The Dogma of Otherness (1986) | Hacker News Reader

The Dogma of Otherness (1986)

davidbrin.com

116 pointsm46389 comments

The idea that people in e.g. Asia don't tend to consider outside viewpoints as much as Americans is so absurd I'm not even sure what to say. If anything it's the opposite, but Westerners are too full of themselves to notice. It would require a genuine interest and to a degree immersion in foreign cultures. Prevailing Western ideology does not permit for that.

To give just one example, people in China know much more about the US and its culture than vice versa. If America were really a questioning culture, it would be reversed.

Do you mean some city folk or people in the hinterlands who’ve never seen any kind of foreigner ever in their lives?

I would think most are familiar with American television, or other cultural symbols like Coca Cola. Regardless of where they live.

Whether or not that equates to understanding American culture I can't say..

My daughter [in Argentina] knows more about Halloween than about the local Independence Day. Every kids show in Netflix has a special episode about Halloween.

This not an apt comparison. Else we could say American kids know more about Anime than about our Independence Day. Kids like kid things.

I doubt people in the Podunks of interior China have much awareness of what the US is about other than what their official propaganda tells them.

This sounds like an easily testable proposition... (for someone with better hanzi-fu than I?)

EDIT: ok, so I was just on douyin.com (seeded with what deepl told me were "farmer" and "opinion of american people") and there's a fair amount of official line delivered by news commentators, a fair amount of not-the-best-of-the-Old-Country phone footage that's been helpfully subtitled in chinese, and not infrequent tubes of chinese-on-the-street commenting about the US or interviews in the US, eg https://www.douyin.com/video/7253009716257836347

(the latter two categories are easy to spot because they've been subtitled in english as well as chinese, but I'm most curious about if the people standing in front of tractors while speaking their bit are ranting as their stateside counterparts often seem to be?)

Anyone with better language skills have a better site, or better query?

EDIT2: finally found the deep link: just click X to dismiss the QR code popup; no idea what that may be...

There are companies in germany that sell red plastic cups in case you wish to throw an "American" theme party.

That’s great; we also have “Oktoberfests” and drink from big mugs. What does that mean; we know German politics or at least royal traditions?

That means that, beyond all the movies, although germans have been watching Magnum, The Denver Clan, The Duke Brothers, etc. I doubt their american counterparts have been watching DSDS, Die Rosenheim-Cops, GZSZ, usw.

They're not buying red cups because they've heard about them, or have seen them on product tie-ins; they buy them because the american media they consume includes them, and red plastic drinking cups stand out as something peculiarly american.

Any suggestions for entry points into chinese culture (beyond the 1961 大闹天宫)?

As an american, who had never met anyone from a Warsaw Pact* country until the very late 1980s, I was very amused to run across a bemulleted late soviet boy band video (1988?) prominently including a Dick Dale and the Deltones t-shirt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dezX61f3Ycg&t=87s

* I had played Tetris and with Rubik's Cube, so there was a small amount of cultural influence coming the other way

(On the theme of fantastic fiction)

It's remarkably hard to find good translations of classic Chinese works such as The Investiture of the Gods, though there is

https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Teahouse-Retold-Investiture-God...

China is having its best success with video games like Genshin Impact but I'd highly recommend the 2010 Three Kingdoms

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL33A390995E9A7F00

(you'd never see tough legendary warriors in western culture cry the way the heroes do in that show)

Also there is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Zha_(2019_film)

which is pretty good despite being packed with the same kind of fart jokes you'd expect in a Dreamworks movie.

(thanks for the jade!)

TIL why I also got CGI results when I had earlier been searching for Jiang Ziya.

[In a Super Dimension Fortress crossover, the singer would get a chorus of おぼえていますか while the old man destroys the staircase?]

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CToPsT1UF10

EDIT: for western weeping: porque no El Cid?

Pedantry:

  En silencio     intensamente llorando,
  volvía la cabeza,  los estaba mirando.

https://miocid.wlu.edu/folios/01r.html

> The idea that people in e.g. Asia don't tend to consider outside viewpoints as much as Americans is so absurd I'm not even sure what to say.

That is indeed an absurd idea. Fortunately, that's not what he wrote. He wrote that considering all points of view to have merit is a liberal Western value.

>> 'There's always another way of looking at things' is a basic assumption of a great many Americans... as a truly pervasive set of assumptions, it's pretty much a liberal Western, even American, tradition..."

At least, it was more true in 1986. Now the pendulum seems to be swinging away.

In what way can you consider a point of view without considering it to have merit? He’s not discussing relativism (everyone is right about everything), just social evaluation of epistemological credentials. Aka “merit”.

Re: the broader question of “are/were Americans the most scientifically minded culture”, I’d like to see some more rigorous evidence than “think of ancient Chinese emperors”. Or, for that matter, “equatorial cultures tend to promote violence”??

You can regard other POVs as a potential threat to your own hegemony, and thus feel the need to study them to understand how that threat may play out. Doing so does not inherently accord them any merit.

Brin wrote:

>> "You all believe that widely diverse points of view have merit, right?"

I wrote "consider" using it in the sense of "to believe" rather than "to evaluate". "Consider" was my word. Brin used "believe".

And, I do believe he was talking about cultural relativism. That specific phrase has unpleasant philosophical and moral booby traps, however, so the left-leaning intelligentsia and fellow travelers of the time ignored these traps by subscribing to the concept without actually using the term.

Brin isn’t making any point about knowledge- in fact acquiring unfiltered knowledge of the other is a risky move in the dogma of otherness, as you may find something you don’t like. Knowing something about the other that you don’t like is of course devastating to your social status. His central example of the dolphins clearly demonstrates this distinction- the dolphin scientists are not popular with the crowd.

I got sucked into Japanese animation because it seemed to be culturally richer, in shows like Urusei Yatsura and Nadia: Secret of Blue Water I found a mash-up of western culture (UY has the same epistemology as Marvel comics) as well as traditional Japanese, Chinese and Indian cultures.

Later I came to understanding Nadia's trick of continuous expansion was itself a trick similar to the Shepard Tone. And now I see every anime as being made by shredding up previous anime into parts and reassembling them. In The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya there is the term 閉鎖空間 which is translated as "Closed space" and if I was going to write a blog about anime now I would use that as the title because that is exactly what anime is. Haruhi is bored of the real world in all its richness so she makes up a dreary place which actually a lot smaller.

In anime and Japanese video games I see a number of different registers of morality. In games like Tales of Symphonia and Hyperdimension Neptunia it is common for principal adversaries to become members of the party and in mahou shojou anime like Sailor Moon and Precure it's not an unusual subplot for enemies to attempt infiltrating the social group of the heroines and wind up being domesticated by the little rituals of Japanese life. In the 2010s most Issekai have a swordsman who, when asked why he fights, says something about the need for the strong to fight to protect the weak while some bad guy says that the strong have the moral imperative to crush the weak. Nietzsche would call the first "slave morality" and the latter "master morality" -- it's not plausible that Castenada's Don Juan would have been as steeped in continental philosophy as he was because contemporary Asians sure are exposed to the ideas of the west.

Before understanding Japanese culture through anime, understand western culture through Cartoon Network.

Were I to wish* to learn american culture, Archer might be a productive entry point.

* this is a counterfactual: I was "soaking in it"

The Classic American animated show Spongebob Squarepants is particularly emblematic of western values, particularly on the themes of self-reliance, and the importance of fast food restaurants as the second (or third) space. In this paper, I will argue...

You joke, but Spongebob wouldn't be nearly as funny if Bikini Bottom weren't both highly absurd and highly recognizable to American audiences.

I'll just leave this here. Real clip from Kuwaiti TV:

https://www.memri.org/tv/kuwaiti-preacher-nabil-al-awadi-war...

Sure, why not?

American kids cartoons have a lot to say about American culture. Just to rattle off whatever was popular when I was a kid: The Simpsons, Spongebob Squarepants, Fairly Oddparents, Family Guy, South Park, Courage the Cowardly Dog.

The fact that everything not overtly meant to be comedy is imported from Japan is interesting in and of itself!

Try watching something like Peppa Pig in a foreign language—there is a lot of western culture in it.

> understand western culture through Cartoon Network

Sounds like a plan!

Have you ever seen a show where the aliens come down and they go, "We know all about your culture! We've been watching your television shows since the 50s!" and then they act really bizarrely because they have no idea what real life is like?

See Galaxy Quest for the pinnacle of this trope.

With all respect, it will forever endlessly bug me that comments like this seem to always be the top comment on Hacker News. This has virtually nothing to do with anything the author of this piece is trying to say. It's more off-topic than on-topic and derails the entire discussion to the point that people are now talking about anime and asking for onboards to learn about China.

Those are perfectly fine topics to discuss, but this guy was talking about the disrespect for expertise. It's a feature of American democracy that we believe all viewpoints to be worthy of getting airtime is what he was saying. This guy giving a lecture who is an expert on dolphins is telling you they almost certainly can't comprehend the kind of thoughts necessary to form sentences and reason linguistically, and the audience is agasp because they heard differently from whatever the equivalent of a random YouTube channel was in 1986, which they consider to be equally authoritative because, in American dogma, authority doesn't really exist. Whoever we agree to elevate for a few years at a time because they won a popularity contest is the authority.

Somebody in the audience also seems to misunderstand him and brings up that Chinese civilization has equally valid points of view compared to American, which I doubt this guy would say is wrong and has nothing to do with his point, and you somehow completely seized upon this one irrelevant detail that was basically interactive happenstance, has nothing to do with the point the author was really trying to make, and this is now the main discussion on Hacker News rather than discussing the content of the link that was submitted.

People in almost any country know more about about the US (and China) then vice versa, because these are big powerful countries.

Note that this was written 30 years ago based on observations of people in the literary community. At the time cultural relativism had become very big in academia, and would grow and peak in the general liberal population over the next decade. I think what he said was a fair assessment of that microcosm. They were very interested in learning about other cultures and were fairly unique in their wanting to hold all cultures equally, although non-charitably that was often obtained by adopting a filtered rose-colored view of other cultures. However, Brin was overestimating how much of what he saw was a reflection of general western or US population vs his particular microcosm at the time. And it didn't hold in the long run. Political and social dogmatism is quite high now across the political spectrum in the US. Looking back, the idea that this form of cultural relativism came about because we were a melting-pot culture doesn't hold up well given it was only popular for a decade or two out of our country's 250ish years of history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Have_Never_Been_Modern

A book for those who are interested in this viewpoint; though, its a bit technical, its audience is anthropologists.

I agree and disagree, in that, the concept of the "other," which Brin subtly attributes to a crude reading of Hegel, is misused in contemporary academia, in contemporary culture, to create these what can't be said to be other than corruptive ideas like an infinite meakness in the face of what we cannot know about ourselves, but a meakness which is secretly all the more chauvinistic, as it claims, above all, that only we are superior who recognize our "mediocrity," in the face of all those animals, cultures, potentialities of otherness, that fail to do so themselves.

But, of course, Hegel's concept of the "other" is not this way at all. As JN Findlay argued, there is no substantial difference between Godel and Hegel's logic in terms of incompleteness: it is likely that, although the only philosophy which Godel ever adopted was Phenomenology, he would himself not have had any issues with the comparison. It is the "identity of non-identity," its not that you "encounter" the other, its the recognition that the other is already contained in what is non-other; which is to say, in a manner that Godel expressed far more clearly, that all logical systems, all systematic programs, contain elements that cannot be contained in the system, and the discreteness of the world only comes when those elements come to a head, when people are forced to, for Hegel, fight in a conflict to resolve, at the level of the Idea itself, what they cannot be certain of: this is why, science, what you'd think is objective and independent, depends on massive political and social forces: and if the Israeli's, for instance, could not fight their wars, it would be the proof that ideology of faith is more powerful than the ideology of the world, of technological power. The "truth" of a missile only becomes apparent when it hits its target, just in the same way that one cannot know, here on HN especially, how others will think of their comment, until they post it.

> which is to say, in a manner that Godel expressed far more clearly, that all logical systems, all systematic programs, contain elements that cannot be contained in the system

Wikipedia [1] summarizes better than I could:

"The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e. an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.

The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency."

That's seems a bit different than what you stated, to me at least.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%2527s_incompleten...

Indeed. Godel's theorem is very technical, and any use outside the very technical realm of its immediate application should be viewed with great suspicion.

For example, if you take the statement you quoted from Wikipedia and replace "natural number" with "real number", it doesn't work anymore: it's been proven that the arithmetic of real numbers is decidable[1]. That means that the sentence you quoted from OP's comment is not true.

Anyone inclined to use Godel's theorem in these philosophical contexts should maybe read the great little book "Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse" by Torkel Franzén. I'll leave here a quote from a review[2]:

    In addition to obvious nonsense, there are among the nonmathematical ideas inspired by Gödel’s theorem many that by no means represent postmodernist excesses, but rather come to mind naturally to many people with very different backgrounds when they think about the theorem. It is especially such naturally occurring misunderstandings that Franzén intends to correct.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decidability_of_first-order_th...

[2] https://www.ams.org/notices/200703/rev-raatikainen.pdf

It was Brin, not me, who makes the connection, and says that Godel refutes Hegel. The scholar I mentioned, JN Findlay, has a rigorous understanding of both authors, but I couldn't quickly find an article where he makes the argument. Nothing to do with "postmodernist excesses" or whatever.

Also read my comment, see this article here[0] about how Godel adopted phenomenology, which is the philosophical backbone of much of "postmodernism," so it would be entirely fair to make a connection between Godel and, say, Derrida, for instance, since they both claim to be in the same philosophical tradition. But that's just what the scholarly evidence suggests.

In any case, Godel's proof has little to do with "math" in the sense of calculation but rather is a refutation of Russel & Whiteheads attempts at a logical foundation of mathematics, which is a philosophical endeavour. The mathematical aspect is secondary and merely follows from the philosophical argument which it entails. It is the simply the case that, Russel & Whitehead were themselves engaging with "Hegel" in Principia Mathematica, who of course had his own system of logic (cf. the Science of Logic), but they failed insofar as Godel's critique is accepted, and insofar as you accept Godel's critique you could make the inference (though by no means on an entirely solid basis) that Godel's work constitutes, in a certain sense, a re-interpretation of Hegel, though not directly.

[0]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/goedel-phenomenolo...

> Nothing to do with "postmodernist excesses" or whatever.

To clarify, I wasn't implying you or Brin were commiting "postmodernist excesses". The part of the review I quoted was explicitly saying that the book aims to correct misunderstandings that "by no means represent postmodernist excesses, but rather come to mind naturally to many people with very different backgrounds".

Then there is Badiou, who perfected deconstructionism in his works like

https://www.amazon.com/Being-Event-Alain-Badiou/dp/082645831...

It's easy to see Derrida as a bullshitter who doesn't understand the texts that he abuses but hard to make the criticism stick because Derrida himself is unclear and hard to read.

Badiou clearly does understand the math that he's abusing and you can't find anything really wrong with it except for the idea that anyone would care about Marxism when we know so much more about the science of civilization now. Many people come to the conclusion that Badiou is a bullshitter, but if he is a bullshitter he's much more rigorous in terms of working within the systems he works with and also much more clear in his exposition in that you really can follow what he says.

If Badiou derives atheism from the topless nature of Nature (no universal set/set of all sets), perhaps I should try to interest him in Algebraic Theology? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41258636

— Herschel, they say you don't believe in G*d?

— What? Who says that?

— You know, people; lots of people are saying it.

— People? People say all kinds of things; you know better than that. Why didn't you just ask G*d directly if I believe in H*m or not?

I’m no Badiouian myself, however Derrida and Badiou are no more difficult to read than Kant and Hegel. Just because its not easy to read doesn’t mean its not worth your time to read.

My first take was it's another case of sci fi fans discovering that the author doesn't believe in the stuff they write.

Charles Stross confessed that he doesn't believe in space colonization and interstellar travel. As a non-fiction author Issac Asimov railed against the belief in ESP although he wrote as many trashy stories about ESP as any author had to to get published in the Campbell era. Maybe Heinlein never broke character or maybe his combination of earnestness and naivety was real (and provided future authors such as Haldeman a chance to write stories somewhere between a homage and refutation such as The Forever War and Worlds) Never mind the writers of fantastic fiction masquerading as non-fiction such as Lily, Castenada, Roberts, etc.

To be a fan of fantastic fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, comic books, etc.) you have to be able to hold an imaginary world and its rules in your mind and take it seriously enough to care what happens to the characters. A certain kind of pornography can interest people for a while without any conflict but Superman would be entirely uninteresting if he didn't have meaningful limitations or worthy adversaries. (And he struggles... in Superman Returns he rescues people who are launching a freaking space shuttle (unsafe at any speed to begin with) off a commercial airliner. I'm sorry if your judgement is that bad you don't deserve to get rescued.)

A good example of a 'serious' short story is The Cold Equations

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equation...

where the story depends on believing certain constraints about space travel. The more fantastic it gets the more you're going to think it's silly unless you've got the ability to jump into a counterfactual world with both feet.

> Cliff Stoll confessed that he doesn't believe in space colonization and interstellar travel.

Perhaps you mean Charles Stross?

You're right! This has been corrected. Thanks!

Hey, don't disparage Asimov's Foundation stories! It's true Asimov was an atheist and also stood against pseudoscience, but his stories are not trash! ;)

> Charles Stross confessed that he doesn't believe in space colonization and interstellar travel

I've never read Stross but I've experienced a similar dissonance with John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" series. If you stop at his first novel, you could easily believe (as I did) Scalzi is pro-war and his stance is that aliens must be met with firm military force "or else". He even has a token pacifist self-righteous character who insists there must be another way, then immediately gets torn to shreds by evil aliens for his naiveté (to everyone else's applause). I was disgusted and ready to toss the series into the garbage bin. Then... well, I'm not saying he's a good writer, but his later novels in the series paint a different picture. Well done fooling me, Mr Scalzi!

> to look, as a species, into the mirror and see neither Lord of Creation nor Worldbane, but merely the first of many in the world to rise to the role of caretaker.

I came to the same conclusion recently. As a species we have almost total control over earth. Caretaker - or BDFL if you prefer - seems to be the only viable long-term role for our species at this scale.

Whether or not we're heading in that direction is another question. But it's interesting to watch nations, societies, businesses, etc, attempt to build sustainable structures and lives for their constituents using the power structures they believe best. A microcosm of the same problem on a smaller scale.

It's not super encouraging how many different civilisations, societies and commercial enterprises have died and failed before us, but maybe diversity and resilience go hand-in-hand, and those values are how we need to approach the natural world we now control.

Of course, that all sounds a bit like the self-serving Dogma of Otherness, and another example of the double-standard in philosophy that "values that prioritise others actually elevate myself with their nobility".

> but maybe diversity and resilience go hand-in-hand

As long as the values that are against resilience are not part of that diversity...

I'll say, I have no idea how to get anything close to sustainability from a human society. Thankfully, making something that can last for a few centuries looks like a much easier problem.

Plato’s Republic was more fun and engaging than other foundational philosophy texts I read as an undergraduate because the dialogue format made me want to interrupt Socrates in way that I don’t usually experience when I read things that I disagree with. It activates the conversation lobes of my brain or something I guess, it’s simultaneously frustrating and satisfying.

Anyway, the introduction to this article does the same thing.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22055276-the-just-city

This seems quite appropriate listening to half wits like Joe Rogan giving equal weight to an expert in a given topic and then cutting away unashamedly to some fruitloop with a theory that would make a sane person blush.

I'll never get accustomed to the arrogance of people hating on the intelligence of some of the most successful people in their field.

I don't have to like JR and I'd be surprised if he wasn't a CIA asset to influence public perception, but outright calling him a half wit is more telling about you and than him. Your reliance on titles and certified experts just exposes what's wrong in a post-COVID and post-truth world.

I think it comes from a long experience of just how stupid people often are despite all of their success. While many certified experts are also often quite idiotic, particularly when talking even slightly outside their fields, or when parroting dogma within their field, there really seems to be almost no correlation between public success and what we'd normally call being smart.

See Pauling, Shockley and Josephson for scientists who did fantastic work to win a Nobel prize who then went crazy with alt health, racism and psionics. Appallingly to me there are people taking Penrose's "I can do math because I am a thetan" seriously in another discussion running now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696434

I like the variety of Joe Rogan guests.

I think being able to listen to crazy viewpoints can help you untangle the fluff and propaganda in not only other speakers, but your own thinking.

also, it prevents the echo chamber effect.

David Brin is a great sci-fi author too by the way. One of the few who've written about dolphins flying a spaceship.

He's an expert in dolphin cognition, he's said so himself. Also notice the "Ph.D." he put after his name? Don't look up what that's in though, else you might wonder what astronomy and electrical engineering have to do with dolphins.

>"I'm not a real expert," I tell them. "But the data are pretty easy to interpret. I'm afraid real dolphins simply aren't all that smart.

>"Look how you all leaped up to refute me. Even though I'm the supposed 'dolphin expert' here, that hardly matters, since you all assume that any expert can still be wrong! No matter how prestigious his credentials, no expert can know all the answers."

Believing things simply because supposed experts say them is a well-known logical fallacy. So the people were right to be skeptical. He also contradicts himself as shown, there is no reason to listen to him on this topic to begin with. The tale is utterly confused. There may well have been people in that audience who knew more about dolphins than he did. "The data is easy to interpret" is a sentence I've heard from idiots so many times, that's Dunning-Kruger in full force. Dumb people generally assume the world is easy to understand and they have it all figured out. Who in the world would think intelligence is a field that we know everything about and there can't be any further debate.

I really liked Startide Rising for its spacefaring dolphins, particularly how their attitudes contrasted with Humans' and the other uplifted or alien species – great concept overall, playful and sometimes poetic. And ‘Earth’ also had some great concepts and predictions, if you discount the global war against Switzerland. I didn’t like ‘Existence’, because (to me) the structure and characters seemed primarily to be a vehicle for Brin to make impassioned points about humanity. They may be good thought-provoking points, but they killed any suspense.

YMMV

The global war against Switzerland is an interesting idea because it was a Boomer "child of WW2" idea that both understood banking in general as needing great reforms (especially in light of stolen Nazi goods being money laundered through Swiss bank accounts), and yet misunderstood a few true root causes and pointed fingers in the wrong directions (the money launderers at the top of the "funnel" rather than the ones making the most profits). As a prediction it doesn't survive things like the 2008 mortgage crisis, but as a concept it was meant to signify lack of certain globally-minded banking regulations and eventual banking fights like the 2008 mortgage crisis and the stalemate that was "Occupy Wall Street". That was certainly not quite a "global war", and certainly wasn't against Switzerland, but in a ballpark of what Earth seemed concerned with. Also "war with Switzerland" is just a silly concept for fiction whether or not it was meant to be predictive.

Pretty nice guy, too. Back in the early-mid 90s I was a teenager and got on some kind of David Brin fan site (this may have been on Prodigy it was so long ago), where the man himself would sometimes reply. He once responded to a message I posted, and it just about made my year.

On the contrary, I'd consider space-faring dolphins a trope.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmartCetaceans

The thesis here pretty much reflects the heresy described and condemned by the Catholic Church as "modernism".

Pope St. Pius X described Modernism as "the synthesis of all heresies", and it's often insidious and difficult to pin down. Because if at its core, it says "there can be no universal truths" that is already an inherent Liar's Paradox, and any subsequent claims are just as questionable if one truly adheres to Modernism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism_in_the_Catholic_Chur...

https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documen...

It is so strange how Brin tiptoes around mentioning any church or pope or the existing terms such as "Modernism", or how much the concept resembles his (rather appropriately) neologism-coined gobbledygook, but his words and phrasing seem to indicate that he's well aware that the same controversy has raged since the late-19th-century, (take note, he is of Eastern-Bloc Jewish descent) and merely wants to avoid cluing anyone in about the parallels.

Mostly tangential, but in mathematics, there are sometimes "canonical" objects, typically a 'natural' viewpoint which is proven to be unique and sometimes also 'universal' in a sense. So, in many cases, you can rigorously prove "this is the one 'best' way" (in some sense of best (in some theory)).

A top-of-mind example is how a tuple `(A, B)` is "obviously" the (minimal) way you would have both objects A and B within one object: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_(category_theory)

I find it interesting that the author mentions "nonscientists", as those seem less likely to be equipped with the experiences of simple/well-defined problems with "global optima". And in mathematics, the "what if there were another way" questions get followed by "suppose there were another way _W_...".

> A top-of-mind example is how a tuple `(A, B)` is "obviously" the (minimal) way you would have both objects A and B within one object

I am confused as to what that means. A and B are most likely one of the thousands of possible modelisations for an abstract concept I am trying to model.

Say I want to model a point on a plane, I could decide to model it as carthesian coordinates in an (A, B) tuple, or a single complex number as a scalar. The _best_ representation depending on how I plan to use that point later on.

Complex numbers are just tuples of real numbers with some rules how to add and multiply them.

Not quite. They can be _represented_ that way (but not uniquely, e.g. c=(a+bi) vs abs(c)=r, arg(c)=Θ) or they can be treated as fundamental (defined by axioms), or as a sub-field of the quaternions, etc. If this seems counterintuitive, think of how the claim that "words are just sequences of letters" breaks down when you examine it closely.

Also, I'm not seeing why a tuple (A,B) (with order) is simpler than a set {A,B} or a bag [A,B].

> They can be _represented_ that way (but not uniquely, e.g. c=(a+bi) vs abs(c)=r, arg(c)=Θ) or they can be treated as fundamental (defined by axioms), or as a sub-field of the quaternions, etc.

Hmm... If we are looking for the simpliest way, then I don't think that sub-field of the quaternions is simplier than tuples with definitions for operations on them: you need to define quaternions for that.

I'm not sure about definition of complex numbers through axioms. Probably it is the simplest way, because for tuples you need first to define real numbers and operations on them.

> Also, I'm not seeing why a tuple (A,B) (with order) is simpler than a set {A,B} or a bag [A,B].

I don't see it either. It is the minimal way to define complex numbers (if we have chosen this path), but why it may be simpler in general case is not obvious.

But in any case, I agree, that the whole idea of a "natural" viewpoint was not clearly stated.

The thing is, if you've not defined precisely what it means for a dolphin (or human) to be intelligent, then, yes, there is room for other handwaving besides yours, even in a world where the otherness dogma has been loudly rejected.

In the hard sciences there is no room for opinions in areas where we have the facts. E.g. electrical engineers don't have to entertain someone who has invented their own equation for how a transistor works which is completely different from Ebers-Moll and yields the wrong results. That's just a kook; move on. Things they try to build based on their wrong model will not work.

If you dislike hecklers who are not easily dismissed kooks, either stay out of soft fields, or else avoid situations where you might engage the public.

I think that humanistic moral universalism (or simply humanism) - a moral philosophy which is a basis for e.g. Universal Declaration of Human Rights - requires the moral axiom that "not hurting humans is above all else".

This obviously begs a question "who is considered a human?" in this moral philosophy. For this to work as intended, things like human cells (we can kill cells to save a human being) or societies like nation states (we can destroy or mutilate states to save a human being) have to be considered lesser than individual humans.

But it gives rise to Russell-type paradox of how to include as many humans as possible without creating contradictions. (A similar problem is with democracy, it cannot be instituted or destroyed democratically.) These logical problems seem to come from the fact that you need some axioms at all. In the same way, you can be "dogmatic in your non-dogmatism".

I also think if you accept the universalist moral position above, the questioning and distrust towards experts (authorities) becomes obvious conclusion. Authorities asking for humans to be killed or harmed (for example, going to a war) need to provide a strong justification.

I also consider it very doubtful that the moral universalism was first invented by "Western civilization" or "enlightenment". Yeah, somebody was first, but it's not that a difficult idea. What might be new is the universal acceptance of it, but I am not so sure when I look around.

However, in practice, the Russell-style paradox is rarely a problem. Yeah, there are edge cases like dolphins, or intellectually disabled people, but mostly we can figure it out.

> [moral relativism is] not that a difficult idea

Eg Aristotle (ca 300BC): Some people think that all rules of justice are merely conventional, because whereas a law of nature is immutable and has the same validity everywhere, as fire burns both here and in Persia, rules of justice are seen to vary.

I'd guess it was common over the last 10k years for educated and/or travelled people to be aware that their neighbours had different* dogmas, and in pre-colonial times (when it was far more likely that these neighbours were similarly located on the tech tree) the parochialism of colonialists ("Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.") would not have been as facile.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

* Tacitus seems to have written De origine et situ Germanorum partly as an objective description of germans, and partly as a subjective reproach of his Roman compatriots; during the XIX (which established many of the tropes we've inherited as "common knowledge") the germans flipped this around: germans and french were in superpower conflict, and as the french —with a significant advantage in language— had laid claim to inheriting the (centralised) Roman tradition, the germans retorted by digging up all the old arguments the (decentralised) greeks had made along the lines of "maybe the Romans have all the money, but we've got all the culture".

(cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Johst#Schlageter ; τὰ πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει )

> > [moral relativism is] not that a difficult idea

Actually I mean moral universalism here, but thanks for your comment.

My bad. For moral universalism, how about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism#Non-violence_(ahimsa) for an older example? (although their protected class is a bit wider than humanity)

Looks like it goes back a ways, either infinitely (if you ask the Jains) or at least thousands of years (if you ask current historians), but both agree to further back than the Age of Pisces covered by Brin's essay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parshvanatha#Historicity

my lagniappe for you today is 兼愛 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mohism/#inclusive which probably you are familiar with but have forgotten

thanks for the anamnemetic reminder!

according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gods_in_the_Investitur... the list of gods (姜太公封神——漏了自己) came via working group from the 3 (three) religions, which doesn't seem to leave much room for Mohism, but on the other hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gods_in_the_Investitur... suggests that as we can't be sure the list itself hasn't been tampered with, we certainly oughtn't be confident of its provenance.

confirmed: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/封神榜三百六十五位正神#封神榜缺失问题 (but unless I'm missing something, no ecumenical wg mentioned in the zh. article)

happy to help!

封神演義 is from the 大明 though, 2000 years after 秦始皇 supposedly performed the 焚書坑儒 and did in fact exterminate 墨家; even if 許仲琳 was concerned with strict historical accuracy, he had no mohists to consult, and even 墨子 himself, if he existed, would have postdated the god-making event of the book anyway by nearly an entire dynasty

TIL; good thing I'm not around in the times of 李斯 or I'd have to give up bad habits like using history to criticise the present, and stick to allusions related to agriculture and forestry instead?

[divination sounds like a good out: in actually technical subjects, there'd always be a tension involved in keeping the cover reading halfway coherent, but divination books sound like they'd be amenable to running at nearly full channel capacity: that which is bright rises twice.]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mohism/#historical makes it sound very much like they were out and out geeks:

> The philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and science of the later Mohist Canons were recorded in difficult, dense texts that would have been nearly unintelligible to most readers ... The Mohists helped to articulate much of the framework of classical Chinese philosophical discourse while advocating a way of life so at odds with most people’s conception of the good life that it stood little chance of ever inspiring a wide following.

things are already that difficult in some places today, but i am glad you are not experiencing them

divination has never lost its popularity, a fact postman occasionally laments in amusing ourselves to death; probably you could find someone nearby who would be willing to teach it to you. the mohists were indeed at the opposite extreme

max demian has an interesting approach to divination; maybe i could learn it by placing hesse under a pyramid? in the meantime (it's coming up on way down in the fall — for me although not for you) taking a seat and facing south does have the advantage of maximising morning sun.

This was a common view back then. By 1986, Americans had long been culturally and geographically insulated from other cultures and nations. Post-modern philosophy was in full flower, promoting the idea that no world view nor cultural practice is inferior to any other. It was quite easy for the liberal wing of the American intelligentsia of the time to adopt a paternalistic universalist outlook, given that there were no immediate challenges to this perspective. In fact, examples of conservative-driven imposition of American ideals abroad were actively punished: Viet Nam, Iranian Revolution, Korea, etc. The Soviet Union appeared to be going strong.

I'd argue that the rise of the internet, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, fears of disinformation and misinformation and foreign influence, bot-farms, the rise to prominance of China, all put the lie to this idea that all ideas have merit. It's an idea that is held by few American intellectuals these days, conservative or liberal.

I think this is more abstractly expressed by Lewis' Convention book.

"Dogmas" as fulfilled expectation about other's expectation's expectation (and so on recursively ad infinitum).

Necessary, in Lewis opinion, to solve coordination problems.

(1986)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

A great read.

To be honest, I posted this because I saw similar discussions s/dolphin/AGI/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41689558

“Answer truthfully. You all believe that widely diverse points of view have merit, right?"

Nope.

Not all orderings are total: just as {A} is a subset of {A,B} and {A,C} but neither {A,B} nor {A,C} are subsets of the other, one can consistently hold the position that point of view A is inferior in merit to points of view AB and AC while neither of AB or AC are inferior to the other.

Sure. In many cases {A} isn’t a subset of anything else, though, and is merely what we might call standalone bullshit, and unfortunately it’s pretty prevalent these days.

{A} is always a subset, by definition, of the power set.

I'm pretty sure avazhi just meant to observe that in these cases {A} is a facet (maximal face) of its memeplex.

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