I read your gnostic/pagan stuff and chuckled over the “degeneracy [ranking where] Paganism < … < Gnosticism < Atheism < Buddhism”.
I think I’ll be better able to steelman you in the future and I’m sorry if I caused you to feel misrepresented with my previous attempt. I hadn’t realized that the vibe you’re trying to serve is so Nietzschean.
Just to clarify, when you say “pathetic” it is is not intended to evoke “pathos” and function as an even a hypothetically possible compliment regarding a wise and pleasant deployment of feelings (even subtle feelings) in accord with reason, that could be unified and balanced to easily and pleasantly guide persons into actions in accord with The Good after thoughtful cultivation...
...but rather I suspect you intended it as a near semantic neighbor (but with opposite moral valence) of something like “precious” in that both “precious and pathetic things” are similarly weak and small and in need of help.
Like the central thing you’re trying to communicate with the word “pathetic” (I think, but am not sure, and hence I’m seeking clarification) is to notice that entities labeled with that adjective could hypothetically be beloved and cared for… but you want to highlight how such things are also sort of worthy of contempt and might deserve abandonment.
We could argue: Such things are puny. They will not be good allies. They are not good role models. They won’t autonomously grow. They lack the power to even access whole regimes of coherently possible data gathering loops. They “will not win” and so, if you’re seeking “systematized winning”, such “pathetic” things are not where you should look. Is this something like what you’re trying to point to by invoking “patheticness” so centrally in a discussion of “solving philosophy formally”?
I kind of love how this post is very very narrow, and very very specific, and about a topic that everyone was mind-killed on in the late aughties, but which very few people are mind-killed on in modern times.
It feels like a calibration exercise!
(Also, I wrote a LOT of words on related issues, and what I think this might be a calibration exercise for …that I’ve edited out since it was a big and important topic, and would have taken a long time to edit into something usefully readable.)
It is safe and easy to say: I appreciate the scholarship and care that was taken to figure things out here, and to highlight how rare it is for people to understand the specific subquestion, and not conflate subquestions with larger nearby issues, and (without doing any original research or even clicking through to read most of the links) I find the conclusion and confidence level reasonably convincing.
On mechanistic psychology priors (given that no smoking guns were found here) the thing I would expect is that Hitchens spent some time thinking that water boarding wasn’t really brutal or terrible torture that should be illegal… (maybe he published something that is hard to find now and felt guilt about that, or maybe he just had private opinions) and then he probably did some research on it and at some point changed his mind in private, and then he might have tried to experience it as a way of creating credibility using a story that would echo in history?
That is, I suspect the direct personal experience didn’t cause the update.
I suspect he intellectually suspected what was probably true, and then gathered personally expensive evidence that confirmed his intellectual suspicions for the sake of how the evidence gathering method would play in stories about his take on the topic.