Oh wait, no I wouldn't. :joke: — frank

Give me a link then.

Genetics could also be a factor. — frank

Heredity is unlikely to multiply the death rate within countries by a factor of 6 compared to the predicted population risk when genetic effects are constant over effected populations.

Specifically, was the UK's result a matter if demographics, treatment strategy, or what? I guess we're too close to it now to make an assessment. — frank

My guess is that the UK's is high because testing isn't commonplace. That means that the majority of confirmed cases are serious ones, it's a data selection bias. Lack of testing can also increase mortality out of sample. There are probably demographic factors at work; like our problem with actually intervening in infected nursing homes, we're hesitant to do that. The exact weighting of them will be unknown for some time, or forever.

My bet is that it's largely attributable to the testing though, as the selection bias based on extreme cases has a multiplicative effect (edit: analogy, like the effect of switching between age categories or comorbidity presence/absence on the (log) odds scale in a risk model) on the estimated mortality risk that applies over all demographics. Norway's tested enough to get the observed death rate of tested cases to be very close to the predicted population risk.

I do think that. That's obvious. — Hanover

It seems you think that now that policy interventions have been implemented in the US, and were extremely skeptical of it beforehand. You demonstrably were not convinced they were necessary, even after the first confirmed cases in the US by date; that includes social distancing. You've passionately argued about the necessity of keeping things going, and... what was it... Keeping everything going as normal when the old people are safely locked away?

Maybe you changed your mind! Maybe you didn't notice. Maybe your past positions are defined by your current declarations, who can say? We all do that to some extent.

My numbers are generally correct. — Hanover

You quoted the right numbers, up to some decimal error. But you interpreted them completely wrongly. You used them rhetorically to downplay the virus without checking you had interpreted them correctly, when you could've looked up how epidemiologists were interpreting the spread, and supported what scientific policy interventions they were recommending. Rather than predicting that no one would die from the disease in the US (presumably from the context because you believed it would not reach the US ( when there were already confirmed US cases and the information was publicly available.

An old physics teacher of mine forgot to multiply Plank's constant by 10^-34, instead multiplying it by 10^34, when calculating a photon's momentum, he ran with it, and said "As you can all see, a single photon has a massive amount of energy". Our class later calculated that with that understanding, a normal bit of light has equivalent energy to over 100 Hiroshima nukes. He defended it adamantly when later questioned, and eventually switched to the correct interpretation quietly over the course of months.

It wasn't that you made typographical errors, it's that you've yet to actually demonstrate any predictive understanding of the numbers you're quoting, or shown any skill in interpreting or contextualising their consequences, or shown willingness to actually look up what you're writing about the virus before you post it.

I'm definitely a partisan hack when it comes to their interpretation; though the view that austerity programs creating healthcare access problems, or healthcare access programs more generally, have exacerbated the effects is probably true; but I make sure I get my facts interpreted right when posting.

I still think that the logic of the social distancing is based upon keeping the serious cases low enough not to overwhelm medical care available. The solution then can arise is two ways, either (1) decrease the number of serious cases at any given time through social distances, or (2) increasing the amount of available healthcare (including ventilators). That's true as far as i can see it. — Hanover

It isn't a choice between them, we need quarantines to decrease the load on healthcare resources; unmitigated growth of the disease would almost certainly quickly overwhelm any immediate investment strategy (the beds and buildings and respirators take time to construct and arrive). The best option is to do both, and focus on testing and isolation, while doing whatever can be done to ensure that serious cases get the resources they need despite the huge load increase from the pandemic (which, as was known beforehand, should be mitigated by quarantine measures).

Despite it being commonplace that people in the US avoid healthcare treatment due to its prohibitive cost being well established before the virus, the cost of a mere coronavirus test was 100 dollars; a debilitating chunk of, if not more than a week's minimum wage after tax + rent; which until the emergency bill to fix that glaring problem was coming out of wage earner's pockets. They certainly could not have afforded any further treatment (costing in the 1000s of dollars) if they tested positive! Countries which do not offload the costs of dealing with a pandemic into their poorest' citizens wage packets (which have also not been inflation adjusted for years and years and years...) did not need to hotfix their healthcare system to deal with a pandemic in this way. It exposes a devastating error in healthcare access in the US that even the supporters of this devastating error had to acknowledge and address when it poured gasoline all over and started nonchalantly smoking inside of that lethal dumpster fire you passionately defend as a healthcare system.

You have such a poor track record saying true things about the virus and the effectiveness and necessity of policy interventions it's difficult to take what you're saying seriously. You've downplayed the spread of coronavirus and its seriousness at every opportunity. Except the one where you said you shouldn't do it any more, and then continued to. You keep flip flopping without ever losing any of the passion in your arguments!

My prediction is that no one here will die or lose a close family member to the virus. — Hanover

I dunno what to tell you. If you don't deny that "test, isolate, treat" when consistently applied has demonstrably lead to bankruptcy in the US and not other countries, or that the healthcare system required a policy hotfix towards something much closer to free (at least more affordable) universal healthcare to address the issue by your administration. The US administration acknowledged the systemic issue and took a measure to rectify it. Let's hope it does not get repealed.

Whatever problems the US may have, I don't think they were exposed or made more evident by this crisis. — Hanover

Have you looked?

Seriously, "test, isolate, treat" is the maxim for dealing with a pandemic. Having a healthcare system which makes people avoid those measures on pain of bankruptcy or being unable to eat for a week is absolutely insane, and I have no idea how you could think of this as anything but a catastrophic design problem; read, a systemic issue.

Edit: even staunch proponents of this incredibly stupid state of affairs realised it was stupid and instituted Medicaid for all (effectively) to address the problem. Let's hope it stays that way.

You are going to give a plausible explanation for an 18% death rate. — unenlightened

I can give you the centrist/conservative line on this if you like.

Well no investment strategy in healthcare could possibly have provided for everyone in every old person's home. The 18% death rate is much higher than the one observed under effective treatment because resources were rightly prioritised to hospitals to deal with the worst cases. It's unfair to think of this as some grand conspiracy to kill people simply because we didn't know enough about the disease in time and we didn't know it was coming. A pandemic is impossible to plan for, the healthcare system will always be overloaded in those circumstances.

It's so easy to start thinking with my gut and be sane.

It's true, but I think it's hard for many not to use this crisis to call into question Trump, capitalism, autonomy, and other Americanisms to show it's somehow a failed system. — Hanover

No one is throwing all the deaths at capitalism's feet, anticapitalist; specifically anti-austerity; criticism which has been going on (in Europe too, even in countries with universal healthcare) is all just saying that the kind of welfare system investment strategy that diminishes access as compared to effective universal healthcare amplifies the knock on effects of the virus by reducing how prepared hospitals could be, and how short sighted postponing quarantine measures (among other things, like too little testing) was by the administrations that chose to take that route.

The anticapitalist generalisation is just that this is business as usual when organising investment based on return on investment than the public good, and favouring the short term concerns of the economy versus longer term concerns and the public good.

I really don't see how this answers my question, which is specifically how the delay in social distancing has resulting in a measurable loss of life, unless you can show that the treatment received under the current conditions has limited the healthcare received and that limitation can be specifically shown to matter. — Hanover

Even if you don't consider the healthcare angle, delays in implementing quarantine measures do that.

(1) How quickly a disease spreads controls the growth rate of infected cases.
(2) The growth rate of a disease in a population is controlled by how infectious it is in the circumstances it may transmit.
(3) The more likely the circumstances it may transmit are to occur, the more quickly it spreads.
(4) The more quickly it spreads, the higher its growth rate.
(5) More growth rate increases over time yield higher proportions of infected people.

(3) combined with (4-5) lets you consider counterfactuals; if intervention X was taken at time t, what would the growth rate have been? Growth rate calculations let you predict disease effects. You compare the counterfactual situation of doing whatever intervention vs not doing it, and if the only thing that was changed was the intervention (like social distancing), the discrepancy between the two scenarios in whatever statistic you like is attributable to the intervention (or lack of it).

It's exactly the same logic as in this scenario: if you've been gross enough at some point in your life to have a pan go mouldy, and you choose not to wash it on a given day, the next day's extra mould is attributable to your lack of washing the blooming thing, just as washing the blooming thing makes the mould goes away.

Or the same logic as vaccinations; if we agree they are responsible for saving lives, administrative responses to pandemics can be responsible for killing people.

I really enjoyed the discussion about reasoning being schematic or not. Roughly, reasoning to demonstrate a claim schematic when it applies to every instance of a kind, even though it uses an instance to demonstrate it.

Schematically put, in reasoning about things of kind K, once we have shown that from certain premisses it follows that such-and-such a condition is true of arbitrary instance c, we can validly infer from those same premisses that that condition is true of all Ks, with the proviso that neither the condition nor any premiss mentions c

Like this proof that 3 is prime. A number is prime if it has no divisors other than itself and 1 (and is not itself 1). The divisors of 3 must be less than it. 1 is not a divisor of 3. 2 is not a divisor of 3. Therefore 3 has no divisors other than itself and 1. The same procedure could be used for any number - exhaustively try to eliminate numbers less than it from the possible list of divisors of it, if you do all the numbers less than it and eliminate every one, the number is prime.

Failure of a proof attempt being schematic is also interesting; like these demonstrations of De Morgan's laws:



It makes what the theorems mean exceptionally clear, but not all sets can be represented as connected subsets of the plane! So it fails as a proof. (@Banno someone perverse might see the proof as about the bits which are not shaded...)

Something that I'm a bit conflicted about is whether the bolded characterisation is spot on.

The distinction between schematic and non-schematic proof attempts should apply generically; we could make it line up and stipulate that schematic reasoning is necessarily correct, insofar as it is stipulated to apply only to a successful proof that a property holds of a kind through clever use of an example. But it seems to me there are relevant hows and whys; why is a proof attempt schematic or not, what blocks it from being so? Conversely, what distinguishes schematic proofs from non-schematic ones?

What blocks a proof from being schematic might be something incidental in each case; like the sets being connected subsets of the plane. That failure of schematic reasoning would only apply to set logic laws being illustrated in the plane (or other things being demonstrated geometrically). There will be restrictions of scope for the ambit of these incidental failures. But really what these incidental features will do is block an inference in the proof, or restrict its result to a subcase. IE: "you can't make this inference in step 2 to step 3 because blah" or "the proof works but you made an assumption in step 154 that makes it only apply to blah". Those are generic reasons for proof failure, rather than a specific failure related to a proof attempt being schematic.

If we focus in on the second case; when the original proof is made to apply to some kind but actually applies to some subkind, it would fail to be schematic for the original kind, but if it was tweaked to state the assumption explicitly, it would become an example of schematic reasoning for the restricted kind. Even though only one or two steps in the reasoning have changed.

It is just counterintuitive to me that whether some proof is schematic or not can depend upon such a small change; the intended target, when the rest of the characterisation of being schematic also applies to the steps in the proof.

I flipped a coin, it came out heads.

But what're the chances of a human flipping the coin and coming out heads? Tiny! Almost impossible!

Therefore, there has to be some explanation for why it came out heads. What appears almost impossible only seems that way under inappropriate assumptions or lack of knowledge regarding its cause.

Universes where God made it come out heads make the coin coming out heads more probable. So they explain it.

Therefore God exists.

------------

There are at least 7 catastrophic errors in that argument. I'll give a brownie point to anyone who can point one out.

They’d much prefer to dismiss a discussion based on ‘lack of evidence’ than examine how we each structure value, potential and possibility, on which our thoughts, beliefs, words and actions are ultimately based. But to me, this is the basis of philosophy. — Possibility

I had imagined that the basis by which someone believed something wasn't a one dimensional thing; like another fact which happened to entail it. I had imagined it as a generating process for that belief; facts are part of it, entailments are part of it, what is seen as relevant to what is part of it, some kind of metaphorical/analogical structure that aids the imagination, and an expectation of how things should be (there's my attempt at a 5). Less a factoid, more what the thread is made of in the instantaneous tapestry of thinking.

Given all that and how deep an attachment to an idea can be, I think it's important to see that there can be errors in connection between and within all of these parts as well as an error of generating belief in something given those as input data.

What are those 5 dimensions in your view?

An argument isn’t always as simple as who is right and who is wrong, or even which argument is most valid. When there isn’t enough information for certainty either way, it’s more about how your perspective of reality relates to mine. The more information we gather about the value structures of alternative perspectives, the more aware we become of the limitations and errors in our own perspective with regard to a more objective understanding of reality. — Possibility

I agree with this in general, more data is a good thing. As is more practice dealing with it - communicating, learning what others' see as relevant to what. But I think that there's a necessary component of disconnecting ideas when reasoning about things.

When two people share perspectives on something, we generally think something X on some basis Y. The basis Y and the conclusion X might not be fully known to their interlocutor, they might not be fully expressed, but I think it is important to be able to disconnect ideas; to say that the connection between X and Y is flawed on some shared, or in principle share-able basis. "There isn't sufficient evidence for that given what we've talked about", "That doesn't follow.". We live in the same world despite our experiences and learning making us see different things as relevant to our speculation.

I say this despite the common tropes that people declare their opponents as illogical, or someone who takes the discursive role as a critic for the sole purpose of maintaining their own opinions (which they then don't need to express) by right of conquest. Still, when someone connects two ideas badly, we have to value dispelling the connection between them, and the emotional work required in having one's idiocy so publicly revealed.

Even in exploratory terms, dispelling bad connections, and being able to recognise them, allows us not to be sent down unfruitful paths, and opens others. Critique should always be an option when talking about the state of things, though it isn't always the best strategy to change someone's ideas about them (or even to learn new ideas).

I think what you're doing is this:

(A) Look at how philosophy is practiced now.
(B) Look back into history to see how it came about.

Methodologically, this makes sense when philosophy's stipulated to have one character. Or alternatively, if you care only about the historical currents that lead to how philosophy is practiced now. When you fix philosophy as an object of study in this way, you can read off its content from what is studied in it.

Fixing it in this way, it's very plausible that Newton's Principia and Descartes' analysis of motion are not part of the tradition as it is currently practiced. Whereas Plato's Dialogues are.

One of your central claims on this basis is that:

(C) That philosophy is unchanged since Plato, and never does any work.

What I've been trying to do with the historical stuff is this:

(D) Look back into history to see what was philosophy then.
(E) Try to establish that natural philosophy was philosophy at the time.
(F) Conclude that philosophy has done work at some point.

Let's look at how (C) interfaces with the process of (D->E->F). If we find something that was philosophy in part (D), and assume (C), what is found in part (D) must be part of philosophy now. Therefore, assuming (C), if natural philosophy was part of philosophy, then contemporary philosophy must be able to do work. Alternatively, a weaker claim than (C) is required; you're focusing on a specific part of the tradition at a specific time, and want to understand what lead to this, bracketing any universal claims about philosophy as a tradition, or rendering them more speculative on the same basis.

Now you deny this claim on the basis that natural philosophy - the examples from Newton and Descartes - are not part of philosophy as it is currently practiced. Then you use (C) to read this back into the historical tradition; since it's not part of the tradition now, and the historical essence of it is unchanging, it must not been part of the tradition then.

.

The reason for this is clear – the methods employed in the Discourse and Meditations are different from those employed in the geometry. And what's more, these methods match the methods of prior works of philosophy, all the way back to the Platonic dialogues, and later works, all the way to articles in the journals today. So it is clear at present that there is a continuity between these works, precisely the ones you are not willing to defend as interesting natural science, and philosophy, but it is not clear that there is any interesting continuity between those works you are willing to defend as interesting natural science and philosophy. — Snakes Alive

This commits you to a methodological break between Newton's Principia and Descartes' geometry from philosophy's canon; they are not part of the historical tradition now since their methods were so obviously different from that of philosophy. I will grant that the kind of reasoning employed by the mathematics in the Principia and in Descartes' analysis of motion are not part of the tradition now. Nevertheless, they were linked to Descartes' metaphysics and Newton's methodological insights at the time.

But I think that, in doing (A), you're filtering the history of philosophy for what is continuous, or conceptually/methodologically similar with, its current practice. As a perspective, it commits you to draw distinctions between the fields of study (philosophy, natural philosophy) from a contemporary understanding of the concepts and how they are classified, rather than how they were classified at the time and historically arose, how they were taught together, how they were integrated into the same field of study.

This, ultimately, is a conceptual retrojection rather than a historical interpretation; what is sufficiently similar to what we have now, what is continuous with it? As opposed to a perspective where we follow the history of philosophy forward in time, bracketing the contemporary classifications.

So let's ask a more productive question – what led Newton to write the Principia? What methods did he employ in framing the principles he did? Was reading philosophers the primary motive behind this? Would the work have been writable in the absence of those philosophers? Are his goals or results philosophical in any interesting sense, by either contemporary standards or 17th c. standards? And no, it's not enough to say 'ah, but Newton had so many philosophical implications!' etc. This is because since philosophers can talk about anything, this move can be used to trivially claim that anything is philosophically relevant and therefore philosophy (#2).

What led Newton to write the Principia? Well, I presume you're looking for the answer "mathematics, and in the tradition of the mechanical/mathematical analysis of motion that goes from Galileo to Descartes to Newton". And the interplay between Descartes' philosophy of mechanical bodies and the bodies as he analysed them mathematically is bracketed as non-necessary for the development of his analysis of bodies; because it has a methodological break, it relies principally on mathematical arguments, definitions linked with syllogisms with constant appeal to intuition (at the time). The same story holds for the mechanical perspective on the world Newton had inherited from his predecessors, because the sciency bit relied upon mathematics and experiments, it had different character historically.

But I think that you've done a lot of work to distinguish natural philosophy conceptually from philosophy as it is practiced now (@Moliere's good points aside), but I don't think you've distinguished it sufficiently historically when you are also positing (C).

So you must be making some weaker claim – they are not philosophy as contemporarily understood, but maybe at one time they were thought to be? Or maybe even though they're not philosophy in any sense, at least they resemble philosophy in some interesting way? Or what I think you are likely saying, and which is really what #3 is getting at: historically, they developed out of philosophy in some interesting way, though they're distinct. — Snakes Alive

If we assume (C), like you do, or if you conclude it, anything which was part of the practice of philosophy in the past must be part of it now!

I think that it is much more plausible to reject (C), or substantially weaken it, given the discussion that we've had. Studying philosophy (even studying in general) can lead to a methodological break with it (or previously established methods in general).

But he was a very lonely man in away because he totally lacked emotional intelligence and the ability to have satisfying personal relationships. — Athena

I'd hesitate to see women's socialisation structually and men's individually. If you express negative feelings as a guy, you're a failure - that was a trope, and is still a trope to some extent. To the extent that rationality was treated as an exclusively male property, affect was treated as an exclusively female one. The restrictions cut both ways.

For men, success on those terms is a waking death and a volatile end for others.

Now, gender archetypes which were updated by the inclusion of women in the workplace have permeated to widespread cultural acceptance without undermining the expected choice of rationality over affect for men. In that time, relatively little has changed in our social expectations of success and the conditions which give rise to a full life are not available to all as is constantly promised. The game is rigged. And the only way to process the worst excesses of this consistent with the gender norms we're living through the death of for men is the false strength and blunted catharsis that comes from anger.

Men are still warped by norms of emotional restriction and a striving for a kind of "success" born from these zombified social expectations. This condition of disconnection, from self and society, yields dissatisfaction and alienation. Then, absent any socially acceptable means of processing it besides rage ; ; it gets channeled into reactionary narratives. Yielding so effected men to resort to racist terrorism, mysogenous harrassment, or a retreat from social life entirely. Unless they get lucky and manage to step through the looking glass and bodge onwards.

And we blame ourselves for all that because we're supposed to be strong and better than it.

Centrists and the right several days ago: This crisis was unpredictable, the information that our governments were informed of was irrelevant, and we could not have been prepared or done anything to prepare for an event on this scale.

Centrists and the right now: China deceived us and caused us to die!

These are a much nicer set of flip flops:

I want to read your post more times and make notes on it before responding so that we can have a productive discussion without (1) me writing in a way where it suggests I'm doing this:

3) "Everything else came from philosophy" – Historically, the natural sciences / engineering / having sex / hair trimming / etc. came from philosophy. — Snakes Alive

and (2) trying to stop you misinterpreting me as doing that, so we both don't get frustrated, snarkshout at each other, and lose what I imagine will be an interesting discussion out of it.

I now regret giving up the book explaining how written language made cultures more male dominant. Especially in the west that favors linear logic over wholistic logic. This male dominance is intensified with education for technology and specialization and "expertise". Before this education, we educated for well rounded individual growth and avoided being narrow-minded. The Conceptual Method of education preparing the young to be independent thinkers and the Behaviorist Method teaching them to react like we train dogs to react to commands. — Athena

It'd be an interesting argument, for sure. I'm persuaded by Engel's account of the origin of patriarchy, linking it to ownership concepts of agricultural resources and land. Think the root goes further back than the development of logic and the (alleged) cultural contrast between holistic and reductive thinking styles. But I find it more than plausible that expected/acceptable behaviour under male socialisation became the norm in academia.

That is a good distinction between formal mental patterns and informal. Gossiping is not a formal mental pattern! Of course in a philosophy forum, people are discussing language and thought, but very few of them have the education for the discussions, so the posts are informal, not formal. And an argument may have nothing to do with the logic of a post, but be focused on attacking the stupid person who made the stupid post. Being formal or informal serves different functions and this not good or bad, it is human and we need all of it. — Athena

:up:

How long have been addressing gender issues and education issues and the ramifications of the change in education? About 30 years I believe. — Athena

Impressive!

However, I am even more enthusiastic since learning of Daniel Kahneman and his explanations of Thinking, Fast and Slow Also in my later years I am experiencing a sensation of enlightenment when suddenly I understand the meaning of things. That is so different from knowing facts and not the meaning of them. I think we can life experiences that radically change our consciousness.

I've certainly had transformative experiences from forum discussions here (and like discussions elsewhere). Allowing an idea to perturb patterns of thought is a much more intimate relationship with the material, rather than familiarising myself with its consequences. Following an idea is much different than making use of it. I can't turn it on or off though, some things capture my imagination and some don't. Even being owned for the idiot I am, especially being owned for the idiot I am.

I think of those things as peak intellectual experiences, and it's quite hard (for me, though I think it generalises) to form patterns of the kind of conduct that leads to them. It seems to me to depend intimately on what's written and the background the reader brings to it.

You must not know the history of our democracy. You could not say that and know the list of books that have changed history. But you should know we have experienced major changes and those changes were lead by people who wanted the changes. — Athena

I agree with you that ideas change history, but I disagree that there are easy measures for mods or forum standards that increase the likelihood of ideas having such knock on effects. I don't see a way to moderate consistently on something that comes down to a very particular relationship between an expression or pattern of thought and a reader.

Why in heaven's name would a forum with leaders and rules not be a democracy? :gasp: Wow, we are in very serious trouble if people think democracy is an unregulated free for all. That is another important subject and it deserves its own thread. — Athena

Running a forum democratically would probably require upvote/downvote software and thresh-holds for post hiding/deletion based upon it. Even reddit and Youtube, which have those measures, trend to the kind of discussions we both agree tend to be shite (as in, unlikely to generate those kind of experiences). It's not that I don't believe in democracy, it's just that more democratic forum management methods still don't suffice for the kind of content we're talking about. I doubt any formal guidelines or institutional rules would. I think avoiding the worst excesses of internet debate is probably the best environment we can consistently moderate to achieve (without imposing restrictive content standards that the staff would also fail a lot of the time).

Though I would be very happy if that turned out to be false, especially if there were actionable insights involved.

And that's the start of the loop.. Not going around it a second time with you.

do we leave it to the Govs or do we stand as a separate, people Government — wiyte

I am not even trying to incite war, but have more social presence on the matter. — wiyte

No, promoting personal violence against foreigners is much more peaceful. Apparently.

I don't think some solitude with potential enemies is right now beneficent. — wiyte

Framing Chinese people and Russians as enemies.

People need an intellectual peace of strict good communications that's not what it is, that's what the Government are dealing with. — wiyte

Stating that the government (which, where?) are dealing with people being too PC towards people from other nations (characterised as threats/enemies).

I am have peace made out of aggression because we have been threatened. Ties need to be mended in war areas. — wiyte

And this is a problem because, you claim, other nations are a threat.

I'm more in support of our Government. — wiyte

But you obfuscated those claims by saying that you support a side (which you invented the characterisation of) by agreeing with the opinions you ascribe to it. Using a common phrase of national solidarity.

For some reason I don't think you are being honest about what you actually believe. :eyes:

They would have a beautiful death in war and same as in peace. — wiyte

...

So now the aggression you promoted towards the Chinese and the Russians for the sole purposes of a joke is... Buttressed by a declaration that it doesn't matter how they die.

You're willing to promote individual aggression towards Chinese people and Russians for a joke?

Nah, I think I took what you wrote more seriously than you did. :wink:

Understanding something does not, by itself, give it merit.

You didn't offend me. You just wrote a bunch of nonsense.

So like... don't be racist. But promote individual aggression ("don't leave it to the government") towards China and Russia based off a nebulous threat. And start talking about it in terms of the coronavirus. Riiight.

I have deep concerns about judgments of raising the bar because whose standards would rule? That is a large part of the problem I want to discuss. I am thinking the male standard leads to very narrow thinking? The requirement of staying on topic prevents anyone from considering the bigger picture, and it is my concern this keeps us in a constant state of conflict, heading towards war, and prevents the expansion of consciousness that could lead to peaceful resolutions. — Athena

Introducing a new topic by articulating how it links to the current one generally makes for a good post. I'm sure that you've noticed that staying strictly on topic doesn't happen very much here, even within the focused exegesis of reading groups. I believe it's partly a combinatoric problem; there's too many divergent ways of taking something as an obvious consequence of something else. Absent strong constraints on seeing what is relevant to a topic, discussion regarding it tends to slide into tangents and tangents on tangents.

I wouldn't call this male or female, it seems to happen regardless of circumstance. You maybe see it as male, though, in that move where discourse itself is seen as following male archetypes and standards.

Despite all the differences in perspective, differences in what people find obvious, and differences in what people find relevant, I believe that when people discuss in good faith, they partake in the same norms of expression and rationality; even if there's no common ground, people speaking in good faith are still disputing the same terrain (usually).

Suggestion- find more people who can handle this discussion. Talk about language and how we think. Talk about consciousness and how to expand consciousness. Talk about the importance of this discussion to our future and a New Age with such a different consciousness the people of the future can not relate to our barbaric past. — Athena

First thing - we're an open access internet forum, we can't selectively recruit. About as good as we can do is invite speakers. Those events are few and far between, big thinkers are too busy to waste their time educating us plebs on their minutia; or responding to our long winded essay posts and convoluted questions takes up time they don't have.

I don't really understand why you frame what you desire in the quote as a departure from normal discourse on here. Posts constantly talk about language and thought, people behave as if they have a blueprint for sorting out all the world's problems a lot - people with contrasting blueprints get frustrated with each other. This is business as usual for talk beyond gossip.

Big picture talk is also usually extremely reactive, responsive to continually updating meat space events. When the meat space events change, the sites of tension which will be discussed between people's blue prints or big pictures change without (usually) changing their perspective. I mean, I have a bunch of thoughts about how things should be done and see things in that light, and essentially that means I have 2 conversations repeatedly on here and don't talk about much else. The events change, the perspective doesn't. I'm guessing your big picture talk is in the same ball park, how long have you been expressing frustration with what you see as male norms of discourse, saying the same thing in different scenarios?

Anyway, the chances of forum big picture talk turning into a world historical event of ideological rupture are slim to none. Framing things with that goal in mind is... noble, but extremely silly. "Everything needs to change! We need to be talking about how everything needs to change. No, not in that way... The purpose of the obscure hobby forum should be to increase the likelihood of a world historic shift in consciousness."

Why should there be a leader and submission to the leadership? Because I ship, an industry or a nation without strong leadership is in big trouble. With that said, it is extremely important to know the qualities of good leadership and avoid mistaking a tyrant for good leadership. Tyrants who appeal to the masses can lead to thousands of people dying because of the ignorance and ego of the tyrant. Democracy is supposed to prevent that from happening, while assuring strong leadership, but it can not prevent that unless the masses are well educated, and the culture supports democracy, not Wrestlemania mentality. — Athena

Well, so long as you have moderators and admins, a forum is not going to be a democracy. If you don't have moderators, you currently end up with 4chan. I believe this is preferable.

One thing that works to propagate exploratory styles is trying to stick with them when talking with someone, mod action to enforce exploratory styles which does not change or strongly restrict the open access nature of the site seems impossible to me.

Oh, goodie. I look forward to it then. I did try to meet your want for historical justification for the claim head on. Hopefully something interesting comes out of it.

You need to stop that. — Snakes Alive

Take it you didn't read the rest of the post then.

A teacher will have a different interpretation. — Athena

I think you're bang on that "going online to have an argument about something abstract" is something that men are more socialised to accept, seek out and revel in. We unfortunately don't keep collaborative and exploratory discussions going long on here, and it's very hard to keep oneself exploratory and collaborative when someone is going to come along and treat it like a fight anyway.

The topic of raising the bar for post quality comes up sometimes, as does lowering the bar for moderating people getting combative. I think we usually err on the side of inaction for a few reasons, (1) it would make many posters unable to contribute and (2) policing the urge to show someone that they are wrong on the internet on an internet forum devoted to arguing about weird shit seems fruitless.

But I do regret that the aggregate effect of this inaction is that we aren't cultivating an environment where exploratory discussions are more common. Always open to suggestions.

In general, I think you're retrojecting inappropriately a lot when this is allegedly a historical discussion, and not just a way to shit on philosophy from an alleged exterior vantage point. The things which made Newton's mechanics efficacious are not so easy to split from the innovations/re-emphasis that he made methodologically. In Descartes' case, his understanding of bodies mechanically is intimately tied up with his understanding of souls as not bodies. You may claim that these are merely philosophical distinctions, as if the flow of ideas within the tradition of philosophy suddenly did not matter for studying its development as a tradition.

Edit: clarifying note, please treat this post as attempting to provide a historical justification for

(1) Natural philosophy was philosophy. — fdrake

(link to post here)

(1) Newton's work is not considered a work of philosophy generally, so if popular classification matters, this should tell us something; — Snakes Alive

This is a contemporary classification, a retrojection. It was published as a work of natural philosophy. It's literally in the title. It's also not just about the word, it's not like I'm saying "it has an adjective in front of
"philosophy", therefore it's rightly considered a work of philosophy". Its methods and concepts now are obviously part of... Newtonian mechanics. Which is in maths, physics and engineering. Does this mean that it was not philosophy in relevant senses at the time of publication? No.

What evidence was there that it was philosophy at the time of publication? Well, here are Newton's principles of reasoning in his own words (doubtless inspired by others of his ilk):

]Rule 1: We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

Rule 2: Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

Rule 3: The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.

Rule 4: In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, not withstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions. — Newton

He's not working in an established discipline of science, he's working on the very edge of a nascent concept of science, in which he still has to care about borderline metaphysical and properly epistemological issues, and not appeal to established tradition of the discipline you're retroactively claiming him to be a part of. It's like calling The Taming of the Shew a rip off of the movie adaptation, or calling Aesop another of those bed time story writers.

It's surely appropriate to see the work as part of the sciences when considering scientific history. But at the time? Nah. This was philosophy turning into something else. It wasn't the Scientific Revolution because there was science close to as we understand it today before then... At the time Newton was expounding his theories of mechanics, his chief academic competitor was Aristotle's physics for crying out loud. There's a whole development going through Aristotle (who was still relevant for his physics at the time of Newton), Galileo, Avicenna; Alhazen and others from the Islamic Golden Age, Descartes, Newton, and there are points of continuity, points of disagreement, and different framings of what it means to study the natural world.

"Is X a case of Y"? It's fuzzy in this case. Development of ideas is. I think you're treating the distinction between natural philosophy and philosophy as much stricter than it actually was in this historical context.

(2) The methods of that work have nothing to with philosophy as traditionally practiced; — Snakes Alive

See the rules he stipulated. What kind of principles do they look like to you? Even if you understand his work as science, there is still a substantial component devoted to the development of scientific methodology in the abstract; what we'd categorize now as philosophy of science.

I'm not saying that Newton was doing exactly the same thing as contemporary philosophers do(you're actually committed to that claim on pain of consistency if philosophy has a historically invariant character involving not being efficacious and natural philosophy rightly counts as philosophy ...), I'm saying that understood historically and conceptually, it's appropriate to consider natural philosophy as a type of philosophy due to continuity of reasoning styles and institutional practices (teaching, common study topics, having Aristotle's physics as an academic competitor within the same field) going back through the tradition.

(3) In philosophy programs, the work is not typically assigned or read by philosophy students, whose training would not equip them with the skills to read and understand it anyway (since philosophers do not learn the principles of mathematics or mechanical motion that would make them conversant in 17th c. physics, or any era of physics). — Snakes Alive

Perhaps philosophy as it is currently practiced has little continuity with things that budded off it much before - even within the Newton example, it looks like optics was much more developed as a separate field than mechanics was at the time... But yeah, you're the person claiming that it always has and always will be out of touch with how things are as a historical invariant, despite the continuity with something we agree with as efficacious reasoning I've highlighted above.

Note the same for Descartes – his philosophy, what is read by philosophers and taught in philosophy programs, actually is fairly well cordoned off from his scientific work, which is not read in philosophy departments (nor is his geometry), and which philosophy students would not be able to understand, since their disciplinary training doesn't teach them any mathematics either. — Snakes Alive

Is Descartes' conception of the soul cordoned off from his mechanics because undergrads don't get readings about the interplay between the two?

That's really not enough of a historical justification for drawing a hard line between Descartes' mechanics, in which he considers the human body as an example (it's extended and follows its own laws of motion), and the soul (it isn't extended, it can't be a body in his sense), almost like the distinction between souls and bodies was something he spent a lot of time writing about.

There may be a reading where you consider a radical methodological break - when he starts treating extended bodies using his algebra to study their motion vs his maybe less grounded use of mechanism to distinguish mind from body. But I'm not buying it. Could probably make the same move with Newton.

It's just a definitional issue. If you want to talk about history, do so. — Snakes Alive

OK. Natural philosophy should be considered part of the history of philosophy (and as philosophy in that context). Why?

(1) Historical argument of its classification; it was understood at the time as being part of philosophy. Universities teaching it as such should carry about the same weight as the Pope declaring someone a Catholic.
(2) Commonalities in methods at the time; conceptual argument, employment of mathematics and syllogisms, generalisations from experience, thought experiments, interweaving of all of them. Newton's Principia was a work of natural philosophy, it uses all of these at once without the rigour of mathematics expected from the later mathematical sciences, though it was an important precursor to them. Can you tell where Descartes study of the soul stops and where his study of sensation begins? Probably not. Boundaries between natural philosophy and philosophy were blurry as hell, though crystallised more and more as natural philosophy became natural science.

Why should natural philosophy be considered distinct from modern day science?

(3) Conceptually: testability and predictability of theories (how does the theory of humours predict rather than post-hoc explain? Still counts as natural philosophy.) and the necessity of theoretical generalisations and conservative extensions of theory was not as emphasised.

I'm not responding to the rest of the post – can't I just leave it as an exercise for you as to why it doesn't work? [Again, deductive arguments that don't involve historical facts can't make historical claims.] — Snakes Alive

The following are historical claims:

(1) Natural philosophy was philosophy.
(2) Natural philosophy was efficacious. — fdrake

Natural philosophy was understood at its time as philosophy. At that point the systematic study of nature wasn't its own thing. Sure, there are changes in understanding on the long road from Thales through the Islamic Golden Age to the Enlightenment, but it was still understood as philosophy at the time. And as a description of a historical practice, natural philosophy was philosophy.

Natural philosophy also included the study of planet motion, the study of time in the abstract...

(4) Philosophy has not changed in any relevant respect since Ancient Greece (what I understand as one of your claims). — fdrake

This is your historical claim.

(5) Philosophy was not efficacious in Ancient Greece (what I understand as part of your characterisation of philosophy) — fdrake

This is also your historical claim.

I don't write on it, since I'm just a layman that thinks about this as a hobby (I 'believed in' philosophy when I was younger, got a degree in it, and later slowly came to my present views on it), but I wouldn't mind discussing it. I'm interested in the history of how philosophy arose, and think the Greek rhetorical tradition (as traced through the quasi-legendary Corax of Syracuse, in his bid to school landowners to defend their claims from Syracusan tyrants) is an interesting place to start. I also think people ought to know more about the sophists and their contribution, and I think a historical survey comparing the Greek legal tradition to the earliest philosophical dialogues could prove fruitful (to see how the actual rhetorical techniques are employed similarly or dissimilarly in each case). — Snakes Alive

This is just mime history. AKA: a philosophical historiography of philosophy that gives itself the ability to pronounce its interpretations of things as facts. You're still doing philosophy! You don't get to play the :I'm not playing that game: game!

Do you want to go into the history, then? — Snakes Alive

Sure! I'd like to see what you've written on it.

So your argument is that natural philosophy = science = philosophy? That's not how words work, I'm afraid! — Snakes Alive

No, not at all. I hoped that you would read me with more charity.

Your line of attack, you see, was to catch me in a contradiction, without historical evidence – but how, one might think, can this be possible? How can I be shown to be in error on a historical matter, with no appeal to history? If we look back through the conversation, we find the answer – your 'argument' turns on an equivocation, and you slipped from 'philosophy' to 'natural philosophy,' which is an old-timey word for science. — Snakes Alive

OK, let me rephrase.

(1) Natural philosophy was philosophy.
(2) Natural philosophy was efficacious.
(3) Then some philosophy was efficacious. (1,2) (you mistook existential generalisation for equivocation)

(Same argument form as:

(1) Apples are a fruit.
(2) Apples are tasty.
(3) Some fruit are tasty.)

(4) Philosophy has not changed in any relevant respect since Ancient Greece (what I understand as one of your claims).
(5) Philosophy was not efficacious in Ancient Greece (what I understand as part of your characterisation of philosophy)
(6) Philosophy is never efficacious (4,5, if something does not change over time and it has a property at some time, then it has that property for all times)

(6) and (3) contradict each other.

So it seems you want to deny (1):

and you slipped from 'philosophy' to 'natural philosophy,' which is an old-timey word for science. — Snakes Alive

And claim that somehow natural philosophy was not philosophy. Why wasn't natural philosophy philosophy? If you say "because philosophy is not efficacious whereas natural philosophy (by equating it with natural science!) was", this is a textbook example of begging the question.

Which, no doubt, you will frame as an observation of conduct rather than an error in reasoning. Which I can agree with, so long as you also accept that you've been painting with too broad a brush, and you're not talking about philosophy simpliciter, or about an unchanging historical essence, but about a much more particular practice of it that you've not articulated.

Philosophy does not, and it's not unique in this regard (neither does New Age, for example), but it is also its own historically contingent thing, defective for its own historically contingent reasons. — Snakes Alive

Defective as compared to what?

The point is that philosophy doesn't really inquire – it mimes inquiry through a kind of conversational ritual that mimics the courtroom, but without witnesses, evidence, or point. — Snakes Alive

Besides the lack of historical justification you're using to make a historical claim, I think you're missing something obvious; to the extent that styles of reasoning are commonplace and shared, the courtroom is those shared norms of reasoning; expectations of behavioural conduct and belief propagation given a starting point. In that regard, the only difference philosophy has from reasoning simpliciter when understood as a historical tradition (we do have to learn how to reason after all) is a mild constraint on topics of interest (just enough so that philosophy doesn't become something which is not philosophy) and a historical particularity.

This doesn't mean there are no distinctly philosophical moves though, I mean something like a transcendental argument, or understanding something as a folk tradition for philosophical purposes, won't make sense outside of a philosophical context.

3) "Everything else came from philosophy" – Historically, the natural sciences / engineering / having sex / hair trimming / etc. came from philosophy. — Snakes Alive

My use of natural philosophy wasn't intended to be that. It was a counter argument.

(1) What I understand as a claim of yours: philosophy hasn't changed meaningfully since its inception. It has always been defective (not efficacious in some unspecified sense).
(2) Something which is a historical fact: natural philosophy did produce efficacious results (in the specified sense of providing a predictive and instrumental understanding of nature).
(3) Natural philosophy was part of philosophy at its time.

Surely you can see the contradiction. Combined, throughout its history philosophy could never have produced a predictive understanding of nature if it was always not productive of efficacious insights, therefore either the character of philosophy has changed over time (and you can't construe it in just one way that entails it does nothing and is useless forever) or it always has the potential to produce efficacious results (if its character actually hasn't changed).

It attempts to inquire about 'anything' by a conversational method, and there's no reason at all that just talking about basic features of the world should yield any insight into them. — Snakes Alive

I'm sympathetic to the idea that the Socratic method invariably involves itself in linguistic confusions, too, but I guess that's a separate hypothesis. — Snakes Alive

Now I'm at a loss. So philosophy doesn't get at how things are. This failure doesn't derive from insufficient similarity to the natural sciences or engineering/technology. Nor does it derive from linguistic confusion. What does it derive from then?

It attempts to inquire about 'anything' by a conversational method, and there's no reason at all that just talking about basic features of the world should yield any insight into them. — Snakes Alive

You're right, there's no necessary reason why any inquiry in any style should yield substantive/efficacious insights. That is quite a different claim from there being no examples of reasoning yielding substantive/efficacious insights. In fact, there are examples in the history of philosophy of precisely this sort; see my previous point about natural philosophy for an example.

The same transcendental game regarding the lack of sufficient reason philosophy exhibits for producing efficacious/substantive results can be played with the fact that it has produced those results on some occasions; reading the capacity for substantive insights back into the essence of the tradition as a possibility.

it is more likely because the technique simply doesn't inquire into things in an effective way or yield any results. — Snakes Alive

What are you imagining as an effective inquiry? The kind of thinking that ended up in the steam engine?

Compare the Jehova's witnesses saying the world did end in 1914, but what we meant by that was... This is a classic pattern of these practices that don't have any efficacy. — Snakes Alive

And this comparison holds because doctrines in philosophy and religion don't tend to be involved in the production of steam engines?

Philosophy as a tradition, much like religion, doesn't have its character determined by being inefficacious in the above sense. Though, this may be a reason why philosophy and theology receive less funding and focus in education than science and technology. More importantly though, this lack of efficacy doesn't help describe philosophy as a tradition, speaking to its conceptual/behavioural structure, the appropriate question seems to me why philosophy lacks efficacy in that sense.

Part of the answer seems to me to be that efficacious reasoning in the above sense usually gets described, and is involved institutionally, with science, engineering and technology. Natural philosophy turned into the sciences as a theoretical study, mix it with the tradition of tinkering and you get engineering. It seems at some point, people who practiced philosophy were indeed doing such efficacious reasoning, and it's a retrojection of contemporary categories to describe it otherwise. Given the premise that the nature of philosophy is a historical invariant, it seems strange that it lost its capacity to be efficacious at some point.

I think that means you would need to paint with a less broad brush; what is it about philosophy as it is currently practiced that ensures it lacks efficacy? Rather than appeal to a historical invariant of aporia and courtroom style reasoning (which are rooted in the previously discussed idea of using language to transfer behavioural commitments (blocking derivation of behavioural commitments from posits and deriving them respectively for aporias and otherwise)).

I copypasted the stuff into the coronavirus thread