Archives for category: alternative ways of acquring knowledge
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Litmus test

August 6, 2023 //
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“if I hope to learn from you,
and if I want to learn in the interest of truth,
then I have not only to tolerate you
but also to recognize you as a potential equal;
the potential unity and equality of all men
somehow constitute a prerequisite of our willingness
to discuss matters rationally“
Karl Popper

Learning from who’s experience?
A wise man is supposed to learn from other people’s experiences, right? No need to make your own mistakes, as long as they have already been committed… and the consequences made public!

‘Admitting that I may be wrong’ … easier said than done, for obvious reasons!
Very few people enjoy being proven wrong. Specially when ‘others’ get the upper hand. And even more so when those ‘others’ have nothing special. When those ‘others’ are nothing more but our “potential equals.”

We’re doing it for a noble cause.
In pursuit of the truth!

How about us being led into a wild goose chase?
Not by Karl Popper, mind you!

“the asymmetry between verification and falsation: actually, if we use the hypothetico-deductive method, we know that purely logical reasons make it impossible to verify any statement however numerous the positive reasons in its favor may be, whilst a single contrary case would suffice to show that the statement is false” (Mariano Artigas, 1997)

Modern propaganda, and particularly the kind currently permeating the social-media, is shaped and propagated by very skilled operators. Who are familiar with all the tricks in the psychology book and conversant in most ideological tenets currently whirling in the public space. And each of these propagandists has their agenda… Each of them tries to pull as many of us into their orbit… One of their favorite tools being Popper’s “I may be wrong and you may be right and, by an effort, we may get nearer the truth”.
In fact, these operators use Popper as a lever to break open our skepticism. To soften our disposition and to prepare the soil for the seed they want us to accept. And nurture…
How to resist? Given the fact that we are mere novices while they are masters of their chosen profession? Masters at ‘brain fogging’…

They try to mis-use Popper, we’ll use Popper as an antidote.
Do you feel treated as an equal?
Being invited as an equal member into a truth searching party?
Are you involved in a real debate? Do you get to say anything?

Or you, along with the rest, are simply told what to believe?

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, corruption, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, manipulation, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, Trust

Reconciling water with fire

August 1, 2023 //
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“that which is divinely natural,
but must be learned humanly; a phenomenon of Science.“
Mary Baker Eddy

Well, we are indeed in the presence of a miracle.
In the presence of a wonderful miracle!
In spite of the entrenched obstinacy of some ‘infallible’ and very powerful agents – who had Giordano Bruno burned in a public square for maintaining exactly the same thing – we have finally accepted this as a fact.

Some of us, at least…

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, manipulation, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

graven Image

July 28, 2023 //
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“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me“

“The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which surveyed 4,414 adults nationwide online, showed a tight race in the November 2024 general election should Trump face Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection and is not expected to face serious competition for his party’s nomination.

Biden led Trump 37% to 35% in a hypothetical matchup, with the remaining 28% saying they weren’t sure who to pick or would vote for someone else or no one at all.
Neither Biden nor Trump were widely liked by people outside their parties. Just 31% of independents had a favorable opinion of Trump and 32% thought as much about Biden.
At 80 years old, Biden is the oldest U.S. president ever to sit in the White House, and 63% of Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that he was too old to work in government. Thirty-seven percent disagreed.

Still, Biden leads the Democratic contest by even more than Trump leads the Republican field, with 63% of Democrats’ support compared with 15% for anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”

What’s going on here?
What happened with/in the greatest/most powerful democracy on Earth?
Why has the American People allowed itself to be split in half? Each of those halves bowing to its own idol…

Only because ‘they had avocados’?!?

And what about Reagan? He was right, after all… Trump was the government, wasn’t he?

Reagan was incomplete.
Government is nothing but a tool. A tool for the society to govern itself with. “of the people, by the people, for the people“. But also a tool for a dictator to exploit a country.
Blaming the tool never takes the blamer out of the ‘unpleasant’ situation.

A more complete statement would have been:

‘Any unchecked government tends, sooner rather than later, to become a problem.’

The key word here being ‘unchecked’, not government. For the same reason which had prompted ‘god’ to warn us:

Any graven image you will ever make will inevitably be incomplete. Not because of your incompetence but because of my infinite complexity. I, your god, am infinite. Hence incomprehensible. You might glimpse some, or even a lot, about my ‘true’ nature but you’ll never find out enough. Enough for you to make a ‘usable’ graven image.
A reliable idol…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, democracy, effective communication, evolution, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Transparency, Trust

Reverse engineering

July 10, 2023 //
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‘Exploring the consequences of our limited consciences‘

A truth is, first and foremost, an expression.
A message, formulated by an observer, describing a portion of what the person expressing themselves considers to be a ‘portion’ of ‘reality’. Being a message, any truth is formulated by means of a language.

Does anybody know everything about any subject? About anything, actually?
No, nobody knows everything about anything. Hence there is no such thing as a complete truth.

Furthermore, being expressed by means of a language, a truth – any expression, actually – will never be able to convey to the person receiving the message everything the transmitter intended to say. The transmitter is never able to cram ‘everything’ inside an inherently limited message, no language is absolutely ‘precise’ and no receiver will ever interpret any message the way the transmitter intended it to mean. Hence even if anybody will ever learn everything about anything, that person will never be able to convey that knowledge to anybody else. Let alone to everybody else…

What next?
‘Never ever believe anything? Anymore?!?’

Is it possible for us, humans living in concert, to cooperate in this manner?
Knowing that nothing which is being said, one way or another, is ‘true’? Completely true?

Well, we did get this far, didn’t we?
We’ve been expressing ourselves, in the imperfect manner I described above, since we’ve learned to use language. Since we’ve learned to speak…

70 000 years ago, give or take a few millennia, is when some scientists believe we’ve started to communicate more or less like we do now. The people living then had the same genes we have now and the bones they have left us to dig up and stare at are similar to ours. Hence the only thing which differentiates us from our ancestors is our culture. A treasure of knowledge which has been noticed – bit by bit, formulated using language – message by message, and remembered, one way or another. Hence the only difference between us and our ancestors is a collection of incomplete – and imperfectly interpreted – pieces of truth.

Then again, is it possible for us – humans living in concert – to cooperate by means of incomplete and ‘misinterpreted’ pieces of truth?
Well, we came this far going (up?) this way, didn’t we?
It seems that as long as we do it ‘in good faith’ things will, eventually, ‘mesh up’ just fine!

Which leads us to ‘the truth’. ‘The’ as different from ‘A’ truth.

While a truth is a message, the truth is a state of mind.
The understanding of the fact that what we call ‘reality’ can be learned only ‘in concert’.
Only as long as we help each-other along the process. Only as long as each time we formulate ‘a message’ we do our best to ‘speak the truth’.

https://www.ontology.co/heidegger-aletheia.htm

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, Intent, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, religion, skin in the game, teleology

Coming out

July 3, 2023 //
3

The sign itself is simply true.

The only intriguing aspect in all this is the courage of the person who had affixed it!

You see, the first religious beliefs/cosmological explanations maintained that the whole ‘creation’ had been given birth by the ‘First Mother’. People in those times – like all of us – were just extrapolating their everyday knowledge into the metaphysical realm. Which hadn’t yet been given that name…

After the advent of agriculture – which had introduced the notion of property/inheritance, hence the need to defend those things – men took over. As owners – better suited for war – and then as dispensers of meaning. A.k.a. priests.
God followed suit. It had become a Father and a Shepard. It still is in the minds of the ordinary believers.

Reading some theology – it’s enough to scrap the surface – I found out that most theologians maintained that God was unfathomable. That its main characteristic is the fact that it is ‘hidden’.

Then how come some of us are so sure about its gender? About its will? About what it means for us to do?!?

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, effective communication, evolutie, gender roles, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Trust

Dictatorship sucks!

July 2, 2023 //
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As usual, Chomsky is only half-right.
Opportunities shouldn’t be provided. Period!
In fact, nobody should be able to control/provide sizable amounts of opportunity!

On the other hand, making it so that only a small number of people enjoy all the opportunities in the world is, indeed, criminal.
Unsustainable for the longer time frame, actually!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust, yes but

Knowingly?!?

June 20, 2023 //
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“As a man thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.”
James Allen

Sometime ago – more than 45 years, when food was still plentiful in communist Romania – I heard for the first time that ‘many people dig their graves with their teeth’.
I was too young to understand the deeper meaning of this. That sooner or later each of us will meet the consequences of our previous decisions.

15 years ago I read a book written when I was a toddler. Almost 60 years ago.
The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann.

“In it, they argued that society is created by humans and human interaction, which they call habitualization. Habitualization describes how “any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be … performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort” (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Not only do we construct our own society but we also accept it as it is because others have created it before us. Society is, in fact, “habit.”“

Nowadays, the social media is full of messages stating that the posters actually don’t care about what other people think of them.

What happened to “society is, in fact, habit”?

Have we become self-sufficient enough to live, each of us, on their own?
Really?

Do we really think like this?
Cocky enough to give the finger to everybody else?
Don’t we realize that we’re building a new pattern here? A new habit?

Will our children say that we’ve built the hell they’ll be living in by carelessly talking about it?

After all, the most dangerous enemy is that who worms its way from within.
Conceit cannot be survived!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Transparency, Trust

Life.

June 14, 2023 //
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It begins as a collection of wishes and, at the end, all that’s left is a pile of memories.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, Trust

Turning tables

June 12, 2023 //
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“Propaganda machines give too much power to symbols;
they tell you the confederate flag is offensive!”

“Today, the Confederate flag is regularly weaponized by neo-Nazis and far-right extremists as they seek to intimidate African Americans. The flag can also be used to target Jewish Americans, as it was when it was tied to the front doors of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in January 2021.”

The fact that propaganda machines give too much power to symbols doesn’t mitigate the fact that some people find that flying the confederate flag is intended as an offense.

On the contrary, actually!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Black Lives Matter, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, manipulation, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

Small wonder

June 10, 2023 //
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I’m convinced Putin still believes he might get away with it.
With whatever he wishes to accomplish…

Why?
Because he is convinced that the only thing which might prevent him from achieving his goal is ‘the West’.
You see, he is adamant that without the ‘western influence’ he would have imposed his will upon Ukraine a very long time ago. After all, he’d already done that in Russia, didn’t he?
And the West seems to be loosing its focus….

A lot of ‘distraction’. Trump is indicted on 37 counts, mainly for mishandling highly sensitive information, while Boris Johnson quits his MP chair claiming he is the victim. ‘I did mislead the Commons but I didn’t do it on purpose’.

According to Putin’s book, there’s no difference between him and these two guys. All three of them have nothing in their mind but their own interest. In this respect, Putin is absolutely right.
What he fails to realize is that Trump being indicted and Johnson being investigated by the Commons are signs of strength. The US and Britain, respectively, seem to have came back to their senses. And started cleaning up their act.

He, Putin, also fails to realize that the Western help might come in handy. For the Ukrainians.
But what keeps them fighting is their will. Their quest for freedom!

The very same thing had happened during WWII.
The West did carry huge amounts of weaponry to the former USSR. Which weapons had helped the Red Army resist – and then defeat – Hitler’s attempt to enlarge the German Lebensraum. But without the ordinary Russians putting up with the war… all western help would have been lost!
Same thing is happening under our own eyes. The arms beefing up Ukraine’s army might come in handy but it’s the Ukrainian determination to lead their own, independent, life which will eventually douse Putin’s ambition.

One final thing.
Nazi Germany had ultimately failed because it was an ‘imperium’. A socio-political arrangement where all decisions were made in a highly centralized manner. Where mistakes accumulated and eventually made it impossible for the arrangement to survive. Because unsolved past mistakes make it impossible for a system to evolve. To solve present day challenges.

Any resemblance to what’s going on in present day Russia is nothing but yet another proof that failing to understand history forces you to repeat the lesson.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, politics, Psychology, Rule of Law, skin in the game
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