DavidOdden

That’s what’s known as context-dropping. The context of the discussion is the video that you didn’t watch, where a number of essential factual observations were made a propos Israel’s defense of its existence (and the anti-Israeli propaganda war). The cat predictably responded (since the posting of the video was directed against her and her ilk as partisans in this propaganda war), but didn’t respond at all productively, instead just making false counter-claims – purporting to disprove major factual claims of the original video, but really just pointing to a huge propaganda document and declaring “The truth is there, you just have to believe!”. I then requested even one concrete instantiation of a case from the document where the law of Israel treats Jews and Arabs differently. That is the context that defines what is relevant. Your quote, which also lacks substantiation (or source) has no bearing on the question of whether the law of Israel treats Jews and Arabs differently (which, again, it does not). Your quote, if it were true, might be relevant to a different question, for example “Is it the case that all existing government have acted immorally?”. We can stipulate that all governments have failed to implement the ideal of rights-protection as the proper function of government, that much has never need in doubt. Because that fact is so self-evident, it needs not be discussed, except as an instantiation of the concept “self-evident”. Taxes and trade restrictions, I rest my case. Palestine is not yet a nation, because it is unwilling to do what is required for existence as a nation. The primary difference between Palestine and Nazi Germany or contemporary Russia is that the latter two have better-organized armies and are better able to carry out wars of aggression against their neighbors. The Palestinians are much more overt in their declaration of an intent to drive the Jews into the sea, compared to Russia versus former and current colonies that they are trying to retake.

The claim is irrelevant, so there is no point in worrying over veracity. The cat woman made a scurrilous false claim about the law of Israel, AI’s claim that it has made certain reports is irrelevant since they are not about the question at hand. The focus on the question at hand comes from the video, which I hope you watched and understood. Consider this analog: US soldiers “discriminated” against German soldiers at the end of WWII when they liberated Germany, and against various people (Pashtuns mostly) in Afghanistan when we expelled the Taliban. So F-ing what? There is no evidence that Israeli soldiers violated the law of Israel in their operations in so-called “Palestine”. Big clue: “Arab” and “Palestinian” refer to wildly different things. When a country is at war for its survival, it is unreasonable to expect the level of de-policing that you find in the peaceful contemporary US. I requested page numbers for such supposedly supporting quotes, you supply no page numbers. I checked the document for that quote, and it is nowhere to be found. This kind of prevarication is why I dismiss these anti-Israeli propaganda sound bites are deliberately created lies intended to besmirch the name of the most civilized nation in the Middle East. Unfortunately, after these lies get written once, they get propagated across the internet by people with good intent. I’m saying, you should check your sources.

This succinctly summarizes not just this issue, but “the problem” in contemporary socio-epistemology. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, nobody is entitled to their own facts, and nobody talks about the proper method of evaluating conclusions. Somewhat surprisingly, the video spends 10 minutes on the topic but she provides the killer disproof in her refutation – falsification by definition – within less than 2 minutes. I was startled that she felt that more needed to be said, though there are two substantive questions of fact that could have been addressed in more detail. The first is to provide satisfactory proof of that the claim was made to the effect that Mr. Howard claims 1x1=2. I was recently sent a copy of “Letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to Colonial Missionaries, 1883”, and was curious about the authenticity of the letter (which is in English, not a language of 150 year old Belgium). I harbor a certain level of distrust as to the authenticity of the letter. I am not certain­ as to Howard’s claim (I haven’t obtained a copy of the book to verify the claim), but there is much more evidence that Howard made some claim than that Leopold II wrote that letter. For the sake of argument I willing to accept this claim (that 1x1=2) as “actually made”. Objectivists are very familiar with the problem of out of context quotes of Ayn Rand’s writing, so I would like to spend a lot more time scrutinizing the original text, though I would probably actually prefer to do something else. The second part, which could stand some improvement, is the much more problematic argument from authority, that 1x1=1 by definition. I understand that it takes more than 10 minutes to prove that by definition 1x1=1, because for one, it requires a very long discussion of self-evident vs. arbitrary definitions (who sets the rules that determine what it “means” to multiply?). Her definition of multiplication is useful to her, Howard’s definition is useful to him, they are both entitled to their opinions. Unfortunately, her exposition of the utility of multiplication kind of fails because we do not multiply 1x7 in computing that there are 7 apples. We are on the boundaries of numeric primitives, that there are cognitively primitive numbers like 1, 2, 3… and not 10, or 9, or any other number. We do indeed use some additive definition of 10 etc by parsing clusters into directly-perceptible subsets of clusters such as “5 and 6”). A less error-prone method and the only one usable for numbers larger than about 12 is actual counting off using naturally-occurring body parts as accumulators. So indeed, she has failed to provide even a shred of evidence that multiplication is useful. After a period of contemplation, I thought of some possibly useful applications of this concept of “multiplication”, for example planning for a party if there will be 19 guests and every guest gets 2 beers, then 5 six-packs will not be enough, to be safe I could get 8 six-packs. Try as I might, I cannot find any useful application of multiplication with 1 as a multiplier (also none with 0 as a multiplier, God forbid that I talk about 1.3 as a multiplier). I say, and I suppose Dr. Howard says, that she is pulling the wool over the eyes of the public. So even though it was initially surprising to me that she spent 10 minutes on the topic, in 2 minutes into the video, I observed an exponential acceleration of the argument, aided with the tool of authority. I do credit her with a small advance in science-education in her proposal of the unit “chopstick-Tesla”, because IMO “units” are or have not been well explained in science-math. Ultimately, I think she is going the right direction, but it is a mistake to rely on apparently arbitrary definitions. It is also a mistake to rely even in the slightest on social convention (anything that smacks of saying “all scientists agree by convention…”), when one is addressing (attacking) wingnut amateur pseudo-scientists, including actual scientists speaking outside their own area of specialization. A well-known problematic example of scientific social convention is the “scientific consensus” on global warming. It is irrational denialism to deny global warming, or any other scientific consensus, however, I am unaware of (and therefore claim the non-existence of) any controlled and objective survey of scientists proving that there is such a consensus on so-called global warming – and that this “consensus” is significantly more-established than some randomly selected unrelated equally politicized factual claim. I see all sorts of wingnut pseudo-science done on language, even by people with PhDs in some field of some sort, and wonder “How can one effectively combat this nonsense?”. Should one even bother? I think one should, provided that (a) one can correctly isolate an target audience (she’s not talking to the crazies but I am not sure who she is talking to – I would say it is more addressed to the scientists who already know the answer) and (b) one can adopt the premises of the intended audience and teach them something new. We can say that by definition the video is a success, and attempt to solve for a: who is she talking to?

One thing you can say is, what is one single real example of a law of Israel that discriminates between Arabs and Jews? 280 pages of unsubstantiated generalized propaganda proves nothing, but surely you can point to a page and copy in come actual text. Give it your best shot.

I am not certain that we agree, but I find it reasonably probable that we do, based on this discussion and the process of exposing and challenging premises. It does take a while. Returning to the initial question about the method of making Objectivism the dominant political ideology in the world, this reveals the fundamental problem with mass-media sound-bite methods of persuasion. This is why I say that Objectivists should focus on individual psychology rather than mass psychology, using reason to check premises and logic and demonstrating what that means. This does not establish that it is possible to use reason to dissuade a person from an erroneous position, it merely establishes that it may be possible to use reason to determine that, despite differences in expression, there is in fact agreement.

or maybe "she" in the quotes refers to a different non-cat person.

I don’t care where “richness of concepts” comes from, I am asking what it even means. In what way can “rich” vs. “impoverished” be meaningfully applied to a concept? Uncontroversially, the concept “dog” implies all facts about dogs. However, no consciousness has that full rich knowledge, a consciousness is limited to what the being has experienced. Just to be clear, we are talking about the specific experiences of a single person. So even then, the set of concepts and propositions touched by “dog” will be enormous, whereas there are only two words in English, however there are uncountably many potential propositions (sentences) containing “dog”. If we are limiting the discussion to the actual (i.e. actual experiences of dogs), we would need to know the set of phrases and sentences uttered by a person containing “dog” – a large but finite number. However since you are allowing implicit mental associations, you are clearly rejecting the “actual” as the range for counting, therefore in fairness we have to open the floodgates of the potential for sentences. In other words, on a level rhetorical playing field, the linguistic manifestation of “dog” is unbounded, and so is the set of hypothetical experiences of dog. This follows from a little-discussed fact of propositions, that there is an unbounded supply of them and they are created de novo, as needed (whereas concepts are conventionalized). As for “experiencing a concept”, this isn’t a fine-grained philosophical question, I simply want to understand what you mean by “experiencing a concept”. I have a better idea what it means to experience a word, or to experience an instance of something, but I do not understand what it means to experience “3”.

The usenet new group humanities.philosophy.objectivism, where various Objectivists would do what they do on OO, until OO came along and provided a better venue for discussion.

You may have gotten the “digestion” impression from HPO, if you ever looked there: there were people who peddled that view, but it isn’t actual Objectivism. It is not so important whether you call that thing the rational faculty or the faculty of reason, what is important is understanding that “reason” is not just Fregean logical formalisms (and what in the world would “non-contradictory identification mean is purely Fregean terms?). The tendency in question is the tendency for certain concepts to always be formed, that is, the same units are subsumed under a label though the label differs across languages. Concepts derive from reality and the functional (cognitive) need to make certain grouping because of the nature of man’s existence on Earth. In all societies, the necessity of eating, sleeping, breathing and drinking are known which is why these concepts are universal, “water” is the perceptible universal entity associated with one of those actions (“beer” has a more restricted distribution). I don’t know what it even means for a concept to be richer than a word. Maybe you are referring to the fact that a concept is open ended so that there could be trillions of specific instances of “dog” but only two word in English, “dog” and “dogs”. I also don’t have any idea what you mean by apprehending a concept. My guess is that you mean that when you learn a new concept, you usually experience the word the you fill in the definition by asking “what does that mean?”. Though sometimes people “form the concept” from experience then ask “What the heck is that called?”. But then you don’t experience a concept subjectively – concepts are not experienced, they are learned or created and used, and always by an individual consciousness. In other words, I don’t get the distinction that you are making.

Perhaps: there is an industry of over-exoticizing Hopi (no) thanks to Whorf. The basic noun is paahu (which covers water in lakes and water in rivers), and the root concept paa is used for domesticated water as well – when you water the garden, that's the root that you use. kuuyi can be used for water in a container, but it also applies to milk or beer, i.e. any fluid in a container. It’s not that Hopi doesn’t have a general concept water, instead they have multiple concepts which might overlap. If we had a fluent Hopi speaker, we could ask if water poured on the ground is still kuuyi, or what substance the water pipes carry.

As a side note, she speaks of the “faculty of reason” exactly once, in FTNI. Instead she speaks of the “rational faculty”. The nature of that faculty is not specified by her, it was left to Peikoff in The ominous parallels to clarify that The senses, concepts, logic: these are the elements of man's rational faculty—its start, its form, its method. In essence, "follow reason" means: base knowledge on observation; form concepts according to the actual (measurable) relationships among concretes; use concepts according to the rules of logic (ultimately, the Law of Identity). Since each of these elements is based on the facts of reality, the conclusions reached by a process of reason are objective. I would say that you simply hadn’t appreciated the difference is between logic and reason / the rational faculty. Logic is simply the art of non-contradictory identification. Spock’s error is that he claims to live by logic alone, which is a Cartesian fallacy.

A bit of correction is needed here: this is true in a society dominated by reason. The current situation is that emotion dominates society, which is why the dominant ideologies are non-explanatory and contradictory. Maybe you mean “It would be nice if…” There are numerous other words that could be used to describe that action, such as “gate-keeping”, “monitoring”, “criticizing”. The function of police is to use force to enforce laws that protect the rights of an individual, although in practice police are used as agents of brutal repression in many places. Maoism is famous for brutally policing the party line, and for requiring public confession of one’s sins. Clearly, that is not the proper direction for Objectivism. I am not surprised to hear that opinion, because many reasonable people still have a poor understanding of the relationship between language and reason. I mainly blame people like Frege for creating the idea of a mystical brain-code assumed to be universally present in the mind of humans. Fregean inferences do not depend on knowing a specific language, but it does require knowledge of some human language. Moreover, all concepts, which are one of the three aspects of reason, are completely language-determined. There may be a predictable tendency for universal convergence on certain concepts in the case of “natural types” (the universal existence of a concept equivalent to “water” is predictable from the nature of life on Earth).

This is theoretically possible, it is also possible that an atom of Plutonium-244 will decay, but you should not wait around for it to happen. Since this discussion is the collective version of “What can one do?”, it is theoretically possible that one can read Galt’s Speech to Biden or Trump which causes them to self-head-smack, declaring “Of course!” and their entire philosophy having been repaired, we move into the Golden Age. But that is a highly unlikely outcome, to the point that it is irrational (specifically, mystical thinking) to pursue such a course of action. The reasonable course of action is to address individuals who are likely to listen to and act on the basis of reason, as opposed to emotion. Some people seem to adhere to a magical revelation view of ideas, that if you speak the truth at them and they are rational, they will then accept that truth – non-acceptance is proof of irrationality, goodbye! I believe that persuasion is a slow and incremental process, which is by nature poorly carried out by social media sound bites. This generally requires person and protracted conversations. The exception, as identified by Rand, is those with relative tabula rasa, who do not have to overcome a lifetime of bad premises and worse methods of reasoning. Of course nobody wears a badge declaring that their minds are open or closed, you just take your chances and hope that you aren’t wasting your time. And I don’t think that this depends on a Heisenbergian unknowable about a person, you can actually get a good estimate of a person’s relationship with reason by ordinary conversation.

Certainly! When a person mis-understands reality and refuses to use reason to check their premises and logic, you have an incurable mis-understanding of reality.

As I suggested before, the primary focus should be on individual psychology rather than mass / social psychology. You can’t change society if you can’t change an individual. I recommend re-reading ‘What can one do?’ in PWNI. As Rand argues, one needs to get personally clear on what the proper questions and answers are, so that you can persuade your neighbor. My proposal that we need to collectively concentrate on the relationship between language and reason is – hopefully obviously – tongue in cheek. That is obviously appropriate for me, personally, that is the essence of what I do professionally. But not for John Allison, whose specialization is business and economics. The answer to the question “what can one do?” is “‘SPEAK’ (provided you know what you are saying”, the next question is, who should you speak to? You should speak to those who are apparently open to reason, you should not pointlessly try to change the minds of the assembled mass of radical “Death to Israel!” protesters on campus. Do not bother to try to mass-convert an assembly of MAGA-extremists, do have a reasoned discussion with a MAGAite to bring out the core agreements and disagreements. It is not generally difficult to determine that a particular individual is a committed idealogue and that discussion is completely pointless. It may require a few iterations of the discussion to determine that you are just banging your head against the wall and your target has an uncurable mis-understanding of reality.