Sunday, October 26, 2008

Fact vs. Feelings


I don't know how many times I've had liberals yelling and shouting and at times crying when I'm debating them. Meanwhile, I'm just sitting there, completely indifferent to the data I have.

You have to understand, I am very cold and unemotional about economics and politics. I have no agenda. All I do is look at the facts and decide my ideology from that. Liberals and leftists decide their ideology FIRST and then try to find "facts" to support it.

Guess whose ideology always wins in the end.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cap, I know EXACTLY what you mean.
The only emotions I feel when dealing with these situations are frustration and anger; yet I still reign them in hoping to appeal to the logical and rational side of argumentative debate.
How others are not able to see how they self manipulate thier own thinking has baffled me for decades.

Anonymous said...

Actually in the example given above both sides are wrong. Much of the problem stems from using the word "is" which makes 2 objects identical. "The sky is blue" is incorrect whereas "The color of the sky is blue" is valid (the sentence isn't true E' but it correctly indicates that we're speaking about an attribute of an object rather than making an invalid assignment. In pseudocode:
sky = blue (incorrect)
sky.color = blue (correct)).

"You're a racist" is another invalid statement as it takes a complex human being and gives it only one attribute, that of a racist. A more appropriate sentence would be "What you have just said would appear to be racist to me"

Part of the problem is that the brains reality generating mechanism is so good that people confuse the artificial reality generated by their brain with external reality which is unknowable. Within a given reality tunnel that people reside one can have absolute truths which are things that work every time they are tried. One of the major problems I see in the US is that there appear to be a number of incongruent reality-tunnels that people inhabit and there seems to be no easy way of making the population aware of this.

The best way of preventing discussions from degenerating is to have people agree to use a more strongly typed form of English (E' is too difficult to speak in). English is a very loosely typed language without any type checking and one can say X is Y regardless of the nature of X and Y.

Your link at SDA doesn't work.

Loki

Anonymous said...

Bullets are cheaper, easier to use, and more effective than facts.

Cheaper, because facts often require costly research and dissemination. A lie uttered in under 5 seconds often takes many hours of careful explanation to dispute.

Easier to use because the mental force field of the ignorant is nearly impenetrable.

More effective...that speaks for itself.

Hot Sam said...

Liberals are terrible with facts vs. opinions. They are even worse at differentiating facts from fallacies.

For example, ask them which of the following is a fact and which is an opinion:

1. "Ice cream tastes good."

2. "I like ice cream."

If they don't have much time to think about, they'll get it wrong almost every time. If they know they are being challenged by it, though, they'll give it more careful thought and avoid the trap.

Try it and see what happens.