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markfrankel18

Rational Disagreement: Arguing Your Way to the Right Decision | Big Think Edge | Big Think - 0 views

  • When you find yourself in a disagreement with someone - whether you are discussing politics or football - you probably tend to view the experience as a waste of time. Humans are stubborn creatures because we need to validate our own egos. That means no one wants to "give in." We all want to "win" the argument. However, as Julia Galef, President of the Center for Applied Rationality, demonstrates in today's lesson, if you are simply out to "win" an argument and validate your ego, you really aren't winning much of anything. You are actually missing out on an opportunity for learning and personal growth.  In the video below, derived from a lesson on Big Think Edge, the only forum on YouTube designed to help you get the skills you need to be successful in a rapidly changing world, Galef shows how one can disagree productively:
markfrankel18

3quarksdaily: Is Wine Tasting Nonsense? - 1 views

  • If there is such a thing as real expertise in identifying the properties of a wine, then it must be possible to get it wrong.  If tastes, in general, were entirely subjective there would be no right answer to the question of whether, for instance, chocolate ice cream tastes of chocolate.  No one really thinks that. The fact that expert wine tasters get it wrong so often is evidence that wine tasting is harder than identifying the presence of chocolate in ice cream—not that it is utterly capricious. So tastes are not so entirely subjective that our experiences of them have no relationship to an object.
  • Furthermore, tasters can strive to eliminate environmental factors that have been shown to influence judgments about wine such as conversations, the style of music being played, and changes in the weather, etc. These are all factors that wine tasters can control by adjusting the environment in which they taste. Wine tasters, if they are to maintain credibility, must taste under the appropriate conditions. But that is no different from any other normative judgment we make. Our ability to make ethical judgments, for instance, is similarly influenced by environmental factors. We know (or should know) better than to make ethical judgments when we are excessively angry, fearful, under the influence of powerful desires, etc. Yet, it does not follow from the fact that ethical judgments can be influenced by irrelevant factors that all ethical judgments are subjective.
  • So the taste of wine (or anything else) is partly dependent on objective features of the world and partly dependent on how our view of those features has been shaped by past experience. The crucial question then is how much of a distorting lens is that past experience.
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  • What is puzzling about this whole debate about the objectivity of wine critics, however, is why people want objective descriptions of wine. We don't expect scientific objectivity from art critics, literary critics, or film reviewers. The disagreements among experts in these fields are as deep as the disagreements about wine. There is no reason to think a film critic would have the same judgment about a film if viewed in a different context, in comparison with a different set of films, or after conversing about the film with other experts. Our judgments are fluid and they should be if we are to make sense of our experience. When listening to music aren't we differently affected by a song depending upon whether we are at home, in a bar, going to the beach, listening with friends or alone? Why would wine be different? The judgment of any critic is simply a snapshot at a particular time and place of an object whose meaning can vary with context. Wine criticism cannot escape this limitation.
  • What we want from critics whether of music, art, or wine is a judgment made in light of their vast experience that can show us something about the object that we might have missed without their commentary. That can be accomplished independently of whether the critic is perfectly consistent or objective. We want the critic to have a certain kind of bias, born of her unique experience, because it is that bias that enables her to taste, see, or hear what she does.
markfrankel18

Can Moral Disputes Be Resolved? - The New York Times - 1 views

  • What makes moral disagreements so intractable? Ethics shouldn’t be as hard as rocket science. Can religion help? It might seem that if morality is a matter of obeying divine commands, we could make short work of moral disagreement, if only we knew which was the true faith. Of course, we don’t. But 2,300 years ago Plato showed that appeals to God’s wisdom, no matter which faith, is irrelevant to what makes for moral rightness.
  • What about reason? Many philosophers have argued that rational beings can reason their way to the right answers in morality. Kant and Mill both tried to do this, but ended up building incompatible moral theories by reasoning from two quite different starting points.
  • In recent years some thinkers have argued that the foundations of morality are given by what science, especially evolutionary biology, shows us about the conditions of human flourishing. These philosophers, social psychologists and evolutionary anthropologists argue that there was strong selection for a core set of moral norms that are so widespread they are absent only in psychopaths.
Lawrence Hrubes

Arguments Against God - NYTimes.com - 2 views

  • L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.
  • That’s not to say that I think everything is within the scope of human knowledge. Surely there are things not dreamt of in our philosophy, not to mention in our science – but that fact is not a reason to believe in supernatural beings. I think many arguments for the existence of a God depend on the insufficiencies of human cognition. I readily grant that we have cognitive limitations. But when we bump up against them, when we find we cannot explain something — like why the fundamental physical parameters happen to have the values that they have — the right conclusion to draw is that we just can’t explain the thing. That’s the proper place for agnosticism and humility. But getting back to your question: I’m puzzled why you are puzzled how rational people could disagree about the existence of God. Why not ask about disagreements among theists? Jews and Muslims disagree with Christians about the divinity of Jesus; Protestants disagree with Catholics about the virginity of Mary; Protestants disagree with Protestants about predestination, infant baptism and the inerrancy of the Bible. Hindus think there are many gods while Unitarians think there is at most one. Don’t all these disagreements demand explanation too? Must a Christian Scientist say that Episcopalians are just not thinking clearly? Are you going to ask a Catholic if she thinks there are no good reasons for believing in the angel Moroni?
markfrankel18

How politics makes us stupid - Vox - 0 views

  • In April and May of 2013, Yale Law professor Dan Kahan — working with coauthors Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, and Paul Slovic — set out to test a question that continuously puzzles scientists: why isn’t good evidence more effective in resolving political debates? For instance, why doesn’t the mounting proof that climate change is a real threat persuade more skeptics?
  • The leading theory, Kahan and his coauthors wrote, is the Science Comprehension Thesis, which says the problem is that the public doesn’t know enough about science to judge the debate. It’s a version of the More Information Hypothesis: a smarter, better educated citizenry wouldn’t have all these problems reading the science and accepting its clear conclusion on climate change. But Kahan and his team had an alternative hypothesis. Perhaps people aren’t held back by a lack of knowledge. After all, they don’t typically doubt the findings of oceanographers or the existence of other galaxies. Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth — purposes like increasing their standing in their community, or ensuring they don’t piss off the leaders of their tribe. If this hypothesis proved true, then a smarter, better-educated citizenry wouldn’t put an end to these disagreements. It would just mean the participants are better equipped to argue for their own side.
  • Kahan doesn’t find it strange that we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it. He thinks it’s strange that we would expect rational people to do anything else.
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  • Kahan’s studies, depressing as they are, are also the source of his optimism: he thinks that if researchers can just develop a more evidence-based model of how people treat questions of science as questions of identity then scientists could craft a communications strategy that would avoid those pitfalls. "My hypothesis is we can use reason to identify the sources of the threats to our reason and then we can use our reason to devise methods to manage and control those processes," he says.
markfrankel18

Are These 10 Lies Justified? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We tell lies to one another every day. But when we commit other acts that are generally believed to be immoral, like cruelty and theft, we do not seek to justify them. We either deny that the acts we committed are appropriately described by these terms, or we feel guilt or remorse. But many of us are prepared to defend our lies: indeed, to advocate their general use.
  • Nevertheless, it is my claim that we could not lead our lives if we never told lies — or that if we could it would be a much worse life. But I would like to invite your own views on this to begin a dialog. Here is a list of lies that I believe to be either permissible, or, in some cases, obligatory. Readers will certainly disagree with me about some, perhaps many, of these cases. But such disagreement should not be the end of the discussion. I invite your reflection on why you disagree.
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