= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Pavitra comments on Rationality quotes: October 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (472)
Why am I getting downvoted for this?
Downvoted, since burning Bibles is stupid and pointless, and certainly not a sane test for recognizing ability to be a scientist. (I agree with the implied point of getting over the reverence, but the presentation is poor.)
Off the cuff guesses:
Can't guess any other reasons.
5) Burning Bibles is socially considered far more disrespectful than simply calling the Bible "false." Even a scientist who treats honesty as a lexicographic preference may still try to maximize politeness or social capital afterwards.
6) A scientist who lives in a time/region when Bible-burning leads to self-burning will use the method of observation to determine that burning the Bible is a bad idea.
I believe this about captures it - for the purpose it serves, burning Bibles is usually needlessly incendiary.
Upvoted for the punnish double entendre.
I aim to please (if not always inform). (:
5. To the extent that a person places political correctness before truth, that person is not behaving as a scientist.
6. i strongly doubt that's what the people who downvoted me had in mind. I could imagine getting a few downvotes on those grounds, but not net downvotes.
Regarding 5, I don't see how not burning a particular book is a necessary condition for valuing truth above political correctness. "Destroying information" and "Valuing truth" might seem logically equivalent to you, but to me they seem quite in tension.
Again, this seems disingenuous. Are people really interpreting the quote in terms of censorship rather than blasphemy?
The quote's at -2. That could well be 2 downvotes total. You have at least 6 reasons here that believably could be why someone might have done that, and you still seem to balk. Is it really that confusing?
When I first saw the quote, I thought "meh". When I saw it again, a couple of the things I cited occurred to me. It's totally out-of-context, and I'm not sure what the intended interpretation is. I definitely wasn't thinking in terms of "censorship" or "blasphemy"; rather, I tried to imagine what the author might have thought scientists do all day that requires them to set books on fire.
There are very few things that I would count as logically necessary conditions for being a "scientist", and that particular action isn't one of them. Why do bibles have anything to do with scientists at all? Are you a religious nut or something?
2 downvotes total requires not only that two people downvote it, but also that no people upvote it. It is the latter that I find surprising.
I was thinking of the objection to scientists who believe unsupportable things when they leave the laboratory.
I certainly hope not. :(
Yes. Historically as well as in current culture, burning a book is THE signal that you wish for it to disappear, not just that you consider it wrong. It implies that you would do the same to all copies, not just one, and book-burners who had the power to do so almost always did. Ridiculously extensive Wikipedia article.
In retrospect, I really should have thought of that myself.
This one did all right.
The intended point is that it is not sufficient to be a scientist only while in the laboratory.
That's stupid. After reflecting on the problem of inferential distance, I could believe that someone could reasonably respond that they didn't understand what the quote was trying to say, but the form of the rhetoric should have made clear that the literal meaning was not the one meant.
My first reaction was "lolwut". I see where you're coming from, but it still just feels wrong, as if I were missing the point. The non-God-repudiating scientist is not just lying to others, but lying to herself, and that is incompatible with the serious pursuit of truth.
I know it's a leaky generalization, that there are obvious exceptions and edge cases, but that's true of all English sentences and especially true of those that are composed for pithiness and rhetoric, that is, the ones that make good quotes.
(Edit: I had originally linked "serious" above here, but I like the current pothole better.)
I honestly expected a link to Outside the Laboratory.
That's what I had in mind, but for some reason when I googled for it the other thing came up instead.