George Conway discusses President Donald Trump's diagnosis
https://youtu.be/fAbpThZ33QA
There's something insanely ironic about Conway reading the "plain English" in the DSM-5
and diagnosing Trump. We've had conversations about things like quantum woo, artificial
mathematization, and (bad) science journalism, here in this forum. And I think the above video,
like everything in this semantically ungrounded time, helps refine the point. On the one hand, it's
difficult to disagree with Conway. I'm fond of reading the DSM, too. But just like navigating
slippery bullshit like "The Tao of Physics", just because the words you're reading *seem*
to have unambiguous referents, doesn't mean the referents evoked in you match, AT ALL, the
referents they were intended to match. If Trump's incompetence facilitates his narcissism, so too
Conway's belief he understands psychology seems pretty clearly narcissistic ... a disrespectful
under-appreciation for the work of therapists combined with an overestimation of his own competence.
This article is fantastic:
An Unlikely Source of (Absurd and Effective) Case Studies for Introductory
Informal Logic
https://philpapers.org/rec/LEMAUS
Lemanek uses "Ancient Astronaut Theory" <https://youtu.be/gZ5zeqro_V0> to teach students
how to analyze fallacious reasoning. [⛧] We ran into a guy at the pub the other night who claimed to work
on bridges. (I said "like civil engineering?", to which he mumbled, which might have been a red
flag.) But later in the conversation, he mentioned he wanted to go to Cancun to visit the pyramids,
because he's fascinated with how such things were built. I made an off-the-cuff comment that it's amazing
what you can do with slaves. And he emphasized that there's no way they could have built them. I let it
go to avoid the conflict that might have ensued ... you know, for Renee's sake.
Anyway, I'm starting to think it's justifiable to use complicated, persnickety
jargon as a bar over which people have to jump in order to be at all confident in
the conversation. Maybe I'm becoming an authoritarian! >8^D
[⛧] I'm also enjoying "The Vow", wherein one of the people responsible for this slippery
bullshit https://whatthebleep.com/, tells a *layered* cautionary tale about how peddlers of slippery
bullshit might be susceptible to the slippery bullshit peddled by others. Who's the victim, here? "I
have no idea what's going on." <https://youtu.be/1Y_7P9Ce9Uc>
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