Interesting articles thread

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Originally Posted by Singu

I don't think you can serve humanity without searching for truth.

You might go the Instrumentalist route and say that the whole point of science is to predict things and not to search for the truth. But the only reason you can predict things is because you have grappled with the truth, at least partially and imperfectly. It's like saying that the whole point of science is to do experiments, when the whole point of doing experiments is to check whether our description of reality via a theory is true or not.

Maybe we're seeking truth for its own sake, or maybe we're serving an even higher goal. We don't know yet, but we won't know unless we search for the truth. But it does seem like we're trying to satisfy our curiosity of wanting to find out what the truth is, even though we can never get to finding "the ultimate truth", so we'll always have something to work on.

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Wow a non-annoying Singu post.

How to survive Trump: End the cult of the presidency

What this whole argument boils down to is Realism vs. Anti-Realism. Anti-Realists would say that scientific knowledge, or even knowledge in general should be limited to what is observable and predictable. While Realists would say that knowledge should also include metaphysical claims about reality, that at least contain some grains of truth.

Well even that very Anti-Realist statement is problematic, because the theory that you should limit knowledge to what is observable... is not observable! So it becomes self-refuting. Anti-Realists have been trying very hard to expunge any metaphysical claims from areas of science and even to all forms of knowledge, only to have it self-destruct by its very nature of not allowing any metaphysical claim, which in itself is metaphysical.

And if we're talking about Anti-Realism like Instrumentalism that is more "agnostic" in that it says that it doesn't really matter what what it says, as long as it's useful or it can correctly predict something, then well you're still going to need theories that make metaphysical claims about reality in order to create new knowledge that would allow us to predict things. The whole point of science isn't to just predict things, but it's to create new knowledge. And the philosophical question is, "How? How should we successfully create new knowledge?".

Anyway, Anti-Realist thoughts have been prevalent in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but ever since Popper's refutation of it by falsificationism and its slight modification and improvements of Popperian epistemology, Empiricism, Inductivism, Instrumentalism, Logical Positivism and other Anti-Realist thoughts have been dead as a dodo. It just simply isn't rationally tenable anymore, even though these philosophies still stubbornly live on in people's minds, and even in many fields of science.

I'm going to have to actually give Popper a chance now even if I have huge problems with other parts of his thought. Anything supporting scientific realism is infinitely better than anything that doesn't even if nearly everything else about it is flawed (which I'm not sure is true of Popper's thought but I can point out a couple of huge problems at least off the bat.)

Oh, and while this article has way too much name-dropping and low-key idolization of the people it talks about it's an excellent introduction to the main alternative epistemology to Kant, which is basically intuitionism. If you're into Jung you should like it too because it is about intuition as a faculty and about Rudolf Steiner's views (so yeah it mentions the occult briefly but come on, it's not like Newton's theory of gravity wasn't based on hermeticism or anything.) Frankly Goethe's epistemology is what I grew up inoculated with probably because I went to an art school for kindergarten to 5th grade and art classes afterwards though it evolved through my actual use of it over the years and it's not like I knew what it was or how discordant it was with the culture around me when I first was brought into it. There are other epistemologies besides Kant and Goethe too like Popper obviously but that's not culturally acceptable either.

Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge, GA#2

Well our "intuition" is just a kind of a theory about the world that we have yet to understand how it works, and yet we somehow claim it to be self-evidently true. But if we claim anything to be self-evidently true, then it's just a way to shield itself from any further criticism. What is thought of to be self-evidently true is not always so self-evidently true after all.

So Jungianism is just a mix of Empiricism, Inductivism and Intuitionism. Jung basically just observed a bunch of patients, and categorized them as he perceived them. And he concluded that that must be true, because his sense-perceptions can't be telling him lies, if only perhaps he were truly honest with himself and rid himself of all prejudices and assumptions. The ideal is to have access to a kind of a direct, "pure" experience of reality, if you will, which has rid itself of all sorts of impurities.

So obviously, the Socionists have inherited this view, and they also conclude that the "typings" must be based on self-evidently true intuitions or sense-perceptions. This is why "battletyping" will always just end with "My perception is more right than your perception, because my perception can't be wrong and it can't be criticized because it's self-evidently true. And if it's wrong, then it must be due to some impure influences, such as that we aren't interpreting the theory purely enough."

Intuition is a valid theory. Let's say you see a tree. You don't see a bunch of shapes and light and then deduce that you're seeing a tree, but it just presents itself as a tree fully formed. Likewise, if you were blindfolded you could still perceive the tree and have an accurate mental image of it through touch, sound, smell, or other senses which you're likely to engage looking at a tree anyways. There's no single sense that accounts for perception and even in people who don't have synesthesia sometimes you have phenomena like flashing a light and playing a beep twice and people seeing the light flash twice. Therefore, people have perception that's not strictly sense-perception, though calling it "ESP" at this point is as problematic as calling something in the sky that you can't identify a "UFO" even if it's technically correct. Just because something's a valid theory doesn't mean it can justify anything you want though and that causes problems when people try.

Also, I think typings should be done scientifically which means not only using intuition even if you're good at it and love it because I don't think any intuitionist worth their salt only uses intuition any more than any empiricist worth their salt only uses their senses or any rationalist worth their salt only uses reason. I think socionics itself would encourage that since it doesn't have IMs that exist outside of the context of being paired with another IM unlike MBTI which just bizarrely measures them like a trait theory when it isn't supposed to be so if people are just trying to be as intuitive as possible (lol) send them off to MBTI to have fun there. (I guess you can measure how well someone fits a type or other intratype differences as traits and MBTI lives in that limbo which is why it gets crossed with Big 5 and other trait theories as well as other type theories.)

‘Why Germany?’ Trump’s strange fixation vexes experts

This is old but it makes me kind of like some of Trump's policies even if he's such an exaggeratedly paranoid autocrat that he almost makes ****** look unremarkable. If you hate German culture like Merkel does you are putting money in the hands of stupid English bankers that create endless wars in the Middle East and direct American funding to tons of unused weapons instead of necessities such as "infrastructure" and "education."

The happiness conspiracy: against optimism and the cult of positive thinking

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Originally Posted by Singu

Well our "intuition" is just a kind of a theory about the world that we have yet to understand how it works, and yet we somehow claim it to be self-evidently true. But if we claim anything to be self-evidently true, then it's just a way to shield itself from any further criticism. What is thought of to be self-evidently true is not always so self-evidently true after all.

So Jungianism is just a mix of Empiricism, Inductivism and Intuitionism. Jung basically just observed a bunch of patients, and categorized them as he perceived them. And he concluded that that must be true, because his sense-perceptions can't be telling him lies, if only perhaps he were truly honest with himself and rid himself of all prejudices and assumptions. The ideal is to have access to a kind of a direct, "pure" experience of reality, if you will, which has rid itself of all sorts of impurities.

So obviously, the Socionists have inherited this view, and they also conclude that the "typings" must be based on self-evidently true intuitions or sense-perceptions. This is why "battletyping" will always just end with "My perception is more right than your perception, because my perception can't be wrong and it can't be criticized because it's self-evidently true. And if it's wrong, then it must be due to some impure influences, such as that we aren't interpreting the theory purely enough."

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Something that’s self-evident isn’t intuition unless you’re referring to common sense.

Intuition consists of peripheral knowledge which the poster below you explained.

The Never-Ending Third Reich and The Sado-masochism of Anglo-German Relations

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Originally Posted by Evolution

The happiness conspiracy: against optimism and the cult of positive thinking

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I think positive thinking is a good thing. The problem is when people try to think positively when they don't have anything positive to think about. Optimism sucks though since that's just the theory that if you sit back and carefully make sure to do nothing everything will magically become awesome instead of going to hell in a handbasket.

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Originally Posted by sbbds

Something that’s self-evident isn’t intuition unless you’re referring to common sense.

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An Intuitionist would say that a certain kind of intuition is self-evident, therefore need no longer be questioned.

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intuitionism

the theory that primary truths and principles (especially those of ethics and metaphysics) are known directly by intuition.

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What I'm saying is that an intuition is just a certain kind of a theory or background knowledge that we have yet to understand how it works.

Anyway, there's actually no such thing as something that's "self-evident", it just means that it hasn't been challenged yet and we have yet to have an explanation for why that thing is the way it is, which is a normal state for most things, because we have no ultimate justifications for anything. And we don't need ultimate justifications. We just propose an (unjustified) idea, then we criticize it so that it can be improved.

@Singu That's not the case. If you question intuitions you just validate or falsify them the same way as if you question empiricist data. I do that all the time. It doesn't invalidate intuition as a faculty. You can try to invalidate intuition but first you need a proper definition of intuition. If people here want to be cool, don't know what intuition means, and think it means common sense, that's their problem. Intuitive as an adjective is used sort of like common sense but that's still not really what it means.

Dealing in Hate: The development of anti-German propaganda

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Originally Posted by coeruleum

@Singu That's not the case. If you question intuitions you just validate or falsify them the same way as if you question empiricist data. I do that all the time. It doesn't invalidate intuition as a faculty. You can try to invalidate intuition but first you need a proper definition of intuition. If people here want to be cool, don't know what intuition means, and think it means common sense, that's their problem. Intuitive as an adjective is used sort of like common sense but that's still not really what it means.

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I think it's only confusing if we take the Instrumentalist approach and say that as long as an intuition can give us the correct data or something, then who cares how we arrived at that data? But it's problematic if we were to seek explanations for how we arrived at that data or even why that data should be correct and what we have expected in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Singu

I think it's only confusing if we take the Instrumentalist approach and say that as long as an intuition can give us the correct data or something, then who cares how we arrived at that data? But it's problematic if we seek explanations for how we arrived at that data or even why that data should be correct and what we have expected in the first place.

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If you use intuition, that's the explanation, you arrived at the data through intuition. It's like if you see something, the explanation for how you arrived at the data is you saw it, and if you worked through a logical proof, the explanation for the data is you worked through a logical proof. How do you plan on getting rid of intuition? If you do that you'll just live in a world consisting of a bunch of nonsensical data and have to reason through everything if you can figure it out at all.

A Short Introduction into the History of Parapsychological Research in Germany

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Originally Posted by Singu

Anyway, there's actually no such thing as something that's "self-evident", it just means that it hasn't been challenged yet and we have yet to have an explanation for why that thing is the way it is, which is a normal state for most things, because we have no ultimate justifications for anything. And we don't need ultimate justifications. We just propose an (unjustified) idea, then we criticize it so that it can be improved.

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This makes no sense. We don't need to form some sort of falsification club and challenge everything and just endlessly improve ideas. You need an ultimate justification for at least one thing to know what "improved" consists of anyways. For example, let's say I think it's better for things to be lighter than to be heavier since that looks good on paper, right? Since I decided the most important thing to start with is humanity, I shall propose that we all get our limbs cut off and then get whittled down until we weigh nothing at all. Then, we shall be completely improved.

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Originally Posted by coeruleum

If you use intuition, that's the explanation, you arrived at the data through intuition. It's like if you see something, the explanation for how you arrived at the data is you saw it, and if you worked through a logical proof, the explanation for the data is you worked through a logical proof. How do you plan on getting rid of intuition? If you do that you'll just live in a world consisting of a bunch of nonsensical data and have to reason through everything if you can figure it out at all.

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I think that's just prediction, not explanation.

I'm not trying to get rid of intuition, I'm just saying that it has yet to have an explanation. If we literally have nothing else to go by other than intuition, then we'll go with intuition. But if we had an explanation for something, then obviously something with an explanation will be superior to something without an explanation.

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Originally Posted by coeruleum

This makes no sense. We don't need to form some sort of falsification club and challenge everything and just endlessly improve ideas. You need an ultimate justification for at least one thing to know what "improved" consists of anyways. For example, let's say I think it's better for things to be lighter than to be heavier since that looks good on paper, right? Since I decided the most important thing to start with is humanity, I shall propose that we all get our limbs cut off and then get whittled down until we weigh nothing at all. Then, we shall be completely improved.

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The criteria will be whether it solves a problem better or not. So first we'll need to constitute a problem of some kind. And if you say "Well what do you mean by better?", then that will also be decided by the premise being proposed by the problem.

And even if you have no reason for anything, you still can go ahead with it anyway. Unless you have an alternative and you can criticize that idea. Then we'll go with an alternative instead.

@Singu You already said that you arrive at the data through intuition. So, yes, you can arrive at data through intuition. There is a difference between explaining the data (reasoning) and explaining how you arrived at the data (in this case, intuition.)

I think your problem is confusing the idea of something with the actual thing. Explaining that you arrived at something through intuition is a form of reasoning, but intuition itself is not reasoning. Intuition is a logical necessity because in order to arrive at anything through reasoning, you have to have something you didn't reason first. And a technicality for anyone who notices: you could have all your data given to you by authority, but in that case the process(es) of reasoning itself would still have to be an intuition. So by definition it's impossible to explain away intuition. I hear a lot of people arguing that you can never really know anything and it's always an argument against direct knowledge a la Kant's tirade against human intuition. I think it's patently wrong that you can never really know anything but maybe it's just the case that they can't really know anything because they don't want to but I can. If they argue that's not the case (good, they get some self-respect) then they know something. Muahahaha.

I think the real question is, knowledge with respect to what? And making purely academic arguments for the sake of what sounds good is a horrible what.

It Would be Super If Universities Stopped Teaching About Superheroes

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Originally Posted by coeruleum

@Singu You already said that you arrive at the data through intuition. So, yes, you can arrive at data through intuition. There is a difference between explaining the data (reasoning) and explaining how you arrived at the data (in this case, intuition.)

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You don't know how you arrived at that conclusion. Intuition by definition is something that you've arrived at without conscious reasoning. It doesn't have an explanation.

We calculate things in our head but we don't know how we do it. But we know how calculators and computers work.

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Originally Posted by coeruleum

I think your problem is confusing the idea of something with the actual thing. Explaining that you arrived at something through intuition is a form of reasoning, but intuition itself is not reasoning.

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Well that's the entire problem with Intuitionism, that it places intuition above even pure logic and pure reasoning.

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Originally Posted by coeruleum

Intuition is a logical necessity because in order to arrive at anything through reasoning, you have to have something you didn't reason first.

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How can it be a logical necessity, when intuition does it away with logic? It places itself above logic.

The only thing that we can conclude is that there is certain logic to intuition, we just don't know how it works yet.

As for the bolded part, people have been trying to find the "ultimate justification" for logical premises forever. They've been saying that if something isn't justified, then it's meaningless or worthless. Saying that an intuition is the ultimate foundation is just one of the proposed justifications, which is what we call Intuitionism. And if you say that something is self-evidently true, then it is true and it can't be proven wrong, albeit it's only circular reasoning.

However ever since Popper, we've done a 180 degree turn and said that we don't need to have justifications. We just propose an unjustified idea, and then we criticize it if we find it to be problematic.

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Originally Posted by coeruleum

I think it's patently wrong that you can never really know anything but maybe it's just the case that they can't really know anything because they don't want to but I can. If they argue that's not the case (good, they get some self-respect) then they know something. Muahahaha.

I think the real question is, knowledge with respect to what? And making purely academic arguments for the sake of what sounds good is a horrible what.

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I wouldn't say that we can never really know anything, I would say that we could never know anything perfectly or absolutely, because of the fact that information is infinite. And in practical ways, because people are free to criticize anything, and people will eventually find cracks and flaws in any premises and foundations.

@Singu If you use intuition to gain knowledge, then you probably do know how you gained that knowledge, which is through intuition. Intuition is direct perception.

Intuition is logically necessary because in order to have logic, you need to have non-logic, and while "non-logic" doesn't have to be a form of knowledge, the fact is that if you try to derive everything logically, you end up in an infinite regress of logic which is impossible to go through linearly. Intuition is the inverse to infinitary logic, since even an infinite logical set can't explain all things so you also have zero logic. You can rationally explain any fact you can intuit but you can't get rid of intuition as a faculty in the process since any (abstract) knowledge you have is the result of both intuition and reason to some extent as a matter of course.

I would place intuition above reasoning due to the fact that it's more basic but that's different than intuition without reasoning. I thought pure reasoning was obviously problematic though.

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Originally Posted by Singu

An Intuitionist would say that a certain kind of intuition is self-evident, therefore need no longer be questioned.



What I'm saying is that an intuition is just a certain kind of a theory or background knowledge that we have yet to understand how it works.

Anyway, there's actually no such thing as something that's "self-evident", it just means that it hasn't been challenged yet and we have yet to have an explanation for why that thing is the way it is, which is a normal state for most things, because we have no ultimate justifications for anything. And we don't need ultimate justifications. We just propose an (unjustified) idea, then we criticize it so that it can be improved.

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1) Intuitionism isn’t the same thing as intuition in general. These are different concepts.

2) Intuition doesn’t have to be a theory if you don’t want it to be lol.

3) Well, it can be argued I guess that what is considered self-evident or common sense can be subjective sometimes.

Intuition is always numerous steps a head of empiricism, which can only really operate in hindsight. If it weren't for intuition, we would do or say anything because it wasn't scientifically proven yet. We use it everyday in numerous different situation and is a large driver of our behavior. However, due to their subjective nature we should not hesitate to question intuitions that go against strong empirical data and evidence, as long as the data has a high confidence of being right. The data should count.

Live by intuition, learn by science.

Life is more meaningful with intuition as a guide. It is important for so many things, from art, to the humanities, to the sciences. It is a large component of who we are. Without it, we would not have imagination, and as Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

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Originally Posted by coeruleum

@Singu If you use intuition to gain knowledge, then you probably do know how you gained that knowledge, which is through intuition. Intuition is direct perception.

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Which you can logically or rationally criticize, because no theory or perception is perfect.

An Intuitionist would say that such a criticism is invalid, because an intuition is placed outside of logic. Then they will continue to say that an intuition is self-evidently true. So this just sort of turns into Solipsism, where they say that only what they can personally perceive or intuit is true.

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Originally Posted by coeruleum

Intuition is logically necessary because in order to have logic, you need to have non-logic, and while "non-logic" doesn't have to be a form of knowledge, the fact is that if you try to derive everything logically, you end up in an infinite regress of logic which is impossible to go through linearly. Intuition is the inverse to infinitary logic, since even an infinite logical set can't explain all things so you also have zero logic. You can rationally explain any fact you can intuit but you can't get rid of intuition as a faculty in the process since any (abstract) knowledge you have is the result of both intuition and reason to some extent as a matter of course.

I would place intuition above reasoning due to the fact that it's more basic but that's different than intuition without reasoning. I thought pure reasoning was obviously problematic though.

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I don't think you can rationally explain intuition by that definition. Which is why an intuition is supposedly placed outside of logic. And then it's illogically assumed to be self-evidently true.

So I would say that an intuition is merely something without a theory of how that works. We can start with an unjustified intuition, but that doesn't mean that an intuition can't be explained or be criticized and improved.

@Singu that's all nonsense. Please go back to teaching us about Popper's books and about empiricism and the scientific method. Thanks!

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The author of this article is LIE to the core: https://ritholtz.com/2019/03/its-not...ny-capitalism/

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Notes Towards a Deranged Realism

I know more than one with this addiction, so I wanted to understand more, and read a lot, and this was the best article of the many I read. Especially because of what she says at the end. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/b...ddiction-today

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