Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

One of Jay Dyer’s New-Pseudoscientific Christian-Fundamentalists stopped by to annoy me today on the grounds that I am arrogant, and smart but apparently not wise.

Well, you know, one who acts as a prosecutor of falsehoods in defense of the informational commons, is not the same as a partner with whom you fantasize by engaging in wishful thinking using terms you do not understand in order to fool yourself and others into the pretense that this pseudo-rational, pseudoscientific, wordplay – much like all religions that preceded it – consists of more than shared reinforcement of nonsense words. Just as religions use wishful thinking to provide the incentives to create mutual reinforcement of nonsense words.

Now, I understand that over the past year I have been working on religion, and that over the past year I have been feeding the alt-right as much rhetoric as I can manage in between bouts of obsessive work on my business.

But neither my posturing (which most of you know is a marketing techique) – nor the prosecutorial stance ( which most of you know is something to use to circumvent the attempt to use entry into debate as a pretext for rallying and shaming, rather than the exploration of truth). So I choose the prosecutorial stance, in moral defense of the commons, and debate. This prosecutorialism is a hostile stance – by design. WHy? because we do not seek to agree upon action as they do in pursuit of allies, we only seek to prevent those actions that are harmful regardless of whether we create allies or enemies.

By prosecuting we are not trying to engage parasites in cooperation, nor are we trying to win their consent, nor win their approval, nor even to assist them in understanding our position. Just the opposite: we are trying to determine if they are trying to engage in error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, or deceit, in order to obtain by fraud, rallying and shaming what they cannot obtain by fully informed voluntary exchange.

In today’s little tiff I had to explain that the inability to falsify something is not a defense, but one of the ways we how we know that something is false. That something cannot be contradicted still requires that it be falsifiable.

In the same vein, that something is beyond our perception, understanding, and reason means that we cannot testify to it. If we cannot testify to it we cannot claim it is true.

That something is imaginable, does not mean it is possible. In fact, we can imagine many things but it is our attempt to falsify those things that determine whether they are truth candidates.

One of the most common ways of falsifying a hypothesis is by providing a subjectively testable sequence of operations that demonstrate that there is a rational explanation for the phenomenon, where that explanation provides the user with a reward – usually psychological.

We call this simple explanation a test of Occam’s razor, but it is far more than that. When we debate phenomenon in the physical sciences we do not know the first principles of the universe so we must often rely on Occam’s razor for the purposes of further investigation, if for no other reason than choosing the cheapest avenue of exploration is what the physical world does of necessity. It does not try to be witty. It just does what it can at the lowest cost.

But when we debate issues in human behavior, human epistemology, and human intuition, we do know the first principle – man is a rational actor, and therefore a consistent actor – and via empathy (subjective testing) we can test the incentives of others, and judge them rational or not, preferable or not, honest or not, deceitful or not.

So the limits of Occam’s razor in the physical sciences, do not apply to human experience. If there is a very simple explanation for a phenomenon, we must provide a superior alternative explanation in order to falsify it. What we cannot do is state that this is ‘imperceptible or unimaginable, or beyond sensation’. That is just an appeal to the supernatural in order to engage in deception and nothing more.

Now some people say that we cannot engage in self-deception, but this is only true in those cases where we are not trying to create external reinforcement of our wishful thoughts. In other words, we are trying to create the behavior in others that provides us the pretense of the world we desire even if we unconsciously know it’s false.

Once enough of us believe a falsehood, one we wish to believe, we defend that existence of the reinforcement of that falsehood.

This is the monotheist’s objective. This is modern monotheists objective (the left). This is the entire twentieth century: tell a lot of lies to women who, because of their irrational need for confirmation from others, rapidly grasp at wishful thinking of nearly any kind that is offered.