deeb
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...this overwhelming evidence coming from paraphsychology studies, and parapsychology studies only.
Before people did these, all we had was overwhelming anecdotal evidence in favour of parapsychology. Every culture, nay, every family is chock-full of reliable witnesses that give accounts of how they personally experienced paranormal phenomena. In the face of such persistent, recurring reports, you can hardly blame people for wanting to investigate. It is only after you do studies under laboratory conditions that you can begin to show that this anecdotal evidence is a product of selection bias.
While I am personally quite convinced that selection bias is all that is needed to explain the phenomena, this doesn't take away the immense cultural significance of... (read more)
actually, this is precisely how I would like people to discuss parapsychology.
What, are you going to defend science or rationalism using unscientific or irrational tactics just because you think that is going to work better? Even if that wasn't detrimental to your own agenda in the long run, you would need to ask yourself at that point what makes you different from any politician defending any ideology at all. Parapsychology isn't "wrong" because it is obvious to the bigwigs in your camp (the "rationalists") that it is wrong. It is "wrong" (or, unsubstantiated) because and only because positive results are not exceeding the positive results expected assuming the null hypothesis. If positive results DID exceed these, we WOULD need to recognize there is an effect. Actually, most people here would probably just see this as proof that we do indeed live in a simulation and would actually be pretty cool with that as they had half-hoped that we did all along.
"Estimate a 10% current AI risk"... wait, where did that come from? You say "Let A be the probability that an AI will be created", but actually your A is the probability that an AI will be created which then goes on to wipe out humanity unless precautions are taken, but which will also fail to wipe out humanity if the proper precautions are taken.
Your estimate for that is a whopping 10%? Without any sort of substantiating argument??
...
Let's say I claim 0.000001% is a much more reasonable figure for this: what would be your rationale supporting that your estimate is more plausible than mine?
Using my estimate, it suddenly becomes much more... (read more)
Nice. Here I present what I genuinely think is a flaw in this article, and instead of getting replies, I am just voted down "below threshold". I believe I have pointed out exactly what I disagree with and why. I would have been happy to hear people disagreeing or asking me to look at this from some other perspective. But apparently there is a penalty for violating the unwritten community rule that "Eliezer's posts are unfailingly brilliant and flawless". I have learned a lot from this website. There are sometimes very deep ideas, and intelligent debate. But I think the community is not for me, so I will let this account die and go back to lurking.
Unfortunately, this post, dated 4 October 2008, blatantly ignores the good sense of the 'Occam's Razor' one, dated 26 September 2007. http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/ It is very naive to argue along the lines of "cellular automata are Turing complete, hence we can build a cellular automaton simulating anything we want to". This is just using the term "Turing complete" in the same way as the poor barbarians of the 'Occam's Razor' post use the term "Thor", viz., as a sort of totem you wave around in order to spare you the work of actually thinking things through. Well, of course you can imagine a cellular automaton simulating anything you like, as long as it... (read more)
I am at a loss how you could list Dawkins as "good science writing". In my opinion, Dawkins is one of the worst things that could happen to intelligent atheism. I have never heard or read him say anything remotely interesting to the intelligent theist. Dawkins apparently thinks "theism" equals "stupid theism" and does a great job debunking variants of theism that are vastly inferior to himself in terms of intellect. Afaik he has so far shown no sign that he even understands intelligent theism. This has had the effect on countless of intelligent people to think that theism is stupid, and you only need to be a little rational to see... (read more)
You went to great length there to show that ancient (pre-Hellenistic) religion was actually indistinguishable from culture. I absolutely love the description of the Old Testament as a "stream-of-consciousness culture dump", that's exactly what it is. But then you somehow go on to derive from this that it is incorrect that "religion cannot be proven or disproven". But if we agree that religion in antiquity was indistinguishable from culture, how are you going to defend that a culture can be "disproven"? Ancient Hebrew culture is just that, a culture, just like Aztec, Sioux, Celtic or Vedic culture. How are you going to "disprove" that? Except perhaps you are confusing "religion" and "theism", and... (read more)
I agree this is an excellent post. In fact, I just created an account and came out of lurking just to vote it up. Yes, the example came out a little forced and unnecessarily convoluted, but the point made is extremely important. To those who clamp down on the post on grounds of lack of formal rigour are missing the point entirely. You are so preoccupied with formulating your rationality in mathematically pleasing ways, applying it to matrix-magic and Knuth-arrow-quasi-infinity situations, that you are in danger of missing the real-life applications where just a modest bit of rationality will result in a substantial gain to yourself or to society.
I must agree with GabeEisenstein 100%. It is annoying to keep reading arguments against fundamentalist religion phrased as arguments "against religion".
I must also note that Gabe did not get any meaningful reply to his point "that orthogonal-to-facts religion can be valuable, and that it is not a modern phenomenon". He was told to "read all antitheism posts". Well, how about a link to a specific paragraph in a specific post that addresses the very specific issues he raised? Namely, why do people keep focussing on debunking fundamentalist religion (reinterpret the fossils, believe in talking snakes, etc.) and then pretend they have debunked "religion" or "theism", completely ignoring the deep intellectual... (read more)