Intellectual humility

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by wegs, Feb 7, 2021.

  1. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    Growth ...
    financial
    intellectual
    Social
    Societal
    Cultural

    sibling rivalry
    systems

    different society's reward wrongness in different ways
    Those societys that re-write history to fake the wrongness to be rite0ness tend to reject wrongness as being a lack of skill, ability & power.

    you can directly compare that to military dictators & mass murderers, narcissistic murder/suicide offenders etc.

    if we take something easily identified
    the poem girl(affectionate term)


    is she right or wrong ?
    is she an intellectual genius or an artist ?

    The sad intellectual irony is the Cultural & Ego(self worth & personal value system) calamity that most face in being incapable of looking past their own greed & lust for power & popularity.
    Which is the very heart of the thread subject.
     
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  3. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Wegs, I hope that answers your question.

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  5. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    I suspect it answers every question. A kind of multi-coloured magic 8-ball.
     
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  7. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    claytons socio-cultural revolution to symbolically kiss whos ass ?
    the elitists who are in control ?

    capitalism ?(social community fundamental construction & design of systems & laws)

    elitist power shares all aspects
    when the democracy is a dictatorship of oligarchy classicism all ideologies of the ruling class become standardized with moral impunity toward self factualising social law.

    so if your going to assert society must change to change the classicist dictators, then you have it a bit backwards unless your suggesting a concept of a peoples revolution.
    one not supported at its core by anarchists & wanna'b serial killers like those who stormed the us capital building
     
  8. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    American culture
    only the #1 is an acceptable position
    there is no system of 2nd 3rd etc as values of society rule

    at its very heart is sibling rivalry & how that is mechanized through childhood by the culture & what that is tooled into as a personality.

    sibling rivalry requires the family member to be rendered to lesser state
    yet words around ideas is the concept of family being held equally important as a core structure of ideological frame work for psycho-social construction of the psyche & personality, through religious & societal values.

    mass murderer Christians versus suicidal mass murdered Muslims ?

    most people cant form the question that they never want to answer but demand society obey to service their own wants & desires.


    USA society ... (you the reader)
    you are angry at yourself
    but you cant admit it
    and you dont want to change it
    because the anger is your last grasp on a feeling of power
    but the power is a power of creating fear & suffering in others
    so its a never ending spiral of destruction & psychosis
     
  9. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    speaking of which
    for around 25 seconds thought i had genuinely seen one the other day.
    until around 35 to 40 seconds in as my brain started to compute variables
    it was the puff of white smoke as a smoke ring coming out of the top of a large ship as they started up the engine on a clear blue sky background

    not to say 100% it was NOT a UFO, but my theory is that what i saw as a round disc like object the size of a small car suddenly appear & fly straight up & disappear , seemed to be the most likely conclusion.

    i have read "countless"[= hundreds of web sites, possibly at a rough guess maybe 400 or soo & thats web sites NOT pages ] & personal reports & biography's of people whom claim to have been abducted, seen UFO's and all manner of things.
    i have spoken face to face with 1 or 2 who claim to have seen something that appeared to have no other logical explanation.
     
  10. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    To tell the truth, I think I may have a character flaw in that regard. I don't like arrogance and I detest people who try to bully other people. As a result, I have a tendency in some contexts to want to take the arrogant down a notch or two, and I really have a low tolerance threshold for bullies. Both of those attitudes probably stem from some personal experiences I had in the past. Their practical consequence is that I probably waste more time than I should on those kinds of people, which is not always a productive thing to do.

    I think you make a good point.

    Giving certain people more of your attention than they deserve is counterproductive in several respects. It tends to give them more airtime than they deserve. They inevitably try to drag you down to their level and sometimes, if you lose your cool, they succeed to a greater or lesser extent. Also, your own actions in replying to them as if they deserve your attention has the sort of side-effect of lending them legitimacy that they might not otherwise have, if you're of good character and have a good reputation. It's sort a of guilt-by-association effect that works negatively in both respects. Just by giving them the time of day, it makes them look better (by association) and you look worse (for the same reason).

    That's why I say it's a sort of character flaw to persist in engaging with certain types of people. Unfortunately for me, I seem to have certain buttons that can be pushed. Probably, I'm not as bad as I used to be, on this. I hope I've learned something over the years.

    That's great advice, wegs. When I started on internet forums over 20 years ago, I initially made the mistake of taking some people far too seriously. At that stage, I didn't really have a good idea about what an internet troll was, or how they operate. In fact, at that time, the whole concept was quite a new thing, since the world wide web itself was only just really starting to take off in popularity. These days, I'm very wary of making emotional investments in internet arguments because it so often turns out that the other party in the discussion/argument/debate is not being honest, about themself or their position, or in how they conduct themselves, or some combination of those.
     
  11. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    I wonder if the lack of verbal and visual ''cues'' that we miss online, are partially responsible for why arguing over the internet is so...easy. We all know that there is a person on the other end of these exchanges, but the anonymity of both debaters makes it easier to show less empathy.

    I've read something recently that was really striking about all of this - that many passionate arguers online, are really arguing with their mother, father, significant other, friend, teacher, boss, etc. The chronic arguer gets out his/her frustrations online, when really he/she might actually need to clear the air with someone in their ''real'' life.

    Well, enough rambling for one day.

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  12. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    These days, I don't think about it that way. I go into most internet "arguments" with the expectation that, by the end, my opponent will most likely double down on whatever silly position he is adopting (the one I'm arguing against) and probably become even more entrenched in his nonsense (on account of being determined to finally prove me and other perceived enemies wrong).

    With that in mind, I'm not usually out to change his mind (it's a "he" most of the time) about anything. I've seen that happen occasionally, but certainly never in a thread in which my opponent has felt the need to resort to personal attacks and the like, having run out of (un-debunked) ideas to advance whatever position he is arguing. Instead, I keep front and centre in my mind that other people will be reading the exchange and drawing their own conclusions, whether or not they choose to participate in the discussion. Since they are usually nowhere near as emotionally invested in the argument, they are far more likely to be able to step back and think clearly about the arguments that are put, rather than being distracted by the interpersonal nonsense that goes on. Some of those people, who might initially have agreed with my opponent's crazy ideas, might change their minds.
     
  13. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    wegs,

    I think that's part of it. It's easy to abstract out the human being and imagine you're just dealing with a random name on a screen. There's the added bonus that you can freely insult names on screens without having to worry about being punched in the nose.

    It's also easier, in some ways, to show who you really are, without fear of reprisals. That can be a good thing in some circumstances, but it can also be a bad thing - especially if you're of bad character underneath. It's why the internet is a breeding ground and meeting place for the anti-social and the criminal, along with the rest of us "normal" people.

    I think that some people who feel disempowered in "real life", for whatever reason, find the internet to be a good place for venting their frustrations and, in some case, blaming other people. For good and ill, it also makes it easier for such people to connect with like-minded people. It's how supportive online communities form, but it's also how hate groups grow.
     
  14. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I think this thread is a verbal Rorschach Test. You could write a paper about the various personalities here from the response. (I think Wegs may be writing her Ph.D. thesis as we speak)

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  15. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Lmao! Your username will be listed in my “research notes.”
     
  16. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    Moderator note: Many posts relating to a complaint about myself by member Q-reeus have been deleted from this thread, to allow for on-topic discussion of the opening post and related matters.

    For those who would prefer to discuss Q-reeus's personal issues, an unedited version of this thread can be found here:

    http://www.sciforums.com/threads/q-reeuss-feedback-original-title-intellectual-humility.164017/

    The member Q-reeus has been excluded from posting in this thread, to stop him from derailing it again.
     
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  17. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    It seems to me that a prerequisite for learning is the ability to perceive questions that still need answers. And that implies that one mustn't believe that all the important questions are already answered. A certain requisite openness to the unknown is required in order to learn, I think.

    In the sense that I just outlined, very much so. I perceive that I am surrounded by questions, by mysteries, at every moment. I most emphatically don't think that I have all the answers to all of the big questions. That's what motivates my agnosticism and my lifelong interest in philosophy.

    If a dispute turns into an ego-contest, yes. If the dispute remains at a more abstract level, not really. If you don't already have the answer, it's hard to be wrong. (Or right.) All that one can do is toss out hypotheses, which by their nature aren't things that one typically becomes so emotionally attached to. It's the difference between 'It might be like this...' and 'This is how it is!'

    What often gets me going is people pretending to know things that I doubt that they (or any human being) really knows, often seemingly without any awareness that deep and fundamental questions lurk in the subject being discussed, and being insulting and abusive towards anyone who doesn't believe as they do. We see very similar behavior from both atheists and religious believers in that regard.

    Yes.
     
    Last edited: Feb 12, 2021
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  18. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    That's a pretty idealized view of science.

    Max Planck famously wrote in his Scientific Autobiography published in 1948, a year after his death (English translation 1949):

    "This experience gave me also an opportunity to learn a fact - a remarkable one, in my opinion: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

    That's what one would expect, given that reputations, careers (and worldviews) are often dependent on the acceptance of particular ideas. People aren't going to give up the vital foundation of their identities without a fight.

    I would disagree with Planck in his use of "scientific truth" and " see the light" though. I don't believe that science possesses a 'God's eye' instrument for discerning truth. (I'd question whether we even possess a satisfactory account of what 'truth' is.) And I don't know of any reason to believe that only the latest generation of scientists has access to that wonderful and necessarily infallible instrument.

    What we seem to have in reality is an historical succession of hypotheses, with the later ones arguably being more empirically adequate than the earlier ones. But that's not to say that future scientists won't produce an even better hypothesis that overturns the whole applecart of today.
     
    Last edited: Feb 12, 2021
  19. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    I'm familiar with the quote. Also with hideboundness in the pillars of all establishments.
    At the same time, Im also aware that in the scientific community there is always a large number of ambitious hopefuls, just salivating at the prospect of overturning an old theory, an entrenched view, an outmoded approach. And so they zealously work at experiments and computer models and mathematical propositions to prove their new theory.

    There is little scope for such subversive activity in jurisprudence, economiscs and theology.
     
  20. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    Would it be more accurate to replace the words "Scientists" with "Science" in Jeeves' quote?

    Scientists are human beings and are therefore subject to biases and other human foibles (such as self-interest). Science as a discipline is designed to avoid those things, as much as possible, albeit that it is a discipline practiced by scientists. Science has built-in mechanisms for self-correction. Sometimes that can play out over a long period of time - multiple human lifetimes - but scientific progress is undeniable.
     
  21. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    You're right, of course. It's just that I don't like representing a discipline, institution or concept as a self-aware agent.
    To be really accurate, what I meant was that, while human beings, with all their personal and cultural baggage, are the active practitioners of all disciplines, the practitioners of some disciplines are aware of the possibility of being wrong. They try to avoid it; they may try to deny it; they certainly try to defer its revelation, but they know they'll have to step aside if/when stronger proof a better theory comes along.
    Whereas, practitioners of some disciplines stake their careers, their reputations, their world-view and often their very lives on a single, unchanging, unassailable, fundamental Truth that must be defended at all cost.
    The two kinds of discipline must generate different intellectual and psychological environments.
     
  22. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    I agree, of course.
     
  23. Luchito Registered Senior Member

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    Lets say, a scientist practiced his field based on the doctrines of a known theory. Everything has been working fine until, from nowhere, somebody appears and demonstrate the theory in question is false, and provides not only evidence to prove it but also provides a more accurate explanation to the phenomenon the already accepted theory has described for decades or centuries.

    Will this scientist accept he has been wrong all his life? Will the rest of scientists accept they propagated a falseness for years and years?

    I don't think so. Intellectual humility will be absent because they will feel recognizing their mistake will be humiliating.

    In a case like the one from above, the answer will be to ignore the new scientific approach and continue with the false theory. It might happen the procedure will be to increase propaganda of the already known theory to later "steal" from the revolutionary one and take credit arguing the new discovery still is supporting their doctrines.

    This will happen because their prestige will be badly compromised.

    At a level like forum discussions, it is different because there is no need to provide the real identity of the poster. No scientific institution is in play and moderators can control what can stay and what must go according to their rules and of their mood in that day.

    Mostly in conversations, intellectual humility is found present and alive, but in discussions and debates that is not the best advised. In discussions and debates what is required more than anything is respect.
     

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