Well, 1) your second sentence almost exactly just mirrors what the title already says in a tone that for some reason thinks it contradicts it, and 2) only refers to thought experiments as pedagogical devices to clarify issues rather than their broader use in philosophical literature, and the more general use of intuition, to actually arrive at allegedly correct solutions.

Wow, the only good response to this issue I've seen, thank you lol

If you're only familiar with thought experiments or intuition as a pedagogical tool because you've only taken a philosophy 101 class then this makes sense, but they're also used in philosophical arguments all the time, and not only for stuff that's thought to be objective.

> But hey, understanding something is harder than rejecting it.

I absolutely agree. You should give that a try for this issue.

They didn't really say anything lmao. It's almost literally gobbledygook still meant as reddit rationalcel cope

1000% this. It's important to acknowledge how much other people don't know things or wing it or are faking it and whatnot, to help mitigate the impostor syndrome and low self-esteem, though those are not always sufficient, admittedly (I'm exhibit A lmao). It really does seem to be about doing your best to accept that everything is tentative and best guesses, based on convention and rarely are things hard and fast, etc.

The abuse of being willing to admit faults is a whole other ball game. But at least for the personal individual matters, even being willing to admit fault and apologize shows that one generally knows when an error was made, and that knowing can then potentially be used to alleviate impostor syndrome and low self-esteem, because it can be used to make one's self better. That's way easier said than done, and someone might just as easily feel worse when admitting an error (hi, it's me again), but it doesn't have to be that way.

This is a really cloudy area to talk about as it's super abstract, but I do wanna try to outline a certain path that helped me a little. Political stuff I've read has always involved a lot of self-criticism, but the last couple years I've read a lot that has involved taking in way more perspectives and academic research than usual. It's helped me see that how things are framed matters immensely and that usually most perspectives have something to contribute. This has helped me become totally fine seeing when something a political opponent says is correct, or when someone points out something bad about me or something. I'll freely admit that, but just incorporate it into the frame and/or reshape the frame of the conversation or interaction based on whether or not it's relevant, how it is, how it does or does not change anything, etc. And I'll freely admit when I don't know something and don't know how it affects the framework of something. Because everything's tentative. I realize this may all sound meaningless because I'm not giving a lot of detail, it's just super hard to talk about without going insanely in-depth if someone hasn't gone through a similar intellectual path (I realize how unbelievably pretentious that phrasing is, I just can't think of any other way to put it lmao). But basically, reading and learning lots of self-criticism of my own and similar political tendencies, learning a bit about the vast amount of research on subjects involved in political stuff that's emphasized in those tendencies, seeing how nuanced and controversial and surprising and ingenious and whatnot that that research can be, seeing how various perspectives color one's interpretation of the world and the ways they do and don't contribute things that are true, all helped me be more okay with the tentativeness of my own understanding of things and how it can change, especially when encountering new or different understandings.

Again, that's not all necessarily sufficient for alleviating low self-esteem, but it could possibly help.

This is just way too contextual to be descibable summarily and as generally as said here.

Yeah, narcissism lol. But that first part's only really as simple as that if you don't really philosophize any further than that.

I agree, just pointing out the lapse in good reasoning in the interview.

It's those and a lot more. I don't really know of anyone explicitly promoting an attempt to live free of suffering either. It just seems like an implicit composite built out of background cultural pushes in that direction that make people feel worse for failing and whatnot, which philosophy then uses as a foil in talking about how to actually get through the suffering instead of the implicit idea of forgoing it entirely.

What are you saying leads to pessimism here, the acknowledgement that suffering is inevitable? Because I doubt there's any philosophy in existence that completely denies the existence of suffering at all, and most philosophies are not pessimistic in the sense here, so the acknowledgement definitely doesn't lead to that.

As for philosophies that speak to the suffering of all and not just some, there are a lot that do, but it's mostly just paper thin arguments about why those suffering the most implicitly deserve it because they don't play by society's rules. I suspect speaking about suffering in general is too abstract to really examine those most suffering in society in a way that's meant to be integrated into a larger sociopolitical philosophy.

Seems like their use of "ideal life" is the imagined one free of "loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, and the absurd" whereas your use here is one in which those are well-managed but still present. I see how both could be called ideal lives, but they're not the same in my eyes, or I doubt anybody's really.

So two things. First, the thought of the story of human life being meaningful if the outcome is a just society is a strange one, especially considering the deemphasizing of telos earlier on (focusing on process instead of projects). This is not only because it focuses on the end of a project, obtaining a just society, but because life goes on after that's obtained. There's no end to history, so it can always be changed, and potentially for the worse, for society to become unjust again, and thus the story of human life becoming unmeaningful once again. The only way out of that I see is for humanity to be extinguished on a good note somehow.

The second and more important thing to me is the focus on atelic activities. Like I agree it's obviously better that if we are able to derive meaning/feel good/have fun/be happy/have a good reason to live/live well/etc at least more through the atelic processes than telic ones then that would be fantastic because those are the activities that make up almost all of life. But I don't know how to think of those as the most meaningful for myself and desperately want to. Somebody please help with that lmao