"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Monday, August 17, 2015
Answer To An Atheist Troll
"Dunning-Kruger". Atheists don't really think, they move their slogan magnets around.
one consequence of knowledge and reasoning I've found, is humility. The more I know, the more I realize I don't know, that there is more to know than I can ever know, more to understand than I can ever understand, that my reach, to quote Browning, will always exceed my grasp.
Or, in D-K terms, that my skills will always leave me far from where my imagination tells me I could go, if I were just more skillful.
Conversely the ignorant think they know all with the little they know. As the saying goes, "You can't fix stupid."
That kind of slogan shuffling reminds me of back in the late 60s or early 70s, when I read a lot of magazine journalism that I noticed there would be a sort of word of the month or season that would start showing up in articles by mid-brow level scribblers, I'd notice it in one and think, well, that's a word you don't see all the time and, then, I'd start noticing it in other articles written by other writers. Most of them from NYC, who I guess were mostly reading each other. I noticed, when it was a word I knew or looked up, that the skill of using it appropriately, according to its meaning and its relevance for what was being said with it varied, greatly. Then the word would disappear and another one would take its place.
There's something about people who don't have nearly as much of an education as they believe they have or, more likely, are afraid people will realize they don't have that makes the use of these kinds of sciency terms irresistible. "Occam's razor", the terms for logical fallacies, such terms invented ad hoc without any validity, stupid things like "The Courtier's Response", I'm afraid their use has led me to suspect someone who uses them generally don't know what they're talking about and are too stupid to know they don't know it as they use it to impress other people who don't know it, either. It's a kind of countersign of the neo-athe club.
Yup. Everybody wants to be in the club, so they use the word du jour. Everybody wants to be "smart," so they throw around terms like "Occam's Razor" as a way to stop the conversation.
Or just shout "BS!" and "Word salad!" (the latter being a term of art in psychiatry, and not a metaphorical way of referring to gibberish).
one consequence of knowledge and reasoning I've found, is humility. The more I know, the more I realize I don't know, that there is more to know than I can ever know, more to understand than I can ever understand, that my reach, to quote Browning, will always exceed my grasp.
ReplyDeleteOr, in D-K terms, that my skills will always leave me far from where my imagination tells me I could go, if I were just more skillful.
Conversely the ignorant think they know all with the little they know. As the saying goes, "You can't fix stupid."
That kind of slogan shuffling reminds me of back in the late 60s or early 70s, when I read a lot of magazine journalism that I noticed there would be a sort of word of the month or season that would start showing up in articles by mid-brow level scribblers, I'd notice it in one and think, well, that's a word you don't see all the time and, then, I'd start noticing it in other articles written by other writers. Most of them from NYC, who I guess were mostly reading each other. I noticed, when it was a word I knew or looked up, that the skill of using it appropriately, according to its meaning and its relevance for what was being said with it varied, greatly. Then the word would disappear and another one would take its place.
ReplyDeleteThere's something about people who don't have nearly as much of an education as they believe they have or, more likely, are afraid people will realize they don't have that makes the use of these kinds of sciency terms irresistible. "Occam's razor", the terms for logical fallacies, such terms invented ad hoc without any validity, stupid things like "The Courtier's Response", I'm afraid their use has led me to suspect someone who uses them generally don't know what they're talking about and are too stupid to know they don't know it as they use it to impress other people who don't know it, either. It's a kind of countersign of the neo-athe club.
Yup. Everybody wants to be in the club, so they use the word du jour. Everybody wants to be "smart," so they throw around terms like "Occam's Razor" as a way to stop the conversation.
DeleteOr just shout "BS!" and "Word salad!" (the latter being a term of art in psychiatry, and not a metaphorical way of referring to gibberish).