It seems you’re mixing culture with ethnicity.
Also, ethnicity/race is a historical, but ultimately pointless fact of evolution. Why should we care, other than for its social implications?
It seems you’re mixing culture with ethnicity.
Also, ethnicity/race is a historical, but ultimately pointless fact of evolution. Why should we care, other than for its social implications?
I think the notion the ‘most people suffer from significant problem X’ is very often plain misunderstood. If everybody ‘suffers’ X, X is the norm, not an affliction (with exceptions such as, say, lower back pain). You’re projecting your normative values onto factual matters.
Also, the notion that we have deficient moral/mental capacities seems to me unsupported and basically quasi-religious. “What we think of as normal is very dysfunctional...” Red pill or blue pill. Please.
Our attachment to material trinkets, material self-worth, emotion expression abilities, family problems etc. all stem from our evolutionary background and the conflicting selection pressures our species was subjected to. Why would one even think that an conflict-free perfect Bayesian could, would or should result from evolution?
Yes, it sucks loving your spouse and wanting to cheat at the same time. I just don’t see how this translates into “significant psychological problems.” Especially not some that need be overcome before moving on towards rationality Nirvana. I suggest bullet-biting as the cure for this ailment.
I’m allergic to self-experimentation. I find that I’m not a very good judge on my own reactions. Furthermore, self-experimentation is probably the worst way to go about setting up a true model of the world.
This seems… so classically crackpot. I admit to initial skepticism towards NLP, but your posts have done nothing to alleviate that and most everything to confirm it. Are you saying that the best book (and thus the model) is 30 years old and the best experiments are 20 years old?
How about the experiments that went into proposing the model? To paraphrase someone, how was this model carved out of existence? Which information led to its identification contrary to the thousands of crackpot ‘theories’ of the mind? And what is your obsession with self-experimentation? That sounds like Hare Krishna.
You’re not doing well to distinguish NLP over the run-of-the-mill internet woo.
I agree on everything but the dangers of neo-liberalism. This seems to me to be ever present, also in relatively succesful countries like Germany and France. Boo neo-liberalism. A bit like inequality.
Ideology in the American sense is pretty much relegated to fringe movements.
I live in Denmark, but follow politics in major European countries.
Why not? If libertarianism (more than other ideologies) reflects statistical truths of human existence, we’d expect to reach the same conclusion from different avenues of argument.
For instance, it seems to me that someone who makes consistently bad decisions with an awareness of signaling is less likely to suffer additional social penalties than someone who makes similarly bad decisions as part of satisfying an addiction.
You think? In my experience, people are more accepting of, say, winos in the street than they would be with perceived normal people acting the same way. I’d say people excuse addicts’ actions exactly because they’re addicts.
Obviously there is a danger of the Perfectly General Explanation. But sometimes signaling has to be seen in context to figure out what is really being signalled. You’re quite right that opposite actions may be interpreted as signalling the same thing, but that also assumes a unity of recipients.
Often in the street, seeing someone from behind, I’ve been wondering whether it’s a dolt with no taste or a avantgarde with extreme tastes. You often can’t tell till you see their faces or perhaps glasses.
Similarly, the signalling in the rural areas I come from mean other stuff to the locals than to my big city peers (i.e. rube, not alpha male).
People are heroes in their own stories. You can count on them to pretty consistently try and look good to their perceived peers.
Of course it isn’t.
Well, do you have any evidence or convincing arguments to that effect, then?
In what way does ID equate with Creationism? First define both, then state the correlation.
ID arose as a way to circumvent the Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard which banned the mentioning of deities in teaching of secular issues.
The creationist text book Of Pandas and People which was being written at the time of the trial subsequently underwent CTRL-H editing to exchange “creator” for “designer,” leading to the hilarious chimera “cdesign proponentsists.”
The people endorsing creationism and ID are more or less the same. By far, most types of argument put forth by IDists have previously been used by creationists. “Irreducible complexity” is merely a restating of Paley’s Watch or, indeed, Darwin’s own rhetorical reservations regarding the complexity of the eye.
Further, the vast majority of IDists have explicit religious motivation (pdf) for their viewpoints, and the ID community uses the same tactics of quotemining, making lists of non-biologist skeptics, and appeals to authority.
Finally, the leading ID “think”-tank, the Discovery Institute, has stated its ultimate goal in an internal workpaper, The Wedge:
“To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies”
“To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”
After defining the two groups’ seminal tenets, we can THEN discuss Dover, Demski, the Wedge et al. Any takers?
All right then. According to the Discovery Institute, ID states
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
and to the question “Is intelligent design theory incompatible with evolution?,” they state
[T]he dominant theory of evolution today is neo-Darwinism, which contends that evolution is driven by natural selection acting on random mutations, an unpredictable and purposeless process that “has no discernable direction or goal, including survival of a species.” [...] It is this specific claim made by neo-Darwinism that intelligent design theory directly challenges.
According to Answers in Genesis, creationism states that
evolutionary theory cannot account for life on Earth
God created the earth (exact method & age optional)
death was the result of the Fall
the biblical Flood occurred and was global
God caused languages to diverge at the Tower of Babel incident
...plus some Christian tenets
The latter three are demonstrably wrong and the latter two are not directly related to biology They go on to say
Most forms of creationism contend that an intelligence, not natural processes, created the universe and all life.
and
Creationists base all of their research and conclusions upon the biblical record. In other words, nothing in science (or any field) makes sense except in light of God’s Word. Where the Bible does not give specifics, creationists form hypotheses and models that accord with what the Bible teaches about the world and test these hypotheses against present data. Thus, hypotheses can be discarded, but the biblical record is not.
Creationism and ID agree that an intelligence created the universe and life, and that evolution cannot explain all of biology. Typically, the same arguments against evolution are used. What’s left is the explicit deference to the Christian bible, and here we can either take DI’s word for it, or we can see what they say to their peers when they think we’re not listening. That’s what the book Of Pandas and People, the pdf and the Wedge document illustrate. I mean, seriously, that book which was supposed to be a creationist textbook became an ID textbook. Authored by creationists (including YEC) who are also IDists. Further, do you really think Phillip Johnson or Bill Dembski would acknowledge anything that does not accord with what the Bible teaches? I don’t.
So what’s left to distinguish them?
This is just a word game. If you sleep better not calling the IDists creationists, fine. It doesn’t change reality, even if the ID movement do their best to make it so.
Longer answer below.
They [the Discovery Institute] also state that ID is not Bible based, nor is it the same as Creationism. They state, “Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text. Honest critics of intelligent design acknowledge the difference between intelligent design and creationism.”
I know perfectly well what the IDists claim to the public. The only question is whether this claim is genuine or whether it is an evasive tactic designed after Edwards v. Aguillard. I think the latter is more likely, because
they made a similar change of tactics after the Kitzmiller trial to now endorse the “teach the controversy” meme.
numerous sources (see posts above) point directly to the Christian culture war effort underlying the entire endeavour. The entire ID motivation is explicitly conservative Christian. Their conclusions are given beforehanded: to accord with Christianity’s teachings.*
while e.g. Behe supports common descent, many IDists don’t. To an allegedly scientific field regarding life’s history on Earth, such discordance is simply disqualifying.
the exact same textbook that taught creationism turned into an ID textbook with barely any editing. The authors were: 1st & 2nd ed., Davis (YEC & IDist) & Kenyon (creationist & IDist); 3rd ed., Dembski & Wells (both IDists).
the designer agnosticism is completely indefensible in scientific terms and most obviously a tactical move. No genuinely scientific field would a priori rule out research into the designer’s identity if not to circumvene the Establishment Clause.
even the Templeton Foundation, whose entire rasion d’être is to “reconcile” religion and science, disavows the DI as a scientifically vacuous PR front. As the Vatican has done.
In short, the DI’s insistence on the non-committal to the Bible is a dishonest front. The same people, the same arguments, the same tactics, the same goals, the same lies, the same quote mining, the same books are involved. The difference between OEC and ID is the explicit deference to the Bible, and this difference can be fully accounted for by the DI’s dishonesty.
Once the DI officially has endorsed any finding that contradicts central conservative Christian tenets, I’ll grant them and you the benefit of the doubt. For now, they haven’t earned it.
*: Also, Dembski:
“But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God’s glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God’s glory is getting robbed...And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he’s done—and he’s not getting it.”
Johnson:
“The objective [of the Wedge Strategy] is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to ‘the truth’ of the Bible and then ‘the question of sin’ and finally ‘introduced to Jesus.’”
But the point of my comment (original) was that ID and Creationism are totally separate concepts, though with some commonality. In a venn diagram, I’d give them only about 10% overlap.
Given that one descended from the other and brought a multitude of proponents along the way, this is seriously wrong—even if one grants all your points for the argument’s sake. The one single thing that separates ID from OEC is the explicit deference to the Bible. Every bit of data indicates that this has simply been replaced by an outwardly implicit, but internally explicit deference to it.
Why not believe they meant what they said?
Exactly. For ‘racial’ reasons alone, Austrians and Danes would get an easier deal than Poles or Ukrainians.
Also, while I find your (taw) posting here and at your blog enlightening, I cannot help but feel you ignore that history teaches us only partial derivatives.
True, Denmark got a sweet deal, but your only comparison is ceteris paribus. We do not know the result if every single country subject to Nazi aggression had chosen to yield. The result may definitely have been less lenient for the Danes.
Finally, I believe it’s commonly accepted that Hitler intended to attack the Soviet Union no matter what, and that he did not expect UK and France to actually go to war over Poland.
Do you think recent trials and warrants against ex-Yugoslav, Cambodian, Rwandan and Sudanese leaders have any preventive effect?
Do you think these trials are void of moral content?
I doubt very much that is correct.
Germany’s & Japan’s populations suffered as little moral damage as the UK’s did during the Blitz.
Germany’s war-time production in general only suffered and faltered in late 1944.
Whether Germany had lost 0, 2, or 10 million civilians in May 45, massive Allied armies occupied the country and capital. As I see it, Germany primarily lost due to its lack of oil and battlefield defeats in the East.
Japan had lost the war economically far earlier than August 45. The scale of civilian casualties during the nuclear bombings had only a psychological effect on the Japanese government, although obviously a major one.
I feel dirty now.
Out of one thousand criminal trials in which the Less Wrong conventional wisdom gave the defendant a 35% chance of being guilty, you would expect to be able to correctly determine guilt nine hundred ninety nine times?
Maybe I’m missing something, but I think you read that wrong.
komponisto said the evidence should not cause anyone to change the prior probability much. Surely, for people in AK’s reference class, the per-year probability of committing a 3-party sex killing is less than 0.001?
I think komponisto quite correctly described the effect of privileging the hypothesis, which might be what caused the LW community to be so much off from his estimate. Everybody seemed to be going backward from assuming AK’s guilt at 50-50, whereas komponisto went forward from the background probability.
Copenhagen (city, not snuff).