
The Defeat of Reason - walterbell
http://bostonreview.net/science-nature-philosophy-religion/tim-maudlin-defeat-reason
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mhneu
Eh.

The author claims that positivism has been debunked “by philosophers”.
Certainly there are semantic arguments to be had if one wishes, but the broad
outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and engineers.

Also, the authors’ discussion of the wave/particle description leaves a lot to
be desired.

And the article hardly explains how reason has been defeated. It barely
mentions the propaganda machine (Fox, Limbaugh, etc.) that played the biggest
role in impugning the idea of truth.

~~~
igammarays
> but the broad outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and
> engineers.

I don't think anyone doubts that a positivist framework is useful for science
and engineering, but why should it hold elsewhere? Scientists and engineers
are also stereotypically bad at social skills and politics. Perhaps because a
different, non-positivist epistemological framework is required to thrive in
other fields?

~~~
gaius
_Scientists and engineers are also stereotypically bad at social skills and
politics._

That is a narrative whose sole purpose is to disenfranchise and disempower the
STEM community.

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DyslexicAtheist
_> People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds;
manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled,
seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this
respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom._

a lot of this could be mitigated through better awareness and early education.
Unfortunately "how to think" or "how to reason" about logic is not something
most of us learn from their parents or from the education system (even though
it would be trivial to do so).

If you know your Kahneman, Tversky (and others) and learn and understand
Cognitive Biases the advantage is huge. It's like Neo in the Matrix when he
picks the bullets from the air :-)

But it needs to be applied continuously using practical applications (not just
by reading 2 papers). People don't have to be an expert on psychology, game
theory & risk but at least should expose themselves to the basics (preferably
at an early age).

If you want to get beyond the basics then read also D Hofstaedter, D Dennet, K
Popper, B Russell, NNTaleb. I wish I would have come across this when I was 10
yro not in my 30ies.

~~~
leoc
That has not been my experience, I'm afraid. The impression I keep getting is
that (with due respect to "the power of the context"
[http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf))
teaching someone about fallacies automatically makes them about 15 IQ
stupider. In general there's a lot to be said for this oversimplified mental
model: "exposing a human being to moral or logical education just leads him to
spin out more alluring and more effectively deceptive rationalisations for the
stupid and despicable things he was going to do anyway".

~~~
cornholio
That's a great way to put it. That's not to say that reason cannot be learned,
but that it isn't a subject in itself, there is no such thing as a 'critical
thinking' curriculum. You learn critical thinking by thinking.

~~~
pas
There are courses that try to teach applied rationality. I don't know how
successful they are.

------
ogennadi
> The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its
> own way. Adam Becker’s What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a
> crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol
> Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely
> influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S.
> Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits,
> fragility, and infirmity of human reason.

The author claims we're currently in an age which doesn't accept an objective
reality outside our own desires, and ties this to fights in physics (and
earlier in philosophy) whose echoes are still being felt.

~~~
mannykannot
Quantum mechanics may have defeated the notion that reason applied to
intuition is not the way to enlightenment, but it appears to be a powerful
demonstration of what can be achieved when reason is applied instead strictly
to observables. Unfortunately, if Adam Becker is correct, this may have led
more to a rejection of reason than to a critical examination of intuitions.

~~~
humanrebar
But the uncertainty principle says there's a limit to what observables we have
access to.

~~~
mannykannot
That might not be the universe of your intuitions, but it is apparently the
one we have.

------
8bitsrule
A remarkable review, this. (It's _so_ rare to see _Lakatos_ quoted!)

One of my favorite reflections out of this period belongs to Werner
Heisenberg:

 _What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of
questioning._

If we have a dilemma (two theories), it's 'Not nature itself' at fault.

------
nabla9
While classical locality is not possible, quantum nonlocality is interestingly
local and not. Causality is local but correlation is not.

Nonlocality where both are nonlocal would be conseptually easier to
understand.

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sullyj3
Humans are the only animals who can be fooled? I pretend to throw tennis balls
to watch dogs run across the yard for my own amusement all the time!

The author doesn't even make an attempt to defend what on the face of it seems
like a pretty ludicrous assertion. I know this isn't the central thesis, but,
not off to a great start

------
carapace
> All that was left was to ask nature herself. In a series of sophisticated
> experiments, the answer has been established: Bell’s inequality is violated.
> The world is not local. No future innovation in physics can make it local
> again.

This is a Copernican revolution.

------
mannykannot
From Maudlin's telling of the story, in which "Einstein won—and would continue
to win—all the logical battles", you would never guess that Bell actually
refuted the claims made in the EPR paper.

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ouid
Forgive me for saying so, but this whole premise seems like bullshit.

>logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers.

Clearly the author, or the philosophers, do not understand what the word
"killed" means.

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tutfbhuf
Eh.

I thought this Article is about Reason ML.

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itwy
Author seems to be a heavy user of thesaurus.com.

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ThomPete
reason is not defeated and to the extent it would be it would apply to
_anyone_ of us. Not just the trailer trash, the trump supporters, the
religious people etc. but all of us.

There is no system of thinking that allow us to be right and so what we are
really left with are perspectives. In other words reason do not lead to truth
but to perspectives that allow us to better navigate reality.

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amriksohata
This entire discussion further verifies for me that state of being inside an
illusion or Maya, where some things like relativity make sense whilst at a
deeper level everything else doesn't.

