[semilattice]

>"... Most things are pretty grey - not black & white. So there's not a clear good/bad side. Which is the reason people want personal freedoms and you could want anonymity regardless of how "good" you think your government is. .."

I agree with you.

1) complexity of science grows every year. It takes a life-time to become infection disease specialist, immunologist, financial guru, constitutional lawyer, environmental scientist.

2) sophistication of deceit also grows with time, if nothing is done (because the reward for the successful deceit grows with time).

3) myself, there is no way I can make my own decisions about complex things. I need pundits, that I can *trust*.

4) but with the growing sophistication of deceit -- how can figure out who to trust?

That's where the division between the two mind sets shows up. Because what's relatively stable throughout the time -- are human character traits...

That division, in turn, later on creates the conflicts every so often -- as I mentioned.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> 3) myself, there is no way I can make my own decisions about complex things. I need pundits, that I can trust.

> 4) but with the growing sophistication of deceit -- how can figure out

I agree with you, but it seems like you're again thinking that everything can be known / black and white. The experts disagree on some very important things quite often. So it's not only who to trust - but is that trustable person even correct in their analysis?

This is where personal choice and freedoms and democracy shine.

[semilattice]

I think I am driving towards 2 keys:

a) people that do live in a structured society, have to trust somebody. Because one cannot be an expert in everything.

In the sea of deceit, figuring out the 'right pundits, rights representatives' to trust is very very difficult.

Certainly, once a person figures out the 'members-to-trust', then dealing with discrepancies, mistakes, and differences of opinion within that circle -- is somewhat a different matter.

Those differences, in my view, will not result in ideological separation that I am mentioning in my original comment. The error delta is always built in in how we deal with 'honest mistakes'.

b) With regards to: >"... but it seems like you're again thinking that everything can be known / black and white .."

As I mentioned above, I do not particularly think that I was creating a false dichotomy. If I did, I am sorry, I hope my explanation above made sense.

But I do want to reveal something:

following through to a yes/no state, a binary end -- is something that I tend to think as a 'feature' of my thinking process :-).

I tend to see that my thought 'resolves' into a 'black/white' (binary) end state. While many steps to that might be very much 'gray' (non-binary).

As a personal guide, when I engage in this type of thinking -- I make it an 'axiom', that 'gray areas', eventually have to collapse into binary choices.

This 'eventual-binarity', in my view, is caused by simply the fact that we either alive or we are not alive.

or,

We either have a partner to create a family with or we do not.

or,

We either have biological progeny, or we do not.. and so on.

So that binary eventuality is built into basics of our existence.

Therefore when thinking about future state, I want it to represent those results.

To reiterate, certainly, there are many 'gray areas' in the steps to that finality of a cycle.

Wars (civil wars) might have many many reason, and they start as 'grey' reasons -- but at the end the brutality of those events revolve around very binary actions.

In my initial comment I suggested that there is a cycle that ends and starts with some sort of serious struggle and tragedy -- between representatives/followers of the 2 mind sets.

The binary choice there -- is that our society gets into that cycle or not.

I have not mentioned what may be ways for us to get out of the cycle, so I hope I did not leave the impression that those can be easily assumed from my comments.