That’s a Generalization… only feminists get to make truth-claims about groups?

Knowledge involves generalizations. The science of amphibians is not about specific frogs, but about frogs in general. A veterinarian, asked to treat a specific frog, would call upon a store of generalizations to help make a diagnosis and to recommend treatments. Even if the vet was very familiar with past episodes of sickness of that particular frog, he would still be generalizing across instances. i.e., in the past, when this frog burps purple bubbles, it has meant that he is reacting to eating a certain kind of fly. The frog is burping purple bubbles, therefore…

It is true that there is nothing logically precise or rigorous about induction. Technically, induction can even be regarded as an error. Just because 100,000 white swans have been observed, it does not mean all swans are white.

On the other hand, since human knowledge is finite, and people are often operating in conditions of uncertainty, it is frequently necessary to make educated guesses based on past experience.

Some thoughts about male and female feminists

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvbtKAYdcZY

Sir Roger Scruton/Dr. Jordan B. Peterson: Apprehending the Transcendent

Scruton comments: “The old way of teaching the humanities was as objects of love. This is what I have loved. This is what previous generations have loved who handed it on to me. Here. Try it out and you will love it too. Whereas the postmodern curriculum is a curriculum of hatred. It’s directed against our cultural inheritance.”

Peterson, describing that postmodern point of view: “This is the best of what the best of us could produce and it’s nothing. Why should you bother?”

When asked why someone would adopt a man-hating ideology, Scruton suggests that with a loss of a culturally inherited religious tradition and church attendance feminists feel something to be lacking in their lives but do not know what it is. They then surmise that it has been stolen from them.[1] They look at people who seem to be at peace with themselves and the world, the socially successful, who seem fairly content, and imagine it is they who have taken it.

Knowledge is Domain Specific : an elusive, inscrutable and profound truth

The statement that knowledge is domain specific has the ring of something blandly matter-of-fact and dull. It is, in fact, of earth-shattering importance and it explains a great deal concerning the limitations of human cognition.

For instance, professors of statistics and probability are generally unable to apply their knowledge to ordinary, everyday affairs and they come up with the wrong answers. They know how their expertise applies to certain domains; perhaps reverse mortgages, or the likelihood of chimpanzee number three getting to mate, but do not know how it applies to used car purchases, dating apps, or paint prices.

If even the professors are unable to apply what they have learned, it seems rather pointless to insist that psychology undergraduates learn the concepts and methods. However, this is simply the situation of all of us in every field. Those psychology students should potentially be able to apply stats to certain kinds of experiments, though possibly completely unable to apply the same concepts to anything outside that narrow topic.

The domain specificity of knowledge explains the need for explanations. Explanations take something a person is already familiar with and relates it to something unfamiliar. It is not possible to explain the unfamiliar by appeal to something also unfamiliar.

If it were possible for someone to extrapolate automatically from something he knows to all circumstances where the concept might usefully apply, explanations would be redundant and human beings would get a lot closer to omniscience.[1]

Christopher Hitchens is Not Great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55GtlOyJnis&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_b0sTjvuas&feature=youtu.be

Self-sealing Fallacy

Some modern militant atheists like to claim things like “religion ruins everything.” Or that the planet would be so much better off without a belief in God. An obvious response is to point at the horrors perpetrated by explicitly atheistic political movements in the twentieth century to claim that actually, things get much worse – atheism ruins everything.

Some atheists have attempted a rebuttal. This is the idea that Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong were not “real” atheists, communism and fascism are not genuinely atheistic, and neither were their followers, and that their ill-deeds cannot be laid at the feet of atheism. The first time I encountered it, I incorrectly imagined it was just one person’s confusion. Apparently, this is not so.

Christopher Hitchens advances the argument in the above clips.

It is a nice example of the self-sealing fallacy – also known as the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

When One Sex Attacks The Other, Both Lose

Many feminists describe the history of humanity as a male tyranny, oppressing and maltreating women at every opportunity. Their name for this is the “patriarchy;” a name now intended to send a shudder down the spines of all who hear it.

Having suggested this characterization of the totality of human existence all that is needed is evidence. Then, in an instance of what is called “confirmation bias,” a selective search is made for unpleasant things ever done to women, not worrying about similarly horrible things perpetrated against men, nice things about men, or nice things men have done for women.

The result is an ugly and repellent account of the way men and women are connected to each other.

A list of male contributions in architecture, art, music, literature, philosophy, poetry, theater, medicine, math, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering – the provision of the water coming out of the kitchen tap and showerhead, plumbing, roads, hospitals, the phone in your pocket, you name it, would present a more positive picture of the male input to humanity.

Thanks to anti-male propaganda it is possible to read Facebook posts where one woman casually comments to the other that “men suck,” and is met by bland agreement by a married woman.

AI and the Dehumanization of Man

Strong Artificial Intelligence is the idea that computers can one day be constructed that have the abilities of the human mind. The contrast is with narrow AI which is already with us – that is the notion that computers can be made that can do one thing very well, such as the Watson computer that won in Jeopardy, or Deep Blue that bet Kasparov in chess.

Strong AI, artificial general intelligence, would mean that a robot fitted with a computer brain could move around in the world as competently as a human.  As F. H. George commented to the editor of Philosophy, 32 (1957), 168-169: “finite automata are capable of exhibiting, at least in principle, all the behaviour that human beings are capable of exhibiting, including the ability to act as poets or creative artists and even to wink at a girl and mean it.”[1] This reference to a wink itself has a poetic touch to it that captures a sense of genuine humanity.

Strong and narrow AI is the difference between an idiot savant who can do one thing incredibly well, such as recognizing prime numbers of incredible length,[2] reading two pages of a book simultaneously with over 90% recall like Kim Peek, and someone with enough nous to handle the wide range of tasks that any normal human being has to face; engaging in a lengthy conversation one minute and enjoying a work of fiction the next.

Utilitarianism: a new kind of evil

[I have so revised Utilitarianism: yet another sacrificial cult, including insights from my article The Trolley Problem Explained, and from thoughts arising from teaching this topic, that I am publishing this new version with a new title.]

Utilitarianism represents a nadir in philosophical moral reasoning, more corrupting and evil even than the spontaneous tendency to scapegoat.

Before Plato, the Ancient Greek attitude to morality was “help your friends, harm your enemies.” Modern people can see that such a point of view is grotesquely immoral. It is a description of corruption. Plato’s suggestion was “harm no one.” This is obviously a vast improvement.

The Bible states that “you should love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus took this even further and said “love your enemy.”

Social Justice: an analysis Part 3

The topics discussed in Part 3 of Social Justice: an analysis now published at The Gates of Vienna include differences in achievement by sex and ethnic groups and further analysis of resentment.The demand for identical outcomes between the sexes and ethnic groups is deeply pathological and irrational. Plenty of empirical evidence is provided in the discussion. Even academic feminists have begun to recognize the incontrovertible fact that the more egalitarian a culture is, the bigger the differences regarding areas of study and vocational choice between the sexes. One study called it a “paradox” which seems to indicate disbelief that their past assumptions could possibly be wrong.The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education. A related “paradox” is referred to here:The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.

By falsely claiming that differences of outcome are the result of discrimination, SJWs ramp up intergroup hatred, fear, and resentment making the world a significantly worse place. The sacrificial crisis of rampant scapegoating continues to escalate.

The notion of resentment is worth trying to understand as deeply as possible because it is such a major feature of human life and right at his moment in time it has been actively encouraged by the left-dominated media, government, and colleges.

Part 1 is here,and Part 2,here.

Social Justice: an analysis part 2 of 4

Social Justice: an analysis part 2 has been published by Gates of Vienna. Part 1 is here.

Beginning as a summary of The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell, the article took on a life of its own. While heavily indebted to Sowell, the analysis ranges further.

Topics include Tough Love vs Mother Love – with modernity suffering from a relative absence of one and a surplus of the other. In Kindness and Charity I argue that SJWs supposedly want both but in fact fill the world with hate and resentment by claiming that all life is a zero sum game and if someone is doing well it is only at the expense of the downtrodden, an idea promoted by Karl Marx. Hierarchies and Equality points out the absolute necessity of hierarchies for social life to function, among other things. Hierarchies and Achievement tries to explain why “from he who has much, more will be given.” Relatively slight differences in ability and industriousness can result in vastly different outcomes for reasons that have nothing at all to do with discrimination.

The end of part 2 ends by commenting on the splendidly informative experiment that was East and West Germany. By taking the same group of people with a common history and cultural habits and subjecting them to different political and economic systems the results were clear very quickly. The “social justice” of communism did not work out at all well.

The Schizophrenia of Strong AI

If a person went to a psychiatrist and said “I think I am a machine,” the psychiatrist would be quite right in thinking he has his work cut out for him. This belief resembles the brain damaged patients described by Oliver Sacks in books like The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. One man thinks he is a machine; another, his wife a hat.

Proponents of Strong AI, or artificial general intelligence, regard people as machines and oscillate between extreme self-hatred and god fantasies. This cries out for a diagnosis as much as an explanation. In many ways, it turns out, this is just a particular variant of an omnipresent modern tendency.

Eric Voegelin makes much of Plato’s notion of the metaxy – man as the in-between; neither beasts nor gods. Finite beings confronted by intuitions of the infinite – neither omniscient nor completely oblivious. Metaxy can only exist if in fact something is recognized as transcending Man.

In a similar fashion, Nikolai Berdyaev comments that without the idea of God there can be no idea of Man. The sense of metaxy is lost and man is unable to find his existential situation.