Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns
I’m hesitant to write about the Mark Minter situation; this whole thing is taking on shades of celebrity/hero worship, and as a general rule I try not to target individuals with my writing. I’ll target their arguments, certainly, and I’ll attack groups of people, whether they be ideologues or mentalities, but focusing the eternal laser-light of the Internet on an individual is a cowardly bullying tactic, employed by the anonymous.
And yet, I recently wrote a scathing take-down of Kezia Willingham; what makes this the exception that proves the rule?
Simple: she chose to make her private life the argument eo ipso. Had she written about life-strategy (informed, but not premised upon, her personal experiences) I would have argued her idea; but she did not do that. What she did instead was write vaingloriously about how wonderful her life is today, without admitting that all the mistakes she made were, in fact, mistakes; nor did she acknowledge that it was an undeserved stroke of luck that saved her from misery and failure.
She didn’t have an argument; she had a hamsterbation fantasy.
In the case of Minter – or even some specific Feminist ideologue – I am in no position to pronounce judgment on their private lives; I don’t know them, I don’t know what sort of thoughts they have when they’re alone, late at night, staring up at the sky, and I don’t know what the actual impact of their decisions on actual people will be.
And quite frankly (short of gross and unambiguous moral violations) their personal lives are none of my business
If you’re unfamiliar with Mark Minter, he was a poster over on the Roosh forums who wrote vociferously about what a terrible idea marriage was… and then recently announced that he was getting married… to a single mother, no less.
XSplat have been familiar from the situation from day one and my thoughts are in alignment with his, so I’ll simply quote him:
Of course his stance was untenable. He was lonely. He could not keep up such a stance unless no one offered intimacy to him.
But given the choices of being discovered as lacking in self knowledge and therefore switching strategies by being a hypocrite to a previous stated stance that would never feed your repressed desires for intimacy, and sticking to your guns and avoiding intimacy and being lonely and broke with little hope of ever meeting as good an offer ever again, which would you choose?
Personally, I’m happy for Mr & Mrs Minter, and I wish them the best of luck.
As for all of his followers who are screaming that he’s a hypocrite who betrayed his values – stop worshipping idols. If you need to have faith in a Perfect Man so badly, go read the New Testament; those of us who are mere flesh-and-blood will always disappoint, even the best of us. We are all hypocrites, we are all idiots, trying to muddle our way through life, whilst dispensing the best advice that we can based upon our limited knowledge.
You’re as bad as those who squealed over Britney Spears in the 90s, only to start circling like sharks in the 00’s. This sort of cannibalistic primitivism¹ has no place in Western Civilization: go find yourselves a soul.
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I’m not writing this post to defend Minter, however; he doesn’t need me to defend him anymore than he needs cultish hero worship from his ex-followers. Rather, I’m writing this because some of the comments attacking him brought to mind a conversation I had with Aaron Clarey last month, a conversation revolving around Rumsfeld’s brilliant – and frequently derided – statement “There are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.”
Minter’s ex-followers are furious with him for being a hypocrite, for violating his principles by getting married: Xsplat agrees that he was a hypocrite, and that he violated his principles, but that’s because his principles were missing a fundamental Truth: he neglected to account for the fact that, to be truly happy, Man requires the intimacy of a good woman.
This was Minter’s unknown unknown.
It’s an odd sort of paradox: “All I know is that I know nothing,” said Aristotle – thereby affirming that he does know something, and that things are knowable – but that he doesn’t know them. The older I get, the more I learn about life, the more I become aware of that cyclopean gulf of things I don’t know, which I can’t know that I don’t know. Again and again, I’ve made mistakes.
Sometimes I’ve dated women who checked out on every heuristic I had available, but who scored points by lying. That’s a minor problem, where a simple adjustment to the heuristic makes it harder for others to cheat on the test in the future.
Those were the known unknowns.
But other times their score was justly earned, and the problem which eventually arose came from a dimension I hadn’t yet realized. A new swath of reality opens up when this happens, and your strategies need to be adjusted.
When you’re playing a game like Civilization V (or IV, or III…) the only way to win on on the higher difficulties is to be thoroughly familiar with every unit, every technology, every other player’s strategy, and the specifics of each victory condition: in other words, the only way to win is to “cheat” by losing the game multiple times, until you have the patterns memorized. It’s a more complex version of what used to be called Save Scumming: repeatedly reloading a game, until the random-number-generator offers you a result you like.
Reality doesn’t offer us the luxury of a do-over.
You will make mistakes in life; all of us have made mistakes in life. The purpose of culture, stories, and idioms (aka colloquial metaphors) is to try and pass on this knowledge of unknown unknowns; the whole purpose of the manosphere is to point out things that we didn’t know that we didn’t know growing up. To deny a Man the ability to ammend his ideals as he grows, is to pridefully deny knowledge itself.
I humbly suggest that we remain humble in front of the vast swathes of knowledge we have yet to learn exist.
Minter was wrong about his unknown need for intimacy, but he wasn’t wrong within context: few women offer intimacy, most only offer the self-delusion of intimacy. A Man needs to recognize that All Women Are Like That – but that likewise, redemption is also a universal: AfOR, with his typical vulgar gruffness, says as much here:
You see, once one of you wimminz makes that offer to me, and being brutally honest here she doesn’t have to be an 8.9 before it becomes an interesting offer, provided she ain’t actually ugly or smelly or annoying to be around, once one of you wimminz makes that offer to me, the value of all other wimminz on the planet drops through the fucking basement, not that it was high before, but at least it could be a positive figure, if not quite an integer.
Once one wimminz decides to be my own personal sex toy and slave, all 3.6 billion other wimminz on the planet have a serious fucking problem, because “I’ll suck your cock” becomes a bit like one leaf on one tree asking for special status in exchange for producing oxygen for me to breathe, meanwhile I have my own personal 75 foot oak tree in the arboretum…
While I contend that belief in the Absolute Truth is fundamental to moral behaviour – that belief in Relative Truth leads to evil and perversion – I also realize that I can never know the Absolute Truth. You can call it Faith, call it Religion, or call it God – but it is a philosophical fact all us mortals can do is occasionally glimpse it. The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; an ideology which is perfect is nought but a graven idol.
Stay humble, my brothers; and have room in your heart for those who change their mind.
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1. Why do you think Catholics take communion? It’s because Man’s urge to project his own self-hatred can only be satiated by the flesh of the Perfect Man.
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If Christ were alive today he’d be agnostic. If any man claims absolute knowledge of the divine than he is either mad or wrong. By definition a false prophet. Humility is found in uncertainty. The High Inquisitor tortured heretics because of the certainty of his position not because he doubted. When mystery abounds uncertainty is the only rational choice.
This issue is pointing out a bigger issue. Some people defend certain ideas out of ego protection. If they had to change just one item in their mental map, they’d therefore have to go through the bother of changing their entire self conception.
Roosh for instance has built up his entire persona and lifestyle and message about being denying the importance of intimacy. Now he bans anyone from his RooshVForum who disagrees with the original Minter vision.
He’s banning people left and right.
I think that’s called narcissistic rage, isn’t it?
1. For any LessWrong folks: if you haven’t acquainted yourself with Fitch’s knowability paradox, check it out (this article should be a great apertif).
2. For any Orthosphere folks: have some G. K. Chesterton (excerpt near the end of ‘Orthodoxy’).
“This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right, like my father in the garden. Theosophists for instance will preach an obviously attractive idea like re-incarnation; but if we wait for its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the cruelty of caste. For if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins, people will tend to despise the beggar. But Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king. Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium. Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only afterwards that we realise that jumping was an athletic exercise highly beneficial to our health. It is only afterwards that we realise that this danger is the root of all drama and romance. The strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness. The unpopular parts of Christianity turn out when examined to be the very props of the people.”
Glad you weighed in on this, Aurini. There is a dearth of philosophical soul in the ‘sphere. I think it remains to be seen that MM was wrong with his counsel, given his relationship has not had time to show its fruits, nor the Institution that will seek to destroy that relationship. He made a calculated move that does not have to turn out perfect or even absolutely good to turn out better that staying alone. I would opine that MM’s forest might be flawed, but he had many good trees to consider, and that is the problem with most people in the ‘sphere and in general: they want the bottom line without the derivation. Applying theory to practice may have an IQ requirement. From where shall we draw enough civilized people to have civilization? I disagree with Xsplat that wisdom is success or happiness, or is proven by the same. Imagine a woman chasing her happiness and getting it. Sometimes you can’t win even if you do things right. That is the fear that drives people to embrace bottom-line dogmas. Even for men, even in sex as in life, there is a wholesomeness of balance to pleasure and pain that fits being healthy as a dynamic being in the context of ecology and evolution. We are stuck in between the bliss of total ignorance (unclothed in the Garden) and of total knowledge (dressed in white in the Garden). Between no foundation and total foundation is the road few will ever travel for lack of re-engineering, which is to not be self-actualized. I enjoy your stuff, Aurini. I only hold a few members of the community is high civilized (as in functionally honorable not ‘polite’) regard. Off the top of my head, that would be you and Frost. I have high respect for others who are knowledgeable with knowledge, but they lack grace of accuracy, precision, and ultimately finesse.
I checked out Fitch’s paradox at Wikipedia. I think it’s BS, knowning perhaps that shows my ignorance. Given that preposition p is true, or p; and that Kp meaning p is KNOWN is true, or Kp; it is fine to say Kp -> p, or that knowledge that p is true implies that p is true. However, it is a bastardization of terminology to define preposition p as an unknown but true proposition and accept Kp -> p as usual. It is not true by definition, and so the expression ‘Kp’, meaning Kp is true, is nonsense. I think the setup is wrong, perhaps like the treatment of infinity or at least unbounded inclusiveness as tractable by naive set theory is wrong, as shown by Russell’s paradox. What I’m getting at is Type theory, which restricts relating conceptual elements to avoid absurdities, somehow.
And despite the fact that Cantor’s set theory was flawed and therefore wrong as a forest, does not mean it is wrong, because an intuitive sense of grouping is a necessary skill in a world of competitive progress, and we crawl in philosophy before we walk, and one can always go faster and higher, than what we’ve done anyway. The glass from Cantor was plenty full. Sick of the children screaming MM was wrong!…looky…the paradox! Let’s go back to being cavemen.
My gut reaction to the Russell thing is: Hey! That’s second order logic, and Fitch is pure FOL. In some ways that doesn’t matter much–unary predicates like K are just sets in disguise–but if you want to look at the use of universal quantifiers further, mind the gap.
Kp -> p shouldn’t be the thing that raises your eyebrows. If a sound chain of reasoning could prove a false statement, i.e. (Kp & ¬p) for some p, shit would be fucked.
imo, the thing that should have grabbed your attention was (¬Kp & p). We should be OK with this–there is some fact of the matter on whether p is true, as well as whether p is known, and we’re assuming that there’s nothing wrong with a truth being true & unknown. Fitch effectively points out that we can’t know (p is true & unknown) because that would make p known to us. Nothing too crazy here.
I might need to do some serious reading on type theory sooner or later–but I’m generally against the notion that “paradoxes” like this and Gödel are reasons to back off and try a more conservative approach. The glass isn’t just plenty full, it runneth over. And even if you take a negative view (away from a properly awestruck “Why can’t I hold all these truths?”) the stain you can’t get out has never been a reason to stop cleaning.
So… I’m pretty sure I agree with you on everything except your criticisms of Fitch.
@C+S, that’s quite full, especially considering the quality of the elixir or whatever liquid it is. Some disagreements are healthy, free market of ideas and all that. One could take similar exception with the (¬Kp & p) as with the Kp, if one does of course, but I was trying to boil it down. There are two assumptions in the first line, and obviously we can’t know p AND also know ¬Kp, yet we set it up knowing that. To me it’s like the square root of -1 = i, except i is apparently useful in electrical engineering, though I am not convinced it is essential for anything. More type theory? lol I speak from ignorance on Fitch’s paradox and undoubtedly elsewhere. No expert here. Just exploring the nuts and bolts of ideas. If men of that bent ever got together to form a community…oh crap…they already did and I wasn’t invited. If men of that bent ever got together openly to form a community…would be efing awesome, like destiny, IMO. Glad to know there are a few of us out here somewhere. I hate feeling like a superior but inferior lunatic all the time, but sometimes I get numb to it, like being a racist or sexist. I’m a think-ist. That’s why I follow Aurini. If I had money, I’d buy his book. Hell, I’d meet some of these people. One day at a time. In short, nice to agree with someone without watering it down.
Just looked up G. K. Chesterton on Wiki: Chesterton, as a political thinker, cast aspersions on both Progressivism and Conservatism, saying, “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”[4]
To wit, he identified a two-party Hegelian dialectic framework used in the UK back in 1924! Too damn true to this day, certainly in USA. The Repubs don’t have anything left to ‘conserve’ and have outlived their usefulness by achieving what they were to do.
Ed: Great comments. I have nothing to add to your guys’ brilliance.
-Again, I imagine that you could deploy type theory to weaken the premise “All truths are knowable” [that’s (p -> LKp) on the wiki] so that it won’t apply to Fitch’s sentence. But ask yourself: would you rather hold on to the full expressive power of first-order logic, or the idea that EVERY truth is knowable? We could similarly “avoid” Gödel’s incompleteness theorems if we were willing to work in theories with a weaker grip on primitive recursive properties and relations. But our flag still hangs from the house of Cantor, Frege, Peano, etc.
-I know that i seems kind of kooky, but adding it lands you in an algebraically complete field, (the complex numbers, where a polynomial of degree n has exactly n solutions counting multiplicites) and that’s a huge leap for theory. Suddenly, you can completely diagonalize matrices, completely characterize solutions to linear ODEs, etc. Physics/Electricity applications aside, you’re not going to see i very much on the applications end of things, but if you want to work through how and why things work the way they do, i is indispensable.
-I’m glad you got something out of this. And I originally had to give Fitch’s proof the stink-eye for a while before I wrapped my head around it. But returning to the intellectual humility bit–you can bring Fitch up in circles where people turn the pop-humanism knob up to 11, (“New Atheist” folks usually fit this) and find yourself facing a mob of people who would rather throw out their notions of logic and truth than accept the existence of truths beyond human grasp.
On that note, I’d like to give Chesterton the last word: “I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child’s mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. I have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes. They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture. We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.”
This is a lot of talk, but marriage is a shitty proposition and I don’t think it is the only way you can attain intimacy.
I’ll be interested to see what happens, but I don’t think it likely it will last between the minters. I think weakness and an inability to deal with his fear of dying alone are what pushed him to this.