Na-na-na-na-na-na, I am so sorry you only got $1000!
Me, I’m gonna replace my macbook pro, buy an apartment and a car and take a two week vacation in the Bahamas, and put the rest in savings!
Suckah!
Point: arguments don’t matter, winning does.
Na-na-na-na-na-na, I am so sorry you only got $1000!
Me, I’m gonna replace my macbook pro, buy an apartment and a car and take a two week vacation in the Bahamas, and put the rest in savings!
Point: arguments don’t matter, winning does.
Yes.
This is how I felt as well, that my personal discovery of atheism was merely the next step in my life having been raised as a Christian. Losing religion and coming clean about it was the test of my integrity, which was formed under the wing of the Bible and Christianity.
The problem is this:
There are only two rules: quantum chromodynamics and universal gravitation, and hopefully they can be united into one. “[I]f you rewrote physics with added rules” is a non-starter.
It is actually quite astounding that so much physical behavior is allowed in such a paltry context. The things that do happen are in an extremely select set of events.
Sam Harris does not believe in a god exterior to the human experience. This accords perfectly well to most definitions of “atheist.” He thinks that religious experience is valid insofar as it is a psychological phenomenon and that in eliminating sentient humans and similar creatures, this experience, along with “God,” would vanish from the universe.
The catchiness of the name “Einstein,” mostly in the interior rhyme and spondee stress pattern but also in its similarity to “Frankenstein” (1818), cannot be discounted as a factor in his stardom.
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A very good point. I’m the type to stay home from the polls. But I’d also one-box..… hm.
I think it may have to do with the very weak correlation between my choice to vote and the choice of those of a similar mind to me to vote as opposed to the very strong correlation between my choice to one-box and Omega’s choice to put $1,000,000 in box B.
I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories, and it occurred to me that if there were actually dragons in our world—if you could go down to the zoo, or even to a distant mountain, and meet a fire-breathing dragon—while nobody had ever actually seen a zebra, then our fantasy stories would contain zebras aplenty, while dragons would be unexciting.
You don’t seriously think that, do you???
Dragons: fly, breathe fire, ginormous | Zebras: gallop, have stripes
Dragons >> zebras. In no world would zebras feature more prominently in fiction than dragons, regardless of which was real. I get the general point, that nonexistence breeds excitement, but this was a horrible example.
Yay free karma. Can I exchange the karma for a lunch?
Only 80%? I hope you’ve brushed up on your physics in the past three years.
The speed of light isn’t some arbitrary speed limit. The speed of light is the speed of masslessness. Everything without mass (prime example: photons), must travel at that speed. Further, anything traveling at that speed does not witness the passage of time, experiencing the entirety of its trajectory at once.
Stated even better, everything travels at the speed of light; it is merely that massive particles divert most of that velocity into traveling through time. There is an intimate connection between spacetime and mass; note that no amount of electric charge bends spacetime.
The speed of light barrier exists absolutely with a probability easily exceeding 99%.
I think the real issue here is not that it is unacceptable to perceive real phenomena as weird or bizarre, but that it is unacceptable to think that something real ought not be so (based on some model of reality) and continue without updating the model or understanding why the weirdness or bizarreness leaks in.
To pick on C.S. Lewis and the religious in particular, Lewis conflates many times the Laws of Nature with the ‘Laws’ of Morality. Laws of nature cannot be broken; those of morality most definitely can be and are. And perhaps as another facet of the naturalistic fallacy, those who would conflate laws of morality (loosely speaking—anything which ‘ought’ to be) with laws of nature, may come across an exception to the laws of nature (their model thereof), and not flinch because they are used to the laws of morality, or that-which-ought-to-be, being breached. Laws cannot be broken, and when they appear to be, one ought to enter into a state of cognitive panic, not passive acquiescence.
Someone may already have mentioned this, but doesn’t the fact that these scenarios include self-referencing components bring Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem into play somehow? I.e. As soon as we let decision theories become self-referencing, it is impossible for a “best” decision theory to exist at all.
mattnewport → mattnew port → matthew port
I think an obvious difference between the last one and the first two is that the last one includes a number. There is no uncertainty when comparing numbers, no wriggle room for subjectivity. A real number is either smaller, bigger, or equal to another real number. Period. This rigidity does not mesh well with the flexibility that comfortable social interaction requires. I don’t think this is the only reason why the third is so inappropriate, but it definitely contributes.
AlexSchell, “scant” is essentially a negative, much like “scarce(ly)” or “hardly” or “negligible/y”. Rewriting: “The decriminalization of drugs in Portugal has scarcely seen an increase in drug use.” I’d argue that these sentences mean the same thing, and that together, they mean something different from “The decriminalization … has seen a small increase …” which is what you seem to have interpreted my statement as, though not completely illegitimately.
“whether Earthly life arose by natural selection” was a bad example of Eliezer’s.
Natural selection does not account for how life arose, and dubitably accounts for how even the diversity of life arose*. Natural selection accounts, and only accounts, for how specified (esp. complex & specified) biological artifacts arose and are maintained.
An infinitely better example would have been “whether terrestrial life shares a common ancestor,” because that is a demonstrable fact.
*This has probably mostly to do with plate tectonics carting around life forms from place to place and with genetic drift.
Good post. For a question to receive a specific answer, it must be itself specific. “Does God exist?” is not a specific question and can therefore not receive a specific yes/no/dunno answer. “Does Yahweh exist?” on the other hand, is quite specific and requires the equally specific answer of “No.”
From your other comments, I believe you’re confusing “I don’t believe men who say they are bisexual” with “I don’t believe men can be bisexual.”
It’s clear to me that, in American society at least, the majority of bisexual men are to be found among the ranks of men who would never identify as anything but straight, sometimes even to the men they have sex with(!). Conversely, many of the men that DO identify as bisexual are merely finding a graceful way to transition to a homosexual love life.
Thus, that a man who identifies as bisexual is mostly likely gay may be true (though I doubt it—especially among men who have been out as bisexual for more than, say, 5 years) is not an indication that male bisexuality doesn’t exist—only that self-professed bisexuality is scantily coterminous with a bisexual orientation in males.
Being wrong in the way that you are wrong will probably not damage the accuracy of your insight when conversing with individuals about their sexuality (you’ll correctly assign a high probability to his being gay if he says he’s bisexual), but it probably WILL damage that accuracy when analyzing human populations in the abstract (you’ll incorrectly assign a low probability to the existence of large ranks of males who engage in and enjoy sexual relations with both men and women).
Portugal, anyone? There is a point when arguments need to be abandoned and experimental results embraced. The decriminalization of drugs in Portugal has seen a scant increase in drug use. QED
The same goes for policies like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Many countries around the world have run the experiment of letting gays serve openly and there have been no ill effects.
Abandon rationalization, embrace reality.