All of Phaedrus' Mistakes

Or, why it took me 2 weeks to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

(All of these are several months old, and some are slightly unhinged. Editing notes are in square brackets)

Fell for mythology of science (I could cut him some slack, his being a gifted youngster in the 50s and all, but I won't.) [Mythology = progression is only forward and up, I think]

Fractal complexity means approaching ultimate truth asymptotically (getting more specific means more things to tie down, but the improvements outweigh the new necessities; cf. quantum vs Newtonian physics).

Ideas underlying the ungraded university don't take into account strivers (e.g, me, who doesn't really care but needs the degree and works hard to get the As).

- Ignores that people teach themselves, they don't reenter the academy. [Unless it's for another credential]

- Also ignores the foundational part of the academy: that it must perpetuate itself (ref. Plato, Zeno, etc).

Quality is a relative measure (crack a fucking dictionary), so defining it in the abstract doesn't really work. [For Phaedrus' purposes, presumably]

Reason as an informal system is inherent to the human mind (small children start both inducing and deducing before they know what those words mean; animals also arguably do this, so perhaps it is inherent to biological things), so attempting to capture and/or replace it is both pointless and nonsensical for self-evident reasons.

- Example with the two compositions is evidence that, if you accept the dictionary definition of quality (which implies that a given subject or medium has different standards for judgment compared to another), you can use inductive reasoning to find the guidelines surrounding a given medium (they may be unconscious, but so is gravity); failure to recognize this (and the failure of the students to take this angle) is lame (but I guess kinda excusable because it was the 50s and the culture/hobbies (programming, debate, etc) that have taught me to approach these problems in this manner hadn't been created yet).

- My refutation may be what the book states was too high-level for the students to come up with. If this is true, then either those students were absolute morons, or I could've gotten a PhD at 15 back in the day.

- Thought experiment over a "world without Quality" hinges entirely upon quality's effects being what he posits; since he refuses to define it/is unable to define it, even in terms of cause and effect, this argument disintegrates completely ("I posit that without Quality, no on would play sports" "Why? How does Quality relate to sports?" "Uhhh...I can't tell you"); furthermore, under the dictionary definition of Quality (i.e, ranking things against each other), this world would not exist to be perceived (the ranking of things is an evolutionary pressure and without it, we would've wandered out of Eden, eaten a bunch of sand, and starved to death, not knowing that sand is a worse food than berries or goat).

- Cleavage point doesn't make sense either; if there is no comparison of things, there is no point to progress (ENIAC computes the same stuff that my laptop does, just slower, see Turing completeness).

- The main thing that his digression into quality is evidence of is that you can draw any conclusion from stupid axioms, which we already knew.

Doesn't seem that things can't predate definitions (Quality, but also every discovery ever, like gravity); the things that require definition before they exist are inventions.

Caring about which facts to consider when conducting an experiment is how you get the fraud that I and my crew have to deal with. Bobby's idea for improving science has been tested, and found severely lacking (massacred psychology, sociology, economics, etc. etc.) [What did I mean by this? Fiddling the figures, obviously, but what's with the phrasing?]

- Quantifying quality via statistics so everyone knows why you chose what you chose beats ~vibes~ by several miles

Being driven insane by reason is losing to it, not beating it

I wonder how much of his reaction against rationality et al in favor of "romanticism" and what have you is due to his being a product of his time. In the 50s, you didn't have the decades of postmodernists fucking things up to compare reason to. I, a child of a postmodern world, can see that, and identify the flaws in Phaedrus' ideas because they've been implemented. All Phaedrus knew was the world of the reasonable and logical, and his awakening to the squareness of it could not be tempered by knowledge of what happens when you drop the squares completely. [The effects of dropping the squares are even more evident as Boeing disintegrates because they fired all their logical-but-disagreeable engineers in favor of doormats who had better vibes]

Consider also the recoiling at the idea that science isn't unshakable. Very Reddit, and a clear distinction between Phaedrus and I (I'm fine working with approximations as long as they work, but he cares about only the process behind them; consequentialism vs deontology strikes again)

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