“There has been genetic success in being bound together in a group going the wrong direction as well as being alone in the right one. Therefore, those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have a significant presence in the gene pool.” – paraphrased from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
Why do you think it took you to be the age you were to begin thinking that way, is it peer pressure or is it yourself? Would you have preferred to have done it differently?
Oh well, you know what’s coming…
Sure, question authority. Think for yourself.
But to what extent in doing this does it really get you any closer to the whole truth when that truth revolves around conflicting value judgments?
So, the masses in the Sanders or the Trump campaign question the authority of the ruling class, overthrow it and then impose a new political narrative that the next generation perceives to be the authority to question.
In other words, like Hegel or Marx, the idealists and the materialists reach the conclusion that their own authority finally comes to reflect once and for all “the end of history”.
To wit: Their own authority is said to reflect the only rational manner in which to understand, among other things, everything.
I’m sorry but I have keep reminding you that in thinking for yourself you are no less thinking from the perspective of dasein. There is almost certainly no “real you” once you strip away all of the existential layers.
At least regarding this: how ought I to live?
And of course we’re all free to define anybody who disagree with as ‘the assertive idiot’ and anybody we personally agree with as ‘the introspective wise person’, such that any time we’re at odds with the masses, we imagine ourselves to be courageously ‘thinking for ourselves’.
That’s all that sort of talk is- a way to pat onesself on the back.
IS that all it is? Shouldn’t there be something more? And if so, shouldn’t we base it on reason, logic, and understanding?
Now in political ideologies it all can come down to values and opinion, but what happens is that people argue nonsensically and are inundated with propaganda, oft through confirmation bias. They base their political ideology on lies from propaganda. But ultimately, anyone can be any ideology if they have a coherent, logical argument for why. And that’s fine. We all have our opinions of course…
So it is a matter of many assertive idiots and their many followers, there’s a lot of them. I mean a lot. There are reasonable people that we can all disagree with reasonable, no matter what our values are. The problem is, there aren’t as many there. It’s not a matter of patting ourselves on the back because the population is stupid. But then again, so what if I, or you, or someone else is so much more intelligent than the general population? That’s not a matter of patting yourself on the back here, its a matter of concern over people listening to assertive idiots than an “introspective wise person”. I don’t agree that everyone can just classify whoever they want as an assertive idiot and an introspective wise person, there needs to bgood reason behind to be able to do that, and there are reasonable people who can and do understand that, regardless of their disagreements.
What you call dasein I call ego.
Formulating a world view takes time because it requires understanding which comes from both knowledge and experience. Sometimes a switch is clicked
and the mind responds accordingly but it can be very subtle so it is not until much later one becomes aware of how it all began. For me it was the simple
realisation that there were significant differences between the Abrahamic religions and entirely different belief systems outside of them. Such pieces did
not fit which meant one of two things : either one was right and the others were wrong or they were all wrong. And I chose the latter for it was the more
logical of the two positions. Then after becoming an atheist five years ago I became interested in science and philosophy. And this is how I ended up both
here and on other philosophy and rational sites. This switch clicked in my mind over eleven years ago when I partly read a book on Buddhism though I was
not planning on becoming one. However my interest was enough to begin the process of reevaluating my entire world view. The Chinese have this saying :
in order to walk a thousand miles a man must first take a step. Well my thousand mile journey began with that book and I am still walking it today. And I
shall carry on walking it until I can walk no more. Because until then there is no point at which I stop learning. As for me that is always a work in progress
Very cool, I’m glad you’re with us.
The vast majority of people already do that to the best of their ability, is the problem. To present 'let’s try applying logic, reason and understanding!" as if it’s some novel idea only a few people are using just seems like a way of puffing onesself up as superior or calling ideological enemies stupid, to me.
In those cases they are usually repeating arguments they heard, and more often than not are arguing about a subject that they aren’t actually interested in enough to have put in real time studying it. It doesn’t take much education to get past that stage.
“Those other people base their ideology on lies and propaganda” is one of the chief bits of lies and propaganda that uneducated folks buy into.
The problem is that merely ‘questioning authority’ and ‘thinking for yourself’ doesn’t provide any guarentee that you can tell one from the other. There are plenty of Catholics who thought for themselves, questioned their religious authority…and became Scientologists instead. “Here is the ideology for people who think for themselves” and “There is the ideology for people who don’t” rapidly becomes just another propaganda point.
Well no of course its not a “novel idea” - after all, didn’t I make it clear that this is now in everyone’s psyche? I don’t know where you got that impression, but it seems to be some sort of preconceived bias.
You are right about this: “Those other people base their ideology on lies and propaganda” is one of the chief bits of lies and propaganda that uneducated folks buy into."
Which makes attempts like this frustrating to deal with. Because fire is fought with fire. So did I really not say anything? So be it. But an attempt was made. Hopefully it means something to someone and its used justly.
Surrept,
But it is set…you just don’t want to feel it, to remember its’ importance, stone grown cold, but in stone none-the-less.
You have no logical reason to grow emotionally?
Or are you reporting that your soul is defunct? Feeling overwhelming compassion for grave injustices always activates my soul tremendously.
Vast amounts of emotional energy in action is the only way to let your soul breathe.
If logic did lead to the most desired answers at it’s conclusion, where are those answers?
Arm,
I disagree with your emphatic NOT “literally…”. 
Emotional energy powers this plane of existence. Your soul is the outlet through which you can harness and wield such energy to go places. Go up or down through various planes or even check out this reality via an out of body transition. Liberate yourself from your clunky body. Go beyond the water-down emotion driven version of this physical dimension.
Ideas are most definitely not set in stone since if they were then they would be universally accepted
And logic and emotion are entirely different mental states which have nothing to do with each other
A few reactions:
1 Thinking for oneself and questioning authority are not synonymous.
One could easily do a lot of the latter without doing much of the former. Unless questioning authority means taking on every expert, including non-dominant ones, all subculture authorities, especially the one one finds oneself in.
2 It should include question the authority of one’s own epistemology and that of the leaders of whatever culture and subcultures one is in. IOW not just accepting whatever one thinks is the way to knowledge and them aiming that at people one disagrees with on specific issues, but actually questioning one’s own way of gaining knowledge.
3 As someone who would be classed as a conspiracy theorist, it seems a poor start to decide from the start that we shall not question the authority that says this is a hypothesis we will examine carefully in the main media and these are the hypotheses we will dismiss from the get go because we decided, generally due to authorities, that these things cannot be true. If you want to think for yourself and to question authorities, this may lead you to conclusions that right now seem very unlikely.
4 Thinking is overrated. At least when one is deciding to really overhaul one’s own beliefs and attitudes (and skills/abilities). One often needs to experience new things and be open to new experiences. Our thinking’s ability to evaluate our thinking is rather incestuous and nepotistic. Gotta get out and experience things in a new way. Have beliefs about poor people or rich people or guns or religion or atheism or conspiracies or official explanations about X, well see if you can do something other than read the media you read at the very least and find the best media by people who believe something else. The best. And that is at the level of reading. Better still get contact with new people and not via screens and emails because your body does not believe they are real until you smell their breath unconscoiusly read their body language hear their voices and so on. Get out of your bubble. And not just once before making conclusions. Learning takes time and experience, not more sifting through words alone.
I tend to agree with your reactions here, expecially since his suggestions are very general and aimed at everyone. But individually, I would guess, each of us tries to nudge people in a direction. It might simply be tactical. I want you to stop believing X (or at least stop saying X) so I try to reason you out of that position or at least make the gallery think you should have given up in the face of my argument. So at a very local individual level, even this battle argument approach has a goal of getting some other person(s) to think better about X. I think one could make the case that using this tactic is, at a meta-level, implicitly trying to get people to use more reason and logic. (one may be quite wrong about what reason and logic are in general or in the specific, but it seems to me it is implicit even in this let’s win this specific argument moment). Couldn’t we look at what we might try to do in a broader sense in individual encounters that would lead others to at least think better - perhaps that is the phrase that is problematic, though I, at the same time am not totally against it - and are we not, at least some of us, doing that?
Think for oneself - to mull on it a bit - implies that one has moved away from a habitual appeal to authority in oneself. Of course at an epistmological level, at least, one has merely changed masters, at least one could argue it. Is it a shift towards being able to make a choice, rather than having a habit?
Could we come at it from another angle? Via emotions? One has the ability to face whatever fears and other emotions we might be avoiding by not looking under the rock of certain beliefs?
I think, largely due to arguing on the internet being such a pass time, tactical rhetoric is everywhere being mistaken for philosophy. People are buying into comments originally only said for effect.
I think that’s a reasonable thing to do on an individual level. There are particular people here on ILP that I wish would use more reason and logic, certainly. But when applied to a group like “Atheists” or “The masses” or “Americans” or whatever, it ceases, I think, to be a sincere attempt to get people to use reason and logic. I don’t think sincere people could really believe that such large groups are truly failing to do so.
I guess my take is that in general, appeals to authority aren’t a bad thing (or at least, not the worst thing) especially in fields in which somebody is ignorant. If you don’t know anything about astronomy, believing whatever most astronomers seem to be saying doesn’t seem like a bad way to go. So breaking from that appeal to authority has to be coupled with replacing it with something better, or it means very little. And not just any old thing is better.
Can Trump think? 
Politicians here have always thought that, and they have publicly said that non-Oxbridge people cannot do politics [hence 97% of mp’s are Oxbridge].
It doesn’t matter over here anyway, because they are all in each others pockets [behind the scenes they concur with most policies, irrespective of public concerns]. Even the lefty labour party is not going to get rid of charges for higher education, so clearly they also want there to be a less educated underclass for cheap labour etc.
That’s certainly true, but I think in general, even in philosophical forums, people have a hard time mounting an argument. There’s the whole assertion vs. argument conflation, but beyond that just a lot of leaping around.
FAiling completely, no. But failing, sure, that is something one could believe in. Getting below 65 on the logic and reason test…? I think that is fairly widespread. On both sides of most issues. You may be right about the intent of the act of bemoaning the failure of the other side, and I don’t know how WWW started the thread and if it was aimed at one side, but both sides have trouble with logic and reason. Both attempt to use logic and to reason. It is rare that logic and reason are used on one side and some other process is used on the other. If only. I wish religious people dead ended some discussions. In fact I wish most people did because I think there are more dead ends then our discussions admit. I wish people could say Beyond this point I rely on intuition. Or this is based on my experience. What I mean by dead end is that this should not be taken as a demonstration of the case, but it also is an end point. To often it is as if all we believe we arrived at through some logic process, examining evidence, considering all views, double checking now and then and that this all goes right down to the bottom, nary an apriori anywhere, every rational person regardless of experienced should be convinced by my words. Thus two problems 1) we dissemble. It is as if we arrived at our beliefs through processes we did not. And if we did not but we like those beliefs, then we should stand up for those processes even if they seem to allow someone to point a finger at us - a person likely using those same processes but not admitting them either. 2) We imply that words can do things they cannot and also that words divorced of other kinds of experiences are the main way we learn.
I agree. How one decides which experts to follow, until further notice, and which ones not to follow but consider and which to dismiss must necessarily rely on intuition.
I agree and in general appeals to authority are generally countered by appeals to a different authority, and the one’s countering often think they are thinking for themselves and can’t even follow, really, the thinking of the experts they are copying.
I do think thinking for oneself is good and I do not think that it is meaningless as a quality, but if it means throwing out experts, you need to think about a very local, limited area. For most people about your own tastes, though even here you may be wrong.
Yes, an intelligent and civil discussion regarding two important subjects: “thinking for yourself” and “questioning authority”.
Uccisore being the political conservative, Moreno being the political liberal.
But my reaction is always the same: Pertaining to what particular authority? Pertaining to what particular context in which one might be required to think for oneself?
And, as I always note in turn: Is there a manner in which using the tools of philosophy these generally abstract arguments might reach what I deem to be the limitations of language and logic?
If, for example, uccisore and Moreno were to take the points that they exchange here and intertwine them in a discussion of a moral or political issue that they are at odds regarding how would others then be able to determine which frame of mind regarding either authority or self-reflection results in the most rational assessment of the issue and the most virtuous resolution.
And, as well, in such a way that the manner in which I construe these things is effectively blunted.
Why do people always assume these things about other people, but exclude themselves?
The whole world is shit…except me. People are lazy, or greedy, etc., except me.
You think lazy and stupid people don’t say these things?
As if I didn’t raise such issues in the posts here. But no it is still only Iamb who knows what needs to be addressed, the lone genius of the new millenium. But the humorous thing is that we are speaking about epistemology in general. Not just morals. You are skeptic only about morals, because that gives you what you think is solid platform to judge what you call objectivists, content with your own assumptions about is and ought and epistemology.
It is harder than that. We do not have THE expert to trust on is
and yet you think you are brave because you can question expertise on ought,
when adults who have dealt with this a long time realize that
we are thrown to a place where both is and ought are in question.
I have had uncivil interchanges with Uccisore, but in general, I meet someone in him who knows what he is doing. I disagee with many specific issues ( though I am not a political liberal, I am more of an anarchist lefty with some seriously conservative ideas also) but because he actually knows what he is thinking himself and tend to respond to what I say rather than responding to me as a category who must be saying X since that is what X people say, I end up generally being civil with him.
In this particular moment I did not need to go into specific, down on earth examples, with Uccisore, because my experience with him says he knows what I mean, even if he will not agree with everything I say, let alone on morals or even ontology.
You see those who disagree with you as threatened, that is, afraid. Let me know when you actually deal with the terror of questioning your own epistemology and can write civilly and relevantly to other adults who have.
The whole morals are not objective is something many people face in their late teens.
Sick of the lone brave man facing the void act you play.