and suffers from the same drawback. And there’s no doubt global warming has a strong ideological and emotional dimension. But then all things human do.
@claudiu Richard and Vineeto are not cognitively impaired – very far from it. I think this is a domain of expertise thing and maybe also a political rather than a cognitive issue. I reached quite different conclusions to you by researching Richard’s arguments on some of these matters in the past. It wasn’t just a matter of accepting that his arguments made sense on the face of it (which may have occasionally been the case), but also cross-checking it with exisiting research and looking at what supported or refuted it.
It is an open question what research would look like in a world of many actually free researchers without feelings, selves or ‘doom and gloom’ handicaps … what new ways of thinking would open up and what sort of scientific consensus quite different technically trained people would reach. It’s exciting stuff and a real unknown. We can’t just simply that they would agree with Richard and Vineeto though.
I’d like to add that after giving it some thought I agree the whole ‘earth is too big’ thing was just as likely to be an opening statement, a broad overview than part of a logical chain. In fact, their other statements could have been meant to be taken in the same way. Why they never got to the meat of their opinion, idk and it doesn’t matter. Ofc, they may not have had any legitimate meat to get to but i’ll never know now.
and while i’m at it - just to clarify again - my term cognitive limitation was meant to be no more perjorative than the terms dyslexic or tone deaf or someone who can’t draw or is bad at poetry or clumsy or poor memory or literal minded or non-expressive or any other term that signifies a particular non essential weakness. We all have multiple weaknesses and a lack of deductive reasoning skills doesn’t currently have it’s own term.
I would like to add my biased opinion to this thread based on the facts as I remember them: There have been warming and cooling trends throughout the earth’s history of which the current one is not unusual. Man made causes of climate change amount to a miniscule .02%.
If you enjoy learning/thinking about this topic and want to update/refresh your knowledge, you might enjoy this page: https://skepticalscience.com/
I first came across it in 2018 when I took the course “Making sense of climate science denial” on the edX platform.
Both sources can become quite technical if you get to the analysis of their sources (which are almost always papers). However, both allow you to graduate the level of understanding you want to get, and in either case they are -at least in my view- pleasant and clear.
This is not to say that they are not biased! After all, they are based on papers produced by emotional scientists, on the concept of consensus, etc., all of which have been questioned in this thread.
But precisely what I liked most about the course and the page is that they deal with the topic of fallacies in an applied way (in this case in the context of climate science -not just global warming-), helping at least to get closer to think better and have better arguments on any topic.
It wasn’t anything in depth, we were talking in passing about climate change and they described their skepticism, and talked about how some globalists are on record talking about intentions for a planned new world order. I could see it was an extension of humanity’s power scheming, in which manipulations are nothing new.
Editorial note: Richard found that more than a few readers calling themselves actualists are of a sinistral statist progressive persuasion politically (21st century orthodoxy) and as such are just as close-minded as those of a dextral privatiser conservative persuasion. Richard has made it crystal-clear that he is a-polical.[sic] Facts and Groupthink Index
I would add there is a place for models and modelling of reality and as long as we accept those models are an approximation of the facts (or an oversimplification) they can have value and are not quite the domain of pure opinion.
Additionally, probability and causal probability can’t be completely disregarded. It muddies the waters slightly but is not something to be totally dismissed. We can still make useful choices and practical developments from just a probabilistic model and interpretation of phenomena.
I would agree that Richard is neither conservative nor progressive. How Apolitical someone can be who has public policy views, I’m really not sure. But he doesn’t vote, doesn’t think better government (or better tech for that matter) is the solution to humanities problems and thinks outside the box.
One of my most lasting impressions from Richards words are the viability of models and their complete separation from actuality.
Probability is not something I’ve heard Richard discuss. Personally, I don’t understand it. All probability seems to be based on a model. So the probability is entirely based on whether the model is a useful approximation or not. But is there a way to quantify a probability that the model is accurate? I don’t see how. We can verify if the model is based on facts and follows a valid logical sequence. We can do our damnest to think of alternative explanations that are also based on fact and just as valid logically. And If we find none then we can assume our model is the best one available. But how can we give a probability?
Let me get myself back to the original question of the post. Based on what has been written here so far, it seems we all agree actually free people will weigh one set of evidence to be heavier than others. And that this is usually due to personal experience. So why do both Richard and Vineeto claim bias ceases after self-immolation?
I guess the obvious answer is that opinion and bias are not the same thing. You can even say it’s only my opinion that actually free people demonstrate some extreme biases. And other fair minded people have a different opinion. I can’t show that an AF person holds one thing to be true despite seeing ample evidence to the contrary. Or has a conclusion that follows a logically inconsistent chain of thought despite being shown how the conclusion doesn’t follow from the evidence. I have several clues this is the case. But no smoking gun. For everything I have given in public and in private as evidence, there is the possibility they either knew more than they bothered to let on or were just farting in the wind.
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