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.
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Notes -
I don't think so. Even for fundamental natural-law sort of questions, the available evidence feels finite. Maybe from an anthropic principle? Issues which we couldn't observe?
Trivially true.
Not sure I paraphrased correctly, or exactly what you meant by "trails off." I do think that this describes some bias failure modes, but not normal operation, so I guess I'll say "no."
In the sense that it must be taken as a starting point, and cannot be arrived at from evidence? Oh yeah. I understand that other people don't feel this way, but I find it very hard to empathize, in the same way that I fail to imagine having a deep-seated feeling about gender.
Generally, no. Such political effort is neither subtle nor particularly efficient. Not that truth fares too much better--I'd say opinion evolves from the chaos of signaling and countersignaling. It is Moloch made manifest.
Even though this thread has some interesting parts, I don't expect it to really resolve your conflict. Y'all are talking past each other. It's not (just) because of ambiguities in the terms, either! Most people are not philosophical purists. They may believe one or two or more of your questions without applying them in all situations.
You can call Dase a postmodernist, but it will only get you partway towards predicting his positions. More importantly, telling other people that he is a postmodernist won't give them that much information.
Let me put it a different way: suppose you wanted to be certain about the existence of God, the way you are about Gravity. How many books have been written on the subject, for and against? If you started now and did nothing else, could you read them all before you died? How many other books would you need to have the right background to understand those books?
@fuckduck9000, as I understand it, claims that when we want to answer a question, we just look at all the evidence and draw the obvious conclusion. I'm attempting to point out that "looking at all the evidence" is itself frequently an intractable problem; there is more evidence than you can actually look at in your lifetime for single issues, and we must reason about multiple issues.
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Thanks.
I mean obviously they are different in some ways. The question is along the lines of 'Is only gravity subject to evidence, while ideology is a matter of choice?'
Ambiguous. I think it is possible to answer the question of the existence of God or of an invisible dragon in my garage through evidence, it just delivers a negative answer. That is not the same thing as saying it is outside the reach of all evidence (proving and disproving) (which would require a legitimate axiom). The postmodernist trick here is to confuse the two, avoiding the update evidence provides.
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