self-help manual

[iansjack]

Quackery is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, you’re obviously far cleverer than I am, so I’m out.

[Octocontrabass]

This is a logical fallacy of appeal to authority, and in general, "credentialism".

I cannot become an expert in every subject, and I cannot evaluate your claims without expert knowledge. If I also cannot trust anyone else to be an expert, how am I supposed to evaluate your claims?

Your credentialism is drugging children with a bogus ODD diagnosis and sees nothing wrong with it. It's part of the canon. I'm shocked that that doesn't give you pause for thought and that you'd continue deferring to such charlatans.

Believe it or not, a lot of people see problems with it. The Wikipedia article on ODD has an entire section for criticism of the validity of the diagnosis, and another entire section on how ODD cannot be effectively treated by medication alone. But extending these disputes to the entire practice of psychiatry is a logical fallacy. (And if the reason you're so upset about children being diagnosed with ODD and given medication is your own personal experience, that too is a logical fallacy.)

[kerravon]

This is a logical fallacy of appeal to authority, and in general, "credentialism".

I cannot become an expert in every subject, and I cannot evaluate your claims without expert knowledge. If I also cannot trust anyone else to be an expert, how am I supposed to evaluate your claims?

An excellent question.

First - it is reasonable to default to assuming expert consensus as a starting point. The trouble is treating that as the final word.

But the heart of the problem is your own self-doubt. You think you don't have the required skills to evaluate claims - when you do. You simply use the same skills you have as an osdever - you use logic, look at the evidence, and look for internal consistency.

I note that you have successfully pushed back against ODD yourself - without needing a psychology degree.

[Octocontrabass]

But the heart of the problem is your own self-doubt. You think you don't have the required skills to evaluate claims - when you do. You simply use the same skills you have as an osdever - you use logic, look at the evidence, and look for internal consistency.

It takes years of study to become an OS developer no matter how skilled you are at logical reasoning. The same is true of every subject, and I simply do not have enough free time for that.

I note that you have successfully pushed back against ODD yourself - without needing a psychology degree.

You mean the qualified experts used as references for the Wikipedia article successfully pushed back. All I did was summarize a Wikipedia article.

[kerravon]

But the heart of the problem is your own self-doubt. You think you don't have the required skills to evaluate claims - when you do. You simply use the same skills you have as an osdever - you use logic, look at the evidence, and look for internal consistency.

It takes years of study to become an OS developer no matter how skilled you are at logical reasoning. The same is true of every subject, and I simply do not have enough free time for that.

Alica Okano was 18 years old when she fleshed out fat.c in the PDOS source code. I had been sitting on it for years, with only FAT-16 working for write. As far as I know she hadn't spent "years" studying to become an OS developer. I had been doing it for years though. But it was me who just stepped back and watched in awe. I didn't ask her for her credentials. I just said "thanks".

However, it occurs to me that debating whether I have the "right" to discuss how to fix the human mind is one step down the line. The first is simply assessing the state of the world. I have a different document for that:

https://mutazilah.org/corpus/corrupt.txt

Basically our default state is a chimpanzee troop. It isn't pretty. We have a lot of cultural overrides in place though. Very impressive. But the globe doesn't have 100% cultural overrides.

Which scientific discipline do you think is responsible for assessing what percentage of the globe is still chimpanzee mode? Anthropology? Political science? Psychology? Something else?

It is my opinion that osdevers have the extreme technical skills required to take on a project like this. The problem is that they don't have the self-confidence to do so. It's something similar to the bystander effect. They assume that there is some super-smart person out there - far smarter than themselves - capable of - and actually doing - the required analysis. When that's not the case. What's out there is chimpanzees.

[Octocontrabass]

Alica Okano was 18 years old when she fleshed out fat.c in the PDOS source code. [...] As far as I know she hadn't spent "years" studying to become an OS developer.

Why do you assume she didn't? I had already spent years studying to become an OS developer when I was 18 years old. Or does self-study not count as studying?

Basically our default state is a chimpanzee troop.

I still have no reason to trust your claims. Can you find any experts who agree with you? Can you find any who disagree?

Which scientific discipline do you think is responsible for assessing what percentage of the globe is still chimpanzee mode? Anthropology? Political science? Psychology? Something else?

How are they "responsible" for that? Are you asking which discipline has the foundations to be able to do so in a logically sound manner?

It is my opinion that osdevers have the extreme technical skills required to take on a project like this.

Maybe so, but technical skills are not the same as expertise.

What's out there is chimpanzees.

Insulting people is a great way to convince them that you have nothing worthwhile to say. (Remember what I said earlier about interpersonal communication and compromise?)

[kerravon]

Basically our default state is a chimpanzee troop.

I still have no reason to trust your claims. Can you find any experts who agree with you? Can you find any who disagree?

It's not a secret. It is part of evolutionary biology and anthropology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_hierarchy

For dominance hierarchies in humans, see Dual strategies theory. For other uses, see Alpha male (disambiguation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_strategies_theory

The first and oldest of the two strategies, dominance, is exemplified by the use of force, implied force or other forms of coercion to take social power.


Welcome to the human race.

Now, evolutionary psychology is the field that documents who we are.

But who on earth do you think is in charge of DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THAT? ie ENGINEERING AN OVERRIDE. The answer is - no-one. Just a whole bunch of bystanders who assume that someone super-smart is "on the job". And the solution is in the question. We need ENGINEERS. For a field that doesn't exist. Software engineers are the most obvious match, with our brains basically being software.


Also, I realized I needed to take one more step back and create a readme.txt introduction. That is here:

https://mutazilah.org/corpus/readme.txt
and pointed to (with the human reading chain) from here:
https://mutazilah.org/corpus.htm

[VSlezak]

It seems to me that you are trying to build some kind of philosophical system centered around anthropology, morality and politics. However, any system is only as good as its epistemology. And to be honest, I find epistemology of this "corpus" to be weak and self-contradictory.

You constantly emphasize rationality, that everything has to be logically sound, or it falls. You even have "AXIOM 3: RATIONALITY TAKES PRECEDENCE OVER ALL OTHER VALUES." But, then you present the very definition of axioms as: "AXIOMS. Chosen starting points. Not derived. Not proven. Selected. The reader can reject them. If the reader rejects them, the derivation does not apply." But even though axioms are not something to be proven, they still need to be justified (usually this is done by direct personal observation). If something is not justified, then it is not rational to accept it in the first place. Therefore, framework which fully embraces rationality can not work if it also embraces arbitrary starting points. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with hypothetical thought experiment "if those things are true, then those things follow". But if I understand correctly, your goal is to prove something real, something that will help human flourishing, not just that hypothetically, if those axioms are true, certain conclusions follows. To summarize, without further justification, there is no rational reason to accept any of those axioms, and because your system is based on accepting only rational things, it is self-defeating.

Then, you have "AXIOM 5: UNCERTAINTY IS PERMANENT. You cannot know anything with absolute certainty. You cannot rule out most things. You must act under uncertainty." But this flatly contradicts another part: "THE FOUR CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE ... 1. BEDROCK Irrefutable facts derivable from physical constants, verified historical events, logical axioms, mathematical proofs. Examples: thermodynamic laws, verified historical dates, logical tautologies. Confidence level: High. These can be stated with certainty."

Next there is claim that you removed "The free world must be defended." and "The cost is acceptable." from axioms, because they are conclusions. But this further blurs whole concept of divison of axioms and conclusions. If your axioms are simply chosen, there was no need to remove those statements. But if you consider statement that can be derived from something else to be conclusion and not axiom, then you have to remove at least four other axioms: "AXIOM 1: SUBJUGATION IS WRONG." "AXIOM 2: THE SPECIES IS THE TRIBE. ... No subgroup - race, religion, nationality, ethnicity - has priority over the species." "AXIOM 4: HUMANISM TAKES PRECEDENCE OVER NON-SUBJUGATION." "AXIOM 6: THE INDIVIDUAL IS THE UNIT OF MORAL WORTH." Because those are all moral claims, and every moral claim can be derived within some broader moral framework.

"AXIOM 6A: DEFAULT AGNOSTICISM ABOUT SUPERNATURAL CLAIMS." is redundant, as from rational inquiry follows, that we should start with agnosticism about any claim.

It is my opinion that osdevers have the extreme technical skills required to take on a project like this. ... But who on earth do you think is in charge of DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THAT? ie ENGINEERING AN OVERRIDE. The answer is - no-one. Just a whole bunch of bystanders who assume that someone super-smart is "on the job". And the solution is in the question. We need ENGINEERS. For a field that doesn't exist. Software engineers are the most obvious match, with our brains basically being software.

No. You are looking for philosophers. Philosophers are specifically trained in critical thinking and proper reasoning, and they are working on exact questions you are trying to dissect. Whole purpose of morality is to find how things ought to be, and that includes how we should act about our inherited - as you call them "chimpanzees" - instincts. I personally like philosophy very much, which is also reason why I take some look at your documents. But taking it all together, because "The corpus derives from first principles.", I do not see reason to continue further, as even the very starting points are not something to be accepted even within the system itself.

[kerravon]

It seems to me that you are trying to build some kind of philosophical system centered around anthropology, morality and politics. However, any system is only as good as its epistemology. And to be honest, I find epistemology of this "corpus" to be weak and self-contradictory.

You constantly emphasize rationality, that everything has to be logically sound, or it falls. You even have "AXIOM 3: RATIONALITY TAKES PRECEDENCE OVER ALL OTHER VALUES." But, then you present the very definition of axioms as: "AXIOMS. Chosen starting points. Not derived. Not proven. Selected. The reader can reject them. If the reader rejects them, the derivation does not apply." But even though axioms are not something to be proven, they still need to be justified (usually this is done by direct personal observation).

Thanks for your comments. Note that I am not a philosophy expert. I ran them through my AI and it had answers to all of them except it conceded 6A as a minor point.

I'm not going to post the AI reply (but I can if you want), but I would highly recommend that you follow the instructions to load the corpus and copy and paste your message into there so that you can see the AI pushback yourself and directly argue.

I'll answer some of your main points myself.

You say that the epistemology is weak and refer to the rational-first line. But this is not contradictory. It is true that (some of) the starting points were chosen. But if there was a rational reason to drop any of them - I absolutely would. No contradiction.

Next, you say that my axioms need to be justified. They are justified by the fact that the derivation produces a world I would rather live in. If different axioms were to be found that produced something even better, I would absolutely adopt them instead. I see nothing wrong with that approach. It is logical.

You mentioned that we don't need engineers, we have philosophers. The readme.txt now points to an engineering document:

https://mutazilah.org/corpus/engineer.txt

and one of the topics there is post-2003 Iraq. It is unresolved. I was thinking of starting a new thread here called "Iraq" where software engineers can suggest how to improve Iraq. I consider that to be an unstaffed department. Are you saying there are philosophers already on the job explaining how to fix Iraqi culture or anything else that is needed to get the job done? Can you point me to them?

[Octocontrabass]

But who on earth do you think is in charge of DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THAT?

Politicians.

Software engineers are the most obvious match, with our brains basically being software.

If you can prove that brains are basically software, you'll revolutionize several fields of study and probably win a Nobel prize. As you have done neither of those things, I can only assume (as I am still not qualified to verify) that your arguments are all predicated on nonsense.

I was thinking of starting a new thread here called "Iraq" where software engineers can suggest how to improve Iraq.

Don't. This is not an appropriate place for that kind of discussion.