skuaMar 18

Irish coffee, 3 position on it.

1. Being sure that coffee with a shot of Irish whiskey in it is better than drinking the whiskey straight.

2. Thinking that it can never be known whether a shot of Irish whiskey that is being drunk would have been better mixed into a coffee. (Agnostic)

3. Drinking Irish whiskey, sure that it would not be better in a coffee. (The spiritualist position)

Which somehow leaves 1. to be twisted into "atheism".
This is your task.

#Sophistry #AngelsOnTheHeadOfAPin

Vadim N.Jan 13

Arguing with the devil never does any of us any good.
He has had 5,000 years of practice.
He knows all the weak spots.
©

#sophistry

Daniel DvorkinDec 17

#Knowledge is #justified #true #belief. That definition is about 2500 years old, and although #philosophers have been trying to come up with a better definition ever since, no one has. All claimed counterexamples are #sophistry.

A lot of my fellow #scientists and/or #atheists have trouble with the word "belief" because they associate it with faith—which in turn can be defined as belief *without* justification, or whose truth is unknowable. But it's really a lot simpler than that.

If I walk inside dripping wet, and someone asks me if it's raining, and I say it is because I've just been out in it, then I'm stating my belief. What you believe is anything you can honestly affirm if someone asks you, "Is such-and-such true?"

Belief can be simple and immediate or complicated and long-term. It can be trivial or profound. It can be true or false, justified or unjustified, testable or untestable. The honesty, that's the key. Knowledge, a proper subset of belief, has a much higher standard.

The above is an extended way of saying that if someone begins a loaded question with an aggressive, sarcastic "Did you know ..." then you are amply justified in truly believing they're full of shit.

Interesting LinksNov 25

LLMs are bullshitters
Kagi's head of machine learning on what LLMs actually are, what they aren't, and what you should definitely not rely on them for. Ranger does think that they can be useful (comparing philosophers, who actually think about things, to lawyers or sophists, who only care about what the rhetoric accomplishes), but only spends one paragraph on it.

#AI #LLM #Kagi #sophistry

LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful | Kagi Blog

*Note:* This is a personal essay by Matt Ranger, Kagi’s head of ML In 1986, Harry Frankfurt wrote On Bullshit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit ).

lmorchard's linksNov 20
LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful | Kagi Blog

"But remember that LLMs are bullshitters: you can use LLMs to get incredible gains in how fast you can do tasks like research, writing code, etc. assuming that you are doing it mindfully with the pitfalls in mind

By all means, use LLMs where they are useful tools: tasks where you can verify the output, where speed matters more than perfection, where the stakes of being wrong are low.

But don’t naively trust a system that freaks out at the inexistence of the seahorse emoji to complete critica..."

https://blog.kagi.com/llms

#ai #bullshit #genai #llms #sophistry
LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful | Kagi Blog

*Note:* This is a personal essay by Matt Ranger, Kagi’s head of ML In 1986, Harry Frankfurt wrote On Bullshit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit ).

WIST Quotations Has Moved!Oct 20

A quotation from John Adams

As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.

John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. Tiffany

More info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/


#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition

WIST Quotations Has Moved!Jul 1, 2025

A quotation from Euripides

HECUBA:      The clear actions of a man,
   Agamemnon, should speak louder than any words.
   good words should get their goodness from our lives
   and nowhere else; the evil we do should show,
   a rottenness that festers in our speech
   and what we say, in capable of being glozed
   with a film of pretty words.
                    There are men, I know,
   sophists who make a science of persuasion,
   glozing evil with the slick of loveliness;
   but in the end a speciousness will show.
   The imposters are punished; not one escapes
   his death.
 
[ἙΚΆΒΗ: Ἀγάμεμνον, ἀνθρώποισιν οὐκ ἐχρῆν ποτε
   τῶν πραγμάτων τὴν γλῶσσαν ἰσχύειν πλέον:
   ἀλλ᾽, εἴτε χρήστ᾽ ἔδρασε, χρήστ᾽ ἔδει λέγειν,
   εἴτ᾽ αὖ πονηρά, τοὺς λόγους εἶναι σαθρούς,
   καὶ μὴ δύνασθαι τἄδικ᾽ εὖ λέγειν ποτέ.
   σοφοὶ μὲν οὖν εἰσ᾽ οἱ τάδ᾽ ἠκριβωκότες,
   ἀλλ᾽ οὐ δύνανται διὰ τέλους εἶναι σοφοί,
   κακῶς δ᾽ ἀπώλοντ᾽: οὔτις ἐξήλυξέ πω.]

Euripides (485?-406? BC) Greek tragic dramatist
Hecuba [Hekabe; Ἑκάβη], l. 1186ff (c. 424 BC) [tr. Arrowsmith (1958)]

Sourcing, notes, other translations: wist.info/euripides/77262/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #euripides #hecuba #actions #evil #excuse #glibness #persuasion #propaganda #rationale #smoothtalker #sophistry #wordsanddeeds

Show threadSpectrum Game of the Year 1988Jun 7, 2025
#GameoftheYear1988 #ZXSpectrum #SinclairZXSpectrum #RetroGaming #CageMatch #ManolloElCavernicola #Sophistry #RamboIII
Spectrum Game of the Year 1988Jun 7, 2025

ROUND 1 Poll 51

Cage Match (Entertainment USA)
Manollo: El Cavernicola (Iber Software)
Sophistry (CRL Group PLC)
Rambo III (Ocean Software)

1988 GAME OF THE YEAR
Top two games go through to next round

#GameoftheYear1988 #ZXSpectrum #SinclairZXSpectrum #RetroGaming

#CageMatch #ManolloElCavernicola #Sophistry #RamboIII

Cage Match
0%
Manollo: El Cavernicola
0%
Sophistry
0%
Rambo III
100%
Poll ended at .
Show threadTurtle_Island_WobblyMay 4, 2025
“Trying to appease the right is a fool's errand”

I wanted to dwell on this point for a moment. A lot of ink has been spilled by so-called #political pundits penning opinion pieces in which they claim that #KamalaHarris and the #Democrats lost the #PresidentialElection because the #DemocraticParty has become too “woke”, which (so they claim) alienated enough of the voting population to throw the #election to #Trump.

I completely disagree with this diagnosis of why the Democratic Party lost the Presidency. Let’s face it: the Democrats lost the Presidency because Kamala Harris was an uninspiring, milquetoast candidate with an uninspiring, milquetoast vision for the future—just like #Biden before her. Her #policy proposals were nothing short of stale attempts to eat around the edges of issues that are systemic to American #capitalism. Like, what was up with that “Economy of Opportunities” crap? I think when I heard her explain her “Opportunity Economy” proposal, I must have yawned and said “So basically she’s got nothing?”

#WorkingClass Americans need a sharp break from the trajectory this country has been on for decades. I would argue that that sharp break needs to come in the form of rapidly moving away from capitalism and towards #Socialism. Kamala Harris was not a “sharp break” candidate. She was a business as usual candidate.

#DonaldTrump was right about one thing: this country IS stagnating (and even entering the “fall” half of “rise and fall”). American capitalism is in crisis. And it is precisely when capitalism is in crisis that #fascism is able to break through and go mainstream (as we are witnessing in real time). American voters broke for Trump because they instinctively knew that we are on the decline and need a major shakeup. Trump was the only candidate promising just that. Of course, everybody who *wasn’t* won over by his #sophistry knows that he doesn’t have any real solutions and will only serve to accelerate the decline.

I want to go back and underscore that “trying to appease the right is a fool's errand”. If the Democrats go down the path of “moving closer to the center” in the hopes of poaching some of the #GOP’s voters, then the #RepublicanParty will just move even further to the right so as to differentiate themselves from the Democrats.

Congrats, #Dems! You shifted Party politics to the right, chasing “moderate voters”, the #Republicans moved farther to the right in response, and the result is that #USpolitics as a whole has shifted rightward. The #OvertonWindow has been moved and ideas once considered outlandish and extreme start being normalized. And the U.S. gets more fascistic.

On the relationship between capitalism and fascism:

https://isreview.org/issue/107/clara-zetkin-and-struggle-against-fascism/index.html
Clara Zetkin and the struggle against fascism | International Socialist Review

The following article is the introduction to a newly-published collection Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win by the German Marxist Clara Zetkin (Haymarket Books, 2017).