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The point parent is making is that the one's own stubbornness (that they are indeed correct) forces them to skip a step -- is what they are saying true and/or w

The point parent is making is that the one's own stubbornness (that they are indeed correct) forces them to skip a step -- is what they are saying true and/or what is their logical positioning? Instead, OP says "first find out how they got to that position in life" which you gotta understand does come across pretty smug since it implies superiority of opinion/belief and degenerates the disagreer as if they are merely using emotion in their logic. I think ideally you first want to let the battle of logic fly then get into biography details if it's a very sharp disagreement. It may be worthwhile for both sides to hear each other's upbringing and catalyst -- though you might not take the other's lens as your own, it nevertheless will add a little wisdom

Swizec 10y ago
> merely using emotion in their logic. Truth often goes deeper than facts and logic.
- axlprose 10y ago
  This is a pretty common sentiment, but I think it underplays just how much phenomena logic and factual observation can analyze/explain, and in turn we easily forget and underestimate just how much it can truly accomplish[0]. I mean, literally all of our modern scientific and technological progress has been built on top of it, so what inherent quality makes these tools ineffective for discovering these other things that are yet to be understood, like emotion? Discussing things like mathematicians trying to solve a hard math problem would probably help our communications more if anything, compared to say, carrying out discourse like we're all Deepak Chopras... [0] This idea is described pretty well by the whole "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" discussion: https://plus.maths.org/content/unreasonable-effectiveness https://plus.maths.org/content/unreasonable-effectiveness http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
  - marklgr 10y ago
    Noe one denies the virtues or achievements of logic, but as you know, the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything ie. to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. As of today, it's clearly not the case--computers are excellent at computing, but they are pretty dumb. Humans must be around to select, prioritize, assign values, interpret, and put it all together. Otherwise, computers only spit the most mundane truths out of facts plus logic, and that was precisely one of the decisive criticism of positivim.
    - axlprose 10y ago
      > the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything Like how math was a good idea that was applied everywhere from physics to modern medicine and architecture? Don't get me wrong, it's a decent rule of thumb for a lot of ideas, but for formal languages with rigid structures and rigorous definitions such as mathematical logic, it doesn't quite work. In fact, applying a good idea to an area where doing so would objectively be detrimental, would inherently be not logical by definition. And That's the power of logic. If followed rigorously, it can actually protect us from going down a lot of inaccurate roads, because doing so means it's also highly probable that you're doing something inconsistent with formal logic. This is the same reason why strongly typed programming languages like Haskell and ML have such a cult following, it's because they prevent a lot of silliness from even starting to happen. It's just a specialized niche case of the same idea, letting people discuss complex ideas in a structured way so that they're easier to communicate and verify. Now imagine if he had that kind of clarity in communication with social issues... > The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. That's not necessarily true, and drastically undermines what logic actually is. We already know there are several problems that have been proven to be uncomputable, but that doesn't mean we can't use logic to understand them; logic is separate from computability, and vastly more powerful. Logic is what gave birth to the entire notion of computation in the first place, and there are many math proofs that are logically sound but not computable either. To paint logic simply as something that computers do is a mass disservice to what it represents and is capable of. The issue is usually not with how logic itself works, but with how people misuse, and more importantly, how people misunderstand it. It is just absolutely tragic how undervalued and widely misunderstood logic is in modern society, despite it having given us so much already.
- chrismcb 10y ago
  Could you please explain how truth goes deeper than facts? I am missing something
  - ethbro 10y ago
    To take a stab at it, parent was talking about the difference between wisdom and intelligence. Or that there may be many facts which are applicable to a situation -- indeed, so many that various subsets can be used to justify a multitude of different responses! Discerning which facts and therefore which course of action to take often involves a judgement call, a portion of which is attempting to know all applicable parties as individuals. The portion in the original journal entry about filter bubbles and excising dissent from our daily experience speaks to this. We cannot make wise decisions without knowing as much as possible about both those who disagree with us as well as those who agree with us. Because sometimes the "why" or "how" is as intellectually valuable as the "what". (Not always, but more than none by a bunch!)
  - marklgr 10y ago
    Saying that truth is just facts and logic is like saying that music is just maths. Yes, at some level, it is, but I'd rather listen to music actually made by musicians than mathematicians.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Logic can tell you, to a certain extent, about cause and effect. It can tell you how to achieve objectives and what likely risks there are. Perhaps you can assign probabilities to possible outcomes. It can't tell you what objectives are important nor what risks are acceptable. Those are both transitive properties: something is important to some people, something might be acceptable to some people. There's no objective morality and no objective politics. Even if we try to limit discussion to "facts", things fall apart fairly rapidly once we start talking stochastic events and statistical morality. Controversial subjects get bogged down with duelling sets of statistics each making subtly different claims about causation. One of the useful things about legal training is that it forces you to separate facts from law. Facts may be true or false but only law and ethics can make claims about what is right and wrong.
hashkb 10y ago
I have been a coldly logical operator for the bulk of my career. Despite arguing from a position of obvious correctness against positions of obvious incorrectness, as clearly proven by me, and agreed with by many spectators, I often found all I was doing was upsetting people and creating bad relationships. You're not going to be able to convince someone who is disagreeing with you from an emotional place, no matter how much logic you throw at them. In addition, you're making it worse each time you do this, because you're ignoring what they're saying, and what they're saying is really important to them. Listening with empathy is how you bring people to the table. It's also how you understand when to walk away. When you try to forcefully convince someone out of their emotional beliefs without understanding how they got there (and you aren't coworkers or running out of air or something) they will think you are an asshole. The less emotional / more logical person is in the best position to open with empathy.

Swizec 10y ago

> merely using emotion in their logic. Truth often goes deeper than facts and logic.

axlprose 10y ago
This is a pretty common sentiment, but I think it underplays just how much phenomena logic and factual observation can analyze/explain, and in turn we easily forget and underestimate just how much it can truly accomplish[0]. I mean, literally all of our modern scientific and technological progress has been built on top of it, so what inherent quality makes these tools ineffective for discovering these other things that are yet to be understood, like emotion? Discussing things like mathematicians trying to solve a hard math problem would probably help our communications more if anything, compared to say, carrying out discourse like we're all Deepak Chopras... [0] This idea is described pretty well by the whole "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" discussion: https://plus.maths.org/content/unreasonable-effectiveness https://plus.maths.org/content/unreasonable-effectiveness http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
- marklgr 10y ago
  Noe one denies the virtues or achievements of logic, but as you know, the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything ie. to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. As of today, it's clearly not the case--computers are excellent at computing, but they are pretty dumb. Humans must be around to select, prioritize, assign values, interpret, and put it all together. Otherwise, computers only spit the most mundane truths out of facts plus logic, and that was precisely one of the decisive criticism of positivim.
  - axlprose 10y ago
    > the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything Like how math was a good idea that was applied everywhere from physics to modern medicine and architecture? Don't get me wrong, it's a decent rule of thumb for a lot of ideas, but for formal languages with rigid structures and rigorous definitions such as mathematical logic, it doesn't quite work. In fact, applying a good idea to an area where doing so would objectively be detrimental, would inherently be not logical by definition. And That's the power of logic. If followed rigorously, it can actually protect us from going down a lot of inaccurate roads, because doing so means it's also highly probable that you're doing something inconsistent with formal logic. This is the same reason why strongly typed programming languages like Haskell and ML have such a cult following, it's because they prevent a lot of silliness from even starting to happen. It's just a specialized niche case of the same idea, letting people discuss complex ideas in a structured way so that they're easier to communicate and verify. Now imagine if he had that kind of clarity in communication with social issues... > The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. That's not necessarily true, and drastically undermines what logic actually is. We already know there are several problems that have been proven to be uncomputable, but that doesn't mean we can't use logic to understand them; logic is separate from computability, and vastly more powerful. Logic is what gave birth to the entire notion of computation in the first place, and there are many math proofs that are logically sound but not computable either. To paint logic simply as something that computers do is a mass disservice to what it represents and is capable of. The issue is usually not with how logic itself works, but with how people misuse, and more importantly, how people misunderstand it. It is just absolutely tragic how undervalued and widely misunderstood logic is in modern society, despite it having given us so much already.
chrismcb 10y ago
Could you please explain how truth goes deeper than facts? I am missing something
- ethbro 10y ago
  To take a stab at it, parent was talking about the difference between wisdom and intelligence. Or that there may be many facts which are applicable to a situation -- indeed, so many that various subsets can be used to justify a multitude of different responses! Discerning which facts and therefore which course of action to take often involves a judgement call, a portion of which is attempting to know all applicable parties as individuals. The portion in the original journal entry about filter bubbles and excising dissent from our daily experience speaks to this. We cannot make wise decisions without knowing as much as possible about both those who disagree with us as well as those who agree with us. Because sometimes the "why" or "how" is as intellectually valuable as the "what". (Not always, but more than none by a bunch!)
- marklgr 10y ago
  Saying that truth is just facts and logic is like saying that music is just maths. Yes, at some level, it is, but I'd rather listen to music actually made by musicians than mathematicians.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Logic can tell you, to a certain extent, about cause and effect. It can tell you how to achieve objectives and what likely risks there are. Perhaps you can assign probabilities to possible outcomes. It can't tell you what objectives are important nor what risks are acceptable. Those are both transitive properties: something is important to some people, something might be acceptable to some people. There's no objective morality and no objective politics. Even if we try to limit discussion to "facts", things fall apart fairly rapidly once we start talking stochastic events and statistical morality. Controversial subjects get bogged down with duelling sets of statistics each making subtly different claims about causation. One of the useful things about legal training is that it forces you to separate facts from law. Facts may be true or false but only law and ethics can make claims about what is right and wrong.

hashkb 10y ago

I have been a coldly logical operator for the bulk of my career. Despite arguing from a position of obvious correctness against positions of obvious incorrectness, as clearly proven by me, and agreed with by many spectators, I often found all I was doing was upsetting people and creating bad relationships. You're not going to be able to convince someone who is disagreeing with you from an emotional place, no matter how much logic you throw at them. In addition, you're making it worse each time you do this, because you're ignoring what they're saying, and what they're saying is really important to them. Listening with empathy is how you bring people to the table. It's also how you understand when to walk away. When you try to forcefully convince someone out of their emotional beliefs without understanding how they got there (and you aren't coworkers or running out of air or something) they will think you are an asshole. The less emotional / more logical person is in the best position to open with empathy.