First, in response to your first paragraph, my complaint about ‘tone-deafness’ was not intended as a complaint about style. It was a complaint about your failure to do well at the listening half of conversation. A failure to tailor your arguments to the responses you receive. A failure to understand the counterarguments. My complaint may be wrong and unjustified, but it is definitely not a complaint about style.
But, speaking of style, you suggest:
We think rational people ought to be able to look beyond [issues of style]. Right?
Well, I can see the attractiveness of that slogan, but we tend to think of it a bit differently here. Here, we think that rational people ought to be able to fix any rough edges in their ‘style’ that prevent them from communicating their ideas successfully. We don’t believe that it makes sense to place the entire onus of adjustment on the listener. And we especially don’t believe that only one side has the onus of listening.
Perhaps it is you that has been deaf?
Perhaps. But that’s enough about me. Lets talk about you. :) As you may have noticed, responding to an attack with a counterattack usually doesn’t achieve very much here.
You seem to care about kharma. If one thinks that kharma is an authoritarian mistake, as I do, then how much respect to you think I should have?
I guess that would depend on how interested you are in having me listen to your ideas.
I do want to hear some good arguments against Popper. Unfortunately most arguments, including those here, are to do with the myths—such as Popper is falsificationism, and come from people that don’t know Popper well or got their information from second-hand sources.
You are probably right. And that presents you with a problem. How do you induce people to come to know Popper well? How do you tempt them to get their information from some non-second-hand source?
Now I’m sure you guys have given long and careful thought to this problem and have developed a plan. But if you should discover that things are not going well, I have some ideas that might help. Which is simply that you might consider producing some discussion postings consisting mostly of long quotes from Popper and his most prominent disciples, with only short glosses from yourselves.
Tversky and Kahneman believe in such ideas as “evolved mental behaviour” and “bounded rationality”. These beliefs exist right enough. If you read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch you will see arguments against these sort of things.
Hmmm. There is something here I just don’t understand. Why all this hostility to what seems to me to be the fairly uncontroversial realization that people are often less good at reasoning than we would like them to be. It is almost as if you had religious or political objections to some evil doctrine. Do you think it would be possible to enlighten me as to why it seems to you that the stakes are so high with this issue?
As for reading Deutsch, I intend to. I don’t think I have ever had a book recommended to me so many times before it is even published in this country.
As for reading Deutsch, I intend to. I don’t think I have ever had a book recommended to me so many times before it is even published in this country.
Somehow I was able to buy it in the Amazon Kindle store for about $18, but the highlight feature is not working properly. My introduction to Deutsch was several years ago with The Fabric of Reality, in which he defends the Everett interpretation, among other things. At that point he became a must-read author (which means I find him worth reading, not that I agree fully with him), one of only a handful. (Daniel Dennett is another). If you want to read Deutsch now, The Fabric of Reality is immediately available. As I recall, it’s a mix of persuasive arguments and dubious arguments.
First, in response to your first paragraph, my complaint about ‘tone-deafness’ was not intended as a complaint about style. It was a complaint about your failure to do well at the listening half of conversation. A failure to tailor your arguments to the responses you receive. A failure to understand the counterarguments. My complaint may be wrong and unjustified, but it is definitely not a complaint about style.
But, speaking of style, you suggest:
Well, I can see the attractiveness of that slogan, but we tend to think of it a bit differently here. Here, we think that rational people ought to be able to fix any rough edges in their ‘style’ that prevent them from communicating their ideas successfully. We don’t believe that it makes sense to place the entire onus of adjustment on the listener. And we especially don’t believe that only one side has the onus of listening.
Perhaps. But that’s enough about me. Lets talk about you. :) As you may have noticed, responding to an attack with a counterattack usually doesn’t achieve very much here.
I guess that would depend on how interested you are in having me listen to your ideas.
You are probably right. And that presents you with a problem. How do you induce people to come to know Popper well? How do you tempt them to get their information from some non-second-hand source?
Now I’m sure you guys have given long and careful thought to this problem and have developed a plan. But if you should discover that things are not going well, I have some ideas that might help. Which is simply that you might consider producing some discussion postings consisting mostly of long quotes from Popper and his most prominent disciples, with only short glosses from yourselves.
Hmmm. There is something here I just don’t understand. Why all this hostility to what seems to me to be the fairly uncontroversial realization that people are often less good at reasoning than we would like them to be. It is almost as if you had religious or political objections to some evil doctrine. Do you think it would be possible to enlighten me as to why it seems to you that the stakes are so high with this issue?
As for reading Deutsch, I intend to. I don’t think I have ever had a book recommended to me so many times before it is even published in this country.
Somehow I was able to buy it in the Amazon Kindle store for about $18, but the highlight feature is not working properly. My introduction to Deutsch was several years ago with The Fabric of Reality, in which he defends the Everett interpretation, among other things. At that point he became a must-read author (which means I find him worth reading, not that I agree fully with him), one of only a handful. (Daniel Dennett is another). If you want to read Deutsch now, The Fabric of Reality is immediately available. As I recall, it’s a mix of persuasive arguments and dubious arguments.