{"id":7094,"date":"2013-03-21T18:03:54","date_gmt":"2013-03-21T22:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=7094"},"modified":"2013-03-21T18:03:54","modified_gmt":"2013-03-21T22:03:54","slug":"would-you-rather-be-wrong-than-boring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2013\/03\/would-you-rather-be-wrong-than-boring.html","title":{"rendered":"Would you rather be wrong than boring?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a post titled \u201cThe sad, sad tale of the philosophical meta-game<\/a>\u201d Eli of Rust Belt Philosophy does a useful job calling out our fascination with outrageousness and impatience with obvious sounding truth. Plus, his frame metaphor is awesome<\/em>: Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3. (Don\u2019t worry, you don\u2019t need to know what that is to follow his point. Let me block quote a little:<\/p>\n

Now, Marvel is a game \u2013 I mean, a paradigmatic game, the kind where there\u2019s really nothing significant on the line except what we put there ourselves. So if the meta-game in Marvel doesn\u2019t advance the way that it should (in some sense) because people prefer exciting play to sound play, it\u2019s not a huge tragedy. But it should be clear that philosophy is not that kind of game. (It is still one in the looser sense of the word.) For whatever crazy reason, people listen to philosophers \u2013 and powerful people, too, like politicians and health care workers and military leaders and such. Moreover, at least some philosophical debates are actually centered on important stuff. (Not all of it is monads, y\u2019know!) Yet even philosophers (and, really, public reasoners in general) can be found attempting to privilege interesting<\/em> play<\/a> (i.e., in this case, exciting reasoning) over effective<\/em> play<\/a>, as though philosophy is somehow the rec league of intellectual debate or something. In the same way that (and to a much<\/em> greater extent than) Marvel\u2019s meta-game is being held back because of the logically irrelevant aesthetic preferences of its players, philosophy\u2019s meta-game is being held back because some significant bloc of philosophers would rather have fun, exciting, playful debates than rational ones, and that\u2019s absolutely fucked up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was sometimes a problem we ran into in our philosophical debating group. \u00a0I remember, one year, that the resolution chosen for the Party Prize debate (where each party fields its two best speakers, one aff and one neg) was \u201cDon\u2019t Fear the Reaper\u201d and all the negs were bitterly complaining that there was no good way to make \u201cDeath sucks\u201d as interesting as whatever bizarre things the aff speakers were going to say. \u00a0It\u2019s a pretty common rhetorical trick to try to hang on to your audience by dressing up the quotidian as somehow counter-intuitive.<\/p>\n

But the reason Eli threw a link-back to me in that post is because he\u2019s suspicious of my questions to atheist readers during A Week<\/a>. \u00a0I\u2019ll admit I used a bit of a \u201cTell me something more interesting\u201d prompt, but I\u2019m really just interesting in something more specific<\/em>. \u00a0Basically I wanted something that\u2019s is a better predictor of how you live and why. \u00a0If someone tells me they\u2019re a skeptic, I know something about their method<\/em>, but not which facts and philosophies actually made it through their filter. \u00a0And that\u2019s what I\u2019m most interested, whether those ideas are ordinary or outrageous.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a post titled \u201cThe sad, sad tale of the philosophical meta-game\u201d Eli of Rust Belt Philosophy does a useful job calling out our fascination with outrageousness and impatience with obvious sounding truth. Plus, his frame metaphor is awesome: Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3. (Don\u2019t worry, you don\u2019t need to know what that is to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":7098,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-epistemologyphilosophy"],"yoast_head":"\nWould you rather be wrong than boring?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In a post titled "The sad, sad tale of the philosophical meta-game" Eli of Rust Belt Philosophy does a useful job calling out our fascination with\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2013\/03\/would-you-rather-be-wrong-than-boring.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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