Hyperion
1mo ago
The Christian theory has the same problem the Positivist one has unless you just assume the consequent. If we were made by God as rational being we can be rational, but how do we know we were made by God and are rational except through our senses and reason? If we were made irrational by a demon or evolution then the Christian theory is wrong and the secular theory could still be right for the wrong reasons.
This reminds me of Lob's Theorem, or as Scott Aaronson puts it.
Do you remember the puzzle from Thursday? The puzzle was whether there's any theorem that can only be proved by assuming as an axiom that it can be proved. In other words, does "just believing in yourself" make any formal difference in mathematics? We're now in a position to answer that question.
Let's suppose, for concreteness, that the theorem we want to prove is the Riemann Hypothesis (RH), and the formal system we want to prove it in is Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF). Suppose we can prove in ZF that, if ZF proves RH, then RH is true. Then taking the contrapositive, we can also prove in ZF that if RH is false, then ZF does not prove RH. In other words, we can prove in ZF+not(RH) that not(RH) is perfectly consistent with ZF. But this means that the theory ZF+not(RH) proves its own consistency -- and this, by Gödel, means that ZF+not(RH) is inconsistent. But saying that ZF+not(RH) is inconsistent is equivalent to saying that RH is a theorem of ZF. Therefore we've proved RH. In general we find that, if a statement can be proved by assuming as an axiom that it's provable, then it can also be proved without assuming that axiom. This result is known as Löb's Theorem (again with the umlauts), though personally I think that a better name would be the "You-Had-The-Mojo-All-Along Theorem."
Hyperion
1mo ago
This is just a kind of argument style common among educated Christians. We have a couple other ones who comment frequently here and think this Alvin Plantinga style skepticism is a slam dunk against naturalism and empiricism.
Hyperion
1mo ago
There were 57,540 births in Ireland in 2022. The death figures are per 100,000. If the true average was 4-6 deaths per 100,000 you would expect Ireland to have the frequency of zero maternal death years it does.
Hyperion
1mo ago
It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero).
Are you even a German? You talk like an American with some far off German ancestors, who has no real connection to the country or it's culture. You also idealize Germany, and attack the Anglo world, like someone who knows the faults of the Anglo world first hand, but has no real understanding of what Germany was like then.
That's not a theory. The Ancient North Eurasians were a population that existed in Siberia 20+ thousand years ago before being demographically replaced by North East Asians. The Native Americans got stuck in Beringa during this process so they are about 30-40% ANE. Some of the ANE migrated east into Eastern Europe where they contributed a lot of ancestry to the Yamnaya as well as Scandinavian Hunter-gathers the Germans assimilated. Europeans are only about 20% ANE at most and it was so long ago and so little of the ancestry of moderns I doubt it really matters for any traits today.
As a bonus here is one of the last people who was mostly ANE by ancestry, shortly after her death her people were assimilated by Indo-Europeans.
Hyperion
1mo ago
It has and is happening in ADoS. It's just there are lots more black people in the USA then there are Indians, especially in the deep south where most live. I see lots of very white looking black people who still identify as black and are culturally very black. And many have been absorbed into white majority once they start looking white enough.
American Indians are very European by ancestry. It isn't unusual at all to have people who look white despite having two Indian parents, to say nothing of Indians with one white parent/grandparent. Lots of famous Indian Chiefs had white mothers.
It's a big reason why the Indian population has been falling in the USA. Some Indian from the reservation moves out, marries a white person; and, has white looking children, who just get absorbed into the white majority as another white person with some story about an Indian ancestor.
Hyperion
1mo ago
I think the only take away from that is to ignore all the editorializing and only look at the actual pictures. I agree that the people who wrote the files are pushing an agenda and playing fast and loose with the facts, but the stuff in the actual WPATH communications is just as crazy.
This mostly seems like an attempt by the author to get people to avoid looking at the actually damning stuff.
Hyperion
1mo ago
There are lots of supernatural acts that are tied to suffering in the bible and Christian mythology. Jesus' own bleeding of water instead of blood when he is pierced in his side and his eventual resurrection, including him still having the wounds he suffered on the cross. The saints suffered like Christ and in doing so became magical like him. Objects associated with Christ and the Saints are considered magical relics, these include supposed body parts of Christ and the Saints. If that isn't magic I don't know what is.
If someone thinks kissing my foreskin or finger can heal them, that is magic.
Hyperion
1mo ago
The had monks, yes, but they also had secular scholars who preserved these things. I assumed you were talking about monks like those in Irish monasteries and other monasteries throughout the Western Europe who preserved some of the ancient corpus despite being assaulted by pagan Germans.
Hyperion
1mo ago
magic actually works but you have to literally either go through extreme suffering...
it would be the best to approach all of this precisely through an institution that says "That's bad...
(most likely) Christianity.
Are thinking about the same Christianity? The one I know glorifies martyrdom, suffering and self sacrifice. At least the Catholic version.
Hyperion
1mo ago
How could you ever differentiate between the signal and noise, especially with all the hoaxes in the mix? It would be pointless to try. Even if you had all the time in the world. Maybe if simulated minds counted you could do it, but the people who advocate this stuff are like the spiritualists in Stellaris.
You don't need quantum mechanics for that sort of interference though. Even in an apparently deterministic universe, you could just say that your mind influenced what happened. Quantum mechanics adds nothing to either the plausibility or mechanics of the thought experiment.
That's what OP is suggesting and it works in every possible universe. There are an infinite number of possible models that describe our universe and the only thing constraining them is their complexity.
Rationalism is choosing the least complex option; because, it makes the best predictions.
That survival is largely down to medieval monks.
If you ignore the Eastern Roman Empire and the Arabs who cannibalized most of it.
China also preserved it's classical corpus despite similar collapses. India the same.
It isn't something unique.
Even the Parsis preserved most of the Avesta, despite their small number. The Samaritans number in the triple digits; and, still, preserved their version of the Torah.
Hyperion
1mo ago
You have claimed psychical phenomena only appear under extreme trauma, and not under the conditions of, normal, austere scientific studies.
Which do you believe? That these studies are really false, or that psychical phenomena can appear, in a detectable way, even in mundane circumstances?
Hyperion
1mo ago
Ah, yes, I take as an axiom in my metaphysical beliefs, Psalm 103:4 "Who makes His angels spirits." Who could argue against that.
Hyperion
1mo ago
And even fought super advanced alien midgets
The opposite, they were tall lanky things called 'Skinnies.' They also jumped around with jump packs, powered armor and I think laser swords.
Hyperion
2mo ago
Looking at opportunity cost is a fair way to divide the profits. Let's say you have only one option, but I have lots of options. If you want me to join your project, pay me more. This is why software engineers get paid more than HR reps. Software engineers have talents they can shop around. HR reps don't.
Prices and wages only equal opportunity cost in a competitive market. They still matter in the monopolistic setting, but the whole point is that any distribution of rents that is above everyone's opportunity cost is economically efficient and a possible equilibrium.
Hyperion
2mo ago
On more replicable scale it sort of happens with programmers. There is a reason why programmers are being better paid than say cleaners.
That's not due to bilateral monopolies though. That's just normal supply and demand. Bilateral monopolies would be more like United Autoworkers or other heavily unionized jobs.
Hyperion
2mo ago
Same-sex couples raise kids at around 56% the rate of straight couples, which is a large difference, but is not an order of magnitude different nor 'impossible' which I feel like some conservative arguments seem to imply. And for lesbian relationships it's more like 80% the rate of straight couples.
90% of straight couples in that sample are married only 50% of same sex couples are. You are also using the married stats without saying so. I was confused by your post at first since the survey you cited shows same sex couples having much lower rates of child rearing than what you claimed.
Hyperion
2mo ago
That's true, but postmodernist leftist philosophers and critical theorists use this kind of thing as a basis for their whole ideology. It isn't just a debate tactic it's something they really believe is true in their heart of hearts.
Hyperion
2mo ago
Flattening out the distribution of realized traits has similar problems to flattening out the distribution of underlying genes, as I'm sure you realize.
Yes, but, most variation is neutral.
Additionally, what the genetics industry actually detects will be what they pay to detect, so there could end up being a reduction in underlying genetic diversity even if there are many variants with the same overall outcome naturally.
All that data is there for you to look at yourself. No one denies the actual data, because it is true.
Hyperion
2mo ago
They use a tactic that's common to leftist thought. Set up an 'essentialist' strawman of a concept that is 100% discrete and definitive and then after knocking down this strawman declare any more nuanced approach just as essentialist and false as the strawman. It doesn't matter if the 'essentialist' idea of race or sex works 99% of the time, you already defeated any notion that discrete races or sexes exist, so any attempt to categorize people by race or sex must be just as false as the strawman(and motivated by racism and sexism).
Hyperion
2mo ago
Most variation is neutral and due to genetic drift and the accumulation of, new, mostly neutral allele variants. This doesn't change the fact that people can vary genetically on socially relevant traits like height, IQ and skin color despite being genetically similar.
Amazonians are relatively light skinned, but nearly identical genetically to their dark skinned Peruvian neighbors. Both Europeans and North East Asians are light skinned due to convergent evolution despite their large genetic differences. Both Peruvians and Amazonians are genetically more similar to Europeans than they are to North East Asians, because they have a lot Ancestral North Eurasian ancestry from people who used to live in Siberia, the same as Europeans.
Yet they don't look or act more like Europeans than the North East Asians do, because of culture and selection and the fact most variation is neutral.
What?
No, the reason males are more risk taking is because a male can impregnate multiple females, where as, a female can only be impregnated by one male. So a male has a higher expected return to risk taking mating strategies.
Chickens are the opposite of humans where females have ZW chromosomes and males have ZZ chromosomes; however, roosters are famously aggressive and risk taking. You can't stop them from fighting if enclosed together.
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