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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

> The problem arises when truth 2.0 becomes hypertrophic, self-righteous, rigid and unconnected with reality, which marks a transformation into ideology.

Ideology is the always a way of interpreting the Real into the Symbolic. If you don't think you have an ideology, congrats on having the dominate ideology. Ideology allows people to take the incomprehensible Real and distill it into the comprehensible Symbolic. The process itself is naively invisible in daily naive life. So much so, that the obviousness of it is reversed in order to justify the ideological process itself.

The author makes the uncritical assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality. And it's this confusion that is-and-ought are two sides of the same coin.

The whole 1.0 vs 2.0 conceptualization is a red herring based in a reactionary call to simpler times.

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nonetheless, to witness the entire cognitive process of the author, as misguided as you find their conclusions, is a positive constructive experience isn't it?

IMO, the main point of the article is to assert that in some fields (medicine and science) this "assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality" is needed, and that to do away with this 'assumption' is 'irrational' and sends one down the path towards authoritarianism.

This involves more epistemology than usual

> this "assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality" is needed, and that to do away with this 'assumption' is 'irrational' and sends one down the path towards authoritarianism.

When you understand that the author is ok with authoritarianism so long as it validates his symbolic universe because it's draped in the fineries of rationalism, the sooner the piece clicks. The author is fine with authoritarianism so long as its his authoritarianism and he doesn't get to call it authoritarianism, he gets to call it reality. To him it is reality and anyone disagreeing with him is denying reality. When we talk about the most insidious delusions, it's his. It's intellectual narcissism. And that's why it's epistemologically vacuous.

Anyone who's studied epistomology knows he's arguing from within a system instead of outside it and it comes across as naive realism because it is.

on the other hand, this same pattern of "authoritarianism" is what we all learn to have when becoming adult members of our societies/cultures: it's an expression of one persons' individual consciousness with the ability to control their own behavior.

this gets weird when projecting our individual consciousness into the systems we construct to rule over ourselves (governments)... better known as our tendency (and capacity) to anthropomorphize anything.

No, I'm not talking about anthropomorphizing. I'm talking about reification.

And no, authoritarianism is not synonymous with the social contract. Sorry. Maybe in some minds, but no.

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