Rex Kerr
2 min readFeb 6, 2023

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You don't like stating it so much that you won't even when asked? I didn't claim you don't address the critiques, just that when you do you provide scant to zero evidence.

This is especially relevant when my claim is that things have changed in the past 50 years. If you use a shovel to dig a hole, and then you start filling it in again, it's not particularly helpful for someone to start criticizing shovels as things that dig holes. Yes, we got that already, and we already changed how we're using the tool. Your perspectives seem supportable at some point in history, just not now. Let's see the evidence for the effect now.

For instance, you ascribe certain attitudes to the "humanist" perspective. I provided a position statement from the American Humanist Society (in my reply here: https://ichoran.medium.com/have-you-actually-read-any-works-by-any-prominent-communicators-of-science-in-the-last-like-fifty-e098ed5ae235), which one would think would be pretty relevant evidence for their modern position. You didn't address the evidence, and you're making the same claim about humanists again.

Likewise, when I repeatedly provide evidence that these days science is a primary institution pushing back against the domestication and exploitation of nature, you continue to place it on the other side of the ledger with little evidence and arguments of this sort: "you simply ignore the possibility of massive hypocrisy on the part of scientists".

If you were making only a logical claim, then inattention to empirical matters might be reasonable. But you're not only doing so, because you use evocative statements about human psychological states like "horror".

If you are ascribing impact on human psychological states from science as an institution (not the accumulated power of human society), then you're making an empirical claim. There are reasons--I've shared some--to think that the impact is now, in fact, on balance, the opposite of what you state.

If you want to define, independent of how people actually feel about things, "horror" as the state of "replacing a model with intrinsic irreducible agency with one with agency implemented mechanistically", sure, go for it. I won't object. Science did that, no argument.

But if you want to maintain that the current way in which the institution of science is affecting human outlooks is in the direction of horror of zombification, at the very least you should come armed with a long list of clear examples, not fail to give any because they are supposedly "obvious".

All too often, it is belief in the "obvious" which hides incorrect assumptions, and one of the biggest advantages of discourse is in revealing these assumptions.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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