He isn't mistaken in one aspect. He needs the numbers, they aren't an optional thing in his ontology. His whole argument depends on "credible FSKs" and credibility is something he can't account for any other way. His endgame is to make it science fact that Islam is evil, and to make it science fact that anyone who says otherwise is factually wrong.Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 1:01 pmMaybe as responders we could do a kind of evaluation.Atla wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 9:57 am Give it a few more decades and VA might develop a halfway usable FSKs-with-numbers system, which will then inevitably show his philosophical stance wrong. Is that a tragedy or a good thing? A punchline? Irony? Sadness? Does it tell us something about the futility of life?
Does VA really think he can come up with multiply decimal placed numbers for the accuracy/objectivity/empiricalness of various fields of inquiry
or
does he probably realize it was not very grounded but can't manage to admit it?
Once we have made our guess about it, we can drop issues where we think he's merely digging in because he never wants to admit he's wrong...here.
And we can continue to criticize issues where we think he's actually sure he's right.
I admit it is mindreading.
But actually I see nothing in his main arguments that depends on having these numbers. I don't think the idea that there are degrees is a silly one. It's just the numbers, and such exact ones. And the contradictions with other estimates he's made before, and then the silliness of that list of rather abstract criteria somehow being used to come up with such exact numbers.
I mean, how many times are we willing to point out, in new paraphrases, silliness that he probably isn't really invested in (though he may not realize it yet)?
His method for manufacturing his FSK to do that job would however allow any old arsehole to make any old FSK thing. Worse, his freewheeling approach to logic means he cannot insist on the usual formula that if X is True then Not X is False, so he has a problem with his evilness-of-Islam-fact in that he cannot say you are wrong to assert that Islam is less evil than his FSK thing. Or at least he can't on the basis of his own statement being true. So he has to make it so that your FSK is bad and thus you cannot credibly challenge him on any subject.
Thus he needs a crediblity-FSK to do that job for him. He needs it to feel good and sciency so that it can say that his morality-proper-FSK also feels good and sciency, and then he can claim sciency levels of credibility for it, and then he gets to say that competing FSK things are not as sciency so they can't be as credible. But if he doesn't have sciency looking numbers, he can't even fool himself that shit sandwich is edible.
He likes to create little hiearchies and label everything. It makes him feel the world is explicable, and everyone else does it to an extent. He just does it compulsively, endlessly, all day long. He never really thinks about whether it makes sense, because nothing else does as far as he's concerned. If stopped trying to force it down everyone's throats with insults and spam, and just offered it as his suggestion instead, it wouldn't be problematic. I'd prefer it if he'd be less of a Stalinist totalitarian as well, but that's just pie in the sky.