Darren:
In order to support humanity and democratic values, does one "need to stand against" and together "against" anything? To protect people from harm, do we have to be honest when people are being harmed? 🤔 We know those who "don't want to believe it" will lie to themselves. Also, knowing liars will lie to "cover up" their crimes. So, if evidence is destroyed intentionally and distorted, do we use our critical thinking skills? Or do we remain philosophically unjustified even though we know evidence is being destroyed? So then, we are inactive and complacent. Long question ha. Criminals always rely on destroying evidence so they can claim they didn't commit a crime. Always. Who's being played when we believe them? 🤔
Seth:
I have addressed this issue in my blog on "Intent". It's a great question and there are many societal variables to weigh in the balance. Specifically, we need a balance between a type 1 or type 2 error bias.
Darren:
I forget the difference. Can you remind me please?
Seth:
Darren:
But we are justified to think Ted Bundy was a murderer even though the "evidence" wasn't us catching him in the act.
Those who need to watch him murder, are complacent in his murdering because they will have to watch him commit it.
Forensic evidence is evidence. Philosophically, it only means we would "love the wisdom of the truth "
Ted Bundy being innocent because we didn't watch him murder...it foolish. Not the other way around.
We don't have a bias that TB is a killer. He just is.
He may say we have a bias against him to confuse us ha. And pull the wool over our eyes. Like Trump, Rittenhouse and Putin.
If you watched Ted Bundy walk into a building where only one girl was living....and he walked out 10 minutes later and she died.
But there wasn't DNA at the crime scene, do you think that this isn't enough circumstantial evidence to prove he was the only one capable of the murder? Would you let him go free?
There are many kinds of evidence. Circumstantial evidence may not be as "strong" as physical evidence...
But this is critical thinking. We have to use our minds to assess. The picture may not be perfectly complete, but our intelligence can fill in many blanks to be accurate despite not having purely physical proof.
What do you think?
Seth:
Absolutely agree. What you are referring to here is not relying only upon deductive reasoning, but also apply inductive reasoning. We absolutely have to use both in everything we do.
Darren:
Have you read what Trump has said about Putin recently?
Seth:
Not within the last 6 days.
Darren:
I wonder, do you still doubt his having been the asset to Russia he was and still is?
Seth:
Yeah, I still have doubts.
Darren:
What kind of information would you need to change your doubts? Because that was the number one important thing to me for years Americans knew. Now, we are seeing the results and we are still very confused as a nation about the partnership between Russian special services, the far right, the disinformation campaigns and Trump's actions as president. We never should have been.
This book was expensive.
The Russians used the Republican party, and they are instilling corruption to Frey Americans. The goal is to exasperated our political factions and cause civil war politically and physically. Psychological warfare is to turn us against ourselves and the west. Period. It rarely is entertained by Americans though because they lack so much knowledge then they don't want to understand it. So they deny. They don't understand Russia as an enemy of democratic states period. This is still the cold war.
Do you watch Fox? Or know how they are covering the Ukrainian war? Watch a couple clips of Tucker Carlson. And ask what is Russian propaganda and what Republicans are misled to believe. It's important. It's tragic.
But unfortunately, with truth and a lie...The lie isn't a "side." It's just a lie about the truth. Like do we study what is false? To understand what is tru?hful. 🤔 In many cases yes, but we have to be aware they are lies. People being lied to don't do this. They take the lies as truth. Like Tucker Carlson and the audience.
Seth:
Social media is a complex system of information - reducing it to an analogy about "truths and lies" is a reductive false equivalency that isn't helpful. Truth and lies are elementary school level problems. Our problems are much more complex than that.
My epistemology is something like -
1) "give both sides of the story equal time until it is clear which side is the more accurate side".
2) "when bias is involved, the bias of an information source reduces its credibility"
3) "try to get information from a variety of sources across the information landscape so that their biases cancel each other out"
4) "in a polarized system, never trust the biased group to expose themselves, look to their enemies to expose them, yet don't trust their enemies too much because they have a bias to exaggerate/lie to destroy their enemy"
Epistemology method #4 - this is the main method I used to evaluate Trump as a Russian asset claim. I reviewed articles from Trumps enemies that would summarize the evidence of his guilt in the Russia investigation. My evaluation of the evidence that Trump's enemies presented was that the evidence was weak. I haven't spent many hours reviewing this, so I don't claim any level of confidence in my conclusion. But after more than a year of investigations, I was expecting them to have something convincing to present in summary form, but they did not.
Darren:
Hey, I was thinking.... deductive logic determines certainty and inductive logic demonstrates probability. But is it that these are often flipped? A person may think their inductive logic (perhaps even a very low probability) means they can be certain of it, and a person may discard a conclusion one could arrive at with deductive logic because they would claim it was only "probable." Basically, certainty and probability can get mixed up in the mind and it's somewhat easier to have bias affect us in this way because of our inner desires for what is true or not. People are uncertain of things with high probability and certain about things with low probability. What do you think?
Conspiracy theories seem to me to fall along these lines. Because a coworker of mine said "I know bill gates is putting microchips in vaccines." When I asked, "how do you know that?" She said "because he is!" I also heard another coworker say "Bob Saget Died from a vaccine." I said "where did you hear that?" And she said she just heard it. She failed to investigate at all what she heard and took it as certain regardless of the extreme low probability it is true. She didn't question her own certainty because perhaps the person who told her came across as certain.
Woh.
That posturing is very convincing. Makes me think of how Tucker Carlson says "I'm only asking questions" before he gives the conclusion he wants the audience to believe. He's done nothing but praise Putin and is claiming the DNC and Biden are at fault for the Ukrainian war. That is propaganda my friend. Switching up and confusing people's logic use. Also, the same coworker said "Putin is a good guy" but I found that Tucker C. said that verbatim so I knew where she had memorized it from. What is the certainty/probability of Putin being a good guy? High or low? See what I mean?
Dude...I really think there is something deep to that. The Dunning Kruger effect is where the less one knows the more they believe they know and vice versa. That is certainty vs probability. It's switched. The more one learns the more one realizes there is to learn. That is increasing the probability and lowers certainty.
But we deny how they work together!!!!! When we want to look away, we switch it ourselves!! And the word "believe" may be the middle ground. Our term and attempt to blend both together. Believe the earth is flat is certainty. And they don't want to understand how improbable it is. And uncertain they should be. That is where self-deception kicks in. To preserve the belief.
Seth:
Excellent analysis my friend. I think you're a spot on. I think if more people understood how they are using their own systems of logic they could find their errors easier.
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