Voltage is derived from chemistry. There is an electric pressure associated with different reactions, and a battery is a device for creating a lot of this pressure in parallel. The basic reactions tend to produce something in the area of 1.5 volts. This is normal for alkaline batteries, the sort you are used to.

The devices we power with those piles usually need more power than this. My knowledge of this is very dated at present, but it comes down to the kind of transistors in the chips. You get about 3 volts out of 2 batteries... Roughly 5 volts out of 3...

There aren't any facts in it to engage with, though. It was all vapid assertions. A claim was asserted about why the Chinese invented global warming (a framing trick, meant to pass off an unsupported assumption as true a priori), but no evidence is given to support the conclusion about American manufacturing. That is also a framing trick, because there are a lot other plausible explanations for our industrial decline.

I don't need a new concept for "fact" to notice these things.

Interesting, but I'm not going along with it.

The assumption that nobody considers epistemological factors and issues of framing when weighing facts is patently absurd. The author demonstrates this by forcefully arguing for their consideration himself.

This feels like an exercise in equivocation. The worry about facts causing religious zeal is ass backwards, because anybody who thinks of facts with epistemological factors and framing considerations in mind is de facto able to consider various points of view.

I would be a lot less hostile to this sophistry if it held the promise of a better approach to rigor, but it does not. All it does is is grant license to believe whatever the hell you want.

I am sorry, but I actually do feel a moral obligation not to believe things that are untrue, to the best of my ability. This entails using all my powers of deduction, induction and abduction to plumb out trust and framing surrounding those data by which I determine what is true. I need no new word for "fact" to keep these considerations in mind.

It seems like you are pointing out a shortcoming in our terminology. This is an interesting thing to key on, because it seems to capture some of the trouble with our therapeutic approaches. Chasing hedonia without a framework for a meaningful life may, in many instances, be the actual cause of the difficulty.

Eudaimonia is a tricky term. We don't exactly think in terms of daimons anymore. It looks like hedonia was used to encompass both forms of happiness initially, and the term eudaimonia was dredged up out of Plato when a need arose for more nuance. To form an opposite, you'd have to go with something like 'maldemonia' and this whole demon thing starts to intrude on it's utility.

Just the same, this right here is the fault line in therapeutic practice today. The need for a better set of terms for the moving parts of a well built life is enormous.

Thank you for this.

My own insights often lack the force of authority, because I am untrained in philosophy. What knowledge I have of it came entirely from my own curiosity and my ability to read.

This has firmly placed me in that camp that finds philosophy not rooted in real events to be so much vapid tail-chasery. I could be (and often am) confused for a Trumpist for my scathing invective at high-left omphaloskepsis. For this I am exposed to an effect treated briefly in this article: the weak attack not the powerful, but the vulnerable.

The comment about Al Franken at the end... I felt this way so strongly that it truly sapped any enthusiasm I could muster for the Democrats. To blast your own foot like that and pretend it wasn't an utter disaster is a good way to telegraph to your constituents that you are unserious about governing.

I still vote for them out of abhorrence for the Trumpist party, but my support hardly rises to the level of 'lukewarm'. With no vision but grievance and guilt, they offer nothing but a way to not vote Trump, and I'm bracing for impact because I know that isn't enough.