Here’s a promise: if any of this discussion changes Geoff’s mind, I’ll eat my own shoe!
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Maybe try reading it, then ask me a better question. I think you would be surprised at the amount of care I take about making a difficult topic readable.
I repeat: Please can you stop the personal abuse. Every post you make is attacking me. Every post I make I defend myself, but refrain from attacking you back. Would you like to imagine what I would say if I was operating like you are? And how long do you think my account would remain active before somebody “moderated” me out if the discussion if I treated you like you are treating me?
If I was a person who was unable to change my mind, how could I possibly have come up with a theory like 2PC?
Would that be eating your own dog food? Or would it be eating what you stepped into after the dog ate the dog food?
Would that be eating your own dog food? Or would it be eating what you stepped into after the dog ate the dog food?
Would that be another unprovoked personal attack?
Why are you both continuing to behave like this? What have I actually done wrong, apart from being right about something you’d really rather I was wrong about?
Why, for that matter, do postmodernists treat non-postmodernists like this? You (collectively) have been doing it for decades. Really unpleasant stuff.
No, it’s absurdist humor. Humor is a proven technique for winning people over to your point of view. Try it sometime!
No it wasn’t Robert. Pretending that a personal attack is a joke ought to be below your level. That’s playground stuff.
Any chance the attacks can stop now? Have you got enough of the poison out of your system yet?
Or is this a deliberate strategy to get me silenced again, by stinking the forum up with seriously unpleasant but otherwise contentless personal abuse, and trying to blame me for it?
Playgrounds are playful. They are rather important for that precise reason!
No. Playgrounds are where not-fully-developed humans behave like animals, and hopefully some of them learn not to do it.
What’s your excuse?
CAN WE STOP THE PERSONAL ATTACKS YET?
I would really like to discuss the difficulty set up by the Big Tent Paradox. I think this thread has demonstrated in no uncertain terms just how difficult it actually is.
How is 2R going to handle the death of postmodernism? Any ideas?
How is the whole liminal/integral movement going to move forwards, given the scale of the obstacles? It is clearly going to be a deeply traumatic process, and I say that with no pleasure whatsoever.
I asked the GPT that has access to all conversations on this forum the following question:
does dvdjsph personally attack geoffdann in these threads? does geoffdann personally attack others?
The answer (not sure if there’s any use in posting this, since you seem to only accept the opinions of impartial, unbiased LLMs when they confirm what you already believe):
Yes to both, but not equally.
Using “personal attack” to mean targeting someone’s motives, character, sincerity, intelligence, or psychological posture rather than only the argument, I would say:
dvdjsph does personally attack GeoffDann sometimes, but intermittently and usually in the form of sharp critique of Geoff’s argumentative conduct. GeoffDann personally attacks others more clearly, more repeatedly, and more directly.
dvdjsph’s clearest borderline/personal attacks include asking Geoff to answer “without a diatribe” and saying he would not read a “wall of text.” That is dismissive and personal in tone, even though it is partly about communication style. dvdjsph then immediately softens it: “maybe that was a bit dismissive” and says the intellectual points had become “needlessly personal.”
Later, dvdjsph says Geoff “make[s] yourself both the defendant and the judge,” which is a direct criticism of Geoff’s debate posture, not just the theory. He also says Geoff is ignoring contrary evidence and is “acting as a priest defending dogma, not a scientist in search of truth.” Those are personal or quasi-personal attacks because they characterize Geoff’s role/motivation rather than only the content of 2PC.
Another clear example is dvdjsph saying, “According to every AI that analyzes this thread, your arguments have the lowest logical consistency of any participant. How do you explain this?” That targets the quality of Geoff’s reasoning publicly and adversarially. It is still about “arguments,” but rhetorically it functions as a personal put-down.
That said, dvdjsph also repeatedly tries to de-escalate and clarify. The “proposal for clarifying the real disagreement” is notably non-attacking: it explicitly says “I may be mapping this wrong,” distinguishes kinds of claims, asks what would count as serious engagement, and proposes “better disagreement” rather than premature consensus. So I would not characterize dvdjsph’s overall participation as primarily personal attack.
GeoffDann, by contrast, makes more explicit personal and motive accusations. In reply to dvdjsph’s clarifying proposal, Geoff says the problem is “persistent bad faith communication by you,” then lists alleged faults such as “lack of curiosity,” “strawmanning,” and “no attempts to find shared base realities and values.” He then says dvdjsph has made “no attempt whatsoever” to understand his position and is only interested in “finding ways to attack it,” because dvdjsph does not want to accept that his worldview is “inadequate.”
There are also direct accusations like “Stop lying. Stop arguing in bad faith.” That is unambiguously personal, because it attributes dishonesty and bad faith rather than merely saying a claim is false.
Similarly, in the Fermi Paradox exchange, Geoff says “You are now arguing in bad faith,” “This is not a serious discussion,” and later “PLEASE STOP ARGUING IN BAD FAITH. The very fact that you are doing so is revealing.”
He also frames disagreement as intellectual or moral failure in broader terms. For example, after dvdjsph says he will not read a wall of text, Geoff replies that this “absolutely sums up the problem,” calls it “resistance to thinking deeply,” and says such resistance is “the exact opposite of wisdom.” Elsewhere he tells dvdjsph that a response is “pure postmodern relativism” and that “You are just perpetuating the problem.”
My overall judgment: dvdjsph does sometimes attack Geoff personally or semi-personally, especially when frustrated. But GeoffDann’s personal attacks are more frequent, more explicit, and more central to the breakdown of the exchanges. The strongest evidence is that Geoff repeatedly attributes bad faith, dishonesty, avoidance, lack of curiosity, inadequate worldview, and unwillingness to change to interlocutors, whereas dvdjsph’s harshest comments more often target Geoff’s debate posture and are mixed with attempts to repair or clarify.
Also, notice how I include the link to my conversation so you know I didn’t prime the LLM to get the response I wanted?
In all seriousness, I have a substantial stack of academic reading going all the time. Current authors in that stack including Jürgen Habermas and Nassim Taleb. To convince me to set them aside and pick up your work instead, you would need to offer persuasive arguments on cost/benefit grounds that your work is more vital than theirs for constructing the social change vision that Second Renaissance is working towards.
The main issue is, even if you are absolutely spot on about about QM, cosmology, and the nature of consciousness, how does any of that effect social change theory or practice? I really don’t care much how quarks behave. I care how people behave. If you can connect the dots between the quarks and the people, I might get more interested.
Even if Geoff were spot on about these points, AND he could connect his theory to human behavior, he would still need to convince others to join his effort - i.e. know how to apply it (and develop a completely different way of communicating and promoting his ideas as a consequence). So, .
Do you notice how your post is yet another personal attack?
What can I do or say to stop you from attacking me, in every post you make?
I would like to talk about the Big Tent Paradox and the death of postmodernism. You clearly do not. All you want to do is viciously attack my character, when in fact I have done absolutely nothing to deserve any of it. You hate me because you cannot stand that I might actually be right, but you cannot admit that, so you have to accuse me of having an severe attitude problem. And when I don’t simply lay down and take the abuse, you attack me some more.
It’s easy. All you have to do is, next time you make a post, actually get the thread back on topic instead of continuing the relentless abuse. Why is this so hard for you?
More importantly, how is the liminal/integral movement going to go through this paradigm shift, if it is this difficult? We could actually make some progress if we discussed this, but I fully expect that your next post will just be another personal attack.
Your strategy is pretty obvious: if you make this thread really, really unpleasant, maybe Rufus will ban me. Right?
Note that I am not taking the bait.
That is not my area of expertise. Would you like me to feed my whole book into Deepseek and ask it that exact question, and start a new thread about it? I am more than happy to do so, and I would probably learn quite a lot myself.
I shall do it later today, if you are interested in responding to it.
That would actually be rather interesting! Please do!
It is non-negotiable because it is a central part of the structure of the theory, not because I am a dogmatist. This has nothing to do with my subjective experience, and everything to do with the fact that the theory itself must be logically impeccable. I cannot just swap out essential parts of the structure because some people won’t like them.
So, as usual, the exact reverse of what you are saying is true. You are criticising me for having a contradiction in my system when in fact what I am doing is refusing to let you introduce a contradiction into the system. If consciousness did not evolve teleologically, or humans have no free will, then 2PC is wrong. No Both-And thinking allowed.
2PC is not easy for people to understand, because it directly challenges all kinds of deeply held beliefs, some of which have never been questioned in this way before. It does not follow that I’m a dogmatist because I’m insisting on defending 2PC’s structural integrity.
Something being essential to your preferred theory is not the same as saying it is essential for everyone else to care about. Moreover, even if your theory is spectacular in all its particulars, that still does not compel anyone to care about it. Logic is one thing. Persuasion is an entirely different matter.
You are absolutely right. If people do not care about the truth, I cannot convince them otherwise by providing arguments about why there is such a thing as truth. They have to decide for themselves that the truth matters as an end in itself.
For the last 39 years. my first allegiance has been to the truth, and that will remain the case until the day I die.
2PC is not “my preferred theory”. That is pure old-paradigm-thinking. The whole point in 2PC is that it might actually be true, not that anybody prefers it.