David Brin – The Dogma of Otherness (1986)

To give just one example, people in China know much more about the US and its culture than vice versa. If America were really a questioning culture, it would be reversed.

A book for those who are interested in this viewpoint; though, its a bit technical, its audience is anthropologists.

I agree and disagree, in that, the concept of the "other," which Brin subtly attributes to a crude reading of Hegel, is misused in contemporary academia, in contemporary culture, to create these what can't be said to be other than corruptive ideas like an infinite meakness in the face of what we cannot know about ourselves, but a meakness which is secretly all the more chauvinistic, as it claims, above all, that only we are superior who recognize our "mediocrity," in the face of all those animals, cultures, potentialities of otherness, that fail to do so themselves.

But, of course, Hegel's concept of the "other" is not this way at all. As JN Findlay argued, there is no substantial difference between Godel and Hegel's logic in terms of incompleteness: it is likely that, although the only philosophy which Godel ever adopted was Phenomenology, he would himself not have had any issues with the comparison. It is the "identity of non-identity," its not that you "encounter" the other, its the recognition that the other is already contained in what is non-other; which is to say, in a manner that Godel expressed far more clearly, that all logical systems, all systematic programs, contain elements that cannot be contained in the system, and the discreteness of the world only comes when those elements come to a head, when people are forced to, for Hegel, fight in a conflict to resolve, at the level of the Idea itself, what they cannot be certain of: this is why, science, what you'd think is objective and independent, depends on massive political and social forces: and if the Israeli's, for instance, could not fight their wars, it would be the proof that ideology of faith is more powerful than the ideology of the world, of technological power. The "truth" of a missile only becomes apparent when it hits its target, just in the same way that one cannot know, here on HN especially, how others will think of their comment, until they post it.

Charles Stross confessed that he doesn't believe in space colonization and interstellar travel. As a non-fiction author Issac Asimov railed against the belief in ESP although he wrote as many trashy stories about ESP as any author had to to get published in the Campbell era. Maybe Heinlein never broke character or maybe his combination of earnestness and naivety was real (and provided future authors such as Haldeman a chance to write stories somewhere between a homage and refutation such as The Forever War and Worlds) Never mind the writers of fantastic fiction masquerading as non-fiction such as Lily, Castenada, Roberts, etc.

To be a fan of fantastic fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, comic books, etc.) you have to be able to hold an imaginary world and its rules in your mind and take it seriously enough to care what happens to the characters. A certain kind of pornography can interest people for a while without any conflict but Superman would be entirely uninteresting if he didn't have meaningful limitations or worthy adversaries. (And he struggles... in Superman Returns he rescues people who are launching a freaking space shuttle (unsafe at any speed to begin with) off a commercial airliner. I'm sorry if your judgement is that bad you don't deserve to get rescued.)

A good example of a 'serious' short story is The Cold Equations

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equation...

where the story depends on believing certain constraints about space travel. The more fantastic it gets the more you're going to think it's silly unless you've got the ability to jump into a counterfactual world with both feet.

I came to the same conclusion recently. As a species we have almost total control over earth. Caretaker - or BDFL if you prefer - seems to be the only viable long-term role for our species at this scale.

Whether or not we're heading in that direction is another question. But it's interesting to watch nations, societies, businesses, etc, attempt to build sustainable structures and lives for their constituents using the power structures they believe best. A microcosm of the same problem on a smaller scale.

It's not super encouraging how many different civilisations, societies and commercial enterprises have died and failed before us, but maybe diversity and resilience go hand-in-hand, and those values are how we need to approach the natural world we now control.

Of course, that all sounds a bit like the self-serving Dogma of Otherness, and another example of the double-standard in philosophy that "values that prioritise others actually elevate myself with their nobility".

Anyway, the introduction to this article does the same thing.

Pope St. Pius X described Modernism as "the synthesis of all heresies", and it's often insidious and difficult to pin down. Because if at its core, it says "there can be no universal truths" that is already an inherent Liar's Paradox, and any subsequent claims are just as questionable if one truly adheres to Modernism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism_in_the_Catholic_Chur...

https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documen...

It is so strange how Brin tiptoes around mentioning any church or pope or the existing terms such as "Modernism", or how much the concept resembles his (rather appropriately) neologism-coined gobbledygook, but his words and phrasing seem to indicate that he's well aware that the same controversy has raged since the late-19th-century, (take note, he is of Eastern-Bloc Jewish descent) and merely wants to avoid cluing anyone in about the parallels.

A top-of-mind example is how a tuple `(A, B)` is "obviously" the (minimal) way you would have both objects A and B within one object: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_(category_theory)

I find it interesting that the author mentions "nonscientists", as those seem less likely to be equipped with the experiences of simple/well-defined problems with "global optima". And in mathematics, the "what if there were another way" questions get followed by "suppose there were another way _W_...".

In the hard sciences there is no room for opinions in areas where we have the facts. E.g. electrical engineers don't have to entertain someone who has invented their own equation for how a transistor works which is completely different from Ebers-Moll and yields the wrong results. That's just a kook; move on. Things they try to build based on their wrong model will not work.

If you dislike hecklers who are not easily dismissed kooks, either stay out of soft fields, or else avoid situations where you might engage the public.

This obviously begs a question "who is considered a human?" in this moral philosophy. For this to work as intended, things like human cells (we can kill cells to save a human being) or societies like nation states (we can destroy or mutilate states to save a human being) have to be considered lesser than individual humans.

But it gives rise to Russell-type paradox of how to include as many humans as possible without creating contradictions. (A similar problem is with democracy, it cannot be instituted or destroyed democratically.) These logical problems seem to come from the fact that you need some axioms at all. In the same way, you can be "dogmatic in your non-dogmatism".

I also think if you accept the universalist moral position above, the questioning and distrust towards experts (authorities) becomes obvious conclusion. Authorities asking for humans to be killed or harmed (for example, going to a war) need to provide a strong justification.

I also consider it very doubtful that the moral universalism was first invented by "Western civilization" or "enlightenment". Yeah, somebody was first, but it's not that a difficult idea. What might be new is the universal acceptance of it, but I am not so sure when I look around.

However, in practice, the Russell-style paradox is rarely a problem. Yeah, there are edge cases like dolphins, or intellectually disabled people, but mostly we can figure it out.

I'd argue that the rise of the internet, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, fears of disinformation and misinformation and foreign influence, bot-farms, the rise to prominance of China, all put the lie to this idea that all ideas have merit. It's an idea that is held by few American intellectuals these days, conservative or liberal.

"Dogmas" as fulfilled expectation about other's expectation's expectation (and so on recursively ad infinitum).

Necessary, in Lewis opinion, to solve coordination problems.

Nope.