escarpment

escarpment, 12 days ago

@nicholas_saunders I wish instead of chanting "free, free Palestine" they would chant "Israelis and Palestinians side by side" or "Israelis and Palestinians united in peace."

escarpment, 12 days ago

@nicholas_saunders @shekinahcancook "no nations no borders" is a position of privilege. Israel had no nations or borders prior to its founding. The result was skirmishes and raids from violent Palestinian groups. Israel decided to establish borders to better protect their citizens, re-learning a lesson that western countries had already learned about statism.

escarpment, 12 days ago

@nicholas_saunders @shekinahcancook Borders and countries are a solution to a problem that happens in their absence.

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook But alcohol is not wrong was not a consensus. Do you dispute that N > 0 people thought alcohol was wrong? Do you think if you polled every American in 1920 all would say alcohol was not wrong? Do you deny the existence of the temperance movement?

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook This consensus idea seems very vague. How do you define it exactly? I define consensus as 100% alignment. Majority is >50%. Plurality is the largest percentage of people, even if under 50%. Do you have a different definition of consensus?

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook 99% alignment is not consensus per my definition. Is it in your view?

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook Majority and consensus are different by my view. Majority is 51%. Consensus is 100%. So do you mean consensus or majority.

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook That definition of consensus still seems vague and not the meaning of consensus. What if a minority view is that everyone is wrong? What if the 1% of Americans who are vegans + millions of animals think animals should not be killed for food. Do the 99% of non-vegans represent consensus?

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook I think this consensus idea is extremely half-baked. I understand you seem to be a moral relativist, which is a tenable position in modern ethics. But you can't seem to pin down what consensus really is, and you seem to have arbitrarily pinned your faith on this idea of consensus for no apparent reason.

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese The claim "power has distorted reality" I characterize as false. Nothing can "distort reality," in my view.

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Power is just part of reality. It is a real phenomenon that some people have the power to effect changes in the world. With a plan, some shovels, beams, etc a team of people can make the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal exists because the people making it had the power to make the landscape match their plan. No distortion there.

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese That is a huge leap. You suddenly started talking about "good" and manifest destiny and a bunch of irrelevant topics related to this poetic concept of distorting reality.

I hope you can see the leap. Now undo the leap. If you take a picture in Panama, do you see a waterway or not? That is the reality. There is now a waterway. Power produced that waterway.

No distortion.

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese The latter (rulership) sounds like poetry to me- sort of emotional mumbo jumbo.

The former (mechanical processes) sounds like reality, the thing I am talking about. What is the state of the world.

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese I don't really know what you mean by a mechanical view of reality? So you reject that the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2 on the surface of the earth?

escarpment, 13 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Perhaps we do have a larger gulf than I thought. I guess you reject all truths? Like "the 2008 Olympics occurred in Beijing"- you think that's not a true statement?

escarpment, 12 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Ah I see, good point. You seem to be pointing out the issue of "theory laden-ness", that our minds heap so much subjectivity or "theory" on even "mundane" facts that it's hard to find a truly objective, theory-less truth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

2008 and 5768 are both arbitrary, if widely agreed upon, labels for years that depend on theoretical presuppositions about how and when to start counting years.

escarpment, 12 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese I think you make a leap to this idea of consensus. The idea of consensus is not entailed by the theory ladenness. Seems like you are emotionally troubled by theory ladenness and grasping for something ("consensus") to provide psychological relief for that trouble. I think instead it's important to "live" with that psychological trouble, without jumping to solutions. "Most facts are theory laden" (full stop). Instead of "most facts are theory laden, ergo blah."

escarpment, 12 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese It is indeed troubling when conspiracy theorists appear to deny reality. My answer to that is that information is only relevant to the extent it is adaptive for survival. Information isn't just intrinsically good. The person who denies the fact their house is in a flood zone then has their house destroyed in a flood learns information "the hard way" having refused to learn the information "the easy way."

escarpment, 12 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Hamas militants who falsely believe they are strong enough to conquer Israel could learn the information the "easy way" and agree to a peace deal, or learn that information the "hard way" and suffer heavy casualties and destruction as Israel batters them militarily.

escarpment, 12 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese I think you "underestimate" how adaptive this is. Even the most distasteful christofascist or Hamas member is the product of millennia of successful reproduction. Something they are doing is adaptive. Evolutionary pressures seem to have made some trade between commitment to scientific truth and group cohesion. Probably in some ecological niches, the group cohesion based on collective lies is more adaptive than individualism based on more objective truth.

escarpment, 12 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Yes, if the climate collapses and results in a human extinction event, that will be learning "the hard way" that climate change was real because they refused to learn "the easy way" through scientific modeling of the climate.

The question in all of these scenarios is how much information do you need, and how open to information are you. The norm seems to be people need to learn "the hard way" because they struggle to integrate inconvenient facts.

escarpment, 12 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese Back to my point about reality and power though, if the climate deniers continue to burn so many fossil fuels, that will mark a failure of the people who believed the climate models to muster sufficient power to avert climate disaster. So the outcome would be the same irrespective of whether the climate models had existed or not.

My catch phrase would be "you don't get extra points for being 'morally' right."

escarpment, 12 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese To use that extremely misunderstood word, the climate deniers seem to be "winning" objectively speaking, and it's unclear if the climate believers have sufficient power (of numbers, persuasion, military force, technological advancement) to fix that.

escarpment, 12 days ago

@shekinahcancook @meltedcheese I am holding out hope for a "deus ex machina" type technological solution, similar to the fix for the hole in the ozone layer. Also, grimly, I imagine there should be negative feedback loops where climate change radically reduces human population which in turn reduces green house gas emissions.