as small as a world and as large as alone

11:54pm May 19, 2014

1. shaaaretheloooad said: what you’re describing is basically a slippery slope argument, right? or is it slightly different than that?

No, actually I’m talking about something quite different.  I mean, what I described could be described as a slippery slope argument, but what I described is really only one instance of a broader problem where “slippery slope” is just a distraction.

What I’m describing is a way of thinking where you ignore what is because it doesn’t fit in with how your ideas about the world fit together.

So you sit there looking at how your ideas about the world fit together.  Like A fits into B which means C which means D, and we don’t want D so we can’t have A.  When often the whole idea-construction going on there is inaccurate and leaves out a lot of reality.

It’s basically taking a top-down approach to understanding the world, rather than a bottom-up approach.  And I think a bottom-up approach is the way that’s going to hurt the fewest people.

Bottom-up meaning you start from what’s real and go from there.  Top-down meaning you start from your ideas about what’s real, push those ideas around in circles, and make your decisions based mostly on how the ideas fit together, without necessarily ever going down and testing those ideas against reality.

(That post I linked in the other post, Politics Ethics and Mental Widgets, goes into it in a lot more detail.   When I rant about ideology and ideological purity and things like that, I’m generally ranting about this sort of phenomenon.  Same when I start ranting about ‘widgetry’.)

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