"The not-truth can be conclusively established by a wide variety of methods, including logic, observation, statistical analysis, mathematics, and experiment."
This is an excellent summary. I wasn't familiar with the term veriphysics but the aptly named gammasecretkings reddit brought me right up to speed. I will likely reference this framework if I ever need to teach philosophy. The translation into rhetoric is the best part.
Reddit puts forward a great example of how not to behave if you want to be taken seriously by anyone. It is the grand intersection of low status Gammas and midwits to the point where it is hard to asses whether the commenters have a mental disorder.
If there is Gamma science, then Reddit and its midwit "Trust the Science" crowd must be one of its incarnations.
Oh, I agree. I wasn't being sarcastic because when I read something overtly gamma, especially if it's an opinion on someone else, it usually sways me in the opposite direction because I know these people can't help but lie. Of course, there's the usual griping and name calling but gammas are info hoarders so they will post the original content even though they are incapable of dismantling it. I don't sift through trash often but when I do it's for information.
Vox, first off, thank you. Your insight into a practical, usable science is highly significant. While you are leaning towards a book, there will be hundreds written by others to explain your book much as hundreds of SSH pieces are being written by others.
Today, 38 years after Chernobyl we see the consequences of a gamma male’s failure to follow the science in the manner that you use it, and he caused the reactor to catch fire.
Your philosophy has great depth and importance, especially with complex systems.
This fits nicely with the recent discussion about evolutionary mathematics & my thoughts on the nature of miracles, which, the way I see it, must be personal, in nature.
That is to say, if something can be observed & it is repeatable, then it cannot be accurately categorised as miraculous. Which is ironic, given that the thing, most often described as miraculous, is life itself - especially new life.
In the case of evolution, mathematical falsifiability would seem to imply a divine origin of life, which is why it is so often dismissed, presumably. (although I lack the time / ability to verify the sums, myself...)
The other problem with miracles, is lack of evidence. So, either can be dismissed, or explained away, with naturalistic arguments.
I must confess, to sometimes doubting whether I would recognise Christ's return & would assume it to be yet another psyop...
"The other problem with miracles, is lack of evidence."
There is plenty of evidence for miracles. The most important miracle is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is plenty of documentary evidence from friends and enemies that he existed, was crucified, and that he rose from the dead.
"So, either can be dismissed, or explained away, with naturalistic arguments."
Dismissing the evidence is not a problem of lack of evidence. That's a problem of not knowing what evidence is and allowing prejudice and rationalization to override acceptance of reality.
I chose my words correctly. A lack of evidence is not an absence of evidence.
Also, recognising an ability to do something doesn't imply that doing so is beneficial.
Accepting Jesus requires the (deeply personal) miracle of faith.
It's certainly possible that acceptance of the available evidence starts some kind of process of probabilistic thinking that leads to ego death / metanoia, but faith is a mystery, also, and cannot easily be explained. I prefer to think that Jesus chose me, personally.
If veriphysics is a pragmatic philosophy, why not just use the pragmatic definition of truth and define it as ideas that help you achieve your goals? Don't see the utility of adding unprovable realist assumptions if it's supposed to be pragmatic.
First, it is a PRACTICAL philosophy, not a "pragmatic" philosophy. Pragmatism, in itself, is too intrinsically flawed and temporally limited to serve as an adequate philosophical truth metric.
The fact that you don't see the utility, or are potentially incapable of understanding the utility, does not mean the utility does not exist. And the fact that you tried to substitute "pragmatic" for "practical" casts your honesty into some degree of doubt.
Was that a mistake on your part or did you intentionally make the switch?
It's no more temporally limited than our minds are. We know our goals and how well our ideas help achieve them, but how well it corresponds to something external to our minds can't be known for certain. I was not trying to engage in intellectual dishonesty to "win" a substack "debate" about philosophy. Genuinely unaware of the difference between "The practical objective of veriphysical analysis is to construct reliable predictive models that provide a sound basis for pragmatic decisions" and it having a pragmatic goal of informing decision making? I guess you meant the primary goal is to make models that correspond to truth and informing decision making is a secondary goal?
"the pragmatic definition of truth" sounds like redefining facts to suit goals. If de-obfuscation of ones view of the world is the goal, this, in and of itself itself is counter to that. As soon as one begins redefining terms like "truth", klaxons should start going off in one's cognitive guard systems. Responding to the original question, which I reduced to "do you think sigmas attempt to disprove their own theories more than gammas?" - I would find it impossible to answer this with certainty, but intuition tells me the questioner may be on to something here. Some experiments may be in order. For what it's worth, one of the first actions I take when I have a theory is to attempt to disprove it, just like everyone else will.
Sigmas are less likely to let the hierarchical demands influence their views. A Beta might keep his mouth shut if a truth makes his alpha look bad, a Delta might keep his mouth shut to keep his job and a gamma will make anti-truth to make the Alpha look bad. That's a lot of external influence their perception of reality has to wrestle with before seeing the light of day.
You don't need to believe in some external objective truth giver with a static relationship with observers to achieve your goals, pragmatic theory serves the same role with less made up a priori assumptions. It cuts out the problem of metaphysical speculation by only working with what each of us know is real in some sense, our own qualitative experiences, making it more universally useful regardless of what metaphysics we live under or what people you're trying to get to adopt the philosophy believes.
You're clearly not tall enough for this ride, as you're making some very basic conceptual errors here. There is absolutely no excuse for confusing "a model for achieving one's goals" with "a philosophical truth metric".
You are also going about this the wrong way. The fact that you have a hammer of pragmatism does not mean that philosophy is a nail.
There were several lists given by the author. None contained features you mentioned to assert the premises are defective; for example, the feature of some external objective truth giver with a static relationship with [others]. Where did you see that?
When I learned one thing from climate science then that the whole thing is about anecdotal experience getting inflated to textbook material by how many guys with fancy titles get behind it.
I think it would be very interesting to start looking for correlations here, there must be some. Gender has some, women dominate biology for example. There are correlations in IQ and what level of job or career an individual would succeed at, it's interesting to speculate how the SSH plays into that as well. 5-10 IQ points can be the difference being being managed and being a good manager. Same dynamic goes for the Delta vs, Bravo and Alphas. This is what makes the SSH so interesting and helpful to consider.
I would initially theorize that that Gammas would favor theoretical nonsense aspects to science, like the Gamma who refused to consider the theory of Evolution to be mathematically impossible. The forms of science they can't put their hands on, but rather claim to wrap their brains around, because they're so much smarter than you! Gamma's want to know it all, they don't actually want to do anything though.
Meanwhile I wouldn't put it past Deltas, Alphas, or Sigmas to have a general appeal towards other avenues that better align with their interests and personalty type as related to the SSH. I could really see Deltas liking laboratory work, Alphas trying to pioneer advances, and Sigmas doing as they please based on their special interests. It would be very interesting for men who are certain what their rank is to inform us what they were most passionate about in STEM if not as a carrier, what they grew up being fascinated by. I'm sure we would start to see some patterns!
Some gammas are probably quite strong in applied fields due to tendencies toward subject matter expertise but disruptive to the organization thinking they’re all speaking truth to power or some such. Serving leaders nonetheless but testing them and sometimes strengthening them. Anklebiters increase resistance and error avoidance strategies
Because of credentialism, Sigmas tend to get excluded, unless they really like science. It is a bit too much work for Alphas to grind. So only the other ranks remain in science.
You'll find a surprising number of Sigmas in the footnotes of scientific history, usually not bothering to take the credit, I think. They'll have their names on patents for critical equipment, unnamed theorems that someone else used/copied, or even just whole hosts of critical systems with their fingerprints all over them.
If you pull back from the physical sciences, you see that women dominate psychology and sociology even more. Pull back further, and they dominate the arts more.
The more direct observation is that women can't do math as well as men.
Some men are better at making things and measuring them, because of fine motor control skills. That seems to have a bit more bearing to who specializes in experimental work vs theoretical.
It is very liberating to learn that sometimes, not knowing is progress.
For example, when I was in fifth grade, I knew for sure that Moozlumz in caves who hate our freedumbs blew up the World Trade Center because Israel is our greatest ally. But now, I have really no certain idea of what happened on 9/11. And that is an improvement.
I think there is a distinctively "gamma" approach to science. It involves finding counterintuitive (and often out-of-context) physical principles with which a gamma can bludgeon people to demonstrate how smart they are. Their approach to scientific discovery is not the establishment of truth, but rather finding a way to prove other people are wrong (or ignorant) and that the gamma is superior for being able to demonstrate it.
In an extreme case, it manifests as attacks on science and reason itself. In my piece on "The Philosophic Premises of Quantum Mechanics – Part I What's Wrong With Quantum Mechanics & Why?" I showed how leading Weimar physicists were advocating randomness and acausality long before quantum discoveries supposedly forced them to abandon a causal, classical world view.
Niels Bohr's behavior in particular puzzled me. He was adamant about making a statistical theory of energy conservation (the BKS theory). When that failed, he got behind Heisenberg's efforts to promote quantum mechanics as having overthrown classical concepts. He even pursued his guest, Erwin Schrodinger, to Schrodinger's sickbed and tried to best him in argument while Schrodinger was trying to recover. That strikes me as a gamma move. I describe all this in the second half of the piece I cited above. https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/philosophic-premises-of-quantum-mechanics-87b
I don't think the SSH is a complete explanation for the social dynamics that led to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I do believe it was a factor. I hope to have more to say on this before too long.
The social dynamics that led to the Copenhagen interpretation are quite possibly the same that led to the even more Clownish Everett interpretation. In Clown World, the Clowns are everywhere and that includes the STEM fields. Crack open a Cosmology text-book for immediate proof.
Due to this post I actually made better sense of the original question. If Gammas have a unique twisting of the scientific method(s), then by implication other categories of SSH might have unique approaches as well.
Of course, truth and sound methods for finding part of the truth exists outside of ourselves, thus having unique approaches is a sign that you are engaging in delusions.
Re: "then by implication other categories of SSH might have unique approaches as well." ... first, establish if there are any other approaches. "Make model fit data and get (valid) prediction vs. Make data fit model and get (desired) (invalid) prediction" seems to be a bimodal choice. Perhaps I have a lack of imagination, but along the axis being discussed, there may be a continuum along the modes in question, but the number of unique approaches seems limited to me. I added the parenthesis for emphasis in my quoted sentence after I noticed something.
This seems very relevant to a stream that Dave the Distributist did a few months ago about “the kid who reads”. People like Lisa Simpson that care more about being seen as smart than actually pursing truth.
Appears to me like textbook gamma behaviour with their obsession with credentialism.
Gammas often embrace and create mysticism around theories so that they can justify any result of their imagination. Quantum mechanics is a great example "Reality is not real, therefore you are wrong. There is no hierarchy, and by the way I am the Alpha."
Much of science is an expression of the scientists philosophical method.
Those who believe of the primacy of the will, believe their minds can dictate to reality what it is. "Cogito, ergo sum" ( my thought makes my existence)
Those who believe in the primacy of experience attempt to allow the obervations of sense to dictate what is true.
Delta: "Glad I'm not an Alpha or Bravo. Hell, we're killing people here. How can I help get this over with effectively and efficiently so I get home to the wife and kids?"
While this is what the lambda would say, what they are actually thinking is closer to "the work required to win doesn't sound fun, so I don't want any part of it"
There's a nice little paradox between bullet points two and three. We cannot, ever, fully grasp the Truth and yet we must use our partial understanding (which we no doubt like to imagine is full) of it as the basis for our thought and action. Through a glass darkly indeed. This is most likely an element of why the Gamma recoils, and maybe why nearly everyone on the SSH, at one point or another down (or up?) the line, recoils. It's a spiritual thing. The Truth will inevitably check your ego at the fucking door.
I think the basic premise of engineering is pretty much how I process the world around me. Tested and tried things that are not really in question become generic axioms (though never absolutes if evidence against them crops up), premises are made, (usually most of them after rigorous testing, but one, which may be the one being tested for) hypothesis are formed, then experimental testing is performed and checked against the hypothesis. Once enough data has been collected and observed a theory can be formed that may become a premise in later hypothesis. As time and experience grow, you begin to have a relatively reliable set off "islands" in various topics that give a certain overall level of confidence on certain subjects, while others may remain unknown and uncharted waters. Sometimes I go with not fully tested premises and so on, but that's a function of synergistic thinking that allows what John's Band called single data point pattern recognition. It is not generally helpful to explain anything to normiess, but can be a very useful investigative tool, and at times even conclusive evidence.
"The not-truth can be conclusively established by a wide variety of methods, including logic, observation, statistical analysis, mathematics, and experiment."
Welcome to 2001+, especially 2016 and later...
This is an excellent summary. I wasn't familiar with the term veriphysics but the aptly named gammasecretkings reddit brought me right up to speed. I will likely reference this framework if I ever need to teach philosophy. The translation into rhetoric is the best part.
Reddit puts forward a great example of how not to behave if you want to be taken seriously by anyone. It is the grand intersection of low status Gammas and midwits to the point where it is hard to asses whether the commenters have a mental disorder.
If there is Gamma science, then Reddit and its midwit "Trust the Science" crowd must be one of its incarnations.
Oh, I agree. I wasn't being sarcastic because when I read something overtly gamma, especially if it's an opinion on someone else, it usually sways me in the opposite direction because I know these people can't help but lie. Of course, there's the usual griping and name calling but gammas are info hoarders so they will post the original content even though they are incapable of dismantling it. I don't sift through trash often but when I do it's for information.
They are not fooling anyone with their snark towards the Alpha, nor with their declarations of Secret Kingery. Even Clowns view them as useful idiots.
I don't think that's what they had in mind, but c'est la vie. They also serve, who squat in squalor and snipe from afar.
Vox, first off, thank you. Your insight into a practical, usable science is highly significant. While you are leaning towards a book, there will be hundreds written by others to explain your book much as hundreds of SSH pieces are being written by others.
Today, 38 years after Chernobyl we see the consequences of a gamma male’s failure to follow the science in the manner that you use it, and he caused the reactor to catch fire.
Your philosophy has great depth and importance, especially with complex systems.
This fits nicely with the recent discussion about evolutionary mathematics & my thoughts on the nature of miracles, which, the way I see it, must be personal, in nature.
That is to say, if something can be observed & it is repeatable, then it cannot be accurately categorised as miraculous. Which is ironic, given that the thing, most often described as miraculous, is life itself - especially new life.
In the case of evolution, mathematical falsifiability would seem to imply a divine origin of life, which is why it is so often dismissed, presumably. (although I lack the time / ability to verify the sums, myself...)
The other problem with miracles, is lack of evidence. So, either can be dismissed, or explained away, with naturalistic arguments.
I must confess, to sometimes doubting whether I would recognise Christ's return & would assume it to be yet another psyop...
"The other problem with miracles, is lack of evidence."
There is plenty of evidence for miracles. The most important miracle is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is plenty of documentary evidence from friends and enemies that he existed, was crucified, and that he rose from the dead.
"So, either can be dismissed, or explained away, with naturalistic arguments."
Dismissing the evidence is not a problem of lack of evidence. That's a problem of not knowing what evidence is and allowing prejudice and rationalization to override acceptance of reality.
I chose my words correctly. A lack of evidence is not an absence of evidence.
Also, recognising an ability to do something doesn't imply that doing so is beneficial.
Accepting Jesus requires the (deeply personal) miracle of faith.
It's certainly possible that acceptance of the available evidence starts some kind of process of probabilistic thinking that leads to ego death / metanoia, but faith is a mystery, also, and cannot easily be explained. I prefer to think that Jesus chose me, personally.
If veriphysics is a pragmatic philosophy, why not just use the pragmatic definition of truth and define it as ideas that help you achieve your goals? Don't see the utility of adding unprovable realist assumptions if it's supposed to be pragmatic.
First, it is a PRACTICAL philosophy, not a "pragmatic" philosophy. Pragmatism, in itself, is too intrinsically flawed and temporally limited to serve as an adequate philosophical truth metric.
The fact that you don't see the utility, or are potentially incapable of understanding the utility, does not mean the utility does not exist. And the fact that you tried to substitute "pragmatic" for "practical" casts your honesty into some degree of doubt.
Was that a mistake on your part or did you intentionally make the switch?
It's no more temporally limited than our minds are. We know our goals and how well our ideas help achieve them, but how well it corresponds to something external to our minds can't be known for certain. I was not trying to engage in intellectual dishonesty to "win" a substack "debate" about philosophy. Genuinely unaware of the difference between "The practical objective of veriphysical analysis is to construct reliable predictive models that provide a sound basis for pragmatic decisions" and it having a pragmatic goal of informing decision making? I guess you meant the primary goal is to make models that correspond to truth and informing decision making is a secondary goal?
So, you don't know the difference between practical and pragmatic, but you're going to attempt to criticize, correct, and clarify?
As I already told you, you are not tall enough for this ride. Just stop talking now. Stop asking questions. Just read and do your best to understand.
"The parts of the truth perceived depend upon the who and the how."
Demonstrated, although that most certainly wasn't your intention.
"the pragmatic definition of truth" sounds like redefining facts to suit goals. If de-obfuscation of ones view of the world is the goal, this, in and of itself itself is counter to that. As soon as one begins redefining terms like "truth", klaxons should start going off in one's cognitive guard systems. Responding to the original question, which I reduced to "do you think sigmas attempt to disprove their own theories more than gammas?" - I would find it impossible to answer this with certainty, but intuition tells me the questioner may be on to something here. Some experiments may be in order. For what it's worth, one of the first actions I take when I have a theory is to attempt to disprove it, just like everyone else will.
Sigmas are less likely to let the hierarchical demands influence their views. A Beta might keep his mouth shut if a truth makes his alpha look bad, a Delta might keep his mouth shut to keep his job and a gamma will make anti-truth to make the Alpha look bad. That's a lot of external influence their perception of reality has to wrestle with before seeing the light of day.
If...
That's actually really simple. Because vox's definition is the only honest result of your definition.
To best achieve your results you must believe in Truth. Your appeal to "pragmatism" is a distraction which can only harm action.
You don't need to believe in some external objective truth giver with a static relationship with observers to achieve your goals, pragmatic theory serves the same role with less made up a priori assumptions. It cuts out the problem of metaphysical speculation by only working with what each of us know is real in some sense, our own qualitative experiences, making it more universally useful regardless of what metaphysics we live under or what people you're trying to get to adopt the philosophy believes.
That’s “your truth”, right?
'Made up a priori'
Lolwat?
Didn't Vox say the comma splice is a tell?
You're clearly not tall enough for this ride, as you're making some very basic conceptual errors here. There is absolutely no excuse for confusing "a model for achieving one's goals" with "a philosophical truth metric".
You are also going about this the wrong way. The fact that you have a hammer of pragmatism does not mean that philosophy is a nail.
I fail to see how that's practical. Frankly it sounds like you are conflating practicality with what flatters your ego.
There were several lists given by the author. None contained features you mentioned to assert the premises are defective; for example, the feature of some external objective truth giver with a static relationship with [others]. Where did you see that?
He's angry that vox's definition is implicitly theistic.
It's not enough that the definition doesn't ce out and demand God, he wants a definition which excludes God completely.
Those terms constitute an inadequate and prejudicial definition of God. Also redefining something to attack it is a hallmark behavior of ….
Which terms?
I look forward to your book on Veriphysics.
In all seriousness, I would likely buy such a work as well.
Something like this?
A sigma will make the model fit the data. Occams Razor style of elimination.
A Gamma will make the data fit the model. Just plain crazy.
When I learned one thing from climate science then that the whole thing is about anecdotal experience getting inflated to textbook material by how many guys with fancy titles get behind it.
"an inconvenient truth" has become an inconvenient piece of evidence of how they constantly move the goal posts.
I think it would be very interesting to start looking for correlations here, there must be some. Gender has some, women dominate biology for example. There are correlations in IQ and what level of job or career an individual would succeed at, it's interesting to speculate how the SSH plays into that as well. 5-10 IQ points can be the difference being being managed and being a good manager. Same dynamic goes for the Delta vs, Bravo and Alphas. This is what makes the SSH so interesting and helpful to consider.
I would initially theorize that that Gammas would favor theoretical nonsense aspects to science, like the Gamma who refused to consider the theory of Evolution to be mathematically impossible. The forms of science they can't put their hands on, but rather claim to wrap their brains around, because they're so much smarter than you! Gamma's want to know it all, they don't actually want to do anything though.
Meanwhile I wouldn't put it past Deltas, Alphas, or Sigmas to have a general appeal towards other avenues that better align with their interests and personalty type as related to the SSH. I could really see Deltas liking laboratory work, Alphas trying to pioneer advances, and Sigmas doing as they please based on their special interests. It would be very interesting for men who are certain what their rank is to inform us what they were most passionate about in STEM if not as a carrier, what they grew up being fascinated by. I'm sure we would start to see some patterns!
Some gammas are probably quite strong in applied fields due to tendencies toward subject matter expertise but disruptive to the organization thinking they’re all speaking truth to power or some such. Serving leaders nonetheless but testing them and sometimes strengthening them. Anklebiters increase resistance and error avoidance strategies
Because of credentialism, Sigmas tend to get excluded, unless they really like science. It is a bit too much work for Alphas to grind. So only the other ranks remain in science.
You'll find a surprising number of Sigmas in the footnotes of scientific history, usually not bothering to take the credit, I think. They'll have their names on patents for critical equipment, unnamed theorems that someone else used/copied, or even just whole hosts of critical systems with their fingerprints all over them.
If you pull back from the physical sciences, you see that women dominate psychology and sociology even more. Pull back further, and they dominate the arts more.
The more direct observation is that women can't do math as well as men.
Some men are better at making things and measuring them, because of fine motor control skills. That seems to have a bit more bearing to who specializes in experimental work vs theoretical.
A more fruitful question might be: How does a Sigma's thought process differ from those of the others?
It is very liberating to learn that sometimes, not knowing is progress.
For example, when I was in fifth grade, I knew for sure that Moozlumz in caves who hate our freedumbs blew up the World Trade Center because Israel is our greatest ally. But now, I have really no certain idea of what happened on 9/11. And that is an improvement.
Truthfully knowing you know nothing is a higher level of knowledge than falsely believing you know something.
Knowledge by subtracting lies, which comes from adding truth so that you can see that the lie was a shadow of the truth.
Corollary - reading lies makes you less knowledgeable. Practice mental hygiene.
I think there is a distinctively "gamma" approach to science. It involves finding counterintuitive (and often out-of-context) physical principles with which a gamma can bludgeon people to demonstrate how smart they are. Their approach to scientific discovery is not the establishment of truth, but rather finding a way to prove other people are wrong (or ignorant) and that the gamma is superior for being able to demonstrate it.
In an extreme case, it manifests as attacks on science and reason itself. In my piece on "The Philosophic Premises of Quantum Mechanics – Part I What's Wrong With Quantum Mechanics & Why?" I showed how leading Weimar physicists were advocating randomness and acausality long before quantum discoveries supposedly forced them to abandon a causal, classical world view.
https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/philosophic-premises-of-quantum-mechanics
Niels Bohr's behavior in particular puzzled me. He was adamant about making a statistical theory of energy conservation (the BKS theory). When that failed, he got behind Heisenberg's efforts to promote quantum mechanics as having overthrown classical concepts. He even pursued his guest, Erwin Schrodinger, to Schrodinger's sickbed and tried to best him in argument while Schrodinger was trying to recover. That strikes me as a gamma move. I describe all this in the second half of the piece I cited above. https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/philosophic-premises-of-quantum-mechanics-87b
I don't think the SSH is a complete explanation for the social dynamics that led to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I do believe it was a factor. I hope to have more to say on this before too long.
The social dynamics that led to the Copenhagen interpretation are quite possibly the same that led to the even more Clownish Everett interpretation. In Clown World, the Clowns are everywhere and that includes the STEM fields. Crack open a Cosmology text-book for immediate proof.
Cosmogony.
Materialists don't do Cosmology.
Due to this post I actually made better sense of the original question. If Gammas have a unique twisting of the scientific method(s), then by implication other categories of SSH might have unique approaches as well.
Of course, truth and sound methods for finding part of the truth exists outside of ourselves, thus having unique approaches is a sign that you are engaging in delusions.
P.S. I enjoy your stack as well.
Re: "then by implication other categories of SSH might have unique approaches as well." ... first, establish if there are any other approaches. "Make model fit data and get (valid) prediction vs. Make data fit model and get (desired) (invalid) prediction" seems to be a bimodal choice. Perhaps I have a lack of imagination, but along the axis being discussed, there may be a continuum along the modes in question, but the number of unique approaches seems limited to me. I added the parenthesis for emphasis in my quoted sentence after I noticed something.
This seems very relevant to a stream that Dave the Distributist did a few months ago about “the kid who reads”. People like Lisa Simpson that care more about being seen as smart than actually pursing truth.
Appears to me like textbook gamma behaviour with their obsession with credentialism.
The stream for anyone that wants to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/live/Rub4ECvuRs4?feature=shared
JD Cowan did a good follow-up on that video.
Gammas often embrace and create mysticism around theories so that they can justify any result of their imagination. Quantum mechanics is a great example "Reality is not real, therefore you are wrong. There is no hierarchy, and by the way I am the Alpha."
Much of science is an expression of the scientists philosophical method.
Those who believe of the primacy of the will, believe their minds can dictate to reality what it is. "Cogito, ergo sum" ( my thought makes my existence)
Those who believe in the primacy of experience attempt to allow the obervations of sense to dictate what is true.
The modern fight of science.
Alpha: "Kill your enemies to win."
Bravo: "Kill his enemies to win."
Delta: "How was I supposed to kill them, again?"
Sigma: "Kill."
Omega: "Win?"
Lambda: "If you kill your enemies, they win."
Gamma: "Wait until my enemy is weakest, and then talk him to death. I win."
Delta: "Glad I'm not an Alpha or Bravo. Hell, we're killing people here. How can I help get this over with effectively and efficiently so I get home to the wife and kids?"
Deltas usually do the bulk of the meaningful fighting and take pride in it.
I think this would be a more accurate spin:
Gamma: "If you fight your enemies, they win."
Lambda: "I surrender! And I've been a very BAD kitty. Punish me!"
Lambda in particular isn't archetypical. Fidel Jr. had to learn to be more implicit in his public statements.
While this is what the lambda would say, what they are actually thinking is closer to "the work required to win doesn't sound fun, so I don't want any part of it"
Gadzooks! Why didn't we think of this sooner? I know where we can get the answer... "The Home for Deranged [Gamma} Scientists". We're off!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V83JR2IoI8k
There's a nice little paradox between bullet points two and three. We cannot, ever, fully grasp the Truth and yet we must use our partial understanding (which we no doubt like to imagine is full) of it as the basis for our thought and action. Through a glass darkly indeed. This is most likely an element of why the Gamma recoils, and maybe why nearly everyone on the SSH, at one point or another down (or up?) the line, recoils. It's a spiritual thing. The Truth will inevitably check your ego at the fucking door.
I think the basic premise of engineering is pretty much how I process the world around me. Tested and tried things that are not really in question become generic axioms (though never absolutes if evidence against them crops up), premises are made, (usually most of them after rigorous testing, but one, which may be the one being tested for) hypothesis are formed, then experimental testing is performed and checked against the hypothesis. Once enough data has been collected and observed a theory can be formed that may become a premise in later hypothesis. As time and experience grow, you begin to have a relatively reliable set off "islands" in various topics that give a certain overall level of confidence on certain subjects, while others may remain unknown and uncharted waters. Sometimes I go with not fully tested premises and so on, but that's a function of synergistic thinking that allows what John's Band called single data point pattern recognition. It is not generally helpful to explain anything to normiess, but can be a very useful investigative tool, and at times even conclusive evidence.
Thanks, very helpfull
Excellent heuristics. Thanks for reposting.