posted
On a superficial level, you're undoubtedly right: since there are more humans on earth, more of them undoubtedly live "better" than at any time in history.
You may even be right on a percentage basis, although I'm not willing to grant that right off the bat.
We're only 60 years or less removed from the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the end of Stalin's purges, and the gulag, a decade or two removed from Apartheid and the Khmer Ruge, and basically contemporary with Rawanda, Darfur, and Bosnia, and a host of other genocides. Abject poverty is the rule, not the exception, in large portions of the world.
posted
Things in the world need to shift globally. It starts with the individual and making ones mind to make a conscious effort to be different. To not accept that sort of thing.
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The problem is that even humanity's attempts to do good carry the capacity for evil. The eugenics movement is an obvious example; the Crusades are another.
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To either of you, all of the things and types of things you describe happened with more frequency to more people in the past, and if the population under attack didn't like it, they had no recourse. Today that is not true. The rule of law is growing, for better or worse. The world is more interconnected.
There is no comparison between the past and the present.
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I disagree. As things become more efficient the potential for abuse grows as well. Modern machines have made killing so easy that entire races of people are being slaughtered right now while we sit at our computers and type messages at Hatrack.
The rule of law is no carte blanc either, there have been many "rules of law" that have not been in the peoples best interest.
During the Napolanic era hardened veterans were appalled at the carnage that cannon and grapeshot could inflict on soldiers. How much more effective are we at it now?
Go and see how much "Law" actually surrounds the average Iraqi or Rwandan citizen.
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Obviously if one is trying to wipe out those they consider imperfect and the other is trying to wipe out a whole religion. Why not try this? Start off being compassionate and understanding to individuals. Help people out when they need it, be friends with people who need friends. It's the thread principle, and that is just part of my "religion". Each person is a thread. Each thread needs to be woven together as strong as possible. It sounds a bit corny, but, there really is a lot of potential for good to be done in the world. And at least we're more aware of it. We read about these things in the past and cringe when at one time it was just accepted! We are making progress, but it's slow, and each time it seems like things are getting better... Folks try to make it bad again by simply NOT THINKING!
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Meh Believe what you will... I'll just stupidly try to change the world in some small way. It's worth a shot and better than just being so pessimistic about things.
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I'm with Synesthesia on this. I will also stupidly go about trying to make my corner of the world a better place. In my opinion, much better than the alternative. Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I try to do the same, not because I thing the whole world is going to change because of it but because I can see the small chnges around me, and because it makes me feel better....both about myself and about the things I see.
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Dag, I probably believe in free will at least as strongly as you do, but I approach it from a different angle. The way I see it, it operates more like a muscle than an inherent property, and many people rarely exercise this muscle. From a descriptive standpoint, the deterministic commonalities among people's behavior (as well as the poor quality of this behavior and the increase in quality that comes with increasing mindfullness) makes it very unlikely that people are using their free will. If their behavior follows laws, especially laws that they are unaware of and even opposed to, then it doesn't make sense to me to regard their behavior as non-deterministically free-willed.
But that doesn't at all preclude the possibility of people developing and enlarging their free will. If this is done, I'm not sure I believe that most aspects of "objective" reality can stand against the creative powers inherent in humankind. As I've brought up many times before, I am big believer in the Pelagian heresy, whcih holds that people have within themselves the potential to choose to do the right thing.
On another note, I find the characterization of the Crusades as something that was intended for good but resulted in evil to be bizzare. Could you explain what you mean by that?
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quote:From a descriptive standpoint, the deterministic commonalities among people's behavior (as well as the poor quality of this behavior and the increase in quality that comes with increasing mindfullness) makes it very unlikely that people are using their free will. If their behavior follows laws, especially laws that they are unaware of and even opposed to, then it doesn't make sense to me to regard their behavior as non-deterministically free-willed.
I think commonalities among people's behavior has no bearing on whether they are using their free will, which is why I categorize my belief in it as stronger than yours. Even the acting out of those commonalities is an exercise of such will in my view. The fact that it can be predicted in aggregate doesn't make it deterministic.
quote:On another note, I find the characterization of the Crusades as something that was intended for good but resulted in evil to be bizzare. Could you explain what you mean by that?
The Crusades were undertaken, at least by some participants, in order to accomplish what they saw as a great good. Yet they committed evil in doing so.
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But the good that they set out ot do was the same evil that you are saying they accomplished. If it's good for them to set up to slaughter Muslims and Jews, how is it evil for them to accomplish these goals? Are you using two different standards of deciding what's good and evil? That is, are you saying that they intened to do what they thought was good (but that you don't agree with) and accomplished these goals that are evil in your judgement?
This brings us back to initial disagreement we had. I think that the Crusades were, for most people and speaking simplistically, intended to be about slaughtering Muslims and Jews, and the "good" (and to be honest, I don't even see how this could be considered good. Serving an evil leader, be they man or god, is still doing evil.) aspects of it served as a useful pretext.
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However, I'm not so certain some of the instigators, notably the pope(s), had the purest of motivations. The crusades were too politically convenient for his(their) position, and the speeches given about them make it pretty darn clear that while there may have been a "good" (if based on bad information) religious motive, the political motive was close to mind.
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They were about rescuing the holy land from defilers. In the context of the crusaders, that was definitely good. Whether it was good in your estimation is a different value judgement entirely.
Unfortunately, this was based on a few mistaken assumptions (notably that things of christian significance were being defiled, when in fact the christians were still in charge of them for religious purposes, generally speaking).
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quote:But the good that they set out ot do was the same evil that you are saying they accomplished. If it's good for them to set up to slaughter Muslims and Jews, how is it evil for them to accomplish these goals? Are you using two different standards of deciding what's good and evil? That is, are you saying that they intened to do what they thought was good (but that you don't agree with) and accomplished these goals that are evil in your judgement?
This brings us back to initial disagreement we had. I think that the Crusades were, for most people and speaking simplistically, intended to be about slaughtering Muslims and Jews, and the "good" (and to be honest, I don't even see how this could be considered good. Serving an evil leader, be they man or god, is still doing evil.) aspects of it served as a useful pretext.
They weren't about "slaughtering Muslims and Jews," they were about taking back the Holy Land. In that context, they thought they were doing good. Even if that were good, the means were not.
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On the way to the Crusades, the Cusaders stopped to burn down Jewish and Muslim villages and towns and slaughter their inhabitants. During one of them, they also sacked Constantinople, which was a Christian, though not a Roman Catholic city. None of this had anything to do with taking back the Holy Land. Even this taking back of the Holy Land was not planned or carried out in such a manner as to meet the theological standards of good of the time. Even by the writings of Augustine, they could not have been considered just wars. If by the context of the times, you meant popular sentiment, then the popular sentiment was that we should slaughter Muslims and Jews. Theologically, the Crusades were unjustifiable, even by the standards of their times.
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The execution of the Crusades was unjustifiable. The stopping to slaughter people was unjustifiable.
Someone attempted to use force to liberate the holy land. They are responsible for the misuse of that force. What they did was not OK. The underlying goal was still an attempt to do good edit: by their standards.
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But, as I said, the people in the Crusades were obviously not focused on the "good" motive. Based on the "let's cleanse the Holy Land" motive, there was no reason to slaughter innocent Jews and Muslims, especially those outside of the Holy Land...but this was a hallmark of the Crusades. It was also a constant part of the surrounding culture (witness the venerable tradition of the Easter pogrom). Sacking Constantinople doesn't even make sense from the "cleanse the Holy Land", but it was something a whole heap of the Crusaders did as part of their Crusade.
Just because they had a dubiously good name to put on their actions doesn't mean that this was actually their motivation. The desire for power and to hurt the other were a huge motivation in the Crusades. This is even reflected in some of the writing of the period, where the power of Christendom and the slaughter of innocent others is celebrated.
edit: And one of the things that bugs me is that the Catholic Church to a certain extent still celebrates the Crusades.
posted
Land that was initially taken by force as well.
I'm not justifying them. I'm saying that many thought they were doing good. And, to actually get back to the topic that started this little diversion, this should be a warning to those who have think sweeping changes for good will somehow avoid being perverted into something evil.
posted
But again, Dag, they achieved what they set out to do. The slaughter of the Jews and Muslims was considered a good thing that they were doing. It wasn't like there was this outcry against them because of this. The society approved of their actions. That doesn't mean that trying to good unleases evil. They were trying to do what they thought was good and we think was evil and they succeeded.
The Crusaders weren't these extremely pious, noble people filled with moral rectitude who engaged on a regrettibly neccesary task with restraint and care for the needs of others. They were filthy, ingorant, book-burning, bigotted savages who conducted themselves with utter abandonment to the negative aspects of human nature. Their society wasn't an enlightened one of love and brotherhood. It was deeply flawed in pretty much every moral and ethical way. It was pretty much incapable of supporting thigns that we would recognize as good (unless you consider worshipping a God that has the same name as yours good). The Crusaders went out to kill and rape and pillage because the people they were going to do it too weren't really human in the eyes of their society.
The Easter pogroms weren't considered evil by the Church or by Christians. They were specifically encouraged and directed. The official explanation for them was dressed up in somewhat legitimate sounding language (often it was "defending ourselves from the evil Jews") but they were, at their roots, church, state, and societally sanctioned occasions to attack the relatively innocent Jews.
There's a huge difference between doing something for good and calling what you want to do good and then doing it. People are almost never villians in their own mind, but people have consistently done terrible, villanous things. There's almost always some excuse, but the actual motivation (which in recent times we've been able to hold up to analysis instead of just inferring "Well, they went out and immediately attacked the Jews, so they were probably motivated to attack Jews.") is almost always much more in line with immaturity and fear than whatever this excuse is.
This is what the Crusades, what most of history teaches.
edit: You seem to me to be saying "You see, even when these good people set out to do a good thing it turned out bad." I don't see these people or what they set out to do as good, nor do I find that what they accomplished was all that far from what they intended.
quote:The problem is that even humanity's attempts to do good carry the capacity for evil.
This is what I said. The Crusades are the PERFECT example. They thought they were doing good. Their attempt was flawed because their understanding of good was flawed. Which, as you say, history teaches us. Which has been my point all along.
I'm curious why you're not picking these nits with my other example, the eugenics movement.
posted
Actually, I think the Inquisition might be an even better example of people thinking they were doing good. They were saving souls, right? Even more important than the Holy Land - after all, God is everywhere.
And, without wanting to go into the whole religious discussion again, this is also why Weinberg argues that "Good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil - that takes religion."
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Dag, It's not nits. They were not good people. It was not a good action. The evil that they achieved was the evil that they intended. It's a horrible example.
edit: To add, the reason that our society has advanced so far beyond this point is that we have directly repudiated the way that these people thought and acted. It's much more difficult to act like that and call it good now, even if people still do similar things. These behaviors and beliefs develop because of specific lacks in the social environment and are oriented towards a purpose. Prejudice decreases, for example, when there is more opne-minded education and contact between peoples and also because it does not confer social benefits. The insecurity and desire to satisfy immature desires is thus in part mitigated and also will take on other or more hidden forms.
second edit: You knwo, that's not really complete. One of the other lage factors for this is our affluence as a culture, which has reduced the external threats on us and given us more leisure time. One of my big fears is that if/when America loses this affluence, the backlash will be horrifying. And, if that happens, I'm pretty sure that when people come for you (or me and mine), they'll be coming under the cross (or possibly the crescent).
quote:It's much more difficult to act like that and call it good now, even if people still do similar things.
This is happening RIGHT NOW throughout much of the world. Eugenics happened in an affluent time, when much of the thinking world was convinced that science would solve all our problems as soon as we were liberated from the old "superstitions" and "sentimentalities." It was a direct outgrowth of scientific materialism (not consumeristic materialism).
It doesn't matter whether WE call it good. The evil was done in order to bring about what the actors' considered good. And it will happen again. Abu Graihib started this way, with the consideration of techniques in order to obtain intelligence to protect us. Look where it ended up.
There are very, very few examples of any institution which has acted in the name of public good which has not ended up enacting evil in some way, shape, or form.
This is an endemic human problem, not "immaturity" that can be grown out of.
You can see it in less dramatic circumstances with what really amounts to simple politeness being encoded into censoring speech codes with numerous ridiculous examples. You can see it with pro-life activists crossing the line to murder, with environmentalists spiking trees, and with animal rights activists terrorizing Cambridge and Oxford. Parents who care about what there kids read advocate virtual book burning, people dedicated to helping sick people profane sacred rituals, and two presidents who promise resistance groups aid against tyrants leave them to be slaughtered.
This is not a failure of maturity. It's a systemic condition of humanity.
quote:This is an endemic human problem, not "immaturity" that can be grown out of.
It seems to be both, kind of like potty-training. A man will pee where a man will pee, but with help and guidance, he will learn that some places are more appropriate places to pee. And we have to repeat the same with the next generation.
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Dag, I deserve better than a "nuh-huh" and a logical fallacy.
What's to argue with there? Your characterization doesn't speak either to the points that I've been making nor to my underlying argument. So some groups constitued in some ways do bad things? What are you drawing from this, that human beings can't do better? People and groups have done better throughout history. They've been overcome or perverted, but it's obvious that people can do better. If we look at actual causes of behavior, and why groups constitued one way act differently constituted another way, we can look at the question of why groups and people act one way or the other. There are real lessons to be learned there, unlike the arguing from example that you're doing.
This is what I do. It's one of the few things I'll claim expretise in and from what I've learned, I feel pretty confident in saying that there's pretty damn good reasons to doubt that this is an inescaple condition of humanity (how does that even work with free will? People can choose anything they want, but they also can't choose to do this? That's a very strange form of free-will from my perspective.) That doesn't mean that I'm right, but I do sure deserve a lot more respect than what you gave.
For example, haven't I made it pretty abundantly clear that I believe that maturity obeys a pretty much normal distribution? In light of that, what is "Oh yeah, well large groups of people act immaturely." supposed to do to my argument. It is my argument. Where I see us differing is that you say that they do this for ineluctable and unknowable reason related to some metaphysical taint and I see it coming from psychological and culture realities.
I don't even really get you're view. Do you think people set out on the Crusades with love and peace in their heart and by some accident ending up as rapists and murderers? Do you think that the Eugenics movement was actually purely devoted to the betterment of mandkind but then whoops, they turned into racists?
For me, these motivations were in the people and were in fact the primary motivation for nearly all of them. In general, people accomplish what they set out to do. The street preacher who yells and screams at the people around him isn't there to convert people and save their souls. He's there to yell and scream at people. People don't continue to do things that don't achieve their motivations and they don't genreally accidentally slip into things completely unrelated and often antithetic to thier stated motivations. If someone keeps non sequitoring about how great their relationship is, you can tell that they are very anxioous about this relationship. If people react violently to something they claim to have faith in being contradicted, they don't have faith, they only have a desire to believe. Usually, when people talking about "defending" themselves from something, they're justifying their own attacks on it.
That's "human nature". Self-deception in one of the cornerstones of our society. But the wonderful thing is that this is mutable. Human nature is what people do, not a strict set of rules. Man is selfish, but man is also empathetic. Man is reductive, but man is also expansive. We are dynamic systems, not homestatic ones. Affluence is not the answer, but the absence of deprivations in people's basic needs is a big help.
Groups formulated one way lead to the dominence of power-motivations over all others, the alienation of peopel from what they are doing, from each other, and from themelves, deindividualization, out-group anatagonism, etc. Groups formulated another way and maintained lead to a much different and healthier result. And, glory of glories, there are definable, understandable reasons for this. It's not just some big old mystery. People's behavior follow rules. My hope is that we get them far enough, and it will stop following rules, but faced with the statistical reality of on average X->Y I think it's terribly foolish to pretend that, on average, people's behavior isn't determined by X. Especially when the seeming result of your free-will assumption is not to say that people can choose without limits, but as some sort of moral justification for blaming them for their common behavior.
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quote:? People can choose anything they want, but they also can't choose to do this? That's a very strange form of free-will from my perspective.
First of all, just for the record...just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make then an idiot, so please stop talking to them like you think they are one, please.
I disagree with you, and I don't see a problem with that in respect to free will. People will always be free to choose either path, but I believe that a large number of people will always choose to use force to achieve their goals when they can get away with it...it is human nature.
All you personal experiences aside, history is on my side not yours...at least in this matter.
There have been many different societies that have chose to take a more kind outlook towards human nature, and society has reached many peaks of achievement...
Only to fall into a "dark age" a few generations later. I am not just speaking about Europe either.
As far as the Crusades go I agree with you more than Dagonee, but I see what he is trying to say...that sometimes things are not all that clear, that it is very possible that the Crusades started off as noble enterprises, because a lot of the people then thought that trying to "free" the Holy Land was worth dying for, and tried to do what they saw was the right thing to do. This in no way means that the atrocities are justified, or that they were all good..but they were good people (at least in some instances) trying to do what they saw as a good thing.
We know, through the lens of history, that the Crusades were horrible, and all sorts of horrible things occurred....Acre, Constantinople.... but that doesn't mean the average Lord, and certainly not the foot soldiers, had any idea what was going on.
That proves the point, that people really don't know any better when taken as a large group...
Just look at Iraq, and tell me what we have learned, oh knowledgeable one...
And how we are to prevent it from happening again.
I think that the soft sciences are more art t, but they won't ever be able to completely subsume our nature...one of inherant inconsistancy.
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Kwea, If people's choice is determined or limited by anything, call it "Human nature" or whatever else you want, then this is actually a limit on their free will.
I don't think you understand my side. What you seem to be taking as what I'm saying isn't what I was trying to say. "History" is not more on your side than mine, not at least in the case you made.
And could you define "soft science" for me and why you think that what I'm talking about falls into it? I'm not sure you understand the nature of my education.
edit: Oh, and for the record, whether or not someone agrees with my doesn't really factor into how intelligent I think they are. I don't see myself as acting as if anyone here is an idiot. I'm not going to appologize for acting with confidence in my intelligence or my education.
posted
Soft sciences are, traditionally, Psychology and Sociology.
quote:People's behavior follow rules. My hope is that we get them far enough, and it will stop following rules, but faced with the statistical reality of on average X->Y I think it's terribly foolish to pretend that, on average, people's behavior isn't determined by X. Especially when the seeming result of your free-will assumption is not to say that people can choose without limits, but as some sort of moral justification for blaming them for their common behavior.
I think I get a lot of what you were saying, if not all of it.
I don't think we will ever be able to say "X is what causes this, universally." People are too different inside their heads. The best we can do right now is notice trends, but that is a far cry from knowing anything.
I think that it IS possible for any specific society to exceed our natural tendecies to use force, but as a whole I don't that is a given that our race will do so completely, and that is what it seemd to me that you were saying there. It goes in cycles, that is what I meant by saying history is on my side...we always revert to the darker side of human nature eventually.
As far as free will, I don't think it limits it at all. I can choose to never eat again, but that doesn't mean I can do it without repercussions. Free Will doesn't mean the basense of obligations, or dury, or complete freedom from bodily concerns...it means that we have choices, even if those choices aren't perfect and carry concequences.
I can choose to jump off a building, but that doesn't mean I am able to fly. Does that mean I have no Free Will?
Kwea
P.S There is a difference between confidence and arrogance, and that was close to the border of it, IMO.
posted
Kwea, That's not a definition. That's a classification. Defining something means enumerating it's qualities that distinguish from other things.
We can, in fact, do much better than notice trends. That's what the scientific method is all about. We apply the scientific method in essentially the same way that a physicist does, but we've got many more confounding factors and our instruments aren't generally as precise. The methodology for assessing correlation and causaility is the same, however. If you don't get that, you don't get what science actually is.
We've methods to analyze data and tease out how much variance a certain variable accounts for. If I can say that 40% of variance is accounted for by one factor, that's a heck of a lot more than noticing a trend. In some psychological situations (not many, mind you, but some), 100% of variance is accounted for, leaving no role for the "differences inside people's heads".
Free will applies to choice, not to consequences. I haven't said anything about consequences and, up till now, neither had you or Dag. You said that people's choice was limited by "human nature", not that human nature entailed a set of consequences. I don't see how people choosing to use violence fits into the idea of consequences. Could you explain where you're coming from?
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I see them as tied together, one being the cause of the other.
I think that we, as humans, have basic weaknesses as a race. I do think that individuals can and do overcome those weaknesses...anger, greed, selfishness...but that human societies as a whole are not likely to overcome them any time soon...maybe not ever.
And I feel that history bears this out.
I also, because of my own history, feel that a lot of mistakes are made on a daily basis by people in the fields of psychology and sociology, and that those fields are far less precise than you have made them out to be. The Human mind is a wonderful and complex organ, and I don;t feel that we are anywhere near the point where we will be be able as a race to overcome the limitations that seem to be inherent to us as a species.
Even in the medical field, where things are much more tangible, I am amazed when I hear these politicians speak about upcoming medical wonders.....I know fro speaking and reading on the topics that we are not close to a cure for cancer, or Parkenson's disease...but if you listen to the MD's speak among themselves you would be amazed how much they admit to not knowing, and how much more work there is to be done just to completely understand some of the things we already do on a regular basis.
The human mind is far more fragile and intangible, and I don't think the soft sciences are close to even a partial understanding of why we act the way we do.
It is late, so I am off to bed. I'll check up on this thread later today, perhaps before I go to work in the morning.
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Squick, I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that it is utterly pointless to talk to you.
You claim I responded with a logical fallacy, but don’t have the decency to actually state what it is. Then you basically prove my point by stating, “Self-deception in one of the cornerstones of our society.” Well, yes it is. Except I expand that to our entire species. The crusaders, at least some of them, deceived themselves about what their purpose was and what they could accomplish. The specific evil they committed was based on the conditions of their society and beliefs. The fact they committed evil was based on their human nature.
And again, when you say, “The insecurity and desire to satisfy immature desires is thus in part mitigated and also will take on other or more hidden forms,” you demonstrate my point. The difference lies in that I believe no amount of societal change will mitigate enough to make a noticeable difference, at least in part because the act of change itself is subject to corruption.
You claim I was arguing from examples. You’re simply stating a worldview and providing no evidence for it. Then you continually, repeatedly, and with seeming glee state that I said things I haven’t said. And I’m tired of explaining it. I’m just tired. I’ve seen it in several threads of yours recently, where you leap to unsupported conclusions about other people. It’s getting quite annoying.
You don’t “deserve” anything from me. Especially when the entirety of your addressing what I actually said is, “I deserve better than a ‘nuh-huh’ and a logical fallacy.” From the time I made the Crusades example, you’ve basically just disagreed, providing no reasoning other than “nuh-huh. They were bad and intended to do bad!”
Frankly, you’ve done nothing other than I have: you’ve stated an underlying worldview and explained events in the world based on that view. The view is probably best represented by:
quote:Groups formulated one way lead to the dominence of power-motivations over all others, the alienation of peopel from what they are doing, from each other, and from themelves, deindividualization, out-group anatagonism, etc. Groups formulated another way and maintained lead to a much different and healthier result. And, glory of glories, there are definable, understandable reasons for this. It's not just some big old mystery. People's behavior follow rules. My hope is that we get them far enough, and it will stop following rules, but faced with the statistical reality of on average X->Y I think it's terribly foolish to pretend that, on average, people's behavior isn't determined by X.
This worldview leads you to reach differing conclusions about the state of the world than I reach. Fine. I think that worldview is pretty much intentionally self-deceptive, and I think it’s very dangerous. You think the same of mine. Again, fine. Since you can’t disprove mine, and I can’t disprove yours, this back and forth is meaningless.
I note you still haven’t addressed the eugenics movement. And I note you still haven’t addressed the Crusades as an example of what I actually said: ‘The problem is that even humanity's attempts to do good carry the capacity for evil.”
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Dag, I'm sorry, I thought it was obvious that the arguing by example was the logical fallacy that you were making. Hasn't does not imply can't. I was arguing against you implying that it did.
I don't think you understand where our base disagreement is. I'm the guy who was talking about how mindfullness is so important in planning actions. I'm the guy who is constantly trying to point out how groups of people who claim to have a pure motive often seem to be acting out of more sinister ones. I'm in complete agreement that groups or individuals need to be careful when engaging on what they see as good causes.
The main disagreement I have with your position is that I don't believe that people's pure attempts to do good contain the seeds of evil. I see people's attempts to do evil (or rather act immaturely) as carrying the seeds of evil and that these attempts are shot through people's obstensively pure attempts to do good. I'm disputing your description of these cases as ones where people having pure good motives did evil. I'm saying they set out to do this evil under the banner of the good motive.
The central point of the Crusades thing is that they were primarily an attempt to do what they did. The Crusaders achieved their primary goal, which was to exercise power over and slaughter the other. Human motivation is a terribly complex thing. There were no doubt many other goals in the mix, some of even laudatory, but the central one for so many of the Crusaders was this one, the one that they then acted on.
From what I read in your last post, it seems that you now agree with me that the Crusades are not adequately described as being "about taking back the Holy Land." and that the people who entered into the Crusades under this banner who then almost immediately went about slaughter innocent Jews and Muslims were acting from the "Let's go slaughter Jews and Muslims" motivation. Is that accurate? Because if it is, you're conceding my point, not the other way around.
I'm not just offerring a different worldview. When, for example, I'm saying that groups constitued one way act differently from groups constituted another way and that one groups actions could be demonstrably more mature than anothers, that's not me providing an unsupported assumption. That's me talking about 70 or so years of group dynamics and organizational psychology. This a something that has been demonstrated pretty consistently. When I challenge the cognitivist assumption that you can trust people's motivations to be what they say they are or even what they consciously think they are, that's me speaking for a tradition of social psychology experiments that show just that.
Even when I'm talking about the determinism thing, it's not just an unsupported worldview. There's plenty of evidence that given stimulus X people will on average furnish response Y. This is not enough to prove deterministic causation, but then again we can't actually prove that one ball hitting another actually causes the second ball to move. We can only infer causation and I feel pretty secure in doing so in a very limited case in the domain of people's behavior. Even if it's not absolutely true, it provides a pretty useful and firm virtual assumption to work from.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Kwea, I'm getting to feel like gtting you define anything is going to be a victory.
You see them tied together. Great. What the heck does that mean? How are they tied together? How does this affect the determinism/free will situation? Why does introducing the laws of gravity - which are part of a deterministic system closed on human free will - have anything to do with human nature not being a deterministically limiting influence on peoploe's choice?
And again, can you define what it means to be a soft science? Right now what I'm getting is that things are a soft science because they can't say anything valid and they can't say anything valid because they are a soft science. Can you provide some context on this? How do soft sciences like psychology differe from hard sciences like, I assume, physics? Are they different from studies such as poly sci and economics? Is it merely a matter of quantitative differences (i.e. "the soft sciences are[n't] close to even a partial understanding") or are there qualitative ones as well? If it is even partially a quantitive matter, what would you accept as a "partial understanding"?
Am I arrogant because I believe that my extensive knowledge in this "soft science" should give me the confidence to say what I have? Or is it that you don't think I have a great deal of knowledge and that me assuming that I do is the arrogant thing?
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:I'm sorry, I thought it was obvious that the arguing by example was the logical fallacy that you were making. Hasn't does not imply can't. I was arguing against you implying that it did.
I’m sorry. I thought it was obvious that I wasn’t arguing by example nor saying that hasn’t does not imply can’t.
I’m giving examples. I’m not saying the examples are why it’s impossible – I’m saying the examples are illustrations of the broader point. Considering that each and every social psychology experiment is an merely, at its heart, a contrived example, I’m surprised you don’t get this.
The whole stupid argument over the crusades is meaningless to my greater point, because if it’s not an example of people thinking they’re doing good actually doing evil, then it’s just an example of people doing evil. Which is highly consistent with my worldview.
quote:The main disagreement I have with your position is that I don't believe that people's pure attempts to do good contain the seeds of evil.
Since I don’t believe people, on their own, can have pure attempts to do good, you’re disagreeing with somebody else, not me.
quote: I'm saying they set out to do this evil under the banner of the good motive.
Fine. You’re guess about their motives is exactly as reliable as mind, except you have no evidence to support yours. I, at least, have their stated motives.
quote:Because if it is, you're conceding my point, not the other way around.
No. My point has been, from the beginning, one which you haven’t addressed, which is that people, in their attempts to do good as they define it, often do evil. And often that evil is greater than the petty thuggery that typifies a lot of non-obscured evil.
quote:This a something that has been demonstrated pretty consistently. When I challenge the cognitivist assumption that you can trust people's motivations to be what they say they are or even what they consciously think they are, that's me speaking for a tradition of social psychology experiments that show just that.
Even if that’s true, it doesn’t tell you what their motives actually were. So you’re just as in the dark as you say I am.
quote:Even when I'm talking about the determinism thing, it's not just an unsupported worldview. There's plenty of evidence that given stimulus X people will on average furnish response Y. This is not enough to prove deterministic causation, but then again we can't actually prove that one ball hitting another actually causes the second ball to move. We can only infer causation and I feel pretty secure in doing so in a very limited case in the domain of people's behavior. Even if it's not absolutely true, it provides a pretty useful and firm virtual assumption to work from.
But if the virtual assumption is wrong, then it’s NOT useful for anything except the most basic interactions.
posted
Dag, Social psych experiments are contrived examples. You'll get no argument from me on that. The thing I think you're missing is that their purpose isn't to serve as an example any more than a physics experiment is to serve as an example. They're there to test hypotheses and, in doing so, hopefully yield underlying principles that can be generalized across many situations. The arguing from examples fallacy is oriented around ignoring this idea of principles in favor of a given sample of outcomes. Tons of people failed to achieve flight before the Wright brothers, not because flight was impossible but because their understanding of the principles were wrong.
I really don't think analyzing people's motivations based on what they do, especially in unconstrained situations, is really this unreasonable idea. The reason why this argument is important is that, from my perspective, you're not saying people do bad when they are trying to do good. I see you saying people do bad when they say that they are trying to do good. The Crusades took place in a culture that accepted and even celebrated at least annual pogroms against Jews. They said they were going to go out to "reclaim the Holy Land" and then almost immediately attacked innocent Jews that were nowhere near the Holy Land. In the writing of the time, the slaughter of innocent Jews and Muslims was celebrated. Maybe it's unreasonable, on the face of this, to say that attacking Jews was a large part of the motivation of the Crusades. I don't actually think so though.
Thankfully, today, we don't have to rely on post-pogrom analysis to ascertain what people's motivations are. We've created tests that among other things have been shown to correlate with certain types of behaviors. We can score people on these tests and then make predictions (of various levels of confidence) on what they are going to do. And these predictions are either accurate within the given confidence intervals or the tests are revised or invalidated. Because that's science. That's what we do.
Granted it's still not directly measuring motivation for a given value of motivation, but it's pretty darn close. And it's a heck of a lot more reliable (that word has an acutal defined meaning in this sense) than the method that you are apparently using, which is to take their statements at face value.
quote:Since I don’t believe people, on their own, can have pure attempts to do good
So, again, what kind of free will do you believe in, if you believe that people have it but aren't free to choose?
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I'm not sure you understand the theory of utilitarian modeling. A virtual model doesn't have to be true. Truth doesn't enter into it. It just has to be useful. The world isn't flat. Saying so is false. But our maps are usually flat, because it's so much more useful to model it that way. All the tests in the world can't actually tell you if something is true. They can only tell you if you can have confidence that treating it as if it were true is going to lead to certain results. As I've said before, science is not the search for truth. It's just the search for confidence. In the realm of absolute truth, you're right, our stances are equivilent. It's the realm of confident (or reliable if you prefer) support where I think they differ.
edit: And that wasn't a snarky sorry. I really thought that what I was talking about was evident. If it wasn't, than it was a mistake. If I had done it on purpose, it would have been disrespectful. So I appologized.
edit #2: I haven't addressed your point that people in their attempts to do what they call good, do evil because I don't disagree with it. As I said in the post before this one, I disagree with almost everything you've surrounded it with, but I don't disagree with that. In fact, I've actually address this very issue in other places and I thought you were in on the conversation. Do you remembering me talking about how one of the main purposes for lists of absolute morality is to label some people "bad" so that it's okay to do bad things to them and about how, when someone wants to do something bad to people, a system of morality will often grow up that allows you to (a la one of the lesser known bits of the Milgram experiment). You may not have been in on that, but I know that one of our historical discussions (the one about obeying the rules or loving the other person) was pretty strongly rooted in this.
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