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Isaac

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Indeed, and yet above we were talking about 'popular and sought after' policies, not 'reasonable and scientifically well supported' ones. That the two...
July 02, 2021 at 05:17
No, but I didn't refer to the services that were 'required'. I was talking about the services that are desired. So... Why would they need to be scared...
July 01, 2021 at 20:27
I get the theory, but doesn't it leave a rather unconvincing model of a governing system that somehow has no way of determining what services are requ...
July 01, 2021 at 20:14
What would be the object of these protests if the changes required are considered too impractical to be adopted? Presumably, living in a democracy, su...
July 01, 2021 at 18:47
Interesting story, thanks for sourcing it. My twopenneth - I think it might be related to the concept of Cultural Lag (Richard and June Brinkman - can...
July 01, 2021 at 18:11
I don't know if it is de rigueur to resurrect such old threads, but I was quite interested in your thought process here prior to being knocked out of ...
July 01, 2021 at 17:45
No. I have no doubt that there's a 'theory-building' element to one's political worldview, and if you still think I'm a reductionist about these matte...
April 30, 2021 at 05:32
Well, if replication is an issue for you, what's your alternative? If I'm supporting an argument for mitigating circumstances to reduce the sentence o...
April 29, 2021 at 05:44
Because contextual legitimacy doesn't mean that resolution is reachable. Just because I can see how someone might have arrived at a position, it doesn...
April 29, 2021 at 05:27
Yes. I'm not quite sure my full critique of Haidt's position is quite appropriate here, but in summary, I think he's right to invoke the factors he ha...
April 29, 2021 at 05:13
It wasn't so much a misunderstanding as a declining of your opening gambit. Indeed. As I said to Frank above, I don't even hold that there are such th...
April 28, 2021 at 15:55
Maybe. I wasn't really responding to the OP by then (which turns out to be just a thinly disguised repetition of the all-to-common neo-liberal whingin...
April 28, 2021 at 14:20
The same would be true of field's sins, no? Reductionism is not a flaw limited political psychology, nor is it a flaw which exhausts political psychol...
April 28, 2021 at 13:36
Am I? One says that psyches needn't be same, the other that some methodical study might be the best way to find out if they are or not.
April 28, 2021 at 13:34
If a field of study committed one to all the output of that field we'd both be Nazis.
April 28, 2021 at 13:14
I could, but I fear I'd run out of hair, there's precious little left as it is. Why? Saltpeter, charcoal and sulphur are dissimilar yet we can model t...
April 28, 2021 at 13:08
I said ecologists are not expected to know the biology of the individual species to any lesser extent. Clumsy wording. One cannot study the ecology of...
April 28, 2021 at 13:03
Yes. If by 'point' you mean much the same as the 'point' that trousers go on button-frontwards, or the 'point' that one shouldn't piss upwind, then ye...
April 28, 2021 at 12:48
This entire sub-topic has already had more serious consideration than it deserved, I'm not going add the deconstruction of a sarcastic rejoinder to th...
April 28, 2021 at 12:08
I think this is a good analysis. what's happening in antinatalism is the consequence of seeking some foundational principle behind a set of moral intu...
April 28, 2021 at 05:22
No, @"Maw"'s got a point. I'm personally giving up work and retraining as a philosopher - I can't believe some people in my profession say things whic...
April 28, 2021 at 05:15
I was referring to the expression of belief when I talked about rhetorical games, the reason why we think the two sides are different is largely the e...
April 28, 2021 at 05:08
I don't really think either apply. It's pretty clear that the arguments put forward by either side are moves in the rhetorical game, so I think if one...
April 27, 2021 at 18:19
As I said, I wasn't discussing the matter seriously. It's like trying to have a serious discussion with a child about the virtues of bedtime. I get it...
April 27, 2021 at 18:08
Indeed. And Astrologers no doubt. wasn't treating the matter as a serious discussion. Though one wonders whom it is we should be consulting in matters...
April 27, 2021 at 06:58
I doubt that. But hell, I'm paid an awful lot of money for my moronic guesswork so at least I've got something to cushion the blow... it's a wonder th...
April 27, 2021 at 05:59
Ah, well, that's cleared that up. 25 years of wondering whether I and my colleagues were morons and I could have just asked...
April 27, 2021 at 05:28
Brilliant idea. Next election we'll let the fascists and Neo-liberals use psychology to target advertising to directly appeal to their core supporters...
April 27, 2021 at 05:20
What definition of morality are you working from? We've already agreed to this. I was just correcting the simplistic analysis presented. A morality ca...
April 27, 2021 at 05:14
Well yeah, that then is exactly what I'm talking about. You put all stuff that your have to do for others in terms of your own benefit. "I have to pay...
April 27, 2021 at 05:01
I'm not sure I'd describe it as 'the point' of the book, but I wouldn't deny that there's been a growth in interest, and perhaps leaning more toward p...
April 26, 2021 at 13:11
By the way, if anyone is interested in the state of research on this, Darren Schreiber has published a retrospective, only a few years out of date htt...
April 26, 2021 at 12:42
They may, but it seems likely, given their purpose, that the psychology they point to is more that of the closest socially acceptable narrative, rathe...
April 26, 2021 at 12:27
That might be true, but do you think it actually matters? Are there situations in which you think either side remain unaware of the arguments of the o...
April 26, 2021 at 11:30
Which political wing most supports environmental conservation? 'Conservation' is just a gloss for the right. It's about individual's rights to take fr...
April 26, 2021 at 11:16
No, I'm saying that having the avoidance of all suffering as a moral maxim is incoherent because moral maxims by their very nature, require at least s...
April 26, 2021 at 11:08
I don't exclude the possibility that the two might sometimes overlap, but if they necessarily overlap, then morally 'right' (as opposed to morally 'wr...
April 26, 2021 at 10:53
Yes. Enacting a moral course of action, in order for it to not count simply as 'whatever we wanted to do anyway' inevitably involves suffering either ...
April 26, 2021 at 09:48
Well, there's the cost of the gun...
April 26, 2021 at 09:45
Which leads to moral absurdities like not wanting to trip up a gunman who's about to massacre a thousand innocent people. So that should be discarded ...
April 26, 2021 at 08:51
Anything from opening a door for the person behind you to throwing yourself on a grenade to save your comrades. In the past it's generally come down t...
April 26, 2021 at 08:44
No, the context was comparing faith in 'string theory' to faith in God/Religious claims. The two are completely dissimilar for the reasons given. Stri...
April 26, 2021 at 08:40
No, not particularly. Why do you ask? What an odd thing to want.
April 26, 2021 at 06:26
Right. Seems at odds with... and and I have great aversion to learning from people who's lives seem like they're not living well, and many aspects of ...
April 26, 2021 at 06:24
Still not seeing what any of this has to do with the issue. What's at stake is whether (to rephrase it in your terms) it is reasonable to have an expe...
April 26, 2021 at 06:18
You're confusing active inference modelling with synaptic pruning, they're not that same thing. No, many of the processes are deliberate and conscious...
April 26, 2021 at 06:13
Yes, morally I think that's a necessary boundary. I don't think any external authority could possibly take on such a role though (if that's where you ...
April 25, 2021 at 06:10
I really can't see how any of that actually meets the charge of neo-liberalism. It seems completely unrelated. Hyper-individualistic notions like "why...
April 25, 2021 at 06:01
Repeating it doesn't make it less absurd. Suffering is a very complex state of a human mind. It's only relevant with the alternatives in play. If ther...
April 25, 2021 at 05:57
Yeah. I think that there's no reason to assume our intuitions will not ever prove contradictory if we imagine scenarios that we've never encountered b...
April 25, 2021 at 05:54