This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think this whole post is confused in very common ways about what it means for something to be material vs scientific vs transcendental.
ESP being real wouldn't disprove science.
It would mean that individual scientists failed to notice something for a long time, possibly it would more intensely highlight the type of problematic resistance to paradigm shifts that we already know the entrenched scientific establishment can be prone to.
But it wouldn't break the notion of cause and effect. It wouldn't break the notion of learning through induction. It wouldn't break Bayesian updating on evidence.
Basically, it might embarrass specific individual scientists who fell down on the job, but it wouldn't break the Scientific Method. It wouldn't invalidate known and proven-reliable relationships between different types of sensory experiences (like the experience of letting go of a rock and the experience of seeing it fall). It wouldn't break the process by which we acquire knowledge, or any of the knowledge which we acquired by using it correctly.
ESP would just be one more natural phenomenon for us to study and learn about. If it had weird properties that made it resistant to being studied, that's fine; the insides of black holes are also difficult to study, and the Uncertainty Principle is a real bitch. We might have a hard time learning about ESP, but that doesn't make it a non-scientific process.
Nor would disproving materialism break science. Maybe there exist both physical and mental objects, maybe all objects are mental constructs and our experience of a physical world is just a hacked-together perceptual interface to let us manipulate those purely-mental objects efficiently. Lots of scientists have contemplated natural systems like that and how to investigate and model them with science.
So long as the non-materialist 'true' universe still works by cause and effect, so long as it is possible to gather sensory inputs from it that correlate in any way with 'true' features of it, you can still do science at it. And if it doesn't, then you have to explain why the hell our sensorium appears to present such a world so reliably, which gets you all the way back to the problem of Solipsism and all the arguments against it.
Neither ESP nor non-materialism would disprove or break science.
Science can only be broken by proving that its process for noticing statistical correlations between sensory experiences is in some way incorrect, or unreliable in some specific domain, or etc.
And that takes a lot more than discovering some weird new thing we didn't think existed... that happens all the time.
Furthermore, neither ESP nor non-materialism would prove the existence of supernatural entities such as Gods, nor would it prove any one specific religion or their teachings to be correct. Discovering that you were wrong to deny the existence of one thing does not prove the existence of all other thing you ever denied; reversed stupidity is not smartness.
And even proving the existence of a specific religion's specific God or Gods would not prove that modern-day science-influenced cultural and political movements are wrong. Even if it were proved that a God exists and it dislikes what we're doing, you'd still have to argue why we should replace our utility function with its, whether we should give into its threats about hell or it's emotional blackmail about being our creator, etc.
I'm not saying your position is as unsophisticated as 'Seems like there's some evidence for ESP being real, that probably means that scientists are wrong about vaccines and we shouldn't take them, and also we all need to start obeying God's will as defined by the convocation of Canterbury in 1870 right now before it's too late.'
But it does rhyme with that argument. I think it's making the same types of incorrect leaps in logic.
You're probably right in that I assumed a lot in the post. To clarify, when you say things like:
I'm more arguing that our culture, and indeed the mainstream scientific apparatus, operates based on a sort of materialist, reductionist Scientism framework. Often when rationalists talk about materialism vs non materialism they get bogged down in these definition games, and to be fair it's for a somewhat good reason.
Regardless, the average scientist doing actual work in the world today, publishing papers that lead to policy interventions, diverting government funds, organizing society, etc, is a materialist by action. Even though a ton of people say they're Christian, in reality they act like materialists. That's what I'm getting at.
So yes you can say okay in an edge case True Science would survive proof that materialism is false, and I'd agree. Sadly our world doesn't run on True Science, it's a motte that never has and never will exist.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link