Sadly, I have moved away from the area, but I am pleased to learn that the tone of Wetherspoons will be improved!

After 20 years work, transcribed 1.2 million words (magazines, lectures, books) by the British philosopher George Walford.

gwiep.net

Steven Poole criticises doubters of human rationality by lauding the virtues of "public reason", which supposedly ensures that "any one thinker can be corrected". It is true that collaborative and, indeed, disputatious reasoning is vital - and the "nudge" theorists he snipes at have never impressed me - but the idea that our societies are efficient self-correcting organisms is plain false. Some influential people think that climate change is a dire threat, for example, and others that it is a mere sham. Some think that state redistribution is key to a functioning society and others that the state is an abomination. Some influential people think that Gods exist and others that there is nothing beyond the material of life. To make sense of the world, intelligent people have to use their own powers of reasoning, and should be aware of their limitations.

Formidable work. Given recent discussions, might it be worth adding "vegan" to "vegetarian"? (And perhaps even "pescetarian" or "flexitarian" but I suppose one can get lost in small distinctions.)

Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled "The Drift from Domesticity":

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. 1)

1) "Taking a Fence Down". American Chesterton Society. Retrieved 21 June 2014.

Wikipedia: Chesterton's Fence

Prompted by this comment; curiously this appears to be lacking from rationality quotes threads despite some references to the fence around here.

I find it hard to believe that God would demonstrate His existence solely through selective and ambiguous appearances.

How else could He do so? The only way we could ever come to know about God would be something in the world that looked like one would expect given God, and not like one would expect given atheism, i.e. a miracle. Now, one could ask why He doesn't do blatantly obvious miracles all the time to remove any ambiguity, but if He's to demonstrate His existence, presumably miracles are going to be involved.

Don't you mean:

I've a diary
To get my thoughts in order
This is how it works:

To keep myself terse
All entries must be haikus
Thus I don't ramble.

[EDITED to add: of course strictly these aren't actually haiku since the 5-7-5 thing is just a surface feature, but I conjecture BenSix's diary entries also mostly aren't.]

The Christian philosopher Timothy McGrew ends his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the subject by saying...

...one's considered rational judgment regarding the existence and nature of God must take into account far more than the evidence for miracle claims. That is not to say that they could not be an important or even, under certain circumstances, a decisive piece of evidence; it is simply that neither a positive nor a negative claim regarding the existence of God can be established on the basis of evidence for a miracle claim alone, without any consideration of other aspects of the question.

Aquinas, for example, maintained that miracles took place but also that the existence of God could be proved through metaphysics. If you find evidence for the former compelling, give the latter a chance. I am an agnostic but I find it hard to believe that God would demonstrate His existence solely through selective and ambiguous appearances. Good luck!

I started keeping a diary about a month ago. The two initial reasons I had for adopting this habit were that, first of all, I thought that I would enjoy writing, and second of all, I wanted to have something relaxing to do for half an hour before my bedtime every evening, because I often have trouble getting to sleep at night.

I have found that I generally end up writing about my day-to-day social interactions in my journals. One really nice benefit of keeping a journal that I hadn't expected to reap was that writing has helped me weakly precommit to performing certain actions that help me improve at being sociable. For example, a few weeks back, there were a couple nights where I wrote about how I felt bad about how a new transfer student to my school didn't seem to know anyone in the class which we had together. A couple days after writing about this, I ended up asking him to hang out with me, which was something that I normally would have been too shy to do.

Another thing that I learned is that writing about your problems can help you digest them in ways which are helpful to you. On a meta- level, I think that writing about my social interactions with others has helped me realize that I want to spend more time with my friends, at the expense of spending less time reading through e.g. posts on Reddit. Looking back on things, it is painfully obvious to me that spending time with my friends is much better than spending time on random internet sites, though I hadn't explicitly realized that I had been failing to spend time with my friends until I ended up writing about the fact that this was the case.

Actually, before I had even started journaling, I had known that thinking about problems by writing about them or making diagrams was, in general, a helpful thing to do-- after all, plenty of people benefit from drawing pictures when stuck on, say, math problems. However, it wasn't previously obvious to me that problems other than math and science problems could be analyzed by writing about them or drawing diagrams that represented the problem. Basically, I found a way (which was previously unknown to me) to identify and solve problems in my life.

“Nobody supposes that the knowledge that belongs to a good cook is confined to what is or may be written down in a cookery book.” - Michael Oakeshott, "Rationalism in Politics"