In physics it is not rare to define things by what measurements they give out and often giving an “objective” contruct it is sufficient how to translate from one coordinate system / measurement to other measurement setting / coordinates. Good epistemology isn’t particularly characterised by having “invariant public objects”.
I can come up with sense of “who is most popular” that has an objective answer. If you asked everybody privately to rank every other persons popularity and had a vote count of some kind some person would probably come on the top of it. I get that there is an attempt to point in that the shared conciousness will regard one member of being more likeable and this mutual understanding building is more muddy than any kind of extrapolated opinion.
I think avoidance of weirdness is not a main motivating factor. Just knowing that this will lead into a rich childhood would be a different and more accurate description on what is going on. It is a “cool story bro”, if hearing it is fun and you care to be entertained then the veracity isn’t that big of a issue.
The limitor off-course for knowledge seekers is that the applicability is reached by focusing on the technical claims. This will bar-off some kind of moves. But those not aware of those limitations might worry about the universal reach being used for wrong purposes ie scientism, opinions trying to disguise as fact. But the fire of truth will only burn falsehoods, otherwise it will be ambivalent. Trying to use “destroyed by truth” to cruelty will be on shady foundation and likely to self-undermine.
I don’t mean to inspire cruelty. If I successfully gave you understanding, you can use it for kindness, pity or cruelty as you see fit. Mostly I wrote the last paragraphs in the tone of “Humans are Cthulhu” as seen through the eyes of someone who thinks in this anti-epistemology.
Your answer to “objective popularity” is only slightly different from common knowledge, and it has the same properties of being fundamentally observer-dependent. Ask some Greens and some Blues separately “is X popular?” where X is a politician, and you get two very different results. Similarly, “possible joke #3852 is funny” is true for one audience, false for another. “The Sun goes around the Earth” is true for a bunch of hunter-gatherers, false for a group of astronomers. Wait, wait, what? “true for some group” i.e. observer-dependence of the answer-generating process.
Compare the alternative. If someone sticks to “either the question is ill-posed, or the answer must be observer-independent” a bit too strictly, they will end up either concluding that popularity is a wrong concept and doesn’t exist, or falling into the mind projection fallacy and concluding that there must be a little “is-popular” label attached to people.
“Frankly, I’m not entirely sure myself where this ‘reality’ business comes from. I can’t create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”
If for whatever reason someone builds their epistemology around popularity as a prototypical use-case, they will necessarily make experimental results dependent on peoples’ expectations in some way. They will say, using the words from the quote, that ‘reality’ is literally made out of ‘belief’.
Blue and Greens are likely to agree what an election result is and statements like “politican X beat politician Y in the vote” can’t really be denied even if they are not fun for your side.
The anti-epistemology is not in the question but how you take the question. While it can be illuminating to use a question that most naturally fits that kind of interpretation answering that question is not itself a problem. The concept of Family Feud is different from a trivia contest but the difference doesn’t live in the prompts.
In physics it is not rare to define things by what measurements they give out and often giving an “objective” contruct it is sufficient how to translate from one coordinate system / measurement to other measurement setting / coordinates. Good epistemology isn’t particularly characterised by having “invariant public objects”.
I can come up with sense of “who is most popular” that has an objective answer. If you asked everybody privately to rank every other persons popularity and had a vote count of some kind some person would probably come on the top of it. I get that there is an attempt to point in that the shared conciousness will regard one member of being more likeable and this mutual understanding building is more muddy than any kind of extrapolated opinion.
I think avoidance of weirdness is not a main motivating factor. Just knowing that this will lead into a rich childhood would be a different and more accurate description on what is going on. It is a “cool story bro”, if hearing it is fun and you care to be entertained then the veracity isn’t that big of a issue.
The limitor off-course for knowledge seekers is that the applicability is reached by focusing on the technical claims. This will bar-off some kind of moves. But those not aware of those limitations might worry about the universal reach being used for wrong purposes ie scientism, opinions trying to disguise as fact. But the fire of truth will only burn falsehoods, otherwise it will be ambivalent. Trying to use “destroyed by truth” to cruelty will be on shady foundation and likely to self-undermine.
I don’t mean to inspire cruelty. If I successfully gave you understanding, you can use it for kindness, pity or cruelty as you see fit. Mostly I wrote the last paragraphs in the tone of “Humans are Cthulhu” as seen through the eyes of someone who thinks in this anti-epistemology.
Your answer to “objective popularity” is only slightly different from common knowledge, and it has the same properties of being fundamentally observer-dependent. Ask some Greens and some Blues separately “is X popular?” where X is a politician, and you get two very different results. Similarly, “possible joke #3852 is funny” is true for one audience, false for another. “The Sun goes around the Earth” is true for a bunch of hunter-gatherers, false for a group of astronomers. Wait, wait, what? “true for some group” i.e. observer-dependence of the answer-generating process.
Compare the alternative. If someone sticks to “either the question is ill-posed, or the answer must be observer-independent” a bit too strictly, they will end up either concluding that popularity is a wrong concept and doesn’t exist, or falling into the mind projection fallacy and concluding that there must be a little “is-popular” label attached to people.
From The simple truth:
If for whatever reason someone builds their epistemology around popularity as a prototypical use-case, they will necessarily make experimental results dependent on peoples’ expectations in some way. They will say, using the words from the quote, that ‘reality’ is literally made out of ‘belief’.
Blue and Greens are likely to agree what an election result is and statements like “politican X beat politician Y in the vote” can’t really be denied even if they are not fun for your side.
The anti-epistemology is not in the question but how you take the question. While it can be illuminating to use a question that most naturally fits that kind of interpretation answering that question is not itself a problem. The concept of Family Feud is different from a trivia contest but the difference doesn’t live in the prompts.