= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eliezer writes: "What distinguishes a semantic stopsign is failure to consider the obvious next question."
I think that you are being unfair here, because you are not reading the fine print. The signs actually read "Stop, then proceed with caution." The subtext is that if you proceed beyond this point, you are going to need a different kind of explanation than the one which has served so far. Ask an atheist where life today came from and he will tell you that it came from past life (and definitely from more than 6000 years ago). Pursue the chain of causality and eventually you will come to a stop sign. "Abiogenesis" says the smart atheist. "Prebiotic soup" catechises the stupid one. These are stop signs, but they are necessary stop signs. They don't so much fail to consider the obvious next question as warn that the obvious next question may be a misleading question. What is going on in the vicinity of the stop sign may be completely different in kind from the kind of thing you are familiar with. Or so claims the stop-sign poster. It is not an explanation, to be sure. But it is something of a hypothesis. Like a notation in the unexplored area of a map. "Here there be phase-transitions."
And if Eliezer believes that defenders of the idea of a First Cause have really failed to consider the obvious next question, then I have to marvel at his lack of scholarship. Hey, I am as atheist as the next guy, but I'm getting pretty tired of finding that all of the negative examples in this series are theists and alchemists. There are plenty more examples of bad thinking to pick on.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Eliezer: Parables are more like stories, so they fit into the mind more easily. Please don't let the critics get you down. This is great stuff. The difference between explanation, citation, and verbal mumbo-jumbo should be taught in elementary science classes as soon as kids can comprehend it.
michael vassar: An even better film example of passwords, curiosity-stopping, and nonexplanation appears in the film "Idiocracy".
There everyone drinks gatorade because they have been inculcated with the marketing slogan that "It's got electrolytes -- what your body craves!" They proceed to irrigate the crops with gatorade, causing a famine. A critic tries to point out that crops need water. Then the mob responds that gatorade is better since it has elecrolytes. But what are electrolytes, he asks? "They're what plants crave!" they answer. But why do plants crave them? he asks. "Because they're electrolytes!" the mob responds, slowly seeing that the critic is moron who can't understand basic logic.
I was reminded of this when my friend commented that creatine is the greatest bodybuilding supplement because it gives your muscles extra "bursting power". It didn't seem to trouble him that the idea of "bursting power" did not exist in his mind before he had heard about creatine, or that it had no meaning in his mind apart from it being the thing creatine gives your muscles.
I think the gibberish supporting exercise supplements is a goldmine for peeople seeking real-world examples of password nonexplanations.
What is interesting is that the rhetoric for exercise supplements apes the verbal style of science to usurp its legitimacy. These supplements are marketed at fairly literal-minded sporty guys. And if you walk down to the next shelf in your health-food store, you will find other supplements marketed with a rhetoric based on the magic power of nature, crystals, love, mother earth, etc.. These are targeted at hippy-dippy types, and ape the verbal style of magic for _its_ legitimacy with them.
I think the fundamental difference in the rhetorics is what logicnazi said: science is based on materialism, and magic is based on a romantic faith in the significance of human feeling. Magic appeals to people more. It is only the institutionalization of science that gives it enough prestige that many people will credit pseudo-scientific nonexplanations they don't really understand over blatantly magical thinking that makes no sense.
Also, you can sell magic to a modern audience by dressing it up in "science." From an 'autopathy' (homeopathy using patient's own bodily secretions) site that I recently found: "Today, isopathy is used to treat, among other things, people whose health has suffered as a result of a certain type of vaccination. They are given the same vaccine, but this time homeopathically diluted. The potentised poison of a viper can be used isopathically to treat a viper’s bite. Nevertheless, this understanding of isopathy has some drawbacks – it ignores certain central aspects of homeopathy, primarily its holistic concept. And it goes against what Hahnemann said about Homeopathy: that it is treatment on the principle of “like cures like”. Isopathy thus ceases to be homeopathy. Opinions on this matter, however, varied. In The Medical Advance, volume XXXII, no. 2, 1894, p. 59, the well-known homeopathic doctor J.H. Allen from Indiana wrote: “I will give proof that I think will be fully convincing to most minds that so called Isopathy is but the highest phase of similia in the highest sense.” "
IMO, this is a brilliant example of "cargo cult science." It looks and sounds like science, but it has no content whatsoever. The system it refers to is in fact a form of sympathetic magic. The author slips by including one falsifiable statement, but it is not one that anyone is ever likely to test experimentally.