[FRIAM] jargon as a competence gatekeeper

[glen∉ℂ]

George Conway discusses President Donald Trump's diagnosis
https://youtu.be/fAbpThZ33QA

There's something insanely ironic about Conway reading the "plain English" in the DSM-5 and diagnosing Trump. We've had conversations about things like quantum woo, artificial mathematization, and (bad) science journalism, here in this forum. And I think the above video, like everything in this semantically ungrounded time, helps refine the point. On the one hand, it's difficult to disagree with Conway. I'm fond of reading the DSM, too. But just like navigating slippery bullshit like "The Tao of Physics", just because the words you're reading *seem* to have unambiguous referents, doesn't mean the referents evoked in you match, AT ALL, the referents they were intended to match. If Trump's incompetence facilitates his narcissism, so too Conway's belief he understands psychology seems pretty clearly narcissistic ... a disrespectful under-appreciation for the work of therapists combined with an overestimation of his own competence.

This article is fantastic:

An Unlikely Source of (Absurd and Effective) Case Studies for Introductory Informal Logic
https://philpapers.org/rec/LEMAUS

Lemanek uses "Ancient Astronaut Theory" <https://youtu.be/gZ5zeqro_V0> to teach students how to analyze fallacious reasoning. [⛧] We ran into a guy at the pub the other night who claimed to work on bridges. (I said "like civil engineering?", to which he mumbled, which might have been a red flag.) But later in the conversation, he mentioned he wanted to go to Cancun to visit the pyramids, because he's fascinated with how such things were built. I made an off-the-cuff comment that it's amazing what you can do with slaves. And he emphasized that there's no way they could have built them. I let it go to avoid the conflict that might have ensued ... you know, for Renee's sake.

Anyway, I'm starting to think it's justifiable to use complicated, persnickety jargon as a bar over which people have to jump in order to be at all confident in the conversation. Maybe I'm becoming an authoritarian! >8^D

[⛧] I'm also enjoying "The Vow", wherein one of the people responsible for this slippery bullshit https://whatthebleep.com/, tells a *layered* cautionary tale about how peddlers of slippery bullshit might be susceptible to the slippery bullshit peddled by others. Who's the victim, here? "I have no idea what's going on." <https://youtu.be/1Y_7P9Ce9Uc>