Today I rejoined The Harry Binswanger Letter (HBL). It's an Objectivist discussion forum. I left in the past because it was moderated and didn't allow me to say some things. It also limited how often you could post to something like 4 posts per week if I remember right. I also had some disagreements with Binswanger (e.g. he hated Popper from a position of ignorance). It's been changed to allow unlimited posting on a web forum and then he only emails selected posts out to the members.
You have to pay for HBL. I don't mind that, but I do mind the lack of public links. (If I ever make a paid forum, maybe I'll have people pay for posting but allow reading for free.)
What I'm going to try doing is reposting my own posts as comments below (unfortunately I'm going to lose the formatting sometimes). I want to have my own copies in case I unsubscribe, they lose their data in a computer crash, or they edit or delete some of my posts. (They actually pay someone to go through and edit formatting and typos. I don't know how far the editing goes.)
Update: I've been banned from HBL. Read my blog post explaining. In short, Binswanger dislikes critical discussion.
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Speeding is not a problem to me as I've been practicing speeding videos to the point some people sound more natural if sped up now, but it could be a problem to others. Your accent is indeed strong, and it sounds a bit "snob" or "gay" to me. Maybe that can be off putting to some people?
> Your accent is indeed strong, and it sounds a bit "snob" or "gay" to me. Maybe that can be off putting to some people?
that would not surprise me. accents are common and often sound strong to others, even if people don't know they're speaking with an accent. it's to be expected due to language variance. welcome to northern california!
i think people can understand me OK if they care to. lots of accents are harder to understand, especially foreign ones, but people often manage anyway.
i'm guessing HB doesn't understand my speech primarily because he isn't very interested. just like how he doesn't understand my text either! i guess he went into the video ready to find an excuse not to watch it.
i'd still be interested in making my speech easier to understand. i don't think trying to change my accent would be worth the effort though. i have tried a little to trail off and mumble less -- i find that a more approachable and interesting problem.
trying meta discussion since none of the discussions went anywhere
One-line summary: Anyone want to try a serious discussion to a conclusion?
If you find a point of disagreement you both consider important, and discuss it to a conclusion, then at least one person learns something major. That’s really great. And most conversations have little value for anyone, so this is better.
Why don’t people do this more? Does anyone here want to do this? This is what I primarily look for in discussions. So far no one has here has seemed to have an approach to discussion anything like this. Despite my efforts, there hasn’t been persistence to resolve anything. People give up long before resolving much.
Don’t people care about answering disagreements? When you don’t answer criticism of your views then you could be wrong, and people could know you’re wrong, and you could just be irrationally persisting in error. All criticism should be publicly answered, rather than ignored. There’s no excuse to ignore criticism of your position instead of address it.
I don’t like hit-and-run discussions where putting effort into the matter (e.g. reading books and writing new essays about it) won’t be productive for the discussion because people don’t care to take it to a conclusion. That ruins discussion quality and seriousness.
I’m willing to talk with people who disagree with me, to the point of actually resolving a dispute. I’m willing to answer criticism. Are any of you?
Do people not understand these concepts and need it explained how you can answer criticism, resolve disagreements, etc? Do people disagree and, in accordance with their philosophy, didn’t write their disagreement down and won’t state it? Or do people just deal with discussion in a haphazard way? Or what?
someone (not HB) arguing against answering much criticism, on principle!
One-line summary: Not addressing criticism is evasion.
A criticism is an explanation of a flaw with an idea. That’s of value to your life because it helps you get ideas with fewer flaws.
You have no way to know which ideas are correct without addressing criticism. Every criticism is a potential error on your part, and you can’t know if you made an error or not without addressing the criticism.
If you skip some criticism, it’s a refusal to think about those points.
If you address a criticism in a way the critic can’t make followup points, such as dismissing it in your mind while saying nothing and moving on, then you’re blocking most criticism. You’re refusing to think about any followup criticism.
Followup criticism is a crucial part of criticism. Most important criticisms are not communicated in the first round of discussion. They require some clarifying questions because communicating is hard and misunderstandings are very common even when people aren’t trying to criticize. And followup criticisms require you saying your answers to the first few criticisms (which people usually have, but which often vary between different people) so the critic can see which other things you don’t know and expand his criticism.
What about replying in private to a critic?
Addressing criticism in public is the best and standard approach because it allows for the criticism, and/or your reply, to be referenced in future discussions. This is a huge time saver. What if the same criticism is made twice? If you or anyone else has written down a reply, then the one answer can be used twice. Most criticism isn’t new and should be answered by reference to existing answers. (A key here is that you take responsibility for any answers you use, even if someone else wrote them. If it’s wrong, you’re wrong, and you should take that seriously just like when you make other mistakes.)
Addressing criticism in public also allows other critics to follow up. It exposes your ideas to criticism from the public instead of just from one person. That allows more people to help you learn better ideas. And it allows more people to learn from your ideas. Many potential critics could read your answer and change their mind themselves.
And, when it comes to impersonal ideas (which is most of what’s interesting to discuss), there’s more or less no downside to answering criticism in public rather than writing to a critic in private. Why wouldn’t you do it that way? What have you got to hide about your philosophy views, your economics views, your politics, etc? (OK there are jobs where your politics could get you fired. Maybe you’ll say that’s an exception, but I don’t think it’s relevant to these HBL conversations. And why take one of those jobs, anyway?)
If you don’t have a general policy of dealing with all criticism, the result will simply be you’re avoidably wrong about many issues where people knew better and were willing to tell you. If you don’t do it in public, you’re hiding from critics. If you claim thinking about counter-arguments to your ideas is not an efficient use of your time, you should improve your skill at how you do it rather than simply refuse to think about a bunch of known reasons you’re mistaken. There are solutions for how to do it in a time-efficient manner. Are you interested? Do you need help with that? Ask if you want. And when you hold positions shared by many, there ought to be plenty of time-saving answers already written by others that you can reference (and would want to have read yourself to check the correctness of). If there aren’t already great public answers by the many people who agree with you, what’s going on? And if you hold ideas that few others agree with, that’s fine except it does mean there’s more burden to check the ideas and address criticism yourself; it’d be foolish to hold a tiny minority position and then not address the reasons people disagree with it.
My 2009 comments on The Comprachicos.
Original: http://curi.us/1448-the-comprachicos
*Paragraphs in italics are additions today.*
These are my comments on The Comprachicos, an essay by Ayn Rand found in http://www.amazon.com/New-Left-Anti-Industrial-Revolution/dp/0452011256
This will make a lot more sense if you read it first. It is not a summary, and it leaves out a lot of good ieas from the essay.
I agree with Rand's pro-children attitude, as opposed to the usual more hateful one. Rand says young children should start learning abstract ideas, and I agree with her.
I agree with her criticisms of "the pack" and conformity and collectivism, and her view that the "problem children" often have the best chance to get through school with their reason in tact.
I agree with many of her specific examples about how some methods of teaching are nonsense, or contradict the educational philosophy the teachers claim to follow. I disagree with her apparent assumption that most of the effects and meaning of teaching methods can be discerned by looking at them and reasoning about them. I think that the bulk of what's done to kids is more subtle than that. And I think kids are resilient and such blatant methods, alone, are not enough to have the affects schools do have.
Rand only mentions parents briefly. She says mistakes of this size aren't made innocently. I don't agree with that logic. I do agree with her assessment that many parents want to get their kids out of their hair, and don't think carefully about what sort of place they are sending their kids, and also don't have thoughtful, rational discussions with their kids.
*Making mistakes is a typical human activity. Some of our mistakes will look huge to people in the future who are much wiser than us. The size of a mistake doesn’t tell you about the guilt involved. (Like Rand’s point that the issue with government is whether it follows its proper role, or meddles where it shouldn’t, not size as such.)*
Rand takes a fairly nature oriented position on some aspects of the nature/nurture debate. She does talk a lot about how education matters, but she also seems to think being more or less intelligent is innate
*I think how intelligent healthy people seem is a matter of how good their ideas are, it’s not some innate function determined by their genes.*
Rand sometimes appeals to "the evidence" or "scientific research" but fails to cite it or explain what research was done and how it is capable of reaching the conclusion it reaches. This is scientism, but it's mild and she provides arguments for all her conclusions.
*I don’t think brief appeals to the science supposedly being on your side are productive today. Maybe the culture surrounding this stuff was different when Rand wrote this.*
*Saying the science is on your side is easy, whether it is or not. And for issues like these, the state of the science is generally controversial.*
Rand overestimates how much teachers hurt children *intentionally*. She thinks they somewhat plan for it. Alright, some do, but they don't actually know how to plan for things and then make them happen, so their planning hardly matters. Rand makes a comment that if they cared about the children they'd notice certain policies are harming children and stop or revise them, and concludes they don't care about children's well being. I disagree with that. I don't think they know how to evaluate what works and what doesn't. Doing that takes skill which they don't have. They have no idea if they are doing harm or not. I don't want to absolve them of all guilt, or even any guilt -- they do see crying children, and they definitely know that many children dislike much of what they do -- but let's not assume they know, plan, or intend more than they do. They are clueless and helpless, and have a mix of callous disregard; superficial, tender love and caring; some meanness; and for many teachers, especially the younger ones, only occasional hatred of the children. Many teachers have given up and don't think about what they are doing.
*Controlling people is hard. Teachers and parents often think they are in control, but would quickly lose control if they didn’t follow traditions and memes. The knowledge to control people has been developed by many people over a long time, and it only works within limits. It’s fragile if circumstances change or the authority starts giving orders of the wrong types. Teachers and parents are themselves subject to a lot of control from their culture, their boss, and the very traditions and memes they are using to control children.*
Rand says schools and culture used to be better and more rational, and the comprachicos only gained control quite recently, and the current educators had a better education themselves. I disagree. Rand doesn't go into detail here. It's true that schools have changed in some ways, and their explicit rhetoric has changed, but I see no reason to think their basic effect has changed. Perhaps Rand is going too much on the schools' explicit messages. If anything, school has gotten better. People are smarter now, and more capable; we can tell because they deal with more complex lives, have more possessions which are more complicated (like computers), there are more knowledge workers, and GDP per capita is much higher. And schools have had reforms, e.g. with corporal punishment. And we now have more and better sources of information (TV, internet, more books, etc).
*The leftist takeover of schools to use them for propaganda is a separate issue than their basic nature of schools to make kids obey authority, break their spirits, and get them to “listen” and believe whatever they’re told to believe. Schools would still be brutal without the leftists.*
Rand does a good job of emphasizing how much of a child's learning is inexplicit, and how much of what is taught is inexplicit (for example, she discusses the emotional vibe of the pack). And I agree with her comments on whim.
I agree with Rand's mentions of the *boredom* of school.
I agree with Rand that the primary way to do well in the pack is to learn to manipulate human beings, and this is disgusting, and not something an individualist would want to do. I agree that "socializing" and "fitting in" are wicked.
I liked Rand's comment that non-conformist children have *no one* on their side. Not even themselves, because they don't have much understanding of the nature of their battle. However, she's slightly mistaken: they have Rand on their side! She does indeed sympathize with them. Good for her. And I do too.
I don't agree with Rand's assumption about the developmental status of children being very strongly tied to age. She even mentions that is false at one point by saying children of the same age and intelligence can be at significantly different levels of development if one is educated well and the other isn't. Yet she still refers to what three year olds need, what five year olds need, and so on. (And it's not even clear if these age numbers refer to normal children or properly educated children.)
I generally agree with Rand's comments about how people automate large parts of their thinking. For example, Rand says you have to learn to focus your eyes, or to coordinate your muscles to walk. And this isn't obvious or trivial. Rand says we learn a huge amount in our first two years, and if any adult could learn as much, as quickly, or as well he'd be a genius. But adults have automated the process so much it seems easy.
I agree with Rand that fakers -- for example people who pretend to agree with the pack when they don't -- often become fakers by habit, and then live that way without thinking, and it becomes a major part of them, and the "real" self gets lost and forgotten.
Perhaps my favorite part is on page 197:
> At the age of three, when his mind is almost as plastic as his bones, when his need and desire to know are more intense than they will ever be again, a child is delivered -- by a Progressive nursery school -- into the midst of a pack of children as helplessly ignorant as himself. He is not merely left without cognitive guidance -- he is actively discouraged and prevented from pursuing cognitive tasks. He wants to learn; he is told to play. Why? No answer is given. He is made to understand -- by the emotional vibrations permeating the atmosphere of the place, by every crude or subtle means available to the adults whom he cannot understand -- that the most important thing in this peculiar world is not to know, but to get along with the pack. Why? No answer is given.
> He does not know what to do; he is told to do anything he feels like. He picks up a toy; it is snatched away from him by another child; he is told that he must learn to share. Why? No answer is given. He sits alone in a corner; he is told that he must join the others. Why? No answer is given. He approaches a group, reaches for their toys and is punched in the nose. He cries, in angry bewilderment; the teacher throws her arms around him and gushes that she loves him.
I like the "Why? No answer is given." theme.
I think Rand's comment that loneliness is only for people who have something of value to share, but can't find any equals to share it with, is insightful. She says the emotion that drives conformists to "belong" is fear. I'm not so sure about that. I think fear plays a role, but there are many other issues, such as not knowing what else to do, and thinking non-conformity is morally wrong.
Rand hates: Kant, John Dewey, Marcuse, Hegel, Logical Positivism, and Language Analysis.
*Rand proposed Montessori schools as part of the solution. I disagree. Here’s my criticism of an Objectivist presentation about Montessori.* http://curi.us/1793-ray-girn-the-self-made-child-maria-montessoris-philosophy-of-education
Textbooks selection isn’t a great opportunity.
Trying to influence textbook selection is hard and awful. Read Richard Feynman’s experience with it: Judging Books by Their Covers in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
And textbook selection isn’t a low hanging fruit. The left already knows about it. There’s already effort going into controlling it.
i'm now banned from posting to HBL. i can still read it for now. details later.
HB Announces My Ban
The following is the full forum post by HB with the uninformative title "Administrative note".
One-line summary: I have removed Elliot Temple’s posting privileges
After much consideration, I decided to remove Elliot Temple’s posting privileges. His posts were not adding value to HBL, and they were: 1) coming from an alien context, 2) nearly always filled with wrong ideas–sometimes startlingly wrong (your eyes are, he says, “opinionated”)–ideas not well argued for, 3) combative, and 4) skating on the edge of violating our etiquette policy. They also were often too long.
All in all, I began to cringe when I saw his name on a post. Instead of the question “Is anything he’s written actually bad enough to take away his posting privileges?” I realized the question was more, “Why do I want him posting on my list, if almost every post brings me grief?”
After I made the decision, but before he knew of it, he posted a piece charging our dismissal of many of his “criticisms” as evasion–the cardinal sin for Objectivism. But, again, I read that only after reaching my decision.
In private email, he asked me to post the following for him:
> 1) I’ve been banned from posting to HBL, so don’t expect me to reply anymore.
>
> 2) It’s not my choice to end the discussions. I didn’t give up.
>
> 3) If anyone wants to continue a discussion, email me (elliot@fallibleideas.com). I’m happy to continue any of the discussions and respond to outstanding points, but only if people choose to contact me.
It's pathetic that HB's best example of me being wrong is a statement of basic science in terminology he found confusing. I put a lot of effort into clarifying various terminology for him, but to little avail.
Apple designs cameras in opinionated ways. There are made tradeoffs they make in the design of the hardware and in the software processing which changes the image before you see it. The software processing is like red eye removal or other touchups to change the image, but automated.
Our eyes are opinionated in the same sense – they have design tradeoffs and they alter images (kinda like touchups) before we see the final result.
With an iPhone, I believe apps can now access the raw camera data. In the past they couldn't. With our eyes, we can't access the raw data. We only have the final, edited image data. It's important to recognize it's basically gone through several filters designed in an opinionated way (to be good at some things, bad at others, according to some particular design goals that could have been done another way).
In this case it's not a human designer with a human opinion. It was designed by genetic evolution. That's still a knowledge creating process which created eyes which are adapted to some purposes and not others, in the same way Apple makes opinionated cameras good for some tasks and not others.
Here is my original passage in which I stated my meaning clearly in the first place. HB's misunderstanding is not innocent.
> As Popper put it: all observation is theory-laden. You need theories first. Raw observation is both impossible (because e.g. our eyes are opinionated--they let us see green but not infrared) and worthless (because there're infinitely many characteristics and patterns out there that one could observe).
Eyes let us see green but not infrared. They are designed a particular way. This is HB's best and clearest example of me being wrong?
I guess he decided to misunderstand me as meaning eyes are conscious? But I would call an iPhone camera opinionated too without meaning it's conscious. HB never bothered saying how he was reading my statement.
HB replied with a wild accusation:
> Is this serious? As stated, it is wild primacy of consciousness.
And I replied clarifying again:
> How so? There are many different possible designs for eyes, and we have a particular one with various strengths (can see green) and weaknesses (can't see ultraviolet). This isn't a claim about consciousness.
And HB didn't reply but, apparently, continued to hold this against me while disregarding what I say I mean. Seems dishonest.
notice how HB is offended by *accusations* of evasion, without bothering to address whether they are true or deal with my *arguments*.
HBL people, including HB, do not do paths forward. typical evasion! and HB banned me rather than discuss paths forward. now he'll continue evading the whole issue of paths forward, and then also continue evading many particular topics (e.g. that induction doesn't work).
no warning
there was no warning before HB banned me from posting. that's super lame.
i also think it's really lame that i wasn't banned for violating any rules, just for being a disliked critic. and there's no posted policy telling all prospective members that HB bans whoever he feels like just because he thinks they're wrong or otherwise doesn't like what they have to say.
HB's own story is basically he couldn't come up with a good excuse to ban me even though he wanted to. so then he did it anyway.
i respect his property rights, but i don't respect his unwillingness to deal with criticism, philosophy discussion and paths forward. and i don't respect his moderation policies. ban whoever you feel like is a bad way to run a discussion group, and especially bad when you lie to the public about the nature of your discussion list. i read how HBL works before posting. i wasn't informed about this possibility. it's not a documented policy. i was led to believe i would be allowed to discuss without a special exception for if HB didn't like my ideas and claimed i was mistaken.
> i'm now banned from posting to HBL. i can still read it for now.
Sorry, I did see it coming. I don't know if i should have advised you to slow down.
I saw it coming too. This isn't my first ban. Slowing down was not a solution.
HB didn't allow me to invite people to my forum to continue discussions he interrupted.
I, of course, do allow people to post about other forums on my forums.
So far the replies to HB's announcement are just cruel attacks on a muzzled person. People start being aggressive jerks the moment I can't reply calling them out for being jerks, criticizing their immorality, etc! It also shows they were being very dishonest in their discussions with me instead of expressing their real opinions.
> I saw it coming too. This isn't my first ban. Slowing down was not a solution.
Why not?
> So far the replies to HB's announcement are just cruel attacks on a muzzled person.
What are they saying? My free trial is over.
How would saying things they don't want to hear, more slowly, have made them happy to hear it?
> How would saying things they don't want to hear, more slowly, have made them happy to hear it?
My thought is it would give them more time to adjust to something foreign to them, to think it over, to not feel invaded and overwhelmed.
Hb seemed to like you quite a lot when you posted your analyses of We the Living. It seems he changed his mind tons in a few days.
i'm writing my HB and HBL criticism blog post. have done several drafts. if anyone wants to read a draft copy, email me quickly and you may be able to give feedback before it's posted.
i've been banned from HBL. i wrote a blog post explaining. it criticizes HB, HBL, passive minds, and more!
http://curi.us/1930-harry-binswanger-refuses-to-think
#7085
>Popper is a worse communicator than Rand.
Doesn't this imply Rand being a bad communicator?
Wouldn't it be better to formulate the sentence the following instead? "Popper is not as good of a communicator as Rand."
Or do you think that Rand is a bad communicator? Based on what I have read on curi.us I think you do not hold that position (Rand being a bad communicator).
#12474
>>Popper is a worse communicator than Rand.
> Doesn't this imply Rand being a bad communicator?
No, AFAICT. Why do you think that?
I was mistaken. I did the wrong conversion from English in my head and got it mixed up (I roughly made it into "even worse than" instead of what it actually said).
https://writingexplained.org/worse-or-worst-difference
#12475
> No, AFAICT. Why do you think that?
In Swedish there are two different words for "bad". One that is similar to the way it is used in English, and one that is used on negative things that are considered bad to begin with. For example diseases . I read it as the latter. I was mistaken and should have re-read before posting.
> When Popper rejects "irrevocably true statements," he's saying that in a future context we may get new information and change our minds. Popper thinks of this in terms of fallibility. Whatever we do, we may have made a mistake. Popper also thinks of revising ideas when we get new information in terms of correcting mistakes. **Popper is unaware of the Objectivist perspective that older ideas remain contextually true. Popper's point is our ideas are never final; further thinking, progress and improvement are always possible.**
This was really helpful to me. I was struggling with what to me seemed like contradictions with Objectivism and looked like skepticism in Popper.
I don't think Popper would like "contextual certainty". Contextual certainty is confusing because you could always make a mistake *within your context*. You might not use the best available knowledge. You might be dishonest. There's no way to be certain you didn't make an avoidable mistake. There's no way to prove your conclusion is the best conclusion possible to know at that time, in that context. So it'd be better to call it "contextual knowledge" but not "contextual certainty" or "contextually true" because you have no way to guarantee it's true even contextually.
The important thing is that knowledge is judged contextually, not non-contextually. You shouldn't demand that ideas meet a standard of omniscient perfection. We always act in the context of our lives and must judge ideas to act on by the standard of whether we judge that they're the best available idea to act on.
Another key part of the context of an idea is the purpose of the idea. If my goal is to get to point A, then you can't criticize the idea for failing to arrive at point B, even if you think point B is a better place. You can criticize the goal itself, but that's different than criticizing the idea about how to accomplish the goal. There's also the general context of your values and life goals, e.g. I generally wouldn't want a method of getting to point A that costs so much money that I become poor. The issue here is that only some criticisms are relevant in context. Some "errors" are not relevant errors in the context.
#12479 Expanding on this:
So there's both the *narrow context* (the goal of this particular idea) and the *broader context* (my life, my values, my other ideas) to consider. Criticisms have to be contextually relevant. A criticism has to say why something fails at its goal (narrow context error) or causes problems for my in some other way that I care about (broader context error).
You can also phrase this without the word "criticism", e.g. "An error has to fit the narrow or broad context or else it isn't an error."
When we learn new things, we often find out that some of our old ideas were errors (they didn't achieve their goals or they harmed our lives in some other ways that we didn't realize). Some were just less good than they could be, and some were worse than nothing. But that doesn't mean it was an error *to act on or accept* that idea at that time. If you did your best, honestly, without evasion, etc. (which is rare), then *you* didn't make an error even if the idea is false.
(Doing your best doesn't mean putting in unlimited effort. Just an appropriate effort level given the importance of the issue and the other things you have to do with your time.)