THE VALUE OF ARGUING WITH THE TINFOIL HAT CROWD It is ABSOLUTELY valuable to arg

THE VALUE OF ARGUING WITH THE TINFOIL HAT CROWD

It is ABSOLUTELY valuable to argue with the Tinfoil Hat crowd, so that you can master the common rhetorical fallacies without relying on normative assumptions for defense. Normative assumptions are just another paradigmatic frame.

As you move into more and more intellectual and academic debate, you realize that the only difference between the Yahoo-news-group idiots, the postmodern social science idiots, the scientistic idiots, and the public intellectual idiots is the density of the tinfoil. The nature of the individuals assumptions simply mature from:

a) schizophrenic bias, to

b) confirmation bias, to

c) nihilistic bias, to

d) pseudoscientific bias, to

e) methodological bias, to

f) paradigmatic bias.

Almost no one gets to skeptical empiricism in the Popperian, and certainly not in the Poincaré models. You can end up like Paul Krugman and ignore the fact that what you’re deducing from your measurements about monetary policy is merely noise, when the military expansion of anglo rules of trade is the signal.

You can end up like John Ralws and Sam Harris and confuse analogy with causality, then compounding your confusion by making the error of aggregation.

The best defense I have made against these errors is to focus on defining and reconciling spectrums – the golden mean. You can make an assumptive line between two ideal types pretty easily – the least work path. But it’s much harder to make errors if you define the different spectrums and see how they intersect with one another. It is much harder to reconcile sets of definitions in ordered spectra with each other.

And it is much easier with a rich language than an allegorical language. It is even easier in operational language.

Or at least. As easy as it can be.

WHICH IS WHY I”M ALWAYS WRITING LISTS (ordered sets).