Back in 2010 I acquired a new hobby, defending Republican candidates from exaggerations of how nutty they were. That raised a more general question of some interest: What counts as nutty?
What’s the utility of saying, “this person is a nut, that one not?” Maybe starting there gives a very different conclusion: not all conversations are a good use of time. Saying someone is a nut means, to me, that me talking to them isn’t a good use of time. Yet this seems to me that it’s more an admission of weakness on my part; maybe if I were more patient and loving it could go well.
I don't label people as "nuts" very often, even in my own thinking.
What I have started to do a few years ago is realize that our priors are so far apart that there's no reasonable way to reconcile our different starting positions and the conversation is not going to be fruitful. We'll end up throwing talking points at each other and never getting to the meat.
I used to engage in these conversations anyway and hope to reach the people reading instead of the person responding. Now I have less time and don't think it's efficient for me to spend hours trying to walk an argument through from first principles in the hopes that a third party is close enough to my own understanding to bridge the gap. I've had some good success with that in the past, but at the cost of many hours of my free time and very mixed results.
“Nutty” generally falls into that Justice Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” category, I think. To the extent that I think about it at all, I lump “nuts” into 2 broad categories: 1) the harmless nuts who just firmly believe things I am very certain are not true, and 2) dangerous nuts whose silly beliefs may lead to real harm to others. Since I grew up in a very low population area, it was very easy to see and recognize some of each of these. We all “knew” which locals were nuts but safe, and which nuts were dangerous and you should avoid being around them and/or “setting them off.”
For instance, here's a borderline case. I knew a woman with a very good job as a bookkeeper (and an accountant, really, with no formal training) whose personal hobby was suing people – family, friends, neighbors, random strangers, whoever. She was simply not happy unless she had 2-3 ongoing lawsuits at any given time. Was she “dangerous”? Absolutely not, Wouldn't physically harm a fly. Was she extremely troublesome to those she sued? Absolutely. Did she endanger them or their lives or health? Well, that's kind of hard to say. So. “Nutty”. No doubt at all. But, where on a harmless to damned dangerous would she fall?
I think we might consider “nutty” to be someone whose beliefs and behaviors are so far from the local norms (defined by however community she and you both occupy) and so resistant to change so as need to be tolerated (at best) rather than engaged.
One of my favorite profs was Leo Strauss's last grad assistant. A very interesting, thoughtful guy. (Most of my academic colleagues who were aware of Strauss regarded him as “nutty”.) My prof said that the problem with (moral) philosophy was that “God or evolution has equipped us to know how to ask questions and seek the Truth, but there is no guarantee that we will find it, or even that it exists.” Nutty, or deeply thoughtful?
Anyway, I tend to think of “nutty” as firmly holding beliefs that most people would find contrary to discoverable facts. Or something like that. A lot of beliefs by all of us don't seem to depend on actual facts at all. I strongly suspect that evolution 'chose' us to be able to ignore many facts that have little or no impact on our reproductive capacity. Considering too many facts is dangerous in many ways. It kind of reminds me of Robert A Heinlein, who said (paraphrase from memory), “While a modern soldier is busy integrating all the facts provided by all his equipment he may have a barbarian creep up behind him and brain him with a stone ax.” Too much attention to too many facts can be very dangerous to an individual. So it is selected against.
And rather a lot of interesting, useful, and eventually acknowledged ideas have started with someone who was considered pretty “nutty.”
Liked for using the RAH reference... Well, and good points.
I would add to the discussion of what folks can be expected to know....
Most folks have a tremendous opportunity to learn about the world around them and refuse to take it. (What am I going to need that for? I won't study.)
Is it really unreasonable to expect a congress-critter to have a basic understanding of math or biology? The opportunity was sitting right there. If they're ignorant, it's because they were too lazy and/or short sighted to bother learning about the world.
Then having no understanding or skill about how the world works, they are like a non-driver trying to seize the wheel in an emergency. They never bothered to learn how to drive, but think they should choose the path for the vehicle and everyone in it.
I think the short answer is that it is unreasonable to expect a congressman to have a basic knowledge of math, biology, or history. It's useful information but not essential for what he is doing. Given the number of pages of legislation each year there is no way that an individual congressman can read all of it, let alone forming an intelligent opinion on the basis of his own knowledge. He is necessarily dependent on his staff and on other informational middlemen.
His expertise is in getting elected, knowing what his voters want, and figuring out how to get it for them. It's amusing that Biden doesn't know basic facts of American political history but the only disturbing thing is that he feels free to invent them, thus contributing to the wider spread of misinformation.
Now days, arguably, such knowledge is essential. Consider our senseless energy policy being pushed by folks who have no idea how the grids work.
And I'm not saying they should educate themselves now. I'm saying that if they were worthy of the office, they would have learned that information as children in school, when it was freely available to any who will put out hte effort.
That they couldn't be bothered as teens to learn those subjects speaks to their character and intellect.
I agree the lacks don't make them 'nutty', but it does make them unworthy of office, IMO.
If they had focused on becoming well educated instead of learning the skills and achieving the experience needed to get elected they wouldn't have the high office to be worthy of.
I have spent a lot time and effort critiquing current climate orthodoxy.
It's fun and intellectually rewarding, but anyone who hasn't put that sort of effort into it, or any of multiple other issues, isn't really acting on his own well informed judgement, he's simply adopting the conclusions on some controversial issue of people he trusts.
The information they would have learned as teens in school would be either whatever conclusions were in fashion with the people then controlling what they were taught or a set of tools inadequate to later figure out for themselves what the right conclusions were. I have a doctorate in physics, a bachelors in chemistry and physics, and a long academic career in economics and law. None of that equips me to have confident conclusions on climate or energy policy without quite a lot of additional effort looking at and evaluating arguments — which a practicing politician probably can't afford to spend on very many of the issues he will vote on.
The civics class model of democracy, where voters figure out who are the ablest legislators and each legislator then works out for himself what policies are in the national interest and votes accordingly, isn't a workable system for a government doing a wide range of things in a large population polity in a complicated world.
I see what you're saying David, but I think basic education in these topics has more utility than you suggest.
Basic physics (or engineering) equips a person to tell the difference between energy and power, which are often confused in an effort to mislead the public and policy makers -- generating capacity vs. energy actually generated. Basic chemistry equips one enough to know that the hype about using H2 as an energy storage and transfer medium is never going to be practical.
It does take some further research to realize that much of the grid level recommendations make no sense, but being equipped with fundamental science gives one (or at least gave me) the platform I needed to look at the recommendations and policies and say, "Hey, wait, something here seems off." Which is the starting point for asking for more information instead of just going along with a societal swindle on a grand scale. Perhaps at that point a legislator would ask an aid to do investigative research.
Of course, all this assumes that the legislators actually want to serve the public interest, which is increasingly questionable.
"It is at the point when the argument depends on ignoring facts he does know, on defending inconsistent positions, demonstrates that he is committed to the conclusion whatever the evidence and the arguments might be, that the balance begins to tip."
I've become strongly convinced that when people are very upset, (mainly: scared and/or angry and/or in an argument) they function in ways that are effectively stupider than their baseline intellect allows--sometimes much stupider. Linking that with this would imply that someone who insists on spending a large percentage of their conversational opportunities on a topic that makes them upset will make them look more like a "nut."
Accordingly, in IRL conversations, when someone "goes there," I consider one of the best ways of being useful to them (and any other hearers present) is to calm. them. down.
You're making the mistake of thinking of the decision-makers and the people suffering for the decisions as the same people or having any useful overlap. A lot of decisions make more sense if you realize that the people suffering have little to no voice and the people deciding have little to no consequences.
To the extent that people have different backgrounds but overlap in physical space, it is easy for one to conclude that there are a lot of nuts out there.
‘Nut’ or ‘this person is nuts’ has a colloquial sense beyond its literal meaning. I don’t think Mike Lindell belongs in an insane asylum, but there are time he says things that would elicit a ‘this guy is nuts’ from me. Everyone would know I didn’t think he should be committed but he has a habit of spewing nonsense.
I find this argument mostly compelling. I.e. to a first approximation, I agree that "a nut" ... [holds] beliefs that no reasonable person with [their] intellectual background could hold."
I'm not sure, however whether it's really OK to think in terms of their specific intellectual background, rather than something a bit larger scale.
Consider some unfortunate raised in a "nut cult," not exposed to anything that could contradict the group's doctrines, and routinely taught that those doctrines are true. As soon as this unfortunate interacts with people outside the cult that raises them, they'll seem just as much a "nut" as any convert to the cult. The converts presumably have an intellectual background that means they should know better; their offspring presumably do not. But both seem equally nutty to outsiders.
A few of those raised in the cult may reject its teachings, when eventually exposed to what everyone outside the cult was raised to know. Many won't. Once that happens, the few apostates are no longer nuts - probably not really nuts once they start questioning their upbringing. But those who remain faithful?
My observation of "nutty Republican statements" is that most of them are massively taken out of context to make them seem nuttier than they actually are. In fact many turn out to be entirely reasonable when presented in context. One classic example was the way that Sarah Palin was alleged to have said that she could see Russia from her living room, which when you dug into it was in fact stating (correctly) that the far eastern bits of Siberia are visible from the far western bits of Alaska.
What I find nuttiest in general are the people who "believe in Science". I always assume that anyone who unironically says / writes that is in fact sure to believe in a number of things that are scientifically false such as misunderstanding how long it will take the icecaps to melt
Leftist activist: "Believe in Science" (masks, lockdown, 12 years to climate catastrophe) = "Men can have Babies" (it's too disrespectful, psychologically damaging to call them trans-men).
Many of the changes made to age of consent laws were surprisingly recent, starting initially during the late 1800s and early 1900s, and then during the late 1970s in response to how far the sexual revolution went, with this wave continuing even to the present day (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2032284417699293). Moreover much of this seems memory holed, my favourite example would be the whole Epstein/Andrew/Giuffre stuff, where most people talking about it seem to forget that prior to the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, the age of adulthood for certain offences was 16, and that the tabloids made great use of this fact. That the story where wealthy elites conspire to do bad things, makes for a much better story than one in which human trafficking and CSA (by contemporary standards) happened in plain sight, and the only people to stand up against such abuses were ridiculed and publicly humiliated, such as in the case of Clare Short (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/jan/14/pressandpublishing.politicsandthemedia). The other more disturbing example would be Scandinavia during the 1970s.
"So what does qualify one as a nut? I think the best answer I can come up with is holding beliefs that no reasonable person with your intellectual background could hold."
I'd say it's about awareness of the likelihood of your belief being true and ability to defend it, not necessarily about the belief itself. If someone believes with certainty things he can't rationally defend, I consider him nuts. For example believing a regularly sized mouse with fully functioning human brain can possibly exist is nuts, because it's impossible to rationally defend such a belief. The same applies to religious beliefs.
That said, human brain is good at compartmentalizing, and many people somehow can be completely irrational in some areas (nuts), while being rational in others. That's why some physicists believe in god, or many smart people are statists.
>rabbis in Palestine raising the marriage age in Jewish law — was defended by the factual claim that bearing children young was more dangerous now than it had been two thousand years ago, a "scientific" claim that strikes me as distinctly nutty.
"It is forbidden for any Jewish man to take in marriage a girl who is below the age of sixteen years and one day, because the pregnancy of anyone younger puts the mother and the child in danger of death in our times when the generations have become weaker and strength has declined ..." (1950)
In terms of Jewish law, technically it's possible for a girl 12 and a boy 13. Much like polygamy is technically possible, of course, but I've never heard this particular reason before.
(When I got engaged to my husband, I insisted that part of the deal was that even if polygamous marriage becomes socially acceptable in the future, I would always be the only wife. So far so good.)
In terms of Rabbinic law as I understand it, a girl becomes a woman at twelve and a half, provided that she showed some signs of puberty by twelve, and a boy similarly at thirteen and a half. That doesn't mean they cannot marry younger, only that doing so requires parental permission. Once they are legally adult it doesn't.
I don't know how that fits current practice of Israeli rabbis but I'm pretty sure it is the traditional rule.
I think you are correct. I am familiar with American cases where this has been practiced (in cult like environments), but no one seems to be questioning the validity of the marriages.
Internal consistency seems to be a big part of this. And not just in what the person has personally said, but how well the things the person has said fits within the generally accepted truth that the viewer knows.
If a person says both X and Y, and they are directly contradictory (in a way that should be evident), then we can generally say the person is a nut.
Also, if a person says X, and society believes Y, and they are contradictory, we have the same gut reaction. It's entirely possible that this person also doesn't believe Y, and therefore their worldview is not contradictory at all (though it may still be wrong and even nutty).
The further away from what society generally believes, the easier for us to categorize someone as a nut.
Some examples (keep in mind that there may be variations of any of these that are more reasonable than the surface-level appearance):
A belief that Donald Trump is a strategic mastermind and also an incompetent buffoon. X contradicts Y.
A belief that a free market economy would solve poverty (X) and a belief that free markets cause inequality and therefore poverty (Y). A person holding both would be a nut, but lots of people hold X without holding Y and vice-versa.
The really kooky conspiracy theory types get labelled as such because their stance requires disagreement with a wide variety of society-held beliefs. Sometimes this is them truly being nuts (the Illuminati secretly control all world governments) and sometimes it's a matter of society's beliefs being unusually wrong - as with covid lab leak or WMDs in Iraq.
Anyone with a column to fill or a speech to make has to stuff in something. If it is nutty, it is nutty. Job done. The more nutty you are the more nutty stuff you stuff in. Outgroup stuffs in more nutty stuff than ingroup. As ingroup one has a duty to ingroup to call outgroup nutty.
It's intriguing to consider how societal consensus often dictates what we deem as 'rational' or 'nutty.' Take, for example, a theory a friend shared with me after going down a YouTube rabbit hole: the idea that super-intelligent aliens visited Earth millennia ago, and their progeny are the puppet masters of today's world. At first glance, it's a concept that many would quickly label as a fringe conspiracy. But isn't it fascinating how this is perceived as more outlandish than the widespread religious beliefs held by billions? These include a deity governing the cosmos, the phenomenon of virgin birth, and the notion of resurrection and eternal salvation.
The irony here is stark. Both sets of beliefs - extraterrestrial overlords and religious doctrines - are, at their core, equally extraordinary and unsupported by empirical evidence. Yet, one is easily dismissed as the fancy of nutty conspiracy theorists, while the other is revered and deeply ingrained in societies worldwide. This disparity isn't about the plausibility of the beliefs themselves but rather about the sheer number of adherents that lends a veneer of credibility to what, in any other context, might be dismissed as fantastical. In a world where belief in a supernatural overseer is the norm, alien overlords don't seem so far-fetched. It's a curious reflection on human nature and our collective inclination to label the unfamiliar as absurd while embracing equally unprovable beliefs simply because they are familiar and widely accepted.
Given that most of our knowledge is necessarily second hand, it really is less nutty to believe something that billions of other people believe than to believe something similar that nobody else believes. The fact that others believe it is evidence that it is true — just not very strong evidence.
The question of nuttiness asked here seems to conflate the relative contributions of psychopathology and poor education and reasoning. That's not a criticism. I think we do that knowingly when we ask what kind of political discourse is beyond the pale. We also understand that when this question arises,we often deal with the territory of personality disorders, where we recognize distortions of perception and behavior that are not psychotic in nature but also not normal. We can think about it in both dimensional and categorical terms. I'd say we typically don't consider merely uneducated people to be nutty and self-correct when we realize it's just a lack of information and being surrounded by same. My problem with defending either illiberal rightists or leftists against the nut charge is that I often find the charges to be deserved. Celebrants of the Hamas atrocities and the January 6 rioters deserve the appellation, despite the fact that quite a few of them will turn out to be much better people in the future than they seemed to be in the moment. One could argue that they therefore don't deserved the nut label to begin with but, for our usual purposes, they do. Joe Biden is quite morally flawed but he's not an obvious psychopath like Donald Trump. This is simply the case, whether one finds it inconvenient or not in terms of policy positions one would like to see implemented. Some past Republican candidates were IMO clearly made of better moral stuff than Biden. It would not be intellectually honest to pretend that such things can never be obvious but are completely subject to political bias. The capacity to engage in reality testing is a thing, and it comes in varying degrees of endowment and interference...
What’s the utility of saying, “this person is a nut, that one not?” Maybe starting there gives a very different conclusion: not all conversations are a good use of time. Saying someone is a nut means, to me, that me talking to them isn’t a good use of time. Yet this seems to me that it’s more an admission of weakness on my part; maybe if I were more patient and loving it could go well.
I don't label people as "nuts" very often, even in my own thinking.
What I have started to do a few years ago is realize that our priors are so far apart that there's no reasonable way to reconcile our different starting positions and the conversation is not going to be fruitful. We'll end up throwing talking points at each other and never getting to the meat.
I used to engage in these conversations anyway and hope to reach the people reading instead of the person responding. Now I have less time and don't think it's efficient for me to spend hours trying to walk an argument through from first principles in the hopes that a third party is close enough to my own understanding to bridge the gap. I've had some good success with that in the past, but at the cost of many hours of my free time and very mixed results.
“Nutty” generally falls into that Justice Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” category, I think. To the extent that I think about it at all, I lump “nuts” into 2 broad categories: 1) the harmless nuts who just firmly believe things I am very certain are not true, and 2) dangerous nuts whose silly beliefs may lead to real harm to others. Since I grew up in a very low population area, it was very easy to see and recognize some of each of these. We all “knew” which locals were nuts but safe, and which nuts were dangerous and you should avoid being around them and/or “setting them off.”
For instance, here's a borderline case. I knew a woman with a very good job as a bookkeeper (and an accountant, really, with no formal training) whose personal hobby was suing people – family, friends, neighbors, random strangers, whoever. She was simply not happy unless she had 2-3 ongoing lawsuits at any given time. Was she “dangerous”? Absolutely not, Wouldn't physically harm a fly. Was she extremely troublesome to those she sued? Absolutely. Did she endanger them or their lives or health? Well, that's kind of hard to say. So. “Nutty”. No doubt at all. But, where on a harmless to damned dangerous would she fall?
I think we might consider “nutty” to be someone whose beliefs and behaviors are so far from the local norms (defined by however community she and you both occupy) and so resistant to change so as need to be tolerated (at best) rather than engaged.
One of my favorite profs was Leo Strauss's last grad assistant. A very interesting, thoughtful guy. (Most of my academic colleagues who were aware of Strauss regarded him as “nutty”.) My prof said that the problem with (moral) philosophy was that “God or evolution has equipped us to know how to ask questions and seek the Truth, but there is no guarantee that we will find it, or even that it exists.” Nutty, or deeply thoughtful?
Anyway, I tend to think of “nutty” as firmly holding beliefs that most people would find contrary to discoverable facts. Or something like that. A lot of beliefs by all of us don't seem to depend on actual facts at all. I strongly suspect that evolution 'chose' us to be able to ignore many facts that have little or no impact on our reproductive capacity. Considering too many facts is dangerous in many ways. It kind of reminds me of Robert A Heinlein, who said (paraphrase from memory), “While a modern soldier is busy integrating all the facts provided by all his equipment he may have a barbarian creep up behind him and brain him with a stone ax.” Too much attention to too many facts can be very dangerous to an individual. So it is selected against.
And rather a lot of interesting, useful, and eventually acknowledged ideas have started with someone who was considered pretty “nutty.”
Liked for using the RAH reference... Well, and good points.
I would add to the discussion of what folks can be expected to know....
Most folks have a tremendous opportunity to learn about the world around them and refuse to take it. (What am I going to need that for? I won't study.)
Is it really unreasonable to expect a congress-critter to have a basic understanding of math or biology? The opportunity was sitting right there. If they're ignorant, it's because they were too lazy and/or short sighted to bother learning about the world.
Then having no understanding or skill about how the world works, they are like a non-driver trying to seize the wheel in an emergency. They never bothered to learn how to drive, but think they should choose the path for the vehicle and everyone in it.
I think the short answer is that it is unreasonable to expect a congressman to have a basic knowledge of math, biology, or history. It's useful information but not essential for what he is doing. Given the number of pages of legislation each year there is no way that an individual congressman can read all of it, let alone forming an intelligent opinion on the basis of his own knowledge. He is necessarily dependent on his staff and on other informational middlemen.
His expertise is in getting elected, knowing what his voters want, and figuring out how to get it for them. It's amusing that Biden doesn't know basic facts of American political history but the only disturbing thing is that he feels free to invent them, thus contributing to the wider spread of misinformation.
Now days, arguably, such knowledge is essential. Consider our senseless energy policy being pushed by folks who have no idea how the grids work.
And I'm not saying they should educate themselves now. I'm saying that if they were worthy of the office, they would have learned that information as children in school, when it was freely available to any who will put out hte effort.
That they couldn't be bothered as teens to learn those subjects speaks to their character and intellect.
I agree the lacks don't make them 'nutty', but it does make them unworthy of office, IMO.
If they had focused on becoming well educated instead of learning the skills and achieving the experience needed to get elected they wouldn't have the high office to be worthy of.
I have spent a lot time and effort critiquing current climate orthodoxy.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Climate.
It's fun and intellectually rewarding, but anyone who hasn't put that sort of effort into it, or any of multiple other issues, isn't really acting on his own well informed judgement, he's simply adopting the conclusions on some controversial issue of people he trusts.
The information they would have learned as teens in school would be either whatever conclusions were in fashion with the people then controlling what they were taught or a set of tools inadequate to later figure out for themselves what the right conclusions were. I have a doctorate in physics, a bachelors in chemistry and physics, and a long academic career in economics and law. None of that equips me to have confident conclusions on climate or energy policy without quite a lot of additional effort looking at and evaluating arguments — which a practicing politician probably can't afford to spend on very many of the issues he will vote on.
The civics class model of democracy, where voters figure out who are the ablest legislators and each legislator then works out for himself what policies are in the national interest and votes accordingly, isn't a workable system for a government doing a wide range of things in a large population polity in a complicated world.
I see what you're saying David, but I think basic education in these topics has more utility than you suggest.
Basic physics (or engineering) equips a person to tell the difference between energy and power, which are often confused in an effort to mislead the public and policy makers -- generating capacity vs. energy actually generated. Basic chemistry equips one enough to know that the hype about using H2 as an energy storage and transfer medium is never going to be practical.
It does take some further research to realize that much of the grid level recommendations make no sense, but being equipped with fundamental science gives one (or at least gave me) the platform I needed to look at the recommendations and policies and say, "Hey, wait, something here seems off." Which is the starting point for asking for more information instead of just going along with a societal swindle on a grand scale. Perhaps at that point a legislator would ask an aid to do investigative research.
Of course, all this assumes that the legislators actually want to serve the public interest, which is increasingly questionable.
"It is at the point when the argument depends on ignoring facts he does know, on defending inconsistent positions, demonstrates that he is committed to the conclusion whatever the evidence and the arguments might be, that the balance begins to tip."
I've become strongly convinced that when people are very upset, (mainly: scared and/or angry and/or in an argument) they function in ways that are effectively stupider than their baseline intellect allows--sometimes much stupider. Linking that with this would imply that someone who insists on spending a large percentage of their conversational opportunities on a topic that makes them upset will make them look more like a "nut."
Accordingly, in IRL conversations, when someone "goes there," I consider one of the best ways of being useful to them (and any other hearers present) is to calm. them. down.
People believe what they want to believe unless reality forces them to believe something different.
And often-times not then. See Uri 2021, Texas Deaths, and continued reliance on wind energy.
You're making the mistake of thinking of the decision-makers and the people suffering for the decisions as the same people or having any useful overlap. A lot of decisions make more sense if you realize that the people suffering have little to no voice and the people deciding have little to no consequences.
To the extent that people have different backgrounds but overlap in physical space, it is easy for one to conclude that there are a lot of nuts out there.
‘Nut’ or ‘this person is nuts’ has a colloquial sense beyond its literal meaning. I don’t think Mike Lindell belongs in an insane asylum, but there are time he says things that would elicit a ‘this guy is nuts’ from me. Everyone would know I didn’t think he should be committed but he has a habit of spewing nonsense.
I find this argument mostly compelling. I.e. to a first approximation, I agree that "a nut" ... [holds] beliefs that no reasonable person with [their] intellectual background could hold."
I'm not sure, however whether it's really OK to think in terms of their specific intellectual background, rather than something a bit larger scale.
Consider some unfortunate raised in a "nut cult," not exposed to anything that could contradict the group's doctrines, and routinely taught that those doctrines are true. As soon as this unfortunate interacts with people outside the cult that raises them, they'll seem just as much a "nut" as any convert to the cult. The converts presumably have an intellectual background that means they should know better; their offspring presumably do not. But both seem equally nutty to outsiders.
A few of those raised in the cult may reject its teachings, when eventually exposed to what everyone outside the cult was raised to know. Many won't. Once that happens, the few apostates are no longer nuts - probably not really nuts once they start questioning their upbringing. But those who remain faithful?
My feeling is that he has nutty beliefs but may not himself be a nut.
My observation of "nutty Republican statements" is that most of them are massively taken out of context to make them seem nuttier than they actually are. In fact many turn out to be entirely reasonable when presented in context. One classic example was the way that Sarah Palin was alleged to have said that she could see Russia from her living room, which when you dug into it was in fact stating (correctly) that the far eastern bits of Siberia are visible from the far western bits of Alaska.
What I find nuttiest in general are the people who "believe in Science". I always assume that anyone who unironically says / writes that is in fact sure to believe in a number of things that are scientifically false such as misunderstanding how long it will take the icecaps to melt
Leftist activist: "Believe in Science" (masks, lockdown, 12 years to climate catastrophe) = "Men can have Babies" (it's too disrespectful, psychologically damaging to call them trans-men).
Many of the changes made to age of consent laws were surprisingly recent, starting initially during the late 1800s and early 1900s, and then during the late 1970s in response to how far the sexual revolution went, with this wave continuing even to the present day (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2032284417699293). Moreover much of this seems memory holed, my favourite example would be the whole Epstein/Andrew/Giuffre stuff, where most people talking about it seem to forget that prior to the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, the age of adulthood for certain offences was 16, and that the tabloids made great use of this fact. That the story where wealthy elites conspire to do bad things, makes for a much better story than one in which human trafficking and CSA (by contemporary standards) happened in plain sight, and the only people to stand up against such abuses were ridiculed and publicly humiliated, such as in the case of Clare Short (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/jan/14/pressandpublishing.politicsandthemedia). The other more disturbing example would be Scandinavia during the 1970s.
"So what does qualify one as a nut? I think the best answer I can come up with is holding beliefs that no reasonable person with your intellectual background could hold."
I'd say it's about awareness of the likelihood of your belief being true and ability to defend it, not necessarily about the belief itself. If someone believes with certainty things he can't rationally defend, I consider him nuts. For example believing a regularly sized mouse with fully functioning human brain can possibly exist is nuts, because it's impossible to rationally defend such a belief. The same applies to religious beliefs.
That said, human brain is good at compartmentalizing, and many people somehow can be completely irrational in some areas (nuts), while being rational in others. That's why some physicists believe in god, or many smart people are statists.
>rabbis in Palestine raising the marriage age in Jewish law — was defended by the factual claim that bearing children young was more dangerous now than it had been two thousand years ago, a "scientific" claim that strikes me as distinctly nutty.
Do you have a link?
Menachem Elon, _Jewish Law_, Volume II p. 834:
"It is forbidden for any Jewish man to take in marriage a girl who is below the age of sixteen years and one day, because the pregnancy of anyone younger puts the mother and the child in danger of death in our times when the generations have become weaker and strength has declined ..." (1950)
This is not as practiced.
In Israel at present? A religious wedding is permitted with a bride younger than sixteen? Is there a limit?
The official limit in Israel is 18:
In terms of Jewish law, technically it's possible for a girl 12 and a boy 13. Much like polygamy is technically possible, of course, but I've never heard this particular reason before.
(When I got engaged to my husband, I insisted that part of the deal was that even if polygamous marriage becomes socially acceptable in the future, I would always be the only wife. So far so good.)
In terms of Rabbinic law as I understand it, a girl becomes a woman at twelve and a half, provided that she showed some signs of puberty by twelve, and a boy similarly at thirteen and a half. That doesn't mean they cannot marry younger, only that doing so requires parental permission. Once they are legally adult it doesn't.
I don't know how that fits current practice of Israeli rabbis but I'm pretty sure it is the traditional rule.
I think you are correct. I am familiar with American cases where this has been practiced (in cult like environments), but no one seems to be questioning the validity of the marriages.
I see his source but it is definitely technically permitted and has been practiced in recent memory. Actually this source is the first I've seen this.
Internal consistency seems to be a big part of this. And not just in what the person has personally said, but how well the things the person has said fits within the generally accepted truth that the viewer knows.
If a person says both X and Y, and they are directly contradictory (in a way that should be evident), then we can generally say the person is a nut.
Also, if a person says X, and society believes Y, and they are contradictory, we have the same gut reaction. It's entirely possible that this person also doesn't believe Y, and therefore their worldview is not contradictory at all (though it may still be wrong and even nutty).
The further away from what society generally believes, the easier for us to categorize someone as a nut.
Some examples (keep in mind that there may be variations of any of these that are more reasonable than the surface-level appearance):
A belief that Donald Trump is a strategic mastermind and also an incompetent buffoon. X contradicts Y.
A belief that a free market economy would solve poverty (X) and a belief that free markets cause inequality and therefore poverty (Y). A person holding both would be a nut, but lots of people hold X without holding Y and vice-versa.
The really kooky conspiracy theory types get labelled as such because their stance requires disagreement with a wide variety of society-held beliefs. Sometimes this is them truly being nuts (the Illuminati secretly control all world governments) and sometimes it's a matter of society's beliefs being unusually wrong - as with covid lab leak or WMDs in Iraq.
Anyone with a column to fill or a speech to make has to stuff in something. If it is nutty, it is nutty. Job done. The more nutty you are the more nutty stuff you stuff in. Outgroup stuffs in more nutty stuff than ingroup. As ingroup one has a duty to ingroup to call outgroup nutty.
It's intriguing to consider how societal consensus often dictates what we deem as 'rational' or 'nutty.' Take, for example, a theory a friend shared with me after going down a YouTube rabbit hole: the idea that super-intelligent aliens visited Earth millennia ago, and their progeny are the puppet masters of today's world. At first glance, it's a concept that many would quickly label as a fringe conspiracy. But isn't it fascinating how this is perceived as more outlandish than the widespread religious beliefs held by billions? These include a deity governing the cosmos, the phenomenon of virgin birth, and the notion of resurrection and eternal salvation.
The irony here is stark. Both sets of beliefs - extraterrestrial overlords and religious doctrines - are, at their core, equally extraordinary and unsupported by empirical evidence. Yet, one is easily dismissed as the fancy of nutty conspiracy theorists, while the other is revered and deeply ingrained in societies worldwide. This disparity isn't about the plausibility of the beliefs themselves but rather about the sheer number of adherents that lends a veneer of credibility to what, in any other context, might be dismissed as fantastical. In a world where belief in a supernatural overseer is the norm, alien overlords don't seem so far-fetched. It's a curious reflection on human nature and our collective inclination to label the unfamiliar as absurd while embracing equally unprovable beliefs simply because they are familiar and widely accepted.
Given that most of our knowledge is necessarily second hand, it really is less nutty to believe something that billions of other people believe than to believe something similar that nobody else believes. The fact that others believe it is evidence that it is true — just not very strong evidence.
Of course, most people regard libertarians and libertarianism as, at least somewhat, "nutty".
The question of nuttiness asked here seems to conflate the relative contributions of psychopathology and poor education and reasoning. That's not a criticism. I think we do that knowingly when we ask what kind of political discourse is beyond the pale. We also understand that when this question arises,we often deal with the territory of personality disorders, where we recognize distortions of perception and behavior that are not psychotic in nature but also not normal. We can think about it in both dimensional and categorical terms. I'd say we typically don't consider merely uneducated people to be nutty and self-correct when we realize it's just a lack of information and being surrounded by same. My problem with defending either illiberal rightists or leftists against the nut charge is that I often find the charges to be deserved. Celebrants of the Hamas atrocities and the January 6 rioters deserve the appellation, despite the fact that quite a few of them will turn out to be much better people in the future than they seemed to be in the moment. One could argue that they therefore don't deserved the nut label to begin with but, for our usual purposes, they do. Joe Biden is quite morally flawed but he's not an obvious psychopath like Donald Trump. This is simply the case, whether one finds it inconvenient or not in terms of policy positions one would like to see implemented. Some past Republican candidates were IMO clearly made of better moral stuff than Biden. It would not be intellectually honest to pretend that such things can never be obvious but are completely subject to political bias. The capacity to engage in reality testing is a thing, and it comes in varying degrees of endowment and interference...