zurew

By theoretical virtue I mean things that can help us differentiate and rank theories. It basically gives meaning to the word "better" in the context of choosing between theories. So for instance, if there is a set of facts (call it X), and there are 3 different theories put forth to explain X, theoretical virtues can helps us to non-randomly choose between those theories. So things like simplicity (all else being equal, a theory that assumes less is better) , explainability ( all else being equal, a theory that can explain more facts is better) , predictability ( all else being equal , a theory that can predict future events or behaviour and isn't just an explanation for an existing dataset is better) and there are more virtues , but generally speaking those are the ones that are brought up.

@DocWatts Regarding specifically the "what would make an argument better compared to another" do you have a take on theoretical virtues? Also do you have a stance on theories of truth? (I am referring to correspondence, pragmatist , coherence and others)

Naaah, Jordan is way too invested in maintaining his christian and non-new agey image. Your stuff will be categorized as new age and he will definitely debate you on solipsism and won't just let you to lay it out without any pushback. You will be debated and your ideas will be hardcore scrutinized on the go and I don't think you have a good skillset to deal with that.

@questionreality Whats your take on jan6?

Go ahead, lay those things out.

Why wouldn't they need to worry about voting next time? As long as there will be elections in the future, that statement doesn't make any sense. Think that statement through. Lets go with Trump actually fixing giant problems and after 4 years the next election comes. Why would Trump give room to democrats and to the deepstate to win the next election and potentially destroy everything that he fixed? it wasn't an accident and it wasn't a slip. Trump is probably aware that his followers will get charged by this rhetoric and he knows that they would be okay with him being a king with all the power in the world . You can literally see posts with like 60k+ likes on twitter where people say I would rather choose a dictator(Trump) than Joe Biden. What you need understand is that the MAGA crowd has certain beliefs that necessarily leads to this direction. In their eyes, everything is corrupt and rigged againts them and everything is controlled by the deepstate (including democrats) and only Trump can help. Given those beliefs and given Trump's rhetoric - of course you end up supporting dictatorship , where the dictator is the good guy, who needs to have power to actually have the ability to fight against the worst and most dangerous group of people in human history. There are almost no real centrists , all of them are right wing, they just don't have the spine to admit, because this way they can collect social credit for appearing less biased.

I completely agree. I am becoming more and more obsessed with clarity (regardless what kind of domain we are talking about). Identifying all the relevant things and being able to know what things you should ignore in a given domain and in a given moment or time period is absolutely essential. Regarding LP, the more clarity you have and the better you can spell out exactly the thing that you want to do or achieve , the better you will be able to attack it and the better you will be able to find and focus on the relevant things. I think in a lot of cases, the reason why we don't know what to do is because our goal is not specified enough so its unclear how we could approach it. A good example for how important clarity is the XY problem. The other important thing after you have clarity is laser focus on the relevant things (obviously without clarity you don't even know whats relevant). Casually doing certain beneficial habits (like going to the gym, meditation etc) can be good, but purposefully doing those things and knowing exactly why you do those things and what you want to achieve exactly with those things will help to actually get results. Imagine being able to spell out the exact purpose behind 90% of your daily actions (including micro actions). An Insane amount of time and energy is wasted because of the lack of goal orientedness behind our micro actions. The other really underrated thing that everyone knows about ,but almost no one takes it seriously enough is tracking your progress and consciously creating an environment where you can periodically get feedback.

None of this make any sense in the context of democracy. What kind of possible issues being fixed could make it so , that republicans won't need the votes of christians in the future ? There is no reason for republicans to discourage potiential voters from voting for them in the future. Thats like saying "You won't need to vote for me in the future, so that democrats will have more chance to win future elections and completely destroy what I built up and what I achieved as a president" From the MAGA's pov, thats like saying "give more power to the deepstate in future elections"

More like almost half of the population thinks that a noble king is better than the corrupt and evil deepstate . Imagine having all the beliefs MAGA has about the deepstate about vaccines, about rigged election about sacrificing kids for ritual about raping people and kids, about poisioning the food , the air, the water, about hiding technology that could cure cancer etc and having Trump the savior who can single handedly go against and fix all of that.

I have seen some big cope from republicans saying that what Trump truly meant was: "If he wins a second term, he can’t run again." (because that would be his last term). If they truly think thats what Trump meant, they shouldn't vote for Trump ever again, because he is too mentally declined and he can't communicate his thoughts at all.

Insane statements to make. Conservatives pissing their pants when Biden says some soft ass things and they read into his statements 20 layer deep, but they will make excuses for Trump when Trump's statements are pretty clear and straightforward. They won't ever call out or say a word when their daddy Trump using insane rhetoric like this and they cry when people call Trump a fascist. Just imagine if Biden would have made those statements, how conservatives would have reacted to it.

Musk and his freedom of speech It seems, there are protected users (all rightwingers) who have special priviledge in using racial slurs Some of the users are: Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, Endwokeness, Clownworld, bunch of users with "Trump" in their name , Libs of tiktok etc. https://x.com/brndxix/status/1816231803973521728 Just as a sidenote: I haven't seen any articles written on this and it is from twitter so it is possible that it is fake or a misunderstanding , but on its face right now, this looks really bad.

Watch the videos in slowmo that I linked I don't know what else to tell you guys or watch this with 0.25 speed from 10:39. You can see the opening of the pot is facing officers, you can also see how she is lifting up the pot and threw it right before she gets shot. You can literally see that steam coming off from the top of the chair. Again you can condemn both of these cops and acknowledge that they hugely fucked up and the one who shot her in the head should go to jail while also acknowledging that she threw the pot. Now regarding the details of the story: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sonia-massey-police-shooting-mental-illness-b2585416.html she was mentally ill (had schizophrenia), and an additional context to the saying of "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" :

She did throw it, watch back the videos in slow motion. At this point, this is almost inarguable. You do know that you can still accept this point and still condemn the cops, right?

@Princess Arabia watch this from 18:30 You can even see when the water lands on the floor.

She did throw it and you can see the pot flying towards the cop and inferring from the steam you can see that from the pot the boiling water managed to immediately land at the cop's feet. How did it get there if it wasn't thrown?

Given all the context "rebuke you in the name of Jesus" does mean throwing the boiling water on you, but regarldess watch the video from the timestamp of 28:25 with 0.25 speed. You can see that she is throwing it.

Here is how it looked like from the shooter cops's pov (I time stamped it, its starts from 28:25 If you put the speed at 0.25 you can see that she did try to throw the boiling water on the cops. The other thing is that she did say a few second before the throw "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" while holding the boiling water in her hand. That all being said, he shouldn't have shot her in the head.

Leo keep increasing the standard until you only have people left who are worth interacting with. I gave you some points in the other thread about how I personally think you could do that , but obviously you can enforce more rules or different rules. You have a bunch of mods who would probably be happy enforcing new rules if they could see how those rules could elevate the quality of the forum. Its your forum dude, you can do whatever you want with it, you don't need to conform to anyone. There is not much to gain from letting people destroy your mental health and letting people create absolute garbage threads that are 4chan quality. When you have people who cant respond with an argument and evidence when pushed on a set of claims they made and they refuse to let go or concede said claims, there is no reason to keep those people around. We ideally should strive for an environment where people are repulsed from responding with speculation and are highly motivated to source their claims (in a way where they can defend the claims made in that source, not in a way where we overwhelm people with sources that we haven't read ourselves) ; to validate the claims that are said in their source, and to reflect on their thoughts 2-3-4 times, before they click on the 'submit reply' button or before they create a thread. People are addicted to this forum and I think some of these people would be willing to change, because some of them absolutely have the capacity to do it, they are just not motivated enough right now. Maybe banning people for a short period of time (and then progressively increase that time, if they refuse to change) from visiting this forum would be enough negative movitation for people to start to change. I think it would be worth it for you to try to enforce a new standard. You can always reverse things, you can always apologize (if you think you fuck up) you can always ask for feedback and then change accordingly, but I think at the end of the day, it would be a good move.

yep, you got it.

I agree that its not necessary, I didn't try to suggest that it is necessary, but I just made a value comparison between bringing substance while being mean and not bringing substance while being nice. Obviously being nice is compatible with bringing substance and being mean is compatible with not bringing substance. The whole idea was just to focus on the substance rather than focusing on the rhetoric or on the niceness/mean-ness that a person brings . Judge based on substance and focus on the substance not on the delivery thats the key point and the other point is - don't value the delivery more than the substance.

This is just my value system right now. I would much rather be corrected by mean people than mislead by nice or fake nice people.

Just because someone can say things in a calm way and just because someone don't insult anyone, that won't make that person concious or a worthy person to make comments about politics. I would much rather engage with educated people who shit on me and insult me , but who are honest about their own biases and who are educated or more educated than me on a given topic/subject. If you bring substance, you can insult and namecall me as much as you want, just bring that substance and don't ramble. If you don't bring substance, I don't care how nice you are, you can still do a lot of damage. Btw these guys are playing into the exact same teamsports as all of us here, so none of them are above any of us. Notice how they use the law of one language to frame politics (negatively polarised side tried to kill trump, trump has good karma, the negative side is against trump etc). They take sides and they bring a lot of baggage into their analysis.

I can relate, but you can say things, just be aware and qualify before you give your opinion, how much knowledge you have on that particular topic and be aware of your own biases. At least thats what I do or strive to do - you need to have a map in your mind about your own knowledge and track, on what set of assumptions and on what set of values and biases a given opinion of yours is based on and that way it will be easier to update your beliefs if you learn more about a given subject. "Given this set of assumptions and given these values, my opinion on this particular topic is this, for this set of reasons" - if you manage to have that much specificity and clarity on a given topic, that on its own is a huge success.

They would have lost their minds completely and would have rambled again about the deepstate.