Ron said to John:
The problem space is where American culture lives, but I would not say that is
where the contributors here at the MD live meaning the mental space deemed the
"problem". So attacking them as part of the problem does not support your
contention.
John replied:
My contention is what I make it. I hadn't really thought of attacking the
problem of anti-intellectualism here in MD because everybody who contributes
here seems pretty intellectual. Maybe too much so, but I gotta add that
intellect needs balancing sometimes, not suppression. I think being in our
heads is good, we just need to be in our hearts also. Attacking the
heartspace, because its not the headspace, is the wrong move. imho.
dmb says:
John, you totally missed Ron's point. The "problem space" is SOM, the problem
addressed by the MOQ, not anti-intellectualism. Even further, the criticism is
that your anti-intellectualism is connected to your failure to get out of the
problem space. That is to say, you keep attacking intellect here in the MOQ
discussion group as if it were SOM, as if it were still the problem. In fact,
you just did it again in your reply to Ron. Nobody is attacking the
"heartspace" or anything like that. The guy who made that "wrong move" is just
your own straw man, one of the most common fallacies.
You still haven't dealt with that criticism and you continue to make that same
mistake over and over again. I sincerely wonder why you don't seem to care
about that. I think that kind of carelessness is bizarre and disturbing.
Ron said:
What good is freedom when you are too stupid to make good quality intellectual
decisions? Is being a slave to biological patterns truly leading a life that's
free?
John replied:
I'd settle for good social decisions. Quality intellect is rare.
dmb says:
Is somebody making a case for the freedom in biological values? I hope not.
That would be lame. I wonder what a good social decision looks like without
intellect doing the deciding. Isn't that what it means to have a society that's
guided intellect rather than tradition?
One point really worth stressing, I think, is that we can never discern the
difference between good ideas and bad ideas without intellect.
One of the objections sometimes raised (against an intellectually guided
society) is that some ideas are bad ideas. Intellectual static patterns of low
quality should be trumped by social patterns, they might add. But, again, we
can never discern the difference between good ideas and bad ideas without
intellect. That's what we mean by intellectual values. It's not that we're
supposed to love every idea just because it's an idea. It's the quality of the
idea that matters, of course, and that's why we're supposed to care about
things like clarity, coherence, consistency with the evidence, honesty,
precision is the use of words and the relations between concepts. These aren't
arbitrary demands or oppressive rules used to squelch dissent or anything like
that. They are just some of the most common marks of intellectual quality.
Ideally, you want to raise this to an art form and those will be some of the
likely ingredients. The art of rationality requires intellectual quality and
then some. You gotta, gotta have it - even if it's not enough all by itself.
It's time to re-integrate the passions, the "affective domain of man's
consciousness," Pirsig says. Likewise, James says our best ideas will be
produced by thinkers who use ALL of their faculties. That's intellect in the
solution space, which is not to be confused with SOM (or with that mean and
cruel community college teacher who didn't like you).
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