I'm looking for an NLP program that can match pronouns in a sentence to the noun they refer to. I don't need anything else, just that. Does anyone know if there's one available that's not too expensive?
This look wonderful, thank you. Do you know of one that can also match up the verbs? For example:
"Amy walks to the store for Nancy and buys her a flower, which she appreciates."
In this sentence, "walks" and "buys" are both being carried out by Amy, while "appreciates" is being carried out by Nancy.
(Out of curiosity I just tested this sentence in neuralcoref and it incorrectly believes that "she" is referring to Amy. Seems to do pretty well with sentences I didn't intentionally design to be difficult though.)
I knew Ukraine wasn't about to lose any major cities, but after hearing bad news about Ukraine for awhile, my confidence that they would take back territory in the next year (on net) fell to 60%. Now it's back to ~88%. [edit: err... make that 80%]
Why? the last two weeks of tweets & retweets by @TrentTelenko, who predicted both that Russia would invade #Ukraine and fail to take over the whole country, and who knows tons of military trivia. I don't know if Trent is holding back any info that reduces Ukraine's chances, but he offers quite a barrage of good signs.
Here I focus on facts I didn't know before, but at the end I'll have some bonus facts that are also instructive.
*Edit* (June 10): very bad news today lowers my confidence all the way down to 60%[1].
- Larger quantities of artillery shells are being sent to Ukraine than I thought: https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1530038089799946240 Edit: somehow I misinterpreted the number "208,000 155mm rounds allocated for Ukraine" from the U.S.; the number felt bigger than it is, though still higher than I knew about before. Google/Bing wouldn't tell me how many shells Russia is using, but I seem to recall somebody claiming Russia uses 30,000 shells per day and Denys Davydov saying Russia fires 20 shells for every shell fired by Ukraine. It should be noted though that much of Russia's artillery is imprecise and slow to configure (basically 'Uragan and Smerch' is lousy, see https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1531012132975910912, and by contrast I've seen some impressive videos of precise Ukrainian artillery). It seems like the Russians have just dumped a lot of their shells indiscriminately on cities until Ukraine has "nothing left to defend", and the spread-out shelling patterns on Ukrainian trenches also demonstrate low precision. As Small Wars Journal noted in 2020 (discussing 2015), "Ukrainians claimed that for every salvo they fired, they received 10 to 15 salvos in return". So it's not entirely clear that Ukraine will get as much gear as they need, and I have to suspect I'm missing some info that is favorable to Russia. On the other hand Russia doesn't seem to use its artillery effectively and I don't think I weighted partisan/guerilla fighting enough. Overall I'm reducing my confidence to 80%.
- Early signs Russia is running low on equipment seem to have been confirmed by more recent signs (the partial retaking of Severodonetsk and Zelensky's visit to Lysychansk) that Ukrainians in Donbas are not on the verge of collapse: https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1530828743832440832 (that's in addition to Russia's deployment of old T-62s and Ukraine knowing about this in advance, as if you needed more confirmation of their good intel https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1529517640053661699) BTW: Russia has lost far more tanks than heavy artillery, but artillery is their weapon of choice. However, when RU runs short on tanks and BMPs, I expect it'll be easier for Ukrainian footsoldiers to advance despite that artillery, especially as their numbers increase.
- *Before* Ukraine's apparent offensive north of Kherson stalled out, @TrentTelenko judged it to be a "shaping operation" rather than a real offensive, which would make the "stall" something to be expected. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1531814609908383744
- Russian losses should mainly be infantry, and their losses are so large that Trent thinks they've "hit a wall"—their infantry is nearly gone after accounting for both dead and wounded. Supporting evidence: RU deployed 25 BTGs to Severodonetsk and is still failing there. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533491373604802561
There is one thing I don't get about Trent: he evidently takes the Ukrainian claim for Russian troops KIA (30,500 dead) at face value, to reach a conclusion that Russia has taken 79,000 casualties with 80% being infantry. I'm not sure why one would trust that 30K number, but on the flip side he uses a low ratio of wounded to killed on the RU side, as compared to what is typical in wars, so maybe it balances out, almost.
[1] June 10: the reported casualty rate has risen to ~150 Ukrainian soldiers killed per day. This is probably higher than Russia's casualty rate and certainly higher than the rate of losses for Russian nationals. Since Ukraine is mostly in a defensive posture, this should not be happening. In fact, I've decided that even though I earn minimum wage (and can't get a tax deduction for Ukrainian charities), I will donate $1000 today. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/ukraine-casualty-rate-russia-war-tipping-point ... June 30: I suspect Ukraine's high casualty rate is related to the continuing artillery imbalance, in which Russia just has far more shells with which to bomb Ukraine. I can only hope that Ukraine's rapid failure around Lysychansk is more about Ukraine trying to reduce casualties than about Ukrainian forces "collapsing".
A counterpoint is the coverage from "War in Ukraine" that is more pessimistic for Ukraine.[1]
A problem with this source (like so many other sources) is that they don't report where they are getting their information from. Although they're probably pro-Ukraine, I know that in one case they said that the Russians has destroyed a third of Ukraine's M777 artillery, and they had a whole segment of the show about this topic[2], but this is just a Russian distortion: a *Russian* source said "The Armed Forces of Ukraine are losing a third of the M777 howitzers transferred from the United States in battles with Russian artillerymen, said Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Denis Sharapov", and I couldn't find any non-Russian sources saying this. I did find sources indicating that about one third of m777 had been damaged from *firing too quickly*, and so had to be repaired.
Similarly I've decided that while Trent Telenko is a very knowledgeable and useful source, he is too biased toward optimism in Ukraine's favor.
This report is also interesting[1]. Key takeaways:
• Americans genuinely deserve to be proud of this: the USA is giving more aid to Ukraine than ALL European countries combined... despite the fact that the EU has a much larger population than the U.S.!
• Total support from the US is about €42.7 billion, over half of which is military aid; the rest of the world combined is giving almost the same amount.
• Well over half of committed military aid has been delivered (figure 7). This tells me that we should be able to tell in the next couple of months whether that aid is enough to allow Ukraine to stop Russian advances and take back territory. I'm guessing they need a little more time for training. Edit: this is misleading, see below.
• Other democracies near Russia also give outsized donations. Destroying Russian weapons of death in Ukraine isn't just the right thing to do — it also bolsters the security of other countries in the region, and will allow refugees to return home from these countries, which also generally took in the most refugees.
Edit: I am confused about something though. The figure 7 chart shows about €4.2 billion committed military aid from USA, but one of the main-page charts[1] shows about €24 billion committed military aid from USA! I am asking them about this and they seem responsive[2]. Most likely the remaining €19.8 billion is undelivered aid, in which case Ukraine is far from having the hardware it needs.
Yes, the Ukrainian army is clearly having a tough time of it. Unfortunately we don't have the same level of insight into the Russian army. That they can't make more than the most minor advances with all the numbers and firepower they have brought to bear, suggests that things are going very poorly indeed on their side - but which army is closest to breaking is unknowable, until it happens.
I'm not even going to try to predict this one beyond saying it's basically a coin toss.
God, I hope. If the Ukraine war ends favorably for Russia I expect that my country will be a candidate for next on the chopping block. Here's to optimism. Cheers!
As you may or may not be aware, there's currently a market on Manifold for whether anyone will take you up on your ban appeals process. As prediction markets tend to do, this creates an incentive for someone to get banned from your blog.
You're one of my favorite writers, so I'd prefer to not actually say anything inappropriate in your comments section, and would appreciate it if you just banned me without that being necessary. :)
In a sense, Michael Shellenberger getting 95000 votes (with only "50%" of ballots in) is a triumph. Jesus only needed twelve, Shellenberger has literally thousands of times more support.
In a more practical sense, fourth place is the second loser. And 3% of the vote is a country mile away from the 15% obtained by the second-place finisher.
Thomas Carlyle, who in life was extremely dismissive of Spirtualism, was made to go through his paces in the afterlife, where he had completely changed his views - according to this book, "What Spiritualism Really Is, By Thomas Carlyle In the Spirit-World, And Through the Impressional Brain of Dr. WM. J. Bryan" written by a doctor in 1919.
Apart from this example of how you can be made to say anything once you're dead, it's why the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. Eminent and respectable people like doctors and scientists backed it. This wasn't pie-in-the-sky based on texts from thousands of years ago, you too could go to a séance today and have independent confirmation of contact with the dead.
So faint demurrals of "but we're nothing like a religion, we never demand you take anything on faith!" are not that convincing to me about the latest New Scientific Wonderment.
Isn't there a big difference between a starry-eyed ideal and a belief system? Transhumanism might be moral or immoral, plausible or implausible, but it's an ideal, not a set of truth statements. It does not claim that human-machine hybrids already exist, but that they would be desirable. Spiritualism and religion makes claims about the existence of supernatural entities in the here and now.
That's true. It is also reasonable to at least sort-of include a guess that transhuman modifications will become feasible as part of the set of ideas considered to be in transhumanism. ( Yeah, fuzzy, I know. )
"the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. "
Yes, you have a good point. (re AI) There is always a worry about whether existing results are being extrapolated beyond what the algorithms can actually deliver. To mangle a traditional line: "The hype we have always with us" :-)
- Brains are sometimes surprisingly flexible. Maybe just adding more neurons will work.
- Brains have lots of anatomically distinct regions (order of 180?). If those didn't provide some advantage why did evolution select for them? Is it _really_ possible to match human capabilities without explicitly coding the equivalent of each of those regions?
Lighting the Ivermectin data on fire and seeing if the smoke cures Covid seems likely to provide identical results as any of the more statistics based tests.
Yes Ref, no matter what test you choose the signal of benefit will always be there. Scott’s gotta choose a statistical method sooner or later, may as well choose G M-K’s. It will show a signal of benefit as well then we can finally put it to bed, IVM works, just like Scott said in his article
'Meta-study demonstrates that dry-smoke inhalation delivers more of active ingredient than wet-steam, aerosol via inhaler, or sticking it up your jumper!'
(Belated) Congratulations to Scott on this title, which was apparently fully decodable (once I found the referenced piece) without reading the article:
"Current Affairs' Marxist Critique Of Toddler Show Blippi Isn't Marxist Enough"
(My reading: the anti-industrialism and the white cringe strike me as fundamentally at odds with Marxist thought, suggesting that Robinson is just name-dropping Marx for leftist cred rather than actually being Marxist.)
Considering Wikipedia lists Nathan Robinson in its "American Anti-Communists" category and he considers that to be an accurate label for himself, he's very obviously not an actual Marxist, no.
Abortions are being performed up to six weeks, not any later than that. The number of abortions performed in Texas has been about cut in half, but many women are leaving the state (if they can) or taking mail-order abortion pills (though there are new laws restricting the pill as well). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/upshot/texas-abortion-women-data.html
Of course, others are unable to access abortion and are being forced to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term.
A couple of other side effects: some pharmacies are afraid of getting sued under the bounty law, and therefore are refusing to sell miscarriage treatments (since the medicines used post-miscarriage and for abortion are the same). Wait times for abortion clinics in nearby states (and not-that-nearby states) are rising due to the influx of patients from Texas, forcing some women to get abortions later in their pregnancies. And ironically, some women are getting abortions that they might have ultimately decided not to get under a less restrictive law, because they legally only have 1-2 days to make a decision after finding out that they're pregnant, so they're pressured into making a snap decision without having time to explore any alternatives.
All that said, I'm not aware of any bounties being paid out. The threat of them seems to be enough.
TracingWoodgrains, late of r/TheSchism which is a spin-off of a spin-off of the SSC reddit site, did a similar stunt with persuading LibsofTikTok that there was an agenda to get furrydom (furriness?) taught in elementary school. Again, this was a hoax, and an extremely detailed one:
That one was way more controversial when he informed the various disapora about it on r/TheMotte etc. He did *too* good a job and became the story, not just reported on it.
Don't believe everything you read on social media, especially when rationalists/rationalist-adjacent people of this parish may be involved!
The bounty hunters subreddit was a joke, sure, but, like... Texas *did* pass a law that allowed civilians to sue those involved in abortions, correct? What effect did that have?
I just use my (mostly cotton) shirt to clean off the dirt about 1-2 times a day when i notice them getting dirty. When i get a bunch of gunk or dirt on them i clean em with a microfiber cloth. Maybe once every 6 months i'll actually run them under water and carefully clean them.
Been doing this for ~10 years now and it works just fine.
Don't use a microfiber cloth if you value having scratch-free glasses. The correct way to clean glasses is simple: with soap and water. First, wash your hands thoroughly. Then gently rinse any grime / particulates off with just the stream of water. Last, if there's any oils / fingerprints / smudges left, lather up some more soap on your fingers and gently clean them off the lenses. You can shake off 80% of the water, and the rest will evaporate within minutes, leaving your glasses perfectly clear.
Modern glasses are 99% likely to be made from materials that won't corrode (plastic, titanium, aluminum, etc), and this method avoids the micro-scratches which are an inevitable part of rubbing them with a cloth. The cloth, microfiber or not, is packed with microscopic particulates that are substantially harder than the polycarbonate modern glasses are almost always made of, and especially harder than the various coatings the lenses almost always have applied.
Long ago, I would use a microfiber cloth like I'd been told, and invariably my glasses would be a scratched up mess within a year. Since developing this method, my glasses have been crystal clear and scratch free for years at a time. The last time I was in, my optometrist referred to the state of my lenses as "remarkable", given their age.
Yes, this is why I pay extra and wait long times to get lenses made of genuine optical glass. Whoever sold the general public on polycarbonate lenses should get the Nobel Prize in Marketing. Far cheaper and easier to manufacture, and don't last as long, pretty much a massive boost to the profit margin. Freaking brilliant, in a sort of evil twisted way.
This is a sign that either you insufficiently broke down any oils with soap, or that your water contains quite a lot of non-water stuff - like calcium, that dries as visible deposits.
Has anyone here read Erik Hoel's The Revelations? I found Kierk Soren to be a really interesting character. I'd like book recommendations with main characters like Kierk Soren.
One more thing, any advise and book recommendations for a 23 year old that's about to embark on his intellectual journey? Thanks.
I know nothing about Erik Hoel or this novel; but there absolutely must be a connection to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. You don't hit on that name by accident. Kierkegaard's books are really good, but hard to understand right if you don't have a pretty deep background in philosophy.
Read The Republic. Everybody should read The Republic.
Find some poetry that you genuinely like. Like, it gives you pleasure to read it. Go deep into that genre/form/movement/school.
Erik Hoel is a fantastic writer. He has a substack publication called The Intrinsic Perspective.
Haha, I noticed that as well. Tried searching 'Kierk Soren' one time on Google and the first result was Søren Kierkegaard. I'll try and check him out despite my shallow background in philosophy.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
Regarding the poetry advice, it's been difficult. Do you have any anthologies that I can check out? Thanks.
Hmmm, I was introduced to most of the poetry that I love either at school, or pulling random books off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, or poetry collections my parents kept on the bookshelf when I was a kid. It looks like you want an anthology. You can often get old editions of textbooks for cheap. For instance: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780393979206&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used
Thanks for the Great Books list. A lot of homework for me, when I`ll be finished with the sagas. Laxness may be overdue for me. I would expect the English translation to be much better than the German after my experiences with Mikael Niemi, though the German translator for Icelandic surely is not the one they hired for Finnish-Swedish texts. I just suspect a general pattern. Are there any other minority language speakers here who also saw better English translations of foreign texts than those to their language?
I can't help with your first issue. As for book recommendations, there are lots of literary canons out there. Don't skip The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Get into Shakespeare. My personal hints would be the Maqroll novels by A. Mutis, Musil's Man without Qualities and Amos Oz.
Well, I did, once. At least I thought so. Just checked my fine bilingual and commented edition, there's a bookmark at page 19. Maybe I stopped there. It's some years ago...
Thanks a lot. I've read some Houllebecq. I don't know if you have read The Elementary Particles, that book is astounding, as well as riveting. I have plans to reread it. An unforgettable reading experience for me, I'd say.
I have a question about where the reasonable deductions that can be made about how AI inputs are related to outputs ends and the "black box" of artificial intelligence begins. I often see posts about AI where the author sort of resigns themself to believing that AI is an impenetrable black box while also making reasonable deductions about why it is behaving in a certain way. I would love some clarity/links to papers about why the consensus is that most of what is happening is opaque and not something that can be understood through the development of the field. I would also love links to any papers or books about like meta-AI studies. I don't mean Meta the company but rather the AI equivalent to meta-physics.
I've asked this question myself for a while now, albeit in slighly different terms, while trying to find how to classify computers in the intelligence/consciousness space.
We're pretty sure computers aren't conscious and do not take explicit decisions to piss us off, yet I'm hearing a lot of people using peculiar words to describe them. Specifically, "the computer do not *want* to do what I ask" or "my computer didn't *listen* to me".
All anthropomorphism apart, I found the words used to be pretty insightful about how we think about computers and systems in general.
A rule of thumb I use for myself is the percieved complexity of a system. If a system is simple enough for someone to be able to hold it in their mind without issue, then there are no intelligence involved.
If a system is too complex to have a complete grasp on it, because (for instance) of too many moving parts, then it's considered intelligent. This is the case for our brain: it is a physical process going through a tremendous amount of neurons and subtle connections, and we consider ourselves intelligent. Our brain cannot grasp our brain.
It seems to me that we classify as "intelligent" any system complex enough to not be trivialized by our own brain. According to this definition, people used to some systems will end up trivializing them, therefore stripping them of their intelligence.
If we apply this definition to neural networks, I'd say your NN is AI as soon as you give up on the idea of understanding their insides. As Kindly stated, we haven't yet grasped why specific weights on specific neurons encode the recognition of dogs. Most people in the AI field aren't interested in finding out how it works, but rather to find empirical configurations producing better results than other configurations (at least that was the case during my PhD).
Part of the source of this belief is the understanding that neural networks behave in this way. Even just with image recognition, we have trouble figuring how all the various weights encode the essence of what a dog looks like.
I've found it depends a lot on the area - in China where many were banned, people from all of them gathered around the ones that existed and cooperated. Where many thrive, they compete more, but usually competing in who does more charity, has more members, throws more parties, things like that.
I'm in Rotary club, and looking to connect to those in other groups, thanks for reaching out. You can find me on nesicdusan.com for LinkedIn and we can connect from there.
Some Free Masons do look down on Catholics. Don’t worry about it. Just stupid snobbery from these fellas that imagine themselves enlightened. As if. Bigotry is a pretty reliable signal for ignorance.
Hangover from Continental Freemasonry, which was vehemently anti-clerical (which meant anti-Catholic) and pro-freethinking, which in the 18th century meant dressing up and pretending to carry out Genuine Mystical Secret Oriental Occult Ceremonies.
The occult ceremonies bit was also what pissed off the Church. So it was associated with magic and revolutions, not popular with the status quo.
English Freemasonry was a bit different and developed into more of a fraternal/benevolent organisation (and jokes about if you wanted a promotion in the police, you should join the Masons) though the Secret Wisdom bit still lingered on, e.g. references in ghost (ish) stories by H.G. Wells. From the story "The Inexperienced Ghost":
"Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a business I had!"
"But how could any series of passes——" I began.
"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis on certain words, "you want everything clear. I don't know how. All I know is that you do—that he did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared."
"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the passes?"
…He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his eyes and so began. .
Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings, which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions with a singular interest in his reddish eye. "That's not bad," he said, when it was done. "You really do, you know, put things together, Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail out."
"I know," said Clayton. "I believe I could tell you which."
"Well?"
"This," said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and thrust of the hands.
"Yes."
"That, you know, was what he couldn't get right," said Clayton. "But how do you——?"
"Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don't understand at all," said Sanderson, "but just that phase—I do." He reflected. "These happen to be a series of gestures—connected with a certain branch of esoteric Masonry—— Probably you know. Or else—— How?" He reflected still further. "I do not see I can do any harm in telling you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you don't."
"I know nothing," said Clayton, "except what the poor devil let out last night."
"Well, anyhow," said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he gesticulated with his hands.
"So?" said Clayton, repeating.
"So," said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.
"Ah, now," said Clayton, "I can do the whole thing—right."
…Well—the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience; there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the midst of an idle tale—as the coroner's jury would have us believe—is no matter for my judging; is just one of those inexplicable riddles that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very instant, of concluding these passes he changed, and staggered and fell down before us-dead!
As far as I’m aware, it’s the Catholic church that forbids masonic membership. There’s nothing against Catholicism in freemasonry--we’re open to all religions, as long as you believe in a higher power.
I come from a family of Catholics, albeit non-practicing anymore, so I certainly have nothing against them! I like the KoC and would love to connect with anyone involved there too. Different groups, more-or-less similar missions.
Yeah the Masons were totally open to letting me join. I understand the Church’s ban but I’m hoping the Pope revisits that sooner or later. The Masons seem to have pretty much let go to the anticlericalism at this point. The deistic aspects are pretty pro-forma.
Really depends org to org, and I can only speak for the masons.
Membership in masonry requires that you be 18, male, and believe in a supreme being. If that disqualifies you there are other orgs that might fit the bill, depending on which part disqualified you haha.
The generic answer in masonry is “to be one, ask one.” Ideally you find someone who is already a mason and ask them. If you don’t know any or are new to the area like I was, you usually will have to email your local lodge, which you should be able to find pretty easily online. There are over 300 lodge in my home state of Virginia. Process for joining usually involves meeting with a few members so they can make sure you’re not crazy, getting a few to sign your petition, then they vote on your admission.
But yes, most members are on the older side and membership has been declining pretty rapidly. But honestly I think that just means it’s ripe for a new generation to step in and take over for a while, maybe make some changes. Pretty perfect opportunity if you ask me.
Activities differ lodge to lodge. Some are better than others. But masons tend to lean heavily into the theatrical and ceremonial side of things. Lots of esoteric talk about King Solomon and geometry and all that.
Get in contact with a lodge or two in your area; while you can't participate in the ceremonies until you're initiated, most would love to have you come to Festive Board (drinks and/or meal held either pre- or post- meeting). If you're able to socialize with strangers easily, you'll find out whether you fit in fairly quickly.
Not really. Only “advice” would be that every lodge can be quite different. And there are no rules that say which lodge you have to belong to. So shop around! See which group of guys you mesh with the best. The r/freemasonry subreddit can actually be pretty useful for newcomers.
My wife was recently diagnosed with gestational diabetes and put on a low glycemic index diet. As far as I can tell the major risk of gestational diabetes is high birth weight but the literature all seems to suggest that high birth weight is a positive predictor of outcomes such as IQ all the way up to about 12lbs (our baby is only predicted to be at ~66th percentile of birth weight which is far below that). Is there a reason why you should want to treat the gestational diabetes and reduce the birth weight or is this just a way to make the obstetrician's life easier during the delivery?
I wouldn't fuck with it. My last kid was born to mom with GD, and she went to heroic efforts to control it, but he was still born a bit premature, had his sugar crash immediately after birth, and got jaundice. All quite treatable, and he's right as rain 18 years later, but who needs that stress?
Personally I'd say if you're considering running *any* kind of health risk for maybe possibly a few IQ points you're misinformed as to the priorities. Birth is a massive physical stress on both mother and child, even in the 21st century, and the list of things that can go drastically wrong in a flash with lifelong consequences is sobering. Give them both every advantage you can, however small. What you want is a healthy normal baby and a mom that bounces back in a day or two. If you can have both of these, take the money and run, give praise to your deity of choice, and be glad you aren't among the ~1 in 33 families for which the outcome is sad in some way or another.
I have a four and a half month old baby and a wife who had Gestational Diabetes. I did a pretty deep dive on this topic about 8 months ago but between the time and the sleep deprivation between now and then I can't cite how I got to these conclusions. Carbs seem to pretty directly correlate to birth weight which also correlated with IQ - goodness etc. But... high blood sugar damages a bunch of things and is more likely to get you a baby with an iffy pancreas and/or other things (nerves?). Resulting in a higher risk of obesity and (more than you would expect from the increased obesity) diabetes. I think there was also an increase in other health risks.
I think this was the most recent good study on the topic and it recommends a much higher carbohydrate threshold than historical recommendations (>175g/day) https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/8/2599
I don't remember all of why, but I thought they were too aggressive and concluded that a floor of 100g/day of carbs and a ceiling of about 200. We also switched to only complex carbs so she could eat more of them without spiking her blood sugar as much.
One of the issues with a low carb diet is that it has higher risks for nutritional issues, use a high quality prenatal and this issue should be moot. I used Life Extension because I respect the way they do research and update their formulas to reflect new findings (I'm not affiliated but I regularly buy their multivitamins and fish oil).
My baby was born at 6 lbs flat and one day after the cutoff to be early. He was small enough that the birth was not terribly damaging to his mother. He's now 3rd percentile for height, 8th percentile for weight, 35th percentile for head size, and 1 - 3 months ahead on basically all his milestones (and amazingly delightful in every way).
Thanks, that's useful additional context. One of my concerns reading through some of the gestational diabetes literature is that a lot of the papers control for birth weight in their models, which is a classic example of conditioning on a collider. i.e. if you control for an outcome of the diabetes you get a (badly calculated) version of the unmediated effect only, when what you want is the total effect (i.e. the effect that goes via any pathway including birth weight). So I'm a bit worried that the literature might be giving a misleading view on this.
Having diabetes isn't nice. Is the alternate plan to just not treat the diabetes and let the blood sugar run wild? She's gonna be pretty miserable doing that.
There's a large continuum between let the blood sugar run wild and tightly control it by cutting out almost all simple carbs.
Her original diagnosis was only barely over the diagnostic criteria (and wouldn't have met the criteria used 15 years ago). At the moment we have been controlling it very well with diet (i.e. her blood sugar readings look like someone without diabetes) but the baby has gone from 76th to 66th percentile size in that time which does raise the question is whether we're actually doing the right thing by controlling it as closely as we are. The doctors seem happy about the size decrease but I'm concerned about whether those recommendations are reliable given the literature on the positive effects of birth weight. The BMJ piece suggests ~0.5 IQ points per additional 100g birthweight (including in normal weight babies).
Well, the baby getting stuck is suboptimal for both kid and mom. Besides that, gestational diabetes is a pathologic process, not well understood in humans for experiment - blocking reasons which are probably pretty obvious. As said lower down, don't fret but do get the GD as under control as possible.
Quoting my wife, who has had GD: "High birth weight, in the abstract, is good because it's better than low birth weight. Low birth weight is correlated with a whole bunch of negative things (and often a result of smoking or poor nutrition during pregnancy). But HBW associated with GD is itself correlated with a risk of diabetes later in the child's life. Bottom line, don't focus on/obsess over birth weight, but do get the GD under control."
I would add that, in my wife's particular case, she found a bizarre magic-bullet cure for all her problems (constipation, anemia, hyperglycemia, swelling) by switching to an all-red-meat diet. Basically she subsisted off pure beef for a while. YMMV, only one data point, etc, but the effect was striking and essentially overnight. The child of that pregnancy (our third) was almost a pound heavier at birth and is now on track to be the tallest of our kids as an adult, but also totally healthy. None of our kids is anything like overweight; the elder two are rather skinny, like me.
Most pregnancy studies are pretty problematic but it looks to me like birth weight effects continue on into normal weight as well as just being about avoiding low birth weight. e.g. this sibling study published in BMJ of birth weight on IQ within the normal weight range:
Given the recommended amounts of vitamins pregnant women are supposed to take having such an unbalanced diet seems like a v bad idea. Except for iron I guess.
I wonder how we changed psychologically in the last hundred years or so due to mass empathy, caused by mass media. Before radio, TV and internet, the only emotions we came into contact with were our own and those of the people around us. Of course there were books and group gatherings, but nothing like now, where you get bombarded with other people's - real and fictional - emotions. And those generate empathy; a scary movie wouldn't be scary without empathy. So all day I 'feel' other people's emotions, from my friends on Facebook to fictional drug dealers in the Ozarks. Does anybody know if there has been anything written about how that changed us?
There were, of course, newspapers before radio, TV and internet, where you could read about the real-life sufferings of someone you didn't know.
But old-style newspaper articles tended to be much more "just the facts" while modern newspaper articles seem designed to weaponise our empathy against us, always starting with the "human interest" part of the story before talking about the big picture.
The obvious difference is that in pre-mass media days, you interacted very frequently and profoundly with your neighbours and your extended family. In a community of five hundred people, you would probably know nearly everyone by sight, and almost all of you would spend nearly all your time interacting with each other - at Church for example. Moreover, many of you would be related or would have known each other for decades, so the level of empathy *as you experienced it in everyday life* would have been a lot higher than anything you find today.
Which seems... unhealthy to me. I've been happier since I joined a church, started building those real world connections as well as I'm able to approximate in the 21st century and ditched youtube.
I think you're selling pre-mass-media short. The appeal of theatre and opera was certainly running on empathy, to hew as close to your modern examples as possible; but beyond that, I think you'd be wrong to dismiss prose and even oral storytelling out of hand.
You're probably right about the appeal of pre-mass-media. However, I doubt it can compare to modern mass media in terms of volume and accessibility. Storytelling and prose definitely appeal to empathy, often on a deeper level than other media. But if I spend 20 minutes on the internet, the sheer number of viewpoints and emotions I am asked to empathize with, is a completely different experience, I think.
Say that I'm a woman on the curvier side. I'm happy with my breasts and hips but would like to slim down my waist a bit once or twice a month during parties and formal events. It looks like shapewear/corsets would be the thing I need, but it's a jungle out there. There's plenty of low-cost, low-quality (I assume) trash. The most vocal corset people seem to be BDSM cultists, not average gals that want to look a bit thinner sometimes. Thus me asking here.
Does anyone have a good beginners guide to shapewear? What are some quality brands that I can trust? Should I just bite the bullet and get a >$400 corset (money is not an issue anyway) and try to avoid getting sucked in by the vortex of "tight lacing" and "waist training" that seem to make up 95% of online corset discussion?
There is a quite big historical fashion community who discuss corsets in a very sensible and realistic way. In general, they all stress that a historical corset that fits your body should not be uncomfortable. So I guess wearing such a corset once in a while should not be a problem.
The difference between historical corsets and contemporary fashion/sexy underwear corsets is that historical corsets are used solely to achieve a specific body shape, they are never to be seen. Contemporary fashion corsets on the other hand are made to be seen, so they are not designed for changing your body shape/silhouette most efficiently.
The question is probably, what exact shape/silhouette you want to achieve. There are some videos that compare the effect of different historical corsets (https://youtu.be/PSvy8N61YnI and https://youtu.be/ZzKUI0TwgFM). Without knowing what kind of clothes you wear exactly, it's hard to recommend anything specific.
For buying corsets, I think the best strategy is to find someone on Etsy who makes historical corsets, and to discuss with them what you want.
All of her corsets are custom made for your exact measurements, and she works with every client individually to ensure you're getting exactly what you need. She only uses high quality materials so they last a lifetime.
Thanks for the recommendations, but these designs seem very goth/burlesque/bdsm (e.g. the name). I just want something slimming to wear under my regular clothes. I guess she can make those as well though...
You could opt for a bodysuit. Keeps things tight and contained, but not as severely as a corset. Relatively inexpensive. You'd wear it under your clothing of choice, can be found in various colors including beige. If you're new to these and want to test the waters it is probably a good place to start.
As an informal information source, I would recommend The Lingerie Addict's articles on corsetry. I used to be really Into Corsets (from a fashion perspective as well as a history perspective) and skimming through a couple of their articles again, they're consistent with my knowledge. They also seem to acknowledge that there's a midpoint between "cheap fashion corset" and "tightlacing down ten inches" which, hopefully, will address your needs. Here's an article that might be useful: https://www.thelingerieaddict.com/2014/09/much-spend-corset.html
They mention specific brands, including Orchard Corset, which is the only one of those mentioned that I've personally bought from and that I have known other people to wear. I agree with the writer's assessment that it's a good balance between "cheap corset that has no real shaping" and "expensive corset for everyday wear."
I have no problem with buying a quality corset to use infrequently. I just have a hard time finding information about the use pattern I envision: most corset people seem to only talk about everyday wear, tight lacing etc. Where's the guide for "how to wear a corset infrequently"?
For the last two years, I've been doubting myself and spending a ridiculous amount of time finding the most optimal career path for me. My conclusion is that all roads lead to Software Engineering.
I plan to work on AI safety in the long term, but first, I need to start my career and focus on earning enough financial freedom.
The fastest route to getting a well-paid job in the IT field is learning Full Stack Web Development, so I'm doing that through The Odin Project.
About me: 123 IQ score (Raven's 2). Asperger's. 99th percentile for Extraversion, 98th Openness, 31st Conscientiousness (understandmyself.com). English level C1.
Here in France many people go to Switzerland to earn more. The cost of living there is roughly twice of what it is in France, but you earn at least 3 times as much. You end up with way more disposable income, and can always move to a cheaper country once you have "enough". I'm sure lots of people do the same with their current country and the US.
Every piece of advice like this misses the point that it is hard as an Argentinian to get a Visa or permission to live and work in those places.
I mentioned Australia and New Zealand not because they are the best countries to move to in general but because, in my context, those are the most cost-effective targets (they give away a lot of Visas to Argentina).
Thanks, though; I appreciate that you try to help me. Have a good day!
Look for US contracts for high hourly rates, but avoid living in the US. If you're a contractor, you don't need US residency for anything. If you need a US-based corporation to sign you onto contracts, you can find folks (like me) with companies that'll subcontract you (for a little bit off the top).
As a New Zealander currently in the UK partially for financial reasons, probably New Zealand is probably a fairly bad place to earn enough money to be able to focus on something without regards to money, certainly the the general opinion of people was that if you wanted to make money moving to Australia was a good way to do that. Admittedly I haven't checked the numbers or been in an environment where people talked about this for about 5 years now.
That said if you're intending to move somewhere cheaper after being a general software engineer NZ might work. If you're intending to get paid for doing AI safety I have no idea what the chances of you being able to do that from Australia of NZ are.
Agreed - New Zealander in the USA here. There's a reason all of NZ's college graduates are fleeing the country: the cost of living is steep, and jobs don't pay well (plus you'd be earning NZD).
Who’s tried Kalshi, the new prediction market using dollars? It looks like they devoted the time and effort to get regulatory approval. I’m enjoying it somewhat, although I find the set of actual markets a bit dull (e.g., the closing value of the S&P 500, inflation, Biden approval ratings).
I've tried it but lost interest after a while due to the markets not being very interesting or active. I find metaculus to be higher quality despite their markets not involving real money.
Can we get a SlateStarCodex deep dive into this? Collab or otherwise? I wanna see the data for the top 10/20/40/80 instead of just top 20. Maybe genre breakdowns?
My quick take is that these industries have just gotten better at making hits. Movies in the 70s were, for the most part, bad. Bad technically, artistically, etc. We only remember the good ones. This is the same for books, music, games, tv, etc. Most media is still shit, but the professional class (big studios, big authors, etc) is really really good at it.
Also they double down on their successes. If a movie costs 10s of millions to make, seems like you would rather make a sequel than an uncertain original. This shouldn't be too surprising.
I think it might also be useful to just see what fraction of total sales are to franchises. There's at least a hypothetical possibility that we have a growing long tail of one-off games with a few franchises competing for the top 100 slots, which make up less and less of total sales each year. (It's also possible that nothing like that is going on.)
I believe this is covered in the tweets and posts somewhere. Big hits make up an increasing percentage of all revenue/sales even as the overall market expands.
Perhaps this is not the community for it. But if you are feeling like something is missing in your life, I recently converted from atheism to Catholicism, and I am happy to answer questions if anyone is interested in learning more about it.
Looks like a snake, has no crosses or crucifixes anywhere, and has an extremely creepy statue of Jesus (looks like he's being blown up) as the centerpiece.
Do you "genuinly" believe in God? Did you before converting? I've personally thought about it (not exactly conversion since I'm technically already Catholic, but being more active) and my lack of faith stopped me. I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop. Is this a common thing, to struggle with faith and belief?
Other question, what did you get from it. You don't mention that in your message. The basic interpretation of your message would be that you felt like something was missing from your life and you don't feel that anymore, but that wasn't explicit and I don't want to assume too much.
A few others: For how long have you been converted? Do you feel like you belong in the community? Are the benefits you get (if you get any) mostly "local" (going to the church, seeing people) or not (would you still get most of those benefits if you didn't engage in the community)?
>Do you "genuinly" believe in God? Did you before converting? I've personally thought about it (not exactly conversion since I'm technically already Catholic, but being more active) and my lack of faith stopped me.
Yes, I do now. I did not before. I think if you don't struggle with "the mystery of faith" at least a little bit you're probably not being honest with yourself. I certainly did and do. If your main hurdle is the "belief in God" part I would suggest reading this:
...and then reading Feser's book "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" if you are interested in a more specific scientific/philosophical discussion. Once you find yourself in a place where you think "Ok, maybe God could be real, I'm not sure" - try going to Mass. Try saying a prayer, out loud, for something you or someone else desparately needs. You will feel very silly and awkward doing this - you'll feel like an imposter. But try it anyway and see what happens.
>Other question, what did you get from it.
I had measurable improvements in my physical and mental health; I lost weight and feel happier. After I was baptized I felt electric, like I had tons of energy even though it was midnight. I obviously feel like my parish is a great community and I've met a lot of very interesting people. As I mentioned below, when I was converting I prayed for something very specific in a crisis situation and received it.
I also feel challenged in my day to day life because Catholicism places demands on me. For example, I used to walk past transient panhandlers and ignore them. Now I feel I can't really just do that. Of course just giving money to every panhandler in a major American city isn't going to solve poverty, but I try to engage on other levels - buying lunch, etc. I simply think about poverty and the poor a lot more than I used to - the Church doesn't let me just think about myself. Also, I have a source of authority I can trust - which is invaluable in a low trust age. After seeing how poorly the CDC/FDA had handled COVID, I was hesitatint about getting a booster - but my priest encouraged us all to do it, so I did. Basically, I now have a source of authority in my life which constantly challenges me to do better and holds me accountable when I don't. Obviously many people in modern society consider this to be basically fascism, but I think it's valuable and something a lot of people lack in their daily lives. We all have a lot of rights, but Catholicism challenges me to remember my duties too.
> For how long have you been converted?
I started a year ago and was baptized on Easter - RCIA takes a long time.
> Do you feel like you belong in the community? Are the benefits you get (if you get any) mostly "local" (going to the church, seeing people) or not (would you still get most of those benefits if you didn't engage in the community)?
Absolutely. As for the benefits of spiritual life, I think they are both personal (see above) and communal. For example I just met someone at church who would be a great professional connection for me if I needed one (I don't).
> I think if you don't struggle with "the mystery of faith" at least a little bit you're probably not being honest with yourself.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
> If your main hurdle is the "belief in God" part I would suggest reading this:
Here's what I think about it:
"The universe as created with intent which explains why it looks like a created thing" I can code generated art that comes from randomness and see beauty in it. I don't think intent has anything to do with beauty, or rather, I don't think intent is necessary for something to look ordrerly, law-bound or beautiful.
"Humans were fashioned which is why they are special" This one I struggle a bit with. Humans do feel special compared to every other animals.
"Signs of a higher order of reality" I don't understand what this one is supposed to be. I've seen a few strange things but the majority of those strange things happened when I was on the lookout for strange things. Some others were linked to some parts of my life. I find it relatively natural that those things come and go. For example, during a few months, I had the impression to see my cat (which is at my parent's house, not my appartment) everywhere in my appartment. Some people see/hear hallucinations all the time (visual snow for example, and there are things that are way wilder). Do these things have any meaning? I'm not sure. I certainly don't feel like they need to. Sometimes things just are.
Skipping some parts as I don't see many argument. "In fact, the very notion of scientific progress — our long track record of successful efforts to understand the material world — doubles as evidence that our minds have something in common with whatever mind designed the universe." I doubt that it's a reasonable argument. I'm personally colorblind. If I list the colors I see in a picture, for some reason all those colors will be colors that are visible to me. Because I'm the one seeing them. To see that there are colors that I missed, because I can't see them, I would need something else. In fact, it's impossible for me to prove that all of this is not a giant prank with enough resources just to make me believe I see less colors than other people. Considering that we never talked and exchanged with a non human on their views on the universe, it's normal that the universe fits our views.
The claim that religious experience happen as much as before is made without any statistics backing it up. It might be that even more people have religious experiences than before, or way less. There's nothing here except quoting a few people. It's easy to find people that went through the opposite process, from religion to atheism.
"Psychic phenomenons still happen" Two things. First "psychic" is a label that we put on it that basically means "we can't explain it", just like magic. If you can do it, it's not magic. That doesn't say anything about the nature of the thing, about how and why it happens. Second thing, again no statistics. Is the demand for mediums bigger than in the 19th century? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, the article is inconclusive.
All in all, that article is unconvincing for me.
> Once you find yourself in a place where you think "Ok, maybe God could be real, I'm not sure"
I'm already in that place.
> try going to Mass. Try saying a prayer, out loud, for something you or someone else desparately needs. You will feel very silly and awkward doing this - you'll feel like an imposter. But try it anyway and see what happens.
I've done it. I've been to the Mass many times in fact. I even said a few words for my brother's wedding. And sometimes there is a something that I can feel. But this something has absolutely nothing to do with God for me. Just like every time I'm in a church, I feel something. But it's not about the church itself. It's about the people. Whether God is real or not, people have assembled here, often for centuries, sometimes for more than 500 years, to celebrate something together. They've built those beautiful buildings. That's something to me. But the same can be said of pretty much anything. Religion/faith can make people do beautiful things, just like love for your family or animals or seashells or anything. You could explain that "love" as some kind of mystical power than humans have, but the jump from this to being a Catholic just doesn't compute for me.
> Obviously many people in modern society consider this to be basically fascism, but I think it's valuable and something a lot of people lack in their daily lives.
I think that's a bit reductive. One of the challenges of modern society is that you have most of the time all of the information you need to make a decision, it's just very hard work. Finding a source of authority can also be a way to not have to do this hard work. In fact, I think a lot of movements in modern society points to people looking for ways to not have to think. Modern politics is a big one. That's of course not to question your personal choices, but just to give an opposite point of view/explanation.
Thanks for sharing all of that and answering my questions! I wish you the best in your journey.
I think it means at some point everyone feels like Job, like God abandoned them. Everyone looks at an obligation demanded of them and feels it is too hard, too crazy. I feel this way about the Church's teachings on abortion. It is a source of ambivalence for me. I don't reject it, but I wrestle with it.
> One of the challenges of modern society is that you have most of the time all of the information you need to make a decision, it's just very hard work. Finding a source of authority can also be a way to not have to do this hard work.
This is true, but I also think that doing all this work from scratch makes you more likely to be wrong. Very smart theologians have worked on these issues for 2,000 years, why reinvent the wheel yourself? Are you really going to do it better? Probably not.
>I'm already in that place.
If you are open to it, I'd really suggest Feser's book about Aquinas for you. I feel like you already have all of the pieces, but his work really ties all these things together to explain why Catholicism is true and correct way better than I ever could.
To take your programming example: Yes, the program makes random, beautiful things because you made it do that. The program was made with a telos, which guides it towards an end. The element of randomness doesn't change the underlying telos. You have DNA which caused you to develop with certain features - arms, legs, etc. Sure, an element of your development is random. But your telos still exists, we have scientific proof of it.
I will also pray for your return to full communion with the Church.
"Very smart theologians have worked on these issues for 2,000 years, why reinvent the wheel yourself?"
Yeah, _mostly_ people do just rework old arguments.
Occasionally, things _do_ change. Prior to Darwin and (ironically) Mendel, the watchmaker argument for the existence of an intelligent creator god was a perfectly respectable intellectual position. Not any more.
You may be interested to know that Catholics do not subscribe to creationism! The Thomistic argument for the existence of God rests on different premises.
> I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop.
It might be interesting to explore deeper what *exactly* they believe in.
I suspect that for many people it is more or less: "there is a supernatural intelligent force that created the world and the afterlife... and I have no specific reason to assume that the description in the Bible is wrong, except for the specific bits that seem weird or inconvenient for me". Which is basically social conformity.
I suspect that for you it would be more like: "is it possible that all the statements, especially the weird and inconvenient ones, are literally true?" which is much higher bar.
> I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop.
Probably yes for nerds, no for people who do not think about things too much.
Non-nerds may have a crisis of faith if they want to hang out with two social groups that have mutually incompatible beliefs, or if their religious group opposes in near-more something that they are (e.g. homosexuality) or they can't give up (e.g. extramarital sex).
> I suspect that for many people it is more or less: "there is a supernatural intelligent force that created the world and the afterlife... and I have no specific reason to assume that the description in the Bible is wrong, except for the specific bits that seem weird or inconvenient for me". Which is basically social conformity.
It could be, but I very much doubt it. That's not how the people I hang with tend to think.
How do you deal with doctrine that you have to accept, created by people much less smart than yourself and kept by institutional inertia?
Personally I'd like to have a spiritual community of some sort, but all the churches around and _especially_ the Catholic Church look like a sad parody of what such a community could look like.
I think you and I simply have totally different epistemological views. I think the accumulated wisdom of everyone who lived and built our civilization over the last 2,000 years far exceeds my own. “Inertia” might also be called “tradition” which the ancients abided by for a reason.
"accumulated wisdom of everyone who lived and built our civilization over the last 2,000 years"
Wisdom is a tricky thing.
Some experience accumulated a 1000 years ago is still valid, some has been invalidated by later changes. Almost anything that could be said about war, beyond "it kills people", in 0 AD would be grossly wrong now. Hiroshima was not a sword fight. The scale and speed of the weapons has changed by orders of magnitude, and that MATTERS.
The platonic solids still are what they were. Most of human biology still is what it was - except medicine is now far more useful and actually gives us options we didn't have.
The whole scale of human action is different. That the CO2 from power plants in the northern hemisphere may melt enough of Antarctica to flood part of Bangladesh is not a possibility that people in 0 AD, or even 1800 AD, dealt with.
I don't think Catholic theology denies most of this. The Church's opposition to war has grown in response to the increased destructive power of weaponry, the Church opposes the death penalty because modern tools of law enforcement and effective incarceration make it unnecessary, there's a lot of theological work being done about stewardship and the enviornment, and so on.
The part that doesn't change are the basic insights about human nature and ethics - for example, the fact that everyone has a right to life. The fact that the telos of sex is reproduction. The fact that all men are born free. The application of principles can and must change with circumstances, but certain truths are universal and eternal.
The "unchanging" parts all look to me like politics, as unconvincing, unsupported, and subject to dispute as any party's platform. Oh, that's funny - re "born free" the RCC itself has waffled on slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_slavery "others, including the influential Thomas Aquinas, argued the case for slavery subject to certain restrictions."
Ah, the shifting winds of politics...
The platonic solids _are_ still there.
Human biology is still mostly constant (mostly with medicine changing)
Unfortunately, I grew up in a Catholic family and rejected religion in my teens, because the "accumulated wisdom" on display among the clergy amounts to spewing hate and diddling kids. I still have to deal with a significant part of my country that wishes to return to the Middle Ages, and votes accordingly.
I think there is something genuinely valuable in the Catholic tradition, but Catholicism as practiced is not good at teaching it to followers.
I think it says a lot about the power of the tradition that even people who have significant antipathy towards it such as yourself still see something good in it.
Sure thing, but as a Catholic you're not allowed to cherry-pick (the entire point, as you mentioned in a different thread). So you have to take the whole package, which for me is too distasteful to do.
Then again, perhaps as a new convert you can avoid the pitfalls of societies in which the religion is entrenched. There used to be a time when people went to be eaten by lions in peace because they believed in Christ, after all...
I'll simply say that I very much reject the idea that any part of Western civilization - including 18th century Britain - isn't build on a Catholic foundation.
Obviously the neolithic revolution predates Christ's arrival; I won't pretend to know a lot about it. But it is interesting that it first happened right in the exact same part of the world where Jacob's descendants later lived.
Not OP but also Catholic: None of the above, I will be the version of me that God wills me to be which I don't think I will ever fully be on Earth but that I try to become closer to every day.
To be more concrete it will likely be a post purgatory version of me and how time works in purgatory is not clear to me,it might be that asking how old I would be is like asking what the angles of the color blue add up to.
If I'm being honest, I do not. I try to comply, but I also attend confession and pray for forgiveness.
One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard. It would be very convenient if God was cool with me doing all the things I personally want to do at any given time, but He is not. He has set out a set of commandments and I am expected to keep them. If I'd just wanted a community I would have become a Unitarian.
On a philosophical level, I also think the Church's sexual teachings are being proven correct with the passage of time. One of the most difficult and unpopular, for example, is birth control. Yet the telos of sex is obviously reproduction, and there seems to be a looming demographic crisis brewing as sex has become totally divorced from that.
"there seems to be a looming demographic crisis brewing as sex has become totally divorced from that."
No. Generally speaking, the demographic transition, slowed population growth, has made our problems a bit more tractable, not more difficult. We've overrun a number of resource limits (the one getting the most attention is, of course, the ability of the atmosphere to absorb CO2 without too much rise in greenhouse effects - but there are others as well (e.g. peak phosphorus)). Setting up parts of the economy and government programs to require permanent exponential growth was always a terrible idea. Ponzi schemes are doomed from the moment they are conceived. They are guaranteed to fail, the only question is when.
This argument would be more credible to me if we were actually on track for a stable population rather than collapse in secular Western societies. TFR isn’t leveling off at replacement so that population growth slows and stops - it’s way below replacement. Less than 1.0 in some Asian countries.
Yes, it is lower than replacement. I don't consider this catastrophic. It isn't dropping to zero. If TFR stayed at 1.0 for three generations, we'd drop from almost 8 billion people to 1 billion people. We had a thriving civilization at 1 billion people. All the triumphs of the 19th century: The periodic table, electromagnetism, evolution, happened with that population.
I'm picking 1 billion because it has been estimated that a 1st world standard of living can be maintained sustainably at around that population.
I expect that, given the 90 years or so that this shrinkage would take, there are plausible things that could be done to make raising children a less lousy deal, possibly raising the TFR back to 2.1 and stabilizing the population at 1 billion: The housing stock need not evaporate - if it is maintained as the population shrinks, this could become less of a constraint to potential parents. Perhaps the economy could be managed to make employment more stable again, and force fewer people into the precariat.
More speculatively, we might have artificial wombs, and be able to circumvent the maternal morbidity and mortality that we still have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_complications_of_pregnancy Also speculatively, perhaps medicine will be able to push human lifespan considerably higher over the next 90 years. Taking 18 years to raise a child looks like less of a chunk of one's life if lifespans were say 160 years rather than 80.
(And other things may happen, e.g. AGI, that might moot all of this)
Population both grows *and* shrinks exponentially, unfortunately, like any other process in which dx/dt ~ x. Like a pandemic wave. It comes on fast, surprising human instincts and causing panics, and it recedes just as fast, also surprising human instincts. Doubtless when the population of Easter Island starting falling the inhabitants thought they had plenty of time to turn it around -- right up until the moment it abruptly dawned on them they didn't.
Or to put it another way, countries are generally finding it *even harder* to turn population change from below replacement to replacement than they did turning it from above replacement to below. That does not bode well. We are a social species, if we accidentally overshoot your 1 billion mark because there's too much inertia, and end up with 100 million scattered over the entire globe I doubt modern society can be maintained. There just wouldn't be enough people in most locations to enjoy the efficiencies of specialization. (The sophisticated suburban county in which I live would be reduced to 4000 inhabitants, basically the size of a medieval town). We would all have to become much more generalist, like people who live in remote locations or survivalists. There would be none of this being one of the few thousand who can afford to specialize in tinkering with machine-learning programs or trying to design boosters that could reach Mars directly, while billions of others keep the wheels turning and the lights on. One would expect progress to drastically slow, or stop.
Why? It seems obvious to me that if someone comes up to you and says “hey, I have this religion, and it just so happens to tell you exactly what you want to hear about truth, life, and the nature of God” that they are lying. This is how a lot of Evangelical Protestantism seems to me.
That has no bearing on perceived difficulty of strict adherence.
It's funny you say that about Protestantism, considering it was borne out of a sentiment that the Church doctrine was not following the Bible closely enough in many respects. You might enjoy reading The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch, very well written.
I used to look at Evangelicals with that line similarly, but now I figure that it is how God is reaching them, and so it is true, for them - at least where they hear Him clearly.
"One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard." Ha! Try not eating bacon and cutting a part of your penis! Or fasting for a month a year. Or self-flagellating! You guys have it sweet!
My understanding of confession is that it's not supposed to be a get out of jail free card. Your sins are forgiven if you genuinely repent them and try not to commit them again.
But if you treat the confession booth like a car wash with no intention of changing your behaviour, your sins won't be forgiven.
As for the effect of Catholic doctrine on birth rates, I note that the birth rate in Ireland is 1.7 children per woman, in Italy it's 1.27 and in Spain it's 1.24. The Catholic prohibition of birth control doesn't seem to be doing any good in preserving the population of nominally-Catholic countries.
I definitely try not to treat confession as a car wash - I do try to adjust my behavior, and I won't take communion if I'm not in a state of grace. Do I always succeed? No. It is very hard to adjust one's own behavior after spending a long time doing pretty much whatever you want. But priests go to death row and take confession from murderers, so I hold out hope for my own soul.
It is true the church has not yet succeeded in arresting declining birth rates, but you do see higher birth rates among Catholics who regularly attend mass anywhere you look - Ireland has higher mass attendance than Italy. More to the point, I think the Church's argument about the telos of sex (which is ancient) has been proven correct: we separated sex from reproduction; and now we are staring down major social and economic problems.
Are you happy with the CC's stance on safe sex and condoms in Africa? Are you going to simply go "well they should all practice chastity and those who don't, yeah, might get AIDS"?
In retrospect I think I made an error even entertaining the premise of the “secondary harm” argument here. Sin destroys the sinner. This isn’t the same as saying that people who get AIDS “deserve it” (they do not, we are all broken) but rather to point out that the harms which flow from sin (STDs, etc.) can in no way ever be attributed to the Church’s doctrine. If there was no sexual sin, there’d be very few STD cases of any kind.
The Church does not consider sex a necessity the way breathing, eating, and defecating are, and regards those who *do* put sex in that same can't-live-without-it-for-a-moment category as thinking like little more than animals, unable to master themselves or their urges.
Hence, they are indeed comfortable with saying yes, in some circumstances chastity is the best and simplest (and certainly the cheapest) solution to the problems of STDs, the strife and tension produced by sexual jealousy, and the stress of unexpected pregnancy.
Your moral judgment would rest on a sounder footing if there *were* no other way to prevent AIDS. But that is not the case. So your beef with the Church, ironically, mirrors their beef with you: both of you believe that the *method* of preventing AIDS the other advocates has sufficiently bad side-effects in the practical real world that it should be rejected.
The question wasn't posed to me but as I have got christened to be catholic last year maybe you like to know my reasons, too. Having grown up in anticlerical surroundings, I was spiritually interested in my teens and thought I really had a choice of religions or ideologies. As I couldn't grok Hegelian philosophy I gave up on marxism and thought mahayana buddhism, especially zen, might be the path for me. After decades of karate practice and maybe one decade of zazen practice I took a postgraduate university course concerning intercultural spirituality, whatever that may be. I still felt apart from people with my buddhist approach, though I live in a pretty liberal city. I had the impression denomination really can't matter much (one love), so I went to join the religion that has shaped my culture, the original version, of course. As an old punk rocker I also like that catholicism is mainly associated with child abuse and corruption in these parts, wouldn' t feel at home in a club with a good reputation.
This is the compressed version, but still very long.
My interest started with Catholic art and jurisprudence, which I regarded as being excellent. I was also impressed with how many leadership figures the church produced In America, we have a Catholic President, Speaker of the House, and six of nine Supreme Court justices. I was also very impressed with the writing of Catholic public intellectuals including Liz Bruenig and Ross Douthat, and with the vast network of Catholic schools and hospitals which have educated/cared for/employed many people I care about or know. I had grown up in an area with a lot of stereotypical Evangelical Bible thumping, which I always regarded as dumb and backwards and intolerant. So I wondered why so many smart/successful people were Catholics, and why so much great work had come from the community in a very secular age.
This got me thinking about theism more generally and about Catholicism specifically. The benefits of belonging to a religious community are well-known (better mental health, physical health, etc.) but (contrary to what my Brother in Christ Evesh suggests below) I wasn't really sold on God being real and I wasn't going to join the community and just pretend. Someone suggest I read Edward Feser's book "Aquinas: A Beginnier's Guide" which I did. Feser's defense of God's existence is basically a response to modern critics of Aquinas Five Proofs, and revolves heavily around Telos. I found it persuasive, and suggest the book for anyone else who is interested (although I will say it is not an easy read). At this point Catholicism seemed like the default choice since 1) the only persuasive defense of theism I have ever read was authored by Catholics and 2) the Church fathers literally compiled the Bible, so the Protestant idea of "read and decide for yourself" seems silly to me. I was still considering Orthodoxy and Judaism, however.
Once I started looking into attending Mass, I had a several experiences which I consider to be instances where God specifically moved things in my life. These were not like, visions or whatever, but rather instances where things seemed to be lining up just so. The very first time I prayed for an intercession, I received it in a very dramatic fashion which I can't address at length here. I considered the possibility that these were all confirmation bias or random chance, but there were enough of them in such a short period of time that it sure doesn't seem like it.
It was a marginal choice on my part. Had I not had the specific experiences I had, I would have definitely looked into it more. I will say I appreciate the hierarchical nature of Catholicism. If the Pope did something really wild and I stopped believing he was infallible I’d look at Orthodoxy again.
I think this discussion (like many similar ones) gets complicated because there are at least three issues that are quite distinct but often mixed together. We can express them as a series of possible statements.
- I believe that religion X is true, and that it provides a complete and correct explanation of the creation and meaning of the world and of this life and the afterlife.
- I believe that the broad tradition of religion X is etc. etc. but I find version Y of it be be more soundly based and convincing.
-I have a generally religious outlook, and I find religion X to be the most intellectually and aesthetically satisfying.
-I don't have strong religious feelings, but I find that I get benefit from religion X and I prefer its moral and philosophical stance to that of others.
-I'm an agnostic and I judge religions by essentially humanist criteria. I don't think they are literally true.
I'm an atheist, and judge religions by how far their doctrine corresponds to my opinions. God is frequently wrong.
There are others, but you get the point. Essentially you have to decide whether you see religion as (a) literally true - and this is not the same thing as biblical literalism (b) sort of true in the symbolic sense and useful socially, appearing in different guises in different places or (c) just another human intellectual construct, to be judged as you would any other philosophy or ideology.
Unless you decide which you believe, it's hard for two people to have a productive conversation.
0. Thank you for doing this! I imagine it might take some courage - though perhaps it says more about me :)
1. You've been (reasonably, given this argument) considering other alternatives such as Judaism. Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
2. All of this is weirdly "I'm betting on the more successful god/ the deity with the most successful people". Isn't the entire concept frowned upon by various religions? I know there's quite some stuff in the Old Testament against this very line of argument - the Jewish god is not to be worshiped *because* he's "better than others" (To be fair, there's a bit of that when, say, Moses duels the Egyptian priests and beats them - but Elija's challenge on mount Carmel paints an entirely different picture. Hey, I'm not the one who expects to find divinely consistent properties in the text!).
3. Also, are Catholics across the globe so very successful? I'd suggest asking the current Pope how his home congregation in the slums of Argentina is doing. OK, I'm a bit snarky, Catholics and religious people in general are heavily over-represented among the poor. There are good reasons - but not ones that necessarily favor your arguments.
4. So if tomorrow you discover a religion whose followers are doing somewhat better in some statistical outcomes sense, you're changing the entire world-view?
5. Relatedly, what was your prior for yourself being susceptible for such spiritual experiences? Do you think it unlikely that you might undergo them again if ever you go on another spiritual adventure?
>You've been (reasonably, given this argument) considering other alternatives such as Judaism. Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
Not really, since Judaism and Catholicism overlap quite a bit in their doctrinal claims. If either is true, quite a large chunk of the other one is true as well, especially as compared to the backdrop of atheism. (That doesn't mean the differences are theologically unimportant, or in any way negotiable from the perspective of an adherent; but it does mean that that a specific piece of evidence for J is not necessarily a coincidence if C is true, and vice versa.) There is quite a lot of common ground. For example, if a Jew has an experience of God while praying in the synagogue, then unless that experience was somehow specifically anti-Christian, there is no particular reason why a Catholic would need to deny its validity, while an atheist would have to.
Of course, there are historical reasons for this overlap. SInce Christianity is a claimed fulfilment of Judaism, you should think of their relation as being sort of like Newtonian Gravity and General Relativity. The latter extends the former, but still accepts nearly all the claims of the former---at least in appropriate contexts and with a somewhat recontextualized interpretation. (This analogy is still viable if you think Judaism is correct: just imagine an alternative science where Einstein was wrong because there actually is absolute space or whatever; or perhaps consider a more controversial extension like string theory.) These theories agree about a bunch of things, and have some commonalities in their justifications.
>Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
Not necessarily - I sort of feel like we make choices along these lines all the time in our daily lives. I can only vote for Party A or Party B, and one party's policy is probably objectively better than the other. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I make an informed choice.
>All of this is weirdly "I'm betting on the more successful god/ the deity with the most successful people"
I think this is not quite the correct account of my decision making process. Rather, I looked at a group of people who had great success and noticed the success appeared to be connected to their culture and value system. Then I investigated the basis of that value system. I think it's logical to conclude that if a certain value system regularly produces good collective outcomes for a community, that system might be rooted in something important and good and true.
Catholics are overrepresented among the poor because the Church works very hard to help the poor. Catholicism is, in many ways, anti-meritocratic and anti-capitalist. It is rooted in the common good, not individual gain. The great works of Catholicism are sometimes material, but are also aesthetic and ethical and legal and social.*
I would actually say that, relative to everything else, Jews probably achieve greater collective success as a people than Catholics when you consider the history of discrimination, etc. I considered Judaism, and I probably would have looked into it further if I had not immediately had the specific spiritual experiences I had. I will say that while I've heard plenty of atheistic and Islamic attacks on Christianity, I have never heard a credible Jewish account of who Jesus was if he was not divine. I'm sure there's some scholarship out there, but modern Jews seem to just ignore the question since they aren't too interested in converting others.
>Relatedly, what was your prior for yourself being susceptible for such spiritual experiences? Do you think it unlikely that you might undergo them again if ever you go on another spiritual adventure?
I had spent my whole life being very skeptical of such experiences and was very surprised when they occurred. I think the odds of them happening at all were very low, and so the odds of them happening again would be even lower. It would be an interesting test though - walk into a synagogue and see if anything happens.
The analogy to parties doesn't seem compelling at all, to me. Religions (mostly) don't claim to be just a set of policies to live a good life. Their claim is to represent a certain Truth (and incidentally, possibly to condemn those who fail to recognize it to eternal torture, but let's not quibble ;) ). Not unlike Sauron, "they do not share power" - you can't shop around. Judaism is certainly not OK with you weighing "eh, on the whole, I might have more mystical profundity there but more socio-economic success there, guess I'll go for Catholicism in the end". It's not even very much OK with you choosing Judaism on those grounds! (though of course that's a somewhat sweeping statement). Would you say the standard Catholic position is different? Sure seems that Catholicism wasn't very forgiving of alternatives, historically. Alas - it seems that parties are now trying to replicate this property...
Re: Jesus - If we don't presuppose anything religious to start with, why is the position "he was possibly some dude, or possibly a conglomeration of some dudes" reasonable? He could quite possibly be a very impressive dude. I could imagine someone in the future looking at, say, Penn or Da Vinci and not quite believing what they were up to without divine explanations, and for that matter Mohammad left his mark on the world. But unless we're presupposing a religious answer, why is there a puzzle for Judaism to solve in Jesus?
Catholicism and poverty - I'm not necessarily up for a debate about your point, but let it be said that in my view your claim that "Catholics are overrepresented among the poor because the Church works very hard to help the poor" is very much not supported by facts. Suppose I do engage you on this point and commonly agreed-upon statistics prove that in fact Catholicism and its presence are not a great predictor of development across the globe, and perhaps that the simple explanation is that poor people are desperate for what religion (in particular, Catholicism) offers without gaining by it - supposing all this, would that change your world-view? Do you agree that a negative answer is devastating to your success-related argument (though not to your personal experiences)?
"that system might be rooted in something important and good and true." - one of these is not like the others. In this sentence you again conflate(?) utility with profound truth. "Catholicism promotes value systems that lead to a good life" is not the same as "and therefore I should adopt the Catholic perspective, skin, bones, body-of-Christ-is-literally-in-my-mouth and all". One important way in which I'm not just nitpicking is if those values *were* useful in the past but are less relevant in the recent centuries, as is argued by, say, Joseph Henrich.
>Would you say the standard Catholic position is different? Sure seems that Catholicism wasn't very forgiving of alternatives, historically.
The Catholic Church is actually rather ecumenical these days. For example, if you are Orthodox, you can walk into a Catholic Church and receive communion. I believe the Pope is the Vicar of Christ and Orthodox don't, but theologically we are otherwise in agreement for the most part, and the Church recognizes that. If you convert to Catholicism, the Church will recognize certain Protestant baptisms as valid. Yes, I believe in the capital-T Truth of Catholic teaching - but some people are closer to it than others. Admittedly some Catholics hate this and are very much against it, but I think it's a fairly logical and obvious way of thinking about theology.
>If we don't presuppose anything religious to start with, why is the position "he was possibly some dude, or possibly a conglomeration of some dudes" reasonable?
For one thing, even most secular scholars agree Jesus was a singular person, his historical existence really isn't disputed.
Past that, I simply have a different epistimology. I see everything we have in our modern society as having been built on a certain foundation - a foundation which was constructed by great men. I see works of theology, history, art, science, jurisprudence, and architecture which have persisted for literally millenia. And for most of the last 2,000 years, the people doing all that work were Catholics, Catholicism is foundational to Western Civilization. Most people who have come before you in the last 2,000 years, including the smartest ones, were Catholic. Virtually all of them were theists. Is the tradition they followed not entitled to some kind of deference, at least as a starting point? I think it is.
>In this sentence you again conflate(?) utility with profound truth. "Catholicism promotes value systems that lead to a good life" is not the same as "and therefore I should adopt the Catholic perspective, skin, bones, body-of-Christ-is-literally-in-my-mouth and all".
I wouldn't say utility always suggests profound truth - and to be clear, my faith is not rooted in beliefs about utility. Utility (I don't like the word "utility" - Catholic social teaching is not utilitarian) opened my eyes to thinking differently about faith, but it was my study of Feser/Aquinas and personal experiences which changed my mind.
It is true that a value system which works in one place and time may not work in all places and times, but Catholicism actually recognizes this. Most of the current Catechism is heavily influenced by the works of St. Thomas Aquinas - who lives in the 13th century. You can see this in the Church's view on capital punishment - at one time, capital punishment could serve the common good. Catholic theology, however, recognizes that we now have modern systems of policing and incarceration which render the need for capital punishment moot, and it no longer serves the common good. Nobody has the right to kill a man (who is created in God's image) unless doing so is necessary for the common good, so capital punishment is unlawful.
Not trying to be a spoilsport, but wouldn't it be more effective to make a ACX goodreads group or something instead of this new wheel?
Currently reading Ubik which I think is fun, before that Gomorrah which is one of those books I got stuck on since it's just very depressing and even though it's not hard to read or very long it took me a month, and before that The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project by Krithika Varagur which I thought was very interesting and maybe worthy of a post by Scott.
Gladio has become such a meme but I've been very very slowly working on something about Dutch Gladio over the last three years (meaning reading some books about it and trying to get like 2 official documents) and The Call was really refreshing in 'oh yeah of course this is constantly happening everywhere!'
How strong is the evidence for the efficacy of EMDR? My wife's counselor suggested it to her, and from reading the description it seems...uh...dubious.
Psychologist here. I think EMDR is nonsense. While doing EMDR (i.e., while looking at the therapist wiggling a finger or whatever) the patient thinks about or describes their trauma. The active ingredient in the treatment is the repeated reliving and recounting of the trauma -- the finger-wiggling part is smoke and mirrors. Edna Foa and others long ago described an exposure treatment of trauma, in which the patient repeatedly describes and relives the trauma, while in the comforting company of their therapist. It's pretty effective (most exposure-based therapies for most anxiety disorders are). That's the active ingredient in EMDR. But I wouldn't trust anyone who's into EMDR to administer the treatment, because either they do not read, think about and understand science, which is bad, or else they know this treatment has a large horseshit component, but administer it anyhow, which is also bad.
I read up on it a couple years ago, came to that conclusion. I agree it's reasonable to want to read some good studies before writing it off, but I don't have time to reread the studies right now, just to make the case for my view. If I had started a thread by announcing that EMDR is horseshit I would have felt obligated to present some RCT, but I'm just quickly answering someone's question on here.
Yeah, good point about less onus on backing up your opinion with evidence if you clearly state it as your opinion in a reply, even when saying you are a professional in the field. Still, it would have more weight if you did. I did not do proper research, either, my views are based on anecdotal evidence of the difference in reaction between people doing talk therapy/CBT/DBT vs EMDR. My guess is that EMDR is more like hypnotherapy, but without suggestions or leading questions. It helps the person to go into a partial trance and explore and process memories in feelings otherwise buried. Whether it is net good or bad is not immediately clear, but it seems to be qualitatively different from the rational-mind approaches. My view (again, not backed up by extensive research) is that PTSD from a one-off traumatic event can be successfully improved with EMDR, more so than with standard approaches like exposure therapy. Or maybe in conjunction. I suspect that pharmacology-assisted therapies like MDMA and psycholbin do something similar: disengage the conscious rational critical part of the brain and let the subconscious do most of the work.
But the alternative to EMDR that I think works is really different from cognitive therapy (a rational mind approach)or talk therapy. Remember the approach I talked about -- Foa's exposure therapy for PTSD? What happens in the office during that is pretty similar to an EMDR session -- patient describes and relieves the trauma, over and over, in a supportive setting. Except the therapist is not wiggling fingers or whatnot to induce eye movements. Instead therapist is supportive -- you're doing fine, this will get easier if you hang in there, I'm here with you, etc.
I do not think the finger wiggles etc. that EMDR therapists do are particularly hyponotic. I do hypnosis (though not for trauma, usually), and it is not that easy hypnotize most adults. You can't just wiggle your fingers rhythmically at them. Takes a solid 15 minutes of work, and even that will only succeed if you're pretty good at hypnosis and have a subject who goes under easily.
By the way, the rationale of EMDR is pretty silly. During REM (dreaming) sleep, the eyes jerk around, although not rhythmically, and not back and forth -- it's random, jerky movements with no pattern. So many proponents of EMDR believe that by making the subjects' eyes move back and forth (which is not the way eyes move in REM sleep anyhow) they are putting the brain into the equivalent of REM sleep, so that the brain can work on the trauma in a special, brain thought to be important for memory consolidation. All this is pretty silly. First of all, the state people get into during EMDR is not remotely like REM sleep. People in REM sleep are profoundly unaware of the real world, engrossed in a dream story, and also, by the way, paralyzed. And anyhow, the eye movements during REM seem to be a sort of side effect of what is going on in the brain -- no reason to think they are the cause. You can't make someone go into the dream state by making their eyes move around any more than you can make them fall asleep by having them make snoring sounds.
I suspect that you might be better than average in your occupation, so you don't need crutches like EMDR, and so you conclude that EMDR is useless. The difference is that EMDR seems to provide a reliable way to get a person to relax and let go a bit (that's what I called a light trance), without the practitioner being an expert at it. Basically, it's the difference between art (not reproducible) and craft (almost anyone can learn the skill).
I don't disagree that the rationale is not very scientific, but the practice stems from experiment and is reported to work, so it is probably not wise to just dismiss it as obvious bunk, just don't use it if it doesn't work for you. Note that plenty of pharmaceuticals have no known basis for their effects, including something as old as aspirin.
And yeah, you can make someone go into a trance-like state by making their eyes follow a periodic pattern, hence the trope of a pendulum used for that purpose, though obviously it's neither necessary nor sufficient.
Re hypnosis: there are millions of ways to do it. I have personally reliably got (consenting) people into trance over text, within 10-15 min or so, just with progressive relaxation and fractionation. All you need is someone's focus.
Not a doctor, but talked to many of those who tried it. My overall conclusion is that it is definitely not a placebo, it works. But. It works well on PTSD, i.e. from a single-trauma or multiple isolated mental traumas, such as from an accident, or a hospital, or war. For a complicated PTSD (CPTSD) due to growing up in abuse it works almost too well. That is, you get one trauma "processed" with EMDR, but it tends to unravel a bunch of related traumas you never thought about, or forgot, and suddenly you are dealing with a Hydra (from the Greek mythology, not from comics). Anecdotally, MDMA and psilocybin, in a safe supervised setting, tend to work better for CPTSD.
I’m looking to generate some conceptual trolley problems for a project I’m working on. For example: A runaway trolley will obliterate either Sexism or Racism. Which track to do you put it on? Etc.
Give me ideas of things this trolley might obliterate: good, bad or mixed. No living beings as trolley targets, please. Extra points for the absurd and/or thought-provoking. Thanks!
For the effect size people. Where do I actually find the discussion on meta-analysis, btw? Your university ran two field studies in environmentally friendly behavior. One is on the use of ecological dishwasher tabs, it shows a standardized effect size of 0.4. The other one on the replacement of large conferences by hybrid meetings to reduce air traffic, effect size is 0.2. Which one should the trolley destroy?
Be sure to put in some taboo tradeoffs, too. The trolley will destroy either everyone's memories of the 2012 Olympics (but not the recordings), or will destroy a random American highway and replace it with whatever would have been there if the highway hadn't been built. Or the trolley will either destroy racism in 10,000 US schools, or destroy one hour from the average daily commute time in Mumbai (population 20 million).
Trolley will obliterate either Runaway Trolley or Save From a Burning Building moral dilemma framings.
Trolley will do away with either White Flight or Gentrification.
Trolley will do away with either Ethnic Languages/Dialects or Ethnic Food.
Trolley will do away with either The Rights Of Englishmen or the English language.
Trolley will do away with either Microbe Theory or Cultural Contamination Theory.
Trolley will do away with Majestic Natural Beauty or The Wonders of Modern Technology.
Trolley will do away with Disney (the corporation and all its holdings), Agatha Christie's works, or Shakespeare's works. As a bonus, the answer must be understood and approved of by your favorite 8 year old.
Trolley will obliterate Friendship or True Love.
Trolley will obliterate either your favorite color, favorite taste, or favorite sound.
Geographical (more or less) options: Nationalism, provincialism (hmm, is there a city-scale analog?)
Various flavors of lacks of skills: illiteracy, numerical illiteracy
Can industries or activities or products be candidates? tobacco, alcohol (yes, I know Prohibition was a horrible mistake - this is a hypothetical "poof, it vanished" case, not criminalizing it)
Industries can absolutely be included. Would be interesting to see if people would target All Laws Restricting a Marijuana Industry vs Tobacco Industry (eliminating it).
Someone I know with a background in computational linguistics and a degree in social work needs a job quickly. She is German and wants to stay in the US. Where should I tell her to look? I feel like someone in EA would have some ideas for this person.
My company (modulate.ai) is hiring and could be very interested in someone with a computational linguistics background and interest in social good! Please feel free to point her to our website - the closest open role would likely be "Scoring Engineer", though it's ok if she doesn't have the full technical experience described there; she can also reach out directly through careers@modulate.ai (I keep an eye on that list) and I can route her to the right folks internally.
You might need to be more specific about why she is in the US can't stay. Illegal immigrants are different from student visas which are different from tourists who fell in love with the country.
She had been a student here for many years, worked for a while, then returned to school. She's been in the US legally on and off for almost 20 years but never became a citizen. She was most recently here on a student visa for the MSW, but now that she's graduated her visa is expiring and she's looking for work. Apparently they don't give you a huge amount of time to find a job after graduation if you haven't lined one up yet, so she's nervous. She's in Boston and would like to stay.
Nope, only sixty days. In that situation she basically needs to find a job that sponsors visas pronto or find someone willing to marry her. She could try the visa lottery but that's a lower probability. There's a lot of job boards that have a filter on whether they do visa sponsorship. But the big employer for MSW is the US government which generally doesn't. What field does she want to work in?
There is no such thing as "sponsoring" a visa. There are a lot of different visa types, each with their own criteria. Her best option is probably the F1 OPT, which allows recent graduates to work in a "training program" for one year (3 years with a STEM degree.) The training program is often pro forma, with the company doing some extra paperwork but treating the employee like any other hire. Her employer can also register for the H1B lottery next spring, which grants a 3 year visa that can be renewed for a total of 6 years. It only opens for one week in March every year, and the chances of selection are usually between 1/3 and 1/4.
Sponsoring a visa is absolutely a thing, is the word used for such a thing, and is the relevant legal term. (Eg, https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/guides/E2en.pdf) Likewise universities sponsor students for visas. I'm very surprised anyone with a passing familiarity with immigration would contest this point.
Not sure what kind of job she wants. She applied to work at her school, and at some sort of state level thing where she did an internship. I think they said "maybe" but they're both keeping her hanging and now she's anxious. She tried the marriage thing about a decade ago and it was a disaster, so she's never doing that again.
To be frank, the pickings are a bit slim for visa sponsorship jobs. She should probably be looking at anything she's qualified for. Private industry tends to do it more than government or universities. So I'd find out what her sort of minimum acceptable job is and start applying for that. She'll need continued visa sponsorship for a few years and then she can get citizenship and do whatever she wants.
I use KMyMoney. Upsides: open source, lots of features. Downsides: the learning curve is like scaling a cliff and there's no automatic transaction sync with most banks if you live in the USA.
Any medical students/ physicians here? I was thinking of starting a Whatsapp group where we could discuss studies and/or the practicalities of the doctor life.
If so, text me at 6098240815899 without the 8s. :)
I wrote the comment in #2 about the DSL test being incorrect. I want to point out that I don't think this statistical issue is actually particularly relevant to the debate at hand. I think basically everyone agrees that there is a strong statistical effect here, and the question of "how strong exactly" is mostly moot.
Scott's point was that there is an effect, and that effect is caused by coinfection with Strongyloides worms. Ivmmeta/Alexandros's believes it has a separate and distinct effect on covid itself. Alexandros/ivmmeta seem to have done some work to try to statistically distinguish these things by looking at infection progression and other metrics, an approach that seems superficially plausible to me. That is, plausible that you could separate these things in this way, in principle.
It seems to me like that's where the locus of the debate should be. It is still important to correct the statistical issue just as a matter of good hygiene, and Scott's use of the t-test was definitely quite inappropriate there, so that's good. I just want to point out that no matter what the outcome of this issue is, it's mostly immaterial to the broader question re: Ivermectin/COVID.
Thanks a lot for the comment on reddit. My favorite quote is at the beginning, "there is no way to do statistics on heterogenous endpoints without additional fairly strong assumptions." Spot on. To illustrate it by some units: Study 1 uses the endpoint X and found an effect of 2 m in favor of the new drug, Study 2 uses the endpoint Y and observed an effect of 3 kg. Meta-analysis now tries to "average" 2 m and 3 kg, good luck. And no, one cannot circumvent the problem by using standardized effects.
I agree with this, but Alexandros emailed me about the test statistic issue, and it seemed like a clear-cut error, so I wanted to address his actual concern.
I assume once we get past that he's going to challenge me on the worm thing too, although at this point I'm kind of sick of dealing with him and I feel like he twists anything I say/do against me, so I'm not sure how much I'm actually willing to have that argument.
I still think ivermectin (or other anti-parasitics) work best in countries where there's a good chance the population have exposure to parasites.
If you're an otherwise healthy First World inhabitant, I see no reason to believe ivermectin will do any good at all if you contract Covid. I would be broadly not unsympathetic to letting people have a dose of it, if they really nag their doctors hard enough, since the worst it could probably do is give them a good purge, but the amount of breathless "this is a miracle cure that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about!" shilling for it has annoyed me to the point that I think they all need to be put working in a piggery cleaning out the slurry, if they're that damn anxious to get near animal drugs.
As I learned last year, you don't have to clean piggeries to get animal drugs. Cocaine seems nowadays to be often mixed with levamisole to be longer effective. Side effects are holes in the skin and possibly the brain, too. Maybe that helps against COVID19 as well.
Does the debate have any practical value at this point? Ivermectin is either useless against covid or has a sufficiently small effect that you have to squint properly to see it. We have much better treatments now, as well as vaccines.
One new insight I had (better late than never) after reading the Ivermectine post: the causal conclusions we can draw from RCTs are rather limited. If an effect is seen in an RCT, we can only conclude that the treatment "somehow" causes the effect (probably, the worm thing). The specific meaning of somehow is still speculative, even in an RCT. I am underlining this because one might be tempted to believe in causality as soon as one enters the realm of RCT.
Yes, this is right, with some caveats. In a hypothetical RCT where you average over the population of the entire world (or statistically do so via random sampling), this problem *kind of* disappears.
In practice, of course, nobody does this. So we always have to apply a bit of theory to draw causal conclusions like this. This is why you want to identify a mechanism of action, and then try to probe that mechanism of action directly to make sure that the drug is in fact doing the thing you think it's doing.
Data alone is usually not enough to draw hard causal conclusions, at least, not causal conclusions that assume a particular chain of causality. We can conclude that Ivermectin probably causally worked at reducing symptoms, but we can't necessarily conclude that it did so in any *particular way*.
I think it matters for figuring out who to listen to in future debates.
Experts get a lot wrong, but they also get a lot right. We should give the amateurs calling out the experts a chance to prove themselves, but when do we throw in the towel and just ignore them?
I think you could argue that Ivermectin is much more available than Paxlovid and/or the vaccines in developing countries, and even in developed countries to some extent. If it really was an effective treatment, it'd be pretty valuable for poorer countries.
There's also the issue of credibility, expert consensus, and media to think about. If it were the case that Ivermectin actually was effective, and the media/scientific establishment shouted the pro-Ivermectin crowd down with chants of "horse paste", that would be a pretty important thing to signal boost, I think. Conditional on them being wrong, I would hope we'd see some soul searching and humility.
On the other hand, if Ivermectin really isn't effective, it'd be a moderate boost to the reputation of expert consensus in general. I don't think it's like, the most important issue we're facing or anything, but I do think it's worth knowing what the truth is here, if it can be sorted out relatively cheaply. Ultimately this blog/community is about getting better at learning true things about the world, so improving these processes would certainly be useful for that.
The problem is that fluvoxamine *also* seems to have a significantly larger effect, and very little of the media ever supported or attacked it, while ivermectin got a lot of media support as well as a lot of media attack. Figuring out why no one other than Vox and a few rationalist bloggers ever pushed fluvoxamine, and figuring out how to get more to do that, seems more important than shouting down the ivermectin shout-downers.
> Conditional on them being wrong, I would hope we'd see some soul searching and humility.
If all you want is for your enemies to be proven wrong then you're fine there. We already have enough information to show that the "Ivermectin doesn't work, just look at this one study" and the "Ivermectin totally works, just look at this one study" crowds were both wrong and should exercise greater epistemic caution in future.
It won't happen, but at least we can all feel smugly superior to them.
Logic/Bayes question: Suppose there is an open question about an underlying fact in a certain domain, and I have a model of how things work which predicts that an observation O is moderately more likely given hypothesis H1 than H2. You have a model which predicts the opposite. We have made observation O, update our conditional probabilities in opposite directions, and then learn that H2 is in fact correct. I should now take your underlying model a bit more seriously than my own, because you said that the observation was evidence for what turned out to be the correct hypothesis while I said the opposite.
This is a sort of meta-Bayesian reasoning, which can help us favor accurate models over inaccurate ones. But obviously it's going to produce updates strictly smaller than the update within the favored model - if your model says something is barely evidence at all, then the confirmation is barely evidence of your model.
Now, some questions: first, can we quantify these meta-Bayesian updates, and if so, how messy is the formula? Second, can we construct any scenario in which we would go up another level and have such a concept as meaningful meta-meta-Bayesian updates?
Sounds like old good Bayesian model selection / Bayesian model averaging. In brief, you want to compute posterior probability for model M_i given data D, P(M_i|D) which (by Bayes theorem is) P(D|M_i)P(M_i) / sum_i P(D|M_i)P(M_i)
However, to compute that you need to evaluate P(D|M_i) (the evidence), and for that you need to actually specify how your model M_i relates to observations D. For example, if you have some kind parametric Bayesian model with parameter(s) theta, then P(D|M_i) = ∫ P(D|theta, M_i)P(theta| M_i) d theta. Suppose you learn hypothesis H2 is true and "H2 is true" corresponds to certain region in parameter space theta under model M_i; this can viewed as imposing prior such that P(theta|M_i) = 0 in regions where H2 false. Then it is "simply" a metter of calculating / approximating how does ones P(M_1|D) change compared to P(M_2|D) under new new prior compared to what you had previously.
This much was straightforward, I don't have much intuition if one can have any heuristics about the relative sizes updates, could be quite model-specific.
And yeah, please do notice that to do any genuine Baysian computation one needs to specify how ones models relate to data or if doing some pure theory, define some abstract class of model space under study. Talking a lot about "Bayes" without the nitty-gritty details is a tad cargo-cult-ish.
I should add: depending on how all-encompassing you view your model, philosophically this could be a bit too much like multi-eyed multi-winged seraphim descending from the Heaven and telling, Fear Not, Behold, I Bring You News About Your Parameter Space. The exercise "so what happens when we set the parameter" very much steps out the Bayes part to the "all models are wrong but some are useful, lets fiddle with them to make it more useful" territory.
I suppose the kosher Bayesian Way is to interpret evidence that "H2 is true" in terms of data: Think about one regular size observation ("I observe one apple in my neighborhood store weighs 181 grams. I wonder what is the average size?"). Suppose you make a strong observation that made you think H2 is true ("my neighbor told me that storekeeper throws away all apples that weigh less than 110 g"). If you had a perfect Bayesian model of absolutely anything, you could trow in that observation directly, but if not (far more likely), one could attempt to add it in as a pseudo-observation. ("I trust my neighbor quite much, that information is as good as observing 100 apples, all >110g")
I think this depends on how the models are interpreted. If the difference in the models is a different in *causal* probabilities, then this just sounds like a case for higher order bayesian uncertainty over which lower order causal bayes net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network) is giving the causal probabilities.
But if these differences were differences in *Bayesian* probabilities rather than causal probabilities, then it's less obvious why the update you mention is going to be justified.
I think, in the ideal case, a Bayesian prior is first over a set of models, and only then over a set of outcomes, as a mathematical consequence of the weighting of the models. (Don't forget to include a 'model' called "I have no clue" with a basically flat prior, because you should never assign 0% odds to anything.)
Bayesian updates are purely mathematical for any given set of priors, but unfortunately the maths is really hairy and for any non-trivial prior distribution can be analytically intractable.
I think it's possible – in principle – to quantity Bayesian updates. It's just effectively impossible in almost every practical case!
I don't see why a 'recursive hierarchy of meta-ness' with respect to Bayesian updates isn't meaningful.
Off the top of my head, the closest thing, that's practical, for the kind of collaborative meta-Bayesian-updating (I think) you're describing is something like the "Double-Crux": https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/double-crux
Without identifying the (most) 'fundamental' source of disagreement, it just seems too hard to track all of the details to perform even something like a numerical update. (In more realistic practice, even just getting two people to attempt to _reasonably_ resolve their disagreements seems like too tall of an order to almost every expect, outside the specific weird social circles where this is, of course, considered perfectly reasonable, when feasible.)
Is this summary of the US vs. European collegiate systems correct? The European college academic experience is much more focused on one's specific major, and does not feature a lot of required classes outside of it. The US college academic experience involves a broader, not deeper education, with required extracurriculars in classes outside of your major. I.e. if you study Chemistry, Comp Sci or Literature in Europe you mostly just take classes in those fields, whereas in the US you're required to take a number of extracurriculars, to be a 'broader' thinker. Thus, American students are not studying their primary subject as intensely. Do I have that right?
(This isn't even getting into medical or law school, which in the US is another program after one's Bachelor, and in Europe I believe rarely or never is).
If I do have that right- are there any advantages to the US system? I've heard many times, from many different people, that European students in a given subject are basically always ahead of American ones at the same point, given the deeper/broader dichotomy. So- why does the US structure its educational system this way? America is famously the world's #1 technological, financial, military, economic, scientific and cultural power at the moment, so I find it a bit difficult to believe the US academic system is markedly worse than Europe's. Do American college students somehow gain something substantive by being forced to take classes outside their major? (Also, how does the rest of the developed world like Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel etc. do it?)
Edit to include: also, in theory, a college could offer this more intensive/less broad education program here in the US, right? America has tons of colleges & federalism- kind of surprising to see that at least a few colleges don't offer the European system instead, right?
Something I'm surprised to see not discussed more often is how bizarre I find it that Europe depends on high school students to pick a major despite presumably exceptionally limited experience engaging in it at a university level. In America you don't even declare your major (typically) until sophomore year, with the assumption that by that time you've at least had time to explore the basics of classes in which you might be interested.
Expecting students of even the most advanced high school level biology courses to decide they want to do molecular biology, or economics, or computer science, or linguistics, or (insert course of study with no particularly good high school level analogue and/or that may well not be offered at many high schools at all, and/or course of study with a wide disparity between undergraduate / graduate level study and high school) to be so certain of what they want to study as to dedicate themselves near-exclusively to it as a course of study has always struck me as a bizarre, and to be blunt, somewhat cruel (inasmuch as intolerant of mistakes or errors in judgment made by deciding agents with comically little information) system.
Indeed, I think that the courses of study most conducive to this kind of commitment in the American system are also exemplary of its failure modes. In particular, molecular biology is known for attracting pre-med students, but how the hell does an eighteen year old know that they want to engage in the practice of medicine when their primary exposure to its is House, M.D. and yearly checkups? I think the answer turns out to be: most of them don't! And in fact I believe this likely accounts for why even in circles comprised overwhelmingly of incredibly intelligent and talented people (i.e., not obviously dominated by genetic selection effects that correlate with professions), the doctors I know have a very strong bias towards being the children of other doctors--because they're the ones who have enough of a clue as to what being a doctor is like so as to structure their lives toward it out of high school!
The fact that Europe makes *everyone* make hugely life-affecting decisions from among a cohort singularly poorly-equipped and informed to make them has always struck me as a huge mark against it rather than in favor.
No direct experience with the European system, but I can tell you that in the Australian system you are expected to choose a degree program straight out of high school, but you have plenty of opportunities to transfer to another program along the way.
Done two years of a Bachelor of Dental Science but decide you'd rather have a Bachelor of Arts instead? No problem, most of your course credits from the BDS will carry across to the BA. Going the other way is more of an issue since there's a lot of dentistry-specific courses you need in order to graduate with a BDS, but some of your credits might be transferable.
And in your example, many course credits from a Bachelor of Medicine are likely to transfer across to a molecular biology degree, if you figure out you're not interested in treating patients.
Note that American undergraduate degrees are 4 years whereas in Europe they're 3 years. That does allow a fair bit more room for breadth without costing depth, 'just' a year of every student's life (time that is very profitable to the universities)
It may be. My experience in a highly technical first-rate American college was that I needed to do about 40% of my classes in my major, and there were definite requirements to learn things well outside of my major. I was a hard-science major, and yet I ended up taking classes in history, foreign language, music, literature, philosophy, engineering, and economics.
I think the "why" and advantage of it stem from the fact that America is basically the land of second chances. It's almost never too late to switch from A to B, to go from being an artist to a scientist, or vice versa, to go from academia to commerce, or vice versa. You can spend your youth in dissipation and still become an intellectual. (You can be an intellectual that degerates, too, but that's not very interesting.) You can become a lawyer or physician at age 60 after 3/4 of a lifetime doing something else. You can become President after a career as an actor or reality TV star, ha ha!
That all seems rooted in traditional American values. We're a Protestant state but nevertheless don't really believe in predestination. You can almost always achieve salvation by good works, even if you have massively screwed up. No one is beyond salvation, everyone can achieve miracles, there are no barriers of class or birth or history that inherently bar anyone from doing anything, no one's destiny is written in stone[1,2].
So Americans tends to inherently value generality and flexibility in education, and be willing to trade for it the disadvantage of an increase in educational inefficiency and a consequently significantly longer educational period for any given outcome.
-------------
[1] I'd be the first to admit this is in agonizing tension with American judgmentalism, to our willingness to make snap and sweeping judgments on scanty evidence. That tension is a major source of our domestic social squabbles.
[2] One can argue this stems from the philosophical and religious convictions of America's founders, but perhaps a better argument is that it comes from the tremendous hetereogeneity that results from being an immigrant nation, in which massive differences in cultural values and personalities are mixed willy nilly. It's hard to make *any* general statement about how personal destiny should unfold in America without having some minority or other raise its hand and say "no way, that doesn't work for us."
It’s also relevant that the dynamics you are talking about pertain specifically to undergraduate education whereas university reputation is built mostly on scholarship (PhD programs and up). And at those stages the US does poach many the best from Europe (and other places overseas). Similarly for our technological etc leadership - a good fraction of the people involved did not do their undergraduate work here.
Incidentally, I do think we do graduate education better (and deeper) than Europe…
Although the difference in graduate education is at least somewhat shaped by the difference in undergraduate education. In many European countries, a PhD student is expected to come in with a project in mind, and take 3-4 years to do it. In the United States, a PhD student is expected to take a few years of graduate coursework in their field, while starting to come up with ideas for their project, and then do it, for a total of 5-7 years. This makes sense given that US students are expected to need some advanced coursework in their field before starting a project, while European students are expected to have done this in their undergraduate.
1. In technical professions, what you learn in school is very different from what you actually do on the job. I write software now. None of the tools or languages I use every day were covered in my classes, and most of what I learned in my classes is background knowledge -- not stuff I use every day.
2. A lot of the best technologists working in America are foreign-born. The number should be higher, because our immigration policy is both byzantine and nasty. But the number is already high.
Like many of the massive advantages over America that exist in Europe this is based on WW2. America experienced very limited impact on the functioning of society compared to Europe. America's inferior democracy, model of capitalism, and tons of other factors resulted in extremely disfunctional public institutions.
"Inferior"? Different. Better at some things, worse at others, yes. But not inferior. If you're not American you need to take some time and learn more about us. If you are American you may be acting out a joke in Gilbert and Sullivan.
"To the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone
every century but this and every country but his own..."
Not actually saying you're an idiot. That's uncivil. But contempt for one's own country is a known bias among smart people. You should guard against it.
America has things it's good at - I have a great respect for many elements of the national culture - but "public institutions" doesn't seem to be on that list. Your physical infrastructure hasn't been properly maintained in decades, large scale construction is prohibitively expensive if not impossible since 50 years ago, the schools system is laughable, and don't get me started on the legislature.
Now, that isn't to say that Europe or Australia or whatever country one compares to is flawless, but every time out public institutions specifically adopt a trend from the US it makes things worse.
One take I've heard is that it's because American high schools are so shocking that students need a couple of years of general education to catch up.
I think it's more a question of incentives. European universities are for the most part funded directly by the national government, which has massive influence over what is taught. The curriculum thus winds up optimised (at least a little bit) in the direction of what government technocrats would want -- short, efficient vocational training.
In the US, universities have different sources of funding, meaning that they're not quite so subject to the whims of government, meaning that they structure things the way that university administrators, rather than government technocrats, would like. That means broad general-education requirements to keep your buddies in the English and Philosophy departments in business. It also means putting off actual useful-for-making-money stuff until grad school, so that students spend as long in university as possible.
The US university system is the best in the world, not because it's well run but because it has lots and lots of money.
I mean, yeah? There's a dozen different ranking systems out there, but no matter which one you choose you'll find the top of the list dominated by US institutions.
Well, they aren't. I went to a prestigious US college, listed in the top 100 in the country (one of the UCs), and the education was bad enough that I hope people don't learn to think there.
First, what passed for sociology was: basically every problem ever was caused by white cis males. If you're a white cis male, you're the problem. Only whites can be racist. This essay is a fair summary of it: https://sapirjournal.org/social-justice/2021/05/critical-race-theory-and-the-hyper-white-jew/ . One of my professors actually said that "heterosexualism is a paradigm developed by the patriarchy to oppress women".
Second, economic and history education was so inadequate that communism was an extremely common belief, and people who went to more of those classes tended to become more anti-capitalist. Education that leads people to make dumber decisions is worse than nothing.
Third, even STEM courses were more about fulfilling credits than teaching. I was able to skip a couple prerequisite courses, but then when I was approaching my degree I was told that I needed to take those basic courses because they were required for the degree. I had to spend extra time going back to basic courses after passing more advanced courses in the same topic. My friend M.A. also had to.
I suppose it's possible that every other college is worse, and if so making higher education illegal would be a major improvement, but I think it's just that prestige and quality are not well correlated.
I won't dispute that, but have you considered that maybe the European universities are *worse*?
However, in reality, the most university rankings are not necessarily indicative of quality of teaching or students: I think near all look at the university's research output, how many Nobel prizes their PhD level graduates are awarded, etc. Usually the staff at top100 university consists of top of the top graduates of the worlds top 1000+ universities, not their modal undergraduate student.
It does help that almost all the rankings are run by Americans; American universities are often Goodhearting those rankings too.
Eg. undergraduate universities are ranked in part by the research output of their academics; this is because the anglosphere combines teaching undergrads and doing research into the same institutions, whereas in continental Europe they're usually different entities (that may be physically next door and even share staff). Thus, European undergraduate universities do very poorly on those rankings.
> Boris Johnson’s government recently rolled out an initiative to let recent graduates of the world’s top universities move to the UK. That required them to come up with a definition of the world’s top universities. Of the 38 on the list, a staggering 20 are American. And while it’s true most of those are private (though private schools benefit from student loans and are not outside the ambit of American higher education funding), there are six US public universities on the list versus five European universities. There are five California universities on the list (Stanford, Caltech, and three UCs) versus one from Germany.
FWIW, American rankings are more likely to pay attention to quality of education while international rankings are more likely to pay attention to quality of research. (Not that either type of ranking necessarily does a good job of paying attention to what it pays attention to, but the discrepancy doesn't go in the direction you suggest.)
The top university rankings that I know about are from the Times Higher Education Supplement (UK), QS (UK) and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (China). The US News & World Report rankings would be the top US-based one I suppose.
Anyway, comparing the big four university rankings, three of them have a top ten which comprises eight US universities plus Oxford and Cambridge. The outlier is QS, which has five US universities plus four UK universities and the ETH Zurich.
Nit: Harvey Mudd isn't a great example IMO. It's a STEM school, but everyone has to take intro classes in CS, Physics, Bio, Engineering, Math, and maybe Chem, plus at least 10 humanities courses. At least, that was the case several years ago, and they emphasized their liberal-artsiness.
I think at least some colleges also trace it to being a well rounded person/citizen rather than a more modern sort of “special uniqueness” movement. There is an idea (also seen in our K-12 school system) that you need to not just understand whatever you’ll directly use in your career, but also enough to have a good context for what you’re doing and how the world works.
The widely used term 'culture war' is a translation of Kulturkampf, a 19th-century political dispute between German chancellor Bismarck and the Catholic Church. But now we use it without any memory of that, as far as I can tell.
It uses 'culture' more narrowly and 'war' more broadly than I'm comfortable with. The narrow use of 'culture' obscures the multitude of values and habits on which partisan rivals tend to agree (cf. Anthropology 101). The broad use of 'war' trivializes the death and destruction in actual war.
The first fairly thorough alternative I've come up with is 'disputes over identity, respect, education, bodily autonomy, and diversity'. For short, you get 'DIREBAD' or 'IREBAD disputes'. Memorable, but also somewhat childish.
There is a better alternative to DIREBAD. It's 'culture war'.
The most important feature of a word or phrase, arguably the only relevant feature, is the information it conveys.
Trying to substitute one word for another almost always fails. When it worked, it was because an organized group managed to discredit the old word by attributing meaning to it that people didn't want to convey.
E.g. the n-word conveying that the speaker is a racist, Kiev instead of Kyiv conveying imperialist attitudes, etc.
Culture War is already as close to perfect as language can usually get. It's brief, it's simple, and even someone who hasn't heard the phrase before can usually derive its meaning from context and form.
I reject your contention that it trivializes 'real war'. People have been using the word war metaphorically for longer than people have been speaking modern English.
Your proposed alternative (and any alternative you might come up with) offers no greater benefit than that you prefer it. If that's enough for you to change, by all means do so, but don't expect anyone else to fall in line.
In the US in particular there's sufficient breakdown of mutual respect that actual civil war's less unthinkable than usual. It would take a Constitutional crisis, but those can happen. Scott's piece "Against Murderism" back on SSC pointed this out as a (dire) possibility.
Education's not really an end in these disputes so much as a means; people fight over the keys to the indoctrination machine simply because it's known to be a potent tool for spreading ideologies, and they fight dirty over it because they're desperate more generally. Respect and identity are both key points for both sides (though in entirely-different ways), so those are fine. I agree with the others that the BAD bit is, well, framed poorly (badly?!).
It depends a lot on what you mean by "better." If what you mean is "a term that more people will recognize and immediately understand what is meant" then probably not. That is an empirical question -- you have to just survey or watch people and see what word they use -- and has nothing to do with logic or linguistics.
On the other hand, if by "better" you mean a word that would cause people to look at the issue more constructively, then there indeed might be better words. I actually agree with you about the over-use of the word "war" and the fact that it implies a total breakdown of civil order that should be strenuously avoided if possible. What's going on in the Ukraine is actual culture war, where people are willing to kill each other over whether they are "Ukrainian" or "Russian." It is wise to bear in mind the difference between that and voting for this candidate or that in an election, or having a fierce Internet debate.
But I share Melvin's concern that what you are looking for is word that twists the debate in nonproductive ways towards a preferred outcome. By framing the debate with those terms, you make it hard to even understand the words of some 40-60% (depending on the particular issue) of your fellow citizens. That doesn't seem conducive to a negotiated outcome.
The first problem with your acronym is that by using the words you do, you're already accepting the left-wing framing of the issues.
Let's take "diversity" for example. The left side of the culture war will tell you they're fighting for "diversity", but the right side will tell you they're neither fighting against diversity nor for it, they're fighting for a principle _orthogonal_ to it. The principle they are fighting for, they will tell you, is the principle that people should be judged individually on their own merits, regardless of whether this happens to cause statistically significant discrepancies between different groups on certain metrics. The right will, furthermore, question whether "diversity" is really the principle that the left is fighting in favour of, since "diversity" should be about the whole gestalt of who you are as a person, whereas the left seems to think that a group of people with different genitals and skin colours but who are otherwise exactly identical is somehow maximally diverse.
So by accepting the word "diversity" as what the argument about you've implicitly accepted the left's framing of the issue. Similar critiques could be applied to most of the other words in your acronym.
The right does seem to fight for "traditional values" too, and while whatever that means remains ever vague, it looks like they have something in mind that once was a particular tradition - a decidedly undiverse approach. Of course, like you say, the left is, if anything, even more interested in ideological conformity, and being in position to dictate the terms on which the discourse happens means that there is nobody to call them out on their hypocrisies.
This sounds helpful but a little like Haidt's attempt to explain the differences on specific issues as driven by differing moral frameworks. In such an analysis, my stance on the US "culture war" is puzzlement. When the many individual positions within the two "sides" are examined in isolation, then to be consistent with my internal moral framework I can't pick either of the incoherent "sides". This leads to the problematic conclusion that either my internal moral framework is at odds with the two apparently dominant frameworks in the US, or that the diversity of moral frameworks which exist (of which my own is an example) is being forced by social discourse to fit into an arbitrary dichotomy for purposes which appear deeply troublesome. Neither is a comfortable conclusion to draw.
We don't remember what "social justice" originally meant other. Terms evolve. Strictly speaking if you're looking for a better translation "kulturkampf' means "culture fight" rather than "culture war" (kulturkrieg).
It's not clear what "social justice" originally meant, if anything. The OED (2nd Edition, 1989) lumped the phrase, with several others, as "one of a very large number of collocations … not [having] gained specialized meaning." (See Volume XV, page 905, 3rd column, 7.a).
Three years ago a young progressive friend showed me the definition "equality" in his pocket dictionary (Merriam-Webster, IIRC). By now it has surely morphed into "equity."
Social justice was originally a Catholic term that meant a social relations (social) that were in line with Catholic natural law principles (justice). It later got adopted by Mills style utilitarians and even later by socialists to have something closer to the modern meaning.
Are you saying that the first occurrences of the phrase "social justice" came from Catholicism? Do you have references? I've long been curious about the term and its evolving meanings.
This fits my experience. Around the turn of the millennium I was involved with campaigning about third-world poverty (fair trade, forgiveness of debts that have been paid several times over in interest, etc), mainly from a Christian perspective. The phrase "social justice" was used in this context, and I even included "social justice" among my interests on my LiveJournal profile. But then around the late '00s I began to notice it being used to refer to identity politics and toxic approaches to race and gender (a category I had noticed but didn't yet have a name for), so I stopped identifying with it myself.
Nowadays I think tongue-in-cheek that "social justice" works like "social smoking", where you're not really a smoker but you just go along with the appearance of smoking to fit in.
This video (c 2006) features the use of "social justice" in a Christian/poverty-relief context.
"Clothing drive for the needy." "Yes! Social justice!" *high five*
Also, interestingly, its title seems to indicate that "PC" refers to traditional Christian values.
EDIT: No wait, the video clarifies the use of "PC":
When we originally made/named the video we were in college and never expected anyone but our college buddies to be watching this junk. So "PC" was a reference to the "Positive Choice" dormitories on campus that allowed no alcohol/tobacco/etc. All our college buddies understood what it meant, but it turns out there is actually a world beyond your college campus (a common mistake).
I think that I understand how interpreting proposals for social (incl. terminological) change primarily through an amalgamation of Chesterton's Fence, Michael Oakeshott, 1984, Robert Nozick, Edmund Burke, and Seeing Like a State is appealing. It seems like a good way to never be tricked into supporting a new bad thing.
But this pro-common sense, anti-theoretical conservatism, while essential to society, is itself another theory. (In other words, what if you read Seeing Like a State through the lens of Seeing Like a State?) This conservatism helpfully encourages caution around new bad things, at the expense of not helping us identify old bad things.
I think the best approach to a proposed social change is finding a balance between (a) revising everything that doesn't make sense, and (b) revising nothing which is somewhat fit for purpose; and then shifting that balance with new evidence.
Re: paragraph 3
I agree. However, there might be a term which survives both objections. By giving my own awkward attempt, DIREBAD, I am trying to provoke someone more creative to try to find that term.
For those of you who have an arts and humanities streak but who've gone into business/science how do you keep up with your more artistic/humanistic pursuits? I find myself regretting not keeping up with my more artistic/humanistic interests. But the opportunities seem to require either more commitment than a working person can give or to be extremely amateur to the point many people have little to no experience. Does anyone have experience with striking that balance? Anyone have advice?
PS: I guess this is technically a request. But I don't think it degrades the discourse too much for an open thread.
No first hand experience, but some people seem to manage to combine medium respected professional success with respectable amateur in their hobby. I suppose it helps if you find one of those things super easy because of whatever (inborn talent, childhood well-spent acquiring critical skills, ).
(Super atypical example: Brian May, a professionally successful musician got his astrophysics PhD accepted in 2008, but at that point it was clearly a scientific hobby project - he started writing it in 1970...)
I have a desk in my office with paint supplies and spend between 0 and 120 minutes there after the kids go to bed. I have a wip book in Google Drive that I work on between 0 and 120 minutes yadda yadda. In the past I've done the same with woodworking, knife making, etc. I work 50 to 65 hours most weeks, volunteer w a few community groups (where I teach kids about art, sometimes), and I find a way.
Because it's a compulsion, I can't not do it. I don't watch TV/movies. I don't "go out" to bars, etc. Not because I'm above those activities, just because first things first (job/family/volunteer work), second things second (art, reading, exercise) and third things.... Usually never.
My limited personal sample says that working in a library is a good pair with a creative pursuit. More library people were doing outside art/music/writing things than in other work settings I saw.
The most successful at this was a (former supervisor) who is an accomplished jazz drummer. He grabbed onto his relatively low-stress, low-average-paying county library job, while playing gigs very often. Then he did that for decades in the same community, building up a strong local musical reputation. Made ends meet, made a lot of music. Did he clear the bar of “professional”? I don’t know if he made any albums.
It seems to matter how dedicated the band mates are. Other arts probably operate differently.
The characteristics of “library” that facilitate this may be it’s a job with regular hours that doesn’t follow you home, surrounded by creative co-workers working with creative products (books/recordings/journals/media).
The problem of “my art/music/poetry feels like I think too much, but I have to think a lot at work” is harder to solve.
The other day in a music store I saw one of those handwritten “bassist needed” posters with the phone number written on little tearable strips. Not intro, not professional. Other people in your art are probably looking, maybe using 1980s methods, maybe more advanced.
A way to get back into something is to sign up for a lesson of it. I guess my other data point is another drummer, this person did work/kids for 25 years, then took a lesson, kept studying with that teacher, joined a performing group, then ran a performing group for over a decade. Just now considering a second retirement after 25 years. It never made ends meet but the other work/family situation did that.
FWIW I'm the opposite. My life's ambition was always math and physics. For a stupid reason I enrolled in university for Computer Science which didn't interest me very much (the stupid reason being Douglas Hofstadter's 'Godel Escher Bach') . Before switching back to math and physics, I decided to take a year off and go to art school. I never made it back - 26 years later I'm still a working artist (in videogame development). I can't leave because I'm one of the founders of the studio where I work. So I live my other life evenings and weekends. I sure wish they'd hurry up with the cloning machine.
I was an artist who got dragged kicking and screaming into programming because I couldn't find any programmers to do the programmer things for me so I had to learn it myself. For about 10 years after my career started my art skills mostly atrophied.
Honestly what got me back into it was having kids. "Daddy, draw me a garbage truck! Draw a horsie! Draw me a paper doll with a dress!" and now I've done more drawing, sculpting, and painting than I have in over a decade because the kids will just twist my arm (sometimes literally). Maybe as a side effect of being narcoleptic, I'm highly suggestible when I'm thinking about something else, and the kids have picked up on this, and so they can get me to do stuff on an almost hypnotic level (*walk into a room*, *kid shoves a blank piece of paper in front of my face and requests a hippopotamus*, *apparently I'm drawing a hippopotamus now*)
No idea how applicable this is to your situation, or anyone else's.
Dana Gioia is proof by example that the combination is possible. He also seems relatively accessible and actually has some material on merging the two worlds, so you might write him?
I'm by no means a close friend of his or anything, just was impressed by his Conversations With Tyler episode and googled a bit about him, but I had https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXWhxMhIjF0 in mind as one example of such material. I know he invests in outreach regarding art, so I'd imagine he'd be worth contacting. As for his e-mail, I can only find dgpoetlaureate@arts.ca.gov.
I did a lot of art as a young adult, and took a couple of classes that gave me a lot of joy late in college. Then I got into a career that was quite challenging and I did not make the time. Got into writing later on, then shifted career tracks and, again, did not make/did not have time.
My advice? You have limited time. Make time for your family, your relationship/spouse, and for your hobby. If you pick a more challenging job, you will have less time as you try to counter not having skills or ability with tenacity. Choose wisely.
I saw a headline about monkey pox being seen in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is quite a large state, and I don't think a case of disease here is all that meaningful.
What would be a better size/system for announcing what's going on, good or bad.
Chunk the world by population? Watersheds? Transportation networks? Different systems for different topics?
Monkey pox has since been seen in Philadelphia-- not good news, but a little more meaningful.
In a better world, we'd have global and national health institutions we could actually trust to behave appropriately about disease outbreaks, and reporting on a single case in the evening news wouldn't be necessary at all.
Eh. The tabloids would still need to find things to report on. It's the major outlets reporting on this that is the issue, here.
I am not sure that I would say the same, though, if it was a was a disease worthy of the concern. (By which I mean 'serious communicable public health risk', not already widespread (like HIV) so smallpox, some influenzas, and I am not sure what else.)
By county would be far better - there are still vast differences in size and population in the US, but it would be better.
How ever, there are HIPPA privacy restrictions that may not be respected for some counties. (On edit: by which I mean that there may not be enough people of specific demographics to keep anonymous the patients mentioned in the reports.)
Why the so-called hard problem of consciousness is nonsense
I'd been thinking of writing a post on the subject – and maybe I will. But now I want to post bits of a post written by Keith Frankish, https://www.keithfrankish.com/2022/05/like-a-rainbow/. His 2nd and 3rd paragraphs:
"Here’s one: rainbows. Rainbows are real, aren’t they? You can see them with your own eyes — though you have to be in the right position, with the sun behind you. You can point them out to other people — provided they take up a similar position to you. Heck, you can even photograph them."
"But what exactly is it that’s real? It seems as if there’s an actual gauzy, multi-coloured arc stretching across the sky and curving down to meet the ground at a point to which you could walk. Our ancestors may have thought rainbows were like that. We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there. Nor are there any specific physical features arranged arcwise — the rainbow’s “atmospheric correlates”, as it were. There are just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc."
That's it, really. An analogy to be sure, but a good one. He continues:
"When I reflect on my own experience, it seems to me that my consciousness is an inner world, where the world around me is rendered in private mental qualities — “qualia” — for my benefit alone. But there isn’t such a world. Neuroscience finds nothing like it in the brain, nor even anything isomorphic to it. Rather, it finds complex trains of neural activity proceeding in parallel and triggering a host of reactions — physiological, psychological, and behavioural. My sense of having a rich qualia-filled inner world is an impression created by all these processes, but the processes themselves are as different from the supposed inner world as a moisture-infused mass of air is from a colourful aerial arc."
That is, it's like rainbows. Perfectly real, but not in the most obvious way.
It's like, when Chalmers posited the "hard problem" he asks us to imagine a complex circuit diagram that accounts for everything neuroscience has to say about consciousness. That's the "easy problem," solved!
"Now," he asks, "see consciousness anywhere in that diagram?"
"No", we reply.
"That's the hard problem," and adds another box to the diagram. "Find that box, and you've solved the hard problem," says he.
No. That's just make-work for philosophers, like digging ditches and then filling them back in.
"My sense of having a rich qualia-filled inner world is an impression..."
Whose sense, again? Who is receiving that impression? The author attempts to have their cake and eat it too, and cannot even criticize the hard problem without introducing it through the back door.
You're trapped in a trick of language. If you wish, you can spin it out into an observer receiving the impression, observing an observer receiving the impression, observing an observer receiving the impression .... But it's a pointless exercise.
"I just need to get it off my chest, you are more than you know, you are more than you know.." https://youtu.be/GsF05B8TFWg ^^
The problem is, the diffraction of light in rain being seen by your retina aka rainbow is nothing mystical but rather a pretty basic phenomenon, although indeed, the very existence of light and the particular physics of the universe is a mystery. We only know "this one universe", one way line of thoughts in our brains, one way time road, one mind in a body. "You are more than you know", meaning consciousness might reside in properties of the universe we have no anatomical/cognitive capabilities to comprehend.
But , as Elon recently tweeted, expanding cognitive capabilities might enable us to see a bit more.
Elon is brilliant, creative, and charismatic. But he has a poor sense of what he doesn't know. I suspect he know more about cars, rockets, and batteries than he does about AI. I don't think he knows much about the brain, much less from first principles. His fantasy of direct brain-to-brain thought transfer, for example, is nonsense, something I argue at some length here, https://www.academia.edu/44109360/Direct_Brain_to_Brain_Thought_Transfer_A_High_Tech_Fantasy_that_Wont_Work
may I note that, when you have a clear stream of words, thoughts, it is transmitted to the tongue whether you speak or not. This particular output could be easily readable. What Neuralink is proposing when it comes to "telepathy", is just a higher rate of transfer to begin with. Moreover, it is particularly focused on the rate of transfer between brain and machine, as in instead of typing on a keyboard, the neuralink reads and the computer types the words/commands directly. This would greatly improve the ergonomy / interface with Internet. Now it could also be used for brain to brain but requires input in the auditory centrum (which is more easy than inputting in wider area of the brain). Well, there is a whole discussion to be had here. I'd just say that there is a ongoing advancement in BCIs, which allows for a growing precision and diversity in use cases..
And just what output from brain A is going into the auditory cortex of brain B? The motor output would be unintelligible and there is no auditory output unless you are imagining that person A speaks aloud and his auditory input is sent to the auditory cortex of brain B, which seems pointless when person B could perfectly well hear person A speak. And you still have the problem of brain B identifying which signals are foreign and which are not. Remember, these signals we're talking about are just spikes. And a spike is a spike is a spike. Nothing unique about them.
they have a collection of patterns, the user must train the software/chip on his particular patterns, then the spikes are being finely read. you can see basic version of that with the monkey playing pong at neuralink.
A monkey learning pong is one thing. People learning how one another talk, or whatever, if that's what they're leaning, I don't see where you're going to get any speed-up of information transfer because you're limited by the speed with which people can generate motor output.
All problems are nonsense at their core because nothing really matters in our universe. But that’s just a lazy non-answer to the very real question of how we can replicate conciousness in machines that we build.
I'm not sure how this says the problem is nonsense. You may reasonably argue self-awareness is emergent[1] or an epiphenomenon, but that still leaves open the problem of tracing *how* it arises.
Which would have considerably practical use if we solved it: if we knew what precisely to measure in a brain's electromagnetic activity to detect whether that brain was experiencing the phenomenon of self-awareness, we would help settle a lot of agonizing end-of-life issues. We would have better insight into animals, and be able to make more rational judgments about how we steward their welfare. We might even be able to help those struggling with severe mental illness better.
We might also be able to build self-aware AIs, of course, although I don't find that very interesting.
--------------
[1] I've never understood how anyone could take that analogical argument of Chalmer's seriously. If I show you an individual water molecule, can you point to anything about that molecule that says 10^23 of them will demonstrate the phenomenon of freezing, will create snowflakes? The answer is "heck no." Phase transitions are an emergent phenomenon, indeed this can be proved mathematically. There's no such thing as one or two or even 100 water molecules "freezing," the behavior only emerges when you have a very large number.
Yeah but there's a difference between rainbows and not-rainbows. You get plenty of water drops in the atmosphere all the time, including rain showers, but you don't always get rainbows.
Saying "what I think is a rainbow is just a selection of water drops lined up the right way to interact with sun rays and that's the same as what I think is my consciousness is just a selection of biological processes lined up the right way" is meaningless. You can just as easily argue "rocks don't exist, what we *think* are rocks are just a selection of atoms arranged in a particular sequence" and then we get into "thus I refute Bishop Berkeley" territory.
Why don't we think rocks are conscious, if all that consciousness is, is a simulation of something existing which is only a trick of atoms falling into a particular sequence? Or if not rocks, why not plants? Don't plants have natural processes that push and pull interiorly for attention and resources, too?
Well, personally I think that rocks are conscious -- minimally so. Keys are a bit more conscious: they can recognize their own lock, and reject others. Amoeba are a little more conscious. Fast-forward to cats and dogs, and eventually to humans, who are the most conscious species that we know of (though others might hypothetically exist). Consciousness is a spectrum, not a binary quality; and it's a spectrum in the same way that color is a spectrum. There's no such thing as "red" or "blue", really, there are just wavelengths; we just assign labels to certain parts of it for convenience. Everything else is philosophical ditch-digging.
There is one view that consciousness is a recursive simulation of the system which is doing the simulating; that is, it's theory of mind, applied to oneself. A cat (according to this view) has a theory of mind, in that it can predict what a mouse might do; however, only humans can analyze their own thoughts in the same manner.
I feel like Descartes had the right counterargument here 400 years ago. It's fair to make a reality/perception dichotomy for things in the external world, but you can't do that for the ability to perceive things at all. "You don't actually believe stuff, you just believe that you do", or "There's nothing that it feels like to be you, you just feel like there is" are contradictory.
On the other hand, if you think that belief can be reduced to information processing of the right sort, there's nothing contradictory in dissolving the hard problem of consciousness by saying "There's nothing that it *feels like* to be you, you just *think* that there is". Qualia are then just a cognitive illusion that only needs belief to be real, and belief can be understood in naturalistic ways.
Welp, the last one seems more Dennett than Chalmers. Isn't that the Dennett explanation of consciousness - you model your own brain as something like the traditional concept of a conscious entity, so of course you think that is what it is?
No, Chalmers is pointing out that electricity and neurotransmitters sloshing around the brain doesn't explain at all why there is awareness (how do you know other brains are sentient?), while Descartes is pointing out the existence of awareness cannot be denied.
Descartes was a dualist as well, which has its own problems, but so does physicalism.
“Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate!”
“This is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere.”
Yes, read him years ago. Thought he was both brilliant and a bit loopy. I don't for a minute believe that the Homeric Greeks were zombies lacking in consciousness. But I do like how he tracks their conceptualization of states of mind.
His theory of consciousness is very similar to what you outlined.
As for Homeric Greeks, depends what you mean. The Greeks he was talking about in his stories or the Greeks he was telling his stories to.
I think describing them as zombies is a misunderstanding of what he was proposing. The mechanism for directing one’s behavior was very different in human beings who were pre-symbolic language. I personally feel it makes a lot of sense.
I consider Jaynes' book to be the equivalent of Graves' "The White Goddess" and for the same reason; both authors fell in love with a beautiful over-arching theory which seemed to explain everything, they linked divergent elements into a gorgeously connected chain with one link leading inexorably to the other, and it is all plated up via Classical Greek mythology.
Well I don’t recall Julian Jaynes ever stating that he came up with something that explains everything.
Obviously I very much disagree with you. I think Jaynes’ theory answers more questions than it raises. If you want to be more specific I would happily engage with you on some of those points.
I have never read the book by Graves so I have no comment.
I respect Jaynes's theory as interesting, but I do not really give it any credence. There are intriguing parallel lines of thought such as Plato's attitude to the written word. But if Jaynes is right, it seems to me that some people should fall into the bicameral mode even today, and it does not seem that it commonly happens, even in those suffering from schizophrenia , who might seem likely to be disposed to it.
I don't have Jaynes in front of me, but he certainly seemed to be saying that the ancient Greeks lacked consciousness. That is, he mistook the lack of words for various states of mind as lack of those states of mind. From my notes:
The central thesis of Julian Jaynes's study of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is that, whatever consciousness is, it is not inherent in being human. Rather, consciousness is something which human beings created at a certain point in their history because the non-conscious way of conducting life, the bicameral way, ceased to function. Society had become too large and complex and so consciousness had to be created to help regulate social interaction.
Jaynes argues that this condition had been reached in those societies that evolved into large city-states, some of them presiding over extended empires. These societies generally had some form of crude writing system and the use of this writing system contributed to the emergence of consciousness. In particular, Jaynes is concerned with what happened in Greece between the original telling of the Illiad and the Odyssey and the emergence of philosophical texts, such as those of Plato and Aristotle.
>These societies generally had some form of crude writing system and the use of this writing system contributed to the emergence of consciousness
Exactly. But they didn’t “have” some crude writing system, accrued writing system had been slowly developing.
I think it would be fair to say that Jaynes proposed that the modern notion of consciousness began in this transition from the bicameral mind.
He is describing a process that probably played over 1500 years. And then the burst of artistic reference in the last millennia BC to the loss of the voice of Gods, to the silence of God to the fall from Grace (Abrahamic) I find this very compelling. “that little voice in my head telling me what to do,” it’s still in use in our language to this day. It’s much easier to think of it as a cute metaphor, but where’s the excuse to do that? It’s actually a nevus complication to avoid some thing that I think a lot of people find very unpleasant to think about; That in some significant way we are much younger than we think as a species, and that all of our mysticisms of God are actually easily explained. Lots of people don’t like that.
Hmmm.... Sure, there's the concept of consciousness, that's one thing. There's consciousness itself, that's another. Does consciousness itself also require the concept of consciousness? I don't think so. But Jaynes seems to identify them. It's one thing to say that the concept of consciousness evolved over 1500 years. That makes sense. But it doesn't make sense to take that as evidence of the phenomenon of consciousness. It's been there all along regardless of whether or not we conceptualize it.
Lots of interesting points, first person I've seen accurately portray my feelings about the aliens in public health. Speaking of injecting malevolence into health decisions.
What about mandates? I was terminated from a remote position because my organization decided that they wanted to force the decision on me, due to this I am denied any unemployment benefits that I have paid into.
If your goal was to make these things appear malevolent (justifiably or not) wouldn't you use them as a cudgel to purge newfound undesirables from society?
It seems to be the case that the bar to involuntarily confine someone experiencing mental illness (whether in a hospital or jail) is extremely low -- as soon as they do something moderately disruptive in public any cop can make this happen if they feel like it.
But the bar to involuntarily treat someone with antipsychotics is way higher, as far as I can tell. If someone says "no", then you have to go get a court order, and it's often only allowed for people who are already committed in state hospitals.
Involuntary outpatient commitment theoretically exists but seems not to happen much and also seems to be institutionally complicated. Certainly more complicated than "arrest -> charges -> no bail -> indefinite jail stay while refusing treatment".
Obviously it would be better for people to enjoy freedom and have their symptoms treated enough to function, vs. having severe symptoms while locked in a jail or hospital. So I wonder why the rules on this seem to be backwards, and how it happened.
My guess is that discussion of involuntary commitment is largely driven by the large, visible, long-term mentally ill population that sleeps on the streets/begs on the corners of basically every decent-sized city and town in the US. I don't know that involuntary commitment is a great solution to the problems caused by that population, or to the large fraction of seriously mentally ill people that end up in prisons that must be even more hellish for them than for the rest of the inmates, but we do need a solution to that. It is nuts that we allow public spaces across the US to be taken over by mentally-ill/addicted/drunk vagrants, and then leave everyone to dodge them or move someplace where the police quietly shoo them off or spend their time in private spaces where the vagrants get run off by private security.
OTOH, I have a relative who is schizophrenic, and whose illness is poorly-controlled. A couple years back during a particularly bad episode, he ended up assaulting a police officer and spent some time in jail, and now has a criminal record. Sooner or later, he will probably end up in prison for a long stretch, and that will be horrible for him and for those around him. There's no way that's a humane response to his problems. OTOH, his father has trouble getting him to take his medicine, and has not been able to force him to do so via any legal means.
As a not-very-informed outsider, it seems like we're too compassionate and libertarian to forcibly treat seriously mentally ill people, but then our compassion extends to letting them freeze to death in cardboard boxes in the winter, or die of an overdose in a ditch, and our commitment to liberty extends to sending these folks to prisons where their illness will probably get worse and will also trigger abuse from other inmates and guards.
I think you seriously underestimate how bad the side effects of many anti-psychotics are. I don't know a lot about the topic but I gather they pretty drastically affect the mind (unsurprisingly, given their goal). Many also have permanent consequences, "side effects" that persist long after the drug has ceased to be administered.
Personally, I'd rather be me locked in a cage than be drugged into being a zombie that superficially resembles the person I used to be, and also it's much easier to continue to plead one's case while in the former state than while in the later.
N.B. I am (broadly speaking) mentally healthy, but given the history of forced psychiatric 'treatment' of healthy people with inconvenient beliefs I don't think that means I (or you) should be blase about giving anyone that level of coercive power.
I have a very solid (though not personal) grasp of how bad the side effects of antipsychotics are -- really bad and as you say, permanent in rare but significant cases -- but I think you probably underestimate how bad psychosis can be in the worst cases.
For instance, there are people whose psychosis, when untreated, impairs them enough that they absolutely would not be able to navigate courts and bureaucracies to plead their case, because they can't string together a coherent sentence on one topic. Yet when treated, even with the serious mental dulling from antipsychotics, they can function fairly normally.
I think choosing between 1) "locked in jail with bad psychosis" vs. 2) "free, treated psychosis, involuntary antipsychotics and their side effects", 2 is really, clearly better.
Of course for a mentally healthy person, choosing between A) "wrongfully locked in jail/hospital, no psychosis" vs. B) "free, no psychosis, unnecessary forced antipsychotics", I agree A is definitely better.
But I don't think biasing the policy choice towards protecting the rights of a tiny number of wrongly diagnosed people is the way to go -- it just doesn't outweigh the huge harm to (at least) tens of thousands of people who should be getting treatment.
Have you ever seen a medical professional publicly arguing that your political opinions are a form of mental disorder?
The first time I saw that; my confidence in "you won't be institutionalized on a faulty diagnosis" plummeted to non-existence. There is at least one doctor in my country who would like to lock me up and "treat" me for my opinions on gun control. How many? I don't know, but at least one who will publicly argue for it, and I've heard none publicly rebutting him.
Suppose outpatient commitment were to become easier and more common than court-ordered inpatient hospitalization (but still harder than just getting a Baker-Act-style observation hold).
How many mentally-healthy people in the United States in the next 10 years do you estimate would receive a false mental health diagnosis on the basis of their political beliefs and be forced into outpatient antipsychotic treatment?
Mentally-healthy? Probably almost none. They wouldn't be talking to a doctor who would be in a position to order such a thing.
How many people with some mild depression will be over-diganosed because the medical professional disagrees with their politics? That number will be larger, I don't have a good estimate.
How many in Canada where freedom of speech is much less well protected? Even more.
To me, it's far worse to do harm than it is to not do good.
I would not be willing to sacrifice one person against their will to heal a thousand mentally ill people (also against their will) nor ten thousand, nor a hundred thousand.
The criminal justice system is (ideally) supposed to work on that principle too, although of course it can't be absolutely perfect. So the U.S. standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" to convict someone.
I think there are many cases where whether or not someone has severe mental illness is completely obvious to any professional, judge, or layman "beyond a reasonable doubt".
In such situations, there are different options that all seriously violate someone's liberties.
Option A is to involuntarily confine someone, but let them refuse medication (this can happen in a hospital or de facto in jail).
Option B is to involuntarily confine someone, and then later get a court order to force medication while they're confined, but once they're stabilized and released they can stop taking it.
Option C would be not to confine someone (or do so for a brief period of time), and court order them to receive injectable antipsychotics every month while released.
Among the different options we almost never pick Option C for some strange reason. In my view, this is bad, as the other options harm people's liberties more, in addition to potentially endangering their lives and making their mental health problems worse.
I think it's unlikely to happen, but if government officials wanted to abuse the mental health system to persecute their political enemies, they could do it with any of these options, so I don't see why shifting the default from A/B to C would make that worse.
I think the main reason is that commitment is a politically easy sell for people who are an immediate danger to themselves or others, and arguing that someone is an immediate danger to themselves or others isn't that hard if there's something really wrong with them.
But if somebody isn't an immediate danger to themselves or others, then it's a hard sell to convince courts/voters/etc to force them to do anything voluntarily.
You'd think "this person will predictably be a danger to themselves or others sometime in the next year" would make it a pretty easy sell, almost as good.
But I guess that kind of future prediction is the kind of judgment courts are often supposed to refrain from making. And I guess in many other contexts I consider it a virtue when courts do the wrong thing on procedural grounds, so maybe this one shouldn't bother me so much even though it seems particularly disastrous.
As someone who’s worked in homelessness services, I think I can square this circle:
The bar to institutionalize someone is kinda low - if someone is disruptive or violent in public, and can’t advocate for themselves, there’s a decent chance that they’ll end up in an institution. The trick is that these institutions are massively understaffed/funded, and have a big incentive to put these people back on the streets. Even in extreme cases, they almost always are released within 1-2 weeks.
Incoherently disruptive in public might get you an involuntary psych evaluation. In my area, those have to be accomplished within 72 hours, I think. But that doesn't get you involuntarily held or medicated long-term. And if the only thing you are doing is being disruptive rather than actually be dangerous to yourself or others, you are unlikely to be held because it doesn't fulfill the legal requirements.
The book review thing is awesome, and something i expect to see more of: communities using computers to communicate the community's values, and individuals using computers to help them make choices more in line with their own values.
It is because he cares more about the truth than being right. As simple as that!! It is why I read his writing. It is extremely valuable, this combination of brilliant plus steadfastly committed to the truth plus passion for sharing it articulately plus sense of humor.
Genuine intellectuals are like that. It was my favorite thing about U.S universities when I moved here from India. Professors seemed to be secure intellectually, have no ego about being wrong, and open to strange questions.
"The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting, the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy."
In my experience, rationalists are way way better at this than average people, although they're not necessarily good at it. But the baseline of admitting mistakes on the internet is so low that it's really not close.
The big thing is to find an audience which awards you with increased credibility for admitting mistakes, then you can admit mistakes to your heart's content.
If Paul Krugman (to pick a semi-arbitrary example) went around admitting _his_ mistakes then he'd lose credibility instead.
It depends a little on the nature of your followers, whether they are following you in the hopes of enlightenment or victory. If the former, then yes admitting you are wrong when you are is a positive for them, because their ultimate goal is understanding and that is only advanced when error is detected and corrected. But if the latter -- if you're seen as a general leading your followers to victory over an Evil Other -- then there's no great advantage of admitting mistakes, because it only reduces esprit de corps. Better to quietly correct course and forge on, pretending to infallibility with some rationalization ("I totally meant to do that! It was the following subtle strategem which I can now reveal...")
Krugman admits his errors. He just does so very *quickly*; almost fast enough to say "blink and you'll miss it."
Here are two examples: after the 2016 election of President(-elect) Trump, he said that he estimated the stock market would recover "to a first approximation, never." (that's from memory but it's very close.) He admitted error and retracted within a day or three. He did it in one sentence whereas he devotes entire columns to reminding people of times when he went against the crowd and was right.
He also admits that he thought that inflation would pass quite quickly; in other words that it would meet the popular and not technical definition of "transitory." He has admitted miscalculation on this matter
Krugman is known for stating opposite things at different times, even arguing each conclusion is obvious. When doing so he does not admit that he previously stated the opposite. If you search for Krugman vs Krugman you'll find numerous results, often where his columns contradict his own textbook.
I don't want to link pages where people mock him for calling on the Fed to create a housing bubble and then denying that the Fed is responsible for a housing bubble (or even that they'd be capable of creating one rather than just inflating all prices), because I agree with Scott Sumner that the concept of a "bubble" is rather dumb and the people crowing over that are much wronger than Kevin Erdmann was.
Your point of departure should be that in most European systems criminal investigations are initiated and run not by the police but by an Examining Magistrate (the name varies) who is a criminal lawyer. The burden of proof is slightly different, and the way the trial is conducted is fundamentally different.
One big difference I’m aware of is that all “not guilty” criminal verdicts are final in the US but can be appealed in Europe. It’s one reason why some European criminal trials can last a decade.
I mean, an obvious point which you probably know already is that European system is not a system at all, but a collection of various systems. Although it is true that compared to the US, they probably mostly do share some very basic characteristics, especially if you limit yourself to continental countries (which is not Britain, though)
The characterization of the bill seems to be essentially lies:
1) No, all girls who participate are not required to undergo testing. Only those whose status is challenged, and nobody, neither conservative nor liberal, has an incentive to challenge every girl’s status.
2) No, the bill does not proscribe invasive genital searches of any particular type. It does not even require anatomical exams, they’re just one of the possible proofs, along with T levels and genetic testing. It requires that physical characteristics consonant with biological sex be used to ascertain status, not identification.
3) No, this is not likely to lead to sexual abuse of girls. Parents will of course be present during physical exams if they wish.
Seems like pretty typical hyperventilation and concern trolling because they realize that the legislation will effectively ban MtF athletes from girls’ sports.
Somebody has an incentive to challenge any given girl's status: competitors. Challenge the star striker before the big match, throw her off her rhythm because she has to face literal rumors of her being a man in disguise. The trolling is going to be off the charts.
Accusations have to be credible and there are very many girls. Even if every star was credibly challenged, that’s like a <1% challenge rate at best, depending on the sport.
I don’t mean to imply that it’s part of the law, but as in that accusations cannot be made arbitrarily against all participating girls for the simple reason that nobody will bother taking it seriously.
Funny, if *I* had a dollar for every time I was told "the slippery slope is a fallacy!" and then that thing that will never, ever happen keeps happening, I'd be hiring Jeff Bezos to be my butler's butler's footman.
The bad outcome that you're referring to is that general practice physicians are utilizing physical exams to sexually abuse young girls?
Is your position that physical examinations of young girls should be banned? If not, what is your position? It can't be 'we should have fewer exams,' because that doesn't solve this abuse problem you assert exists.
Physical examinations of young girls should for the most part be left to the discretion of young girls and their parents, and focused on ensuring the continued health of young girls. *Mandating* physical examinations of young girls for any other reason, and particularly exams with a focus on the genitals of the young girls in question, is going to result in people being very legitimately skeptical of your motives.
So this is not some unnatural horrible new intrusion into a child's personal health, this is a routine occurrence. Checking sex where there is a question raised about the sex/gender of a young athlete is just an extension of what already happens, My understanding is that chromosomal testing is done by a cheek smear, but if I believe the opinion piece in the Washington Post (and I don't) then it will be back to nude parades and forced genital examination:
"Ohio’s measure requires that “if a participant’s sex is disputed,” the athlete in question must provide a doctor’s note confirming their physical sex on the basis of “the participant’s internal and external reproductive anatomy,” “the participant’s normal endogenously produced levels of testosterone” or “an analysis of the participant’s genetic makeup.”
So a cheek smear or a blood test will also do, but that won't gin up the same outrage as "forced paedophile abuse" now will it?
And while we're at it, Mr. Schilling, can you explain to me the meaning of "it's not gonna lick itself"? I'm not an American, I'm not familiar with American slang, I have heard this in a certain context but since it's clearly appropriate for young children, then it must have an innocuous secondary meaning I'm not getting, right?
As I said earlier, if you believe the law mandates anatomical exams, you have badly misread it and need to correct your understanding or you will, at some point, be accused of arguing in bad faith due to the depth of your misreading.
As to whether any ‘legitimate skeptics’ believe that this law is a cryptopedophilic conspiracy on the part of legislators to deliver young girls to the family doctors who are slavering at the opportunity to molest them under guise of checking their biological sex—no, that would be lunacy if anyone actually believed it, but they don’t.
It's even more ironic since these people would be totally happy with bringing the child to a doctor for a physical exam in order to get a prescription for puberty blockers and/or hormone treatment medications.
'Dr. Brown examined little Torrence and declared xe was intersex based on xer genitalia" - normal medical treatment, keep your nose out of patient-doctor affairs. Torrence at eight years of age is old enough to decide if xe is female or non-binary and consent to appropriate interventions.
"Dr. Brown examined little Torrence and declared he was physiologically male based on his genitalia" - oh no, this is only a general practitioner not even a urologist or gynaecologist, this is paedophilia and child abuse! Torrence is a child who cannot legally consent to this!
You've got that already when you do any of those "spit in the vial" ancestry DNA tests. There are cheap (relatively) buccal swab test kits, I think the expense would be getting lab tests done since most of these seem to be marketed at bulk sample testing (e.g. the police are taking swabs):
If the twitter thread was arguing that such an outcome was a possibility of the law being passed (one that the OP thought was highly likely), I would be much more sympathetic, rather than the actual claim that the law _requires_ these things, which it simply does not.
If they got sent to a sufficiently uncharitable/malicious doctor, yes, something like the described is absolutely possible. And maybe most doctors in Ohio are sufficiently malicious. Note however, that the bill _does not say_ that the school and/or the accuser gets to pick the doctor. Merely that there must _be_ a signed doctors note. Presumably the parents would pick a doctor they know and trust.
-edit- By the way, none of this is meant to be in support of the bill. I don't think amateur school athletics are important enough to warrant this level of attention, but I do think that in this community of all places, truth in argumentation should be valued.
The characterization from that twitter thread seems to be pretty hyperbolic. The only thing the bill says (according to the link from the thread) is that sex must be confirmed by a signed doctors note and shall be determined solely by
1) Internal/external reproductive characteristics
2) natural hormone levels
3) genetics
I assume this is to prevent doctors who are pro trans rights from signing off on trans athletes.
That being said, the bill does not specify _in any way_ how those things are to be verified.
The set of examinations and tests outlined in the thread certainly seem like they _could_ be used to satisfy those criteria, but they also seem completely unnecessary. It's like saying that a bill requires gas chromatography on every baked good when all it really does it ban chocolate chips and sets up a definition of what chocolote is.
I suppose we will see how the courts wind up ruling on whatever the first case about this, but I would be shocked if any student athletes are _actually_ subjected to those tests.
Yep. I also actually read the text of the bill. What you say is correct. The bill text is not hard to find. She even linked it from her thread! I was tempted to report the thread for misinformation, but I don't believe any action would have been taken, and there was a nonzero chance of retaliation, so I let it go.
Girl. Singular. There was only one trans girl in all of Ohio competing at the high school level last year, according to OSHAA (which already has rules in place for transgender athletes). Republicans are trying to solve an almost nonexistent problem because they see an opportunity to fight the culture war.
If it's no big deal, then why add a bunch of legal and medical complexity to a sport that seems to be operating just fine? I thought Republicans were supposed to be the party of small government.
While I think we should keep boys out of girls' sports, you're right that having the whole state handle this is probably too much.
I don't know the right answer, but let different school boards figure it out. They surely all won't make the correct call, but at least some of them will make something appropriate for their community.
The state of Ohio should have, at most, provided cover to school districts to enforce the rules they make.
And a big deal to her competitors I'd imagine, who are disadvantaged by having to compete against an ex-boy, even one taking hormones. The trans sports issue is interesting, because it's a stark demonstration of the ascendancy of "oppression olympics" principle over the older "interests of the many outweigh interests of the few" one.
Ignoring the larger issue at hand, I think you're mistaken on this particular point.
I imagine Matt's claim would be that the harm being done by the law is significant in some sense, but that the *state interest* being advanced is trivial.
Like if the MA state legislature passed a law requiring specifically my dog to be killed in some graphic and painful manner. Like, ok it wouldn't be the worst thing a government has ever done, but it's not great. And it would, in some sense, be trivial and beneath them to get involved with.
If a trans girl wants to participate in girls' sports, they need to have undergone hormone treatment for at least a year and have a doctor's note saying that they don't have a physical advantage over genetic females in the same age group. (Trans boys who are being treated with testosterone likewise need to show that it hasn't led to atypical-for-a-boy muscle mass).
This strikes me as a much more balanced approach than banning trans athletes from their chosen gender's sports outright. And it also requires less looking at kids' genitals.
I don't think this bill is *specifically* about looking at kid's genitals, but I do think this bill is intended to make life unpleasant for trans people rather than to "protect fair competition," because as I pointed out, the governing body for high school sports in Ohio already has rules about that, rules which are far less restrictive and actually allow at least some trans boys and girls to compete in the division they identify as.
Not that the problem even needed solving, as far as I can tell - there's no epidemic of boys deciding to trans themselves so they can sweep the gold medals in girls' sports, Republicans are passing these bills purely out of fear that someone *might* do that.
Almost no one is not the same as literally no one. Why is it a problem for the legislature to pick on one trans kid? Because it's mean. And that kid probably has a hard enough time without getting singled out by the legislature for recreational bullying.
You know, what I really appreciate about progressives is their calm approach to even hotbutton topics, no exaggeration, hysteria or scaremongering!
"The tweet is about a bill that would legally permit child molestation for suspected individuals, not even by urologists or gynecologists mind you, just general examination of private areas by any doctor, which a child by definition cannot consent to"
(1) If they can't consent to a medical examination, they sure as hell can't consent to puberty-blockers
(2) By this definition, I was molested as a child by a doctor! Let me regale you all with the harrowing account of non-consensual body examination back when I was about six or seven, and the school doctor was visiting, and my mother brought me in for the general check up, and I didn't want him to listen to my heart because I'd have to take off my top and he would - gasp, the horror! - see my vest.
Well, even though I didn't consent, this hideous violation of my bodily autonomy by a common or garden GP - not even a urologist or gynaecologist! - occurred (he declared my heart was ticking away like a grandfather clock).
Until we have the first generation of mutilated children who were put on puberty blockers and never went through normal puberty, then perhaps transitioned straight into hormone therapy for their 'affirmed' gender, who want to compete as trans men/trans women, we won't be able to say if this means they are on level playing grounds with cis men/cis women in sports.
But for the current generation? Do I think Andraya Yearwood is a real girl? I have no opinion there.
But I'm damn sure Andraya Yearwood should not have been let compete in high school female athletics when she still had the fuzzy moustache of a teenage boy:
She got to college via her track and field victories, and was on the college team in her first year, but seems to have given that up in favour of being a spokesperson on LGBT+ affairs. So being a female high school athlete was a grift, to get her where she couldn't get while competing as a male, and once that juice had been squeezed out of the orange, it was dropped.
As for the girls she beat in those high school and national events? Sorry girls, it is more important that Transness be celebrated than that you get to win on your merits in your chosen sport. So what if Andraya beating you means she got the scholarship and you didn't? And you've missed out on that spot for the nationals and maybe the Olympics? Be glad to sacrifice for her benefit!
That depends a lot on how you define "competitive". If you define it as all players being expected to devote a high level of effort, care a lot about winning, etc, then it would be pretty easy to set up multiple divisions at different ability levels where women could still compete.
On the other hand if you define "competitive" to require competing against the best practitioners of the sport, women already don't participate in competitive sports.
I've read the 95 theses. Not one of them was anywhere in the vicinity of "we need to do something about all these Witches".
The early Protestants were quite clear and explicit about why they didn't want to be Catholics any more. They said a lot of things that got a lot of them killed for their trouble in a way that "hey, Pope-dude, can we get some help dealing with all the witches?" probably wouldn't have. So I'm inclined to take their word for it that it was the indulgences and the nature of salvation and the scope of spiritual authority, etc, and not so much the witches.
I don't say "witches first, then Protestantism" but that "Reformation, Protestantism, now what do we do about an old problem when we've junked the old solutions? We need new ones now!"
A lot of downstream effects happen due to reforms of *all* natures (which is partly why I'm a social conservative). "Let's do away with X, a bad addition which is totally man-made!" often becomes "How were we to know Y would happen?" (Chesterton's Fence).
Thus, the perennially-amusing to me dilemma that faced Luther when it came to Philip of Hesse. Philip was married, didn't like his wife any more, and wanted to ditch her and marry his mistress. Philip was now A Good Protestant, so he asked Luther for advice how he would go about this, on a Scriptural basis of course.
Luther, who had already butted heads with Henry VIII over various matters including his attempts to ditch Catherine of Aragorn and marry Anne Boleyn (Luther said 'no'), tried taking advice from another reformer, and they came up with "well, we can't give you a Scriptural reason for divorcing your wife, but how about polygamy? Marry a second wife, we can back this up by the Patriarchs".
Luther didn't *like* this course, because even though he had stripped marriage of the status of a sacrament, he was still in the mindset that Christians should only have one (living) wife at a time. But this was a dilemma that arose, which he couldn't really have foreseen, and which was a result of the Reformation: now I'm a Protestant and you've junked the sacramental nature of marriage, surely I can just dump my old wife and take a new one? 'We're going back to the pure Gospel and a corrected, purified Christianity' became, in this case, 'We're recommending bigamy'.
Even this article, which is very pro-Luther, pro-Reformation, and very old now, has to admit with some wincing that it didn't go too well:
"Philip's court preacher Melander, a stormy, eloquent, ready-witted man of none too strict life, confirmed his prince in his views. He told him that the idea that a second marriage by which scandal was to be avoided was forbidden to Christians rests upon a misunderstanding of the Bible, just as does the prohibition of the marriage of ministers, of the eating of flesh, etc., which were previously looked upon as detestable as this. Philip of course was sure of the permissibility of bigamy, but inasmuch as the latter was a capital crime in the lawbooks of his suzerain, the emperor Charles V, he wanted to make all things safe by getting the consent both of the Wittenberg reformers and through them of the electoral prince of Saxony, John Frederick. The consent of the former would, he thought, maintain his credit before the evangelical world, and that of the latter would save him from being pounced upon by the emperor. Besides, the mother of the girl (Margaret von der Saal) whom he wished to marry demanded conditions something similar, as she wished to safeguard her daughter from dishonor."
So the author puts the blame on Melander rather than Luther, and paints this patsy as being a naughty boy himself and not at all a good, proper Protestant preacher, in order to dance around "yes, our ministers said bigamy was a-okay" because even today, we tend not to approve of bigamous marriages.
To be less harsh, the 'accretions' of which the Reformers complained that the Catholic Church has burdened the plain teaching with, were responses to exactly these kinds of problems of living in the world and dealing with pastoral issues. Here was their very own problem of "when the doctrine and the practice come into conflict, what do you do? Do you insist on the strict letter of the law? Can you find an accommodation? How do you soften the burden on the weaker brethren?" and boy, was it a doozy for them to go "Well dang, we better go back to Old Testament times (even though we're banging the pulpit about Grace not Law and the New Dispensation) and take the example of the Patriarchs who married more than one wife at a time to solve *this* one".
Also that I'm pretty sure if it had been Hans the ploughman rather than Philip of Hesse who came to them with this problem, their attitude would have been rather different. So they too were getting caught up in worldiness and regarding the persons of the rich, just like the corrupt old Romanists.
It was also the problem of "the plain word of the Gospel is enough, just read it and you will have the answer". When people read 'the plain word' and disagreed with Luther's interpretation, he didn't like that either. There was only one 'right' interpretation and he knew it, by his scholarship and authority, etc. But all the Reformers had this problem - that's how Calvin ends up burning Servetus as a heretic. If you let everyone read 'the plain word' and interpret it, don't assume that their interpretation will jibe with your 'obviously this is the right one' interpretation.
If you tell me that the folk religious belief in witches (also elves, fairies etc) survived Christianity in northern Germany more strongly than it did elsewhere, then I'd be inclined to agree with you. German folklore is full of witches to this day.
If you tell me that the latent belief in witches caused protestantism, that's where I'd say you haven't really joined the dots. How about this: protestantism arose in northern Germany and England because these places were far from Rome?
I am skeptical of the claim that Protestants did more witch hunts than Catholics. I read an account of witch-hunts, from someone who was there and strongly disapproved, and he admitted that his own church (Catholic) tended to do it more.
Some people think that the Inquisition was a witch-hunt, when in fact it was a heretic-hunt and many inquisitors were skeptical that witches existed. Maybe this is what you were thinking of?
IF you feel like looking at the primary or secondary literature, you could look for it by yourself. One significant feature of Early Modern period witch hunts is that there were trials, and both the Catholic church and Protestant secular authorities kept records of the procedures. The documentary evidence and records survives.
I don't know about Catholics in general, but I recall that witchcraft trials were a bit rarer in Spain because the Spanish Inquisition was a centralized bureaucracy and simply didn't approve of them, preferring to concentrate their efforts at their usual targets.
My own view on it is less a resurgence of paganism, and more that Protestantism stripped away the accretions around Christianity, which included a lot of folk traditions that were pure superstition and probably warmed-over survivals from actual paganism.
I think we all remember the popular history version we learned in school as to why Luther became a monk? Wikipedia gives it as follows:
"On 2 July 1505, while Luther was returning to university on horseback after a trip home, a lightning bolt struck near him during a thunderstorm. Later telling his father he was terrified of death and divine judgment, he cried out, "Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!" He came to view his cry for help as a vow he could never break. He left university, sold his books, and entered St. Augustine's Monastery in Erfurt on 17 July 1505"
Well, this was the old tradition. You invoked a patron saint for help about *everything* and anything. You had specific prayers, holy medals, blessed candles, blessed palm (from Palm Sunday Masses), holy water, Easter water, relics, and the paraphenalia of charms and vows and votives that went along with that. So even if malefic powers like demons, witches, ghosts and the Devil himself were prowling around, you had protections.
Luther and the other Reformers stripped all that away. They went back to (their notion of) the pure Gospel. Now you were left with your faith in God alone, and the Bible. This was like standing in a forest full of wolves and bears but now your gun has been taken away and you are left there in your socks, with just "My faith will protect me". Except that the doubts about justification, salvation, and predestination that went along with Reformed debates also left you with "but what if I am deceived and my faith is not a true faith?"
So then witch-hunting, because you had been inculcated with a strong sense of sinfulness, a strong sense of the personal presence of the Devil, and responsibility for your own salvation being dumped on your own shoulders - remember, there are no mediators between God and man like priests and popes any more. So before where old Hannah in the cottage at the end of the village could do charms and spells and provide herbs and cures, and maybe on the side do curses and charms to cause misfortune, before you had a protection against witches and fairies if you hung up a countercharm of your own or got a blessed candle and burned it and so on. Now you have nothing of that nature, but old Hannah still has her powers - and maybe they come from the Devil himself, this time! So in pure self-preservation, you have to hunt out the witches before they can come after you.
There does seem to have been something in the Germanic imagination that inclined them to this; the infamous "Malleus Maleficarum" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum was written by a German Dominican.
By contrast the big (and really only) witchcraft trial in Ireland happened in the 14th century in Kilkenny, and was as much a power struggle between the Norman-Irish clergy (in this case the Bishop of Ossory, Richard de Ledrede) trying to impose their authority (and more importantly Continental values of Catholicism) on the native Irish church, and local politics in Kilkenny amongst the wealthy and well-connected, as it was about witches and religion:
"Dame Alice Kyteler (1263 – later than 1325) was the first recorded person condemned for witchcraft in Ireland. She fled the country to either England or Flanders, and there is no record of her after her escape from persecution. Her servant Petronilla de Meath (also spelled Petronella) was flogged and burned to death at the stake on 3 November 1324, after being tortured and confessing to the heretical crimes she, Kyteler, and Kyteler's followers were alleged to have committed.
...Kyteler was born in Kyteler’s House, in County Kilkenny, Ireland. She was the only child of a Flemish family of merchants settled in Ireland since the mid- to late thirteenth century. She was married four times, to William Outlaw, Adam le Blund, Richard de Valle, and Sir John le Poer.
...Ledrede made initial attempts to have Kyteler arrested, and Kyteler called on the assistance of powerful friends. The bishop wrote to the Chancellor of Ireland, Roger Utlagh (Outlaw), demanding that she be arrested. Using the decretal Ut Inquisitiones (1298), designed to protect the faith, Ledrede demanded that secular powers concede to church wishes, and this point of law became a thorny issue throughout the trial. Kyteler was related to the Chancellor (he was probably her first husband's brother) and he asked the bishop to drop the case. The chancellor demanded that Kyteler be excommunicated for at least 40 days before the trial, which caused a delay in the proceedings. This allowed Kyteler to flee to Roger Utlagh. Ledrede accused Utlagh of harbouring heretics, but a commission cleared him of any wrongdoing. The bishop then charged Kyteler and her son, William Outlaw, with the crime of heresy. William was a powerful man and was related to many in the ruling classes. He called upon his friend, Sir Arnold le Poeur, a Senior Official in Dublin, who had de Ledrede thrown in prison in Kilkenny Castle.
...It is said Kyteler fled to England. She appears no further in contemporary records. The Bishop continued to pursue her working-class associates, bringing charges of witchcraft against them. Petronilla de Meath was flogged and burned at the stake on 3 November 1324. Petronella's daughter, Basilia, fled with Kyteler. Kyteler's son, William Outlaw, was also accused inter alia, of heresy, usury, perjury, adultery, and clericide. Multiple courts refused to try the case, but he was eventually convicted, excommunicated, and briefly held in prison. Outlaw was released after he begged for forgiveness from Ledrede. Additionally, he was able to reverse his excommunication by visiting the Holy Land while following specific rules."
So, not really a great example of the alleged nine million slaughtered during the Burning Times, now is it?
Yeah, she got the rough end of the stick, being a servant and so without the same protection as her mistress, who was able to flee abroad (at least she took Petronilla's daughter with her). I don't know what the Bishop of Ossory was thinking, he seems to have been sincere in his attempts at reform or whatever he was doing, and certainly Alice got herself into trouble over the four marriages, with some of her step-children later alleging she had poisoned or otherwise done away with some of her husbands; that seems to have started the whole trouble.
But a real witch-hunt craze never took off in Ireland, partly due to the Church and partly due to the stronger belief in fairies; anyone with healing/mystic powers was credited with getting them from the fairies, not the Devil.
The nine million thing drives me bananas because it is so unfeasible, and even worse one of our folksingers did a song about it (he should have known better) which is wince-inducing in its New Agey inanity:
While this is interesting, I'd characterize the lead-in as somewhere between "Betteridge's Law" and "clickbait".
It's seems a big jump from "Protestant interest in witch hunts may stem from pre-Christian traditions on witches" to Protestantism being a "resurgence" of paganism.
No. Protestantism is just institutionally weak against infiltration by existing folk-religious beliefs, such as the belief in witchcraft. The hierarchy of RCs allows them to crack down on divergent beliefs as they appear, but the personal relationship of Protestants to their faith allows greater leeway in the formation of heresies, so their suppression of latent endemic paganism is less effective.
I say this as a Protestant myself; as correct as I believe my beliefs to be, I admit that RC institutionalism has its advantages. Note the perennial ‘prosperity gospel’ and ‘many ways to God’ heresies that plague the Protestant church on right and left in the States; RCs have great success in quashing these, but Protestants struggle.
The main place where RCs struggle on suppression of folk religious heresies is that they folded early on ancestor worship and folk sacrifices: thus you see the lighting of candles, praying to saints, multiplication of sacraments, etc.
I've always thought that Catholicism was more pragmatic - it could accept various syncretic concepts that a stricter ideology would call heretical, but the more problematic ideas could be headed off at the pass.
A stricter ideology might call X heretical, but within the framework of Protestantism your stricter ideology and judgement of heresy is just the words of one man. The Roman Catholic Church has a way to define what is dogma and what is heresy - papal bull backed by the threat of excommunication. Protestants, generally speaking, do not (there is *some* capability in the Anglican Communion, but not a lot even there), which means that there's no real way to delegitimise priests that go off the reservation and bring their congregations back into doctrinal alignment; you can criticise them and that's about it.
This would make sense if Catholics didn’t have a history of fighting bitterly with one another around very very very fine theological points where it would have been more pragmatic to simply embrace minor differences as long as they served the spirit of the faith. Witness the Filioque and Great Schism, which could have and should have been mended centuries ago but remains idiotically present dividing the RCs from the Orthodox.
Protestants are much more pragmatic and tolerant of minor differences, having little central authority and few drawn lines. But this also tends to division after division (and multiplication of heresies) as no one can force others to fall into line.
I was thinking more about the peasantry - so long as they went to Mass and didn't openly worship idols, it didn't matter if they ascribed more powers to the Saints than they technically possess.
That’s more ‘pragmatic’ in one way—it folds in the predilection for ancestor worship and prayer to local spirits in exchange for magical favors—but as I said, the RCs are extremely unpragmatic in other ways, such as cutting out and rejecting huge swaths of cobelievers with 99% identical values and practices on the basis of legalistic theories of the Godhead that are rooted in basically nothing but tradition and would if reconciled have near zero effect in real life, only on the feelings of angry theologians.
This tiny difference has massive effects on the common believer, or the peasantry as you call them, although this isn’t a Middle Ages issue.
I think more that Luther had an ego the size of Saturn and insecurity issues the size of Jupiter, so him telling Albert to do that was also, aside from politics and polemics, a case of "since I, with my giant brain, have worked out that monastic orders and the likes are WRONG and clerical celibacy is WRONG and the Pope is WRONG, and since I have given up being a monk and got married and become a Protestant, why doesn't everyone else do likewise now that I have CHECKMATE, PAPISTS? Could it be that I am out of touch - no, the kids are just wrong" 😁
I fall into the ‘in a damaging way’ category too. Getting a dumbed down ‘for the kids’ version of RC dogma heavy on original sin and eternal damnation at 9 was not good for me.
I’m pretty sure it made an ideal hook for the onset of OCD a decade later.
That was back in the ‘old days’ of the early 1960’s though. I think they may have reframed things into more of a ‘Jesus loves you’ presentation for kids that age after that.
There was the added complication of my mother’s mother having my mom exorcised at 3 that left her never comfortable in her own skin for the rest of her life.
I think I’m the only person my mother ever told about that. Kept it a secret locked away from her 5 younger sibs, my dad, my own younger sibs and the rest of the world.
The way I understand the event, my mom ran around the house as a toddler sayin ‘monkey, monkey’. Obviously a case of demonic possession so gramma called in a priest.
My mom was the first child after a still birth and my grandmother was a turn of the 20th century Italian immigrant who had two years of formal schooling. I think it’s possible there was some guilt transference going on there.
Who knows?
Even into her 80s my grandmother would suspect an unseasonably warm day in January was the work of the devil. So she had a 19th century Old World peasant’s RC view of things all her life.
The upshot is here I am well into the 21st century approaching 70 still trying to work all that stuff out. That sort of trauma gets passed along like an extra gene from one generation to the next.
The doctor I see every 6 months for OCD looks at me if a just grew an extra head if I try to talk about any of this. He is strictly med management, not a therapist. He sees I’m socially pretty well functioning, successful in good paying career and in a long happy marriage so it’s “Just take the Prozac and Xanax, guy.” The thing is I would really prefer to take neither.
Scott does a survey of the readers every year. In no year since I have been reading this blog has the secular rate of fiscal charitable donation, as a percent of annual income, come close to half the rate of deitists. This is not a novel finding, and I thought everyone was aware of it.
That’s funny. I make those kind of quick scan errors from time to time too. I think there is probably a typo there to. I’d guess he was going for deists or as he said below theists
That is insufficient to establish your claim as stated without an analysis of the targets of those donations. That's the whole point of the EA approach. (For the record, I don't actually consider myself to be part of the "EA crowd", FWIW).
As Scott doesn't distinguish between donations for bednets, donations for parish outreach, donations for displays of anti capitalist artwork, donations for care of AIDS orphans and donations for trying to get a political figure elected, oh I am pretty dang sure it's sufficient.
(Neither am I, but I do like the general vibe of "whatever you're doing, fail better!")
Hmm, that seems to suggest that the data really *don't* support the claim that "Religious people do EA better than the EA crowd". You can't support that unless you show something about what sorts of causes the two groups are donating to, to show that the religious people are donating more effectively than the EA crowd. If the data don't disaggregate effective from ineffective donation, then the data definitely aren't sufficient to say anything here.
The rate of religiosity in rationalist spaces is FAR below the base rate, and every good Bayesian should keep the base rate in mind. The question is why you "expected" a lower rate than you observe.
There is no such thing as *the* base rate. Religiosity in rationalist spaces is far below the base rate of all American adults. It also seems to be quite a bit above the base rate of people with university degrees interested in math and computing. The former is explained by rationalist spaces having high overlap with "people with university degrees interested in math and computing" or something similar, but why rationalist spaces have higher rates of religiosity than *that* base rate is not yet clearly explained.
Do you have numbers for the "the base rate of people with university degrees interested in math and computing" vs the rate in rationalist spaces? If it's just your impression, that could come from rationalist spaces *discussing* religion & philosophy more often, so the religious people are more visible.
Would it be explained by the presence of folks like myself who; are neither math nor computing interested, don't have a university degree, but are religious?
Seems like we should pull the rate back towards the *base rate* for the general population and away from the base rate of "university graduates with an interest in programming and math". ?
Could be! But many of the things that people assume are distinctive of "university graduates with an interest in programming and math" are even *more* pronounced in this community than in that broader community, and it's not obvious why religiosity would be one that is less so (if it is in fact less so, rather than this just being a misperception about "university graduates with an interest in programming and math").
In addition to what others have said, rationalists tend to spend enough time thinking about rationality that they start probing the limits -- under what circumstances is a certain amount of irrationality actually beneficial?
Some have proposed (though I'm not convinced myself) that religion is one of these, and if you can convince yourself that a certain religion is probably true then you can have a happier life overall.
This blog is an outlier because I used to get in (relatively friendly, productive) fights with some religious bloggers who cross-pollinated the comments section, plus I talk about religious themes sometimes (especially in my fiction). I think most other rationalist spaces have as few religious people as you would expect, with a few exceptions that have equally complex backstories.
The rationalist community attracts smart people, and smart people are drawn to worldviews that are systematic and intellectually stimulating (which isn't always the same as true). People with brainpower like worldviews that require brainpower. Marxism has a pretty damaging legacy but has captivated a lot of very smart people over the past few generations. It's not correct, in my opinion, but it's attractive to intellectuals.
Over the centuries, there have been a lot of extremely smart Catholics who have developed very sophisticated philosophical and theological systems. There's a lot there for intellectuals to chew on.
Do religious people congregate here? The most recent SSC survey found that only 19.7% of SSC readers claimed any type of religious beliefs at all [1]. This is far less than the 92% of Americans that believe in God [2]. And even groups such as physics professors are more religious than SSC readers (30% of US physics professors claim religious beliefs [3]).
If your question is, "why is there a non-zero number of theists in the comments?" Then the answer seems pretty easy: humans in general are very prone to religion and anyone can read ACX.
33% Believe in some higher power / spiritual force.
10% Do not believe in any higher power / spiritual force.
The SSC survey does not use the same categories. Its results are:
10.2% Committed theist.
6.3% Lukewarm theist.
3.1% Deist / Pantheist / etc.
18.4% Agnostic.
9.6% Atheist but spiritual.
52.3% Atheist and not spiritual.
OP's category of "traditional Abrahamic religions" seems to be most similar to "Believe in God as described in the Bible" or "Committed theist". This group is 5 times more common in the general population than here.
I like "congregate" (hey, we're a congregation!) but mostly we skulk in the undergrowth and Scott is too humane to call in the exterminators as long as we don't overturn the rubbish bins and make a mess all over the driveway 😀
But decline notwithstanding, it remains to be the case that large proportion of US population believes in God, far more than 20 % od SSC readers claiming any religious belief.
Christian (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) faithful believer here. I also admire much about the rationalist truth-seeking approach. I would like to see a synthesis of the two.
“Evidence” goes both ways. You can’t just ignore the fact that 50% of Americans claim to have had a religious experience. There is a lot of evidence from personal experiences that a purely material/physicalist model doesn’t capture everything there is, so I would argue that someone open to evidence shouldn’t close the door on all faith generally.
Of course it doesn't work that way. It's called "faith" for a reason, you can't entangle empirical evidence as a deciding factor. Even the way people decipher religious/non-religious experiences for validation is already through the lens of their beliefs, and desire. Despite this some adherents seem to place a lot of importance on them.
Coming from that background, I perceive a sense of duty and stability associated with Church-going - arguably more-so than piety. But as piety goes, you either believe as a given (either it's so ingrained in the social fabric that you don't consider otherwise, or you're unshakably on board with the Truth), or believe because you want to.
The religious experience serves to resolve feelings of doubt, validate desires, for the latter group. The mere fact that we are all less isolated and more cosmopolitan in the modern world is threatening to any faith, and the religious experience is a necessary leverage. I would not be surprised if historically it sprung up more in clashes of faiths. One of the more interesting stories is that of the German city of Munster, explored by Dan Carlin in the Prophets of Doom episode of his podcast.
For this reason I find that many progressive believers adopt a less strict, more cookie-cutter view of their religion to reconcile with other faiths. The "it's all the same God" worldview, somewhere between faith and cultural practice. Eat Pray Love kind of stuff. This is derided by true believers and non-religious alike, but that seems unfair. Adopters seem less wound up about particulars and less xenophobic. It might actually be a necessary evolution in the long-run for a globalized world.
Religious belonging is different from religious experience - so poll numbers on religious belonging might not be the same as the tally on who has had religious experience, and neither would be sufficient to reveal the truth. My view of God is as a Father that cares about all of His children. So even those whose religion (or non-religion) has a lesser degree of truth can still have revelatory religious experiences that manifest His love for them.
Also, I love Dan Carlin and that episode was just crazy and fun to listen to.
> neither would be sufficient to reveal the truth.
Right. Are you hinting that something else sufficiently reveals the truth?
> even those whose religion (or non-religion) has a lesser degree of truth can still have revelatory religious experiences that manifest His love for them.
Then it would not be possible to distinguish between degrees of Truth. Unless you are suggesting your Truth is not one revealed by religious experience.
My sense is that most people have a sense that there is something more, but we are all grasping for what that is. I believe my branch of Christianity (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) is the true revealed religion, based on empirical fruits as well as personal experience, but I understand if you are skeptical, and my purpose here isn’t to convince you.
>There is a lot of evidence from personal experiences that a purely material/physicalist model doesn’t capture everything there is
We're far from complete understanding of how the brain works, so it's true that there isn't such a model yet, but there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to expect that it won't become available eventually. And also, no reason to prefer any mystical "explanation" to any other either, because they all are just-so stories.
>no reason to prefer any mystical “explanation” to any other.
I strongly disagree on empirical grounds. The “fruit” of some religions is better than others. We are not supposed to think this way but it is true. The liberal pluralist rational-ish order of The West sprouted from the seed Christ planted 2000 years ago. I know that’s broad strokes and subject to debate, but the fruit of Christianity seems pretty sweet. I also examine the fruits of various doctrines and experiences in my own life on a more micro level.
Indeed, I acknowledge that this is the strongest remaining argument for religion in general and Christianity in particular, and atheists first need to show their work in actually implementing a better society before dismissing it altogether. However, ironically, the most salient fruit of Christianity turned out to be the eventual permissibility to question its dogmas, and to replace them with better grounded theories as soon as we figure out how to develop them empirically. The vast majority are already gone, and the writing is on the wall for the remaining few, if you know how to read it.
It certainly did try, at first. Turns out, getting rid of those opiates by fiat is neither easy nor a safeguard from them being superficially replaced by new ones.
+1. Was an ardent Christian, now an atheist, and I still pray for God to change my mind. I'd love for there to be a meaning behind it all: if I die and learn that I'm destined to go to hell as an unbeliever, I'd still be happier to learn that there's a purpose behind all the pointless suffering in the world. But if there's a God, he gave me the mind I have, and that mind has to go after what it thinks is true.
This is a great point to bring up and very real. I only know in a personal way what I have personally experienced. I also struggle to explain why some people do and some do not have recognizable experiences. Any way you look at it, this is a complicated and personal subject, essentially relational (with God), and difficult for scientifically-minded people to wrap our minds around.
I was in a similar boat: I was told God would answer if I prayed, but he never did. I concluded that if I were God I wouldn't bother talking to a mortal like me either, even though the laziness of human instinct shouldn't be relevant evidence for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity. Some time after that I reasoned my way toward fundamentalist ultra-calvinism despite being raised a mainline Protestant, as the picking & choosing of which tenets to accept or reject struck me as unprincipled "cafeteria Catholicism". Later when I learned about evolutionary psychology & Bayesian probability theory I asked myself what was the honest probability I assigned to the existence of a deity resembling that of the Bible and concluded it was epsilon. "Go hard or go home" was my approach to theology, starting with the former and then switching to the latter :)
For me, though doubts sometimes crop up, Faith means manually shifting my Bayesian probability estimate of the existence of God from 70% or whatever to 100% and act on that. It has worked well for me and given me a good and meaningful life. Occasionally I peek at what my estimate would be without the manual adjustment, and it keeps growing as I have more faith-based experiences, to pretty near 100% at this point. I do think Faith requires this manual adjustment, and I recommend it for those that are on the fence.
He probably means you can't ignore it *and* claim to be examining all evidence without prejudice stemming from your own internal hypotheses and faiths. You might believe it's tough being black or being diagnosed with terminal cancer on the basis of the testimony of strangers to the effect. You might believe it was awesome walking on the Moon, or frightening being under fire in Vietnam for the same reason. You might even believe that COVID started in Wuhan, or that the Sun fuses hydrogen to form helium, if you lack access to the measurements and sufficient familiarity with the field, for essentially the same reasons -- because enough other people tell you so.
So what makes you *uniquely* reject *this* testimony of strangers? It has to be your internal faith in your own pre-existing beliefs, such that you're willing to say "oh when these 100 people say they've personally heard God they're just mistaken or deluded," but when these other 100 people say losing your sense of smell is one of the first symptoms of COVID you say "oh ok now I know something new."
Mind you, I'm not saying all testimony of strangers is equally credible, it is clearly not. I'm just saying you cannot immediately reject without consideration the testimony of strangers in one case, but not others, without using internal faiths and beliefs.
Haha. Fair comeback. It’s a choice to consider people’s personal experience seriously or not. But the cumulative sum of personal religious experience is evidence, which you are free to ignore or not.
> But the cumulative sum of personal religious experience is evidence
Evidence for what exactly? I agree that it's evidence that there is something that we don't yet fully understand about how human/the world works, but that's it. It could be religion, it could be just something that happens in people's head, it could be invisible aliens having fun, it could be basically anything. We, humans, are the ones calling them "religious" experiences, but that's just a label we put on it, and it may or may not be linked to the actual reality of the experience.
Because that's not how evidence works?... Like, in what world does having hundreds of millions of people emphatically claim to have experienced something cause you to update (in the Bayesian sense) literally 0% towards their position? Non-believer here, but saying that you're willing to literally ignore it (unless you're not being precise with the word) is bad Bayesianism. You *should* update - and that might very well leave you very far from changing your views. Didn't change mine.
I think the correct response is to update *away* from their position. My prior is that if the omnipotent and omnibenevolent God described by Christianity were real, it would be really obvious and everyone would be aware of its presence. The statistic that only 65% (or whatever the exact figure is) of people claim to have had religious experiences is therefore evidence against the existence of such a being.
That's still much more properly Bayesian than "ignoring it all", but I'm not sure I follow this logic - in the past almost 100% *would* have claimed to have had such experiences. Would a good Bayesian be religious back then and update against it gradually as religiosity declined? But then the logic runs in reverse and the presence of a substantial amount of believers relative to a possible world with very few *is* some evidence for religion.
Ah. You're saying he wouldn't update "gradually" but almost instantly as the number fell under less than, say 99%, and that almost no changes beyond that point would matter except to update somewhat away from religion. The very existence of even a 1 (5? 10?)% of non-believers suffices for you to kill dead the notion of such a God, and 65% is almost the same to you as 0%. OK that makes sense - of course a Christian would probably disagree that "it would be really obvious and everyone would be aware of its presence" but you can ask CC in his thread!
True, the argument is necessarily personal. You may (or not) update based on the existence of others’ experiences, but the impact can’t be directly transferred. There is no “Journal of the Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James style, and if there were , I admit it would be a disaster.
I think many of the new atheist rationalists just got bored of the argument, so will mostly check out of any comment thread discussing it. Whereas believers find a rationalist view on religion more interesting and newer than traditional arguments, motivating them to discuss it more. Scott has a post on how new atheism just seems rather boring in 2022 (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/). So I would say you shouldn't equate willingness to comment about a topic a reflection of the community percentages. (the yearly SSC survey also often shows how there are significant differences between readership and commenters)
> Self-identified Christians of all varieties... make up 63% of the adult population. Christians now outnumber religious “nones” by a ratio of a little more than two-to-one. In 2007, when the Center began asking its current question about religious identity, Christians outnumbered “nones” by almost five-to-one (78% vs. 16%).
Some rationalists regard rationalism as a way of reasoning with insufficient evidence, as contrasted with waiting for evidence solid enough for a peer-reviewed scientific paper.
Even with the issues that have been revealed with bad information getting through scientific peer review (google "replication crisis") I don't expect any religion to meet the peer-reviewed scientific evidence test any time soon.
So maybe rationalism functions as a framework where one can draw religious conclusions with more justification than "because I said so".
I think it's mostly people who were raised religiously in a non-damaging way that they mostly liked. There's a wide enough pool here that there's some people who just stay religious, rationalism doesn't automatically make everyone change their minds about things they like (although I do get the feeling a lot of the religious rationalists I know pretty consciously don't really believe most of the religion stuff and are just into it for the culture - but maybe that's just Jews).
1) I don’t go around the web posting about my beliefs - much - but this community shows a lot of respect when engaging with different people’s different ideas - and beliefs. No (well, few) pile-ons.
2) Connected to #1, people can be more open here about their personal interactions among upbringing, religious practice, philosophy and faith. The interesting part for purposes *here* is not whether they are correct, but which connections they describe and how they explain it.
3) My impression is that most posters here are not practicing religionists, or are agnostic (searching), eclectic, or connected to a religion by cultural background but not belief. Some posters note their faith/practice if it’s connected to the philosophical topic being discussed.
So I’m not sure they are numerically congregating here, for starters. But regardless of their numbers, people engage respectfully with ideas/observations as presented. I think this is influenced by Scott setting a tone and then modding carefully.
Theology is rational in the philosophical sense of the term. What it's not is empirical. But new rationalists aren't empiricists either. So it doesn't surprise me all that much. There's more consonance in their ways of thinking that might be apparent at first. Though specifically for High Church types. I expect (and forgive me if I'm wrong) you probably came out of a Low Church tradition. Methodists or Baptists or something, not Anglicans or Catholics. And likewise a lot of the posters are High Church, not Low Church, types.
What exactly do you mean "new rationalists aren't empiricists either"? This makes me think you're using some extremely narrow meaning of "empiricists".
No, I'm just using the normal definition. The philosophical underpinning of rationalism includes anti-empiricism. The purer forms of empiricism, or philosophical schools like pragmatism or critical theory, are some of the major schools of anti-rationalism. This is a fairly basic philosophical dichotomy/dialectic but one, admittedly, that the modern New Rationalist movement doesn't study much. It's a blindspot caused by their general dismissal of humanities.
I would generally say that the reason for rationalists not running there own studies is running studies is a full time job and most rationalists have other time commitments rather than a philosophical stance on how to find things out. Admittedly my prototypical example of a new rationalist is Scott who might not be super representative.
It seems deeply weird to me to claim that when half this blog is about interpreting and criticising scientific studies, and the scientific establishment. There are also examples of Scott and other people in the community I’ve come across from this blog doing experiments when it is practical for example SlimeMildTimeMold’s potato diet, Scott’s experiments around the effect of CO2 on his cognitive performance.
Talking about what a group of people believes is of course difficult, and I might be projecting my own beliefs, or only paying attention to an empiricist fringe of internet rationalism, but my understanding of the internet rationalist movements position on philosophical rationalism vs empiricism would be something like: doing experiments and thinking about them are both important in coming closer to the truth, and trying to put on of those two things on top of the other is likely to result in you getting things wrong. Also actually figuring out what is true is hard and if you wait till your certain you can run out of time, so reasoning under uncertainty as to what is actually true is a useful skill to practice.
Do you think this is not actually internet rationalists’ position on the rationalism-empiricism spectrum? Or does the position I’m describing not count as empiricist in philosophical terms?
Your first paragraph is the amateur defense. But that's a double edged sword because if that's really your defense then I shouldn't have to take you seriously at all. You don't get to motte and bailey by saying "we're a bunch of amateurs" (motte) when you're criticized but expect your ideas to be taken seriously when you're not under direct criticism (bailey). So: no.
For second paragraph: The mere doing of experiments is not a useful dividing line. As I said, Descartes did a lot of experiments and he's considered the father of old style rationalism. As I've said.
Third/Fourth: It does not count as empiricism. Nor is your attempt at a synthesis remotely new. As I said, in some ways it literally goes back to Descartes. The extreme end of empiricism ends in Hume's questioning of existence where your thoughts literally do not exist. The extreme end of rationalism is Descartes where cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. Concepts are more certain to exist than physical reality. New style rationalists are more Cartesian. Their philosophical framework is entirely focused on the concept of reasoning (and improving reasoning). This implicitly excludes them from being empiricists and puts them in the rationalist camp.
This isn't a criticism by the way. It's just a category. What IS a criticism is that this is pretty basic philosophical background and I'd appreciate if the movement understood it more. After all, it underpins a lot of understanding of philosophies that rationalism finds confusing.
In my experience Rationalists tend to view the liberal arts as some kind of embarrassing disease universities (and humanity as a whole) suffer from instead of a vital part of the education process, and would like to see them go into the dustbin alongside religion and phrenology (see how a notable number of Rationalists reacted DALLE-2 with what boiled down to "hooray, this will let us STEM nerds liberate art from the evil post-modern tyranny of the artists!").
I suspect there's a non-trivial link between these attitudes towards the liberal arts and the very strong anti-Woke tendencies among some of the commentariat- after all, the grievance studies people are usually lumped in with the liberal arts.
I've been told this. Yet when I've asked for the difference (and read that piece by Scott) I haven't found it all that different. If you have a different case to make I'm happy to hear it.
AFAIK, the rationalist movement places a big emphasis on empirical verification and is probably closes to philosophical empiricism than philosophical rationalism. But I could be wrong, as I am not an expert in any way on the movement.
In philosophy, the distinction between rationalism and empiricism is the distinction between the importance of logic and reason as the foundation of knowledge and experience as the foundation of knowledge.
The standard story goes that Descartes calls himself the first truly modern philosopher, because he is not willing to listen to anyone's testimony, neither the scholastics nor the ancients, and wants to work everything out for himself. He convinces himself that even his senses are subject to illusion and deception, but through pure thought alone he can first conclude that he exists as a thinking being (otherwise there would not be an entity to have these deceptions), that a perfect being exists (it's obviously impossible for a more perfect thing to come into existence from a less perfect thing, so whatever the original cause is must be fully perfect and logically necessary), and that if there is a physical world, it must obey the laws of Euclidean geometry. He then goes on to derive an a priori theory of physics in which everything moves according to vortices, because it is impossible for there to be space without matter. This is all classic rationalism.
About a century later, after people tried to fix all the various problems with Descartes (and Leibniz, and Spinoza, and other rationalists), some English-speaking people decided that reason can only tell you about abstract relations of ideas like mathematics and logic, and that knowledge of the physical world can only be derived from experience. Berkeley concludes that in fact we can't know that there is a physical world, just sensations, and that what we think of as physical things persisting must just be sensations in the mind of God. (This is known as "idealism", because ideas are the only real things.) Locke and Hume are much more accepting of a physical world, but they also think that nothing can be known about it except through experience, and the mind is a blank slate (apart from a few habits of reasoning) and that most rationalist theorizing about metaphysics or ethics is meaningless, because it doesn't terminate in any observations. This is all classic empiricism.
The story continues that Kant came up with some sort of synthesis of these two, and that all contemporary philosophers recognize some sort of knowledge from pure reason, and some sort of knowledge that depends on experience. There are some radical empiricists in recent decades, like Quine, who believes that even logic and mathematics are just attempts we have of systematizing our observations of the world, and that if quantum mechanics or something else makes us revise our logic and mathematics, that's just another sign that pure reason sometimes leads us astray when we don't put it in service of experience. But the strongest rationalists that still exist are people like Noam Chomsky, who believes that knowledge of the structure of language is innate, and some people who believe that the foundations of inductive reasoning (ie, the inference from seeing sufficiently many black ravens to the claim that all ravens are black) must derive from some a priori insight we have into the nature of reasoning.
Bayesians tend to be more empiricist than rationalist according to philosophical categorizations. Catholicism involves a lot of rationalist theorizing about the nature of matter and substance to explain the miracles in the Christian tradition, while "Low Church" tends not to have all that much in the way of theorizing about the nature of things, either rationalist or empiricist.
When speaking of the rationalist community, I tend to get this entirely backwards. From a philosophical POV, I'm probably an empiricist, in the sense that I believe thought without data to be generally sterile, outside of mathematics. To me, this is the only position that can possibly be "rational", and furthermore fits with the kind of "rationalism" espoused by sites like https://www.lesswrong.com.
Of course this wouldn't be the first time a technical term has been recycled with something close to the opposite of its prior technical meaning, sometimes under the influence of tis non-technical usage.
Changing tack slightly, is there a philosophical term for those who believe in revealed truth, use that as their primary approach, etc.? These obviously wouldn't fit with either pure reason or empiricism, as you describe them above, though a determined person could probably shoehorn it into empiricism - the alleged revelation, passed down through any number of fallible humans, could be treated as empirical data, with or without ignoring the fallible humans involved, and the human tendency to lying.
It is unfortunate that "rationalism" isn't about rationality generally, but is somehow derived from the word "reason" in the sense of "pure reason". But within philosophy this probably isn't quite as confusing as the use of "idealism" and "realism" as opposite sides in several very different debates (the debate about whether everything is just in the mind or there is a physical world; the debate about whether international relations is about ideology like religion and democracy or about practical interests and geography; probably others) and the use of "internalism" and "externalism" as opposite sides in many other different debates (can't really explain simply, but they're used for opposing views in semantics, in epistemology, and in ethics).
I haven't heard of a philosophical term for the reliance on revealed truth. That definitely seems like it would be an important viewpoint in the history of religious thought, but the religious thinkers that had the most significant influence on philosophy tended to either be concerned with the reason-based arguments for the existence of God or else with natural theology like Newton and Copernicus, and thus to have become ancestors to rationalists and empiricists. An emphasis on revelation would have some interestingly different features that could easily pull the debate onto orthogonal questions!
+1. I am curious, do you happen to know when and how "rationalism" and "empiricism" started to be used as a labels for distinct schools of thought? I.e. basically who is the author(s) of the standard story?
My general thought is that this is a convenient story for Kant and the post-Kantian idealists, who see themselves as the culmination of this debate between two radical extremes that we can clearly see are wrong and reach the synthesis of transcendental idealism. I've never actually read Hegel myself, but this particular characterization of a historical debate (the thesis of rationalism, then the antithesis of empiricism, followed by the synthesis of transcendental idealism) sounds very nicely Hegelian, so it could be from him. It's also possible that this story of rationalism vs empiricism emerges among the logical positivists of the early 20th century, who self-consciously reject Kantian and post-Kantian idealism in favor of a radical empiricism (that is itself idealist in the Berkeleyan sense) that denies Kant's central concept of the synthetic a priori.
But tl;dr, my best guess is that this is Kant's story, or some Kantian's story, but it could be from Hegel or the positivists/early analytics.
Catholism has a long history of intellectually rigorous thought. (Look up Thomas of Aquinas.) A great deal of that history was discarded along with the rest of the Roman authority in the Reformation, a process furthered still more by the growth of Charismatic sects.
If you're looking for a general definition of rationalism an intro to philosophy course will do better than I can. The whole rationalism-empiricism dichotomy is a fairly important thing in western philosophy. If you want to assert your definition over that then no one can stop you I guess. Likewise a basic intro to theology can tell you about the difference between Low and High Church theology and why one is more focused on reasoning and the other less.
I think "taking intellectual ideas seriously" is probably the explanation. Most people would just read arguments for utilitarianism/Catholic apologetics/whatever, find them convincing, and then go on with their lives happily believing and doing lots of contradictory stuff. A certain type of person, if they're convinced, feels compelled to actually live a life consistent with their new beliefs. This could lead you to become an effective altruist or it could lead you to convert to Catholicism.
I just picked two examples of worldviews that have built some very intellectually sophisticated systems and have very smart people who've developed powerful arguments for why their worldview and system is correct.
I think the similarity is in the psychology of people who convert to them -- that they read the arguments, take them seriously, and then change their lives based on the conclusions of the arguments. This is an unusual personality type -- the normal type of person reads the arguments, might be convinced by them, and then goes on with their unchanged lives.
(Incidentally, I also think, if you read Catholic apologetics, you'd have a hard time defeating the strongest arguments for belief, which are really quite sophisticated. It's not nearly as anti-intellectual and simplistic as the stuff you get from American Evangelicals. But neither here nor there.)
First of all, as an empiricist myself I will assert that EA (in my observation) is not empirical. I would agree it's *one of* its professed values, but not necessarily the grounding or dominant one in my observation. The name itself should give you pause: it emphasizes the importance of reasoning, whereas the true empiricist emphasizes the importance of measurement, and to hell with the reasoning if it doesn't match up.
Secondly, the Catholic Church suffers an unreasonable modern reputation for being anti-rational -- we can speculate about why that is, but cui bono seems like a good place to start -- when its actual history is one of great interest in rationality. Bear in mind for much of history between the fall of Rome and the Enlightenment it was the Church, more than any other institution, that kept alive the traditions of reading, writing, philosophy, logic, reasoning. It's not a coincidence that many of the oldest universities stem from ecclesiastical origins, nor that academic pomp and circumstance bears more than a passing resemblance to monastic ceremony and dress.
For that matter, your own entry into the question highlights the distinction between a rationalist and an empiricist. An *empiricist* would say that the available evidence on Abrahamic religions is so scant, and the subject matter so poorly-defined, that we cannot usefully form theory on the subject. The only empirically valid position on religion is agnosticism.
To instead say that we *can* assign a level of credibility to these religions, is a sign of a faith in rationality -- in human reasoning -- that goes well beyond what an empiricist would essay, such that we *can* say something like "oh the chain of logic required to conclude that God made the Earth in seven days is so absurd that I can be confident this never happened." You have to have a lot of confidence in the rightness of pure reasoning to make that statement -- and confidence in the rightness of pure reasoning is exactly what empiricism rejects.
> EA (in my observation) is not empirical. I would agree it's *one of* its professed values, but not necessarily the grounding or dominant one in my observation. The name itself should give you pause: it emphasizes the importance of reasoning,
I'm not seeing how the name "Effective Altruism" emphasizes the importance of reasoning?
Addendum: I think it's also relevant that empiricism is not something that can be adopted across the board, in all of one's individual and social life. If you undertook to be an empiricist in your love affairs, in your relationships to your parents or children, or in your personal values -- what you will live and die for -- or your social allegiances, you would be paralyzed.
That is, it is necessary, to be a fully engaged human being, to limit empiricism to those places where you can afford it. In other areas we all have to have some degree of faith. That's why one can be rigorously empirical about, say, high-energy physics or medicine, and yet be comfortable embracing moral precepts and ideas about the meaning of life that come from Catholic doctrine (or any other random non-empirical source).
This article is very favourable to Luther, so let me be fair to my enemies. The reason Luther devalued the Epistle of St. James is because his entire emphasis was on salvation by faith alone, not by works, and the Epistle of St. James pretty much whammies that one:
"14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
18 But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. 19 You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.
20 You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? 21 Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. 23 And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. 24 You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.
25 In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? 26 As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead."
So EA could be seen as "works-based righteousness", in the bad old Catholic tradition of 'buying salvation' 😁
EA may examine empirical evidence to see whether donating to a bed net charity saves more QALYs than donating to your local breast cancer awareness drive. But the idea that you have a moral obligation to donate your money to QALY-maximizing charities is not something that can be proved empirically.
https://francisquinn.substack.com/p/newcombs-paradox-and-metaphysics?s=w
I'm looking for an NLP program that can match pronouns in a sentence to the noun they refer to. I don't need anything else, just that. Does anyone know if there's one available that's not too expensive?
Hugging face has a library called neuralcoref. It uses spacy and is free
This look wonderful, thank you. Do you know of one that can also match up the verbs? For example:
"Amy walks to the store for Nancy and buys her a flower, which she appreciates."
In this sentence, "walks" and "buys" are both being carried out by Amy, while "appreciates" is being carried out by Nancy.
(Out of curiosity I just tested this sentence in neuralcoref and it incorrectly believes that "she" is referring to Amy. Seems to do pretty well with sentences I didn't intentionally design to be difficult though.)
I knew Ukraine wasn't about to lose any major cities, but after hearing bad news about Ukraine for awhile, my confidence that they would take back territory in the next year (on net) fell to 60%. Now it's back to ~88%. [edit: err... make that 80%]
Why? the last two weeks of tweets & retweets by @TrentTelenko, who predicted both that Russia would invade #Ukraine and fail to take over the whole country, and who knows tons of military trivia. I don't know if Trent is holding back any info that reduces Ukraine's chances, but he offers quite a barrage of good signs.
Here I focus on facts I didn't know before, but at the end I'll have some bonus facts that are also instructive.
*Edit* (June 10): very bad news today lowers my confidence all the way down to 60%[1].
- Key M270 and M142 MLRS systems (which can threaten Russian supply lines to Izyum) are being sent to Ukraine (I heard this already but it's good to have confirmation, plus Trent says it's a "game changer" https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1531822945911328768): https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1531012132975910912
-- Ukraine is even getting quality stuff from Germany: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533576265847955456 (Germany still drags its heels though https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1534615136467550209)
-- "80 Russian artillery pieces have been destroyed with less than 12 Caesar SPH in a few days" https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534291040357830656
-- Spain to supply 40 KMW Leopard 2A4 MBTs: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534341808687308800
. -- Update: Ukraine WON'T get enough ammo for their new long-range GMLRSs: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1537131753441214465
- Larger quantities of artillery shells are being sent to Ukraine than I thought: https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1530038089799946240 Edit: somehow I misinterpreted the number "208,000 155mm rounds allocated for Ukraine" from the U.S.; the number felt bigger than it is, though still higher than I knew about before. Google/Bing wouldn't tell me how many shells Russia is using, but I seem to recall somebody claiming Russia uses 30,000 shells per day and Denys Davydov saying Russia fires 20 shells for every shell fired by Ukraine. It should be noted though that much of Russia's artillery is imprecise and slow to configure (basically 'Uragan and Smerch' is lousy, see https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1531012132975910912, and by contrast I've seen some impressive videos of precise Ukrainian artillery). It seems like the Russians have just dumped a lot of their shells indiscriminately on cities until Ukraine has "nothing left to defend", and the spread-out shelling patterns on Ukrainian trenches also demonstrate low precision. As Small Wars Journal noted in 2020 (discussing 2015), "Ukrainians claimed that for every salvo they fired, they received 10 to 15 salvos in return". So it's not entirely clear that Ukraine will get as much gear as they need, and I have to suspect I'm missing some info that is favorable to Russia. On the other hand Russia doesn't seem to use its artillery effectively and I don't think I weighted partisan/guerilla fighting enough. Overall I'm reducing my confidence to 80%.
- Early signs Russia is running low on equipment seem to have been confirmed by more recent signs (the partial retaking of Severodonetsk and Zelensky's visit to Lysychansk) that Ukrainians in Donbas are not on the verge of collapse: https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1530828743832440832 (that's in addition to Russia's deployment of old T-62s and Ukraine knowing about this in advance, as if you needed more confirmation of their good intel https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1529517640053661699) BTW: Russia has lost far more tanks than heavy artillery, but artillery is their weapon of choice. However, when RU runs short on tanks and BMPs, I expect it'll be easier for Ukrainian footsoldiers to advance despite that artillery, especially as their numbers increase.
- There are indications Russian casualty rates are higher than Ukraine while Ukraine mobilizes faster: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1532823278699663360
- Russian artillery is manpower-heavy, lowering Russian efficiency: https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1528024733983424512 (see also https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1530567969889300482)
- Unconfirmed good news for Ukraine https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1530027464990277650
- Unconfirmed advanced cancer and assassination plot for Putin: https://twitter.com/Archer83Able/status/1532367395964309504
- Apparent Russian tank losses are confirmed accurate: https://twitter.com/partizan_oleg/status/1526199389764874240 (a loss rate dramatically higher than that of Ukraine https://twitter.com/Lee__Drake/status/1529870039167315969)
- *Before* Ukraine's apparent offensive north of Kherson stalled out, @TrentTelenko judged it to be a "shaping operation" rather than a real offensive, which would make the "stall" something to be expected. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1531814609908383744
- Russian losses should mainly be infantry, and their losses are so large that Trent thinks they've "hit a wall"—their infantry is nearly gone after accounting for both dead and wounded. Supporting evidence: RU deployed 25 BTGs to Severodonetsk and is still failing there. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533491373604802561
-- Related tweets on Severodonetsk: (1) UA tactical advantage: height https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1533249952809463809) (2) LNR is out of troops: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533556977674117122
-- Related 🧵: 'I think the" Culminating Point" for Russian offensive operations in Ukraine is almost upon us.' https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534291035924340736
-- Related: "Ghost Troop" corruption means Russia had less soldiers than it thought https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534700521633857536
-- Followup 🧵: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534700516843864065
- And some minor evidence.
-- Ukrainians are more motivated and produce new hardware that Russia possibly wouldn't (https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533516137992007681 https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1532816735996346370)
-- Russian 122mm MLRS destroyed close to the front (https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533521893969612800)
-- Ukraine still attacking snake island (https://twitter.com/raging545/status/1534248225632358401)
- And a little counterevidence: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534412330330636289
- "Butcher of Syria" General Dvornikov seems to have been fired, suggesting that Putin was unhappy with Russia's performance and is trying a useless "Hail Mary" https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/06/05/putin-has-relieved-general-alexandr-dvornikov-as-commander-in-ukraine/
Plus here's some stuff I already knew:
- Russia still loses Generals ocasionally: https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1533518405042589697 https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1533523990312099845
- More bad tactics from Russia https://twitter.com/mdmitri91/status/1532689797269045248
- Some pro-Russian milbloggers are changing their tune https://twitter.com/mdmitri91/status/1533505067881533441
Bonuses:
- a long 🧵 on the history of Russian political and strategic goals in Ukraine: https://twitter.com/John_A_Ridge/status/1529262545521020928
- partisan/guerilla warfare is another point in Ukraine's favor, e.g. https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1533934971722817542
- the most important bonus: powerpoint videos by Perun: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q/featured
- Forecasts from understandingwar.org have been pretty consistently optimistic for Ukraine, and pretty consistently correct too
- Fun fact: Russia is happy to starve third-worlders to death if it hurts Ukraine. Let's hope Ukraine wins quickly! https://twitter.com/vcdgf555/status/1533557914954178560
- Fun fact: visual representation of estimated density of Russian BTGs (via uawardata.com): https://twitter.com/HN_Schlottman/status/1533917743375859712
- Anyone know where to get English versions of these POW videos? The ones English ones I have seen have been fantastically entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/c/VolodymyrZolkin/videos
There is one thing I don't get about Trent: he evidently takes the Ukrainian claim for Russian troops KIA (30,500 dead) at face value, to reach a conclusion that Russia has taken 79,000 casualties with 80% being infantry. I'm not sure why one would trust that 30K number, but on the flip side he uses a low ratio of wounded to killed on the RU side, as compared to what is typical in wars, so maybe it balances out, almost.
[1] June 10: the reported casualty rate has risen to ~150 Ukrainian soldiers killed per day. This is probably higher than Russia's casualty rate and certainly higher than the rate of losses for Russian nationals. Since Ukraine is mostly in a defensive posture, this should not be happening. In fact, I've decided that even though I earn minimum wage (and can't get a tax deduction for Ukrainian charities), I will donate $1000 today. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/ukraine-casualty-rate-russia-war-tipping-point ... June 30: I suspect Ukraine's high casualty rate is related to the continuing artillery imbalance, in which Russia just has far more shells with which to bomb Ukraine. I can only hope that Ukraine's rapid failure around Lysychansk is more about Ukraine trying to reduce casualties than about Ukrainian forces "collapsing".
Ugh, okay, Trent Telenko is uh ... wow. I am dumbfounded that he didn't pick up on this video being obviously fake. Kudos that he owned up to the mistake, at least. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1542604260420067328
It's also clear he was wrong about Russian forces being close to exhaustion.
A counterpoint is the coverage from "War in Ukraine" that is more pessimistic for Ukraine.[1]
A problem with this source (like so many other sources) is that they don't report where they are getting their information from. Although they're probably pro-Ukraine, I know that in one case they said that the Russians has destroyed a third of Ukraine's M777 artillery, and they had a whole segment of the show about this topic[2], but this is just a Russian distortion: a *Russian* source said "The Armed Forces of Ukraine are losing a third of the M777 howitzers transferred from the United States in battles with Russian artillerymen, said Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Denis Sharapov", and I couldn't find any non-Russian sources saying this. I did find sources indicating that about one third of m777 had been damaged from *firing too quickly*, and so had to be repaired.
Similarly I've decided that while Trent Telenko is a very knowledgeable and useful source, he is too biased toward optimism in Ukraine's favor.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P23DCGiChbU
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sepZO-bYSnk
This report is also interesting[1]. Key takeaways:
• Americans genuinely deserve to be proud of this: the USA is giving more aid to Ukraine than ALL European countries combined... despite the fact that the EU has a much larger population than the U.S.!
• Total support from the US is about €42.7 billion, over half of which is military aid; the rest of the world combined is giving almost the same amount.
• Well over half of committed military aid has been delivered (figure 7). This tells me that we should be able to tell in the next couple of months whether that aid is enough to allow Ukraine to stop Russian advances and take back territory. I'm guessing they need a little more time for training. Edit: this is misleading, see below.
• Other democracies near Russia also give outsized donations. Destroying Russian weapons of death in Ukraine isn't just the right thing to do — it also bolsters the security of other countries in the region, and will allow refugees to return home from these countries, which also generally took in the most refugees.
• Also worth noting that more generally, aid delivered lags far behind aid committed: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1537234675369816064
Edit: I am confused about something though. The figure 7 chart shows about €4.2 billion committed military aid from USA, but one of the main-page charts[1] shows about €24 billion committed military aid from USA! I am asking them about this and they seem responsive[2]. Most likely the remaining €19.8 billion is undelivered aid, in which case Ukraine is far from having the hardware it needs.
[1] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/?cookieLevel=not-set
Tweeted: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1537222054344175618
[2] https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1537445028670283781
Yes, the Ukrainian army is clearly having a tough time of it. Unfortunately we don't have the same level of insight into the Russian army. That they can't make more than the most minor advances with all the numbers and firepower they have brought to bear, suggests that things are going very poorly indeed on their side - but which army is closest to breaking is unknowable, until it happens.
I'm not even going to try to predict this one beyond saying it's basically a coin toss.
God, I hope. If the Ukraine war ends favorably for Russia I expect that my country will be a candidate for next on the chopping block. Here's to optimism. Cheers!
What is "the AK47 of paintball guns" and what is "the AR15 of paintball guns"?
As you may or may not be aware, there's currently a market on Manifold for whether anyone will take you up on your ban appeals process. As prediction markets tend to do, this creates an incentive for someone to get banned from your blog.
You're one of my favorite writers, so I'd prefer to not actually say anything inappropriate in your comments section, and would appreciate it if you just banned me without that being necessary. :)
https://manifold.markets/EnopoletusHarding/will-so-much-as-a-single-banned-pos
> Market Manipulator (Banned)
> You're one of my favorite writers
There you go, running your mouth off again
In a sense, Michael Shellenberger getting 95000 votes (with only "50%" of ballots in) is a triumph. Jesus only needed twelve, Shellenberger has literally thousands of times more support.
In a more practical sense, fourth place is the second loser. And 3% of the vote is a country mile away from the 15% obtained by the second-place finisher.
We've had a discussion before about spiritualism, so here is an article from the Public Domain Review:
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/what-spiritualism-really-is
Thomas Carlyle, who in life was extremely dismissive of Spirtualism, was made to go through his paces in the afterlife, where he had completely changed his views - according to this book, "What Spiritualism Really Is, By Thomas Carlyle In the Spirit-World, And Through the Impressional Brain of Dr. WM. J. Bryan" written by a doctor in 1919.
Apart from this example of how you can be made to say anything once you're dead, it's why the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. Eminent and respectable people like doctors and scientists backed it. This wasn't pie-in-the-sky based on texts from thousands of years ago, you too could go to a séance today and have independent confirmation of contact with the dead.
So faint demurrals of "but we're nothing like a religion, we never demand you take anything on faith!" are not that convincing to me about the latest New Scientific Wonderment.
Isn't there a big difference between a starry-eyed ideal and a belief system? Transhumanism might be moral or immoral, plausible or implausible, but it's an ideal, not a set of truth statements. It does not claim that human-machine hybrids already exist, but that they would be desirable. Spiritualism and religion makes claims about the existence of supernatural entities in the here and now.
That's true. It is also reasonable to at least sort-of include a guess that transhuman modifications will become feasible as part of the set of ideas considered to be in transhumanism. ( Yeah, fuzzy, I know. )
"the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. "
Yes, you have a good point. (re AI) There is always a worry about whether existing results are being extrapolated beyond what the algorithms can actually deliver. To mangle a traditional line: "The hype we have always with us" :-)
Now, the existing results are what they are, and have exceeded what some skeptics expected to be possible with no change in architecture (Scott describes the cycle in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs?s=r).
I know that I don't know:
- Brains are sometimes surprisingly flexible. Maybe just adding more neurons will work.
- Brains have lots of anatomically distinct regions (order of 180?). If those didn't provide some advantage why did evolution select for them? Is it _really_ possible to match human capabilities without explicitly coding the equivalent of each of those regions?
edit: boosted brain region count: https://theconversation.com/mapping-the-brain-scientists-define-180-distinct-regions-but-what-now-62972
Looks like a pretty tough way to read 230 pages. One buck plus 10 cents postage in 1920?
Why don’t you ask Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz which test is best to do on the Ivermectin data then do that test?
Lighting the Ivermectin data on fire and seeing if the smoke cures Covid seems likely to provide identical results as any of the more statistics based tests.
Yes Ref, no matter what test you choose the signal of benefit will always be there. Scott’s gotta choose a statistical method sooner or later, may as well choose G M-K’s. It will show a signal of benefit as well then we can finally put it to bed, IVM works, just like Scott said in his article
'Meta-study demonstrates that dry-smoke inhalation delivers more of active ingredient than wet-steam, aerosol via inhaler, or sticking it up your jumper!'
(Belated) Congratulations to Scott on this title, which was apparently fully decodable (once I found the referenced piece) without reading the article:
"Current Affairs' Marxist Critique Of Toddler Show Blippi Isn't Marxist Enough"
(My reading: the anti-industrialism and the white cringe strike me as fundamentally at odds with Marxist thought, suggesting that Robinson is just name-dropping Marx for leftist cred rather than actually being Marxist.)
Robinson has never claimed to be a Marxist. The association between the two is Scott's invention.
Robinson did name-drop Karl Marx in the article, so I wouldn't call it "Scott's invention".
(Article here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-dead-world-of-blippi )
Considering Wikipedia lists Nathan Robinson in its "American Anti-Communists" category and he considers that to be an accurate label for himself, he's very obviously not an actual Marxist, no.
There are, I am afraid, very few actual marxists around these days. Expecially in the leftist side of the world
Freddie de Boer self-describes as a Marxist.
Well, I didn't say there aren't any at all
What's the current status of abortions in Texas? Are abortions still being performed? Are bounties being paid out?
Abortions are being performed up to six weeks, not any later than that. The number of abortions performed in Texas has been about cut in half, but many women are leaving the state (if they can) or taking mail-order abortion pills (though there are new laws restricting the pill as well). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/upshot/texas-abortion-women-data.html
Of course, others are unable to access abortion and are being forced to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term.
A couple of other side effects: some pharmacies are afraid of getting sued under the bounty law, and therefore are refusing to sell miscarriage treatments (since the medicines used post-miscarriage and for abortion are the same). Wait times for abortion clinics in nearby states (and not-that-nearby states) are rising due to the influx of patients from Texas, forcing some women to get abortions later in their pregnancies. And ironically, some women are getting abortions that they might have ultimately decided not to get under a less restrictive law, because they legally only have 1-2 days to make a decision after finding out that they're pregnant, so they're pressured into making a snap decision without having time to explore any alternatives.
All that said, I'm not aware of any bounties being paid out. The threat of them seems to be enough.
The "Texas abortion bounty hunters" was an operation by r/Drama. They set out to make a bait site, and they succeeded:
https://tracingwoodgrains.medium.com/how-one-tight-knit-circle-of-internet-troublemakers-convinced-professional-journalists-they-were-ac05459aa4c5
TracingWoodgrains, late of r/TheSchism which is a spin-off of a spin-off of the SSC reddit site, did a similar stunt with persuading LibsofTikTok that there was an agenda to get furrydom (furriness?) taught in elementary school. Again, this was a hoax, and an extremely detailed one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/uenyis/how_i_convinced_libs_of_tiktok_to_publish_a_false/
That one was way more controversial when he informed the various disapora about it on r/TheMotte etc. He did *too* good a job and became the story, not just reported on it.
Don't believe everything you read on social media, especially when rationalists/rationalist-adjacent people of this parish may be involved!
The bounty hunters subreddit was a joke, sure, but, like... Texas *did* pass a law that allowed civilians to sue those involved in abortions, correct? What effect did that have?
> the studies aren’t homogenous
Not homogenous, "from the same origin", or not homogeneous, "of the same kind"?
Yes, but it is common to drop the extra 'e' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneity_and_heterogeneity#Etymology_and_spelling
After a decade of being glasses-free after LASIK, I need glasses again (I can still see 20/20, but I need prism correction and blue-light blocking).
It is strange that I have forgotten things like "how do I keep glasses clean".
How do I keep glasses clean?
I wash them with water and wipe it with a towel. Never had a scratch I could see.
I just use my (mostly cotton) shirt to clean off the dirt about 1-2 times a day when i notice them getting dirty. When i get a bunch of gunk or dirt on them i clean em with a microfiber cloth. Maybe once every 6 months i'll actually run them under water and carefully clean them.
Been doing this for ~10 years now and it works just fine.
Don't use a microfiber cloth if you value having scratch-free glasses. The correct way to clean glasses is simple: with soap and water. First, wash your hands thoroughly. Then gently rinse any grime / particulates off with just the stream of water. Last, if there's any oils / fingerprints / smudges left, lather up some more soap on your fingers and gently clean them off the lenses. You can shake off 80% of the water, and the rest will evaporate within minutes, leaving your glasses perfectly clear.
Modern glasses are 99% likely to be made from materials that won't corrode (plastic, titanium, aluminum, etc), and this method avoids the micro-scratches which are an inevitable part of rubbing them with a cloth. The cloth, microfiber or not, is packed with microscopic particulates that are substantially harder than the polycarbonate modern glasses are almost always made of, and especially harder than the various coatings the lenses almost always have applied.
Long ago, I would use a microfiber cloth like I'd been told, and invariably my glasses would be a scratched up mess within a year. Since developing this method, my glasses have been crystal clear and scratch free for years at a time. The last time I was in, my optometrist referred to the state of my lenses as "remarkable", given their age.
Yes, this is why I pay extra and wait long times to get lenses made of genuine optical glass. Whoever sold the general public on polycarbonate lenses should get the Nobel Prize in Marketing. Far cheaper and easier to manufacture, and don't last as long, pretty much a massive boost to the profit margin. Freaking brilliant, in a sort of evil twisted way.
I'm now imagining that a Nobel Prize for Marketing would consist of a lit stick of dynamite.
Not using a microfiber cloth is strange, i've been using them for many years and i've never once had it scratch my glasses, not even a bit.
I second the superiority of soap and water (personally I use tissues soaked in them) over microfiber
I've found that when my glasses get wet and it evaporates, it leaves obvious, visible residue.
This is a sign that either you insufficiently broke down any oils with soap, or that your water contains quite a lot of non-water stuff - like calcium, that dries as visible deposits.
You don't. Fortunately you'll start having floaters soon, and dirty glasses will be the least of your problems.
Microfiber cloth in your back pocket ?
Scott, where did you get your characterization of Shellenberger?
From his Rogan clip?
That's not the last word, but neither is it an error.
Hello everyone.
Has anyone here read Erik Hoel's The Revelations? I found Kierk Soren to be a really interesting character. I'd like book recommendations with main characters like Kierk Soren.
One more thing, any advise and book recommendations for a 23 year old that's about to embark on his intellectual journey? Thanks.
I've read some of it, but I feel like too much of its effort is going into sounding literary-ish, to the detriment of flow and readability.
I know nothing about Erik Hoel or this novel; but there absolutely must be a connection to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. You don't hit on that name by accident. Kierkegaard's books are really good, but hard to understand right if you don't have a pretty deep background in philosophy.
Read The Republic. Everybody should read The Republic.
Find some poetry that you genuinely like. Like, it gives you pleasure to read it. Go deep into that genre/form/movement/school.
If you want to be well-read in the Western canon, you can't do better than the Great Books list from St. John's College: https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list
Erik Hoel is a fantastic writer. He has a substack publication called The Intrinsic Perspective.
Haha, I noticed that as well. Tried searching 'Kierk Soren' one time on Google and the first result was Søren Kierkegaard. I'll try and check him out despite my shallow background in philosophy.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
Regarding the poetry advice, it's been difficult. Do you have any anthologies that I can check out? Thanks.
> Find some poetry that you genuinely like. Like, it gives you pleasure to read it. Go deep into that genre/form/movement/school.
Is there something like compilations of different styles of poetry with "what to read next" and explanations to find something that you like?
Hmmm, I was introduced to most of the poetry that I love either at school, or pulling random books off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, or poetry collections my parents kept on the bookshelf when I was a kid. It looks like you want an anthology. You can often get old editions of textbooks for cheap. For instance: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780393979206&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used
Thanks for the Great Books list. A lot of homework for me, when I`ll be finished with the sagas. Laxness may be overdue for me. I would expect the English translation to be much better than the German after my experiences with Mikael Niemi, though the German translator for Icelandic surely is not the one they hired for Finnish-Swedish texts. I just suspect a general pattern. Are there any other minority language speakers here who also saw better English translations of foreign texts than those to their language?
I can't help with your first issue. As for book recommendations, there are lots of literary canons out there. Don't skip The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Get into Shakespeare. My personal hints would be the Maqroll novels by A. Mutis, Musil's Man without Qualities and Amos Oz.
Ulysses is good but has anyone actually read Finnegans Wake?
Well, I did, once. At least I thought so. Just checked my fine bilingual and commented edition, there's a bookmark at page 19. Maybe I stopped there. It's some years ago...
I’ve tried. Never made it very far.
Thanks a lot.
Get into Shakespeare on stage, if at all possible. The read version isn't the same.
Thanks a lot. I've read some Houllebecq. I don't know if you have read The Elementary Particles, that book is astounding, as well as riveting. I have plans to reread it. An unforgettable reading experience for me, I'd say.
I have a question about where the reasonable deductions that can be made about how AI inputs are related to outputs ends and the "black box" of artificial intelligence begins. I often see posts about AI where the author sort of resigns themself to believing that AI is an impenetrable black box while also making reasonable deductions about why it is behaving in a certain way. I would love some clarity/links to papers about why the consensus is that most of what is happening is opaque and not something that can be understood through the development of the field. I would also love links to any papers or books about like meta-AI studies. I don't mean Meta the company but rather the AI equivalent to meta-physics.
I've asked this question myself for a while now, albeit in slighly different terms, while trying to find how to classify computers in the intelligence/consciousness space.
We're pretty sure computers aren't conscious and do not take explicit decisions to piss us off, yet I'm hearing a lot of people using peculiar words to describe them. Specifically, "the computer do not *want* to do what I ask" or "my computer didn't *listen* to me".
All anthropomorphism apart, I found the words used to be pretty insightful about how we think about computers and systems in general.
A rule of thumb I use for myself is the percieved complexity of a system. If a system is simple enough for someone to be able to hold it in their mind without issue, then there are no intelligence involved.
If a system is too complex to have a complete grasp on it, because (for instance) of too many moving parts, then it's considered intelligent. This is the case for our brain: it is a physical process going through a tremendous amount of neurons and subtle connections, and we consider ourselves intelligent. Our brain cannot grasp our brain.
It seems to me that we classify as "intelligent" any system complex enough to not be trivialized by our own brain. According to this definition, people used to some systems will end up trivializing them, therefore stripping them of their intelligence.
If we apply this definition to neural networks, I'd say your NN is AI as soon as you give up on the idea of understanding their insides. As Kindly stated, we haven't yet grasped why specific weights on specific neurons encode the recognition of dogs. Most people in the AI field aren't interested in finding out how it works, but rather to find empirical configurations producing better results than other configurations (at least that was the case during my PhD).
Part of the source of this belief is the understanding that neural networks behave in this way. Even just with image recognition, we have trouble figuring how all the various weights encode the essence of what a dog looks like.
I don't have anything so formal as a paper to link to, but here is an AI StackExchange post I found: https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/do-scientists-know-what-is-happening-inside-artificial-neural-networks This is about ways that we can try to peek inside the ANN black box, which can give you an idea of how opaque that box really is. You may be interested in the links in some of the answers.
Any fellow Freemasons here? Or anyone involved in civic/service/fraternal orders or clubs? Would love to connect!
I've been a member of lodges in Canada and Australia; three years removed from being WM of my current lodge.
Hey Jeff! I'm in the US, but would love to connect anyway. My email is brandon.quintin@outlook.com
There's an Odd Fellows meeting house near my work; do all of these fraternal organizations compete, or is there general cooperation?
I've found it depends a lot on the area - in China where many were banned, people from all of them gathered around the ones that existed and cooperated. Where many thrive, they compete more, but usually competing in who does more charity, has more members, throws more parties, things like that.
Some people are members of multiple organizations, depending on how much free time they have haha.
Odd fellows are pretty rare! Hard to find active odd fellows groups.
I'm in Rotary club, and looking to connect to those in other groups, thanks for reaching out. You can find me on nesicdusan.com for LinkedIn and we can connect from there.
Thanks! I’ll reach out!
Currently joining Knights of Columbus, but I think that may make us enemies.
Some Free Masons do look down on Catholics. Don’t worry about it. Just stupid snobbery from these fellas that imagine themselves enlightened. As if. Bigotry is a pretty reliable signal for ignorance.
In fairness to Masons, my Deacon also told me not to join. So the antipathy runs both ways...
Hangover from Continental Freemasonry, which was vehemently anti-clerical (which meant anti-Catholic) and pro-freethinking, which in the 18th century meant dressing up and pretending to carry out Genuine Mystical Secret Oriental Occult Ceremonies.
The occult ceremonies bit was also what pissed off the Church. So it was associated with magic and revolutions, not popular with the status quo.
English Freemasonry was a bit different and developed into more of a fraternal/benevolent organisation (and jokes about if you wanted a promotion in the police, you should join the Masons) though the Secret Wisdom bit still lingered on, e.g. references in ghost (ish) stories by H.G. Wells. From the story "The Inexperienced Ghost":
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Inexperienced_Ghost
"Passes," said Clayton.
"Passes?"
"Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a business I had!"
"But how could any series of passes——" I began.
"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis on certain words, "you want everything clear. I don't know how. All I know is that you do—that he did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared."
"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the passes?"
…He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his eyes and so began. .
Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings, which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions with a singular interest in his reddish eye. "That's not bad," he said, when it was done. "You really do, you know, put things together, Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail out."
"I know," said Clayton. "I believe I could tell you which."
"Well?"
"This," said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and thrust of the hands.
"Yes."
"That, you know, was what he couldn't get right," said Clayton. "But how do you——?"
"Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don't understand at all," said Sanderson, "but just that phase—I do." He reflected. "These happen to be a series of gestures—connected with a certain branch of esoteric Masonry—— Probably you know. Or else—— How?" He reflected still further. "I do not see I can do any harm in telling you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you don't."
"I know nothing," said Clayton, "except what the poor devil let out last night."
"Well, anyhow," said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he gesticulated with his hands.
"So?" said Clayton, repeating.
"So," said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.
"Ah, now," said Clayton, "I can do the whole thing—right."
…Well—the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience; there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the midst of an idle tale—as the coroner's jury would have us believe—is no matter for my judging; is just one of those inexplicable riddles that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very instant, of concluding these passes he changed, and staggered and fell down before us-dead!
Then there’s Herman Hesse’s take on an Eastern enlightenment secret society
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_East
Oh boy. I don’t know what to tell you. Two benevolent orders that despise each other. I’d avoid them both.
As far as I’m aware, it’s the Catholic church that forbids masonic membership. There’s nothing against Catholicism in freemasonry--we’re open to all religions, as long as you believe in a higher power.
I come from a family of Catholics, albeit non-practicing anymore, so I certainly have nothing against them! I like the KoC and would love to connect with anyone involved there too. Different groups, more-or-less similar missions.
Yeah the Masons were totally open to letting me join. I understand the Church’s ban but I’m hoping the Pope revisits that sooner or later. The Masons seem to have pretty much let go to the anticlericalism at this point. The deistic aspects are pretty pro-forma.
Okay. I stand corrected. :)
Really depends org to org, and I can only speak for the masons.
Membership in masonry requires that you be 18, male, and believe in a supreme being. If that disqualifies you there are other orgs that might fit the bill, depending on which part disqualified you haha.
The generic answer in masonry is “to be one, ask one.” Ideally you find someone who is already a mason and ask them. If you don’t know any or are new to the area like I was, you usually will have to email your local lodge, which you should be able to find pretty easily online. There are over 300 lodge in my home state of Virginia. Process for joining usually involves meeting with a few members so they can make sure you’re not crazy, getting a few to sign your petition, then they vote on your admission.
But yes, most members are on the older side and membership has been declining pretty rapidly. But honestly I think that just means it’s ripe for a new generation to step in and take over for a while, maybe make some changes. Pretty perfect opportunity if you ask me.
Activities differ lodge to lodge. Some are better than others. But masons tend to lean heavily into the theatrical and ceremonial side of things. Lots of esoteric talk about King Solomon and geometry and all that.
I've been thinking about it.Might just take the plunge this summer.Any advice?
Get in contact with a lodge or two in your area; while you can't participate in the ceremonies until you're initiated, most would love to have you come to Festive Board (drinks and/or meal held either pre- or post- meeting). If you're able to socialize with strangers easily, you'll find out whether you fit in fairly quickly.
Not really. Only “advice” would be that every lodge can be quite different. And there are no rules that say which lodge you have to belong to. So shop around! See which group of guys you mesh with the best. The r/freemasonry subreddit can actually be pretty useful for newcomers.
Awakening the Ancestors - a sci-fan-fic pastoral pastiche in 7 movements, submitted for EA Post Prize #1: The World in 2072 (it didn't win) - how many references can you spot? https://pathfindings.substack.com/p/awakening-the-ancestors?s=w
Pregnancy advice question.
My wife was recently diagnosed with gestational diabetes and put on a low glycemic index diet. As far as I can tell the major risk of gestational diabetes is high birth weight but the literature all seems to suggest that high birth weight is a positive predictor of outcomes such as IQ all the way up to about 12lbs (our baby is only predicted to be at ~66th percentile of birth weight which is far below that). Is there a reason why you should want to treat the gestational diabetes and reduce the birth weight or is this just a way to make the obstetrician's life easier during the delivery?
I wouldn't fuck with it. My last kid was born to mom with GD, and she went to heroic efforts to control it, but he was still born a bit premature, had his sugar crash immediately after birth, and got jaundice. All quite treatable, and he's right as rain 18 years later, but who needs that stress?
Personally I'd say if you're considering running *any* kind of health risk for maybe possibly a few IQ points you're misinformed as to the priorities. Birth is a massive physical stress on both mother and child, even in the 21st century, and the list of things that can go drastically wrong in a flash with lifelong consequences is sobering. Give them both every advantage you can, however small. What you want is a healthy normal baby and a mom that bounces back in a day or two. If you can have both of these, take the money and run, give praise to your deity of choice, and be glad you aren't among the ~1 in 33 families for which the outcome is sad in some way or another.
There are many reasons why you want to control gestational diabetes.
Adverse health effects of uncontrolled maternal diabetes include:
-Shoulder dystocia (baby gets stuck, can lead to broken shoulder, oxygen deprivation)
-Greater risk of early preterm delivery
-Hypoglycemia(can't regulate blood sugar when born)(this is a common reason for full term babies to be in the NICU)
-Baby lung hypoplasia (baby can't breathe right)
-Baby has hypocalcemia (baby can get seizures)
-Baby more likely to have jaundice
I have a four and a half month old baby and a wife who had Gestational Diabetes. I did a pretty deep dive on this topic about 8 months ago but between the time and the sleep deprivation between now and then I can't cite how I got to these conclusions. Carbs seem to pretty directly correlate to birth weight which also correlated with IQ - goodness etc. But... high blood sugar damages a bunch of things and is more likely to get you a baby with an iffy pancreas and/or other things (nerves?). Resulting in a higher risk of obesity and (more than you would expect from the increased obesity) diabetes. I think there was also an increase in other health risks.
I think this was the most recent good study on the topic and it recommends a much higher carbohydrate threshold than historical recommendations (>175g/day) https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/8/2599
I don't remember all of why, but I thought they were too aggressive and concluded that a floor of 100g/day of carbs and a ceiling of about 200. We also switched to only complex carbs so she could eat more of them without spiking her blood sugar as much.
One of the issues with a low carb diet is that it has higher risks for nutritional issues, use a high quality prenatal and this issue should be moot. I used Life Extension because I respect the way they do research and update their formulas to reflect new findings (I'm not affiliated but I regularly buy their multivitamins and fish oil).
My baby was born at 6 lbs flat and one day after the cutoff to be early. He was small enough that the birth was not terribly damaging to his mother. He's now 3rd percentile for height, 8th percentile for weight, 35th percentile for head size, and 1 - 3 months ahead on basically all his milestones (and amazingly delightful in every way).
Thanks, that's useful additional context. One of my concerns reading through some of the gestational diabetes literature is that a lot of the papers control for birth weight in their models, which is a classic example of conditioning on a collider. i.e. if you control for an outcome of the diabetes you get a (badly calculated) version of the unmediated effect only, when what you want is the total effect (i.e. the effect that goes via any pathway including birth weight). So I'm a bit worried that the literature might be giving a misleading view on this.
Having diabetes isn't nice. Is the alternate plan to just not treat the diabetes and let the blood sugar run wild? She's gonna be pretty miserable doing that.
There's a large continuum between let the blood sugar run wild and tightly control it by cutting out almost all simple carbs.
Her original diagnosis was only barely over the diagnostic criteria (and wouldn't have met the criteria used 15 years ago). At the moment we have been controlling it very well with diet (i.e. her blood sugar readings look like someone without diabetes) but the baby has gone from 76th to 66th percentile size in that time which does raise the question is whether we're actually doing the right thing by controlling it as closely as we are. The doctors seem happy about the size decrease but I'm concerned about whether those recommendations are reliable given the literature on the positive effects of birth weight. The BMJ piece suggests ~0.5 IQ points per additional 100g birthweight (including in normal weight babies).
Well, the baby getting stuck is suboptimal for both kid and mom. Besides that, gestational diabetes is a pathologic process, not well understood in humans for experiment - blocking reasons which are probably pretty obvious. As said lower down, don't fret but do get the GD as under control as possible.
Quoting my wife, who has had GD: "High birth weight, in the abstract, is good because it's better than low birth weight. Low birth weight is correlated with a whole bunch of negative things (and often a result of smoking or poor nutrition during pregnancy). But HBW associated with GD is itself correlated with a risk of diabetes later in the child's life. Bottom line, don't focus on/obsess over birth weight, but do get the GD under control."
I would add that, in my wife's particular case, she found a bizarre magic-bullet cure for all her problems (constipation, anemia, hyperglycemia, swelling) by switching to an all-red-meat diet. Basically she subsisted off pure beef for a while. YMMV, only one data point, etc, but the effect was striking and essentially overnight. The child of that pregnancy (our third) was almost a pound heavier at birth and is now on track to be the tallest of our kids as an adult, but also totally healthy. None of our kids is anything like overweight; the elder two are rather skinny, like me.
Most pregnancy studies are pretty problematic but it looks to me like birth weight effects continue on into normal weight as well as just being about avoiding low birth weight. e.g. this sibling study published in BMJ of birth weight on IQ within the normal weight range:
https://www.bmj.com/content/323/7308/310.full?casa_token=GZxhLtd1x7wAAAAA%3AuQbq_vHAsjCCmrpzgSfh4m7uTlGRobirug5kKvf0N_wdS1H1_3xghjqJoiHbJtW-ZiOWnEcXYjo
Given the recommended amounts of vitamins pregnant women are supposed to take having such an unbalanced diet seems like a v bad idea. Except for iron I guess.
Several months ago there was a bounty announcement for a compilation of Robin Hansons best blog posts: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QaDwBio8MLqRvTREH/usd10k-bounty-read-and-compile-robin-hanson-s-best-posts
Does anybody know if that resulted in anything?
I wonder how we changed psychologically in the last hundred years or so due to mass empathy, caused by mass media. Before radio, TV and internet, the only emotions we came into contact with were our own and those of the people around us. Of course there were books and group gatherings, but nothing like now, where you get bombarded with other people's - real and fictional - emotions. And those generate empathy; a scary movie wouldn't be scary without empathy. So all day I 'feel' other people's emotions, from my friends on Facebook to fictional drug dealers in the Ozarks. Does anybody know if there has been anything written about how that changed us?
There were, of course, newspapers before radio, TV and internet, where you could read about the real-life sufferings of someone you didn't know.
But old-style newspaper articles tended to be much more "just the facts" while modern newspaper articles seem designed to weaponise our empathy against us, always starting with the "human interest" part of the story before talking about the big picture.
The obvious difference is that in pre-mass media days, you interacted very frequently and profoundly with your neighbours and your extended family. In a community of five hundred people, you would probably know nearly everyone by sight, and almost all of you would spend nearly all your time interacting with each other - at Church for example. Moreover, many of you would be related or would have known each other for decades, so the level of empathy *as you experienced it in everyday life* would have been a lot higher than anything you find today.
So maybe the main difference would be that now more/most of your empathy is spent on strangers and fictional characters.
Which seems... unhealthy to me. I've been happier since I joined a church, started building those real world connections as well as I'm able to approximate in the 21st century and ditched youtube.
I think you're selling pre-mass-media short. The appeal of theatre and opera was certainly running on empathy, to hew as close to your modern examples as possible; but beyond that, I think you'd be wrong to dismiss prose and even oral storytelling out of hand.
You're probably right about the appeal of pre-mass-media. However, I doubt it can compare to modern mass media in terms of volume and accessibility. Storytelling and prose definitely appeal to empathy, often on a deeper level than other media. But if I spend 20 minutes on the internet, the sheer number of viewpoints and emotions I am asked to empathize with, is a completely different experience, I think.
Say that I'm a woman on the curvier side. I'm happy with my breasts and hips but would like to slim down my waist a bit once or twice a month during parties and formal events. It looks like shapewear/corsets would be the thing I need, but it's a jungle out there. There's plenty of low-cost, low-quality (I assume) trash. The most vocal corset people seem to be BDSM cultists, not average gals that want to look a bit thinner sometimes. Thus me asking here.
Does anyone have a good beginners guide to shapewear? What are some quality brands that I can trust? Should I just bite the bullet and get a >$400 corset (money is not an issue anyway) and try to avoid getting sucked in by the vortex of "tight lacing" and "waist training" that seem to make up 95% of online corset discussion?
There is a quite big historical fashion community who discuss corsets in a very sensible and realistic way. In general, they all stress that a historical corset that fits your body should not be uncomfortable. So I guess wearing such a corset once in a while should not be a problem.
The difference between historical corsets and contemporary fashion/sexy underwear corsets is that historical corsets are used solely to achieve a specific body shape, they are never to be seen. Contemporary fashion corsets on the other hand are made to be seen, so they are not designed for changing your body shape/silhouette most efficiently.
The question is probably, what exact shape/silhouette you want to achieve. There are some videos that compare the effect of different historical corsets (https://youtu.be/PSvy8N61YnI and https://youtu.be/ZzKUI0TwgFM). Without knowing what kind of clothes you wear exactly, it's hard to recommend anything specific.
For buying corsets, I think the best strategy is to find someone on Etsy who makes historical corsets, and to discuss with them what you want.
I guess I've been overestimating how outfit-independent corsets are. I guess there's no magic "look good in every situation bullet" then. :(
I can personally recommend this corsetiere: https://www.asphyxiacouture.com/corsets
All of her corsets are custom made for your exact measurements, and she works with every client individually to ensure you're getting exactly what you need. She only uses high quality materials so they last a lifetime.
Thanks for the recommendations, but these designs seem very goth/burlesque/bdsm (e.g. the name). I just want something slimming to wear under my regular clothes. I guess she can make those as well though...
You could opt for a bodysuit. Keeps things tight and contained, but not as severely as a corset. Relatively inexpensive. You'd wear it under your clothing of choice, can be found in various colors including beige. If you're new to these and want to test the waters it is probably a good place to start.
The pro corset people say that shapewear only smooths. But I guess they're biased. Spanx seems to be the gold standard, is it a good lace to start?
It's a decent brand I hear, but plus size stores also have some, e.g. - https://www.penningtons.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-Penningtons_CA-Site/default/Search-Show?q=bodysuit
I think you'll be pleased with one, even if you do opt for a corset eventually.
edit: btw, if you or anyone knows of a source for plus-size lingerie worth checking out, I would like to know :/
As an informal information source, I would recommend The Lingerie Addict's articles on corsetry. I used to be really Into Corsets (from a fashion perspective as well as a history perspective) and skimming through a couple of their articles again, they're consistent with my knowledge. They also seem to acknowledge that there's a midpoint between "cheap fashion corset" and "tightlacing down ten inches" which, hopefully, will address your needs. Here's an article that might be useful: https://www.thelingerieaddict.com/2014/09/much-spend-corset.html
They mention specific brands, including Orchard Corset, which is the only one of those mentioned that I've personally bought from and that I have known other people to wear. I agree with the writer's assessment that it's a good balance between "cheap corset that has no real shaping" and "expensive corset for everyday wear."
I have no problem with buying a quality corset to use infrequently. I just have a hard time finding information about the use pattern I envision: most corset people seem to only talk about everyday wear, tight lacing etc. Where's the guide for "how to wear a corset infrequently"?
Hi! I'm 20 years old and from Argentina.
For the last two years, I've been doubting myself and spending a ridiculous amount of time finding the most optimal career path for me. My conclusion is that all roads lead to Software Engineering.
I plan to work on AI safety in the long term, but first, I need to start my career and focus on earning enough financial freedom.
The fastest route to getting a well-paid job in the IT field is learning Full Stack Web Development, so I'm doing that through The Odin Project.
About me: 123 IQ score (Raven's 2). Asperger's. 99th percentile for Extraversion, 98th Openness, 31st Conscientiousness (understandmyself.com). English level C1.
Any advice?
Hi David, not sure if you've seen this from Alexey Guzey, but might be useful in your situation... https://guzey.com/personal/what-should-you-do-with-your-life/
Yep, I did. But thanks tho.
Work on moving to the US.
Australia and New Zealand seem like better options.
How? The USA seems to be the best place for a well paid job in IT.
Yep, but it's much harder to get a Visa there being Argentinian; also, it's not cheap country to live, and my goal is to save money.
Here in France many people go to Switzerland to earn more. The cost of living there is roughly twice of what it is in France, but you earn at least 3 times as much. You end up with way more disposable income, and can always move to a cheaper country once you have "enough". I'm sure lots of people do the same with their current country and the US.
Every piece of advice like this misses the point that it is hard as an Argentinian to get a Visa or permission to live and work in those places.
I mentioned Australia and New Zealand not because they are the best countries to move to in general but because, in my context, those are the most cost-effective targets (they give away a lot of Visas to Argentina).
Thanks, though; I appreciate that you try to help me. Have a good day!
Look for US contracts for high hourly rates, but avoid living in the US. If you're a contractor, you don't need US residency for anything. If you need a US-based corporation to sign you onto contracts, you can find folks (like me) with companies that'll subcontract you (for a little bit off the top).
As a New Zealander currently in the UK partially for financial reasons, probably New Zealand is probably a fairly bad place to earn enough money to be able to focus on something without regards to money, certainly the the general opinion of people was that if you wanted to make money moving to Australia was a good way to do that. Admittedly I haven't checked the numbers or been in an environment where people talked about this for about 5 years now.
That said if you're intending to move somewhere cheaper after being a general software engineer NZ might work. If you're intending to get paid for doing AI safety I have no idea what the chances of you being able to do that from Australia of NZ are.
Agreed - New Zealander in the USA here. There's a reason all of NZ's college graduates are fleeing the country: the cost of living is steep, and jobs don't pay well (plus you'd be earning NZD).
Who’s tried Kalshi, the new prediction market using dollars? It looks like they devoted the time and effort to get regulatory approval. I’m enjoying it somewhat, although I find the set of actual markets a bit dull (e.g., the closing value of the S&P 500, inflation, Biden approval ratings).
I've tried it but lost interest after a while due to the markets not being very interesting or active. I find metaculus to be higher quality despite their markets not involving real money.
I'm in the same boat as you - it's enjoyable, but rather dull compared to something like Polymarket's markets.
https://twitter.com/a_m_mastroianni/status/1521133090638282752
Can we get a SlateStarCodex deep dive into this? Collab or otherwise? I wanna see the data for the top 10/20/40/80 instead of just top 20. Maybe genre breakdowns?
My quick take is that these industries have just gotten better at making hits. Movies in the 70s were, for the most part, bad. Bad technically, artistically, etc. We only remember the good ones. This is the same for books, music, games, tv, etc. Most media is still shit, but the professional class (big studios, big authors, etc) is really really good at it.
Also they double down on their successes. If a movie costs 10s of millions to make, seems like you would rather make a sequel than an uncertain original. This shouldn't be too surprising.
I think it might also be useful to just see what fraction of total sales are to franchises. There's at least a hypothetical possibility that we have a growing long tail of one-off games with a few franchises competing for the top 100 slots, which make up less and less of total sales each year. (It's also possible that nothing like that is going on.)
I believe this is covered in the tweets and posts somewhere. Big hits make up an increasing percentage of all revenue/sales even as the overall market expands.
Perhaps this is not the community for it. But if you are feeling like something is missing in your life, I recently converted from atheism to Catholicism, and I am happy to answer questions if anyone is interested in learning more about it.
What do you make of the Paul VI audience hall? (https://www.reddit.com/r/evilbuildings/comments/priegy/popes_audience_hall_wich_looks_like_a_snake_head/)
Looks like a snake, has no crosses or crucifixes anywhere, and has an extremely creepy statue of Jesus (looks like he's being blown up) as the centerpiece.
Isn't the snake thing just an artefact of the fish-eye lens being used? Those two "eyes" are on opposite walls.
Lol yeah, that one could have been done better.
Do you "genuinly" believe in God? Did you before converting? I've personally thought about it (not exactly conversion since I'm technically already Catholic, but being more active) and my lack of faith stopped me. I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop. Is this a common thing, to struggle with faith and belief?
Other question, what did you get from it. You don't mention that in your message. The basic interpretation of your message would be that you felt like something was missing from your life and you don't feel that anymore, but that wasn't explicit and I don't want to assume too much.
A few others: For how long have you been converted? Do you feel like you belong in the community? Are the benefits you get (if you get any) mostly "local" (going to the church, seeing people) or not (would you still get most of those benefits if you didn't engage in the community)?
>Do you "genuinly" believe in God? Did you before converting? I've personally thought about it (not exactly conversion since I'm technically already Catholic, but being more active) and my lack of faith stopped me.
Yes, I do now. I did not before. I think if you don't struggle with "the mystery of faith" at least a little bit you're probably not being honest with yourself. I certainly did and do. If your main hurdle is the "belief in God" part I would suggest reading this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/opinion/sunday/faith-religion.html
...and then reading Feser's book "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" if you are interested in a more specific scientific/philosophical discussion. Once you find yourself in a place where you think "Ok, maybe God could be real, I'm not sure" - try going to Mass. Try saying a prayer, out loud, for something you or someone else desparately needs. You will feel very silly and awkward doing this - you'll feel like an imposter. But try it anyway and see what happens.
>Other question, what did you get from it.
I had measurable improvements in my physical and mental health; I lost weight and feel happier. After I was baptized I felt electric, like I had tons of energy even though it was midnight. I obviously feel like my parish is a great community and I've met a lot of very interesting people. As I mentioned below, when I was converting I prayed for something very specific in a crisis situation and received it.
I also feel challenged in my day to day life because Catholicism places demands on me. For example, I used to walk past transient panhandlers and ignore them. Now I feel I can't really just do that. Of course just giving money to every panhandler in a major American city isn't going to solve poverty, but I try to engage on other levels - buying lunch, etc. I simply think about poverty and the poor a lot more than I used to - the Church doesn't let me just think about myself. Also, I have a source of authority I can trust - which is invaluable in a low trust age. After seeing how poorly the CDC/FDA had handled COVID, I was hesitatint about getting a booster - but my priest encouraged us all to do it, so I did. Basically, I now have a source of authority in my life which constantly challenges me to do better and holds me accountable when I don't. Obviously many people in modern society consider this to be basically fascism, but I think it's valuable and something a lot of people lack in their daily lives. We all have a lot of rights, but Catholicism challenges me to remember my duties too.
> For how long have you been converted?
I started a year ago and was baptized on Easter - RCIA takes a long time.
> Do you feel like you belong in the community? Are the benefits you get (if you get any) mostly "local" (going to the church, seeing people) or not (would you still get most of those benefits if you didn't engage in the community)?
Absolutely. As for the benefits of spiritual life, I think they are both personal (see above) and communal. For example I just met someone at church who would be a great professional connection for me if I needed one (I don't).
> I think if you don't struggle with "the mystery of faith" at least a little bit you're probably not being honest with yourself.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
> If your main hurdle is the "belief in God" part I would suggest reading this:
Here's what I think about it:
"The universe as created with intent which explains why it looks like a created thing" I can code generated art that comes from randomness and see beauty in it. I don't think intent has anything to do with beauty, or rather, I don't think intent is necessary for something to look ordrerly, law-bound or beautiful.
"Humans were fashioned which is why they are special" This one I struggle a bit with. Humans do feel special compared to every other animals.
"Signs of a higher order of reality" I don't understand what this one is supposed to be. I've seen a few strange things but the majority of those strange things happened when I was on the lookout for strange things. Some others were linked to some parts of my life. I find it relatively natural that those things come and go. For example, during a few months, I had the impression to see my cat (which is at my parent's house, not my appartment) everywhere in my appartment. Some people see/hear hallucinations all the time (visual snow for example, and there are things that are way wilder). Do these things have any meaning? I'm not sure. I certainly don't feel like they need to. Sometimes things just are.
Skipping some parts as I don't see many argument. "In fact, the very notion of scientific progress — our long track record of successful efforts to understand the material world — doubles as evidence that our minds have something in common with whatever mind designed the universe." I doubt that it's a reasonable argument. I'm personally colorblind. If I list the colors I see in a picture, for some reason all those colors will be colors that are visible to me. Because I'm the one seeing them. To see that there are colors that I missed, because I can't see them, I would need something else. In fact, it's impossible for me to prove that all of this is not a giant prank with enough resources just to make me believe I see less colors than other people. Considering that we never talked and exchanged with a non human on their views on the universe, it's normal that the universe fits our views.
The claim that religious experience happen as much as before is made without any statistics backing it up. It might be that even more people have religious experiences than before, or way less. There's nothing here except quoting a few people. It's easy to find people that went through the opposite process, from religion to atheism.
"Psychic phenomenons still happen" Two things. First "psychic" is a label that we put on it that basically means "we can't explain it", just like magic. If you can do it, it's not magic. That doesn't say anything about the nature of the thing, about how and why it happens. Second thing, again no statistics. Is the demand for mediums bigger than in the 19th century? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, the article is inconclusive.
All in all, that article is unconvincing for me.
> Once you find yourself in a place where you think "Ok, maybe God could be real, I'm not sure"
I'm already in that place.
> try going to Mass. Try saying a prayer, out loud, for something you or someone else desparately needs. You will feel very silly and awkward doing this - you'll feel like an imposter. But try it anyway and see what happens.
I've done it. I've been to the Mass many times in fact. I even said a few words for my brother's wedding. And sometimes there is a something that I can feel. But this something has absolutely nothing to do with God for me. Just like every time I'm in a church, I feel something. But it's not about the church itself. It's about the people. Whether God is real or not, people have assembled here, often for centuries, sometimes for more than 500 years, to celebrate something together. They've built those beautiful buildings. That's something to me. But the same can be said of pretty much anything. Religion/faith can make people do beautiful things, just like love for your family or animals or seashells or anything. You could explain that "love" as some kind of mystical power than humans have, but the jump from this to being a Catholic just doesn't compute for me.
> Obviously many people in modern society consider this to be basically fascism, but I think it's valuable and something a lot of people lack in their daily lives.
I think that's a bit reductive. One of the challenges of modern society is that you have most of the time all of the information you need to make a decision, it's just very hard work. Finding a source of authority can also be a way to not have to do this hard work. In fact, I think a lot of movements in modern society points to people looking for ways to not have to think. Modern politics is a big one. That's of course not to question your personal choices, but just to give an opposite point of view/explanation.
Thanks for sharing all of that and answering my questions! I wish you the best in your journey.
>I'm not sure what you mean by this.
I think it means at some point everyone feels like Job, like God abandoned them. Everyone looks at an obligation demanded of them and feels it is too hard, too crazy. I feel this way about the Church's teachings on abortion. It is a source of ambivalence for me. I don't reject it, but I wrestle with it.
> One of the challenges of modern society is that you have most of the time all of the information you need to make a decision, it's just very hard work. Finding a source of authority can also be a way to not have to do this hard work.
This is true, but I also think that doing all this work from scratch makes you more likely to be wrong. Very smart theologians have worked on these issues for 2,000 years, why reinvent the wheel yourself? Are you really going to do it better? Probably not.
>I'm already in that place.
If you are open to it, I'd really suggest Feser's book about Aquinas for you. I feel like you already have all of the pieces, but his work really ties all these things together to explain why Catholicism is true and correct way better than I ever could.
To take your programming example: Yes, the program makes random, beautiful things because you made it do that. The program was made with a telos, which guides it towards an end. The element of randomness doesn't change the underlying telos. You have DNA which caused you to develop with certain features - arms, legs, etc. Sure, an element of your development is random. But your telos still exists, we have scientific proof of it.
I will also pray for your return to full communion with the Church.
"Very smart theologians have worked on these issues for 2,000 years, why reinvent the wheel yourself?"
Yeah, _mostly_ people do just rework old arguments.
Occasionally, things _do_ change. Prior to Darwin and (ironically) Mendel, the watchmaker argument for the existence of an intelligent creator god was a perfectly respectable intellectual position. Not any more.
You may be interested to know that Catholics do not subscribe to creationism! The Thomistic argument for the existence of God rests on different premises.
Thanks for the explanation and sharing your point of view. I'll read the book you recommanded, it seems interesting.
> I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop.
It might be interesting to explore deeper what *exactly* they believe in.
I suspect that for many people it is more or less: "there is a supernatural intelligent force that created the world and the afterlife... and I have no specific reason to assume that the description in the Bible is wrong, except for the specific bits that seem weird or inconvenient for me". Which is basically social conformity.
I suspect that for you it would be more like: "is it possible that all the statements, especially the weird and inconvenient ones, are literally true?" which is much higher bar.
> I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop.
Probably yes for nerds, no for people who do not think about things too much.
Non-nerds may have a crisis of faith if they want to hang out with two social groups that have mutually incompatible beliefs, or if their religious group opposes in near-more something that they are (e.g. homosexuality) or they can't give up (e.g. extramarital sex).
> I suspect that for many people it is more or less: "there is a supernatural intelligent force that created the world and the afterlife... and I have no specific reason to assume that the description in the Bible is wrong, except for the specific bits that seem weird or inconvenient for me". Which is basically social conformity.
It could be, but I very much doubt it. That's not how the people I hang with tend to think.
Why did you convert?
How do you deal with doctrine that you have to accept, created by people much less smart than yourself and kept by institutional inertia?
Personally I'd like to have a spiritual community of some sort, but all the churches around and _especially_ the Catholic Church look like a sad parody of what such a community could look like.
I think you and I simply have totally different epistemological views. I think the accumulated wisdom of everyone who lived and built our civilization over the last 2,000 years far exceeds my own. “Inertia” might also be called “tradition” which the ancients abided by for a reason.
"accumulated wisdom of everyone who lived and built our civilization over the last 2,000 years"
Wisdom is a tricky thing.
Some experience accumulated a 1000 years ago is still valid, some has been invalidated by later changes. Almost anything that could be said about war, beyond "it kills people", in 0 AD would be grossly wrong now. Hiroshima was not a sword fight. The scale and speed of the weapons has changed by orders of magnitude, and that MATTERS.
The platonic solids still are what they were. Most of human biology still is what it was - except medicine is now far more useful and actually gives us options we didn't have.
The whole scale of human action is different. That the CO2 from power plants in the northern hemisphere may melt enough of Antarctica to flood part of Bangladesh is not a possibility that people in 0 AD, or even 1800 AD, dealt with.
I don't think Catholic theology denies most of this. The Church's opposition to war has grown in response to the increased destructive power of weaponry, the Church opposes the death penalty because modern tools of law enforcement and effective incarceration make it unnecessary, there's a lot of theological work being done about stewardship and the enviornment, and so on.
The part that doesn't change are the basic insights about human nature and ethics - for example, the fact that everyone has a right to life. The fact that the telos of sex is reproduction. The fact that all men are born free. The application of principles can and must change with circumstances, but certain truths are universal and eternal.
The "unchanging" parts all look to me like politics, as unconvincing, unsupported, and subject to dispute as any party's platform. Oh, that's funny - re "born free" the RCC itself has waffled on slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_slavery "others, including the influential Thomas Aquinas, argued the case for slavery subject to certain restrictions."
Ah, the shifting winds of politics...
The platonic solids _are_ still there.
Human biology is still mostly constant (mostly with medicine changing)
lol im not gonna argue about ethics with a dude who thinks the Holocaust was a moral nonevent
That's a fair heuristic.
Unfortunately, I grew up in a Catholic family and rejected religion in my teens, because the "accumulated wisdom" on display among the clergy amounts to spewing hate and diddling kids. I still have to deal with a significant part of my country that wishes to return to the Middle Ages, and votes accordingly.
I think there is something genuinely valuable in the Catholic tradition, but Catholicism as practiced is not good at teaching it to followers.
I think it says a lot about the power of the tradition that even people who have significant antipathy towards it such as yourself still see something good in it.
Sure thing, but as a Catholic you're not allowed to cherry-pick (the entire point, as you mentioned in a different thread). So you have to take the whole package, which for me is too distasteful to do.
Then again, perhaps as a new convert you can avoid the pitfalls of societies in which the religion is entrenched. There used to be a time when people went to be eaten by lions in peace because they believed in Christ, after all...
That's true. I guess I see the defects as being defects of execution, not defects of doctrine.
That's approximately when Jesus was alive. Even prior to that, basically everyone was a theist of some kind.
"It seems very probable that had christians not existed, some other hebrew sect would have become dominant in the Roman Empire; "
I've read claims that the most viable rival was Mithraism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism
I'll simply say that I very much reject the idea that any part of Western civilization - including 18th century Britain - isn't build on a Catholic foundation.
Obviously the neolithic revolution predates Christ's arrival; I won't pretend to know a lot about it. But it is interesting that it first happened right in the exact same part of the world where Jacob's descendants later lived.
When you go to heaven, which version of you will experience it? The 1 year old? The 10 year old? The 90 year old? All of them at once?
“When” assumes a lot!
Not OP but also Catholic: None of the above, I will be the version of me that God wills me to be which I don't think I will ever fully be on Earth but that I try to become closer to every day.
To be more concrete it will likely be a post purgatory version of me and how time works in purgatory is not clear to me,it might be that asking how old I would be is like asking what the angles of the color blue add up to.
How do you manage the sex parts?
If I'm being honest, I do not. I try to comply, but I also attend confession and pray for forgiveness.
One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard. It would be very convenient if God was cool with me doing all the things I personally want to do at any given time, but He is not. He has set out a set of commandments and I am expected to keep them. If I'd just wanted a community I would have become a Unitarian.
On a philosophical level, I also think the Church's sexual teachings are being proven correct with the passage of time. One of the most difficult and unpopular, for example, is birth control. Yet the telos of sex is obviously reproduction, and there seems to be a looming demographic crisis brewing as sex has become totally divorced from that.
"there seems to be a looming demographic crisis brewing as sex has become totally divorced from that."
No. Generally speaking, the demographic transition, slowed population growth, has made our problems a bit more tractable, not more difficult. We've overrun a number of resource limits (the one getting the most attention is, of course, the ability of the atmosphere to absorb CO2 without too much rise in greenhouse effects - but there are others as well (e.g. peak phosphorus)). Setting up parts of the economy and government programs to require permanent exponential growth was always a terrible idea. Ponzi schemes are doomed from the moment they are conceived. They are guaranteed to fail, the only question is when.
This argument would be more credible to me if we were actually on track for a stable population rather than collapse in secular Western societies. TFR isn’t leveling off at replacement so that population growth slows and stops - it’s way below replacement. Less than 1.0 in some Asian countries.
Yes, it is lower than replacement. I don't consider this catastrophic. It isn't dropping to zero. If TFR stayed at 1.0 for three generations, we'd drop from almost 8 billion people to 1 billion people. We had a thriving civilization at 1 billion people. All the triumphs of the 19th century: The periodic table, electromagnetism, evolution, happened with that population.
I'm picking 1 billion because it has been estimated that a 1st world standard of living can be maintained sustainably at around that population.
I expect that, given the 90 years or so that this shrinkage would take, there are plausible things that could be done to make raising children a less lousy deal, possibly raising the TFR back to 2.1 and stabilizing the population at 1 billion: The housing stock need not evaporate - if it is maintained as the population shrinks, this could become less of a constraint to potential parents. Perhaps the economy could be managed to make employment more stable again, and force fewer people into the precariat.
More speculatively, we might have artificial wombs, and be able to circumvent the maternal morbidity and mortality that we still have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_complications_of_pregnancy Also speculatively, perhaps medicine will be able to push human lifespan considerably higher over the next 90 years. Taking 18 years to raise a child looks like less of a chunk of one's life if lifespans were say 160 years rather than 80.
(And other things may happen, e.g. AGI, that might moot all of this)
Population both grows *and* shrinks exponentially, unfortunately, like any other process in which dx/dt ~ x. Like a pandemic wave. It comes on fast, surprising human instincts and causing panics, and it recedes just as fast, also surprising human instincts. Doubtless when the population of Easter Island starting falling the inhabitants thought they had plenty of time to turn it around -- right up until the moment it abruptly dawned on them they didn't.
Or to put it another way, countries are generally finding it *even harder* to turn population change from below replacement to replacement than they did turning it from above replacement to below. That does not bode well. We are a social species, if we accidentally overshoot your 1 billion mark because there's too much inertia, and end up with 100 million scattered over the entire globe I doubt modern society can be maintained. There just wouldn't be enough people in most locations to enjoy the efficiencies of specialization. (The sophisticated suburban county in which I live would be reduced to 4000 inhabitants, basically the size of a medieval town). We would all have to become much more generalist, like people who live in remote locations or survivalists. There would be none of this being one of the few thousand who can afford to specialize in tinkering with machine-learning programs or trying to design boosters that could reach Mars directly, while billions of others keep the wheels turning and the lights on. One would expect progress to drastically slow, or stop.
> One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard.
This makes it seem like you're trolling.
Why? It seems obvious to me that if someone comes up to you and says “hey, I have this religion, and it just so happens to tell you exactly what you want to hear about truth, life, and the nature of God” that they are lying. This is how a lot of Evangelical Protestantism seems to me.
That has no bearing on perceived difficulty of strict adherence.
It's funny you say that about Protestantism, considering it was borne out of a sentiment that the Church doctrine was not following the Bible closely enough in many respects. You might enjoy reading The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch, very well written.
I’m aware of the Protestant complaints. I just think they forget who actually compiled the current Bible.
I used to look at Evangelicals with that line similarly, but now I figure that it is how God is reaching them, and so it is true, for them - at least where they hear Him clearly.
Many are very fine people. But I do hope they all come home.
"One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard." Ha! Try not eating bacon and cutting a part of your penis! Or fasting for a month a year. Or self-flagellating! You guys have it sweet!
"self-flagellating" Hmm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellant includes _both_ Martin Luther _and_ Peter Damian (in the RCC) amongst flagellants.
My understanding of confession is that it's not supposed to be a get out of jail free card. Your sins are forgiven if you genuinely repent them and try not to commit them again.
But if you treat the confession booth like a car wash with no intention of changing your behaviour, your sins won't be forgiven.
As for the effect of Catholic doctrine on birth rates, I note that the birth rate in Ireland is 1.7 children per woman, in Italy it's 1.27 and in Spain it's 1.24. The Catholic prohibition of birth control doesn't seem to be doing any good in preserving the population of nominally-Catholic countries.
I definitely try not to treat confession as a car wash - I do try to adjust my behavior, and I won't take communion if I'm not in a state of grace. Do I always succeed? No. It is very hard to adjust one's own behavior after spending a long time doing pretty much whatever you want. But priests go to death row and take confession from murderers, so I hold out hope for my own soul.
It is true the church has not yet succeeded in arresting declining birth rates, but you do see higher birth rates among Catholics who regularly attend mass anywhere you look - Ireland has higher mass attendance than Italy. More to the point, I think the Church's argument about the telos of sex (which is ancient) has been proven correct: we separated sex from reproduction; and now we are staring down major social and economic problems.
Are you happy with the CC's stance on safe sex and condoms in Africa? Are you going to simply go "well they should all practice chastity and those who don't, yeah, might get AIDS"?
In retrospect I think I made an error even entertaining the premise of the “secondary harm” argument here. Sin destroys the sinner. This isn’t the same as saying that people who get AIDS “deserve it” (they do not, we are all broken) but rather to point out that the harms which flow from sin (STDs, etc.) can in no way ever be attributed to the Church’s doctrine. If there was no sexual sin, there’d be very few STD cases of any kind.
The Church does not consider sex a necessity the way breathing, eating, and defecating are, and regards those who *do* put sex in that same can't-live-without-it-for-a-moment category as thinking like little more than animals, unable to master themselves or their urges.
Hence, they are indeed comfortable with saying yes, in some circumstances chastity is the best and simplest (and certainly the cheapest) solution to the problems of STDs, the strife and tension produced by sexual jealousy, and the stress of unexpected pregnancy.
Your moral judgment would rest on a sounder footing if there *were* no other way to prevent AIDS. But that is not the case. So your beef with the Church, ironically, mirrors their beef with you: both of you believe that the *method* of preventing AIDS the other advocates has sufficiently bad side-effects in the practical real world that it should be rejected.
It doesn’t really matter if I’m happy with it.
Why Catholicism? Not intended as a criticism but you had a choice of religions or ideologies and I'm curious why you chose that one specifically.
The question wasn't posed to me but as I have got christened to be catholic last year maybe you like to know my reasons, too. Having grown up in anticlerical surroundings, I was spiritually interested in my teens and thought I really had a choice of religions or ideologies. As I couldn't grok Hegelian philosophy I gave up on marxism and thought mahayana buddhism, especially zen, might be the path for me. After decades of karate practice and maybe one decade of zazen practice I took a postgraduate university course concerning intercultural spirituality, whatever that may be. I still felt apart from people with my buddhist approach, though I live in a pretty liberal city. I had the impression denomination really can't matter much (one love), so I went to join the religion that has shaped my culture, the original version, of course. As an old punk rocker I also like that catholicism is mainly associated with child abuse and corruption in these parts, wouldn' t feel at home in a club with a good reputation.
This is the compressed version, but still very long.
My interest started with Catholic art and jurisprudence, which I regarded as being excellent. I was also impressed with how many leadership figures the church produced In America, we have a Catholic President, Speaker of the House, and six of nine Supreme Court justices. I was also very impressed with the writing of Catholic public intellectuals including Liz Bruenig and Ross Douthat, and with the vast network of Catholic schools and hospitals which have educated/cared for/employed many people I care about or know. I had grown up in an area with a lot of stereotypical Evangelical Bible thumping, which I always regarded as dumb and backwards and intolerant. So I wondered why so many smart/successful people were Catholics, and why so much great work had come from the community in a very secular age.
This got me thinking about theism more generally and about Catholicism specifically. The benefits of belonging to a religious community are well-known (better mental health, physical health, etc.) but (contrary to what my Brother in Christ Evesh suggests below) I wasn't really sold on God being real and I wasn't going to join the community and just pretend. Someone suggest I read Edward Feser's book "Aquinas: A Beginnier's Guide" which I did. Feser's defense of God's existence is basically a response to modern critics of Aquinas Five Proofs, and revolves heavily around Telos. I found it persuasive, and suggest the book for anyone else who is interested (although I will say it is not an easy read). At this point Catholicism seemed like the default choice since 1) the only persuasive defense of theism I have ever read was authored by Catholics and 2) the Church fathers literally compiled the Bible, so the Protestant idea of "read and decide for yourself" seems silly to me. I was still considering Orthodoxy and Judaism, however.
Once I started looking into attending Mass, I had a several experiences which I consider to be instances where God specifically moved things in my life. These were not like, visions or whatever, but rather instances where things seemed to be lining up just so. The very first time I prayed for an intercession, I received it in a very dramatic fashion which I can't address at length here. I considered the possibility that these were all confirmation bias or random chance, but there were enough of them in such a short period of time that it sure doesn't seem like it.
Purely out of curiosity, what made you discard Orthodoxy? I'm Orthodox and wonder what it looks like to a rat-adjacent inquirer.
It was a marginal choice on my part. Had I not had the specific experiences I had, I would have definitely looked into it more. I will say I appreciate the hierarchical nature of Catholicism. If the Pope did something really wild and I stopped believing he was infallible I’d look at Orthodoxy again.
I think this discussion (like many similar ones) gets complicated because there are at least three issues that are quite distinct but often mixed together. We can express them as a series of possible statements.
- I believe that religion X is true, and that it provides a complete and correct explanation of the creation and meaning of the world and of this life and the afterlife.
- I believe that the broad tradition of religion X is etc. etc. but I find version Y of it be be more soundly based and convincing.
-I have a generally religious outlook, and I find religion X to be the most intellectually and aesthetically satisfying.
-I don't have strong religious feelings, but I find that I get benefit from religion X and I prefer its moral and philosophical stance to that of others.
-I'm an agnostic and I judge religions by essentially humanist criteria. I don't think they are literally true.
I'm an atheist, and judge religions by how far their doctrine corresponds to my opinions. God is frequently wrong.
There are others, but you get the point. Essentially you have to decide whether you see religion as (a) literally true - and this is not the same thing as biblical literalism (b) sort of true in the symbolic sense and useful socially, appearing in different guises in different places or (c) just another human intellectual construct, to be judged as you would any other philosophy or ideology.
Unless you decide which you believe, it's hard for two people to have a productive conversation.
0. Thank you for doing this! I imagine it might take some courage - though perhaps it says more about me :)
1. You've been (reasonably, given this argument) considering other alternatives such as Judaism. Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
2. All of this is weirdly "I'm betting on the more successful god/ the deity with the most successful people". Isn't the entire concept frowned upon by various religions? I know there's quite some stuff in the Old Testament against this very line of argument - the Jewish god is not to be worshiped *because* he's "better than others" (To be fair, there's a bit of that when, say, Moses duels the Egyptian priests and beats them - but Elija's challenge on mount Carmel paints an entirely different picture. Hey, I'm not the one who expects to find divinely consistent properties in the text!).
3. Also, are Catholics across the globe so very successful? I'd suggest asking the current Pope how his home congregation in the slums of Argentina is doing. OK, I'm a bit snarky, Catholics and religious people in general are heavily over-represented among the poor. There are good reasons - but not ones that necessarily favor your arguments.
4. So if tomorrow you discover a religion whose followers are doing somewhat better in some statistical outcomes sense, you're changing the entire world-view?
5. Relatedly, what was your prior for yourself being susceptible for such spiritual experiences? Do you think it unlikely that you might undergo them again if ever you go on another spiritual adventure?
>You've been (reasonably, given this argument) considering other alternatives such as Judaism. Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
Not really, since Judaism and Catholicism overlap quite a bit in their doctrinal claims. If either is true, quite a large chunk of the other one is true as well, especially as compared to the backdrop of atheism. (That doesn't mean the differences are theologically unimportant, or in any way negotiable from the perspective of an adherent; but it does mean that that a specific piece of evidence for J is not necessarily a coincidence if C is true, and vice versa.) There is quite a lot of common ground. For example, if a Jew has an experience of God while praying in the synagogue, then unless that experience was somehow specifically anti-Christian, there is no particular reason why a Catholic would need to deny its validity, while an atheist would have to.
Of course, there are historical reasons for this overlap. SInce Christianity is a claimed fulfilment of Judaism, you should think of their relation as being sort of like Newtonian Gravity and General Relativity. The latter extends the former, but still accepts nearly all the claims of the former---at least in appropriate contexts and with a somewhat recontextualized interpretation. (This analogy is still viable if you think Judaism is correct: just imagine an alternative science where Einstein was wrong because there actually is absolute space or whatever; or perhaps consider a more controversial extension like string theory.) These theories agree about a bunch of things, and have some commonalities in their justifications.
>Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
Not necessarily - I sort of feel like we make choices along these lines all the time in our daily lives. I can only vote for Party A or Party B, and one party's policy is probably objectively better than the other. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I make an informed choice.
>All of this is weirdly "I'm betting on the more successful god/ the deity with the most successful people"
I think this is not quite the correct account of my decision making process. Rather, I looked at a group of people who had great success and noticed the success appeared to be connected to their culture and value system. Then I investigated the basis of that value system. I think it's logical to conclude that if a certain value system regularly produces good collective outcomes for a community, that system might be rooted in something important and good and true.
Catholics are overrepresented among the poor because the Church works very hard to help the poor. Catholicism is, in many ways, anti-meritocratic and anti-capitalist. It is rooted in the common good, not individual gain. The great works of Catholicism are sometimes material, but are also aesthetic and ethical and legal and social.*
I would actually say that, relative to everything else, Jews probably achieve greater collective success as a people than Catholics when you consider the history of discrimination, etc. I considered Judaism, and I probably would have looked into it further if I had not immediately had the specific spiritual experiences I had. I will say that while I've heard plenty of atheistic and Islamic attacks on Christianity, I have never heard a credible Jewish account of who Jesus was if he was not divine. I'm sure there's some scholarship out there, but modern Jews seem to just ignore the question since they aren't too interested in converting others.
>Relatedly, what was your prior for yourself being susceptible for such spiritual experiences? Do you think it unlikely that you might undergo them again if ever you go on another spiritual adventure?
I had spent my whole life being very skeptical of such experiences and was very surprised when they occurred. I think the odds of them happening at all were very low, and so the odds of them happening again would be even lower. It would be an interesting test though - walk into a synagogue and see if anything happens.
*edited to clarify a point
Thank you again for the answers.
The analogy to parties doesn't seem compelling at all, to me. Religions (mostly) don't claim to be just a set of policies to live a good life. Their claim is to represent a certain Truth (and incidentally, possibly to condemn those who fail to recognize it to eternal torture, but let's not quibble ;) ). Not unlike Sauron, "they do not share power" - you can't shop around. Judaism is certainly not OK with you weighing "eh, on the whole, I might have more mystical profundity there but more socio-economic success there, guess I'll go for Catholicism in the end". It's not even very much OK with you choosing Judaism on those grounds! (though of course that's a somewhat sweeping statement). Would you say the standard Catholic position is different? Sure seems that Catholicism wasn't very forgiving of alternatives, historically. Alas - it seems that parties are now trying to replicate this property...
Re: Jesus - If we don't presuppose anything religious to start with, why is the position "he was possibly some dude, or possibly a conglomeration of some dudes" reasonable? He could quite possibly be a very impressive dude. I could imagine someone in the future looking at, say, Penn or Da Vinci and not quite believing what they were up to without divine explanations, and for that matter Mohammad left his mark on the world. But unless we're presupposing a religious answer, why is there a puzzle for Judaism to solve in Jesus?
Catholicism and poverty - I'm not necessarily up for a debate about your point, but let it be said that in my view your claim that "Catholics are overrepresented among the poor because the Church works very hard to help the poor" is very much not supported by facts. Suppose I do engage you on this point and commonly agreed-upon statistics prove that in fact Catholicism and its presence are not a great predictor of development across the globe, and perhaps that the simple explanation is that poor people are desperate for what religion (in particular, Catholicism) offers without gaining by it - supposing all this, would that change your world-view? Do you agree that a negative answer is devastating to your success-related argument (though not to your personal experiences)?
"that system might be rooted in something important and good and true." - one of these is not like the others. In this sentence you again conflate(?) utility with profound truth. "Catholicism promotes value systems that lead to a good life" is not the same as "and therefore I should adopt the Catholic perspective, skin, bones, body-of-Christ-is-literally-in-my-mouth and all". One important way in which I'm not just nitpicking is if those values *were* useful in the past but are less relevant in the recent centuries, as is argued by, say, Joseph Henrich.
>Would you say the standard Catholic position is different? Sure seems that Catholicism wasn't very forgiving of alternatives, historically.
The Catholic Church is actually rather ecumenical these days. For example, if you are Orthodox, you can walk into a Catholic Church and receive communion. I believe the Pope is the Vicar of Christ and Orthodox don't, but theologically we are otherwise in agreement for the most part, and the Church recognizes that. If you convert to Catholicism, the Church will recognize certain Protestant baptisms as valid. Yes, I believe in the capital-T Truth of Catholic teaching - but some people are closer to it than others. Admittedly some Catholics hate this and are very much against it, but I think it's a fairly logical and obvious way of thinking about theology.
>If we don't presuppose anything religious to start with, why is the position "he was possibly some dude, or possibly a conglomeration of some dudes" reasonable?
For one thing, even most secular scholars agree Jesus was a singular person, his historical existence really isn't disputed.
Past that, I simply have a different epistimology. I see everything we have in our modern society as having been built on a certain foundation - a foundation which was constructed by great men. I see works of theology, history, art, science, jurisprudence, and architecture which have persisted for literally millenia. And for most of the last 2,000 years, the people doing all that work were Catholics, Catholicism is foundational to Western Civilization. Most people who have come before you in the last 2,000 years, including the smartest ones, were Catholic. Virtually all of them were theists. Is the tradition they followed not entitled to some kind of deference, at least as a starting point? I think it is.
Ross Douthat makes a similar point here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/opinion/sunday/faith-religion.html
>In this sentence you again conflate(?) utility with profound truth. "Catholicism promotes value systems that lead to a good life" is not the same as "and therefore I should adopt the Catholic perspective, skin, bones, body-of-Christ-is-literally-in-my-mouth and all".
I wouldn't say utility always suggests profound truth - and to be clear, my faith is not rooted in beliefs about utility. Utility (I don't like the word "utility" - Catholic social teaching is not utilitarian) opened my eyes to thinking differently about faith, but it was my study of Feser/Aquinas and personal experiences which changed my mind.
It is true that a value system which works in one place and time may not work in all places and times, but Catholicism actually recognizes this. Most of the current Catechism is heavily influenced by the works of St. Thomas Aquinas - who lives in the 13th century. You can see this in the Church's view on capital punishment - at one time, capital punishment could serve the common good. Catholic theology, however, recognizes that we now have modern systems of policing and incarceration which render the need for capital punishment moot, and it no longer serves the common good. Nobody has the right to kill a man (who is created in God's image) unless doing so is necessary for the common good, so capital punishment is unlawful.
*edited because I hit "send" too soon.
Not trying to be a spoilsport, but wouldn't it be more effective to make a ACX goodreads group or something instead of this new wheel?
Currently reading Ubik which I think is fun, before that Gomorrah which is one of those books I got stuck on since it's just very depressing and even though it's not hard to read or very long it took me a month, and before that The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project by Krithika Varagur which I thought was very interesting and maybe worthy of a post by Scott.
Gladio has become such a meme but I've been very very slowly working on something about Dutch Gladio over the last three years (meaning reading some books about it and trying to get like 2 official documents) and The Call was really refreshing in 'oh yeah of course this is constantly happening everywhere!'
How strong is the evidence for the efficacy of EMDR? My wife's counselor suggested it to her, and from reading the description it seems...uh...dubious.
Psychologist here. I think EMDR is nonsense. While doing EMDR (i.e., while looking at the therapist wiggling a finger or whatever) the patient thinks about or describes their trauma. The active ingredient in the treatment is the repeated reliving and recounting of the trauma -- the finger-wiggling part is smoke and mirrors. Edna Foa and others long ago described an exposure treatment of trauma, in which the patient repeatedly describes and relives the trauma, while in the comforting company of their therapist. It's pretty effective (most exposure-based therapies for most anxiety disorders are). That's the active ingredient in EMDR. But I wouldn't trust anyone who's into EMDR to administer the treatment, because either they do not read, think about and understand science, which is bad, or else they know this treatment has a large horseshit component, but administer it anyhow, which is also bad.
You seem to be awfully sure, with little or no RCT to back up your assertions cited.
I read up on it a couple years ago, came to that conclusion. I agree it's reasonable to want to read some good studies before writing it off, but I don't have time to reread the studies right now, just to make the case for my view. If I had started a thread by announcing that EMDR is horseshit I would have felt obligated to present some RCT, but I'm just quickly answering someone's question on here.
Yeah, good point about less onus on backing up your opinion with evidence if you clearly state it as your opinion in a reply, even when saying you are a professional in the field. Still, it would have more weight if you did. I did not do proper research, either, my views are based on anecdotal evidence of the difference in reaction between people doing talk therapy/CBT/DBT vs EMDR. My guess is that EMDR is more like hypnotherapy, but without suggestions or leading questions. It helps the person to go into a partial trance and explore and process memories in feelings otherwise buried. Whether it is net good or bad is not immediately clear, but it seems to be qualitatively different from the rational-mind approaches. My view (again, not backed up by extensive research) is that PTSD from a one-off traumatic event can be successfully improved with EMDR, more so than with standard approaches like exposure therapy. Or maybe in conjunction. I suspect that pharmacology-assisted therapies like MDMA and psycholbin do something similar: disengage the conscious rational critical part of the brain and let the subconscious do most of the work.
But the alternative to EMDR that I think works is really different from cognitive therapy (a rational mind approach)or talk therapy. Remember the approach I talked about -- Foa's exposure therapy for PTSD? What happens in the office during that is pretty similar to an EMDR session -- patient describes and relieves the trauma, over and over, in a supportive setting. Except the therapist is not wiggling fingers or whatnot to induce eye movements. Instead therapist is supportive -- you're doing fine, this will get easier if you hang in there, I'm here with you, etc.
I do not think the finger wiggles etc. that EMDR therapists do are particularly hyponotic. I do hypnosis (though not for trauma, usually), and it is not that easy hypnotize most adults. You can't just wiggle your fingers rhythmically at them. Takes a solid 15 minutes of work, and even that will only succeed if you're pretty good at hypnosis and have a subject who goes under easily.
By the way, the rationale of EMDR is pretty silly. During REM (dreaming) sleep, the eyes jerk around, although not rhythmically, and not back and forth -- it's random, jerky movements with no pattern. So many proponents of EMDR believe that by making the subjects' eyes move back and forth (which is not the way eyes move in REM sleep anyhow) they are putting the brain into the equivalent of REM sleep, so that the brain can work on the trauma in a special, brain thought to be important for memory consolidation. All this is pretty silly. First of all, the state people get into during EMDR is not remotely like REM sleep. People in REM sleep are profoundly unaware of the real world, engrossed in a dream story, and also, by the way, paralyzed. And anyhow, the eye movements during REM seem to be a sort of side effect of what is going on in the brain -- no reason to think they are the cause. You can't make someone go into the dream state by making their eyes move around any more than you can make them fall asleep by having them make snoring sounds.
I suspect that you might be better than average in your occupation, so you don't need crutches like EMDR, and so you conclude that EMDR is useless. The difference is that EMDR seems to provide a reliable way to get a person to relax and let go a bit (that's what I called a light trance), without the practitioner being an expert at it. Basically, it's the difference between art (not reproducible) and craft (almost anyone can learn the skill).
I don't disagree that the rationale is not very scientific, but the practice stems from experiment and is reported to work, so it is probably not wise to just dismiss it as obvious bunk, just don't use it if it doesn't work for you. Note that plenty of pharmaceuticals have no known basis for their effects, including something as old as aspirin.
And yeah, you can make someone go into a trance-like state by making their eyes follow a periodic pattern, hence the trope of a pendulum used for that purpose, though obviously it's neither necessary nor sufficient.
Re hypnosis: there are millions of ways to do it. I have personally reliably got (consenting) people into trance over text, within 10-15 min or so, just with progressive relaxation and fractionation. All you need is someone's focus.
Not a doctor, but talked to many of those who tried it. My overall conclusion is that it is definitely not a placebo, it works. But. It works well on PTSD, i.e. from a single-trauma or multiple isolated mental traumas, such as from an accident, or a hospital, or war. For a complicated PTSD (CPTSD) due to growing up in abuse it works almost too well. That is, you get one trauma "processed" with EMDR, but it tends to unravel a bunch of related traumas you never thought about, or forgot, and suddenly you are dealing with a Hydra (from the Greek mythology, not from comics). Anecdotally, MDMA and psilocybin, in a safe supervised setting, tend to work better for CPTSD.
I’m looking to generate some conceptual trolley problems for a project I’m working on. For example: A runaway trolley will obliterate either Sexism or Racism. Which track to do you put it on? Etc.
Give me ideas of things this trolley might obliterate: good, bad or mixed. No living beings as trolley targets, please. Extra points for the absurd and/or thought-provoking. Thanks!
For the effect size people. Where do I actually find the discussion on meta-analysis, btw? Your university ran two field studies in environmentally friendly behavior. One is on the use of ecological dishwasher tabs, it shows a standardized effect size of 0.4. The other one on the replacement of large conferences by hybrid meetings to reduce air traffic, effect size is 0.2. Which one should the trolley destroy?
The trolley will obliterate either a concept picked randomly (racism, sexism, love, friendship, etc), or it will obliterate itself.
Be sure to put in some taboo tradeoffs, too. The trolley will destroy either everyone's memories of the 2012 Olympics (but not the recordings), or will destroy a random American highway and replace it with whatever would have been there if the highway hadn't been built. Or the trolley will either destroy racism in 10,000 US schools, or destroy one hour from the average daily commute time in Mumbai (population 20 million).
The last one is great. People (who haven’t lived in Los Angeles, say) greatly underestimate the misery of long commutes.
Trolley will eliminate Public Transportation Problems and Bicycles.
Tricky, but seems like an easy choice unless one really loves bicycles qua bicycles.
A runaway trolley will obliterate either cause or effect. Which track do you put it on?
I have read a lot of meta trolley problems in researching this but not this one yet; quite funny!
Trolley will obliterate either Runaway Trolley or Save From a Burning Building moral dilemma framings.
Trolley will do away with either White Flight or Gentrification.
Trolley will do away with either Ethnic Languages/Dialects or Ethnic Food.
Trolley will do away with either The Rights Of Englishmen or the English language.
Trolley will do away with either Microbe Theory or Cultural Contamination Theory.
Trolley will do away with Majestic Natural Beauty or The Wonders of Modern Technology.
Trolley will do away with Disney (the corporation and all its holdings), Agatha Christie's works, or Shakespeare's works. As a bonus, the answer must be understood and approved of by your favorite 8 year old.
Trolley will obliterate Friendship or True Love.
Trolley will obliterate either your favorite color, favorite taste, or favorite sound.
Le Guin's _The Lathe of Heaven_ might be relevant.
Friendship vs True Love is a great matchup! I’d probably keep Friendship, since intense love quickly turns into something like friendship over time.
Geographical (more or less) options: Nationalism, provincialism (hmm, is there a city-scale analog?)
Various flavors of lacks of skills: illiteracy, numerical illiteracy
Can industries or activities or products be candidates? tobacco, alcohol (yes, I know Prohibition was a horrible mistake - this is a hypothetical "poof, it vanished" case, not criminalizing it)
Industries can absolutely be included. Would be interesting to see if people would target All Laws Restricting a Marijuana Industry vs Tobacco Industry (eliminating it).
Many Thanks! Hmm... A grisly choice would be nitrogen vs phosphorus:
Trolley eliminates either Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixation or the phosphate rock industry...
Someone I know with a background in computational linguistics and a degree in social work needs a job quickly. She is German and wants to stay in the US. Where should I tell her to look? I feel like someone in EA would have some ideas for this person.
My company (modulate.ai) is hiring and could be very interested in someone with a computational linguistics background and interest in social good! Please feel free to point her to our website - the closest open role would likely be "Scoring Engineer", though it's ok if she doesn't have the full technical experience described there; she can also reach out directly through careers@modulate.ai (I keep an eye on that list) and I can route her to the right folks internally.
You might need to be more specific about why she is in the US can't stay. Illegal immigrants are different from student visas which are different from tourists who fell in love with the country.
She had been a student here for many years, worked for a while, then returned to school. She's been in the US legally on and off for almost 20 years but never became a citizen. She was most recently here on a student visa for the MSW, but now that she's graduated her visa is expiring and she's looking for work. Apparently they don't give you a huge amount of time to find a job after graduation if you haven't lined one up yet, so she's nervous. She's in Boston and would like to stay.
I'm not an expert, but if she's an accomplished researcher, she might try the O visa (outstanding achievements)? I've known some successful cases.
Nope, only sixty days. In that situation she basically needs to find a job that sponsors visas pronto or find someone willing to marry her. She could try the visa lottery but that's a lower probability. There's a lot of job boards that have a filter on whether they do visa sponsorship. But the big employer for MSW is the US government which generally doesn't. What field does she want to work in?
There is no such thing as "sponsoring" a visa. There are a lot of different visa types, each with their own criteria. Her best option is probably the F1 OPT, which allows recent graduates to work in a "training program" for one year (3 years with a STEM degree.) The training program is often pro forma, with the company doing some extra paperwork but treating the employee like any other hire. Her employer can also register for the H1B lottery next spring, which grants a 3 year visa that can be renewed for a total of 6 years. It only opens for one week in March every year, and the chances of selection are usually between 1/3 and 1/4.
Sponsoring a visa is absolutely a thing, is the word used for such a thing, and is the relevant legal term. (Eg, https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/guides/E2en.pdf) Likewise universities sponsor students for visas. I'm very surprised anyone with a passing familiarity with immigration would contest this point.
Not sure what kind of job she wants. She applied to work at her school, and at some sort of state level thing where she did an internship. I think they said "maybe" but they're both keeping her hanging and now she's anxious. She tried the marriage thing about a decade ago and it was a disaster, so she's never doing that again.
To be frank, the pickings are a bit slim for visa sponsorship jobs. She should probably be looking at anything she's qualified for. Private industry tends to do it more than government or universities. So I'd find out what her sort of minimum acceptable job is and start applying for that. She'll need continued visa sponsorship for a few years and then she can get citizenship and do whatever she wants.
Options for best budget software for personal use, and/or WFH independent contracting, and why that option works/what the drawbacks are?
I have found GnuCash sufficient for all household and independent contractor needs.
I use KMyMoney. Upsides: open source, lots of features. Downsides: the learning curve is like scaling a cliff and there's no automatic transaction sync with most banks if you live in the USA.
Any medical students/ physicians here? I was thinking of starting a Whatsapp group where we could discuss studies and/or the practicalities of the doctor life.
If so, text me at 6098240815899 without the 8s. :)
How do you envision this group breaking away from the inertia of group chats with no shared short-term goal?
Scott's a physician (psychiatrist) – or did you mean more like 'general practitioners'?
Physicians of all specialties :)
Let me be the first to rush to accept John Schilling as our new space overlord 😁
I think he'd do a great job too!
I wrote the comment in #2 about the DSL test being incorrect. I want to point out that I don't think this statistical issue is actually particularly relevant to the debate at hand. I think basically everyone agrees that there is a strong statistical effect here, and the question of "how strong exactly" is mostly moot.
Scott's point was that there is an effect, and that effect is caused by coinfection with Strongyloides worms. Ivmmeta/Alexandros's believes it has a separate and distinct effect on covid itself. Alexandros/ivmmeta seem to have done some work to try to statistically distinguish these things by looking at infection progression and other metrics, an approach that seems superficially plausible to me. That is, plausible that you could separate these things in this way, in principle.
It seems to me like that's where the locus of the debate should be. It is still important to correct the statistical issue just as a matter of good hygiene, and Scott's use of the t-test was definitely quite inappropriate there, so that's good. I just want to point out that no matter what the outcome of this issue is, it's mostly immaterial to the broader question re: Ivermectin/COVID.
Thanks a lot for the comment on reddit. My favorite quote is at the beginning, "there is no way to do statistics on heterogenous endpoints without additional fairly strong assumptions." Spot on. To illustrate it by some units: Study 1 uses the endpoint X and found an effect of 2 m in favor of the new drug, Study 2 uses the endpoint Y and observed an effect of 3 kg. Meta-analysis now tries to "average" 2 m and 3 kg, good luck. And no, one cannot circumvent the problem by using standardized effects.
I agree with this, but Alexandros emailed me about the test statistic issue, and it seemed like a clear-cut error, so I wanted to address his actual concern.
I assume once we get past that he's going to challenge me on the worm thing too, although at this point I'm kind of sick of dealing with him and I feel like he twists anything I say/do against me, so I'm not sure how much I'm actually willing to have that argument.
I still think ivermectin (or other anti-parasitics) work best in countries where there's a good chance the population have exposure to parasites.
If you're an otherwise healthy First World inhabitant, I see no reason to believe ivermectin will do any good at all if you contract Covid. I would be broadly not unsympathetic to letting people have a dose of it, if they really nag their doctors hard enough, since the worst it could probably do is give them a good purge, but the amount of breathless "this is a miracle cure that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about!" shilling for it has annoyed me to the point that I think they all need to be put working in a piggery cleaning out the slurry, if they're that damn anxious to get near animal drugs.
As I learned last year, you don't have to clean piggeries to get animal drugs. Cocaine seems nowadays to be often mixed with levamisole to be longer effective. Side effects are holes in the skin and possibly the brain, too. Maybe that helps against COVID19 as well.
Does the debate have any practical value at this point? Ivermectin is either useless against covid or has a sufficiently small effect that you have to squint properly to see it. We have much better treatments now, as well as vaccines.
One new insight I had (better late than never) after reading the Ivermectine post: the causal conclusions we can draw from RCTs are rather limited. If an effect is seen in an RCT, we can only conclude that the treatment "somehow" causes the effect (probably, the worm thing). The specific meaning of somehow is still speculative, even in an RCT. I am underlining this because one might be tempted to believe in causality as soon as one enters the realm of RCT.
Yes, this is right, with some caveats. In a hypothetical RCT where you average over the population of the entire world (or statistically do so via random sampling), this problem *kind of* disappears.
In practice, of course, nobody does this. So we always have to apply a bit of theory to draw causal conclusions like this. This is why you want to identify a mechanism of action, and then try to probe that mechanism of action directly to make sure that the drug is in fact doing the thing you think it's doing.
Data alone is usually not enough to draw hard causal conclusions, at least, not causal conclusions that assume a particular chain of causality. We can conclude that Ivermectin probably causally worked at reducing symptoms, but we can't necessarily conclude that it did so in any *particular way*.
I think it matters for figuring out who to listen to in future debates.
Experts get a lot wrong, but they also get a lot right. We should give the amateurs calling out the experts a chance to prove themselves, but when do we throw in the towel and just ignore them?
I think you could argue that Ivermectin is much more available than Paxlovid and/or the vaccines in developing countries, and even in developed countries to some extent. If it really was an effective treatment, it'd be pretty valuable for poorer countries.
There's also the issue of credibility, expert consensus, and media to think about. If it were the case that Ivermectin actually was effective, and the media/scientific establishment shouted the pro-Ivermectin crowd down with chants of "horse paste", that would be a pretty important thing to signal boost, I think. Conditional on them being wrong, I would hope we'd see some soul searching and humility.
On the other hand, if Ivermectin really isn't effective, it'd be a moderate boost to the reputation of expert consensus in general. I don't think it's like, the most important issue we're facing or anything, but I do think it's worth knowing what the truth is here, if it can be sorted out relatively cheaply. Ultimately this blog/community is about getting better at learning true things about the world, so improving these processes would certainly be useful for that.
The problem is that fluvoxamine *also* seems to have a significantly larger effect, and very little of the media ever supported or attacked it, while ivermectin got a lot of media support as well as a lot of media attack. Figuring out why no one other than Vox and a few rationalist bloggers ever pushed fluvoxamine, and figuring out how to get more to do that, seems more important than shouting down the ivermectin shout-downers.
> Conditional on them being wrong, I would hope we'd see some soul searching and humility.
If all you want is for your enemies to be proven wrong then you're fine there. We already have enough information to show that the "Ivermectin doesn't work, just look at this one study" and the "Ivermectin totally works, just look at this one study" crowds were both wrong and should exercise greater epistemic caution in future.
It won't happen, but at least we can all feel smugly superior to them.
It would seem like, even if it's 'not very effective', that should still – ideally – result in "some soul searching and humility".
I don't in fact hope for that because that seems like a waste of hope!
Logic/Bayes question: Suppose there is an open question about an underlying fact in a certain domain, and I have a model of how things work which predicts that an observation O is moderately more likely given hypothesis H1 than H2. You have a model which predicts the opposite. We have made observation O, update our conditional probabilities in opposite directions, and then learn that H2 is in fact correct. I should now take your underlying model a bit more seriously than my own, because you said that the observation was evidence for what turned out to be the correct hypothesis while I said the opposite.
This is a sort of meta-Bayesian reasoning, which can help us favor accurate models over inaccurate ones. But obviously it's going to produce updates strictly smaller than the update within the favored model - if your model says something is barely evidence at all, then the confirmation is barely evidence of your model.
Now, some questions: first, can we quantify these meta-Bayesian updates, and if so, how messy is the formula? Second, can we construct any scenario in which we would go up another level and have such a concept as meaningful meta-meta-Bayesian updates?
Sounds like old good Bayesian model selection / Bayesian model averaging. In brief, you want to compute posterior probability for model M_i given data D, P(M_i|D) which (by Bayes theorem is) P(D|M_i)P(M_i) / sum_i P(D|M_i)P(M_i)
However, to compute that you need to evaluate P(D|M_i) (the evidence), and for that you need to actually specify how your model M_i relates to observations D. For example, if you have some kind parametric Bayesian model with parameter(s) theta, then P(D|M_i) = ∫ P(D|theta, M_i)P(theta| M_i) d theta. Suppose you learn hypothesis H2 is true and "H2 is true" corresponds to certain region in parameter space theta under model M_i; this can viewed as imposing prior such that P(theta|M_i) = 0 in regions where H2 false. Then it is "simply" a metter of calculating / approximating how does ones P(M_1|D) change compared to P(M_2|D) under new new prior compared to what you had previously.
This much was straightforward, I don't have much intuition if one can have any heuristics about the relative sizes updates, could be quite model-specific.
And yeah, please do notice that to do any genuine Baysian computation one needs to specify how ones models relate to data or if doing some pure theory, define some abstract class of model space under study. Talking a lot about "Bayes" without the nitty-gritty details is a tad cargo-cult-ish.
"Suppose you learn hypothesis H2 is true"
I should add: depending on how all-encompassing you view your model, philosophically this could be a bit too much like multi-eyed multi-winged seraphim descending from the Heaven and telling, Fear Not, Behold, I Bring You News About Your Parameter Space. The exercise "so what happens when we set the parameter" very much steps out the Bayes part to the "all models are wrong but some are useful, lets fiddle with them to make it more useful" territory.
I suppose the kosher Bayesian Way is to interpret evidence that "H2 is true" in terms of data: Think about one regular size observation ("I observe one apple in my neighborhood store weighs 181 grams. I wonder what is the average size?"). Suppose you make a strong observation that made you think H2 is true ("my neighbor told me that storekeeper throws away all apples that weigh less than 110 g"). If you had a perfect Bayesian model of absolutely anything, you could trow in that observation directly, but if not (far more likely), one could attempt to add it in as a pseudo-observation. ("I trust my neighbor quite much, that information is as good as observing 100 apples, all >110g")
I think this depends on how the models are interpreted. If the difference in the models is a different in *causal* probabilities, then this just sounds like a case for higher order bayesian uncertainty over which lower order causal bayes net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network) is giving the causal probabilities.
But if these differences were differences in *Bayesian* probabilities rather than causal probabilities, then it's less obvious why the update you mention is going to be justified.
I think, in the ideal case, a Bayesian prior is first over a set of models, and only then over a set of outcomes, as a mathematical consequence of the weighting of the models. (Don't forget to include a 'model' called "I have no clue" with a basically flat prior, because you should never assign 0% odds to anything.)
Bayesian updates are purely mathematical for any given set of priors, but unfortunately the maths is really hairy and for any non-trivial prior distribution can be analytically intractable.
I think it's possible – in principle – to quantity Bayesian updates. It's just effectively impossible in almost every practical case!
I don't see why a 'recursive hierarchy of meta-ness' with respect to Bayesian updates isn't meaningful.
Off the top of my head, the closest thing, that's practical, for the kind of collaborative meta-Bayesian-updating (I think) you're describing is something like the "Double-Crux": https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/double-crux
Without identifying the (most) 'fundamental' source of disagreement, it just seems too hard to track all of the details to perform even something like a numerical update. (In more realistic practice, even just getting two people to attempt to _reasonably_ resolve their disagreements seems like too tall of an order to almost every expect, outside the specific weird social circles where this is, of course, considered perfectly reasonable, when feasible.)
Is this summary of the US vs. European collegiate systems correct? The European college academic experience is much more focused on one's specific major, and does not feature a lot of required classes outside of it. The US college academic experience involves a broader, not deeper education, with required extracurriculars in classes outside of your major. I.e. if you study Chemistry, Comp Sci or Literature in Europe you mostly just take classes in those fields, whereas in the US you're required to take a number of extracurriculars, to be a 'broader' thinker. Thus, American students are not studying their primary subject as intensely. Do I have that right?
(This isn't even getting into medical or law school, which in the US is another program after one's Bachelor, and in Europe I believe rarely or never is).
If I do have that right- are there any advantages to the US system? I've heard many times, from many different people, that European students in a given subject are basically always ahead of American ones at the same point, given the deeper/broader dichotomy. So- why does the US structure its educational system this way? America is famously the world's #1 technological, financial, military, economic, scientific and cultural power at the moment, so I find it a bit difficult to believe the US academic system is markedly worse than Europe's. Do American college students somehow gain something substantive by being forced to take classes outside their major? (Also, how does the rest of the developed world like Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel etc. do it?)
Edit to include: also, in theory, a college could offer this more intensive/less broad education program here in the US, right? America has tons of colleges & federalism- kind of surprising to see that at least a few colleges don't offer the European system instead, right?
Something I'm surprised to see not discussed more often is how bizarre I find it that Europe depends on high school students to pick a major despite presumably exceptionally limited experience engaging in it at a university level. In America you don't even declare your major (typically) until sophomore year, with the assumption that by that time you've at least had time to explore the basics of classes in which you might be interested.
Expecting students of even the most advanced high school level biology courses to decide they want to do molecular biology, or economics, or computer science, or linguistics, or (insert course of study with no particularly good high school level analogue and/or that may well not be offered at many high schools at all, and/or course of study with a wide disparity between undergraduate / graduate level study and high school) to be so certain of what they want to study as to dedicate themselves near-exclusively to it as a course of study has always struck me as a bizarre, and to be blunt, somewhat cruel (inasmuch as intolerant of mistakes or errors in judgment made by deciding agents with comically little information) system.
Indeed, I think that the courses of study most conducive to this kind of commitment in the American system are also exemplary of its failure modes. In particular, molecular biology is known for attracting pre-med students, but how the hell does an eighteen year old know that they want to engage in the practice of medicine when their primary exposure to its is House, M.D. and yearly checkups? I think the answer turns out to be: most of them don't! And in fact I believe this likely accounts for why even in circles comprised overwhelmingly of incredibly intelligent and talented people (i.e., not obviously dominated by genetic selection effects that correlate with professions), the doctors I know have a very strong bias towards being the children of other doctors--because they're the ones who have enough of a clue as to what being a doctor is like so as to structure their lives toward it out of high school!
The fact that Europe makes *everyone* make hugely life-affecting decisions from among a cohort singularly poorly-equipped and informed to make them has always struck me as a huge mark against it rather than in favor.
No direct experience with the European system, but I can tell you that in the Australian system you are expected to choose a degree program straight out of high school, but you have plenty of opportunities to transfer to another program along the way.
Done two years of a Bachelor of Dental Science but decide you'd rather have a Bachelor of Arts instead? No problem, most of your course credits from the BDS will carry across to the BA. Going the other way is more of an issue since there's a lot of dentistry-specific courses you need in order to graduate with a BDS, but some of your credits might be transferable.
And in your example, many course credits from a Bachelor of Medicine are likely to transfer across to a molecular biology degree, if you figure out you're not interested in treating patients.
Note that American undergraduate degrees are 4 years whereas in Europe they're 3 years. That does allow a fair bit more room for breadth without costing depth, 'just' a year of every student's life (time that is very profitable to the universities)
It may be. My experience in a highly technical first-rate American college was that I needed to do about 40% of my classes in my major, and there were definite requirements to learn things well outside of my major. I was a hard-science major, and yet I ended up taking classes in history, foreign language, music, literature, philosophy, engineering, and economics.
I think the "why" and advantage of it stem from the fact that America is basically the land of second chances. It's almost never too late to switch from A to B, to go from being an artist to a scientist, or vice versa, to go from academia to commerce, or vice versa. You can spend your youth in dissipation and still become an intellectual. (You can be an intellectual that degerates, too, but that's not very interesting.) You can become a lawyer or physician at age 60 after 3/4 of a lifetime doing something else. You can become President after a career as an actor or reality TV star, ha ha!
That all seems rooted in traditional American values. We're a Protestant state but nevertheless don't really believe in predestination. You can almost always achieve salvation by good works, even if you have massively screwed up. No one is beyond salvation, everyone can achieve miracles, there are no barriers of class or birth or history that inherently bar anyone from doing anything, no one's destiny is written in stone[1,2].
So Americans tends to inherently value generality and flexibility in education, and be willing to trade for it the disadvantage of an increase in educational inefficiency and a consequently significantly longer educational period for any given outcome.
-------------
[1] I'd be the first to admit this is in agonizing tension with American judgmentalism, to our willingness to make snap and sweeping judgments on scanty evidence. That tension is a major source of our domestic social squabbles.
[2] One can argue this stems from the philosophical and religious convictions of America's founders, but perhaps a better argument is that it comes from the tremendous hetereogeneity that results from being an immigrant nation, in which massive differences in cultural values and personalities are mixed willy nilly. It's hard to make *any* general statement about how personal destiny should unfold in America without having some minority or other raise its hand and say "no way, that doesn't work for us."
It’s also relevant that the dynamics you are talking about pertain specifically to undergraduate education whereas university reputation is built mostly on scholarship (PhD programs and up). And at those stages the US does poach many the best from Europe (and other places overseas). Similarly for our technological etc leadership - a good fraction of the people involved did not do their undergraduate work here.
Incidentally, I do think we do graduate education better (and deeper) than Europe…
Although the difference in graduate education is at least somewhat shaped by the difference in undergraduate education. In many European countries, a PhD student is expected to come in with a project in mind, and take 3-4 years to do it. In the United States, a PhD student is expected to take a few years of graduate coursework in their field, while starting to come up with ideas for their project, and then do it, for a total of 5-7 years. This makes sense given that US students are expected to need some advanced coursework in their field before starting a project, while European students are expected to have done this in their undergraduate.
1. In technical professions, what you learn in school is very different from what you actually do on the job. I write software now. None of the tools or languages I use every day were covered in my classes, and most of what I learned in my classes is background knowledge -- not stuff I use every day.
2. A lot of the best technologists working in America are foreign-born. The number should be higher, because our immigration policy is both byzantine and nasty. But the number is already high.
Like many of the massive advantages over America that exist in Europe this is based on WW2. America experienced very limited impact on the functioning of society compared to Europe. America's inferior democracy, model of capitalism, and tons of other factors resulted in extremely disfunctional public institutions.
Inferior version of capitalism? On what metric? (I'm not an American)
"Inferior"? Different. Better at some things, worse at others, yes. But not inferior. If you're not American you need to take some time and learn more about us. If you are American you may be acting out a joke in Gilbert and Sullivan.
"To the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone
every century but this and every country but his own..."
Not actually saying you're an idiot. That's uncivil. But contempt for one's own country is a known bias among smart people. You should guard against it.
America has things it's good at - I have a great respect for many elements of the national culture - but "public institutions" doesn't seem to be on that list. Your physical infrastructure hasn't been properly maintained in decades, large scale construction is prohibitively expensive if not impossible since 50 years ago, the schools system is laughable, and don't get me started on the legislature.
Now, that isn't to say that Europe or Australia or whatever country one compares to is flawless, but every time out public institutions specifically adopt a trend from the US it makes things worse.
One take I've heard is that it's because American high schools are so shocking that students need a couple of years of general education to catch up.
I think it's more a question of incentives. European universities are for the most part funded directly by the national government, which has massive influence over what is taught. The curriculum thus winds up optimised (at least a little bit) in the direction of what government technocrats would want -- short, efficient vocational training.
In the US, universities have different sources of funding, meaning that they're not quite so subject to the whims of government, meaning that they structure things the way that university administrators, rather than government technocrats, would like. That means broad general-education requirements to keep your buddies in the English and Philosophy departments in business. It also means putting off actual useful-for-making-money stuff until grad school, so that students spend as long in university as possible.
The US university system is the best in the world, not because it's well run but because it has lots and lots of money.
It's the best in the world? Huh?
I mean, yeah? There's a dozen different ranking systems out there, but no matter which one you choose you'll find the top of the list dominated by US institutions.
Well, they aren't. I went to a prestigious US college, listed in the top 100 in the country (one of the UCs), and the education was bad enough that I hope people don't learn to think there.
First, what passed for sociology was: basically every problem ever was caused by white cis males. If you're a white cis male, you're the problem. Only whites can be racist. This essay is a fair summary of it: https://sapirjournal.org/social-justice/2021/05/critical-race-theory-and-the-hyper-white-jew/ . One of my professors actually said that "heterosexualism is a paradigm developed by the patriarchy to oppress women".
Second, economic and history education was so inadequate that communism was an extremely common belief, and people who went to more of those classes tended to become more anti-capitalist. Education that leads people to make dumber decisions is worse than nothing.
Third, even STEM courses were more about fulfilling credits than teaching. I was able to skip a couple prerequisite courses, but then when I was approaching my degree I was told that I needed to take those basic courses because they were required for the degree. I had to spend extra time going back to basic courses after passing more advanced courses in the same topic. My friend M.A. also had to.
I suppose it's possible that every other college is worse, and if so making higher education illegal would be a major improvement, but I think it's just that prestige and quality are not well correlated.
"I went to a prestigious US college [snip]"
I won't dispute that, but have you considered that maybe the European universities are *worse*?
However, in reality, the most university rankings are not necessarily indicative of quality of teaching or students: I think near all look at the university's research output, how many Nobel prizes their PhD level graduates are awarded, etc. Usually the staff at top100 university consists of top of the top graduates of the worlds top 1000+ universities, not their modal undergraduate student.
It does help that almost all the rankings are run by Americans; American universities are often Goodhearting those rankings too.
Eg. undergraduate universities are ranked in part by the research output of their academics; this is because the anglosphere combines teaching undergrads and doing research into the same institutions, whereas in continental Europe they're usually different entities (that may be physically next door and even share staff). Thus, European undergraduate universities do very poorly on those rankings.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/two-cheers-for-american-higher-education
> Boris Johnson’s government recently rolled out an initiative to let recent graduates of the world’s top universities move to the UK. That required them to come up with a definition of the world’s top universities. Of the 38 on the list, a staggering 20 are American. And while it’s true most of those are private (though private schools benefit from student loans and are not outside the ambit of American higher education funding), there are six US public universities on the list versus five European universities. There are five California universities on the list (Stanford, Caltech, and three UCs) versus one from Germany.
FWIW, American rankings are more likely to pay attention to quality of education while international rankings are more likely to pay attention to quality of research. (Not that either type of ranking necessarily does a good job of paying attention to what it pays attention to, but the discrepancy doesn't go in the direction you suggest.)
The top university rankings that I know about are from the Times Higher Education Supplement (UK), QS (UK) and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (China). The US News & World Report rankings would be the top US-based one I suppose.
Anyway, comparing the big four university rankings, three of them have a top ten which comprises eight US universities plus Oxford and Cambridge. The outlier is QS, which has five US universities plus four UK universities and the ETH Zurich.
Nit: Harvey Mudd isn't a great example IMO. It's a STEM school, but everyone has to take intro classes in CS, Physics, Bio, Engineering, Math, and maybe Chem, plus at least 10 humanities courses. At least, that was the case several years ago, and they emphasized their liberal-artsiness.
I think at least some colleges also trace it to being a well rounded person/citizen rather than a more modern sort of “special uniqueness” movement. There is an idea (also seen in our K-12 school system) that you need to not just understand whatever you’ll directly use in your career, but also enough to have a good context for what you’re doing and how the world works.
The widely used term 'culture war' is a translation of Kulturkampf, a 19th-century political dispute between German chancellor Bismarck and the Catholic Church. But now we use it without any memory of that, as far as I can tell.
It uses 'culture' more narrowly and 'war' more broadly than I'm comfortable with. The narrow use of 'culture' obscures the multitude of values and habits on which partisan rivals tend to agree (cf. Anthropology 101). The broad use of 'war' trivializes the death and destruction in actual war.
The first fairly thorough alternative I've come up with is 'disputes over identity, respect, education, bodily autonomy, and diversity'. For short, you get 'DIREBAD' or 'IREBAD disputes'. Memorable, but also somewhat childish.
Are there better alternatives?
There is a better alternative to DIREBAD. It's 'culture war'.
The most important feature of a word or phrase, arguably the only relevant feature, is the information it conveys.
Trying to substitute one word for another almost always fails. When it worked, it was because an organized group managed to discredit the old word by attributing meaning to it that people didn't want to convey.
E.g. the n-word conveying that the speaker is a racist, Kiev instead of Kyiv conveying imperialist attitudes, etc.
Culture War is already as close to perfect as language can usually get. It's brief, it's simple, and even someone who hasn't heard the phrase before can usually derive its meaning from context and form.
I reject your contention that it trivializes 'real war'. People have been using the word war metaphorically for longer than people have been speaking modern English.
Your proposed alternative (and any alternative you might come up with) offers no greater benefit than that you prefer it. If that's enough for you to change, by all means do so, but don't expect anyone else to fall in line.
In the US in particular there's sufficient breakdown of mutual respect that actual civil war's less unthinkable than usual. It would take a Constitutional crisis, but those can happen. Scott's piece "Against Murderism" back on SSC pointed this out as a (dire) possibility.
Education's not really an end in these disputes so much as a means; people fight over the keys to the indoctrination machine simply because it's known to be a potent tool for spreading ideologies, and they fight dirty over it because they're desperate more generally. Respect and identity are both key points for both sides (though in entirely-different ways), so those are fine. I agree with the others that the BAD bit is, well, framed poorly (badly?!).
It depends a lot on what you mean by "better." If what you mean is "a term that more people will recognize and immediately understand what is meant" then probably not. That is an empirical question -- you have to just survey or watch people and see what word they use -- and has nothing to do with logic or linguistics.
On the other hand, if by "better" you mean a word that would cause people to look at the issue more constructively, then there indeed might be better words. I actually agree with you about the over-use of the word "war" and the fact that it implies a total breakdown of civil order that should be strenuously avoided if possible. What's going on in the Ukraine is actual culture war, where people are willing to kill each other over whether they are "Ukrainian" or "Russian." It is wise to bear in mind the difference between that and voting for this candidate or that in an election, or having a fierce Internet debate.
But I share Melvin's concern that what you are looking for is word that twists the debate in nonproductive ways towards a preferred outcome. By framing the debate with those terms, you make it hard to even understand the words of some 40-60% (depending on the particular issue) of your fellow citizens. That doesn't seem conducive to a negotiated outcome.
The first problem with your acronym is that by using the words you do, you're already accepting the left-wing framing of the issues.
Let's take "diversity" for example. The left side of the culture war will tell you they're fighting for "diversity", but the right side will tell you they're neither fighting against diversity nor for it, they're fighting for a principle _orthogonal_ to it. The principle they are fighting for, they will tell you, is the principle that people should be judged individually on their own merits, regardless of whether this happens to cause statistically significant discrepancies between different groups on certain metrics. The right will, furthermore, question whether "diversity" is really the principle that the left is fighting in favour of, since "diversity" should be about the whole gestalt of who you are as a person, whereas the left seems to think that a group of people with different genitals and skin colours but who are otherwise exactly identical is somehow maximally diverse.
So by accepting the word "diversity" as what the argument about you've implicitly accepted the left's framing of the issue. Similar critiques could be applied to most of the other words in your acronym.
The right does seem to fight for "traditional values" too, and while whatever that means remains ever vague, it looks like they have something in mind that once was a particular tradition - a decidedly undiverse approach. Of course, like you say, the left is, if anything, even more interested in ideological conformity, and being in position to dictate the terms on which the discourse happens means that there is nobody to call them out on their hypocrisies.
This sounds helpful but a little like Haidt's attempt to explain the differences on specific issues as driven by differing moral frameworks. In such an analysis, my stance on the US "culture war" is puzzlement. When the many individual positions within the two "sides" are examined in isolation, then to be consistent with my internal moral framework I can't pick either of the incoherent "sides". This leads to the problematic conclusion that either my internal moral framework is at odds with the two apparently dominant frameworks in the US, or that the diversity of moral frameworks which exist (of which my own is an example) is being forced by social discourse to fit into an arbitrary dichotomy for purposes which appear deeply troublesome. Neither is a comfortable conclusion to draw.
A little from column A, a little from column B.
We don't remember what "social justice" originally meant other. Terms evolve. Strictly speaking if you're looking for a better translation "kulturkampf' means "culture fight" rather than "culture war" (kulturkrieg).
It's not clear what "social justice" originally meant, if anything. The OED (2nd Edition, 1989) lumped the phrase, with several others, as "one of a very large number of collocations … not [having] gained specialized meaning." (See Volume XV, page 905, 3rd column, 7.a).
Three years ago a young progressive friend showed me the definition "equality" in his pocket dictionary (Merriam-Webster, IIRC). By now it has surely morphed into "equity."
Social justice was originally a Catholic term that meant a social relations (social) that were in line with Catholic natural law principles (justice). It later got adopted by Mills style utilitarians and even later by socialists to have something closer to the modern meaning.
Are you saying that the first occurrences of the phrase "social justice" came from Catholicism? Do you have references? I've long been curious about the term and its evolving meanings.
This fits my experience. Around the turn of the millennium I was involved with campaigning about third-world poverty (fair trade, forgiveness of debts that have been paid several times over in interest, etc), mainly from a Christian perspective. The phrase "social justice" was used in this context, and I even included "social justice" among my interests on my LiveJournal profile. But then around the late '00s I began to notice it being used to refer to identity politics and toxic approaches to race and gender (a category I had noticed but didn't yet have a name for), so I stopped identifying with it myself.
Nowadays I think tongue-in-cheek that "social justice" works like "social smoking", where you're not really a smoker but you just go along with the appearance of smoking to fit in.
This video (c 2006) features the use of "social justice" in a Christian/poverty-relief context.
"Clothing drive for the needy." "Yes! Social justice!" *high five*
Also, interestingly, its title seems to indicate that "PC" refers to traditional Christian values.
EDIT: No wait, the video clarifies the use of "PC":
When we originally made/named the video we were in college and never expected anyone but our college buddies to be watching this junk. So "PC" was a reference to the "Positive Choice" dormitories on campus that allowed no alcohol/tobacco/etc. All our college buddies understood what it meant, but it turns out there is actually a world beyond your college campus (a common mistake).
Re: paragraphs 1 & 2
I think that I understand how interpreting proposals for social (incl. terminological) change primarily through an amalgamation of Chesterton's Fence, Michael Oakeshott, 1984, Robert Nozick, Edmund Burke, and Seeing Like a State is appealing. It seems like a good way to never be tricked into supporting a new bad thing.
But this pro-common sense, anti-theoretical conservatism, while essential to society, is itself another theory. (In other words, what if you read Seeing Like a State through the lens of Seeing Like a State?) This conservatism helpfully encourages caution around new bad things, at the expense of not helping us identify old bad things.
I think the best approach to a proposed social change is finding a balance between (a) revising everything that doesn't make sense, and (b) revising nothing which is somewhat fit for purpose; and then shifting that balance with new evidence.
Re: paragraph 3
I agree. However, there might be a term which survives both objections. By giving my own awkward attempt, DIREBAD, I am trying to provoke someone more creative to try to find that term.
For those of you who have an arts and humanities streak but who've gone into business/science how do you keep up with your more artistic/humanistic pursuits? I find myself regretting not keeping up with my more artistic/humanistic interests. But the opportunities seem to require either more commitment than a working person can give or to be extremely amateur to the point many people have little to no experience. Does anyone have experience with striking that balance? Anyone have advice?
PS: I guess this is technically a request. But I don't think it degrades the discourse too much for an open thread.
No first hand experience, but some people seem to manage to combine medium respected professional success with respectable amateur in their hobby. I suppose it helps if you find one of those things super easy because of whatever (inborn talent, childhood well-spent acquiring critical skills, ).
(Super atypical example: Brian May, a professionally successful musician got his astrophysics PhD accepted in 2008, but at that point it was clearly a scientific hobby project - he started writing it in 1970...)
I have a desk in my office with paint supplies and spend between 0 and 120 minutes there after the kids go to bed. I have a wip book in Google Drive that I work on between 0 and 120 minutes yadda yadda. In the past I've done the same with woodworking, knife making, etc. I work 50 to 65 hours most weeks, volunteer w a few community groups (where I teach kids about art, sometimes), and I find a way.
Because it's a compulsion, I can't not do it. I don't watch TV/movies. I don't "go out" to bars, etc. Not because I'm above those activities, just because first things first (job/family/volunteer work), second things second (art, reading, exercise) and third things.... Usually never.
My limited personal sample says that working in a library is a good pair with a creative pursuit. More library people were doing outside art/music/writing things than in other work settings I saw.
The most successful at this was a (former supervisor) who is an accomplished jazz drummer. He grabbed onto his relatively low-stress, low-average-paying county library job, while playing gigs very often. Then he did that for decades in the same community, building up a strong local musical reputation. Made ends meet, made a lot of music. Did he clear the bar of “professional”? I don’t know if he made any albums.
It seems to matter how dedicated the band mates are. Other arts probably operate differently.
The characteristics of “library” that facilitate this may be it’s a job with regular hours that doesn’t follow you home, surrounded by creative co-workers working with creative products (books/recordings/journals/media).
The problem of “my art/music/poetry feels like I think too much, but I have to think a lot at work” is harder to solve.
The other day in a music store I saw one of those handwritten “bassist needed” posters with the phone number written on little tearable strips. Not intro, not professional. Other people in your art are probably looking, maybe using 1980s methods, maybe more advanced.
A way to get back into something is to sign up for a lesson of it. I guess my other data point is another drummer, this person did work/kids for 25 years, then took a lesson, kept studying with that teacher, joined a performing group, then ran a performing group for over a decade. Just now considering a second retirement after 25 years. It never made ends meet but the other work/family situation did that.
Things seem less cliquey than they used to be.
FWIW I'm the opposite. My life's ambition was always math and physics. For a stupid reason I enrolled in university for Computer Science which didn't interest me very much (the stupid reason being Douglas Hofstadter's 'Godel Escher Bach') . Before switching back to math and physics, I decided to take a year off and go to art school. I never made it back - 26 years later I'm still a working artist (in videogame development). I can't leave because I'm one of the founders of the studio where I work. So I live my other life evenings and weekends. I sure wish they'd hurry up with the cloning machine.
I was an artist who got dragged kicking and screaming into programming because I couldn't find any programmers to do the programmer things for me so I had to learn it myself. For about 10 years after my career started my art skills mostly atrophied.
Honestly what got me back into it was having kids. "Daddy, draw me a garbage truck! Draw a horsie! Draw me a paper doll with a dress!" and now I've done more drawing, sculpting, and painting than I have in over a decade because the kids will just twist my arm (sometimes literally). Maybe as a side effect of being narcoleptic, I'm highly suggestible when I'm thinking about something else, and the kids have picked up on this, and so they can get me to do stuff on an almost hypnotic level (*walk into a room*, *kid shoves a blank piece of paper in front of my face and requests a hippopotamus*, *apparently I'm drawing a hippopotamus now*)
No idea how applicable this is to your situation, or anyone else's.
Dana Gioia is proof by example that the combination is possible. He also seems relatively accessible and actually has some material on merging the two worlds, so you might write him?
I would. Do you, by any chance, have any idea how to write him? I don't see anything on his website. Though I only briefly looked so far.
I'm by no means a close friend of his or anything, just was impressed by his Conversations With Tyler episode and googled a bit about him, but I had https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXWhxMhIjF0 in mind as one example of such material. I know he invests in outreach regarding art, so I'd imagine he'd be worth contacting. As for his e-mail, I can only find dgpoetlaureate@arts.ca.gov.
I did a lot of art as a young adult, and took a couple of classes that gave me a lot of joy late in college. Then I got into a career that was quite challenging and I did not make the time. Got into writing later on, then shifted career tracks and, again, did not make/did not have time.
My advice? You have limited time. Make time for your family, your relationship/spouse, and for your hobby. If you pick a more challenging job, you will have less time as you try to counter not having skills or ability with tenacity. Choose wisely.
Also, stay off the internet.
I saw a headline about monkey pox being seen in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is quite a large state, and I don't think a case of disease here is all that meaningful.
What would be a better size/system for announcing what's going on, good or bad.
Chunk the world by population? Watersheds? Transportation networks? Different systems for different topics?
Monkey pox has since been seen in Philadelphia-- not good news, but a little more meaningful.
In a better world, we'd have global and national health institutions we could actually trust to behave appropriately about disease outbreaks, and reporting on a single case in the evening news wouldn't be necessary at all.
Eh. The tabloids would still need to find things to report on. It's the major outlets reporting on this that is the issue, here.
I am not sure that I would say the same, though, if it was a was a disease worthy of the concern. (By which I mean 'serious communicable public health risk', not already widespread (like HIV) so smallpox, some influenzas, and I am not sure what else.)
By county would be far better - there are still vast differences in size and population in the US, but it would be better.
How ever, there are HIPPA privacy restrictions that may not be respected for some counties. (On edit: by which I mean that there may not be enough people of specific demographics to keep anonymous the patients mentioned in the reports.)
Why the so-called hard problem of consciousness is nonsense
I'd been thinking of writing a post on the subject – and maybe I will. But now I want to post bits of a post written by Keith Frankish, https://www.keithfrankish.com/2022/05/like-a-rainbow/. His 2nd and 3rd paragraphs:
"Here’s one: rainbows. Rainbows are real, aren’t they? You can see them with your own eyes — though you have to be in the right position, with the sun behind you. You can point them out to other people — provided they take up a similar position to you. Heck, you can even photograph them."
"But what exactly is it that’s real? It seems as if there’s an actual gauzy, multi-coloured arc stretching across the sky and curving down to meet the ground at a point to which you could walk. Our ancestors may have thought rainbows were like that. We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there. Nor are there any specific physical features arranged arcwise — the rainbow’s “atmospheric correlates”, as it were. There are just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc."
That's it, really. An analogy to be sure, but a good one. He continues:
"When I reflect on my own experience, it seems to me that my consciousness is an inner world, where the world around me is rendered in private mental qualities — “qualia” — for my benefit alone. But there isn’t such a world. Neuroscience finds nothing like it in the brain, nor even anything isomorphic to it. Rather, it finds complex trains of neural activity proceeding in parallel and triggering a host of reactions — physiological, psychological, and behavioural. My sense of having a rich qualia-filled inner world is an impression created by all these processes, but the processes themselves are as different from the supposed inner world as a moisture-infused mass of air is from a colourful aerial arc."
That is, it's like rainbows. Perfectly real, but not in the most obvious way.
It's like, when Chalmers posited the "hard problem" he asks us to imagine a complex circuit diagram that accounts for everything neuroscience has to say about consciousness. That's the "easy problem," solved!
"Now," he asks, "see consciousness anywhere in that diagram?"
"No", we reply.
"That's the hard problem," and adds another box to the diagram. "Find that box, and you've solved the hard problem," says he.
No. That's just make-work for philosophers, like digging ditches and then filling them back in.
This is a non sequitur.
"My sense of having a rich qualia-filled inner world is an impression..."
Whose sense, again? Who is receiving that impression? The author attempts to have their cake and eat it too, and cannot even criticize the hard problem without introducing it through the back door.
You're trapped in a trick of language. If you wish, you can spin it out into an observer receiving the impression, observing an observer receiving the impression, observing an observer receiving the impression .... But it's a pointless exercise.
The notion of qualia makes no sense without an observer, though.
Pleasure is real, but there is no observer. It just is. Here's what I say about pleasure in my book on music, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2022/06/what-is-musical-pleasure.html
The idea of an experience that no one experiences is much more obviously nonsense.
Experience is not the same thing as observe.
So maybe we drop the idea of qualia.
The difference between non dream state sleep and being awake might be the difference between the extinction of consciousness and consciousness.
"I just need to get it off my chest, you are more than you know, you are more than you know.." https://youtu.be/GsF05B8TFWg ^^
The problem is, the diffraction of light in rain being seen by your retina aka rainbow is nothing mystical but rather a pretty basic phenomenon, although indeed, the very existence of light and the particular physics of the universe is a mystery. We only know "this one universe", one way line of thoughts in our brains, one way time road, one mind in a body. "You are more than you know", meaning consciousness might reside in properties of the universe we have no anatomical/cognitive capabilities to comprehend.
But , as Elon recently tweeted, expanding cognitive capabilities might enable us to see a bit more.
Elon is brilliant, creative, and charismatic. But he has a poor sense of what he doesn't know. I suspect he know more about cars, rockets, and batteries than he does about AI. I don't think he knows much about the brain, much less from first principles. His fantasy of direct brain-to-brain thought transfer, for example, is nonsense, something I argue at some length here, https://www.academia.edu/44109360/Direct_Brain_to_Brain_Thought_Transfer_A_High_Tech_Fantasy_that_Wont_Work
interesting piece.
may I note that, when you have a clear stream of words, thoughts, it is transmitted to the tongue whether you speak or not. This particular output could be easily readable. What Neuralink is proposing when it comes to "telepathy", is just a higher rate of transfer to begin with. Moreover, it is particularly focused on the rate of transfer between brain and machine, as in instead of typing on a keyboard, the neuralink reads and the computer types the words/commands directly. This would greatly improve the ergonomy / interface with Internet. Now it could also be used for brain to brain but requires input in the auditory centrum (which is more easy than inputting in wider area of the brain). Well, there is a whole discussion to be had here. I'd just say that there is a ongoing advancement in BCIs, which allows for a growing precision and diversity in use cases..
Higher rate of transfer, how? If it's reading from the tongue, then rate of transfer is limited by the tongue.
And just what output from brain A is going into the auditory cortex of brain B? The motor output would be unintelligible and there is no auditory output unless you are imagining that person A speaks aloud and his auditory input is sent to the auditory cortex of brain B, which seems pointless when person B could perfectly well hear person A speak. And you still have the problem of brain B identifying which signals are foreign and which are not. Remember, these signals we're talking about are just spikes. And a spike is a spike is a spike. Nothing unique about them.
they have a collection of patterns, the user must train the software/chip on his particular patterns, then the spikes are being finely read. you can see basic version of that with the monkey playing pong at neuralink.
A monkey learning pong is one thing. People learning how one another talk, or whatever, if that's what they're leaning, I don't see where you're going to get any speed-up of information transfer because you're limited by the speed with which people can generate motor output.
All problems are nonsense at their core because nothing really matters in our universe. But that’s just a lazy non-answer to the very real question of how we can replicate conciousness in machines that we build.
I'm not sure how this says the problem is nonsense. You may reasonably argue self-awareness is emergent[1] or an epiphenomenon, but that still leaves open the problem of tracing *how* it arises.
Which would have considerably practical use if we solved it: if we knew what precisely to measure in a brain's electromagnetic activity to detect whether that brain was experiencing the phenomenon of self-awareness, we would help settle a lot of agonizing end-of-life issues. We would have better insight into animals, and be able to make more rational judgments about how we steward their welfare. We might even be able to help those struggling with severe mental illness better.
We might also be able to build self-aware AIs, of course, although I don't find that very interesting.
--------------
[1] I've never understood how anyone could take that analogical argument of Chalmer's seriously. If I show you an individual water molecule, can you point to anything about that molecule that says 10^23 of them will demonstrate the phenomenon of freezing, will create snowflakes? The answer is "heck no." Phase transitions are an emergent phenomenon, indeed this can be proved mathematically. There's no such thing as one or two or even 100 water molecules "freezing," the behavior only emerges when you have a very large number.
Yeah but there's a difference between rainbows and not-rainbows. You get plenty of water drops in the atmosphere all the time, including rain showers, but you don't always get rainbows.
Saying "what I think is a rainbow is just a selection of water drops lined up the right way to interact with sun rays and that's the same as what I think is my consciousness is just a selection of biological processes lined up the right way" is meaningless. You can just as easily argue "rocks don't exist, what we *think* are rocks are just a selection of atoms arranged in a particular sequence" and then we get into "thus I refute Bishop Berkeley" territory.
Why don't we think rocks are conscious, if all that consciousness is, is a simulation of something existing which is only a trick of atoms falling into a particular sequence? Or if not rocks, why not plants? Don't plants have natural processes that push and pull interiorly for attention and resources, too?
Well, personally I think that rocks are conscious -- minimally so. Keys are a bit more conscious: they can recognize their own lock, and reject others. Amoeba are a little more conscious. Fast-forward to cats and dogs, and eventually to humans, who are the most conscious species that we know of (though others might hypothetically exist). Consciousness is a spectrum, not a binary quality; and it's a spectrum in the same way that color is a spectrum. There's no such thing as "red" or "blue", really, there are just wavelengths; we just assign labels to certain parts of it for convenience. Everything else is philosophical ditch-digging.
My one-and-a-half-year-old knows the difference between red and blue, and you don’t?
>we just assign labels to certain parts of it for convenience.
I would say out of necessity, not convenience.
If we didn’t name things we’d have nothing to talk about.
Consciousness isn't a simulation of anything.
There is one view that consciousness is a recursive simulation of the system which is doing the simulating; that is, it's theory of mind, applied to oneself. A cat (according to this view) has a theory of mind, in that it can predict what a mouse might do; however, only humans can analyze their own thoughts in the same manner.
>Don't plants have natural processes that push and pull interiorly for attention and resources, too?
Indeed they do but that doesn’t imply consciousness as Jaynes defined it.
If rocks are conscious they are being awfully chill about it.
I feel like Descartes had the right counterargument here 400 years ago. It's fair to make a reality/perception dichotomy for things in the external world, but you can't do that for the ability to perceive things at all. "You don't actually believe stuff, you just believe that you do", or "There's nothing that it feels like to be you, you just feel like there is" are contradictory.
On the other hand, if you think that belief can be reduced to information processing of the right sort, there's nothing contradictory in dissolving the hard problem of consciousness by saying "There's nothing that it *feels like* to be you, you just *think* that there is". Qualia are then just a cognitive illusion that only needs belief to be real, and belief can be understood in naturalistic ways.
Most of the time I feel like what it is like to be a bat 🦇. ;-)
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/epistemologicalNightmare.html
Welp, the last one seems more Dennett than Chalmers. Isn't that the Dennett explanation of consciousness - you model your own brain as something like the traditional concept of a conscious entity, so of course you think that is what it is?
I think I get what you're saying. Chalmers is just creating an unnecessary 'layer' of awareness.
No, Chalmers is pointing out that electricity and neurotransmitters sloshing around the brain doesn't explain at all why there is awareness (how do you know other brains are sentient?), while Descartes is pointing out the existence of awareness cannot be denied.
Descartes was a dualist as well, which has its own problems, but so does physicalism.
> how do you know other brains are sentient?
Because it is incredibly unlikely that my own brain is super-special ?
That's not evidence though.
Yes, but you don't know that. You don't know if other brains exist at all.
You familiar with Julian Jaynes? This line of thinking is pretty on track with his.
Into ‘The Iliad’ chapter now. This seems a bit far fetched, but it is interesting and engaging.
What’s far fetched specifically? Im curious.
I’m digesting a lot of new ideas I’ll get back when I’ve had some time for it to settle. This is probably going to call for a long walk. :)
Reading Jaynes now. I get the best tips on books here. Thanks btw.
After reading Jaynes, you should go on to read Iain McGilchrist.
I’ll have a look. Thanks.
Seriously though, let me know what you think of it. I would love to discuss him with someone other than myself.
I love this analogy:
“Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate!”
“This is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere.”
Sounds good. I’ll get back to you. :) My gmail is in my profile. It’s a pretty interesting read.
Let me change that to it’s a very interesting read. This is good.
Cool. I get a commission. 😆
Yes, read him years ago. Thought he was both brilliant and a bit loopy. I don't for a minute believe that the Homeric Greeks were zombies lacking in consciousness. But I do like how he tracks their conceptualization of states of mind.
His theory of consciousness is very similar to what you outlined.
As for Homeric Greeks, depends what you mean. The Greeks he was talking about in his stories or the Greeks he was telling his stories to.
I think describing them as zombies is a misunderstanding of what he was proposing. The mechanism for directing one’s behavior was very different in human beings who were pre-symbolic language. I personally feel it makes a lot of sense.
I consider Jaynes' book to be the equivalent of Graves' "The White Goddess" and for the same reason; both authors fell in love with a beautiful over-arching theory which seemed to explain everything, they linked divergent elements into a gorgeously connected chain with one link leading inexorably to the other, and it is all plated up via Classical Greek mythology.
Good reads, rubbish history.
I seem to remember that Graves admitted his book was "poetic history".
Well I don’t recall Julian Jaynes ever stating that he came up with something that explains everything.
Obviously I very much disagree with you. I think Jaynes’ theory answers more questions than it raises. If you want to be more specific I would happily engage with you on some of those points.
I have never read the book by Graves so I have no comment.
I respect Jaynes's theory as interesting, but I do not really give it any credence. There are intriguing parallel lines of thought such as Plato's attitude to the written word. But if Jaynes is right, it seems to me that some people should fall into the bicameral mode even today, and it does not seem that it commonly happens, even in those suffering from schizophrenia , who might seem likely to be disposed to it.
I don't have Jaynes in front of me, but he certainly seemed to be saying that the ancient Greeks lacked consciousness. That is, he mistook the lack of words for various states of mind as lack of those states of mind. From my notes:
The central thesis of Julian Jaynes's study of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is that, whatever consciousness is, it is not inherent in being human. Rather, consciousness is something which human beings created at a certain point in their history because the non-conscious way of conducting life, the bicameral way, ceased to function. Society had become too large and complex and so consciousness had to be created to help regulate social interaction.
Jaynes argues that this condition had been reached in those societies that evolved into large city-states, some of them presiding over extended empires. These societies generally had some form of crude writing system and the use of this writing system contributed to the emergence of consciousness. In particular, Jaynes is concerned with what happened in Greece between the original telling of the Illiad and the Odyssey and the emergence of philosophical texts, such as those of Plato and Aristotle.
>These societies generally had some form of crude writing system and the use of this writing system contributed to the emergence of consciousness
Exactly. But they didn’t “have” some crude writing system, accrued writing system had been slowly developing.
I think it would be fair to say that Jaynes proposed that the modern notion of consciousness began in this transition from the bicameral mind.
He is describing a process that probably played over 1500 years. And then the burst of artistic reference in the last millennia BC to the loss of the voice of Gods, to the silence of God to the fall from Grace (Abrahamic) I find this very compelling. “that little voice in my head telling me what to do,” it’s still in use in our language to this day. It’s much easier to think of it as a cute metaphor, but where’s the excuse to do that? It’s actually a nevus complication to avoid some thing that I think a lot of people find very unpleasant to think about; That in some significant way we are much younger than we think as a species, and that all of our mysticisms of God are actually easily explained. Lots of people don’t like that.
Hmmm.... Sure, there's the concept of consciousness, that's one thing. There's consciousness itself, that's another. Does consciousness itself also require the concept of consciousness? I don't think so. But Jaynes seems to identify them. It's one thing to say that the concept of consciousness evolved over 1500 years. That makes sense. But it doesn't make sense to take that as evidence of the phenomenon of consciousness. It's been there all along regardless of whether or not we conceptualize it.
Frankish is also a philosopher.
re: 2
Lots of interesting points, first person I've seen accurately portray my feelings about the aliens in public health. Speaking of injecting malevolence into health decisions.
What about mandates? I was terminated from a remote position because my organization decided that they wanted to force the decision on me, due to this I am denied any unemployment benefits that I have paid into.
If your goal was to make these things appear malevolent (justifiably or not) wouldn't you use them as a cudgel to purge newfound undesirables from society?
What was this responding too?
(mandates were stupid and why I'm qutting my job shortly.)
It seems to be the case that the bar to involuntarily confine someone experiencing mental illness (whether in a hospital or jail) is extremely low -- as soon as they do something moderately disruptive in public any cop can make this happen if they feel like it.
But the bar to involuntarily treat someone with antipsychotics is way higher, as far as I can tell. If someone says "no", then you have to go get a court order, and it's often only allowed for people who are already committed in state hospitals.
Involuntary outpatient commitment theoretically exists but seems not to happen much and also seems to be institutionally complicated. Certainly more complicated than "arrest -> charges -> no bail -> indefinite jail stay while refusing treatment".
Obviously it would be better for people to enjoy freedom and have their symptoms treated enough to function, vs. having severe symptoms while locked in a jail or hospital. So I wonder why the rules on this seem to be backwards, and how it happened.
My guess is that discussion of involuntary commitment is largely driven by the large, visible, long-term mentally ill population that sleeps on the streets/begs on the corners of basically every decent-sized city and town in the US. I don't know that involuntary commitment is a great solution to the problems caused by that population, or to the large fraction of seriously mentally ill people that end up in prisons that must be even more hellish for them than for the rest of the inmates, but we do need a solution to that. It is nuts that we allow public spaces across the US to be taken over by mentally-ill/addicted/drunk vagrants, and then leave everyone to dodge them or move someplace where the police quietly shoo them off or spend their time in private spaces where the vagrants get run off by private security.
OTOH, I have a relative who is schizophrenic, and whose illness is poorly-controlled. A couple years back during a particularly bad episode, he ended up assaulting a police officer and spent some time in jail, and now has a criminal record. Sooner or later, he will probably end up in prison for a long stretch, and that will be horrible for him and for those around him. There's no way that's a humane response to his problems. OTOH, his father has trouble getting him to take his medicine, and has not been able to force him to do so via any legal means.
As a not-very-informed outsider, it seems like we're too compassionate and libertarian to forcibly treat seriously mentally ill people, but then our compassion extends to letting them freeze to death in cardboard boxes in the winter, or die of an overdose in a ditch, and our commitment to liberty extends to sending these folks to prisons where their illness will probably get worse and will also trigger abuse from other inmates and guards.
I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think it’s actually an “indefinite stay” in America at least. One does have a right to a speedy trial.
I think you seriously underestimate how bad the side effects of many anti-psychotics are. I don't know a lot about the topic but I gather they pretty drastically affect the mind (unsurprisingly, given their goal). Many also have permanent consequences, "side effects" that persist long after the drug has ceased to be administered.
Personally, I'd rather be me locked in a cage than be drugged into being a zombie that superficially resembles the person I used to be, and also it's much easier to continue to plead one's case while in the former state than while in the later.
N.B. I am (broadly speaking) mentally healthy, but given the history of forced psychiatric 'treatment' of healthy people with inconvenient beliefs I don't think that means I (or you) should be blase about giving anyone that level of coercive power.
I have a very solid (though not personal) grasp of how bad the side effects of antipsychotics are -- really bad and as you say, permanent in rare but significant cases -- but I think you probably underestimate how bad psychosis can be in the worst cases.
For instance, there are people whose psychosis, when untreated, impairs them enough that they absolutely would not be able to navigate courts and bureaucracies to plead their case, because they can't string together a coherent sentence on one topic. Yet when treated, even with the serious mental dulling from antipsychotics, they can function fairly normally.
I think choosing between 1) "locked in jail with bad psychosis" vs. 2) "free, treated psychosis, involuntary antipsychotics and their side effects", 2 is really, clearly better.
Of course for a mentally healthy person, choosing between A) "wrongfully locked in jail/hospital, no psychosis" vs. B) "free, no psychosis, unnecessary forced antipsychotics", I agree A is definitely better.
But I don't think biasing the policy choice towards protecting the rights of a tiny number of wrongly diagnosed people is the way to go -- it just doesn't outweigh the huge harm to (at least) tens of thousands of people who should be getting treatment.
Have you ever seen a medical professional publicly arguing that your political opinions are a form of mental disorder?
The first time I saw that; my confidence in "you won't be institutionalized on a faulty diagnosis" plummeted to non-existence. There is at least one doctor in my country who would like to lock me up and "treat" me for my opinions on gun control. How many? I don't know, but at least one who will publicly argue for it, and I've heard none publicly rebutting him.
Suppose outpatient commitment were to become easier and more common than court-ordered inpatient hospitalization (but still harder than just getting a Baker-Act-style observation hold).
How many mentally-healthy people in the United States in the next 10 years do you estimate would receive a false mental health diagnosis on the basis of their political beliefs and be forced into outpatient antipsychotic treatment?
Probably much higher than the number of people who have been "swatted", which is a thing.
Mentally-healthy? Probably almost none. They wouldn't be talking to a doctor who would be in a position to order such a thing.
How many people with some mild depression will be over-diganosed because the medical professional disagrees with their politics? That number will be larger, I don't have a good estimate.
How many in Canada where freedom of speech is much less well protected? Even more.
To me, it's far worse to do harm than it is to not do good.
I would not be willing to sacrifice one person against their will to heal a thousand mentally ill people (also against their will) nor ten thousand, nor a hundred thousand.
The criminal justice system is (ideally) supposed to work on that principle too, although of course it can't be absolutely perfect. So the U.S. standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" to convict someone.
I think there are many cases where whether or not someone has severe mental illness is completely obvious to any professional, judge, or layman "beyond a reasonable doubt".
In such situations, there are different options that all seriously violate someone's liberties.
Option A is to involuntarily confine someone, but let them refuse medication (this can happen in a hospital or de facto in jail).
Option B is to involuntarily confine someone, and then later get a court order to force medication while they're confined, but once they're stabilized and released they can stop taking it.
Option C would be not to confine someone (or do so for a brief period of time), and court order them to receive injectable antipsychotics every month while released.
Among the different options we almost never pick Option C for some strange reason. In my view, this is bad, as the other options harm people's liberties more, in addition to potentially endangering their lives and making their mental health problems worse.
I think it's unlikely to happen, but if government officials wanted to abuse the mental health system to persecute their political enemies, they could do it with any of these options, so I don't see why shifting the default from A/B to C would make that worse.
I think the main reason is that commitment is a politically easy sell for people who are an immediate danger to themselves or others, and arguing that someone is an immediate danger to themselves or others isn't that hard if there's something really wrong with them.
But if somebody isn't an immediate danger to themselves or others, then it's a hard sell to convince courts/voters/etc to force them to do anything voluntarily.
You'd think "this person will predictably be a danger to themselves or others sometime in the next year" would make it a pretty easy sell, almost as good.
But I guess that kind of future prediction is the kind of judgment courts are often supposed to refrain from making. And I guess in many other contexts I consider it a virtue when courts do the wrong thing on procedural grounds, so maybe this one shouldn't bother me so much even though it seems particularly disastrous.
As someone who’s worked in homelessness services, I think I can square this circle:
The bar to institutionalize someone is kinda low - if someone is disruptive or violent in public, and can’t advocate for themselves, there’s a decent chance that they’ll end up in an institution. The trick is that these institutions are massively understaffed/funded, and have a big incentive to put these people back on the streets. Even in extreme cases, they almost always are released within 1-2 weeks.
Incoherently disruptive in public might get you an involuntary psych evaluation. In my area, those have to be accomplished within 72 hours, I think. But that doesn't get you involuntarily held or medicated long-term. And if the only thing you are doing is being disruptive rather than actually be dangerous to yourself or others, you are unlikely to be held because it doesn't fulfill the legal requirements.
The book review thing is awesome, and something i expect to see more of: communities using computers to communicate the community's values, and individuals using computers to help them make choices more in line with their own values.
A feature I notice about this "new" rationalism, or it may just be Scott, but the openness to being corrected is refreshing.
I'm happy about your compliment, but keep in mind that the person who sent in the ivermectin correction feels like I'm doing a bad job responding to it - see https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-corrects-error-ivermectin (obviously I disagree)
It is because he cares more about the truth than being right. As simple as that!! It is why I read his writing. It is extremely valuable, this combination of brilliant plus steadfastly committed to the truth plus passion for sharing it articulately plus sense of humor.
Genuine intellectuals are like that. It was my favorite thing about U.S universities when I moved here from India. Professors seemed to be secure intellectually, have no ego about being wrong, and open to strange questions.
This is famously hard to actually do, even when you agree it is a good idea, but yes, this is considered a rationalist virtue.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7ZqGiPHTpiDMwqMN2/twelve-virtues-of-rationality
"The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting, the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy."
Agree - very refreshing. I somehow think Scott does it in a more convincing, genuine way than your average rationalist.
Regardless, it's awesome.
I think it's supposed to be a standard rationalist virtue. I'm not sure whether it's better here than in other rationalist spaces.
In my experience, rationalists are way way better at this than average people, although they're not necessarily good at it. But the baseline of admitting mistakes on the internet is so low that it's really not close.
The big thing is to find an audience which awards you with increased credibility for admitting mistakes, then you can admit mistakes to your heart's content.
If Paul Krugman (to pick a semi-arbitrary example) went around admitting _his_ mistakes then he'd lose credibility instead.
It's funny you should mention that, since I recall Paul Krugman saying that he was wrong about some things on Twitter a month or two back.
It depends a little on the nature of your followers, whether they are following you in the hopes of enlightenment or victory. If the former, then yes admitting you are wrong when you are is a positive for them, because their ultimate goal is understanding and that is only advanced when error is detected and corrected. But if the latter -- if you're seen as a general leading your followers to victory over an Evil Other -- then there's no great advantage of admitting mistakes, because it only reduces esprit de corps. Better to quietly correct course and forge on, pretending to infallibility with some rationalization ("I totally meant to do that! It was the following subtle strategem which I can now reveal...")
Krugman admits his errors. He just does so very *quickly*; almost fast enough to say "blink and you'll miss it."
Here are two examples: after the 2016 election of President(-elect) Trump, he said that he estimated the stock market would recover "to a first approximation, never." (that's from memory but it's very close.) He admitted error and retracted within a day or three. He did it in one sentence whereas he devotes entire columns to reminding people of times when he went against the crowd and was right.
He also admits that he thought that inflation would pass quite quickly; in other words that it would meet the popular and not technical definition of "transitory." He has admitted miscalculation on this matter
Krugman is known for stating opposite things at different times, even arguing each conclusion is obvious. When doing so he does not admit that he previously stated the opposite. If you search for Krugman vs Krugman you'll find numerous results, often where his columns contradict his own textbook.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/03/025752.php
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/krugman_versus.html
I don't want to link pages where people mock him for calling on the Fed to create a housing bubble and then denying that the Fed is responsible for a housing bubble (or even that they'd be capable of creating one rather than just inflating all prices), because I agree with Scott Sumner that the concept of a "bubble" is rather dumb and the people crowing over that are much wronger than Kevin Erdmann was.
Not with me he wouldn't
It's just Scott :-/
Also https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/mistakes/
Not just Scott. https://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes
Your point of departure should be that in most European systems criminal investigations are initiated and run not by the police but by an Examining Magistrate (the name varies) who is a criminal lawyer. The burden of proof is slightly different, and the way the trial is conducted is fundamentally different.
One big difference I’m aware of is that all “not guilty” criminal verdicts are final in the US but can be appealed in Europe. It’s one reason why some European criminal trials can last a decade.
I mean, an obvious point which you probably know already is that European system is not a system at all, but a collection of various systems. Although it is true that compared to the US, they probably mostly do share some very basic characteristics, especially if you limit yourself to continental countries (which is not Britain, though)
The US sytem is also a collection of systems, to a lesser extent. Louisiana runs on civil law, like most of continental Europe does.
The characterization of the bill seems to be essentially lies:
1) No, all girls who participate are not required to undergo testing. Only those whose status is challenged, and nobody, neither conservative nor liberal, has an incentive to challenge every girl’s status.
2) No, the bill does not proscribe invasive genital searches of any particular type. It does not even require anatomical exams, they’re just one of the possible proofs, along with T levels and genetic testing. It requires that physical characteristics consonant with biological sex be used to ascertain status, not identification.
3) No, this is not likely to lead to sexual abuse of girls. Parents will of course be present during physical exams if they wish.
Seems like pretty typical hyperventilation and concern trolling because they realize that the legislation will effectively ban MtF athletes from girls’ sports.
Somebody has an incentive to challenge any given girl's status: competitors. Challenge the star striker before the big match, throw her off her rhythm because she has to face literal rumors of her being a man in disguise. The trolling is going to be off the charts.
Accusations have to be credible and there are very many girls. Even if every star was credibly challenged, that’s like a <1% challenge rate at best, depending on the sport.
> Accusations have to be credible
I don't see anything in the text https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/solarapi/v1/general_assembly_134/bills/hb151/PH/02/hb151_02_PH?format=html that says this. I searched for "dispute" and "accus" and "credibl" and didn't find it.
I don’t mean to imply that it’s part of the law, but as in that accusations cannot be made arbitrarily against all participating girls for the simple reason that nobody will bother taking it seriously.
So your point about it mischaracterizing the bill is that people won't follow the reading of the bill?
Funny, if *I* had a dollar for every time I was told "the slippery slope is a fallacy!" and then that thing that will never, ever happen keeps happening, I'd be hiring Jeff Bezos to be my butler's butler's footman.
The bad outcome that you're referring to is that general practice physicians are utilizing physical exams to sexually abuse young girls?
Is your position that physical examinations of young girls should be banned? If not, what is your position? It can't be 'we should have fewer exams,' because that doesn't solve this abuse problem you assert exists.
Physical examinations of young girls should for the most part be left to the discretion of young girls and their parents, and focused on ensuring the continued health of young girls. *Mandating* physical examinations of young girls for any other reason, and particularly exams with a focus on the genitals of the young girls in question, is going to result in people being very legitimately skeptical of your motives.
The statute doesn't mandate examinations.
It says that a contested student can present a doctor's note giving the doctor's determination.
And to stop the doctor saying "do you feel like a boy or a girl?" as the evaluation, the doctor is limited to three evaluation criteria.
One of them is a physical exam.
The addition of that item would let Caster Semenya, er, pass.
Athletes have a lot of physical exams while they engage in sports, and here is one site about it:
https://barcainnovationhub.com/athletes-physical/
That is a lot more thorough than simply going to your family doctor.
Medical examinations may be certified by law:
https://www.docdoc.com/medical-information/procedures/certified-medical-examination-for-athlete
Sports medicine is its own branch:
https://www.sportireland.ie/institute/performance-service/sports-medicine
And yes, they do it for junior/underage athletes, in some cases as young as seven:
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/45/4/364.2
http://www.sportmed.ee/en/services/examinations/examinations-for-young-athletes/health-examination-guide/
https://kidshealth.org/en/teens/sports-physicals.html
So this is not some unnatural horrible new intrusion into a child's personal health, this is a routine occurrence. Checking sex where there is a question raised about the sex/gender of a young athlete is just an extension of what already happens, My understanding is that chromosomal testing is done by a cheek smear, but if I believe the opinion piece in the Washington Post (and I don't) then it will be back to nude parades and forced genital examination:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289604595_The_history_and_current_policies_on_gender_testing_in_elite_athletes
"Ohio’s measure requires that “if a participant’s sex is disputed,” the athlete in question must provide a doctor’s note confirming their physical sex on the basis of “the participant’s internal and external reproductive anatomy,” “the participant’s normal endogenously produced levels of testosterone” or “an analysis of the participant’s genetic makeup.”
So a cheek smear or a blood test will also do, but that won't gin up the same outrage as "forced paedophile abuse" now will it?
And while we're at it, Mr. Schilling, can you explain to me the meaning of "it's not gonna lick itself"? I'm not an American, I'm not familiar with American slang, I have heard this in a certain context but since it's clearly appropriate for young children, then it must have an innocuous secondary meaning I'm not getting, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIR7Xk52jLY
As I said earlier, if you believe the law mandates anatomical exams, you have badly misread it and need to correct your understanding or you will, at some point, be accused of arguing in bad faith due to the depth of your misreading.
As to whether any ‘legitimate skeptics’ believe that this law is a cryptopedophilic conspiracy on the part of legislators to deliver young girls to the family doctors who are slavering at the opportunity to molest them under guise of checking their biological sex—no, that would be lunacy if anyone actually believed it, but they don’t.
It's even more ironic since these people would be totally happy with bringing the child to a doctor for a physical exam in order to get a prescription for puberty blockers and/or hormone treatment medications.
'Dr. Brown examined little Torrence and declared xe was intersex based on xer genitalia" - normal medical treatment, keep your nose out of patient-doctor affairs. Torrence at eight years of age is old enough to decide if xe is female or non-binary and consent to appropriate interventions.
"Dr. Brown examined little Torrence and declared he was physiologically male based on his genitalia" - oh no, this is only a general practitioner not even a urologist or gynaecologist, this is paedophilia and child abuse! Torrence is a child who cannot legally consent to this!
I believe the correct response, based on the recent Florida ruckus, is "Okay groomer."
Now of course I'm not actually calling you a groomer, just want to point out how this looks from the other side. It's fucking unpleasant.
Now I'm wondering: if there was actually a market for it, how difficult would it be to make a quick-and-cheap genetic test for sex chromosomes?
You've got that already when you do any of those "spit in the vial" ancestry DNA tests. There are cheap (relatively) buccal swab test kits, I think the expense would be getting lab tests done since most of these seem to be marketed at bulk sample testing (e.g. the police are taking swabs):
https://blog.puritanmedproducts.com/ancestry-dna-kits-collection-by-swab-or-spit-what-they-reveal
https://lifescience.canvaxbiotech.com/product/buccal-swab-collection-stabilization-kit/
https://tritechforensics.com/buccal-swab-collection-kit/
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/js-genetics-announces-launch-of-xcat-ks-a-bloodless-cheek-swab-test-for-the-diagnosis-of-klinefelter-syndrome-and-other-male-sex-chromosome-aneuploidies-149895305.html
If the twitter thread was arguing that such an outcome was a possibility of the law being passed (one that the OP thought was highly likely), I would be much more sympathetic, rather than the actual claim that the law _requires_ these things, which it simply does not.
If they got sent to a sufficiently uncharitable/malicious doctor, yes, something like the described is absolutely possible. And maybe most doctors in Ohio are sufficiently malicious. Note however, that the bill _does not say_ that the school and/or the accuser gets to pick the doctor. Merely that there must _be_ a signed doctors note. Presumably the parents would pick a doctor they know and trust.
-edit- By the way, none of this is meant to be in support of the bill. I don't think amateur school athletics are important enough to warrant this level of attention, but I do think that in this community of all places, truth in argumentation should be valued.
The characterization from that twitter thread seems to be pretty hyperbolic. The only thing the bill says (according to the link from the thread) is that sex must be confirmed by a signed doctors note and shall be determined solely by
1) Internal/external reproductive characteristics
2) natural hormone levels
3) genetics
I assume this is to prevent doctors who are pro trans rights from signing off on trans athletes.
That being said, the bill does not specify _in any way_ how those things are to be verified.
The set of examinations and tests outlined in the thread certainly seem like they _could_ be used to satisfy those criteria, but they also seem completely unnecessary. It's like saying that a bill requires gas chromatography on every baked good when all it really does it ban chocolate chips and sets up a definition of what chocolote is.
I suppose we will see how the courts wind up ruling on whatever the first case about this, but I would be shocked if any student athletes are _actually_ subjected to those tests.
Yep. I also actually read the text of the bill. What you say is correct. The bill text is not hard to find. She even linked it from her thread! I was tempted to report the thread for misinformation, but I don't believe any action would have been taken, and there was a nonzero chance of retaliation, so I let it go.
You mean "competed in the men's races last year" 'girls'? I think Ohio is on to something there.
Girl. Singular. There was only one trans girl in all of Ohio competing at the high school level last year, according to OSHAA (which already has rules in place for transgender athletes). Republicans are trying to solve an almost nonexistent problem because they see an opportunity to fight the culture war.
If it's no big deal, then why add a bunch of legal and medical complexity to a sport that seems to be operating just fine? I thought Republicans were supposed to be the party of small government.
While I think we should keep boys out of girls' sports, you're right that having the whole state handle this is probably too much.
I don't know the right answer, but let different school boards figure it out. They surely all won't make the correct call, but at least some of them will make something appropriate for their community.
The state of Ohio should have, at most, provided cover to school districts to enforce the rules they make.
I would imagine it's a big deal to *her*.
And a big deal to her competitors I'd imagine, who are disadvantaged by having to compete against an ex-boy, even one taking hormones. The trans sports issue is interesting, because it's a stark demonstration of the ascendancy of "oppression olympics" principle over the older "interests of the many outweigh interests of the few" one.
Ignoring the larger issue at hand, I think you're mistaken on this particular point.
I imagine Matt's claim would be that the harm being done by the law is significant in some sense, but that the *state interest* being advanced is trivial.
Like if the MA state legislature passed a law requiring specifically my dog to be killed in some graphic and painful manner. Like, ok it wouldn't be the worst thing a government has ever done, but it's not great. And it would, in some sense, be trivial and beneath them to get involved with.
Link to the actual bill seems dead, do you have one?
Unclear on why a birth certificate wouldn't be sufficient for proof of sex.
Most states (including mine) have ways to receive amended birth certificates in original format after a legal gender change.
it worked for me, but in case it's twitter weirdness, here's the link: https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/solarapi/v1/general_assembly_134/bills/hb151/PH/02/hb151_02_PH?format=pdf
That is not actually the current rule in Ohio: https://ohsaaweb.blob.core.windows.net/files/Eligibility/OtherEligibiltyDocs/TransgenderPolicy.pdf
If a trans girl wants to participate in girls' sports, they need to have undergone hormone treatment for at least a year and have a doctor's note saying that they don't have a physical advantage over genetic females in the same age group. (Trans boys who are being treated with testosterone likewise need to show that it hasn't led to atypical-for-a-boy muscle mass).
This strikes me as a much more balanced approach than banning trans athletes from their chosen gender's sports outright. And it also requires less looking at kids' genitals.
I don't think this bill is *specifically* about looking at kid's genitals, but I do think this bill is intended to make life unpleasant for trans people rather than to "protect fair competition," because as I pointed out, the governing body for high school sports in Ohio already has rules about that, rules which are far less restrictive and actually allow at least some trans boys and girls to compete in the division they identify as.
Not that the problem even needed solving, as far as I can tell - there's no epidemic of boys deciding to trans themselves so they can sweep the gold medals in girls' sports, Republicans are passing these bills purely out of fear that someone *might* do that.
Almost no one is not the same as literally no one. Why is it a problem for the legislature to pick on one trans kid? Because it's mean. And that kid probably has a hard enough time without getting singled out by the legislature for recreational bullying.
Really ridiculous bit there about "unemployable".
Hell even I don't think that just self identification makes me a woman. Essentially none of us do. That's why we transition in the first place.
You know, what I really appreciate about progressives is their calm approach to even hotbutton topics, no exaggeration, hysteria or scaremongering!
"The tweet is about a bill that would legally permit child molestation for suspected individuals, not even by urologists or gynecologists mind you, just general examination of private areas by any doctor, which a child by definition cannot consent to"
(1) If they can't consent to a medical examination, they sure as hell can't consent to puberty-blockers
(2) By this definition, I was molested as a child by a doctor! Let me regale you all with the harrowing account of non-consensual body examination back when I was about six or seven, and the school doctor was visiting, and my mother brought me in for the general check up, and I didn't want him to listen to my heart because I'd have to take off my top and he would - gasp, the horror! - see my vest.
Well, even though I didn't consent, this hideous violation of my bodily autonomy by a common or garden GP - not even a urologist or gynaecologist! - occurred (he declared my heart was ticking away like a grandfather clock).
Until we have the first generation of mutilated children who were put on puberty blockers and never went through normal puberty, then perhaps transitioned straight into hormone therapy for their 'affirmed' gender, who want to compete as trans men/trans women, we won't be able to say if this means they are on level playing grounds with cis men/cis women in sports.
But for the current generation? Do I think Andraya Yearwood is a real girl? I have no opinion there.
But I'm damn sure Andraya Yearwood should not have been let compete in high school female athletics when she still had the fuzzy moustache of a teenage boy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwlKwuC6LkE
She got to college via her track and field victories, and was on the college team in her first year, but seems to have given that up in favour of being a spokesperson on LGBT+ affairs. So being a female high school athlete was a grift, to get her where she couldn't get while competing as a male, and once that juice had been squeezed out of the orange, it was dropped.
As for the girls she beat in those high school and national events? Sorry girls, it is more important that Transness be celebrated than that you get to win on your merits in your chosen sport. So what if Andraya beating you means she got the scholarship and you didn't? And you've missed out on that spot for the nationals and maybe the Olympics? Be glad to sacrifice for her benefit!
Medical examinations are not molestation. Lying does your cause no favors.
No more-so than regular physical checkups, which frequently involve genital examination, by normal doctors.
That depends a lot on how you define "competitive". If you define it as all players being expected to devote a high level of effort, care a lot about winning, etc, then it would be pretty easy to set up multiple divisions at different ability levels where women could still compete.
On the other hand if you define "competitive" to require competing against the best practitioners of the sport, women already don't participate in competitive sports.
I've read the 95 theses. Not one of them was anywhere in the vicinity of "we need to do something about all these Witches".
The early Protestants were quite clear and explicit about why they didn't want to be Catholics any more. They said a lot of things that got a lot of them killed for their trouble in a way that "hey, Pope-dude, can we get some help dealing with all the witches?" probably wouldn't have. So I'm inclined to take their word for it that it was the indulgences and the nature of salvation and the scope of spiritual authority, etc, and not so much the witches.
I don't say "witches first, then Protestantism" but that "Reformation, Protestantism, now what do we do about an old problem when we've junked the old solutions? We need new ones now!"
A lot of downstream effects happen due to reforms of *all* natures (which is partly why I'm a social conservative). "Let's do away with X, a bad addition which is totally man-made!" often becomes "How were we to know Y would happen?" (Chesterton's Fence).
Thus, the perennially-amusing to me dilemma that faced Luther when it came to Philip of Hesse. Philip was married, didn't like his wife any more, and wanted to ditch her and marry his mistress. Philip was now A Good Protestant, so he asked Luther for advice how he would go about this, on a Scriptural basis of course.
Luther, who had already butted heads with Henry VIII over various matters including his attempts to ditch Catherine of Aragorn and marry Anne Boleyn (Luther said 'no'), tried taking advice from another reformer, and they came up with "well, we can't give you a Scriptural reason for divorcing your wife, but how about polygamy? Marry a second wife, we can back this up by the Patriarchs".
Luther didn't *like* this course, because even though he had stripped marriage of the status of a sacrament, he was still in the mindset that Christians should only have one (living) wife at a time. But this was a dilemma that arose, which he couldn't really have foreseen, and which was a result of the Reformation: now I'm a Protestant and you've junked the sacramental nature of marriage, surely I can just dump my old wife and take a new one? 'We're going back to the pure Gospel and a corrected, purified Christianity' became, in this case, 'We're recommending bigamy'.
Even this article, which is very pro-Luther, pro-Reformation, and very old now, has to admit with some wincing that it didn't go too well:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3154607.pdf
"Philip's court preacher Melander, a stormy, eloquent, ready-witted man of none too strict life, confirmed his prince in his views. He told him that the idea that a second marriage by which scandal was to be avoided was forbidden to Christians rests upon a misunderstanding of the Bible, just as does the prohibition of the marriage of ministers, of the eating of flesh, etc., which were previously looked upon as detestable as this. Philip of course was sure of the permissibility of bigamy, but inasmuch as the latter was a capital crime in the lawbooks of his suzerain, the emperor Charles V, he wanted to make all things safe by getting the consent both of the Wittenberg reformers and through them of the electoral prince of Saxony, John Frederick. The consent of the former would, he thought, maintain his credit before the evangelical world, and that of the latter would save him from being pounced upon by the emperor. Besides, the mother of the girl (Margaret von der Saal) whom he wished to marry demanded conditions something similar, as she wished to safeguard her daughter from dishonor."
So the author puts the blame on Melander rather than Luther, and paints this patsy as being a naughty boy himself and not at all a good, proper Protestant preacher, in order to dance around "yes, our ministers said bigamy was a-okay" because even today, we tend not to approve of bigamous marriages.
To be less harsh, the 'accretions' of which the Reformers complained that the Catholic Church has burdened the plain teaching with, were responses to exactly these kinds of problems of living in the world and dealing with pastoral issues. Here was their very own problem of "when the doctrine and the practice come into conflict, what do you do? Do you insist on the strict letter of the law? Can you find an accommodation? How do you soften the burden on the weaker brethren?" and boy, was it a doozy for them to go "Well dang, we better go back to Old Testament times (even though we're banging the pulpit about Grace not Law and the New Dispensation) and take the example of the Patriarchs who married more than one wife at a time to solve *this* one".
Also that I'm pretty sure if it had been Hans the ploughman rather than Philip of Hesse who came to them with this problem, their attitude would have been rather different. So they too were getting caught up in worldiness and regarding the persons of the rich, just like the corrupt old Romanists.
It was also the problem of "the plain word of the Gospel is enough, just read it and you will have the answer". When people read 'the plain word' and disagreed with Luther's interpretation, he didn't like that either. There was only one 'right' interpretation and he knew it, by his scholarship and authority, etc. But all the Reformers had this problem - that's how Calvin ends up burning Servetus as a heretic. If you let everyone read 'the plain word' and interpret it, don't assume that their interpretation will jibe with your 'obviously this is the right one' interpretation.
If you tell me that the folk religious belief in witches (also elves, fairies etc) survived Christianity in northern Germany more strongly than it did elsewhere, then I'd be inclined to agree with you. German folklore is full of witches to this day.
If you tell me that the latent belief in witches caused protestantism, that's where I'd say you haven't really joined the dots. How about this: protestantism arose in northern Germany and England because these places were far from Rome?
I am skeptical of the claim that Protestants did more witch hunts than Catholics. I read an account of witch-hunts, from someone who was there and strongly disapproved, and he admitted that his own church (Catholic) tended to do it more.
Some people think that the Inquisition was a witch-hunt, when in fact it was a heretic-hunt and many inquisitors were skeptical that witches existed. Maybe this is what you were thinking of?
IF you feel like looking at the primary or secondary literature, you could look for it by yourself. One significant feature of Early Modern period witch hunts is that there were trials, and both the Catholic church and Protestant secular authorities kept records of the procedures. The documentary evidence and records survives.
I don't know about Catholics in general, but I recall that witchcraft trials were a bit rarer in Spain because the Spanish Inquisition was a centralized bureaucracy and simply didn't approve of them, preferring to concentrate their efforts at their usual targets.
My own view on it is less a resurgence of paganism, and more that Protestantism stripped away the accretions around Christianity, which included a lot of folk traditions that were pure superstition and probably warmed-over survivals from actual paganism.
I think we all remember the popular history version we learned in school as to why Luther became a monk? Wikipedia gives it as follows:
"On 2 July 1505, while Luther was returning to university on horseback after a trip home, a lightning bolt struck near him during a thunderstorm. Later telling his father he was terrified of death and divine judgment, he cried out, "Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!" He came to view his cry for help as a vow he could never break. He left university, sold his books, and entered St. Augustine's Monastery in Erfurt on 17 July 1505"
Well, this was the old tradition. You invoked a patron saint for help about *everything* and anything. You had specific prayers, holy medals, blessed candles, blessed palm (from Palm Sunday Masses), holy water, Easter water, relics, and the paraphenalia of charms and vows and votives that went along with that. So even if malefic powers like demons, witches, ghosts and the Devil himself were prowling around, you had protections.
Luther and the other Reformers stripped all that away. They went back to (their notion of) the pure Gospel. Now you were left with your faith in God alone, and the Bible. This was like standing in a forest full of wolves and bears but now your gun has been taken away and you are left there in your socks, with just "My faith will protect me". Except that the doubts about justification, salvation, and predestination that went along with Reformed debates also left you with "but what if I am deceived and my faith is not a true faith?"
So then witch-hunting, because you had been inculcated with a strong sense of sinfulness, a strong sense of the personal presence of the Devil, and responsibility for your own salvation being dumped on your own shoulders - remember, there are no mediators between God and man like priests and popes any more. So before where old Hannah in the cottage at the end of the village could do charms and spells and provide herbs and cures, and maybe on the side do curses and charms to cause misfortune, before you had a protection against witches and fairies if you hung up a countercharm of your own or got a blessed candle and burned it and so on. Now you have nothing of that nature, but old Hannah still has her powers - and maybe they come from the Devil himself, this time! So in pure self-preservation, you have to hunt out the witches before they can come after you.
There does seem to have been something in the Germanic imagination that inclined them to this; the infamous "Malleus Maleficarum" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum was written by a German Dominican.
By contrast the big (and really only) witchcraft trial in Ireland happened in the 14th century in Kilkenny, and was as much a power struggle between the Norman-Irish clergy (in this case the Bishop of Ossory, Richard de Ledrede) trying to impose their authority (and more importantly Continental values of Catholicism) on the native Irish church, and local politics in Kilkenny amongst the wealthy and well-connected, as it was about witches and religion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Kyteler
"Dame Alice Kyteler (1263 – later than 1325) was the first recorded person condemned for witchcraft in Ireland. She fled the country to either England or Flanders, and there is no record of her after her escape from persecution. Her servant Petronilla de Meath (also spelled Petronella) was flogged and burned to death at the stake on 3 November 1324, after being tortured and confessing to the heretical crimes she, Kyteler, and Kyteler's followers were alleged to have committed.
...Kyteler was born in Kyteler’s House, in County Kilkenny, Ireland. She was the only child of a Flemish family of merchants settled in Ireland since the mid- to late thirteenth century. She was married four times, to William Outlaw, Adam le Blund, Richard de Valle, and Sir John le Poer.
...Ledrede made initial attempts to have Kyteler arrested, and Kyteler called on the assistance of powerful friends. The bishop wrote to the Chancellor of Ireland, Roger Utlagh (Outlaw), demanding that she be arrested. Using the decretal Ut Inquisitiones (1298), designed to protect the faith, Ledrede demanded that secular powers concede to church wishes, and this point of law became a thorny issue throughout the trial. Kyteler was related to the Chancellor (he was probably her first husband's brother) and he asked the bishop to drop the case. The chancellor demanded that Kyteler be excommunicated for at least 40 days before the trial, which caused a delay in the proceedings. This allowed Kyteler to flee to Roger Utlagh. Ledrede accused Utlagh of harbouring heretics, but a commission cleared him of any wrongdoing. The bishop then charged Kyteler and her son, William Outlaw, with the crime of heresy. William was a powerful man and was related to many in the ruling classes. He called upon his friend, Sir Arnold le Poeur, a Senior Official in Dublin, who had de Ledrede thrown in prison in Kilkenny Castle.
...It is said Kyteler fled to England. She appears no further in contemporary records. The Bishop continued to pursue her working-class associates, bringing charges of witchcraft against them. Petronilla de Meath was flogged and burned at the stake on 3 November 1324. Petronella's daughter, Basilia, fled with Kyteler. Kyteler's son, William Outlaw, was also accused inter alia, of heresy, usury, perjury, adultery, and clericide. Multiple courts refused to try the case, but he was eventually convicted, excommunicated, and briefly held in prison. Outlaw was released after he begged for forgiveness from Ledrede. Additionally, he was able to reverse his excommunication by visiting the Holy Land while following specific rules."
So, not really a great example of the alleged nine million slaughtered during the Burning Times, now is it?
Sure, but you have to feel for poor Petronilla. Prompted me to casually google alleged 9 million and found this nice explainer by Prof. Diane Purkiss (probably not a witch) https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/eight-witchcraft-myths/
Yeah, she got the rough end of the stick, being a servant and so without the same protection as her mistress, who was able to flee abroad (at least she took Petronilla's daughter with her). I don't know what the Bishop of Ossory was thinking, he seems to have been sincere in his attempts at reform or whatever he was doing, and certainly Alice got herself into trouble over the four marriages, with some of her step-children later alleging she had poisoned or otherwise done away with some of her husbands; that seems to have started the whole trouble.
But a real witch-hunt craze never took off in Ireland, partly due to the Church and partly due to the stronger belief in fairies; anyone with healing/mystic powers was credited with getting them from the fairies, not the Devil.
The nine million thing drives me bananas because it is so unfeasible, and even worse one of our folksingers did a song about it (he should have known better) which is wince-inducing in its New Agey inanity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASORLE6dPYU
While this is interesting, I'd characterize the lead-in as somewhere between "Betteridge's Law" and "clickbait".
It's seems a big jump from "Protestant interest in witch hunts may stem from pre-Christian traditions on witches" to Protestantism being a "resurgence" of paganism.
No. Protestantism is just institutionally weak against infiltration by existing folk-religious beliefs, such as the belief in witchcraft. The hierarchy of RCs allows them to crack down on divergent beliefs as they appear, but the personal relationship of Protestants to their faith allows greater leeway in the formation of heresies, so their suppression of latent endemic paganism is less effective.
I say this as a Protestant myself; as correct as I believe my beliefs to be, I admit that RC institutionalism has its advantages. Note the perennial ‘prosperity gospel’ and ‘many ways to God’ heresies that plague the Protestant church on right and left in the States; RCs have great success in quashing these, but Protestants struggle.
The main place where RCs struggle on suppression of folk religious heresies is that they folded early on ancestor worship and folk sacrifices: thus you see the lighting of candles, praying to saints, multiplication of sacraments, etc.
I've always thought that Catholicism was more pragmatic - it could accept various syncretic concepts that a stricter ideology would call heretical, but the more problematic ideas could be headed off at the pass.
I think there is a time dimension -- Catholicism was more pragmatic early on, before it was increasingly codified.
A stricter ideology might call X heretical, but within the framework of Protestantism your stricter ideology and judgement of heresy is just the words of one man. The Roman Catholic Church has a way to define what is dogma and what is heresy - papal bull backed by the threat of excommunication. Protestants, generally speaking, do not (there is *some* capability in the Anglican Communion, but not a lot even there), which means that there's no real way to delegitimise priests that go off the reservation and bring their congregations back into doctrinal alignment; you can criticise them and that's about it.
This would make sense if Catholics didn’t have a history of fighting bitterly with one another around very very very fine theological points where it would have been more pragmatic to simply embrace minor differences as long as they served the spirit of the faith. Witness the Filioque and Great Schism, which could have and should have been mended centuries ago but remains idiotically present dividing the RCs from the Orthodox.
Protestants are much more pragmatic and tolerant of minor differences, having little central authority and few drawn lines. But this also tends to division after division (and multiplication of heresies) as no one can force others to fall into line.
I was thinking more about the peasantry - so long as they went to Mass and didn't openly worship idols, it didn't matter if they ascribed more powers to the Saints than they technically possess.
That’s more ‘pragmatic’ in one way—it folds in the predilection for ancestor worship and prayer to local spirits in exchange for magical favors—but as I said, the RCs are extremely unpragmatic in other ways, such as cutting out and rejecting huge swaths of cobelievers with 99% identical values and practices on the basis of legalistic theories of the Godhead that are rooted in basically nothing but tradition and would if reconciled have near zero effect in real life, only on the feelings of angry theologians.
This tiny difference has massive effects on the common believer, or the peasantry as you call them, although this isn’t a Middle Ages issue.
I think more that Luther had an ego the size of Saturn and insecurity issues the size of Jupiter, so him telling Albert to do that was also, aside from politics and polemics, a case of "since I, with my giant brain, have worked out that monastic orders and the likes are WRONG and clerical celibacy is WRONG and the Pope is WRONG, and since I have given up being a monk and got married and become a Protestant, why doesn't everyone else do likewise now that I have CHECKMATE, PAPISTS? Could it be that I am out of touch - no, the kids are just wrong" 😁
I fall into the ‘in a damaging way’ category too. Getting a dumbed down ‘for the kids’ version of RC dogma heavy on original sin and eternal damnation at 9 was not good for me.
I’m pretty sure it made an ideal hook for the onset of OCD a decade later.
That was back in the ‘old days’ of the early 1960’s though. I think they may have reframed things into more of a ‘Jesus loves you’ presentation for kids that age after that.
There was the added complication of my mother’s mother having my mom exorcised at 3 that left her never comfortable in her own skin for the rest of her life.
I think I’m the only person my mother ever told about that. Kept it a secret locked away from her 5 younger sibs, my dad, my own younger sibs and the rest of the world.
The way I understand the event, my mom ran around the house as a toddler sayin ‘monkey, monkey’. Obviously a case of demonic possession so gramma called in a priest.
My mom was the first child after a still birth and my grandmother was a turn of the 20th century Italian immigrant who had two years of formal schooling. I think it’s possible there was some guilt transference going on there.
Who knows?
Even into her 80s my grandmother would suspect an unseasonably warm day in January was the work of the devil. So she had a 19th century Old World peasant’s RC view of things all her life.
The upshot is here I am well into the 21st century approaching 70 still trying to work all that stuff out. That sort of trauma gets passed along like an extra gene from one generation to the next.
The doctor I see every 6 months for OCD looks at me if a just grew an extra head if I try to talk about any of this. He is strictly med management, not a therapist. He sees I’m socially pretty well functioning, successful in good paying career and in a long happy marriage so it’s “Just take the Prozac and Xanax, guy.” The thing is I would really prefer to take neither.
Religious people do EA better than the EA crowd.
Lowercase-ea effective altruism is hard for *everyone*.
Citation and definition of "better" needed. It might well be true in some sense - but you're providing no evidence whatsoever.
Scott does a survey of the readers every year. In no year since I have been reading this blog has the secular rate of fiscal charitable donation, as a percent of annual income, come close to half the rate of deitists. This is not a novel finding, and I thought everyone was aware of it.
I was about to reply 'dentists can afford to be more generous'...
That’s funny. I make those kind of quick scan errors from time to time too. I think there is probably a typo there to. I’d guess he was going for deists or as he said below theists
Ha! Well, true, I should have said theists.
That is insufficient to establish your claim as stated without an analysis of the targets of those donations. That's the whole point of the EA approach. (For the record, I don't actually consider myself to be part of the "EA crowd", FWIW).
As Scott doesn't distinguish between donations for bednets, donations for parish outreach, donations for displays of anti capitalist artwork, donations for care of AIDS orphans and donations for trying to get a political figure elected, oh I am pretty dang sure it's sufficient.
(Neither am I, but I do like the general vibe of "whatever you're doing, fail better!")
Hmm, that seems to suggest that the data really *don't* support the claim that "Religious people do EA better than the EA crowd". You can't support that unless you show something about what sorts of causes the two groups are donating to, to show that the religious people are donating more effectively than the EA crowd. If the data don't disaggregate effective from ineffective donation, then the data definitely aren't sufficient to say anything here.
The rate of religiosity in rationalist spaces is FAR below the base rate, and every good Bayesian should keep the base rate in mind. The question is why you "expected" a lower rate than you observe.
There is no such thing as *the* base rate. Religiosity in rationalist spaces is far below the base rate of all American adults. It also seems to be quite a bit above the base rate of people with university degrees interested in math and computing. The former is explained by rationalist spaces having high overlap with "people with university degrees interested in math and computing" or something similar, but why rationalist spaces have higher rates of religiosity than *that* base rate is not yet clearly explained.
Do you have numbers for the "the base rate of people with university degrees interested in math and computing" vs the rate in rationalist spaces? If it's just your impression, that could come from rationalist spaces *discussing* religion & philosophy more often, so the religious people are more visible.
That’s what I’m starting to realize!
"It also seems to be quite a bit above the base rate of people with university degrees interested in math and computing."
I've never gotten that impression. Rather I'd say it's extra-enriched for atheism.
Would it be explained by the presence of folks like myself who; are neither math nor computing interested, don't have a university degree, but are religious?
Seems like we should pull the rate back towards the *base rate* for the general population and away from the base rate of "university graduates with an interest in programming and math". ?
Could be! But many of the things that people assume are distinctive of "university graduates with an interest in programming and math" are even *more* pronounced in this community than in that broader community, and it's not obvious why religiosity would be one that is less so (if it is in fact less so, rather than this just being a misperception about "university graduates with an interest in programming and math").
In addition to what others have said, rationalists tend to spend enough time thinking about rationality that they start probing the limits -- under what circumstances is a certain amount of irrationality actually beneficial?
Some have proposed (though I'm not convinced myself) that religion is one of these, and if you can convince yourself that a certain religion is probably true then you can have a happier life overall.
This blog is an outlier because I used to get in (relatively friendly, productive) fights with some religious bloggers who cross-pollinated the comments section, plus I talk about religious themes sometimes (especially in my fiction). I think most other rationalist spaces have as few religious people as you would expect, with a few exceptions that have equally complex backstories.
I don't even remember such fights with religious bloggers.
The rationalist community attracts smart people, and smart people are drawn to worldviews that are systematic and intellectually stimulating (which isn't always the same as true). People with brainpower like worldviews that require brainpower. Marxism has a pretty damaging legacy but has captivated a lot of very smart people over the past few generations. It's not correct, in my opinion, but it's attractive to intellectuals.
Over the centuries, there have been a lot of extremely smart Catholics who have developed very sophisticated philosophical and theological systems. There's a lot there for intellectuals to chew on.
Do religious people congregate here? The most recent SSC survey found that only 19.7% of SSC readers claimed any type of religious beliefs at all [1]. This is far less than the 92% of Americans that believe in God [2]. And even groups such as physics professors are more religious than SSC readers (30% of US physics professors claim religious beliefs [3]).
If your question is, "why is there a non-zero number of theists in the comments?" Then the answer seems pretty easy: humans in general are very prone to religion and anyone can read ACX.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2008/06/01/u-s-religious-landscape-survey-religious-beliefs-and-practices/
[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023116664353
> This is far less than the 92% of Americans that believe in God [2].
Note that only 59.9% of the people answering the survey are Americans.
Data from 2018 can be found here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/04/25/when-americans-say-they-believe-in-god-what-do-they-mean/
56% Believe in God as described in the Bible.
33% Believe in some higher power / spiritual force.
10% Do not believe in any higher power / spiritual force.
The SSC survey does not use the same categories. Its results are:
10.2% Committed theist.
6.3% Lukewarm theist.
3.1% Deist / Pantheist / etc.
18.4% Agnostic.
9.6% Atheist but spiritual.
52.3% Atheist and not spiritual.
OP's category of "traditional Abrahamic religions" seems to be most similar to "Believe in God as described in the Bible" or "Committed theist". This group is 5 times more common in the general population than here.
I like "congregate" (hey, we're a congregation!) but mostly we skulk in the undergrowth and Scott is too humane to call in the exterminators as long as we don't overturn the rubbish bins and make a mess all over the driveway 😀
Ahem... can't help taking that one personally "~}
You may not be vermin scuttling around in the shadows, don't worry!
Consider using a study not from 2008. Just a thought. Religious decline in the last 14 years is serious.
But decline notwithstanding, it remains to be the case that large proportion of US population believes in God, far more than 20 % od SSC readers claiming any religious belief.
Christian (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) faithful believer here. I also admire much about the rationalist truth-seeking approach. I would like to see a synthesis of the two.
“Evidence” goes both ways. You can’t just ignore the fact that 50% of Americans claim to have had a religious experience. There is a lot of evidence from personal experiences that a purely material/physicalist model doesn’t capture everything there is, so I would argue that someone open to evidence shouldn’t close the door on all faith generally.
My personal thoughts and some experiences here, if you want a sampling: https://trocb.blogspot.com/2022/03/transcendence-and-physicalism.html
If we lent any credence to religious anecdotes, in the capacity of evidence, then weighting would suggest Christianity has the slight majority, and Islam comes 2nd - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations#Adherents_in_2020
Of course it doesn't work that way. It's called "faith" for a reason, you can't entangle empirical evidence as a deciding factor. Even the way people decipher religious/non-religious experiences for validation is already through the lens of their beliefs, and desire. Despite this some adherents seem to place a lot of importance on them.
Coming from that background, I perceive a sense of duty and stability associated with Church-going - arguably more-so than piety. But as piety goes, you either believe as a given (either it's so ingrained in the social fabric that you don't consider otherwise, or you're unshakably on board with the Truth), or believe because you want to.
The religious experience serves to resolve feelings of doubt, validate desires, for the latter group. The mere fact that we are all less isolated and more cosmopolitan in the modern world is threatening to any faith, and the religious experience is a necessary leverage. I would not be surprised if historically it sprung up more in clashes of faiths. One of the more interesting stories is that of the German city of Munster, explored by Dan Carlin in the Prophets of Doom episode of his podcast.
For this reason I find that many progressive believers adopt a less strict, more cookie-cutter view of their religion to reconcile with other faiths. The "it's all the same God" worldview, somewhere between faith and cultural practice. Eat Pray Love kind of stuff. This is derided by true believers and non-religious alike, but that seems unfair. Adopters seem less wound up about particulars and less xenophobic. It might actually be a necessary evolution in the long-run for a globalized world.
Religious belonging is different from religious experience - so poll numbers on religious belonging might not be the same as the tally on who has had religious experience, and neither would be sufficient to reveal the truth. My view of God is as a Father that cares about all of His children. So even those whose religion (or non-religion) has a lesser degree of truth can still have revelatory religious experiences that manifest His love for them.
Also, I love Dan Carlin and that episode was just crazy and fun to listen to.
> neither would be sufficient to reveal the truth.
Right. Are you hinting that something else sufficiently reveals the truth?
> even those whose religion (or non-religion) has a lesser degree of truth can still have revelatory religious experiences that manifest His love for them.
Then it would not be possible to distinguish between degrees of Truth. Unless you are suggesting your Truth is not one revealed by religious experience.
My sense is that most people have a sense that there is something more, but we are all grasping for what that is. I believe my branch of Christianity (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) is the true revealed religion, based on empirical fruits as well as personal experience, but I understand if you are skeptical, and my purpose here isn’t to convince you.
We aren't all grasping for it, incidentally. Religions categorically don't have empirical evidence to offer, so I'll not press for it.
>There is a lot of evidence from personal experiences that a purely material/physicalist model doesn’t capture everything there is
We're far from complete understanding of how the brain works, so it's true that there isn't such a model yet, but there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to expect that it won't become available eventually. And also, no reason to prefer any mystical "explanation" to any other either, because they all are just-so stories.
>no reason to prefer any mystical “explanation” to any other.
I strongly disagree on empirical grounds. The “fruit” of some religions is better than others. We are not supposed to think this way but it is true. The liberal pluralist rational-ish order of The West sprouted from the seed Christ planted 2000 years ago. I know that’s broad strokes and subject to debate, but the fruit of Christianity seems pretty sweet. I also examine the fruits of various doctrines and experiences in my own life on a more micro level.
Indeed, I acknowledge that this is the strongest remaining argument for religion in general and Christianity in particular, and atheists first need to show their work in actually implementing a better society before dismissing it altogether. However, ironically, the most salient fruit of Christianity turned out to be the eventual permissibility to question its dogmas, and to replace them with better grounded theories as soon as we figure out how to develop them empirically. The vast majority are already gone, and the writing is on the wall for the remaining few, if you know how to read it.
Well, for what it's worth the Soviet Union was pretty militantly atheist.
It certainly did try, at first. Turns out, getting rid of those opiates by fiat is neither easy nor a safeguard from them being superficially replaced by new ones.
+1. Was an ardent Christian, now an atheist, and I still pray for God to change my mind. I'd love for there to be a meaning behind it all: if I die and learn that I'm destined to go to hell as an unbeliever, I'd still be happier to learn that there's a purpose behind all the pointless suffering in the world. But if there's a God, he gave me the mind I have, and that mind has to go after what it thinks is true.
This is a great point to bring up and very real. I only know in a personal way what I have personally experienced. I also struggle to explain why some people do and some do not have recognizable experiences. Any way you look at it, this is a complicated and personal subject, essentially relational (with God), and difficult for scientifically-minded people to wrap our minds around.
You know, sometimes the answer to a prayer is "no."
I was in a similar boat: I was told God would answer if I prayed, but he never did. I concluded that if I were God I wouldn't bother talking to a mortal like me either, even though the laziness of human instinct shouldn't be relevant evidence for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity. Some time after that I reasoned my way toward fundamentalist ultra-calvinism despite being raised a mainline Protestant, as the picking & choosing of which tenets to accept or reject struck me as unprincipled "cafeteria Catholicism". Later when I learned about evolutionary psychology & Bayesian probability theory I asked myself what was the honest probability I assigned to the existence of a deity resembling that of the Bible and concluded it was epsilon. "Go hard or go home" was my approach to theology, starting with the former and then switching to the latter :)
For me, though doubts sometimes crop up, Faith means manually shifting my Bayesian probability estimate of the existence of God from 70% or whatever to 100% and act on that. It has worked well for me and given me a good and meaningful life. Occasionally I peek at what my estimate would be without the manual adjustment, and it keeps growing as I have more faith-based experiences, to pretty near 100% at this point. I do think Faith requires this manual adjustment, and I recommend it for those that are on the fence.
He probably means you can't ignore it *and* claim to be examining all evidence without prejudice stemming from your own internal hypotheses and faiths. You might believe it's tough being black or being diagnosed with terminal cancer on the basis of the testimony of strangers to the effect. You might believe it was awesome walking on the Moon, or frightening being under fire in Vietnam for the same reason. You might even believe that COVID started in Wuhan, or that the Sun fuses hydrogen to form helium, if you lack access to the measurements and sufficient familiarity with the field, for essentially the same reasons -- because enough other people tell you so.
So what makes you *uniquely* reject *this* testimony of strangers? It has to be your internal faith in your own pre-existing beliefs, such that you're willing to say "oh when these 100 people say they've personally heard God they're just mistaken or deluded," but when these other 100 people say losing your sense of smell is one of the first symptoms of COVID you say "oh ok now I know something new."
Mind you, I'm not saying all testimony of strangers is equally credible, it is clearly not. I'm just saying you cannot immediately reject without consideration the testimony of strangers in one case, but not others, without using internal faiths and beliefs.
Haha. Fair comeback. It’s a choice to consider people’s personal experience seriously or not. But the cumulative sum of personal religious experience is evidence, which you are free to ignore or not.
> But the cumulative sum of personal religious experience is evidence
Evidence for what exactly? I agree that it's evidence that there is something that we don't yet fully understand about how human/the world works, but that's it. It could be religion, it could be just something that happens in people's head, it could be invisible aliens having fun, it could be basically anything. We, humans, are the ones calling them "religious" experiences, but that's just a label we put on it, and it may or may not be linked to the actual reality of the experience.
Yes, that’s it. Evidence for what we humans call “religion”. Who knows, maybe God calls it “science.”
Because that's not how evidence works?... Like, in what world does having hundreds of millions of people emphatically claim to have experienced something cause you to update (in the Bayesian sense) literally 0% towards their position? Non-believer here, but saying that you're willing to literally ignore it (unless you're not being precise with the word) is bad Bayesianism. You *should* update - and that might very well leave you very far from changing your views. Didn't change mine.
I think the correct response is to update *away* from their position. My prior is that if the omnipotent and omnibenevolent God described by Christianity were real, it would be really obvious and everyone would be aware of its presence. The statistic that only 65% (or whatever the exact figure is) of people claim to have had religious experiences is therefore evidence against the existence of such a being.
That's still much more properly Bayesian than "ignoring it all", but I'm not sure I follow this logic - in the past almost 100% *would* have claimed to have had such experiences. Would a good Bayesian be religious back then and update against it gradually as religiosity declined? But then the logic runs in reverse and the presence of a substantial amount of believers relative to a possible world with very few *is* some evidence for religion.
> in the past almost 100% *would* have claimed to have had such experience
Actually, the number of people that claims to have had such experiences has increased in the last 60 years, from 22% to 48% in 2009 according to https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/12/09/many-americans-mix-multiple-faiths/, the article linked in Stephen Lindsay's article.
Ah. You're saying he wouldn't update "gradually" but almost instantly as the number fell under less than, say 99%, and that almost no changes beyond that point would matter except to update somewhat away from religion. The very existence of even a 1 (5? 10?)% of non-believers suffices for you to kill dead the notion of such a God, and 65% is almost the same to you as 0%. OK that makes sense - of course a Christian would probably disagree that "it would be really obvious and everyone would be aware of its presence" but you can ask CC in his thread!
Because otherwise he doesn't have an argument? He has to believe that.
True, the argument is necessarily personal. You may (or not) update based on the existence of others’ experiences, but the impact can’t be directly transferred. There is no “Journal of the Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James style, and if there were , I admit it would be a disaster.
I think many of the new atheist rationalists just got bored of the argument, so will mostly check out of any comment thread discussing it. Whereas believers find a rationalist view on religion more interesting and newer than traditional arguments, motivating them to discuss it more. Scott has a post on how new atheism just seems rather boring in 2022 (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/). So I would say you shouldn't equate willingness to comment about a topic a reflection of the community percentages. (the yearly SSC survey also often shows how there are significant differences between readership and commenters)
They are disproportionately populated by Americans, and USA is (checks wikipedia) more than 70 % Christian as of 2016?
(https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/)
> Self-identified Christians of all varieties... make up 63% of the adult population. Christians now outnumber religious “nones” by a ratio of a little more than two-to-one. In 2007, when the Center began asking its current question about religious identity, Christians outnumbered “nones” by almost five-to-one (78% vs. 16%).
Some rationalists regard rationalism as a way of reasoning with insufficient evidence, as contrasted with waiting for evidence solid enough for a peer-reviewed scientific paper.
Even with the issues that have been revealed with bad information getting through scientific peer review (google "replication crisis") I don't expect any religion to meet the peer-reviewed scientific evidence test any time soon.
So maybe rationalism functions as a framework where one can draw religious conclusions with more justification than "because I said so".
I think it's mostly people who were raised religiously in a non-damaging way that they mostly liked. There's a wide enough pool here that there's some people who just stay religious, rationalism doesn't automatically make everyone change their minds about things they like (although I do get the feeling a lot of the religious rationalists I know pretty consciously don't really believe most of the religion stuff and are just into it for the culture - but maybe that's just Jews).
1) I don’t go around the web posting about my beliefs - much - but this community shows a lot of respect when engaging with different people’s different ideas - and beliefs. No (well, few) pile-ons.
2) Connected to #1, people can be more open here about their personal interactions among upbringing, religious practice, philosophy and faith. The interesting part for purposes *here* is not whether they are correct, but which connections they describe and how they explain it.
3) My impression is that most posters here are not practicing religionists, or are agnostic (searching), eclectic, or connected to a religion by cultural background but not belief. Some posters note their faith/practice if it’s connected to the philosophical topic being discussed.
So I’m not sure they are numerically congregating here, for starters. But regardless of their numbers, people engage respectfully with ideas/observations as presented. I think this is influenced by Scott setting a tone and then modding carefully.
Theology is rational in the philosophical sense of the term. What it's not is empirical. But new rationalists aren't empiricists either. So it doesn't surprise me all that much. There's more consonance in their ways of thinking that might be apparent at first. Though specifically for High Church types. I expect (and forgive me if I'm wrong) you probably came out of a Low Church tradition. Methodists or Baptists or something, not Anglicans or Catholics. And likewise a lot of the posters are High Church, not Low Church, types.
Convert to High Church from very Low Church Non-Denominational here, by way of a decade spent as an ashiest.
What exactly do you mean "new rationalists aren't empiricists either"? This makes me think you're using some extremely narrow meaning of "empiricists".
How many rationalists perform experiments to test their hypotheses?
No, I'm just using the normal definition. The philosophical underpinning of rationalism includes anti-empiricism. The purer forms of empiricism, or philosophical schools like pragmatism or critical theory, are some of the major schools of anti-rationalism. This is a fairly basic philosophical dichotomy/dialectic but one, admittedly, that the modern New Rationalist movement doesn't study much. It's a blindspot caused by their general dismissal of humanities.
I would generally say that the reason for rationalists not running there own studies is running studies is a full time job and most rationalists have other time commitments rather than a philosophical stance on how to find things out. Admittedly my prototypical example of a new rationalist is Scott who might not be super representative.
It seems deeply weird to me to claim that when half this blog is about interpreting and criticising scientific studies, and the scientific establishment. There are also examples of Scott and other people in the community I’ve come across from this blog doing experiments when it is practical for example SlimeMildTimeMold’s potato diet, Scott’s experiments around the effect of CO2 on his cognitive performance.
Talking about what a group of people believes is of course difficult, and I might be projecting my own beliefs, or only paying attention to an empiricist fringe of internet rationalism, but my understanding of the internet rationalist movements position on philosophical rationalism vs empiricism would be something like: doing experiments and thinking about them are both important in coming closer to the truth, and trying to put on of those two things on top of the other is likely to result in you getting things wrong. Also actually figuring out what is true is hard and if you wait till your certain you can run out of time, so reasoning under uncertainty as to what is actually true is a useful skill to practice.
Do you think this is not actually internet rationalists’ position on the rationalism-empiricism spectrum? Or does the position I’m describing not count as empiricist in philosophical terms?
Your first paragraph is the amateur defense. But that's a double edged sword because if that's really your defense then I shouldn't have to take you seriously at all. You don't get to motte and bailey by saying "we're a bunch of amateurs" (motte) when you're criticized but expect your ideas to be taken seriously when you're not under direct criticism (bailey). So: no.
For second paragraph: The mere doing of experiments is not a useful dividing line. As I said, Descartes did a lot of experiments and he's considered the father of old style rationalism. As I've said.
Third/Fourth: It does not count as empiricism. Nor is your attempt at a synthesis remotely new. As I said, in some ways it literally goes back to Descartes. The extreme end of empiricism ends in Hume's questioning of existence where your thoughts literally do not exist. The extreme end of rationalism is Descartes where cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. Concepts are more certain to exist than physical reality. New style rationalists are more Cartesian. Their philosophical framework is entirely focused on the concept of reasoning (and improving reasoning). This implicitly excludes them from being empiricists and puts them in the rationalist camp.
This isn't a criticism by the way. It's just a category. What IS a criticism is that this is pretty basic philosophical background and I'd appreciate if the movement understood it more. After all, it underpins a lot of understanding of philosophies that rationalism finds confusing.
In my experience Rationalists tend to view the liberal arts as some kind of embarrassing disease universities (and humanity as a whole) suffer from instead of a vital part of the education process, and would like to see them go into the dustbin alongside religion and phrenology (see how a notable number of Rationalists reacted DALLE-2 with what boiled down to "hooray, this will let us STEM nerds liberate art from the evil post-modern tyranny of the artists!").
I suspect there's a non-trivial link between these attitudes towards the liberal arts and the very strong anti-Woke tendencies among some of the commentariat- after all, the grievance studies people are usually lumped in with the liberal arts.
I think you might be conflating philosophical rationalism with the rationalist movement. They are not the same.
I've been told this. Yet when I've asked for the difference (and read that piece by Scott) I haven't found it all that different. If you have a different case to make I'm happy to hear it.
AFAIK, the rationalist movement places a big emphasis on empirical verification and is probably closes to philosophical empiricism than philosophical rationalism. But I could be wrong, as I am not an expert in any way on the movement.
In philosophy, the distinction between rationalism and empiricism is the distinction between the importance of logic and reason as the foundation of knowledge and experience as the foundation of knowledge.
The standard story goes that Descartes calls himself the first truly modern philosopher, because he is not willing to listen to anyone's testimony, neither the scholastics nor the ancients, and wants to work everything out for himself. He convinces himself that even his senses are subject to illusion and deception, but through pure thought alone he can first conclude that he exists as a thinking being (otherwise there would not be an entity to have these deceptions), that a perfect being exists (it's obviously impossible for a more perfect thing to come into existence from a less perfect thing, so whatever the original cause is must be fully perfect and logically necessary), and that if there is a physical world, it must obey the laws of Euclidean geometry. He then goes on to derive an a priori theory of physics in which everything moves according to vortices, because it is impossible for there to be space without matter. This is all classic rationalism.
About a century later, after people tried to fix all the various problems with Descartes (and Leibniz, and Spinoza, and other rationalists), some English-speaking people decided that reason can only tell you about abstract relations of ideas like mathematics and logic, and that knowledge of the physical world can only be derived from experience. Berkeley concludes that in fact we can't know that there is a physical world, just sensations, and that what we think of as physical things persisting must just be sensations in the mind of God. (This is known as "idealism", because ideas are the only real things.) Locke and Hume are much more accepting of a physical world, but they also think that nothing can be known about it except through experience, and the mind is a blank slate (apart from a few habits of reasoning) and that most rationalist theorizing about metaphysics or ethics is meaningless, because it doesn't terminate in any observations. This is all classic empiricism.
The story continues that Kant came up with some sort of synthesis of these two, and that all contemporary philosophers recognize some sort of knowledge from pure reason, and some sort of knowledge that depends on experience. There are some radical empiricists in recent decades, like Quine, who believes that even logic and mathematics are just attempts we have of systematizing our observations of the world, and that if quantum mechanics or something else makes us revise our logic and mathematics, that's just another sign that pure reason sometimes leads us astray when we don't put it in service of experience. But the strongest rationalists that still exist are people like Noam Chomsky, who believes that knowledge of the structure of language is innate, and some people who believe that the foundations of inductive reasoning (ie, the inference from seeing sufficiently many black ravens to the claim that all ravens are black) must derive from some a priori insight we have into the nature of reasoning.
Bayesians tend to be more empiricist than rationalist according to philosophical categorizations. Catholicism involves a lot of rationalist theorizing about the nature of matter and substance to explain the miracles in the Christian tradition, while "Low Church" tends not to have all that much in the way of theorizing about the nature of things, either rationalist or empiricist.
When speaking of the rationalist community, I tend to get this entirely backwards. From a philosophical POV, I'm probably an empiricist, in the sense that I believe thought without data to be generally sterile, outside of mathematics. To me, this is the only position that can possibly be "rational", and furthermore fits with the kind of "rationalism" espoused by sites like https://www.lesswrong.com.
Of course this wouldn't be the first time a technical term has been recycled with something close to the opposite of its prior technical meaning, sometimes under the influence of tis non-technical usage.
Changing tack slightly, is there a philosophical term for those who believe in revealed truth, use that as their primary approach, etc.? These obviously wouldn't fit with either pure reason or empiricism, as you describe them above, though a determined person could probably shoehorn it into empiricism - the alleged revelation, passed down through any number of fallible humans, could be treated as empirical data, with or without ignoring the fallible humans involved, and the human tendency to lying.
It is unfortunate that "rationalism" isn't about rationality generally, but is somehow derived from the word "reason" in the sense of "pure reason". But within philosophy this probably isn't quite as confusing as the use of "idealism" and "realism" as opposite sides in several very different debates (the debate about whether everything is just in the mind or there is a physical world; the debate about whether international relations is about ideology like religion and democracy or about practical interests and geography; probably others) and the use of "internalism" and "externalism" as opposite sides in many other different debates (can't really explain simply, but they're used for opposing views in semantics, in epistemology, and in ethics).
I haven't heard of a philosophical term for the reliance on revealed truth. That definitely seems like it would be an important viewpoint in the history of religious thought, but the religious thinkers that had the most significant influence on philosophy tended to either be concerned with the reason-based arguments for the existence of God or else with natural theology like Newton and Copernicus, and thus to have become ancestors to rationalists and empiricists. An emphasis on revelation would have some interestingly different features that could easily pull the debate onto orthogonal questions!
+1. I am curious, do you happen to know when and how "rationalism" and "empiricism" started to be used as a labels for distinct schools of thought? I.e. basically who is the author(s) of the standard story?
I was hoping that the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the debate would say more about the history: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
Unfortunately, they don't.
My general thought is that this is a convenient story for Kant and the post-Kantian idealists, who see themselves as the culmination of this debate between two radical extremes that we can clearly see are wrong and reach the synthesis of transcendental idealism. I've never actually read Hegel myself, but this particular characterization of a historical debate (the thesis of rationalism, then the antithesis of empiricism, followed by the synthesis of transcendental idealism) sounds very nicely Hegelian, so it could be from him. It's also possible that this story of rationalism vs empiricism emerges among the logical positivists of the early 20th century, who self-consciously reject Kantian and post-Kantian idealism in favor of a radical empiricism (that is itself idealist in the Berkeleyan sense) that denies Kant's central concept of the synthetic a priori.
But tl;dr, my best guess is that this is Kant's story, or some Kantian's story, but it could be from Hegel or the positivists/early analytics.
Catholism has a long history of intellectually rigorous thought. (Look up Thomas of Aquinas.) A great deal of that history was discarded along with the rest of the Roman authority in the Reformation, a process furthered still more by the growth of Charismatic sects.
If you're looking for a general definition of rationalism an intro to philosophy course will do better than I can. The whole rationalism-empiricism dichotomy is a fairly important thing in western philosophy. If you want to assert your definition over that then no one can stop you I guess. Likewise a basic intro to theology can tell you about the difference between Low and High Church theology and why one is more focused on reasoning and the other less.
Theology involves a lot of reasoning from premises. Or conversely, trying to explain human experience in ways that don't contradict desired premises.
I'm weirded out, too. I don't feel a strong desire to push religious rationalists about their beliefs, but I'd be interested if you do.
I think "taking intellectual ideas seriously" is probably the explanation. Most people would just read arguments for utilitarianism/Catholic apologetics/whatever, find them convincing, and then go on with their lives happily believing and doing lots of contradictory stuff. A certain type of person, if they're convinced, feels compelled to actually live a life consistent with their new beliefs. This could lead you to become an effective altruist or it could lead you to convert to Catholicism.
I just picked two examples of worldviews that have built some very intellectually sophisticated systems and have very smart people who've developed powerful arguments for why their worldview and system is correct.
I think the similarity is in the psychology of people who convert to them -- that they read the arguments, take them seriously, and then change their lives based on the conclusions of the arguments. This is an unusual personality type -- the normal type of person reads the arguments, might be convinced by them, and then goes on with their unchanged lives.
(Incidentally, I also think, if you read Catholic apologetics, you'd have a hard time defeating the strongest arguments for belief, which are really quite sophisticated. It's not nearly as anti-intellectual and simplistic as the stuff you get from American Evangelicals. But neither here nor there.)
First of all, as an empiricist myself I will assert that EA (in my observation) is not empirical. I would agree it's *one of* its professed values, but not necessarily the grounding or dominant one in my observation. The name itself should give you pause: it emphasizes the importance of reasoning, whereas the true empiricist emphasizes the importance of measurement, and to hell with the reasoning if it doesn't match up.
Secondly, the Catholic Church suffers an unreasonable modern reputation for being anti-rational -- we can speculate about why that is, but cui bono seems like a good place to start -- when its actual history is one of great interest in rationality. Bear in mind for much of history between the fall of Rome and the Enlightenment it was the Church, more than any other institution, that kept alive the traditions of reading, writing, philosophy, logic, reasoning. It's not a coincidence that many of the oldest universities stem from ecclesiastical origins, nor that academic pomp and circumstance bears more than a passing resemblance to monastic ceremony and dress.
For that matter, your own entry into the question highlights the distinction between a rationalist and an empiricist. An *empiricist* would say that the available evidence on Abrahamic religions is so scant, and the subject matter so poorly-defined, that we cannot usefully form theory on the subject. The only empirically valid position on religion is agnosticism.
To instead say that we *can* assign a level of credibility to these religions, is a sign of a faith in rationality -- in human reasoning -- that goes well beyond what an empiricist would essay, such that we *can* say something like "oh the chain of logic required to conclude that God made the Earth in seven days is so absurd that I can be confident this never happened." You have to have a lot of confidence in the rightness of pure reasoning to make that statement -- and confidence in the rightness of pure reasoning is exactly what empiricism rejects.
> EA (in my observation) is not empirical. I would agree it's *one of* its professed values, but not necessarily the grounding or dominant one in my observation. The name itself should give you pause: it emphasizes the importance of reasoning,
I'm not seeing how the name "Effective Altruism" emphasizes the importance of reasoning?
Addendum: I think it's also relevant that empiricism is not something that can be adopted across the board, in all of one's individual and social life. If you undertook to be an empiricist in your love affairs, in your relationships to your parents or children, or in your personal values -- what you will live and die for -- or your social allegiances, you would be paralyzed.
That is, it is necessary, to be a fully engaged human being, to limit empiricism to those places where you can afford it. In other areas we all have to have some degree of faith. That's why one can be rigorously empirical about, say, high-energy physics or medicine, and yet be comfortable embracing moral precepts and ideas about the meaning of life that come from Catholic doctrine (or any other random non-empirical source).
"I don't understand why there is an equivalence toward being Catholic and adopting EA?"
Are you familiar with the whole Faith Versus Works controversy in the Reformation?
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/the-epistle-of-straw-reflections-on-luther-and-the-epistle-of-james/
This article is very favourable to Luther, so let me be fair to my enemies. The reason Luther devalued the Epistle of St. James is because his entire emphasis was on salvation by faith alone, not by works, and the Epistle of St. James pretty much whammies that one:
"14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
18 But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. 19 You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.
20 You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? 21 Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. 23 And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. 24 You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.
25 In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? 26 As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead."
So EA could be seen as "works-based righteousness", in the bad old Catholic tradition of 'buying salvation' 😁
EA may examine empirical evidence to see whether donating to a bed net charity saves more QALYs than donating to your local breast cancer awareness drive. But the idea that you have a moral obligation to donate your money to QALY-maximizing charities is not something that can be proved empirically.