A quick scan of the last couple of pages of MugaSofer's comments seems to indicate that the last handful of comments have not received negative votes, and a long sequence of comments before that have consistently received a single negative vote each, which looks like systematic downvoting to me (by someone who hasn't yet caught up) but of course is not remotely definitive.

That said, the net balance of them is generally positive, which means the negative balance isn't accounted for either way.

Ooh, I hadn't thought of that.

This is one of the standard scholarly explanations May I suggest this shows that you should maybe read more on this subject?

I think the claim isn't quite "it has a mistake, therefore it can't be meant to be interpreted at face value" but "it has a really glaringly obvious mistake, therefore it can't be meant to be interpreted at face value".

That's a lot more sensible, and using this principle doesn't make you incapable of recognizing mistakes. It does make you incapable of recognizing when the people who put together your sacred text did something incredibly stupid, but maybe that's OK.

Except that I think another reasonable interpretation is: whoever edited the text into a form that contains both stories did notice that they are inconsistent, didn't imagine that somehow they are both simultaneously correct, but did intend them to be taken at face value -- the implicit thinking being something like "obviously at least one of these is wrong somewhere, but both of them are here in our tradition; probably one is right and the other wrong; I'll preserve them both, so that at least the truth is in here somewhere".

If this sort of thing is possible -- and I think it's very plausible -- then the inference from "glaring inconsistency" to "intended metaphorically or something like that" no longer works. On the other hand, in that case you at least have some precedent for it being OK not to assume that everything in the text is literally correct.

USian fundamentalist-evangelical Christianity, however, is ... exceptionally bad at reading their supposedly all-important sacred text, though. And, indeed, facts in general. We're talking about the movement that came up with and is still pushing "creationism", here.

Historically that isn't quite true to credit anything there to the US. Pre-Darwin insistence on a literal global flood could be found in locations all over Europe. But more relevant to the point, I don't see how this is a good example: if anything this is one where the fundamentalists are actually reading the text closer to what a naive reading means, without any stretched attempts to claim a metaphorical intent that is hard to see in the text. The problem of trying to read the Genesis text in a way that is consistent with the evidence is something that smart people have been trying for a very long time now, so that leads to a lot of very well done apologetics to choose from, but that doesn't mean it is actually what the text intended. It is true that the more, for lack of a better term, sophisticated creationists due stretch the text massive (claims about mats of vegetation to help preserve life during the flood and claims of rapid post-deluge speciation both fall into that category), but they A) aren't that common claims and B) aren't any more stretches than what liberal interpretations of the text are doing.

including the fact that they're wildly misinterpreting key passages and it's really really obvious

Worth noting here that both groups are convinced that this applies to the other group.

Wouldn't the attitude of moderate Muslims to more extreme Muslims often be an example of where the metaphor does work?

You have noticed, he says, that the new German society also has a lot of normal, "full-strength" Nazis around. The "reformed" Nazis occasionally denounce these people, and accuse them of misinterpreting Hitler's words, but they don't seem nearly as offended by the "full-strength" Nazis as they are by the idea of people who reject Nazism completely.

This part of the metaphor doesn't work.

Religious people generally condemn heretics even more strongly than nonbelievers. Liberal Christians, specifically, are generally more opposed to fundamentalist Christians' policies than liberal atheists' policies - for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they're wildly misinterpreting key passages and it's really really obvious, and the fact that there's a readily-available blue/green divide between them.

I've left most of the probability questions blank, because I don't think it is meaningfully possible to assign numbers to events I have little or no quantitative information about. For instance, I'll try P(Aliens) when we've looked at several thousand planets closely enough to be reasonably sure of answers about them.

I left them blank myself because I haven't developed the skill to do it, but the obvious other interpretation ... are you saying it's in-principle impossible to operate rationally under uncertainty?

No, I just don't think I can assign probability numbers to a guess. If forced to make a real-life decision based on such a question then I'll guess.

In addition, I don't think some of the questions can have meaningful answers. For example, the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, if true, would have no testable (falsifiable) effect on the observable universe, and therefore I consider the question to be objectively meaningless. The same goes for P(Simulation), and probably P(God).

Do you usually consider statements you don't anticipate being able to verify meaningless?

No, and I discussed that in another reply.

The obvious next question would be to ask if you're OK with your family being tortured uner the various circumstances this would suggest you would be.

I've lost the context to understand this question.

The singularity is vague, too. (And as I usually hear it described, I would see it as a catastrophe if it happened. The SF story "With Folded Hands" explains why.)

I believe I've read that story. Azimov-style robots prevent humans from interacting with the environment because they might be harmed and that would violate the First Law, right?

Yes. Eventually most human activity is banned. Any research or exploration that might make it possible for a human to get out from under the bots' rule is especially banned.

Could you go into more detail regarding how as you "usually hear it described" it would be a "catastrophe if it happened"? I can imagine a few possibilities but I'd like to be clearer on the thoughts behind this before commenting.

The usual version of this I hear is from people who've read Minsky and/or Moravec, and feel we should treat any entity that can pass some reasonable Turing test as legally and morally human. I disagree because I believe a self-aware entity can be simulated -- maybe not perfectly, but to an arbitrarily high difficulty of disproving it -- by a program that is not self-aware. And if such a standard were enacted, interest groups would use it to manufacture a large supply of these fakes and have them vote and/or fight for their side of political questions.

The stagnation is because of "progressive" politics, especially both the welfare state and overregulation/nanny-statism, which destroy most people's opportunities to innovate and profit by it.

Hmm. On the one hand, political stupidity does seem like a very serious problem that needs fixing and imposes massive opportunity costs on humanity. On the other hand, this sounds like a tribal battle-cry rather than a rational, non-mindkilled discussion.

It is. At some point I have trouble justifying the one without invoking the other. Some things are just so obvious to me, and so senselessly not-believed by many, that I see no peaceful way out other than dismissing those people. How do you argue with someone who isn't open to reason? You need the sales skill of a demagogue, which I haven't got.

Certainly the environmental movement, including its best known "scientists", have discredited themselves this way.

I don't know, I find most people don't identify such a pattern and thus avoid a BWCW effect;

What's that?

while most people above a certain standard of rationality are able to take advantage of evidence, public-spirited debunkers and patterns to screen out most of the noise. Your milage may vary, of course; I tend not to may much attention to environmental issues except when they impinge on something I'm already interested in, so perhaps this is harder at a higher volume of traffic.

One of the ways in which the demagogues have taken control of politics is to multiply political entities and the various debates, hearings, and elections they hold until no non-demagogue can hope to influence more than a vanishingly small fraction of them. This is another very common, nasty tactic that ought to have a name, although "Think globally, act locally" seems to be the slogan driving it.

If the strip was also clever or funny,

It is funny. Not the best xkcd ever, but not worse than the norm for it.

So why don't most people extend the same sympathy they would give Brits who don't like pictures of salmon, to Muslims who don't like pictures of Mohammed?

1. Because people who take their religion and its taboos seriously are low status in the West.

2. Mind projection fallacy: We assume most Muslims don't take their religion seriously like most Christians or Jews don't. We see them using a technicality to claim offence where there is none in order to control us or display dominance over our tribe.

3. They aren't part of our tribe. And worse they belong to a culturally powerful, demographically ascendant and politically threatening tribe.

Another thing I find interesting is that such a argument would never be set up using the example of piss Christ or a desecrated Talmud. I think the reason such a argument is employed using the Muslims as an example is because we quietly accept that Christians, Hindus, Shintoist and Jews are very unlikely to retaliate with violence compared to Muslims. We hide this so it seems that we are arguing about general principles but we are actually arguing about this specific situation based on appeal to consequences.

Note: I don't think this is the case with this LW article but I do think it is the case with many other ones available in the media and on-line.

PS: Excellent article! The debate it provoked is very much intriguing. Upvoted.