How is that viable? — I like sushi

Is eternal economic growth viable?

about.the identification of those people. — Isaac

A few pointers and indicators about people arguing in bad faith:

1. No data is good enough for them, except theirs. They are likely to disregard entire sciences and throw away vast amount of data just because they can (or must).

2. On the other hand, they choose to trust and accept uncritically any data that seems to buttress their view, without ever wondering if it's genuine or manipulative. They are eager to believe alternative views and that makes them easy to manipulate.

3. They misinterpret even their own data, like when you pretended to confuse an in vitro finding with an in vivo conclusion. This is done on purpose and is part of the lying.

4. They tend to essentialize their opponents, at least in their rhetoric. Whether it's the Jews, climate scientists, politicians, the CIA or the medical establishment, they pretend to believe that their (invented) enemies -- all of them or nearly all of them -- are essentially, fundamentally evil and will always remain so.

5. From 4, it follows that they see no solution. They will criticize any proposal or policy around, but can't propose anything cogent themselves. It's about denial and negativity, about lying and poisoning the well of knowledge for others, not about proposing new knowledge or constructively moving forward.

it's nonsensical, incoherent, and inconsistent with the definition of "token", to call pain a token. — Metaphysician Undercover

Fair enough. The token-type distinction is overblown anyway.

Identifying a category doesn't constitute proof that any given entity is a member of it. That such people exist doesn't answer the question of which side in any discussion are behaving that way. Both sides will obviously accuse the other of such activities. — Isaac

That happens but is not necessary or obvious. There are many discussions here or elsewhere between people in good faith. Seek them and you will find them.

Everyone agrees that...

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. — Isaac

I happen to disagree; all of us believe many things without evidence, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

The decay started before Covid but has been exaggerated massively during the crisis to the point we now find ourselves, where one's conclusions are all that matter, not the diligence with which one has arrived at them. — Isaac

'We'? Speak for yourself. There's no fatality here, nobody is forcing anyone to become stupid. It's a choice 'we' make.

Do we not have an epistemic responsibility in life? If our actions have ripple effects, and our actions are largely an outgrowth of our beliefs, then isn't it irresponsible to believe in things that lead to harmful actions? Shouldn't we be more careful about what we believe in? — Xtrix

I would say we have a responsibility to argue in good faith, to try and understand others rather than pretend ignorance or misunderstanding, and to remain open to the evidence presented to us by others. And if we can't be bothered to read or understand said evidence (something which I do a lot), at least we should be careful to not clairon our ignorance or mistrust of said evidence day in and day out. We should rather remain silent or honestly say "I don't know and I don't care", if that's the case.

They won't tell you that on Twitter, but nobody needs to have an opinion on strictly everything.

And sure, everybody is in bad faith now and then about something, we're only human. But do we need then to keep harping to no end in bad faith? Measure, anyone?

Do we really need an army (or several) of prolific bad faith crusaders? No, and yet that's exactly what the Gods of the Interwebs unleashed upon us.

There's always been people like that of course, but now they have this megaphones called Facebook and Twitter and co. Some of our ancestors used to write endless memoirs to newspapers and science academies across the globe about the possibility of perpetual movement or the rationality of Pi, about the earth being flat or tobacco as a cure for cancer... Strange obsessions leading to nowhere. It made for excellent dustbin or fire material back then. But their descendents now all have a YouTube channel.

This whole discussion seems to miss the central point of bad faith. One can make honest mistakes and then when presented with a series of facts contradicting a previously held idea, change one's mind, and all that is fine. People can also decide to not pronounce themselves on some issue because they don't know enough about it, and this is also fine. The real issue is with people who are obviously, demonstrably wrong in their belief but will pretend to not even understand the counterfactuals or arguments of others, and to disbelieve or simply ignore their evidence en vrac.

These people are simply liars. They lie to themselves and to others. They decide to remain ignorant, knowing very well at some deep level that it is what they do.

When on top of it they also insist on spreading their misinformed BS day in and day out, their bad faith becomes a real problem.

You can't see beliefs on a CT scan. So there can't be any neurological evidence for the belief that "It is neurologically impossible to believe something without evidence."

Assuming that Mary is an adult female and that she has got a functional uterus, at a minimum she sees the color red every 28 days. Some thought experiment... :razz:

i don't see how you could produce a token of pain with a token of hammer and a token of hand. You could create a token of 'damaged hand', or 'injured hand', but where's the token of pain? — Metaphysician Undercover

Don't worry, you'll know where it is as soon as I start smashing your hand with that hammer.

For those interested in how the abilities of counting or estimating magnitude pan out in other species than our own, Octolab has a series of fun experiments on octopuses, including on such topics as object permanence and numeration.

https://octolab.tv/can-an-octopus-count-viewer-request/

It is neurologically impossible to believe something without evidence. — Isaac

How could you possibly know that? You've checked all the beliefs in all the world?

Just saying, if you want a token of pain, just give me your hand and a hammer. I can easily combine those two things in a manner that will produce a token of pain for you.

Perhaps we aren't sure, as we should be, about good, evil, and idiocy. They seem to be entangled with each other in a conceptual cloud of confusion. — TheMadFool

I think we ARE sure. It's just more convenient to ignore evil, less disturbing. More confortable to think he's just another moron than to accept the depth of moral corruption the country has sunk into.

One needs to be smart to be 'machaivellian'. There is no doubt in my mind that Trump is evil ,but he is also a cretin.

And he likes being a cretin, and he wallows in it. Hence I agree, in his and many other cases, that true, limitless stupidity is chosen, embraced. It is not a natural state of man to be that stupid.

Epistemic responsibility, due to its moral flavor, would mean that Donald Trump is an evil/bad person. — TheMadFool

Isn't that obvious?

I can understand your motivations without necessarily sharing them. It's not that hard.

You've already made up your mind that it's impossible for anyone to be vaccine hesitant as a result of having intelligently weighed the evidence and just reaching a different conclusion to you. — Isaac

Not at all. It's just a matter of what people value in life.

You for instance think that the risk you are taking by not being vaccinated is quite small -- perhaps you don't mix up with others a lot; perhaps you are in good health and not overweight -- and that giving money to pharmaceuticals is a much larger risk. You would rather catch COVID and get sick for a week than use the protection of a vaccine, because you see the latter involving the risk of profiting an evil pharmaceutical company.

I wouldn't call it rational, but it's not totally stupid either. You just hate big pharma enough for it to tip the risk calculation.

It seems like such a disingenuous enquiry. — Isaac

Looking for cui bono is precisely what you do, though. Ergo you are being disingenuous, by your own account...

you're frantically searching around for who might profit from vaccine hesitancy? — Isaac

Not frantically, no. It's just a question I am playing with. Cui bono?

You becoming clinically insane is one topic which I won't touch anymore as it is personal.

The history of Maggi and the French antisemites is about something else: about how people can get very suspicious of new technology coming from abroad, and about how some economic interests threatened by such development may fight back by spreading disinformation in the press, often the nationalistic press. IOW it is about economic chauvinism as a factor of systematic disinformation.

E.g. climate deniers have been funded by Big Oil to misinform people systematically, though mainly in the US. Remember how the 'Kyoto protocol' was mocked and trashed, thanks in part to its very label as a foreign (non US) accord? The same is happening now with the Paris accord. If Americans were ever to commit to any climate change mitigation plan, it would need to be labelled the "Huston Texas Plan", or the "Salt Lake City Accord", or the "Star-and-Stripe Agreement". Baring that, FAUX News is certain to shoot it down.

What I wonder is this: Who profits or hopes to profit from vaccine hesitancy, and would they be behind some of the misinformation currently being spread about vaccines?

I am waiting for you to produce this token of pain which you seem to believe is so real. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you asking for being tortured?

This is my last word on the topic.
— Olivier5

And yet... — Isaac

It was on a different topic.

I am currently reading La France Goy by Donner. It's the edifying story of how a few people (re-)invented, stroke and unleashed French antisemitism at the turn of the 19th/20th. The title is a provocative echo to Drumont's best seller La France Juive (1886).

The story is absolutely disgusting but also somewhat fascinating, the fascination involved in seeing a whole culture crumble into total confusion and chaos, just because a few obsessed assholes wrote books after books, article after article drooling hatred of les Juifs, and of course about Dreyfus, whose innocence was his greatest crime.

And the thing is, the inventors of modern antisemitism had some good arguments, among all the lies. The Panama affair, the affaire des fiches: there was something rotten in the Third Republic. But then, this rot was structural, not racial. Like in any democracy, MPs can be bought, newspapers can be purchased, journalists can lie, the truth can be manipulated, etc. To racialize the problem like Drumont (and later Léon Daudet) did was a way to externalize it -- to say that France was corrupted only by them Jews, and that therefore there was nothing wrong in the system per se.

Note that it's the very essence of scapegoating to try and save the system from its contradictions by blaming them all on some random villain.

We all know how this little game ended. The Third Republic failed to prepare for the war and lost it, and then all these so-called 'nationalists' worked diligently for Marshal Pétain, to try and find a "final solution to the Jewish problem".

One of the most absurdist part of the book is about how the two main French antisemitic newspapers of the time, La Libre Parole and L'Action Francaise, started to target the Swiss society Maggi.

Yes, them


Why Maggi? 1) it was a foreign firm making big progress on the French market with its revolutionary soup concentrates and its pasteurized milk distribution system in Paris, and this created anger among traditional French milk retailers whose labor union formally approached various politicians including the extreme right to try and break the rise of Maggi; 2) the processes involved were technically new, even revolutionary, and touched on something important for the French: food; 3) the company founder Julius Maggi was investing massively in advertisement in newspapers, but had decided against advertising in those two newspapers (Libre Parole and Action Francaise), therefore constantly criticizing the company in the newspapers columns might also have been an effort, at least originally, to blackmail Maggi for advertising money...

Maggi's pasteurized milk distribution system most probably saved lives, because milk had been a contaminant until then, e.g. for Cholera. This is precisely why urban costumers liked it so much and why the French government ultimately gave them a public health medal.

And yet Maggi was seen by some as the personification of capitalism that artificializes and profits from good traditional things such as a vegetable soup or milk, replacing them with their unnatural industrial processes. It was also branded as foreign because the founder was Swiss, although Maggi had the poor taste of being neither Jewish nor even German... But that didn't stop the Libre Parole and the Action Francaise. In the decade before WW1, they pretended that Maggi was spying for Germany, that each and every time a milk truck was passing by a French military compound, it was taking notes and photographs that would ultimately be sent to the Kaiser... Maggi was branded as a fifth column.

It seems totally crazy to read this nowadays, and of course it never stopped the company in France, but it is also remindful of the 5G haters and of the anti-vaxxers. RNA vaccines are a new technology coming from abroad, and they are seen by some wackos as some sort of Trojan horse, just like Maggi was.

Otherwise, your argument is just hot air. — Isaac

He is not arguing, he is simply pointing out that your mental health is on a slippery slope. If you don't shake off your political paranoia soon, if you cannot understand what people tell you on this thread about the dangers of paranoia, then you will most certainly lose your mind. Paranoia tends to get worse over time. Next thing you know, Big Pharma people will be aliens from another planet.

Get help before it is too late. I don't mean this rhetorically. This is my last word on the topic.

To the OP, the adjective 'continental' is dead, as it should be.

Sorry but I won't order food from you. It would take two or three days to get the order.

To me the interesting bit is: what are you trying to achieve with your writing? Popper was trying to solve problems and teach their proposed resolution in the clearest way possible because he expected interesting arguments in return, in a productive dialogue rather than more wasteful misunderstanding. Others may rather try to explore a subject without searching for resolution. The task not being the same, the language can (must?) then be more poetic than technical.

Such a case you are. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I'm here to please.

That's a good one!

Fair enough, although you make it sound as if Wittgenstein wanted to invite as many contradictions as possible. — Janus

According to the principle of explosion, if you accept one contradiction in a logical system, you accept them all.

If memory serves it's in the first few pages of the Open Society and its Enemies.

More than one person have said it.

Clear, as defined by Popper himself, is equivalent to 'not using more complex a language than the problem at hand requires'. In other word, clear = clear enough. It's a clear enough definition to me.

With regard to Popper, what you call ‘clear’ I call lacking in depth, — Joshs

How many of his books have you read?

The main problem I see with obscure language is fake depth. It is a phenomenon linked to projection: the reader faced with an obscure and ambiguous text tends to project his own intuitions onto the text and this results in a play of mirrors, an echo effect where the reader can easily mistake hollowness with depth.

Nobody can understand everything. Nevertheless his contribution was gigantic, and go well beyond reframing the scientific method. It included an in-depth critique of historicism in its marxist and fascist forms, as well as a staunch defense of indeterminism. All written in perfectly clear and unpretentious language.

It also explains why Popper managed to understand so much on his own, and open the way to Kuhn in the process.

So, it's better to follow Popper's advice:

If you can't say it simply and clearly, keep quiet, and keep working on it till you can — Amalac

:fire:

Life is too short, and I tend to find SEP unreliable.

A bit confusing now... It seems to me that you just said that paraconsistent logics exclude the LNC, then you backtracked. But if the backtracked version is the correct one, they become irrelevant to this discussion.

I mean a permanent or semi-permanent man-made structure for the purpose of allowing folks to pass over a river (usually) or another obstacle, by walking or driving a vehicle on the structure. A variety of design types are known, but I am not aware of the existence of any paraconsistent bridge. This would tend to prove that Turing was onto something.

Also, to be able to get intuitionisitic logic. — TonesInDeepFreeze

What's intuitionistic about the 'inclusive or' in LEM? Can a door be both open and not open at the same time? Can a man be alive and not be alive at the same time?

by not subsuming LEM within an LEM/LNC combo, we can take out LNC to get paraconsistent logics — TonesInDeepFreeze

I suppose this is the main advantage of dissociating the two.

Coming back to the topic at hand, I do have a question after all: has anyone tried to build a bridge based on paraconsistent logic then, and if yes, what does the bridge look like?