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Re: “Don’t they have grandchildren?” was The case for universal basic income UBI

Posted by Pieter Steenekamp on May 21, 2021; 4:05pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-case-for-universal-basic-income-UBI-tp7601843p7602059.html

The world is the better for all not having the same views on everything. 

Surely there's a difference between facts and opinions? Your  "But it is *NOT* a sound, sensible, or rational view, any more than a stopped clock is right twice per day." is your opinion, it's not a fact.

Interesting work by Jonathan Haidt on different moral values of libertarians https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0042366 .  It's good to be mindful in having a discussion with someone with different moral values, you see the world with different biases.

Take for example global warming.
We might agree on the following facts:

The earth has been getting warmer and the sea levels have been rising since the end of the mini ice age circa 1850
CO2 contributes to the earth getting warmer
Humans are causing CO2 to increase

What we might disagree on is in the interpretation of the facts, for example:
The use of RCP 8.5 as reason for alarm
The accuracy of the models, for example the significant differences between balloon measurements and model predictions
The empirical evidence that the climate sensitivity is low enough that we probably don't have reason for alarm about global warming
All the benefits of fossil fuels for humanity
The climategate evidence of deliberate dishonesty of prominent climate scientists like Mickael Mann

The facts are not relative, it's absolute, so I don't subscribe to the  postmodernists' "relativism" for factual matters.

Our opinions are guided by our moral values. This is where it;s good to allow others their place under the sun too. 




On Fri, 21 May 2021 at 16:56, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:
Interesting. We hear from righties like Brett Weinstein and Ben Shapiro all the time how postmodernists' "relativism" is diluting our culture and sending us on the path to Hell. Is this such a relativism?

I'm reminded of the "all sides" fallacy or the snowflake idea that any arbitrary opinion of any arbitrary person is just as "valid" as any other opinion of any other person. I blame psychotherapy. >8^D Nobody's ever *wrong*. We all just have different points of view! And we all deserve trophies just for participating.

Last week the concept of a broken clock being "right" twice per day came up. This highlights, I think, the differences between a) validity vs. soundness, b) descriptive vs. mechanistic models, and c) correlation vs. causation. The broken clock is *not* accurate twice per day. The clock is THE canonical mechanism. A "stopped clock" is almost self-contradictory. If it's stopped, it's not a clock.

So, no. Sure, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels may be a valid view, in some unhinged yet logical fantasy. But it is *NOT* a sound, sensible, or rational view, any more than a stopped clock is right twice per day. Had it been written in, say, 1950, I might be more generous.

On 5/20/21 10:59 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> But there are other valid views of the world too, for example The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein.
> Neither is right or wrong, it simply represents different valid views. 

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↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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