[extropy-chat] Politics: worthwhile commentary

[Dirk Bruere]

On 12/29/05, Jeff Medina <analyticphilosophy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/28/05, Joseph Bloch <transhumanist at goldenfuture.net> wrote:
> > I find any argument that begins by saying, in effect, "unless you are
> > referencing my favorite thinker, your argument is not worth considering"
> > to be somewhat less than consideration in and of itself.
>
> With the relatively important qualifier that areas with even moderate
> sophistication have foundational ideas one really does need to read up
> on before one's own ideas are worthy of the consideration of people
> who actually have studied up in that area.
>
> There are some exceptions to this, as with almost every rule, but the
> ratio of brilliant to crazy-or-stupid-or-ignorant is so low that one
> is almost assured to be wasting one's time listening to the thoughts
> of the uninformed (say, not even at the level of someone who majored
> in that field as an undergraduate).
>
> > This seems like
> > an attempt to require that every political argument be framed in a
> > Friedmanian framework, and smacks me as being as hubristic as those who
> > say that insist all problems must be examined from the standpoint of
> > Bayesian analysis.
>
> It isn't hubris for an evolutionary biologist to demand familiarity
> with Mayr, Gould, Maynard Smith, etc., before listening to what you
> have to say about evolution. Nor for a mathematician Kleene, Cauchy,
> Bernoulli, and so on.
>
> Similarly, there are areas in which certain mathematical results are
> heavily relevant to an area, such as decision theory (something of a
> meta-area, applicable to reasoning in general, and hence to thinkers
> in all other fields), and here we might invoke Bayes, Schlaifer, de
> Finetti, and so forth. And again it would not be hubristic.
>
>
Politics is different from maths and science.
In politics everyone has an axe to grind and being 'economical with the
truth' or ignoring unpleasant data is an accepted tactic. Not to mention
topics  that are 'unspeakable' due to political correctness. In the case of
the Middle East you won't see much analysis in the US media of Isreal and
the power of the Jewish lobby in the US. Notable exception being Chomsky.

Dirk
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