I'd never seen the term Bulverism, but I don't think what you are doing would classify. You aren't saying A is false because Okeymaker likes B, you're saying the extraordinary claims with lack of extraordinary evidence doesn't provide much prove A.
And that lack of good evidence does not seems not to matter... which makes me wonder how a discussion can continue. Questioning the motives of the discussion is goal clarification, without which there is no discussion.
errancy.org is a good reference. A simple reading of the first page should be sufficient to put doubt in the fact that the gospels are completely 'true'.
While this is not enough to convince someone that the Biblical God is false, it at least is a good gate to further discussion. If someone can't acknowledge that there are factual errors and contradiction... I'm not sure what there is left to talk about.
don´t NEED to read non-canon gospels to believe in Jesus, just like I don´t need to read Feynman to believe in physics.
Absolutely true, but if your belief on some specific part of physics is based on a single untested book which has demonstrable errors, you should read some other sources. Especially when there really isn't a huge volume.
[As a side note 'belief in physics' doesn't really mean anything. If you believe that a dropped apple will fall, you 'believe in physics'... you have direct evidence of it.]
...I intend to read non-canon gospels, do you k
with ACTUAL knowledge on the subject
The beauty of theological study (and the internet) is that you can look at the source material and translations in detail and directly yourself. You have access to the very small amount of source data on the subject. Most of what people 'know' about the Trinity was made up hundreds of years after the fact.... and quite obviously these theories about the holy trinity have been untested.
To be blunt, I'm not really seeing answers from you. Most of your responses to most people's claims have been "well I don't believe that anyway". Meanwhile, you haven't even read most of Christianity.
Your specific responses seem to say very little:
No. But I haven't fully read any non-canon gospels yet.
You haven't done even your basic due diligence. You believe your eternal soul is controlled by God, but you can't be bothered to read a few documents that claim to have worthwhile information? This is absurd. Instead you've randomly latched on...
I may have misread your initial comment. To paraphrase to check my reading: you are penalizing due to complexity of a 'god' prior but, on the balance, eyewitness details should increase your estimate of the claimed witnessed set being true. More details from eyewitnesses do not then penalize further. The complexity of the god models are just so complex in the first place, that eyewitness details don't increase your estimate much.
What I'm not grasping is what this sentence meant:
...And even an Abrahamic God (or a divine Gospel Jesus, if we treat that as over
I know this has been discussed before, but I'm not convinced that complexity penalties should apply to anything involving human witnesses.
Suppose someone theorizes that the sun is made of a micro black hole covered in lightbulbs, and there is no obvious physics being broken.... this is an obvious place to use complexity penalties. Simpler models can explain the evidence.
With the Bible though, we have witnesses that presumably entangle the Bible with a divine being. Complexity penalty in this case shouldn't penalize for extra details. (Considering complexit...
True and I didn't consider that... but assuming a supreme being had any impact in humanity, it is reasonable to assume that the set of practiced religions are more likely to be true than the set of not discovered religions.
I was trying to minimize the possible tangential arguments. I think trying to expand from 1 religion to 19 major religions is enough to show the problem without going to ~200 religions, which allows room to argue about applicabiliy/similarity of subtypes. Going to all possible religions allows room to argue about applicability of set theory.
I'm not quite sure what you want to see when you ask for the 'weakest point in Christianity'. I thought the easily found arguments and frequently discussed arguments were compelling enough by themselves. I was a regular Sunday school attendee, continued to go to church (for social reasons) even after I started to think the whole thing was random, and genuinely enjoy having these sorts of discussions
The main things that I found had weight is that it's taking the numerous world religions and saying 'this one' without any great reason. When the correct selec...
1 gramming is checking single words; should identify unfamiliar vocabulary. (Ex: quantifiable)
2 gramming would check pairs of words; should identify uncommon phrases made of common words (ex: probability mass - better examples probably exist)
The 1/2 gram terminology may be made up, but I think I've heard it used before.
Two reason:
Granted, I probably wouldn't have noticed the second issue, if not for the first issue.
Maybe my thought of 'religion' is different than yours, but I think of 'religion' as being a set of beliefs that claims to know some fact that is outside observable reality. By definition, this seems non-disprovable. If a belief system doesn't have claim to some 'extra-normal' normal, I wouldn't consider it a religion.
This may be the christian god's rules on who goes to heaven, or Buddhism's rules on what you come back as.
As far as dis-provability is concerned, all major religions seem to consist of two pieces:
If you extract the ideas of karma and rebirth from Buddhism, I'd still consider those two topics a religion which is non-disprovable... while what is left of Buddhism looks more like a testable philosoph...
See Mark's post regarding 7th grade; my intention was aimed at adults, who (for whatever reason) seem to like the 7th grade reading level.
I'm not sure how to effectively crowd source this without getting volunteers for specific (non-overlapping) tasks and sections. I share your concern with the wiki-method, unless each section has a lead. At work we regularly get 20 people to collaborate on ~100 page proposals, but the same incentives aren't available in this case. Copyediting is time consuming and unexciting; does anyone know of similar crowd sourced efforts? I found a few but most still had paid writers.
Agreed that it may not be the point, but other than what I think are fixable issues, the book contents work well. I don't think starting from scratch would be a large enough improvement to justify the extra time and increased chance of failure.
I think the big work is in making the examples accessible, and Eliezer already did this for the -other- negative trigger.
..."If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it. If your point is inherently abou
Perhaps this is already discussed elsewhere and I'm failing at search. I'd be amazed if the below wasn't already pointed out.
On rereading this material it strikes me that this text is effectively inaccessible to large portions of the population. When I binged on these posts several years ago, I was just focused on the content for myself. This time, I had the thought to purchase for some others who would benefit from this material. I realized relatively quickly that the purchase of this book would likely fail to accomplish anything for these people, and may...
Thanks for all the comments! This is helpful. I agree 'Biases: An Introduction' needs to function better as a hook. The balls-in-an-urn example was chosen because it's an example Eliezer re-uses a few times later in the Sequences, but I'd love to hear ideas for better examples, or in general a more interesting way to start the book.
'Religion is an obvious example of a false set of doctrines' is so thoroughly baked into the Sequences that I think getting rid of it would require creating an entirely new book. R:AZ won't be as effective for theists, just as i...
I've had similar concerns and I agree with a lot of this.
Get this closer to a 7th grade reading level. This sets a low bar at potential readers who can understand 'blockbuster' books in English. (This might be accomplished purely with the terminology concern/change above)
If we really want to approach a 7th grade reading level, then we had better aim for kindergartners. I remember reading through the book trying to imagine how to bring it down several levels and thinking about just how many words I was taking for granted as a high-IQ adult who has had p...
This is a very good idea. Generally Google or Reddit works for this sort of thing, but focusing on aggregating news only is useful.
Few things:
How would you consider monetizing this? The online advertising bubble appears to be shrinking, as people realize minimal returns. For a similar website I've been considering an iP*/Android app, but the return still looks low.
Much of this information can be gathered automatically. The website I mentioned above is for an automated new summary generating site... which only works 90% of the time. For what you're doin
That link (fixed version ) is very accurate. I wish I'd considered the first few points BEFORE programming/advertising the site.
I was thinking of this same sort of thing for a diet site. Rather than count calories, just photograph your plate with your hand next to it, and have the computer calculate for you.
The main issues I see with doing this in a fridge would be viewing angles and telling the difference between an old carton of OJ and a new carton of OJ.
It seems that the entire idea of currency is to act as a trusted means of recording exchange and debt. Of all the functions of money, which one is being improved by this proposal?
What's actually different between this and Bitcoin? I don't understand what the benefit of having two non-legal currencies instead of just one. The idea of wasting electricity to generate unbacked currency doesn't make sense to me.
About 75% of the hits came from Google adWords, which was on for about 8 months. Maybe about 10% from search results. I also had a few links from subject specific websites. Average CTR was about 0.25%. Best CTR were ads that mentioned 'flashcards' and 'online'. The best conversion rate (answered a study session question) was 17% with the ad below:
Graphic/animated ads were a waste of money, but at least I learned how to make animated GIFs.
Here's the actual PHP code, weighing in at 18Mb. It's probably the best way to get a feel for what it was, and it might help you decide what to do.
It includes:
I think Micaiah_Chang mostly nailed this. I actually wrote a site that did this a few months ago. I had about 4000 users who had actually gone through a complete session.
it would appear to be an uphill battle to make the benefits immediately relevant
As guessed, the problem is that I couldn't get people to start forming it as a habit. There is no immediate payback. Less than 20 people out of 4000 did more than one session.
you have to learn how to make cards that are easy to memorize or download a deck which is already well made
This one is easily so...
In an effort to learn Mandarin, I started to use Anki. At the time the android app kept crashing. (Reviews seem to say it's better now.) I also had a doubt that the current two variable algorithm is actually optimal.
So I set up a webpage with a mobile interface that lets you import decks and study using a variation of SuperMemo's SM-2 algorithm. It has a small Gaussian randomness built into the easiness factor (decay constant). This might help determine if the algorithm should change.
I'm also worked on a way of sorting a language corpus. If you have senten...
I'd been tossing around the idea of a popular "How to Improve Your Life" sort of site. The user answers questions regarding what they are disappointed in, some 'dance around the bush' type questions to work around people's self-bias and questions to judge education level on various necessary topics.
The system would then weight the answers and calculate what improvements would have the highest cost/benefit. My assumption was that most people would suffer from too little time, irrational beliefs or health issues. A site is then suggested to support...
The first 3 chapters of Jaynes' "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" is available at: http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf
Also, here's a copy of his unpublished book (pdf link at bottom): http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/science.pdf.html
I’m an engineer for train systems. Our equipment kills people everyday; usually because of trespassers/suicides, but infrequently due to other reasons.
I can always make a system safer, for a cost. The IS rail industry spent a billions dollars on Positive Train Control, and statistically may have save a life a year, while making trains slower and less reliable.
That system was implemented due to the thought process described here. An email saying “that is too expensive for the cost of one life so we won’t do it” is not going to stand up in court.
Things as si... (read more)