What have intellectuals ever done for us?

They have no idea how to save humanity from itself. None!

But they sure know how to make themselves seem indispensable.

OK. I'm gonna imagine for a moment that we all know that Brexit is nonsense, that Trump is inane and insane, and we support stupid just to fuck you off, because you have fucked up the world so completely there is nothing else to be done.

So get out of that without moving!

Or, here is a talk that starts off with brain talk, and answers your question only in the last minute.

Thank'ye @unenlightened. :)

Hyper-critique could be down to finding a single fault + subsequent complete dismissal, not in logic/mathematics, but more social/human matters. Normalization of hyper-critique is a part of what I had in mind. Some trends and thoughts that might be related to what I'm thinking of (with the requisite name-dropping) ...

• science (Popper (1930s)) → methodical falsification attempts
• suspicion (Ricœur (1960s)) → onwards to radical suspicion
• cynicism (Sloterdijk (1980s), Žižek (1980s)) → knowing and not caring
• bullshit (Frankfurt (1980s)) → not caring
• postcritique (Sedgwick (1990s)) → reparation of paranoia
• distrust (Latour (2000s)) → on to radical distrust

So, post-truth, the Trump, pandemic reactions, Evangelism resenters demagogues onboard for the ride, UFOs, mind-control, ...? Examples can be found here on the forums, too. Say, where does "being reasonable" fit in? (in a colloquial sense, with a nod towards ethics)

This is a nice quiet corner where we can put the world to rights without being interrupted by the world and his brother.

Say, where does "being reasonable" fit in? (in a colloquial sense, with a nod towards ethics) — jorndoe

Sound judgement? It requires the love of wisdom. There are threads currently on what is love, and what is stupidity; they are both somewhat confused.

I am start with moral realism as an unconditional condition on our philosophy. Plato puts 'the good' at the heart of philosophy, and the final object therefore of reason, defined as sound judgement, not merely sound reasoning.

So I lay this out in the form of a conditional, because that is how it can be understood universally:

IF you do not really value truth,
THEN you are not worth talking to or listening to.

I bypass all the hypothetical baby killers and axe murderers by staying right now in the present of this dialogue. This is the necessary condition for talk to be meaningful. It doesn't "have to be meaningful", but if it isn't then I am not interested.

In this sense, philosophy is religious in just that way that science pretends not to be, from the outset. Sophia is an object of worship, that her lovers seek to realise in their lives, not a convenient advantageous heuristic.

So we are dying in our own waste because we live in a godless age. You are right to put science in the dock. But Popper was trying to mend something in science, but ended up curing scepticism with more scepticism. Personally, I blame Descartes. The original thinking thing and originator of mechanical man. Also he was French!