Comments on: I Myself Am A Scientismist http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/ In a mad world, all blogging is psychiatry blogging Fri, 24 Jul 2015 18:45:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3 By: MugaSofer http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-28826 Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:36:50 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-28826 “If it gets proven wrong once or twice or sixty times, we can dismiss that as a fluke, or an edge case, or It’s Beside The Point, or The Real Question Is Whether You Are Racist For Even Bringing That Up.”

Scott, are you ever going to explain your Deep Insights into this sort of thing? Obviously, some of these techniques may be evil. But you have unparalleled access to the rationalist community, so I’m guessing the instrumental value could be high.

Oh, and I’m crazy curious, of course. Hmm, I think I’ll ask this on a few posts in the hope it’ll be seen.

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]]> By: houseboatonstyx http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-16427 Tue, 03 Sep 2013 19:04:44 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-16427 Very late comment. In the old view, the center of the Universe was not a place of honor. It was considered the worst place (short of Hell, which was the center of the Earth). It was the bottom, the gravity well of the Universe, where the dregs collected.

For a short and readable treatment, see C. S. Lewis’s THE DISCARDED IMAGE. For equally readable but much longer and more detailed, Google
site:m-francis.livejournal.com earth center of universe

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]]> By: Rob http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-15987 Sun, 18 Aug 2013 18:53:38 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-15987 Sean Carroll suggests tabooing the word “scientism”, and I’m inclined to agree with him.

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/08/14/lets-stop-using-the-word-scientism/

(http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationalist_taboo)

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]]> By: Will http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-15740 Wed, 07 Aug 2013 17:41:43 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-15740 For me “scientism” has a slightly different connotation, that of people who are pretending to use the scientific method, but are actually not converging on truth.

I probably get this connotation from reading Hayek, particularly his Nobel Prize lecture, though he never uses that term as such (preferring “scientistic”): http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html

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]]> By: Paul Torek http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-15483 Mon, 29 Jul 2013 16:58:14 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-15483 Alexander Rosenberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Rosenberg) “published a defense of what he called ‘Scientism’—the claim that ‘the persistent questions’ people ask about the nature of reality, the purpose of things, the foundations of value and morality, the way the mind works, the basis of personal identity, and the course of human history, could all be answered by the resources of science”. More discussion at http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=4209. Some of the “answers” to “persistent questions” amount to more like dismissals of the questions, but sometimes that’s a good thing.

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]]> By: deathpigeon http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-15480 Mon, 29 Jul 2013 10:52:55 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-15480 I solve the scienstimist problem by calling it sciencism and people who are like that sciencists.

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]]> By: Anonymous http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-15468 Sat, 27 Jul 2013 20:51:09 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-15468 The top post of all time is “So guys and girls, who wants to see all the crazy posts that are picked up by the mods of /r/philosophy before you get a chance to rip them apart?”.

So it’s pretty explicitly about making fun of bad philosophy.

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]]> By: Paul Crowley http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-15466 Sat, 27 Jul 2013 15:27:39 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-15466 Interesting that when (on Twitter) I pointed the journalist Oliver Burkeman at this article, he also raised the example of Sam Harris’s errors of moral philosophy as a great example of scientism, just as many commenting here have. Is there only one example of copper-bottomed scientism in the world? Can we have nine more points in this cluster before we draw a circle around it and give it a name please?

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]]> By: Carinthium http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-15459 Sat, 27 Jul 2013 06:41:07 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-15459 Von Kalifornen, can you clarify your reasoning here? I admit I haven’t read enough of the relevant stuff, but if I remember correctly this is because of them are wants and from a metaethical perspective equivalent. But as far as I can see it in practice:
-Take the hypothetical where a person has two courses of action. One benefits them overall and is bad from a utilitarian perspective, the other makes them worse off overall but is good from a utilitarian perspective. This is factoring for guilt and future consequences of such selfishness which of course exist. Elizier’s theory, if I understand it right, has no way to choose between them. Despite this, Elizier’s ethical writings never seem to treat this is a question worth discussing.

I know about “You can’t argue with a rock”, but the difference is that real people do sometimes come into dilemnas which are basically “Should I be selfless or selfish?” A practical guide of human behaviour should thus adress such situations.

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]]> By: von Kalifornen http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/#comment-15455 Sat, 27 Jul 2013 03:24:28 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=876#comment-15455 With TDT, selfishness and selflessness become identical.

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