No, I guess that covers it. When you're ready to debate anything more difficult than religion's corpse, let me know.
So, you think it would be okay to make a post about it as long as I was on the right side of the argument?
Is 9/11 truthism a specifically banned topic, or is it just too crazy or too offensive?
Are all conspiracy-related topics banned? Can I, for instance, talk about the assassination of JFK?
Seeing Patterns Where They Don't Exist
One of the places where rationality is most seriously tested is cases where on the one hand, we have a mountain consisting of tiny pieces of evidence, red herrings, blue balloons, green coincidences, yellow marshmallows, etc. and on the other hand, we have one giant incredulity. Excuse me, not incredulity, "prior probability". It's different because it has a number attached to it.
It seems easy enough to weigh one little thing at a time, to pick up in one hand the "prior probability" and in the other some little trinket which disagrees with it, and to conclude the much smaller thing is too unlikely to be seriously considered.
The difficulty is to do this with the whole mountain at once. For one thing, even picking up the mountain is virtually impossible. How the facts slip between our fingers, how hard it is to sift them out from the misinformation and irrelevant lunacy and bad data and outright lies. In some cases it's so decohesive we cannot even be sure we're sifting through the whole pile. Maybe most of it has already poured down through cracks in the floorboards before we arrived on the scene.
If the data has a regularity in its form, we can collect it in a database and organize it and do a statistical analysis. But what if it doesn't?
For your perusal: The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11, by Jeff Wells.
In response to When It's Not Right to be Rational
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
In response to On Things that are Awesome
(4) This made me realize a strange thing: Whenever someone compliments "Eliezer Yudkowsky", they are really complimenting "Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing" or "Eliezer Yudkowsky's best writing that stands out most in my mind".
Yeah, he used to be a brilliant AI researcher, and now he's an annoyingly preachy blogger! Haw haw!
But seriously: regression to the mean?
In response to Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate
I think that there are parts of life where we should learn to applaud strong emotional language, eloquence, and poetry. When there's something that needs doing, poetic appeals help get it done, and, therefore, are themselves to be applauded.
That may be, but I generally find YOUR poetic appeals to make me throw up in my mouth. I read my mother your bit about how amazing it was that love was born out of the cruelty of natural selection, and even she thought it was sappy.
In response to Tolerate Tolerance
The communities that I've been a part of which I liked the best, which seemed to have the most interesting people, were also the nastiest and least tolerant.
If you can't call a retard a retard, you end up with a bunch of retards, and then the other people leave. When eventually someone nice came to power, this is invariably what happened.
In response to Closet survey #1
I was hoping to get more interesting replies to this post.
It seems you all more or less agree about how the world works, and what's left is people mooning about their personal ethical preferences or niggling issues in already vague areas, or minor doubts about this and that.
I believe jesus is entirely mythical, quarks don't exist, 9/11 and the london tube bombings were inside jobs, and flying saucers are the manifestation of a non-human, superior intelligence.
This rationalist community is a dry husk of libertarians, mathematicians, and various other people who don't get invited to parties. I find it very depressing...
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If you'd like, we could talk about it elsewhere. I'm castlezzt@gmail.com on google chat, and TheMetapuzzle on aol instant messenger.
That goes for anyone, really. Please, drop me a line.