I haven’t figured out how to quote yet. I apologise for this fact. I wanted to mention that I found this, potentially throw-away, line insightful.
“The biologists can stop arguing with creationists, and get down to sorting out the details of kin selection or whatever. The creationists can stop having to pedal creationism to the unconvinced and can get together to work out the difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution.”
This sort of thing is how we get places like WUWT exposing the flaws in the IPCCs methods, models, and media pronouncements. It’s how we get places like suspicious0bservers creating a model for predicting M7+ earthquake locations with statistically significant regularity—to the point that their work is being picked up by the Chinese, Russians, and NASA.
I think it’s incredibly useful for finding not just solutions to questions, but questions that we didn’t know needed to be asked. The difficult point, and I think this is what Elizer was getting at, is in disseminating these questions and solutions to the public in such a way that social pressure is enough that something gets done about it.
I don’t have an answer for that—but that is probably because I haven’t spent at least 5 minutes by the clock thinking about the problem first.
I am new to the website. So new that this is my first comment and I didn’t even particularly want to sign up. I found it interesting having just come from reading Eleizer’s post about 0 and 1 not being probabilities to here I immediately had a question form in my mind.
How certain of a thing do we have to be in order to prescribe that the state be able to end someone’s life for their speaking it?
There are several points in this question that require some unpacking. The most prominent being about the state being able to end someone’s life. Though people are generally self-seeking and somewhat rational in being so (so taking a prison sentence over engaging in a shootout with police), any action we ask the state to police is then done so with the threat that the state has total authority to use lethal force in the case of serious non-compliance. If we grant that the state has the right to put people in prison for an action, we grant that the state has the right to kill someone for refusing to comply with the states right to put them in prison.
So how certain of a thing do we have to be in order to grant the state the right to kill someone who questions it? Can any story told have a probability of 0 that every part of it is absolutely true in the telling?
In the example used here—specifically the Holocaust and laws against its denial—what quantitative value can we place on a political ideology that had just defeated the rival that existed with the singular aim of ensuring its extinction told no lies? What quantitative value can we place on a victorious military inventing no embellishments about the actions of its vanquished foe? What quantitative value can we place on the testimony of defeated soldiers rendered under torture having no falsehoods? What quantitative value can we place on the anecdotal evidence given at a series of trials that required no corroborating evidence?
As a burgeoning rationalist how can I accept that an event is so true it is illegal to question even one part of the telling thereof?