Who said anything about shadowy? I’d wager most of the more moderate protesters would openly support rationalist ideas as part of their policy discussion.
I wouldn’t be so quick to make that assumption. There’s a strong “post-modernism” “post-rationalism” bent amongst the political-left -- and based on the published “demands lists” the OWS-esque groups are reliably well on the political-left.
I’m not familiar with post-rationalist opinions in the left though (or in general really.) Can you please provide me with a few examples/links?
The fundamental error here is assuming that I’m talking about two different things. This is, as it is an ongoing political phenomenon, a difficult topic to get concrete materials on but there have been instances of post-modern philosophers delivering speeches to OWS groups.
Post-modernism, further, is definitely not an “artistic” phenomenon—though there are classifications of art called post-modern. Post-modernism is a philosophical movement which rejects the notion of objective truths; holds that there is no “global meta-narrative”. It is a common belief to post-modernists that “rationalism” is an Enlightenment term and as such is ‘parochial, patriarchical, and fallacious’. This is where you get New Agers who say “Well that’s just your opinion, man.”
This is a directly antithetical view to notions Eliezer has expressed in the hoary past. Have you read The Simple Truth?
Ah, I see what you’re getting on about now (And yes, I did accidentally think you meant the post-modernist art style rather than the philosophy, sorry about that,)
I’ve been trying to figure out why philosophies like that tend to profuse in the left more than the right, actually. I’ve not come up with much yet, and I think that it may just be a Rattlers-v-Eagles type thing, where one party takes on a philosophy just to differentiate themselves from the other party.
So I think that this may just be a very good opportunity to help educate people out of those post-modernist leanings. Most every protester out there is angry at what they view as a rigged political and economic system, they’d probably be pliable to believing other systems aren’t true as well. And if we come up to them with very convincing arguments, they may just listen.
Not saying it’d work universally, or even all that widely, but teaching even a few people is a long way from being a bad thing.
So I think that this may just be a very good opportunity to help educate people out of those post-modernist leanings.
“You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.” in the sense that it maps to free-floating beliefs, was my first thought when reading this.
Not saying it’d work universally, or even all that widely, but teaching even a few people is a long way from being a bad thing.
But I think you are right about this. Maybe a small group of LW volunteers should try?
I’ve been trying to figure out why philosophies like that tend to profuse in the left more than the right,
A fundamental value of the political left is multiculturalism and egalitarianism—the notion that “everyone ought to be ‘equal’”: equal in personal value, equal in economic outcome, equal in productivity and talent, equal in rank. These simply aren’t values of the right. And from that root extends the notion that all beliefs are “equal”.
In that sense, post-modernism is a ‘core value’ of the political left just as much as ‘tradition’ is a core value of the political right.
Most every protester out there is angry at what they view as a rigged political and economic system, they’d probably be pliable to believing other systems aren’t true as well.
… The one thing protestors definitely have in common is the existence of strongly-held beliefs and/or opinions. They’re not there to have their minds changed; they’re there because they believe—strongly—that “the truth” is being ignored.
That’s not exactly a hotbed arena for rational discourse.
This post is much better than its grandparent and I hope you can write such stuff not as responses to questions. I’d like to see more like this and less:
The fundamental error here
Not the best way to begin a post.
there have been instances of post-modern philosophers delivering speeches to OWS groups.
“there have been”!? Also, quantity of speeches or something like that would be important, not instances.
This is where you get New Agers who say “Well that’s just your opinion, man.”
Not ideal to caricature like that, but not terrible.
This is a directly antithetical view to notions Eliezer has expressed
This is a directly antithetical view to notions Eliezer has expressed
Authority is appealed to too often.
On that note I absolutely agree.
there have been instances of post-modern philosophers delivering speeches to OWS groups.
“there have been”!? Also, quantity of speeches or something like that would be important, not instances.
Quantity is not always necessarily the bottom line in providing information towards validating a statement. In this case for example, I believe it is sufficient that there has been at least one organized event—considering how bottom-up the organization of OWS itself is—where a known and reputed-as post-modern philosopher gave a speech at what is otherwise a purely political demonstration. That is more of a qualitative than a quantitative statement.
This is where you get New Agers who say “Well that’s just your opinion, man.”
Not ideal to caricature like that, but not terrible.
Would it help to consider it a disclosure of personal bias on my part?
This post is much better than its grandparent and I hope you can write such stuff not as responses to questions. I’d like to see more like this and less
Thank you for your continued help in my effort to become a better commenter. I will consider this further. No promises, though… I’m too cantankerous an ass to be easily amenable to change. :-)
That is a damn good point, and I don’t know if I can entirely counter it, because as far as I can tell it’s pretty darn true. I do think that there are arguments that will work for some of the less hippie-esque protesters though, the ones who are there more because of economic issues rather than moral ones.
A major part of what drove the economic recession that lead to most all of the problems that these people are protesting was speculation on subprime mortgages. These are mortgages that are plain-to-see crappy to everyone. However, ratings agencies gave the vast majority of these mortgages very high ratings. When speculators came to purchase insurance on these loans, they would see a AAA rating, no indication the loan was subprime until it comes crashing down upon them.
The ratings agencies have argued in court that they were merely giving their opinion about these mortgages, that it didn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with what was actually in the mortgages. They argue that their opinion is ‘true’ because it’s what they believe, and everyone else just chose to accept that.
Now, these ratings agencies were paid to analyze loans. Their word was used to price transactions on the market. There were literally in some cases lives on the line (in the case of medical loans.) Does this mean their opinion is worth two shakes? How about when their ‘truth’ causes the entire country to crash?
I think that argument would get a lot of people angry, but would also be a good setup for convincing them that objective truth not only exists, but should be priority when you’re negotiating economic and political deals.
I do not think you have really addressed Logos01′s point, which I understand to be that the OWS folks are characterized by epistemic zeal for existing beliefs. Your strategy does not seem designed to alter that.
Instead, you suggest starting by affirming a bedrock zeal-inducing belief, making sure it pisses them off, and then (somehow) getting them to apply the insight that admitting that they are wrong about a lot of things is one of the keys to becoming less so.
A major part of what drove the economic recession that lead to most all of the problems that these people are protesting was speculation on subprime mortgages. These are mortgages that are plain-to-see crappy to everyone. However, ratings agencies gave the vast majority of these mortgages very high ratings.
A bit late to the party, but I wanted to point out that this is a very inaccurate view of how the subprime mortgage thing went down. I would know; I used to be a wire transfer auditor for a subprime correspondent loan company (Bear Stearns Mortgage, in fact.) I was also in a committed relationship for about ten years with a woman who worked as a loan coordinator. I ate, breathed, and slept mortgages for a sizable chunk of the window for which these things occurred.
The thing is—what the ratings agencies were ensuring wasn’t the loans themselves, but the expected payout rate of the loans, when bundled into aggregate products. (I.e.; if 20% default each loan that doesn’t default brings in 25% profit, then the aggregate is worth 5% more than its invested value. This is a VAST oversimplification.) It’s worth noting that subprime loans were very often amortized in such a manner that the first few years of their existence, they were pure interest payments. People were sold on the notion of buying a house as a way to improve/repair their credit; spend five years on a subprime and then refinance into a better mortgage. The single most common loan product out there in many areas was a 5-year Option ARM. This was a mortgage that was termed for five years, with a balloon payment due at the end of the five years for the remainder of the note. It was designed to be refinanced away.
So from the ratings’ agencies perspective, these products were pure gold at the time. Of course, that was only true because the housing market kept going up—but it was the genuine widespread belief of nearly everyone in the industry that housing prices could only keep going up. Homes were described as one of the best/easiest possible investments.
( It’s also worth noting that some of this came down from Federal statutes coming out of the Clinton administration’s push to increase homeownership in the US. The lending regulations were adjusted for political reasons and… well, we’ve all seen what happened. Not quite related to the ratings agency thing, but… this is a complicated and nuanced topic. You did start it out by mentioning that the economic recession was associated with this, and that opens the floor to further root-cause analysis.)
At the end of the day, though, the people who need to hear that it was a Democratic usurpation of a Republican talking point that “caused” the housing bubble—are the same ones who, insofar as I can see, won’t hear it.
I’ve been trying to figure out why philosophies like that tend to profuse in the left more than the right, actually.
I don’t know what to say about “left” and “right” here—I don’t find those terms descriptive enough to be useful for analysis; they are more useful for branding—but it seems almost definitionally true that the sorts of people who find a mode of thought that emphasizes deconstructing conventional beliefs appealing are more likely to identify as political or social progressives than as conservatives.
FYI, I’ve downvoted each post where you claim the left is predominantly postmodernist. I’ll revoke them if you provide links to any sociological evidence to back this up, but it doesn’t accord with my experience at all. It reads like an ideological attack, and it’s not going to reduce mindkilling.
I made no such claim. I said that there exists a tendency towards post-modernism. This isn’t even remotely similar to saying “the left is predominantly postmodernist.
Post-modernism has such an established presence within the ideology of the political left that it has its own sub-entry on the wikipedia entry, “Left-wing politics”
Anything can achieve mind-killing status if you let it kill your mind. I refuse to allow the inability of others to address a topic sanely to prevent me from discussing that topic.
Please reconsider your position. It is uncalled for and inappropriate. A more-nuanced reading of my posts thus-far will reveal that you have misunderstood my statement.
Who said anything about shadowy? I’d wager most of the more moderate protesters would openly support rationalist ideas as part of their policy discussion.
I wouldn’t be so quick to make that assumption. There’s a strong “post-modernism” “post-rationalism” bent amongst the political-left -- and based on the published “demands lists” the OWS-esque groups are reliably well on the political-left.
Post modernism most certainly, you can even see its artistic influences in some of the signs protesters are carrying.
I’m not familiar with post-rationalist opinions in the left though (or in general really.) Can you please provide me with a few examples/links?
The fundamental error here is assuming that I’m talking about two different things. This is, as it is an ongoing political phenomenon, a difficult topic to get concrete materials on but there have been instances of post-modern philosophers delivering speeches to OWS groups.
Post-modernism, further, is definitely not an “artistic” phenomenon—though there are classifications of art called post-modern. Post-modernism is a philosophical movement which rejects the notion of objective truths; holds that there is no “global meta-narrative”. It is a common belief to post-modernists that “rationalism” is an Enlightenment term and as such is ‘parochial, patriarchical, and fallacious’. This is where you get New Agers who say “Well that’s just your opinion, man.”
This is a directly antithetical view to notions Eliezer has expressed in the hoary past. Have you read The Simple Truth?
Ah, I see what you’re getting on about now (And yes, I did accidentally think you meant the post-modernist art style rather than the philosophy, sorry about that,)
I’ve been trying to figure out why philosophies like that tend to profuse in the left more than the right, actually. I’ve not come up with much yet, and I think that it may just be a Rattlers-v-Eagles type thing, where one party takes on a philosophy just to differentiate themselves from the other party.
So I think that this may just be a very good opportunity to help educate people out of those post-modernist leanings. Most every protester out there is angry at what they view as a rigged political and economic system, they’d probably be pliable to believing other systems aren’t true as well. And if we come up to them with very convincing arguments, they may just listen.
Not saying it’d work universally, or even all that widely, but teaching even a few people is a long way from being a bad thing.
“You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.” in the sense that it maps to free-floating beliefs, was my first thought when reading this.
But I think you are right about this. Maybe a small group of LW volunteers should try?
A fundamental value of the political left is multiculturalism and egalitarianism—the notion that “everyone ought to be ‘equal’”: equal in personal value, equal in economic outcome, equal in productivity and talent, equal in rank. These simply aren’t values of the right. And from that root extends the notion that all beliefs are “equal”.
In that sense, post-modernism is a ‘core value’ of the political left just as much as ‘tradition’ is a core value of the political right.
… The one thing protestors definitely have in common is the existence of strongly-held beliefs and/or opinions. They’re not there to have their minds changed; they’re there because they believe—strongly—that “the truth” is being ignored.
That’s not exactly a hotbed arena for rational discourse.
This post is much better than its grandparent and I hope you can write such stuff not as responses to questions. I’d like to see more like this and less:
Not the best way to begin a post.
“there have been”!? Also, quantity of speeches or something like that would be important, not instances.
Not ideal to caricature like that, but not terrible.
Authority is appealed to too often.
On that note I absolutely agree.
Quantity is not always necessarily the bottom line in providing information towards validating a statement. In this case for example, I believe it is sufficient that there has been at least one organized event—considering how bottom-up the organization of OWS itself is—where a known and reputed-as post-modern philosopher gave a speech at what is otherwise a purely political demonstration. That is more of a qualitative than a quantitative statement.
Would it help to consider it a disclosure of personal bias on my part?
Thank you for your continued help in my effort to become a better commenter. I will consider this further. No promises, though… I’m too cantankerous an ass to be easily amenable to change. :-)
That is a damn good point, and I don’t know if I can entirely counter it, because as far as I can tell it’s pretty darn true. I do think that there are arguments that will work for some of the less hippie-esque protesters though, the ones who are there more because of economic issues rather than moral ones.
A major part of what drove the economic recession that lead to most all of the problems that these people are protesting was speculation on subprime mortgages. These are mortgages that are plain-to-see crappy to everyone. However, ratings agencies gave the vast majority of these mortgages very high ratings. When speculators came to purchase insurance on these loans, they would see a AAA rating, no indication the loan was subprime until it comes crashing down upon them.
The ratings agencies have argued in court that they were merely giving their opinion about these mortgages, that it didn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with what was actually in the mortgages. They argue that their opinion is ‘true’ because it’s what they believe, and everyone else just chose to accept that.
Now, these ratings agencies were paid to analyze loans. Their word was used to price transactions on the market. There were literally in some cases lives on the line (in the case of medical loans.) Does this mean their opinion is worth two shakes? How about when their ‘truth’ causes the entire country to crash?
I think that argument would get a lot of people angry, but would also be a good setup for convincing them that objective truth not only exists, but should be priority when you’re negotiating economic and political deals.
I do not think you have really addressed Logos01′s point, which I understand to be that the OWS folks are characterized by epistemic zeal for existing beliefs. Your strategy does not seem designed to alter that.
Instead, you suggest starting by affirming a bedrock zeal-inducing belief, making sure it pisses them off, and then (somehow) getting them to apply the insight that admitting that they are wrong about a lot of things is one of the keys to becoming less so.
A bit late to the party, but I wanted to point out that this is a very inaccurate view of how the subprime mortgage thing went down. I would know; I used to be a wire transfer auditor for a subprime correspondent loan company (Bear Stearns Mortgage, in fact.) I was also in a committed relationship for about ten years with a woman who worked as a loan coordinator. I ate, breathed, and slept mortgages for a sizable chunk of the window for which these things occurred.
The thing is—what the ratings agencies were ensuring wasn’t the loans themselves, but the expected payout rate of the loans, when bundled into aggregate products. (I.e.; if 20% default each loan that doesn’t default brings in 25% profit, then the aggregate is worth 5% more than its invested value. This is a VAST oversimplification.) It’s worth noting that subprime loans were very often amortized in such a manner that the first few years of their existence, they were pure interest payments. People were sold on the notion of buying a house as a way to improve/repair their credit; spend five years on a subprime and then refinance into a better mortgage. The single most common loan product out there in many areas was a 5-year Option ARM. This was a mortgage that was termed for five years, with a balloon payment due at the end of the five years for the remainder of the note. It was designed to be refinanced away.
So from the ratings’ agencies perspective, these products were pure gold at the time. Of course, that was only true because the housing market kept going up—but it was the genuine widespread belief of nearly everyone in the industry that housing prices could only keep going up. Homes were described as one of the best/easiest possible investments.
( It’s also worth noting that some of this came down from Federal statutes coming out of the Clinton administration’s push to increase homeownership in the US. The lending regulations were adjusted for political reasons and… well, we’ve all seen what happened. Not quite related to the ratings agency thing, but… this is a complicated and nuanced topic. You did start it out by mentioning that the economic recession was associated with this, and that opens the floor to further root-cause analysis.)
At the end of the day, though, the people who need to hear that it was a Democratic usurpation of a Republican talking point that “caused” the housing bubble—are the same ones who, insofar as I can see, won’t hear it.
I don’t know what to say about “left” and “right” here—I don’t find those terms descriptive enough to be useful for analysis; they are more useful for branding—but it seems almost definitionally true that the sorts of people who find a mode of thought that emphasizes deconstructing conventional beliefs appealing are more likely to identify as political or social progressives than as conservatives.
FYI, I’ve downvoted each post where you claim the left is predominantly postmodernist. I’ll revoke them if you provide links to any sociological evidence to back this up, but it doesn’t accord with my experience at all. It reads like an ideological attack, and it’s not going to reduce mindkilling.
I made no such claim. I said that there exists a tendency towards post-modernism. This isn’t even remotely similar to saying “the left is predominantly postmodernist.
Post-modernism has such an established presence within the ideology of the political left that it has its own sub-entry on the wikipedia entry, “Left-wing politics”
Anything can achieve mind-killing status if you let it kill your mind. I refuse to allow the inability of others to address a topic sanely to prevent me from discussing that topic.
Please reconsider your position. It is uncalled for and inappropriate. A more-nuanced reading of my posts thus-far will reveal that you have misunderstood my statement.