Also Marx's theories are not drawn from REAL LIFE but dreamt up from his own prejudices. — Ross Campbell

How do you come to this conclusion? He didn't use the facts of the life of the workers' conditions during the industrial revolution?

I'm entitled to my opinion that philosophy should be ONLY based on REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE and in line with NATURE. — Ross Campbell

Opinions don't mean much in philosophy. Why are real-life experience and nature a better foundation for philosophy than any other method or observation? You need to make a proper argument for this opinion, otherwise, you are not doing philosophy.

Don't misunderstand me I think Nietzsche is a brilliant writer and many of his critiques of religion and some secular philosophys are very thought provoking and penetrating. But his ideas are not necessarily all valid. I think SOME are off the wall. I think there's a grain of truth in what someone else on this blog said "Nietzsche is a bit like a Germanic version of Oscar Wilde" who is another beloved, brilliant and widely quoted writer but I wouldn't go to him for guidance on how to live a virtuous life. — Ross Campbell

What are you even arguing for here? You provide nothing for why his ideas aren't valid, only that you prefer "lived experience and nature", which doesn't mean a thing within the context of this discussion. Explain how his ideas are invalid and your line of thinking is correct.

Then, philosophy doesn't necessarily give you answers on how to live, it can also be an observational deconstruction of the status quo, in order to force people into thinking in new ways. This is actually more of a foundation to philosophy than any other clear-cut answers on how to behave or what to think. More often than not, clear "answers" in philosophy tend to become framed "carpe diem" quotes decorated on someone's wall instead of actually being of any academic value. The deconstruct and critique of earlier ideas is how we move forward with philosophy, and Nietzche is one of the key figures in pushing philosophy forward through turning previous ideas on their heads. Philosophy also doesn't have to have any positive messages at all, it is irrelevant in the pursuit of truth. This is why many pseudo-philosophers don't like philosophers who conclude negative standing conclusions about the human condition.

I rarely see anything but biased opinions in fallacy-driven arguments.

Buddhism is a PHILOSOPHY as well as a religion. — Ross Campbell

I know this. Doesn't mean it is better or worse than other philosophies. But you also incorporate Christianity in your argument, which is much less of philosophy and a whole more of controlling mechanisms for a ruling class.

like myself only take the philosophy component and disregard the religious component. — Ross Campbell

So why even incorporate Christianity in you argument?

Stoicism is also a philosophy. — Ross Campbell

So?

In my opinion the strength of these philosophies is that they are not just drawn from REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE but also in line with the way nature and reality works. — Ross Campbell

As does Nietzche and many other philosophers. Don't see your point.

They believe in living according to nature. I would hazard a guess that Nietzsche is selective in where he gets his ideas from, he despises so much of traditional culture and values that he's left with very little to work on. — Ross Campbell

How much of Nietzche have you even read?

I don't get what point you are trying to make here? You are praising Christianity and Buddhism and try to convince through premises that Nietzche doesn't observe real life or make any valid points because... of what exactly? You don't agree with Nietzche, sure, but your way of criticizing his writings doesn't make any sense or have any philosophical depth. You just say that you don't like him or his writings and then strawman his texts in favor of Christianity and Buddhism because you like them... it's not really enough.

I disagree that Buddhism and Christianity are not based on everyday experiences. Love, compassion, forgiveness, kindness which they preach are part of the ways human beings relate to each other in a positive way — Ross Campbell

Religion has always been used as a form of class control. So why have trust in that compared to examining people outside of any religious form?

Ask any modern psychologist and they will tell you that practicing these virtues will enhance a person's happiness and those he/she interacts with. — Ross Campbell

Sure, but that's a very simplified way of looking at life. What about the complexity of justice, the entire field of moral philosophy? So many examples of complexities that make empty phrases that have no meaning in themselves.

These virtues did not come from some academic textbook like Marx's theories they were developed by many thinkers over centuries, modified, built up and so on. — Ross Campbell

These virtues are the result of complex empathy patterns that are basically built into our psychology. You cannot credit these virtues to religion, that's giving them credit for nothing but observing humans truthfully. Like saying the sky is blue but it was credited to a guy named Steve in the late 1800s so it is his idea that the sky is blue. We just have better tools to examine these behaviors today than before, religion is unnecessary as a factor.

They are drawn from REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE of ORDINARY people in ordinary situations. — Ross Campbell

So did many philosophers in thier work, what is your point?

Where did Nietzsche get his ideas, eg The Will to Power, from reading another academic, Schopenhauer? To what extent has he backed up his ideas by observation of real people in real life? — Ross Campbell

He got them from building on previous philosophical ideas and added his own. Why are you so obsessed with the observation of real people. Do you think Nietzsche didn't do this? How can a person go through life without observing other people? Why is this attributed specifically to religion in your opinion?

His thinking based on a series of aphorisms and metaphors seems to lack a logical rigour of thought. I thought the definition of philosophy was supposed to be logical or rational argument. — Ross Campbell

In my opinion compassion which is at the heart of Christian and Buddhist ethics is what brings people together, without it the world would be a very cold place. — Ross Campbell

What is you're point of view in this matter? You criticize Nietzsche's writings for not being philosophically rooted in logic and rationality, but you praise Christianity and Buddhism for just being, without any logic or rationality behind it.

Nietzsche's writings need the context of the full text to reach full understanding. The same goes for any other philosopher who wrote in the same way. Both Satre and Camus can be criticized in the same manner. The problem is that you praise Christianity and Buddhism for using observation of people as a foundation for their teachings. Actually, they don't. They built their virtue's foundation on adjustments to fit the narrative they work under. True observation is what Nietsche and the rest of all prose writing philosophers did in order to deconstruct human behavior.

I think you are stuck with a simplified idea about what Nietsche is really saying, and you use it as a foundation for criticizing the whole of his writing. The Nazis didn't use Nietsche's writings, they used most of the corrupted version of his unfinished work by his Nazi-fangirl zealot sister.

Nietsche is the father of most of 20th-century philosophy, the way we put religion aside and examine human behavior and the universe without the shackles of tradition and institutionalized faith. Not recognizing the importance of his work is a failure to understand the history of philosophy and the key figures of its evolution. It's like saying Einstein isn't important for modern physics.

Is Nietzsche's ambiguous style genuine Philosophical thinking? — Ross Campbell

Arguments are in there. There are ways to deconstruct prose philosophical writing, but people aren't educated enough to do it, so they dismiss it instead.

Until about 150 years ago many, if not most, philosophers and scientists in Europe and the U.S. accepted as fact what we would now label as racist ideas. Was it because they were weak-minded, stupid and not rational? Or was it because ideas about many aspects of human nature evolve over long periods of time? — Joshs

Yes, it was because the tools of rational thought weren't fully developed by then. No scientist or rational thinker today that's worth a damn would be able to reach a racist conclusion without totally abandoned the wisdom that we've acquired from the enlightenment era to today. Only reason it's still going on is because of generations of people keeping conservative biases alive while the reasonable and rational thinkers view these people as mere morons, incapable of actually doing the proper work needed for up-to-date rational thinking.

Basically, you argue against my point by pointing out that we should dismiss the last 150 years of development in science and philosophical thinking because before that people didn't come to the same conclusions. That's a fundamentally flawed way of giving credit to people who either didn't have any modern tools of deduction or simply dismissed any attempt at rational thought during their times. I would argue that thinking heavily through biases and subjective superstitions or invented concepts that don't have any connection to reality outside of the self... is stupid. It doesn't matter which time in history we are speaking about, history up until now has only developed to lessen the influence of idiots and weak-minded people. We still have them, but we have developed tools to lessen their influence on the world and we are still doing it. Would you agree that we still have idiots in the world today? If the amount of them are higher in power the further back in history we get, based on my reasoning here, that only strengthens the idea that the way we've developed rational thinking today and respect its process, has decreased the number of idiots having influence compared to 150+ years ago.

Just because people had some good ideas back then, doesn't mean they had the tools to always arrive at rational conclusions.

Actually, it is precisely our intellect and intelligence that is behind what we call racism. If the problem were simple irrationality it would be a it easier to solve it. But when people do their best to act as ‘rationally’ as possible and still end up behaving in ways that others call racist it should teach us that the cause of racism isnt irrationality, it is the limits that are imposed on intelligence in any given era. — Joshs

It is definitely not intelligent to reach a racist conclusion. I said "weak-minded", which means that the person arriving at a racist conclusion is weak-minded, stupid, not using the intellect or rationality correctly. Plenty of people think they are rational and that they use rational deduction to reach conclusions but instead have biases and fallacies in their line of thinking. It's why we have biases and fallacies as concepts used in a deduction in order to arrive at logical conclusions that aren't influenced by our stupidity. There's no logic to racism, not even in the context the "fear of the unkown" originally formed from. Racism is an invented concept by individuals and society in order to cope with the "fear of the unknown", but through biased and fallacy-heavy reasoning aimed it at different looking people. It's the Dunning-Kruger process of intellect that formed it, not intelligence or intellect when used properly.

Is racism natural? — Lil

Fear of the unknown is natural. Racism is an irrational mental construct and product of an irrational surrender to this natural drive. Our intellect and intelligence are the shields against this irrational construct since we can understand that it is irrational and fight the urge to surrender to it.

The weak and weak-minded cannot live without surrendering their intellect to the laziest interpretation of our natural drives. Is racism natural? No, the fear of the unknown is. "Racism" is a construct invented by weak-minded people in order to explain that fear.

Sort of. Rather, is it ethical to choose for someone else a state of affairs whereby they must "work" and "feel stress" and do so when there was no need in the first place (no one existed prior to work or feel stress)? I am looking for a standard here, not necessarily what is happening in practice. — schopenhauer1

A bit hard to deconstruct what you are aiming for here? Is it ethical to ask someone to do stressful work that is unnecessary? Or to do stressful work that is necessary but wasn't up until that point? Depends on what work it is, how the economy works, and so on. If the work is, say, dig up people who are trapped in a collapsed building, then demanding stressful work onto people is a necessity to save lives; the stress they feel during work is irrelevant to the positive outcome. If the work is rather stressful out of making the owner rich while the person working earns very little, you could argue it is unethical, but also while under a free market, fair, if the worker didn't do anything to become an owner themselves and only accepted their class and place in the economical hierarchy. In a more Marxist view, the only fair/ethical thing would be if the work is helping both the worker and collective, the stress is shared among all that collaborate for the whole group.

It's hard to sense a standard with so many variables. It depends on the type of work and what kind of ethical economical structure society is built upon. In the US, people are being more taken advantage of than in Sweden where the unions have much more power and laws are harsh against those who try to use cheap labor. So just between these two nations, there are two pretty different levels of ethical viewpoints on "work" that leads to different answers to your question.

I find it funny how it is all a big raucous, work, life etc. All needing to be maintained. How about the goal of not spreading more work and stress via "just don't create the situation for more people". If we can't actually develop a way out of it, then why would we put people into it? Pondering ways out on a philosophy forum won't suffice to change anything. The micro-decision to not put more people into situations of work and stress is attainable, however. — schopenhauer1

Because capitalism really. We invented a monster we call a friend and when we realize we cannot easily kill the monster devouring us we either just continue ignoring it and feel fine in that ignorance, or we just kill it, regardless of the consequence to society. Problem is that if we adapt heavily into automation, we are essentially "solving" this thing by replacing humans who are stressed out by the work, with machines so that the bigger monster can continue and let us humans rest... but we haven't figured out how the monster will continue to exist when the bloodstream of transactions stop working. It's like we have the shell of capitalism, but nothing within it will work. Right now, we maintain the monster, we keep it fed, we read fairy tales before it sleeps the out-of-market night, but we don't know how to actually opt-out and deal with it without collapsing the entire world.

Capitalism is like Fenrir, the giant wolf, and child of Loki. If Loki created capitalism, it would be this wolf. And we, the people, are Odin, chaining it down, feeding it in the hopes that it will not lead to Ragnarök. We hope that we can keep it like that, forever ongoing, that it will not devour the moon and start the collapse of everything. But it will, it is inevitable, and we need to know what to do after Ragnarök, not fool ourselves with trying to prevent it, as Odin did and failed.

So if the choice was between no one existing and creating someone who must do X work to survive, maintain, entertain, what would yo do? — schopenhauer1

Are you asking if it's better to exist and suffer or not exist at all? I don't think that question helps in regards to a very realistic outcome of the current capitalist movement of automation. We will probably end up in what I describe, so what do we do in that scenario and after is the main question. I feel the question asked in the OP just touch upon a very old and contemporary issue with "work", but we're soon in for something entirely different in the scale of the industrial revolution during the coming hundred years, and it will define if capitalism, as we see it today, will survive in the same form or not.

I think the biggest question to tackle is if there's even going to be a solution that is enough for all?

Not all people are suited for high intellectual work, which is the kind of gigs that will be left for humans when automation becomes enough advanced. People live in a fantasy where everyone can become whatever they want if they want it, but that's not true. The IQ levels required for many gigs that cannot easily be automated go above the average intelligence, so a majority of people cannot do that work based on their mental capacity alone. If society focuses on high intelligence work more, then we might see a more complex education system and generally higher IQ in society when people are required to push their own IQ span a bit higher, but it won't be enough.

In the end, we will have a massive amount of people who don't fit anywhere. So going back to the original question of economics, capitalism will through this fall and needs to be replaced with a new system. It will start with universal basic income, which is just the natural way for governments to make sure the economy doesn't crash in the first run of change. But even that cannot work since there's no one working and paying enough taxes to fund that UBI, so eventually that would collapse as well.

What then would a new form of economics be? If the only choices a citizen has is to do creative or high intellectual jobs, which most aren't educated for or have the capacity for, or have UBI until they can't anymore because there aren't enough national funds to cover it, and then industries start failing because no one can afford to buy products even though they make them cheaply using automation.

There will be a collapse in this scenario and something needs to replace that collapse.

First of all, some (or many?) people will not be able to afford the automation and will have to make do the old fashioned way. — baker

Is that what we've seen with the car? Started off as exclusive, then luxury, then it worked its way down through the classes and today everyone can either get a $100000 Model S or a scrappy old rust-waggon from the 90s. Technology rarely stays exclusive and expensive, especially in wide adoption. On top of that, it's mainly larger industries that employs people who will automate in the first run of change. So where do the employees go?

Secondly, some people will probably rebel against automation. — baker

Why? Sure, if it's a nice corner café with really good service, that will never change to automation because social interaction is part of the reason people go there. There will be a lot of similar places to work, but not enough for the entire population.

But if you mean that the implementation of automation in industries lead to mass unemployment and that these unemployed people will rebel against this adoption, yes, it will be a massive push to "ban" it, but how can you combine a capitalistic free market system with governments demanding companies to "lose money" on employing people instead of the extremely more efficient automation systems?

This will probably shift more into governments getting the boot since they didn't have a plan for this kind of mass change in the economy. They are still educating subway engineers to drive trains in nations where the trains will soon be automated. Governments don't seem to have a clue on what's going on. The solution is to re-educate the workers getting replaced, into technical support teams for the automated systems. Instead of driving the trains, they supervise, but even that will be gone a couple of decades later.

There is a vast number of futuristic films that explore the possible scenarios of how the above two premises work out. — baker

Films are mostly written with the intent to tell a story and that story is about other things than the premise of world-building. So, in a sci-fi set in a future where there's automation all over and there are class struggles around these things, they rarely are the center of that story, or it never really explores the extreme sociological problems that could happen if the progress goes unchecked. I would say that "Blade Runner 2049" gives a good background to how the future might look in that the majority of people live almost in homeless conditions while the ones actually working are stuck in shit jobs while the privileged have gone off-world retiring far before old age. But even that isn't really about the wide sociological scope, it only zooms in on the workforce of replicants that took over the jobs of the regular people, which mostly live in hallways and megastructures with little to no hope of any change in their condition.

Even a movie like "Elysium" seems to focus directly on the class division that happens when technology becomes extremely advanced, almost caricatures the complexities of the issues into an almost "heaven and hell" simplicity.

The etymology of "robot" is slave. Ah, those good ol' days! — TheMadFool

A slave can only be a slave if it has the capacity for self-reflection. It's also the foundation for how slavers mentally tortured slaves into thinking of themselves as slaves and nothing else, they changed their mental self-image to fit the reflection. But "AI" doesn't have to be strong AI, it can just be VI (virtual intelligence), it can be an algorithm or a complex automated robot that do complex actions in repetition, like taking care of old people by fixing laundry, making dinner etc. They don't have to be strong AIs for that.

Anyone who's into AI and the development of such technology can see what is going on right now. It's the first step in the total automation of society. Like every new disruption technology, like the first car, people right now are viewing these things as little more than a curiosity. "Oh, look at Tesla's new self-driving, it's cute, but it will never be a thing". It will, and it is inevitable. Capitalism demands it. It's the perfect ratio of expense vs income for a company, so any company will apply automation where it is possible, or else lose to the competition.

But what is interesting is what happens after the fall of traditional economics. What will the future of capitalism look like when everyone is utilizing autiomation?

As for work, it's economics. Everybody has to sell something. — TheMadFool

Or we change the economics into something else that does not require that. It will be a necessity in the future when automation takes care of most stuff. What will people do then?

I worked because I had to, as do all humans. As do all animals I guess. It's not unfair. It's just how it works. — T Clark

That's a lot of assumptions about "how things work".

I would argue that work activates people. The early humans got mentally and physically active because of doing what was needed in nature. In modern times we have replaced this with "work", so it keeps us healthy.

However,

That is just an illusion since if we had anything else than work that required thought and physical movement in day-to-day life, that would be as much "activating" as any kind of work. Assuming work is needed is based on the manufactured ideas of duties. But what if we replaced all those duties with automation? What then? It is probably going to happen, as it is being done right now. Lots of people are losing their jobs because of automation, so what will the future hold if "work" is no longer a necessity?

Work is also stressing out people, it is lowering their life expectancy. There are only a few occupations today that do not have a negative impact on people's lives and it's usually non-critical jobs that give more of a subjective sense of meaningfulness than any collective necessity.

But assuming that we work, "because that's just how it works" feels like a philosophically shallow viewpoint on the topic of "work". The nature of "work" as it exists for many people in the world today, is often just a manufactured thing that is not necessary at all.

To make sure we're talking about the same thing, when you say I'm "straw-manning" your argument, you mean I'm attributing an argument to you that you never made. Correct? If so, it was on account of a misunderstanding, not an attempt to win the argument. I have no problem with explaining the problems with another person's argument. As I've said from the beginning, it is labelling an argument as a logical fallacy I object to. Doing that allows people to criticize another person's argument without thinking through the reasons. It also makes it easier for the other person to dismiss the criticism. — T Clark

To criticize the logic in someone's argument, pointing out fallacies is still a valid way. What you are attributing my argument to being, is - (in terms of a strawman, making it a simplified version of my real argument and in so make it easier to counter, i.e making an argument I didn't make) - that you just point out fallacies and nothing more. I've never said that the one pointing out the flaws in logic of the other speaker shouldn't do the job themselves of explaining the lack of logic. But pointing out which fallacy is being made can make it crystal clear what the problem is, rather than trying to invent the wheel and explain the basics of something already publically defined.

That just raised a question for me - is labelling a person's argument a logical fallacy an example of an argument from authority? I'm not sure. — T Clark

No. The logical fallacies are logical flaws, it's like math. If I say that 2 + 2 is 4, do you think that's an appeal to authority?

Yes, this is my point. — T Clark

But still makes it easier for the one with flaws in logic to understand where the flaw was made and how.

Generally speaking, it's like if you say 2 + 2 is 5 and instead of me just showing you two stones and two other stones and ask what they make together, I go on a rant for ten minutes on how stones can be single things and if you can imagine two stones, like those on the ground, but in some abstract way combine them, then attribute numbers to them and then you will know that... Just show the stones and get to the point, it's wrong, it's 4.

The existence of fallacies and biases is there to make it easier to get rid of flaws in logic. I don't understand the reason to not use them in a discussion. If someone misuses them, it would be painfully obvious for that person. But it would be just like any other who has flaws in logic. You tell them their fallacy is wrong. But using them right is a shortcut through hours of unnecessary talk that can be settled in a short sentence.

The problem isn't pointing out fallacies or biases, the problem is people never learning to understand what they mean or how to check the logic in their own argument. The problem is that people can't write reasonable arguments, not that others point out fallacies in their flawed reasoning. It's like you are defending the incompetent speakers trying to point out that the competent ones "are the real problem". Don't get it.

A quantum particle is in all states at the same time. What IS and what is the anti-IS there?

How is it possible.

It isn't from a scientific perspective. How has it become so accepted as a concept? — Andrew4Handel

In what way isn't it possible? Are you defining physical gender based on whether or not they have a dick or vagina? Or are you talking about chromosomes? With the latter, which is more accurate for physical gender, it's not as clear-cut as perceived physical attributes of genders. There are genetic events during development that could alter the physical gender so much that it's not really clear which gender a person really has.

But we also have, as MadFool points out, the mental perception of gender. I presume you are a man? How do you know this? Is it just because of the physical properties of your body? In CIS people, we have the perception of our own gender in line with the physical properties of out body. In order to understand transgender people, you have to imagine that your perception of your own gender, beyond the physical properties of your body, is out of sync with each other. It's a combination of perception of your own behavior, social interactions, cultural identity and sense of physical body. If all of these leans towards a gender that isn't in line with your physical body, then transitioning the physical body will give you harmony in the same way as a CIS person feels in harmony between the mental perception of gender and the physical body.

Before the discovery of hormones and extensive advances in plastic surgery there was no way to live other than in the body you were born in. There is no evidence of mass trans suicides before they could get surgery and hormones. — Andrew4Handel

There's no evidence that it didn't happen either. There's also very little evidence of them since the little that is known about transgender people before modern times showed that they were most often killed and forced to comply with society. Just like women needed to comply with society, not vote, force themselves to keep within living standards and physical norms that the times demanded. Did that mean there were no women who fought against such standards? What do you think happened to women who stood up against the social norms of the time silencing their voices?

It sounds more like you know little about the history of both women and trans people throughout history.

Someone to recommend whenever there's talk about transgender culture, sex changes and related topics is Contrapoints. She's, compared to many in here, an academic philosopher who's been aiming towards explaining many of these things with a scope of philosophy. We also have Philosophy Tube with Olly who just transitioned to Abigail, although she's not really focused on gender-related topics and more focused on pure and time-relevant philosophy.

https://www.youtube.com/c/ContraPoints/videos

I do not believe a focus on fallacies will improve the quality of discussions. If you think someone has their facts wrong or has provided inadequate justification, say so and explain why. If you think someone has made an incorrect inference or deduction, say so and explain why. Just shouting out "logical fallacy" doesn't convince anyone. Too many boys have cried "wolf" before. Everybody knows there's a good chance you're using the term incorrectly because so many others have. Just explain in regular language what your problem with the argument is. — T Clark

But that's not what I'm saying. Ironically you are making me use this argument as an example of how it is used. You are essentially straw-manning my argument. I'm not saying that someone is just saying a fallacy and using that as a way to dismiss other's arguments, I'm saying, like right now, that pointing out fallacies and biases and then explaining why they are applicable is the way to use them.

Since a fallacy used by someone else, or a bias they show is not recognized by the speaker of that argument, hence why they fail the argument because of them, it doesn't work to just say which bias or fallacy they are guilty of. You have to explain why. Like here, when you take my argument and simplify it down to just using fallacies as something to drop in arguments, that is not what I'm talking about.

To ask for better arguments from someone who is constantly doing low-quality reasoning, and pointing out which flaws they have in their reasoning through pointing out their fallacies or biases, is absolutely reasonable when the aim is to conduct a discussion or debate through philosophical means.

The point is not to "win" an argument by pointing out fallacies and biases, it is to improve the quality of arguments so that there actually is a forward momentum of thought for both parties. Someone who ignores making better arguments is not someone I would consider philosophically able, but rather closer to evangelists, regardless of topic. Someone who just says or preaches their opinion and argues for that regardless of the quality of the counterarguments, regardless of how bad their own logic is, and regardless of how good the opponent's logic is.

An argument needs to be solid, it needs to have good thought out premises. We don't need to use the classic deduction/induction format, but it needs to have a logical throughline. But for argument's sake I can make one here.

p1. Fallacies and biases are flaws in reasoning that break the logic of someone's conclusion.
p2. Breaking the logic means the discussion is at a standstill until it has been solved.
p3. The quality of both side's arguments is improved when there's an active attempt to discuss without fallacies and biases.
p4. Pointing out fallacies and biases is helping the other side improve the quality of their argument.
p5. Pointing out fallacies and biases is helping the other side find the actual core of their argument.
p6. Pointing out fallacies and biases is not a valid argument in itself.

Conclusion: Avoiding fallacies and biases help to improve the quality of a discussion and pointing them out helps both sides moving forward towards a conclusion.

I don't think waving the logical fallacy yellow card is a very effective way to improve the quality of discussions. — T Clark

Neither is bad arguments and low-quality reasoning. I would say that if a forum thread leads to a "bullshitting mosh pit that leads nowhere", then pointing out fallacies and biases can absolutely be a way to straighten the discussion up and get it on track towards something instead of just being some random internet debate like on any other forum that isn't a forum dedicated to philosophical discussion.

The topics posted on this forum require a lot of education and knowledge, why would knowledge of fallacies and biases be any different?

The idea is not to have forum "laws" that fallacies and biases cannot exist, but instead try and encourage people to actually break down their own arguments in order to improve their quality. This should absolutely be encouraged on a philosophy forum and is pretty much done so by the forum guidelines, but there's rarely anything done about the bs arguments.

Having a clear focus on fallacies and biases as solutions to avoid "bullshitting mosh pits that leads nowhere", is in my opinion a positive thing for increasing the quality. I see no reason to fear them other than for those with a notion about their own ability to create a reasonable argument.

If someone points out a hole in logic, a specific fallacy, or a bias that seems to get in the way of a reasonable argument, then, like all other normal philosophical discussions, the person making those lacking arguments need to change it to make more sense or plug those logical holes.

It's just basic philosophical behavior in discussions and I think this forum encourages too little of such standard philosophical behavior in discussions.

Trying to get back to the point I wanted to make. Religion, generally, encodes ideas about the nature of meaning in mythological forms, to try and tell the story in an allegorical manner. Clearly the allegories of religion are out-moded by the circumstances of modern culture. But what was it, that was encoded in those allegories in the first place? And if the allegorical representation of those ideas are discarded, what is discarded with them? — Wayfarer

The allegory, the power of religious writing as stories, is not the same as belief in the supernatural or God/Gods. You can have stories, they can be powerful. We have stories all around us in literature, movies, games, music, art etc. With great imagination and powerful emotions. All of these make us examine life and existence.

There's a difference though, when someone believes allegorical stories and fantasy to be truth rather than fiction. To interpret allegory and stories as being true in themselves. This is a religious belief.
It's no less valid than starting to believe in the Avengers as actually existing deities protecting our world. To interpret the Marvel cinematic universe as factual representations rather than allegories.

This is done out of fear. Instead of using allegory to give perspective in order to figure out a meaning in life, it is taken literally in order to give the responsibility to a higher power to figure that out. Instead of me understanding Iron Man's journey through the Marvel cinematic story, and because of this allegory, get a new perspective on life, I take the story literally and actually believe Iron Man is out there figuring all this shit out. This is one of the main problems with theism.

Unfortunately however Lovecraft's vision was essentially demonic in nature, as if the forces he intuited were utterly alien to humanity. — Wayfarer

Has nothing to do with demons. It is an allegory of how alien to our human perception the nature of reality actually is. Like our human vision only able to see a very small spectrum of light, if we were suddenly able to see all light spectrums it would blast our mind with such intensity of perception that we would go insane. It's an allegory for humanity's inability to stare into the extreme complexity of the universe and never be able to comprehend its enormous existence without going insane.

So the point is that it is alien to us, that's the whole point. It does however have nothing to do with "demons". Just like the movie Annihilation isn't about a demon coming to earth, but something truly alien and uncomprehensible. (Which in turn takes great inspiration from Color Out of Space)

But I think Lovecraft's idea of there being kind of parallel planes of being that interpenetrate with our own is completely plausible, in fact, I'm sure he drew on the grand tradition of mythology and occult religion as a source of inspiration for his (unfortunately deviate) stories. — Wayfarer

Why do you take Lovecraft literally? Like, why do you speak of it as plausible? It's fiction, it's a story, an allegory. It's like you are proving my point of religion being wrongly interpreted by theists and believers as truth when the texts are allegorical stories of fiction. The Bible and Necronomicon are the same kind of things: stories, allegory, fantasy, and tales to speak about the human condition. They are not the truth, they are meant to examine the behavior of humans in situations that put these humans under moral, emotional, and political pressure. It's storytelling, not reality.

Since I'm often guilty of holding the yellow cards, it's usually not to "win" an argument. In a philosophical discussion, it's important that the arguments are made to the best ability of the speaker. They should try to make them bulletproof by examining them as they are writing them.

Fallacies just make the discussion low quality. We turn to philosophy in order to lift a discussion up to a higher standard. If a group of people sits at a restaurant discussing "determination and free will", that's not really a place to have a moderator, arguments said within a time frame, examinations of premisses etc. It's just a casual discussion about the concept.

However, if the discussion is a philosophical one, then it needs to have certain rules in order to actually move a subject forward. If it doesn't have this backbone, then it will just be a bullshitting mosh pit that leads nowhere.

Demanding philosophical scrutiny and pointing out fallacies is meant to increase the quality of the other speaker. If their argument is of low quality, pointing out fallacies means pointing out the flaws in the argument until the argument is without those flaws.

There's no point in putting together counter-arguments to an argument filled with fallacies as there's no logic to deconstruct before forming the new argument. The discussion is at a standstill.

Maybe it's better to actually learn the knowledge about fallacies and put some effort into making arguments that don't feature them? Doing the opposite would just degrade the quality of a philosophical debate. There's a reason for them to exist.

One wonders how it is the not the height of infantialism to demand that 'meaning' be handed to one on a silver platter from on high, with the alternative being that one is consigned to some kind of drooling existential incapacity. One imagines that the theist - for all his inventions of sky daddies and karmic mysteries - has a lack of imagination so severe that he has to invent a whole industry to cover over their total inability to recognize 'meaning' seeping through every pore of the universe without all that trash. — StreetlightX

Because of fear. It takes existential courage to live without all that trash. Most people who stare into the concepts of reality are overpowered by the enormity of it; the extreme facts that put them into a context of such insignificance that they feel like they will implode; they cannot comprehend it, so they invent a lullaby to sing for themselves in order to feel calm.

Society teaches us to have small minds. Upbringing and education, work, and social life all have in common that they focus on making insignificant things feel important. More complex knowledge, more complex ideas about existence have usually been devoted to the church of that society, whatever religion was present in that time. So if and when someone asks a hard question, the "church" was quick to answer.

But then came the enlightenment era and more and more people had the ability to gain knowledge by themselves. When someone then dared to peak into complex knowledge and discover how much more complex the world and universe are and how contradictory the "church's" answers were, it was a pure horror of awakening.

Such horrors are portrayed by writers such as Lovecraft for example. Where the ones who dares to open their eyes to the actual truth of the cosmos rarely had their minds intact. The horror of turning your back against the fluffy answers by the "church" and instead embrace the extreme nature of the truth.

I think the reasons why most theists can't accept "meaning" as something coming from us, invented by us or figured out by us, individually or as a group, is because they must first peak into pure reality without fear. Only when the fear is gone, like accepting death without fear, even though you know it is as cosmically pointless as your life, can meaning be built. It's only when the cosmic fear has past away and you are ok and friends with the idea that everything is pointless, only then can meaning be built.

We externalize building things, like houses and art. We demolish something to rebuild something new. To build meaning internally, we must demolish something first. But theists think that's about demolishing religious belief and God. It does however have more to do with demolishing the fear in order to build meaning. Demolishing the fear demolishes the reasons to have belief and a God. Because belief and God aren't something built, it's a consequence of something already built. The fear has been built long before birth and taught down to all children. Reject the fear, then God and belief will start to erode and disappear. Without fear, there's no need for fluffy fairy tales to comfort life and instead, life and the universe is open to be interpreted honestly.

Empirically proving what a particular war was (actually) about is virtually impossible. So as much as one might dislike religion, there are things one cannot say about it without thereby losing one's self-respect as a lover of wisdom. — baker

Since this connects to what I said, it's important to note that I said more things than what wars were actually about. Most notes in historical records and research on reasons for wars throughout history do exist, while the rest of the idea I had, had to do with the psychology behind religion compared to atheism. If you combine such psychology and review history, it's absolutely in high probability to conclude that most conflicts had religious reasons over other reasons.

This also applies to political reasons because many of those societies had power that was a mix between religion and politics and not separated. So religious reasons were political and political reasons were religious. But conflict also means outside war; peace times when other atrocities happened within society or from institutes of power using religion as tools for that power. So in the end, most conflicts had religious reasons. But in here, when I say "most" in an argument, that seems to be interpreted as "all".

"the church starts all the wars" in particular. — T Clark

Where did I say this? I said:

I'd say that religious beliefs and similar irrational ideals were the core of most wars and conflicts. — Christoffer

See the difference?

But claims like 'most wars in human history have been religious wars' need to rest on more than having atheism in common. — Kenosha Kid

Because it's taken out of context of that post. The claim is in relation to atheism, to atheism being linked to violence and blood when the statistics or religious violence is quite clearly higher going through the history books. It was a summed up sentence but should have maybe pointed out "violence" instead of war since it seems like it confuses more than "violence".

In no sense have you supported your claim, and this shouldn't be too surprising given a) your unnecessary hostility toward disagreement, b) your preference for expansive complaints over a single sentence of justification, and c) your inconstant attitude to whether the problem is that people are focusing too much on this one thing or aren't going into enough detail. — Kenosha Kid

I literally expanded on that part of the original argument, because it's linked to the argument that atheism is being blamed for more murder and violence than religion. I lifted the logic that you have religious doctrines that easily come in conflict with other doctrines and practices and therefore are prone to conflict, while atheism does not have any binding doctrines or practices to stand behind, it's rather a lack of it. This means there's a logical gap when blaming atheism for violence and murder in history, compared to what religion has caused. This is the argument.

In no sense have you countered this logic.

Let's take what should be an easy example for you: jihad. On the one hand, nothing could be a better example of the warlike nature of religiosity than something that calls itself Holy War and whose Cyberman-like message is 'convert or die/be raped'. It's written there in their primary text, so no escaping it.

And yet, for the most part, Islam has been and remains a particularly peaceful, sophisticated religion. If 1001 people read the same book, 1000 think "peace" and 1 thinks "kill", is the religion accounting for the war, or the difference between that 1 and the other 1000? — Kenosha Kid

Compared to not reading the book at all? And being a peaceful religion can also mean that it is peaceful within itself, that if the community or society with it as its foundation, it may be peaceful if all worship under it because it becomes homogeneous and has no freethinkers or critics.

The problem arises whenever you have someone questioning the status quo. Human history is filled with violence attributed to when people question the status quo, and there's nothing more "deep core" of a status quo than religion being a foundation of a society. Questioning or confronting another nation/people with other religious beliefs almost always led to bloody conflicts. And since religion isn't a political theory, it isn't something that can be argued and converted easily into something new or different, because it is at the core of the heart of every person in such a society, questioning it means, in their eyes, questioning existence itself and it's a threat that feels like being about survival instead of intellectual discourse.

The argument I made was that religion causes violence far more than the lack of religion. The mechanics of religion almost forces people into conflict whenever there's a different voice that doesn't follow that specific religion. This is because religion finds its way into the core values of a person much more than any other system of knowledge. It more easily corrupts and more easily controls people. It can make them utterly abandon all intellect to do as a text says. It works in a bubble, but introducing another element almost always leads to conflict.

If you take what I wrote out of context, of course, it becomes problematic, but that was not my argument, it was in relation to the view on atheism as a violent "church". And the logic I present here is the logic of how religion works and why it leads to a conflict far more than anything else.

Add to that the actual number of cases of religious violence and wars rooted in conflicting religious views and you have everything in support of this right there.

The common denominator in all war is definitely not religion, and the common denominator of all religions is not war. — Kenosha Kid

And this has never been stated or said by me. It is a simplification of what I actually argue. If people cherry-pick stuff from my argument and make further simplifications of it, you might begin to understand my frustration here. It's straw-manning after straw-manning without really reading what I actually write and understanding it before forming a counterargument. Because of this, I get oversimplifications like the one you wrote there and that this is somehow what I meant in my text? How does any of what I write here conclude that all wars are religious and all religions are about war? Where did this come from?

I can see how you'd like that to work, but that's not how it works. Claims aren't true until proven otherwise. Since you are unwilling to defend your point, no one else is obliged to disprove it. — Kenosha Kid

Which is why I provided it if you bothered to read it.

It was infantile tantrum-throwing and nothing more, quite obstructive to the sorts of detail you now claim to want. — Kenosha Kid

I write maybe ten times longer posts than most in here and a majority of each post is the actual arguments. Then things get cherry-picked, conclusions ignored, and I'm drawn into explaining things that have been explained to absurd lengths in many threads on this forum, by many others including me, that to stay on the topic of the current thread, we just point out the conclusion of those countless other posts. But I provided a sum up, I still like to hear the counter-argument to that logic, but I suspect it becomes the usual "straw-manning atheism" thing again, which I'm not interested in because it's frankly stupid and beneath me to put time and effort into saying the same things over and over to people so blinded by their own belief biases that they cannot form tangible arguments.

If you have anything to counterargue what I just wrote in the previous post, please do that, because I'm tired of infantile belief arguments that would never pass basic philosophical scrutiny or believers just saying I'm wrong without any further elaboration. I'm still waiting for anything substantial.

But in the absence of that, it doesn't come naturally, I don't think. — Wayfarer

Life is hard, but religion really makes it more confusing and harder, requiring someone to accept a "truth" without proof. Either people are idiots and accept such a truth without questioning it, or they try to understand it, spending years of their life in search of an explanation behind that truth, only to sometimes come to the conclusion that it was just made up by people throughout history and that there's nothing more to it. It's a great waste of a lifetime. Why not just make it "less hard" and accept things around and in the universe, for what they are or what we can perceive them as? The rest is just irrelevant time-wasting noise.

then any idea of meaning is basically an illusion. — Wayfarer

Any meaning that has some cosmic objectivity, yes, not meaning as invented, felt, and built by us humans for us humans. It's the "cosmic meaning" that is both non-existent and irrelevant.

It's just a comfort blanket for theists to crawl under. The universe is mind-blowingly big and we are so impossibly small in comparisons that they just can't accept that we are basically the same as bacteria on a cosmic scale. They can't wrap their heads around these things, so they pull the blank over their heads and tell themselves that there truly is a cosmic meaning to their existence. It's the same reason why religions came to be in the first place, we've just scaled up the knowledge of the world around us into the size of the universe and its timeline. Before, we tried to explain thunder, couldn't, needed some comforting explanation so we invented thunder gods. Crops died unexpectedly, so we invented agricultural gods. And so on. Then it was just easier to use one God for everything. A basic "god works in mysterious ways" to sum up all the shit we can't explain and you're all setup and ordered the comfort blanket ultra mega 2000 experience package, with some action figures of prophets and downloadable content with predictions for the end of time, so you don't have to think about your meaningless and upcoming death.

It's basic psychology really.

Given people do precisely this, it must be true. I think for all the lofty talk about meaning requiring some transcendent foundation, I believe people obtain meaning from being in the world, interacting and doing things. Possessions, nature, music, food, friends, family, home, whatever you are into is where your meaning comes from. I believe this is true for theists and atheists alike. — Tom Storm

I agree. But theists tend to apply an unnecessary layer that wastes "life time" on irrelevant interpretations that lead nowhere. Atheism is Ockham's razor of meaning in life. The shortest path to a sense of clarity, the least clouded by confusion when worldviews get challenged.

you just can't handle people pointing out where you're wrong. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not though. People just say I'm wrong, they provide nothing substantial behind it. For around two weeks now, everyone whom I've been in discussion with on this forum radically fails at basic philosophical reasoning. It's just believers spewing out opinions and that they are right because "God" or whatever. It's getting rather tedious hearing the same thing over and over when so many, not just me, has already countered the lack of logic or knowledge in many of the claims.

It's rather all these people who are the ones not able to understand when they're wrong. I'm still waiting for true arguments to bounce off into the next argument. But I'm paddling in the manure of biases and fallacies.

If you want to defend the point, great, but like you say this is a philosophy forum and posts like your last aren't going to cut it: that's just tantrum-throwing. — Kenosha Kid

Let's start with everyone else supporting their counter-argument first, please. I can either roll my thumbs waiting or just continue to ask for something substantial.

If you don't feel inclined to defend the point, just have some dignity and move on peacefully. If you're just trying to pick a moronic fight, well carry on as you are I guess. I'm here to discuss the matter, including the finer details. For the record, I considered the matter closed several posts ago. — Kenosha Kid

The cherry-picked portion of my argument had to do with religion and its bloody history compared to atheism. Now, theists really love to mash together communism and atheism to make the point that "atheism is worse", which, by looking at the actual mechanics behind the communist movement throughout the 20th century, shows that it has nothing to do with atheism, it's not "part of the murdering", it's rather a way to create guilt by association to a political movement with their own doctrines, in no shape or form linked to atheism just because there wasn't a religion at the core of communism. Just like religion, the communism and corruption of Marxist theories of the 20th century act out as a form of institution, almost by religious standards. Atheism isn't an institution, there is no "church of atheism". There can be atheistic organizations that have a place of gathering, focused primarily on giving guidance to those seeking to move away from religion, but there's no single "church" or institution or a gathering of rituals, rules, laws, principles etc. There are nothing binding atheists together as a form of "method of life". So to blame atheism for murders throughout history makes zero sense whatsoever and is a straw-manning attempt at attacking atheism whenever the notion of "religion's bloody history" is being brought up. The bloody history of religion is, however, very documented. The suffering, terror, prosecution, mass murder, torture etc. for thousands of years, throughout many different types of religious beliefs and institutions that through rules, laws, practices, and principles gathered a group behavior into these acts. It's the entire nature of religious institutions and doctrines to force behavior onto the practitioner of that belief system and it's been a source of power over the people for as long as human history. Atheism is a rejection of all of that and the antithesis of it makes it impossible to be a "reason" for mass murder. Someone murdering "in the name of atheism" doesn't really refer to anything.

So, anyone claiming either that religion doesn't have a bloody history, or that Atheism is responsible for more terror and murders than religion, really needs to prove those points with some actual logic, history, and support. Straw-manning atheism in an attempt to shift blame from religion to atheism is fundamentally stupid and childish and an insult to the intellect of those who actually just paid attention to the information, knowledge, and records of history we have.

I considered this matter to be closed years ago. Believers still seem to form a sound reasonable argument that doesn't use every bias and fallacy in the book to reach its conclusion. It's tiresome and I rather just sum up the conclusion with theists are wrong in this matter, period. End of discussion, until an unbiased, sound argument is made with an antithesis to this.

Yes, a philosophy forum, meaning, a higher quality should be expected. Outside of picking out a single point, that point has been discussed so many times on this forum and believers defend it saying “No! Religion is innocent, it has no blood on its hands. But look at atheism and communism, that’s where the blood is”.

It’s a blanket statement that’s both wrong and mind-numbingly lacking in philosophical quality. It’s tedious going down that route every time believers get triggered by the notion that religion has a bloody history that isn’t at all as visible on the atheism side. People need to pick up a history book, and also understand what they read.

We're fast arriving at the point where some larrikin decides to demonstrate that 20th mass murder is the result of atheism (i.e., godless Communism), proving Friedrich Nietzsche right about the inimical consequences of the Death of God. I'll do it now to save time. — Tom Storm

Ah, that kind of argument again, it's getting old and has been countered so many times without any of the theists able to remember the conclusions of those counterarguments. I think I've countered this a dozen times on this forum. Maybe create a search button for all the biased theists needing to get some counterarguments of that bullshit, I'm tired of doing it over and over in all the evangelical threads of indoctrinated believers.




It's so interesting to see you all focusing on this out of the entirety of my argument. It's like you don't get my point whatsoever.

Actively clinging on to a point that you can stretch to be the only thing to argue about. That "no, not all conflicts are religious, look at these examples, look at all the proof that this is NOT the case". Yeah, sure, some conflicts are not religious in nature or have anything to do with religion. That's not my point. Seriously. If this is the thing that gets people riled up, no wonder I'm fucking right.

I'm with T-dog on this one. There are religious wars but, more often, religion is the excuse and rallying point, not the cause. — Kenosha Kid

I'm talking about human history. Quantify the entirety of that before concluding the reasons for all conflicts. I would say that even in the cases where conflicts and wars were seemingly by other reasons, religion has a core anyway.

But, after everything I wrote, this is the thing to hang up on. It kind of shows how the argument gets steered off course when some get triggered by these notions. This is not about religious war, but the need to defend religious history around that seems to be a valuable point to many, to the point of ignoring the rest. I think I've made my point around this specific thing.

This is not true at all except in the most trivial sense. — T Clark

Do you mean that there are rarely religious themes under the actions of people through war throughout history? Including all those who thought they were guided by God or Gods to invade and conquer other lands? I'd say that religious beliefs and similar irrational ideals were the core of most wars and conflicts. Rarely have I found intentions not related to religious themes as reasons for such acts. Maybe you can explain why this is superficial and that there are reasons other than that at play. Remember, even conquers for power were mostly generated by illusions of divinity for the conquerer, rather than conquering for anything else.

A significant crisis is also an opportunity to seek a new belief system, perhaps for consolation.

The secret to being happy in the foxholes is probably to expect chaos and suffering in the first place. Some people are fortunate and do not get to know the foxholes.

The saying there are no atheists in the foxholes refers specifically to the fact that otherwise secular people become superstitious and religious when facing death for the first time in a terrifying war
zone. This falls under what might be called 'folk wisdom.' — Tom Storm

I was in what would have been a very serious car accident with an 18-wheeler and trailer, around 15 years ago. I got super lucky, the car was smashed, but I was totally fine. So there were no consequences to me or anyone else other than my car crushed and a fence broken when my car flew into it. I managed to open the door and just stroll right into organizing the police and everything on the location, the truck driver more traumatized than me.

When I got home a friend asked if I'm religious now. I replied sincerely: fuck off.

Meaning is use.

Even if life was intrinsically meaningless, extrinsic meaning can come from how life is used. Chess pieces on a chess board are intrinsically meaningless. The meaning of chess comes from how the pieces are moved on the board.

IE, meaning comes not from life itself but how life is used. — RussellA

Exactly my point.

People put so much effort into finding a cosmic meaning to everything that they can go through their entire life without putting much meaning into that life. Accepting the meaningless nature of the objective universe does not mean the subjective experience has to be meaningless, and I think that if one actively finds meaningful things out of the meaningless mess, that is worth every breath of one's life. A futile surrender to religious belief somewhat makes people miss out on actually feeling a meaning of existence within the life that they have. They focus all that energy on the hope of something totally unproven to show itself after death and it means wasting an entire life with the risk of nothing being beyond death, which by any facts about biology, is the truth.

For me, religious belief and people who are consumed by it are one of the great tragedies of the human condition.

Of course, some find meaning in the practices of religious belief, and that I'm not opposed to. The problem I have is when such belief is forced upon other people, indoctrinate them, and consequently affecting many others by the irrationality out of such forced belief. Not many major wars and conflicts have been done without any religious themes.

If people can find meaning in religious practices that doesn't force itself onto others, then that is a purposeful meaning in their life. But it's my hypothesis that we can find "rituals" outside of irrational belief, we can find meaning without irrational belief and we can live happily, even in face of tragedy, without irrational belief. Meditation is a great example of how some religious practices were made into practice outside of belief. Meditation is by many researchers found to be of great health benefit to the physical and mental state of the one practicing it. If someone creates a daily routine, a "ritual", to meditate every morning or every night, it can create a tremendous sense of calm and tranquility. Without having anything to do with belief or religion.

Finding meaning outside of belief systems and religion means it's always a search inwards. Introspection, listening to the inner voice as a guide for the meaning of external events. It requires an open mind, it requires learning new things, knowledge, wisdom, and empathy. Religion and belief is a safety blanket, something to hide under, but never really true when examined. It's always limited and I can't even imagine the horror one feels when dying, getting a sense of nothing being there beyond the horizon when all their lives they've been taught there will be a paradise. Accepting and knowing the end is the end, like a computer being shut off, not showing anything but a black void on the screen, is very scary. But accepting this horrific thing, as it is, removes it of its scary power over you. You know it's the end, memories of you continue past your death, eventually, you are an unmarked grave in history, eventually nothing at all. So you start focusing on the time you have, it's the only thing that matters. The time you have and the things that actually exist; the things that can be witnessed, experienced, felt, learned about, understood etc.

Religious people and people with belief often think of atheism, or the "ideal atheism" as I've been told is my definition of it, as "lacking something". But I would argue that you add something. You add your own existence to the time you are alive, not excluding it as being something temporary before the "real purpose of existing" after death. You dismiss all the "belief noise" and start to actually fill your life with real things, you put your time into those things, skip the wasted time spent on religion and do something substantial instead.

There's more to life than religion and belief.

rejection of reason and logic for irrationality and intuition, a Continental rather than analytic approach. — RussellA

Still requires an atheistic approach. If you reject set "rules for life" then there's an absence of them. If atheism is the absence of belief and faith in God or religious motifs, then the rejection works best within atheism. I still feel that rejection of reason and logic isn't necessary in order to not preoccupy oneself with "winning or losing". You can be very analytical and still not have an interest in winning or losing. Analytical people are very interested in arriving at substantial truths that exist and can be witnessed, but it doesn't mean they're doing it to win, just that they find meaning in the pursuit of knowledge. That pursuit doesn't have an end or is able to be won or lost, it just is a meaning in itself. As life is not a journey towards the end goal, death is not a win or loss, it just is.

What are the arguments for trust in the medical system, given the above considerations? — baker

Probability should be enough. Mistakes are made by people, not the "medical system". The "medical system" can have problematic bureaucracy and coordination systems in place that are prone to create problems and mistakes and these are the things to keep push for the better. The fact that many doctors and surgeons sometimes work long hours with little sleep is a sign of such structural problems.

The important thing to remember is that "the medical system" is built upon other people who struggle and fight often to the breaking point in order to help other people. The bar is low for mistakes, it shouldn't happen, but it does, because they are people. But that doesn't mean these people do these mistakes because they don't care, there are many variables involved.

and the prospect of malpractice or betrayal — baker

Malpractice is one thing, betrayal is another. "Betrayal" is a very strong word that needs some deeper explanation. Are we talking about medical staff betraying the will of the patient? There are variables there as well, the patient might not know everything about their condition, the patient might be stupid and risk their own lives. The "will" of the patient should be interpreted. If the "will" of the patient is to survive, feel better, then that is the purpose for the medical staff and doctors, regardless of what the patient believes makes them better. So a "betrayal" when treating someone could actually be a good thing that saves the patient's life. If that was against the will of the patient, why is the patient even at the hospital and not dying or suffering outside of that "system"?

If a person has already experienced serious negative side effects of a medication, or has been the victim of medical malpractice or betrayal, on the grounds of what should this person still trust the medical system? — baker

Elaborate on what the "system" is? There are thousands of "medical systems" all around the world. Some with better care than others, some with better expertise than others. So back to "probability".

Is the probability higher that you are affected by negative side effects, including malpractice, mistakes, or bad competence, compare to the probability of getting better from your illness or risk of illness/death?

Probability is all around us, the risk of anything exists always. In order to trust something, a probability has to be calculated for that trust. There will always be a risk of damage or dangerous consequences for any interaction a human is doing in their life, it's unavoidable. If people stop making probability predictions, they start operating on irrational fear and biases.

Does the "medical system" possess a higher danger through mistakes, malpractice, side effects etc. than the consequences of not getting involved at all when a health problem arises? No, it's not higher, obviously. So any malpractice, mistakes, side effects etc. that exist in the world is not enough to erase trust in the medical system. There's no rational reason to mistrust an entire system because of cases of bad luck or incompetent people.

The rational thing to do when constantly getting problems with some specific medical people is to report them because it can be that a specific doctor or medical staff is individually incompetent and a danger to others. Or an entire hospital with a bad administrative team creating systemic problems for that specific hospital.

The "medical system" is referring to the entire global medical system (as nothing else has been specified), but problems occur on individual levels or specific hospitals. These usually don't survive long, doctors lose licenses, hospitals get shut down, and so on.

The probability of getting help is still higher than any of these consequences. And people can only act on probability, the rest is an irrational belief and bias.

dying from complications of the vaccine are 112 times more likely than dying from covid itself — Thinking

It's literally disproven by actual numbers of deaths getting lower when vaccination numbers get higher. So please provide a source for such a specific number.

Are you a zombie or something??! is there nobody home there??

I'm not saying that if something happens to me, then the statistics are wrong. Oh god. I'm talking about the way a person handles or is supposed to handle the possibility of experiencing negative side effects of medical treatments. — baker

Subjective, singular, personal, and emotional experiences are irrelevant when making moral arguments about vaccines, which is what this thread is about. Morality has more to do with what we do against others than our own personal experiences. If someone experiences extreme side effects they might scream at the world "WHY!?" but for all the ones who survive because of the vaccine and the pandemic fading away along with the suffering; all those millions or billions of people who were helped by population immunity and the vaccine will be the sum of the morality around vaccines.

If someone is suffering, the world shouldn't suffer because of that. This doesn't mean we should aim to let some suffer, but the statistics of suffering from the vaccine is blown out of proportion to the suffering of the virus. It's pure anti-vaccer propaganda rooted in irrational fears formed as factual arguments and "news" from such sources. As some US states now face a problem with not being able to vaccinate enough people due to a high number of anti-vaccers present in those states, it becomes apparent that the spread of false statistical interpretations to push an almost religious agenda is becoming rather dangerous. Anti-vaccer propaganda is not something harmless, it is right now actively pushing back the end of the pandemic and risk introducing even worse mutations. It is morally degenerate to oppose vaccines in light of the suffering Covid-19 creates and anyone who's not educated, too stupid or indoctrinated into anti-vaccer propaganda should be shut down when spreading bullshit about the science behind the vaccine.

If you think I'm a zombie for misinterpreting your argument, then maybe elaborate or expand further. I'm no mind reader, I can only read the things you actually write. But good that you started a new thread that's about the things that this thread isn't about.

Is that what the reasonable thinker does? I am no expert in anything but from what I've seen, its the brainless thinkers that tend to buy into experts' so called expertise. — Merkwurdichliebe

Is it "buying into"? Or is it compiling the consensus conclusions of people who have studied most of their lives on subjects and science that we only grasp a fraction of? Whenever someone says "so called" expertise my alerts fire up. What is "so called"? If you haven't studied viral diseases, epidemiology, vaccine methods, RND and DNA behavior, and so on at any time in your life, how are you in a position to question these experts' results? And I am well aware of the appeal to authority fallacy, that's why I'm saying "consensus", because a reasonable thinker looks at the results of many within a field of knowledge that the thinker isn't an expert within, and then draws conclusions out of that collectively formed knowledge. And I've yet to see any "brainless thinkers" who buy into expert ideas in any negative ways. It's rather that these "brainless thinkers" buy into pseudo-experts who aren't really knowledgable in their fields but possess a biased opinion that they push with an expert's rhetoric. Hence why the scientific method requires peer reviews and second opinions. The "reasonable thinker" understands this and guards against acquiring biases of their own.

I have also seen many examples of experts getting it wrong and leading the brainless followers into shitty situations, which should make anyone with two shits for brains skeptical about anything any expert might claim. — Merkwurdichliebe

Of course, therefore consensus. If one expert says something, you can conclude that if you are not an expert in the same field, that person might know more than you and you should take note of the knowledge presented. But in order to reach a conclusion that more and more chips away and reveal the truth about something, a consensus needs to be formed among many experts.

Being skeptical is good, but just as handling any knowledge requires rational thought, skepticism requires rationality as well. "Being a skeptic" doesn't mean someone is intelligent or rational. Most conspiracy nuts are highly skeptical. It's how you manage skepticism that is key. I am an extremely skeptical person, which requires me to be smart about how to tackle a certain topic. I need to form an opinion unbiased by myself and with support from facts. The only way to do so is to include experts into forming that opinion with me reviewing the logic of many expert sources and truly understand their conclusions before forming one.

Of course, I didn't get my opinion from an expert, so you will probably reject what I'm saying here. — Merkwurdichliebe

No, I get your point. But I point out that caution needs to be taken if the opinion comes from emotional experience or anecdotal evidence. In any form of arriving at truth, excluding yourself means that both anecdotal and emotional experience is almost always irrelevant to forming a rational and sound conclusion.

The logic of what you're saying is that you shouldn't just listen to someone and take their word as truth. This is true, it's the foundation of "appeal to authority". But just accepting an expert's word is not the same thing as listening to experts and forming an opinion.

The key here is not revolving around any "expert", it's how you treat new knowledge and ideas; If you take anything at face value, you aren't really being epistemically responsible. The same goes for just rejecting everything any expert says. The path to take is to acknowledge your shortcomings in knowledge and only speak as someone who knows when you actually know something. The path is to listen to experts and analyze the truth value without biases of your own. If you have one expert who will earn a fortune on convincing you about a certain "truth", then you naturally have to be very skeptical and wary of any underlying agendas. But if you have 10, 50, 100, or more experts saying the same thing, in different labs, in different nations, independent of each other and with totally different personal goals, all while you have zero knowledge of their field of expertise. Then what is the rational path? To dismiss them all and form your own opinion based on emotional or anecdotal evidence instead? Or listen to everyone, even the ones not involved with the consensus these experts provide? No, in that case, the only two options to have are to either become an expert yourself (a real expert based on education, not an armchair one) or to actually conclude the truth of the consensus.

But then we have those who talk about science as "changing its mind" around different topics. That people present theories that are then rejected and changed. This is true, a topic within science is always changing when new data is presented. This is nothing strange to the ones understanding the process. As mentioned earlier, the process is about chipping away at something until the most likely and clear truth emerges. This is the reason behind what "hypothesis" means and the confusion of what a "scientific theory" is compared to the common idea about "theory". If someone looks at experts and expects that they tell the truth they don't understand how things work, just as much as someone who rejects anything an expert says. Listening to experts requires understanding the process by which they arrive at knowledge. Understanding that if a hypothesis is presented, that isn't pure truth, if a scientific theory is presented that is as close to pure truth as possible with the data set that exists. But with new data, it can change. That doesn't mean the expert is "failing people" with knowledge. It means that if they arrive at new conclusions, the consensus needs to shift and the people need to change their set of facts to work according to new findings.

People just don't like change. They want to get "one" truth" from an expert and when that "one truth" is changed they blame the experts for not knowing "the truth". This is what's degenerate about society right now. People want to know the truth, experts form a consensus and people either A) dismiss that consensus because it's a discomfort in their lives and they won't comply with it out of that, or B) they accept the consensus and get angry when the consensus changes, even though it's totally logical and in-line with the scientific process, or C) They accept the consensus and understand that it can change, adapting accordingly.

Petty people can't accept uncertainty. They collapse under the idea that they need to accept an uncertain factor in their lives. Maybe it's because many in the western world haven't lived in a war in the same way as older generations. They don't have experience with uncertainty. They want control, they want a clear way forward and when that is not possible they collapse into moronic behavior.

So, what is a reasonable thinker? Someone who is morally balanced and can survive any intellectual challenge. Someone who is epistemically responsible, who listens, who forms opinions around consensus results, facts that by human measurements can be considered to be true. Who do anything in their power not to form opinions out of biases, who explain their position without fallacies.

There are experts and then there are those who gather knowledge to form a whole picture. If the expert is the spear, the archer, the soldier, the "compiler" of knowledge is the one forming a picture out of different facts presented by these experts. This is what philosophy is for me. Compiling the knowledge of others who are specialized, into a complete picture. Collaboration in its best form. If a specialized expert forms broad perspectives, they fail. If a "compiler" forms a broad perspective without listening to experts, they fail.

The reasonable thinker is the one who listens to a knowledge consensus, studies the fringe results of combined large sets of facts, and form conclusions out of that. I cannot see a human be any more truthful to the world outside their own mind than that. Anyone who "just have an opinion" without anything more than that, is in my opinion not helping anyone but their own sense of ego. A narcissist of the modern age, irrelevant to arrive at any kind of truth or constructive position for anyone, including themselves.

yep. And then say irrelevant, or anecdotal. Either way, whatever you dislike, you dismiss. — Book273

Are you dense? Did you read what I wrote? That you are comparing apples to oranges? Are you unable to understand that such comparisons aren't relevant and not a logical correlating foundation to what you actually concluded? Can you understand this now or should we dance around your inability to understand this simple thing some more? You haven't presented valid premises for your conclusion, fucking get that already. It doesn't matter if you think this yourself, I have deconstructed the argument you've made and showed how it makes no logical sense to compare in the way you do, but you continue like a parrot along the same line of thinking. You are simply just proving yourself to be just stupid now.

Nope, not ever. You are projecting again. I think the pandemic response will result in more damage than the pandemic would have if there had been no response at all. — Book273

Projecting? Isn't you thinking that the pandemic response is more damaging than if we'd not done anything at all... exactly like assuming things would have been fine? Are you actually fucking stupid right now in not understanding that those two basically mean the same thing?

Check the WHO site for anticipated deaths due to starvation, lack of TB diagnosis and treatment, etc. as a result of all the border closures and crap resulting from the pandemic response. Last I checked the numbers were about 50,000,000. — Book273

And you are comparing that to what estimate of death tolls for the virus? Here's your actual argument in philosophical terms:

p1: The seriousness of the virus is not high
p2: The consequences of the pandemic response leads to many deaths (around 50 000 000) due to other global health problems
Therefore, the pandemic response is more damaging than not doing anything at all.

p1 is an assumption you have no supporting evidence for or can point out to be true. It's your own assumption that you have just "guessed". So by that alone, your argument falls. p2. is probably true if you remove the number. However, because you also point to a number of 50 000 000, you need to support that number with relevant statistical linking data. You cannot quantify that data as a direct relation to the pandemic response. You need to establish a direct link to that number, otherwise, you cannot quantify how many deaths are a causation of the pandemic response (this is a classic causation/correlation fallacy). Your conclusion relies on p1 being correct and that the serious consequences of p2 is both directly linked to the pandemic response and that they are worse than anything could be if p1 was false.

So once again, with this extremely low-quality induction, tell me again why you are on this forum?

Where I work we are seeing adverse reactions to vaccine at 1:5. Not monster life ending stuff, but still, 1:5. Hard to support that. But hey, it's anecdotal right? So ignore it and carry on. — Book273

Yes, it's an anecdotal fallacy... again. You think that fallacy exists for everyone else but doesn't apply to you or your argument? You even acknowledge it yourself to be anecdotal but don't understand why it's a fallacy? What level of stupidity are you on?

The OP asked for reasons regarding Vaccine yes or no. I am saying no. Do what you like based on the data. — Book273

But you have no data! You make a correlation/causation fallacy, you use anecdotal evidence, you speculate the severity of the virus without any facts behind it. "Do what you like based on the data" is epistemically irresponsible and also plain wrong. You do what is best according to actual data and understanding that data. This means you need to understand both the action to take and you need to know how to interpret the data. You are unable to do both. The way you describe it is selfish and dangerous to others. Stupid people thinking they know best without actual education, knowledge, or ability to interpret statistical data is the problem I'm speaking about. They need to sit down and stop being so loud.

Unless you are frontline, your data is filtered. I am taking the data I see, anecdotal as it is, and working from that. And No is what I come up with. — Book273

And this is why you are stupid and don't belong on a philosophy forum. Being on the frontline means you also have data filtered as you are only seeing ONE part of a whole, ONE sample of data that is limited and only in context to that situation. It's the exact opposite of the scientific method, the exact opposite of any kind of method of logic to arrive at what can be concluded true.

And once again not able to understand what the anecdotal fallacy is and why it exists.

And No is what I come up with. — Book273

Without any philosophical scrutiny whatsoever. You don't even attempt to follow any kind of philosophical methods needed to arrive at a sound conclusion. You just have an opinion based on anecdotal experience. And without the capacity to understand statistics you think you have support for that opinion, without ever logically create an argument around it.

I'd like to see you actually create an induction argument around your conclusion. Please do that, because you are still on a philosophical forum, so this is a valid request. Put forth the argument and I'll run through why the logic doesn't work.

There it is. Never gets old eh, back to the old "irrelevant" position. So your position is that it's ok to rebel, maybe, but not now, and not against this, because....it weakens your position? — Book273

You are comparing rebelling against a government fighting for the freedom to fighting scientists and experts who try to fight a pandemic. You're so far off the map now that you've fallen off and you can't even realize it. This is why your comparison is irrelevant. If you can't understand why such a comparison is irrelevant and not valid as a premise to your conclusion, then you're purely delusional.

I cannot argue against something that has no relevance or is unable to follow as a counterargument to what was actually written. You've said nothing of relevance to the point that was made.

Contradicting yourself their eh. Just saying, pick a direction and stick with it. Either we don't understand our place and should "shut the fuck up" and let someone else take over, (big brother) OR it's not about big brother, which invalidates the first bit. — Book273

No, because Big Brother is about a government who spies and controls the people. I'm talking about experts in the field of science and coordinators of medical staff and people fighting the pandemic. I'm referring to morons not being in the steering wheel and instead letting the experts in their fields steer what they have knowledge about. You are talking about government control, it's not the same thing. Are you mentally unable to understand the difference here? You are pretty much proving my point by this extreme inability to understand even the simplest thing.

Also; just because you put in parenthesis doesn't make it a quote. I have not used the phrase "would have been fine." — Book273

You are advocating against restrictions and relevant actions taken to fight the pandemic and your logic was assuming things would have been fine while then saying this:

Really hard to prove how bad things "would have been". Everything runs on modeling and assumptions. — Book273

So, you are basically speculating a scenario that doesn't have any modeling or valid assumptions behind it other than your wild speculation and irrelevant comparisons between apples and oranges, while criticizing a scenario that has a valid foundation of logic based on the facts we actually have about the virus, calling that "hard to prove" because it's out of modeling and assumptions.

If you are only using your uneducated wild speculation as a foundation for what you think would have happened to the world and then dismiss scenarios that actually have facts and knowledge as a foundation, I'd call that a contradictory argument from you, and my parenthesis was to sum up your stance in order to show why your logic failed. I guess it's impossible to, even when it's staring you in the face.

Ghandi rebelled eh. Peacefully, and effectively, but he still disagreed with the powers that were and changed his world. — Book273

Why do you keep bringing up rebelling political injustices when that has nothing to do with the problems of morons standing in the way of experts trying to fight a pandemic? It's like you're unable to understand what we're talking about here? What the fuck has Gandhi to do with Karen's screaming that they don't want facemasks? Or armchair experts spreading stupid bullshit that creates confusion while scientists and experts try to educate the people and stop the pandemic?

Mother Theresa worked around the restrictions placed upon her, effectively rebelling against those who would stop her from doing what she thought was right. — Book273

And one more again

You are doing what you think is right. As am I. We will both be ignored by history, and yet, one of our positions will be more accurate than the other, such is the way of things. We are rebelling. Good for us. — Book273

You are not acting upon the knowledge that we have. You are acting like a moron and have zero foundation as to why. The fact is that you have less probability of being accurate because you don't have any rational deduction behind the things you write. I keep asking for it, but you make historical comparisons to things that have nothing to do with the current situation or problem.

Seems like a bankrupt plan. — Book273

Seems like you should sit down.

I am not anti-vax — Book273

No, you're only using their exact rhetoric, wild speculative bullshit, fear-mongering, and total ignorance of the science. It's like a racist who says they're not racist. The proof is in the pudding.

So...big brother knows best eh. Scary stuff. — Book273

If you actually bother to understand the text I'm writing, I'm talking about the need for experts to be behind the steering wheel and not have morons pulling that steering wheel while the experts are trying to drive. It's dangerous and stupid. It's not about "Big Brother", stop trying to make my argument into something that it's not and understand what I write.

Applicable to you my friend. — Book273

The difference here is that I acknowledge the experts around me and refer to them to conclude what they are actually knowledgeable about. If I make arguments that refer to source material that they produced, then I'm taking the epistemically responsible path of arguing logic out of that knowledge. The difference between me and you is that you just have opinions, you think you know best, but have little to no foundation for that logic. The same goes for every other person who does the same. Armchair experts are called that based on them thinking they know best. The reasonable thinker, however, never position themselves to know past their own knowledge and instead include the consensus of experts into the arguments. So you are comparing apples to oranges while you don't understand the difference.

And yet...you are still posting. Most of your rant is fully applicable to you as well eh. Or is that another irrelevant detail that you will overlook in defense of your position? — Book273

Read above.

It is refreshing to hear someone actually come out and just say that people should not make their own decisions and just follow the leader, because the leader knows best. Appallingly ignorant and short sighted, but refreshing none-the-less. — Book273

Again, read what the fuck I'm actually writing. What "leader" are you referring to? If you're gonna strawman the argument at least try to talk about something I actually write.

There would be no United States if people had listened to what you are pushing. No one can rebel in your philosophy of obedience. How dreary. — Book273

Oh, another unrelated comparison. Read what I fucking wrote stupid.