Voice typing is the bomb!

Voice timing typing is the bomb!

I've been trying to get into using better at using voice typing to write my blog posts. It's been a slow process with lots of setbacks. But I think I finally am hitting my stride.

My aspiration is simple. Here's my aspiration: I'd like to be able to write a complete blog posts, fairly long, and with moderate intellectual content, and produce it them in the a single draft. As I am trying to do right now.

(I'm two paragraphs into this thing, and it's going pretty well.)

The secret to being able to do this, as with all things his practice.

Practice! Practice! Practice!

My phone is my tool of choice for the first draft. I like to produce them first drafts while I'm walking up and down my 500-foot driveway. I started this on the way up. Right now, I'm on the way back down. walking back down my 500  foot driveway; Walking does might not permit work for voice typing the deepest sort of thinking ideas, but it's not bad for producing something moderately thoughtful like this.

I do my first drafts in a Google dDoc that I've got shortcut head shortcutted on my phone's home screen. That way I can lets me work on the same document on my phone and on my other devices.

Writing something that requires deeper thinking takes other tools. I can speak athe first draft on my phone. Bbut then I have to go to need a device with a keyboard and to revise it. And for more thoughtful pieces, to rewrite it. My tool of choice for that activity is I use Google Docs, with a voice typing on either my Chromebook or my Lenovo ThinkPad. I like my Chromebook because it's portable and I think it's got a for its better microphone. I like my ThinkPad because it's got a for its better keyboard.

I'm done sp with speaking my first draft. Instead of revising it and losing all the changes, I'll deliberately red line it so you can see what's difference different between my first draft and the final.

I copy/pasted the text from Google Docs into the Blogger editor which makes it easy for me to strike through deleted text and underline additions (like this sentence.)

iIf you aspire to be able to do this as well too, I have three words for you. Practice! Practice! Practice!

PS: I will get better at doing this. How? I have three words for you. Guess which ones.

A meditation on assholery

I'm a decent person. Not a great one, but a decent one. But I'm also kind of an asshole. I admit it. There’s something honest about this admission, and there’s something dishonest and assholish about it, too. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking how wonderful I am for admitting that I’m an asshole. I’m thinking that makes me better than you, whoever you are. I may be an asshole, but I’m an asshole who can admit he’s an asshole--a better kind of an asshole. What about you? I thought so. You’re just an ordinary asshole. I’m better.

I know I’m an asshole because I know all the bad, stupid, malicious, vengeful, thoughtless, spiteful, uncaring things I’ve done. I don’t go around telling people about them, for God’s sake! I may be an asshole, but I’m not a stupid asshole.

I am also an egotistical asshole. If I were a modest asshole I’d admit my assholery to myself and go about the business of making myself less of an asshole. Instead, I’m writing what I hope will be a charming and amusing blog post about how what an asshole I am. Maybe that way I can get away with it.

Or not. I hope I’m not writing this just to get away with it. I hope I’m writing this to get some of my personal assholery out of my system. And I hope that I’m writing it to make it easier for other assholes who might realize that they are assholes to admit it to themselves and maybe even others. But who knows? I’ve discovered, over the course of a lifetime, that I have an outstanding ability to deny, explain, justify, and make excuses for my own behavior. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that I’m kidding myself.

But maybe my ability to mislead and fool myself isn’t outstanding. Maybe I’m just average. I don’t really know. And it doesn’t matter. No matter how good I think I am--even at bad things like self-delusion, I’m probably not that good. And no matter how bad I might think I am, I'm probably worse. I almost certainly overvalue the good things that I've done and I undervalue the harm. Such is being human. Or at least that’s what I tell myself to help me live with that knowledge.

It must be true that the better you know me the more you know of the bad things I’ve done. It’s not just because I’ve done more bad things to you or in your presence, but also because I have probably shared with you (very carefully) some of my more disreputable acts. I’ve shared a lot with Bobbi. She knows me better than anyone but me and knows more bad things about me than anyone but me. And still, it seems that she loves me. I’m a lucky guy.

Over the course of my life, I’ve become good at forgiving myself. After all, you can only go so far with denial and self-justification. But I do live with myself and I think that's because I have learned how to forgive myself for the worst things I've done. Or at least the worst things that I'm not currently in denial about.

I think that the ability to forgive is a virtue, and to be forgiven is a great gift. When I listen to the song “It's quiet uptown” from the soundtrack of “Hamilton” and the chorus sings “Forgiveness! Can you imagine? Forgiveness!” I reliably burst into tears. I can imagine forgiveness. I've experienced it because I have forgiven myself. I’ve learned to forgive others. I’ve done it selfishly--to justify forgiving myself. How can I not forgive them, when I’ve done worse? But I’ve also done it because--well, I don’t know. I’ve done it.

Why do I cry when I hear that song? Maybe it’s because something big remains unforgiven. Maybe it’s because the song reminds me that forgiveness is possible, and a gift, and I have received that gift, even though I am undeserving. Maybe it’s because I like telling stories that prove how sensitive I am because it makes it look like I’m less of an asshole. I really don’t know. How could I possibly know? I’ve already said it. I’m just an asshole.

Jordan Peterson on the rise of the new media

The popularity of my ideas is partly a consequence of a technological revolution. I've seen that more clearly since October partly because I can see the mainstream media dying at a faster and faster rate and the alternative media expanding faster and faster.

The landscape of consciousness: Part I

Here I am, right now, as I start writing the first draft of this piece, in the Flexit Cafe in Ellsworth Maine. That was the approximate physical location of my body at that time. As I edit different drafts I’m in different physical locations. I’m writing this because I’ve thought of a new way to understand the state of my mind and of my consciousness.  I’m using this essay as a tool to carry out my exploration. Come with me as I explore!

My body has a state. So does my mind. So does my consciousness. My body's state includes its location in physical space along with other attributes that might be measured and reported. My mind was in some state when I started writing this and is in a different state now. My state of consciousness--which I see as different from my state of mind--has also changed. I can consider my mind’s state including something like a location in something like a mind state space--whatever that might be. And I can consider my consciousness as having a state in some consciousness state space. Can, and did, and do.

My body's location in physical space might be described with respect to a physical landscape. The landscape identifies locations, their proximity to one another and also something about the difficulties of moving from one location to another. My body can be in locations that are not part of the landscape--for example, my body might be above the landscape or below it. But the landscape metaphor is helpful, though we must acknowledge that it is inadequate.

I've been considering how I can change my body’s location as I might move through (and above and below) the commonly understood physical landscape and have gained useful insights about how a mind and a consciousness, such as my own, might move through their respective landscapes. And I imagine how other minds and consciousnesses might move or be moved.

I started this essay by locating my body with respect to a physical landmark: Flexit Cafe. I could find the location of Flexit Cafe on Google Maps, and read out its latitude and longitude. That might be a more accurate statement of location, but less meaningful.  What I'm after here is meaning, not accuracy.

I know how to move my body from place to place through the physical landscape. Indeed I've done it. Since starting to write this I’ve moved from the Flexit Cafe to my home in Blue Hill Maine where I am right now. I know how I could move my body to other places in the physical landscape as well.

So much for a physical location. For now, anyhow.  Let's consider mental location,  mental spaces, the mental landscape, and the means for moving a mind such as mine.

When I started writing this my mind was situated in some location in some sort of mental space whose characteristics I had hoped to discover and to describe as I constructed and revised this essay. This essay is a record of my exploration of a landscape of ideas adjacent to that first location in that mental space. It might be turned into a kind of map. I don’t know what else it might end up being.

A mental space, as I conceive of it, is a space that contains ideas, images, and other mental phenomena. Phenomena exist in relation to one another. Some ideas are close to others. Some are distant. We might consider that a mental space exists only within a particular mind. We might also consider that a mental space exists independent of any mind and that minds locate themselves within it. Or both. We're talking metaphor here, so I'm not sure it matters whether it's one, or the other, or both. Yet.

I can't think of a coordinate system for an idea space that might parallel the coordinates of a physical space. That doesn't mean there can't be one. But I don't think it's necessary. I can locate my mind in relation to landmark ideas just as I located my body in relation to Flexit Cafe--a landmark location. Right now my mind is exploring the region around an idea I might call “mental landscapes” occasionally teleporting to ideas in the region of the idea of “physical landscapes.”  Occasionally my mind goes somewhere else entirely-- to ideas associated with sentence structure or choice of words.

So minds can travel the landscape of ideas by tedious exploration (and possibly creation) of adjacent ideas, by logical reasoning to move from one idea to another, and by something like teleporting in which one jumps from one idea, or one region of mind space, to a distant idea or region.

Is such a jump a change in location, that is, a change in state of mind? Or do certain states of mind require different states of consciousness?  When I'm exploring the neighborhood of ideas about the content of this essay and when I'm thinking about the mechanics of writing it seems that I am in more than different states of consciousness. But that's just the idea that I'm examining, right now. The question does not have to be resolved, yet, if ever.

The characteristics of a physical landscape are entirely familiar to all of us. The characteristics of a mental landscape, less so. When it comes to understanding what a consciousness landscape might be like, I'm a bit lost. That is: I'm not conscious of any ideas that seem to have utility.

No matter. I am in some location in some space of possible conscious states, and if pressed I could write some word describing that state. And I even know a little about how I got here. I started by moving my mind through my mental landscape to ideas about mental and consciousness landscapes. And then I turned my mind to the question: “What is my current state of consciousness?.” And then I became conscious of my current state of consciousness--for how else could I answer that question?

So now my body is located in my bedroom in Blue Hill, my mind is moving between ideas about physical location, ideas about mental location,  and ideas about my location in the space of consciousness, and I am intermittently conscious and unconscious of what I am doing.

What am I doing?

I am deciding, right now, that this is a good start. And I'm going to finish it up and post it.

The Intellectual Dark Web--fad or phenomenon

I propose two questions:

1. Is there a rising trend toward long-form conversations and open public discussion of serious questions? Or is it another fad? I think it’s a valuable and growing phenomenon. The so-called Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) is one facet.
2. Are these conversations producing something beneficial? I think yes. Internet technology has produced the toxic online environment that includes tweets and counter-tweets, and that has driven old-style media to chase on-line clicks by spinning and slanting and inducing fear and anger rather than thought and understanding. This phenomenon is an alternative and might be curative.

By long-form conversations, I mean just that. Long. Like hours long. And conversations. Not a lecture. Not a performance. Just a couple of people sitting down and discussing issues.

By “producing something beneficial” I mean—producing new knowledge. Not existing knowledge from mind to mind, but new knowledge.

Here’s an example of a long form conversation: this one between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. Among the folks who follow the people having these conversations, they are referred to as JBP and Sam. JBP summarizes his conversation with Sam here (emphasis mine.)

“Sam Harris and I met in Vancouver on June 24 and 25 for what amounted to five hours of intense discussion about the possibility of a universal morality with a solid foundation. We are continuing our discussion (adding Douglas Murray) into the mix) in Dublin on July 14 (tickets available here) and in London on July 16 (tickets available here).

OK, five hours of intensive discussion. And more multi-hour conversations to come. As for the value of the conversations, JBP, who is a scholar of dizzying range, talks elsewhere about insights he—a person who has studied and thought about some of these problems for decades—has had recently as a result of these conversations. So, the answer to (2) has to be yes.

At the end of this post, I’ve quoted some bits from a transcript I did of a Bret Weinstein YouTube video that I thought worthwhile enough to transcribe in its entirety. If you think the excerpts are interesting, then you can listen to the video or read the whole transcript. Or both. I think you’ll find some new ideas. And from there, you might follow the same kind of winding path that I’ve been following.

I think it’s a growing movement. Two years ago I knew the existence of several of them, but the only one who I’d much listened to was Sam because of his book “Waking Up” which led me to his podcast. From Sams Podcast, I was introduced to several others in the core community. And then friends who I introduced to Sam pointed me to still others. Recently I’m hooked on both absorbing the ideas and taking advantage of the media that these guys are using. Whenever I’m driving somewhere I’m also streaming content from someone. When I can’t sleep, I listen. Or read.

The term that’s used most often to describe this group is “Intellectual Dark Web” or IDW. The idea of the IDW hit the mainstream after this NYT article was published.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

The core members have little in common politically. Bret and Eric Weinstein and Ms. Heying were Bernie Sanders supporters. Mr. Harris was an outspoken Hillary voter. Ben Shapiro is an anti-Trump conservative.

“People are starved for controversial opinions,” said Joe Rogan, an MMA color commentator and comedian who hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country. “And they are starved for an actual conversation.”

These and conversations like them sell out 2,500 seat auditoriums (and some larger ones) People pay $200 each to watch people talk. And pay two or three times that for conferences where they can watch more people talk and hang around with other people who like listening to other people talk.

And then there are PodCasts, live streams, and YouTube video lectures, some of which have millions of views and run for as long as three hours.

I was aware of many of these people, but here’s a link to a live stream that significantly increased my interest (and the time I spend watching and listening). The live stream phenomenon is interesting. A friend was watching, was about a half hour into it, and told me he thought I’d like it. So I joined it and watched it with him, with us commenting back and forth in a chat channel and then talking (and chatting) more later. Later I watched the parts that I’d missed. Typically I watch these things at 1.5x speed. Only an hour long and only about 1M views.

Here’s Joe Rogan talking to Eric Weinstein for 2 hours and 40 minutes. 1.15M views.

Here’s Dave Rubin who hosted that first live stream, talking for 2:40 with Bret and Eric Weinstein. Only about 500,000 views.

But these numbers, large as they are, are misleadingly small. Rubin’s show on YouTube is just a camera watching people talk into Microphones. The audio gets distributed as a PodCast and PodCasts can be accessed through any number of channels. Then bits of the video and the audio version are excerpted and published. People make transcripts of content that they think is particularly valuable.

I thought that this video on government by Bret Weinstein was so good that I transcribed it here

The most powerful idea to me is that if you push any value to an extreme it creates a dystopian nightmare. If you love freedom and you say: “Well I want everybody to be free at all times to do
anything they want,” you create a total catastrophe for justice.

We can actually engineer a system it’s totally non-utopian but it’s very successful at delivering outcomes that are desirable without being the nanny state, without being onerous and meddlesome and dictatorial.

I don’t think a hundred years ago that was foreseeable. I think we were stuck with partial solutions and people became entrenched in the idea that they were correct and so they lost sight of what was incomplete about them.

So, you know, it’s very tempting for you to imagine that corporations are like creatures. They’re not. That’s not the right mapping. And so if you try to map the creature rules onto corporations it won’t work for various reasons—including the fact that corporations don’t die. Right? And so their uncreaturelike in this way. But there is a proper mapping and if you can find it, the rules are quite intuitive, in fact

Utopians tend to focus on a single value that they wish to see maximized. Right? And whether that value is freedom, or justice, or..

…whatever it is. Anything that maximizes one value is a catastrophe, because of its massive cost in every other value. And so the other thing that utopians do is they tend to imagine that they know what the system needs to be structured like in order to reach their one value. Right? And so they ignore the collateral damage of the other values. They assume that those will be prettied up later or something. It’s impossible, actually. And they assume that they know what structure creates the elevation in this value. And they are always under-imaginative in the unintended consequences.

So what I would say is: effectively, utopians are searching for perpetual motion machines.

From the Old Version

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Denial, Denialism, and Climate Change: Part II

Continued from here where I said:

A friend of mine sent me a long article from The Guardian, “Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth.” To me, the article is a long, intellectual justification for name-calling.

and

I don’t agree that climate change is necessarily an urgent problem. The key word is “necessarily.” It might be urgent. I’m just not convinced on the basis of what I know of climate science. There are people who know way more climate science than me who disagree with my view and people who know about as much as those people who agree. But I’m in a charitable mood and I’m willing to later stipulate that it is an urgent problem needing radical actions in order to discuss whether the radical actions that are proposed are good ones. I will argue that many are not—using science a facts to back up my claim.

I think I might qualify, according to Keith’s criteria, as a climate denier, just as he might qualify, according to my criteria as an asshole. But I am not denying anything. I am not refusing to consider any reasoned argument based on facts. And if I question an explanation, or offer another explanation, I will do it based on facts. And I think he’s well-intentioned so I won’t call him an asshole. But if you call me a denier, I reserve the right to call you one.

I don’t think it’s possible to be entirely neutral. We all walk around with our own Bayesian priors. I have read claims of impending disaster for more than forty years, starting with Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” in 1968. The book, widely hailed, predicted mass starvation in the 1980s. Then there was the Club of Rome Report “Limits to Growth” in 1972. Whenever they’re made a prediction of dire consequences it’s turned out to be wrong. And decades of prior doom-saying has turned out wrong. So if you come to me predicting doomsday, my prior is that you’re wrong.

But I am very willing to update my prior based on evidence. And update my prior that I correctly understood the claim that I had concluded was untrue. And I am aware of the ever-lurking problem of my own confirmation bias and my own susceptibility to other cognitive errors. So I am extra careful to give “the benefit of the doubt” to arguments that do not support my prior, and less weight to those that support it.

(And by the way, I do think that’s the right stance to take unless you are a cognitive bias denier or a Bayesian reasoning denier. And by the way, Bayesian analysis is not the only tool I use to evaluate arguments and evidence. There are problems with Bayesianism. Every tool has its limitations. Including some of the methods of science.)

So, back to the article’s argument. I agree that people sometimes deny facts because they don’t want them to be true and that is because they are aware of the consequences of their being accepted as true. It’s pretty clear to me that Holocaust deniers are motivated anti-semitism, not a quest for truth. They call themselves revisionists, not deniers. But who cares. They don’t merely deny the Holocaust, they explain the “evidence” as part of a plot by the lying Jews. And some say: there was no Holocaust, but if they had been it would have been a good idea because Jews are always up to no good. The reasoning: Jews are always up to no good, therefore in this instance, Jews are up to no good. QED.

People who deny the Armenian genocide are different. They mostly agree that a lot of Armenians were killed by the Turkish government. They disagree on the number, but they’re within the same order of magnitude, unlike the Holocaust deniers who either believe the whole thing is a fabrication, or reduce the number by more than an order of magnitude. The dispute about the Armenian genocide is whether it was a genocide or simply a fuckload of Armenians getting killed. It’s a genocide if the Armenians who were killed were killed solely because they were Armenians. It’s not a genocide if a million (plus or minus) Armenians were killed because they got in the way during a war for territory and because the Armenians were (mainly) the opposite side to the Turkish government. Turkish government denies it was not genocide because they claim to be nice people and partly because they have said that they know that if they accept that it was genocide their admission will be followed by a claim for money damages.

People who are 9/11 deniers are in yet another category. They call themselves 9//11 truthers and call the rest of us deniers. Whatever. They point to evidence that it was an inside job, engineered by the US government to manufacture an excuse to attack Afghanistan and Iraq and pass the Patriot Act, and we who don’t believe that are the real deniers. I have not studied their evidence but I have looked at it and revised my prior, but only very slightly. I think they are wrong.

Almost all of the people who reject Darwinian evolution do so because of its conflict with a foundational belief: that the Bible is true and inerrant. If someone points out that one part of the Bible is obviously inconsistent with another, they will do a lot of difficult intellectual work to “prove” that there is no inconsistency. When they reject evolution they not “denying” the evidence. They are simply pointing out that it conflicts with the Bible, therefore it must be wrong. QED.

To characterize them as ignorant for not evaluating the evidence that the Bible is true versus the evidence that evolution is true is to misunderstand them. Their belief system is axiomatic—like mathematics, not evidentiary and explanatory, like science. The inerrancy of the Bible is not a conclusion reached after considering evidence. It is an axiom. The axiom. An axiom is a statement that is assumed true, without proof. In an axiomatic system you accept the axioms, and then go on and reason from there. Since the Bible is true and inerrant, then every argument that seems to show that there is a contradiction MUST be false. We just need to discover how it is false. Because it must be. Otherwise, it would be in conflict with the axiom.

You don’t have to agree to the inerrancy of the Bible to call yourself a Christian. And people who see the Bible as a metaphor can use it to lead pretty good Christian lives. But for those who do, and accept as a matter of definition that a Christian is one who believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, then you can’t be a Christian unless you accept that the Bible is inerrant. And why would anyone choose to believe that? Because it’s true. Because Axiom One says that.

So people who accept the Axiom of Inerrancy don’t deny evolution. They don’t have to. It can’t be true that species evolved on the paleontological timescale because there is no such time scale because the Bible does not allow for it. QED. There also can’t have been a Big Bang. Same reason. QED.

It’s not that they disagree with the physical evidence that is consistent with the Big Bang theory. Or the evidence in the fossil record that is consistent with Darwinian evolution. It’s just that according to their understanding of the Bible, the universe was created by God, not too long ago. So their explanation of the existence of the fossil record is not “evolution” but “that’s the way God created it.”

And some will claim that their explanation is more consistent with science. We can’t do an experiment to see whether the Big Bang is true, or that humans evolved from non-human primate creatures. So what technique of science can we use? How about Occam’s razor, which says: given two competing explanation, always accept the simpler one. On the one hand there’s an explanation involving a big bang, Population I stars made of hydrogen that go nova and produce the heavier elements according to a theory of nucleosynthesis; later generation stars that coalesce with planetary systems that contain these elements; chemistry that gives rise to replicating life forms by an as-yet unknown chemical process. Once we have self-replicating chemicals, Darwinian evolution explains how we get the full panoply of living systems. But it’s all very complex. Physical constants have to be exactly right for it to work out.

On the other hand, here’s a simpler explanation: God made it that way. So Occam’s razor says accept that explanation. Why did God make it that way? You might as well ask “Why was there a Big bang?” Or “Why were the physical constants the way they were?” Question after question. Problem after problem.

Why not be a good scientist and choose the simplest explanation: “God made it all.” Or are you an Occam’s razor denialist?

And among people who are very knowledgeable about evolution, there is strong agreement on the fundamental mechanism: “replication, variation, selection” but disagreement on many of the details. Some subscribe to a theory called “group selection.” Some subscribe to a theory of selfish genes. But then how do you explain altruism? So one can accept the theory of evolution and yet disagree with many details. So if we have one group of people who accept “group selection” and another that does not, can one group be called “deniers?” And if so, which one. The answers: of course we can call them names. But it’s not going to help us understand reality. And anyone can call the group that they want to discredit the denier group.

Same thing with climate change. Anyone who understands the fundamentals of science can understand the basic ideas. Climate does change. Science has produced records of those changes. People can debate some of the details but not the fact that climate does change.

Here is a chart showing climate change over a period of 450,000 years.

The data is from the Vostok ice cores. The climate history in the Vostok core records is consistent with other records—both for shorter and for longer periods of time. So I am not cherry-picking the data to refute clear and settled science. I am using science to make an argument about what reasonable people should agree on, and what they can disagree on and still be reasonable people.

The red line is temperature. The blue is CO2. Let’s focus on temperature and CO2 since that’s what the debate is mainly about. The present is to the left, the ancient past is to the right. So the most recent temperatures in the record are the top left of the red line. To see the evolution of climate as time moves forward, you go from right to left.

What you can see is that climate changes. You can see temperature and CO2 varying for 450,000 years with no humans around for most of it and with no significant human impact for all but a tiny bit. We can see temperature varying over a range of about 12 degrees Centigrade from higher than today to way, way colder. And we see carbon dioxide varying very substantially and in phase with temperature.

So almost none of this change is due to humans because, for almost all of that time, humans did not exist or did not have much impact. So what can we learn from this? Climate does change. It changes substantially without humans. What shall we call climate change that doesn’t involve humans? Let’s call it natural variation. There is natural variation in carbon dioxide and there’s natural variation in temperature. And they are correlated. Science shows this.

Now the conflict.

Some people believe that all of the climate change that we see today is human-caused. That’s the same as saying that NONE of it is due to natural variation. How could that be true? We have records that show climate change through natural variation for millions of years. For NONE of today’s change to be due to natural variation and ALL due to humans then either something must have happened to cause natural variation to stop or some supernatural agency has weighed in. I don’t think God has gotten involved. And I have not heard anyone suggest that natural variation has stopped. So I’m going with “some part is natural variation.”

But 100% natural? Also unlikely. We know that humans are spewing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We have well tested theories of physics that tell us that increasing CO2 will increase temperature. So some of it is human-caused. How much?

I’ll go into that in the next post.

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Denial, Denialism, and Climate Change: Part I

A friend of mine sent me a long article from The Guardian, “Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth.” To me, the article is a long, intellectual justification for name-calling. Call someone a denier, you’re calling them a bad person. Call them a denialist, they’re a worse person. What could be worse than calling someone a denialist? Well, calling them a post-denialist. Like fucking the fucking post-denialist, Donald Trump.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, done for "humorous effect," I don’t like name calling. I think it degrades dialog and the search for truth—and that’s why I am here. To discover truth. To create knowledge. In a world flooded with information, how do you decide what to believe?

One answer is: you write long blog posts to explain your present point of view to a friend. Because you are writing for a friend you have an obligation to not propagate your own ignorance and error. So you fact-check yourself as you go along. And you pay heed to people with views not identical to your own. In the course of doing so you clarify your own ideas and you even change your mind.

Which I have done while writing the first two parts of this series.

To know what to believe you need to evaluate facts as they are presented to you. You can't fact-check everything. It’s tedious and expensive, but a necessary starting point.

You've also got to heuristics. It would be nice if it was easier: if I could say "Well, I trust the New York Times." But I've fact-checked the New York Times, and I've found that's a bad heuristic. Likewise "Trust the Wall Street Journal" is a bad one." On the other hand "Trust Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) to reliably report facts" is a good one.

So my metaheuristic is: I’ve got some. If have determined (by fact-checking) that X is a reliable source of information in a particular domain—where X might be a person or an institution and person X endorses Y as a resource, then I can assign a certain amount of trust to Y without the full cost of fact-checking.

Another heuristic: if someone resorts to name-calling, I downrate them. I may reject them entirely. I’m not against name calling in every situation. But if someone replaces discussion of facts and critical analysis of arguments with name calling, then they’re assholes.

That’s a joke.

I’m not going to saying that Keith Kahn-Harris, author of the Guardian piece, is an asshole. He does have some critical analysis to go along with his name calling. But he name calls, too. And his whole essay seems an elaborate justification of name calling. So I could call him an asshole if I wanted to, and justify that to myself. Because I’m in a generous mood and I want to demonstrate charitable behavior, I’m not going to call him an asshole, even if he is one. Which I didn't say.

Instead, I am going to criticize his essay on its merits.

I don't disagree that there are people who deny certain things, and he starts by saying that it's a normal human activity. Even a necessary one. 

I think that there is something wrong with putting people who deny the Holocaust in denier and denialist buckets with people who “provide subtle and not-so-subtle support for those opposed to taking radical action to address this urgent problem [climate change].” Like me. And I don’t like being in the same bucket as people who don’t accept evidence pointing to the origin of species based on Darwinian evolution, and people who believe that 9/11 was a government plot.

And what about people who deny evidence that--on the whole--the world has been getting better and has kept getting better for decades, perhaps even centuries. Yes, there are billions of people living in poverty, but the number of people who are NOT living in poverty is vastly greater than at any time in history. And the percentage is greater. What's wrong with acknowledging the fact that--even though there is still a lot of violence--that there is a stunning amount of evidence that shows that violence of every kind has been decreasing. We face an enormous number of problems caused by technology, but what about the benefits we're reaped.

What about human flourishing denialists? What about we live in an awesome world denialists? What about life is good denialists?

I'm not a Pollyanna. I don't believe that it is inevitable that life will continue to get better and will continue to be good. But FFS don't deny the evidence that it has gotten better and it might continue to be good. Don't build an alternative dystopian narrative to prevent people from being complacent. There is no good reason to be complacent. The whole world can turn to shit, quite easily. There are many more ways that things can go wrong than there are ways that things can get better.

But that's always been true. And yet many things have gotten better. And I think there are reasons that things have gotten better. Critical analysis of ideas, testing of theories, and so on, have made things better. I will acknowledge that there are times when name-calling might have some benefits. And I might even write something describing when name-calling could be valuable. But probably not. And certainly not now.

Instead, I'm going to explain why I don't like Keith's essay. And since I think I quality, according to his criteria, as a climate change denialist, I'm going to explain why I believe I am not denying what some might think that I'm denying. And in the course of that, I'll explain some of the problems that I see with what some might describe as the "consensus view" and others might describe as "not a consensus view."

To be continued in Part II.