This is brilliantly plainly stated. Your last sentence coincides with a feeling I’ve had, that intellectuals can run verbal circles around “normies” and declare themselves winners because their opponents don’t have the vocabulary or the inclination to match them. That doesn’t make them right; it just makes them clever.
"Clever" isn't necessarily wrong, though some of those "intellectuals" seem more interested in scoring points than in providing illumination or education. Reminded of a post by a Christian pastor, Jim Tonkowich on "Libido Dominandi: St. Augustine and the Lust for Domination":
"This lust for domination doesn't just characterize politics in the City of Man, it characterizes each of us. The libido dominandi is that within each of us that plots and strives to have our own way and force others do as we say. As such, it is the controlling passion of our fallen nature and, thus, of our fallen world. .... Loving truth is good; loving being right and lording it over others is sin, plain and simple."
Though the other side of the coin is that far too many these days are what Carl Sagan called "scientifically illiterate" and refuse to educate themselves or take any instruction at all. As Proverbs 1:22 has it:
"How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?"
I also browsed the LessWrong community back in the day. The thought experiments were interesting, but the explanations and responses were sometimes unsettling. It became obvious that rationality alone, without any other guiding principle or solid grounding, could lead you to some bizarre and dangerous places.
Well-written and majorly thought-provoking essay. 🙂 Will bear re-reading in detail and further comments later.
But your comments about LessWrong -- "incel adjacent, LoL -- reminded me of Hume's:
"... `Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
As Martin Luther once put it, "That Whore, Reason." Has its benefits but as you cogently noted, reason tends to be only as good as its premises: garbage-in, garbage-out, and all that. Moot where those premises come from -- many have argued as a gestalt.
Related thereto but somewhat too briefly, you might be interested in a book by Norbert Wiener -- The Human Use of Human Beings; the subtext of my own Substack -- and this passage in particular:
"I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law. For all we know, the world from the next moment on might be something like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the balls are hedgehogs which walk off, the hoops are soldiers who march to other parts of the field, and the rules of the game are made from instant to instant by the arbitrary decree of the Queen. It is to a world like this that the scientist must conform in totalitarian countries, no matter whether they be those of the right or of the left. The Marxist Queen is very arbitrary indeed, and the fascist Queen is a good match for her."
This is brilliantly plainly stated. Your last sentence coincides with a feeling I’ve had, that intellectuals can run verbal circles around “normies” and declare themselves winners because their opponents don’t have the vocabulary or the inclination to match them. That doesn’t make them right; it just makes them clever.
"Clever" isn't necessarily wrong, though some of those "intellectuals" seem more interested in scoring points than in providing illumination or education. Reminded of a post by a Christian pastor, Jim Tonkowich on "Libido Dominandi: St. Augustine and the Lust for Domination":
"This lust for domination doesn't just characterize politics in the City of Man, it characterizes each of us. The libido dominandi is that within each of us that plots and strives to have our own way and force others do as we say. As such, it is the controlling passion of our fallen nature and, thus, of our fallen world. .... Loving truth is good; loving being right and lording it over others is sin, plain and simple."
https://web.archive.org/web/20170714050518/http://www.jimtonkowich.com/libidodominandi.php
Though the other side of the coin is that far too many these days are what Carl Sagan called "scientifically illiterate" and refuse to educate themselves or take any instruction at all. As Proverbs 1:22 has it:
"How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?"
Clearly, an age-old problem.
I also browsed the LessWrong community back in the day. The thought experiments were interesting, but the explanations and responses were sometimes unsettling. It became obvious that rationality alone, without any other guiding principle or solid grounding, could lead you to some bizarre and dangerous places.
Well-written and majorly thought-provoking essay. 🙂 Will bear re-reading in detail and further comments later.
But your comments about LessWrong -- "incel adjacent, LoL -- reminded me of Hume's:
"... `Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
As Martin Luther once put it, "That Whore, Reason." Has its benefits but as you cogently noted, reason tends to be only as good as its premises: garbage-in, garbage-out, and all that. Moot where those premises come from -- many have argued as a gestalt.
Related thereto but somewhat too briefly, you might be interested in a book by Norbert Wiener -- The Human Use of Human Beings; the subtext of my own Substack -- and this passage in particular:
"I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law. For all we know, the world from the next moment on might be something like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the balls are hedgehogs which walk off, the hoops are soldiers who march to other parts of the field, and the rules of the game are made from instant to instant by the arbitrary decree of the Queen. It is to a world like this that the scientist must conform in totalitarian countries, no matter whether they be those of the right or of the left. The Marxist Queen is very arbitrary indeed, and the fascist Queen is a good match for her."
http://asounder.org/resources/weiner_humanuse.pdf
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/coming-soon
We kind of have to accept some premises on "faith"; but it sure shouldn't be a blind one.