“One can be so angered and disgusted by panic and whimsical pseudoscience that one gives over all one's hobby time to reducing its dire effects and spread and containment and debunking and so on.”
Original posting from 2015: If emotions can cloud judgment, how does one know his judgment is objective?
I would rather be a man than an unreasoning brute. It is intensely interesting to me the 'knowledge' claims made on specious grounds, especially intuitions or emotional snap-shot judgments. Many prejudices and bigotries are fueled by 'feelings,' and stand athwart roads to knowledge.
I repudiate and loathe post-modern conceptions of knowledge, which have proliferated upon stupidity. From shoddy 'alternative' modalities taught in nursing schools to imponderably stupid sociology, a reliance upon epistemic whoopee had alarmed me. This took root early in life as a skeptic of religious claims, and grew past cult studies into an engagement in the Recovered Memory Wars. Please don't mistake me for an epistemic relativist. I had contempt and disgust for the 'knowledge' claims made by practitioners, authors, touts, also-rans, theorists. I cut my teeth on the internet doing battle with such epistemic claims. If you think I am on a bench with Chopra, you're nuts.
Emotion and Epistemology (2015)