| [Please pardon the snark, it is in my nature.] >Smart people are dangerously good at finding compelling rational arguments for any position. A much(!) smaller set of smart people can poke holes in such persuasive arguments with ease. The response with rare exceptions will be memes and rhetoric, &/or downvotes, silence, bans or rate limiting on one's account (helping to ensure humans stay locked in their local maxima indefinitely...say, have you seen what's happening in the Middle East, with our unwavering "democratic" support, again?). > Logic and reasoning has no guarantee what-so-ever to end up correct. Abstractly, of course not, but at the object level it depends. >Communism is perfectly rational. Make the case, and watch me poke holes in it. If this was well implemented as a game, I could even predict how your argument could be attacked before you even state it, and then reveal my predictions after your move and see how close I got. A problem though: how to judge, since all participants (including me) suffer from delusion? > Self reasoning may just make you more stubborn. Love the strategically played "may"! What's the "just" doing in there though? > Limit the death of the argument. Don't go too many steps away from the axioms or assumptions. Leaps of logic give us the most freedom to creatively warp the outcome. Artificially constraining scope is excellent for rhetoric and deceit (and thus very popular, in Western culture at least), but perhaps not so useful for discovering truth. > Die on all the hills. Argue your misguided ideas loudly and proud to your peers. 100% agree. A problem though: culture disallows this. I believe humans have some free will, but not much (for now). >Discussing dumb ideas is the only way to find what dumb idea is the least dumb. "Discussing" is ontologically ambiguous, and we've been discussing many ideas for centuries, with little positive outcome. Time for some new approaches if you ask me (man, it sure was a hot summer this year eh?). >Being scared of being wrong, and aligning with others, leaves dumb ideas unchallenged, and dumber ideas unexplored. Welcome to HN, and planet Earth (2023). Let's check back in in a few years. :) |