Comment by ben_w
1 year ago
> Side note: all of this is the basis for my extremely strong view that freedom of speech is an absolute necessity for continued prosperity, science, democracy etc. If people are unable to turn their ideas into concrete language, and to do this together as a group, without fear, then they are unable to reason things out properly and make good decisions. I only feel like adding that because within my lifetime I have seen an erosion of the importance of that freedom, to the point where it's no longer possible to discuss mundane, everyday things, or to point out some obvious truth.
A fun tangent :)
I think "freedom of speech" is perhaps the wrong place to describe the line: if everyone used words to try to learn about the world, to test their models against reality, this would be flawless.
But that does not fully describe us: we are social creatures, we use language not only to scout, but to fight; and freedom of speech also means freedom for rhetoric. It's cliché to criticise ethos these days, to say that arguments don't depend on the qualifications of one making them. Logos is the one I think you're interested in, based on what you wrote here. Pathos is the one I fear, because I know it works and it makes people believe falsely.
Still, I don't know how to actually get to just "freedom of logos". Some pathos may be necessary to avoid accidentally prohibiting some logos. Some pathos may be simply unavoidable, as the reason to care in the first place (see explanations of why "straw Vulcans" are made of straw: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan).
It isn't straw Vulcans, but a completely real thing.
Highly dimensional problems can only be solved through dimensionality reduction, you extract some key features that encompass the problem, get something that at least partially works, and eventually get to the actual solution, even for problems that would be too complex and multifaceted to approach analytically.