Where did it go?

He has decided what kind of guiding he wants to do.

This is not the first time this sort of discussion has taken place. Maybe it ought to be the last time.

I’m not recommending that “you do it”. I see no good reason why anyone should do it, because it “wouldn’t change things very much”. There are better ways to achieve the goals expressed here, and you should do those.

But if your goals are different, if spinning wheels matter intrinsically, or if signaling a desire to educate is a good-in-itself even if no actual education occurs, by all means have at it. Those aren’t my goals, and what you’re asking me to do does not achieve any goal anyone has stated in this thread, and it seems that you have acknowledged that.

So you’re on board with “pro-life” = “pro-death” because it’s accepted, therefore it must not be disingenuous? The definition for moderator that you’re using is synonymous with “cop” and completely redundant. The “moderator” label is a holdover from televised debates where moderators actually moderated rather than played the role of police, but the practice online has morphed from the old role of the moderator to that of a cop, which I feel is counterproductive and evidenced by your frustrations.

Well, it’s both functional and a potential George Carlin skit. You admitted yourself that the status quo is not working and that you don’t have time nor desire to “play cop”, so teach people to argue properly and pass the torch to some regulars in an effort to create a self-sustaining organism. You’re good with people, so teach people to be as you are.

Discussion moderator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[i]A discussion moderator or debate moderator is a person whose role is to act as a neutral participant in a debate or discussion, holds participants to time limits and tries to keep them from straying off the topic of the questions being raised in the debate. Sometimes moderators may ask questions intended to allow the debate participants to fully develop their argument in order to ensure the debate moves at pace.

In panel discussions commonly held at academic conferences, the moderator usually introduces the participants and solicits questions from the audience. On television and radio shows, a moderator will often take calls from people having differing views, and will use those calls as a starting point to ask questions of guests on the show. Perhaps the most prominent role of moderators is in political debates, which have become a common feature of election campaigns. The moderator may have complete control over which questions to ask, or may act as a filter by selecting questions from the audience.[/i] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_moderator

That seems less synonymous with a “cop” who lurks in the background handing out citations or executions.

Who is making that equivalence? I’m not familiar with it, and it doesn’t seem there is nearly as wide agreement on it as there is on the use of ‘moderator’ in the context of online forums.

I’ve been arguing online since the late 90s, and the word moderator has meant what we use it to mean here as long as I can remember. In fact, though I have no way of confirming this, I would bet that I learned the online meaning first, since I was getting into trouble on internet message boards before I was watching televised debates.

Moreover, the word ‘moderator’ is written into the fabric of the software this site runs on, and apparently in the sense in which we use it. There is a built in class of user called a “moderator”, certain built-in relationships between users and forums, built-in sets of permissions, etc. all labelled with the word ‘moderator’. That class of user, those relationships, those permission sets, have nothing to do with playing interviewer, they have to do with “approv[ing] or reject[ing] messages and uphold[ing] the terms of service”.

I’m not familiar enough with Carlin’s work to get this reference.

I appreciate you saying so, but I think this thread shows otherwise!

Thanks for this, Phyllo. One needs all of the helpful reminders one can receive, especially when one’s ego can get in the way and when one is not necessarily a philosopher, per se. lol

I’m glad that it got a generally positive reception. :smiley:

That’s true. And to the extent to which I am deficient in acquiring and then sustaining those skills, I am clearly open to legitimate criticism.

But my focus here is always on the distinction between those things/relationships for which “the truth” is in fact applicable objectively, and those things/relationships which may well be embodied subjectively/subjunctively in but points of view for mere mortals in a No God world.

All I can do then is to ask those who do claim to have acquired the necessary skills, to bring them out into the world of conflicting human behaviors; such that we might explore any possible limitations in regards to the tools philosophers use in their search for the truth.

I care about the extent to which anyone who claims that what they think they know is true or false about God and religion is something that they can in turn demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated to think they know is true or false about them too.

What else is there? The rest revolves around faith.

What particular truth in what particular context? Isn’t that where I always take the exchanges?

So, is there a postmodern mathematics? a postmodern science? a post modern set of empirical facts? a post-modern logic?

Again: What particular “reality” is being discussed?

In other words, outside of you and I and everyone else here, there is this a-historical, a-cultural, a-experiential thing that is Communism or abortion.

And the “reality and truth” about them [for now] still revolves around the manner in which you think about them.

And that at least offers some measure of comfort for you. Others may not share your own moral narrative or political agenda about them but to the extent that they don’t is the extent to which they are further removed from that “reality and truth”.

And we just continue to “get” this is different ways.

Yes there is. The truth in climate science is whatever you want it to be. Sociology and psychology are driven by politics and fads. Look at anything involving race or gender. Look at science posted by big agro and big pharma.

Look at Youtube and you will get get all sorts of truths about science, medicine and math. The place is full of geniuses.

Or just look at the gibberish posted in the Science forum on this site. Sadly James is no longer posting his highly entertaining nonsense. :frowning:

You can’t even get a count of the dead in Puerto Rico without Trump denying it and some people believing him. How is that for math?

I don’t think that those can be “other words” for what I wrote.

I think all knowledge comes from experience or is logically derived from experience - either my experience or the experience of others or a combination of both. So why would I write that some truth is a-experiential???

I wrote the exact opposite. I wrote that I need to alter my thinking as required by an external reality.

That’s what I’m asking on a forum. Should I be thinking differently about X? Am I doing something wrong? Does this still work? Did this ever work?

Pro-life has been equivalent to pro-death before the internet was around.

Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that “moderator” in the online context ever had any meaning other than it does now, but the label originated from the offline usage of it while the actual duties of a mod became that of a cop instead of a moderator. Do you see what I mean? The name was transferred from offline, but the duties changed.

I’m not suggesting a name change, but to recognize that the duties of a moderator in the most literal and original sense of the word is to moderate intense situations. I’m not picking on ILP, but mostly other forums and speaking generally. For instance the physics forums mod posted a warning to me publicly on the thread about offtopic conversations, so I replied to it and he hassled me about replying to his message, so I replied again saying he should have pm’d me instead of posting on the thread if he didn’t want the thread cluttered with his own offtopic nonsense. The point is instead of striving to moderate the situation, he continued to escalate into a battle of wills and it didn’t have to be that way. I gave him a piece of my mind then left because I knew where it was inevitably going. Too many of those guys have Napoleon complexes and some forums have “trophy cases” to show off their banned members. Acting in that fashion is a perversion of the meaning of the word moderator, like a school is no longer a place of leisure as the original meaning of the word implied, but a place of work. Mods are rarely moderate (adj) and they almost never moderate (verb), but escalate; they should be called escalators! :wink:

Carlin was a self-proclaimed wordsmith who professionally joked about the silliness of the English language and how words are perverted for political reasons:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc[/youtube]

Well, you concede points and have a sense of fairness and equity that’s unique among forum-people. You don’t see it about yourself? Surely I’m not the only one to notice. Lao Tzu said “To lead people, walk behind them.” and you either do it innately or have learned somewhere along the way. I’ll point it out the next time I see you do it.

Well, there’s the part where science becomes more and more sophisticated in understanding the natural world. We go from the abacus to the latest computers. That’s a “postmodern” leap of sorts.

Obviously, the tricky thing about the science of climate change is that the predictions are still off in the future. “By the year 2050…”. That sort of thing.

But sets of facts can be accumulated; then discussed and debated. And [ultimately] there is going to be a set of facts that does unfold. The future will be what it is. In other words, only that which it could have been given the facts involved.

With “in fact” dire consequences around the globe or “in fact” no dire consequences around the globe.

Same with race and gender and all the rest of it. There are inherent genetic facts and considerably more problematic memetic interpretations of what the facts tell us. But what ought we to do with respect to burning fossil fuels and reacting to those of another race or another gender or another sexual orientation?

What are the “facts” here but [in my view] existential contraptions entangled – ineffably? inextricably? – in dasein.

Sure, if someone here can offer me an argument that pins down once and for all how rational men and women are obligated to think about these things ethically, I’ll take that into consideration.

Indicating yet again just how crucial it becomes for some to invent the Gods.

Directly or indirectly, that hurricane killed a particular number of people. How many? Only God knows.

And, if no God, cue the exchange of political prejudices.

Did Trump do the “right thing” in responding to that particular disaster? Given all the people that did die, can it be reasonably argued that his behavior here was…immoral?

Again, I’m puzzeled by this. What are you trying to tell me here that I must be missing?

There are things that we can know that transcend particular historical, cultural and experiential contexts. Things that transcend what we think we know when what we think we know is not in fact true. We can know truths embedded in mathematics and science and natural laws and the rules of language. No matter what experience anyone has in whatever context there are still actual facts intertwined in human interactions that revolve around things like Communism and abortion.

But what I assume that you assume here is there will be/can be no interpretation of the “external reality” that is ever likely to convince you to become a Communist yourself.

Communism as a historical phenomenon is [in my view] embedded existentially in a particuar sets of political prejudices embedded in a particular set of experiences.

Then it comes down to those who insist that their own experiences have enabled them to pin down what Communism really is.

What they say it is. And if others don’t say the same thing then they are wrong.

And they are wrong, right?

After all, if you don’t insist that they are then you are acknowledging that given a different set of assumptions and a different set of experiences, they are able to convince themselves in turn that you are wrong.

So what’s crucial here [for the objectivists] is this: that somebody must in fact be either right or wrong.

I merely embed this frame of mind [psychologically] in this: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

A-experiential means separate from experience.

Science is entirely based on experience. We only claim there are natural laws because we observe them. If we didn’t observe gravity then there would be no natural law of gravity. Same goes for rules of language … we notice certain rules to it.

Mathematics need not match any physical reality. It only needs to be consistent. It’s constructed that way. We observe which mathematical constructs are in sync with reality and which are not.

IOW, I have no idea what you mean by “transcend particular … experiential context”.

If you have never seen ice, then you don’t know the natural laws governing ice formation. You are ignorant of the experiential truth. You will learn about it when someone, who has studied ice formation, tells you about it.

If I thought that society would be better under communism, then I would be a communist.

I already covered this in another thread. Not all assumptions are the same … some are invalid, some poor, some could be good or bad, some are good. Some reasoning is invalid, some is poor, some could be good or bad, some is good.
People are wrong when their assumptions or reasoning are wrong.

Okay, so knowledge and therefore truth is based entirely on experience.

Several problems arise.

Experiences are complicated and human senses are limited. It’s possible to be mistaken or confused about what is being experienced.
For example, there is a highway where cars “roll uphill”. One could think that one is experiencing a “reverse gravity”. A closer investigation with measuring tools shows that there is actually slight downward slope.
The other day I saw broken branch on the ground, which at first impression looked like a big spider.

When one does not experience something personally, then one is relying on the descriptions of other people. These descriptions can be unclear, ambiguous and by necessity only pass on a small fraction of an experience.

Furthermore, some people outright lie.

Error and deception cloud the truth.

The difference between science and something like politics is that science does not an evaluation statement to an experience.

Science does not say “this is good” or “this is bad”. Politics does. It’s an extra statement on top of the statements about an experience.

That evaluation statement is based on goals and wants. So you are going to get a lot of different evaluations coming from different people.

(Then along came postmodern science and the evaluations started to be added to science as well. :imp: )

Yes, the experiences [material interactions/relationships] explored by science are still embedded in all there is yet to be discovered about why something exists rather than nothing, and why this something and not another.

Which necessarily involves a who knows how complex an entanglement between genes and memes, nature and nurture, perception and conception, deduction and induction, a priori and a posteriori “reality”.

But there still seems [to me] to be a clear distinction to be made between what science can tell us about the laws governing phenomenal interactions, and what ethicists can tell us about the gap between what individuals choose to do and what it is said that all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to do.

What I mean is that for a doctor performing an abortion the biological parameters are what in fact they are. There are “the facts” that are embedded in the objective reality of human sexuality and pregnancy.

But for the ethicists reacting to the abortion as a moral or an immoral behavior, there would appear [to me] to be be only subjective/subjunctive narratives rooted in dasein and conflicting goods.

But no one argues that water ought to turn into ice at 62 degrees farhenheit so that there will be considerably less icestorms resulting in considerably less human pain and suffering resulting from falls and automobile accidents.

Or, once again, I’m missing your point here.

Exactly. You might have new sets of experiences and come into contact with new information and knowledge that reconfigures your thinking.

The only alternative is an argument able to in fact demonstrate once and for all that societies either will be or will not be better under Communism.

But we don’t live in that world now, do we? We live in this one:

Right, like those who still embrace socialism over capitalism won’t assume their own assumptions are more valid. That their own “reasoning” isn’t closer to the optimal or the only truth with regard to the role that political economy has played in human interactions down through the ages.

Jesus Murphy

Yeah, but in your examples above there may be confusion and ambiguity and uncertainty and lies, but there is an objective truth that we can all eventually come to understand.

Not much here in the way of experiencing conflicting goods in an is/ought world construed from the subjective perspective of dasein.

You won’t get much in the way of an argument from me here. But with respect to these “evaluations”, my point revolves entirely around the assumption that the three components of my own moral philosophy are important considerations when attempts are made to defend them out in the world of actual conflicting human behaviors.

Politicians and social scientists can in fact use particular collections of objective truths in discussing things like abortion and Communism and climate change.

But there does not appear to be the equivalent of the “scientific method” when it comes down to assessing the obligation of all rational human beings when the evaluations themselves come into conflict.

Only those who insist that, through the evaluations of their own God or ideology or philosophy or understanding of nature, has this already been accomplished.

Re the OP on this thread, the assumption seems to be that God and religion exist by default. Those who don’t believe this are therefore encouraged to go elsewhere.

Yet how many scientists who ponder the existence of God would start the discussion on that note?

Had to Google that one:

urbandictionary.com/define. … s%20Murphy

Not exactly sure what this – if it actually is this – has to do with either the OP or our own discussion. But I do suspect that sooner or latter we’ll come to the part about dasein. :wink: