Ideologies and theo-philosophical schools are rarely if ever defined precisely enough to exclude true facts about the world or justifications for genuinely good ideas. They’re more collections of rules of thumb, methods, technical terms and logics. If mathematically formulated scientific theories are under-determined then ideologies are so, but ten-fold. The problem of inferential distance when it comes to worldviews isn’t really about shear decibels of information that need to be communicated. It’s that the interlocutors are playing different games and speaking different languages. And I suspect most deconversions are more like picking up a new language and forgetting your old one, than they are the product of repeated updates based on the predictive failures of the old ideology/religion. It’s a pseudo-rational process which is why it doesn’t reliably occur in just one direction.
Back to your point: since people have egos, memetic complexes usually have self-perpetuating features and applause lights don’t constrain future experience it makes sense that if anything is held constant it will be Greens being really sure they are right. That’s non-optimal and definitely irksome to people like all of us. It’s inefficient because we’re spending a resources on constructing post-hoc justifications for how the real Green answer is the true one and the corrections to our model may not be more curve-fitting. That is, what ever beliefs and assumptions that led the Greens to be wrong in the first place may still be in place. Plus, it is kind of creepy in a “we’ve always been at war with Eurasia” kind of way.
But on the other hand it is sort of okay, right? At least they’re updating! You can think of academic departments of philosophy, religion, law and humanities as just the cost of doing business to mollify our egos as we change our minds. And changing people’s minds this way is almost certainly much easier than making them convert to the doctrine of the hated enemy and engage in extend self-flagellation. It’s a line of retreat.
Making the modern Green cop to the literal beliefs of her intellectual ancestor seems like an exercise in scoring points, not genuine persuasion. Who needs credit? The curve fitting is still an issue but you might be better off trying to make room for better beliefs and assumptions within the context of Green thought. Especially since it isn’t obvious the opposing movement did anything other than get lucky.
A few out-there scholars think Descartes was an atheist. He almost certainly wasn’t. But there is a reason they suspect him even though much of the Meditations is an extended argument for the existence of God. The thing is that the practical upshot of his non-empirical argument for God is that we should completely abandon the Christian-Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition and use our senses to discover what the world is really like. “The sky is certainly Green and this proves that the ideal method for discovering the color of things is visual examination and use of a spectrometer.”
Ideological multi-lingualism is a crucial skill; I’d like to hear ideas for cultivating it.
Ideologies and theo-philosophical schools are rarely if ever defined precisely enough to exclude true facts about the world or justifications for genuinely good ideas. They’re more collections of rules of thumb, methods, technical terms and logics. If mathematically formulated scientific theories are under-determined then ideologies are so, but ten-fold. The problem of inferential distance when it comes to worldviews isn’t really about shear decibels of information that need to be communicated. It’s that the interlocutors are playing different games and speaking different languages. And I suspect most deconversions are more like picking up a new language and forgetting your old one, than they are the product of repeated updates based on the predictive failures of the old ideology/religion. It’s a pseudo-rational process which is why it doesn’t reliably occur in just one direction.
Back to your point: since people have egos, memetic complexes usually have self-perpetuating features and applause lights don’t constrain future experience it makes sense that if anything is held constant it will be Greens being really sure they are right. That’s non-optimal and definitely irksome to people like all of us. It’s inefficient because we’re spending a resources on constructing post-hoc justifications for how the real Green answer is the true one and the corrections to our model may not be more curve-fitting. That is, what ever beliefs and assumptions that led the Greens to be wrong in the first place may still be in place. Plus, it is kind of creepy in a “we’ve always been at war with Eurasia” kind of way.
But on the other hand it is sort of okay, right? At least they’re updating! You can think of academic departments of philosophy, religion, law and humanities as just the cost of doing business to mollify our egos as we change our minds. And changing people’s minds this way is almost certainly much easier than making them convert to the doctrine of the hated enemy and engage in extend self-flagellation. It’s a line of retreat.
Making the modern Green cop to the literal beliefs of her intellectual ancestor seems like an exercise in scoring points, not genuine persuasion. Who needs credit? The curve fitting is still an issue but you might be better off trying to make room for better beliefs and assumptions within the context of Green thought. Especially since it isn’t obvious the opposing movement did anything other than get lucky.
A few out-there scholars think Descartes was an atheist. He almost certainly wasn’t. But there is a reason they suspect him even though much of the Meditations is an extended argument for the existence of God. The thing is that the practical upshot of his non-empirical argument for God is that we should completely abandon the Christian-Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition and use our senses to discover what the world is really like. “The sky is certainly Green and this proves that the ideal method for discovering the color of things is visual examination and use of a spectrometer.”
Ideological multi-lingualism is a crucial skill; I’d like to hear ideas for cultivating it.