Debate talk:Another of Jim's essays (Is RW really rational?)

What theory do I have? Can you describe it or parhaps you know it by its name? Name the theory please. Of course it might be renamed too (the right name is "relativity"). But the debate is not about it but about rationality in science, where atheists let themselves to be lead by their noses by creationists because they (atheists) don't understand physics and believe creationist professors that energy can be created from nothing via math (a novel method of creating energy). Funny picture.

You better sit down and learn something. Until you learn so much that you are able to ask sensible questions. Then we might get somewhere. With constant deleteting we surely don't get to the scientific explanation of the world. Which should be our common aim, shouldn't it? Why don't you, for starters, try to answer questions that I asked Virginia? We'll see how much you know about it, and if it is a lot, ask your questions too. This way will be debating not just quarreling. JimJast (talk) 08:56, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Talk page as it was before the eejit blanked it

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Cat ate the text? What happened to those many lines of text? JimJast (talk) 00:43, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

JimJast, what the blimey are you talking about? I don't see any evidence there was any text ever here. There is nothing about this page in the deletion log. --(((Zack Martin)))^™ 00:45, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Neither I see any text which makes two of us. I saw only EDIT CONFLICT but not my text any more. I guess I'll try again tomorrow. JimJast (talk) 00:53, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Oh, I understand you to mean you were trying to create the page Debate:Is RW really rational?, and sadly for you the Internet gremlins were hungry and they decided to eat it. Very sad. Yes, try again tomorrow. --(((Zack Martin)))^™ 00:54, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

The title of this debate

Does not match its content. It has nothing to do with the rationality or otherwise of RW. Rather it is yet another attempt to foist JJ's theory on us. It should be deleted or at the least renamed. --Damo^Hi 06:39, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

This is fuck all to do with RW: it's a fucking essay. Delete the tripe. --Scream!! (talk) 08:39, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

PROTIP

Help:Mistakes#Riting gud Inglish. And I'm not a girl. And my name is not Virginia. -- Nx / talk 06:49, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

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Back to the present

Don't remove talk page posts. Damo^Hi 09:01, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

For fucks sake, Jim, you claim to be so bloody clever BUT CAN'T EVEN EDIT A WIKI PROPERLY. PISS OFF WILL YOU. </shout> --Scream!! (talk) 09:07, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Disappointment

You know JimJast, you start by asking a very good question - "Is RW really rational?"... but then your answer disappoints. I think you could have made a positive contribution if you thought less (in your attempted debate opening) about your own theories and more about the different styles of argument adopted by various editors here and how you could evaluate the rationality of each of them. This question in turn raises some even deeper and more universal questions - What is rationality? How does one decide what is rational and what is not? --(((Zack Martin)))^™ 10:01, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Subjectivity of rationality

The whole "why do you call it RATIONALwiki?!?!?" criticism fails primarily because of the conflation of rationalism and rationality and because it doesn't take note that the latter is very subjective. Rationality is just joined up thinking by an individual. It's subjective and everyone, even raving lunatics, would say they are being rational or acting in a rational manner. You can easily justify your opinions and make them "make sense" to you. This isn't difficult and is one of the reasons economics often fails to predict a population's behavior because it makes the assumption that "people will act rationally" but doesn't recognise that one person's rational behaviour is another person's irrational nonsense. No one ever thinks that they are acting irrationally otherwise they just simply wouldn't act that way. This is why science relies heavily on openness and constant review and criticism - the eyes of many people with a common goal iron out all the points where reasoning differs between individuals. You can't just pull the "you're irrational" card purely because someone disagrees with you - and that applies equally to critics and supporters of RW alike. It's just a variant on an ad hom attack and is completely nonsensical. With this in mind, it was possibly a bad choice to name it RationalWiki but SkepticWiki was already taken. Deal with it. ADK^{...I'll endanger your shark!} 11:35, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree completely. It's a bit like when a atheist will say something like "how can you be an theist - you are so intelligent"(this applies both ways obviously) as if the only measure of intelligence is whether you agree with me. I wonder if the author of this essay is making the same mistake - how can anyone who doesn't agree with me possibly be rational? Damo^Hi 12:03, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

The thing I find funny, is the name rationalism has already been taken by the movement in European philosophy represented by thinkers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, who emphasised deductive over inductive reasoning - preferring reasoning from abstract first principles over experiment or observation. In that sense, this place is not rationalist at all, it's decidely empiricist.

Anyway, I think you are ignoring that there is a real philosophical question here over what is reason? This place seems to make the tacit assumption that there is some objective universal standard of reason which everyone agrees with. The problem is, while most people agree there is such a standard, they have much more trouble agreeing on what it actually is.

What are the basic principles of reason? Some suggest laws of logic, like the law of non-contradiction or the law of the excluded middle. But even those basic laws are actually controversial - for example, intuitionistic logics (and their motivation in the constructivist position in the philosophy of mathematics) deny the law of the excluded middle; paraconsistent logics deny the law of non-contradiction (see the work of Graham Priest, or traditional Indian logic).

The problem of reason is very similar to the problem of ethics - everyone agrees there is such a thing as ethics, much less agreement on what it actually is. Same goes for reason. --(((Zack Martin)))^™ 12:11, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Oh, Armondikov, another relevant point occurs to me - you are trying to draw a distinction between individual and communal rationality. You are right that, individual irrationality is not a big problem so long as the community as a whole acts in a rational way - following your science example, some individual scientists can be wildly irrational, but peer review etc., keeps the community as a whole rational.

The problem I see with RW - is some individual editors (not all, but some), are very irrational - it's not about what they believe, it's about the way they go about defending their beliefs - yet the community doesn't seem to hold them to account for this, with a result that their irrationality ends up making the community as a whole less rational.

Important point - rationality is about process more than outcomes. Your beliefs can be 100% true, but if your reasons for believing them are invalid, you aren't being rational. Likewise, your beliefs can be 100% false, yet still be rational so long as you have valid reasons for believing them. This is something people forget - just because you believe the truth doesn't mean you are rational - you can believe the truth, yet be irrational because you try to justify/defend that truth in irrational ways. Of course the process itself is justified in terms of its outcomes, but the justification is in terms of average outcomes, not the outcomes in individual cases. --(((Zack Martin)))^™ 07:02, 25 April 2011 (UTC)