SwordOfOccam
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User ID: 2777
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Neither of those facts remotely modifies the argument I presented about incentives.
Assisted living and end-of-life care should also not be subsidized by taxpayers. Entitlements need reform across the board.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
What is really useless is creating policies that distort incentives and make problems worse. You can’t just ignore personal agency interacting with incentives just because the scale went up.
You have to consider effects on incentives for future behavior and “willingness to pay”, when it becomes a black hole of government spending for everything because it’s labeled a “chronic disease.”
In this case, individuals being shielded from bearing the cost of their poor lifestyle decisions will almost certainly make things worse.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Well I’m a layman at physics, so I’d suggest finding someone who can lay out the math, theory, and experimentation that shows it is impossible for any object with mass to travel faster than the speed of light.
My layman’s understanding is that the fundamental properties of spacetime, mass, and energy as we understand them via Special Relativity make it impossible.
Here’s a bunch of physics nerds describing how it would violate causality:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/671516/proof-for-impossibility-of-ftl-signals
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
You’re applying a rigid categorization of “fact or fiction” to an area where the practicality of “all models are wrong; some are useful” is the typical approach.
You’re calling for perfection or it’s fiction, when science has been building knowledge bit by bit. Things can have shades of gray.
Obviously, understanding the Ultimate Nature of Reality and Its Universal Laws is a fine goal, but the way to get there is almost certainly a pretty messy process.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
yielding justifiable nonzero confidence in universal natural laws may be zero
I’m failing to understand why this is a bar any epistemology needs to clear.
Science as a method verifiably works at improving our material lives because it produces sufficiently accurate information. The utility is the payoff, but the correlation to reality is what enables it.
if someone were to give a single universal natural law of the physical world -- take your pick -- and give an objective argument why we should have greater than zero confidence in its literal truth.
Where does math fit here under “physical world”?
The thing you seem to be doing is putting forth a standard no epistemology can satisfy. It’s not like pure math and logic don’t have identified paradoxes and limitations. Just ask Bertrand Russell.
How about the finding that nothing with mass can exceed the speed of light? This is something backed by math and logic, as well as experimentation. If it were otherwise physics would break, is my layman’s understanding anyway.
Is that sufficiently “universal”?
There are a lot of “universal” rules in physics, so long as you stay at the atomic level. (The quantum domain also has its rules, but they don’t break the atomic ones altogether.)
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Yes, the knowledge was useful in that it allowed us to put man on the moon. Many such cases.
But the focus here is not on it being useful; the focus is on it being proved sufficiently accurate to be useful in that endeavor, as an epistemology dedicated to understanding reality.
Proof -> Pudding
We do want the utility pudding, but it’s the evidence of the epistemic success I’m trying to highlight.
In the case of religion, if someone presented evidence of the gift of prophecy then the focus would be on the accuracy of the predictions, not the utility of them. Or faith healing consistently working.
It’s the utility showing the epistemic success of correlating to reality, not the utility per se that would be evidence of divine power (or at least something inexplicable). Even if we don’t understand the causal mechanism, the effects could be systemically demonstrated such that we the faithless would have to worry about our current stance.
In the case of religion, in my experience the practical utility of religion is typically kept separate from factual accuracy of the theology. You’ll hear a lot about meaningfulness and belonging and community as secular evidence religion is good. And these things are often true (I’ve experienced them myself), it’s just not direct evidence of the religious doctrine being factually accurate about the nature of reality.
Here’s a related epistemic irony I still can’t get over: Learning about evolution was a big piece of evidence against the religion of my youth. There were so many battles between the scientifically literate New Atheists and the ignorant Young Creationists, while the religious Intelligent Design types looked down on both as they tried to pretend they had squared the circle and reconciled their theology with a natural origin of mankind.
But now I often find myself siding with trad religious conservatives regarding e.g. average biological and behavioral differences between men and women, because so many secular science aficionados deny evolution above the neck when it’s inconvenient for their political ideology.
The flawed epistemology used by many believers can beat the flawed Blank Slate one in many cases.
I guess the historical precedent of patriotic Christian capitalists being far preferable to godless communists should have kept me from being too surprised this kind of thing can happen.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Success rates matter.
If tarot reading worked as consistently physics or math then boy would that be something.
(Now social sciences, well…)
Science as a method frequently involves guessing and dumb luck and accidental discovery. But then the point is systematically testing findings and examining new evidence and ideas. Tarot reading doesn’t have iterative improvement going on.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
But that’s shifting from epistemology to utility.
Religions and religious beliefs certainly have had and do have utility. They certainly have a lot of “reproductive fitness” mimetically and biologically, though there is the significant decline in modernized societies.
How much credit say Christianity gets for contributing (vs. inhibiting) the secular bits of Western progress in science and such is contested. (And of course there are the debates over Islam’s golden era and Eastern religions’ contributions vs. Christianity being uniquely likely to foster say individualism.)
I don’t think ~empiricism required a “completely irrational belief” coming from a religion, but it’s basically impossible to separate out progress in science from religious influence, from the Greeks down through Newton, because everything was so entangled until “natural philosophy” split off sufficiently and science became secular.
We can’t know the counter factual of the past, but even if I’m willing to totally grant that eg Christianity played a critical role in fostering the Enlightenment, Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and other things that led to Western Culture, that doesn’t mean that Christianity in particular or religion in general is useful today on net (or factually accurate).
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Comparing one sport to another is still within the domain of sports. The rules are different in any particular case, but it’s not a fundamentally different category where say the laws of physics or other fundamental facts about reality change.
Science deals with reality as we can understand it. Religion seems to not do that so much. The fact that religions don’t tend to come to consensus on much of anything over time is pretty strong evidence there is no underlying system of discovering truth.
You’re leaning hard into nonoverlapping magisteria. It’s not very trad but it is common.
If you read an article on “god of the gaps” you should be able to see your point about “existing methods” is doing the same. Applied backwards, it makes religious believers seem naive. So too using it now.
You’re bringing up Bayes when there’s no need to. It’s elementary logic that you shouldn’t look to “believe what can’t be disproven” vs. “believe what there is evidence for.” The possibility space of the former is infinite; the latter is constrained by reality if you have good standards of evidence. “What must I believe” vs. “What can I get away with believing.”
Not sure how familiar you are with various forms of trad religious legal systems, but I’ll take secular legal systems informed by modern concepts of science and reason. Secular philosophy is rich on the questions of justice and personal responsibility, and scientific principles and findings influence most of us who care to think about such things.
Methodological naturalism is true because it works. Anyone can use it, even the religious. Anyone can run and observe experiments that show the mind-brain connection, and the lack of evidence for any concept of a soul.
I think you’re failing to understand the model here. I don’t need to believe in your god or anyone’s beforehand for you to demonstrate solid evidence something strange is happening via prayer. If your god stretches forth its hand to affect the material world, as so many claim it does, then where is the evidence? Trying to philosophize about the limitations of materialism are irrelevant unless your god never comes into that domain.
You also have the causation backwards: I disbelieve in god because people claim so much about eg prayer but can show so little evidence to back those claims. But even if I had started from a null position, the burden is on the claim being made. Why is the omnipotent creator of the universe such a shy fellow and why do his believers talk him up so much with so little hard evidence brought to bear?
Nowhere did I claim I solved my own brain with my brain. I used tools to disprove certain ideologies to them disprove the one I had been raised with. The facts were relatively easy; the emotions and conditioning were far more challenging.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Focusing on the “trust” aspect instead of the “belief” aspect of the word “faith” is not helpful in an epistemological discussion.
To trust in a deity, one believes it exists.
Those Marines doing their duty are not doing so with an epistemology that requires them to believe in anything without regular boring evidence.
Similarly, people do recover from comas. No special beliefs required.
In contrast, hoping/trusting/believing in something like a deity that may or may not be out there is in a different category of belief. How do you know?
I think the idea of faith as firm belief without evidence is a power grab by fundamentalist clergymen who do not want to be questioned on their axioms.
I guess it’s too bad the faithful can’t come to a shared understanding on how it is they ought to develop their beliefs regarding deity and theology.
Is this site fundamentalist in your view? (I assume you think Evangelicals count as such.)
These?
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/true-to-the-faith/faith?lang=eng
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
You can try to accuse me of strawmanning Religious Faith, but I was raised in a devout religious environment and personally experienced how it works. Different strains of Christianity have their particular spins on it, but there’s a lot of commonality in at least how it’s scripturally defined and commonly practiced.
Bringing up little-f faith is a red herring with respect to critiques of religious epistemology. Obviously, humans go about our days dealing with uncertainty and have to rely on heuristics and gut feelings. The motte/bailey between “regular faith” and “Religious Faith as an epistemology” is obnoxious and frequently invoked to shield religious beliefs from direct critique. It’s probably necessary to taboo the word “faith” altogether to avoid these kinds of issues.
So to is “blind faith” unhelpful to discuss in that it typically is something everyone can agree is bad and that religious types will deny they are doing it.
It is certainly the case that Faith or any other label for “faulty epistemology” can exist in non-religious contexts. Many ideologies rely on credulity and insufficiently examined claims to survive. In fact, science is hard and scientists fail regularly to do it well (and can be wrong even when doing it as well as they could). That’s why it’s so critical that science is iterative, with no special authorities or sources of knowledge. Human nature is not by default well-calibrated for consistent scientific reasoning.
Religious epistemology does not have standards of evidence that satisfy science, or even other secular frameworks, such as law. It does tend to have special authorities and sources of knowledge. Religion can iterate and change, but it tends to be haphazard and so rarely results in more consensus on any given religious concept or interpretations of god’s will—even within one religion.
Religious beliefs have to be justified via a special religious epistemology because they cannot withstand scrutiny from an actually effective and consistent epistemology. It’s simply special pleading and inconsistent standards backed by tradition.
When you say:
Faith is believing in something that can neither be proven nor disproven with existing methods.
Religious faith applies this to transcendental concepts.
You’re making a few major mistakes. One is that “existing methods” is basically “god of the gaps” and it ought to be embarrassing to invoke.
Two, “proven nor disproven” is to frame things wrongly. If good evidence sufficient to justify a belief probabilistically can’t be obtained, then saying “well you can’t disprove it so I can maintain my belief” is not a logical stance. I don’t need to disprove there’s an incorporeal dragon in your garage to dismiss it as extraordinarily unlikely.
Three, historically (and in many cases to this day), Religious Faith is not merely applied to whatever “transcendental concepts” are. Religious Faith has retreated enormously as science has progressed, because science actually worked no matter what your religion is. E.g. no need to worry so much about casting out devils as medical science improved.
Relatedly, “nonoverlapping magisteria” really doesn’t get you very far because science has this pesky habit of intruding. For example, Christians typically have strong doctrinal and personal beliefs about souls and prayer. Unfortunately, “souls” do not exist, unless they are somehow neither matter nor energy. Same situation as ghosts and other such phenomena. The mind is what the brain does, which we can demonstrate in a myriad of ways. Similarly, “prayer” as a way to communicate with deity or to seek causal impact or special knowledge is consistently shown to just not be a thing. Same situation as mediums and fortune tellers.
The trick that worked for me was examining other religious beliefs and finding them sorely lacking (as encouraged by my religion). Eventually, those critical tools of logic and reason came for my own religious beliefs.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
The scientific method is believing things based on evidence.
Religious faith is believing things not based on evidence.
“Evidence” is doing a lot of work in those statements, of course. There is no One True Definition of scientific evidence. It’s almost easier to say what it isn’t. For example, receiving revelation in a dream or any other special knowledge that can’t be tested or verified by others. “It made me feel warm inside” is no way to practice epistemology because human emotion is too volatile. “We explain the inexplicable with further inexplicabilities” leaves something to be desired as searching for truth goes.
Scientific knowledge is true insofar as it can accurately represent the workings of the universe. Theory often comes after experimentation. Theories often need to be refined or get superseded by new knowledge. What’s important is the process of refining our understanding, not a single point in time on any given theory.
The Wright Brothers achieved flight before the physics were understood. My understanding is that the physics of lift are still contested. We use electricity to make sand do math and other thinking, but my understanding is that the physics of lightning are still contested. We started vaccination before understanding all that much about germs and viruses.
All this is to say that you are making a category error, common among classical philosophers, of judging science by the benchmarks of classical philosophy and finding it wanting.
Science is what works; not what is sacred or revealed from mysterious sources. If something doesn’t work, we can and should discard it. That’s the nice thing about iterative systems open to feedback and dedicated to improvement.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Uneducated Christians: “I don’t believe science when it conflicts with my biblical beliefs.”
Educated Christians: “I don’t believe science when it conflicts with my biblical beliefs as justified by elaborate philosophical arguments.”
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Irrational belief systems did not get man to the moon, split the atom, or turn sand into a thinking machine.
Methodological naturalism, science, and engineering is a systematic way of learning and accomplishing new things.
Your metaphysics are stupid if they think word games supersede hard results. Any old superstition can be defended by the clever. “Formally extremely weak” — maybe your philosophical system is what is weak.
Positivism may be wrong, but religion tends to be “not even wrong” as an epistemology. Which is why there are so few positivists and so many religions.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
I’m questioning by what metrics or standards, absolute or relative, you label “US spooks” as “not very good at the moment.”
These things are hard to judge for insiders, let alone outsiders, and typically becomes evident only with the passage of time and significant declassification.
The points you make in A are sufficient to explain why it would almost never make sense for anyone to ever attempt it anyway.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
And that’s what makes the Motte special
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Sorry didn’t mean to imply you were making Hlynka’s error
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
there’s reasons beyond IQ to explain black underperformance,
Come on man don’t just copy Hlynka here by straw manning the other side. Just because one side has a lot of blank slatism doesn’t mean the other side mirrors it by being strictly biodeterminist. Like height and many other traits, genes and environment matter.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Saying clear facts outright, which may be controversial, negative, or inherently “disrespectful,” is a lot different than “boo outgroup” using inflammatory language.
For example, saying “there’s a racial achievement gap” used to be uncontroversial as an empirical fact, and it was only controversial to bring up certain forms of causation. In more recent years there have been cases where even mentioning the fact of, which is indisputable, got somebody fired. See also: Damore and differences between sexes.
All of this is to say that you have a lot of gall for criticizing those here who try to discuss distasteful facts with decorum, given how basically everywhere else on the internet works (either censorship or cesspool).
The mods forcing consistent decorum even for those where it’s thinly papering over antipathy is a pretty fucking important norm to preserve even for the actual Nazi defenders around here, among others.
So please don’t cry that you have to work a little to hold in your contempt for your outgroup(s) here because that’s how it is for most of us on any given issue. (I’ll grant that you are playing on hard mode relative to the average poster here.)
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
I enjoyed poking at his cognitive dissonance and the internal inconsistencies of his worldview.
He was wrong but in pretty unique ways.
I personally wasn’t overly offended by his rule breaking, but it does seem his response to my comment is what led to the ban.
Ironically, he was fairly justified in being peeved at me there for my demonstrated ignorance (though he’d be on firmer ground if he hadn’t been constantly avoiding questions and misrepresenting many of us).
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
I may be misreading him but I took this as pointing out Christian philosemitism is much larger than Christian antisemitism in modern times.
So it’s not really “bizarre” because he was matching the framing of the previous comment to say “shame most Christians disagree with your views.”
Though I guess it’s unavoidably culture warring in that responding in kind to a comment blatantly breaking the rules is still going to break the rules. But it didn’t strike me as over the top, so I would think this was more of a warning situation (unless you have other violations as a pattern).
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
People getting things wrong in good faith is one thing.
Blatantly disregarding clarification is an order.
There’s still enough diversify of thought here that any given stance is going to risk an inferential gap with someone, and consistently striving to pass an ITT is the best we can do.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
So a mistake I was making based on my exposure to the anti-woke sentiments I’ve read in the US is that the term “Identitarian” was specifically left-coded, which is apparently not the case, as the term originated to describes European right-wingers.
A lot of posters here in recent HBD arguments explicitly claimed to support race-blind individualism, which would not make them Identitarian, but I’m not sure what the breakdown is.
I am aware a group of posters here are implicitly or explicitly right-wing Identitarians, though I was not seeing that being particularly relevant to the arguments being made about the descriptive factuality of intellectual differences between populations having a genetic component.
Hlynka apparently caught a ban because I drove him to incivility, but his constant labeling of those who think there is truth to HBD/race realism/hereditarianism as Identitarian in arguments with those of us who reject that stance was annoying.
SwordOfOccam
1yr ago
Most of us HBD types here are not neo-Nazis as far as I can tell.
Moreover, the term “Identitarian” typically refers to left-coded ideas, even if we accept horseshoe theory is real. (Edit: seems I’m wrong about that actually in a global context.)
Brave of you to accuse me of being a troll here.
Well, that, and he couldn’t help but lump us all together and combine us with the Left racialists.
He would not recognize that a fair number of us here combine race realism with a desire for race-blind classical liberalism/individualism.
If he would have engaged with actual arguments made, instead of constantly dodging and misrepresenting them, and only been pissy with the actual Nazis and white supremacists he would probably still be around here.
It sure was a trip to watch him contort his arguments against the descriptive evidence for race realism with his anti-elite/academia views.
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