Comment author: Bugmaster 08 February 2012 02:26:28AM 0 points [-]

...it is almost as certainly true, on Bayesian grounds, that belief in resurrection as a function of the power of a super-natural God is not a rejection of science.

I believe that it is. Either an incredibly powerful agent such as the one described in the Bible exists and acts upon the world, or he doesn't. If he exists, and if he pops in from time to time to perform miracles, then we should see some evidence of him doing that. If we did, then science as we know it would not work, because we'd have no predictable natural laws against which to run our tests. Science does appear to work, however, which means that either gods do not exist, or they do exist but aren't actually doing anything, which is no better than not existing at all.

Comment author: smijer 08 February 2012 02:35:04AM *  0 points [-]

Either an incredibly powerful agent such as the one described in the Bible exists and acts upon the world, or he doesn't. If he exists, and if he pops in from time to time to perform miracles,

Not "time to time" - I was addressing the specific claim of one resurrection event in history. We might not expect to have any evidence of such an event preserved at all, and certainly none better than the type of documentary evidence adduced to it.

then we should see some evidence of him doing that.

Agreed - however, there is a correllation between the frequency and mode of such interventions and the amount and quality of evidence we should expect. It doesn't make sense to think this is happening at all, but it isn't anti-scientific to believe that it has and maybe does happen in subtle ways and/or at rare times.

Comment author: MixedNuts 08 February 2012 01:52:08AM 10 points [-]

I have a hard time thinking of anything UUs generally hold to in terms of doctrine at all

Well, UU is definitely on the "accommodationist" side, which means that, when asked "Are there supernatural things?", it answers "Shut up, debate is intolerance". But Unitarians' behavior does reveal a probability estimate - for example, someone praying for a disease to be cured is certainly putting a non-negligible probability mass on "There are things that listen to me pray and can cure disease". There are no Official Unitarian Beliefs, but there are beliefs of individual Unitarians and they can be stupid but protected by "Don't tell me this is stupid or you are evil and intolerant"-type memes. In particular, "Belief in the supernatural is not laughably wrong" is a claim made by many Unitarians.

rabbits chewing cud

Okay, chewing pellets could plausibly be lumped in with chewing one's cud, though I am Not Happy about things becoming "imagery" the second they're literally false.

Yes, science can prove dead people cannot rise again... but it cannot prove that an agent with the power to suspend or violate the laws of nature could not perform the trick.

Well, obviously such an agent could. But science can and does prove that such agents just don't happen. We've spent the last three thousand years looking at increasingly robust laws of the universe, and we found out that the universe loves locality and referential-independence and hates special exceptions. We've spent the last thousand years looking at accounts of miracles and never found one that held water. At some point you just reach probabilities lower than "There is a pony behind my sofa, but it teleports away whenever you try to look at it, by sheer coincidence".

To accept most scientific claims ("Schrödinger's equation predicts...") and also accept a claim that contradicts their generalization ("And lo, Jesus did violate conservation of energy") requires rejecting the claim "Induction works", which is sort of the very core of science.

Comment author: smijer 08 February 2012 02:07:08AM 1 point [-]

Sorry - I still haven't figured out why standard html doesn't work here, or how to do blockquotes...

  • "Well, UU is definitely on the 'accommodationist' side," Generally, yes

-"which means that, when asked 'Are there supernatural things?', it answers 'Shut up, debate is intolerance'." I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean that. I fall closer to the accommodationist side, and I gladly answer, "no, probably not" to that question.

-"Okay, chewing pellets could plausibly be lumped in with chewing one's cud, though I am Not Happy about things becoming "imagery" the second they're literally false." I'm not a big fan of Christian apologetics - especially of the sort that like to claim that there are no errors in the Bible, but to hold that "rabbits chew their cud" is an example of a falsehood in the Bible requires you assume that the phrase so translated literally means rumination of partially digested material in exactly the way that ruminant species do. This is a terrible assumption, since the language belonged to people who did not understand rumination: why would they have a term term in their vocabulary that literally describes a process they didn't understand?

There are many examples of real errors in the Bible... it just looks dumb to cite something as an error based solely on an assumption that ancient languages will somehow embed modern classification systems.

-"But science can and does prove that such agents just don't happen." To fix your argument: science proves that such agents don't arise under ordinary physical law. Any number of elements of rational thought make the existence of such an agent improbable, but that doesn't make it specifically anti-scientific to believe in such an agent.

-"requires rejecting the claim 'Induction works'," Nonsense - it merely requires asserting that induction can fail outside the boundaries for which it should apply (in the case of science, outside the boundaries of natural law).

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2007 05:02:44PM 18 points [-]

Actually, Robin, come to think of it, you may be executing an inappropriate shift between levels of abstraction.

Science is not the same as a particular scientific theory. Any particular scientific theory is subject to the Bayes-law, the rules of evidence, and may be destroyed by contrary evidence; any particular scientific theory is disprovable. This is what people mean when they say "Science is falsifiable." They're referring to every particular instance of science, not the abstract category Science. Red is a color, blood is red, blood is not a color.

When someone says "I am a scientist", they (should) mean that they identify with the rules of evidence, not with any particular theory. You can disavow past specific scientific theories, and still remain a scientist, so long as you avow the rules of evidence. A lawyer can disavow trial by combat, and still avow justice, but then they cannot call themselves a medievalist.

Similarly, when I talk about "religion's claim to be non-disprovable" I mean the claim that specific religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Unitarianism are non-disprovable.

What is the category that includes both the Bhagavad-Gita and the Twelve Virtues of Rationality? I'm not sure there is one. But it certainly isn't the category "religion". Atheism is not a religion. They are both answers, perhaps, albeit answers to different questions using different methods. Maybe the superspace should be called "answerism". Perhaps you could reject Christianity but try to answer the same sort of questions Christianity did using a completely different method, i.e., "How old is the universe?" = "Six thousand years, because it sounds cool" -> "13 billion years, because we went out and looked using telescopes", while still legitimately calling yourself an "answerist". But you would then have rejected religion as a general method of answering; permitting science, democracy, and personal acceptance of responsibility for moral arguments, to answer various questions formerly answered by scripture.

Comment author: smijer 08 February 2012 01:09:20AM 1 point [-]

I am a Unitarian Universalist, and I am confused.

I don't make a habit of claiming UUism to be non-disprovable, but now that I think about it... The seven principles affirmed by the UU association are statements of values, not empirical claims. I have a hard time thinking of anything UUs generally hold to in terms of doctrine at all... So, what's to disprove?

We don't even have <em>ethics</em> in common. Only values, and the most controversial subject of those values is "the interdependent web of all existence", which we agree to "respect". Even there, I doubt many of us would argue against evidence that there are bits of existence that are not interdependent.

I have a lot of other quibbles with the article. Somehow this one slipped past my radar for a long time. On the principle that the rationalist fixes their opponents arguments for them, it doesn't seem to come to a high standard. It almost seems to treat arguments as soldiers. (I mean rabbits chewing cud? It's not just easy to see that this type of language conveys imagery: if you've ever seen a, rabbit, you know exactly what imagery it is conveying)...

On other boards, I've seen arguments treated very much like soldiers. It's one reason I don't visit Jerry Coyne's site any longer. Science cannot disprove historical miracles, for instance. Yes, science can prove dead people cannot rise again... but it cannot prove that an agent with the power to suspend or violate the laws of nature could not perform the trick.

So, I argue against the claim that acceptance of such a belief, of itself, is a rejection of science. For very narrow cases, there really is a separation between the "magesteria". One of the things I enjoy about less-wrong is that the focus is moved away from whether belief is "scientific" or not and onto the question of whether it is "true" or not. While the resurrection almost certainly isn't true, it is almost as certainly true, on Bayesian grounds, that belief in resurrection as a function of the power of a super-natural God is not a rejection of science. On Coyne's board (and some other "anti-accommodationist" boards), the first truth is embraced, and the second is an enemy soldier.

Comment author: Solvent 31 December 2011 11:30:02AM 9 points [-]

I assume that you've heard of PredictionBook? That's not scored, but it is a good system.

Comment author: smijer 10 January 2012 04:11:30PM 0 points [-]

Thank you. I will check it out.

Comment author: smijer 31 December 2011 12:25:01AM 2 points [-]

Is there a free / registration only prediction market game? I'm too poor to gamble real money, but I'd like to see something that will allow gambling for points or some such, and introduce it to my circle of friends. Something that allows a wide variety of categories of bet, with the ability to add your own well-quantified predictions.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 December 2011 04:30:55PM 7 points [-]

If that was an observation that you had already thought of, and you believed it good to be mentioned, why didn't you so mention it yourself -- instead of waiting to see if anyone else said it?

I did write a reply when Vladimir first wrote the comment. But I deleted it since I decided I couldn't be bothered getting into a potential flamewar about a subject that I know from experience is easy to spin for cheap moral-high-group points ("you're a murderer!", etc). I long ago realized that it is not (always) my responsibility to fix people who are wrong on the internet.

Since smijer is (as of the time of this comment) a user with 9 votes while Vladimir is in the top 20 of the top contributors and the specific comment being corrected is at +19 it does not seem at all inappropriate to lend support to his observation.

Comment author: smijer 24 December 2011 04:48:41PM 2 points [-]

I appreciate the support.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 December 2011 06:08:20PM *  18 points [-]

From consequentialist perspective, the value of not saving a life is the same as the value of killing someone. In which light, the title of your post becomes, "Is every person really worth not killing?" Try re-reading the argument with this framing in mind.

(Avoiding measures that save lives with certain probability is then equivalent to introducing the corresponding risk of death.)

Comment author: smijer 24 December 2011 02:13:00PM 14 points [-]

If the value of not saving a life is the same as the value of killing someone, that's fine. We can do that exercise and re-frame in terms of killing, and do the consequentialist calculation from there. The math is the same. If the goal is to bring ourselves to calculate from the heightened <em>emotional</em> perspective associated with killing, though, it is time to drop that frame and just get back to the math.

In terms of the opening post, the math is going to be similar even for the creation of all possible minds. If we have a good reason to restore every mind that has lived, it seems very probable that we have the exact same reason to create every mind that has not lived.

I'm not sure I see what that value is, though. Even if I want to live forever - and continue to want to live forever right up to the point that I am dead... One second after that point, I no longer care. At that point, only other living minds can find value in having me alive. It's up to them if they want to invest their resources in preserving and re-animating me or prefer to invest more of their resources in keeping themselves alive and creating more novel new minds through reproduction.

Comment author: smijer 06 June 2011 02:28:22AM *  0 points [-]

Stealing often means wrongful taking of property... but point well taken.

Comment author: smijer 28 December 2010 01:16:33AM 13 points [-]

I have a question about the problem of recursion here. If I observe a blue sky and I observe a group of scientific papers claiming that it is green, how much more likely is it that my observation of the sky is what is wrong than that my observation or understanding of the scientific articles are what is wrong?

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