Posted by
glen ep ropella on
Jun 30, 2015; 8:18pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-New-Society-for-the-Study-of-Cultural-Evolution-tp7586275p7586299.html
On 06/30/2015 11:34 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Is a search engine a participant in people's web browsing?
No. But the people who wrote the artifact (and maintain the servers, and tweak the algorithms, and use it for advertising) are participants in my web browsing.
> And it is not about objective reality, it's about precision of terminology.
Bah. What can "precise terminology" mean without any stable referent? Precision _is_ about objective reality at least to some extent. At the very least, there has to be some way to measure the difference between 2 different terms or usages of a single term. So, even if the terms themselves don't map to reality, the metric used to contrast them does.
So, your dependence on precise terminology implies a dependence on objective reality.
> What is nailed down sufficiently-well for an analysis about the logical consequences of the nailed-down thing or system of things. It's not clear what this group of people is willing to nail down, even temporarily.
I agree that it's not clear for this new society.
> Just like it isn't clear what climate change deniers are willing to nail down.
But it is NOT "just like ... climate change deniers". Are you seriously making that equivalence?
> It is bad faith, not skepticism, when people put their monetary or ideological goals ahead of the evidence, and then claim they are interested in the evidence. That's what I mean by corruption.
OK. I disagree, _if_ those people are up front that they put their monetary or ideological goals first. It's not bad faith or corruption, then. And you have to admit that by openly stating that activism is one of this new group's objectives, then it's a bit of a leap to accuse them of bad faith or corruption right off the bat. If it were bad faith, their true objectives would not be as obvious as they've made them.
--
glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847
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