[FRIAM] Trumps motives not judiciable because they are "in his head"

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I've been stewing in my own juices regarding the previous mentions of "puritanism" and my commitment to reductionism-resistance. It started awhile back when a friend forced me to read Michael Heumer's  "The Problem of Political Authority", which was less interesting than his "Ethical Intuitionism", FWIW. In a bout of insomnia the other night, I ran across Bryan Caplin's post:

  "Catholic" vs "Protestant" Ethics
  https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/04/catholic_versus.html

which (if you follow some of his other posts) seems to rely on a tendency to *reduction*. While reading all this hooha, I was reminded of mathematical intuitionism and finitism in response to transfinite numbers, as well as the objections to things like proof by contradiction. 

I've avoided having any significant conversations with any right-leaning people, including those who believe we can "innovate" our way out of the climate crisis, precisely because of the sense that their positions are presented in "bad faith". And this morning, I ran across this rant:

  Resist false hope: America under Trump is in big trouble, and there's no going back
  https://www.salon.com/2020/01/31/resist-false-hope-america-under-trump-is-in-big-trouble-and-theres-no-going-back/

which distinguishes between "hope peddler" and "hope warrior", which seems a little silly to me (in the same way I didn't "fight" my cancer - metaphor run amok). But I like the appeal to action, the idea that *action* has meaning (as opposed to refreshing one's phone/browser/etc).

But there's an issue churning underneath all this that I think appeals to anyone exposed to "complex systems", where apparent complexity arises from a reduced rule set. As Pieter forced us to consider by presenting this group: <https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg#Copenhagen_Consensus_Project>, which do we choose? The catholic or Protestant approach? Complexity people would, arguably, choose the puritanical reduction to a *small* set of actionable targets, whereas it's also arguable that a more catholic approach (allowing anyone to work on whatever problem they found motivating) allows diversity [†].

And a subsequent question, after asking which approach to choose, is: How outraged should I be when talking with someone who does *not* choose the same approach I choose? And, similarly, how outraged should a puritan who reduces to climate crisis be with a puritan who reduces to the rise of fascism?


[†] Just a note to say that I don't argue for diversity for diversity's sake. But reductionism faces a problem in constructing seemingly open-ended systems, as the ALife sessions on OEE have shown, I think. Diversity seems, to me, to be a hallmark property of open systems. Catholic approaches to action are agnostic about the sources of diversity whereas puritan approaches are obliged to explain them.


On 1/30/20 4:00 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> I don’t think finding a language to talk will come from being co-opted in a bad-faith narrative where up is down and black is white, just because some people are angry and have been led to believe they want to tear truth up to revert to a game in which it is only who has power — wrongly believing it is them.
> 
> One brings character back into a community by first having character, and being willing to hang onto it.  
> 
> The common language will have to come from having a material commitment to other people’s wellbeing, with enough understanding of their circumstances to address the complexity of those circumstances substantively.  I think some of that will be barn-building without talking, and the building may need to go on for a while before there is a shared base of activity to talk about.  Those who want to solve problems will need to accept that as the responsibility for the end they want, and do whatever they can think of to get to the goal, rather than being distracted by showing that they were “right" in some dispute.  Shed the vanity; keep an eye on what matters.  If there are others who just want to throw bombs and don’t want to contribute to understanding or helping anything, then that is part of the situation we have to deal with.  Good-faith people from any starting point are welcomed.  The nature of the problems will sort out who is contributing to solving something.

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☣ uǝlƃ