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No; he's trying to stick to the point. He's stuck his neck out in other posts.
OK, I may have misunderstood his meaning. I thought he was saying that there were things he would never mention, as it would alienate people, as opposed to just not mentioning it in this post.
If you are going to take religion's effects into account as well as the truth of it, you need to look at both sides of the ledger, and weigh the ills it brings against the good. No cherry-picking.
Morendil, I absolutely agree. It may very well be that the ills outweigh the good (though I happen to personally doubt it). I'm just saying that the weighing should be done independently of the rationality of religion (which I think we can all agree is about 0). I just fear that it is too easy for there to be a negative halo effect around religion, which is understandable seeing that this is a forum about rationality.
In response to
Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies
" 'God made me pregnant' sounded a tad more likely in the old days before our models of the world contained (quotations of) Y chromosomes. "
I don't know about that; the whole point about the "virgin birth" was that it was miraculous, i.e. physically impossible. Had they known about DNA, the story would have included God creating some DNA for "his" side of the deal. Saying that knowledge of DNA would have made the virgin birth less believable is like saying greater knowledge of classical physics would have made people more skeptical of Jesus walking on water. Impossible == Impossible.
In response to
Undiscriminating Skepticism
"And of course I could easily go on to name some beliefs that others think are wrong and that I think are right, or vice versa, but would inevitably lose some of my audience at each step along the way - just as, a couple of decades ago, I would have lost a lot of my audience by saying that religion was unworthy of serious debate. "
So are you admitting to just going for "cheap credit"? In your post you encourage people to stick their intellectual necks out, but seem reluctant to do so yourself.
In response to
The ABC's of Luminosity
This may be a bit pedantic, but isn't the A->C relationship wholly contained in the A->B and B->C relationship? In other words, the only way A->C works is via B; there is no "extra" information in the A->C relationship.
That was a simplified account of what is going on. To include the full system, you would have to include the means by which the Demon recorded the knowledge. However it's recorded, it overwrites the information that was otherwise contained in that recording mechanism (i.e., mutual information with some environment), and this deletion of mutual information is an increase in entropy.
But in such an accounting, you would have three systems, which complicates the scenario. In the example given, the Demon is implicitly taken to include the Demon's recording devices (even if that's his brain). The fact that it has destroyed some relationship between some system (the recording device) and another is represented as higher Demon entropy that retains independence from the Y system. (There are extra states the Demon can have that have nothing to do with Y.)
Did that make any sense?
I guess it would seem to me that what gets "overwritten" is the (now invalid) knowledge of where Y is, and what it is overwritten with is the new, valid position of it. I'll have to chew on it for a while.
By the way, sort of unrelated, but I've always wondered why gravity acting on things is not considered a loss of entropy. For example I can drop a bowling ball from multiple distances, but it will always end up 0 feet from the ground:
B4 -> B0
B3 -> B0
B2 -> B0
etc.
The only thing I can think of is that, when the ball hits the ground the collision creates enough heat (i.e. entropy) to balance everything out. Is that correct?
In response to
The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition
So after doing the Maxwell's Demon thing, you say that mutual information decreases, the entropy of Y decreases, so we are left with the same amount of total entropy:
M1,Y1 -> M1,Y1
M2,Y2 -> M2,Y1
M3,Y3 -> M3,Y1
M4,Y4 -> M4,Y1
However, I don't see why the mutual information would be lost; would the Demon know where he "put" the molecule, thus making the transition look more like:
M1,Y1 -> M1,Y1
M2,Y2 -> M1,Y1
M3,Y3 -> M1,Y1
M4,Y4 -> M1,Y1
This would of course shrink the phase space, violate the second law, etc. I just do not see how M would stay the same when Y changed (i.e. lose the mutual information).
In response to
Open Thread: January 2010
Does anybody have any updates as to the claims made against Alcor, i.e. the Tuna Can incident? I've tried a bunch of searches, but haven't been able to find anything conclusive as to the veracity of the claims.
See Bayesians vs. Barbarians. You may need the following posts for the background:
Thanks; the Bayesians vs. Barbarians post is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I'll have to read some of the posts that it links to (as well as re-read the background posts you referred to; haven't read them in a while), as the way it stands I still think the Barbarians would win.
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I do not really think you need an anthropic argument to prove that "you" couldn't be an animal; it is more a matter of definition, i.e. by definition you are not an animal. For example, there is no anthropic reason that "I" couldn't have been raised in Alabama, but what would it even mean to say that I could have been raised in Alabama? That somebody with the same exact genes and parents was raised in Alabama? In that case, it is the same as saying I have an identical twin that was raised there. The fact of the matter is that when I say "I", I am referring to someone with all of the same genes and experiences I have. To say that "I" could have been some other human is nonsensical; to say that "I" could have been a bat is even more so.