Essentially, I want to make sure my logic is sound, from the point of view of smart rational people who do not believe in the existence of supernatural miracles. The Chanukah story: 175-134 BCE. Hellenic Assyrians (Antiochus IV) had conquered Israel, and passed a variety of laws oppressing the freedom...
I've been lurking here a bit, and am trying to understand what people here mean by rationalism. Many articles here seem to refer to discussion participants as rationalist while meaning very seemingly-different things, including intelligent, socially awkward, well-educated, and unencumbered by education. I'm trying to make a little more sense...
No, but the people who believed in the Greek deities also typically believed those deities were heavily invested in immediate mortal conflicts and highly sensitive to slights. Those Greeks would have expected some protection for the bird or retaliation against Meshullam. Seeing none would provide evidence that the bird was not a favorite of any of their deities.
"Each question will at least be held at 2 to 1 odds amongst professional philosophers, i.e., if more than 2/3s of professional philosophers agree, we won't bother. So as to not waste our time with small fish."
This is cheating, of course. You are comparing group A to group B on questions specifically selected for their difficulty to group B. Instead, it would be more fair to find open problems in fields that haven't received much attention from professional academic philosophers.
The person need not even be self-serving. All people respond to incentives, and since publishing popular results is rewarding (in fame; often financially as well) the creators of novel arguments will become more likely to believe those arguments.
Nietzsche can't know what the Superman will look like - nobody can. But he provides a great deal of assistance: he is extremely insightful about what people are doing today (well, late 1800s, but still applicable), how that tricks us into behaving and believing in certain ways, and what that means.
But he wrote these insights as poetry. If you wanted an argument spelled out logically or a methodology of scientific inquiry, you picked the wrong philosopher.
The first two are excellent examples. Thanks!
If Buller is to be believed that's another postdiction. The sort of studies I want to see would compare two groups who aren't known to be distinct. An example:
Group A and B evolved in different environments and should display some difference in behavior. They have different rates of intron fragments G and H Now look at apparently-homogenous group X, who do not believe they have A or B ancestry. Compare X with intron G to X with intron H and find the predicted behavior difference.
Do we have studies at that level?
Buller claims that the statistics come from police reports and that the police had previously been trained to look for stepparents as a source of child abuse. If so, 1 this was well known by nonpsychologists and 2 the magnitude of the effect may be overstated. Is there a problem with this critique?
Ok, update my cache: you listed 7 bold postdictions; please list some bold predictions.
Its true that not all science is prospective, but you need to at least avoid looking at the data when making hypotheses you will then test against that data. Often we divide a data set to do this. Its much easier to do this with quantitative hypotheses than qualitative ones.
It is cheating to make predictions that are actually postdictions. To test hypotheses we have to look at questions for which we don't have information and then test those questions by gathering new information. A lot of the "evolutionary psychology" are really "Just So" stories without this kind of hypothesis testing.
Essentially, I want to make sure my logic is sound, from the point of view of smart rational people who do not believe in the existence of supernatural miracles.
The Chanukah story: 175-134 BCE. Hellenic Assyrians (Antiochus IV) had conquered Israel, and passed a variety of laws oppressing the freedom of worship of the Jews there. They defiled the Temple and forbade the study of sacred texts. The Maccabees led a Jewish revolt against the Assyrians, and eventually drove them out of Israel. Immediately upon retaking the Temple, they cleaned and rededicated it; they relit the sacred flame using a small vial of kosher oil and sent for more oil (which was 8 days distant). ... (read 796 more words →)
I've been lurking here a bit, and am trying to understand what people here mean by rationalism. Many articles here seem to refer to discussion participants as rationalist while meaning very seemingly-different things, including intelligent, socially awkward, well-educated, and unencumbered by education. I'm trying to make a little more sense of the word/concept.
Surely it does not refer to rationalist in the empiricism/rationalism divide, because it doesn't seem to be used in quite that way.
There is enough food for all starving human children. The existence of starving children has much more to do with corruption than with production.