Post by DT on Mar 9, 2011 5:55:47 GMT
First, to Ezekiel UK, Gold Star, Fr4nk Castle, Purple Cat, and Gabby: Thank you for keeping this thread alive and active despite my long absence.
I appreciate the gesture.
Does it threaten those points? Of course. That's the point - we briefly remove the physical comforts of life and health, and of psychological security, in order to give the Ignorant little reason to avoid a Rational, Self-Actualizing existence.
This is also the reason we do not kill anyone save our specific enemies (and zergs) in Centers of Learning. In these places, the Ignorant can safely seek to further their minds.
But this is, essentially, the ideology that ignorance can be beaten out of someone. I continue to view this as the self-justification of an abuser.
An abuser? Really? Most people settle for calling our methods 'school-yard bullying', 'griefing', or 'coercion'. Getting people's attention via violence has the distinct advantage of being similar to intimidation.
Nobody is trying to 'beat the Ignorance out' of anyone. That'd be similar to manipulating someone into psychologically repressing their personality through trauma. That would be a full reversal of our ideology, and would cripple the entire "web of needs" we seek to build. We're trying to force them to sit down, listen to what we have to say, and then think. Just...think, mind you - we like to let people come up with their own conclusions. Since ours is a logical conclusion, people who come to it without prodding (beyond the initial Introductory Prodding, of course) tend to grasp it more fully than those who are pressured into it.
I don't have an account on your forums. Last time I looked into the eligibility requirements for getting one it was clear I didn't meet them. I did post anonymously a couple of times but last time I looked the response to my post was the equivalent of "Google it" followed up with the implication that, had I studied philosophy at all, I wouldn't even have to ask.
Then who was this?
Because they've had their account activated for months.
Now, your thread was an example of How Not To Begin a Debate.
While I do apologize that nobody was particularly interested in answering your question, your charges of ill-behavior by our membership is unfounded. The question you staged is not exactly a debate-sparker.
Nobody told you to Google anything, or told you that your question was that of an uneducated person, or had an obvious answer.
What it was - to be frank - was an awful conversation-starter, being a combination of vague terms (ancient Greek philosophers? Which one?), dry, and noncontroversial. Presenting a challenging viewpoint from the get-go stimulates debate, not a short-answer question from the first quiz of the semester. It was boring.
This person was far better at bringing an interesting topic to the table, and thus received a great deal more interest from us. Hardly the same subject matter, but the topic was framed a great deal better.
I find the attitude elitist, as well as being factually incorrect.
*snip... detail of the educative works of the philosophe knights which apparently consisted of a comic sketch followed by violence... which rather makes it sound like the next installment of the Evil Dead franchise. This is apparently what counts as education in Malton these days*
Actually, this is what counts as entertainment in Malton these days. The education, as I mentioned, came after the violence, and was held on our forums, which I linked to you for reference previously.
I note that the Philosophe Knights own web pages have both policies which refer only to crime and punishment (firstly) and alliances (secondly) and Philosophy in which the conclusion that the ignorant should be killed appears before the conclusion that education should be provided. I still see no reason to alter my opinion that the Knights are known firstly for killing and only tangentially for educating.Obviously we are known for killing people. We've put an awful lot of effort into publicizing that particular activity of ours.
However, stating that we are not known for education is grossly inaccurate. Questions relating to 'why' we killed people, and why they were considered 'ignorant' tops the list of questions put to us in terms of frequency.
And trying to judge our capacity for kindness and good-will versus our institution of violence by the order with which they are presented on a website is just a little shallow, if you don’t mind me saying so.
If you wish to provide evidence that the Philosophe Knights are not friendly people, you need only point out that a good number of our ‘allies’ in the PKA are referred to by us in public as ‘fools’, frequently threatened by our number, and killed without regret.
As a contrast, the Knights of St. Jude, the Malton College of Medicine, and the Quartly Study Group have yet to complain about any ill-treatment from us since we judged them to be good allies.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that piece of evidence.
My brief observation of PK discourse, and writings, is that it has an emphasis on the pithy quotation over actual debate and a positive antipathy towards the formation of hypothesis, collection of data and careful drawing of conclusion. Your own response seems to support this.
It's true. I quote myself most often, though Lord N and Citizen M's quotes are rather good too.
My evidence in support of the assertion that our publicity is so good that just saying our name before killing people can get people to pay attention to us is what, exactly?
I have no idea which debates between members of the PK you have observed, since most of them are on our private forums, but my observation is quite the opposite. We have a terrible tendency to cite no sources, provide no quotes, and generally support assertions through sheer force of will. We’ve had to ban discussions of religion and current world politics for this reason. Not that providing outside evidence for either of those topics helps, given the quality of today’s “reliable sources”.
While it may not be possible to codify everything that constitutes "greater human good" we can state and measure many things that contribute towards it, ditto rationality, self-actualization &tc., without even making the attempt to define and measure such things we are simply trading rather bald assertions of fact. I see your peripheral measurements and provide a counterpoint: Kant’s Moral Good.
I'm not trying to say that it cannot be done, nor that it shouldn't be done. I'm saying that you have no research of your own to cite in order to back your assertions up.
And because I’ve quoted your ‘100 years of educational theory’ below, but haven’t got room there to reply to it:
Asking the accepted Educational Theory of the past century to act as a counter to the Knights’ educational theory is tricky. For one thing, it doesn’t contradict any of our methods, simply because our methods had never been tried previous to the Malton Incident. You have, in other worse, 5 years of educational theory to back you up. Speaking as a person with access to all the records, you’re looking at some mixed results.
We’ve had some extremely positive results (Knights of St. Jude), and some embarrassingly counterproductive failures (Bandit Queens try to save themselves from us by zerging, but ultimately end up flattened, and worse off than before).
Conclusive evidence either way? I’d say no. It's a work in progress, and we're not nearly ready to wrap anything up.
You say that hurting people contributes to their education, I maintain that there are better ways to do this (I'm inclined to believe I have approximately 100 years of educational theory on my side of the debate but since no one seems to care about educational theory I've not actually gone and looked). You claim above, for instance, that PKing causes the survivors of Malton to focus upon more abstract concepts.
Don't be silly, and don't misquote me, please. PKing doesn't get people to focus on anything other than the fact that they died*.
I said that PKing gets the attention of those who've died (and that repeated PKing often wears down the "You killed me so I hate you forever and I'll never listen to you nanananana" resistance that is instinctive in so many people simply due to exhaustion). It also can get the attentions of those who witness the killing, which is a nice advantage.
Encouraging people to focus on abstract concepts gets them to focus on abstract concepts. We have yet to invent the projectile which can implant inclinations into people's brains (although that would be both cool and terrible).
Some people are highly disinclined to focus on abstract concepts, regardless of whether or not we have their attentions, while others are highly receptive to it.
*Which is not the sort of education you appear to be referring to. Though the fact that they died, and are no worse off for it, is a very important concept we seek to impress upon people. However, we’ve found that people don’t pick this up until later on, when they actually discuss it with us and meditate upon it further.
While not amenable to conclusive proof there are studies that could be undertaken to justify this, the literature on corporal punishment could be brought to bear on the subject. Other methods of education should be tried and measures of outcomes decided upon and then measured. Obviously that would all be work and probably not as much fun as killing people.Once again, we do not engage in anything which can be provided as a parallel to corporal punishment in the classroom. Your analogy is flawed.
As to other venues of education, please wiki 'MCM', and examine the list of Guest Lecturers. I don't know if it's entirely complete on their wiki, but we have a tradition of lecturing there. The same is true at the Quartly Library, where we have lectured both the living and the dead. Furthermore, while the MCM and the Quartly Library are very nice places indeed, they have a great deal of regulars and not that many people who come from outside. We've found that herding people into Centers of Learning via force is somewhat time-consuming but provides similar atmospheres for educational lectures. We’ve done this several times.
Originally science was a branch of philosophy, called natural philosophy and the assertions of those philosophers eventually came to be proved or disproved through experimentation. The very formation of scientific method and the understanding of how theory, mathematics and experimentation combine in order to draw conclusions is itself a philosophical achievement and arose from the very attempts of philosophers to bring evidence to bear in relation to philosophical problems. Many important philosophical questions of past ages such as the nature of time and space, man's position within the universe, the formalisation and nature of reasoning, the way information about the world is conveyed to our senses have been answered by scientific and/or mathematical means and/or are now considered appropriate topics of scientific study (in some cases these questions are tackled by both the scientist and the philosopher working either separately or together). The fact that we no longer consider such questions as purely philosophical ones does not mean they were never a branch of philosophy nor that philosophers have not and do not draw conclusions about them that may at some point be overturned by evidence. To ignore the ways in which philosophy and science are intimately related does disservice to both disciplines.
Goodness, you ignored literally everything I have said. Nobody is debating the nature of time and space, biology, astronomy, mathematics, or elementary chemistry. While I do understand your reason for bringing this up, its relevance is slim. We are discussing rationality, the lack of rationality, the lives of those people who embrace it and those who do not. In addition, we are discussing whether it is morally and practically correct to encourage one and discourage the other through an application of force and then reasoned debate.
Bringing this to the empirical level is a bit difficult, because nobody has ever done what we're doing in Malton before. Furthermore, trying to determine our level of success with this method after five years is hardly going to get you anywhere, since not only have we only visited a tiny fraction of the people we intend to bring enlightenment to, but we’ve yet to actually use all of the tricks in our bag.
Consider the evidence which exists in front of you:
This thread is an embodiment of what I'm describing. It began as a complaint from one of your allies about BD punishing him (along with members of the DHPD) for ignorance, and has since become a discussion of Ignorance, Enlightenment, and the merits of punishing the former and encouraging the latter. Large amounts of ~words~ have been deposited in this thread on these subjects, and the discussion doesn’t look like it’s ready to be over yet.
Ignorance must be punished before education can be provided. It's not that we want to beat people up before they are allowed to learn, it's that they have no inclination to do anything other than stick their fingers in their ears unless we, uh, cut the fingers off and deny them that recourse. So to speak. Er. That was a bit more graphic than I’d intended it to be.
I understand that you had a bad experience when asking us for debate on our forums, but unless you are determined to let it cloud your judgment, that's very little reason to disregard our long tradition of entertaining guests with lengthy answers filled with either 5-dollar words and many Wikipedia links and/or the sheer force of the unimpeachable Opinion.
We don’t just debate our former victims, either - we subject all our applicants to questioning and debate, which has seen some highly amusing ragequits from some who couldn’t stand being told that they were mistaken in some of their beliefs.
My word, no.
You had obviously read nothing of what I wrote previously and yet decided to critique it anyway.
I felt (and still feel) that trying to explain to you that the one major point of ethical philosophy throughout the ages is to pinpoint the basic purpose of life and proceed from there to identify a way to be healthy in both mind and body throughout life would be a bit pointless since you clearly do not get it.
He said "What" followed by calling you an ignoramus, which is an answer of sorts. Very similar, in fact, to the reception I got on the PK forums.Goodness, you are upset about the lack of debate your question about mysterious Greeks caused.
Your reception, in contrast to your colorful remarks about us, involved a total lack of replies due to sheer apathy about your question, which was followed by disinterested replies to your assertion that we do not engage in debate.
Shall I ask each of the Knights to write up a paragraph in reply to your question in an effort to smooth things over?
I appreciate the gesture.
Jan 28, 2011 15:29:15 GMT DT said:
Does it threaten those points? Of course. That's the point - we briefly remove the physical comforts of life and health, and of psychological security, in order to give the Ignorant little reason to avoid a Rational, Self-Actualizing existence.
This is also the reason we do not kill anyone save our specific enemies (and zergs) in Centers of Learning. In these places, the Ignorant can safely seek to further their minds.
But this is, essentially, the ideology that ignorance can be beaten out of someone. I continue to view this as the self-justification of an abuser.
An abuser? Really? Most people settle for calling our methods 'school-yard bullying', 'griefing', or 'coercion'. Getting people's attention via violence has the distinct advantage of being similar to intimidation.
Nobody is trying to 'beat the Ignorance out' of anyone. That'd be similar to manipulating someone into psychologically repressing their personality through trauma. That would be a full reversal of our ideology, and would cripple the entire "web of needs" we seek to build. We're trying to force them to sit down, listen to what we have to say, and then think. Just...think, mind you - we like to let people come up with their own conclusions. Since ours is a logical conclusion, people who come to it without prodding (beyond the initial Introductory Prodding, of course) tend to grasp it more fully than those who are pressured into it.
Then who was this?
Because they've had their account activated for months.
Now, your thread was an example of How Not To Begin a Debate.
While I do apologize that nobody was particularly interested in answering your question, your charges of ill-behavior by our membership is unfounded. The question you staged is not exactly a debate-sparker.
Nobody told you to Google anything, or told you that your question was that of an uneducated person, or had an obvious answer.
What it was - to be frank - was an awful conversation-starter, being a combination of vague terms (ancient Greek philosophers? Which one
This person was far better at bringing an interesting topic to the table, and thus received a great deal more interest from us. Hardly the same subject matter, but the topic was framed a great deal better.
I find the attitude elitist, as well as being factually incorrect.
*snip... detail of the educative works of the philosophe knights which apparently consisted of a comic sketch followed by violence... which rather makes it sound like the next installment of the Evil Dead franchise. This is apparently what counts as education in Malton these days*
Actually, this is what counts as entertainment in Malton these days. The education, as I mentioned, came after the violence, and was held on our forums, which I linked to you for reference previously.
I note that the Philosophe Knights own web pages have both policies which refer only to crime and punishment (firstly) and alliances (secondly) and Philosophy in which the conclusion that the ignorant should be killed appears before the conclusion that education should be provided. I still see no reason to alter my opinion that the Knights are known firstly for killing and only tangentially for educating.
However, stating that we are not known for education is grossly inaccurate. Questions relating to 'why' we killed people, and why they were considered 'ignorant' tops the list of questions put to us in terms of frequency.
And trying to judge our capacity for kindness and good-will versus our institution of violence by the order with which they are presented on a website is just a little shallow, if you don’t mind me saying so.
If you wish to provide evidence that the Philosophe Knights are not friendly people, you need only point out that a good number of our ‘allies’ in the PKA are referred to by us in public as ‘fools’, frequently threatened by our number, and killed without regret.
As a contrast, the Knights of St. Jude, the Malton College of Medicine, and the Quartly Study Group have yet to complain about any ill-treatment from us since we judged them to be good allies.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that piece of evidence.
I don't think you understood what I meant, which means I might not have understood what you initially meant in your previous post.
I'm saying that trying to apply the scientific method to concepts like the greater human good and true happiness through rationality, balance, and self-improvement is probably a waste of time. How would one maintain a Control, and how would one know if their test was faithfully applying reason and balance throughout their lives, rather than slipping into vice? Certainly, I've never heard of anyone attempting to prove a philosopher right through lengthy experimentation.
I'm saying that trying to apply the scientific method to concepts like the greater human good and true happiness through rationality, balance, and self-improvement is probably a waste of time. How would one maintain a Control, and how would one know if their test was faithfully applying reason and balance throughout their lives, rather than slipping into vice? Certainly, I've never heard of anyone attempting to prove a philosopher right through lengthy experimentation.
My brief observation of PK discourse, and writings, is that it has an emphasis on the pithy quotation over actual debate and a positive antipathy towards the formation of hypothesis, collection of data and careful drawing of conclusion. Your own response seems to support this.
It's true. I quote myself most often, though Lord N and Citizen M's quotes are rather good too.
My evidence in support of the assertion that our publicity is so good that just saying our name before killing people can get people to pay attention to us is what, exactly?
I have no idea which debates between members of the PK you have observed, since most of them are on our private forums, but my observation is quite the opposite. We have a terrible tendency to cite no sources, provide no quotes, and generally support assertions through sheer force of will. We’ve had to ban discussions of religion and current world politics for this reason. Not that providing outside evidence for either of those topics helps, given the quality of today’s “reliable sources”.
I'm not trying to say that it cannot be done, nor that it shouldn't be done. I'm saying that you have no research of your own to cite in order to back your assertions up.
And because I’ve quoted your ‘100 years of educational theory’ below, but haven’t got room there to reply to it:
Asking the accepted Educational Theory of the past century to act as a counter to the Knights’ educational theory is tricky. For one thing, it doesn’t contradict any of our methods, simply because our methods had never been tried previous to the Malton Incident. You have, in other worse, 5 years of educational theory to back you up. Speaking as a person with access to all the records, you’re looking at some mixed results.
We’ve had some extremely positive results (Knights of St. Jude), and some embarrassingly counterproductive failures (Bandit Queens try to save themselves from us by zerging, but ultimately end up flattened, and worse off than before).
Conclusive evidence either way? I’d say no. It's a work in progress, and we're not nearly ready to wrap anything up.
Don't be silly, and don't misquote me, please. PKing doesn't get people to focus on anything other than the fact that they died*.
I said that PKing gets the attention of those who've died (and that repeated PKing often wears down the "You killed me so I hate you forever and I'll never listen to you nanananana" resistance that is instinctive in so many people simply due to exhaustion). It also can get the attentions of those who witness the killing, which is a nice advantage.
Encouraging people to focus on abstract concepts gets them to focus on abstract concepts. We have yet to invent the projectile which can implant inclinations into people's brains (although that would be both cool and terrible).
Some people are highly disinclined to focus on abstract concepts, regardless of whether or not we have their attentions, while others are highly receptive to it.
*Which is not the sort of education you appear to be referring to. Though the fact that they died, and are no worse off for it, is a very important concept we seek to impress upon people. However, we’ve found that people don’t pick this up until later on, when they actually discuss it with us and meditate upon it further.
While not amenable to conclusive proof there are studies that could be undertaken to justify this, the literature on corporal punishment could be brought to bear on the subject. Other methods of education should be tried and measures of outcomes decided upon and then measured. Obviously that would all be work and probably not as much fun as killing people.
As to other venues of education, please wiki 'MCM', and examine the list of Guest Lecturers. I don't know if it's entirely complete on their wiki, but we have a tradition of lecturing there. The same is true at the Quartly Library, where we have lectured both the living and the dead. Furthermore, while the MCM and the Quartly Library are very nice places indeed, they have a great deal of regulars and not that many people who come from outside. We've found that herding people into Centers of Learning via force is somewhat time-consuming but provides similar atmospheres for educational lectures. We’ve done this several times.
Goodness, you ignored literally everything I have said. Nobody is debating the nature of time and space, biology, astronomy, mathematics, or elementary chemistry. While I do understand your reason for bringing this up, its relevance is slim. We are discussing rationality, the lack of rationality, the lives of those people who embrace it and those who do not. In addition, we are discussing whether it is morally and practically correct to encourage one and discourage the other through an application of force and then reasoned debate.
Bringing this to the empirical level is a bit difficult, because nobody has ever done what we're doing in Malton before. Furthermore, trying to determine our level of success with this method after five years is hardly going to get you anywhere, since not only have we only visited a tiny fraction of the people we intend to bring enlightenment to, but we’ve yet to actually use all of the tricks in our bag.
Consider the evidence which exists in front of you:
This thread is an embodiment of what I'm describing. It began as a complaint from one of your allies about BD punishing him (along with members of the DHPD) for ignorance, and has since become a discussion of Ignorance, Enlightenment, and the merits of punishing the former and encouraging the latter. Large amounts of ~words~ have been deposited in this thread on these subjects, and the discussion doesn’t look like it’s ready to be over yet.
Ignorance must be punished before education can be provided. It's not that we want to beat people up before they are allowed to learn, it's that they have no inclination to do anything other than stick their fingers in their ears unless we, uh, cut the fingers off and deny them that recourse. So to speak. Er. That was a bit more graphic than I’d intended it to be.
I understand that you had a bad experience when asking us for debate on our forums, but unless you are determined to let it cloud your judgment, that's very little reason to disregard our long tradition of entertaining guests with lengthy answers filled with either 5-dollar words and many Wikipedia links and/or the sheer force of the unimpeachable Opinion.
We don’t just debate our former victims, either - we subject all our applicants to questioning and debate, which has seen some highly amusing ragequits from some who couldn’t stand being told that they were mistaken in some of their beliefs.
My word, no.
You had obviously read nothing of what I wrote previously and yet decided to critique it anyway.
I felt (and still feel) that trying to explain to you that the one major point of ethical philosophy throughout the ages is to pinpoint the basic purpose of life and proceed from there to identify a way to be healthy in both mind and body throughout life would be a bit pointless since you clearly do not get it.
He said "What" followed by calling you an ignoramus, which is an answer of sorts. Very similar, in fact, to the reception I got on the PK forums.
Your reception, in contrast to your colorful remarks about us, involved a total lack of replies due to sheer apathy about your question, which was followed by disinterested replies to your assertion that we do not engage in debate.
Shall I ask each of the Knights to write up a paragraph in reply to your question in an effort to smooth things over?