Just more black-on-black violence

The Narrative further melts down:

The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him

A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men. Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account. “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?” the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.”

Now that is indeed amusing. The Great White Defendant isn’t just Hispanic, but turns out to be an octoroon! Case closed. Send the camera crews home. That sound you’re hearing is just the term “White Hispanic” being frantically scrubbed from the media style guides.

Dissecting the sceptics I

I’ve been asked in the past to explain how go about breaking down and critically analyzing an argument and how I am able to so readily spot the flaws it contains. Since Delavagus has demonstrated that he is no more able to discuss and defend his views of Pyrrhonism than Sextus Empiricus, albeit without Sextus’s excuse of having been dead for 1,802 yearsfound the time to respond to my two questions, his two posts on ancient scepticism will serve as an ideal specimen for this example. I’m not going to do it all at once, however. This will be an ongoing series over the next few weeks in order to keep the argument digestible since most of you have no reason to be familiar with the ancient source material. But I can assure you that it’s really not very difficult stuff so long as you look past the fluff of the vocabulary.

The first question I always ask myself is if the argument is primarily factual, logical, or rhetorical in nature. The second question I ask myself is if the author is likely to have any idea what he’s talking about or not. And the third question is if I regard the author as being trustworthy or not, or rather, if I believe him to be fundamentally intellectually honest or not. These three questions determine how carefully I read through an argument and whether I presume the author is more likely to make a simple mistake or whether any apparent mistakes are actually intentional attempts to sneak something past the insufficiently careful reader in order to make a flawed argument look convincing.

The fourth question is what is the author trying to prove? This question often can’t be answered initially, but I keep it in the back of my mind for future reference. Once I identify the specific point that the author is trying to prove, I can track back from it to see if a) his logic is correct, and b) if that logic is soundly supported. It’s important to keep in mind that the actual point that the author is trying to prove is not necessarily the one that he appears to be trying to prove in the title or introduction.

Now, in his post To Know Our Unknowing, Delavagus describes himself thusly: “My name’s Roger Eichorn. I’m a friend of Scott’s, an aspiring fantasy novelist, and a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Chicago. My primary area of specialization is ancient skepticism, particularly the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus.”

So what does this tell us? He’s educated, he’s inexperienced, he’s at least moderately intelligent, he’s a wannabee, he’s a larval academic, and like most would-be novelists, he’s probably got at least a bit of a superiority complex. Moreover, he chooses to frequent a place that we know to be run by a confirmed intellectual snake. We also know, given the subject matter, that there is a textual authority to which his arguments can be compared and held accountable. So, the answers to the three questions are: factual, yes, and no. It’s a factual argument written by someone who probably knows what he’s talking about and is potentially at least a little intellectually dishonest. And since he’s an academic of sorts, we know to look for the word games, in particular the definitional bait-and-switch of which they are so very fond. At this point, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I smell a rat, only that I believe there is a high probability that a rat or two will soon present itself. So, I read the post paying particular attention to any definitional ambiguities or unwarranted leaps of logic.

In this post, I’d like to discuss one of Scott’s favorite themes—human stupidity—in relation to Pyrrhonism. Scott focuses, and for good reason, on the growing scientific (that is, empirical) evidence to the effect that humans are stupid, stupid creatures. Much of this work is cutting-edge stuff, largely because of recent technological advances that have (as Scott likes to say) broken open the ‘black box’ of the human brain. Even so, there’s a sense in which the findings Scott brings to our attention are merely the latest chapter in a long story, a story that goes all the way back to the ancients.

Sextus Empicirus himself based many of his arguments on empirical evidence. Though, of course, his ‘evidence’ was not the sort of thing that would pass muster in a modern scientific context, I believe there’s every reason to think that, were he alive today, Sextus would be at least as fascinated by the growing body of evidence concerning human cognitive shortcomings as Scott is—and moreover, there’s every reason to think that he would have made potent use of this evidence in his skeptical dialectic.

However, Sextus did not think that we require empirical evidence in order to arrive at the conclusion that we’re all idiots. That conclusion, he thought, can be arrived at purely a priori, that is, while lounging in our armchairs and merely thinking through our knowing. Let’s see how this works.

The question is this: What, if anything, do we know? Knowledge is generally taken to be justified true belief.* (This is a twentieth-century formulation, but the thought goes back at least to Plato.) On the one hand, there are beliefs—all sorts of beliefs, many of them batshit crazy. On the other hand, there is the way things actually are (truth). How do we assure ourselves that a belief reflects how things actually are? We do so, the thought goes, by justifying that belief.

* = Those with a philosophical background might at this point protest, “But what of Gettier cases?” I’m going to ignore Gettier here, partly to keep things simple, but also because I think Gettier’s problematization of the standard conception of knowledge fails, that its failure has been demonstrated numerous times, and that epistemologists should just move on already.

Now, far be it from me to argue with the assertion that humans are stupid, stupid creatures. MPAI, after all. That being said, do you spot the first error? We’ve barely gotten started and already we find a questionable word game being played with “evidence”, as well as irrelevant musings on what would fascinate Sextus and an unjustified belief claim concerning how Sextus would have made use of modern scientific evidence. The latter, we will eventually see, is particularly ironic, but at this point it’s neither here nor there. Perhaps, like the gentleman with the 190+ IQ, Sextus would instead spend his days looking at pictures of unclad women, repeatedly taking IQ tests, and writing jokes. We don’t know, and more to the point, we don’t care. But what this very usefully tells us is that Delavagus is not a rigorous thinker and he is liable to going off on irrelevant tangents and making groundless assertions concerning things he can’t possibly know.

Of course, the second error is not only readily observable, but is the very sort of error towards which we anticipated he would be inclined. He practically highlights it for us, as he writes “Knowledge is generally taken to be justified true belief.” Weasel words such as “generally”, “basically”, and “pretty much” are always red flags, particularly when they precede something as important as the definition of an argument’s foundation or central subject. So is “justified true belief” really what knowledge is? Let’s turn to the dictionary.

Knowledge
Origin: 1250–1300; Middle English knouleche

1. acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation; general erudition: knowledge of many things.
2. familiarity or conversance, as with a particular subject or branch of learning: A knowledge of accounting was necessary for the job.
3. acquaintance or familiarity gained by sight, experience, or report: a knowledge of human nature.
4. the fact or state of knowing; the perception of fact or truth; clear and certain mental apprehension.
5. awareness, as of a fact or circumstance: He had knowledge of her good fortune.
6. something that is or may be known; information: He sought knowledge of her activities.
7. the body of truths or facts accumulated in the course of time.
8. the sum of what is known: Knowledge of the true situation is limited.
9. sexual intercourse.

As should be clear, Delavagus’s definition of knowledge isn’t a valid one in common usage, but instead represents a different concept altogether. His statement is provably incorrect, as knowledge is quite clearly NOT “generally taken to be justified true belief”. I tend to doubt Sextus Empiricus is considered to have logically proven that Man cannot have sex, even if, as per Tucker Max, the average philosophy student at the University of Chicago has about as much experience of sexual intercourse as he does with riding unicorns. But the important thing is that Pyrrhonism, or more properly, Delavagus’s argument in defense of Pyrrhonism, has no more connection to the other eight definitions of “knowledge” than it does to sex. This tenth definition would be fine, of course, (perhaps it could be termed “knowledge in the philosophical sense”), so long as Delavagus subsequently avoids attempting to switch from “justified true belief” to any of the nine definitions provided by the dictionary. He hasn’t done so yet, but due to his attempt to pass off his own definition as a general one, we now know to be on guard for the likely switch to come.

As for his dismissal of Gettier, who showed that there are instances of justified true belief that are not knowledge and therefore it is not correct to attempt equating knowledge with justified true belief, Delavagus’s handwaving and appeal to the authority of his own opinion only underlines his previously identified lack of intellectual precision. But since he doesn’t attempt to deal with it, we have no need to do so either other than to point out that he readily admits to ignoring this known objection to a key foundation of his argument.

Subsequent sections
Dissecting the skeptics II
Dissecting the skeptics III
Dissecting the skeptics IV
Dissecting the skeptics V
Dissecting the skeptics VI
Dissecting the skeptics VII
Dissecting the skeptics VIII

Related
Exposing the False Skeptic
The “Skeptic” Confesses

Too many lawyers

Even law professors are beginning to think so:

This week I’m planning to write about various widespread but in my view mistaken beliefs regarding the intensifying crisis in American legal education. I’m going to start with this one: The biggest problem with American legal education is that it fails to produce practice-ready graduates.

This claim has been made by critics of the legal academic establishment for roughly a century now (every 15 years or so some sort of quasi-official report reiterates it). It was a topic of discussion at a law school symposium this weekend on the future of the legal profession, and is apparently a theme of Jim Molitenrno’s forthcoming book, A Profession in Crisis, which argues that the fundamental problems with legal education today are in large part products of the fact that more than a century ago “medical schools decided that their mission would be to turn out doctors, while law schools decided that their mission would be to turn out law professors.”

Now the claim that law schools remain largely indifferent to the fact that law school teaches law students almost nothing about the practice of law is itself quite true. What isn’t the case is that this fact has in itself much to do with the increasingly unacceptable relationship between the cost of a law degree and the economic benefits it confers. Making graduates practice-ready is a fine idea in theory — why else are law students going to law school anyway? — but if such reforms do nothing about, or worse yet exacerbate, the crumbling cost-benefit structure of legal education they will do nothing about this fundamental structural problem. … Any reform that doesn’t make legal education less expensive while reducing the number of new attorneys is doing nothing about the real crisis, which is that law school costs far too much relative to the number of jobs available for attorneys.

Of course, unemployment is not the real problem with producing two lawyers for every one legal job. The primary problem is that lawyers are one of the few professions where they can easily create demand for their services at the expense of everyone else in society. It’s as if doctors were out there breaking legs and releasing flu viruses in order to ensure a growing demand for their services.

Vibrant marriage and the future

When you read this, keep in mind that most of the Muslims in the UK are of Pakistani origin:

Rachna Kumari, 16, was shopping for dresses in this city’s dust-choked bazaar when it happened. The man who her family says abducted her was not a street thug. He was a police officer. Nor was he a stranger. Rachna’s family knew and trusted him. He guarded the Hindu temple run by her father, an important duty in a society where Hindus are often terrorized by Muslim extremists, and he had helped Rachna cram for her ninth-grade final exams. After she disappeared from the market, he did not demand a ransom. According to her family, he had an entirely different purpose: to force her to convert to Islam and marry him.

In a country where Hindu-dominated India is widely reviled as Enemy No. 1, Pakistan’s Hindu community endures extortion, disenfranchisement and other forms of discrimination. These days, however, Hindus are fixated on a surge of kidnappings of teenage girls by young Muslim men who force them to convert and wed. Pakistani human rights activists report as many as 25 cases a month.

Of course, the left-wing champions of barbarian immigration aren’t likely to be concerned about the risk of adding these vibrant cultural traditions to their societies, since they are statistically less inclined to have children in the first place. This inspires an idea. Perhaps it’s best to forget women’s suffrage, as it’s arguably even more important to not permit those who have no stake in the future any voice in shaping it. Why should the childless be permitted to sentence future generations to whom they have no connection to massive quantities of debt? This also has the added bonus of disproportionately removing the most ideologically problematic women from the electorate as well as many of the most left-leaning men.

You don’t say

A global warming fanatic admits that he’s been “alarmist”:

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too. Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared. He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
However, the professor admitted in a telephone interview with msnbc.com that he now thinks he had been “extrapolating too far.”

You think? The interesting thing about this article is that there is no chance that Lovelock was alarmist about “climate change”, considering that he was in on it early. He was a “global warming” alarmist, and while climate change may be happening, global warming isn’t. And while the “scientific consensus” may have been settled, it’s important to remember that even peer-reviewed experimental science only gets it right 11 percent of the time. Extrapolative science, otherwise known as “science fiction”, doesn’t do anywhere near that well.

Mailvox: Sextus say relax

Not being a reader of this blog, Delavagus would have had no reason to know I’d read Sextus Empiricus last October, which is why I’m somewhat more familiar with Pyrrhonian scepticism than he probably assumed. Anyhow, the two questions he presented weren’t difficult to answer, although I leave it to the reader to decide how effectively I answered them.

I’m particularly interested if, after reading [his two posts on ancient skepticism], you still want to charge skepticism with incoherence. If so, (a) what do you think the incoherence consists in? and (b) in what way does Sextus’s argument against peritrope fail?

First, let me point out that I’ve told Delavagus I am quite willing to respond in detail to those two posts on ancient skepticism if he’s willing to allow me to post large chunks of them – properly credited to him, of course – here on the blog so that everyone easily can follow along. But it’s not necessary to go into that level of detail to answer these two questions, although I have to point out that my charge of incoherence was not directed at Sextus Empiricus, the Pyrrhonian school of scepticism, or even skepticism in general, but rather at the professed uncertainty of R. Scott Bakker.

That being said, yes, I do still want to charge skepticism, specifically Pyrrhonian scepticism, with incoherence. In answer to (a), I think the incoherence consists of the inherent contradiction between its arguments and its aims. In Chapter XII What Is the Aim of Scepticism, Empiricus writes: “It follows naturally to treat of the aim of the Sceptical School. An aim is that for which as an end all things are done or thought, itself depending on nothing, or in other words, it is the ultimatum of things to be desired. We say, then, that he aim of the Sceptic is “tranquility of soul” in those things which pertain to the opinion and moderation in the things that life imposes.”

This creates two problems. It should be readily apparent that we can observe here that the Sceptic is claiming knowledge of things that, by virtue of his own philosophical system, he cannot possibly know. If he cannot know that the soul exists, he cannot reasonably aim for its tranquility. If he cannot know what tranquility is, he cannot aim for helping his soul reach that state. If he has no quantifiable metric for the things that life imposes, he cannot know what is excess, what is insufficient, and still less what is that desired moderation. Pyrrhonian scepticism is incoherent as both a philosophy and as a way of life because it is little more than a philosophically offensive weapon that can be trained just as effectively on its own stated purposes as on anything else.

Moreover, it can be shown to empirically fail as well, at least to the extent that it actually exists today. One of the arguments presented by the Uncertainty crowd is that the unquestioning nature of belief certainty is dangerous because it permits people to act freely without remorse or guilty conscience. But what is the most extreme belief certainty if not “‘tranquility of soul’ in those things which pertain to the opinion”? The member of the SS-Totenkopfverbände who was morally certain of the rightness of the Final Solution and liquidated the enemies of the National Socialist regime during the day without losing any sleep over it at night is, by Sextus Empiricus’s own chosen measure, a more perfect Sceptic than the philosophy student who tosses and turns throughout the night wrestling with the troubling question of his own existence. Moreover, in discussing various beliefs with the Uncertainty crowd at Three Pound Brain, (who are not necessarily proper Pyrrhonian School Sceptics by any means), it is readily observable that they possess no tranquility of soul, as they are, by their own admission, deeply bothered by the mere existence of beliefs with which they strongly disagree.

Concerning (b), Sextus’s argument against peritrope fails on three counts. First, he erroneously conflates the subset (his particular philosophy) with the set (all philosophico-rational thought); because there is philosophico-rational thought that is not Pyrrhonian scepticism, all refutation of the latter cannot automatically be taken as any refutation of the former. Second, even if Sextus were correct and charging the skeptic with self-refutation did amount to charging philosophico-rational thought as such with self-refutation, that doesn’t change the fact that since Pyrrhonian scepticism is a subset of philosophico-rational thought, if the charge is substantiated and all philosophico-rational thought is, in fact, self-refuting, then the charge of peritrope against Scepticism must also be correct! It’s not a valid defense. Third, Sextus doesn’t realize that the intended target of Pyrrhonian arguments is irrelevant with regards to its self-refuting nature; it doesn’t matter what he is intending to target when it can be shown that his arguments necessarily also target his own stated aims.

And in conclusion, I note that it is not only the core aims that are susceptible to a valid charge of peritrope, but each of the Ten Tropes that are used to justify Pyrrhonian “suspension of judgment” as well.

Democracy vs Aristocracy

The New York Times asks Tyler Cowen about the present state of the EU:

Today, very few countries in the euro zone are capable of making credible commitments or binding agreements with the others. Quite simply, democracy is having its say. The French soon may elect a left-wing candidate who, in essence, wants to exempt France from fiscal rules and place more fiscal risk on Germany. The Dutch can no longer form a governmental consensus on the budget. The Irish will be putting the fiscal compact up for a referendum, and the Greeks are holding an election in May. Even in Germany there could be problems holding together the ruling coalition.

In general, voters are unwilling to give up their say over policy, or to regard the European Union or euro zone as necessarily superior to national interests. When it comes to the specifics, it appears increasingly likely that at least one national electorate will pull the plug on the entire set of bailouts and austerity programs.

There is no way to pull off the required cross-national agreements. Resources are being drained from euro zone banks, which are contracting their lending to business. This will make the current recession worse, which in turn will necessitate further unpopular policies, including cuts in government spending. Euro zone countries will become more nationalistic in hard times, and more likely to vote against incumbent governments, no matter what the specific issue at stake. It is hard to see a stabilizing outcome, so the best bet is on a crack-up of some of Europe’s major economies, including Spain and Italy.

There is an old saying in economics, namely “no monetary union without a corresponding fiscal union.” It could be added “no fiscal union without a corresponding electoral union.” In the longer run, we will probably end up with none of these institutions.

The euro zone probably was unworkable from the beginning, and now we are seeing why.

What we’re seeing here is the last desperate gasps of democracy as the new aristocratic age struggles to be born. The outcome of the current crisis is far from certain, but at least we’re now able to see relatively clearly what the most likely possibilities are. The collapse of the Dutch government and the surge of the anti-EU National Front in France show that the strategy of the European political elite, which is to offer the people a choice between pro-EU Party A and pro-EU Party B, is no longer working. Even in the UK, which is slightly insulated from the problems of the Euro thanks to its retention of the pound sterling, the popularity of UKIP is now growing rapidly due to the recognition that there isn’t any meaningful euroskepticism in the Conservative Party anymore. (Note to Daniel Hannan – you’re a leader, not a follower, and so it’s time to switch to UKIP).

Since the European masses are turning against the EU, the next tactic of the EU elite will be to suborn leaders like the Socialist Hollande, who are elected on moderately anti-EU promises. I expect Hollande to turn around and stab his left-wing nationalist followers in the back by embracing the austerity programs designed to keep the banks out of default, thus assuring that Marine Le Pen and the National Front will have a real chance of winning the next set of French elections. But the overall pressure is growing, and so when the bait-and-switch tactics fail, the new European aristocracy will turn to the solution they’ve imposed in Italy and Greece, which is to altogether abandon democratic rule. Right now, these aristocratic interregnums are short-term, but no doubt another debt or currency crisis will provide the justification for extending them where they already exist and imposing them where they don’t. The only way they can push for the political and fiscal union for which the monetary union was the bait is by throwing out all but the last vestiges of democratic government.

But the long-awaited nationalist tide is just beginning to rise, which is an excellent thing considering the monstrous and authoritarian nature of the globalist aristocracy. The potential problem is that in order to smash the edifice constructed by the ruling aristocracy, the nationalist pendulum will swing farther than it needs to. Thanks to the machinations of the multiculturalists, there are no shortage of scapegoats readily on hand for the angry and newly nationalistic natives; in fact, one wonders if the elite’s encouragement of mass immigration might have been intended as a means of both distracting and marginalizing the nationalist forces from the start. Either way, it’s already clear that it won’t work; the National Front won 30 percent of the real French vote and similar results will be seen in other elections across Europe.

No patience for debate?

Fresh from being caught out, Wängsty makes what would appear to be a wildly unfounded accusation:

One of the things that has always puzzled me about this fracas is the way the Hate Camp is so bent on perceptions of my ‘emotional distress,’ the idea that they are ‘getting to me,’ or causing me real emotional anguish. And I realized, these are people who want to hurt people they deem ‘immoral.’ They want, quite simply, someone to punish – or a ‘punching bag,’ as ACM has it. Now this is more than a little troubling. But it does explain why they have no patience for nuance or debate. It’s hard to hurt people when their guilt is aired as an open question. If they’re innocent, then you being so bent on hurting them says some pretty nasty things about you.

To which I responded: Is that so? You couldn’t find any of the extensive debates on my blog? Very well, to prove you wrong, I’m pleased to challenge you to a written debate on the causal relationship between certainty, as you have defined it, and war. I suggest three rounds of no more than 2,500 words per person each, and since you have made the claim, I suggest that you go first.

Do you accept?

PS – I readily acknowledge that I still owe Dominic the next round on the existence of gods. And I have worked on it, but I’m not satisfied with it yet. Knowing him, I expect he won’t object, seeing as that it will take only a fraction of the effort to take apart Bakker’s claim than it does to effectively respond to Dominic’s arguments.

A classic hero

You are Aeneas. You’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders but sometimes you just need to focus on the task at hand and stop moaning! Sometimes your relentless drive can make you seem cold-hearted but you are compassionate and a selfless leader.

How very odd! I thought surely I’d end up as Odysseus. Anyhow, the quiz is to celebrate the release of a new edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. And speaking of classics, I have to express my deep gratitude to SL, whom I met yesterday for an excellent three-wine lunch on a beautiful afternoon overlooking the uncharacteristically sunny Langhe. He also gave me a set of the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is already established in my bookshelf on two shelves just under my cherished Cambridge Medieval History. It makes for fascinating reading, and I’ve already encountered a monastic order, hitherto unbeknownst to me, that I’m considering how to incorporate into the new novel.

This seemed apt

I thought this comment at In Mala Fide was particularly on target in light of the ongoing discussion at Wängsty’s place:

Jonathan Haidt has shown that most liberals are simply people who only care about care/harm and fairness, while discounting loyalty, respect for authority, and purity/sanctity. For liberals there are no transcendent moral values, only utility and fairness. Furthermore, other scholars have found that most people tend to rely less on those latter three moral foundations when they are comfortable and safe. Which means that liberalism is the natural and spontaneous result of living in a safe and prosperous society. Haidt has also found that liberals can’t even understand loyalty, respect for authority and purity/sanctity. So they tend to think their political opponents are just being massive dicks.

The landmark performance of the National Front in France yesterday makes it very clear that conventional left-liberalism can’t survive economic hard times. As unemployment continues to rise and economic pressure intensifies, people will quite naturally become far less indulgent of the various absurdities that the Left continues to push on the populations of the West. It’s simply not credible to argue “immigration is good for the economy” when the youth unemployment rate is north of 50 percent and 50 percent of college graduates are either unemployed or working at jobs for which their degrees are absolutely unnecessary.

History has always been cyclical and it is not different this time. I pointed out that peak atheism corresponded pretty closely with the tech boom, and I think it is safe to conclude that we have likely passed the peak of social liberalism and multiculturalism as well. The problem, of course, is that while some left-liberals will return to sanity, many more will move to the hard left, or what the Communists call “the fascist right” and all of the violence that necessarily entails.

It’s worth noting that according to Haidt, the only arguments to which liberals are likely to convincing are utility-based. You’ll note that those are the sorts of arguments upon which I tend to heavily rely when engaging in discourse with them.