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All of smijer's Comments + Replies

Archimedes's Chronophone
smijer50

70 comments so far, and none of them, "Holy Shit! I'm talking to Archimedes!"

... which I suppose he would hear as "Ye Gods! I'm talking to Plato"...

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Imperfect Voting Systems
smijer50

My morning coffee hasn't kicked in... I wonder what the significance is that no voting system can be "perfect". Is it a fluke of math, or does it say something about the coherence of our value systems as they pertain to electoral systems?

I should also express my view that a plurality voting system that allows only two parties to thrive in practice is probably the worst of all worlds where it concerns voting systems. I believe the polarizing effects of a system that requires exactly two parties are a large component of the set of difficulties that make it so politics is the mind-killer.

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0VAuroch
No voting system can deal with people who have arbitrary preferences. I've lost track of the first time I looked into this, but I'm pretty sure that if you map preference space, impose a metric, and say that each candidate and voter choose a location in that space and the votes go in proportion to the distance by that metric, it gets around Arrow by imposing the requirement "voters may only express a preference that their representatives share their preferences", which is reasonable but still violates the theorem's preconditions.
A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies
smijer60

Oh - this is a veiled critique of conciliatory attitudes toward religion? I though it was a direct critique of conciliatory attitudes toward political ideologies - and I was going to disagree with it. I think I detect a dark side to lumping all political ideologies together under the category of "poltitical ideology" and ignoring the specific reasons why political ideologies can become harmful or anti-rational.

Now that I see that this was a veiled critique of religion (or a specific religious grouping?) I think my reservations still stand.

What ... (read more)

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0hamnox
I read your post multiple times, and yet I almost missed the point. Lumping is dangerous, yes. In the case of this parable, I think (though I might be wrong) that you noticed it was dangerous to lump everything related to Nazis together in one group. Blanket condemnation for supporting Nazism loses us the opportunity to examine what makes the difference between direct harm and harms that can be redirected. The lumping happens anyways, positive associations made by the typical human brains of the general populace, and this is the darkness seen by the original poster. That doesn't mean there aren't other dark corners to be seen. It occurs to me that science has had some pretty dark patches in its past. Especially with experimentation. Probably going a few questionable directions in the current day too. The march of reason is not marched at a uniform pace, even with a pretty agreed upon creed of "the scientific method". I wonder, have we differentiated ourselves enough? Do we still carry the baggage of our forbearers?
Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable
smijer00

Personally, it isn't something I waste my time on... as I mentioned earlier - it is still a mistake, in terms of strict probability, to believe that there have been miracles from God. It just isn't a specifically anti-scientific mistake. The act of making it is not evidence that a person is unscientific - merely that they are not reasoning well.

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Guardians of the Truth
smijer10

Did Chuang Tzu know that much about the ancient history of humans, really?

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Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
smijer100

The person who originally claimed that "they hate us for our freedom" was probably referring to a Western, enlightenment notion, called by that name.

The thing that the Muslim university student praises and calls freedom is apparently an Islamic religious idea, corresponding very roughly to the sort of freedom a recovering addict craves from his addictions.

If the words were tabooed, then you would probably see the coherence of both points of view, and I think, could fairly assert that Islamists really do "hate our freedoms" in a sense, so long as you don't allow this approximation to carry more than its fair burden of explanatory weight (as certain former POTUSs have done).

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Rationality Quotes May 2012
smijer00

I'm not sure Chesterson deserves the epithet of apologist. Christian yes... evangelist, of a sort. I see him as a cut above the apologist class of Christian commentators.

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1hairyfigment
I don't know that "apologist" counts as a natural class, but he definitely produced Christian apologetics. He may have preferred to call them 'refutations' of non-Christian or atheist doctrines.
Ontologial Reductionism and Invisible Dragons
smijer20

Coming late... enjoying this discussion. I haven't read much from Jewish apologists. Balofsky seems a cut above his Christian counterparts. But my question is about your mention of a non-extant history mentioned in 23:28. How do we know this is a non-extant history, and not a reference to Chronicles?

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1JoshuaZ
There's some detailed scholarly issues about this. It looks like what he have as Chronicles may contains parts of the text that Kings calls Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. (To be precise, what Kings calls Divrei Hayamim and what is commonly translated at Chronicles. The Hebrew title of the extent book of Chronicles is also Divrei Hayamim). So why do they seem to be distinct books? First the extant book called Chronicles contains description of events after the time of Kings, so whatever Kings is talking about had at minimum to refer to something else. In particular, Chronicles includes the decision by Cyrus to let the Jews return and Kings ends with events happening about forty years before. (There are some complicating issues- the chronology in both Kings and Chronicles as well as other later books of Tanach doesn't fit well at all with the Babylonian or Persian records when talking about the time period of the first exile. Exactly which bits are temporally reliable are not clear.) Now, one could say to this that it is possible that the book of Kings actually refers to an earlier version of Chronicles and that our text has sections added at the end. There is, as I understand, linguistic problems with this. In particular, the end of Chronicles_extant uses a pretty consistent language and style, but I don't know enough about the linguistics to evaluate or comment on that claim in detail. Second, Kings seems to be referring to multiple distinct books as Chronicles, one for the Judean kingdom and one for the Israelite kingdom. (For most of the First Temple period there are two distinct kingdoms). See for example 1 Kings 16:5, and the verse cited above. And in fact, Chronicles_extant makes a similar pair of references to two books of kings, although it isn't completely clear that the author is talking about the same thing. See for example 1 Chronicles 9:1 and 2 Chronicles 16:11. Third, Kings and Chronicles have very different attitudes about the same kings and eve
Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable
smijer00

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... (read more)

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1Bugmaster
Sure, it's possible that the Resurrection did occur; believing in its mere possibility is not, in itself, unscientific. But I would argue that if science works, then you'd be forced to conclude that the Resurrection most likely did not occur, based on the evidence available to you. Similarly, you would be forced to conclude that intelligent aliens most likely never visited the Earth -- not even that one time -- while still acknowledging that it's entirely possible that they did. Once again, it's a matter of probabilities. If these effects are so subtle and/or rare as to be undetectable, then we'd conclude that such effects most probably do not occur. This is different from saying that they definitely do not occur, or that they cannot occur in principle, etc.
0Strange7
That sort of argument implies some unpleasant things about the agent in question's willingness to render assistance to those who claim to serve it, and further claim to receive various favors in return for such service.
Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable
smijer40

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 a... (read more)

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0Veldurak
If you step outside ordinary physical law, you lose your firm objective ground to stand on. What's the point of considering the question when the answer is "You can't disprove me because God is magical and can do anything." ? Unless there's firm evidence towards those events happening (which consistently have been disproven historically), then why waste your time?
3Alejandro1
When you write a comment, at the bottom right of the text box there is a "Help" button that tells you how to to blockquotes, italics, bold, links, and bullet points.
Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable
smijer10

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 ethics in common. Only values, and the most controversial subject of those values is "the interdependent web of all existence", which we agree to "respect". Ev... (read more)

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0Bugmaster
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.
MixedNuts140

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 Unitar... (read more)

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[LINK] "Prediction Audits" for Nate Silver, Dave Weigel
smijer20

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.

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Solvent140

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

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Is every life really worth preserving?
smijer160

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 emotional 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 t... (read more)

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9wedrifid
Well spotted. I was wondering if anyone was going to notice that Vladimir's (absurdly highly upvoted) comment was basically a just a dark arts exploit trying to harness (largely deontological) moral judgements outside their intended context.
Pluralistic Moral Reductionism
smijer00

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

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0lukeprog
True! Maybe I need a different example.
Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary
smijer160

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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0minusdash
Yes, exactly. Hallucinations and altered consciousness periods don't simply mean that your sane and usual rational mind is still there and it simply receives strange visual inputs as if you were enjoying a movie. Sometimes your very own thought processes are disturbed, it's not like a little rational homunculus can always remain skeptical. So if you then try to think about journals and science, it won't feel like a better alternative hypothesis. You will be genuinely confused and maybe imagine reading something in a journal that you didn't, or imagine that some conspiracy is out there and you're now uncovering it, etc. A real strong hallucination can be very very strong. Some on-the-fence atheists convert to a religion when they have some extreme experience of pleasure and bliss and feel that some miraculous event happened. They will know that religion is true, it will be the first and foremost truth they can imagine. It's really hard to imagine what it feels like to be someone else. Again, no rational homunculi pulling the string in our heads.