That's basically just my reading of your own "bridge to meta-rationality" article, but I find it convincing and see it as making "the stories used to justify rationality are false" unnecessary to explain what's observed.
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Replying to @mattskala @robamacl and
While generally agreeing here, there seems to have been a shift; most people used to more-or-less accept that science was mostly justified, even if they didn’t understand it at all, and even if they rejected particular bits. “It’s just another belief system” is prevalent now.
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl and
Maybe I'd prefer to say "The stories used to justify rationality are no longer convincing to a lot of people." Focusing on whether they are *false* makes the claim harder to prove and pretty much limited in its usefulness even if proven, to operating within rationality itself.
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Replying to @mattskala @robamacl and
I’d be interested to hear more from this line of reasoning? Is there a better way to get more convincing stories than to find ones that are actually accurate?
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl and
It's not something I have thought about much before this conversation just now, but it seems to me that we need to know what the audience actually cares about. E.g. the spectacular failure of most atheists to recruit, because they care themselves about whether God exists /
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Replying to @mattskala @Meaningness and
and assume that's what religious people care about, too. So an attempt to prove that God doesn't exist comes across to the religious person as "This nutbar is going to lengths to convince me of something stupid and irrelevant." /
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Replying to @mattskala @Meaningness and
Now, if I knew what people who are rejecting rationality want that they aren't getting from rationality, I'd be much more successful in many of my own projects than I am. But I think it's probably not "a way of determining which propositions are true or false." /
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Replying to @mattskala @Meaningness and
It may have a lot to do with stuff like having technology (even "low" technology) that really works. "I don't want to walk under a bridge that was built on the basis of 'alternative ways of knowing.' " is a strong argument that I think resonates with a lot of people. /
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Replying to @mattskala @Meaningness and
But the "high" technology we have today that does *not* work, and is hostile to what people want out of life, is not helping anything here.
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Replying to @mattskala @robamacl and
These are very interesting points! If rationality/science is considered “a belief system,” then what is wanted is a way of making meaningful sense of the world. Rationalists often evangelize a claim of providing that, which they mostly can’t deliver on, which is unhelpful.
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Rationalism/scientism has generally presented itself as an alternative to religion/magic, and therefore is evaluated by religious criteria (whether positively or negatively). Maybe emphasizing instead the ways rationality/science is orthogonal in purpose would be helpful?
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl and
Yes: what is rationality actually good for? What does it solve that is *not* a religious question? Because things being true and false kind of is religious.
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Replying to @Meaningness @mattskala and
Working a methodology with discipline is a useful exercise, if you don't work the methodology things degrade to orthodoxy and ideology
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