All of username_redacted_9999's Comments + Replies

I completely agree with you; there shouldn't be any problems discussing political examples where you're only restating a campaign's talking points rather than supporting one side or the other.

I doubt I'd call popular culture an important problem. (And I was, fairly clearly I thought, talking about pretty much the entire decade, not just two guys at the end of it.) Except possibly as a threat. It is one that involves moderate quantities of money sloshing back and forth. But, more importantly, undue influence. Most recently, it got its hooks into things that actually affect the rest of the world. I submit that understanding how an industry that small can punch so ridiculously far above its economic weight may be useful. (Not that PM/crit is fully up to that task yet, and I'm greatly disappointed by that, but it's the right direction.) As my comment notes, it's not something to bother with unless you're interested already, but Luke's invocations of straw postmodernists do come across as declaring ignorance as social signaling rather than as saying something that helpfully places these fields in their contexts.

Well, if you wanted to succeed in pop music in Britain in the 1980s ...

Would you mind explaining how? I would like to see more of other people's observations, since mine are likely to be biased.

My general answer to that question is here. In this specific context, I would recommend thinking carefully about what made you want to change your beliefs, assuming you did want to. If you can figure that out and articulate it, you may find that other people in the same position you were in will react to it the same way.

If they really are rejecting logic in its entirety, as you suggest, then they have insulated themselves from being forced into accepting conclusions they don't want to accept simply because they follow from premises they've previously accepted, so any attempt to convince them that depends on that sort of force will simply fail. It seems to follow that, if you want them to accept your beliefs, you will have to induce them to want to accept those beliefs. All of that said, I'm somewhat skeptical that this is actually what they've done, although of course I don't know the people you're talking about.

Have you known this method to ultimately result in theists changing their religious views, and not just their views on logic?

That is true in my experience. I find it somewhat frustrating that I have to argue by picking apart the Bible and defending evolutionary biology instead of by talking about reductionism and Kolmogorov complexity, but the former is what seems to work. (Quoting myself from elsewhere: "I find that deconversions begin more often from a person noticing some internal absurdity in their beliefs than from having the problems in their epistemology explained to them. It’s only once they find they can’t run away from some counterexample to their beliefs that they are willing to consider why such a counterexample is allowed to exist.")

This comment puzzles me. You have found that the most effective strategy, if you actually want to convince people of the truth of your position, is to argue from within their worldview and according to their rules. So far, so good... this is also my experience, of both theists and nontheists alike. You have found that some people dismiss "logic itself," which you find (understandably) frustrating. Given those two findings, the natural conclusion seems to be that the most effective strategy for convincing those people is to give up arguing from "logic," discover what it is they are using instead, and argue from whatever that is. Instead, you seem to ignore your own first paragraph and try to convince them using the selfsame "logic" that they dismiss. Why do you expect that to work?