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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3261 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023

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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You can choose to continue the conversation in good faith as you more or less have to date, because you value some greater axiom more than the axiom in question here, and maybe your mind changes and maybe it doesn't.

Everything’s not an axiom. Definition time:

An axiom, postulate, or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word ἀξίωμα (axíōma), meaning 'that which is thought worthy or fit' or 'that which commends itself as evident'.

Axioms don’t change, they’re the start, what you reason from, not what you argue about. Calling your beliefs axioms is artificially locking them up, where the evidence and arguments can’t get to them.

My beliefs are my honest approximation of the truth, and they can change, like priors. You may think you’ve made an ironclad argument against them, and they may not change after 20, or 2000 comments, but that still does not make them axioms.

the evidence is ironclad, so far as it goes: you can't claim that Freudianism wasn't bullshit, and you can't claim that it didn't dominate for generations,

When have I ever claimed the opposite. Man, even in our other discussions I was already getting annoyed having to repeat every time that I think Freudianism is bullshit, and I even made a top-level back at the old place on how fucked up modern psychotherapy is because it was harming people I care about. It does not contradict my priors, and I have never claimed that falsehood can’t win, just that it’s harder.

All of those choices are choices, not deterministic forced state transitions. Your mind cannot change without them. If the sum of a sequence of choices is you changing your mind, you have chosen to change your mind.

I can’t choose to believe something I perceive as false (like there is a lion at my window). I choose to argue with you to give my perception more time to detect truth and falsehood, that is not choosing my version of the truth.

I choose to look out the window. I see a cow. So I believe there is a cow. Doesn’t mean I have chosen to believe in a cow instead of a crow. I didn’t choose what I saw, and I didn’t choose to believe what I saw either.

Hmmmm, I have to ask, could it be that you picked up the postmodernism strictly to serve as a defense mechanism for believing in God?

You cannot uncritically assume that evidence offered you second-hand is actually trustworthy, which means that the overwhelming majority of evidence available to you is at least somewhat suspect.

If I’m so gullible, woulnd’t you expect me to have less unorthodox positions? What are the fruits of your grand scepticism, worth (imo) sacrificing epistemic integrity? I think you’re missing a signal and wasting your time questioning the 99,99 % stuff.

When I accuse you of rounding my arguments to absurdities, it's because of things like this. At no point have I actually questioned gravity, but you appear to be certain that I have.

Because your argument was not limited to ideology-like knowledge and was questioning gravity-like knowledge.

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