Goatse on WP Options

[ThurstonHowell3rd]

There is a link to the famous goatse image in the goatse.cx article. There has been a multi-year discussion and a currently in progress RFC on whether or not the article should directly include the actual goatse image.

The identity of the person in the image has been removed from the article because of BLP rules.

This post has been edited by ThurstonHowell3rd: Wed 25th June 2008, 3:21am

[KD Tries Again]

"Lame" is kind. What a lousy article. An appeal to emotion is a "logical fallacy"?

[Milton Roe]

"Lame" is kind. What a lousy article. An appeal to emotion is a "logical fallacy"?

According to Ayn Rand and Mr. Spock (who was of course inspired by Randroidism).

The following is longer than I expected it to be. tl;dr at any point.

Rand's view of emotion is actually interesting and not entirely wrong. She viewed emotional judgement as a second type of thinking, in which the steps are hidden, and the decision output is presented in another format. But she saw it as valid: so long as the part of the brain concerned with producing emotional judgement was fed the correct factual premises, it would LOGICALLY produce the "correct" emotional output response.

The only problem is that since the intervening steps are hidden, it's always possible to argue that your emotional processor is working fine (indeed, everybody's is), but since your emotional response differs from MINE (which is of course correct), that it must be because your premises are faulty. It's sort of Baysian.

And it has lots of other problems, besides the obvious one that it allows people who think their emotionals are infalable to beat others over the head about logic anyway.

Not the least of which is the plain fact that the emotional processing part of your brain is useful, but certainly not infallable. A plain example is how you feel about somebody who you are convinced for years has committed some horrible deed-- for example a shocking crime. You might hate the person if the victim is one of your family. Then, suppose you find out for certain that the man is innocent. Are you feelings immediately and completely changed toward him? No. Some residuum may NEVER change, despite your knowing intellectually that it ought to. Your emotional "brain" is not only slow, but it's sometimes deeply irrational.

I said "sometimes"-- there are other times when emotions in social situations act like visual processing, doing a massive job in parallel, allowing the slow and error prone human brain to do complex processing tasks that a far faster linear system could not begin to do in the same time, although it's hard to identify the intervening "steps". We have this system for good reasons, since our social mileau is at least as complex as our visual one, and decision time is short. "I do not like thee, Dr. Fell." Speed dating. Pick your favorite example.