This is a directly antithetical view to notions Eliezer has expressed

Authority is appealed to too often.

On that note I absolutely agree.

there have been instances of post-modern philosophers delivering speeches to OWS groups.

"there have been"!? Also, quantity of speeches or something like that would be important, not instances.

Quantity is not always necessarily the bottom line in providing information towards validating a statement. In this case for example, I believe it is sufficient that there has been at least one organized event -- considering how bottom-up the organization of OWS itself is -- where a known and reputed-as post-modern philosopher gave a speech at what is otherwise a purely political demonstration. That is more of a qualitative than a quantitative statement.

This is where you get New Agers who say "Well that's just your opinion, man."

Not ideal to caricature like that, but not terrible.

Would it help to consider it a disclosure of personal bias on my part?

This post is much better than its grandparent and I hope you can write such stuff not as responses to questions. I'd like to see more like this and less

Thank you for your continued help in my effort to become a better commenter. I will consider this further. No promises, though... I'm too cantankerous an ass to be easily amenable to change. :-)

I do not think you have really addressed Logos01's point, which I understand to be that the OWS folks are characterized by epistemic zeal for existing beliefs. Your strategy does not seem designed to alter that.

Instead, you suggest starting by affirming a bedrock zeal-inducing belief, making sure it pisses them off, and then (somehow) getting them to apply the insight that admitting that they are wrong about a lot of things is one of the keys to becoming less so.

A major part of what drove the economic recession that lead to most all of the problems that these people are protesting was speculation on subprime mortgages. These are mortgages that are plain-to-see crappy to everyone. However, ratings agencies gave the vast majority of these mortgages very high ratings.

A bit late to the party, but I wanted to point out that this is a very inaccurate view of how the subprime mortgage thing went down. I would know; I used to be a wire transfer auditor for a subprime correspondent loan company (Bear Stearns Mortgage, in fact.) I was also in a committed relationship for about ten years with a woman who worked as a loan coordinator. I ate, breathed, and slept mortgages for a sizable chunk of the window for which these things occurred.

The thing is -- what the ratings agencies were ensuring wasn't the loans themselves, but the expected payout rate of the loans, when bundled into aggregate products. (I.e.; if 20% default each loan that doesn't default brings in 25% profit, then the aggregate is worth 5% more than its invested value. This is a VAST oversimplification.) It's worth noting that subprime loans were very often amortized in such a manner that the first few years of their existence, they were pure interest payments. People were sold on the notion of buying a house as a way to improve/repair their credit; spend five years on a subprime and then refinance into a better mortgage. The single most common loan product out there in many areas was a 5-year Option ARM. This was a mortgage that was termed for five years, with a balloon payment due at the end of the five years for the remainder of the note. It was designed to be refinanced away.

So from the ratings' agencies perspective, these products were pure gold at the time. Of course, that was only true because the housing market kept going up -- but it was the genuine widespread belief of nearly everyone in the industry that housing prices could only keep going up. Homes were described as one of the best/easiest possible investments.

( It's also worth noting that some of this came down from Federal statutes coming out of the Clinton administration's push to increase homeownership in the US. The lending regulations were adjusted for political reasons and... well, we've all seen what happened. Not quite related to the ratings agency thing, but... this is a complicated and nuanced topic. You did start it out by mentioning that the economic recession was associated with this, and that opens the floor to further root-cause analysis.)

At the end of the day, though, the people who need to hear that it was a Democratic usurpation of a Republican talking point that "caused" the housing bubble -- are the same ones who, insofar as I can see, won't hear it.