For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.
--Mencius Moldbug, on belief as attire and conspicuous wrongness.
This reminds me of the following passage from We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver:
But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.
A final goal of any scientific theory must be the derivation of numbers. Theories stand or fall, ultimately, upon numbers.
Counterfactual: the theory of evolution is one of the most successful scientific theories, yet it contains no equations; nor numbers. It is rather a framework of ideas in which observations can be made sense of.
Reminds me of the proposed double blind studies about the effectiveness of parachutes in preventing injuries while falling from great heights.
Which in turn reminds me of The Onion news piece 'Multiple Stab Wounds May Be Harmful To Monkeys'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ7J7UjsRqg
An atheist walked into a bar, but seeing no bartender he revised his initial assumption and decided he only walked into a room.
http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/02/29/complete-the-atheist-joke-1/
My initial response was to chuckle, but when my analytical capacities kicked in a moment later I was disappointed.
If his initial assumptions was that he was walking into a bar, does that make him atheist in this metaphor? Substitute "walked into a bar" by "believed there is a god", the thing I assume it is a metaphor of. You will see it makes no sense.
I've read it, and while I liked it and it gave me some things to thing about...
V'ir ernq vg. V guvax fbzr bs gur gevpxf gung gur bgure fcrpvrf chyyrq jrer n ovg dhrfgvbanoyr gb znantr jvgubhg frys njnerarff. (yvxr gur jubyr "zbir orgjrra oenva plpyrf gb or vaivfvoyr" guvat. Jbhyqa'g gung ng yrnfg erdhver fbzrguvat yvxr "vs V qba'g qb guvf, V jvyy or frra"?
Bs pbhefr, vs frys njnerarff (va fbzr frafr) naq pbafpvbhfarff pna or frcnengrq, gura lrf, V pna rnfvyl frr pbafpvbhfarff orvat fhcresyhbhf (va gur frafr bs n pyrire ercyvpngbe orvat noyr gb qb jryy jvgubhg vg). Ohg gur nhgube frrzrq gb zhfu gur gjb gbtrgure. (Naq jura gur guvatvr qvqa'g abgvpr vgfrys va gur pntr/obk/rgp... gung vg qvqa'g pbhag vgfrys nzbat gur ragvgvrf gurer, gung'f whfg fghcvq.)
How do I decode this?
My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.
—The r-selectors, Trunclade, quoted in Blindsight by Peter Watts
I highly recommend anyone interested in hard sci-fi to read Blindsight.
On a not so much related, but equally interesting hypothetical note of naughty AI: consider the situation that AIs aren't passing the Turing Test, not because they are not good enough, but because they are failing it on purpose.
I'm pretty sure I remember this from the book River of Gods by Ian McDonald.
So the only thing we need to improve online discourse is a way to instantly deliver ice cream over the internet...
Though I appreciate the fun, you are forgetting that this is a solution to a problem that lies in old-fashioned rudeness of interrupting one another, something quite impossible on a turn-based medium as this.
On a different note, some people may be distracted too much by the ice cream, and the goal of making them listen might be forgone because of this.
Without, ultimately, trusting science more than intuition, there's no hope of making epistemic progress.
That's not really true. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice at making predictions about a given field will improve the intuition by a lot. Intuition isn't fixed.
Isn't "intuition" in that case not simply subconscious empirical knowledge?
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― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game