thereby creating a clearer distinction between religious and secular.

Given that Newton was a person who cared about the religious that would be a bad example. He spent a lot of time with biblical chronology.

You claimed that science wouldn't have been invented at the time without Newton. It's historically no accident that Leibniz discovered calculus independently from Newton. The interest in numerical reasoning was already there.

To get back to the claim, following the scientific method and explicitly writing it down are two different activities. It takes time to move from the implicit to the explicit.

Possibly, but I wouldn't say the popes started science by being terrible rulers, thereby creating a clearer distinction between religious and secular.

The main point is that if you buy the philosophic commitments of Descartes the hypothetico-deductive method is a straightforward conclusion. Newton might have expressed the method more clearly but various people moved in that directions once Descartes successfully argued against the old way.

True, but on the other hand humanity has been left alone for millions of years, so odds of some species conquering universe just after humans accidentally happen to meet them (while they are still very limited in size) seem low. If there would be nothing stopping such expansions, i would´ve expected seeing some species conquering universe millions or billions of years ago.

More developments on the vibratory mechanisms of consciousness: http://actu.epfl.ch/news/how-the-brain-produces-consciousness-in-time-slice/

The video is somewhat odd in that he claims Descartes had no problem with experiments, but I recall the philosopher proposing rules which contradicted experiments and hand-waving this by appealing to the impossibility of observing bodies in isolation.

In any case, Hakob does make clear that Descartes used a more Aristotelian method as a rhetorical device to persuade Aristotelians. (In effect, he proved the method of intuitive truth unreliable by producing a contradiction.) I don't believe his work includes any workable method you could use to do science, while Newton's rules for natural philosophy seem like an OK approximation.

From memory without Googling the studies I remember that there are studies that test whether having a "Black name" on a resume will change response rates and it does.

There are also those studies that suggest that blinding of piano players gender is required to remove a gender bias.

Do you have another read on the literature?

As a general query to other readers: Is it bad form to just ignore comments like this? I'm apt to think it unwise to try to talk about this topic here if it is just going to invoke Godwin's Law.

In general you can ignore comments when you don't like a productive discussion will follow.

LW by it's nature has people who argue a wide array of positions and in a case like this you will get some criticism like this. Don't let that turn you off LW or take it as suggestion that your views are unwelcome here.

Legal does not mean "accepted". For us you could replace it with hugging: "Can I delay or prevent someone from getting from point A to point B by hugging them in the hallway? What if three people all decide they want to hug same person at once? Twelve people? A hundred?"

Most interaction between people is controlled by people losing social status when behaving wrong, and some mild violence (mostly pushing away) for more extreme misbehavior. Laws are only needed for really extreme cases.

Though I stand by my claim that he started it, unless you can point to someone else writing down a workable scientific method beforehand

Hakob Barseghyan teaches in his History and Philosophy of Science course that Descartes started it. The hypothetico-deductive method (what's commonly called the scientific method) is a result of the philosophic commitments of Descartes thought.

but these things are ephemeral on the scale of centuries.

That's what I just said. You seem to have an alarming confidence in our ability to bounce back from ephemeral shifts. If there were actually some selection pressure against a completed LHC, then it would take a lot less than a repetition of this to keep us shifted away from building one.

We're not talking about all of science. (Though I stand by my claim that he started it, unless you can point to someone else writing down a workable scientific method beforehand.) We're talking about whether or not anthropic reasoning tells us to expect to see people building the LHC, at a cost of $1 billion per year.

Thatcher apparently rejected the idea as presented, and rightly too if the Internet accurately reported the pitch they made to her. (In this popular account, the Higgs mechanism doesn't "explain mass," it replaces one arbitrary number with another! I still don't know the actual reasons for believing in it!) So we don't need to imagine humanity dying out, and we don't need to assume that civilization collapses after using up irreplaceable fossil fuels. (Though that one seems somewhat plausible.) I don't think we even need to assume religious tyranny crushes respect for science. Slightly less radical changes to the culture of a small fraction of the world seem sufficient to prevent the LHC expenditure for the foreseeable future. Add in uncertainty about various risks that fall short of total annihilation, and this certainty starts to look ridiculous.

Now as I said, one could make a different anthropic argument based on population in various 'worlds'. But as I also said, I don't think we know enough to get a high probability from that either.

We also have a great deal of evidence for past failures of scientific racism, which has set my prior for the next such theory very low.

I'm not sure what you mean here. How are you defining scientific racism and how is it relevant to what we're talking about?

As a general query to other readers: Is it bad form to just ignore comments like this? I'm apt to think it unwise to try to talk about this topic here if it is just going to invoke Godwin's Law.

So, I'm pretty sure we know that humans have a bias against anyone sufficiently different, and that this evolved before humanity as such. We certainly know that humans will try to rationalize their biases. We also have a great deal of evidence for past failures of scientific racism, which has set my prior for the next such theory very low.

It was poor wording on my part when I wrote "the contexts under which the adjustment was made". The spirit of my point is much better captured by the word "applied" (vs. made). That is, it looks like a balanced reading of stereotype literature shows that people are quite good in their judgments of when to apply a stereotype. My point is therefore a bit more extreme than it might have appeared.

I would think that many sociologists would say that many people who are racist and look down on Blacks are racists because they don't interact much with Blacks.

I agree with this and would add that such perceptions of superiority could be amplified by other members of the community reinforcing those judgments.

If the adjustment was made during a time where the person was at an all-White school, the interesting question isn't whether the adjustment performs well within the context of the all-White school but whether it also performs well at decisions made later outside of that heterogeneous environment.

To get a little deeper into this topic, I should mention that our stereotypes are conditional and, therefore, much of the performance of a stereotype depends on applying it in the proper contexts. Of the studies looking at when people apply stereotypes, they tend to show that they are used as a last resort under conditions in which almost no other information about the target is available. We're surprisingly good at knowing when a stereotype is applicable and seem to have little trouble spontaneously eschewing them when other, more diagnostic information is available.

My off-the-cuff hypothesis about students from an all-white school would be that they would show racial preferences when, say, only shown a picture of a black person. However, ask these students to provide judgments after a 5-minute conversation with a black person or after reviewing a resume (i.e., after giving them loads and loads of information) and race effects will become nearly or entirely undetectable. I don't know of any studies looking at this exactly and urge you to take my hypothesis with a grain of salt, but my larger point is this: You might be surprised.

Reply to an old comment about literalism:

Yes, but every version of the Torah we have contains parts from different, incompatible versions of the story. The Redactor who put them together had a clear preference (I think) for the Priestly text, but was willing to include stories that contradicted it (at least as a political compromise).

In these spheres people generally understand that heuristics optimize for something. Frequently people think they optimize for some ancestral environment that's quite unlike the world we are living in at the moment. I think that's a question where a well written post would be very useful.

This is probably not a novel analogy, but the surprising thing to me is that social psychology tends to frame any "reticle adjustment" as a bias against which we must fight without testing its performance in the contexts under which the adjustment was made.

I would think that many sociologists would say that many people who are racist and look down on Blacks are racists because they don't interact much with Blacks. If the adjustment was made during a time where the person was at an all-White school, the interesting question isn't whether the adjustment performs well within the context of the all-White school but whether it also performs well at decisions made later outside of that heterogeneous environment.

That specific thesis is mostly just an example. Much of what I would say would be paraphrasing the work of someone else (Lee Jussim mainly) and explaining its relevance to this community. I could do this if people thought it would be productive, but its just one of many topics that I think are misunderstood on a large scale.

My more general interest is in the less-known fact that many of our hardwired biases and heuristics were designed by natural selection (e.g., negativity bias) to improve accuracy based on goal-relevant criteria. It also seems that the biases formed in response to the environment (e.g., much of the content comprising a stereotype) track reality to a surprising degree. Imagine a marksman who practices shooting at the same firing range everyday and this range generally has a side-wind in the same direction and intensity. The marksman can manually adjust for this by placing his reticle upwind of the target, but he could also adjust his scope's reticle such that he can aim for the bulls-eye and account for the wind at the same time. Once the adjustment is made to the scope, he many have a "biased" tool, but his shots are still centered on the bullseye (on average) and the only online calculations needed to account for the wind on a shot-by-shot basis are minute. What if the marksman moves to another range? Well, in time, he will see his shots wildly missing and make the proper adjustments. This is probably not a novel analogy, but the surprising thing to me is that social psychology tends to frame any "reticle adjustment" as a bias against which we must fight without testing its performance in the contexts under which the adjustment was made. It's not that biases and heuristics don't cause problems, its that we have a much poorer understanding of when they cause problems than our field claims.

This general idea applies to stereotypes, but also:

• Negativity Bias
• Attribution errors (including the FAE)
• Availability heuristic
• Clustering bias and other illusory correlation-type biases
• Base rate neglect
• Confirmation Bias (this claim might get me in trouble here... haha)
• etc.

Yup! I agree completely.

If you were modeling an octopus-based sentient species, for the purposes of writing some interesting fiction, then this would be a nice detail to add.

Thank you. :)