I have a question for you: do you expect that you will still be a theist after having read all the sequences?
Vive-ut-Vivas
That’s not the question you’re asking. There’s no God-shaped hole in answering “because we feel like taking over galaxies” until you put it there.
Substitute “meaning” for “God”, then. The problem is trying to fit everything into a “larger objective”: whose objective? That’s what I mean when I say you’re presupposing the answer.
Also, “why would taking over galaxies be progress?” can be answered pretty simply once you explain what you mean by “progress”. Technological advancement? Increased wealth? Curiosity?
If I had the catch-all cure to existential angst, I wouldn’t be parroting it on here, I’d be trying to sell it for millions!
Maybe you could call it a hardware problem, since I’d liken it to a virus. You’ve been corrupted to look for a problem when there isn’t one, and you know there isn’t one, but you just don’t feel emotionally satisfied (correct me if I’m wrong here). I don’t have an answer for that. I would suspect that the more you distance yourself from these kinds of views (that the universe must have “meaning” and all that), the question just stops being even relevant. I think the problem just involves breaking a habit.
“Your comparison between the Amanda Knox case and scientific knowledge leaves me cold. Science is concerned with regularities, situations where induction applies; the knowledge sought in a criminal case is of a completely different kind, by definition applying to a unique and hopefully irregular situation.”
I’m eerily reminded of creationists arguing that studying evolution isn’t “science”, because it happened in the past. I don’t see how it follows that the knowledge sought in a criminal case is somehow “different” than the knowledge sought in otherwise “legitimate” scientific pursuits. At the risk of playing definition games, if science is simply the methodology used to arrive at correct answers, then science can be applied to the Amanda Knox case—resulting in “scientific” knowledge.
Criticizing komponisto for citing “Friends of Amanda Knox” while you yourself cite “True Justice” causes those criticisms to fall flat.
Unfortunately, I find that your essay is wading into Dark Arts territory, since its intent is to show that komponisto’s original essay was “misleading”, and that that would somehow give veracity to arguments of Amanda Knox’s guilt. Using that same logic, one would have to consider the implications of the chief prosecutor in Amanda Knox’s case being convicted of abuse of office in another murder trial.
However, I would be interested in seeing komponisto and rolf nelson discuss the actual details of the case; in particular, the points that rolf nelson brought up in the essay.
My intent here is merely to repair some of the Bayesian damage caused by komponisto’s original post.
I hardly think komponisto inflicted “Bayesian damage” on the members of Less Wrong, seeing as they had already overwhelmingly come to the conclusion that Amanda Knox was not guilty before he had even presented his own arguments.
This post is intellectually dishonest. You yourself state that you have no interest in establishing Amanda Knox’s guilt, but instead intend to “debunk komponisto’s post”—what is the purpose of that? - and then proceed to list a bunch of cherry-picked details about the case, half of which you have not even sourced!
My belief is that komponisto merely accepted propaganda from the Friends of Amanda (FoA) at face value, even though most of their claims are incorrect. Unlike komponisto and FoA, I shall cite reliable sources for my claims.
Like TrueJustice.org? Which is more reliable than Friends of Amanda because..… you say it is?
Did you read the original survey post? As far as I can tell, there is no intent to mislead there, as the OP doesn’t even state his position. Yet—somehow! - most members seemed to conclude that she had a low probability of being guilty. If you want to establish Amanda Knox’s guilt, I suggest you read through those comments and see what factors influenced their opinions. I don’t see that you addressed any of those factors in your post.
This should help you understand that DNA does not voluminously and constantly spew forth from humans in the way komponisto believes it does.
This statement, in particular, comes off as more “misleading” than anything komponisto claimed in his post.
If this post is not the result of a vendetta against a particular member, then the OP could have done a much better job of arguing this case. But frankly, this whole case has been discussed on this website at great length already, and in great detail. I would suggest examining the arguments that have already been made in the 3(?) or so other posts that have been devoted to this topic.
- 2 Feb 2010 7:01 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Debunking komponisto on Amanda Knox (long) by (
I haven’t followed the Amanda Knox case at all, or even its discussion on LW, but I’m interested now in the outcome because it bears on how much we can trust priors over court rooms, and on how good the LW community’s previous judgment was.
In that case, I highly recommend going through the posts and comments already devoted to this topic. The original survey post and the follow-up Amanda Knox test go into great detail about this case. Of particular interest should be the comments in the survey post, where members stated their estimates of the defendants’ guilt.
I strongly agree with this.
From his own website repeatedly linked here:
The Rational Model of Complex Mechanisms asserts that the universe exists within God. The Model asserts the Theory of relativity is wrong, and that nature of the universe encapsulated by E=MC2 is found not in plastic time but instead in the frequency of GodSong—The Speed Of Light Squared—C2 .
This is not the kind of “nugget of gold” that we want to see on here, I would think.
As someone who has no interest in the case (I haven’t made any comment related to the case, nor read any of the discussions)
This appears to be the common denominator regarding people who think that Rolf has brought up game-changing information in his post.
So the only thing I think he did was to put them in a top-level post without making a sufficiently convincing case for his position.
Exactly. Therefore, it was voted down. Is this not working as intended?
It’s stressful living in America when you realize that every time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you’re killing someone.
Can you explain more about what you mean by this, exactly? If I’m killing several people a day, I’d really like to know about it.
- 23 Mar 2010 14:36 UTC; 6 points) 's comment on Undiscriminating Skepticism by (
The idea of promoting Less Wrong (and rationality in general) via Harry Potter fanfiction is so outside the box that I really shouldn’t be surprised that it exists! What a great way to tap into a particular group of people that may not have necessarily found their way here otherwise. I wonder if we’ll get any users to come out of the woodwork and say they’ve found LW through the fanfic?
I hope we see more projects like this (from anybody here) in the future!
The original Harry Potter was really just a clever re-imagining of standard fantasy tropes, so as long as you’ve had some sort of passing familiarity with fantasy you’ll have no trouble following along. There are all kinds of geeky references thrown in that you might even be better off than someone who has read the books but never passed a science course.
Welcome! Please feel free to join in the discussion. There’s been a concerted effort here to make this place much less intimidating. Of course, once you spend some time reading Less Wrong, you’re going to find your other hangouts woefully inadequate. ;-)
I don’t have much to add, but in the spirit of Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate, I want to state that I’ve found this post very insightful and very useful. Thanks for posting!
Being able to pick out positive traits in people that you might otherwise not be able to stand will help you win in several ways: 1) You’ll enjoy life more; 2) You’ll get more people on your side; 3) You’ll have more access to different modes of thought which, while they may be wrong, can help strengthen the foundations of your own ideas.
This actually does work. I tested it out in my day job, which requires regular interaction with people whose company I do not usually like, and found myself almost enjoying it! We shouldn’t be afraid to like people, and to enjoy ourselves, for fear of actually becoming like them. If you make the effort to be friendly to that disagreeable person and find something pleasant about them, you’re not making their disagreeable qualities pleasant (and thereby running the risk of adopting them yourself). So, don’t be afraid to be nice, and by extension, to tolerate tolerance. This is a lesson I’m still struggling to learn.
I think your hypothesis is right. I just took the test now:
Openness: 84 Conscientiousness: 13 Extraversion: 95 Agreeableness: 63 Neuroticism: 93
Not that I thought the test I took was particularly accurate, but as ballpark figures they mostly make sense.
The question itself (“what’s the purpose?”) presupposes the answer. If you’ve never heard of God or superstition, why would you assume that there was any purpose other than just to take over all these galaxies?