The notion of “Public Interest” has survived many decades, of contrary evidence.
Didn’t India Get The BIG PHARMA memo: Don’t You Dare!
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Can we have a third option? These are not choices one makes like selecting from a menu; they are catastrophic failures of a political system.
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… No these are examples of failures of a far different, and much more deadly kind. Bad Reasoning Kills.
“Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already.” - C. S. Peirce
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The failure of logic is paramount. I suppose the article was an attempt to diagnose why that failure becomes systemic in the first place. It’s not just that individuals reason poorly, but that the structure of the system—fueled by the interests he describes—actively incentivizes and rewards a specific, deadly kind of reasoning (e.g., partisan victory over truth). The system’s failure enables the failure of logic, and together they become existential.
… the last comment is putting the cart before the horse. Who or whatever produced the last sentence shows both a lack of understanding of and reinforces Peirce’s observation.
Didn’t mean to downplay how important good reasoning is. I was really just trying to describe what happens when a society stops caring about truth altogether. The system I’m talking about is what you get when people give up on facts and logic and just go all in on tribal warfare and winning at all costs. And honestly, my own take on logic here isn’t really about Pierce’s system—it’s more rooted in the Catholic experience of things.
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… “It seems to me that we are driven to this, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle.” - from C.S. Peirce’s The Doctrine of Chances (1878)
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This is profound Scarmoge
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