I skimmed the first quarter of it and read through the rest; a decent read that touches on a lot of good points.
I found this particularly interesting:
The mistake of many modern feminists, he writes, is that they “look only at the top of society and draw conclusions about society as a whole. Yes, there are mostly men at the top. But if you look at the bottom, really at the bottom, you’ll find mostly men there, too.” His examples: The homeless; the imprisoned; the people who die at work, 92 percent of whom are male. The popular modern view is that it’s women who are most poorly valued by culture. But, ever the contrarian, Baumeister says men are demonstrably “more expendable than women.”
Also this:
Susan remembers hearing about a theory that the most successful people in life are those who are still searching for their parents’ unconditional regard.
The idea that men are on the top and the bottom and women somewhere in the middle is something I also experienced when learning about China. There are so many men who are completely unable to find a decent job and nor any wife at all, and on the other end of the spectrum men so rich that one of them has more money/power than a small country. The point that women completely ignore the men on the bottom and fight each other about the men on the top, who in turn have so much choice and so little punishment for bad behaviour that they don't regard women as breathing human beings, seems to add up to a picture that looks quite realistic.
It's probably a little too simplified, though. While the percentages vary between top and bottom men and women, you have both on each level. Beside the amount of people one would also need to look at the impact on each gender's life. And the result might still be that a woman on the bottom might have a much harder life than a man, and a woman at the top might not gain as many rewards as a man.
It's rather hard to get a complete picture, right?
I've never seen those two ideas combined before: the skewness of the male population towards failure, and the resulting misogyny of the "spoilt for choice" men at the other end of the distribution. Very interesting.
Notably, the men at the bottom are considered failures for failing to acquire a wife. That's also one of those things that feminism takes issue with. Poor males are not saints; they just aren't in a position to actually change the overall status quo.
If wife acquisition stopped being an indicator of success in China, you'd have a lot fewer men being considered at the bottom.
>No wife means not only a lonely existence, but also no children to care for you in your old age. If that isn't failure, I don't know what is.
This line of thinking just seems juvenile to me. Do you really believe the pinnacle of human achievement (and the only one that matters) is being in a long term relationship and having children?
> Do you really believe the pinnacle of human achievement (and the only one that matters) is being in a long term relationship and having children?
Can anyone with any sense of Darwinian evolution not believe that having children is the goal of life? Can anyone with any emotional sense at all not believe that a lasting relationship with another is not the highest of pursuits?
I'm personally far more interested in passing down a cultural legacy than squirting my genes into an egg, and I'm more inclined towards raising the average happiness of the world than just a single relationship.
The funny thing about belief is that it doesn't necessarily extend from basic facts like having read the same book.
Darwinian evolution is useless when applied to modern humanity. There is no "survival of the fittest". Consider also that individual genetics are irrelevant to breeding success when put against external factors like security and wealth. Our knowledge and ideas are much more valuable to humanities survival than our individual genetics at this point.
I would also personally argue that once you gain the ability to modify the human genome any desire for classical evolution is deeply flawed. Relationships are largely a holdover from the evolutionary need to reproduce, although obviously it's good for our happiness and emotional state to satisfy those desires in our current form.
You're actually giving him too much credit. Speaking as someone whose family has the same values, "having children" isn't enough. They have to be obedient and willing to care for you in your old age. Success, in these terms, is breeding future slaves for your twilight years. The academic term for this is "filial piety". It also includes things like guilting your children for all the things you forced them into doing, such as learning the violin or piano.
To state the obvious, I am kinda disagreeable to this presumption.
Similarly, he's not just talking about a "long term relationship", but a much more economic arrangement where one's wife fulfills your needs for companionship and breeding in return for the bread you win. Unsurprisingly, this is something that many modern Chinese women have started balking at.
That's an interesting view. My English is not so good. What I meant was that getting a wife is the result of being successful for the Chinese guys I know. If you have a stable job, an apartment and a car you are quite likely to get a wife. But there are many people applying for the jobs, and cars/apartments are more expensive than in the west.
From what I've seen and heard, getting a wife was the goal, and since women had actual choices, they'd be choosing someone with a stable job, apartment, etc., so the men feel compelled to get those things. They're not accidentally tripping over wives; they're actively seeking them out.
That's interesting. From what I've seen I would guess that Chinese women seek marriage partners above else, but Chinese men choose financial success above else. Losing a wife to get rich is okay for them. But failing to get a car and house can not be compensated by having a wife.
I would agree that marriage is more important to Chinese men than to western men. The idea of marriage is also different, though.
The root of this is that having a daughter was less culturally valued, people chose sex-selective abortions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#China), which led to a skewed gender ratio for the population. Many rural men struggle to find wives because of the shortage. If women/daughters were more valued, there would be more women, and poor men would have an easier time finding a wife. So even though there are more men on the bottom, it was caused by valuing men over women.
I think a large part of the reason that men are more likely to end up "on the bottom" of society is that men have smaller support systems/friend networks than women. Some of the reasons for this are stigma against men expressing vulnerability, stigma against men seeking help, homophobia around close male friendships, gender expectations that women should do more "emotional work" than men, and stereotypes that women are social and men are not. Feminism seeks to dismantle all of the above, so in that sense, it would make it possible for men to have much stronger support networks.
Additionally, many (most?) feminists believe in "intersectionality", the belief that sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and heterosexism act in intersecting ways, and that all need to be dismantled together (for instance, this is why most feminists support reform of the US prison system, even though this is something that primarily effects men). Dismantling these oppressive systems would very much help those on the bottom.
The exclusive-focus-on-more-white-woman-as-CEOs brand of feminism is actually a minority of feminists (although they seem to get the most coverage in the popular press) and is widely critiqued within feminism.
> "Additionally, many (most?) feminists believe in "intersectionality", the belief that sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and heterosexism act in intersecting ways"
Yes, of course they intersect, at their core they're all the same thing; judgements made based on human traits.
What does it matter whether people are judged based on gender, skin colour, etc... ? The point is, the judgements are being made whilst we build a picture of the world around us. The danger only comes when irrational traits are associated, when those being judged are not careful about self-fulfilling prophecies, and when people forget that stereotypes are a shortcut, never the whole picture.
It has the double-barreled utility of both sufficiently explaining the term I wanted to introduce to you and provide a reasonable critique of it at the same time.
Yet it seems to be feminism that clouds the mind by being everything and all at the same time, with about 1000 different subtypes and OF COURSE you are following the right ones.
How about we drop that stupid feminism label and movement and start to actually talk about the issues at hand?
"[T]here are mostly men at the top [and] at the bottom"
That's consistent with analysis by Howard Wainer[1] on gender differences:
"[I]t has been well established that there is an overabundance of boys at the high end of test score distributions. [S]ome observers have used such results to make inferences about differences in intelligence between the sexes. [H]owever, most enlightened investigators have seen that it is not necessarily a difference in level but a difference in variance that separates the sexes. Thus, while there are more boys at the high end, there are also more at the low end."
> Susan remembers hearing about a theory that the most successful people in life are those who are still searching for their parents’ unconditional regard.
BBC correspondent Robert Peston made a short radio documentary http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nh06m about this after being left with the same impression after interviewing many successful business people as part of his job. There's also the idea that the experience of an (in some way) absent parent during childhood is strongly correlated with narcissism, which in turn is strongly correlated with success in the entertainment industry. (I can't find a good link which discusses this atm.)
>Susan remembers hearing about a theory that the most successful people in life are those who are still searching for their parents’ unconditional regard.
Sound like any famous (recently deceased) CEO?
If this is a reference to Steve Jobs it arguues with great strength against your point. Jobs was raised by a working class couple who adopted him. From reading Isaacson's biography they seem to have been proud but bemused parents. Comparing Jobs to his biological sister (His grad student parents later married and had her.) and his adoptive sister would suggest heredity is pretty powerful.
His criticism of feminism is terrible and nothing new at all. I wish he would just shut up and try to draw inferences from his data instead of speculating on a movement he hasn't made any actual attempts to understand. Feminism deserves competent critique from outside its own movement, but it's sure not coming from him. Feminism has more than enough explanation for the expendability of males, he just doesn't know that because he's working from a caricature.
Could you link a feminist discussion of the expendibility of males, skewness of male outcomes, or a critique of Baumeister? I read Baumeister's essay a little while ago, and went looking for critiques. All I found was name calling. I'd like to read an actual response.
(for anyone reading, I'm actually very interested in reading a critique. I'm not just passively calling out the parent post.)
I don't have any offhand but let me give you one. The social construction of "men" is that men are made (this is in contrast to social construction of women as natural e.g. babymakers.) You have to work to be a man, you don't have innate value. To be a man you compete with other males for resources and reputation. This is the basis of hierarchy, part of male society, the so-called Patriarchy. In competition there are of course losers. They are not men, so much as they are failed men. This is a natural state, there are winners and losers in life. So the theory goes, feminism wants to free men from this destructive social order. This is a feminist theory that explains why there are men on the top and men on the bottom but masculinity is still the underlying principle.
That is one theory, there are other theories. You can poke holes in this theory, but it's not just a handwave that feminists haven't thought about this or recognized that men are disposable. I mean, feminism knows about this thing called "war." My major problem with feminism is that there is a large gap between theory and activism which results in time and energy being spent on CEO equality and ignoring feminism's own arguments about how mistreated many males are in the lower rungs of society. But that is a problem with practice, not theory.
This sounds very similar to Baumeister's idea. See the Earning Manhood section in his essay. Excerpt below.
So perhaps Baumeister's essay wouldn't be a revelation to some feminists. But is Baumeister wrong? Perhaps I am missing the difference. The main difference seems to be the feminist take is more normative.
" The phrase “Be a man” is not as common as it once was, but there is still some sense that manhood must be earned. Every adult female is a woman and is entitled to respect as such, but many cultures withhold respect from the males until and unless the lads prove themselves. This is of course tremendously useful for the culture, because it can set the terms by which males earn respect as men, and in that way it can motivate the men to do things that the culture finds productive.
Some sociological writings about the male role have emphasized that to be a man, you have to produce more than you consume. That is, men are expected, first, to provide for themselves: If somebody else provides for you, you’re less than a man. Second, the man should create some additional wealth or surplus value so that it can provide for others in addition to himself. These can be his wife and children, or others who depend on him, or his subordinates, or even perhaps just paying taxes that the government can use. Regardless, you’re not a man unless you produce at that level.
Again, I’m not saying men have it worse than women. There are plenty of problems and disadvantages that cultures put on women. My point is just that cultures find men useful in these very specific ways. Requiring the man to earn respect by producing wealth and value that can support himself and others is one of these. Women do not face this particular challenge or requirement."
If you'll note, I didn't trash on his work, I think it has a lot of value. My problem was his characterization of feminism as not having talked about these things and therefore implying they are a bunch of boobs. [edit] What is the cause of this system? What ideology is sustaining it? Is it on the whole good or bad? Normative description is not enough for many feminists, who have identified it as a problem and want to change it. It may be enough for him for his work, so that's a pretty significant difference.
The cause is biology, he explains it in the speech/book. It's actually pretty simple to understand - men are expendable because sperm is cheap. Wombs are a limited resource, sperm isn't. (In a nutshell).
I think feminism having a theory doesn't amount to much in itself. Religion also has a theory that "explains" the world. But it isn't science. Neither is feminism (in most cases).
I'm also amused because of course it is in the women's power to change men's behavior - simply change who they mate with. If they prefer mating with the most powerful men, men will compete to be the most powerful men. It's not the patriarchy creating that, it's women's choices. (Although it's possible that women's choices make biological sense, but I've never seen a feminist who cared much for evolution theory).
Another interesting thought which I think is from Nassim Taleb: religions did a lot for peace by mandating monogamy and making sure more men got access to a womb that way.
Got it. My bad. I improperly combined your comment with the criticisms of Baumeister I read that disagreed with him but didn't say why. Sorry about that.
By the way, I meant normative means they want to change it, whereas positivist would be merely describing a system. Baumeister seems more positivist.
I definitely agree that Baumeister didn't engage with feminist talk on this issue. I think he was responding to public discourses on issues like wage gaps, which don't necessarily correspond to more nuanced feminist narratives.
I wasn't clear enough separating his useful work from his feelings on feminism, and my initial post was vitriolic toward him. I can do better next time.
"In 1996 Baumeister, now teaching at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, co-authored a review of the literature that concluded that it was, in fact, 'threatened egotism' that lead to aggression. Evil, he suggested, was often accompanied by high self-esteem. 'Dangerous people, from playground bullies to warmongering dictators, consist mostly of those who have highly favorable views of themselves,' he wrote.
It was an astonishing theory..."
I can imagine a group of people who might not be astonished; anyone who has been bullied, and then told they should feel sorry for the bullies because the bullies had "low self-esteem". At least, when it happened to me, my first thought was "Low? More like way too high."
I'd say either way it's a hasty generalization. I'm very skeptical that there is a high correlation or anti-correlation given how complex people and their social environments can be. In my experience the entire spectrum is covered from "narcissistic prick" to "self-loathing misfit".
It's frustrating to me that people perpetuate the fallacy that high self-esteem leads to schoolyard bullying. And it's mystifying that some critics of the self-esteem movement (such as the author of this article) are as strident in their criticism as they are.
The behavior that bullies exhibit isn't caused by high self-esteem, but by their need to overcompensate for low self-esteem through anti-social actions. They see themselves as inadequate, and they see others as threats. When people have this self-concept, their fight-or-flight response kicks in. Bullies gravitate toward their "fight" instinct, and social recluses toward their "flight" instinct. People with truly high self-esteem don't see others as threats, so they feel no need to treat them as anything other than equals.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett don't feel the need to talk about how rich they are, or put down people with less money. Similarly, people who are truly confident don't go around talking about how awesome they are or bullying others.
> Bill Gates and Warren Buffett don't feel the need to talk about how rich they are, or put down people with less money. Similarly, people who are truly confident don't go around talking about how awesome they are or bullying others.
Have you ever read about Bill Gates in his glory days? He was basically Steve Jobs without the fashion sense, but with the complete and total ass-holery (maybe not to the same utmost extent though).
You've been downvoted not because you're wrong but because this is a technical forum. No well-educated psychologist in the world would disagree with you.
> As a man of science, he insists his views are influenced only by data...
> Rejecting the feminist notion of patriarchy as a conspiracy theory...
> “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “I wouldn’t say that. In America there’s a third movement, the libertarians, who are trying to reduce government involvement and promote freedom. To me, they make a lot of sense.”
> Political correctness upsets Roy Baumeister. He rages against what he sees as a left-wing bias in social psychology that means that white prejudice against the black community is studied frequently, while inter-minority racism is comparatively ignored. Papers that show greed might be in any way good are rejected. “If you have a finding that says the conservative viewpoint did better, nobody wants to publish it,” he says. Papers that show greed might be in any way good are rejected.
It's funny how so many of the people who style themselves as "objective" and "ideology-free" all fall into the same ideological traps, straw-manning their opposition and believing what is most convenient for their own in-group.
How can anyone claim with a straight face that America is a nation were inter-racial violence is understood in terms of its historical roots too much, and go on to state that the idea that "greed is good" is demonized?
> How can anyone claim with a straight face that America is a nation were inter-racial violence is understood in terms of its historical roots too much, and go on to state that the idea that "greed is good" is demonized?
He's not talking about "America", he's talking about "social psychology", or to be more precise, the predominant academic culture in that field.
> How can anyone claim with a straight face that America is a nation were inter-racial violence is understood in terms of its historical roots too much...
There is obviously still enough ego in America to claim that C. Rogers was the first to argue that men are fundamentally good. Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau formulated that already in the 18th century in his "Second Discours" - Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Inequality)
this is a deeply ironic comment, seeing as how mencius instilled that idea into confucianism back in the 3rd century bc. (rousseau might have introduced the idea to western philosophical thought; i don't know very much about him.)
Thanks for the addition, I have not heard about Mencius before but will certainly check him out. Surely the idea of goodness is older than Rouseau, yet his work is probably the beginning of a new stream in western philosophy.
From a novel I read recently:
"Bob was American and called himself a former American, although such a thing would never happen. He had the fist-line friendliness typical of this culture, or lack thereof, and the particular and very irritating sense of specialness that had been infused in several generations of American children. You had to be special indeed if you were to play into the American Dream, the very only thing holding this mass of people together. Be somebody rather than do something. Not that this would not be in the back of the head of any parent anywhere else in the world, but anywhere else there was an unconscious sense of healthy resignation. Being was still a tad more important than becoming. Anywhere else, the condensate of thousands of dead generations, the wisdom of finitude had not been washed down to homeopathic levels by the tidal terror and guilt of having left and lost Mother. A borderline Nation, whose sense of abandonment, emptiness and void identity had brought about destruction, oral compensation and the art of fake relationships. But also a knack for pottering stuff."
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We can admit that unbridled self-esteem has created too many people whose actions may not jibe with their self-image.
What bothers me is that the pendulum will return to the old notion of self-esteem as a doggie biscuit for obeying one's masters. I'm sure the 1 percenters will like that.
It was an excellent read, I did not know how huge the self-esteem thing was around the time when I was growing up. Sure explains a lot.
I didn't like the focus on conservative / liberal ideology, I think both of those are the same kinds of mixed category that self-esteem wound up being. It surprises me that the author didn't see that connection, though I should probably cut him some slack as it was written a whole year ago.
Your instincts are right; it's worth a skip. The article is both poorly written and largely obtuse.
Its subject argues that promoting self-esteem leads to narcissism, and therefore is undesirable, while never fully grasping the obvious: that narcissism, despite appearances, is an artifact of low self-esteem.
That's a spurious distinction because it depends on defining artificial.
In the end, the number of people who are truly inflated (which is the correct term I believe) are so few that this is an argument about over-eating discussed during a famine.
This should be read as a story about belief versus data. Forty years of naked dogma resulted in massive social impact. It took a challenger to go through the data, and show that the ideas weren't true. And from the data, had been known to be not true for decades.
The social damage done by that dogma is likely severe.
The better approach is a scientific one. Measure. Question. Be sure that your beliefs are based on evidence, not theory.
Too bad that these things are very difficult, if not impossible, to do in the domain of psychology. How do you measure someone's self confidence? Their degree of narcissism? All you can do is ask them questions, and then argue over which set of questions are more accurate. There is no way to evaluate personality traits other than subjective observation.
Data is indeed the answer. Please, for the love of god, measure, question and quantify. But when it comes to social studies real data is very difficult to come by. Self reporting is the antithesis of empiricism. Baumeister does good work, given the field that he works in, and his ideas are powerful and useful. But at the end of the day, it's just a matter of social fashion. People prefer his ideas, or other ideas, or whatever suits them at the time. Anyone can come up with an experiment that shows that one psychological disposition is superior to another, or that kids should be taught this over that. These things change with the times. By comparison, F will always equal ma. There's no way to argue with real science. Everything else, is open to debate.
Not entirely. The article talks about this. The theory was that low self-esteem led to violence. The facts are that self-reports of high self-esteem are correlated with increased violence.
You might disregard the "self report" aspect of the studies. But the main conclusion is that the original theory is wrong.
For Branden, the violent people Baumeister wrote about might have appeared confident, but underneath all that bluster they actually had low self-esteem.“One does not need to be a trained psychologist to know that some people with low self-esteem strive to compensate for their deficit by boasting, arrogance, and conceited behavior,” he wrote.
It's all a game of he said/she said. The bottom line is that the human mind is opaque. There's nothing easier than theorizing about something that can't be measured, or even directly observed.
With some work, a computer can determine the video a person is watching in an MRI. It's not perfect, but it's amazingly close.
Saying "the human mind is opaque" is wishful thinking. It's magical thinking that somehow people (and thought) is different from everything else in the world.
You act as if disregarding the self-report component is minor, but surely it is fundamental.
The original theory is that bullying is a way for someone with low self-esteem to make themselves feel superior. By the definition of the theory, a bully so motivated not to see themselves as having low self-esteem that they will resort to violence. Someone who will resort to violence to avoid acknowledging something, is unlikely to self-report accurately on that same topic.
Self-report is therefore clearly an invalid measure by which to test this theory.
Measurements that are qualitative are much more tricky to deal with than quantitative measurements.
When I read words like 'hollow self esteem' I feel like I am reading a poem, not scientific data. Hollow self esteem means 'self esteem that lacks social validation', but when we define self esteem clearly in terms of social validation with relations that show the distribution of 'when the social validation occurs in terms of time' and 'how much social validation is given' versus 'how much social manipulative ability is granted' then people in society start to become definable and moveable like machines. What is the point of existing as a human being when life can be plotted?
If I define my self esteem through a single data point in my past, can you really compare that to someone who defines their self esteem by each day as it unfolds? Can you really measure self esteem when everyone's self esteem is dependent on comparisons of self analysis versus social analysis?
Culture defines culture. Social groups define social groups dynamically as the group is processing and composing information. Data is almost the same as theory when it comes to psychology. I personally find it all ridiculous and believe that people need to have balance between the methods of science and understanding and seeking their own personal truths. People have the potential to be more than what language and mathematics can convey, but this makes many people uncomfortable, because it's not definable. What isn't definable always seems to get filtered through a lens of religious, dogmatic belief in the scientific community. If it can't be measured, it doesn't exist. But it does exist. The problem is that scientific, mathematical language does not measure the effect of itself.
You claim that you know that something that can't be measured does exist. If you haven't just made up that claim, that implies that you have somehow detected the existence of that thing. What you might not be aware of is that in the eyes of a scientist that makes you into a "measuring apparatus" for the thing that you claim cannot be measured. In order for a scientist to consider something unmeasurable, it cannot have any influence on the natural world, as that would be a measurable effect. Making you utter or type a claim about the existence of something is an influence on the natural world that can be measured, so if you making that claim is actually causally connected to the thing (as opposed to made up by you), that would make the thing measurable.
I don't think you understand that you can't control what information and processes are dynamically influenced and what components are static and unchanging. The methodology of science can be subject to the same level of analytical inspection and rigor that the scientific methodology itself upholds.
You hold science as a constant and shape the world around that lens. What happens when science starts to take itself apart, when it starts to redefine itself, analyze itself, study itself?
Keep down-voting me if you like. All I really know is that I have more questions than I have answers, and I don't think that is a bad thing.
Science on science, it's a thing. Also named Theory of Science, it studies Science from a philosophical view and brings up questions like "If we have measured something to be the same 10000 times, can we be sure it will be same the 10001st time?"
What happens when you do that? Well, for me what happens is the realization of the value of being pragmatic. Truth is, like Descartes said, we can't really know anything but our own existence, and depending on your definition of existence, even that can be questioned. But what is the value in that? Now when I know I know nothing, is it a good basis to live my life upon?
My answer to that is no, it's not a good basis to stand on. Instead I choose to approach it pragmatically, or as an engineer if you prefer, "I accept my perception of reality* as real" and "a useful fact is information that can somehow be used to predict the future"
But then, I tend to like answers more than questions, I guess it comes included with my engineering degree.
* Not meaning that everything I perceive in a given moment has to be real, rather that my understanding of the world is my best guess of how things are.
I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me, but I certainly don't hold science as a constant.
Also, I didn't down-vote you. And I agree that not having answers is not a bad thing--what is bad, though, is making up an answer instead of just accepting the lack of knowledge, or insisting that current lack of knowledge means permanent lack of knowledge.
I wasn't directing that at you, just in general. I really do try to create one part of an intelligent dialogue on these forums, but it is incredibly frustrating to have experienced variations of ways of perceiving information, without having the capacity to express the issue in a way that anyone is willing to listen to, and then be down-voted on top of that, which feels like being silenced.
> insisting that current lack of knowledge means permanent lack of knowledge.
The alternative to that is that there is a limit to knowledge, that it is possible for all things to be known. And even if humanity does hit that point, I think at that point, it becomes a choice to choose whether to believe all things are known, or to believe that some things are not yet known.
I would suggest that there might be things that we will never figure out, but for which we will never know that we will never figure them out.
Also, belief is not a choice, by definition. Belief comes from being convinced. You cannot choose to be convinced, either you are or you are not, change only comes due to new information or new ideas, but never due to a deliberate decision to be convinced of something else. You can decide to pretend a different belief, but you cannot decide your actual belief.
What if my belief has always defaulted on silence, no thought?
It's just the opposite of the confidence in always yielding a conclusion. When I work with science, I ere on the side of hesitance, and I always believe that hesitence will be there.
I think some of my beliefs about believing are stronger than my actual beliefs. This conversation has become too overgeneralized to say anything useful aside from the ways the mind simplifies, reduces, and applies pattern derived from observation.
I don't understand the strong reaction in 'knowing'. I always feel like I have to know everything all at once, in order to truly suggest that I know anything, and since I can not know everything, I only have a very vague guess of knowing some things, which are continually subject to the same analytic deconstruction and reconstruction. Ideas are broken down and rebuilt over and over and not a single one of them is a complete picture. That's what I observe in my mind and in dialogue outside of my mind. I don't have to believe anything about it because it's a direct observation. It just comes down to how angry, 'strong', assertive, or authoritative people sound, and I find that ridiculous. It's like being human is a stupid joke.
> What if my belief has always defaulted on silence, no thought?
Well, if you haven't thought about something, you presumably don't believe it? (Not to be confused with believing the negation, which you presumably also wouldn't believe in that case.)
> This conversation has become too overgeneralized to say anything useful aside from the ways the mind simplifies, reduces, and applies pattern derived from observation.
Well, feel free to be more specific?
> I don't understand the strong reaction in 'knowing'. I always feel like I have to know everything all at once, in order to truly suggest that I know anything, and since I can not know everything, I only have a very vague guess of knowing some things, which are continually subject to the same analytic deconstruction and reconstruction.
I think I would agree. That's why I consider the question of knowledge (in the sense of being ultimately sure about the truth of something) ultimately uninteresting. What actually matters is what you believe (that is, what you act on) because you cannot avoid interacting with the world, and you will do so based on you beliefs, whether they reflect ultimate truth or not.
> Ideas are broken down and rebuilt over and over and not a single one of them is a complete picture. That's what I observe in my mind and in dialogue outside of my mind. I don't have to believe anything about it because it's a direct observation.
Well, I think that that's questionable. On the one hand, semantically, considering something you observed directly to be true still is a belief, even if a well-founded one. One can believe things by blind faith or due to direct observation, or for many other reasons, some good, some bad. On the other hand, I would be cautious with the term "direct observation": There is a ton of indirection between your brain thinking a thought and the "reality" outside the brain causing the thought, and conceptually there isn't really all that much difference between observing another brain by means of that brain causing the body it's in to create sound waves, causing your eardrum to vibrate, causing nerve signals in your brain, and the same with an MRI machine observing the same brain and feeding its images through your eyes into your brain, both are ultimately pretty indirect, even if one of the scenarios uses only natural machinery to achieve the result, so artificial machinery is not necessarily any worse at producing a reliable perception of the world than natural bodies, and you have to believe quite a few things in both cases, be it about larynxes, air, sound waves, and ears, or about MRI machines, light, and retinas.
> It just comes down to how angry, 'strong', assertive, or authoritative people sound, and I find that ridiculous.
I am not quite sure what you are trying to say with that, but I guess that science is the best way we know that avoids just that as far as possible by making it as easy as possible for anyone to reproduce an observation (at least that's the ideal ...).
> It's like being human is a stupid joke.
Well, from some perspective, maybe? I guess the solution is to adopt a different perspective? Like: Well, yes, ultimate knowledge seems to be unattainable--but why does that matter? It's a philosophical curiosity, interesting to think about, but ultimately it doesn't prevent you from improving your model of the world and interacting with the world. Your model predicts that the chair you sit on will hold you up, and it does, you don't get hurt and can sit comfortably--does it matter whether the existence of the chair is some ultimate truth or maybe "just" an illusion?
I already agree with you and I have from the start. I have no interest in talking, because it is obvious that I can not communicate effectively and fluidly, on the internet. Thank you for the conversation, but this is the same circle of thought as it has always been, and it never seems to change.
I found this particularly interesting:
The mistake of many modern feminists, he writes, is that they “look only at the top of society and draw conclusions about society as a whole. Yes, there are mostly men at the top. But if you look at the bottom, really at the bottom, you’ll find mostly men there, too.” His examples: The homeless; the imprisoned; the people who die at work, 92 percent of whom are male. The popular modern view is that it’s women who are most poorly valued by culture. But, ever the contrarian, Baumeister says men are demonstrably “more expendable than women.”
Also this:
Susan remembers hearing about a theory that the most successful people in life are those who are still searching for their parents’ unconditional regard.
Sound like any famous (recently deceased) CEO?