Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Did the image of my friendly neighbours being secretly replaced by nefarious aliens tip you off?
Yes, obviously, to a degree. If the ukrainians had welcomed their russian liberators in 24 hours, ukrainian nationalism would be discredited and putin’s ‘on the unity’ view would be validated(again, to a degree). Reality is the testing ground for opinions just as much as it is for science.
There is a signal in a military defeat, there is a signal in popular belief, the Truth is trying to tell you something. And if you say ‘widespread popular belief just means more effective propaganda’, you’re putting your fingers in your ears.
How can a deconstruction of science be valid? Besides, postmodernism invalidates itself retroactively, proactively, presently, it can deconstruct anything anytime.
Yes, correct. There are limits imposed by the truth. Propaganda can’t make them believe they have 5 arms. They do converge on the truth, even if they miss it.
I’m actually very agreeable, I take everything I hear on faith, I avoid any area of controversy and I certainly would never go out of my way to invite people to explain to me exactly why I’m wrong. Come on. Blow my mind. You have my permission to collapse my mental sanity if you can.
You said SS has a set of beliefs about material reality that he thinks are objectively true. But when I say it, my epistemic systems are about to give out.
What if they were as oppositional as in reality, but Russian forces were just more competent and swiftly crushed all resistance?
This is not a matter of degree, this is a matter of things having nothing to do with each other. You talked of defeat. The signal in defeat can have zilch to do with merit of ideology.
All of science is deconstruction of earlier failed science: both procedure and facts finding new shared mechanical explanation. We know why Galileo failed to measure the speed of light with lanterns, because we know how all parts of the system work, and which of his assumptions were erroneous.
Can propaganda make a child believe she is in some truer-than-life sense a boy with a penis, and only the nature's caprice has made it seem otherwise?
How does postmodernism accrue popularity at all, in your theory?
In alternate universe where SMO worked as planned Russian propaganda would claim that all Ukrainians welcomed the liberators and any resistance was due to NATO mercenaries.
This was outcome that everyone predicted, and would not discredit NATO/GAE any more that fall of Mosul to ISIS and Kabul to Taliban discredited it. Instead of shock and horror, the reaction would be: "Ukraine? What you expected from this shithole?"
More options
Context Copy link
Then there would be less of a raw signal wrt the legitimacy of the ukrainian nationality and more of a signal regarding putin's(and the russian state's) competence (it would still reflect positively on his views on nationality).
I mean, why? If a religious lunatic charges naked against a besieging army because he thought God would help him and gets eviscerated instead, has his claim to prophethood not been discredited?
There is still a signal in what he did. You're switching between meanings of deconstruct. Truly deconstructed science would be throwing dice and reading the speed of light as 'five'.
First, mistakes happen (though even they are closer to the truth than random nonsense). Second, epistemic defense mechanism. "Shit, marxism fails all its predictions. Wait, how do we know what's true anyway? I'm boring myself already, let's just say it's all bullshit. Now I don't have to update."
Because bad guys can in fact win. The belief that the opposite is true is what is called «just world theory».
What an example. You sure are soft on yourself, o truth-lover. Consider a strident democracy lover who organizes an anti-war rally in Berlin 1939. It is not, let's say, as entirely implausible as in the case of a lunatic that he might succeed in changing the course of history. Nevertheless he fails, is arrested and processed. Consider my friends who stayed in Moscow and get summoned to court on this very day for doing the same. The main signal I see here is that they are instrumentally outgunned, perhaps naive, less charitably – deceived by their Western «friends». This isn't much of a blemish on their ideology.
Indeed, I would argue that they constitute its best and truest part. And the worst parts are clearly triumphant, gloating, this is the woke stuff we've written and read so much about.
Bad guys can win, both within and without a movement.
You are. This is the canonical idea of deconstruction (or perhaps better said epistemological break), the motte of it, what I practice, what science practices, the entirely valid practice of skepticism about widely held beliefs/metaphysics/epistemologies/ontologies that you condemn people for using: the tough question of whether we actually know what we think we know, whether our method for ascertaining truths is good enough, and whether the apparent consensus of our esteemed experts is organic, genuine and best-possible attempt at parsing all available evidence.
Pomo garbage in the style of «Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism» is cynical or deluded cargo-cult application of this valid premise, and precisely what ought to be deconstructed – as an attempt to manufacture an inorganic, bad-faith consensus.
It's deconstruction all the way down. You can't escape it. What you are trying to do here is deconstruction of a popular epistemology too.
Indeed, how? Do we just ask a bunch of older white males? Is there, historically speaking, a surer way to know?
Oy, did you see this:
Pedestrian understanding of the mechanisms responsible, but even they agree.
No, their understanding is exactly correct: people cling to power, and power worship is rationalization of the status quo, to minimize losses from opposing the strong or getting crushed along with the weak. Might is right because it can redefine terms, in a perfectly postmodernist manner: words mean whatever the stronger party wishes them to mean, so the only question is, as Humpty Dumpty argued, which is to be master. And with the next master, new meanings come, so no learning from history is possible. Of course, theorizing to the effect that the Universe (devoid of God in your picture, incidentally) is so configured as to make each successive Master in some objective sense external to the struggle more deserving, and his meanings Truer, is nothing more than Just World theory. The world is not obliged to be just.
Kamil flaunts his faux-wise Asiatic cynicism of the Russian prison cell, and the fact that you prop this up as evidence is quite hilarious. Once again, even Greks knew better.
(There's a moral lesson in italic at the bottom).
You've really corn cobbed yourself. Just admit that your whole belief system stands on air and adopt something more mature.
They’re using the veneer of the always-popular sheeple theory, but I think it boils down to the sheeple basically being right, as always.
Minimizing losses is a valid logical reason. An average joe who challenges a muscle-bound giant to a fistfight doesn’t have a pristine epistemology, he’s just stupid. The giant didn’t twist reality.
Perhaps the problem with postmodernists is that since truth is supposedly power, they don’t know what to do with observed power, it’s just meaningless, assigned a value of zero, like history. So they get their asses kicked.
Karlin approved of Putin swallowing russian-speaking territories when it carried no cost, and that was sensible, for him, for the russian people. They weren’t blinded by power, they just saw the world as it was. Now that the cost-benefit has changed, their view must change also. I don’t see where Humpty dumpty is supposed to be, manipulating them.
@Amadan is it fair to call this gibberish? I suppose he can't be thinking he makes a solid point.
You know the mods don't adjudicate how good or logical or correct someone's post is. If you are asking "Can I call this gibberish and insult the OP," no.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sure bad guys can win, and bad ideas can win. But I disagree that there is no signal in winning or losing a battle, or ‘the battle of ideas’. The battle acts like a filter, and the winning side of the solution contains more truth particles, so to speak.
Chinaman says “General who knows his own and his enemy’s strength never loses a battle”. So from his defeat we can infer a flaw in his understanding of the world.
Why do you need postmodernism for that? These so-called ‘epistemological breaks’/paradigm shifts happened without its input, old-school scepticism was enough. Science did not need deconstruction. And practically speaking, you and I agree on a lot of controversial areas of science, so where is the postmodernist gain from all that wild and diffuse scepticism? In Superman studies?
Why deconstruct what can be refuted? What good is a test with only one answer. By contrast, it is harder to refute true ideas than false ones. Per scott, refutation is an asymmetric weapon, stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys.
YesChad.jpg . The alternative is not practical. Did you personally test all the laws of science you rely on every day? We sample, we test on the margins, where popularity fades, or if something doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. No need to argue with the derridas.
Indeed you don't need the teaching of postmodernism for that, which is why your attempts to tar all skeptics with the same brush as Pomo grifters are disingenuous. Personally I'm more informed by philosophy and methodology of science (e.g. Lakatos. I'll save you the trouble, he's Jewish, as are Popper and Kuhn, but not Feyerabend) than e.g. Derrida. But the basic claim is the same in both.
Have you read her argument? How does one refute that crap? It is free of falsifiable claims that can be traced back to a debate over empirical evidence, it is corrupt down to its very method, like your sloppy «truth particles in the winning side» power-worship epistemology. No, the proper «refutation» is discussion of Prescod-Weinstein's curious ideological commitment to slander white people via disingenuous rhetoric after having made a fortunate scientific career and accrued reputation in their society, and of course one can't avoid noticing both parts of her surname when looking into that. By the way, it does seem like she produces perfectly fine science on less political topics.
There is no rule, no shortcut to «thinking straight». This is what broke rationalism. You cannot codify it such that it won't be gamed, you can only try not to delude yourself or be deluded.
This way. Not by pointing out her jewhishness, there's no signal there, because the author is always someone with biases, even when they tell the truth.
Don’t you see the blatant similaraties between @SecureSignals superman rant and this crap, and feminist/african american studies in general? They point to disparities and assume the jew/white male is wrong and has nefarious motives. His ‘narrative-crafting’ assymmetry is her ‘prestige assymmetry’. They use this invented assymmetry to justify a far more concrete assymmetry, privileging the standpoint of the non-jew/non-white male, and the truth-value in their statements.
Make it ‘power-respecting’, at least.
This is just completely contradictory... there are always biases, but there's no signal there? How does that make sense? If there is a bias that is the definition of a signal, if you try to understand the content without taking into consideration their identity then you will be systematically wrong. There would be no signal there if the Jewishness of a content creator was completely uncorrelated with the content, which it is not. There are broad correlations across various disparate subject matters, the bias is averaged in a particular direction that is meaningful and influential to the broader culture.
My 'narrative crafting' asymmetry: "Jews have a particular talent for creating propaganda and narratives that are memetically influential in culture."
Prescod-Weinstein's 'prestige assymmetry': "In American society, Black women are on the losing end of an ontic prestige asymmetry whereby different scientists “garner unequal public approbation” in their everyday lives due to ascribed identities such as gender and race"
Her asymmetry is invented, mine is true. Of course my asymmetry does not say all Jews are better than all Gentiles at this behavior, no more than making a claim "Jews have on average higher IQ than Gentiles" would be making a claim of universality. If you simply assume that there is a positive correlation between IQ and a talent for narrative-crafting, then my claim holds true on that empirical measurement alone. But I admit I go further than that and believe the gap between the two is greater than the IQ gap and is driven by differences in cognitive profile beyond simply intelligence. Something like Verbal Intelligence might be a better proxy for that talent, and the gap between Jews and Gentiles is biggest there whereas the reverse is true for Spatial Intelligence. More Gentiles in MMA, more Jews in Hollywood.
In contrast, Black women are not losing 'prestige asymmetry' due to discrimination by their gender or race, but due to their lower capabilities in producing science.
I affirm my asymmetry and reject Prescod-Weinstein's asymmetry by appealing to innate differences in talent in both cases...
You, presumably, accept that there is an asymmetry when it comes to Black Women contribution to physics, but when it comes to contributions to crafting grand social narratives and propaganda, you throw your hands up in the air and claim we cannot say anything meaningful about the asymmetry of Jewish contributions to these crucial cultural institutions.
IQ correlates with knowledge too, and the ability to create great art and science. That correlates with Truth in the speaker’s statements. Going by identity epistomology, they should be granted a knowledge-and-intelligence-assymmetry bonus instead of your narrative-crafting malus.
To be consistent with your anti-correlation of truth and IQ, you should find the stupidest person available and believe him.
By your own rules, whites have a narrative-crafting advantage over blacks, and they would be right to ignore our statements and go for Prescod-Weinstein ’s crap.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link