French, but because my teacher tried to teach all of the days of the week at the same time, they still give me trouble.
They're named as the planets: Sun-day, Moon-day, Mars-day, Mercury-day, Jupiter-day, Venus-day, and Saturn-day.
It's easy to remember when you realize that the English names are just the equivalent Norse gods: Saturday, Sunday and Monday are obvious. Tyr's-day (god of combat, like Mars), Odin's-day (eloquent traveler god, like Mercury), Thor's-day (god of thunder and lightning, like Jupiter), and Freyja's-day (goddess of love, like Venus) are how we get the names Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
While an institution's reliability and bias can shift over time, I think AP and Reuters currently fit the bill. They report the facts the most reliably of any big-name general news sources I know of, without very much analysis or opinion. Their political leaning is nearly neutral or balanced, but maybe on the left side of the line (Reuters might be slightly less biased than AP, but still on the left side).
The Wall Street Journal is a little bit less reliable on the facts, also centrist, and on the right side of the line due to their business focus. If you read this too, it may help you counterbalance AP's and Reuters' slight left bias without going to the unreliable right-wing extremist sources.
If you want only one source, The Hill is about as nonpartisan as it gets (maybe a bit less reliable on the facts than the WSJ, but still pretty good). They report on both sides of the aisle. Their focus is, in their words, "on the inner workings of Congress and the nexus of politics and business".
[Epistemic status: I looked at the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. Exactly how impartial their judgements are, I can't say, but they do seem to try. Media Bias/Fact Check mostly agrees with these judgements, but I don't think they're any more reliable.]
That said, even an "impartial" news source (to the extent there is such a thing) is going to give you a very distorted view of the world due to selection biases and the Overton Window. "Newsworthy" stories are, by their nature, rare occurrences, and will tend to amplify your availability bias. Don't lose sight of base rates. Our World in Data should be worth exploring for that reason. They publish what they think is important rather than what is new.
Why is Google the biggest search engine even though it wasn't the first? It's because Google has a better signal-to-noise ratio than most search engines. PageRank cut through all the affiliate cruft when other search engines couldn't, and they've only continued to refine their algorithms.
But still, haven't you noticed that when Wikipedia comes up in a Google search, you click that first? Even when it's not the top result? I do. Sometimes it's not even the article I'm after, but its external links. And then I think to myself, "Why didn't I just search Wikipedia in the first place?". Why do we do that? Because we expect to find what we're looking for there. We've learned from experience that Wikipedia has a better signal-to-noise ratio than a Google search.
If LessWrong and Wikipedia came up in the first page of a Google search, I'd click LessWrong first. Wouldn't you? Not from any sense of community obligation (I'm a lurker), but because I expect a higher probability of good information here. LessWrong has a better signal-to-noise ratio than Wikipedia.
LessWrong doesn't specialize in recipes or maps. Likewise, there's a lot you can find through Google that's not on Wikipedia (and good luck finding it if Google can't!), but we still choose Wikipedia over Google's top hit when available. What is on LessWrong is insightful, especially in normally noisy areas of inquiry.
How did you manage to prompt these? My attempts with Stable Diffusion so far have usually not produced anything suitable.
If you can gently find out how he handles the internal contradictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_consistency_of_the_Bible), you've got a ready-made argument for taking some things figuratively.
If the Utah mention means the Mormons in particular, their standard answer is that the Bible is only correct "as far as it is translated correctly" (that phrasing appears in their extended canon), which is a motte they can always retreat to if one presses them too hard on Biblical correctness generally. However, that doesn't apply to the rest of their canon, so pressure may be more fruitful there. (If it's not the Mormons, the rest of my comment probably isn't relevant either.)
There is of course the "which bible?" question. Irrefutable proof of the veracity of the old testament, if someone had it, wouldn't answer the question of which modern religion incorporating it is "most correct".
The Book of Mormon would at least narrow it down to the LDS movement, although there have been a few small schisms in their relatively short history.
if he does an experiment, replicate that experiment for yourself and share the results. If you get different results, examine why. IMO, attempting in good faith to replicate whatever experiments have convinced him that the world works differently from how he previously thought would be the best steelman for someone framing religion as rationalism.
Disagree with this one. The experiment the Mormon missionaries will insist on is Moroni's Promise: read the Book of Mormon and then pray to God for a spiritual confirmation. The main problem with this experiment should be obvious to any good scientist: no controls. To be fair, one should try the experiment on many other books (holy or otherwise) to see if there are any other hits. Also, a null result is invariably interpreted as failing to do the experiment correctly, because it's guaranteed by God, see, it's right there in the book. The inability to accept a negative outcome is also rather unscientific. And finally, a "spiritual confirmation" will be interpreted for you as coming from (their particular version of) God, rather than some other explanation for a human emotional response, which we all know, can be achieved in numerous other ways that don't particularly rely on God as an explanation. Make the experiment fair before you agree to play with a stacked deck!
Theism is a symptom of epistemic deficiency. Atheism follows from epistemic sufficiency, but not all atheists are rational or sane. The epistemically virtuous do not believe on insufficient evidence, nor ignore or groundlessly dismiss evidence relevant to beliefs they hold.
That goes for both of you. The Litany of Tarsky is the correct attitude for a rationalist, and it's about not thumbing the scales. If your brother were sane (to rationalist standards), he would not hold such a belief, given the state of readily available evidence. If he hasn't figured this out, it's either because he's put his thumb on the scales or refuses to look. Organized religions (that have survived) teach their adherents not to look (ironically), and that it is virtuous to thumb the scales (faith), and that is something they have in common with cults, although not always to the same degree. These tactics are dark arts—symmetric weapons, that can promote any other beliefs (false or otherwise) just as easily.
If you feel like talking to him about it, but don't want it to devolve into a debate, Street Epistemology is a pretty good approach. It can help dislodge irrational beliefs without attacking them directly, by instead promoting better epistemics (by Socratically poking holes in bad epistemics).
To answer your direct question, I think Privileging the Hypothesis is pretty relevant. Einstein's Arrogance goes into more detail about the same key rationality concept of locating the hypothesis.
That dentist on YouTube also recommended a sodium fluoride rinse (ACT) after the Listerine and mentioned somewhere that if you could get your teenager to use only one of the three rinses, that it should be the fluoride. (I've heard others suggest waiting 20 minutes after brushing before rinsing out the toothpaste to allow more time for the fluoride in the toothpaste to work.) She also mentioned that the brands involved sell multiple formulations with different concentrations and even different active ingredients (some of which may even be counterproductive), and she can't speak to the efficacy of the treatment if you don't use the exact products that she has experience with.
One can also use Vim to edit clipboard text. I've experimented with a few ways. Here's a published example of how it could be done (from someone else). Adding a keyboard shortcut makes it faster when you're not already in a terminal. You can edit (e.g.) web text boxes with Vim this way, although active JavaScript doesn't always react to a paste the same way as typing. Depends on the page.
I feel like this has come up before, but I'm not finding the post. You don't need the stick-on mirrors to eliminate the blind spot. I don't know why pointing side mirrors straight back is still so popular, but that's not the only way it's taught. I have since learned to set mine much wider.
This article explains the technique. (See the video.)
In a nutshell, while in the diver's seat, tilt your head to the left until it's almost touching your window, then from that perspective point it straight back so you can just see the side of your car. (You might need a similar adjustment for the passenger's side, but those are often already wide-angle.) Now from normal position, you can see your former "blind spot". When you need to see straight back in your side mirror (like when backing out), just tilt your head again. Remember that you also have a center mirror. You should be able to see passing cars in your center mirror, and then in your side mirror, then in your peripheral vision without ever turning your head or completely losing sight of them.