But how do you debate for example the climate issue with a believer in the climate crisis?
The argument is that the experts make models, which clearly show we will al die in a fiery apocalypse, 50 years from now. Hence we must act right now.
What can you say to that?
- You cannot point to experience: the issue is in the future. Sure, every warm day proves the climate crisis, but no weather disproves it.
- You cannot point to other experts who have other opinions, because clearly they are in the minority, or too old, or may have noble prices in physics, but what do they know.
- You cannot even make good scientific arguments yourself, because the climate believers usually have so surprisingly little knowledge, and they do not even understand it when the refute themselves.
Right, these convictions are not strictly rational, they're based in the whole complex of human experience, including values and worldviews, which have to a great extent been hijacked by the mass media propaganda system, and function as an impoverished mythological anchoring.
Maybe it's appropriate to say that these convictions (in relation to ultimate and existential issues such as the Ukraine war, the trust in authorities in relation to the covid situation, the Ukraine war &c) are negotiated in "mythic space" rather than only or strictly at the rational level, and that this is why debates restricted to the latter are inadequate.
Jul 28, 2023·edited Jul 28, 2023Liked by laughlyn (johan eddebo)
Thanks ? I was actually thinking about Something Else, but it didnt work...
A thought: Mything is in our nature ? It's the glue, it makes up for all that we dont or cant know....Can there be 'pseudo-myths' ? I suppose if i was one of those Jungians types i'd say there were (unconscious) architypes, in which case there'd be no 'traditional ones' only a reworking (updating ?) of the same ones ?
I'd define myths as complex narrative and aesthetic phenomena that connect with fundamental truths and profound aspects of our human nature and the world around us.
They're not reducible to rationalist discourse, and they're not heuristic placeholders in lieu of more accurate, formal modes of conceptualization such as those dominant within Western scientism and the entire Enlightenment paradigm.
I think you will find this passage from the introduction of Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth (Childrens Health Defense, 2022) relevant to your discussion:
"Due to the inherent complexity of its underlying subject, the vaccine debate challenges medical professionals and scientists alike… In order to attain even a moderate level of expertise on this topic, one needs to have at least a basic understanding of numerous and varied medical and scientific disciplines… infectious diseases, pediatrics, family medicine, vaccinology, bacteriology, immunology, epidemiology, toxicology. To diagnose adverse side effects, assess their severity, and find suitable treatments, one needs considerable knowledge of clinical medicine, with the specific fields depending on which organs are affected and the level of harm sustained (neurology, gastroenterology, dermatology, allergology, rheumatology, autoimmune diseases, etc.)
The above is by no means an exhaustive list. Vitally important aspects of the vaccine debate lie outside the domain of medical science… One must learn how vaccine research is conducted and vaccine policy is formed in the real world—where power, money, and politics shape the rules.
Legal and constitutional matters, especially with regard to severe vaccine side effects, occasionally crop up in courts across the globe. And ethical questions arise from legislative initiatives to compel immunization by law… Thus, some knowledge in all the aforementioned academic and non-academic disciplines is required if one is to gain a comprehensive understanding of all the issues surrounding vaccines. Vaccination, then, has to be one of the most complex issues—if not the most complex—to be publicly debated over the last few decades. It’s safe to assume there isn’t a single person on Earth with expertise in all of these fields, even among those celebrated as “experts” on vaccination and those responsible for shaping vaccine policy. "
Thanks. Very much so. That's another important point - if you actually look closely upon the relevant issues of any half-complex topic, it's immediately clear that there are no experts, nor groups of ostensible such, that actually can possess all the necessary knowledge or competence to certainly conclude the best course of action or all of the final answers.
The inevitable implication is that all voices need to be heard so that every potentially useful idea may come to light.
Well, in case we're actually interested in the truth, that is.
And thanks for your book, started reading it yesterday. Utterly brilliant, I'll try for a similar direction with the draft of our common piece.
This is why our society once promoted the ideal of a roundly-educated citizenry. People love to piss on degree requirements, but the fact is that forcing STEM students to take a couple courses in what used to be called the humanities, and liberal arts students to take at least a couple math and science classes, produced college graduates with enough general knowledge to competently assess the issues being debated by their representatives in government.
I took formal logic as one of my “math” requirements; it was a rigorous course that sharpened the way I think and how I evaluate arguments. And as one of my science requirements, I took a class on virology focusing on the AIDS virus. I learned so much about how viruses replicate and how our immune systems work.
Unfortunately, this education resulted in me realizing how fraudulent so much of the “pandemic”-era propaganda was.
My highschool education was also pretty rigorous.
It’s my understanding that this kind of intellectual formation has been pretty much phased out of public education.
I do not believe that any of these experts is untainted by external pressures and forces, not to mention their own beliefs and predilections. You don't get to be an expert, or at least one who is in a position of power, nominated by the proper authorities, without appeasing them. If someone is an expert I always wonder who owns them.
It’s a cultural thing. Any detailed study of the historical development of Western European intellectual institutions shows that they predictably follow the organisational form of the Catholic Church (funnily enough, the more Protestant a country is the more this seems to be true). It seems westerners cannot possibly think of any other way to structure it, and this all comes back to the base assumptions at the heart of western European thought (free will, infinite time and space, personal development). All the schools become mini churches, complete with strictly hierarchical structures, and the punishment of excommunication. Schisms and heresy’s are littered through the history books. There are even popes (Fauci springs to mind). The word ‘layman’ gives it away, in that in the west there can never be a generalised priesthood in the masses, it must be an exclusive clique of experts lording over everyone else.
What did counterbalance this was the ideological opposition to the church; the material world, and namely the what we call the ‘market’, which in this context just means negative and positive feedback. Market discipline quickly makes a meal of defective ‘expertise’, skin in the game has a way of doing that. It’s when expertise, whether it be religious or (nominally) secular, becomes cloistered in the bubble of abstraction without consequence (government subsidies do that to you) that it becomes authoritarian without merit; real world feedback is key.
Jul 26, 2023·edited Jul 26, 2023Liked by laughlyn (johan eddebo)
There's experts and there's experts...Cosmologists and paleontologists are, to me, story tellers - until they insist theirs is the correct story...
My mother had no training, before raising nine of us...Some might say she trained on the job, but i can tell you, from the way i turned out, she was never an expert...
When she insisted "because i said so !" she'd a thick strap to back up her 'expertise'...
(She was, of course, an expert at making do, and getting through, which sometimes i think, is the only expertise that really matters)...
But how do you debate for example the climate issue with a believer in the climate crisis?
The argument is that the experts make models, which clearly show we will al die in a fiery apocalypse, 50 years from now. Hence we must act right now.
What can you say to that?
- You cannot point to experience: the issue is in the future. Sure, every warm day proves the climate crisis, but no weather disproves it.
- You cannot point to other experts who have other opinions, because clearly they are in the minority, or too old, or may have noble prices in physics, but what do they know.
- You cannot even make good scientific arguments yourself, because the climate believers usually have so surprisingly little knowledge, and they do not even understand it when the refute themselves.
I find there is no debating possible.
Right, these convictions are not strictly rational, they're based in the whole complex of human experience, including values and worldviews, which have to a great extent been hijacked by the mass media propaganda system, and function as an impoverished mythological anchoring.
Maybe it's appropriate to say that these convictions (in relation to ultimate and existential issues such as the Ukraine war, the trust in authorities in relation to the covid situation, the Ukraine war &c) are negotiated in "mythic space" rather than only or strictly at the rational level, and that this is why debates restricted to the latter are inadequate.
"mythic space", which in our time are computer models.
Myth mediates...And without Science as myth us laymen wouldnt believe in Science...
That's a profound insight I think. Contemporary pseudo-myths sort of fill in the void of the traditional ones.
Thanks ? I was actually thinking about Something Else, but it didnt work...
A thought: Mything is in our nature ? It's the glue, it makes up for all that we dont or cant know....Can there be 'pseudo-myths' ? I suppose if i was one of those Jungians types i'd say there were (unconscious) architypes, in which case there'd be no 'traditional ones' only a reworking (updating ?) of the same ones ?
I'd define myths as complex narrative and aesthetic phenomena that connect with fundamental truths and profound aspects of our human nature and the world around us.
They're not reducible to rationalist discourse, and they're not heuristic placeholders in lieu of more accurate, formal modes of conceptualization such as those dominant within Western scientism and the entire Enlightenment paradigm.
It's better to show that the models are based on edited data...
Garbage in, garbage out modelling.
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/11/visualizing-noaanasa-us-data-tampering/
"no weather disproves it." well that's the thing, isn't it. there's no debate possible where no negation is possible.
It's not directly analogous to the favored covid argument "but people are dying!" but it's similarly slippery.
I think you will find this passage from the introduction of Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth (Childrens Health Defense, 2022) relevant to your discussion:
"Due to the inherent complexity of its underlying subject, the vaccine debate challenges medical professionals and scientists alike… In order to attain even a moderate level of expertise on this topic, one needs to have at least a basic understanding of numerous and varied medical and scientific disciplines… infectious diseases, pediatrics, family medicine, vaccinology, bacteriology, immunology, epidemiology, toxicology. To diagnose adverse side effects, assess their severity, and find suitable treatments, one needs considerable knowledge of clinical medicine, with the specific fields depending on which organs are affected and the level of harm sustained (neurology, gastroenterology, dermatology, allergology, rheumatology, autoimmune diseases, etc.)
The above is by no means an exhaustive list. Vitally important aspects of the vaccine debate lie outside the domain of medical science… One must learn how vaccine research is conducted and vaccine policy is formed in the real world—where power, money, and politics shape the rules.
Legal and constitutional matters, especially with regard to severe vaccine side effects, occasionally crop up in courts across the globe. And ethical questions arise from legislative initiatives to compel immunization by law… Thus, some knowledge in all the aforementioned academic and non-academic disciplines is required if one is to gain a comprehensive understanding of all the issues surrounding vaccines. Vaccination, then, has to be one of the most complex issues—if not the most complex—to be publicly debated over the last few decades. It’s safe to assume there isn’t a single person on Earth with expertise in all of these fields, even among those celebrated as “experts” on vaccination and those responsible for shaping vaccine policy. "
Thanks. Very much so. That's another important point - if you actually look closely upon the relevant issues of any half-complex topic, it's immediately clear that there are no experts, nor groups of ostensible such, that actually can possess all the necessary knowledge or competence to certainly conclude the best course of action or all of the final answers.
The inevitable implication is that all voices need to be heard so that every potentially useful idea may come to light.
Well, in case we're actually interested in the truth, that is.
And thanks for your book, started reading it yesterday. Utterly brilliant, I'll try for a similar direction with the draft of our common piece.
This is why our society once promoted the ideal of a roundly-educated citizenry. People love to piss on degree requirements, but the fact is that forcing STEM students to take a couple courses in what used to be called the humanities, and liberal arts students to take at least a couple math and science classes, produced college graduates with enough general knowledge to competently assess the issues being debated by their representatives in government.
I took formal logic as one of my “math” requirements; it was a rigorous course that sharpened the way I think and how I evaluate arguments. And as one of my science requirements, I took a class on virology focusing on the AIDS virus. I learned so much about how viruses replicate and how our immune systems work.
Unfortunately, this education resulted in me realizing how fraudulent so much of the “pandemic”-era propaganda was.
My highschool education was also pretty rigorous.
It’s my understanding that this kind of intellectual formation has been pretty much phased out of public education.
Too bad.
I do not believe that any of these experts is untainted by external pressures and forces, not to mention their own beliefs and predilections. You don't get to be an expert, or at least one who is in a position of power, nominated by the proper authorities, without appeasing them. If someone is an expert I always wonder who owns them.
Let Ezra Pound and T S Elliot fight in the Captain's tower -
all that really matters from now on is your OBEDIENCE...
It’s a cultural thing. Any detailed study of the historical development of Western European intellectual institutions shows that they predictably follow the organisational form of the Catholic Church (funnily enough, the more Protestant a country is the more this seems to be true). It seems westerners cannot possibly think of any other way to structure it, and this all comes back to the base assumptions at the heart of western European thought (free will, infinite time and space, personal development). All the schools become mini churches, complete with strictly hierarchical structures, and the punishment of excommunication. Schisms and heresy’s are littered through the history books. There are even popes (Fauci springs to mind). The word ‘layman’ gives it away, in that in the west there can never be a generalised priesthood in the masses, it must be an exclusive clique of experts lording over everyone else.
What did counterbalance this was the ideological opposition to the church; the material world, and namely the what we call the ‘market’, which in this context just means negative and positive feedback. Market discipline quickly makes a meal of defective ‘expertise’, skin in the game has a way of doing that. It’s when expertise, whether it be religious or (nominally) secular, becomes cloistered in the bubble of abstraction without consequence (government subsidies do that to you) that it becomes authoritarian without merit; real world feedback is key.
There's experts and there's experts...Cosmologists and paleontologists are, to me, story tellers - until they insist theirs is the correct story...
My mother had no training, before raising nine of us...Some might say she trained on the job, but i can tell you, from the way i turned out, she was never an expert...
When she insisted "because i said so !" she'd a thick strap to back up her 'expertise'...
(She was, of course, an expert at making do, and getting through, which sometimes i think, is the only expertise that really matters)...