[FRIAM] description - explanation - metaphor - model

[uǝlƃ ☣]

And this is one of the reasons postmodern rhetoric is more pragmatic than modern rhetoric, because it shifts the concern away from Truth and toward Power. It's nothing more nor less than the standard gumshoe technique of following the money. If you want to know why some yahoo said what he said, Truth is irrelevant. What matters is how he might benefit from such expression.

But many people seem to think postmodern implies a form of pure relativism. I disagree. A postmodernist can still believe in some stably structured reality "out there". But she is willing to employ *both* power-based *and* stability-based analytic tactics.

A friend recently claimed I wasn't a Platonist because I challenged the idea of a unitary, constant entailment operator (⊢), as well as me claiming that the whole algebra can be arbitrarily changed, at will. So, the question for the Platonist becomes "which parts do we hold constant and which parts vary". I'm still a Platonist ... simply one that's skeptical of anyone's assertion that some part should be held constant/universal.

As you point out later in your post, of course, we have to doubt our own rhetoric just as much as we doubt others' rhetoric. And that's (obviously) difficult. Personally, posts like this one (https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4476) teeter me on a kind of knife edge. It's a great sensation to teeter one way, then another, on some value-based judgement. Did Pinker's tweet provide cover for systemic sexism? It's a kinda Zen Koan ... one of those unanswerable questions whose only proper answer is Mu. But if we look at it through a postmodern lens, Pinker is *clearly* part of the good old boys club ... as crisply a member of that set as Jordan Peterson. He's objectively smart enough to know better than to tweet such nonsense.

Seth Meyers handles this well with his "Jokes Seth Can't Tell" segments. And the recent Jost/Che bit where they give each other jokes to tell blind handles it well, too: https://youtu.be/Ys786ZsA5tI. In the end, the bane of the rationalists (including Aaronson, Pinker, et al) is their tendency to *avoid* power analytics and focus on truth analytics.

On 12/24/19 10:08 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> But (BUT) what I think I find disturbing about the truism (oupsie!) that
> "everything is interpretation" is so often used as the sophists entree
> into a manipulation, into a switcharoo where the "everything is
> interpretation" suddenly becomes "let me give you my interpretation in a
> compelling way that has you acting as if it is somehow 'more true' than
> the one you started with". 
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☣ uǝlƃ