Isaac, look at the math and the logic. — Roger Gregoire

It's not a matter of math and logic. God! I wish people would give up with this messianic delusion that they can sit in their fucking armchairs and work out how the world is using math and logic.

Just what bizarre delusion makes you think that you can use math and logic to work out the rate at which the human immune system typically kills virus particles, the rate at which covid-19 typically replicates, the rate at which it is inactivated outside of its host, and the shedding rate of healthy and unhealthy hosts?

Did you read the paper I cited, which details some of these figures?

Must must must. What is it with this must?? — baker

You introduced necessity, I'm only asking you about it

A philosopher is supposed to "give all ideas a fair shake" — baker

So you seem now to be saying that a philosopher is not, after all supposed to give all ideas a fair shake, but rather only those which would be neither a rehash, nor fruitless?

I agree.

Oops, I've got "Nv" representing two different things. Corrected equation: — Roger Gregoire

Really? That's what you're correcting? Not the manifestly false claim that healthy people remove viruses from the environment faster than socially distanced unhealthy ones, for which you've provided absolutely zero evidential support and on which your entire thesis is based?

No doubt such people exist, but that wasn't my question. My question was "why must lack of objectivity preclude commonality?", not "why may it do so in some circumstances?"

What do you mean? — baker

Some ideas must surely be ideas we've already heard, no? When we re-hear those ideas, must 'philosophers' give them due consideration on each occasion, or may they say "I've already heard this one, and disagree". If the former, then it somewhat gives the floor to whichever ideas are repeated most, which seem inefficient at best.

if one doesn't believe in objective morality, then how can one hope to get along with others in the pursuit of some common goal (which is, presumably, what politics is about, ie. the pursuit of some common goal)? — baker

Why would a lack of objectivity preclude commonality. There's no objective 'best film' but that doesn't prevent people from collectively promoting the one they all agree is such.

a philosopher is still a human and still in the process of learning, so to him, there are ideas that are new, even if someone else might have known those ideas for a long time. — baker

Yep, probably. But not all ideas are in this category, surely?

Assuming that you are right is one thing. Proving it to others is another. — Harry Hindu

Indeed it is. What has that got to do with an OP about how to interpret the disagreement of others?

Once you try to prove it to others and they don't agree, at that point you may want to revisit your assumption. — Harry Hindu

Yep. A good point. One which I'm not sure anyone here would disagree with. If other people disagree with you, one of the things you might want to do is check your workings. Again, how does that have any bearing on the question of how to interpret the disagreement of others on those matters where, one having carried out this check, one still disagrees? Or alternatively, if carrying out this check does not yield any improvement in certainty, then why advocate it?

I'm not saying that you being wrong is the only possibility if someone disagrees, just that it is a possibility to be considered. — Harry Hindu

Definitely a possibility. again, not really progressing on the notion of how to interpret others whilst one is performatively assuming it is not the case.

If you don't consider that, then you would be no better than the person you are arguing with that you assume is wrong and just won't admit it, or even consider it. — Harry Hindu

True again. Still not seeing the link in those situation where one is performatively presuming one is right already.

To think that you can assume that you are right without having to prove it to others - without having exposed your ideas to open criticism - is the problem. — Harry Hindu

This is an odd thing to say. If I'm unsure which path to take, and I decide the left is more likely to lead home than the right, are you saying that, in the absence of a person to talk to about it, i don't consider my assessment of likelihood as 'right'? What status would you say I'd assigned it then?

If you were interested, you might wonder what I mean by 'social' and 'delegitimising'. — unenlightened

Nah. If this were an isolated comment maybe, but as it is it comes off the back of (and even refers to) a long and persistent effort on your part to paint the whole of modern psychology as somehow complicit in the actions of some of it's past members where nothing short of ritual suicide would satisfy you. My previous attempt to give you the benefit of the doubt lead to a four page argument in which you insisted that we should change our practices without offering a single shred of evidence that we hadn't already done so, despite me posting rule after rule from organisations like the BPS showing exactly that we had.

So no. You've got a bone you want to gnaw and it's a waste of time pretending that you've the slightest interest in what is actually the case, your only interest is gnawing that bone and woe betide anyone who tries to take it from you.

The better you behave the more undeserved the suffering you undergo becomes and the more deserving of pleasure you become. There's the desert of pleasure generated - at least typically - by one's undergoing undeserved suffering, and then there's the desert of pleasure generated by the fact one has behaved well. So, someone who leads a very saintly life may well deserve much, much more pleasure than they received in their life - which is terrible, of course, for it is a great injustice if a person does not get the pleasure they deserve. And any suffering they endure will be, from a moral perspective, much much worse than it would be if they hadn't behaved so well. — Bartricks

Right. So a population of well-behaved people are perfectly likely to deserve all the pleasure they get (and more) and thus there is no 'badness' in giving birth to them because the pleasure they will revive in life truly does outweigh the suffering, morally, because it is all deserved pleasure. It is a god thing to give birth to them because it will create a situation of greater deserved pleasure than otherwise, whilst at the same time, (given that one strong component of behaving well is reducing the suffering of others), this same population will be working to reduce the amount of undeserved suffering in the world, which is also a good thing.

to reply in kind, I assume you've done extensive research into the nature of desert and the nature of morality and haven't just posted on a public forum from a position of philosophical ignorance? — Bartricks

...is not replying in kind. Another person experiencing suffering and/or pleasure is a fact about the world. It can only be determined empirically and therefore there will be some body of knowledge about it (a collection of such empirical observations). Whether someone deserves such suffering/pleasure or not is not an empirical observation, it is determined by the assessment of the person considering it. As such there is no body of knowledge, no collection of observations the learning of which would increase the accuracy of such a judgement. If I were critiquing a particular named philosophical position, then there would constitute a body of knowledge about exactly what that position is which I would be well-advised to apprise myself of prior to comment, but this is no such situation,

Is the argument that if I am critical of psychiatry, I must be in favour of murder and suicide? — unenlightened

Yes, that's basically it. If you see madness as

necessarily social, and necessarily delegitimising. — unenlightened

...then you get an increase in murder and suicide.

If, however, you see some mental health diagnoses as a cover-up for a society's poor treatment of its citizens... then, you'd have a valid point to discuss.

That's a very shallow cover for an ad hominem attack. — counterpunch

It wasn't covered at all.

I haven't read everything, but I have read extensively. It's always open to you to cite your hypothetical:

alternative (equally scientific) positions — counterpunch

So the former then. You really don't think there's even so much as an active debate among scientists about the positions you espouse as 'scientific'.

The problem with politically correct lefty keyboard warriors; apart from their overwhelming ignorance — counterpunch

This is such a fascinating approach. Are you at all aware of alternative (equally scientific) positions to the ones you espouse, or do you genuinely live in a world where the (first?) scientist you read on a subject must automatically be right and everyone who disagrees is ideologically deluded. I don't know if it's just a really good act, but if so, well done. You really do come across as actually believing this bizarre world-view.

Madness is necessarily social, and necessarily delegitimising. — unenlightened

Yeah right. Because the 34 murders, including 8 children and 266+ of suicides in just one year* directly linked with schizophrenia, even with a strong psychiatric profession, were just them expressing their legitimate difference of opinion about who was and was not a demon/devil/whatever. How repressive of us to try and convince them otherwise.

* Royal College of Psychiatrists, and National Schizophrenia Fellowship figures concurrent in two separate reports.

there is the possibility that the reason they disagree with you is because you are wrong. — Harry Hindu

I don't understand how this could possibly work as an assessment of a disagreement about an idea you currently think is right. How could it possibly be the case the reason they disagree with you (according to you) is because you're wrong? If you thought you were wrong, you wouldn't hold the idea in question. So we have to only include categories which assume you're right. The question I understood the OP to be addressing is "assuming I'm right, why might my interlocutor think the way they do?"

The important point is that the OP is about ethics, not knowledge in general. In most ethical cases one must act in accordance with some assumption (many more empirical cases of knowledge fall into this category too). Personally I don't see much merit in making an entirely academic distinction between 'acting as if x were right / the case' and 'believing x is right / the case', especially in ethics and politics, the two are for all intents and purposes, the same. Which means that, for all binomial dilemmas (and obviously all dilemmas can be framed binomially as x,~x), we can treat each person as believing either x or ~x.

Presumably a philosopher will stay open to new ideas indefinitely, so that any conclusion will, at most, be just temporary. — baker

I wasn't really referring to 'new' ideas. Very few ideas are new. The vast majority have been expressed before. So what about those? OK to categorise them, or do we have to remain open to them indefinitely?

If this were true, then we could simply lock up all healthy immune people in quarantine, and voila, then we would magically achieve herd immunity and save all the vulnerable people. — Roger Gregoire

This is absolutely and demonstrably true, so I don't see how you think it supports you view.

If we locked up all the healthy people and left the others exactly where they are geographically, we would indeed have reached herd immunity. The remaining viable hosts would be, on average, too socially isolated to transmit the virus to new non-immune hosts and so the virus (being unable to live outside of a non-immune host) would die.

A philosopher is supposed to "give all ideas a fair shake" — baker

Permanently? Are they never allowed to reach conclusions about said ideas?

After learning a language I can know that all husbands are married but I can't know that all men are married, and that is how the distinction is made. — Michael

It's worse than that even. Since there's no objective set of rules as to what words in a language 'really' mean, nor boundaries where one language ends and another starts (pidgin English for example), you don't even know that all husbands are married a priori after you've learnt a language. You know it in no less a way than you know the earth is round. All the while you continue to successfully use the terms synonymously, it's true. At any point in future, or within any given sub-set of language speaker, or within any new language game, it may cease to be the case.

Its not possible for us both to be objectively correct, but it is possible for both of to be objectively wrong. — Harry Hindu

The question is not what might, later, turn out to be the case, but what I now consider the case to be. That I might later be wrong is trivially true of every position I hold, so it's useless as a distinguishing property.

The point (I think) @Pfhorrest is making here is strictly about how to treat people whose position you disagree with (now), nothing more.

It's got nothing whatsoever to do with the epistemic status of that position, nothing whatsoever to do with politics, extremism or any of these associated issues people seem to have wanted to latch on to. I disagree vehemently with @Pfhorrest's epistemological position, for example, but I broadly agree with his position here.

A group-thinker doesn't know what is wrong or right. Group-thinkers look to the group to tell them what is wrong or right. This is pleading to popularity and authority, which are logical fallacies, therefore cannot be the objectively right thing to do. — Harry Hindu

I don't really understand how this comment relates to either my post, or the OP. Regardless of that, it's obviously wrong. Some people believe quite strongly in principles like democracy, for example, where, in its most radical form, what the majority believe is the right course of action is exactly the right course of action. It can also be a very useful heuristic in situations where one is inexperienced (especially where the group in question is vastly more experienced). There are numerous scenarios where trusting the collective judgement of a group is a good logical choice.

I don't see any costs in there, nor risk assessments. — Isaac


Me either. It's almost as if that's not possible at this stage. — counterpunch

Then how do you know it's better than wind?

Why, at one time - did people carve glaciers into chunks and transport the ice thousands of miles, when they could just have invented the refrigerator? — counterpunch

They did invent the refrigerator.

Oh, and the other thing that would be interesting to hear is why, if it's cheaper, lower risk and lower environmental consequence, yet produces free energy - why is no-one doing it already? Why are firms investing in low return industries when they could be selling electricity at half the price of their competitors and still making a huge profit?

I don't see any costs in there, nor replacement schedules, nor risk assessments.

East Anglia ONE - UK offshore wind array, 102 turbines, 7 MW each, producing 714 MW - enough for 600,000 homes. It took 10 years to build, and cost £2.5bn.

The UK has 30 million homes. So roughly, that would require 6000 windmills, costing £1500bn - ish. Only from 2030 - UK government intend phasing out petrol cars, adding the transport energy demand of 30 million cars to the national grid. So 10,000 windmills costing £2500bn. Plus storage facilities - because wind is intermittent. Wind turbines have a working life of around 25 years, and then need replacing. — counterpunch

Brilliant. A little 'broad brush' maybe, but you've given us some actual figures to back up your argument from the real world. Good move.

Right then, let's have the figures for your solution. £2.5 trillion for wind every 25 yrs (according to your figures - I'm not endorsing them, only the fact that you've bothered to present them). What is the cost for your solution to fuel 30 million homes and 30 million cars, and what is it's replacement time?

Oh yes, and

What are the environmental consequences of doing so? — creativesoul

plus the cost of any insurance needed against those consequences.

Oh and we'll have to have that breakdown for each country, of course, since contrary to @Banno's suggestion, you're claiming this is the solution for each and every country in the world.

But presumably you've got access to all this data, yes? Otherwise you'd be arguing with a little more humility. So let's have it, then we might all get on board, but if not we will have at least been usefully informed.

You have somehow narrowed a lot of arguments I've made into a lifeguard that is woken up. A clever trick, but it's like summing up someone's whole life story in a one liner joke. — schopenhauer1

That's totally unfair. You've not been 'talked over'. No-one's cut you off mid proposition and @khaled has dissected your posts practically sentence by sentence. Look back over the responses Khaled has given. Every single point you make has been addressed, and if you disagree with any of those points, or if you think any specific point has not been addressed you've had ample opportunity to just say so. If you can't argue your case it's either because your case is weak or because you're not expressing it well. It's just absinthian to dismiss all that as 'a clever trick'.

But, on the off-chance that I'm wrong, let's have the full justification. Quote the sections of @khaled's responses to you that you think have qualified his approach to be dismissed as 'a clever trick', so that we can all see the underhand deception he's trying to get away with, because to the rest of us it looks like an intelligent, dedicated, patient, unabusive, and diligent dissection of your argument.

some of the suffering we undergo we deserve to undergo by dint of our behaviour. Suffering that you deserve to undergo doesn't, at least not typically, make one deserving of pleasure. — Bartricks

This then would make it sound like the amount of undeserved please (the pleasure not accounted for by undeserved suffering) is dependent on a person's behaviour. Behave well and you will unlikely put yourself in a position of not deserving your pleasures because any suffering you undergo will be undeserved (and therefore continue to yield a debt of deserved pleasure to make up for it).

parents owe their children a decent living for having, of their own free will, subjected them to a life in a world in which having a decent living is needed if one is to have a reasonable prospect of happiness. — Bartricks

How have you calculated this? What maths have you used to work out that the sum total of pleasure deserved (in return for the all the undeserved suffering being born brought about) is 'a decent living'. I want to see your workings.

I'm presuming you haven't just posted to a nationwide public forum to tell us all that you reckon 'a decent living' is a bout the deserved quantity of pleasure appropriate for 'all the suffering one endures in life that isn't itself deserved', using quantities you've just pulled out of your arse.

I presume you've done a fairly substantial amount of research using, say glucocorticoids as a proxy for suffering and maybe oxytocin, serotonin, adrenaline, prolactin, norepinephrine or dopamine as you proxies for pleasure - with some sensible threshold quantities, based on the literature.

Or, maybe, you've quite reasonably decided to eschew the contentious neurological approach and stick to self-reports, that would be understandable. You've conducted a series of wide ranging surveys, or perhaps just relied on the thousands of such that have already been done, to give some quantitative score to these otherwise qualitative measures - did you perhaps use ordinality inducing questionnaire formats, they have a fairly good reputation for generating significant quantitative values in such cases?

Or maybe yours was an historical approach, a meta study of the social and political changes societies have striven for as a measure of pleasures they pursue and suffering they're willing to endure for them. Yes, that would make a good aggregate comparison without getting bogged down in ironing out individual differences. Of course then you'd have to account for the disproportionate influence of he powerful, but...

...No? Please don't tell me you've just written to a public forum advising that all parents owe their children in compensation for being born is 'a decent living' based on absolutely nothing but the fact that you 'reckon' that's the case.

At my hospital they stopped doing elective surgeries during the blitz and devoted surgical ICUs to COVID. We just started doing that again. Space isn't an issue for us because we're gigantic. Staffing limits our capacity. That's true across the country. — frank

So, yes then. You were at capacity. It doesn't matter if it's staff, space, equipment, or specialists. The details are not the point. The working to capacity is. Maybe the nature of the capacity is different in America (over here it's all four), but the point of being at or near capacity in some respect is all that's relevant.

You can stock basics (although we use plastic, which means all that stuff has expiration dates), but we learn from the disease what we need in terms of supportive equipment. — frank

No. You can stock anything and replace it at expiry if need be. Again, the details aren't the point.

If ebola evolved into something less deadly and more transmissible, we don't know if we would need ventilators. We'll have to find out if it happens. — frank

Not if you paid for an emerging disease monitoring service, had an efficient manufacturing chain on standby, had excess staffing in both medical services and medical supply services, had a contingency plan to cover all this (oh, and avoided having a clown for a president). Then you might stand a chance of finding out just before it happens (in your country).

So this is mostly wrong, but I've talked to you about it before, and I don't see any reason to go through it again. — frank

No, you spouted off a load of ad hoc guesswork without a single citation to support your assertions, whilst I posted papers from the bmj, the lancet and the manufacturers own testing facilities...is actually what happened.

That's why "they" hated Trump. He wasn't for sale. — synthesis

No, they hated Trump because they couldn't trust him to sit the right way round on a toilet, let alone run a country.

They can actually figure things out and don't really need any more experts to screw things up. — synthesis

So you think ordinary people can figure out climate science, agricultural subsidies, interest rates... Let's see. As an ordinary person, without looking anything up or consulting an expert in any way, what do you think we should alter the fiscal
mandate to reduce cyclically adjusted public sector net borrowing to? What do you think we should do about talik methane emissions?

Following Habermas (and discourse theory in general) if you are entering into a genuine dialog, then you must not only be prepared to offer reasons but also be persuaded by them. — Pantagruel

Wouldn't that fall into the category of

People who don't have strong opinions one way or the other and just try to give all ideas a fair shake — Pfhorrest

? Seems to be right there in the OP.

Well there's always the possibility that you are or I am wrong, no? — ChatteringMonkey

Yeah, but the advice is obviously regarding the categories as they are perceived at the time, not as they might be perceived at some time in the future. People who I think are wrong at this moment would fall into one of the three categories of wrong. The fact that I might, at some future date, come to think they're right doesn't have any bearing on the matter.

Everyone learns where the weaknesses were and what we should have done. — frank

Really. You work in healthcare, right? Are you seriously suggesting that neither you no any of your colleagues had the faintest idea the ICUs were working at near capacity before the pandemic? Did you all look at your stock of ventilators and think "plenty there to handle a pandemic"? Did anyone working in emergency care feel they spent a good deal of their time twidling their thumbs because their units were ever so slightly overstaffed?

I know you have it slightly different over there, but honestly, I've not heard a single story from any health professional across the world who says their healthcare services are fine as they are. We all knew.

Your attitude toward the vaccine perplexes me. — frank

Yeah I know. A multinational conglomerate that has a documented history of lying about its products, plans to make billions out of injecting half the world with a chemical that's had one tenth of the testing and one fiftieth of the approval checks given to medicines normally administered to less than one thousandth of the target population, to alleviate the spread and hospitalisation rate of a virus despite no evidence whatsoever that it will do either, and despite knowledge of proven alternative approaches which are cheaper and will definitely do both. And I'm bothered about it. I guess I'm just funny like that. We all have our quirks I suppose.

how do you think people's response to hearing 22,00 children a day die from poverty is going to have changed? — Isaac


Who cares? — frank

Well, I do. Obviously. The possibility that people might be made less likely to help prevent the deaths of thousands of children is another one of those little things that just bothers me.

You might not think they are right, but you could be wrong. — Pantagruel

If you thought you were wrong, then why would you persist in that idea? If you thought you might be wrong (and they might be right) then their idea would be equally value and they wouldn't be in the category of people with whom you disagree. It's set out in the OP

ideological (dis)agreement — Pfhorrest

A person whom you think might be right is not a person with whom you disagree and so is outside of the scope of situations this advice applies to.

They could be right. — Pantagruel

If you thought they were right they wouldn't be in the category of people with whom you disagree would they?

following your categorization someone who disagrees with you can only incorrect, because they are either confused/not informed enough/to be converted (middle group) stupid/misguided (4th group), or morally corrupt (5th group). Doesn't seem all that respectful to me. — ChatteringMonkey

I think you've misunderstood what @Pfhorrest is talking about. He's suggesting a way of approaching people who disagree with you using categories relative to the person using them. So there are no other ways to categorise those who disagree with you ethically. They're either wrong, misinformed (where an ethical choice might be based on empirical data), or misguided (where an ethical choice might require some complex consideration). I'm not sure what other category you might imagine putting people in...

'Also right' doesn't work because that would take them outside the scope of the people being considered (those who disagree with you).

'Differently right'...? 'Using alternative facts'...? 'Not yet right'...?

What is this other category in which we could place those who disagree with us ethically aside from misinformed, misguided, or wrong?

Empiricism is a philosophical position. — Pantagruel

So. That empiricism is a philosophical position doesn't affect what things are empirical, it only affects the extent to which you believe that those things inform us of reality as a whole. Are you implying that social membership is not a property derived from the senses?

I like to think that, when I absorb the nuances of Mannheim's thought, or Heidegger's, I am in a way bringing the force of their intellects to bear on current situations. — Pantagruel

How could you possibly? They're unaware of data from modern research and so are unable to apply their intellects to it. Not even Heidegger is clever enough to consider data gathered nearly fifty years after he died (though I would not put it past some of his acolytes to claim as much). No, what you're doing is using your own intellect to elbow modern data into theories people came up with without the benefit of. It's fitting the data to the theory. Something rightly frowned upon in the sciences.

a detailed analysis of the way that social membership steers political and ideological domination... — Pantagruel

...is not a philosophical investigation, it's an empirical one. Social membership is an empirical property and the effect it has is an empirical observation.

You might have a philosophical approach to the way in which you want to frame that data, but to do so, you need the data itself. A lot of Mannheim's ideas have been corroborated, it's not that he's wrong, just that ideas about empirical matters should be checked against up to date data where possible, not discussed from the armchair as if we could work out what is the case just by thinking hard.

If you really don't believe that great historical works contain elements of current merit and value, then you're probably not in the right place — Pantagruel

I didn't say anything about it lacking either merit or value. What I claimed it lacked was contemporaneity. I'm asking why you'd want to base an analysis on a book which has that particular flaw, regardless of its other potential merit, which I'm sure any modern sociology text could equally lay claim to.

I was thinking specifically of cases where one knows the person in question and has seen them fall in with bad views in real time. I think of my parents in this category; I know from a lifetime of experience they are well-intentioned and loving (albeit severely flawed) people at heart, but they've also both been suckered in by whatever they're reading on the internet into believing stuff on the edges of Qanon territory. — Pfhorrest

It's not an unfamiliar phenomenon unfortunately. I don't know anyone personally, but have been made aware of people who used to be within my social group starting to adopt Trumpian style rhetoric. All from the far left, curiously. All citing political correctness around transgender issues as their tipping point. Don't quite know what to make of it, but I hear it a lot, just anecdotally.

I'm actually just starting a detailed analysis of the way that social membership steers political and ideological domination through an ongoing process ... All centered on Mannheim's sociology of knowledge — Pantagruel

Why on earth would you centre such an analysis on a book that's 70 years out of date. Do you really have such a poor opinion of modern sociology that you think nothing of note has been advanced since then?

I don't mean to suggest that we should treat the truly ridiculous ideas of the "other side" as legitimate like that, but only that we shouldn't treat the people as enemies merely for not having made up their minds about them, because that then frames us and the undecided as enemies, as so inclines them to whatever side is opposite ours. We should be clear in our view that those ideas are not worth consideration, but we should convey that in a way that's more like warning a stranger away from a path they may not have seen the dangers of, and less like attacking an enemy for daring to even consider going down that path. — Pfhorrest

I see. I didn't get that from my first reading, but it makes more sense now. I think distinguishing the forth from the fifth group will be difficult, and so ensuring we present a sufficiently resilient front against the fifth might be compromised by a less antagonistic treatment of the fourth. In theory I agree, but in practice I think it might only apply to a few cases where one is sure one's interlocutor is in the fourth group and not the fifth, otherwise one had better be sure they know that they are made one's enemy by holding such ideas.

it's the people in the middle group who feed into the second-to-last, and treating them like enemies only makes them more likely to shy away from our side and get suckered in with our enemies — Pfhorrest

Do you have any evidence if this?

The problem is that, as you point out, people in the last group think they're in the first, and treating an idea as a valid contribution to the 'marketplace of ideas' makes it seem more 'good', by inclusion at the big table than it might otherwise be.

So, what is it that prevents people in the third group from being facilitated in joining the last group by being convinced that the last group's ideas are just as valid and likely to be right as the first group's? Afterall "if there wasn't a chance they're right, why would we even be considering them".

And don't say "by rational argument", because the very existence of these groups is evidence that people adopt and maintain ideas for reasons other than rational arguments. It would be a perfomative contradiction to argue that we could use rational argument to resolve a situation brought about by a failure of rational argument.