[FRIAM] “Don’t they have grandchildren?” was The case for universal basic income UBI

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There's a layering in the relationship between fact and opinion. And what the postmodernists warned us about is that many of us are unable to unravel those layers. The idea that there exist absolute facts and (mere) interpretations of those facts can often be an indicator for the inability to unravel those layers. Sometimes, it's evidence of bad faith (e.g. when a fossil fuel profiteer funds or advocates for rhetoric on, say, the moral good of burning fossil fuels). Sometimes it's just an efficiency problem. It's more efficient, for the purposes of some limited scope episode, to take some assertion *as* fact in order to get on with assessing the suite of actions available. And sometimes it's simply that we're finite creatures and can't continually deconstruct everything to first principles all the time.

Here, in this context, Russ points to a well-unraveled attempt at a *cause* ... a mechanistic model. Alex Epstein and those who advocate variations on his story, like Pinker or Shermer, *truncate* the layering and take a particular *slice* of the "facts" abstracting away the rest of the inconvenient goo in which their skeleton is embedded. That *sampling* of the data can then be fleshed out by something like an interpolation, a shrink-wrap *hull* around the "facts" they chose. The model that obtains, the model that has been so *induced*, amounts to a descriptive model. No matter how well that model can fit the data, it's still an artificial fitting, quite distinct from a mechanistic model. Such fitted models have a huge host of practical fragility problems. Add a new triangulating fact and the whole model crumbles. Shift the distribution to a slightly different (in time or space) distribution of facts and the whole model crumbles. Etc.

So, sure, we can often agree on some assertions that we'll take as facts and iterate forward from there. But the ontological status of models thereby built will always be questionable. Only generative modeling helps us extract ourselves from that trap.


On 5/21/21 9:05 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> The world is the better for all not having the same views on everything. 
> 
> Surely there's a difference between facts and opinions? Your  "*/But it is *NOT* a sound, sensible, or rational view, any more than a stopped clock is right twice per day./*" is your opinion, it's not a fact.
> 
> Interesting work by Jonathan Haidt on different moral values of libertarians https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0042366 <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0042366> .  It's good to be mindful in having a discussion with someone with different moral values, you see the world with different biases.
> 
> *Take for example global warming.
> We might agree on the following facts:*
> The earth has been getting warmer and the sea levels have been rising since the end of the mini ice age circa 1850
> CO2 contributes to the earth getting warmer
> Humans are causing CO2 to increase
> 
> *What we might disagree on is in the interpretation of the facts, for example:*
> The use of RCP 8.5 as reason for alarm
> The accuracy of the models, for example the significant differences between balloon measurements and model predictions
> The empirical evidence that the climate sensitivity is low enough that we probably don't have reason for alarm about global warming
> All the benefits of fossil fuels for humanity
> The climategate evidence of deliberate dishonesty of prominent climate scientists like Mickael Mann
> 
> The facts are not relative, it's absolute, so I don't subscribe to the  postmodernists' "relativism" for factual matters.
> 
> Our opinions are guided by our moral values. This is where it;s good to allow others their place under the sun too. 

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