91–100 of 109 posts
Bring the site back up. Been getting this error lately. > Bandwidth Limit Exceeded > The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
Should be back soon. Have a ticket in with my hosting.
If you are part of a serious debating society you will be expected to be able to form an argument for or against a concept, viewpoint or position regardless of your personal beliefs. This is arguing constructively without the entrenched partisan foxholes people dig for themselves which makes it so hard to have civilized discussions and conversation with many people in our current febrile social climate.
My understanding was that that was becoming more rare in collegiate debate societies these days. Have things changed since the below article was published? https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/tradit...
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> The entire purpose of emotions is that they are they only place where human motivation comes from. Trying to separate "logic" vs. "emotion" when dealing with humans is a fools' game in my opinion. Not only that. Another aspect is that emotions and "instinct" are much, much older, from an evolutionary perspective, than our very recent reasoning abilities, and way more widespread amongst the animal kingdom than reaso…
> So, while far from perfect, they work. Emotions and instinct kept most of our ancestors and most of the currently living animals both alive and thriving. It's not just that they work; they matter in and of themselves. For example, it may literally be true that I'm more likely to die from falling furniture than from terrorism, but the fact that I fear terrorism more than falling furniture is relevant on its own term…
Isn't it the whole point of Behavioral Economics?
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> The article reads like you took every smartass redditor on the planet and condensed them down into an article. Why can I not express emotions in an argument, or why do I need to be 'rational', or why can I not be subjective? I don't mean this in an offensive way but why is everyone who argues supposed to pretend they're autistic, because that's honestly how this piece comes across. The author never says you have to…
I've had just as many constructive arguments that were angry, or subjective or whatever else. Hunter S. Thompson wasn't objective, but he was more insightful and sharper and commited to truth than most writers of the time. MLK didn't pull up an excel sheet when he advocated for a cause. Argumentation isn't just about facts, it's about expressing a state of mind and communicating authentically what one thinks, and if…
Your definition of an argument is much broader and probably encompasses all of what I would call persuasion. From reading the article I never got the impression he was suggesting this is how you persuade a large group of people to act. If you are arguing with your uncle at Thanksgiving about politics and want it to be productive this guide might help. I think we can both agree if you're trying to convince a bunch of center left / left friends who mostly agree with you to take the day off and protest. This guide probably won't.
Did you come to a different understanding after reading the article?
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Sometimes I use emotion in an argument to create ambiguity that the other party fills with some new point. So, for example, I'm arguing something, I run out of good argument. I dodge by making a vague, emotional point. Then the other party will construct a new argument based on my vague emotional point. This lets me reset and construct a new argument. It's a way to keep arguing when following a given point down the r…
Are you arguing to win or arguing to learn something/strengthen your argument? Because what you describe seems detrimental to the latter.
When the point has been prodded to death by some argument, it lets your fellow arguer back-up and poke it from another side. Maybe my argument is wrong, but myself and the person I'm arguing with haven't figured out exactly why yet. This lets us keep circling looking for weak points.
Hopefully over the course of that we both come away with a deeper understanding of the idea itself.
I think of it like when E. coli run and tumble over the course of the hunt for food. Sometimes a random walk is a weirdly great way to discover the mechanism of how an idea works or doesn't work. I'm just occasionally flipping the switch on the 'tumble' circuit: https://www.mit.edu/~kardar/teaching/projects/chemotaxis(And...
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I agree emotions are important. Given how all of our brains work, it's not realistic to take them out of the equation. But it is important to maintain some moderation and rein them in. Emotions are powerful, and if you don't learn to exercise some degree of control them, then they will control you. I think it helps to understand that emotions have a purpose. For example, fear helps you avoid threats, and anger pushes…
I totally agree with what you've written, with perhaps one small clarification/caveat/nuance. A mistake I've made in the past was to think about "controlling" emotions, as if emotions and logic were mutually exclusive, opposing forces. For example, take your excellent example about how a maladjusted fear response can make you afraid of things that aren't actually dangerous. The solution to this problem is not to try…
Even if you call it managing, it's too easy to see emotions as something with a volume knob you can just turn down whenever you like. But it's more complicated than that. They're basically hardwired into our brains. Some people's brains are wired differently, but even in a completely normal brain (if such a thing exists), there are systems that kick in and do stuff whether you want them to or not. As in parts of the brain that activate and shift gears for other parts of the brain.
So there are some things you can control but also some things you cannot control. Which means to manage them, sometimes you need to understand how the system works and the kinds of changes you can make. It's a bit like fixing a complicated bug: you can't just comment out the code that is doing whatever you don't like. You need to understand the whole system so you can make the right change in the right place.
I think your fear example is a good illustration of this. Experts have figured out how the system works, and they know where a change can be made, and that's exposure.
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I'm a leftie, but to be honest I have a left-wing and a right-wing uncle and they're both completely disinterested in the truth. One thinks Trump is god, and the other feels the same way about Noam Chomsky. One thinks Hillary eats babies, and the other thinks the CIA did 9/11. Meanwhile, the landscaping guy at work seems to have a pretty balanced take on things and he doesn't vote because he's not a citizen. He's one…
> the other thinks the CIA did 9/11 You're right that it's not true, or at least that memo about a month prior makes a pretty persuasive case for them. Currently it's only clear that a few prominent people in the executive branch of the US government had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and then later covered up the participation of high level Saudi organizers like Prince Bandar.
If you want to step back and start talking about the CIA's role in Afghanistan in the eighties and nineties, as well as the US's covering for the Saudis, and the engineering of the Iraq war, I have an extensive rant prepared that I've been inflicting on my poor friends for years.
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https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette Dawkins wasn't "deplatformed" for his legitimate views, but for islamophobia, which is completely legitimate. > In 2013, Dawkins came under fire for a series of statements regarding Islam that seemed to blur the line between reason-based resistance to dogma and xenophobic prejudice. He views Islam as the "greatest force for evil in the world today"[35][36] and stated that "All…
Do you not think that criticizing a religion is an acceptable thing for someone (e.g. an academic) to do? Indeed, that it would be a terrible thing if our academics were not free to criticize cultural movements such as religions? He wasn't speaking at a kindergarten; he was speaking at a university society that exists to platform intellectual debate.
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https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette Dawkins wasn't "deplatformed" for his legitimate views, but for islamophobia, which is completely legitimate. > In 2013, Dawkins came under fire for a series of statements regarding Islam that seemed to blur the line between reason-based resistance to dogma and xenophobic prejudice. He views Islam as the "greatest force for evil in the world today"[35][36] and stated that "All…
Wow, have you read the RationalWiki entry for Quillette? Just that entry is a good example of how the intolerance of the identity politics movement is spreading into domains that a rational society should be protecting. Read the articles in Quillette that I linked to by Colin Wright -- he was (before his career was ended by identity politics people) very obviously just an evolutionary biologist, not some sort of righ…
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Do you not think that criticizing a religion is an acceptable thing for someone (e.g. an academic) to do? Indeed, that it would be a terrible thing if our academics were not free to criticize cultural movements such as religions? He wasn't speaking at a kindergarten; he was speaking at a university society that exists to platform intellectual debate.
Yes, I remember when he did that with Christianity. I'm agnostic and I have his old books in my bookcase. He wasn't "criticizing" Islam, he was fearmongering. Then he started cozying up with evangelists as long as they hated "post-modernists" enough. He has (previously) had a lot of good things to say, and at some point he abandoned his ideals in favor of politics, and just became another Jordan Peterson crank.
> abandoned his ideals
I certainly wouldn't say that about him! What makes you think so?
> Then he started cozying up with evangelists as long as they hated "post-modernists" enough.
Could you tell me what you're referring to there? I agree he hates post-modernism.