dubdobdee | towards the bullet-dodging of my much put-upon readers!!!

syzygy: from the Greek participle sun and verb zugein, meaning two entities linked together while maintaining their separate existence... "get me rewrite!" :D

its astronomical meaning -- which i actually sort of knew* -- is a bit different and more specialised: but a.cockburn just used it as a joking way to link opposed squads of paranoid obsessives, viz truth3rs and b!rthers, as a combined shaping force in current US politics

*the alignment of three or more celestial bodies in the same gravitational system along a straight line: i knew it (tho had forgot) bcz it's the name of a 1973 SF novel by Michael G. Coney, which I read but didn't much like in the mid-70s...

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From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

i tweeted this! but i don't know who to...

From:

koganbot

My turn to be pedantic: I know the word "paranoid" gets used for conspiracy theorists, but I really don't like the meaning of "paranoia" to be extended in that way. A paranoiac thinks everything is about himself, either a delusion of persecution or delusion of grandeur; and in casual speech in reference to the noninsane, "paranoia" has been extended to mean excessive self-consciousness (or even normal self-consciousness) or excessive (or normal) uneasiness as to the intentions of others in relation to oneself. Now a feature of the clinical condition is that paranoiacs use an impressive amount of logic/reason/rationalization in support of their paranoid ideas, whereas logic and reason totally abandon them when the possibility of alternative, nonparanoid, explanations arise. So paranoiacs are impervious to counter-evidence.

Now, there's a family resemblance between conspiracy theorists (or anyway the more extreme types, not just ones who consider the possibility of a botched or deliberately curtailed investigation in regard to, e.g., the Kennedy assassination, but people for whom it's a matter of faith that there's a conspiracy) and paranoiacs, in that both the paranoiac and the conspiracy theorist resist counter evidence in exactly the same way. And both use the paranoia/conspiracy theorizing to organize a lot of information into too coherent a package. But even here there's a difference, in that the paranoiac will include (and organize) a huge amount of what happens to him or her, or what he reads and observes, into the paranoia, whereas the conspiracies that the conspiracy theorist sees, while wide-ranging, still have boundaries, areas that they don't apply to (e.g., most of one's everyday social interactions).

The same person can have paranoid tendencies and can be drawn to conspiracy theorizing, but still, those are different phenomena, since the first is about oneself and the second isn't (or, the second is about oneself as a knower, but it's not about oneself as the center of attention).

Could we come up with a different name for what the conspiracy theorist is afflicted with? And perhaps come up with a general name for the curious combination of excessive logic and abandonment of logic that characterizes both paranoia and conspiracy theorizing?

From:

koganbot

By the way, a lot of common behavior that I wouldn't consider either paranoid or conspiracy theorizing is nonetheless also very resistant to counter evidence. E.g., my opposition to teleology is an axiom, something that I use to organize experience, rather than something that I use experience to confirm or disconfirm. And for the believer, the idea that God has a plan for him, or the idea that the hand of God is evident in world affairs, are axioms in the same way. These axioms can be tested, but not by simply pointing to counter evidence, since the axioms organize the evidence, get applied to the evidence, are used to interpret the evidence. So counter evidence doesn't exist in the way it does when you're testing a hypothesis. The way you test an axiom or a fundamental belief is by thinking up alternatives and seeing how the alternatives work. But you usually don't do this unless your axioms run into a lot of problems, run into more anomalies and difficulties than you can sidestep or explain away. And even then, you might not challenge your axioms unless at least the rudiments of some alternative explanation are in sight.

Also, a lot of life has to do with following conventions, e.g., for how to behave, how to use words, and so forth. And it's often hard to see when someone is following a different convention, rather than that he's being defiant or uncooperative.

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

yes: my habit has become to think of such axioms as follows -- are they being used forensically, in a manner to produce a question or fruitful line of enquiry (cf darwinism as an axiom: where the line of enquiry is all of modern biology, really -- those dispensing with darwinism have to dispense with an entire huge discpline and all its facts); or are they being used to muffle enquiry (as "intelligent design" does, since the ntelligence at issue isbby definition beyond the wit of man to study or explore -- the hundred thousand possible questions of the form "why does THIS happen so neatly?" are every one smugly and flatteningly answered by the same phrase: "since god knows all, neatness is merely inevitable")

forensics come from the latin for "before the forum": viz, a line of enquiry that opens up public discussion and discovery...

From:

koganbot

Well, some people who were pretty smart in their time, Aristotle, for instance, were teleological thinkers; I do think that inevitably such arguments must hit a wall and achieve flattening, something along the lines of "This happens because this is the way it's supposed to happen." But, e.g., prior to the mid 19th century, I don't think there was a better explanation for "why do acorns end up as trees?" than the idea that the form of the tree was already somehow correctly there for the acorn to grow into. (I don't know enough about the history of science, however; didn't the rebellion against teleology start in the 16th century with Hobbes and Bacon and such people? I've never actually read a word of Hobbes.)

I'd think that, say, 18th century intellectuals who believed in evolution but of course knew nothing of Darwinism, and who assumed that evolution, like everything else, had to do with God's bounty, might have been creative in many of their explanations, and that when Darwinism came along in the middle of the next century, a lot of interesting work got wiped out.

But I don't think creationism/intelligent design as it exists now has much of anything to do with, e.g., trying to understand the fossil record and so forth. What I think is at issue, actually, is the fear that Darwin takes down God. I think that this fear is intellectually justified, in that I don't see how you can be anti-teleology in one practice (biology) but not in others. However, many people are quite happy living with that particular contradiction and not even noticing it unless they're biologists trying to explain their belief in God. Most people don't deal with contradictions until the contradictions have an actual impact on what they do.

But as I said, my hypothesis about creationism and intelligent design is that it exists to protect the idea of God and the ten commandments and so forth, not to help explain the fossil record or explain life on the planet and in the universe. Most people don't use God to answer the big questions but to get through the day, and to deal with disappointments and catastrophes functionally and even creatively rather than, say, falling into dysfunction and destruction by, e.g., becoming addicts or abusing one's family. And in day-to-day life, "I believe everything happens for a reason" and "what is God's will for me?" and "what is the next right thing for me to do?" can be useful and powerful; so atheists like me who don't revert to such thinking may not necessarily be at an advantage in our immediate response. For long-term intellectualizing and its results (such as immunology, nuclear weapons, etc.) "everything happens for a reason" doesn't have much power, but in the short-term it has plenty.

In any event, I think that believers fear that Darwin takes away their recourse to "everything happens for a reason" and "what is God's will for me?" Which isn't to say that atheists can't try to come up with effective ways of getting through the day and of making the most of disappointment and catastrophe. But having the Big Fellow to draw on gives many people a psychological boost.

When we get to chance to restart the Kuhn conversation, I want to go directly to the teleology question, step away from the paradigm tangle for a while. I'll be less likely to lose my constituency that way.

From:

koganbot

Er, for "16th century," read "17th century" (though Bacon straddles the two).

From:

koganbot

And I have too read a word of Hobbes; six of them, in fact: "solitary," "poor," "nasty," "brutish," "and," and "short."

From:

koganbot

two entities linked together while maintaining their separate existence...

What about "bipolar opposite"? E.g. stamen and pistil.

(But if one of a bipolar opposite ceases exist, the other would lose its meaning and function, though that doesn't imply that it couldn't then evolve other meanings and functions, and it may even evolve physically. But whether it did or not, what it is would either change or disappear. Whereas a syzygy that lost its partner may well continue on with at least some semblance of its former meanings and functions intact. E.g., even without truthers, the birthers would keep on birthering.)(And of course where things that are considered bipolar opposites - e.g. "men" and "women" - have plenty of characteristics that are not opposite, then being defined by the mutual opposition is problematic.)