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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Not that any of this will happen. Not only because the Community Notes system is not being applied in Yerp by Facebook but because, even if it was, our footprint doesn't rise to the status of hoofprint. Let's face it, we're just not important enough.
That is something I've been meaning to address. More on this anon.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Conspiracy theorists have just taken power in Washington D.C. Which is laid out in a grid pattern designed by the Illuminati.
So this is a good moment to consider how you decide on what you believe. The theory is that God (or evolution or ‘other’) has given you a brain and five senses. You use your senses to hoover up information about the world and then your brain uses a complex system of synapses to decide what it all means.
Fairly early on in life you discover this to be a remarkably inefficient way of doing things and you switch over to an indirect system which consists of listening to authority figures who tell you what’s what, what they tell you is laid down in synapses in your brain and you agree with them that’s what it all means. When you reach adolescence you discover
| It’s not quite as simple as that. |
There are competing views among authority figures about what’s what. Since your synapses are a set of on/off gates, it is not possible to hold competing views in your brain, so you will have to start choosing, as it were
| which authority figures will be your authority figures. |
You could, if you so wished, take each belief in turn, select the authority figure that makes most sense to you about that belief and end up with an astonishingly diverse array of beliefs. This runs into two problems
1. It is unbelievably hard work. You discover, somewhat to your chagrin, that beliefs are not that important compared to getting a job, acquiring a mate, passing on your genes via ‘children’ and so on and so forth.
2. But beliefs are hugely important when it comes to being a ‘social animal’ which God (or evolution or ‘other’) has dictated you are. Generally speaking, you are welcomed by people holding the same beliefs as you but shunned by people who hold different beliefs. If you have chosen the ‘astonishingly diverse array’ strategy you will, by definition, disagree with everyone about an astonishingly large number of things and you will be universally shunned.
Since everyone is potentially in this boat, human beings would not be social animals if human beings selected for themselves what to believe on an individual basis. The present world would contain eight billion people shunning 7,999,999 people. So human beings have devised a way of coping with billions of individuals, each with a distinct brain.
When you reach adolescence you find there are a number of these packages on offer and by choosing a ‘popular’ package you are
(1) saved the hard graft of having to choose each time what you believe about any given belief and
(2) guaranteed to be acceptable to a large pool of friends, acquaintances, potential mates and so on and so forth.
The big drawback to this system is that society will likely end up as a congeries of warring packages, each shunning all the other packages (to put it mildly) and hence society will soon cease to be a society.
| So there are über-beliefs. |
Ones everyone in a given society believes, over and above the packages, and that together are sufficient to ensure packaged strife is kept to levels which allow society as a whole to motor along. Each society has its own set and, since each society has sufficient force to maintain law and order in the ordinary law and order sense, it has sufficient force to ensure uniformity of über-beliefs.
The big drawback to this system is that if everyone has already gone through the packaging system there is no-one left
| to über the über-beliefs. |
* Individuals cannot ask their own synapses to start changing their own synapses
* Societies are hardly likely to appoint individuals with the special task of challenging beliefs that are holding society together
* In any case, what beliefs? Uber-beliefs do not advertise themselves as über-beliefs — most of them come in the guise of being ‘self-evidently true’.
| Yet they do have to be challenged. |
Not only in the elementary sense that all human beliefs are fallible and ought to be challenged from time to time but in an über-sense. All human beliefs exist because they seem true to the brain-and-senses, but über-beliefs exist for the purpose of maintaining societal order not because they seem true to the brain-and-senses.
| It helps if they are but there is no-one to say if they aren’t. |
That’s all for now. I’m sure your brain hurts as much as mine but you’re not trained to enjoy it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The Pursuit of Wisdom
The word ‘wisdom’ has acquired a lot of unnecessary baggage
Too high falutin’, too old-fashioned, too subjective. But really it just boils down to ‘sound judgement’. Now if you are thinking ‘Oh, is that all?’ then think again. That is the one thing most people are incapable of.
* Are there wise plumbers? No, there are good and bad plumbers.
* Are there wise philosophers? No, there are good and bad philosophers.
* There are plumbers who are wise but a good plumber is one who is well-trained, meticulous and cheap.
* There are philosophers who are wise but a good philosopher is one who is well-trained, original and useful.
* Wisdom is not a job requirement.
| Wisdom is available to anyone who wants it but it is not necessary for a long, productive and happy life. So not many seek it. If you do, listen up. |
Let us take a recent event for which you have the same amount of information as everyone else. Elon Musk waving his arms around. You have to use ‘sound judgment’ to decide whether he was making a Nazi salute or not. These are your options:
(1) He didn’t mean to do so. Since it would be vastly to Mr Musk’s demerits and had no obvious advantage for him, it was an accident arising from his well-known brio.
(2) He meant it. It was some kind of coded (or indeed overt) signal to his followers and sympathisers. Or he sort of half-meant it, or it became one, as a gesture of derision or combativeness to his critics. Something.
(3) I don’t know.
| Which of these would be an example of ‘sound judgement’? |
We can speedily dispense with (3). People can acquire the reputation for wisdom by appearing to be judicious in situations where ‘the full facts’ are not known but this is not applicable here since only an opinion is being sought. Anyone who said, ‘I don’t know’ is either chickening out or, more likely, not wishing to court unpopularity with whomsoever they are speaking.
(1) is clearly a fully rational position and would constitute ‘sound judgement’ though that does not make it true. (2) is less likely (in my judgement) but still within the parameters of ‘sound judgement’ to make (in my judgement). So where does the ‘wisdom/unwisdom’ come in?
| It is the attitude you adopt to (2) if you are (1) or (1) if you are (2). |
If an air of hostility is somewhere in your thoughts, it indicates you are bringing something to the table outside the parameters of the question. You are either of a generally anti-Musk cast of mind or a generally pro-Musk one.
It is immaterial that in fact there is a very great correlation between adopting (1) and being pro-Musk or adopting (2) and being anti-Musk. That is their problem and hostility would not be appropriate on your part. They cannot help themselves. Some degree of forbearance, even sympathy, is called on from you.
You will have noted that I myself am firmly in the (1) camp. But the difference is that I have forbearance, even sympathy, for you all.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Those packages of beliefs become brand names.
Which then have a strange similarity to supermarket brand names. With very similar social snobbery and a plethora of potential pitfalls. Like going shopping in Lidl with a Waitrose carrier bag. or trying to use your Tesco Club Points in Sainsbury.
We might also notice that even philosophers are prone to tribalism or football club-isms.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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That is entirely correct. You cannot be a Marxist and working class for example. You'd have the piss taken out of you something wicked darn the pub.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The nub of it all
How do you stop believing one thing and start believing another?
Being sentient creatures we are supposed to do this all the time. The ability to learn from stimuli in the external world in order to change what we think and hence what we do is what marks us out from the beasts, stuck with their combination of instinctive and copied behaviour.
| Don’t you adam-and-eve it. You are pure animal. Your beliefs are still the ones authority figures imparted to you on your journey from toddler to late adolescence. |
* You may have honed these assumptions.
* You may have expanded them, modernised them, reformed them to within an inch of their sorry lives.
* You may, in a few cases, have flipped them over to their mirror state.
* But they are manifestly the same beliefs you hold right now and
* You regard them as being self-evidently true or as near as human ingenuity can make them
* So there is no reason to change them.
It is irrelevant whether you believe any of this because it is a simple matter of brain chemistry, and you and I share a knowledge of brain chemistry. The simple fact is
| your brain is not designed by nature to change your mind. Not about anything major. |
Your brain is designed to cope with the manifold situations you face in life, as they arise. That requires a complex brain working at or near peak efficiency and would not be the case if your brain was
| busy replacing a major synapse because the owner of the brain wishes to stop believing something and to start believing something else |
because changing a major synapse inevitably requires
| tests being carried out on all connecting synapses to see whether they still fit with the new one. |
Given the cause-and-effect connectedness of knowledge, some of them definitely will not. It wouldn’t be very major if they did. Which means
| your brain remaining unavailable while new connecting synapses are forged. |
Given the nature of networks, all these new synapses will have to be tested for compatibility too, meaning
| your brain will be unavailable indefinitely inspecting and if necessary replacing more and more synapses |
as the changes — or the decisions not to change them — cascade through all the relevant parts of your cortex and, given the nature of the human brain, this means
| dropping down dead because so much of your brain will be busy testing, discarding and replacing cortex circuitry, it won’t have anything left over to keep your autonomic body functions going. |
Do you want that? Do you really, really want to drop down dead? Probably not. So if you’ve got an ounce of common sense, you’ll stick with what you’ve got and be thankful for it. But just one thing. Just as a favour to me.
| Could you please stop pretending you’re anything more than an unthinking twat who mouths twatty things you picked up when you were a twatty adolescent? |
You can pretend you’re all grown up to one another. You’ve got to breed and stuff, I understand all that. Just don’t bend my ear because
| I’ve been on a course that makes it possible to change your mind without general paralysis of the brain. |
No, wait. That would mean you believing something you didn’t believe before, wouldn’t it? Bugger. Back to the drawing board.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | The In the Pub with M J Harper story (on the previous page) has had an interesting backwash, AE-wise. The exchange here is between me and Pete Jones, something of a fan of mine (he even claims to have read RevHist) |
"Claims"?? Sheeeeeeit, I read it twice (but I read lots of things twice, so, easy there)
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Whoops! I just posted it up again in the Brain/Mind thread. But as you say, reading things twice is a sine qua non. That's why I deliberately posted it up twice.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Boreades wrote: | | I do have "hands-on" experience to offer |
It's been so long, I have forgotten what "hands-on" experience I had to offer.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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An example of a frequently occurring AE-relevant event is being played out currently on one of our threads. The phenomenon doesn't have a name, so far as I know, so I thought I would set out its general principles.
1. A makes a statement of fact of a negative nature 'No, it didn't happen.' He says this on the basis of observing the situation at the time and recollecting it accurately now. It also happens to be the orthodox position.
2. B disputes it. 'It did happen'. Also on the basis of observing it then and recollecting it now. His is a revisionist position but by no means unlikely on its face.
3. A cannot produce independent evidence because there is none, it never happened.
4. B can theoretically produce evidence, if it did happen, but declines to do so. (He criticises A on an ad hominem basis instead but this is superfluous.)
5. A's position is the orthodox one so he would not be expected to have commented about it at the time. Nor would anyone else.
6. B's position, being the revisionist one, would be expected to have attracted comment at the time, either by him or generally. But B declines to provide evidence of this either.
So what is the overall position? Clearly both A or B could be right (though not both). It is equally clear that, as things stand, A's appears to be the stronger position, viz
* Orthodox arguments are inherently more likely to be true than revisionist ones.
* A has a reason for his inability to produce contemporaneous evidence stronger than 'I remember witnessing it.'
* B does not have such a reason but given the exigencies of the circumstances this does not seem to be important. Except...
| If the revisionist case was 'by no means unlikely on its face', one would expect there to be just such evidence. |
In its absence, A must be assumed to be correct. Paradoxically, the stronger B's argument is inherently, the weaker it becomes in practice.
The reason this is important for AE-ists is that in disputes with orthodoxy, evidence is the critical factor and 'careful ignoral' is the red flag. The more important the case orthodoxy is putting forward, the more evidence is to be expected to be offered in support of it. And consequently its paucity becomes first a red flag for AE-ists and, if there proves to be none at all, all they need.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Citation required.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Citation
Brian Ambrose: In its wisdom, government moved the old (and presumably ill) from hospital beds to care homes, with disastrous results. In addition, the old were cut-off from their families and treatment was withheld.
Mick Harper: In their defence, it seemed reasonable at the time.
Boreades: No. At the time, it was sheer bloody panic. Calling it "reasonable" is a post-traumatic rationalisation.
Mick Harper: You are quite wrong, Borry. We were both there. If you are right, I should like some evidence that you said different at the time. 'At the time' being in the two months the drama was playing out. This is quite important because I don't recall any counter-arguments at the time. Even among the crazies.
Boreades: That will be because living in an AEL-bubble is not the same as the real world. Where many people were producing counter-arguments. It's not our fault if you have limited sources of knowledge or information.
Mick Harper: I'd be the first to agree. That's why I asked you.
---------------
The AE aspect of this is about distinguishing a rational but ultimately disastrous policy from an 'irrational' one (in terms of stupidity, cupidity, 'other'). We all have a tendency to suppose a disastrous policy must be due to something more than honest error. But if there was no argument at the time, this must surely be assumed to be the case.
The AEL is irrelevant, all three of us were recollecting events that we witnessed as they unfolded. My recollection was that
* the decision itself was uncontentious
* the flaws in the logic were only pointed out in hindsight
* but also--and this is the AE bit--claims were made that the flaws in the logic should have been spotted at the time the decision was made.
In the fast moving flow of events at the time--and especially if a generalised anti-government cast of mind is present--it is all too easy to get the sequence wrong and to suppose that the decision was in fact made in the face of vehement opposing voices. Not recollections that there were.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | We all have a tendency to suppose a disastrous policy must be due to something more than honest error. But if there was no argument at the time, this must surely be assumed to be the case. |
God almighty, you really do need to get out of this AEL bubble more often.
| Mick Harper wrote: | My recollection was that
* the decision itself was uncontentious |
Some decisions were highly contentious. Much of the discontent came from medically qualified people, not from the social sciences. These were not idle spectators, watching from the sidelines and jeering at the referee. This even came from inside the SAGE medical subcommittee. Examples are available, if you bother to look.
| Mick Harper wrote: | | * the flaws in the logic were only pointed out in hindsight |
Flaws in the logic were pointed out with foresight. Including accurate predictions of woeful consequences. Examples are available, if you bother to look.
| Mick Harper wrote: | | * but also--and this is the AE bit--claims were made that the flaws in the logic should have been spotted at the time the decision was made. |
Flaws in the logic were pointed out even before the decisions were made, while they were still options. Examples are available, if you bother to look.
My predictions for the Harpo responses?
1 - a complaint that nobody told him at the time.
2 - a complaint that people here are not spoon-feeding him with evidence.
3 - a complaint that the evidence he has been given (including links to other websites, even including SAGE committee minutes) must be wrong.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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In its wisdom, government moved the old (and presumably ill) from hospital beds to care homes, with disastrous results. In addition, the old were cut-off from their families and treatment was withheld.
|
As I remember it this was not what happened. The government discharged people on an accelerated basis presuming they were not ill to care homes. The mistake was in fact that they did not test these patients for Covid, before discharge, and also did not ensure these former hospital patients would be isolated from other care home residents on arrival.
The problem was that many people already within care homes had existing condtions that would render them more at risk if they were to catch COVID, and it was later thought that a number of these new arrivals of hospital patients would have caught COVID during their time in hospital.
The policy was later changed so all hospital discharge cases had to be tested for COVID before leaving, and care homes had to keep hospital discharge cases isolated, whether testing positive or not, from other residents for, I think, 14 days.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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We all have a tendency to suppose a disastrous policy must be due to something more than honest error. But if there was no argument at the time, this must surely be assumed to be the case.
God almighty, you really do need to get out of this AEL bubble more often. |
Why do you keep saying this? I told you I was describing my recollections of the time. It has nothing to do with either AE or the AEL
My recollection was that * the decision itself was uncontentious
Some decisions were highly contentious. Much of the discontent came from medically qualified people, not from the social sciences. These were not idle spectators, watching from the sidelines and jeering at the referee. This even came from inside the SAGE medical subcommittee. |
I recollect all this just as well as you do. I am simply claiming that the decision about the care home patients was made right at the beginning and was uncontentious in the sense I cannot recall there being any great debate about it.
| Examples are available, if you bother to look. |
That's why I asked you. You still haven't. However I am sure you will be able to track something or other down if you really tried. Since you continue to be shifty on the point I expect you will continue to be.
* the flaws in the logic were only pointed out in hindsight
Flaws in the logic were pointed out with foresight. Including accurate predictions of woeful consequences. Examples are available, if you bother to look. |
Where have I heard that before?
* but also--and this is the AE bit--claims were made that the flaws in the logic should have been spotted at the time the decision was made.
Flaws in the logic were pointed out even before the decisions were made, while they were still options. Examples are available, if you bother to look. |
I have asked a colleague to institute enquiries but he's being a bit lackadaisical.
| My predictions for the Harpo responses? 1 - a complaint that nobody told him at the time. 2 - a complaint that people here are not spoon-feeding him with evidence. 3 - a complaint that the evidence he has been given (including links to other websites, even including SAGE committee minutes) must be wrong. |
I find it generally is all my fault.
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