The butchers of science and philosophy, with naive mono-parametric statistics reaching maximalisations. The “games don’t affect violence” is equally BS with the “games cause violence”. The “IQ is the cause of success” is equally BS with the “IQ is not affecting success”.
Humans build systems, embedded in complex network of causal relationships. Science needs surgical knifes (nuance, polyparametric, longterm, fat tails) while our butchers talk on “religion”, “violence”, “crime”, “IQ” in black & white charts. Either you “have it” or not.
VIDEO GAMES AFFECT SOCIAL OUTCOMES. The keyword here is not “violence”. There are documented negative effects on aggression & prosocial behaviour, particularly in men. Why? It’s complex! We don’t know in what level this is affecting the society in the longterm.
To understand the methodological errors of the “butchers of science” (evolutionary BS vendors) lets compare with a real science: medicine. If we study “all cancer patients” and give them Chlorambucil (chemotherapy) we will find no correlation, no health outcome.
So we divide cancer in types. Nuance! In certain types we test certain chemical agents. Nuance! And… there is a correlation between Hodgkin lymphoma & Chlorambucil. Nuance! If we tested “drugs” & “cancer” in general, this would not be science, it would be “social science”.
Deductive: principles → logical consequences Inductive: observations/evidence → general principles
During the last 300 years, deductive reasoning (including Plato) has been increasingly demonized as dogmatic & non-scientific.
‘platonism’ is often spelled with a lower-case ‘p’. Why? Critics of ‘Platonism’ (upper-case P) were, supposedly, against the certainty of Platonic premises (deductive). Faced w/ the contradiction of original texts (complex original ideas) the compromise was a lower-case p.
What is interesting here is not just the naive dichotomy (between deductive & inductive), not just the contemporary ignorance (of original texts), but something else: deductive reasoning seems to have become a lost art.
It seems more & more common that people considered as experts, academics & scholars can’t see the consequences of their own beliefs (premises). Truth & reality is presented more flexible and open than it is. Truth seems plastic, can alter based on probabilities, evidence etc.
Students trained in the inductive-mania adopt a certain mental framing: any specific conclusion should be drawn on specific evidence. The lack of [specific] evidence means a lack of [specific] logical conclusion.
So a group of modern experts can discuss the premises of modern feudalism without realizing the logical consequences of feudalism. They can discuss, casually, the premises of modern communism without being aware of its consequences to themselves.
Often, what we call “reductionism” is mostly poor deductive thinking: inability to sort out key-elements & draw conclusions. For example, why the Platonic “ideal city” is not a Bolshevik communist one? One key-element: no walls. Citizens are not prisoners in the ideal city.
Countless passages of the Bible intentionally train the reader to single out key-elements and draw deductions (necessary vs. sufficient elements). Are angels good? Well, Satan is an angel. Is belief in God enough? Well, the demons “also believe, and shudder” etc.
I’ve read my share of books, on numerous topics. Typically, a book (particularly the “scientific” ones) tries to present a single coherent view of reality. The Bible, on the other hand, presents real-life stories of belief, too often with no apparent explanation.
For example, for atheists a “man of Reason” should think or behave in a certain coherent way. According to religious dogmatics, similarly, a simple model to follow. But if you read the stories of Peter, David or Solomon (& their sins) there is no simple deductive model.
The Bible is not just a set of beliefs. It’s a complex set of stories supporting cause-effect syllogisms. In fact, biblical stories are presented in an angle that would be counter-intuitive to predict with a simplistic belief in God (particularly for young readers).
Was the Bible used (along w/ math & classics) as a training tool for deductions (adding 1000s years of context)? In fact, Jesus uses nuance (adding words like “if”) to make his disciples more attentive to form careful conclusions. Every word matters.
The story goes like this: Voltaire wrote radically progressive books while living in palace courts & investing… in the slave trade.
Meghan, holds back her progressive anti-conservative activism while she’s marrying into the Royal Family. “Meghan Markle’s activism to be held in check by royal protocol”. The Guardian
Gini Index + Social Equality in California and Holywood The more social justice = The less GINI INDEX (metric of economic INEQUALITY) Examples: Finland 21.5 – the most “equal” country in the planet South Africa 62.5 – one of the most unequal countries in the planet Can you guess what’s the GINI INDEX of Hollywood?
Lets compare the GINI INDEX ➠Mexico 48.2 (cartels) ➠New York: 55.1 (#ImWithHer) ➠California: 48.8 (Google, Apple) ➠Hollywood: 47.7 and … ➠Hungary: 28.2 (below France) So is Hungary “conservative” & California “progressive” in terms of econ. inequality?
Authentic conservatism = Humanism It never ceases to amaze me how most comments on race, slavery & enlightenment are uninformed or misinformed on the HISTORY OF ABOLITION OF SLAVERY. Lets take a peak in an interesting summary found from Enlightment and Slavery.
And while the “white christian” became a synonym of “racist” let’s not forget: a. Atheism and anti-christianity in the enlightenment was strongly linked to SCIENTIFIC RACISM (e.g. Voltaire)[1] b. The EQUALITY of blacks & whites was taught as a CHRISTIAN idea based on the BIBLE
[1] Yes, in one detail. The references (in various books & the German Wikipedia) on the direct involvement of Voltaire in the slave trade are not solid. No doubt, however, that he was a pillar of scientific racism. He considered equality of races as a ridiculous Christian doctrine.
A. To master dead languages (takes years and years) to examine original sources from the history of civic freedoms? OR B. To make abstractions on “systems”, conjectures on “evolution” reading history from McGraw-Hill?
B is the laziest way. The modern way.
The reason why I’m criticising the “complex systems” activists is because their ignorance on actual complex history is transparent. ALL political ideas have been applied, through different constitutions, and failed, under certain conditions.
Referendums? Hitler did them e.g. to annex Austria. Napoleon became emperor through referendums. Erdogan consolidated his power through referendum. but…. France was the first country to reject the “European constitution” through referendum. This saved the decency of Europe.
France alone has tried 16 different constitutions, a laboratory of all shorts of dogmas, from extreme centralism to decentralisation. Reading comments like “we need localism” by “complex systems scientists” it’s like watching a child participating in an adult conversation.
We should not underestimate Psychology, the “BS science”. The science of Psyche (ψυχή = soul), indistinguishable with classic Philosophy and Theology. The nature of human soul is linked to deep roots of ETHICS vs. CORRUPTION: The MAIN thing that matters in a political system
[…] Freud started his career by copying Plato a whole lot.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book III: "κυριωτάτην πίστιν έχει το ήθος" ("you should be persuaded mostly by the ethos/character [and not just by instrumental arguments]")
Sigmund Freud founded his ideas of psychology based on Platonic / Aristotelian dialectic on ethos/character. pic.twitter.com/U0qBoZFTTg
Unedited interview of a real black slave. Fountain Hughes was born a slave in 1848. He gained his freedom at age 17 after the Civil War in 1865. He was 101 years of age at the time of this recording.
Fountain Hughes tried to warn the black community: DEPT is the new slavery. “So many of colored people is head over heels in debt.” The full text of the interview is found here.
Blacks ought to be awful thankful. “Colored people that’s free ought to be awful thankful. And some of them is sorry they are free now. Some of them now would rather be slaves.”
Did the slaves ever talked about freedom? Yes, when the preachers taught them the gospel of Jesus the slaves didn’t stop praying for freedom & chanting related christian songs. Note: in the west every significant movement to free slaves was bible-inspired.
So this amazing guy, an ex-slave, gets emotional when it gets to Jesus, but what about the church? Final question: do you go to the church? “Don’t go to church at all”, he answers. When he tries to explain [criticise protestant church ??] the recording suddenly ends.
Some comments
Unlike the Orthodox & Catholics the protestant churches were active communities having their elders accompanied to the church every Sunday or by having their brothers & sisters visiting them with house-served communion. So “go to a church” mainly means “belong to a church”.
Black slavery appeared when the the first banks were created, giving loans to slave traders.
Modern historiography goes like this: white christians enslaved the blacks. That’s all what a marxist needs to know while the same old banks fund their LGTB parades on sexual freedom.
Documented history is not so vast. What happened in the past of the west (~3000 years) is more or less written. Current democracies are not even comparable to the Athenian one. Yet, it was all lost. And the greeks were insightful enough to document the reasons.
Plato, for example, explains how diversity of opinions leads to diversity of morals that gives lot of free space to the extreme morals (immorals), leading to unsustainable governance and tyranny.
That’s why, during the peak of direct democracy, it was forbidden to even mention in public the contents of Eleusinian Mysteries (Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια). Penalty not for criticising the mysteries. Not for ridiculing them. But just … mentioning them was punishable by death.
According to Herodotus, the Persians (military superpower) offered a generous treaty to Athens (a city). Athenians not only refused to accept exchanging absolute freedom w/ privileges, but murdered (by stoning) the Athenian representative who voted in favour. Zero tolerance.
“κερδαλεώτερόν εστι ομολογέειν τω Πέρση μάλλον ή περ πολεμέειν’ (it would be more profitable for us to accept the Persians rather than fighting against them) Athenians had a unique conception in what consists profit & value. Gold & privileges had no longterm value.
After beating the vast Persian army (with careful strategy), the Athenians were considered “mini Gods” within the ancient world. Other greek city-states were shocked & amazed. The pragmatic approach on liberty is why Athenian education became the model of “liberal arts”.
Ironically, the purpose of religious blasphemy laws is being inactivated (written in the hearts and minds of citizens). The activation of blasphemy laws was the sign of the fall of Athens (e.g. condemnation of Socrates to death). Same trend today
My guy Nassim Taleb once again gets his history wrong. In Greek vs. Roman he writes: “Plato’s disastrous chance at governing in Sicily”. He builds a BS model, exactly like the one he criticises & doubles down in historical ignorance. This is unfortunate.
Yes, the education of Roman elites gradually became more and more “practical”, thus ignorant of greek philosophy, similarly on how modern US education replaced the classics with STEM. It was all about power, not truth. The english-speaking world is falling into the same trap.
Please think through the following questions: (a) from 1 to 10 how important was greek philosophy (& Plato) to the founding fathers of US? (b) from 1 to 10 how important is greek philosophy to Obama or Trump? Hint (a) 9 to 10 (classical liberalism) (b) zero (scientism)
Example: Charles Bristed was an American scholar and author, sometimes writing under the pen name Carl Benson. He was the first American to write a full-length defence of Americanisms (vs. British language). We may claim he’s the first true “American scholar”.
Charles Bristed documented that in 1855 there was talk amongst the founding fathers, some of whom were proposing GREEK to become the OFFICIAL US language. That was the extent of Platonic & Aristotelian thinking of the founding fathers of US. The face of no-BS pragmatism.
Unlike what Nassim Taleb suggests, the opposite is actually true. The Romans, not Greeks were a normative culture fixated with norms transformed to legal forms. The Romans hated medicine, the only true inductive science that the Greeks developed even during the Roman empire.
Back to ancient Romans: Knowing Greek became less and less common, unable to find or even copy greek texts, leading themselves to illiteracy gradually introducing the dark ages. Finally greek books got lost.
We see something similar with the introduction of STEM in US & UK today. An elite class is running business & academy, a whole generation virtually ignorant of greek or byz culture & history, falling to all kind of mental traps made by MARXISM or SCIENTISM / RATIONALISM.
Davis Hanson recently published his warning on US education: “Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom”
Twitter is not the place to write a PhD holding up against a storm of historical BS. I’ll just post an interview of Tim O’Neill, an atheist [often too cynical for my taste] summarising the failure of Roman education when they rejected Plato.
When the western Romans rejected greek education, guess who remained experts in Platonic philosophy? The Byzantines! they were teaching the classics with passion to the point that Julian the Apostate tried to ban christian teachers from teaching philosophy.
Note: Julian the Apostate was the last non-Christian emperor of Rome. He was the last emperor w/ astrologers as counselors, typical for Romans. When Western Rome went down, astrology went down as well. That speaks volumes on the no-BS approach of Byzantine greek culture.
Pinker in Harvard 2018, doesn’t represent Harvard of 1600. And it’s only 400 year difference. Neoplatonic philosophy of Roman era (400AC) is NOT platonic (400BC), 800 years later. The Academy of Athens was degenerated and it was the Byz, not the Romans, that closed it down.
Today If you search in google the greeks vs. byzantines the top result is marxist (pseudo)Macedonia propaganda.
This BS, backed officially by Trump, can pass in a western political elite that has no f#cking clue of greek lang & history. The Romans in decline all over again.
If you want to see the face of dark ages in english-speaking world, take a look at the comments here. Highly-educated people with breathtaking level of hist. ignorance. Proud Romans thinking in boxes, worshiping their leader. No debate based on sources.
Of course we see nothing random here. We see predictable patterns of behaviour within the current global power structure. There is a non-random predictable attack against everything platonic, greek or western, mainly on Whig & Judeo-Christian BS w/ illiterate population.
It’s reasonable to judge a character by their friends. We can’t escape the dynamics of the group we spend our time with. This amicable peer-pressure is a gradually blinding force leading to “bounded rationality”. I know it may seem cryptic, it’s the only thing I can say for now.
This is called “bounded rationality”. Yes, it happens to all of us. But he’s not that naive. He knows Gibbon was anti-Byz & Cato anti-Greek. It’s like quoting Fox News for Obama or CNN for Trump. He carefully selected his sources, playing games w/ the ignorance of the audience.
Some comments
Question asked to Benoux: What is your suggested material on greek or byzantine history? Your posts imply that mainstream narrative is wrong.
Response: Original texts. I’ve never found a translation that I would trust. This applies also to New Testament. e.g. In the original NT the word “θρησκεία” (religion) is found only in one place w/ negative connotation (James 1:26-27). Translators put the word “religion” all over the NT.
UNIVERSITIES: THE INSTITUTIONALISATION OF IGNORANCE.
By producing noise of ignorance stronger than the signal of valid information
Often having no clue what they’re talking about, presenting it as “science” (e.g. nutrition science, evolutionary BS psychology etc.)
Example: Nutrition Science It took one single paper, by John Ioannidis, to do a reality check: “almost all foods revealed statistically significant associations with mortality risk”, proposing the necessity of a radical reform of the whole field.
STEM fields are also hijacked. The virus of ignorance is NOT limited to the humanities & the gender-bender studies. Those who imply “something is wrong” with hard science are a minority forced to APOLOGETICS or SILENCE.
Let’s take a hard scientific field: Physics. Spending loads of $$$ to go beyond the “falsifiability of science”, engaging the methods of… Astrology (rationalisations + pointing to the stars).
Contrary to popular belief, fields like Astronomy & Astrophysics have even LESS CONSERVATIVES than marxist/liberal fields like Sociology. Similar trend, of course, in all domains. Source: Nature magazine.
The rest, the “conservatives”, go to university to learn that:
Conservatism is a combination of realpolitik + capitalism
Enlightenment, a quasi-atheistic trend favouring individualism against collectivism.
American & French Revolutions … fruit of individualism!
And my favourite one: the Judeo-Christian values of the west! A term populated AFTER the WWII in english-speaking world as the deep roots of our… civilisation! Our ancestors, surprisingly, studied other roots e.g. Greek / Latin / Catholic / Orthodox values etc.
So, should we close down the universities? In fact, it has happened before. The defunding & closing down of the Academy of Athens. An act of religious dogmatism by the Byzantines! Right? In fact, the Academy was degenerated & it was the Byz, not the Romans, that closed it.
Contrary to University indoctrination, it was the Christian Byzantine Empire who introduced a SEPARATION between THEOLOGY + SCIENCES. And it was exactly because the Academy of Athens mixed those two domains. secular higher education + separate ecclesiastic studies.
Contrary to University indoctrination, the Church Fathers took the single most important step of towards modern science: to exclude astrology. The last pagan Emperor, Julian the Apostatem, was the last Emperor with a council of astrologers. Typical for Roman rationalists.
Science vs. Scientism : a different conception of the world. This conception is lost.
Science vs. Scientism : a different conception of the world.
What does the absence of classical conception of the world means?
a limited sense of time & purpose (consumed in the little things)
ignorance on how the world actually works (multiverse utopias were everything is possible)
blind trust in mass media (pavlov training)
Primitive impulsions are addictive. Like heroin addiction, you need to increase the dose to keep the same effect. Universities & media steadily increase the supply for those trembling for their daily dose, just to feel better for a short period. They NEVER get satisfied.
The Future a. New Inquisition: going after fake science & fake news (e.g. Alex Jones accused of witchcraft). b. New Institutions: bought off and c. New Platonic & Christian institutions with:
Homer, New Testament, Virtue
Citizen vs. individualism
Freedom of research
Any serious education adds value by teaching two things: taking risks & assuming responsibility. In this topic, finally, I have more time to study Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb, with all the twitter context. Very good writing indeed.
However I’ve expressed my disagreement on certain points of Nassim Taleb manifesto. It’s hubris to use “Greek/Platonic” in a negative connotation. Platonism is not the past, it’s the FUTURE and the PILLAR of western education (including theology, linguistics & logic).
Example: Plato uses word IDIOT (ΙΔΙΩΤΗΣ), in the most literal sense, favouring the INDIVIDUAL/PRIVATE life in a [collective] democracy. It’s used as an insult! Modern illiterate west, by praising individualism, by definition praises… idiocy.
All words in greek (ancient & modern) around the individual are insults.
21/ And the opposite is also true. The most significant words in greek have a strong COLLECTIVE element:
politis (citizen), δημος (demos) etc.
αμιλλα: friendly rivalry in competitions. It’s like “compete strongly but don’t forget you’re friends with common interest”.
Those are the real ΙΔΕΕΣ / FORMS / MODELS of Plato, not unique to his texts but found throughout the classics. greek: ΜΟΡΦΗ (=form) -> ΜΟΡΦ-ΩΣΗ (=education) french: “form-ation” = education english: in-form Education = FORMS/MODELS shaping the mind & attitude of a student
One of the greatest fallacies is to presume rhetoric is a game of verbal persuasion. It’s not. It’s mainly a game of attention.
Attention comes first. Persuasion follows. Engagement comes last. Pop intellectuals gain attention. Marketers gain attention. Martyrs gain attention with heroic actions. It works like this: now you have my attention, persuade me with your message. https://t.co/EZAz2KTZ2F Red is the colour of attention.
STOP traffic signs are red
CNN is red
Youtube is red
Economist is red
TIME Magazine is red
Communist flags are red
Nazi flags are red
Antifa flags are red Get the picture?
Aristotle lectured on rhetoric (art of persuasion) in Plato’s academy. That’s ironic since he never managed to persuade Athenians to adopt his school of thought. However it was enough to catch the attention of one person: Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander.
The moral of the story is this: you don’t care if your rhetoric persuades many people, you care if it catches the attention of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander. You care if your small group of students have the capacity to conquer the world, given the opportunity.
Attention is your most valuable asset. Most people perceive & observe with their eyes & ears, unaware of the forces designed to draw their attention. Others observe with their mind, like doctors, making “diagnoses” with clinical semiotics not visible to the rest.
The easiest way to persuade: (a) gain attention (seize the media) (b) lower the standards When attention is gained, persuasion is relative to the standards of the audience. The easiest way to lower the standards is to make them blind of competition. So, remove the classics!
Example: what is the easiest way to promote the “selfish gene” & meme pseudoscience? Answer (a) Gain attention w/ aggressive marketing. Make sure Dawkins is a household name. (b) Create population with lower standards. Remove Developmental Systems theory from mainstream.
For (b) target a generation that doesn’t know any serious abstract pattern of life (λόγος, αριθμός, ιδέα, άτομο, semiotics) & push the “meme” BS instead. With no serious competition it will blow their mind that a modern biologist thought there may be basic pattern in life.
The art of mastering our attention depends largely upon our interests, and here lies the secret of persuasion: by cultivating sophisticated interests to children we determine who is going to persuade them later in life and with what standards. High Standards ↔ Good Leaders
Παιδεία (Paideia) fosters children with the ambition to:
self-control their attention
use nuanced logos (logic) to detect contradictions
observe with their mind the non-observable by the senses or the evidence
Why? To uphold high standards of leadership (=persuasion)
Guantanamo Bay is not just a detention camp. It is a legal regime where the Aristotelian tradition of “Rule of Law” doesn’t apply. The Rule of Law is not “any law”. It is a set of principles in resolving conflicts.
Typically, media present an urgency to resolve a crisis by any means necessary. 1000 excuses why the rule of law is OUTDATED or should NOT be applied. CNN: New Zeland – No question, we had to change our laws.
In 2004 everyone was a terrorist. Terrorists should be arrested & interrogated as soon as possible. It was urgent. (Guantanamo Bay) In 2019 everyone is a racist. Racists should be silenced as soon as possible. It’s urgent. We should change our laws. Media ARE Guantanamo Bay.
Discrimination based on skin color After the Obama Presidency, a media hysteria led to new laws for “positive discrimination” based on skin color. State-level skin-based discrimination IS the Guantanamo Bay.
Under the constitutional principles of Rule of Law, there is a statute of limitations that sets the maximum time when sexual assault allegations can be admissible in courts. The media calling for Kavanaugh’s Impeachment ARE the Guantanamo Bay.
CNN Politics: The First Amendment doesn’t guarantee you the rights you think it does. Again, the Media ARE the Guantanamo Bay.
On May 1, 2001, President Obama announced the successful operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was condemned by the MEDIA and NOT by the judge. He was never arrested. Never held into a fair trial. This is the Guantanamo Bay.
The media condemn by whim & glorify by whim. They had previously glorified Osama Bin Landen as a “freedom fighter”. They provided with the publicity that the US government needed to actually finance Al-Qaeda. Again, the Media ARE the Guantanamo Bay.
François Benoux wisdom 