Re: Future of online fora

On Thu, 3 Apr 2025 20:14:55 -0500, AMuzi <am@yellowjersey.org> wrote:
>

On 4/3/2025 7:02 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 4/3/2025 1:09 PM, AMuzi wrote:

On 4/3/2025 10:58 AM, cyclintom wrote:

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Frank, you have spent a great deal of your life being
subjective. Or should I say, strongly opinionated?

>
>
WTF??
I consider 'strongly opinionated' to be a compliment.

 
As opposed to "All truth is subjective. All opinions are
valid. Nothing can be known. Ommmmmm....."   ;-)
 
 

>

You continually consistently and annoyingly misstate that.

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Agreed.
>

To observe that personal opinions are, in fact, personal is
not to say that nothing is true.
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But policy preferences from agreed undisputed facts are
areas for discussion and persuasion (or, in extremis,
coercion by those who could not prevail in argument).

>
This was duly noted by Friedrich Nietzsche in about 1886:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche>
He postulated that "There are no facts, only interpretations". 
>
Nietzsche is difficult to understand without context.  I'm not going
to try to explain what he meant.  This discussion might help:
<https://www.reddit.com/r/Nietzsche/comments/bhywqw/what_does_nietzsche_mean_by_there_are_no_facts/>
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Picking the nits and splitting the hairs:
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To agree that the speed of light is constant

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The speed of light is NOT constant because it slows down when it
masses through various substances.  It's only constant in a vacuum and
in the absence of a magnetic field.
"Scientists Slowed Down Light by 10,000 Times in an Experiment"
<https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-slowed-down-light-by-10000-times-in-an-experiment>
>

or that E=R/I

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Ohms Law is E = I * R
or
voltage = resistance times current
>

or whatever has no bearing on policy preferences, which are
not truths, have no single answer and are inherently personal.

>
There was once a bill in the Indiana state legislature that attempted
to change Pi to something more geometrically convenient.  Fortunately,
it failed:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill>
See first paragraph.  I seem to recall the tag line was something like
"Pi = 3.2 should be close enough for most purposes".
>

Oh, and there can never be a lack of such, as long as we
remain human.  Or as noted here recently, the dialectic is
eternal and cannot, by its nature, be permanently resolved.

>
There are an infinite number of wrong answers, but only a finite
number of correct answers.  By sheer weight of numbers, the wrong
answers are winning.