Given your unwillingness to accept that you aren’t as informed on the topic as you think you are I can see why you have the ideas you do.
Sam Harris has never been part of the rationalist or skeptical culture. He is much better known in the atheist and the “intellectual dark web”. In the skeptical community he is generally regarded as a close minded person who is too busy kissing the butt of people like Ben Shapiro and selling meditation.
Even before Elevatorgate Dawkins was on the outs for being a sexist & misogynist who was contributing nothing to the movement except harm. If you are using him as an example you are operating on information that is more than a decade out of date and it might be time to update your priors.
“I utilize a narrower definition of the word, shame you are too closed-minded to comprehend that I’m right. Now let’s force a debate on semantics to maximize our time wasted.”
Don’t you find it’s usually better to frame your opponent’s position in terms they would agree with? You’re using skepticism in a way that does not comport with today’s use by the community. Community exchange over time. Community exchange over time.
The community’s use isn’t the correct point of reference. It is also naturally biased, because the community seeks to avoid association with these people.
It’s not crazy or outlandish to label Harris or Dawkins as skeptics in the common use of the term. It’s core to their branding whether you like it or not. That’s what matters when you talk to people outside the community, not the insular definition you treat as objective fact.
I don’t even see a point in litigating this, other than the one I mentioned already. It was clear from context what they were talking about.
The community has explicitly rejected the people you named because they aren’t in keeping with positions the community holds. If the community says they don’t want these people in the group but you insist on saying they are part of the group then you are making a bad faith argument.
Communities get to decide who is an isn’t part of the community. You specifically mentioned trans issues. Two of the pods I named had trans hosts. Dawkins had his AHA award pulled because of trans comments. Skeptics aren’t being the people you said they were. You can either change your mind or stick to your beliefs despite the evidence.
You’re completely missing the point. This isn’t about a community no matter how much you’d prefer otherwise. This was a conversation in a public forum.
The word “sceptic” has a generally understood meaning regardless of how the community feels about it, because the general public isn’t paying attention to what the community wants.
You can either change your mind or stick to your beliefs despite the evidence.
How kind of you. Word of advice, don’t resort to statements like this. It’s transparent ego stroking that makes you sound like a self-centered asshole and doesn’t help your argument in any way.
“This isn’t about a community no matter how much you’d prefer otherwise.”
Except that it was/is about the community/movement/group collectively known as skeptics. Go back the the beginning of the conversation. I mentioned materials and the reply came back about how it was all transphobic misogynist stuff. Well there is nothing inherently transphobic or misogynist about the application of epistemology, logic and spotting logical fallacies
so the complaint must have been about the people. Then the conversation explicitly mentioned people by name as represe representatives of the community. So no matter how much you try to say it wasn’t about the community it was.
“This was a conversation in a public forum. The word “sceptic” has a generally understood meaning.”
There are lots of “generally understood” groups that go by existing words that aren’t understood at all by the general population. To many people atheists are Satan worshipers, trans people are bathroom predators, and geologists are part of a massive cover-up about the truth of young earth creationism. But we know that these “generally understood” meanings are completely false. In a dictionary a word can have more than one meaning and context matters.
Given your unwillingness to accept that you aren’t as informed on the topic as you think you are I can see why you have the ideas you do.
Sam Harris has never been part of the rationalist or skeptical culture. He is much better known in the atheist and the “intellectual dark web”. In the skeptical community he is generally regarded as a close minded person who is too busy kissing the butt of people like Ben Shapiro and selling meditation.
Even before Elevatorgate Dawkins was on the outs for being a sexist & misogynist who was contributing nothing to the movement except harm. If you are using him as an example you are operating on information that is more than a decade out of date and it might be time to update your priors.
“I utilize a narrower definition of the word, shame you are too closed-minded to comprehend that I’m right. Now let’s force a debate on semantics to maximize our time wasted.”
Don’t you find it’s usually better to frame your opponent’s position in terms they would agree with? You’re using skepticism in a way that does not comport with today’s use by the community. Community exchange over time. Community exchange over time.
The community’s use isn’t the correct point of reference. It is also naturally biased, because the community seeks to avoid association with these people.
It’s not crazy or outlandish to label Harris or Dawkins as skeptics in the common use of the term. It’s core to their branding whether you like it or not. That’s what matters when you talk to people outside the community, not the insular definition you treat as objective fact.
I don’t even see a point in litigating this, other than the one I mentioned already. It was clear from context what they were talking about.
The community has explicitly rejected the people you named because they aren’t in keeping with positions the community holds. If the community says they don’t want these people in the group but you insist on saying they are part of the group then you are making a bad faith argument.
Communities get to decide who is an isn’t part of the community. You specifically mentioned trans issues. Two of the pods I named had trans hosts. Dawkins had his AHA award pulled because of trans comments. Skeptics aren’t being the people you said they were. You can either change your mind or stick to your beliefs despite the evidence.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/richard-dawkins-trans-humanist-aha-b1835017.html
You’re completely missing the point. This isn’t about a community no matter how much you’d prefer otherwise. This was a conversation in a public forum.
The word “sceptic” has a generally understood meaning regardless of how the community feels about it, because the general public isn’t paying attention to what the community wants.
How kind of you. Word of advice, don’t resort to statements like this. It’s transparent ego stroking that makes you sound like a self-centered asshole and doesn’t help your argument in any way.
“This isn’t about a community no matter how much you’d prefer otherwise.”
Except that it was/is about the community/movement/group collectively known as skeptics. Go back the the beginning of the conversation. I mentioned materials and the reply came back about how it was all transphobic misogynist stuff. Well there is nothing inherently transphobic or misogynist about the application of epistemology, logic and spotting logical fallacies so the complaint must have been about the people. Then the conversation explicitly mentioned people by name as represe representatives of the community. So no matter how much you try to say it wasn’t about the community it was.
“This was a conversation in a public forum. The word “sceptic” has a generally understood meaning.”
There are lots of “generally understood” groups that go by existing words that aren’t understood at all by the general population. To many people atheists are Satan worshipers, trans people are bathroom predators, and geologists are part of a massive cover-up about the truth of young earth creationism. But we know that these “generally understood” meanings are completely false. In a dictionary a word can have more than one meaning and context matters.