281–290 of 947 posts
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There should be an extremist cult of people who are certain only that uncertainty is the only certain thing
More people should read Sextus Empiricus as he's basically the O.G. Phyrronist skeptic and goes pretty hard on this very train of thought.
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The "bears" story reads a lot more sensibly if you translated it correctly as "a gang of thugs tries to bully Elisha into killing himself." Still reliant on the supernatural, but what do you expect from such a book?
Where do you see that in the text? I am looking at the Hebrew script, and the text only reads that as Elisha went up a path, young lads left the city and mocked him by saying "get up baldy", and he turned to them and cursed them to be killed by two she bears. I don't think saying "get up baldy" to a guy walking up a hill constitutes bullying him into killing himself.
I think the true meaning has been lost to time. The Hebrew text has been translated and rewritten so many times it’s a children’s book. The original texts of the Dead Sea scrolls are bits and pieces of that long lost story. All we have left are the transliterations of transliterations.
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Why didnt they kill the hippos like we killed the buffalo?
Hippos are more dangerous than emus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
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It's generally worth remembering that some of the fallacies are actually structural, and some are rhetorical. A contradiction creates a structural fallacy; if you find one, it's a fair belief that at least one of the supporting claims is false. In contrast, appeal to authority is probabilistic: we don't know , given the current context, if the authority is right, so they might be wrong... But we don't have time to re…
… however, even that is up for debate. Maybe the TV actor in your own example is Al Gore filming An Inconvenient Truth and the environmental scientist was in the minority which isn’t so afraid of climate change. Fast forward to 2025, the scientist’s minority position was wrong, while Al Gore’s documentary was legally ruled to have 9 major errors; so you were stupid on both sides, with the TV actor being closer.
These "maybes" are on the table. They are probably not the case.
(You end up with a spread of likelihoods and have to decide what to do with them. And law hates a spread of likelihoods and hates decision-by-coinflips, so one can see how rhetorical traditions grounded in legal persuasion tend towards encouraging Boolean outcomes; you can't find someone "a little guilty," at least not in the Western tradition of justice).
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Without speaking for religions I'm not familiar with, I grew up Catholic, and one of the most important Catholic beliefs is that during Mass, the bread (i.e. "communion" wafers) and wine quite literally transform into the body and blood of Jesus, and that eating and drinking it is a necessary ritual to get into heaven[1], which was a source of controversy even back as far as the Protestant Reformation, with some sect…
I've recently started attending an Episcopal church. We have some people who lean heavy on transubstantiation, but our priest says, "look, something holy happens during communion, exactly what, we don't know." See also: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/real-presence/ ? "Belief in the real presence does not imply a claim to know how Christ is present in the eucharistic elements. Belief in the real presence doe…
There’s a fine line between suspension of disbelief and righteousness. All it takes is for one to believe their own delusion.
The whole game of Rationalism is that you should ignore gut intuitions and cultural norms that you can't justify with rational arguments. Well, it turns out that intuition and long-lived cultural norms often have rational justifications, but individuals may not know what they are, and norms/intuitions provide useful antibodies against narcissist would-be cult leaders. Can you find the "rational" justification not to…
> The whole game of Rationalism is that you should ignore gut intuitions and cultural norms that you can't justify with rational arguments. The game as it is _actually_ played is that you use rationalist arguments to justify your pre-existing gut intuitions and personal biases.
It's really worth reading up on the techniques from Large Group Awareness Training so that you can recognize them when they pop up. Once you see them listed (social pressure, sleep deprivation, control of drinking/bathroom, control of language/terminology, long exhausting activities, financial buy in, etc) and see where they've been used in cults and other cult adjacent things it's a little bit of a warning signal wh…
https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-d...
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It is used ti be always religion. But now downsides are well understood. And alternatives that can fill the same need (social activities) - like gathering with your neighbors, singing, performing arts, clubs, parks and paries are available and great.
Religions have multitudes of problems but suicide rates amongst atheists is higher than you'd think it would be. It seems like for many, rejection of organized religion leads to adoption of ad hoc quasi-religions with no mooring to them, leaving the person who is seeking a solid belief system drifting until they find a cult, give in to madness that causes self-harm, or adopt their own system of belief that they then…
Atheists tend to not have those consistently and must build their own.
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I suspect you didn't read some parts of my comment. I didn't say everyone in the world is always data-limited, I said we normally are where I work. I didn't recommend "sitting back on our laurels." I made very specific recommendations. The qualifier "normally" already covers "not entirely true". Of course it's not entirely true. It's mostly true for us now. (In fact twenty years ago we used more numerical models than…
> It's not a sentiment, it's a reality that we have to deal with. And I think you missed the main point of my reply: that people often think we need more data, but cleverness and ingenuity can often find a way to make meaningful progress with existing data. Obviously I can't make any definitive judgment about your specific case, but I'm skeptical of any claim that it's out of the realm of possibility that some genius…
I read your point and answered it twice. Your latest response seems to indicate that you're ignoring those responses. For example you seem to suggest that I'm "claim[ing] that it's out of the realm of possibility" for "Einstein" to make progress on our work without taking more data. But anyone can hit "parent" a few times and see what I actually claimed. I claimed "mostly" and "for us where I work". I took the time to repeat that for you. That time seems wasted now.
Perhaps you view "getting more data" as an extremely unpleasant activity, to be avoided at all costs? You may be an astronomer, for example. Or maybe you see taking more data before thinking as some kind of admission of defeat? We don't use that kind of metric. For us it's a question of the cheapest and fastest way to solve each problem.
if modeling is slower and more expensive than measuring, we measure. If not, we model. You do you.
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I don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms, I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence. Not that non-rationalists are any better at reasoning, but non-rationalists do at least benefit from some…
I feel this way about some of the more extreme effective altruists. There is no room for uncertainty or recognition of the way that errors compound. - "We should focus our charitable endeavors on the problems that are most impactful, like eradicating preventable diseases in poor countries." Cool, I'm on board. - "I should do the job that makes the absolute most amount of money possible, like starting a crypto exchang…