FailForward @FailForward@social.cleverlibre.org

@kattascha Reaction to a toot https://qoto.org/web/statuses/105716541289609969

Thanks again for your inspiring thoughts.

I am not going to argue with you, I'd rather like to share a thought which I think is relevant for your toot-thread and which intrigues me since a couple of years. First a brief summary of your position:

> Wenn man nicht mit Leuten reden wollte, deren Anhängerschaft einen mit dem Tod bedroht, sah das quasi nach Diskursverweigerung aus.
> Menschen haben ernsthaft diskutiert, ob man quasi schon moralisch verloren hat, weil man sich den „Argumenten“ der AfD nicht stellt. Wahnsinn.

Yours is a perfectly understandable position. But I am not sure whether it's a constructive one. By not engaging and being absent, we let them win by default whatever screwed up game they constructed. I am not sure whether that is a good thing. Certainly it lets them collect some electoral points this way too. And just to clarify, I think morals have nothing to do with this. I care about pragmatic steps here.

> Denkt ruhig mal daran, wenn es darum geht, ob Verschwörungsideologen ein Podium gegeben werden sollte.

So here's a story. In Czecho-slovakian space there is this guy Fedor Gal (https://www.memoryofnations.eu/en/gal-fedor-1945) you probably never heard about, but who's quite a famous person in your neighbouring country. A Jew born in Konzentrazionslager/ghetto Theresienstadt in 1945, later a dissident against communism, scientist, sociologist, one of the leaders of the '89 revolution in Czechoslovakia, later a politician and by every means still a very active public person. This guy is hated by all neonazis of both countries, in 90's he became an anti-symbol for the extreme right and for many he still remains such, even though it's 25+ years since he left active politics.

Now this person's motto is this: **_"We have to keep dialogue open across the fences"_** and he lives up to it. He engages the right wing scene a lot. From public persecution of neo-nazi attacks on Roma minority, through active support to oppressed people and so on. Up to a point, that he patiently went into an e-mail exchange with an active neo-nazi, sustained it for several years and in the end published a book of their conversations with that guy - who still was at that point and probably still remains a skin-head/neo-nazi!. Fedor Gal even went on a tour with that person and engaged on stage in discussions with him for everybody to see. Long story short, the neo-nazi guy got so scared and ashamed that soon he stopped with it and quit.

So what is the point of this story? This person, Fedor Gal does not believe in disengagement with people who actively wish him harm and actually tried to do so many times. He well understands that giving right-extreme scene a platform is a bad thing. At the same time, he's a fighter and will not back off from a conflict. In a way, he's out there to take these extremists down. He clearly recognised that at the core of these people's beliefs is **dehumanisation** of others - extreme _us vs. them_ distinction. He also recognised that **you cannot win by letting yourself to be drawn into their game of us vs. them**. It's their turf, their game, they will win it. His strategy of engagement of these people and groups is based on **putting in contrast his (your) humanity and decency against their brutality and lack of empathy**. People are not emotionally blind. If you show them this contrast, they get it on the emotional level (as far as they are capable of empathy), even if intellectually they have qualms about the persona of Fedor Gal. He's not fighting to convince the right wing guys to stop thinking the BS they do. They are probably lost to us. My understanding is that he's fighting to save the silent majority not to be drawn closer to them and do their bidding, or voting for them. And that is a fight worth fighting. At least if I want to think about myself as an upright and decent human being. For this to work, one needs to let the strategy work again and again over longer periods of time, maybe decades. I consider this to be a very brave way of living.

I also believe that we shall keep dialogue open across the fences. And I try hard to find at least a fraction of Fedor's courage in my life, even though unlike him, I do not actively seek those confrontations, I have more important stuff to do in this stage of my life. But I encourage you and people who listen to you to find the courage to re-engage too.

(from a guy once beaten up by skin-heads in daylight and plain sight on one of the most busy streets of a town somewhere)

@mithrandir Oh, sir is a connoisseur. Does he prefer WGS84 or EGM2008?

@mithrandir Now I almost spit out my beer on the screen. What are you doing to me?!

@mithrandir This is a topic I am deeply interested in, but unfortunately have very few solid words/sentences to speak about what is it that intrigues me so much.

Part of it is a certain feeling of "muddiness". Reality is muddy, while math is clean - something like that.

Another way to put it is this: whenever you construct a pure theory of reality and then proceed to apply it in practice, you get bogged down by all those pesky annoying details and the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards. That's the "muddiness" in action.

Another piece is this: in math and comp-sci we love extremes: trivial case and the worst-cases. Take computational complexity. We solve trivial cases, edge cases, extremities... Typically, these tend to be in reality quite pathological cases.In reality, often that is not what matters. What matters is the average, or "median"-complexity (average complexity exists, but "median", I am not sure). Many problems have this nature of being NP complete, or worse in the worst-case (i.e., hopeless), yet most (if not all!) real-world instances are often well solvable with the vailable tech.

What I am trying to say is this: it's deeply intriguing to me what happens when either a good theory turns out inapplicable (as you pointed out), or when an actually bad theory (as in "not really computable) turns out to be actually useful in reality. I have some real examples of this, but that's for another evening with a glass of a beer 🙂 .

@kattascha Thanks for an interesting reading. While I do not have a relevant research reference on this, my personal take is that religions and belief in conspiracy theories is probably rather independent.

The two are indeed related in that both help an individual to deal with uncertainty. That's perhaps the reason why people around you have a tendency to think that conspiratory beliefs are Ersatzreligion.

In my opinion they however differ in that religion helps to resolve the stress from uncertainty related to the relation of an individual to the world, that is, the psychology of one's relation to reality. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, help an individual to deal with uncertainty in the nature of external physical phenomena and objects.

In other words, while the mechanics of religion and conspiratory thinking might look similar (suspension of disbelief), the root reason and the purpose of the two differs. That's why (I speculate) they can co-exist: both religious people, as well as atheists have a choice to either lean towards science or towards conspiracies when it comes to uncertainty in the physical reality.

@mithrandir

re your last paragraph: I suspect, that math sometimes plays well with the physical reality is largely a coincidence than by design. There's this simple part of math, where things play well with Nature, you know that one where 1+1=2. And then there's all that other, weird part with proof by contradiction, axiom of choice, undecidability, and so on. You know, the really interesting, but quite unreal (as in not "very physical") part. The one which does not play so well with Nature any more. Explorations of connections of the latter to physical reality tend to fall on the more philosophical spectrum of ideas.

What I was referring to is that many of us drank a bit too much Kool-aid in our lifetimes and because of congruence of the first math to Nature, we started to believe that the same holds for the latter. Mind you, there's nothing wrong about believing that! But then we get sometimes brutally reminded by the physical reality (or a computer game in this case) that we are actually quite wrong. Some call this also the "theory vs. applications/practice" gap 😄 .

Bah! My writing is indeed very sloppy this morning. I shall invest in better configuring (and listening to!) a spell checker in my editor.