NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics, specializing in probability theory, from the University of Georgia. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
The current battle lines of elite and counter elite in the west are once again drawn on a precise difference between two modes of dealing with modernity. And that difference is quite exactly the one we are talking about here, between an individual desire of transcendence, escape and a collective desire of management, control.
Management and control by what agency and to what end?
Does it not give you any pause that you've now likened these real and existing Canadian doctors to five fictional characters and zero real people? In fact contrasting this fictional archetype with two actual people.
Interesting question. Answer: no. Can you elucidate why you presume it ought to?
Good question. The theft of fire from the gods is the most common, indeed the default archetypal original sin in world religions [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_fire]. I don't believe there is any natural moral law forbidding people from making or using fire, or that we ought to give it back. The cultures that held (or hold) the stories sacred, including the classical Greeks, also didn't think they needed to relinquish fire or give it back. At the same time, I do believe there is a lot of wisdom in those stories. If that perplexes you, it might be because you are approaching religious mythology with the wrong hemisphere of your brain.
While it is true that Dr. Frankenstein wanted to know something, I think to state that as his motive, and leave it at that, leaves out what is most essential. I submit that Victor Frankenstein has more in common with Faust, or Elric of Melniboné than he does with, say, Paul Erdos, or Thomas Edison (doesn't it feel so?). Like Faust and Elric, but unlike Erdos or Edison, Dr. Frankenstein commits copious moral transgressions in the service of his compulsive quest (e.g., desecrating dead bodies, theft, vivisection). In his effort to cross certain boundaries as a far term objective, he crosses boundaries that he knows, or ought now, should not be crossed in the here and now. He could have violated those boundaries in a quest for knowledge, or, like Elric or Gilgamesh, in a quest for something else. So, I think Frankenstein's quest for knowledge is relatively incidental while his quest by forbidden means, for what he ought to know is within the exclusive dominion of the gods is essential. Like Prometheus.
If this analogy [I presume you mean the analogy between the trans-mania and Frankenstein] has any legs, it has to be about the desire to see if man can be turned into woman and vice versa, about transhumanism and the escape from the binding of natural laws without regard for prevailing morality... Not the petty bureaucratic impulse of classification and normalization that moves Canada as a nation and its managerial ilk today, which itself is justified by conforming to a morality, not disregard for it.
From this I suspect one difference between you and me is that I believe Dr. Frankenstein -- along with Faust, and Elric, and the trans-mutilators -- are recklessly crosswise of morality plain and simple, not merely "prevailing" morality. They all lie to themselves to justify the intoxicating ecstasy of crossing boundaries, and seeming, for the time being, to get away with it. Like Prometheus.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
The definitive portrayal of Dr. Frankenstein, of course, is Mary Shelly's novel. Before I respond to this, I am curious whether you (@IGI-111) have read the book, and, in case you have, whether, upon reflection, you think it is accurate to describe Dr. Frankenstein's driving motive as "lust for knowledge".
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
I spent about half an hour on this post. The longest draft was a paragraph, but my eventual opinion was that the connection, for those who had read Frankenstein, would be more dramatic if I left it at that. If the post is deficient, it is not from lack of effort but lack of ability.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Whatever it is, I think it is the same thing that motivated Dr. Frankenstein.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
What rule makes this necessary?
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
By "inflammatory" do you mean (a) inflammatory in the eyes of a reasonable person, or (b) something that will, if widely seen, get a lot of people riled up, reasonably or unreasonably?
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Your statements of "duty" were very declarative,
I cannot tell which "statements of 'duty'" this refers to.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
People also tend to upvote a nice, spicy polemic
Incidentally, I don't care for the term "spicy" as a euphemism for things that are uncomfortable, or potentially expensive, or potentially dangerous to say. If someone declines to make an objectively reasonable post because it is spicy", then maybe they just don't like spicy stuff; different strokes! On the other hand, if someone declines to make a post because it is uncomfortable (or expensive or dangerous), they are keeping their head down, or perhaps cowering, instead of speaking the truth. There are times to keep your head down, but there is never a time to deceive yourself about the fact that you are keeping your head down.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
the net upvotes tell the story of which way TheMotte leans ideologically.
It is a little sad, for The Motte, that it can be assumed people upvote arguments whose conclusions they agree with (as opposed to meritorious arguments on all sides).
Not to derail, and it's possible that you're still right, since I don't know what exactly constitutes hatred for you, but I do think the scriptures are pretty clear that homosexual sex is bad.
Important enough question for a derail, IMO. What constitutes hatred, for me, is taking carnal delight in the pain and loss (or prospective pain and loss) of another person. This is as opposed to indignation, by which I mean making a judgment that someone's conduct is immoral and, if it rises to a certain level, calls for punishment. In that light, my case is twofold. First (as I think @Felagund anticipated),
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. [Matthew 25: 42-45 KJV]
Jesus doesn't say "I was in prison for something I did not do and ye visited me not", or "I was in prison for a minor offense, and you visited me not". The people who count as the least of our brothers include people who have actually committed a major offense. So I think it is consistent, and indeed only right, to judge an action as a sin without hating the person who committed it. If my brother drove home drunk from a night on the town, or even murdered someone, I could acknowledge that as wrong, or gravely wrong in the latter case, without hating him.
Second, the Bible does condemn homosexual sodomy. Just as strongly, it condemns witchcraft, idol worship, working on Saturday, cursing your parents, eating meat of an animal that been strangled, consuming animal blood (e.g., blood sausage), premarital sex, and many other things which call for the death penalty under Mosaic law. Some of these prohibitions, including idol worship, consuming animal blood, and eating the meat of a strangled animal, carry over explicitly into New Testament law [cf. Acts 15]. Bible believing Christians, as a rule, do not take all of those seriously as sins, let alone call for death by stoning for all of them -- so they have to square with that one way or another.
But of all ways to square with it, to arbitrarily pick one of those alleged sins and lift it up as an abomination on Biblical grounds, while discounting or ignoring the rest, and then to use that capricious choice to justify hating another person, is not only hypocritical but blasphemous -- insofar as it also recklessly puts your bigoted words in God's mouth. Yet, as a group characteristic, that is what Evangelicals [my people] have historically done, and to some degree continue to do, in large numbers by comparison with the general population. I'm not saying we all do it or ever did; I am saying that (1) we did/do it significantly more than our outgroups in the Western world (e.g., white collar Democrats), (2) those of us who do not vocally acknowledge that are part of the problem.
This is kind of the opposite of my statement.
These are the statements I am comparing:
- @AhhhTheFrench: So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too?
- The serpent: Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?
They are both phrased as questions; notably both use some version of "actually"/"really", and both suggest a narrative that, in order to do right, you have to go to onerous extremes -- which makes a great excuse to do as you please. Generally, I think it is a common pattern when someone is confronted with a duty, that they respond by saying, "What am I supposed to do, Give away all of my stuff? go around jumping in every time someone is getting bullied? Starve myself so kids in Uganda can eat? Never have any fun? Fall on my sword over every little thing? etc. etc. etc.
So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too?
Of course not. This all-or-nothing, fall-on-your-sword straw man was first thing the Devil ever said: "Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”"
Most people are just humans trying to get by, and that is alright.
It might be "alright", whatever that means, but it makes them lesser men. We (Americans) live in a relatively free, safe, and prosperous society because the founding fathers and continental soldiers answered the call of duty to a higher purpose than minding their own business. We owe them a monumental debt that we can never pay back. We can only pay it forward by living up to their legacy of duty and sacrifice.
"We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all." [Pericles]
The easy solution is to simply reject the idea of "our community".
This may be an ideal solution, but I do not believe it is an easy solution. A community collectively and instinctively puts people in categories, assigns default characteristics to people in these categories, views the categories as part of the identity of its members, and views the categories as competing factions. If you think you can easily (or totally) escape buying into that factionalism, I think you are under an illusion. The trick is not to eliminate identity groups as functional units of society, but to make the competition between them honest, healthy, and based on furthering interests that are shared among the identity groups.
I feel the OP's pain. But the closer you are to God, the less it will matter to you whether you are a member of a group that happens to suffer from an epidemic of foolishness (whether it is biological or cultural). Moreover, if your people are acting like fools, you dissociate yourself from the foolishness precisely to the extent that you call it out. For example, as a white Christian Republican, my people have a history of irrational and immoral hatred for gays. As a Southerner from Alabama, my people have a history of hypocritically identifying as Christian while also having racist contempt for blacks. If I call those sins out, I am not stained by them. I can actually feel my conscience being freed when I acknowledge them. But, to the extent that I remain silent about those corporate sins of my own people, and at the same time identify as members of those groups, I am truly guilty by association (whether I am individually an offender or not).
The same thing goes for other groups. If you are a Muslim and that is part of your identity, that does not make you part of the problems of Islamic fascism, genocidal antisemitism, and terrorism -- but, if you aren't talking about those problems in the Muslim world and calling them out, then you are part of the problems -- even if you don't advocate for Sharia law, or hate jews, or fly airplanes into buildings. Similarly, if you are black, and you aren't talking about the problems of black supremacy, anti-intellectualism, deadbeat dads, serially pregnant welfare moms, gang violence, or whatever you honestly see as the problems in your community, then you are part of those problems. On the other hand, if you are vocally calling them out and trying to address those issues, then you are not part of the problem -- and also, you are fundamentally part of a bigger identity group called "Honest, caring people".
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Do you honestly believe that we can't say, by study of the motion of say, the planets of our solar system, be justified in believing a theory about the motion of the planets (and only the planets).I am not talking about everything in the universe.
Yes, that is what I believe. I invite you to make the opposite case by sharing with me whatever rule of evidence you think can establish otherwise.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
If you are an EA buff, I'd be happy if you'd share with me the case for one of their better, or best projects.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Republicans should not concede illegal results If this is uniquely democracy-destroying, and unacceptable, then: Republicans need to cheat harder. Since in many ways (2) is worse than (1), I'm skeptical of any argument that supposes that conceding a rigged election is the healthy and adult decision.
The nuance here is that (1) we don't know if the election was rigged, and (2) that, by itself, is the problem. Every week I hear people say there is no evidence that the election was rigged. That is the wrong place to put the burden of proof. There is no evidence that the 1946 Russian elections were rigged either, but as Stalin said, "It's not who votes that matters, but who counts." The question is not whether there is evidence the election was rigged, but whether the election was conducted in such a way that there would be evidence if the election were rigged. I think the answer to that question is no -- because if it were yes, Democrats would say that and back it up instead of gaming the burden of proof a la Stalin.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
To be a really fine point on this, what happens in the real world when there is an armed resistance against a government that lacks maximal willingness and ability to kill 'em all and let God (or Allah, as it were) sort 'em out? The most salient example in a first-world nation seems like the Irish Republican Army and their experience is not at all consistent with the idea that armed resistance doesn't do anything
Amen.
Also, I would look at the low (single digit percent) compliance rate with the "assault weapons" bans in Connecticut and New York. They knew (from sales records) who had the guns, so why didn't they go door to door and confiscate them? Because their owners had already demonstrated that they were willing to become felons on a matter of principle, so some of them just might be willing to shoot it out with the cops. And if even one, let alone three or five, of those incidents happened, where the gun owner was killed by the police in the raid along with possibly one or more cops, it would spark a backlash that would be very bad for the politicians who ordered the raid. Hence, those laws are not being enforced.
Also, if you are from NY or CT and are one of the patriots who didn't register your "assault weapon", then you are a friend of mine -- and if we ever meet dinner is on me.
If you're not playing some kind of game that amounts to wanting people to stop snorting when someone brings up god in an intellectual context?
I'm glad you mentioned that. I am actually not interested in the reactions of people who scoff (or "snort") when someone brings up God in an intellectual context. The readers that interests me for this argument are people like political scientist Charles Murray and historian Tom Holland, who do not scoff, and who are even sympathetic to the idea, but who are not believers because they cannot find reasons to believe.
just parsing the differences between degrees of philosophical certainty that no one out in the world ever thinks about when making decisions?
My argument isn't about parsing degrees of certainty
Then I'll leave you to your hobby and continue to be puzzled as to the appeal. Back in the world where people make decisions, the fact that science does in fact produce functional results obliterates every other consideration anyway.
Look, I'll be honest:...
I'm glad you are being honest. In that same spirit, I think it is Philistine to separate the effort to reveal the true laws of nature from "the world where people make decisions". Science, conceived as the effort to reveal the laws of nature, involves making many of decisions; I believe it is what many scientists perceive themselves as doing, and I believe it is a worthwhile pursuit for its own sake -- independently from its applications to such things as bread and circuses.
Besides, the best, most accurate superforecasters and people like quants absolutely pull it out and do explicit work. In their case, the effort really is worth it. You can't beat them without doing the same.
I know quants do this, but I think it is a special case. Show me a hundred randomly selected people who are making predictions they suffer consequences for getting wrong, and are succeeding, I will show you maybe 10 (and I think that's generous) that are writing down priors and using Bayes rule. Medical research, for example, uses parametric stats overwhelmingly more than Bayes (remember all those p-values you were tripping over?), as do the physical sciences.
If the effective altruism (EA) crowd are in the habit of regularly writing down priors (not just "there exist cases"), then I must be mistaken in the spirit of my descriptive claim that nobody writes them down. On the other hand, I would not count EA as people who pay consequences of being wrong, or that is doing a demonstrably good job of anything. If they aren't doing controlled experiments (which would absolutely be possible in the domain of altruism), they are just navel gazing -- and making it look like something else by throwing numbers around. I have a low opinion of EA in the first place; in fact, in the few cases where I looked at the details of the quantitative reasoning on sites like LessWrong, it was so amateurish that I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. So an appeal to the authority if LessWrong doesn't cut much ice with me.
I should give an example of this. Here is an EA article on the benefits of mosquito nets from Givewell.org. It is one of their leading projects. (https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/insecticide-treated-nets#How_cost-effective_is_it). At a glance, to an untrained eye, it looks like an impressive, rigorous study. To a trained eye the first thing that jumps out is that it is highly misleading. The talk about "averting deaths" would make an untrained reader think that they are counting the number of "lives saved". But this is not how experts think about "saving lives" and there is a good reason for it. Let's suppose that we take a certain child, that at 9 AM our project saves him from a fatal incident; at 10 Am another, at 11 AM another, but at noon he dies from exactly the peril our program is designed to prevent. Yay, we just averted 3 deaths! That is the stat that Givewell is showing you. Did we save three lives? no, we saved three hours of life.
This is the way anyone with a smidgeon of actuarial expertise thinks about "saving lives" -- in terms of saving days of life, not "averting deaths", and the Givewell and Lesswrong people either know that or ought to know it. If they don't know it, they are incompetent; and if they know it, then talking about "averting deaths" in their public facing literature is deliberately deceptive because it strongly suggests "saving lives", meaning whole lives, in the mind of the average reader. To be fair to givewell, their method of analyzing deaths averted apply to saving someone from malaria for a full year (not just an hour), but (1) that would not be apparent to a typical donor who is not versed in actuarial science, and (2) the fact remains that you could "avert the death" of the same person nine times while they still died of malaria (the peril the program is supposed to prevent) at the age of 10. The analysis and language around it is either incompetent or deceptive -- contrary to either one word or the other in the name of the endeavor, effective altruism.
That's not a cherry picked example; it was the first thing I saw in my first five minutes of investigating "effective altruism". It soured me and I didn't look much further, but maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe you can point me to some EA projects that are truly well reasoned, that are also on the top of the heap for the EA community.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
While Predictive Processing theory, which posits that human cognition is inherently Bayesian,
I'm skeptical of this. I think predictive processing theory posits a model with certain qualitative features that Bayesian updating would also have, but there are scads of non-Bayesian approaches that would also have those qualitative properties. They would only look Bayesian from the point of view of someone who doesn't know any other theories of belief updating. Does PPT posit a model that have the quantitative properties of Bayesian updating in particular, and experimentally validate those? That would be a very interesting find. If you know of a source I'd be curious to look at it.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
(4) For OP: you suggest downthread that we should be inclined to trust models like Newtonian or Einsteinian physics. Why should we trust them (if we cannot infer universal physical laws with nonzero confidence) and how much should we trust them?
We should trust them for two reasons. First, we do not need nonzero confidence in full generality to trust them for practical purposes. Being 99% sure the technology works 99% of the time is good enough -- or something like that, depending on the application. Second, I didn't say we cannot infer universal physical laws with nonzero confidence, just that we can't do it without believing in one more miracle, viz. that we are blessed with just enough intelligence, and a simple enough universe, that abductive reasoning is reliable (on top of the miracle that certain equations are physically instantiated in the form of a physical systems and consciousness, that this system continues persistently to be governed by those laws, that the parameters of those laws fall into the narrow range required for stars to form, etc.).
and how much should we trust them?
That depends on how many miracles you believe.
Note that I didn't say "is" and I didn't say "typically"; I said historically in disproportionate numbers. Indeed, I don't see it as much as I used to -- but, then again, I don't hang out with as many old rednecks as I used to. Here is one anecdote. In 1997 a gay nightclub (the "Otherside Lounge") was bombed in Atlanta, Georgia; 5 people were injured, one critically, though no one died. A nominally Christian group calling itself the "Army of God" claimed responsibility. That much is not indicative; there are whackos who identify as everything and their existence in small numbers doesn't necessarily reflect on anything. What is more notable is that I heard someone who was not (viewed as) a whacko, on his regular radio show, minimize and nearly excuse the bombing on the grounds that it targeted gays. Before you read the next paragraph, I invite you to guess whether the speaker was (a) a leftist pundit, or (b) a Christian pastor.
Of course he was a Christian pastor. His words as I remember were, "You may have heard that a gay bar was bombed in Atlanta recently. Well, I wouldn't worry about that too much. God bombed Sodom and Gomorrah." This was 1997 in Athens, Georgia (1 hour from Atlanta). It was not a hot mic moment; it was apparently his planned public remark on the event, which he expected to be assented to en masse by likeminded brethren. Now that was a tail event (that is, strange and unlikely); it surprised me to hear it, and even a person my age (56) from the deep South could have gone their whole life without hearing anything that bad from someone in a position of public authority. But what is more important is that, given that somebody did say it, I think any reasonable person who has been around that block would guess (b) rather than (a) -- because we know which group is more likely to have that kind of tail event, and the tail is indicative of milder tendencies of the same sort in larger numbers, of which I saw many.
It's plausible, but I don't think the Christian rednecks who despise gays in the name of God have thought it out far enough to get off the hook; I don't think any Biblical argument justifies the actual level of focus they put on sexual deviance as a sin relative to others that would be rationally subject to the same argument, and I don't think their animus is targeted wholly at the acts rather than the actors. (Nonetheless, those people would be voting with me on almost every living political issue of today -- and if there is ever another civil war in America we will be on the same side. In fact, if it comes to a shooting war, I wouldn't be surprised if they are about the only ones on that side that actually fight.)
I think the word "Conventionally" here appeals to a vague and precarious authority. I know that there are Hebrew words for the three sorts of laws, and that the idea of giving them different levels of force in modern times goes back at least to Aquinas -- but his scriptural basis for it [Summa Theologica, Question 99] seems pretty thin to me, and most discussions of the distinction that I see give no scriptural basis at all. Anyway, whether it is Aquinas's argument or not, I would be curious to know if you (@Felagund) know of a Biblical argument for the distinction in force, for us today, between the three kinds of laws.
This suggests that you believe it was necessary and proper, in ancient Israel, to judicially stone people to death for homosexual sodomy, idol worship, sabbath breaking, adultery, premarital sex (in the case of women), etc. To be clear, is that your view?
So that you know where I am coming from, this is my view of scripture (now in my Motte bio): I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I believe there is noise in the signal.
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