Vorkosigan

Both are inclined to react with fear or contempt when someone attempts to challenge their belief system. Not all of them do, but I think there are fundies who believe in a complicated and unchanging set of rules for security, and I believe there are MN's who believe in a completely predictable and naturally-explained world for security.

I have never met an MN with this point of view. Nor do MNs fear challenges to their philosophy from a Fundie. What we fear is the Fundie preference for violence, a trait we do not share with Fundies at all.

Both have a worldview that is committed to rejection of anything inconsistent with certain core axioms of the current worldview.

Completely incorrect. This pathetic attempt to develop some kind of moral/philosphical equivalency between the two systems is..well...contemptible. MNs do not harass, oppress, and kill for their beliefs, which in any case are not a ready-minted worldview like Fundyism, but only a philosophical stance on the nature of reality. There's no equivalence here.

Furthermore, MNs, being both practical and evidence-oriented, would be happy to change if confronted with evidence. But evidence is one thing believers never have. They just have faith.

As Steve Jackson's _Illuminati_ card game observes, any two fanatic groups are necessarily opposed to each other.

SJ rulz! I still have all my TFT rulebooks at home, and my dog-eared copy of OGRE. >nostalgic sigh<

It is quite possible that not all MN's are fanatical, or that not all fundies are fanatical; I think it is assumed that we're discussing the people who get very offended when you suggest alternative theories.

Yes, but MNs don't get offended by the suggestion of theories, but by the political activities of Fundies. This kind of pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-being-in-the-reasonable-middle post appears to be good positioning, but if you examine it, it won't fly. MNs, even deeply committed ones, are not the mirror image of Fundies. We entirely lack their authoritarian politics and commitment to violence, and we are open to change based on empirical evidence. We espouse secular values, same as you. The mirror image of a Fundie is a committed Communist, not an MN. We're orthagonal to Fundies.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

I think you misunderstand what I mean by rules. Remember that I'm talking about valuing systems for determining proof, not the necessarily the answers themself. With the high place that math and formal logic takes in metaphysical naturalist, where proof is determined by rigid rules of derivation from initial axioms (the initial axioms that MNs are highly skeptical about), metaphysical naturalism very much values rule-based systems for deciding proof. Almost all the sciences rely on formal rules based systems for deciding what is and isn't a valid proposition.

Yes, I did misunderstand. So the difference between a Fundie and an MN would be that the latter is committed to rules that determine conclusions regardless of the users personal position on said conclusions...MNs emphasis methodology, Fundies.....answers

Vorkosigan

seebs

Hmm. In many cases, I don't really care whether *they* believe it - I'm just saying what I happen to think.

Hmm. I see your point, though; implicitly, if I describe the world as I see it, I'm telling people to agree with me.

I think that's basically it; the problem comes when, for instance, I say that I accept the theory of evolution, or that I believe in God, and someone tells me to "justify" this, since I'm making a claim - in fact, the claim I generally think I'm making is "these are my beliefs", not "you should accept these". "These are true" is a sort of middle-ground; it's sort of implied that you want people to accept them, but at the same time, it's possible to not care if other people accept a thing you believe to be true.

The Other Michael

Hi seebs,

At times I've taken the tack of agreeing with people "yes, I agree that is what you believe/think" rather than arguing with them about the "correctness" of their belief. This has come in handy with elderly relatives where you'd really like to avoid getting into an arguement.

If a person is just announcing for general information their thoughts, they really don't deserve more comment than a "that's nice".

But many of the statements thrown out on the SecWeb have an implied " and if you don't agree with me you are in big trouble/doomed/horribly wrong" tacked on the end. These kinds of statements suffer a bit of burden of proof.

cheers,
Michael

seebs

I think a lot of the particularly fierce debates come from miscommunications about what people think they're proving, or what they think is being asserted.

I have noticed that I get in a lot fewer fights if I'm more careful about the border between what I believe and what I expect other people to believe.