The DoomYoshi Musings thread

[DoomYoshi]

there's nothing to be found with reason.

What does this mean?

[2dimes]

turns out you can overcome cancer, Parkison's and all diseases with pure willpower... at least according to the Massachussets health department...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... nce-stigma

This theory started about 2053 years ago.

[nietzsche]

there's nothing to be found with reason.

What does this mean?

you know what it means

[DoomYoshi]

there's nothing to be found with reason.

What does this mean?

you know what it means

Not really.

[nietzsche]

then you don't know what it means. i can't explain it to you with words if you don't already know.

[mrswdk]

It means nietzsche believes the age of consent is a meaningless social construct.

[betiko]

It means nietzsche believes the age of consent is a meaningless social construct.

the real question is... in what way is it not and does it not depend on the age of the partner? what's wrong if a 19yo dates a 17yo? how is it ok if a 70yo dates an 18yo?

[DoomYoshi]

To combine a few different ideas - the role of philosophy in figuring out what counts as rationality. It may be harder than you think:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n23/william-d ... -eat-badly

Here's a few of the more interesting paragraphs:

Faced with a choice between a world governed by brute Pinker-esque reason and the Dadaist nightmare of fantasy and propaganda emanating from the White House, Smith seems in no doubt where he stands. Yet Irrationality is unique among recent paeans to Enlightenment and liberalism in marrying a resolute defence of reason with a recognition of how futile such defences tend to be. What troubles Smith is that ‘rationality’ means nothing without some ‘irrationality’ from which to distinguish itself, yet the precise nature of this distinction is impossible to establish. Whenever some apparently ‘rational’ activity or epoch is inspected further, it turns out that ‘irrationality’ isn’t so much absent as hidden or ignored. Take the Enlightenment, the period so celebrated by Pinker in particular. As many of Pinker’s critics pointed out in response to his book Enlightenment Now (2018), no sooner had principles of scientific reason apparently triumphed than a romantic counter-Enlightenment was reshaping cultural sensibilities. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, with the codification of academic disciplines, that science was fully segregated from the fields of philosophy and the humanities. But the institutional autonomy of ‘science’ was then immediately challenged by the insurgency of psychoanalysis, modernism and Continental philosophy, which set out to challenge the separation of truth from aesthetics and desire. As Smith expertly reveals, wherever one looks in the history of Western philosophy, rationality is haunted and teased by its other.
------
Away from the frontiers and mythology of Enlightenment, the meaning of ‘rationality’ (and hence ‘irrationality’) becomes difficult to pin down. You can resort to the otherworldly ideas of logic and mathematics floating free from all politics and culture. But the academic study of ‘rational choice’ makes little sense once diverted from the kinds of strategic problem – war and profit – it has long been tasked with solving. When we reflect on how we actually live, it becomes all the harder to identify what an ‘irrational’ action or choice might be. Smith wonders ‘whether an anthropologist external to our cultural world would, in studying us, be able to make sharp distinctions among the horoscope, the personality quiz and the credit rating’, or even be able to tell ‘whether we ourselves clearly understand how they differ’. Equally, it isn’t clear how one would distinguish between the scientific societies of the 17th century, to which so much subsequent progress is owed, and, say, a website dedicated to picking through the evidence that vaccines cause autism. Understood purely as ‘culture’ or as ‘behaviour’, rationality becomes ritual or (as the nudgers have it) habit, and ‘irrationality’ is just a pejorative term for the habits we consider bad.
-------
As academic disciplines, philosophy and the natural sciences will survive the age of Trump and Facebook. Game theorists and economists in universities will continue to model ‘rational’ choices in abstract mathematical terms. Yet the message of Irrationality is partly about philosophy’s repeated failure ever to impose sufficient clarity and reason on the world. Efforts to distinguish philosophy from mere sophistry (wordplay) or mystical revelation are never completely satisfactory; philosophy struggles to secure its own foundations to the extent that it pretends. And philosophers’ reliance on a model of honest, egalitarian deliberation as the test of a ‘reasonable’ argument underestimates the obstacles that any such model faces in the real world. Smith is admirably open about this problem, but is convinced that it is still worth arguing back. At the very least, the philosopher retains the power to narrate the cultural apocalypse, as Adorno once did.

[mrswdk]

Sounds like the problem with almost all academia. It's too navel-gazing to have any real application outside the world of people wanking each other off in university seminar rooms, unless an outsider comes along to do a bit of translation and operationalize it.

[DoomYoshi]

Sounds like the problem with almost all academia. It's too navel-gazing to have any real application outside the world of people wanking each other off in university seminar rooms, unless an outsider comes along to do a bit of translation and operationalize it.

Facebook is not just navel-gazing. It's looking at the world we live in.

[mrswdk]

The text you pasted makes reference to Trump and Facebook but doesn't say anything about how its little rationality/irrationality debate applies to either.

[DoomYoshi]

The text you pasted makes reference to Trump and Facebook but doesn't say anything about how its little rationality/irrationality debate applies to either.

that's true. The whole article in general is about how states and corporations use "predictable irrationality" to control people (resulting in tangible election results). The philosophy comes in whether or not that is a good thing. It's not really the navel gazing kind of philosophy. However, to answer the question, the first step is to define rationality. That's where the difficulty is and that is what we spoke about in this thread earlier, which is why I included those particular paragraphs.

Sorry, I didn't connect all the dots.

[mrswdk]

Oh, I'd seen nietzsche talking about 'meaning' earlier in this thread and zoned out, so wasn't following anything until your most recent post if I'm honest. I will take your word for it.

[Dukasaur]

Nietzche has that effect on people.

[mrswdk]

Amen!

[DoomYoshi]

A quick read on the positive benefits of religion from a secular perspective:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts ... eism-faith

[DoomYoshi]

An old classic article, saved due to Chinese pirates:
http://jiaoyou8.com/friends_article?act ... ew_model=0

On the unbearable ugliness of Volvos. I just read an interview with Stanley Fish where he updated his position somewhat:

Subaru seems to breathe the same kind of virtue that academics are after. Academics want material things, but they want to feel good about their having them. So they have to demonstrate that buying this extremely expensive Volvo is a good thing. About 10 years ago, the answer I would have given is the Prius.

Ten years or 20 years ago, people were buying Priuses in the same spirit in which they gave up smoking. In other words, an act of virtue. I’m not gonna buy that souped-up XK8 Jaguar (a great car by the way). I’m gonna buy myself a Prius and receive many bonus points in the good book of life. You can count on academics to be playing several games at the same time. Even though the objects with which they play those games change.

[DoomYoshi]

There were more witch hunts during the "Little Ice Age" which people have used to show that global temperature and witch hunts are inversely proportional.

So, if the world is cooling now that would explain the witch hunt for DJT. If the world is actually heating up, it isn't a witch hunt. Similarly, if it isn't a witch hunt, the world is heating up.

[DoomYoshi]

played Maniac Mansion today. It's a really good adventure game that reminds me why I used to love adventure games.

Some of my favorites:
1)Loom (my favorite game of all time, you could really call me LoomYoshi).
2)Broken Age
3)Emerald City Confidential
4)all the Zorks (Zork 0 is a great place if you aren't ready for pure text)

[DoomYoshi]

Now Algiers joins the ever-growing list of cities that would rather be governed by proper Europeans than illegitimate cartels.

https://www.voanews.com/africa/thousand ... -president

[DoomYoshi]

Canada is pretty much the worst country in the world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

[Dukasaur]

Canada is pretty much the worst country in the world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

Odd attitude for a Christian.

Ez 18:19 “Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. 20 The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

[DoomYoshi]

Canada is pretty much the worst country in the world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

Odd attitude for a Christian.

Ez 18:19 “Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. 20 The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

Christianity has nothing to do with it.

Children of illegal aliens should be denied birthright citizenship. These are worse than illegal aliens though, they are actually an offensive, enemy force.

[nietzsche]

you don't think a person has the right to choose a path different to his parents'?

[Dukasaur]

Canada is pretty much the worst country in the world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

Odd attitude for a Christian.

Ez 18:19 “Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. 20 The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

Christianity has nothing to do with it.

Children of illegal aliens should be denied birthright citizenship. These are worse than illegal aliens though, they are actually an offensive, enemy force.

It has everything to do with it.

You're saying these children should be made to suffer because their parents did something which they themselves had no say in.

Why not punish them for the sins of their grandfather and their great-grandfathers and their great-great-grandfathers, on ad infinitum? Hell, why don't we retroactively punish everyone for the crimes of all their ancestors? I'm sure we could find something to hang every single person on earth. That solves the population problem! Just, the last one standing has to be trusted to kill himself.