It has been suggested <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age>
that stifling of independent reasoning (aka willful ignorance)
contributed to the end of the Islamic Golden Age. I've seen other
references calling it a rise in anti-rationalism. Western civilization
may be heading the same way.
Robert C
PS sorry to enter the thread a little late. R
On 6/10/15 7:05 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME
-- rec --
On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Steve Smith <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Nick,
It's the _shocked_ outrage I find tiresome. By all means be
outraged at any and all forms of corruption that take your fancy,
and forge that outrage into action.
But if someone is shocked and thinks that shock is worth
mentioning, then he or she hasn't been paying attention or is
exhibiting another kind of "willful ignorance".
-- rec --
Roger (et alii) -
And what of "shocked but not surprised"?
The longer I live, the more I experience this dichotomy... my
intellectual self has catalogued a wide enough range of behaviour
and experience in the world, that when confronted with a specific
new point fact in the universe, I can usually find a place to hang
it in my world-view tree, but that doesn't mean it doesn't disturb
my soul when I first apprehend the "factoid" in question.
I wonder how this is affected by our wide-ranging apprehension
mediated (mostly, or formerly) by journalism (nod to Tom) and now
(more recently) crowd-sourcing of information from around the
world (including in the (willfully hidden from self?) corners of
our own back yards). On one hand we get desensitized (thus losing
"shock value") and on the other hand we are given much more
context in which to help us properly understand whatever "shocked
but not surprised" factoid just got bounced off our apprehension.
Every time I feel "shocked" (if not surprised) I am thankful that
my soul remains tender enough to experience that. While I do have
plenty of callouses of cynicism, it is nice to be reminded that I
am still alive inside these multiple layers of insulation
(economic and other forms of security, cynicism, etc.).
- Steve
On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Nick Thompson
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
But Roger, isn’t this a ticket to apathy? Where is the spur
to action without outrage? I know that question sounds odd,
but I am really asking it. Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
*From:*Friam [mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>] *On Behalf Of *Roger
Critchlow
*Sent:* Tuesday, June 09, 2015 1:37 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The Attack on Truth - The Chronicle of
Higher Education
Of course the really fun thing about statistics is the
ongoing discussion about the "willful ignorance" of
scientists submitting papers with technically correct but
wholly dubious claims of statistical significance, because --
rather, becorrelate -- their salaries depend on getting
published. Funny that the language naturally inserts a
causal claim into that observation, where I would rather put
the cause on the system than the individuals, and I have to
invent a word to back off
I'm tending to see this issue theologically. The technical
name for "we're all imperfect and we've always been so" is
original sin. Feeling a bit of impostor syndrome? That's
how the personal experience of original sin manifests.
Disgusted that cops aren't fair, that rich people get
privileges, that politicians repay rich people with more
privileges, that FIFA is corrupt, that Australia outsources
immigrant detention camps to Nauru, that Nauru denies visas
to Australian civil rights lawyers seeking to defend
immigrant rights, and so on? Yeah, well, be disgusted, but
try not to get too righteous about it and spare us the
expressions of shocked outrage. If you're shocked at this,
then you haven't been paying attention.
So, are there any entirely good or entirely bad persons? Or
are they entirely figments of our imaginations?
-- rec --
On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 10:10 AM, glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Statistics is one tool. I'm not sure it's the most
powerful tool, though. I tend to think the best tool is
... well, it goes by many names. One name is "active
listening" ... "empathy" ... etc. The technique is well
known to all of us (well unless we're autistic or
psychopathic). When you hear someone say something that
just sounds wrong, there are 2 basic steps:
1) find out why you think they're wrong (including the
statistics that surround any of the facts involved), and
2) try to figure out what the speaker _really_ means by
whatever nonsense they're spouting.
Since I don't believe our thoughts are very accurate at
all, I have no problems empathizing with someone who
spouts (apparent) nonsense. I do it myself on a regular
basis. I try not to. But it's difficult. In fact, the
reason I find purposeful nonsense (including climate
denial or chemtrails, but more like chatbots) so cool is
because of the accidental nonsense in which we bathe.
On 06/09/2015 08:36 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
> Righto. So what we do is put a measure on "how much
confidence" we have. Statistics gives us some tools for
that - namely the "moment functionals" (mean, variance,
skewness, etc.); and information theory gives us some
more general tools for that - entropy and the other
entropic funtionals. So maybe it's a mixture of the
relative and the absolute. Maybe we've moved up to the
"junior" level?
>
> Grant
>
> On 6/9/15 9:14 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> Correct. Nothing is certain. We've known that since
Kant. NOW what? That
>> there are no certain facts does not imply that some
facts are not more
>> enduring and useful than others. We need to get
beyond the sophomoric
>> revelation that "everything is relative."
--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
Float away from those horizons
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