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Jiro comments on Psychic Powers - Less Wrong
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Whether the angel Gabriel was really there is inherently the most important and meaningful question because how people act based on that can leave me dead. Whether something leaves me dead is pretty important. You can't just say it isn't important and make it become unimportant.
Very few people act on whether or not the angel Gabriel was really there or not. A lot of people act on whether or not they think the angel Gabriel was really there. If James thinks that Gabriel was there, then James will act as if Gabriel had been there; if John think Gabriel wasn't there, then John will act as if Gabriel hadn't been there.
You are replying as though "X is an important question" means "the truth value of X has important effects", but in this context it really means "knowing the truth value of X has important effects". The fact that people will act based on what they think the answer is, rather than the actual answer, is irrelevant to the latter parsing.
Yes, you care about the question and it's very meaningful to you.
At the same time is valuable to understand that there are other people who don't care about the question and care about different things and that you won't understand them if you project your own values about which questions are meaningful on them.
That's a fully general argument--you could say it about the importance of anything.
It has nothing to do specifically with hallucinations.
If you just mean that it's unimportant whether something is a hallucination because everything is unimportant to someone, then I can't disagree. But you don't seem to have meant that.
I haven't used the word hallucinations or intentended to refer to that concept before you did. I also haven't said atheists but new atheists, which is a term that refers to a subgroup of atheists.
If someone goes offtopic and you tell them that they are offtopic it's indeed a quite general argument. That doesn't make it wrong.
You don't need to use a concept in order for what you say to have implications concerning that concept.
That's not a standard term, so with no way to distinguish them, anything you say about it just ends up being a statement about atheists.
It is a standard term, the fact that you don't know it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a regular usage. It's standard in the way that it has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism
If you can't follow me when I talk about concepts that are easily understandable and well documented on Wikipedia, there no hope that you get a glimpse when I talk about things in this discussion that are not easy to understand. No hope for medium level concepts like the nature of modern drug development and the QS. No at all for hard concepts like living knowledge, body knowledge, beginners mind, support points, effects of ideology and phenomenological investigation.
Okay, I just read that page. It's odd, then, that I haven't heard of "new atheism", even though I have heard of most of the people mentioned on that page. It's also odd that nobody on that page is quoted as calling themselves a new atheist. Is this a term used by people other than their detractors?
This link suggests that the term arose from "journalistic commentary on the contents and impacts of their books"--that is, they don't call themselves that and it's just a label attached by someone else. This doesn't give me confidence that the label is used for more than just "people I don't like".
And while rationalwiki is untrustworthy for a lot of things, the article on new atheism there is decidedly lukewarm on it. "The term "New Atheism" is generally only used in blogs and opinion columns, and is more of a pejorative than a self-descriptor for the New Atheists".
Do you object to the core idea? That there's as Wikipedia describes:
If you would want to take a self-description you could use the term 'militant atheist'. Richard Darwin used the phrase in his TED talk but I would expect that most people would understand it more pejoratively than "new atheism".
It's quite worthile to distinguish the cluster the cluster of new atheists from other atheists. The average atheist in Germany simply doesn't believe in God. He doesn't go around and argues that religion should be fought in the way Dawkins et al do. They average atheist in Germany does care very much for the question of whether "Whether the angel Gabriel was really there". But people like you care about the question. It's useful to have a term for that cluster of beliefs.
I object to the idea of someone claiming that his opponents are all part of the same group when the targets in question don't actually identify as part of the same group. Labelling other people this way is highly prone to bias.
That's a self-description of one person, not an assertion about how he should be grouped with other people.
Dude, get over yourself.