Woke NBA - Mark Cuban style

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

33 minutes ago, merjet said:

Take your time. But if you limit yourself to only those two hypotheses, then you will find dead-ends and not get far. Both focus on the messenger rather than the message.

Good luck.

Merlin,

Then we must play by the same rules.

Is that fair or not to you?

If it is, then let's look.

What is the following if not focusing on the messenger rather then the message?

23 hours ago, merjet said:

Ask yourself why MSK felt a need to include “Marxist” in the above? Did it clarify or confuse? Was it to slur NBA people? Something else?

Your posts are full of things like that. And many of them go way beyond simply asking questions.

For example:

On 9/9/2020 at 5:41 AM, merjet said:

Hogwash. Borrowing your notion of “logic” and turning the table 180 degrees, I made this. You put smiley faces on critical race theory and postmodernism by sweeping them under the rug.

I didn’t put smiley faces on Marxism, or critical race theory, or postmodernism.

I saw your switcheroo.

These days, you constantly get my intentions wrong and project them as boneheaded as you constantly denigrate my mental capacities.

If you knock off that hostile personal shit, I will, too.

If you rationalize it and say it is not hostile or personal at all, instead it is yada yada yada, then you have to deal with how I treat hostile personal shit.

In normal discussions, flare-ups happen at times. Humans are humans. But there has to be willingness to stop them after a certain point--that is, if the messages really are more important to you than the messenger.

That is not happening in your posts right now. You are constantly on the warpath.

Given the recent amount of heckling on this forum you, in particular, were subjected to, I can understand why. 

But I put a stop to heckle qua heckle, at least as best I could.

And I'm willing to discuss ideas without all this negativity. In fact, that's what I want.

Think about it. 

And think about if this is what you really want. I mean that, too. If discussing things without getting personal and hostile irritates you, or if someone disagreeing with you always makes you want to seek revenge or trounce them, it will never work. Only you know what's inside your head.

I'll do my part, and I mean that. But I won't even try to do yours for you.

So decide what you want and we'll try to work from there and see what happens.

Michael

[Dglgmut]

2 hours ago, merjet said:

conspiracy theories, which typically have lots of dots and the connections are mostly imagined.

The connections drawn within conspiracy theories may be wrong, but the existence of connections is not imagined. People, events and ideas throughout history are connected.

[Peter]

Dg wrote, “The connections drawn within conspiracy theories may be wrong, but the existence of connections is not imagined. People, events and ideas throughout history are connected.”

What is disheartening is people connecting the dots between portions of reality, but not in a scientific way. In a biased way their minds psychologically “prove” something that is untrue but agrees with a “feeling” or prejudice they have already established. Those hunches, like a slow moving storm in the Gulf of Mexico, gather momentum and become hurricanes of malice.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, Peter said:

Those hunches, like a slow moving storm in the Gulf of Mexico, gather momentum and become hurricanes of malice.

Peter,

That's the way scientific breakthroughs work, too. And great unexpected engineering feats. And, frankly great fellowship among humans. Don't forget that the use of money itself is based on a pattern of trust everyone adheres to by connecting dots nobody can prove. How can you prove someone will take your money for goods and services? You can't. You just assume it because you see lots of unrelated people doing just that.

(Oh, there are laws about legal tender, but those only affect money within the context of the courts.)

You can't have the good without the bad on dot-connecting since both use the brain in the way the brain works.

The trick is learning to treat initial pattern identifications as initial. 

Acquiring knowledge is not an on-off switch. It happens in stages. And the first stage is always making patterns out of related elements and/or seemingly unrelated elements.

What caveman would have ever thought that isolated fire could be good for something? Fire to him meant massive destruction. But there was that good smelling and good tasting meat sometimes found after forest fires. What if that could be done inside a cave without burning everything up?

What was scientific about thinking like that?

Yet some caveman or other connected the dots and now we cook.

And, to go Godwin's law for a bit, the holocaust used to be thought of as a malicious conspiracy theory back when it started. Ditto for the millions Stalin killed. And this was within the context of a huge amount of pro-state propaganda. Were the dot-connectors scientific? How could they be in that context?

So what was the true malice? The conspiracy theories or the reality the dot-connectors kept talking about? In my view, piles of corpses are a lot worse.

I say the elites purposely hiding shit from the public often leads to a lot of malice. Actual malice, like killing and maiming people, not just bickering.

Conspiracy theories batter open the coverings the elites want to keep using to hide shit. If there is nothing evil behind those coverings, the conspiracy theories generally peter out. For example, not many people believe the CIA staged the moon landing anymore. (Just some fringe kooks.)

But when a huge amount of cognitive dissonance still remains, I say it's a good thing conspiracy theories keep battering. May they batter on until the crap being cooked up behind closed doors can be seen by everyone.

Michael

[merjet]

On 9/13/2020 at 7:21 AM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

... let's look...

Oh, my. I make a calm, reasonable, 34-word request to MSK to consider more than his mere two presumptuous hypotheses – my hurt feelings or vanity. He took it as an opportunity to concoct a >300-word blast. Much of it is a hyperbolic narrative portraying me as "constantly" making personal attacks on him and nary a word about his personal attacks on me. Fair and balanced is not his style. The truth is that he is about as innocent as the schoolyard bully who always says, “He started it.”

He “constantly” dismisses what I say that he doesn't like by calling it a gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, or pettiness – his lingo for lack of any substance – or insinuating that my motivation is mere hurt feelings or vanity or loneliness.

Something else he does not mention in his hyperbolic one-sided narrative is the volume, degree of hostility, and absurdity of personal attacks. He cited one where I asked others to consider his motives. I believe that is much less hostile and absurd than his that follow.

“Vladimir Lenin used to call people who argued like this "useful idiots. … you are putting a smiley face on the Marxist rot underneath BLM" (link).

“Lenin would have loved you. That is, until he got the power he wanted. Then he would have had you shot. He wasn't good at tolerating gotcha arguments, much less gotcha qua gotcha” (link).

I frankly admit I do play tit-for-tat, often adding a little ad hominem to something more substantive when I get personally attacked. When he stops the personal attacks and sticks to the message, he will be treated likewise. We can erase the chalkboard clean this minute and see what ensues. That’s my white flag. If his “If you knock off that hostile personal shit, I will, too” is a white flag, we will see how long it stays up.

[Dglgmut]

18 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

The trick is learning to treat initial pattern identifications as initial.

My thread about Two Points of View was an attempt to look at just this. Not the treatment of initial pattern identifications as initial, but the pattern identifications themselves and the tendencies for those initial patterns to point in one of two directions. You don't know from the onset where that pattern will lead, but you put in the effort to confirm/disconfirm the hypothesis. Once you've put in a certain amount of effort without disconfirmation, you may become biased. Your theory may solidify by your unwillingness to do the work all over again, and your psychology will devalue conflicting information.

 

The interesting part to me is what inspires us to put in the effort. Why do the patterns pointing one way attract some people (at some point in their lives), while patterns pointing the other way attract other people (at some point in their lives). At least to some extent, the amount of effort spent exploring a hypothesis must correlate positively to the eventual acceptance of the theory, since we have limited time and effort to think. So part of what constitutes truth, as we can know it, is time and effort spent confirming/disconfirming that truth. The way in which we explore possibilities, those initial patterns and the direction they point us, are hugely consequential.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

9 hours ago, merjet said:

Oh, my.

That started well.

9 hours ago, merjet said:

I make a calm, reasonable, 34-word request to MSK to consider more than his mere two presumptuous hypotheses – my hurt feelings or vanity. He took it as an opportunity to concoct a >300-word blast.

That's not continuing well. Merlin is calm and reasonable and I am presumptuous, concocting God knows what and blasting shit at him.

Dayaamm!

As I read his post, it gets worse.

 

(Now to Merlin.)

So let's do it this way, Merlin. I have a better idea.

Carry on as you normally do. Make your constant subtext that you are the intellectual superior of everyone you talk to, and play gotcha over trivialities galore. When people disagree with you, make sure to take it as a personal offense. Also, if people don't accept your awesomeness and superiority when you make your pronouncements of enlightened wisdom, add "a little ad hominem." Actually, add a lot like you normally do. Based on the past, I would expect nothing less.

I wrote:

On 9/13/2020 at 6:21 AM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

So decide what you want and we'll try to work from there and see what happens.

It looks like you decided. 

And I've decided based on your decision.

From the attitude in your post, I don't think the bickering is fixable. And, I think you might be too old to make a change like adopting goodwill and make it work.

I don't have time to do a pissing contest over white flags. So let's just see what happens.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

4 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

The interesting part to me is what inspires us to put in the effort. Why do the patterns pointing one way attract some people (at some point in their lives), while patterns pointing the other way attract other people (at some point in their lives).

D,

At the subconscious level, pattern recognition is just that. Pattern recognition.

At the conscious level it is called induction or inductive reasoning. (As opposed to deduction.)

Much to the chagrin of determinists, deduction is not the whole shebang to find truth. Which is probably why they often deny truth exists.

(One guy who is a harsh critic of Rand, Gary Nyquist--he runs a blog called Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature--denies that induction exists at all. When you realize that induction is pattern recognition, I don't think he realizes how goofy that sounds, especially in light of neuroscience and modern psychology.)

The human brain needs both induction and deduction in order to arrive at effective and/or correct conclusions. I am pretty sure this is in line with what Ayn Rand meant, but in different words (see here).

Quote

The process of forming and applying concepts contains the essential pattern of two fundamental methods of cognition: induction and deduction.

The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.

One good way to tie both induction and deduction together into the same mental abstraction is storytelling. An added benefit is that storytelling allows for adding a whole lot more inputs from the brain's different compartments (emotions, biases, heuristics, neurochemical surges, different forms of memory, etc.).

That's probably why storytelling (or story or narrative of any other name one wants to use for this process) evolved--to connect the different parts of the brain into making a single abstraction about something from reality (or something imagined) based on many different inputs of many different natures.

When two people use induction on the same situation, but see two different things, look at the stories they tell themselves, that is, the stories they believe to be true. There you will find why.

(btw - Rand did not explore narrative epistemologically in the same way she did concepts. The closest she ever got, to my knowledge, was her thoughts on art and sense of life. She even came up with a very interesting term: normative abstractions, that is right there on the edge of narrative.) 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Back to sports and Marxism.

The NFL took a beating in the ratings this weekend.

But the players did stand and sing the black national anthem while taking a knee for the USA National Anthem.

Marx himself could not have been prouder. One of the strategies his followers have used to great effect is to topple the symbols of countries where they want communism to take over.

Modern day Marxism has its own style which does not look like classical Marxism, but it is just as effective at destroying cultures, then countries, and just as deadly to the citizens (except for insiders).

Right now the Marxists in the back rooms are laughing their asses off as millionaire American professional athletes proudly stand and do their undermining-the-culture work for them like the useful idiots they are.

And don't think the mask crap isn't part of this. It is. The whole purpose is to keep the public afraid, make sure they are used to obeying authoritarian orders, and at the same time accept exceptions for the privileged under the projected new order.

It's a softening up process.

For example, the press is going apeshit over the fact that not everybody wore masks on the sidelines. But notice that the pro players didn't have to social distance or wear masks when they played. (Frankly, how could they and still play?) According to what these Marxists and fellow travelers are doing (not saying), do they think the virus itself likes football enough it will make exceptions for the players?

Of course not. They just want to train the human livestock to act right and obey. They have bigger plans later.

Thankfully, the audience--the American audience--for this crap is tanking and making the owners lose a ton of money.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Tim Pool is not amused.

 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On 9/13/2020 at 1:06 PM, Peter said:

Those hunches, like a slow moving storm in the Gulf of Mexico, gather momentum and become hurricanes of malice.

Peter,

I already responded to this talking about the value of conspiracy theories as a way to batter down the coverings of ruling class malice.

But since there are two sides (at least) to every issue that have good things to look at, let's look at a different way to handle hostility and malice.

I wish this worked all the time. (Watch it. I know you will like it.  )

That's the best direction I can think of.

Michael

[merjet]

On 9/14/2020 at 8:03 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Tim Pool is not amused.

At least Tim Pool is grounded enough to not invoke “Marxist” or “Marxism” umpteen times and dismiss all other sources of Wokeness. Pool didn’t say “Marxist” or “Marxism” even once.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” ― H. L. Mencken

[william.scherk]

Tim Pool and the "problem of evil."

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, merjet said:

At least Tim Pool is grounded enough to not invoke “Marxist” or “Marxism” umpteen times and dismiss all other sources of Wokeness.

Merlin has a new gotcha cause.

Now for the crusade.

 

See here, though.

Michael