151–160 of 307 posts
A few more tips for arguing on the Internet: 1) Be polite. Nobody wants to listen to or learn from a rude person. 2) Avoid signaling your values, knowledge, or status. Write for the person you are addressing, not other members of your in-group. Proofread your writing and delete anything that does not serve this purpose. 3) Don't value winning more than understanding.
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Imagine that there's a meteor heading towards earth. All evidence suggests that it will hit in three days, and wipe out all multicellular life - it's a big one. What do you do? How do you live your life your last three days? One school of thought says, disregard the evidence. Assert, against it all, that the meteor is going to miss. Or if that's hard, decide to trust someone who asserts it (this is usually easier). T…
This is one of the simplest, and most useful, explanations for religious belief I've seen. Thank you! There's a tendency to write off creationists and theists as completely irrational and stupid, without giving any thought to their motivations.
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I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ. This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief. Not all forms of faith and belief require you to reject evidence, mind, but this one most certainly does.
> I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ. That stretches the definition of an idiot considerably. > This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief. That could be beneficial for one's emotional health (belief in higher power and all that) and thus the smart t…
And personally, yeah, I think anyone that can't cope with reality as it is, that needs comforting fictions of higher powers, is de-facto weaker and worse off.
The scientific method has advanced our society immeasurably. Evolutionarily speaking our rationality and logical thought has given us such amazing success it's hard to see how that is supportable at all. It's also not clear what they mean by "tuned to fitness" there. He seems to consider that abstractions and shortcuts are the same as unreality, which appears orthogonal to this debate.
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> Only when you understand their argument... I couldn't agree more. As a lifelong believer in science, raised in the Midwest among creationists, I have come into many conversations with intelligent people who somehow place faith in front of evidence. It's demoralizing to realize the frequency that this phenomenon occurs. I've recently scheduled a trip to the Creation Museum to observe the message at its core (half fo…
Sorry, most people are indeed not idiots, but that doesn't apply to creationists. It's one thing to go to a church (there even might be purely social reasons), and it's another thing to discard overwhelming scientific evidence and believe something based on the principle of not needing any evidence at all. I become especially sad when I think of the confused minds of the poor children of these people. On the topic, I…
Succinctly, if miracles exist, they violate natural laws. Claiming that natural laws and observations (carbon dating, say) do not allow for miracles is begging the question.
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One of the arguments for evolution involves some very non-trivial calculation on probability of whether it could result in the world we're in right now (not the maths itself, but the sequence of reasoning). It has been a while since I read Dawkin's books, but I don't think the books cover those kind of arguments. I think there are quite a bit of writing on lesswrong on the topic. I've met creationists that believed i…
The probabilities cannot be calculated as we do not have interstellar travel required to inspect worlds that evolve separately from our own. So, that is no argument, just speculation. Same problem as with Drake's equitation and aliens. A stronger argument is that we have managed to create building blocks of life from basic physics and chemistry. No superpowers required for that. At least we can see how the stars begi…
No. Just some creators.
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Imagine that there's a meteor heading towards earth. All evidence suggests that it will hit in three days, and wipe out all multicellular life - it's a big one. What do you do? How do you live your life your last three days? One school of thought says, disregard the evidence. Assert, against it all, that the meteor is going to miss. Or if that's hard, decide to trust someone who asserts it (this is usually easier). T…
That's the essence of Pascal's Wager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager
Hell is nowhere in this chain of argument. God arguably is, but that's in step 2. It's step 3 which may kinda, sorta remind you of Pascal's Wager, but it's only an argument against nihilism, not even for theism.
Yes, conceding step 3 leaves wide open the question of what to believe in instead of nihilism. Even conceding step 2 leaves open the question of "what sort of god are we talking about". But this is precisely the point. That means you can argue these things separately, while still acknowledging your opponent's ultimate concern.
--Dale Carnegie
For the above reasons, in social situations, I avoid every argument that I can.
What did I just read? Some unheard of psychologist distorted and dumbified a perfectly understandable passage from the famous Pascal. And because he, as a psychologist, did that; the statement is now considered truth and valid "for realz". Am I getting this right? Scientist are really our times high priests.
I think it resonates because we've all seen both methods in action, and the proposed one (at least for me) has always lead to a better outcome. The psychologist has also most likely seen even more examples in all the literature he has read and so can add a bit more weight to the argument. What would convince you of the hypothesis? A quantitative study?
Wasn't Pascal beautiful passages already obvious true before this psychologist made his statement?
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I've learned plenty (and changed my mind many times) from having people simply tell me that I'm wrong.
I have found programmers to be far more receptive to blunt criticism than my other non-programmer friends. I think it's just a frame of mind to accept that will be wrong a lot and that is fine. It would take a whole lot of cognitive dissonance to get through a decent sized software project and imagine it is all flawless or couldn't be even slightly better in some way.
Both ends of behavior are the result of being confronted often with error, be it caused by wrongful action or caused by externalities. When a circuit goes up in smoke, its just physics being a harsh mistress; getting angry about it is useless, so we just skip the blame/anger part.
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It's one of the usual arguments for ignoring the "simulation argument". I think there's a bigger problem with the religious version that you presented. Namely, for any religion/concept of God, you can imagine another one that wants you to do opposite things. How do you know which God's existence to assume? You're back to trying to find evidence for one God against another God. In practice, this would probably also pr…
> Namely, for any religion/concept of God, you can imagine another one that wants you to do opposite things. How do you know which God's existence to assume? In some religions, the relation with God is a tangible and personal one. God "speaks to you" so to speak. So you just "know" -- you're not starting from evaluating random entities against each other as if they're all equal.
If God "speaks to you", you already "know" he exists. This was precisely what I tried to point out in my previous comment. If you have a method to pick out a particular God out of all possible Gods, then this method (or something related) can also be used to reject atheism directly. There's no need for the elaborate argument that I responded to.