Apology for delay and [link] rationality comic
Link.
To provide some background: Kimiko, the main character, is moving to Nephilopolis, where all empiricism is strictly regulated by the Department of Inquisition: “You couldn’t so much as make an observation based judgment without a license.” Since her bag is lost, she has no references, so she was rejected and is attempting to appeal.
My first reaction was that the Department is acting ridiculous. But on further consideration, given the futuristic setting, it would actually be quite plausible that she’s a hologram or an automaton or something of the sort (I do wonder why they don’t mention this hypothesis).
So, discuss! Just how ridiculous are they being? What do you think of this “credibility score” idea? Or, if you were to implement such a score, how would it be determined and how would it be administrated?
This comic was also a convenient excuse to offer my apologies for delays getting started on the sequence I posted about. I’ve been having a really rough time with some house issues, though it looks like the worst of it may blow over in the next day or two. I’m going to cautiously say the first post will be out early- to mid-next week.
Very? Isn’t that the point of the comic?
I took it as a quick lesson on (misinterpreting? the logic conclusion of?) science as a social process rather than an attempt to improve one’s beliefs.
Also, the “vote up” and “vote down” links on LW feel weird now, even though we don’t use them that way.
Good points. Upvoted :)
Alternate dialogue for the last two panels:
(This joke would work better if there were clearer hints that past appellant hypotheses had also been rejected, though.)
Has there ever been a whether balloon falling down the appeals shaft? If not, they have no reason to favor it over a person, and it looks much more like a person.
I enjoy this comic (my favorite is the Laplace’s Demon comic that manages to sneak Boltzmann brains into the story).
I wonder why they haven’t challenged her to solve and justify the solution to some sort of scientific puzzle, like Blackbody Radiation or the equation of state for a white dwarf for a degenerate fermi gas or something.
Unless the answer is so universally known (blackbody radiation may have been a poor choice), she would have to use the type of reasoning they’re looking for to solve it, and then it doesn’t matter what she is, as it demonstrates that she’s sentient and capable of reasoning in the way needed.
(Tl;dr: Employ some sort of existential entrance exam?)
Strongly related: Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary and the comments on the Sequence Rerun thread.
They are being very ridiculous. They observed something and completely failed to update on it. Also, even if appeals never come down the appeals chute, that doesn’t mean a person can’t.
Word of God is that she hit the appeal button by mistake, actually.
Dresden Codak has been posted here before. The author even has an account.
Interesting that this got posted here. This guy seems to think this comic may be an intentional parody of Eliezer Yudkowsky and this community.
That guy went by the handle Caledonian in the days of joint EY/RH blogging at Overcoming Bias and the handle Annoyance after LW was created. He also managed to annoy PZ Myers into banning him from Pharyngula years ago.
Yeah, I knew that blogger was Caledonian. I never understood the cause of the feud between him and Eliezer, though.
Getting banned by Myers isn’t exactly difficult, though. The man is extremely prone to righteous anger.
Not as much as one would expect. There’s a very long list of people who have been banned but PZ’s blog is one of the most popular blogs and covers controversial topics. I haven’t seen much evidence that it is easy to get banned by PZ. In the case of Caledonian he got banned from Pharyngula for being generally tone-deaf and engaging in what amounted to trolling but it probably would not have been sufficient to get banned by many bloggers. Note that as Annoyance he never got banned here, and he in fact has positive karma.
Really? Huh, how strange. It sounds to me like a parody of CSICOP or the skeptic movement in general — especially as previously mocked by Robert Anton Wilson in The New Inquisition and the Cosmic Trigger books. “Dresden Codak” has dropped references to Wilson previously, if I recall correctly.
If I had to pick out specific personages being mocked here, I’d pick Martin Gardner or James Randi long before Eliezer. The “weather balloon” reference is specifically to UFO skepticism, which doesn’t seem to be a big topic around here, but which was a pretty big deal for the skeptic movement in the ’80s.
The scholars in the comic are being “pseudoskeptics”, as Marcello Truzzi would say …
That strikes me as an interpretation which is unlikely to be correct, although note that Greg Egan has explicitly mocked both Eliezer and Robin in one of his recent novels. (I haven’t read the story, but the excerpted section struck me as amusing.)
Dresden Codak reccomended the Singularity Summit here, saying:
That was in 2009, but if he hasn’t changed his position since then he’s at least a bit supportive.
It almost certainly isn’t. To the best of my knowledge, the creator of Dresden Codak is a big fan of the singularitarian community, and his complaints are more directed towards mainstream academia.
My feeling is that this will lead to some sort of ‘falling through layers of hell’ kind of montage which will lead Kim to some quirky character that represents true science.
I don’t have very high confidence in this idea, as Dresden Codak is always full of surprises.
They are being very ridiculous. They observed something and completely failed to update on it. Also, even if appeals never come down the appeals chute, that doesn’t mean a person can’t.