Glen - Your ability to demonstrate the "steelmanning" skill continues to inspire me. I don't know if I am constitutionally capable of focusing down on a single topic well enough to even begin to demonstrate it myself. I have been "fuming" over Dave's *written* response to Nick's last minute challenge (on vFriAM) and wanting to challenge *HIM* to steelman this for us. I think you sketched it out for him here. Dave may well be as handicapped in this mode as I seem to be, but I would value it if he could try. Dave?
Since vFriam degenerated to just 4 Brady Bunch characters (you, Nick, Guerin, myself), nobody else observed the _role-playing_ that you and Stephen both adopted so adroitly, calling up an alternative personality, or homunculous or channeling of each of your own cartoon-but-steelmannish characterization of a (naive?) Trump Supporter. Even better, I felt, was the way Nick very good-naturedly all but pleaded to your alternate characters to let "Stephen and Glen come back! I don't even know who I am without you" (bad paraphrase, worthy of correction by Nick if he feels misquoted). I just observed, winding up my whole body to throw myself between "Danny and ???" and Nick if things got violent. It was a fascinating moment. - Steve > Agreed. To be fair, though, just as Dave announced he had to leave the > meeting, he was asked to quickly state why he thought the accusations against > Trump supporters was a mischaracterization. He called out the anti-Trump > crowd for over-generalizing those who voted for Trump and briefly described a > few reasons a *heterogeneous* collection of people might have different > reasons for doing so (conservative court appointments, tough talk to China, > etc. -- arguably legitimate things some of us might want in a President). > This post of his was, therefore, a legitimate response to that request, > coming up with a narrative circumscribing the faulty thinking of the > anti-Trump crowd. > > However, in so doing, he attempts to right one wrong with another wrong. His > post rightly calls out the over-generalizing fallacy of the anti-Trump by > then over-generalizing (or outright false narrative cartooning) them. My tack > would have been to demonstrate the diversity of the not-pro-but-not-anti > Trump tolerators first. *Then* maybe dive into why the anti-Trump crowd > exhibits such flawed thinking. And FWIW, I agree with his gist that the > anti-Trump crowd is, at least a bit, eschatological. But I think lots of us, > regardless of political bent, are eschatological. We see it in the > Singularians, the bioethicists re: DIY Bio, ecologists, climatologists, Steve > Guerins re: societal phase transitions >8^D, etc. > > The story could easily be rounded out with a demonstration that the > anti-Trump crowd is also diverse. Not all of us are eschatological. Some of > us are simply embarrassed by him. I'll take an Evil Genius over a bumbling > moron any day of the week. And my reasons for purposefully over-generalizing > my characterization of the Trump tolerators as morons or cult members is a > (likely misguided) attempt to shame or guilt them into thinking a little > harder about who they vote for. It's got nothing to do with "millenarianism". > > On 6/5/20 11:16 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: >> Presumably, davew doesn't believe that the preceding characterizes the way >> any living human being thinks. So why pretend that it does other than to >> insult people? And why does he want to insult people? We don't need any more >> of that. We are already fully supplied with insults from the >> insulter-in-chief. Let's not make things worse. - .... . -..-. . ...- --- .-.. ..- - .. --- -. -..-. .-- .. .-.. .-.. -..-. -... . -..-. .-.. .. ...- . -..-. ... - .-. . .- -- . -.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
