We are living in the post-truth, post-modernist era, and I am very happy that more and more people are realising where it is taking us.<p>I feel genuine relief reading again things like:<p><<<We cannot have differing rules based on the speaker’s skin color, gender, or political affiliation. No one has a higher claim to the truth because of their group identity. “Who you are does not count;” Rauch says, “the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable.”>>><p>Something that over the last few years has been heavily contested and went from being one of the most obvious values to one that triggers the most vitriol.
To get to the truth, you have to be open-minded. Many modern secularists claim to be open-minded, even the left leaning liberals claim to be open-minded, but they're more closed minded than their ancestors. Everyone wants the great claim of being open-minded without the cost of actually being open-minded. There's an element of sacrifice when it comes to getting to the truth.<p>To actually be open-minded, you have to sacrifice your idealism, which is a lot harder than it seems. Especially since many of our prejudices are hidden to us, and we could spend a lifetime preoccupied with identifying what's true and what's prejudice.
The Internet has the same incentive landscape as bathroom stall graffiti. That's why you're so mad, Robyn.<p>This isn't a back-and-forth between two real people who mutually respect each other. If I was talking to Robyn in real life, over coffee, for 2 or 3 hours, we'd probably get something productive done.<p>But online, it's a hit-and-run dumpster where the truth matters a little, and humor and presentation matter _much more._<p>Robyn writes their wounded-gazelle piece whining about the woke cancel mob, and I try to 'clap back' without 'seething'. Wittgenstein would roll in his grave to see the level of MLG language gamers we have online these days.<p>Nuance gets buried online. I am not gonna sit here and write a boring screen-long essay expressing my nuanced thoughts on the rights of trans adults and trans children, to an audience that might literally be reading this on the shitter.<p>It works fine for less-controversial topics like Rust vs C. It just doesn't work for gender.<p>They who write on shit-house walls...<p>P.S. - If you have 2 hours to spare for nuance, I highly recommend the Contrapoints video about J. K. Rowling. This is a good, calm, nuanced discussion about why LGBTQ people and our allies don't like Rowling as much as we used to. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us</a><p>If you don't have 2 hours to spare, then you aren't gonna get nuance, sorry to tell you.
I've made this argument to many progressive friends, and nearly all of them replied with a variant of "you're 'bothsides'ing this" which apparently is supposed to mean your argument is invalid. That then leads to me pointing out that world isn't a clear binary and "both (major) sides" can be wrong or have problems. For some reason though, that seems to be the end of the conversation and no progress toward reaching agreement is made.
The blog he referenced was discussed here recently.<p>I can't find the specific discussion, but searching on the domain is probably a good summary:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=whyevolutionistrue.com" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=whyevolutionistrue.co...</a><p>The conclusion in that thread, as I recall, and apparently coming from people in NZ, seemed to be that he was mostly misrepresnting it to generate rage bait, similar to Critical Race Theory discussions.
Isamov has this great "Relativity of wrong" piece that counters post-modernism. It's often the case that one of us is closer to the truth, even if both of us are wrong.<p><a href="https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dbalmer/eportfolio/Nature%2520of%2520Science_Asimov.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiUjqq6o977AhXI_aQKHWCtDz8QFnoECBkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2cdD4Zh4pBQOxMvjShNr8P" rel="nofollow">https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dbalmer/eportfolio/Nature%2520of%...</a>
> We needed more than ancient books and the near universal buy-in by everyone else to convince us that supernaturalism is real. We needed empirical evidence.<p>I wish people were more honest about the inherent contradiction in that assertion. Isn’t the point of “supernatural” that it will exist outside of empiricism (depending on how you define that)?
A short story: I once was recruited by an acquaintance to work on the social media campaign of a local politician contesting for the governorship election. Mind you, this isn't the US or any western country but a third-world nation. I was a college student on break, so it was an easy way to make some money...nothing wrong I thought.<p>Well, time to start work, and it turns out it isn't as straightforward as I thought. This social media campaign involved creating fake Twitter accounts with AI-generated photos as profile pictures and pushing stories supporting the politician. I've always hated social media and wasn't too familiar, so I thought, does this even work?<p>Well, yeah, it worked. We pushed frankly bogus stories and overtly biased posts and many of them got to the Twitter front page for users in my country. Even I was shocked how those posts had a considerable impact, and the politician ended up winning the election.<p>This work thought me a great lesson; quit social media because you're being manipulated everywhere. Mind you, this was a small operation with less than two dozen persons. Imagine what someone with a massive budget, let's say Putin or MBS, could achieve by building a propaganda farm employing thousands...It's definitely hard to discern truth when everyone is being fed a large stream of propaganda at every second.<p>As for me, I quit social media or any type of news...I'm not confident in my abilities to discern truth when there are dedicated teams of psy-op operators trying to manipulate me. If you think you're smart enough to counter such efforts, good luck to you, but as for me, I think the human brain did not evolve to handle mass media positively.
Somewhere in Hell, Nietzsche is laughing his ass off at the contemporary socio-political landscape. Everything he had to say about 'Nihilism' (which is quite the opposite of 'lack of belief in anything') and 'The Last Man' (who, to paraphrase, "has figured out happiness... and blinks") came true.
“ Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed. “<p>G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Secular humanism in its more radical and moderate forms since the French revolution has always been subject to the direct and straightforward criticism that as a philosophy it will eventually lead to an erosion of a shared reference frame and eventually an erosion of sanity itself.<p>What if this societal rejection of Truth that we are witnessing (and is summarized well by the article) is the direct result of the <i>success of</i> secular humanism?<p>I think this is the elephant in the room.
Pious lies work much better, most people aren't interested in truth. The enlightment is completely dead, why try to resurrect these old, white, male driven ideas?
No. The truth doesn't matter. The fact does. The ruth is the majority people's view of a certain fact, and it is still subjective. What really matters is to allow people speak out their truth.
Truth is overwhelmingly inconvenient. Unlikely to draw advertising or funding from "stakeholders".<p>Lip service on the other hand, is cheap and ubiqutious. Perfect for the limited lifespan of the average stakeholder.<p>Education does not check self-interest, nor does wealth. "History" is cherrypicked and spun to useless effect. "Chip Wars" a case in point.<p>That leaves a single useful guide: Biology of life on this moonmeld. That record is full of interesting studies and lessons. Also highly inconvenient.<p>Portents poor for all sects of Humanists :(
Secular humanism is and has been on the way out and as a philosophy it's sort of impoverished. The big issue is in the title, namely the simplistic relationship to truth. There's a dinstinction between fact, which is the business of science, and truth which is always contextual. Take the claim from the article:<p><i>"Truths about the universe don’t depend on which country you are in</i>"<p><i>Facts</i> about the universe don't care where you're at. Truth which imposes meaning and perspective on facts very much does. By neglecting culture, myth and narrative which are central to how humans make sense of the world this secular perspective becomes completely unappealing, and that's not the fault of the non-enlightened masses but because that worldview is superficial. It also has the tendency to end up with a scientific fatalism that conflates what is and what ought to be.<p>This is usually where secular humanism suddenly turns a little bit dark, and not-so-very-humanist. Also on display in the article when "behavioral genetics" is elevated from something that ought to provide us with tools to increase human agency to something that apparently "determines life outcomes" ("genetic lottery"). That's the point where it's obvious that really the belief system is something closer to scientism, that is to say using science to impose <i>values</i> on people.<p>A belief system that ignored human cultural and religious experience and reduces individuals to a collection of genes is many things, but certainly not humanistic.
This blogpost is not fairly representing the current state of the conversation about care for transgender kids. That is dishonest behavior and as a secular humanist I feel obligated to call in and present a fuller picture.<p><a href="https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/3/e2022056567/188709/Sex-Assigned-at-Birth-Ratio-Among-Transgender-and" rel="nofollow">https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/3/e20220...</a><p>"Our findings from a national sample of adolescents across 16 states reveal that the sex assigned at birth ratio of transgender adolescents does not favor transgender adolescents assigned female sex at birth."<p>The claims of social contagion and so on have been examined and they just aren't true. It is also wrong to represent that level of uncertainty about puberty blockers, which have been and continue to be used by cis children for years without a peep or a poop from those currently in a panic about trans kids on puberty blockers. It is also paternalistic and authoritarian to say that weighing risks and benefits of puberty blockers should be done by culture warrior politicians rather than a conversation between a patient and a doctor.<p>The data are in, the debate is settled: it's simply a moral panic and it harms real people to pretend there are enough open questions to merit further discussion. You're just being a bigot who refuses to acknowledge empirical reality at that point, not a secular humanist.<p>1 out of 4 stars.
> The Genetic Lottery<p>This is such a transparently silly concept. Human beings do not mate randomly or even remotely close to randomly. The genes that you inherit are a product of your parents’ choice of mate, not some lottery. Those choices are informed by both biological and cultural factors.
While I would love to see this happen, I'm no longer convinced that anything other than fear of eternal torment can prompt people to actually defend the truth. It may be cynical but it's where I've been for a few years now.<p>I don't think there's any evidence of humans ever having actually stood up for any idea in large numbers, other than in religious settings. So to use the articles own insistence against them... What time evidence do they have that their philosophy is motivating enough to make anyone actually do what they want?