Reality is arational. Everything you do is arational. You aren't aware of it because you lack awareness. By becoming aware that you are unaware, you have increased your awareness. Yet still, you will always lack awareness. The same with me. My definition of awareness is the subjective experience of separating thoughts from awareness. You can become aware of thoughts, and if an "I" thought appears, that was not you, you simply became aware of it.

My point is that I think that you, confuse the map for the territory. Now I made the same mistake, because "map not being the territory" is a map. In all actuality, all types of communication are, and equally untrue.

The way I see it is that reality is the way it is and it is arational. Gravity does not exist. We may create a layer on top of arational reality and call it reality, while in all actuality it is a virtual reality.

It is simply a human projection on top of the arational reality. Arationality is completely independent of reasoning, everything rational and irrational exists within a matrix (virtual reality) of the arational.

Trigger warning: politics is hard mode.

"How to you make America safer from terrorists" is the title of my op-ed published in Sun Sentinel, a very prominent newspaper in Florida, one of the most swingiest of the swing states in the US for the presidential election, and the one with the most votes. The maximum length of the op-ed was 450 words, and it was significantly edited by the editor, so it doesn't convey the full message I wanted with all the nuances, but such is life. My primary goal with the piece was to convey methods of thinking more rationally about politics, such as to use probabilistic thinking, evaluating the full consequences of our actions, and avoiding attention bias. I used the example of the proposal to police heavily Muslim neighborhoods as a case study. Hope this helps Floridians think more rationally and raises the sanity waterline regarding politics!

EDIT: To be totally clear, I used guesstimates for the numbers I suggested. Following Yvain/Scott Alexander's advice, I prefer to use guesstimates rather than vague statements.

As a learning exercise, I wrote a web app which shows some charts on your karma score.

I recommend just going to the website and trying it out, but here is a description of it as well if you're interested. To use it just enter your user id in the text box at the top and then press the go button. It will show that it is loading and after a while five charts will be shown.

• The first chart is a time series chart which shows you when you have posted a comment or discussion post. This chart allows you to zoom in on any desired area.
• The second chart is a time series chart which shows you when you have posted a main post. This chart allows you to zoom in on any desired area.
• The third chart shows your cumulative score. This chart allows you to zoom in on any desired area.
• The fourth chart shows proportions, i.e. how many comments/posts you have made and how many were positive, neutral or negative. 
• The fifth and final chart shows information on your total positive and negative scores. This chart allows you to drill down and see where your points have originated from, i.e. from comments or discussion posts or main posts. 

Please note that it may take a while to load. I am scraping all the information from your users page. It shouldn't take too long though. On my computer it takes less than a minute to load all the information on my karma score, but it did take around half an hour to load Eliezer_Yudkowsky's karma information. YMMV depending on what computer you are using. It is not your score that determines how long it will take, but the amount of comments and posts that you have made. I recommend using chrome as I haven't tested it in any other browsers.

The karma calculated by LessWrong also might be slightly different to what my web app shows. For example, my webapp shows Eliezers karma total score as 290096 and in LessWrong it is 290174. I am pretty sure that my code is right since I counted one example out and I do know of one bug in the LessWrong code that would effect the total score. There are also other things that LessWrong takes into account that I don't, e.g. karma awards and the troll tax. The difference shouldn't be too major, though, so it shouldn't be a big problem.

The website is hosted on github and the code can be found here.

TLDR: Try out the Less Wrong Karma Chart Website and let me know what you think or if you run into any issues.

Bertrand Russell, well aware there were health risks of smoking, defended his addiction in a videotaped interview. See if you can spot his fallacy! 

Today on SBS (radio channel in Australia) I heard reporters breaking the news that Nature article reports that Cancer is largely due to choices. I was shocked by what appeared to be gross violations of cultural norms around the blaming of victims. I wanted to investigate further since science reporting is notoriously inaccurate.

The BBC reports:

Earlier this year, researchers sparked a debate after suggesting two-thirds of cancer types were down to luck rather than factors such as smoking.

The new study, in the journal Nature, used four approaches to conclude only 10-30% of cancers were down to the way the body naturally functions or "luck".

"They can't smoke and say it's bad luck if they have cancer."

-Dr Yusuf Hannun, the director of Stony Brook

-http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35111449

The BBC article is roughly concordant with the SBS report. 

I've had a fairly simple relationship with cigarettes. I've smoked others' cigarettes a few times, while drinking. I bought my first cigarette to try soon after I turned of age and discarded the rest of the packet. One of my favourite memories is trying a vanilla flavoured cigar. I still feel tempted to it again whenever I smell a nice scent, or think about that moment. Though now, I regularly reject offers to go to local venues and smoke hookah. Even after my first cigarette, I felt the tug of nicotine and tobacco. Though, I'm unusually sensitive to eve the mildest addictive substances, so that doesn't suprise me in respective. What does suprise me, is that society is starting to take a ubiquitous but increasingly undeniable health issue seriously despite deep entanglement with long standing way of doing things, political ideologues, individual addictions and addiction-driven political behaviour and shareholder's pockets.

Though the truth claim of the article isn't that suprising. The dangers of smoking are publicised everywhere. Emphasis mine:

13 die every day in Victoria as a result of smoking.

Tobacco use (which includes cigarettes, cigars, pipes, snuff, chewing tobacco) is the leading preventable cause of death and illness in our country. It causes more deaths annually than those killed by AIDS, alcohol, automobile accidents, murders, suicides, drugs and fires combined.

So I decided to learn more about the relationship between society and big tobacco, and government and big tobacco to see what other people interested in influencing public policy and public health can learn (effective altruism policy analytics, take note!) about policy tractability in suprising places.

Here's what might make for tractable public policy for public health interventions

Proof of concept

Governments are great at successfully suing the shit out of tobacco. And, big tobacco takes it like a champ:

It started with United State's states experimenting with suing big tobacco. Eventually only a couple of states hadn't done it. Big Tobacco and all those attorney generals gathered and arranged huge ass settlement that resulted in the disestablishment of several shill research institutes supporting big tobacco and big payouts to sponsor anti-smoking advocacy groups (which seem politically unethical, but consequentially good, but I suppose that's a different story). However, what's important to note here is the experimentation within US states culminating with the legitimacy of normative lawfare. It's called 'Diffusion theory' and is described here.

Wait wait wait. I know what you're thinking, non-US LessWrongers - another US centric analysis that isn't too transportable. No. I'm not American in any sense, it's just that the US seems to be a point of diffusion. What's happening regarding marajuana in the US now seems to mirror this in some sense, but it's ironically pro-smoking. That illustrates the cause-neutrality of this phenomenon.

That settlement wasn't the end of the lawfare:

On August 17, 2006, a U.S. district judge issued a landmark opinion in the government's case against Big Tobacco, finding that tobacco companies had violated civil racketeering laws and defrauded consumers by lying about the health risks of smoking.

In a 1,653 page ruling, the judge stated that the tobacco industry had deceived the American public by concealing the addictive nature of nicotine plus had targeted youth in order to get them hooked on cigarettes for life. (Appeals are still pending). 

Victims who ask for help

I also stumbled upon some smokers attitudes to smoking and their, well, seemingly vexacious attitudes to big tobacco when looking up lawsuits and big tobacco. Here's a copy of the comments section on one website. It's really heartbreaking. It's a small sample size but just note their education too - suggesting a socio-economic effect. Note, this comments were posted publicly and are blatant cries for help. This suggests political will at a grassroots level that is yet under-catered for by services and/or political action. That's a powerful thing, perhaps - visible need in public forums addressed to those that are in the relevant space. Note that they commented on a class action website.

http://s10.postimg.org/61h7b1rp5/099090.png

Note some of the language:

 

"I feel like I'm being tortured"

You don't see that kind of language used in any effective altruism branded publications.

Villains

Somewhat famous documents exposing the tobacco industries internal motivations and dodginess seem to be quoted everywhere in websites documenting and justifyications of lawfare against the tobacco industry. Public health and personal dangers of smoking don't seem to have been the big catalyst, but rather a villainous enemy. I'm reminded of how the Stop the boats campaign which villainised people smugglers instead of speaking of the potential to save lives of refugees who fall overboard shitty vessals. I think to Open Borders campaigners associated with GiveWell's Open Philanthropy Project, the perception of the project as just about the most intractable policy prospect around (I'd say a moratorium on AI research is up there), but at the same time, non identification of a villain in the picture. That's not entirely unsuprising. I recall the hate I received when I suggested that people should consider prostituting themselves for effective altruism, or soliciting donations from the porn industry where donors struggle to donate since many, particularly relgious charities refuge to accept their donations. Likewise, it's hard to get rid of encultured perceptions of what's good and what's bad, rather then enumerating ('or checking, as Eleizer writes in the sequence) the consequences.

Relative merit

This is something Effective Altruist is doing.

William Savedoff and Albert Alwang recently identified taxes on tobacco as, “the single most cost-effective way to save lives in developing countries” (2015, p.1).

...

Tobacco control programs often pursue many of these aims at once. However, raising taxes appears to be particularly cost-effective — e.g., raising taxes costs $3 - $70 per DALY avoided(Savedoff and Alwang, p.5; Ranson et al. 2002, p.311) — so I will focus solely on taxes. I will also focus only on low and middle income countries (LMICs) because that is where the problem is worst and where taxes can do the most good most cost-effectively.

..

But current trends need not continue. We can prevent deaths from tobacco use. Tobacco taxation is a well-tested and effective means of decreasing the prevalence of smoking—it gets people to stop and prevents others from starting. The reason is that smokers are responsive to price increases,provided that the real price goes up enough

...

Even if these numbers are off by a factor of 2 or 3, tobacco taxation appears to be on par with the most effective interventions identified by GiveWell and Giving What We Can. For example, GiveWell estimates that AMF can prevent a death for $3340 by providing bed nets to prevent malaria and estimates the cost of schistosomiasis deworming at $29 - $71 per DALY.

 

There are a few reasons to balk at recommending tobacco tax advocacy to those aiming to do the most good with their donations, time, and careers.

 

• Tobacco taxes may not be a tractable issue

• Tobacco taxes may be a “crowded” cause area

• Unanswered questions about the empirical basis of cost-effectiveness estimates

• There may not be a charity to donate to

...
Smoking is very harmful and very common.  Globally, 21% of people over 15 smoke (WHO GHO)

 

-https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2015/09/tobacco-control-best-buy-developing-world/

Attributing public responsibility AND incentivising independently private interest in a cause

The Single Best Health Policy in the World: Tobacco Taxes

The single most cost-effective way to save lives in developing countries is in the hands of developing countries themselves: raising tobacco taxes. In fact, raising tobacco taxes is better than cost-effective. It saves lives while increasing revenues and saving poor households money when their members quit smoking.

-http://www.cgdev.org/publication/single-best-health-policy-world-tobacco-taxes)

Tobacco lawsuits can be hard to win but if you have been injured because of tobacco or smoking or secondary smoke exposure, you should contact an attorney as soon as possible.

  If you have lung cancer and are now, or were formerly, a smoker or used tobacco products, you may have a claim under the product liability laws. You should contact an experienced product liability attorney or a tobacco lawsuit attorney as soon as possible because a statute of limitations could apply. 

-http://smoking-tobacco.whocanisue.com/

There's a whole bunch of legal literature like this: http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/clqv86&div=45&id=&page=

that I don't have the background to search for and interpret. So, if I'm missing important things, perhaps it's attributable to that. Point them out please.

So that's my analysis: plausible modifiable variables that influence the tractability of the public health policy initiative: 

(1) Attributing public responsibility AND incentivising independently private interest in a cause

(2) Relative merit

(3) Villains

(4) Victims that ask for help

(5) Low scale proof of concept

Remember, lawfare isn't just the domain of governments. Here's an example of non-government lawfare for public health. They are just better resourced, often, than individuals. They need groups to advocate on their behalf. Perhaps that's a direction the Open Philanthropy Project could take. 

I want to finish by soliciting an answer on the following question that is posed to smokers in a recurring survey by a tobacco control body:

Do you support or oppose the government suing tobacco companies to recover health care costs caused by tobacco use?

Now, there may be some 'reverse causation' at play here for why Tobacco Control has been so politically effect. BECAUSE it's such a good cause, it's a low hanging fruit that's already being picked. 

What's the case for or against this?

The case for it's cause selection: Tobacco control

Importance: high

tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death and disease in both the world (see: http://www.who.int/nmh/publications/fact_sheet_tobacco_en.pdf) and Australia (see: http://www.cancer.org.au/policy-and-advocacy/position-statements/smoking-and-tobacco-control/)

‘Tobacco smoking causes 20% of cancer deaths in Australia, making it the highest individual cancer risk factor. Smoking is a known cause of 16 different cancer types and is the main cause of Australia’s deadliest cancer, lung cancer. Smoking is responsible for 88% of lung cancer deaths in men and 75% of lung cancer cases in women in Australia.’

Tractable: high

The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) was the first public health treaty ever negotiate.

Based on private information, the balance of healthcare costs against tax revenues according to health advocates compared to treasury estimates in Australia may have been relevant to Australia’s leadership in tobacco regulation. That submission may or may not be adequate in complexity (ie. taking into account reduced lifespans impact on reduced pension payouts for instance). There is a good article about the behavioural economics of tobacco regulation here (http://baselinescenario.com/2011/03/22/incentives-dont-work/)

Room for advocacy: low

There are many hundreds of consumer support and advocacy groups, and cancer charities across Australia.

Room for employment: low?

Room for consulting: high

The rigour of analysis and achievements themselves in the Cancer Council of Australia annual review is underwhelming, as is the Cancer Council of Victoria’s annual report. There is a better organised body of evidence relating to their impact on their Wiki pages about effective interventions and policy priorities. At a glance, there appears to be room for more quantitative, methodologically rigorous and independent evaluation. I will be looking at GiveWell to see what I recommendations can be translated. I will keep records of my findings to formulate draft guidelines for advising organisations in the Cancer Councils’ positions which I estimate by vague memory of GiveWell’s claims are in the majority in the philanthropic space.

I grew up in an atheistic household.

Almost needless to say, I was relatively hostile towards religion for most of my early life.  A few things changed that.

First, the apology of a pastor.  A friend of mine was proselytizing at me, and apparently discussed it with his pastor; the pastor apologized to my parents, and explained to my friend he shouldn't be trying to convert people.  My friend apologized to me after considering the matter.  We stayed friends for a little while afterwards, although I left that school, and we lost contact.

I think that was around the time that I realized that religion is, in addition to being a belief system, a way of life, and not necessarily a bad one.

The next was actually South Park's Mormonism episode, which pointed out that a belief system could be desirable on the merits of the way of life it represented, even if the beliefs themselves are stupid.  This tied into Douglas Adam's comment on Feng Shui, that "...if you disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for it, it may be there is something interesting going on" - which is to say, the explanation for the belief is not necessarily the -reason- for the belief, and that stupid beliefs may actually have something useful to offer - which then requires us to ask whether the beliefs are, in fact, stupid.

Which is to say, beliefs may be epistemically irrational while being instrumentally rational.

The next peace I made with belief actually came from quantum physics, and reading about how there were several disparate and apparently contradictory mathematical systems, which all predicted the same thing.  It later transpired that they could all be generalized into the same mathematical system, but I hadn't read that far before the isomorphic nature of truth occurred to me; you can have multiple contradictory interpretations of the same evidence that all predict the same thing.

Up to this point, however, I still regarded beliefs as irrational, at least on an epistemological basis.

The next peace came from experiences living in a house that would have convinced most people that ghosts are real, which I have previously written about here.  I think there are probably good explanations for every individual experience even if I don't know them, but am still somewhat flummoxed by the fact that almost all the bizarre experiences of my life all revolve around the same physical location.  I don't know if I would accept money to live in that house again, which I guess means that I wouldn't put money on the bet that there wasn't something fundamentally odd about the house itself - a quality of the house which I think the term "haunted" accurately conveys, even if its implications are incorrect.

If an AI in a first person shooter dies every time it walks into a green room, and experiences great disutility for death, how many times must it walk into a green room before it decides not to do that anymore?  I'm reasonably confident on a rational level that there was nothing inherently unnatural about that house, nothing beyond explanation, but I still won't "walk into the green room."

That was the point at which I concluded that beliefs can be -rational-.  Disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for them, and just accept the notion that there may be something interesting going on underneath the surface.

If we were to hold scientific beliefs to the same standard we hold religious beliefs - holding the explanation responsible rather than the predictions - scientific beliefs really don't come off looking that good.  The sun isn't the center of the universe; some have called this theory "less wrong" than an earth-centric model of the universe, but that's because the -predictions- are better; the explanation itself is still completely, 100% wrong.

Likewise, if we hold religious beliefs to the same standard we hold scientific beliefs - holding the predictions responsible rather than the explanations - religious beliefs might just come off better than we'd expect.

(Disclaimer: The following perspectives are based in my experience with policy debate which is fifteen years out of date. The meta-level point should stand regardless.)

If you are not familiar with U.S. high school debate club ("policy debate" or "cross-examination debate"), here is the gist of it: two teams argue over a topic, and a judge determines who has won.

When we get into the details, there are a lot of problems with the format. Almost everything wrong with policy debate appears in this image:

This is a "flowsheet", and it is used to track threads of argument between the successive epochs of the debate round. The judge and the debators keep their own flowsheets to make sense of what's going on.

I am sure that there is a skillful, positive way of using flowsheets, but I have never seen it used in any way other than the following:

After the Affirmative side lays out their proposal, the Negative throws out a shotgun blast of more-or-less applicable arguments drawn from their giant plastic tote containing pre-prepared arguments. The Affirmative then counters the Negative's arguments using their own set of pre-prepared counter-arguments. Crucially, all of the Negative arguments must be met. Look at the Flowsheet image again, and notice how each "argument" has an arrow which carries it rightward. If any of these arrows make it to the right side of the page - the end of the round - without being addressed, then the judge will typically consider the round to be won by the side who originated that arrow.

So it doesn't actually matter if an argument receives a good counterargument. It only matters that the other team has addressed it appropriately.

Furthermore, merely addressing the argument with ad hoc counterargument is usually not sufficient. If the Negative makes an argument which contains five separate logical fallacies, and the Affirmative points all of these out and then moves on, the judge may not actually consider the Negative argument to have been refuted - because the Affirmative did not cite any Evidence.

Evidence, in policy debate, is a term of art, and it means "something printed out from a reputable media source and taped onto a notecard." You can't say "water is wet" in a policy debate round without backing it up with a notecard quoting a news source corroborating the wetness of water. So, skillfully pointing out those logical fallacies is meaningless if you don't have the Evidence to back up your claims.

Skilled policy debators can be very good - impressively good - at the mental operations of juggling all these argument threads in their mind and pulling out the appropriate notecard evidence. My entire social circle in high school was composed of serious debators, many of whom were brilliant at it.

Having observed some of these people for the ensuing decade, I sometimes suspect that policy debate damaged their reasoning ability. If I were entirely simplistic about it, I would say that policy debate has destroyed their ability to think and argue rationally. These people essentially still argue the same way, by mental flowsheet, acting as though argument can proceed only via notecard exchange. If they have addressed an argument, they consider it to be refuted. If they question an argument's source ("Wikipedia? Really?"), they consider it to be refuted. If their opponent ignores one of their inconsequential points, they consider themselves to have won. They do not seem to possess any faculty for discerning whether or not one argument actually defeats another. It is the equivalent of a child whose vision of sword fighting is focused on the clicking together of the blades, with no consideration for the intent of cutting the enemy.

Policy debate is to actual healthy argumentation as checkers is to actual warfare. Key components of the object being gamified are ignored or abstracted away until the remaining simulacrum no longer represents the original.

I actually see Notecard Logic and Flowsheet Logic everywhere. That's why I have to back off from my assertion that policy debate destroyed anybody's reasoning ability - I think it may have simply reinforced and hypertrophied the default human argumentation algorithm.

Flowsheet Logic is the tendency to think that you have defeated an argument because you have addressed it. It is the overall sense that you can't lose an argument as long as none of your opponent's statements go unchallenged, even if none of your challenges are substantial/meaningful/logical. It is the belief that if you can originate more threads of argument against your opponent than they can fend off, you have won, even if none of your arguments actually matters individually. I see Flowsheet Logic tendencies expressed all the time.

Notecard Logic is the tendency to treat evidence as binary. Either you have evidence to back up your assertion - even if that evidence takes the form of an article from [insert partisan rag] - or else you are just "making things up to defend your point of view". There is no concession to Bayesian updating, credibility, or degrees of belief in Notecard Logic. "Bob is a flobnostic. I can prove this because I can link you to an article that says it. So what if I can't explain what a flobnostic is." I see Notecard Logic tendencies expressed all the time.

Once you have developed a mental paintbrush handle for these tendencies, you may see them more as well. This awareness should allow you to discern more clearly whether you - or your interlocutor - or someone else entirely - is engaging in these practices. Hopefully this awareness paints a "negative space" of superior argumentation for you.

This post is a third installment to the sequence that I started with The Truth About Mathematical Ability and Innate Mathematical Ability. I begin to discuss the role of aesthetics in math. 

There was strong interest in the first two posts in my sequence, and I apologize for the long delay. The reason for it is that I've accumulated hundreds of pages of relevant material in draft form, and have struggled with how to organize such a large body of material. I still don't know what's best, but since people have been asking, I decided to continue posting on the subject, even if I don't have my thoughts as organized as I'd like. I'd greatly welcome and appreciate any comments, but I won't have time to respond to them individually, because I already have my hands full with putting my hundreds of pages of writing in public form.

In a recent poll, many LW members expressed interest in a separate website for rational discussion of political topics. The website has been created, but we need a group of volunteers to help us test it and calibrate its recommendation system (see below).

If you would like to help (by participating in one or two discussions and giving us your feedback) please sign up here.

About individual recommendation system

All internet forums face a choice between freedom of speech and quality of debate. In absence of censorship, constructive discussions can be easily disrupted by the inflow of the mind-killed which causes the more intelligent participants to leave or descend to the same level.

Preserving quality thus usually requires at least one of the following methods:

1.  Appointing censors (a.k.a. moderators).
2.  Limiting membership.
3.  Declaring certain topics (e.g., politics) off limits.

On the new website, we are going to experiment with a different method. In brief, the idea is to use an automated recommendation system which sorts content, raising the best comments to the top and (optionally) hiding the worst. The sorting is done based on the individual preferences, allowing each user to avoid what he or she (rather than moderators or anyone else) defines as low quality content. In this way we should be able to enhance quality without imposing limits on free speech.

UPDATE. The discussions are scheduled to start on May 1. 

Introduction

A recent survey showed that the LessWrong discussion forums mostly attract readers who are predominantly either atheists or agnostics, and who lean towards the left or far left in politics. As one of the main goals of LessWrong is overcoming bias, I would like to come up with a topic which I think has a high probability of challenging some biases held by at least some members of the community. It's easy to fight against biases when the biases belong to your opponents, but much harder when you yourself might be the one with biases. It's also easy to cherry-pick arguments which prove your beliefs and ignore those which would disprove them. It's also common in such discussions, that the side calling itself rationalist makes exactly the same mistakes they accuse their opponents of doing. Far too often have I seen people (sometimes even Yudkowsky himself) who are very good rationalists but can quickly become irrational and use several fallacies when arguing about history or religion. This most commonly manifests when we take the dumbest and most fundamentalist young Earth creationists as an example, winning easily against them, then claiming that we disproved all arguments ever made by any theist. No, this article will not be about whether God exists or not, or whether any real world religion is fundamentally right or wrong. I strongly discourage any discussion about these two topics.

This article has two main purposes:

1. To show an interesting example where the scientific method can lead to wrong conclusions

2. To overcome a certain specific bias, namely, that the pre-modern Catholic Church was opposed to the concept of the Earth orbiting the Sun with the deliberate purpose of hindering scientific progress and to keep the world in ignorance. I hope this would prove to also be an interesting challenge for your rationality, because it is easy to fight against bias in others, but not so easy to fight against bias on yourselves.

The basis of my claims is that I have read the book written by Galilei himself, and I'm very interested (and not a professional, but well read) in early modern, but especially 16-17^th century history.

Geocentrism versus Heliocentrism

I assume every educated person knows the name of Galileo Galilei. I won't waste the space on the site and the time of the readers to present a full biography about his life, there are plenty of on-line resources where you can find more than enough biographic information about him.

The controversy?

What is interesting about him is how many people have severe misconceptions about him. Far too often he is celebrated as the one sane man in an era of ignorance, the sole propagator of science and rationality when the powers of that era suppressed any scientific thought and ridiculed everyone who tried to challenge the accepted theories about the physical world. Some even go as far as claiming that people believed the Earth was flat. Although the flat Earth theory was not propagated at all, it's true that the heliocentric view of the Solar System (the Earth revolving around the Sun) was not yet accepted.

However, the claim that the Church was suppressing evidence about heliocentrism "to maintain its power over the ignorant masses" can be disproved easily:

- The common people didn't go to school where they could have learned about it, and those commoners who did go to school, just learned to read and write, not much more, so they wouldn't care less about what orbits around what. This differs from 20-21^th century fundamentalists who want to teach young Earth creationism in schools - back then in the 17^th century, there would be no classes where either the geocentric or heliocentric views could have been taught to the masses.

- Heliocentrism was not discovered by Galilei. It was first proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus almost 100 years before Galilei. Copernicus didn't have any affairs with the Inquisition. His theories didn't gain wide acceptance, but he and his followers weren't persecuted either.

- Galilei was only sentenced to house arrest, and mostly because of insulting the pope and doing other unwise things. The political climate in 17th century Italy was quite messy, and Galilei did quite a few unfortunate choices regarding his alliances. Actually, Galilei was the one who brought religion into the debate: his opponents were citing Aristotle, not the Bible in their arguments. Galilei, however, wanted to redefine the Scripture based on his (unproven) beliefs, and insisted that he should have the authority to push his own views about how people interpret the Bible. Of course this pissed quite a few people off, and his case was not helped by publicly calling the pope an idiot.

- For a long time Galilei was a good friend of the pope, while holding heliocentric views. So were a couple of other astronomers. The heliocentrism-geocentrism debates were common among astronomers of the day, and were not hindered, but even encouraged by the pope.

- The heliocentrism-geocentrism debate was never an ateism-theism debate. The heliocentrists were committed theists, just like  the defenders of geocentrism. The Church didn't suppress science, but actually funded the research of most scientists.

- The defenders of geocentrism didn't use the Bible as a basis for their claims. They used Aristotle and, for the time being, good scientific reasoning. The heliocentrists were much more prone to use the "God did it" argument when they couldn't defend the gaps in their proofs.

The birth of heliocentrism.

By the 16th century, astronomers have plotted the movements of the most important celestial bodies in the sky. Observing the motion of the Sun, the Moon and the stars, it would seem obvious that the Earth is motionless and everything orbits around it. This model (called geocentrism) had only one minor flaw: the planets would sometimes make a loop in their motion, "moving backwards". This required a lot of very complicated formulas to model their motions. Thus, by the virtue of Occam's razor, a theory was born which could better explain the motion of the planets: what if the Earth and everything else orbited around the Sun? However, this new theory (heliocentrism) had a lot of issues, because while it could explain the looping motion of the planets, there were a lot of things which it either couldn't explain, or the geocentric model could explain it much better.

The proofs, advantages and disadvantages

The heliocentric view had only a single advantage against the geocentric one: it could describe the motion of the planets by a much simper formula.

However, it had a number of severe problems:

- Gravity. Why do the objects have weight, and why are they all pulled towards the center of the Earth? Why don't objects fall off the Earth on the other side of the planet? Remember, Newton wasn't even born yet! The geocentric view had a very simple explanation, dating back to Aristotle: it is the nature of all objects that they strive towards the center of the world, and the center of the spherical Earth is the center of the world. The heliocentric theory couldn't counter this argument.

- Stellar parallax. If the Earth is not stationary, then the relative position of the stars should change as the Earth orbits the Sun. No such change was observable by the instruments of that time. Only in the first half of the 19^th century did we succeed in measuring it, and only then was the movement of the Earth around the Sun finally proven.

- Galilei tried to used the tides as a proof. The geocentrists argued that the tides are caused by the Moon even if they didn't knew by what mechanisms, but Galilei said that it's just a coincidence, and the tides are not caused by the Moon: just as if we put a barrel of water onto a cart, the water would be still if the cart was stationary and the water would be sloshing around if the cart was pulled by a horse, so are the tides caused by the water sloshing around as the Earth moves. If you read Galilei's book, you will discover quite a number of such silly arguments, and you'll see that Galilei was anything but a rationalist. Instead of changing his views against overwhelming proofs, he used  all possible fallacies to push his view through.

Actually the most interesting author in this topic was Riccioli. If you study his writings you will get definite proof that the heliocentrism-geocentrism debate was handled with scientific accuracy and rationality, and it was not a religious debate at all. He defended geocentrism, and presented 126 arguments in the topic (49 for heliocentrism, 77 against), and only two of them (both for heliocentrism) had any religious connotations, and he stated valid responses against both of them. This means that he, as a rationalist, presented both sides of the debate in a neutral way, and used reasoning instead of appeal to authority or faith in all cases. Actually this was what the pope expected of Galilei, and such a book was what he commissioned from Galilei. Galilei instead wrote a book where he caricatured the pope as a strawman, and instead of presenting arguments for and against both world-views in a neutral way, he wrote a book which can be called anything but scientific.

By the way, Riccioli was a Catholic priest. And a scientist. And, it seems to me, also a rationalist. Studying the works of such people like him, you might want to change your mind if you perceive a conflict between science and religion, which is part of today's public consciousness only because of a small number of very loud religious fundamentalists, helped by some committed atheists trying to suggest that all theists are like them.

Finally, I would like to copy a short summary about this book:

In 1651 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli published within his Almagestum Novum, a massive 1500 page treatise on astronomy, a discussion of 126 arguments for and against the Copernican hypothesis (49 for, 77 against). A synopsis of each argument is presented here, with discussion and analysis. Seen through Riccioli's 126 arguments, the debate over the Copernican hypothesis appears dynamic and indeed similar to more modern scientific debates. Both sides present good arguments as point and counter-point. Religious arguments play a minor role in the debate; careful, reproducible experiments a major role. To Riccioli, the anti-Copernican arguments carry the greater weight, on the basis of a few key arguments against which the Copernicans have no good response. These include arguments based on telescopic observations of stars, and on the apparent absence of what today would be called "Coriolis Effect" phenomena; both have been overlooked by the historical record (which paints a picture of the 126 arguments that little resembles them). Given the available scientific knowledge in 1651, a geo-heliocentric hypothesis clearly had real strength, but Riccioli presents it as merely the "least absurd" available model - perhaps comparable to the Standard Model in particle physics today - and not as a fully coherent theory. Riccioli's work sheds light on a fascinating piece of the history of astronomy, and highlights the competence of scientists of his time.

The full article can be found under this link. I recommend it to everyone interested in the topic. It shows that geocentrists at that time had real scientific proofs and real experiments regarding their theories, and for most of them the heliocentrists had no meaningful answers.

Disclaimers:

- I'm not a Catholic, so I have no reason to defend the historic Catholic church due to "justifying my insecurities" - a very common accusation against someone perceived to be defending theists in a predominantly atheist discussion forum.

- Any discussion about any perceived proofs for or against the existence of God would be off-topic here. I know it's tempting to show off your best proofs against your carefully constructed straw-men yet again, but this is just not the place for it, as it would detract from the main purpose of this article, as summarized in its introduction.

- English is not my native language. Nevertheless, I hope that what I wrote was comprehensive enough to be understandable. If there is any part of my article which you find ambiguous, feel free to ask.

I have great hopes and expectations that the LessWrong community is suitable to discuss such ideas. I have experience with presenting these ideas on other, predominantly atheist internet communities, and most often the reactions was outright flaming, a hurricane of unexplained downvotes, and prejudicial ad hominem attacks based on what affiliations they assumed I was subscribing to. It is common for people to decide whether they believe a claim or not, based solely by whether the claim suits their ideological affiliations or not. The best quality of rationalists, however, should be to be able to change their views when confronted by overwhelming proof, instead of trying to come up with more and more convoluted explanations. In the time I spent in the LessWrong community, I became to respect that the people here can argue in a civil manner, listening to the arguments of others instead of discarding them outright.

Less Wrong,

Before posting this, I debated myself as follows:

"Should I create a new username?"

Motivations (normal):  I have not posted here in a long time.  There are honest, good reasons to start on an interesting forum with a "clean slate."  One reason is that I have changed so many of my opinions since I last posted.  This is not a big deal.  I am recently 25.

Motivations (abnormal):  OH MY GOD SOCIETY ANXIETY NEW SITUATION AAHHHHHHH.

Motivations (selfish):  Less Wrong is full of experts whose internet names I keep coincidentally running into...

A pleasant surprise:  Absolutely everybody I've been speaking with lately is entirely surprised that I had social anxiety all along.

My therapy:  honesty.  Weaknesses of honesty:  obvious.  Strengths of honesty:  also obvious.  For radical honesty, non-obvious to non-rationalists.

(I have not seen a therapist in about 10 years.  My therapy is, to put it shortly, in the style of Bertrand Russell.  Sort of.)

Well, I'm back.  Let's see how much better I have become.  I promise that I did not give myself time to read my old posts.  Anybody who is sufficiently interested in me will always be able to find out what I was like anyway.  My greatest protection is that I am not that interesting.  That's risky.  I have preferred the simple life for a reason.  That reason has been bad.

Anxiety is irrational.  It leads you to overestimate the degree to which people are interested in you.  Anxiety is rational.  It is an evolutionary vestige, reflecting a typical spectrum disorder, and is therefore likely to have been subject to selective effects, like overly aggressive dogs, and so forth.  Real life paradoxes.  Tricky things.  They can drive you absolutely bonkers.

I give Less Wrong my total honesty.  I will decline only with generalized rationales, only to protect the rights of others.  These include ordinary rights to privacy.  Again, anxiety.  None of my friends have known me as long as I have been away from Less Wrong.  Still, if I want to say "ask me anything," my reasons for declining, should I decline, will be "ordinary."  I will therefore decline in polite, normal ways, and simplify answers in polite, normal ways.  This took recent training:  even after holding a steady, normal job for quite some time, in which I was "very good."  It is blue collar.  Nothing exciting.  I will be leaving shortly.

I've come a long, long way my last post in a lot of ways.  I remember one stupid mistake which kept me from posting on Less Wrong for a while:  I came back - for a second - not too long ago, having read a few things about population genetics, and then I made an argument that was obviously stupid.  (From memory and shame:  I forgot about matrilineal descent.)

I have read the sequences.  I remember them, from long ago, unusually well lately.  They seem to be popping back up a lot.  You can quote them to me.  Do not assume I know anything.  I've learned to be a little more patient.

I've learned a lot about the private sector which I "knew but didn't <em>know</em>."  Like LaTex, HTML, and category theory (biological) and category theory (mathematical).  I am still working full time in a blue collar job.  I will find the time to learn.  The question is, where to start...

Bad answers:  school.  (not yet.  I know.  I have a university subscription.  It's practically free.  I have access.)

Bad answers:  textbooks.  (I've read them.  I prefer the real articles.  I already know the only category theory (mathematics) textbook I need.  To me, that's obvious. It's even more obvious to me than propositions like, "now's a good time to sleep.")

Good answers:  "what?"

This Q and A will be conducted in the style of Robert Sapolsky.  My plagiarisms are honest.  You may request sources to any answer.

I will sleep.  That's healthy.  Much more healthy than I ever really understood.  I'll check in tomorrow.

If nothing else, I do like jokes.  You are allowed to treat this post with the full force of intellectual cruelty.

I was not always nice.  I have done it to strangers.  I do regret it now.  Still, it can be funny.  So, fire away!

______________

That concludes my first Less Wrong experiment.  Like any bad experiment, it confirms what I know, because I know what a self-fulfilling prophecy is.

From now on, I will post on the presumption that I am not anonymous.

Continue.

(Note:  as an analytical social hyperanxious who envied "normal functioning," I do not believe that I can hide.  I can only expect people to be exactly as nice as they always were.  There are no demands, in the world of hyperanxious honesty.  Only requests.)

______________

Now, to begin another experiment:  I am not anonymous, and I am also not here for therapy.  That is what friends are for.  I have my therapy.  You know, family and stuff.  Same honesty, new constraint, which, as promised, only random people on the internet may introduce.

Less Wrong just filtered what it can and cannot hear.  It has done this before.  Not its fault.  Mine.  I accepted "random internet responsibilities."  I must now accept "people who are not me" constraints.  Those, are rules.  I am good at formalisms....

Continue as before.  Ask me anything.

______________

The second experimental result:  I have failed to elicit interest.  Per the original posts, I accept the responsibilities of a writer, though I am no writer.  Per ordinary standards of intellectual honesty, I will emphasize:  this is an experiment.  Less Wrong determines the parameters as it goes.  The experiment will continue on the following lines:

My failures:  clear communication.

My "root cause theory":  Generalized Anxiety Disorder

My constraints:  the lack of expertise to make that call.

My second constraint:  sufficient knowledge and skill to avoid learning precisely what I need to.

My "primary" motivation:  from memory, Less Wrong is full of people with similar intellectual interests.

My prediction:  "self help" threads will be similar to mine, in some ways, albeit much better written.

My control:  I have not ever read a self help thread.

Limitation:  Why should Less Wrong believe that?

Ask me anything.  Or not.  Some experiments fail, others succeed.