[FRIAM] yay!

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen, 

 

I have a solution to the "deplatforming" problem that I know you are going to abhor, so I thought I would reveal it to you, first.  

 

1.	A society cannot survive without an idea of truth, at least as a goal. 
2.	We have numerous mechanisms for determining truth, notably the courts.  Every day Juries and courts decide matters of fact.  Fallibly, inconsistently, probabilistically.  
3.	We cannot have platforms deciding matters of truth.
4.	Therefore, we are going to have to institute digital courts. 
5.	It is up to people like FRIAM members to cogitate on what a digital court will look like. 

 

See, I told you you would hate it. 

 

Nick  

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2021 1:16 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] yay!

 

I'd begun preparing this long post saying nothing. So I deleted it. Nick's done a good job, here, except that I completely disagree with his assertion that sought divergence is boring and sophist. Convergence is fine. But often convergence can be premature or artificial. What we (and presumably Peirce) want is *good* convergence ... the right kind of convergence. Convergence at the right rate, with error correcting processes, enough heat to strengthen but not burn the metal, etc. And *that* is ethics. There's a large number of people who've converged on QAnon. Sure, that convergence will *eventually* fade because it's garbage. In the meantime, people are dying and going crazy. What to do in that meantime? How do we diverge from QAnon and settle into a better convergence *sooner* than we would otherwise? Divergence and convergence are not disjoint things, one to be rejected and another adopted.

 

Anyway, should Parler be deplatformed? Should Gebru have been fired/deplatformed by Google? Should I actually give some eyeball time to OAN just to see what kind of bullsh¡t they say? Should Weinstein have been run out of Evergreen into the welcoming arms of Heterodox?

 

There's no grand unified ethical program for resolving these questions. That's not what ethics is. We must be (methodological) pluralists. Instead, it's a set of languages and lexicons for naming the components and discussing their relationships. In many ways, having such language *deescalates* conflict because rather than saying some value is "wrong" or "evil", we can call it by its ethics name and bias the convergence so that it satisfices multiple objectives. It's similar to, say, "the disease model of alcoholism". By naming it as a disease, we free up discussion of it from the *converged* concept that alcoholics are simply morally degenerate. And that works even *if* alcoholism is nothing like a disease.

 

It strikes me that, in these interesting times, we're recognizing that deplatforming has always been A Thing. But because of the state of our culture and technology, we've now identified it and *need* to talk about it. I would claim ethics gives us the language to do so.

 

 

On 1/11/21 10:42 AM,  <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:

> Ok, so, FWIW, a Peircean take on ethics is that it is like any other 

> form of inquiry.  To the extent that the participants are seeking a 

> convergence, it is interesting and useful; to the extent that they are 

> seeking divergence, for its own sake, it is boring and sophistic.  It 

> is in that sense that he regards logic as a subfield of ethics.  Logic is how we "should" think.

> The whole goal of thought, whether ethical or scientific,  is to 

> anticipate experience as it will be, not as we'ld like it to be.

 

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