Category: Epistemology and Method

HOW CAN PEOPLE USING THE SAME METHOD MAKE DIFFERENT ARGUMENTS?

—“I’ve noticed some followers have slight disagreements. Is this because they are getting it wrong? Or what? Example, I’ve heard Eli explain that he disagrees that Christianity is the optimum cooperative strategy. I mean, either it is or isn’t, right? How can different people using the method ever disagree or contradict?”– by Curtus Maximus

Short answer: First, People who should know better, still get Darwin and Einstein wrong – every day. And second, we are all arguing a field of possibilities rather than just the central proposition – that field is a means of providing due diligence against your misunderstanding by deduction, inference, and free association. In other words we differ largely in which error we are trying to stop you from making (many), not in the central thesis (one).

Long answer: we are in that phase where we are applying the method to everything, but have not yet covered all the cases nor examined the consequence of the application of our judgements. At this point we will naturally have some ‘calculating’ to do.

In the example you gave, I say that christianity teaches (_contains_, not _is_) the optimum cooperative strategy WITHIN a group. This is just a general rule and it’s not possible to debate it.

We can say that (a) it is a very bad way of teaching that rule, (b) teaching it that bad way produces terrible consequences, (c) teaching that rule without limiting to kin is suicidal.

Eli is the most sophisticated person we have at the economic analysis of cooperative behaviors. There just isn’t anyone better at it. And he has such a head start that it will be hard for anyone to catch up with him.

But, when he’s making those statements I don’t know the context so I don’t know which of the points (a,b,c) he’s making.

Eli’s method is extremely pejorative. He uses that method to render extremely intolerant (weasel-proof) judgements because he’s not letting you come to your own ‘weasel-word’ conclusion. I tend to want you to come to your own conclusion so that you ‘own it’. So I will leave the doorway for weasel-words open in order to iteratively trap you so that you come to the conclusion on your own. (it’s socratic – and as you can see over the past few days, it’s what I’m doing with you.)

Usually, when reading Eli, I can simply look at the context (argument he’s refuting) and define what he’s saying. But I don’t know if I’ve ever disagreed with him. It’s pretty hard to.

So in the sense of judgement, Eli will give the LIMIT test of the argument. Where I will tend to describe the general rule. I suspect that any difference we have is in this difference between medians and limits.

Bill will use a more sensitive approach. and if you watch john mark he’s probably becoming the best of us so far in completely answering the question.

So you know, in ‘manly terms’ eli=well done, curt=medium, bill-medium rare, and John Mark = Rare.

😉