Well when they made claims like “logic/math is only one way of knowing things, along with metaphor and [something else I forgot]” and some claims about culture being distinct from individuals, I readied myself for explaining how human intuition and culture ultimately reduces to deterministic firing of neurons. When I started on that, they jumped ahead and said that they already knew and accepted a soul-free, lawful universe. I was a bit stumped, until I realised that I’d just pattern-matched those claims onto a stereotype of the kind of people that would write in The Social Text.
Upon reflection, I had been talking more in the vein of “The Universe is lawful, even when we don’t know the laws, so math ultimately drives everything”, and they had been more along the lines of “We can’t go around calculating probabilities all the time, so we might as well go by intuition most of the time”. It was a failure to cross inferential gaps on my part.
I met a relativist postmodern-type that also understood evolutionary psychology and science in general.
What, you hadn’t heard of Paul Feyerabend?
More detail, please.
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Seconding the call for more details.
Well when they made claims like “logic/math is only one way of knowing things, along with metaphor and [something else I forgot]” and some claims about culture being distinct from individuals, I readied myself for explaining how human intuition and culture ultimately reduces to deterministic firing of neurons. When I started on that, they jumped ahead and said that they already knew and accepted a soul-free, lawful universe. I was a bit stumped, until I realised that I’d just pattern-matched those claims onto a stereotype of the kind of people that would write in The Social Text.
Upon reflection, I had been talking more in the vein of “The Universe is lawful, even when we don’t know the laws, so math ultimately drives everything”, and they had been more along the lines of “We can’t go around calculating probabilities all the time, so we might as well go by intuition most of the time”. It was a failure to cross inferential gaps on my part.
I think you just broke LW’s new commenter CSS.
Looks fine to me?