I have a friend who is joining anti-vax groups to try to understand / combat them and I’ll tell you the same thing I told that friend: don’t get in too deep.
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i’m already done. i had been searching for a thread compact enough to be read over in 30 minutes that managed to impart the particular flavor of dealing with popobawian discourse. once i found representative sample i stopped. i had the link to that one handy when someone mentioned them.
hey, maybe popo is “q” . . .
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That was a fun read. The ghosts of Karl Marx and/or Ayn Rand must have been looking on with pride.
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I think you might be looking for Max Stirner
I’m not sure I can deal with the idea of an Egoist egotist again
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I tried and failed to slog my way through that thread.
I’m pretty sure it captures the essence of why I hated my philosophy classes in college.
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People really underestimate the power of psychological and social manipulation as well as just the nature of human bonding/socialization. There is no group I’ve ever interacted with long-term that hasn’t changed me in some manner for better or worse.
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unless you took a course in “philosophy for cranks and humbugs” i sincerely hope your philosophy courses didn’t actually resemble that dialogue very closely.
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It was a long time ago. I just remember that they spent an inordinate amount of time debating the definition of words. It all seemed like pointless drivel. Pick a definition and argue from there. If the definition doesn’t fit what you are trying to say, then use a qualifier, or make up a friggin word already.
That, and all the bullshit about qualia.
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i’ve had that course, as well as reading all the materials from a graduate-level course on epistemology a friend of mine took, and i recognize that a lot of time is spent in pursuit of definitions, the nature of knowledge, and how we know what we know or if we know. that said, there really are some settled common agreements on meaning, at least within so-called western thought. the problem with popobawa4u was that they refused to submit to such common ground and were quite happy to change the definitions of even terms to which they had already applied their own idiosyncratic “definitions” too, only to change those “definitions” from one part of a thread to a later part.
i think they were in part an attempt to play the role of a legendary trickster god in real life, in part a deliberate troglodytam, and in part a very deliberate eccentric.
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I’ll continue to stand up for this observation. It’s true. 
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in this case, the standard curriculum for philosophy 101 involves not only defining one’s terms but also defining about 14 or 15 ways of defining one’s terms before it starts to move into more germane territory.
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…which is also a classic example of the ‘First, define your terms’ approach to philosophy.
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Yeah, by that time I was just done.
I have a background in science and all the semantic games just made we want to strangle someone.
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Yeah, it’s meant as a bit of a footnote for a typical conversation. If the actual topic of discussion is hardcore philosophy, then an unusual emphasis on precisely defining things is expected, I guess?
This is also why The Good Place was such an extraordinary show. It managed to pull off the incredible feat of simultaneously mocking something (philosophy) while actually teaching you the value of that something (philosophy). I’ve never seen any other show quite like it, and man, kudos to everyone involved … a unique gem 
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“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
Edit: To me, scientists define things. Philosophers define non-things. 
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I liked The Good Place too. It was fun, even if they kind of punted on the whole good/evil thing in the end. Apparently evil is just something you do because of your job description I guess.
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And they do it because philosophers came up with that method. Then the philosophers who were more interested in tables and chairs, and zebras and whatnot started to concentrate on those things and eventually got called scientists.
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Sure, there was a lot of overlap in the early days of “science”, when you could become a fairly competent physicist by sitting in a bathtub.
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I believe you still can. 
At least at the theoretical, ‘lets postulate a 19-dimensional multiverse’ end of physics.
Although, arguably that is just old school philosophy.
I’m sure Parmenides would have loved chatting to Hawking.
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I think the difference between philosophy and modern theoretical physics is math. You can come up with a lot of wild theories, but there’s a ton of experimental observations your model had better meet, and the math has to back it up, even if some of the math can get “creative”.
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