low quality culture war stuff — Jamal

I predict a rapid escalation of this stuff over the coming months.

Thank you for the heads-up. :smile:

I think political threads need some extra eyes up until at least after the US election. You mods are pretty good at keeping this forum clean from the overwhelming BS found everywhere else online, but I think these months before the election may go extreme. A fusion of fake AI media, coupled with the downfall of X (Twitter), the bad algorithms of Meta, and an extreme escalation of polarization among even people outside of the regular extreme groups globally. With a world standing on the edge of a sword, internet is going to be flooded with extreme stuff and it would be important for a place like this to survive its level-headed discussions on all these complex situations.

Yeh, it's good that we're invitation-only.

Yeh, it's good that we're invitation-only. — Jamal

Thanks, Marco.

:up:

sometimes "informal logical fallacies" can still be reasonable arguments

Hmm. Only in a situation where determining premises is difficult, I think.

Moving from shaky premises is acceptable (read: reasonable) when we can't be sure one way or the other. Like when there's, for instance, disputed facts, the subsequent argument tends to get back-engineered to determine the reasonability of hte premises. This is why lawyers can get a superbly well-founded rep. for massaging the facts.

But if you can show (as tends to be the case in cross-exam.) that the premises are unlikely enough to make the subsequent story inherently unlikely(eg. claiming one felt a certain level of threat that is implausible to support a self-defense argument), that story tends to be reject as unreasonable.

Banned Steven P Clum for low quality culture war stuff and throwing around accusations when criticized. — Jamal

I personally am not happy when people are banned, but I think this was a correct thing to do. Low quality. And if this kind of forum is left without supervision, then it comes very quickly so hostile that those who enjoy the forum simply leave.

Banned @Vaskane for flaming (even after multiple warnings) and low quality.

everyone on here with a picture of themselves as their profile picture should be banned. (Forthwith)

Ehhhhhh

This is not me; it is merely a frog that resembles me somewhat.

Farewell, @Vaskane, alas all too neuro-typical in some rather reactive ways.

Drat

I remember that someone being banned does not result in their posts being purged. If someone is banned, they may request their data to be removed by email, I am guessing?

He was kind of interesting until he became abusive. I get enough of that at work.

A farewell to one of the few military veterans on the site, as if that means anything on a philosophy forum. But Wittgenstein was a military hero. Did that influence his writings?

See this. Originally published and endorsed by the UK Wittgenstein Society.

He also beat up the little girls and boys in his classes as a school teacher (even to the point of knocking one of them unconscious).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidbauer_incident

Is that so? Sobering. Anyway, probably not the place for this discussion, I just had the urge to draw JGill's attention to that article. (Oh, and there's also the infamous incident where he allegedly threatened Karl Popper with a poker.)

I have a particular disgust for child beaters so I will never like Wittgenstein as a character (even though he may have reformed). Anyway, yes, not the place for this and we have already had the personal faults of Descartes and Heidegger (among others probably) dissected on the site.

we have already had the personal faults of Descartes and Heidegger (among others probably) dissected on the site. — Baden

Ww dissected the fact he dissected dogs alive.

It turned out I was wrong about that. The actual story concerned students at some medical faculty who were convinced by Descartes' philosophy that animals don't feel pain, and flayed them alive, which then got mis-translated as something Descartes did. It wasn't Descartes himself, which I did note that at the time.

I prefer @Hanover's version.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, eh? And, on that note.....

I'm glad you clarified actually. One less evil philosopher to be concerned with.

And on that note...

Banned @PL Olcott for a lot of threads with aggressive cranking in them. Their posts also kept getting stuck in the spam filter due to poor formatting.

Aaah... well, I'll guess that I won't get an answer from him.

I don't know about other threads, but in the Eliminating Decision Problem Undecidability it was clear how difficult it is for many to understand the Undecidability results. This simply happens because in general, we don't actually understand all the impact of these results. Many even academic people can misunderstand them and also there is also true nonsense about them out there. So in fact, these kind of threads do have a value. Unfortunately when people don't get the message, it's far too easy especially in a forum where everybody is anonymous (and hence you cannot know what the qualifications/knowledge level of others are) to insist on your view even if shown to be mistaken.

I'll tip my hat to @TonesInDeepFreeze and @tim wood for trying to explain to him, but when somebody doesn't understand it, the result can be that tempers rise and as you said yourself, "This isn't a particularly productive discussion".

I still do appreciate the willingness of people to correct others mistakes and give effort to it.

what is aggressive cranking?

Being very rude about the pseudoscience you're peddling.