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

[Pieter Steenekamp]

I agree with you. It's very challenging to make sense of the world, and the
human mind is amazing at building generative models of the world and those
models become the reality for the mind. With the models we can make
conclusions and explain how the world actually works. Now the clincher, to
make progress, the conclusions must have clear explanations that are
independant of the different layers that we used to generate the model to
get to the conclusion.

I repeat, sure, use a complex layered approach to get to an understanding.
But after you have formed your conclusions, don't rely on the complex
layered model to explain the phenomena, distil it and get to a clear
conclusion and back it up with good explanations. Always try to verify it
using evidence.

For example, in the narrative of Russ, it is assumed that they have
knowledge of the effects of Reagan and Thatcher on the world. I argue that
it is impossible to have any level of confidence in that. The world is a
chaotic complex system and we have some knowledge about what different
actors (eg Reagan and Thatcher) did and what consequently happened, but
nobody has a clue what the causal relationships were. It is simply
impossible to know that. Sure, one can speculate, but tag it as
speculation. ABM generative models show some promise in helping humans to
understand such complex systems, but it's early days and current ABM models
are not even close to answer questions like that.

I don't know the answers and I speculate it's beyond any human's capability
to make statements like *“The self-assured neoliberal imagination has
increasingly revealed itself to be not equipped to deal with problems it
causes,”* and have any level of confidence in this. Yes, it's a good
process to speculate that, but be real and admit that it's only speculation
and/or the result of a generative model in your mind and not rooted in the
real world. I tag it as "opinion" and respect the person to have that
opinion.

On Fri, 21 May 2021 at 21:30, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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