House of Eratosthenes

Given the choice between a sound knowledge base of verifiable & verified factual information, and the ability to think logically, I would choose the latter.

If I have a good understanding of how to figure out what a fact means, but my head is crammed chock full of silly “factoids” that aren’t really true even though they may be repeated by others verbatim, I should be able to ultimately determine some of these conflict irreconcilably with others. From there, I should be able to figure out which ones are suspect and, eventually, which ones should be questioned, and then reconsidered.

If I have a good solid repository of verified fact, but I don’t know how to figure out what these facts are really telling me, I might as well have nothing.

Fact is merely foundation. You can’t live in a foundation.

They’re both pretty useless alone, but you don’t have to choose. You can have both.
- Zachriel | 07/30/2012 @ 10:08
Drucker wrote about the difference between data and information.

Data alone isn’t worth much.
.
- TMI | 07/30/2012 @ 13:21
Of course it’s the liberal who chimes in with “you can have both.” 🙂

What liberals tend to possess, in great quantities, is what our gracious host calls “fecktoids” — true (or true enough) bits of information that are irrelevant to the discussion, but which liberals insist on treating as forensic WMDs. We’re talking about D, E, and F, but here’s the leftist, cutting and pasting his .gif over and over and over and screeching “what about A?”

Liberals have convinced themselves they’re “the reality-based community” by means of a sad, transparent little maneuver I’ve taken to calling the “Ms. Applewhite:” treating a fact as validation of a feeling, and a feeling as proof of a fact. Ms. Applewhite is a wheelchair-bound African-American great-great-great grandmother who marched with Martin Luther King and has voted in every election since FDR. My heart bleeds for Ms. Applewhite. Ms. Applewhite didn’t get to vote in the last election. Therefore, one MILLION people have been disenfranchised. Or, the converse: I don’t like voter registration laws; voter registration laws don’t have a 100% success rate at preventing voter fraud; therefore voter registration laws are the work of an evil cabal to deprive blacks and veterans of the sacred franchise.

There really is a Ms. Applewhite, and anti-fraud laws really aren’t 100% effective, but facts don’t prove feelings anymore than feelings affect facts. Note, too, that this feelings-and-facts transitivity only works one way — no liberal would ever countenance the argument that since gun control laws aren’t 100% effective (ZERO preventable murders!), they are just Trojan horses for taking away the second amendment rights of blacks and veterans.

The Ms. Applewhite really is pathetically obvious. Nobody would ever pull it in real life — I’m not hitting .350 in the majors right now, even though I feel very strongly about it; Alex Rodriguez is a great hitter even though he’s a jerk. The fact that it serves as some kind of rhetorical jiu-jitsu death blow for so many otherwise intelligent, perceptive people speaks to the peculiar psychology of leftism.
- Severian | 07/31/2012 @ 07:53
TMI: Data alone isn’t worth much.

Quite so. Nor is logic without knowledge.

Severian</b.: Liberals have convinced themselves they’re “the reality-based community” …

Um, you do realize it was a modern conservative that defined conservatism as beyond the reality-based community?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

Severian</b.: Ms. Applewhite didn’t get to vote in the last election. Therefore, one MILLION people have been disenfranchised.

Well, no. That doesn’t follow. However, anecdotes when combined with data can often give a more balanced picture.
- Zachriel | 07/31/2012 @ 08:27
Nor is logic without knowledge.

The point is, that isn’t true. Logic can be used to acquire knowledge; or, at least, to validate it, which for all practical purposes means to acquire it — it all comes down to translating an unknown into a known.

As the fact-to-feeling-to-other-fact false syllogism demonstrates, facts without a working methodology for reason, are worth considerably less than vice-versa. Want another example? Chick-Fil-A’s president made some comments about “shaking our fist at God” and re-defining marriage, this proves he isn’t as receptive to same-sex marriage as some other people…I find it far-fetched to suppose he isn’t discriminating in his business practices in some way…therefore, his operation is illegal.

I can see Russia from my house! That makes Sarah Palin an idiot, of course…and you know, I just feel like she said that.

Heck, every time a liberal learns “news” from The Daily Show, we see this in effect. There’s parody…it isn’t supposed to be real, of course, but the “joke” gels so well, I can easily see that guy saying something stupid like that. So I just feel like he did. Therefore he’s hateful, an idiot, or both. The list goes on and on. Deprived of the use of the fact-to-feeling-to-fact false syllogism, our friends the liberals would be robbed of nearly all their arguments.
- mkfreeberg | 07/31/2012 @ 08:48
mkfreeberg: The point is, that isn’t true. Logic can be used to acquire knowledge; or, at least, to validate it, which for all practical purposes means to acquire it — it all comes down to translating an unknown into a known.

Validating knowledge means having knowledge to validate.

We may be speaking past each other. Knowledge, as we are using the term, means to accumulate experiences about the world. In the primitive sense, this experience is unorganized, but the healthy mind finds patterns and categorizes it into primitive information. Logic can then be used to derive fundamentally new conceptions about the experiences you have gathered. Without knowledge of the world, you still lack the fire of life, which requires experience as well as thought.

mkfreeberg: Deprived of the use of the fact-to-feeling-to-fact false syllogism, our friends the liberals would be robbed of nearly all their arguments.

Truthiness.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/24039/october-17-2005/the-word—truthiness
- Zachriel | 07/31/2012 @ 09:12
I love these guys!!!!! 🙂

I write a whole post about how leftists deliberately miss the point by insisting on fecktoids, and here they come with Um, you do realize it was a modern conservative that defined conservatism as beyond the reality-based community? Complete with wiki link.

Classic.
- Severian | 07/31/2012 @ 09:18
Severian: I write a whole post about how leftists deliberately miss the point by insisting on fecktoids, and here they come with Um, you do realize it was a modern conservative that defined conservatism as beyond the reality-based community? Complete with wiki link.

It’s not difficult to follow the point. Again,

Severian: Liberals have convinced themselves they’re “the reality-based community” …

They didn’t convince themselves that they were the reality-based community. They were *accused* of it, of having the belief that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.
- Zachriel | 07/31/2012 @ 09:49
Well yeah, but I think The Zachriel are on to something here. I speak often of fact, and inferences/opinions to be derived from those facts; most self-identifying “conservatives” would delineate those more-or-less according to the way I do, a “fact” is an observation that can’t be subjected to question except by way of unreasonable, bullshit existentialist navel-gazing. Like, when we see stars, we aren’t seeing anything that’s actually there, a giant panda is amusing himself by painting them in the sky and we’re all living in a snow-globe or something…

Now, once we accept that the stars are stars, we measure that Polaris is this many degrees, minutes and angular seconds from Star X on such-and-such-a-date. That is a fact.

These friends of ours, seem to think of it in terms of likelihood and nothing else…above eighty percent probability, or something, it makes the cut. Once you model knowledge in such a way, you effectively discard the concept of “knowing” anything at all and it must smoosh together into a big bunch of good-feeling. The sea levels are going to rise this much over the next hundred years, I can feel it.

I’m gonna catch that red dot today…
- mkfreeberg | 07/31/2012 @ 09:58
And the point of my posts, dear hearts, is that this is a classic virtue juunkie behavior — you don’t really have anything to add to the discussion, but you really really really want to get that fix, and so we’re off proving what dumbasses us troglodytes are by schooling us on a particular fecktoid…

… immediately followed with [liberals] were *accused* of it, of having the belief that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.

Ooooooh, it feels ssooooooo good, doesn’t it? The rush, man, the rush!! That’s some good shit right there!

[PS I’m loving your wiki link, by the way. An “unnamed Bush aide,” “later attributed to Karl Rove,” saying “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” to out-and-proud Bush-hating liberal Ron Suskind of the NY Times magazine. Are we noticing a certain, shall we say, credulousness here? Completely unsourced — didn’t notice that little fecktoid, did we?]
- Severian | 07/31/2012 @ 10:00
[…] do not think things through. They pride themselves on having the right “facts,” but what good are verifiable facts if you don’t know how to use them? And these people do not. I’ve personally had conversations with them that look like […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/17/2012 @ 12:25
[…] recall jotting down last summer a pithy and simple idea, which invited challenge in spite of its simplicity. That’s a good […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 01/22/2013 @ 06:57
[…] So information sometimes is a contaminant, if it is designed and deployed for the purpose to distract, to such an extent that it becomes a weapon. There are other ways it could be a contaminant. It could be a falsehood, of course. Now, that one doesn’t fly with me quite so much. As I explained before, […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 01/26/2013 @ 11:34
[…] So information sometimes is a contaminant, if it is measured by quantity and not by quality, designed and deployed for the purpose to distract, to such an extent that it becomes a weapon. There are other ways it could be a contaminant. It could be a falsehood, of course. Now, that one doesn’t fly with me quite so much. As I explained before, […]
- Information as a Contaminant | Rotten Chestnuts | 01/27/2013 @ 05:49
[…] So information sometimes is a contaminant, if it is measured by quantity and not by quality, designed and deployed for the purpose to distract, to such an extent that it becomes a weapon. There are other ways it could be a contaminant. It could be a falsehood, of course. Now, that one doesn’t fly with me quite so much. As I explained before, […]
- Information as a Contaminant | Right Wing News | 01/27/2013 @ 05:50
[…] beyond doubt? It wouldn’t very much matter if you’re thinking like a loon, would it? I discussed this before: You’d be much better off knowing nothing at all, or even relying on a trove of pure nonsense […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/18/2014 @ 06:54
[…] state of things. A liberal doesn’t even try. So a conservative, forced to choose, will value the ability to think logically over a repository of verified & verifiable information, whereas the liberal will not, because the conservative can see one can be made from the other with […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 03/03/2016 @ 07:06
[…] leads to an imbalance. An imbalance I unwittingly described awhile […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/19/2016 @ 11:01

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