Expanding an idea out of morality into how fact claims work (I should probably just write a book): I've had to stress something many times that I'm not sure there's a general term for. "Knowing that..." beats "Knowing how..." Simply knowing that something happens turns out to be much more useful than knowing how. Heuristics beat causal chains. Knowing "that" some drug reduces heart attacks is the important thing--knowing "how" isn't necessary for it to work, or even to make it. In fact, most drugs don't have known paths of effect to begin with; we just know that taking X is associated with Y happening, and that's useful enough. A spider has no idea why it builds webs. They just make them, and food spontaneously appears. You can benefit from facts without understanding how they work--that's actually just about everything we do. We were domesticating plants and animals millennia before learning what genes were; we didn't need to know every microscopic process to benefit from heredity, and we still don't know them to this day, yet breeding works just fine. Knowing that leeches react to incoming storms let us build the tempest prognosticator. How's it work? Nobody knows! But it sure can predict storms real good. Turns out that's the important thing. Say a guy with only "that"-type knowledge, gathered from the top down, makes a simple pencil and paper algorithm that's right 90% of the time... Is his method more or less useful than a dweeb running bottom-up "how" calculations on a supercomputer, who tries in vain to simulate the motion of every atom to predict the behavior of a larger system, and is correct no more often than chance? It should be obvious who to put your money on, yet when arguing there's some kind of assumption top-down "that"s aren't real knowledge--aren't good enough--and you need the bottom-up "how"s to not be dismissed. Shitlibs act as if you can't name every exact step of some effect, that means they can weasel their fake reality into the gaps. >"You can't name the IQ genes and what they do--all these differences could still be environmental." 1: Nobody demands this level of scrutiny about height. We don't know what "height genes" there are or every exact protein pathway that eventually leads to someone being taller or shorter (it's basically the whole genome to varying degrees and an incalculable number of interaction effects), yet since the dawn of humanity we could already see height is extremely heritable because we know the tendency that tall begets tall and short begets short in spite of other influences. 2: In spite of this, yeah, we do in fact know a lot of IQ-influencing genes actually. >"Why care about heterosexual monogamy? It's just another tradition." >"If you can't explain to arbitrary detail exactly how it benefits a child to develop in a straight household seeing masculine and feminine role models interacting, that means your whole worldview is bogus." Nobody can explain anything to an arbitrary level of detail. We just know it works. At some point you have to accept that a given fact happens, and you don't know why, but you can make use of it anyway. Where the rubber meets the road, knowing THAT it works is the important part. If you ever actually know HOW, that's a fun victory lap, but is extremely rare and probably not particularly useful anyway. They use this shitty objection to justify everything they want, down to bestiality and CSAM. "You can't explain what makes something lead to agreeably bad results, therefore you have to be okay with us doing it." Just tell them to go drink bleach. They can't explain what exactly would make it deadly off the top of their head, yet somehow they just accept the fact it's poisonous and refuse to. Curious! RT: https://poa.st/objects/88ce24ee-958b-4a38-adb1-6d3be0a84d8e