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People like trusting their intuitions. In many cases, they trust them so much they even deny that there's an argument to be made about their content - especiall

People like trusting their intuitions. In many cases, they trust them so much they even deny that there's an argument to be made about their content - especially if people surrounding them share them. This leads to people being ignorant of and confused about philosophical issues, but more importantly, it leads to them dismissing them without looking at them. Which doesn't make a worldview void of philosophy, instead it makes one with an unquestioned amateur philosophy. It's a lot like many in politics assuming that our time is different, and historical examples are irrelevant, even when there is no good reason to believe that. Our modernity is a lot like that.

emodendroket 10y ago
Hm. This seems right to me. Other people like trusting their intuitions. :)
brightball 10y ago
The issue generally comes down to the source of trust. You're trusting your intuition or you're trusting a source saying something else is also trustworthy.
- pklausler 10y ago
  And there's our little problem there in a nutshell: thinking that those are the only two choices, my ignorant assumptions and those of somebody else. Back in Enlightenment days, people also consulted empirical reality.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    There are also ignorant assumptions that are or aren't generally accepted. As in by many people. These we call society.
wozniacki 10y ago
It pays to keep this in the context of the events in our recent history which some argue have lead to a certain stripe of ideological stagnation in America, not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also their debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself. Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this : I think one of the … you know, the counter-cultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology. You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science. It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where actually believing that a better future is possible that you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually radically counter-cultural.[1] [1] Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like. http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-counter-culture/ http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-co... (or if your political persuasion forbids you against patronizing Beck) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM
- trgn 10y ago
  IMHO, the space example is bad. I have no interest in space travel. Not because I don't believe in technology, but because I don't think there's anything appealing about going to space. Yeah, I think living on some cool Star Trek planet would be fun, but we're talking about the moon or Mars. They are, well, rocks. For a lot of people, like Thiel, space is like Plan B, where we go to after we blow up the earth. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. And should it happen, the earth during a nuclear winter will still be infinitely more hospitable than some plastic pod on Mars. Space-stuff is a cerebral pleasure. As an astronaut you can feel in awe as you experience the sum total of human technological prowess. But space is a horrible sensual pleasure. Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords in Houston. Let space to the robots. They can go mine ores, take pictures, and putz around in the dust. But that sounds like a terrible way to spend time as a human.
  - VLM 10y ago
    "Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords" So the experience of 99% of humanity ... on Mars. The "on Mars" part sounds better enough to sign up for. I suppose there's an aspect of personal taste. I think Mars and the Moon are very beautiful. Imagine what a landscape photographer like Ansel Adams could have done if unleashed on the surface of the Moon... Someday we'll have a colony up there and I think its important that before we start bulldozing and building a human settlement up there, we should have a real artistic landscape photographer run around for awhile.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    Given what we know about the asteroid probabilities, space, preferably very far space, should be a quite big priority. Or at least a sensible asteroid defense system, but colonies are potentially more resilient if self sufficient.
    - peterwoo 10y ago
      The odds of a medium sized impact in the next few thousand years are very small. Still, an advanced asteroid defense capability should be prepared, since even the small-ish bolides that we expect to hit with greater frequency should be eliminated. This should reduce the risk from catastrophic impactors even further. Settlement of e.g. Mars will never be needed in the time frames we should be thinking about. If asteroid defense is developed, then for thousands of years that will not be a concern at all. And if in 2,000 years they need a settlement on Mars, the people in 1,800 years can prioritize doing it. In other words I don't see it as a priority. Material conditions on Earth are not great, and we are threatened by catastrophes in the atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates. Earth and its cities are infinitely more responsive to our efforts and investment than Mars or elsewhere. There is so much that we can do here in this century, while settling another planetary body in this century seems basically impossible.
VLM 10y ago
Scary that its recursive, in that "historical examples are irrelevant is modernity" is in itself modernity. Ignorance of history leading to disaster is old as dirt. Err, its as old as written history anyway LOL. Soon as some dude wrote a good story about a tactical maneuver some other dude promptly ignored the story and gets killed, every time. Don't matter if its sarissa carrying heavy infantry or knights or tanks or air craft carriers or spaceships someday. I think the belief lives in the modern mind because when a modern does something that would have resulted in Alexander the Great spanking him severely, the modern feels better when claiming "not my fault that my culture doesn't respect the past" etc etc. For example the Vikings used to F over the British locals centuries after Alexander the Great via the good ole feigned retreat. Trick a tough defensive shield wall into thinking you're running for it and they should chase you, because booty, then once they break their wall at a predetermined practiced point reform your own shield wall, flank the freshly unorganized soldiers and slaughter them. Oldest trick in the book. The book that no military readers read, I mean. Yeah yeah I realize the general population didn't sip tea while reading Plutarch in that era, anymore than British do today, but you wouldn't expect a King of England to fall for that even in the late dark ages.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Hume actually says why this kind of thing happens. Any one person or entity can be shown to not have complete knowledge of the world with a simple example. Proving you actually know something completely is instead a hard inductive proof likely to fail. Most modern physics fails this proof as it cannot show convincingly that it is the only true version of physics. And that is quite rigid, well tested and proven knowledge about the world...
- faktorialas 10y ago
  Indeed. With regards to science, it seems like at least young people respect it, so we're going to have progress in that sense. Unfortunately, philosophy doesn't produce life-changing tech or neat gadgets, so reading philosophy that would change one's outlook on politics, ethics or epistemology is ignored.
  - 10y ago

emodendroket 10y ago

Hm. This seems right to me. Other people like trusting their intuitions. :)

brightball 10y ago

The issue generally comes down to the source of trust. You're trusting your intuition or you're trusting a source saying something else is also trustworthy.

pklausler 10y ago
And there's our little problem there in a nutshell: thinking that those are the only two choices, my ignorant assumptions and those of somebody else. Back in Enlightenment days, people also consulted empirical reality.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  There are also ignorant assumptions that are or aren't generally accepted. As in by many people. These we call society.

wozniacki 10y ago

It pays to keep this in the context of the events in our recent history which some argue have lead to a certain stripe of ideological stagnation in America, not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also their debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself. Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this : I think one of the … you know, the counter-cultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology. You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science. It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where actually believing that a better future is possible that you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually radically counter-cultural.[1] [1] Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like. http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-counter-culture/ http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-co... (or if your political persuasion forbids you against patronizing Beck) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM

trgn 10y ago
IMHO, the space example is bad. I have no interest in space travel. Not because I don't believe in technology, but because I don't think there's anything appealing about going to space. Yeah, I think living on some cool Star Trek planet would be fun, but we're talking about the moon or Mars. They are, well, rocks. For a lot of people, like Thiel, space is like Plan B, where we go to after we blow up the earth. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. And should it happen, the earth during a nuclear winter will still be infinitely more hospitable than some plastic pod on Mars. Space-stuff is a cerebral pleasure. As an astronaut you can feel in awe as you experience the sum total of human technological prowess. But space is a horrible sensual pleasure. Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords in Houston. Let space to the robots. They can go mine ores, take pictures, and putz around in the dust. But that sounds like a terrible way to spend time as a human.
- VLM 10y ago
  "Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords" So the experience of 99% of humanity ... on Mars. The "on Mars" part sounds better enough to sign up for. I suppose there's an aspect of personal taste. I think Mars and the Moon are very beautiful. Imagine what a landscape photographer like Ansel Adams could have done if unleashed on the surface of the Moon... Someday we'll have a colony up there and I think its important that before we start bulldozing and building a human settlement up there, we should have a real artistic landscape photographer run around for awhile.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Given what we know about the asteroid probabilities, space, preferably very far space, should be a quite big priority. Or at least a sensible asteroid defense system, but colonies are potentially more resilient if self sufficient.
  - peterwoo 10y ago
    The odds of a medium sized impact in the next few thousand years are very small. Still, an advanced asteroid defense capability should be prepared, since even the small-ish bolides that we expect to hit with greater frequency should be eliminated. This should reduce the risk from catastrophic impactors even further. Settlement of e.g. Mars will never be needed in the time frames we should be thinking about. If asteroid defense is developed, then for thousands of years that will not be a concern at all. And if in 2,000 years they need a settlement on Mars, the people in 1,800 years can prioritize doing it. In other words I don't see it as a priority. Material conditions on Earth are not great, and we are threatened by catastrophes in the atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates. Earth and its cities are infinitely more responsive to our efforts and investment than Mars or elsewhere. There is so much that we can do here in this century, while settling another planetary body in this century seems basically impossible.

VLM 10y ago

Scary that its recursive, in that "historical examples are irrelevant is modernity" is in itself modernity. Ignorance of history leading to disaster is old as dirt. Err, its as old as written history anyway LOL. Soon as some dude wrote a good story about a tactical maneuver some other dude promptly ignored the story and gets killed, every time. Don't matter if its sarissa carrying heavy infantry or knights or tanks or air craft carriers or spaceships someday. I think the belief lives in the modern mind because when a modern does something that would have resulted in Alexander the Great spanking him severely, the modern feels better when claiming "not my fault that my culture doesn't respect the past" etc etc. For example the Vikings used to F over the British locals centuries after Alexander the Great via the good ole feigned retreat. Trick a tough defensive shield wall into thinking you're running for it and they should chase you, because booty, then once they break their wall at a predetermined practiced point reform your own shield wall, flank the freshly unorganized soldiers and slaughter them. Oldest trick in the book. The book that no military readers read, I mean. Yeah yeah I realize the general population didn't sip tea while reading Plutarch in that era, anymore than British do today, but you wouldn't expect a King of England to fall for that even in the late dark ages.

AstralStorm 10y ago
Hume actually says why this kind of thing happens. Any one person or entity can be shown to not have complete knowledge of the world with a simple example. Proving you actually know something completely is instead a hard inductive proof likely to fail. Most modern physics fails this proof as it cannot show convincingly that it is the only true version of physics. And that is quite rigid, well tested and proven knowledge about the world...
faktorialas 10y ago
Indeed. With regards to science, it seems like at least young people respect it, so we're going to have progress in that sense. Unfortunately, philosophy doesn't produce life-changing tech or neat gadgets, so reading philosophy that would change one's outlook on politics, ethics or epistemology is ignored.
- 10y ago