Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Here's a trite aphorism:

The problem is not that mankind invariably fails to agree, it's that mankind often fails to tolerate disagreement.

Adjusting for you...

Smart, wise, well-intentioned people's failure to agree, unwittingly mobilises not so smart, not so wise, not so well-intentioned people to rectify this failure.

Global warming is nothing compared to the day when mankind's disagreements are settled once and for all with the help of a few nuclear bombs.

We can let the cockroaches evolve the solution we could not.

Umm, can someone familiar with the book indicate if there's more than an elaborate riff on:

1) Complete moral relativism doesn't lead anywhere because then by definition there's no way to pick between competing systems.

and:

2) Recursively, in fact trying to pick a moral system gives you the relativism problem all over again.

OK, heard it, got it - again, anything beyond saying this at very l-o-n-g length?

Regarding: "thousands of years of experience shows us that smart, wise, well-intentioned people are not going to come to agreement -- applies also to our experience of the Web."

Yes. It means lots of chatter and argument doesn't necessary produce Truth, or even Shared Agreement. It usually just produces lots of chatter and argument. So Bubble 2.0 won't necessarily make our politics any better, or "empower" anyone except the exploiters of wishful thinking. As I put it: Punditry Is Not Democracy.

I understand this is not the answer you wanted to hear :-(

Seth, thinking that the choices are universal, unanimous agreement and mere chatter seems to me to be place too much value on universal agreement. There are degrees of truth between those two poles, and, I'm pretty sure the mistake we've made is in thinking there are those two poles, although I'm not sure what's the way past that mistake.

And, yes, AKMA's book is very aware of relativism - which he refers to as pluralism - as a danger to be avoided. I don't think AKMA finds his way past it entirely, but, then, that's much of what his book is about.

David, I'm sure AKMA's book is very aware of relativism - what I was asking is if he gets anywhere at all, as opposed to just stating the basic philosophical problem at length. That is:

"If we accept the idea that interpretations are only right or wrong within a community, do we then have to embrace ideas of interpretation -- say, a literal fundamentalism -- that (a) dispute this interpretation of interpretation and (b) may be dangerously wrong?"

i.e., to paraphrase, if we are to be tolerant, what about tolerating intolerance?

So, I was asking, well, what about it? Is there anything in the book besides extensive reiteration of the issue itself?

The implications for the Net are, basically, more is not automatically better, and can easily be worse.

You know what the real answer is though don't you?

Humans are at the pinnacle of evolution that they are precisely because they evolved a mechanism to stress their own species when environmental pressure became insignificant.

Maybe it's the ability to invoke supernatural arbitrators into any argument, and then to invoke the right to be able to do this? Maybe it's simply the diversity of intellect being a feature rather than a flaw?

We are still executing those who do not hold life sacred. We are still torturing those we suspect care little for human rights. We are still demonstrating that we are human.

On the one hand we have the ultimate near pure and eternal luminescence provided by the harmonious dolphin, and on the other we have the brilliant but polluting and ultimately doomed incandescence of the oil lamp that is mankind.

We know nothing apart from obscure submerged ruins off the coast of india as to what happened to mankind preceding the fimbulwinter of our last ice age.

The final obscurity of fimbulsummer is coming everyone!

Don't forget your sunscreen.

The dolphins are looking forward to peace and quiet at last...

Crosbie, don't get me started on the dolphins, dude. They totally screwed me. The bastards.

We'll find a way to knock those supercilious dolphins off their holier than thou pedestal. Probably heathen and beyond salvation anyway.

Don't worry David, when we run out of Tuna I'm sure we'll develop a taste for Dolphin. It's probably a staple ingredient of dog food already.

Sheesh! What's the point of WikiPedia when you get informed by morphic resonance eh?

Any conjecture you can come up with is only conceivable because it resonates with reality vis http://www.eia-international.org/cgi/news/news.cgi?t=template&a=145&source

More astounding facts concerning the erasure of unknowable previous human civilisations:

There have been 4 ice ages since mankind migrated into Eurasia.

There have been over 20 ice ages since the DNA of homo sapiens figured out that selecting for a predilection toward intraspecies warfare was probably a good idea for species hardening.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens
The most widely accepted view among current anthropologists is that Homo sapiens originated in the African savanna between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago, descending from Homo erectus, and colonized Eurasia and Oceania by 40,000 years ago, and finally colonized the Americas by 10,000 years ago.

"...it's important to remember that it was an issue before AKMA and before postmodernism. It is the issue of sharing a world with people with whom we seriously disagree so seriously that a failure to act is itself an act."

For completeness we might add that it has remained an issue since postmodernism as well.

(But it will probably be less of an issue as the climate change and the great die off progress.)

Yes, fp, so the question is not whether pomo settles that question's hash entirely but whether it makes progress. In this case, I'd take progress as occurring not in the realm of head scratching and figuring things out but in helping us to live together more peacefully. And, despite the depressing state of the world, I'd say that having our fundamentalist assumptions shaken is very much a good thing, even if we're left scratching our heads and befuddled.

Befuddlement beats certainty unto death in my book.