Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

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BRUTE
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by BRUTE »

7Wannabe5 wrote:how I feel when the person traveling next to me suggests Stephen King or Ayn Rand as candidate for "great novelist."
brute loves both Stephen King and Ayn Rand, though they both might be more accurately described as endurance typists.

Papers of Indenture
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by Papers of Indenture »

BRUTE wrote: almost. if Papers of Indenture likes Less Wrong, brute has a basilisk to sell him.

I don't think I liked it. It was just another phenomena to observe.

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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by jacob »

@brute - I liked your post but I did not see any mention of the importance of having a contextual framework for understanding facts and how the existence or lack of framework makes a huge difference in one's level of insight into a collection of facts.

Here's an extremely simple example, perhaps suitable to explain 3 year olds to 7 year olds' insight into numbers.

Lets say there are numbers: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 on a clock. That's all there is.

We also have a bunch of kids.

The 3 year old knows how to identify a few of them. And I'm going to do this in Danish just to make the point clearer. He knows en to tre. For added realism, put some mashed potatoes in your mouth and say it out loud: "en to tre". Basically he knows the sounds that corresponds to a few symbols on the clock face.

The 4 year old knows en to tre fire syv ni ti elleve tolv fem otte seks. He has 12 facts, namely 12 sounds mapping to 12 symbols .

The 5 year old knows en to tre fire syv ni ti elleve tolv fem otte seks and he knows entotrefirefemsekssyvottenitiellevetolv. Basically a rhyme that puts them in order just like how many people need to sing [part of] their ABC to figure out which letter is halfway between L and P. He has 13 facts: 12 symbol sounds and a song.

The 6 year old knows all the written symbols and all their sounds but he also knows that they correspond to numbers. E.g. he knows that fire means 4 and that it's a way to summarize 4 objects, like 4 apples. He also knows how to count. He has 12 facts, one framework (the sounds correspond to numbers), and one method (counting). Notice how he doesn't need to sing out entotrefirefem ... anymore to tell what comes after ni.

At this point, things speed up.

The 6.5 year old learns that for numbers higher than 12 (The world is bigger than the face of the clock), there's method for making the sounds for a given number. He knows how to say 85 even if he's never memorized what that number sounds like. Same reason you know how to read out 768,136,629,012 even if you were never directly taught the word for this particular number. While you don't know the word, you know the method for constructing the word, and that is as good as knowing the word.

The 7 year old knows all that ... but he also learns addition. If you give the 6 year old 3 apples he'll count 1-2-3. You give him two more. He'll count 1-2. You ask how many he's got, he'll count them all from the start: 1-2-3-4-5 --- he has 5 apples. The 7 year old will count 1-2-3 ... but then count on 4-5. And soon he will understand what 3+2 means (without having apples in front of him) and that it's 5. He knows about 30 facts (about the sounds that make up any number up to 10000), one framework and four methods (symbol->name, counting, adding by counting, and abstract addition).

I could go on to the point where the average math professor has a couple of dozen frameworks and many hundreds of methods. And the average adult human has few frameworks (numbers, fractions, simple algebra) and little more than a handful or so methods (+ - / * > = ^ sqrt). An average STEM with a bachelor degree knows several frameworks and a few dozen methods. He is much closer in ignorance to the average person than the average math professor when it comes to mathematical insight. Of course your average math professor is still below the combined effort of your average math department, that is, a collaboration with other math profs leads to more insight than being stuck doing your own thing in the library or the sociology department.

And maybe we can agree that such a process also happens for other fields: Reading, playing the piano, algebra, programming, woodworking, calculus, ... and even self-consistent models of the heat transport and chemical behavior of the Earth's atmosphere, land surface, and oceans.

What I see with post-factualism is the increasing belief that frameworks beyond one's personal comprehension simply don't exist!
("If I don't understand something, nobody else does either." Corollary: "I understand anything as well as any other person".)

For example, a statement like "nobody knows facts from first principle(*)" is essentially saying that we don't know that 2928 is the next number after 2927 as long as we've never personally counted that high. It's also saying that we don't know how to pronounce the number 72723358 because nobody has ever told us directly what it sounds like.

Now in the universe above, a statement like "we can't know facts based on first principles" would make sense to the 3 yo, the 4yo, and the 5yo. The reason is that none of them know any methods. Nor do any of them have a framework. To the kids at 6, 6.5, and 7 such a statement would seem rather silly. Of course they know what comes after 2927 and they know how to say "totusindenihundredeogsyvogtyve" without having memorized or seen this previously. They will also know that given a truckload of apples and the fact that there's 2927 apples in there ... then if they count them ... lo and behold there will be 2927 of them. If they somehow get another number, either somebody is lying or they miscounted but in any case, they KNOW that they could in principle (first principle that is) establish how many apples there are by doing a recount and maybe they will do the recount.

In other words, they know FACTS about 2927 from FIRST PRINCIPLE. The principle of counting objects.

(*) It occurs to me that some people might not know what "first principle" actually means ... but it refers to deducing a result based on established methods, such as counting or addition. In more complicated situations, like science, it means starting _without_ making empirical assumptions during the deduction. For example, calculating the Earth's orbital configuration (which are facts) from Newton's law of gravity (which is fundamental) would be knowing facts from first principles. On the other hand, calculating the configuration from Kepler's laws (which is empirical) is NOT knowing facts from first principles. One can however, derive Kepler's laws from Newton's laws. This means that Newton's laws are a strong framework for understanding not only facts about the world but also in explaining simplified frameworks like Kepler's.

Given the actual meaning of "first principle", it obviously means that saying that "we can't know facts from first principle" is bullshit.

Saying that "we don't have all the facts" suggests that the person lacks a framework to make sense of the facts they already have. In the example above, it could either be like a 3.5 year old who knows 10 symbols but sees that he's obviously missing some, like how to pronounce the word for "11". It could also suggests a 6 year old who believes that "nobody really knows how to pronounce 553,785,125,728,474" because he hasn't learned what the 6.5 year old knows yet.

Saying that "we need better facts" suggests that the person is unable to form or understand the framework because they're not really sure how to pronounce elleve or tolv because he hasn't heard it directly from a native or googled it on the internet. However, I presume that most people who have paid attention so far will have figured out that tolv = 12 even if they don't know how to pronounce it properly. And they also know that 5+7=12 and that 13 comes after 12 even if they never learned (from above) what the word for 13 is.

In other words, the existence of a framework and several methods can substitute for "not having the best facts" [sic] or "needing more facts". One does not need to know everything to know a lot already.

And I think it is the appreciation of that insight that's going away. That such frameworks exist and that such frameworks are useful.

Lets insert some social dynamics and go to kindergarten or preschool where we have a bunch of 4yos and a 6yo. In such a situation, it's quite easy to imagine that the 4yos will mutually agree that there's no such thing as counting numbers and because if counting is too complicated for a 4yo to understand, then nobody understands counting. In fact, there's no such thing as counting. In a group setting where the stakes are low (e.g. they aren't counting their pocket money), it's easy for the 4yos to democratically convince themselves that the 6yo is just going blablabla ... On the other hand, in an alternate universe, it might also be that a couple of the 4yos think that this counting concept is really amazing and try to learn it for themselves. It requires a certain combination of curiosity and work to do that.

To me post-factualism essentially is tearing down frameworks ... and yes they existed back when I was a physicist but the general public took them a bit more serious back then.

For example, if you can spread the general idea that the media is biased, you're essentially spreading the idea that the media doesn't have a framework for presenting facts. This has the side-effect that anyone can present whatever they want. There's no longer a belief that anyone knows what's going on in the world ... or more precisely, that everybody knows equally little.

Similarly, if you spread the idea that graduate level physics is "too complex for anyone to understand" based on your high school level insight or your one semester college course in "astronomy for non-scientists", you're also spreading the idea that even people who have studied and worked on this full-time for 10+ years also lack such a framework. You're pretty much operating under the impression that "because jacob hasn't spent 50 years tracking all the planets in a telescope, jacob doesn't know how planets move because Newton's law of gravity is too complicated to understand and jacob doesn't know enough to build a computer program that iterates planetary orbits based on Newton's laws and compute the position of a given planet in the sky in the future (but I do).

And goddamnit, but Newton's laws aren't based on a set of beliefs in the same way that one's opinion about the outcome of a football game or whether emacs is a better editor than vi are based on beliefs. I find it thoroughly disturbing that this is the impression I get from above. It's not such that there is a "political reality" and a "scientific reality". There's ONE reality. Then there's a scientific understanding of that reality. And then one can create a policy based on the scientific understanding of that reality or one could base it on voodoo or personal feelings or whatever. But it's not like there are different realities.

However, if enough people get it into their head that "this stuff is too complex for anyone to know", then it's pretty easy for a well-spoken person, say your friendly neighborhood astrologer to convince the average person that "we" don't really know about this planet stuff to actually say anything meaningful and therefore one set of facts ("Venus is in the third house and Mars in in ascension" and "This determines whether you'll find your soulmate next year") is as good as another set of facts ("the position of Mars is 45degrees azimuth and 136 degress right ascension at 8:00:00 in Chicago and based on orbital calculations it will be in a new position 24 hours from now with the following coordinates" and "There's absolutely no relation between the planets in the solar system and whether you'll find your soul mate").

Same thing: You can make policy decisions about space launches based on what physicists and astronomers know about planetary motions or you can make them based on what astrologers know. That's just policy. "Political reality" might be that it will forever be unpossible to convince more than 66% of laymen that rocket guidance computers shouldn't be based on astrology... but that's aside from science.

Heading back to preschool/kindergarten to illustrate where we have with complex subjects like politics and climate science... this situation is one of where we have ten 3 yos + one 5 yo and one 7 yo in our number example. Now, if the 5yo and 7yo start arguing about whether addition is possible, it will be quite easy for the 3yos to come to the conclusion that the matter of addition of unsettled. It's quite clear to the 7yo that the 5yo doesn't "get it" but it is not possible to explain why to the 3yos because they "really don't get it". It's also quite possible for the 5yo to believe that the 7yo is just making things up as well as for the 5yo to believe that he's smarter than everybody because he's clearly smarter than all the 3yos and maybe the 7yo is just bullshitting. And as for the 3yos they entirely lack the framework to make the distinction. All they have to go on is that the 7yo is in 2nd grade and the idea that people in the 2nd grade probably "know about this". Now, if the 5yo was willing to listen or read a book, he could learn. But imagine he'd rather go read a blog or listen to a podcast instead thinking that he already "knows all the numbers because he learned them in school".

Now, it used that the proverbial 3yo would realize that they didn't know enough to judge the case by its merits and therefore default to credentials: "Clearly a 2nd grader is smarter than a preschooler". However, in a post-factual world, that's going away. And that wasn't the case even 10 years ago.

PS: And since this has bearing on a certain thread, I suppose I should briefly establish my scientific credentials (which you can look up google scholar or arXiv for those who know what that is). I have PhD in theoretical physics and graduated summa cum laude (the Swiss system gives grades for dissertations). This was followed by five years of postdoctoral work. My work during those 9 years was in fully self-consistent computational simulations of the surface layers ("atmosphere and ocean") of neutron stars and white dwarfs. This [self-consistent] means FIRST PRINCIPLE stuff. I built models in 1D, 2D, and 2.5D (that's a cylindrically symmetric sphere) and simulated the fluid dynamics (how gas moves, winds and shocks), nuclear/chemical reactions in the atmosphere, heat transport (how heat moves around: radiation, advection, convection). These are what in climate science are referred to a "general circulation models" (GCM). I didn't just run stuff from other people. I built stuff too. The output was then compared and verified against astronomical observations (what you see through a telescope, either ground based or orbital). A few of my first-authored (<- meaning I was in charge/did most of the work) papers have been cited dozens of times. Now ... the physics and the kinds of models I worked on for that time are very similar to what's being used to simulate the earth hydro/atmospheres. Obviously simulating gases near room temperature in 1g (i.e. planet Earth) is much easier than the top of a neutron star. Point being, the physical METHODS are EXACTLY the same if if the range [of numbers in the metaphor] is different. I have a very strong background in this stuff, I am therefore able to read publications and understand what climate scientists (modeling: I'm extremely confident I know much more about complex physics systems than any skeptic I've ever come across... grain yields: I wouldn't have a clue ...) do and why they're doing it. This is why I'm able to to talk about it and also why I'm able to dismiss certain skeptic blogposts as bs or "missing the point" (even if they come from skeptic professors with a background in economics or geography) because it's very easy for me to see when/if they only demonstrate a familiarity with simplified models (what in astrophysics is called a "toy-model")---something that might look profoundly complex to an undergraduate but which to me falls under the "but doesn't everybody know this?"/"sure, but have you thought about this other issue". You will notice how I don't really have a detailed position on things that are outside my specialty even if I did took a couple of courses in them back in undergrad. For example, I have no position on solid state physics, like what is the best photovoltaic material or where is the ultimate limit (insofar it's not beyond 100% efficiency obviously) or where nanotube research is going. Point being ... the difference between taking a couple of one-semester classes and working and publishing in a field for 9 years (and that includes teaching some of these classes)... is HUGE and much larger than the difference between your average undergrad and your average high school dropout or adult member of society.

And yes, ... science is not based on beliefs about "facts" from other people. I'm sure computer science students recompile/look at source code to verify that their programs actually come from somewhere and check that applications aren't run by magic elves living inside the computer or appreciate that source code isn't just made up because nobody hasn't looked at single piece of software in the world :-P It might blow your mind, but science students do the same thing :o Forsooth, even in high school we measured the charge/mass ratio of an electron (Lorentz force) and showed how the electron charge was quantized (Milikan oil drop). If anyone seriously tells me that they've never done that, I'll believe them but I'll also believe that this is because HS education has been dumbed down further over the past 20 years, because I didn't go to a fancy private school. This was normal HS/standard part of the physics curriculum back in 1994. Later, I did lab experiments directly measuring sound speed in different gases, ... even got to play with a 400keV accelerator (the size of a small class room) for the final lab experiment. Overall I've done about 20 or so experiments measuring stuff. I've also collaborated closely enough with experimental physicists to be qualified to post on nucl-ex for a while (I'm sure I can't anymore because it requires staying active in the field). Now, I don't think any of that made me an experimental expert but I personally got close enough to believe that scientists who've spent decades perfecting a more detailed measurement would come up with a more accurate number than what a bunch of 17-23 year olds can do in the span of five hours. For example, the electron charge is now known to 8 decimals worth of precision. That's way better than the two decimals we managed within two hours in high school using a stopwatch and a caliper. Still ... high school(!!) ... and pretty close. In terms of temperatures ... yeah, I know how to read a thermometer and so I presume other people are able to do so too but do so more accurately over time using fancier instruments than I am. Surely you guys don't think that temperature records are established by wetting the paw of a puppy and sending him outside for 5 minutes and then listening to how much he woofs.

batbatmanne
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by batbatmanne »

Ego wrote:Rule #1: I must learn how to distinguish facts from fiction.

Rule #1a: When the topic is too complex for me to understand, I must try to figure out who really does understand how to make that distinction and listen to what they have to say.

Rule #1b: Since humans are prone to error I must watch for experts making Brute error #1. Thankfully, I have plenty of people who know more than me doing the same. The scientific method at work.


Good stuff, and essentially what I wanted to respond. It is true that every individual human has a low limit of what we can be experts about, but this is too high of a threshold for what gets to count as knowledge for us. In science, everything from statistics to experimental design to data analysis that goes into an individual research project is itself its own field composed of peer-reviewed research constructed by experts in each field. It's certainly simplistic to think about all of science as following the same method, or even of having the same epistemic status, but one thing remains true rather ubiquitously: every field is composed of experts, and cross discipline experts, looking for a research project to make a new claim or to shit on an old one. When you have this process working at a large scale, it works as a selection process, or sieve, where the demonstratably false claims get filtered out and the remaining claims are those that no expert can demonstrate to be false. This is an immensely powerful apparatus that can be appealed to for knowledge, even by non-experts. The difficulty lies in distinguishing science from pseudoscience and this is a skill that requires much less development to be effective than those required to be an expert.

steveo73
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by steveo73 »

Ego wrote:
BRUTE wrote: what is jacob expecting? that humans learn ALL THINGS before having an opinion?.
Brute, there are two possible explanations for why you are so persistent at missing the point:

1) You are actively trying to miss the point because of motivated reasoning. You want to believe things that are unsupported by evidence.
2) You actually are missing the point.
I don't want to make this about Brute but I see your point. I think you get the evidence and then come to a conclusion. I think some people don't care about the evidence. Even worse is when the evidence is against your opinion and you just ignore it.

In stating that the idea that humans need to learn everything prior to offering an opinion or they need to be experts is patently false. This is just an appeal to authority argument. It's a way to avoid the facts. The facts matter not the classification of someone into an arbitrary camp.
Ego wrote:Maybe this will help:

Rule #1: I must learn how to distinguish facts from fiction.

Rule #1a: When the topic is too complex for me to understand, I must try to figure out who really does understand how to make that distinction and listen to what they have to say.

Rule #1b: Since humans are prone to error I must watch for experts making Brute error #1. Thankfully, I have plenty of people who know more than me doing the same. The scientific method at work.
Even this doesn't stand up well enough for me personally. I think though the scientific method is something that we can utilise.

I think that we need to discern the different between good quality facts and good quality data and poor quality facts and poor quality data.

If the topic is too complex then that is part of the facts. We need to state this clearly.
Ego wrote:Wrong. Scientists take pleasure in devouring those who make a mistake. It is the essence of the scientific method. If it is not reproducible then it gets exposed as wrong rather quickly.
BRUTE wrote: but surely not 100% of their beliefs were based on their own measurements, because that would be impossible. instead, most of what they "know" are actually "beliefs" as well, in the sense that they didn't measure them themselves.
Wrong again. You are misunderstanding the scientific method.
The scientific method is really a good place to start. We should check our assumptions. We should check our biases.

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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by luxagraf »

Ego wrote:Rule #1: I must learn how to distinguish facts from fiction.
I could be wrong, but I think the point Brute is trying to make is that assuming there is a distinction to be made here is predicated on a belief, which is not fact, which obliterates rule number one.

Not to be too philosophy 101, but all frameworks for thinking are founded on beliefs, not facts. To believe that observation of the universe leads one to being capable of distinguishing fact from fiction is a *belief* that leads to a system for ordering the world. That this belief is the dominant one of our time, and that is seems to work pretty well (at least it enables some pretty amazing stuff), does not make it any less of a belief, that is, a non-fact.

Incidentally, the late Hellenistic period of Greek philosophy might lend some help in terms of how we extricate our culture from it's current post-whatever confusion. I'm not a history expert by any means, but generally speaking that's when the gradual collapse of Greek culture led to the collapse of most of the materialist/rationalist/atheistic schools of thought that had flourished for 400 years or so. We're not so original in our descent into Idiocracy and I suspect that our way out of it will be similar to how Greek culture got out of it.

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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by jacob »

@luxagraf - How did the Greek culture get out of it? I'm not trying to be rhetorically facetious about that question. I mean, didn't Greek civlization basically decline in importance only for a few of their smartest people to end up as teachers for rich Romans in the mid-run ... and end up in a financial clusterfuck 2000 years later. The only reason we still have a lot of their culture is because monks deemed it important to preserve it. (Yeah, something about Alexander the Great... but you get what I mean.)

PS:I don't thinking getting too phil101 is such a great idea. Going that far is not operationally useful when deciding whether it's a good idea to jump out the window from the 20th floor. We can sit here and agree that whether one falls down and turns into splatter is just someone's belief and that nobody who hasn't jumped really doesn't know whether they too will turn into sidewalk goo. But is such a discussion fundamental useful in any sense of the word... I don't think it is. In particular, I think it just might cause a few rare deluded individual to actually jump just to see... maybe they believe in Vedic levitation... so bad idea to go there. IOW, when it comes to jumping out from high places without a parachute, a belief is not just a belief.

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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by jacob »


George the original one
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by George the original one »

Digging further into the Pew survey on fake news, it's interesting to see how it breaks down across political & economic lines:
http://www.journalism.org/2016/12/15/ma ... news_0-02/

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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by luxagraf »

jacob wrote:@luxagraf - How did the Greek culture get out of it?
Politically they didn't. The romans came and did their thing... thanks for the ideas here's some heavy taxation to ensure your economy doesn't compete with ours. Culturally, well I guess that depends on how you define winning at culture, they have a couple of "blue zones" so they might be doing something right.
jacob wrote:PS:I don't thinking getting too phil101 is such a great idea. Going that far is not operationally useful when deciding whether it's a good idea to jump out the window from the 20th floor.
True, but it might be helpful to keep in mind when trying to convince other people to change a high level belief. To me it's like wheaton levels (or your Drew Carey clip above) there's no point in trying to sway someone's high level opinions about say, energy use, when their opinions are undergirded by an operational framework that holds that truth handed down from on high trumps observation of the world (assuming my beliefs are built on the observation of the world belief system). it's apples to oranges and a waste of time.

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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by BRUTE »

@jacob

it seems brute and jacob are operating on different definitions of the word "fact".

in the context of this discussion, brute has been thinking of "facts" as something that an individual has personally, objectively measured. jacob measuring a star's position or the speed of sound in a gas.

for "belief", brute has been thinking about anything that an individual holds as true that he has not personally measured, i.e. a "factoid" or "bit of information" that has been acquired via social means.

jacob seems to define "fact" as something that is "held as true" (to avoid the word belief) and that is actually objectively true.

maybe the term "indirect fact" can be used to determine things "held as true" that were learned from others instead of from personal observation. so there are "direct facts", "indirect facts", and "falsehoods".

brute agrees with the frameworks-framework. his whole point is that while direct facts can be learned about reality, and many scientists learn very many direct facts about reality, as soon as they tell these direct facts to another human, that human will acquire them as indirect facts. and without the effort to convert the indirect fact into a direct fact by reproducing the experiment, it is very hard for the learner to tell if the teacher was objectively right or not.

there might be some granularity to the type of relationship, and there's probably a game of telephone going on. jacob can probably tell if what his physicist colleague is talking about makes sense. this is because jacob has spent 10+ years working in the field. brute could not. brute can mostly tell if humans are full of shit with regards to certain sub fields of computer programming, diet, or exercise. this is because brute has spent 10+ years in each of these fields.

if knowledge (the sum of known facts) were limited to direct facts, society would likely never rise above a very low level. after a certain amount of complexity, humans HAVE to rely on indirect facts, via the aforementioned frameworks and what not.

unfortunately, this introduces all the disadvantages of networking. maybe brute is equipped with above average understanding of networking problems because of his software background and interest in bitcoin, but uncertainty, fragmentation, and difficulty of settling on any specific result are typical. this is not exceptional, it's the rule. in fact the genius of bitcoin was that for the first time, decentralization, certainty, and unification could be combined. (it's easy to have a decentralized network, but it's hard to prevent fragmentation or settle on a certain state among participants).

said yet another way: the perceived problem seems to be that most humans are very distant from the objective source of facts, reality. they acquire almost all of their facts indirectly, and are therefore vulnerable to charlatans, demagogues, liars, the incompetent, biases.. but this is to be expected. relying on social, indirect facts is the only way a society of this complexity can exist. if humans only relied on facts they acquired directly, they would still sit in caves and marvel about fire. the social effect of spreading knowledge comes at a price.

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Ego
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by Ego »

BRUTE wrote: said yet another way: the perceived problem seems to be that most humans are very distant from the objective source of facts, reality. they acquire almost all of their facts indirectly, and are therefore vulnerable to charlatans, demagogues, liars, the incompetent, biases.. but this is to be expected. relying on social, indirect facts is the only way a society of this complexity can exist. if humans only relied on facts they acquired directly, they would still sit in caves and marvel about fire. the social effect of spreading knowledge comes at a price.
Brute channeling Zizek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SQpczc8mGg

Can anyone think of ways we might deal with unknown-knowns?

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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by Campitor »

@Brute

You arrived at the essence of what we are talking about. It is difficult as you state, for anyone to come to a correct conclusion or define what the relevant facts should be about any complex issue when they aren't experts or spent years studying the field. Essentially they don't know what they don't know. That doesn't mean we can't have opinions. But we must acknowledge that we could be wrong since we lack the pre-requisite experience and training to make a truly informed decision. I'm very impressed at how eloquently and precisely you outlined the problem.
Ego wrote:
Can anyone think of ways we might deal with unknown-knowns?
Maybe constant self-auditing? Why do I believe this? What are my motivations? Is my bias selectively ignoring valid arguments that disprove my assumptions? Why am I pursuing this specific activity? What do I want and why?

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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by jacob »

@Ego - What do you mean by unknown-unknowns?

Do you mean black swans? Are you referring to the problem of induction (e.g. if I drop an apple 100 times and observe that it falls to the ground, how can I be sure that it also falls when I drop it for the 101st time?)

Or---since it's rather pertinent to where this thread has been going so far---do you mean unknown-unknown on a personal level (like brute's direct and indirect facts)? See diagram here: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/the-o ... world.html

7Wannabe5
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jacob:

A few observations related to your analogy.

1) Young children may or may not be intelligent individuals. Cultures may or may not be anti-intellectual. The expansion of intellectual faculties as the brain develops in a child only rather weakly resembles the emergence of intelligence in a species, the achievement of mastery in a field of study by an adult with a mature brain, or the development of a culture where intellect and its achievements are particularly appreciated.

2) Even in the earliest phases of learning, part of the process is the necessity to release or "destroy" previous strategy or paradigm before new one can be adopted. For instance, learning to multiply is partially "destructive" of addition. Bobby has 6 apples, Sally has 6 apples, Pedro has 6 apples. How many apples are there altogether? We must, maybe for just a moment, let go of the grip we previously had on the problem in order to proceed with better tool or strategy.

3) It is very easy to underestimate that which we take for granted in our human intellectual heritage. When we teach our children to multiply, we are first gifting them with the useful tool of the Hindu numeric system which was promoted by Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi who was a Director of the House of Wisdom during the golden age of Islamic mathematics in the 9th century (while the lights were dimmed in the realm of the severely melanin deprived.) In spite of their much vaunted contributions to realms such as geometry, the Greeks couldn't multiply or divide for sh*t with their lame-azz numeric system. So, when we present our children with this system, it is really not that different than allowing them the use of an abacus or a calculator.

4) Maybe I have two groups of students. One group consists of adults with an average IQ of 90. One group consists of 8 year old children with an average IQ of 130. It is my job to teach both groups that Base 10 is arbitrary. With which group am I more likely to succeed? Why do humans persist in the arbitrary use of an archaic Base 10 numeric system when teaching children rather than the Factorial Number System, which it seems to me would be much more elegant and useful?

Oh my, I have really gone off on a wild tangent now. How shall I conclude? My point is that I believe that the problem you perceive is due to the fear of letting go of the good enough for the better, and the humans who are to blame are overly introverted scientists who spend too much time in the laboratory* or library and not enough time in the classroom ;)

*And those who have zero memory of ever measuring charge/mass ratio of an electron in high school physics class, perhaps due to fact that they shared a joint in the back of a potato chip truck with a guy who looked like Hutch (not Starsky) the night before such an experiment was performed, shall forever be held blameless!!!

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Ego
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by Ego »

jacob wrote:@Ego - What do you mean by unknown-unknowns?
Unknown-knowns. Things we don't know we know. Subconscious. Biases and whatnot. Watch that short Zizek video.

As I see it, Brute is making two points:

1)
BRUTE wrote:it is very hard for the learner to tell if the teacher was objectively right or not.
and

2)
BRUTE wrote:...they acquire almost all of their facts indirectly, and are therefore vulnerable to charlatans, demagogues, liars, the incompetent, biases.. but this is to be expected. ....
Brute's nihilism is shining through - or - darkening the argument, depending on how you look at it.

1) Just because something is hard, does not mean it is impossible. Yes, it is challenging to figure out what sources of information to trust. For important things..... try.

2) At the end of the spectrum we have two types.
a) A person shaped by a world where they have never learned to distinguish fact from fiction but can still learn.
b) A person shaped by a world where they were indoctrinated to distinguish fiction as fact. They are wired to see fiction as fact and to actively ignore evidence of facts.

The realization I am coming to is that (to my surprise) unlimited access to information has not shifted people from b) to a) as I expected. It has done the opposite. In some places the number of b)s has now reached critical mass.

How do we teach critical thinking to those who place a high value on ignorance and are proud that they trust their heart over their mind when making important decisions? How do we encourage people to see the value in critical thinking?

Consequences.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Consequences..?


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steveo73
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by steveo73 »

Campitor wrote:@Brute

You arrived at the essence of what we are talking about. It is difficult as you state, for anyone to come to a correct conclusion or define what the relevant facts should be about any complex issue when they aren't experts or spent years studying the field. Essentially they don't know what they don't know. That doesn't mean we can't have opinions. But we must acknowledge that we could be wrong since we lack the pre-requisite experience and training to make a truly informed decision. I'm very impressed at how eloquently and precisely you outlined the problem.
Ego wrote:
Can anyone think of ways we might deal with unknown-knowns?
Maybe constant self-auditing? Why do I believe this? What are my motivations? Is my bias selectively ignoring valid arguments that disprove my assumptions? Why am I pursuing this specific activity? What do I want and why?
I agree with these comments or at least the conclusion.

I don't agree with we have to be experts. There are plenty of experts who are wrong. In some areas I think it's harder for experts because they need funding to keep their jobs. We should never rely completely on the letters beside someone's name.

Campitor
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by Campitor »

steveo73 wrote:
I don't agree with we have to be experts. There are plenty of experts who are wrong. In some areas I think it's harder for experts because they need funding to keep their jobs. We should never rely completely on the letters beside someone's name.
I completely agree that there are plenty of experts who are wrong. But we have to entertain that if an expert can be wrong, whatever the reason (bias, ineptitude, greed), non-experts can also be wrong. This doesn't mean we toss our reason and logic into the infinite abyss of indifference. It only means that we must admit, if we are going to be faithful in our quest for logic/truth, that we may be drawing incorrect conclusions. Either we must conduct our own research, tempered by rigorous training and peer review, or acknowledge we are just taking an educated guess.

Please take my aforementioned comments in context. I'm not talking about simple topics but more complex issues with variable inputs that require a rigorous application of scientific reasoning and peer review. :D

steveo73
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Re: Post-factualism: Goodbye Enlightenment--Hello Idiocracy?

Post by steveo73 »

Campitor wrote:
steveo73 wrote:
I don't agree with we have to be experts. There are plenty of experts who are wrong. In some areas I think it's harder for experts because they need funding to keep their jobs. We should never rely completely on the letters beside someone's name.
I completely agree that there are plenty of experts who are wrong. But we have to entertain that if an expert can be wrong, whatever the reason (bias, ineptitude, greed), non-experts can also be wrong. This doesn't mean we toss our reason and logic into the infinite abyss of indifference. It only means that we must admit, if we are going to be faithful in our quest for logic/truth, that we may be drawing incorrect conclusions. Either we must conduct our own research, tempered by rigorous training and peer review, or acknowledge we are just taking an educated guess.

Please take my aforementioned comments in context. I'm not talking about simple topics but more complex issues with variable inputs that require a rigorous application of scientific reasoning and peer review. :D
I completely agree with the statement non-experts can be wrong. Anyone can be wrong unless we have proven facts. We also can't be over the top when it comes to proving something. If you have good hypothesis that are backed up by empirical data and the research is at a good level of maturity then we have to concur with the science or facts.

I agree with you as well. When it comes to complex issues we need to accept that complexity. I have stated this multiple times within this thread. People that deny the complexity of a topic are clearly part of the idiocracy as per this thread. They deny the facts.

We should also be prepared to change our assessments of the data/facts based upon better quality data/facts.

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