dmreedy

I'm writing a science fiction book that takes place mostly around Jupiter, and would love to hear more about this; if you found anything particularly interesting or unexpected or striking (especially visually), and whether it might transfer at all to e.g., Ganymede/Europa/Callisto.

Consider for a moment a world in which not every mind is as self-possessed and self-assured as yours.

Consider further a world in which there are many minds for whom sensitivity to being wrong is such a high priority, as you seem to want it to be, that they may try and avoid formulating stances or taking positions at all. Lest they be wrong.

Sometimes it can be helpful to have someone explain to you how you have to have some confidence in your own capacity for intuition, your own ability make decisions, in order to make anything happen.

I certainly won't argue that there are probably a lot of ineffective practitioners out there, but to me that speaks to the difficulty of the task, of tuning between insecurity and confidence and arrogance. It doesn't suggest to me the task, or the institution that is still in its earliest years of trying to formally study it, is fundamentally flawed.

While I agree with your conclusion, for what it's worth I'm not sure journalism "decided" anything. The economic system it is embedded in did.

I say that because it's not like the pattern is unique to journalism.

I like to think of it as an encouragement to meditate a bit more on, for example, why this "solution" (let the free market handle it) isn't currently already solving everything. Not argument by authority, just a reminder that perhaps you are not the first person to have thought about this problem.

And an admonishment against the hubris of just casually dropping deeply loaded positions like "Europe has more important things to worry about" than Africa or Ukraine. Hell even casual the separation of Ukraine as something outside of Europe.

If you took it as a personal attack, then perhaps it is just because a hit dog will holler.

I'm not saying I want it, I'm saying it is an ingredient to the function and survival of a society, especially as the number of members of a society grows and diversifies.

> If one person / group wishes to force it's view on the other then we have a problem

I would put it even more simply:

My view is that this valuable resource is mine. Your view is that this resource is yours.

How do we reconcile this?

edit: just in the interest of not seeming antagonistic, I'll elaborate further.

I assert that resolving conflicts like this requires either direct violence, or deference to some external framework. That external framework often defines terms like "just" and "right" and "good" and "true". These terms are kind of "meaning flywheels" since they don't have direct correlation to physical things. You spin them up by giving them continuous impulses of examples and then they carry the abstracted sense of meaning in themselves, becoming almost qualia-like. You don't know all the examples anymore you just know more or less what is "just".

This process is an act of mystification; you separate the meaning from the direct examples, and push it into a layer of linguistic abstraction.

Any measurement against those ideas then becomes a engagement with the mystic. You simply know "what is just". Any perception that these things can be rationally defined or deduced is simply the hangover from the older, mystical systems that impelled the original flywheels of meaning.

That's all good and peaceful until two peoples' intuitions collide.

What is the process for reconciliation?

These "nonsense questions" are usually derived from an effort to find a common denominator of things which a society may agree on, beyond its component individuals.

I would assert that it should serve as a memento mori against too much confidence in your priors. And a reminder of the value of Russellian "Hypothetical Sympathy", an encouragement to examine your priors, and see whether you disagree with something because of a glitch in its proof, or a lack of understanding (or a rejection) of the assumptions that it began with.

Yeah, I'm not sure whether they passed it or just never got to it. To be fair I guess, it's not exactly what I would call a productive philosophy, if your goal is "productivity" (by some material definition) and not the act of philosophy in and of itself.

I feel like they looked in the mirror, saw only themselves, and decided what was needed was a better mirror, because there must be something else there.

If you find this subject interesting, the different ways the sort of post-enlightenment intellectual diaspora has begun to try and chase fundamental "meaning" again (after realizing perhaps they could not arrive at it by deduction), and the deeper nature of "religion" beyond the thing your parents used to drag you to on Saturday/Sunday, the author of this piece, Burton, also has a book called Strange Rites.

I've always enjoyed the lighthearted analysis of the Nietzchean "God is Dead" moment as asking:

"Yes, God is Dead. Congratulations; that was the easy part. Now what?".

He had is own answer of course, but, as the characters in this piece have discovered, it's not necessarily an effective one.

edit: ah they mention the book in the postscript of course.