I agree with Marcus that the litigants do have the "right" to "enforce" their contrived rules on the judges (as usual, the scare quotes foreshadow my rhetoric). I think this is mostly because there is no line between judge and litigant. We can see this quite obviously with the rampant accusations of "activist judge" in punditville today. Even if there is some sort of line, it's a fuzzy one. The memes of the litigants infect the judges and the rulings of the judges infect the litigants.
I am quite taken (aback?) by the neoreactionary movement (e.g. http://www.moreright.net/why-nrx-is-winning/). If you filter out the nonsense: misogyny, racism, etc., their criticism of democracy is interesting. What it seems you do (in your criticism of consensus democracy) and what they do (in their criticism of populism) are to oversimplify the inverse and forward maps by which the high dimensional and low dimensional data relate.
Even within a single eyeball, there is no single perspective. So, even in your parallax analogy, the oversimplification can be demonstrated. Perhaps the foveal blindspot thing works to demonstrate it? The image generated by 1 eyeball is already a reduction from a higher dimensional image, as shown by the single eyeball consensus that there is nothing in that foveal area. Adding the new eyeball just combines two pre-reduced consensuses to create an even further reduction... but thereby adding back the two blinded areas.
Similarly, the litigants are collectives; the judge is a collective; and their both collectives of collectives, all the way down and up. Any instantaneous snapshot is open to some false clustering... the stability of any given consensus can be largely illusory, ready to vanish in an instant.
On 01/27/2015 01:25 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote:
To Marcus and Group, If there are multiple points of view of any event, which one of the many can be true, or are all true in some respect? If every view point is contaminated by default belief/delusion how can we decide which is true? Consensus or democracy seems appealing but it is a very simple matter of numerical superiority with no better a chance of being right. The collective opinion is reduced to one and gains nothing by addition. Parallax is the simplest such example, left eye versus right eye and the brain merges the disparate 2D images into a 3D mapping. We could decide to blind one eye in favour of the other but then the value of the map is compromised. Control Freaks would prefer their working eye or viewpoint to be the only one ever considered. So the control freak must annihilate all contradiction and be elevated in the esteem of the group ( whose opinions have also been squashed as the admission price) . Harris may simply be indulging in a manoeuvre to appear as an "authority" and enrich himself at the expense of a naïve group. Quite Normal. But none of that makes him right but only wealthier than some. There is something so medieval about pitting an atheist against a believer in an arena each using bludgeons to assert their position. Well if both are deluded in some manner there will never be truth , who so ever gets the killing blow in first conflates assassination with the victory of his argument. ad hominem fallacy Everyone seems to assume that one is either a Believer or an Atheist as if there are only two possibilities. As a "judge", neither side can force me to adopt certain limitations, or petitions. If the judge is outside of any group affiliation he is free to shrug off fallacious arguments as they appear. The litigants have no right to enforce their contrived rules on the judges, or do they? anymore than the left eye has tricks to exclude the right eye. Harris may also be motivated by a need for status as well as funds, the drive for literary quality may be very small.
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