| | Dean Michael Gores,
Thanks for comments.
Rand addressed lifeboat situations in the ethics of emergencies. Not sure why you are bringing them up. Rand also said there are no rational conflicts of interests between men. Something like that. She, like me, had heard of lifeboat situations but thought that anyway.
You say that my position wouldn't work in reality and then your answer is to make up a hypothetical disaster situation completely different than daily life and you try to define into the premises that only disaster is possible to the men in the situation. And somehow that is an argument that the benevolent universe premise (as Rand calls it) is unrealistic?
Regarding people who don't want a common preference, like murderers, then defense is the right option. I don't know what you read but we're aware of bad guys. Common preferences are possible but not automatic; people have to try to achieve them. If instead someone tries not to achieve one, it's not going to happen, so then you better go your separate ways if you can, or defend yourself if necessary.
I'm aware of the time constraints of human life. Time limits are no reason to use methods that don't work, over those that do. It's not really relevant to the debate about which methods work. Unless some method was super time intensive. But critical thinking isn't particularly more or less time intensive than its rivals, and also I have writing about how you can adjust the time usage to fit your situation (which I think is also possible with its rivals, so shrug).
On 1: Even if an idea isn't always consistent with reality, it can still be very useful when it works with great benefit sometimes and doesn't hurt when it fails. Of course if a contradiction is found, you can try to remember some of the context (if you have spare memory), and if you have the spare time, come back to it later to try to come up with a better idea.
Yes we know. What you have to do is come up with an idea with no criticisms of it about how to use the refuted idea. Like you come up with the idea, "Although Newton's laws are false, that criticism only makes them get significant errors in X, Y, and Z situations. In A, B, and C situations the error is very low so it can be used when that precision is adequate". This idea has no criticisms of it. If you can't come up with an idea like this (one with no flaws), then there's no way to use the refuted idea.
(You can also look at this as an issue of criticism being contextual and you need an idea with no criticisms in the relevant context. See comments on context below.)
About forgetting ideas, I don't really get the point. Yeah some stuff gets pushed out of memory into notes or even to nowhere. So? I'm not denying limited memory. And you say to prioritize by utility. I don't think judging ideas by "utility" is a good idea; I don't think Objectivism would agree with it either. But it depends what you mean more specifically.
"You said that anything could be used as a criticism, and that all criticized ideas should be thrown out. This completely ignores the importance of utility." -- because?
"You said that complexity or difficulty in understanding is reason to throw an idea out." Like basically everything in epistemology, and as Objectivism also emphasizes, this is contextual. Criticism is contextual. How complex is a flaw is contextual – what is the idea for? For some purposes, certain amounts of complexity are bad. For other purposes, greater complexity is OK.
(Edited by Elliot Temple on 7/12, 9:11pm)
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