@andrewk@SophistiCat@fishfry@Owen, missing anything vital?

Wasn't aware there's already a thread for it. I'll pin this one, thanks for including the reference.

I did confirm that social disruption is on the horizon, you $$#%^&&. — frank

Hey good! Now you're ready to start considering the arguments in the paper!

For those of you too lazy for close reading:

First question for any paper: what is it trying to do?

(1) The paper is trying to highlight that current climate science/sustainability management treats severe global socioeconomic impacts as an edge case (A), that management strategies thus advocated are short term bodges given the plausibility of severe global socioeconomic impacts of climate change within our lifetime (B), and because of (A) and (B) it is now time to consider alternative strategies which adjust or adapt to the plausible reality of such changes (C).

Second question for any paper: how does it try to achieve this?

(2) It surveys contemporary climate science to assess the plausibility referenced in (1), finding that such large changes are consistent with its reviewed literature, evincing (A). Moreover, it does a literature search for climatology or sustainability management looking for people analysing adjustment or adaptation strategies given severe global socioeconomic impacts from climate change within our lifetime. It doesn't find much literature explicitly on it, and doesn't find much literature which treats these scenarios as plausible, evincing (B). Given (A) and (B), investigating (C) seems sensible. So he proceeds to investigate (C).

Investigating (C), he takes the approach of trying to isolate why there are holes in the scientific literature corresponding to (A) and (B) - which has psychological and institutional components, he summarises:

Have professionals in the sustainability field discussed the possibility that it is too late to avert an environmental catastrophe and the implications for their work? A quick literature review revealed that my fellow professionals have not been publishing work that explores, or starts from, that perspective. That led to a third question, on why sustainability professionals are not exploring this fundamentally important issue to our whole field as well as our personal lives. To explore that, I drew on psychological analyses, conversations with colleagues, reviews of debates amongst environmentalists in social media and selfreflection on my own reticence. Concluding that there is a need to promote discussion about the implications of a social collapse triggered by an environmental catastrophe...

he then begins to analyse what he sees as relevant information for adjustment or adaptation:

I asked my fourth question on what are the ways that people are talking about collapse on social media. I identified a variety of conceptualisations and from that asked myself what could provide a map for people to navigate this extremely difficult issue. For that, I drew on a range of reading and experiences over my 25 years in the sustainability field to outline an agenda for what I have termed “deep adaptation” to climate change.

So first thing, the article is not predicting an extinction event, the argument does not require strong commitment to the reality of an imminent extinction event - though that is consistent with the broad aims of the paper - it predicts socio-economic upheaval on a large scale. As it puts it in the introduction:

Instead, this article may contribute to future work on sustainable management and policy as much by subtraction as by addition. By that I mean the implication is for you to take a time to step back, to consider "what if" the analysis in these pages is true, to allow yourself to grieve, and to overcome enough of the typical fears we all have, to find meaning in new ways of being and acting.. That may be in the fields of academia or management - or could be in some other field that this realisation leads you to.

If the author thought his research strongly supported an extinction event, I doubt he would put this emphasis on adjustment to massive socioeconomic upheaval. The paper is even called 'Deep Adaptation' for Christ's sake, and the title of the section he reviews the climatological literature in is 'Apocalypse Uncertain'. He does however make an effort to portray an extinction event as emotionally relevant:

It is a truism that we do not know what the future will be. But we can see
trends. We do not know if the power of human ingenuity will help sufficiently to change the environmental trajectory we are on. Unfortunately, the recent years of innovation, investment and patenting indicate how human ingenuity has increasingly been channelled into consumerism and financial engineering. We might pray for time. But the evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war.

We do not know for certain how disruptive the impacts of climate change will be or where will be most affected, especially as economic and social systems will respond in complex ways. But the evidence is mounting that the impacts will be catastrophic to our livelihoods and the societies that we live within. Our norms of behaviour, that we call our “civilisation,” may also degrade. When we contemplate this possibility, it can seem abstract. The words I ended the previous paragraph with may seem, subconsciously at least, to be describing a situation to feel sorry about as we witness scenes on TV or online. But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.

These descriptions may seem overly dramatic. Some readers might consider them an unacademic form of writing. Which would be an interesting comment on why we even write at all. I chose the words above as an attempt to cut through the sense that this topic is purely theoretical.

I suspect that good responses to the article would deal with its 'theory of adaptation' and possible socio-economic organisational strategies that might work irrespective of the doomy-gloomy plausibilities.

Oh, and just for @frank, firstly:

The World Bank reported in 2018 that countries needed to prepare for over 100 million internally displaced people due to the effects of climate change (Rigaud et al, 2018), in addition to millions of international refugees.

if the World Bank, that well known cabal of green anarchist zero-growth environmental activists, is informing us of the need to prepare for Bad Times, we (by that I mean our betters) should probably take it seriously. If that doesn't suffice there are two slightly methodological sections called 'Our Non-Linear World' and 'Looking Ahead' which cover why the paper takes a more qualitative/integrative approach over the use of quantitative models.

The observed phenomena, of actual temperatures and sea levels, are greater than what the climate models over the past decades were predicting for our current time. They are consistent with non-linear changes in our environment that then trigger uncontrollable impacts on human habitat and agriculture, with subsequent complex impacts on social, economic and political systems. I will return to the implications of these trends after listing some more of the impacts that are already being reported as occurring today....

The impacts I just summarised are already upon us and even without increasing their severity they will nevertheless increase their impacts on our ecosystems, soils, seas and our societies over time. It is difficult to predict future impacts. But it is more difficult not to predict them. Because the reported impacts today are at the very worst end of predictions being made in the early 1990s - back when I first studied climate change and modelbased climate predictions as an undergraduate at Cambridge University.

I'm sure if you actually went through a proper error-propagation over all the combined climate data and tried to estimate the societal effects, your resultant models would have crazy high future error - and they should, because the future of nonlinear complex systems is really hard to pin down in numbers -, but if you change your frame of questioning a bit; why should the need for such error propagation and an integrated quantitative model of everything the paper touches on stop us from trying to plan to adjust or adapt to the horrible possible circumstances consistent with those models? They shouldn't... that's the real point of the paper. That is the position from which its interesting questions are tackled. It looks at various psychological factors in depth, and some institutional ones. It's only from that position does its title and intended contribution to discourse actually makes sense.

Given the climate science we discussed earlier, some people may think this (current) action is too little too late. Yet, if such action reduces some harm temporarily, that will help people, just like you and me, and therefore such action should not be disregarded. Nevertheless, we can look more critically at how people and organisations are framing the situation and the limitations that such a framing may impose. The initiatives are typically described as promoting “resilience”, rather than sustainability. Some definitions of resilience within the environmental sector are surprisingly upbeat. For instance, the Stockholm Resilience Centre (2015) explains that “resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about how humans and nature can use shocks and disturbances like a financial crisis or climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking.” In offering that definition, they are drawing on concepts in biology, where ecosystems are observed to overcome disturbances and increase their complexity (Brand and Jax, 2007).

So please, if you want to put this research in bin with the Mayan Apocalypse and Millenium Bug, do so, but politely leave it out of the thread (personal opinion, not moderator opinion).

ITT people try to convince an OP explicitly asking for help with a natural deduction proof in a specified system that it isn't worth the bother.



∴ (((∃x)(Fx • ∼(∃y)(∼y=x • Fy)) • (∃x)(Gx • ∼(∃y)(∼y=x • Gy))) • ∼(∃x)(Fx • Gx)) ⊃ (∃x)(∃y)(((Fx ∨ Gx) • (Fy ∨ Gy)) • (∼x=y • ∼(∃z)((∼z=x • ∼z=y) • (Fz ∨ Gz))))


Only thing I can offer is that if the author didn't attempt it but knows that it is true, maybe the important thing to cultivate in the exercise is an intuition for why it must follow somehow. I imagine you already have this intuition - F is an exclusive property of x, G is an exclusive property of y, for some x Fx, for some y Gy; ie only x if F and only y is G. The only way for there to be a z such that Fz or Gz is if z=x or z=y, and the only way to be both is z=y=x. By eliminating the x=y case, you force the implication that (such a z exists implies z=x or z=y) which by the exclusivity of F and G we know can't be the case. Since we've exhausted the only way such a z can exist and it lead to a contradiction, no such z exists.

Yes. I didn't mean to suggest they were empty of content or insight.

It does make a lot of effort to give their claims an empirical backing though, eg:

In Alaska, cross-cultural school science resulted in Indigenous students’ standardized science test scores uniformly improving over four years to meet national averages (Barnhart, Kawagley, & Hill, 2000). Classroom teacher/researcher Medina-Jerez (2008, p. 209) maintains that what matters most is “the acknowledgement of cultural differences in the classroom that provides the needed attention to each student in coping with his/her strengths and weaknesses as they feel integrated into the cross-cultural scenario of the classroom.”

The 'uniformly' there is important. I'm too ignorant of the data to weigh the specifics of 'improved schooling' that incorporates more practical demonstration and social/cultural pedagogy vs one which focusses on 'indigenous knowledge' to provide those improvements in the way the paper advocates.

This is slightly off topic I suppose, but I started reading through the article @ssu linked, and I absolutely love this:

(Aikenhead, 2006a; supporting citations are omitted)

that's such a huge fuck you to a skeptical reader. It's just 'You won't, I know you won't.' I'll have to steal it.

The article doesn't actually say Western science (whatever that is) is wrong or produces falsehoods, it's a critique on an institutional level. The goals of their argument are to support the following notion:

A cross-cultural science curriculum promotes the decolonization of school science.
Indigenous students learn to master and utilize Eurocentric science and technology without, in
the process, sacrificing their own cultural ways of knowing nature. Cross-cultural school science nurtures walking in both worlds – Indigenous and Eurocentric. In the Mi’kmaw Nation, some Elders talk about two-eyed seeing that emphasizes the strengths of both knowledge systems (Hatcher, Bartlett, Marshall, & Marshall, 2009). By walking in both worlds or by two-eyed seeing, Indigenous students (rural and urban) gain cultural capital essential for accessing power as citizens in a Eurocentric dominated world while maintaining their roots in an Indigenous wisdom tradition.

For non-Indigenous students, cross-cultural school science can nurture a richer
understanding of the physical world. Their Eurocentric dominated world can be an impoverished mono-cultural world that stifles diversity. By learning to walk in both worlds or by two-eyed seeing, non-Indigenous students gain insight into their own culturally constructed Eurocentric world, and they can gain access to Indigenous cultural capital essential for wisdom-in-action for their country’s sustainable growth (Glasson, Mhango, Phiri, & Lanier, 2010

So what they'd like is more inclusive teaching practices along ethnic lines, a greater emphasis on practical demonstration, and an introduction of 'Indigenous knowledge' as a cluster of practical methodologies for doing... stuff. Doing stuff nowadays requires familiarity with technology; engaging with any research team or technology developer group requires being in accord with 'Eurocentric science' - or at least being able to adopt its vocabulary and methods of thinking.

In the authors' view (it seems to me), what they want, is to remove cultural identity based alienation's effect on people's developmental prospects, and they think that incorporating education about such cultures into the curriculum would help address that.

I don't agree that teaching cultural practices or ideology alongside normal science in the science classroom is particularly appropriate; not because I think 'indigenous knowledge' is worthless or whatever, but because I see some basic level of technical understanding over most scientific fields as a necessary goal of education which expands people's developmental potential more than the alternative 'indigenous wisdom' that competes with it for science classroom time.

But I would like to see a greater emphasis on cultural/historical/anthropological/social/political education in curricula, and would also like to see more practical demonstrations incorporated into teaching especially with regard to 'Eurocentric science'. An overemphasis on decontextualised theory breeds boredom and then ignorance.

I mean, the worldview that school history taught me is that before William Wallace there were dinosaurs and then another bloke called William stopped slavery, someone else who surprisingly wasn't named William discovered antibiotics, and now we have an understanding of reality down to its fundamental constituents and somehow that required trade, which is capitalism. Hitler came along at some point and killed a lot of people, but everything's back to normal now. Eventually because of an unfortunate incident with planes and buildings we were told about a writhing sea of angry brown people who weren't Indians because Indians are our friends and have this cool light festival thing. Outside of the classroom I was surprised to learn the Indians were only our friends when they weren't stealing our jobs.

Edit: though it does seem the kind of paper that would probably cite agricultural field studies to establish that cultural pluralism is more sustainable (#sneering academic jokes).

So, possible world semantics applies to propositions. We evaluate a proposition at a collection of worlds with some relation on them that captures the sense of possibility in question. A requirement of this is that the thing we evaluate must be either true or false in each possible world. It doesn't help analyse whether we can say a moral rule is truth apt while treating a moral rule as a fundamental constituent of language use. So, if we start the inquiry into the truth aptness of a moral rule with respect to a possible world semantics, we will have begged the question about their truth aptness to begin with.

If Witty is suspicious about saying 'The Paris meter stick is 1 meter long' and 'The Paris meter stick is not one meter long', one wonders why something even messier, like 'One ought not introduce security backdoors into communications software', would behave differently. Paradigmatic examples of good conduct may be unable to be said to be good for precisely the same reason as the Paris meter stick cannot be said to be 1 meter long.

a + (bc) = (a + b)(a + b) — Ulrik

The usual way you deal with bracketed expressions are by axiomatising how products interact with sums and how products interact with products. The sum-product interaction axioms are usually called the distributive laws.

$a.(b+c) = a.b + b.c$
$(b+c).a=b.a+c.a$


There's no need for the second one if the algebra you're dealing with has a commutative product operation, IE where $a.b=b.a$ for all $a$ and $b$. If only the first one holds. the algebra is called 'left distributive', and the first one is usually called 'the left distributive law', when the second one holds, the algebra is called 'right distributive' and the law correspondingly is called 'the right distributive law'.

The product-product interaction axiom is usually called 'associativity of the product operation' or 'the associative law'.

$a.(b.c)=(a.b).c$

When you expand the term $(a+b)(c+d)$, you're covertly using the left distributive law and the right distributive law:

$(a+b)(c+d)=(a+b).c+(a+b).d=a.c+b.c+a.d+b.d$

the first step uses the left distributive law, the second step uses the right distributive law. Structures which have both addition and multiplication operators which interact using a distributive law are typically called 'rings', if the ring also has $a.b=b.a$ for all a and b then it's called a 'commutative ring'. You can look up these topics yourself to see how they are axiomatised (there are more required properties than the ones I've presented here).

Dunno. If your world is sufficiently messy to have moral norms in the same category as 'paradigms' in Wittgenstein, then we can't ensure that they're truth apt (in all contexts). I'm sure there's a good account linking them, but I don't immediately see it.

I think PWS is a red herring here. The relevant question to me seems to be if we take moral norms as part of the background, how can we ensure that they are necessarily true or false? It may be that we can evaluate using them, but without the necessity of assuming their truth.

Another general remark.

If you consider Wittgenstein's discussion of the meter stick in the PI, when it is used as a standard of measurement it neither (allegedly) makes sense to say 'The meter stick is not one meter long' nor 'The meter stick is one meter long'. If we are analogising the role moral rules or norms play in life, some care would be required to ensure that the formulation of moral rules as propositions renders them true or false.

d0 + d1(10) + d2(10^2) + dn(10^n) ? I have trouble understanding this method of notation and when to use it and what it means. — Ulrik

$10365 = 5*10^0+6*10^1+3*10^2+0*10^3+1*10^4$
so
$d_0 =5, d_1=6, d_2=3, d_3=0, d_5=1$
can do the same for any number. That's what it means to write something in base 10 positional notation (the usual way we write numbers).

Maybe living in accord with newly posited values, or a new system to evaluate norms, doesn't make much sense from this perspective since it is overemphasising already established rules. 'One ought not introduce security backdoors into communications software' would not have made sense prior to a public understanding of these issues, but nevertheless such a public understanding was put in place.

Moreover, we need to be able to evaluate such norms in order to decide which ones to live in accordance with. This requires an ability to treat norms as an object of discourse, a topic of conversation, and not just a fundamental constituent of discourse.

3xVy( y = x <-> Gy); therefore 3x3yVz ( ~ (x = y) & (z = x V z = y)) <-> 3xVy( y = x <-> ~ Gy)

=

$\exists x \forall y (y=x \leftrightarrow Gy) \vdash \exists x \exists y \forall z [((\neg(x=y) \wedge (z=x \vee z=y))]\leftrightarrow \exists x \forall y (y=x \leftrightarrow \neg Gy)$

?

Forum has mathjax support.

No, no, enthymeme reminds me of urethra.

This helps me sleep.

Ad hominem. Facts don't care about your feelings.

Special pleading. False dilemma. ;)

Right, so I finally have some purchase on the construction in section 2 §2. This post will be heavily edited to include diagrams later. Anyone more experienced with math in this field please correct me.

Imagine we're on the surface of a wibbly wobbly sphere, and we pick a point O and call it the origin. We're going to look at the distance from O to nearby points.

For this purpose let us imagine that from any given point the system of shortest limes going out from it is constructed; the position of an arbitrary point may then be determined by the initial direction of the geodesic in which it lies, and by its distance measured along that line from the origin.

From O, we move out in every direction along the shortest possible path. We can imagine this as inscribing a wibbly wobbly circle on the wibbly wobbly sphere and drawing lines on it which hug the surface and are as straight as possible.

We then pick another point on the wibbly wobbly sphere within the wibbly wobbly circle. Since we drew the 'system of shortest lines (geodesics)', and drew all of them, this point will lay on one of the geodesics. Therefore, we can relate the position of this point to its position on the geodesic. In order to do this, we need to look at how the geodesic hugs the sphere - which means we need to look at how the geodesic changes over the wibbly wobbly circle within the wibbly wobbly sphere. That is, we need to relate the new point to the old point using the geodesic line and the coordinate system the wibbly wobbly sphere is in (the embedding space).

Riemann's recipe for this is:

It can therefore be expressed in terms of the ratios dx0 of the quantities dx in this geodesic, and of the length s of this line. Let us introduce now instead of the dx0 linear functions dx of them, such that the initial value of the square of the line-element shall equal the sum of the squares of these expressions, so that the independent varaibles are now the length s and the ratios of the quantities dx. Lastly, take instead of the dx quantities x1, x2, x3,..., xn proportional to them, but such that the sum of their squares = s2

The $\text{d}x$ quantities 'in' the geodesic are the embedding coordinate system quantities which vary with it - like the angle when moving on the boundary of a circle. The ratios $\text{d}x_0$ are the rates of change of each coordinate with respect to every other. EG, moving around the boundary of a circle, we never change the distance from the origin-we have a fixed radius, so the rate of change with respect to the distance from the origin is 0, whereas the rate of change with respect to the angle from the horizontal axis is 1. IE we are looking at $\text{d}r$ and $\text{d}\theta$, the $(r,\theta)$ being the distance of the point in the embedding space from the origin $r$ and the angle of rotation from the positive x-axis $\theta$, rotating clockwise around the boundary of the circle by $\text{d}\theta$ moves $\frac{\text{d}\theta}{\text{d}\theta}=1$ with respect to $\theta$ changes and $\frac{\text{d}\theta}{\text{d}r}=0$ with respect to $r$. So the distance between two points on the boundary of a circle only increases with respect to the angle (sweeping out an interpoint distance of $r \text{d} \theta$ infinitesimally, and does not increase with respect to the radius since the distance from the origin does not change.

Riemann wants to generalise from this notion, instead of necessarily having two independent coordinates, the system of points going out from the origin might (and in general will) be functions of multiple dimensions from the embedding space - a general interpoint distance on the wibbly wobbly surface depends on changes in all the in the embedding space coordinates. This means instead of just looking at independent sums where $\frac{dx_i}{dx_j}=0$, he wants it to be $\frac{dx_i}{dx_j}=k_{ij}$. What this looks like for a curve $f$ with inputs $x_1,x_2,...,x_n$ from the embedding space that outputs a position $y_1, y_2, ... , y_m$ on the surface is.

$\text{D}f = 0+J_x f + \text{higher order terms}$

where $J_{x}$ is a matrix that stores all the $k_{ij}$ at the chosen origin. This $J_x$ interfaces with the y variables through the chain rule:
$df(y_i (x_1,...,x_n))=\frac{df}{dy_i}\frac{dy_i}{d(x_1,...,x_n)}$ and stores the results in the vector $J_x f$. This vector can be thought of as a linear displacement from 0 - (edit: like the gradient operator combined with the chain rule), and Riemann then insists that when the displacement is infinitesimally small - when we increment along the curve $f$ by $Df$, this gives us the square of the line element:

$ds^2 = \sum dy_i ^2$

the intuition here is that we need to increment along 'all the quantities in the geodesic', which are the $y_i$, so that the infinitesimal increment in position becomes:

$\sum d y_i$

and the norm of this increment is then

$\sum (d y_i )^2$

through Pythagoras (and the flat space stuff from before). Which Riemann states as if it is incredibly obvious:

When we introduce these quantities, the square of the line-element is \sum dx^2 for infinitesimal values of the x,

. It should be noted here that the embedding space coordinates are kind of extraneous so long as we are considering increments confined to the surface - IE, whenever we write a y or a dy it's also secretly an x or a dx, and all this chain rule stuff does is express how the changes on the surface coordinates (system of geodesics) work with respect to the embedding coordinates which we initially used to express them. This local linear approximation of changes on the manifold with respect to the embedding space using the variables on the manifold is what Riemann achieves through the proportion construction

. Let us introduce now instead of the dx0 linear functions dx of them, such that the initial value of the square of the line-element shall equal the sum of the squares of these expressions, so that the independent varaibles are now the length s and the ratios of the quantities dx.

by fixing the 'initial value' to be the sum of the squares of the increment's norm. The increment's norm gives us the local linearity, the remaining discussion refines the approximation of $ds^2$ to include quadratic terms that express the curvature.

@jamalrob @Baden @StreetlightX

If having a sticked resources thread is a good idea, advise we include:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, articles on pretty much everything by experts in the field, peer reviewed, citable, free.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, articles on pretty much everything by experts in the field, peer reviewed, citable, free.

Brian Magee interviews, introductory videos to various fields and thinkers, always with an expert.

David Harvey's lectures on Marx's Capital Volume 1, expert in the field, pedagogical style, introductory, free.

UCL's introduction to philosophy resource, pedagogical and introductory, free.

Wikipedia's list of fallacies, free.

Rick Roderick's lectures on continental philosophy, series 'Self Under Siege' - Freud, Nietzsche, Derrida, Sartre, Heidegger, introductory and pedagogical, free.

Rick Roderick on the 'Postmodern Condition', Nietzsche, introductory and pedagogical, free.

Project Gutenberg, loads of free books.

Marxist internet library, free books/letters.

A stickied list of logical fallacies probably wouldn't help... But maybe if we zoom out a bit, a stickied list of philosophical resources would probably be quite helpful. A link to logical fallacies could well be a part of that.

It reminds me of urethra for some reason. Spoils it a touch for me.

At least you seem to recognise the limitations of syllogistic form when arguing for a point. :P

This is why a fallacy list is a stupid idea. The most interesting deductions don't even work with pre-established logical rules. If you doubt this, try going through Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic and put the argument into a series of syllogisms. Even Spinoza's Ethics, which was explicitly written to ape Euclid's Elements' axiomatic style, relies heavily on footnotes and often does not explicitly spell out how one thing follows from another, just what things depend on other things - and even then, there's lots of footnotes that don't fit into the structure he wants which are nevertheless essential to understanding the text.

On a more basic level, logic alone doesn't let you derive 'it is coloured' from 'it is red'...

On his way down the slippery slope to the straw man festival, the one true Scotsman felt a rumble in his tummy, he had forgotten to eat today and thus had an undistributed middle. Unfortunately, he could not attribute his hunger to his eating habits today; so he quenched his thirst with some fine post hoc( k ) and fried up some red herring, though he felt some hesitation in having both - he could not decide if it was a constructive dilemma or a false one. Anyway, he affirmed the consequence that his hunger was sated due to the meal, and after he finished his fried fisking he sat down in a circle with the rest of the smoking guns and retired hazily with them to their tent. Unfortunately, their activities in the tent were an enthymeme and he awoke with an illicit minor.

Is The Philosophy Forum sometimes like a place where unpaid teachers go to bang their head against the wall with difficult students? :lol: — S

Yes, but who's who?

You're making the same arguments you were in the previous thread.

There's definitely a romanticism in Heidegger about normativity, there are heroic figures who realise their own destiny by grasping their finitude, and there are those cowards who are lost in small talk and banality. These two caricatures take on a methodological significance for him, through understanding the hero we understand how a human can understand their environment and stand forth from it, through understanding those cowards we can understand the regularity of our lives and how that stops us from reaching greater heights.

Though, the hero in Heidegger is not an action figure, the hero is anxious. And the coward is not oblivious, they are guilty. It is tempting to read the flow of argument in Being and Time as a transformation from philosophical cowardice to philosophical heroism; the existential structures exemplified by the hero; 'ontological moods' like anxiety, their fundamental authentic Being-toward-death, and their gleeful anticipation of the future; drive Heidegger's account towards an understanding of mortality and time. The existential structures exemplified by the coward are treated as merely existentiell understanding, as concerned with the behaviour and norms of entities; which covers their true nature and thus prevent true understanding or mastery. This covering drives Heidegger to an understanding of the usual function of language and readiness-to-hand. Heroes bring being into language, cowards disperse into it.

Presenting Heidegger in this way I imagine would be quite unpleasant to him, as archetypes of the collective unconscious are the typifying stories of life; they are what accrue through its living as the history of personality and affectation. They further dramatise this history, as if it is played between fictions rather than people. In that regard, they belong to what is said and thought about people, and do not enjoy questions about how they arise. The collective unconscious is then an image of our folk theory of personality, it is populated by corpuscles of norms which typify into everymen which then display the character of those norms as if those norms were more essential than the people they tell stories about.

Mind needs to put more effort into post formatting or mind will soon receive mod attention.

So, if you can background anything, and it depends on the context, why is it legitimate to background 'is good', 'ought' etc /after/ their relation to emotions and norms and not before? You engender a different a priori (or set of assumptions) for each, and you have no means with your strategy of distinguishing them. If you want to play the game of treating things as given, and you have contextually dependent principles for treating things as given, what makes your perspective any more accurate than @S's or @Terrapin Station? You just treating different things as given, using different framing devices.

It looks to me like you want to have your cake and eat it too, though. You once wrote 'The problem with quietism isn't the quiet, it's the ism', but you're still analysing these things philosophically and putting it into its philosophical context - this is how you put the 'ism' onto the quiet. The quiet's just not writing.

What stops you from applying this argument to almost anything, though? You can place everything in 'the background' for some purpose or in some context.

Please break up your post into paragraphs.

This part shows that "gender" is arbitrary and therefore meaningless independent of some subjective idea of gender. I could make up any identity and call it "gender". It also contradicts the previous sentence in your definition. — Harry Hindu

You want consistency in definition, you've seen definitions from the WHO and the Oxford English Dictionary that conflict with yours. You're a person on the internet engaging in a-priori speculation about the meaning of words who finds something, gender, incoherent. The WHO and Oxford English dictionary are non-partisan institutions which (1) research the topic unbiasedly and set out a clear definition of gender which is informed by investigation and (2) reflect the actual usage of the word 'gender' and its connotations.

All I see is someone who for some reason wants a clear definition of something but can't recognise one when it's given and painstakingly explained to them. This isn't a limitation of the concept of gender, this is a limitation of your understanding of it. It is not equivalent to sex, either in the common usage of the word or in the senses relevant to the WHO's research.

For me gender is a characteristic of an individual, or more specifically the sex of the individual. For you and the left (I should let everyone know that I'm not on the right. I consider myself as a-political), it is the characteristic of a society and is the antithesis of how a transperson uses the term - to refer to a characteristic about themselves as an individual. — Harry Hindu

Hm. I wasn't aware that the WHO was a leftist institution. It has a good reputation for non-partisanship and factual accuracy. Which do you think is more likely, really, that a nonpartisan international collaboration of scientists and policy researchers has a research topic which is completely incoherent and they've somehow not noticed it or that you have an inadequate understanding of the issue?

Their research topic is consistent with years of anthropology and social studies on the difference between gender and sex, is consistent with current dictionary definitions of the word 'gender', and uses both lived experiences/first hand sources and statistical techniques to analyse the impact of gender based differential advantages in institutions, societies and cultures... Their definition of gender is commensurate with and informed by this understanding.

I'll trust the WHO rather than you here. I advise others to do the same.

I think I have firm grasp of language as I have been able accumulate 1.7k posts without much of a problem. The only problem I seem to be having is with the way in which you are using a certsin term - "gender". I have defined it as the equivalence of sex. You have yet to provide a consistent definition for your use of the term. — Harry Hindu

Define "I", "have", "equivalence", "consistent", "certain", "defined", "language", "able" etc. We generally do not need definitions to talk plainly about things, and certain words - like language, game, object, culture, ability and so on are quite resistant to exhaustive and exclusive characterisations/definitions.

Nevertheless, by means of a guideline, in case you don't actually understand what I mean by gender and sex, sex is a property of a body determined by the presence of typical reproductive organs and other biological properties in the population. Females typically have wombs, vulvas, clitorises, ovaries, XX chromosomes and so on. Males typically have penises, testicles, developed facial hair and so on. There are edge cases, as I highlighted with XX male syndrome, and these people (as @andrewk) pointed are usually called 'intersex'.

Instead of focussing on my definition of sex and gender, let's look at a neutral institution's treatment of the term - the WHO. The WHO defines gender as:

Gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men – such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men. — WHO

and adds:

It varies from society to society and can be changed. While most people are born either male or female, they are taught appropriate norms and behaviours – including how they should interact with others of the same or opposite sex within households, communities and work places. When individuals or groups do not “fit” established gender norms they often face stigma, discriminatory practices or social exclusion – all of which adversely affect health. It is important to be sensitive to different identities that do not necessarily fit into binary male or female sex categories.

It further clarifies the distinction between sex and gender in its term glossary page:

(Gender) Refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men – such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men. It varies from society to society and can be changed. The concept of gender includes five important elements: relational, hierarchical, historical, contextual and institutional. While most people are born either male or female, they are taught appropriate norms and behaviours – including how they should interact with others of the same or opposite sex within households, communities and work places. When individuals or groups do not “fit” established gender norms they often face stigma, discriminatory practices or social exclusion – all of which adversely affect health.

Note here that they explicitly include qualifying phrases to indicate that they are also discussing trans people, their rights, opportunities and so in with their account. A key term they use in characterising comparative advantages that one gender may have over another are '(gender based) differential exposure to risk factors':

(Differential exposure to risk factors means) Refers to the different ways in which gender norms, roles and relations affect women and men’s exposure to risk factors. For example, due to the gender-based division of labour different groups of women and men are exposed to different risks for work-related injuries or illnesses (paid activities) or women’s gender roles with respect to food preparation in low and mid income settings (unpaid activities) often exposes them to unsafe cooking fuels more often than men.

though there are other concepts they use in their assessment of gender in a society, culture, institution or other social structure (note the relevance of this to the definition of gender as a social construction). Through their assessments, they have a guideline scale that they use to assess the the social structure's attitude towards gender and how they manage, mitigate or incorporate relative advantages and disadvantages arising from gender. The scale goes from 1 to 5, where 1 is 'gender unequal, 2 is 'gender blind', 3 is 'gender sensitive', 4 is 'gender specific' and 5 is 'gender transformative'.

The debate in this thread, and with you really, occurs when a social structure we share is on the precipice of transition from 2 to anywhere above it - which the WHO believes is a good thing by the way. The starting point, 2 is:

Level 2: Gender-blind
• Ignores gender norms, roles and relations
• Very often reinforces gender-based discrimination
• Ignores differences in opportunities and resource allocation for women and men
• Often constructed based on the principle of being “fair” by treating everyone the same

which, if I have read you correctly, you emphasise the first bullet point very strongly because of your firm belief in the fourth bullet point. You seem aware of the third bullet point in your contrasts from typical western societies and institution to places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, and you are resisting the idea that being 'gender blind' actually 'very often reinforces gender-based discrimination'.

This was covered in the thread in the discussion between @Hanover, @Baden and others. The key points of contrast were that progressive political interventions were seen as intrusive applications of ideology by one side of the argument, while the other attempted to highlight that the current state of affairs is already an intrusive application of the ideology of gender norms. This is partially why a 'gender blind' attitude on a societal or institutional level actually maintains harmful gender norms - it sees interventions against them as unjustified, and the very means by which we would justify such interventions in terms of the attempt to increase fairness is stymied by the application of current fiat (like legal or contractual) equality.

This level of understanding of gender is deemed as decidedly suboptimal by the WHO, that well known biased and illogical postmodern neomarxist organisation. The stages after it mirror the perspectives expressed by @Baden, @andrewk and others.

Level 3: Gender-sensitive
• Considers gender norms, roles and relations
• Does not address inequality generated by unequal norms, roles or relations
• Indicates gender awareness, although often no remedial action is developed

Level 4: Gender-specific
• Considers gender norms, roles and relations for women and men and how they affect access to and control over resources
• Considers women’s and men’s specific needs
• Intentionally targets and benefits a specific group of women or men to achieve certain policy or programme goals or meet certain needs
• Makes it easier for women and men to fulfil duties that are ascribed to them based on their gender roles

Level 5: Gender-transformative
• Considers gender norms, roles and relations for women and men and that these affect access to and control over resources
• Considers women’s and men’s specific needs
• Addresses the causes of gender-based health inequities
• Includes ways to transform harmful gender norms, roles and relations
• The objective is often to promote gender equality
• Includes strategies to foster progressive changes in power relationships between women and men

I have no idea how you could maintain that gender is an inconsistent concept without satisfactory characterisation, and how you could maintain ignorance about the stakes involved in progressive politics about gender when the WHO has already done all this work for you, and explicitly includes trans issues among gender ones. It is also written in largely non-technical language, and they they provide an extremely clear conception of gender and what's at stake in interventions to promote gender equality and sensitivity.

Redundancy is bad in formats with word limits. It's generally good to say the same thing in a few different ways while writing pedagogically.

That's a lot clearer to me, thanks.

Let me get this straight, make sure I understand.

Zeno's paradox can be stated as follows 'In order to travel a distance of 1 meter, you must first travel 0.5 meters, in order to travel a distance of 0.5 meters, you must travel 0.25 meters. For any distance you can travel, you must first travel half that distance. Thus you cannot travel the distance.'

Fleshing out the paradox entails fleshing out the relationship between the thought exercise of division and the impossibility of travelling the distance. Michael's version seems to be:

(1) If journey did not have a beginning, it could not have occurred.

Your response to this is:

(1A) For the purposes of the paradox, a journey is a sequence of distances which must be travelled. This is $\big[\frac{1}{2n}\big]_{n=\infty\rightarrow 1}$ (abusing notation but I think it makes sense). The beginning of the journey would be the least element of the set - the smallest distance travelled - since this set has no least element in the ordering described, the usual notion that a journey must have a beginning (the journey presumably being the sequence of distances travelled in their usual ordering) is not in play. In effect, this is a confusion of two distinct concepts - the well ordering of travelled locations in typical journeys, and the mere total ordering of journeys constructed through the thought experiment. The same distances are considered, but under different orderings. IE

$\big[\frac{1}{2n}\big]_{n=\infty\rightarrow 1}\neq\big[\frac{1}{2n}\big]_{n=1\rightarrow \infty}$
even though they are equal as raw sets. Equality of sets does not imply equality of ordered sets.

Do you think your response also addresses the case where we replace (1) with (2):

(2) The number of distances travelled is infinite, and we cannot do an infinite task.

?