Activity

Lausten, I’ll try to get some reflective time on the above from you. Meanwhile, here’s something from the great givers of this forum space, Skeptic.com. Steven Pinker points out that we have just as strong of an innate sense of rational reasoning as we do for our sometimes troublesome agency detection. Rather than be paralyzed by the need to have all data and make perfect decisions, we sometimes use irrational thinking as a shortcut and this is a rational thing to do. I haven’t finished the article yet, but he does provide some ideas for how we move forward. Ideas that have experimental backing.

Why We are Not Living in a Post-Truth Era

Well, it started out better than I thought and I enjoyed the first half, then it simply seemed less and less relevant, though I kept reading, I did start drifting off the page – guess I’m not really too concerned with worrying about what happens in the universities.   Remember I’m the one who’s lost all faith in the future considering how childish and utterly self-serving leaders across the board seem to have become.   There’s no long term future for any of them anymore, we all blew our window of opportunity to retain the living biosphere we needed for our complex human society and institutions to continue existing into the next century.  But that’s a completely different story.

Before I continue with items I think worth pointing out, I need to ask you Lausten if you can explain what it was about this article you thought was relevant to what I’d written about the development of the Human Mindscape?

but (Pinkert) does provide some ideas for how we move forward.

 

Pinker: “A final danger to allowing universities to repress open debate is that it sets off equal and opposite backlashes. The regressive left is an incubator of the alt-right.”

But where does he discuss the critical need for “honesty” when discussing scientific and political issues?   Even as he trumpets the need to allow open debate, he never discusses the difference between a cynical agenda driven debate and a debate that demands honest discussion of facts, both our own and how we communicate another’s facts.  

A debate where learning rather that winning is the goal.   

Why should I be impressed with a showman, if he can’t even enunciate those simple principles.  Yeah sure get me on stage with him and he’d run circles around me with his fancy dancing rhetoric and tie me in a bow fit for the christmas tree – but in the end where’s his substance?  To me it all seems like reflecting on a hall of mirrors within his Mindscape  – Rather than a reflection on the world he sees around him.  I can understanding it happening if you spend your entire life reading and writing and talking about what you’ve read and imagined, he’s celebratory constantly being crowded while grooming an image, when, were would he have the time for some serious reflection on the world itself.

What is he really telling us, that’s interesting or new?  Seriously.   Because from where I’m watching it’s all simply rehashing the hash, while missing the opportunity to enunciate the difference between the physical world that created us and the mindscapes we use to understand that world.

At one point Pinker makes the point we’ve always lied to each other, leaving us with the dangling impression that today’s is no different than any other time in human history.
Seriously?   (yes he does point out the massive information at our finger tips, but just sort of leaves it at that.  But all the ready access to a universe of information is useless if you don’t know what to do with it beyond winning trivia contests. )

So great, we’ve always been liars, and we have more information at our finger tips than ever – where (or how) does that help us deal with today and the political chaos being instigated by that major political party, yes, teabagger/trumster Republicans, that cynically, but in absolute seriousness tells us Americans we should ignore fundamental physical facts and objective evidence because we still aren’t rich and fat enough yet?  Well, okay, they’ll tell us it’s not about the money -> it’s about their need to do God’s Will.  Why does that make the lying and disconnecting from physical reality okay?  But I digress.

Maybe I should go to the beginning because he did write a few things I was surprised and impressed with.