= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
The desire to have done something, in the absence of the desire to actually do it, is an interesting phenomenon. I find that in my case it most often applies to travel, which I hate, although I desire to have been to places I would need to travel to in order to have visited. We have to juggle the wants of self-at-t1-for-self-at-t1 with the wants of self-at-t2-for-self-at-t1. It's like procrastination, except that instead of forming an intention to do something later, one dissolves the intention to do it at all.
Like Mark Twain's definition of a classic: "Something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
In response to
Tell it to someone who doesn't care
It just occurred to me that it might be impossible to construct a gravitational model that had any stable equilibriums.
Well, everyone sharing the exact same opinion would be stable.
Theism has never provided answers to these questions, only curiosity-stoppers.
The question "Where did people come from?" is one that you'd expect to be answerable, and therefore a reasonable question to ask. We might, in principle, be able to do research in the physical world to figure out where we came from, since physical events (such as the appearance of a new species) leave traces in the physical world that we might be able to detect long after the fact. Likewise, intuition suggests that everything in the physical world comes from somewhere, and so an answer of "We were always here" seems intuitively unlikely.
On the other hand, if you ask "Where did God come from?", you're talking about an entity that (in the case of a Jewish-style God) predated all physical existence. There's no reason to expect us to be able to figure out where God came from, if a God exists. And since God doesn't have to play by the rules of the physical world, "God always existed" sounds much more palatable than "humans always existed": God isn't something we expect to obey our intuition. God is supposed to be inherently perfect and unchanging, so "God always existed" fits in nicely with our picture of God.
Now, you can fairly say that this is all completely unverifiable and can be matched up to any facts you feel like by altering details. You'd be totally right. But there are real reasons for why many people ask "Where did humans come from?" and don't ask "Where did God come from?" It's not just because they're "not allowed" to ask those questions -- the people who came up with the answers sure were allowed to ask them! It's because the idea of an eternal God is intuitively more satisfactory than the idea of eternal humans, even if this breaks down upon closer inspection.
On the other hand, theism at least had coherent and consistent answers to a slew of basic questions like "How did life arise?"
Yes it did and does, though you're left having to handwave away the question of "how did God arise?"
Yes it did and does, though you're left having to handwave away the question of "how did God arise?"
Yup, but those seem less troubling if anything than the questions atheism would be unable to answer at the time.
Can you name any evidence supporting the necessity of, to pick a moderately troublesome example off the top of my head, copyright?
You seem to be expecting a much higher standard of evidence than I had in mind. Perhaps necessity was too strong of a word. Utility? Benefit? Something like that.
All I ask is that laws have 1) a clearly defined goal of solving a problem that society wants to solve, and 2) empirical evidence (gathered after the fact, if needed) that they are doing what they were intended to do with acceptable side-effects. Marijuana criminalization seems to badly fail at least the latter, and the former depending on what problem you think it's solving.
The examples you use both have straightforward utility (compensating positive externalities, reducing death rates), and mixed evidence of effectiveness (lots of art created but copyright terms of infinity minus epsilon inhibit building shared culture, misuse of legal firearms suggests more powerful weapons would also get misused for greater potential damage but firearm crime correlates poorly to ownership rates).
Prohibiting by default strikes me as untenable on practical grounds, as well as being morally dubious in the extreme. As an aside, however, I actually would support abolishing intellectual property as weakly superior to the current scheme, but I doubt either is optimal.
All I ask is that laws have 1) a clearly defined goal of solving a problem that society wants to solve, and 2) empirical evidence (gathered after the fact, if needed) that they are doing what they were intended to do with acceptable side-effects.
How can you gather the evidence after the fact without experimentation? You have to try out alternative copyright schemes, for instance, to test whether it's actually working well. Otherwise I don't know what you'd consider empirical evidence for success.
Marijuana criminalization seems to badly fail at least the latter, and the former depending on what problem you think it's solving.
How can you tell? What would the actual effects of decriminalizing it be? What would widespread marijuana use do to traffic accidents, the intelligence of the general public, etc.? You can argue that it's surely better than alcohol and tobacco, but the obvious counterargument is that those are too entrenched to do away with (especially alcohol) and therefore have to be grandfathered in for pragmatic reasons.
Who's right? Maybe you're right, but the only way to tell is to experiment. I'd be all in favor of more experiments in things like criminal law, to be sure, but I don't think the evidence in favor of a marijuana ban at present is much worse than that in favor of copyright.
Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn't you? I certainly don't know much of Bayesian probability, but I can't see any flaw in that logic.
This is a deep and important topic -- if I lived in the middle ages then if there exists any rationality principle that in practice would have allowed me to deconvert from medieval christianity despite hell threats, I'm not sure what exactly that principle is, though it seems like there should be one.
In the Middle Ages, I'm not sure atheism would be too much more rational than theism, in any sense. To the average European in the year 1000, being an atheist would probably be about as rational as being a heliocentrist, i.e., not at all. We know all the arguments in favor of atheism and heliocentrism, but they didn't. No amount of rationalism is going to let you judge things based on evidence you don't know about.
The average person back then could probably have given you plenty of evidence for God's existence. The evidence would be weak by modern standards, but not by medieval standards. No one was conducting scientific studies then: almost any assertion not directly checkable was supported by pretty weak evidence. Theism might make few predictions and test them rarely, but the same was true of all the alternatives. On the other hand, theism at least had coherent and consistent answers to a slew of basic questions like "How did life arise?", which atheism did not.
So I think the answer is that the only rational principle that would have allowed you to deconvert in medieval times would be "single-handedly reconstructing modern science".
Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn't you?
This is a preference over rituals of cognition, choosing not just decisions, but the algorithms with which you arrive at those decisions. It is usually assumed that only the decisions matter, not the thought process. If you did live in such a world, I agree, you should avoid getting into a doubt-state, although it might be the case that you'd benefit from building an external reasoning device that would resolve the problem for you, not being hindered by limitations on the allowed cognitive algorithms.
Also, I guess that an altruistic person should still undergo a conversion to rationality, on the chance that the evidence points out that the inborn priors are incorrect, thus sparing his fellow people living under such limitations on thought.
Well, if you're altruistic in the sense you describe, you don't have the utility function I gave in my scenario, so your result will vary. If you don't really mind going to hell too much, comparatively, then the argument doesn't work well.
In response to
The uniquely awful example of theism
For what it's worth, I've recently started reading this site and am an Orthodox Jew. I have no particular plans to stop reading the site for the time being, because it's often rather interesting.
It may be worth considering that while rationalists may feel they don't need religion, almost all religious people would acknowledge the need for rationality of some kind. If rationality is about achieving your goals as effectively as possible (as some here think), then does it suddenly not work if your goals are "obey the Bible"? No -- your actions will be different from someone with different goals (utilitarianism, etc.), but most of the thought-process is the same.
Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn't you? I certainly don't know much of Bayesian probability, but I can't see any flaw in that logic.
The question seems rather similar to that of Omega. The winners are those who can convince themselves, by any means, that a particular belief is right. In that sense, God could be said to reward irrationality, just like Omega. The only real difference is that in Omega's case, nobody doubts the fact that Omega exists and is doing the judging in the first place. I don't think that's essential to the nature of the problem, although it makes it harder for most rationalists to dismiss.
Of course, "rationalism" as used on this site often implies acceptance of empiricism, Occam's razor, falsifiability, and things like that, not just pure Bayesian logic with arbitrary priors. But of course, I almost completely accept all those things, and am tolerant of those who accept them more thoroughly than I. It should therefore not be very surprising that I'd see value in this site, along with other religious people with similar attitudes (however few there may be).
I do think that at least being polite toward religion (which doesn't always happen here) is more likely to advance the goals of this site than otherwise. It doesn't help anyone's goals to drive people away before you can deconvert them; and even if you can't deconvert them, you still gain by helping them think more logically (by your definitions) in other areas.
It doesn't seem to be an unreasonable assumption that a lack of supporting evidence (of both necessity and effectiveness) should in fact be reason to rescind a law. Do you disagree with this, or are you just looking for hidden assumptions in Eliezer's comment?
If you do disagree I would be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning for it.
Can you name any evidence supporting the necessity of, to pick a moderately troublesome example off the top of my head, copyright? I'm not aware of any alternatives being tried (successfully or otherwise) in modern countries, so there's no actual evidence for its necessity. Shall we abolish governmental protection of intellectual property? That's a somewhat tenable position (donation-based profit, etc.), but I'm guessing most people here don't hold it.
I suspect that if your suggestion's consequences were carefully inspected, it would turn out to be more or less indistinguishable from a very extreme form of libertarianism. I'm aware of no clear evidence that prohibiting civilian possession of assault helicopters and anti-tank missiles is beneficial. Are you? Perhaps they'd be primarily used to resist oppressive governments.
It's also worth observing that plenty of professed rationalists take the exact opposite approach to you. They follow the precautionary principle: ban anything unless we have evidence it's not harmful.
I don't think much of either approach. Suggesting that we should have a hard-and-fast rule of what we have to do in the absence of clear evidence is a bad idea. Humans have capacities for intuition and logic in addition to our capacity to gather empirical evidence. If evidence is lacking, we need to take a best guess, not just say "let's permit/ban it".
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
For what it's worth, if you're using MediaWiki -- I'm a MediaWiki developer and would be happy to help out if anyone wants to know "how do I do X" or otherwise get assistance of some kind setting up or configuring the wiki.