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Surely you would admit that this breaks down in many cases. Suppose you are teaching someone to drive. They might have some funny ideas about what they can do s

Surely you would admit that this breaks down in many cases. Suppose you are teaching someone to drive. They might have some funny ideas about what they can do safely. But there isn't any room for debate. Same if we are building a bridge. I can't come in with some creative new idea and implement it with out first learning the right way to build a bridge. Nature doesn't have some mental model that I can choose to disagree with. It is what it is and I have to adapt my model or suffer.

themodelplumber 6y ago
> They might have some funny ideas about what they can do safely. But there isn't any room for debate What are the ideas, and why isn't there any room for debate? It seems like a bit of an imaginative and wide-open perception to yield much traction for the purposes of this discussion. > I can't come in with some creative new idea and implement it with out first learning the right way to build a bridge Hmm, is there "a" right way? What size is the bridge? For what use? I can build a Lego bridge that's pretty strong. Did I just meet nature at its bridge-building rules while not knowing your right way, or are those rules perhaps more nuanced than expected? Also, are we sure that the imaginary creative idea in question is in total disagreement with nature? What if it's fitting observed perceptions? Perhaps it has leverage in this way or that. Again there's not much else to be said in the conceptual zone here. I'd also add that dichotomous model like "adapt or suffer" is in my experience a common sign of a mental model which may be in need of further adaptation :-)
- discreteevent 6y ago
  Adapt or suffer is not a mental model. I'm not talking about politics or religion. If you routinely drive down the wrong side of the highway because you would not adapt then you will suffer. That's just the way it is. Can you agree on that?
  - themodelplumber 6y ago
    The imagined example seems suspiciously detached from real context, and also detail-avoidant. Hypotheticals that get even broader and less detailed aren't really doing such an absolutist position any favors. Instead they would seem to buttress the position that absolutism is easily divorced from real-life utility and social benefit. I would offer that the questions you ask do seem to point at a fixed mental position, around which theoretical and intractable constructs are arranged as seems most expeditious to the closure of the discussion. If that's what you really want, permission to go your way and think your thoughts without others butting in with details, then you don't really need a partner with whom to reach that decision. But there's also no guarantee that relevant and contextual details won't cause someone in your position considerable philosophical trouble in the future, around this fixed concept of truth...
    - discreteevent 6y ago
      Fair enough. You avoided my question. Looks like we are at opposites then. I see your position as absolutist. Everything is a model. No exception. There is no truth. I think there is truth and that we have to drop our egos and continually adapt and understand. To be honest I think that humanities ego has never been bigger, postmodernism is a symptom of this, and we are suffering more than we need to because of it.
      - themodelplumber 6y ago
        To be clear, your question about traffic was unwisely unencumbered by real context and details. Let me give you a personal example: I have a friend who routinely drove in the oncoming traffic lane. She never had to adapt to a rule about driving in this way, because she had an additional layer of frameworks to protect her. She was a construction engineer. The adaptation was already performed for her, by smart civic policy. So what you have to ask is, who's doing this thing, and why? What factors are involved? Details. Otherwise the solution will fail to the extent that it is divorced from context. And that's no way to develop policy, be it personal or public. This kind of fixed, non-adaptive thinking leads to the Judge Judy phenomenon, rewriting public policy discourse as shallow "common sense" pornography for what amounts to entertainment for armchair critics. Your summary of my position as "no truth" is also unfair to the details, since I communicated upthread that multiple truths and perspectives may exist, and that this can create a smarter approach to problem-solving. This is true even in computer programming, where multiple, conflicting truths about an object can be reconciled, simulated and leveraged. But the trick is depth, and details. That's why there's no computer program that stops everyone from driving in oncoming traffic. By itself it's not a useful rule in that it fails to account for the exceptions. What seems to be happening at the end of your comment is that you have a set of perceptions from your past, these exist as fixed labels or categories in your mind, and you are attempting to map them onto my words without so much as asking if they're relevant. Which, unfortunately, they're not. Postmodernism needn't be involved; these ideas predate it by quite a stretch. So while your conclusion seems to have felt therapeutic, it's also a communication of subjective-emotive values, and not quite ready for logical and useful public discourse.

themodelplumber 6y ago

> They might have some funny ideas about what they can do safely. But there isn't any room for debate What are the ideas, and why isn't there any room for debate? It seems like a bit of an imaginative and wide-open perception to yield much traction for the purposes of this discussion. > I can't come in with some creative new idea and implement it with out first learning the right way to build a bridge Hmm, is there "a" right way? What size is the bridge? For what use? I can build a Lego bridge that's pretty strong. Did I just meet nature at its bridge-building rules while not knowing your right way, or are those rules perhaps more nuanced than expected? Also, are we sure that the imaginary creative idea in question is in total disagreement with nature? What if it's fitting observed perceptions? Perhaps it has leverage in this way or that. Again there's not much else to be said in the conceptual zone here. I'd also add that dichotomous model like "adapt or suffer" is in my experience a common sign of a mental model which may be in need of further adaptation :-)

discreteevent 6y ago
Adapt or suffer is not a mental model. I'm not talking about politics or religion. If you routinely drive down the wrong side of the highway because you would not adapt then you will suffer. That's just the way it is. Can you agree on that?
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  The imagined example seems suspiciously detached from real context, and also detail-avoidant. Hypotheticals that get even broader and less detailed aren't really doing such an absolutist position any favors. Instead they would seem to buttress the position that absolutism is easily divorced from real-life utility and social benefit. I would offer that the questions you ask do seem to point at a fixed mental position, around which theoretical and intractable constructs are arranged as seems most expeditious to the closure of the discussion. If that's what you really want, permission to go your way and think your thoughts without others butting in with details, then you don't really need a partner with whom to reach that decision. But there's also no guarantee that relevant and contextual details won't cause someone in your position considerable philosophical trouble in the future, around this fixed concept of truth...
  - discreteevent 6y ago
    Fair enough. You avoided my question. Looks like we are at opposites then. I see your position as absolutist. Everything is a model. No exception. There is no truth. I think there is truth and that we have to drop our egos and continually adapt and understand. To be honest I think that humanities ego has never been bigger, postmodernism is a symptom of this, and we are suffering more than we need to because of it.
    - themodelplumber 6y ago
      To be clear, your question about traffic was unwisely unencumbered by real context and details. Let me give you a personal example: I have a friend who routinely drove in the oncoming traffic lane. She never had to adapt to a rule about driving in this way, because she had an additional layer of frameworks to protect her. She was a construction engineer. The adaptation was already performed for her, by smart civic policy. So what you have to ask is, who's doing this thing, and why? What factors are involved? Details. Otherwise the solution will fail to the extent that it is divorced from context. And that's no way to develop policy, be it personal or public. This kind of fixed, non-adaptive thinking leads to the Judge Judy phenomenon, rewriting public policy discourse as shallow "common sense" pornography for what amounts to entertainment for armchair critics. Your summary of my position as "no truth" is also unfair to the details, since I communicated upthread that multiple truths and perspectives may exist, and that this can create a smarter approach to problem-solving. This is true even in computer programming, where multiple, conflicting truths about an object can be reconciled, simulated and leveraged. But the trick is depth, and details. That's why there's no computer program that stops everyone from driving in oncoming traffic. By itself it's not a useful rule in that it fails to account for the exceptions. What seems to be happening at the end of your comment is that you have a set of perceptions from your past, these exist as fixed labels or categories in your mind, and you are attempting to map them onto my words without so much as asking if they're relevant. Which, unfortunately, they're not. Postmodernism needn't be involved; these ideas predate it by quite a stretch. So while your conclusion seems to have felt therapeutic, it's also a communication of subjective-emotive values, and not quite ready for logical and useful public discourse.