The advice to assume your readers are stupid, lazy, and mean, is merely an arresting, memorable way of saying you should write clearly, concisely, and should argue carefully. — jamalrob

Why doesn't it exemplify the care and clarity it recommends instead of this sensationalist macho hyperbolic tone? No, i think it betrays a real attitude that is as problematic as it is prevalent in academia.

I remember such ideas being parroted in physics classes when writing up experiments - works for that because every, ‘seemingly pointless,’ detail matters if experiments are to be repeated. — I like sushi

It explains why social sciences are in such an appalling state. It is an inherently authoritarian dogmatic attitude to take that might be appropriate in the lower reaches of shut up and calculate physics to a very limited extent. I might ask why anyone wants to even try to teach these people that one has clearly nothing to learn from, except that would be to take the uncharitable position I am rejecting.

Communicate clearly, completely and with detail of course is another matter. Or should I charitably assume that this is what is really meant, and the universal insult is just 'banter'?

I wasn't taught that mnemonic. It doesn't look to me to be a good recipe for communication (because communication is a two way process), and thus a really poor recipe for education.

I notice that I am a person wishing to communicate with other persons. So if I have regard for this mnemonic, I would have to assume that I too am lazy stupid and mean. think I would post a lot less...

But here at least, the lazy have no reason to post, the mean have no reason to share their thoughts, and the stupid are easy to ignore for the most part. So why not assume that we are all intelligent, generous, and diligent? We could call it 'The Principle of Charity.'

1. A Plausible mechanism — Isaac

When I dig the garden, I am not considering my happiness at the garden being dug I am not calculating that the effort will be compensated by the produce I am not thinking of the superior taste of really fresh veg, or the pleasure of looking at the flowers. I am thinking about what I'm doing and looking for perennial weeds, and trying to get an even dig. On a good day, I'm not thinking at all. I am absorbed by the action. People are not machines, so if you insist on a mechanism, you will fail to see what is going on.

2. Some empirical evidence — Isaac

People risk their lives for others every day. The pleasure of feeling like a fine fellow is rather diminished by death in most people's calculation.

A mechanism for the cultural or biological embedding of such a network - what maintains it through the process of adolescent neural pruning without being in regular use. — Isaac

It is in regular use. Children imitate rather than calculate. People simply do not calculate their lives the way it is proposed all the time. they run on habit, and on an automatic sociability. Amenability is instinctive. It works in analogous way that the cells of the body cooperate and even die for the benefit and development of the whole, without having to calculate whether or not they will benefit as individuals. It is only a brain that has become obsessed with itself that finds cooperation mysterious and in need of explanation.

Here's something I noticed recently. It took about a week for the habits of social interaction to be transformed by lockdown. There has been a huge amount of what the mechanists call 'social facilitation'. Monkey see, monkey do. Everyone is maintaining distance, so everyone maintains distance, just like everyone drives on the left - here. No calculation required, fortunately, because no one has the numbers to make a calculation possible; but people are amenable, and we do social distancing because that is what we are doing, not because we have calculated a personal benefit from nowhere except the TV and inter web that we do not trust.

Alas the wonderful brain cannot be trusted at all to navigate the complexities of the world, it requires the superior wisdom of the embedded body.

Oh, OK. Here you go. — Isaac

No I don't.

I don't need convincing that people can and do find motivation in anticipation of rewards. I need convincing that there can be no other motivation. None of those studies remotely supports that.

You might do, yeah. Generally, if you were to repeatedly feel that way you'd probably stop rescuing damsels from icy lakes. If your imagined (predicted) reward never shows up you learn not to repeat that behaviour. Indeed, in societies which do not punish selfishness (in the public sense), we see more selfishness. The key here is that not everyone stops to think how their bravery was ultimately motivated by a desire to feel good, so mostly this doesn't happen. — Isaac

Ok, but what are we doing here? It looks like anthropology or psychology. But the philosophy is that it is impossible to be unselfish, that it is impossible for you to buy flowers for your wife simplicitier, but it must be for some selfish reason, either a manipulation of her, or to feel smug. This is the doctrine of the rational self-interested man that has plagued philosophy for a long time, and I have yet to see the least justification, except the endless invention of secret or unconscious motives, and the bald declaration that unselfishness is impossible. It's a joyless lonely world, and I am glad I don't live there.

Why must I always please myself?

Knowing that you're acting in such a way as to benefit yourself in the long run is not sufficient to undo decades of neural priming cresting a strong desire to act in such (apparently) noble ways, nor the reward mechanism for having done so. — Isaac

Again you confuse the imagined reward with the reward. When you are shivering on the bank having just rescued the damsel in distress from the icy lake, you might feel smug, until you realise how selfish you are and then you feel both selfish and foolish (and cold). How many times do you go through this before you realise that rescuing damsels from icy lakes is not worth doing?

Alternatively, it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that one might rescue damsels from icy lakes because (one imagines) damsels in icy lakes need rescuing, and not be all that concerned whether one is going feel something or nothing. Since it is a matter of imagination that motivates, one can imagine other things than one's own pleasure. This explains why people can die for their country and stuff.

Hence the example does not demonstrate that "doing the right thing has nothing to do with how you feel". — Isaac

There is a knot here. first, I think it is useful to distinguish the imagined reward which gets one out of the chair, with the actual reward, that comes after the action.

So the proposal is that there is some calculation in the imagination, that the pain of cold water will be outweighed by the pleasure of thinking well of oneself for one's kindness in saving another. Now I do not deny that humans are sufficiently irrational to make such a calculation, but if one is somewhat self-aware, one is liable to notice that doing something in order to feel good about oneself is not the unselfish act that one would feel good about being the author of.

At which point the reward no longer exists; I am being unselfish for selfish reasons, therefore I am not being unselfish. This theory only explains the unselfish acts of the terminally dim. Thus it becomes a theory held by people who wish to justify their selfishness rather than understand unselfishness.

We should instead see it as a good or beautiful thing he gets locked up in prison. Or, we could see it as a good or beautiful thing that he's torturing those living things. Either way, we're getting beauty and goodness out of it. — TranscendedRealms

I don't feel it that way. I feel that it is an ugly situation and it would be ugly to find any beauty in either the torture or the imprisonment. And Whence this moral exhortation of how we should see things?

And why the "nothing more" in the title? As though how one feels is unimportant.

Are you suggesting that someone who just jumped into ice cold water to save another person's life mightn't feel at all good about themselves? — Isaac

I think he's suggesting they'd feel rather cold.

Calling yourself a democracy or a republic or a representative form of government carries the burden of doing what's best for the overwhelming majority. It also demands an immediate redress and subsequent correction when it doesn't. — creativesoul

Thats a really attractive slogan. What of the protection of minorities? What you have there is the tyranny of the majority, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or rampant populism.

I'll give you another slogan. The form and makeup of a government is less important than its moral stature. A good king would be better than a corrupt and venal populism, which loves to persecute minorities as scapegoats.

Seems to me the prevalent mood of philosophy is deflationism and silentism on the big questions rather than nihilism/relativism. "Whereof one cannot speak..." etc. Whereas the prevalent mood among the populace is a mixture of obliviousness, confusion, and cynicism. — Baden

I think there's a time lag. Of about 50 years. Which has to be added to the 50 years for, say, Wittgenstein to become the orthodox philosophy. So expect much sage nodding and silence from politicians in about another 30 years, in the meantime we are living with the politics of logical positivism. :vomit:

Well we disagree.

People do not give an iota of a damn about the prevailing mood of academic philosophy — fdrake

I agree with this, but philosophy percolates through social science that again most people ignore, and from there into think tanks, and so to political rhetoric and media headlines. "There's no such thing as society", "Greed is good." These are what resonate, and what people give a damn about, and philosophy opens the way to them, and gives them a veneer of plausibility.

Thanks but you're referring to analytic truths (did I get that right?). — TheMadFool

No. 'Sugar is sweet' is not analytic.

'Sweetener is sweet' is more or less analytic.

'These apples are sweet' is actually worth knowing, because 'these other apples are unripe and extremely sour.' So not all apples are sweet.

All acts are hedonistic acts is not an analytic truth. Looks like a synthetic truth claim to me. — TheMadFool

"Altruistic acts are hedonistic." Do you think so? This looks to me like the claim that sour apples are sweet.
Or perhaps you prefer:
"There are no altruistic acts." As if there were no sour apples. And since there are many acts that people call altruism, hence the word has a use, you would have to defend that with an appeal to psychological insight into motivation as per my much earlier post. and it becomes a contrived and unhelpful psychology that just insists for no particular reason that everyone is always selfish.

"Dogs always want to bite, and when they are not biting it's because they are afraid to bite, but they still want to." Such an appeal to invisible motives that even become invisible to the one motivated, is unassailable. Unassailable at the cost of both vacuity and of doing violence to the language. And at this point, I think I have been right round the roundabout, and kind enough for long enough, and will now leave you to your hedonistic infinity. Enjoy.

Here's one I made earlier.

Sorry Un...

... jumps off bandwagon and exits stage left. — creativesoul

No apologies required. This is exactly where I want to end up. Lies, propaganda and the manipulation of beliefs are destructive of meaning and destructive of social relations. They kill. People are dying of lies. Be annoyed, Be very annoyed.

Conspiracy theories are the natural outcome of untrustworthy government and untrustworthy media. Nothing is trustworthy, so anything is believable. and a large portion of the blame lies with the moral relativism/nihilism of much modern philosophy.

All acts are hedonistic acts — TheMadFool

What this means is that 'hedonistic act' becomes an oxymoron.

All sugar is sweet. So no-one bothers to advertise "sweet sugar", because there is no other kind.

But there are many different kinds of act, and kinds of motivation. So let's not pretend that there is no difference between wanting to please one's partner, and wanting to please oneself. There is a difference.

No matter how things may turn out, the winner and loser (gambling analogy) both want pleasure — TheMadFool

If you make this a universal truth, and you certainly can do that, you are not saying very much.

The masochist wants the pleasure of pain; the altruist wants the pleasure of being unselfish; the suicide wants the pleasure of non-existence. It becomes a bit vacuous. Hedonism is no longer a way of life that one can follow (or not), but simply a grammatical necessity. Do you want to talk about the pleasure of dying for your country? It sounds a bit daft to me.

And my "No!" was directed at the supposition that he was afraid of death, and hence went quietly. — Banno

Ah, sorry. A colloquialism, Irish I think. "Your man" = 'the aforementioned person' or thereabouts. He who advocated rage; a Welshman, but honorary Irish by drinking achievement.

Better? — Banno

No.

Quite often when people are afraid of death, they are even more afraid of life. — unenlightened

No!

Some recognised that life will continue after they are gone, and those left behind will have to deal with it. — Banno

I am clearly and explicitly talking about "people who are afraid of death"
I don't think you are, but about people who "die quietly".

They recognised — Banno

Who? People who die quietly? People who keep the rage inside? People who are afraid of death?

Do be careful that the they in my quotation is the same as the they in yours if you are going to use one to deny the other.

They keep the rage inside, for the sake of the family... — Banno

It's not your man's fault if people don't take his advice. Quite often when people are afraid of death, they are even more afraid of life.

Say it plainly or don't bother is my preference. — Pantagruel

That was a reference to Wittgenstein who used to talk about the book he did not write, and whereof one cannot speak and reserved a large space for the mystical, as exactly that which is not and cannot be talked about, but perhaps can be 'shown' in some way.

so you might learn something new. — Punshhh

I might well. Or I might experience something new. I might be transformed such that I have to change my name! Go on, I dare you! Transform me.

Here's a thing. How is one to talk? I like to use a little humour, as above, but the real question is the place one adopts. I speak as one who is not transformed, as one who is unenlightened. And I speak with that expertise. Now if someone thinks they can look down on me in this regard, I reserve the right to expose their hubris without mercy.

Anything I can think of as meaningful is within my consciousness, which is lost when we die.
I mean even without the fear, it's clear it's a big loss. — I-wonder

That is a slightly different question. Do you find yourself meaningless because you are not infinitely big?

The daffodils have finished, and the tulips are getting raggedy, so they are going into the back garden to finish and die down, and I'm bringing out the geraniums and begonias. Flowers are not meaningless because they are short-lived any more than they are meaningless because they are short stemmed. And nor are you and I.

But don't worry about meaning only being in your consciousness - I mean really - the world is more extensive and more meaningful and more beautiful and terrible and just way more in every dimension, than your consciousness. I you limit yourself to that, then you are bound to have problems.

This all seems rather unenlightened indeed. — Pantagruel

"Those who know, do not take the piss; those who take the piss do not know." Un Tzu.

It's not that i don't care, — unenlightened

Personally, I wouldn't start a thread about it either — Pantagruel

I am more brave.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6287/the-most-wonderful-life/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5119/i-ching-the-metaphysics-of-flux
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6185/the-emotional-meaning-of-ritual-and-icon/p1

Denigration is in the eye of the visionary. I was asking not to diminish, but to find the topic. When I want to philosophise my garden, I discuss Ecophilosophy. You can look for those threads of mine too if you like.

I cannot feel good about losing the opportunity to feel, — I-wonder

Nor should you. But fear is too small an emotion for the case.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must waffle.

Mystic: a person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect. — Google

Mysticism is the practice of religious ecstasies, together with whatever ideologies, ethics, rites, myths, legends, and magic may be related to them. It may also refer to the attainment of insight in ultimate or hidden truths, and to human transformation supported by various practices and experiences. — Wiki

So do you want to talk about 'whatever ideologies' or 'self-surrender,' or 'the practice of ecstasies', or what? Is there a 'philosophy of' any of this that is worth discussing?

It's not that i don't care, but I wonder if there is anything in the abstract to be said. I practice gardening, and I talk about gardening with other gardeners; I don't make threads about it on the forum.

There are billionaires on both sides. — fdrake

Politics is like chess; it's the pawns that generally get sacrificed, and the players move on to the next game even if they lose.

Like you said, happiness is an "effect". — TheMadFool

Indeed. And circularity results from conflating the imagined effect as cause of action with the actual effect as result of action.

I act to realise an imagined happy result. Thus it helps to have a realistic imagination. A good architect has a realistic imagination to the extent that her buildings don't immediately fall down, whereas a gambling addict has an unrealistic imagination, such that his imagined winnings materialise as losses.

Why do people have accidents?

Talking of infinite loops. Have a chat with a compulsive gambler, who may be a close friend of the compulsive arguer.

Why do you gamble?
Because I like winning.
But you are losing thousands overall.
But I win sometimes.

Thus the philosopher of hedonism comes to notice that the reason one does something and the result of doing it may not always be identical.

As I can imagine you've been on the edge of your seat waiting for the actual data... — Isaac

Imagination is a wonderful thing. I'll back out now I've got the social scientists and statisticians bickering.

UK population density 274/km2.
Netherlands population density 419/km2.
France 123/km2. — Isaac

It's crude measure. Consider that the highlands of Scotland Mid Wales, and the Pennine hills have a density of maybe 1/km2. And France has the Alps, the MassifCentral and the Pyrenees. What one wants is a sort of mean distance between habitations... If everyone lives in big blocks of flats and most of the country is empty, the effective density might be high, though the averaged density is low. Whereas in the Netherlands, everyone lives exactly one windmill apart, with no empty spaces.

I trust the Klansman to be a racist, and in a perverse way prefer him over the person pretending not to be racist, but who is. I trust my parking brake to fail because the cable is broken, so I park my car against the curb.

What I want though really are people who aren't racist and a car that won't roll down a hill. — Hanover

Indeed so. Annoying, but i completely agree with this. So could we say that the Klansman is reliably untrustworthy, whereas the shamefaced racist is unreliably untrustworthy? Well we can argue about the terminology, but the substance is clear enough I think.

Therefore it appears like the only way to properly deal with the untrustworthy person is to actually change the person, conversion. Would you agree? And do you think that this is even possible?. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is a heck of a big question. But I'm happy to move on to it, as we seem to have reached the point where the disagreement is more about terminology than substance.

Let's lay out some simple assumptions.

1. People vary. Some are more trustworthy than others.

2. Thou and I and the other contributors are more trustworthy than untrustworthy. (Especially as we can't get near each other's throats or stashes.)

So you are asking how we might best deal with Mr Thing, the hypothetical untrustworthy person.

It seems to me, that because we are trustworthy, we can only deal with Mr thing in a trustworthy manner. If we are not trustworthy from Mr Thing's POV, then we are not trustworthy. I think that means that we cannot even try to change the person against their will. Cannot, that is, without changing ourselves in the other direction, and becoming untrustworthy.

But people can change, at least.

I think that is sufficiently convoluted to stop there and see how it goes down with some of you trustworthy folks. Can you swallow it?

And here's a big fat dissertation in case the unenlightened diet is a bit rich for you. I've only just started it myself, but it looks relevant.

But I'm not from the UK, so I'll miss out. Damn... — Baden

Not at all, he's moving his business to Ireland so he can stay in the EU.

You lucky, lucky people.

You're getting a bit pervy now...are you on the shant already? — Chester

It's bevvies dear boy, short for beverages. Enough of this parade of working-class credentials already. We're gently mocking your sensibilities; there's no need for you to mock yourself.

when I say that I do not trust the weather, I'm really saying that my ability to understand what might happen is insufficient to make a judgement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok. I don't know if it will rain or be fine so I take a coat.

But when I say that I do not trust my neighbour, I'm really saying that my ability to understand is sufficient to make a judgement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok. I know he's thieving bastard, so I lock the door when I go out. (You can trust Mr Thing to take advantage as soon as your back is turned)

But I would want to say, because I am banging on about necessity here:

I don't trust the weather, so I have to trust my coat.
I don't trust my neighbour, so I have to trust my door lock.

Of course in each case I could maybe just not go out, but then I would have to trust my roof to keep me dry, or my presence to keep me from being burgled.

Tbh, I'm not particularly keen on jocks, especially the gobby lefty ones that dominate message boards...I think you understand that. — Chester

But you like being dominated, sweetie, and I am ever so understanding.

you jocky boy. — Chester

Could you translate that into proper middle-class English for me darling?