The following is meant as a question to find out, not a statement of belief.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the possibility that initially they did not intend to fire Sam, but just to warn him or to give him a choice to restrain himself. Yet possibly he himself escalated it to firing or chose firing instead of complying with the restraint. He might have done that just in order to have all the consequences that have now taken place, giving him more power.
For example, people in power positions may escalate disagreements, because that is a territory they are more experienced with as compared to their opponents.
I think your own message is also too extreme to be rational. So it seems to me that you are fighting fire with a fire. Yes, Remmelt has some extreme expressions, but you definitely have extreme expressions here too, while having even weaker arguments.
Could we find a golden middle road, a common ground, please? With more reflective thinking and with less focus on right and wrong? (Regardless of the dismissive-judgemental title of this forum :P)
I agree that Remmelt can improve the message. And I believe he will do that.
I may not agree that we are going to die with 99% probability. At the same time I find that his current directions are definitely worthwhile of exploring.
I also definitely respect Paul. But mentioning his name here is mostly irrelevant for my reasoning or for taking your arguments seriously, simply because I usually do not take authorities too seriously before I understand their reasoning in a particular question. And understanding a person’s reasoning may occasionally mean that I disagree in particular points as well. In my experience, even the most respectful people are still people, which means they often think in messy ways and they are good just on average, not per instance of a thought line (which may mean they are poor thinkers 99% of the time, while having really valuable thoughts 1% of the time). I do not know the distribution for Paul, but definitely I would not be disappointed if he makes mistakes sometimes.
I think this part of Remmelt’s response sums it up nicely: “When accusing someone of crankery (which is a big deal) it is important not to fall into making vague hand-wavey statements yourself. You are making vague hand-wavey (and also inaccurate) statements above. Insinuating that something is “science-babble” doesn’t do anything. Calling an essay formatted as shorter lines a “poem” doesn’t do anything.”
In my interpretation, black-and-white thinking is not “crankery”. It is a normal and essential step in the development of cognition about a particular problem. Unfortunately. There is research about that in the field of developmental and cognitive psychology. Hopefully that applies to your own black-and-white thinking as well. Note that, unfortunately this development is topic specific, not universal.
In contrast, “crankery” is too strong word for describing black-and-white thinking because it is a very judgemental word, a complete dismissal, and essentially an expression of unwillingness to understand, an insult, not just a disagreement about a degree of the claims. Is labelling someone’s thoughts as “a crankery” also a form of crankery of its own then? Paradoxical isn’t it?