what's wrong with negativity ?

I suggest you look into psychology. Your brain uses biases created through experience to create shortcuts so you don’t have to analyze everything you look at. That fluorescent light at the end of the hallway is rectangular. Even though it appears to be a trapezoid, your brain automatically registers that it’s a rectangle because of experience. You don’t have to analyze it for that to happen.

Your brain chooses how you perceive the world, and the best you can do is be aware it’s happening. Think about it like a colorblind person - the barn may be red, but that person will always see it a different color, no matter how aware they are that it’s not brown or gray or whatever.

And then you had Kierkegaard who thought Hegel’s ideas anathema. And I would suppose he did or would have felt the same of Schopenhauer’s. Kierkegaard believing that the idea of becoming better naturally was not inevitable. That the individual and individuals collectively were responsible thought by thought and action by action for their own future (and present).

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Hegel was right. Given how AI gathers data from human beings and then formulates the equivalent of thoughts or information when prompted, humanity has effectively harnessed the power of the zeitgeist. For the non-tech heads, AI is a hive mind and cannot exist, or continue to do so without constant human interactions with it. Don’t let Hollyweird movies and science fiction fool you. The laws of physics are the primary reason for the occurrence. Finally, we may now revisit the Phenomenology of Spirit with renewed vigor. :)

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I don’t like how you act like this is some uncontrollable thing happening in the brain, and not the result of cultural attitudes about art and morality. If someone reads and internalizes the aesthetic ideas of Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom, and Oscar Wilde then they will approach works of art from “problematic” artists much differently

I must've confused it with another article about Schopenhauer that I had read earlier which goes more in depth about those influences. He even had a bust of Buddha on his writing desk. My mistake then, I was convinced I had read it in this article.

>People tend to overly lean on negativity. It's why you can be sure a negative opinion will reach further and persist despite any evidence to the contrary. People don't want to be hurt.

My take is that because people generally prefer to accept more positive thoughts, the neutral reality seems negative in comparison. It doesn't have to be that way though, it's always possible to change how you feel about things.

>Being optimistic is not about expectations either, it's about seeing the potential in people or things.

The very definition of expect is to believe something more likely to happen. Which in the case of optimism, is to believe that a favorable outcome is more likely to happen.

>"he has good qualities and I would like to see him cultivate them"

This is not an optimistic statement, it's neutral. It doesn't suggest any outcome, it's just commentary.

An optimistic statement would be "I believe he'll cultivate his qualities and grow". If you don't truly believe in or expect the outcome, by definition you're not actually being optimistic about it.

Just to elaborate on what I mean:

• Optimistic: things will get better

• Neutral: things could get better

• Pessimistic: things won't get better

I'm a firm believer of neutral in most cases when things are uncertain. I do like to be cautiously optimistic sometimes though.

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That's interesting because Schopenhauer is by far the easier read.

Both are correct in different ways, and wrong in different ways. Thesis, antithesis... synthesis. Cake got nuthin' ta do with it, bro.

The most cursory reading of Heidegger would show you that rebelling against the void and creating your own is the opposite of going along with the narcissistic herd.

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I also recommend reading The Last Hour of Gann by R Lee Smith. Looks like shitty alien erotica, but is something like 800ish pages of debate about what it means to be human. One of the most honest takes that I’ve ever read. Is like seven different genres.

It’s not precisely pessimism, but dances around the topic with the plot. (I’ve read Ligotti, but I think R Lee Smith conveys stuff in a way that is really clever. She doesn’t have answers for anyone, basically—I thought Ligotti was heavy handed.)

I believe they call that a “tautology”. The only solution is to solve it.

There is nothing in the article about Eastern philosophy. Only Kant is mentioned as a foundation of his thought. There was simply enough of his philosophy for me to notice the parallels.

Ironically, it is clear that you yourself didn't open and read the article before commenting.

>but that observation isn't relevant to the mental processes of Alice and Bob

Sure. From their context, they may not be able to distinguish which is correct. But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. When that context changes (eg. they learn something new), it matters a lot, and it's pretty relevant to their future actions and predictions. Thus it's an important aspect we want to distinguish in our epistemology. Ie. if Bob learns he was wrong, he shouldn't think his new situation is just as good as his old one just because in both cases he held "the best beliefs that can be constructed on the basis of his evidence". Something meaningful has been said, and that difference is important to encapsulate when discussing epistemology.

This distinction is independent of the internal belief states, but that's exactly why it's so important: we don't just want to talk about internal states, we want to relate these to the external reality we're talking about. The world where my belief is wrong is different in a very important way from a world where it's correct - a way I care very much about.

>Saying that Bob knew ¬X and lost that knowledge when he changed his belief centers our assessment of Bob's mental processes on the wrong thing

This is the wrong faming though. Bob never knew ¬X: ¬X was false. He thought he knew ¬X, but was mistaken. And that mistakenness is something Bob would care about, and should consider meaningful to his epistemology. If he didn't care about his truth, it'd be just as good for him to avoid learning anything, because he'd be in the same state either way wrt holding a reasonable belief. But in reality, if he's wrong, he'll want to find this out, and consider his situation improved when that happens.

>what Bob should be concerned with is what conclusions he can draw on the basis of his available evidence

The reason Bob should be concerned with this is solely because Bob wants his beliefs to be true ones. You can't discard that aspect.

>Perhaps another way of stating this would be to say that Bob ought to believe he knows X as a result of {A, B, C}, and that whether he knows X (or that he cannot know X because ¬X is true) is irrelevant.

Bob ought to believe X, but that certainly doesn't mean whether he knows it is irrelevant - epistemic contexts can change, and ones where our beliefs reflect truth are more valuable to us than ones that don't.

How much do you wonder about it on the scale of 1 to 10? 2 being opening the article and reading about it.

> I'd also argue that the more negative take is almost always closer to reality than the positive take.

People tend to overly lean on negativity. It's why you can be sure a negative opinion will reach further and persist despite any evidence to the contrary. People don't want to be hurt.

Being optimistic is not about expectations either, it's about seeing the potential in people or things. It's not "he is the best person and will never let me down" but "he has good qualities and I would like to see him cultivate them". It's akin to Existentialism and there being no inherent meaning but infinite space for you to fill with meaning.

It's not as hard if you can make yourself forget everything you possess of logic, common sense and critical thinking. That's all hindrance. And get one of the two modern Cambridge translations. Pinkard or Inwood, or both.

The last paragraph is what I disagree with. Suppose that there's a truth value to X, but that truth value us inaccessible to Alice and Bob. We as outside observers can state whether Alice or Bob has knowledge, but that observation isn't relevant to the mental processes of Alice and Bob. We can say "they both believe they have knowledge", but that isn't particularly interesting.

Suppose that Alice has access to evidence {A, B} and Bob has access to evidence {B, C}. If {A, B} ⇒ X and {B, C} ⇒ ¬X, stating that both of their beliefs is reasonable says more than "both of these people hold beliefs", it says that both people hold the best beliefs that can be constructed on the basis of their evidence. It would be unreasonable for Alice to believe ¬X or for Bob to believe X.

Suppose, furthermore, that {A, B, C} ⇒ X, but ¬X is ultimately true. If Bob gains access to A, he ought to believe X, and X would be the reasonable belief for the premises he holds. Saying that Bob knew ¬X and lost that knowledge when he changed his belief centers our assessment of Bob's mental processes on the wrong thing: what Bob should be concerned with is what conclusions he can draw on the basis of his available evidence, and we should concern ourselves similarly with the best conclusions that can be drawn from Bob's reference point, not from the reference point of an outside observer.

Perhaps another way of stating this would be to say that Bob ought to believe he knows X as a result of {A, B, C}, and that whether he knows X (or that he cannot know X because ¬X is true) is irrelevant.

They definitely feuded. Hegel was a superstar in his day and for a ehile both him and Schopenhauer taught at the same university. Arthur was so jealous of Hegel that he would schedule his classes at the same time as Hegel's. Of course almost everybody preferred Hegel which left Schopenhauer even more bitter. Germans who thought they'd figured it all out. Not the first, not the last.

So here's the thing, a lot of the time when I hear this shit, the art itself is actively racist as well. JK Rowlings Goblins are direct Antiemetic stereotypes, Rudyar Kipling's "The gift" comes down to "Just take the present and stop bitching about Christians running everything". R Kelly has songs about seducing under aged girls. Cosby has an episode where he puts something special in his barbeque sauce that makes his wife and daughters horny. Woody Allen and Roman Polanski both have movies about relationships between young women/underaged women, and older men.

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I'm willing to separate the art from the artist, but most of the time the art is still fucking racist/sexist/whatever.

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Now, there's some good Cosby episodes, Chinatown and Bananas are both awesome movies, ""Trapped in the closet" is hilarious and musically sound. But typically when I hear "separate the artist" that means I'm going to have to wade through some offensive shit to dig up value.

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Why bother, why should I go out of my way to reward the art of the offensive when there's plenty of other art out there? What value is there to creating this separation in my mind when it mostly ends up meaning I'm going to have to go through some cringe shit anyway?

>but of whether we can actually be justified

Sure, but that's not an objection to the conception of knowledge, but about what criteria we consider to constitute justification. And pretty much no standard model of knowledge states that the justification criteria should be certainty, so I think you're targeting the wrong thing in your definitions here. In general, knowledge is held to be defeasible - you can be wrong about something you believe you know, and change your mind as to whether it was really knowledge. Certainty is not a requirement.

>Moving from a position of knowledge to a position of reasonability

As such, this is misunderstanding knowledge: those two are not at cross-purposes: "reasonability" is generally part of the justification part of knowledge - and there's certainly room to debate on exactly what makes something reasonable or constitutes a justified reason to believe something - but framing this as arguing against knowledge is to misunderstand what knowledge is about.

>allows for forms of justification that are rooted neither in truth nor in cohesion

Justification isn't rooted in truth for JTB - the truth criteria is entirely seperate. Certainly we believe it to be true (though not with certainty), since that's basically what belief is, but the truth criteria is considered entirely seperate from justification.

>but at least for externalist conceptions of knowledge like JTB this is not generally considered to constitute "knowledge" in the philosophical sense.

Certainly. If something is false, it's not knowledge. But I think that's absolutely something we should definitely be concerned about in our epistemology: If you believe, and are absolutely certain about something, I think there's a rather important difference depending on whether that belief is actually true. If Alice reasonably believes X, and Bob reasonably believes ¬X, I think there's something more to be said than "Well, both these people hold beliefs" - the question of which is right seems important.

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