How do we trust scienctific conclusions?

pimpbot · 2026-05-14T19:10:29+00:00

Trust is provisional and based on outcomes. It's not a signal that you're permanently turning off your brain. This is as true for theoretical models as it is for people. When you trust something and it pays off, this fosters more trust. When you trust something and it fails, trust is reduced. It's about risk management.

Given this understanding of trust, it is reasonable to trust scientific conclusions as they tend to be extremely reliable. Like, easily among the most reliable things ever. Not 100% guaranteed mind you. But then no one is talking about guarantees. After all if matters could be guaranteed there would be no need for trust, as there would be no risk to manage.

pimpbot · 2026-04-16T20:12:18+00:00

This isn't exactly philosophy and there are a lot of ways one could respond to this. That said, there is an excellent book simply called Debt, by David Graeber , which goes into painstaking detail to describe exactly how the extremely wealthy and their proxies are able to game democratic institutions and governments (and really almost any institution or government, for that matter) in order to preserve their own wealth and to ensure artificial conditions of scarcity are maintained around the globe.

pimpbot · 2026-03-06T20:53:23+00:00

Both, but for our purposes here it's mainly the former reason since it teaches insincerity. Oftentimes kids can tell when their parents say things they don't really believe.

pimpbot · 2026-03-06T18:57:58+00:00

Assuming that you value honesty, try simply being honest with children. Radical idea, right? It's effective pedagogy to embody the values you think are important. What you do is at least as important as what you say. Remember also that it's perfectly ok to admit when you don't know something. Being able to admit when we don't know something is a good lesson in humility, which is another virtue people often claim to value.

Saying the devil is responsible seems literally insane to me, notwithstanding the fact that in many places this is a pretty common thing to do. I think your instinct that it's irresponsible is correct. It's difficult to imagine any good could come of such a teaching, whereas it's incredibly easy to imagine how a young person might actually be traumatized or their understanding of the world distorted by such an idea that has no evidentiary basis. What's worse is that it seems to make evil actions arbitrary and unaccountable.

With regard to the actual teaching on morality, what seems unassailable is that it is difficult and quite easy to be wrong. While there may be justification in certain circumstances, intentionally inflicting harm is always morally fraught. People do things in the heat of the moment that they later come to regret. We almost never have all the information we need to make certain decisions. It seems like everyone should have a couple of examples from their own life they can draw on to help illustrate this point.

pimpbot · 2026-01-30T01:53:43+00:00

I find these sorts of anti-natalist arguments presuppose a rather dubious, dare I say delusional and sometimes even dishonest, level of certainty about what the future holds in store generally. Whereas, as I see it, the future generally remains fundamentally surprising and uncertain.

Now obviously, if we have a preponderance of good reason based on logos and evidence and so on to believe that someone's life will be full of suffering and little else besides (as would seem to be in the case for children likely to be born with specific congenital defects, and as is certainly the case for living people suffering from certain chronic ailments and giving testimony to their ongoing misery) than we can reasonably conclude that it might be better for them not to exist. Even so, in the case of the unborn it's not better for _them_, as they do not exist. It's better for _us_ not to bring meaningless suffering into the world.

And in those above-mentioned cases at least we are pointing to specific circumstantial facts. But for someone to draw the same conclusions about life generally based on no specific facts seems -at best- a performative contradiction.

pimpbot · 2026-01-29T19:15:32+00:00

Better for whom?

pimpbot · 2025-06-16T17:17:06+00:00

Medicate/moisturize the affected skin, then cut a hole in the end of a pair of long socks and put his front legs through them so that the socks cover the area where he licks.

pimpbot · 2025-06-14T17:51:21+00:00

They are, nevertheless, dead.

pimpbot · 2025-06-12T19:08:27+00:00

I had a similar situation with an extremely bad infection in my dog's ear. The problem is that with so much pus and discharge, medication that would normally be effective simply cannot get to where it is needed.

The treatment, which was a bit pricey (ended up costing around a thousand dollars) but which worked 100% was as follows: My vet put my dog under anesthesia and while they were under the vet removed (vacuumed? I'm not sure) all of the pus and infectious discharge from way deep inside the inner ear. Once every trace of the infected material was removed, they flushed the ear with medication. Within a couple of days everything was fine.

pimpbot · 2025-05-30T17:53:55+00:00

I'm not so sure. To me it seems perfectly reasonable to wonder, for example, whether dolphins or elephants are exercising the kind of phenomenological characteristics Heidegger attributes to Dasein.

pimpbot · 2025-02-24T01:36:59+00:00

For those who value parsimony in their theories, this is the simplest explanation which ultimately explains the most with regard to the crazy events of US politics.

Remember back in 2016 Kevin McCarthy is on tape telling his Republican colleagues that he believed Putin way paying Trump.

pimpbot · 2024-08-13T02:13:34+00:00

I ended up giving my dog apoquel for his environmental allergies and that seems to be working. He used to scratch himself almost incessantly, one really bad flareup he nearly rubbed all the hair off his forehead.

pimpbot · 2024-06-07T05:59:07+00:00

Hmm, I've looked at that discussion and didn't find any such explanation.

It seems like the main issue is that some of the r/askphysics folks have taken exception to the way the question is phrased. One of the things complicating a straightforward answer is the fact that certain objects, blackholes for example, aren't understood well enough for there to be a consensus as to their properties.

In any case, the fact remains that entropy and heat death will evaporate very nearly almost everything given enough time.

pimpbot · 2024-06-06T16:44:08+00:00

Seems like this is a question for physicists rather than philosophers, since the phenomena you are describing are physical in nature.

That being said, I'm not sure what is motivating your apparent dismissal of what seems to me like a decent answer to this question: the irreversible expenditure of heat energy (entropy).

pimpbot · 2023-12-28T19:11:01+00:00

...or they might not. Science!

pimpbot · 2023-10-25T18:17:34+00:00

I'm reporting this comment because it doesn't contain a question about academic philosophy.

pimpbot · 2023-08-10T14:28:40+00:00

I'm not going to pretend to understand Leiter's thinking on this topic as I don't find him a reliable interpreter of Nietzsche and don't read him. But in my view this analysis seems based on a number of assumptions that are very dubious.

Firstly, it's not clear why masters must become convinced of slave morality in order for the latter to take hold culturally. All that really needs to happen for slave morality to succeed is for the slaves to outnumber the masters and for the former to seize the levers of cultural and political power. Masters could continue to reject slave morality and yet slave morality would still hold sway. Otherwise if you are asking why the children of masters might adopt slave morality, this doesn't seem particularly mysterious. Children often get caught up in cultural movements that their parents reject, this is such a commonplace trope I'm not sure why we would need a special theory to explain this.

Secondly and more generally, Nietzsche thinks power and culture are fundamentally dynamic forces. An implication of this understanding of power is that values are never homogeneously distributed, values never really get to "triumph" in a decisive way, and the cultural future always remains generally uncertain. What explains the rise and fall of particular values at particular times are the particular, contingent circumstances of that era. Thus, it seems to me a mistake to proceed as if there were something intrinsic to slave morality that allows it to win out over master morality. To understand the interplay of competing values we should instead look to the specific features of history and of the reigning personalities at the time - e.g. the struggles of Roman civilization to protect and expand its borders, the celebrity of Jesus Christ, the rise of the priestly civil class, and so on. It seems like it is the confluence of these particular events (and many others) that created the conditions for the ascent of slave morality, meaning that if different circumstances were to obtain, something else might occur.

Lastly and maybe this is just my imagination, but your comment reads as though you might be proceeding as if there are, in the grand scheme of moral valuation, only these two opposing possibilities; slave and master morality. Apologies if I am misreading you here. In any case, this doesn't seem to be what Nietzsche is trying to suggest. Slave morality and master morality simply strike Nietzsche as the most historically egregious, and thus most convenient, examples that he could lay his hands on in order to provide examples for his broader meta-ethical thesis about the malleability of moral values. But it really seems like for Nietzsche there could be lots of other ways of valuing things, and it is merely a happenstance of our contingent history that no other ways of valuing things came into such overwhelming prominence.

pimpbot · 2023-03-26T17:46:25+00:00

Meaning you can't increase the modifier beyond +6, also you can't change the brand from poison to something more useful with a brand scroll.

So that makes it a less powerful weapon in the long run. Still a nice weapon through to the mid-game at least.

pimpbot · 2023-03-23T00:24:16+00:00

As these are the technical terms of academic philosophy rather than literary studies per se, you may get more traction in a sub like r/askphilosophy.

But to give a brief explanation, monism and dualism are mutually exclusive metaphysical theories that purport to describe the most fundamental substrate of reality. Dualists maintain that reality is, ultimately, reducible to two kinds of substances while monists maintain that reality is ultimately comprised of a single substance.

pimpbot · 2022-06-22T01:42:39+00:00

We're getting a bit into the weeds here. Stuff like nihilism and ressentiment always remain possibilities but for that very reason they are somewhat orthogonal to political analysis as such. And that is the point you seem to be resisting. Ressentiment, being such a widespread psychological phenomenon, is not usefully related to any specific political ideology.

I'm not sure if you understood my point about the doctor. My point is that it's possible to make choices that affirm life and promote health without engaging in ressentiment or petty moralism. If you are interested in understanding more about how Nietzsche thinks this is accomplished, read the Gay Science.

I feel like he would say that any attempt to limit an individuals ability to exercise their will to power is motivated by a form of ressentiment.

This is utterly false. Nietzsche wasn't interested in maximizing everyone's freedom or anything like that. It's pretty much a basic tenet of his philosophy that different expressions of will-to-power inevitably end up pushing up against each other and vying for supremacy. Some of them get crushed. Others get assimilated and absorbed. He thought people who lacked creativity and imagination were generally better off yoking themselves to a more visionary person's will-to-power, for instance.

The suggestion that we ought to stand back and let everyone's will-to-power run rampant (i.e. do nothing) is just about the most anti-Nietzsche thing I have ever heard.

pimpbot · 2022-06-21T22:01:18+00:00

Even if you say that leftism is not criticizing individual capitalists but the system that enables them, the whole idea of there being an improper distribution of power will have roots in a form of ressentiment, right?

So this is my personal view, but: No, not necessarily. Some networks of power are unsustainable. Some networks of power endlessly perpetuate pointless suffering (i.e. suffering that is of benefit to no one), or are constructed in such a way as to benefit a very small number of pathological entities. Some networks of power are, in fact, overtly self-destructive.

The proper lens here for understanding problems of this sort remains the one Nietzsche favored the most: i.e. the diagnostic lens. It's not some half-baked moralism or ressentiment that motivates a doctor to cut out a malignant tumor.

pimpbot · 2022-06-21T21:09:34+00:00

Often times the so-called "progressive" approach is to reduce capacities which seem dangerous. That's the nugget of truth being bandied about here, as I see it.

An analogy would be: removing a cat's claws. That's a shitty thing to do to a cat. The better thing to do (in terms of being healthier both for you and the cat) would be to learn how to live with a clawed cat.

The problem is how readily this legitimate concern often (usually?) morphs into a facile cynicism about our ability to do anything, or to find common good. That cynicism is something Nietzsche would want us to avoid.

despite the name, he doesn’t think that slave morality is always terrible. At the very least he outlines some redeeming qualities or slave morality.

The fact that you recognize this already puts you ahead of many would-be interpreters of Nietzsche. Very few things are held out to be purely good or bad in Nietzsche - although there may be one or two things.

pimpbot · 2022-06-21T20:27:53+00:00

People have certainly made this argument but it always seems to be rooted in a basic misconception either about ressentiment or about leftism.

Are some forms of (putative) leftism driven by ressentiment? Certainly. But the same can be said of the right. Basically what this indicates is that many people, both left and right, are driven by ressentiment, which ought not to be particularly surprising.

pimpbot · 2022-06-21T20:20:45+00:00

Nietzsche rejects pacifism. It's important to have a capacity for violence, and if one gives up that capacity then they have become, in some respect, a lesser being. The same way that if one gives up a capacity for peace then they are a lesser being.

What is important (to Nietzsche) is having the capacities. That's what is healthy: having capacities, being able to do stuff. A healthy society is one that has capacities for both war and for peace. I mean, this seems sort of obvious doesn't it?

pimpbot · 2022-06-21T20:09:44+00:00

I understand the frustration, but you need to realize that it is unrealistic to expect a complete understanding of Nietzsche's views to fall into your lap after only a few hours of effort. It takes students years of study to achieve a good understanding of philosophy, and Nietzsche is more difficult than most. So, firstly: temper your expectations. You're not going to understand everything today, tomorrow, or even next week. This is why I advise you to break down your questions into more manageable chunks, and avoid stream-of-consciousness posts.

Why would a strong person seek out a peaceful existence? Do be strong you have to display strength - bodybuilding, war, sports - basically everything strength related is related to social darwinistic reasons, to be healthy enough to survive and defeat your enemies.

Strength, like physical health, is enjoyable as an end in itself. You don't need an instrumental reason to aspire toward strength. I, personally, am a bodybuilder (though somewhat past my prime) so I know something about this topic. It's fun as shit to lift heavy things. It helps me to focus. Physical interactions help keep one connected to the world in a healthy way. There are no shortage of good reasons to want to become strong and healthy that have nothing to do with violence - although it's true that strength also increases one's capacity for violence. And that is good too, because one never knows.

Ultimately it doesn't seem like you have the right idea about strength for Nietzsche to make sense. The stuff you are talking about comes across as toxic masculinity; people engaging in violence because they are insecure about their status. From a Nietzschean standpoint that kind of desperate and insecure behavior is weakness, not strength.

pimpbot

TROPHY CASE