tsiivola
24d ago
In any case, it doesn't get much clearer than this: The theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
I gave you a counterexample, and if a counterexample exists then logically it cannot be a tautology. This seems to be what you think also, because you were arguing that tautologies do not have counterexamples.
You now admit that natural selection is more useful as a theory than for example the doctrines of Saint Augustine, because it makes it possible to predict resistance to antibiotics. This means that natural selection cannot be a tautology in the sense that it provides no useful information.
So I guess this is game over for you, as there is nothing left of your claim. Thanks for playing, try again sometime.
tsiivola
26d ago
Why don't you focus on what I actually said?
I'm trying to understand what you are saying, but it's difficult because sometimes what you say is unclear and sometimes it's nonsensical.
Newton says...
No he does not.
Yes he does. Newton's second law of motion, does it sound familiar? F=ma? I don't understand why you would deny a basic fact like this.
I'm only stating that there's no counterexample to a tautology. Because I'm trying to explain that the theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
Here's a simple counterexample: God protects all animals and won't allow any of them to suffer due to effects from their environment, and therefore there is no difference in survival or reproduction rates based on the traits of the animals.
Yes, St. Augustine is not the same as Darwin. But in practical terms, Divine Selection and Natural selection have the same explanatory value. That is, none at all.
You develop a miracle drug that kills harmful bacteria, but then you discover that your miracle drug is becoming less effective. What do you do? Divine Selection tells you that "God selects". What are you gonna do with that? Natural selection tells you that if you change the environment where a population of organisms live, the change in the environment can affect the prevalence of traits over generations. This allows you to explain why your drug is becoming less effective, and the explanation allows you to know how you could develop bacteria that are resistant to your drug, or how to prevent bacteria from developing resistance. So as we can see, it is exactly in practical terms that Natural selection has much more explanatory value than Divine selection.
And yes, the Wikipedia article says that Flemming "predicted" antimicrobial resistance, but he "predicted" it in 1945, that is, 17 years after he discovered antibiotics.
No, I'm talking about for example this mention on Alexander Fleming's Wikipedia page:
Almroth Wright had predicted antibiotic resistance even before it was noticed during experiments
tsiivola
28d ago
I would say that things like the idea of a circle or the idea of a dog exist in some sense, even though ideas are not material things that you can touch. Maybe it's a feature of the human brain that it tries to find patterns with commonalities in everything that it perceives, and you can only mentally process physical things as representations of these patterns. If you see a rock that is approximately the shape of a circle, you can see and remember it as a rock shaped like a circle, but if you see a rock with a random shape then it's kind of like looking at something that's in the blind spot of your retina, it's right there, but it's difficult to remember what the shape is or to draw it on paper, etc. If you analyze your subjective experience further along these lines you may come to think that there is some other reality of pure ideas that is parallel to physical reality, because that's what it feels like from a subjective point of view.
The mechanism of selection is:
slight modifications, which in any way favoured the individuals of any species, by better adapting them to their altered conditions, would tend to be preserved
You seem to be saying that since any definition works both ways (a coward is a person lacking courage, and a person lacking courage is a coward), then all definitions are tautologies. If that is what you are saying, then you really don't understand what a tautology is.
What Darwin actually said is that a change in the environment will cause changes in the organisms living in the environment, through the mechanism of selection. This is a very useful idea. It is so useful that it allowed the people who discovered and produced the first antibiotics to immediately understand what causes antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and how to cause it in the laboratory and also how to prevent it. You claim that people were not able to predict that resistance would happen before they observed it, even though they knew about Darwin already, but for example Wikipedia seems to disagree with you there.
Newton says that when you push left, it will accelerate to the left, and when you push right, it will accelerate to the right. Similarly Darwin says that when nature metaphorically "pushes" for dark fur to provide better camouflage from predators, then eventually prey animals will tend to have dark fur, and when it "pushes" for light fur to provide better camouflage, then eventually prey animals will tend to have light fur.
Your complaint seems to be that whenever you come up with a clever counterexample to Darwinian natural selection, it turns out that it wasn't a counterexample after all
No it isn't. My complaint is what I said it is, it's in the title of the post.
I mean you literally wrote:
But now that resistant bacteria exists, you tell me that's proof of Natural Selection? You see how it works? No matter what example you give me, Natural Selection will always be the correct explanation
It does seem that you are complaining about how all the counterexamples turn out not to be counterexamples after all.
And did you read the quote I cited?
Yes I did. We can go through it again. Here it is: "species emerged sequentially in historical time rather than all at once". Notice first that the words "select" or "selection" are nowhere to be seen. Then remember that when we talk about selection we are talking about it in the sense of selective breeding, about which animals procreate more and which animals procreate less. We are not talking about choosing which dress to wear to a wedding. You asked:
Before Darwin people thought God was nature, and they belived He perfomed his own "selection" of living beings. How does this differ from Darwin's explanation?
You could argue that if "species emerging sequentially" is a result of God's will, then in some abstract sense God has "selected" how and when this emergence happens, but still we cannot find in your quote anything about animals with certain traits procreating more than others. If the people who discovered antibiotics only had Saint Augustine's doctrines they may have never understood how to prevent antibiotic resistance in bacteria. So that is how it differs from Darwin's explanation.
tsiivola
1mo ago
The example about Newton was meant to illustrate your deficient understanding of Darwin. Newton did not discover that "those things fall down which fall down", just like Darwin did not discover that "those things survive which survive". Darwin discovered that the composition of a population of organisms can be affected by the environment through the mechanism of selection. Just like Newton proposed that when something pushes on an object the object will start to accelerate, Darwin proposed that when the environment changes the animals living there will start to change.
Your complaint seems to be that whenever you come up with a clever counterexample to Darwinian natural selection, it turns out that it wasn't a counterexample after all. It's like someone drops a rock to demonstrate gravity, and you think you have a clever counterexample, so you release a helium balloon, and exclaim: "See, it goes up, so therefore gravity is disproved!", and then they respond: "No, without gravity the balloon would not rise up, so your balloon actually confirms the theory of gravity". The fact that none of your counterexamples actually disprove Darwinian natural selection just means that they are bad counterexamples. There are some real counterexamples that could disprove Darwinian natural selection, such as prayer affecting antibiotic resistance in bacteria, but those counterexamples do not exist because reality is what it is and Darwinian natural selection is true and correct.
There does not seem to be any reference to "God performing his own selection" in your source.
tsiivola
1mo ago
Again, not a prediction.
Yes, and...? It seems that it was never a great mystery what mechanism leads to bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics, because scientists understood Darwinian natural selection. They knew how resistance happened, and with that knowledge they knew how to make it happen or how to prevent it from happening. If they had believed that God is making the bacteria resistant to antibiotics, or God is making the antibiotic less effective, they could have maybe tried praying, and then give up when it didn't work. It's like Richard Dawkins said: "It works, bitches!"
You seem to be saying that when all evidence in the universe confirms a theory, that makes it a tautology, but that actually just makes it true and correct. It's like you would go through every household item and drop it, and complain that you can't find a single example where the item doesn't fall down, so therefore Newton's theory of gravity is a tautology. You could try reversing antibiotic resistance by praying to God. If you succeeded then you would have disproved natural selection. If you don't succeed it just means that prayer doesn't work, but Darwinian natural selection does. It could be psychologically uncomfortable for you, but that's just reality, what can you do?
Before Darwin people thought God was nature, and they belived He perfomed his own "selection" of living beings.
Do you have a source for this? I thought God made living beings on the sixth day and concluded that they were good and needed no further tweaking.
tsiivola
1mo ago
Alexander Fleming (the guy who discovered the first antibiotic and got the Nobel Prize for it) talked about bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics already in 1945 in his Nobel Prize lecture. It seems he had done it in his lab, and presumably because he knew about Darwin he had a really clear idea about the mechanism behind it.
What comes to natural selection, the idea of selection was old at the time of Darwin. You select the trees that produce the sweetest fruit or the animals that have the most desirable features, and then you breed them to get new trees and animals that have more of what you like. The new idea was that nature, that is the environment around the organisms, could perform the selection, hence natural selection. You can put a bunch of cats on an island with a freezing climate and expect that the short haired ones will die off and the long haired ones will flourish and multiply, or alternatively you can expect that God's providence will allow all of them to prosper equally. Which one do you think will turn out?
tsiivola
1mo ago
I'm not sure whether it's a culture thing or a raw intelligence thing, but I think you could say that some people aren't capable of understanding the idea that some things are physical systems that are not governed by the whims of individuals but instead by their own sets of rules.
This reminds me of Robert Kegan's 5 stages of adult development, which I first learned about through David Chapman's blogs, for example https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence. In short, people at stage 3 are like fish in water regarding their relationships to other people ("if the judge sentences me, then the judge does not like me personally"), whereas people at stage 4 see their relationships to other people more from an outside perspective, almost like objects that can be used for specific purposes, and they know that even if they know the judge personally and could ask them for a favour when hanging out after work, they cannot ask for a favour in the courtroom ("have to put the friend-friend relationship back in the toy box and take out the defendant-judge relationship and play with that for a while").
tsiivola
6mo ago
The linked Wikipedia article says: "two hours after the attack began, Israel informed the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv that its military forces had mistakenly attacked a U.S. Navy ship"
Without knowing anything else it does seem that Israel indeed doesn't lie about this sort of thing.
tsiivola
10mo ago
A man once wanted to learn to play the bass, so he went to a teacher. First lesson they learned to play the open E string, just plucking the string, nothing else. Second lesson they learned to play the open A string, again just plucking the string, nothing else. The third lesson they were supposed to learn the D string in a similar manner, but the student never showed up again.
The teacher bumped into the man on the street one day by chance and asked him: "Why don't you want to learn the bass any more? Was it not a suitable instrument for you?". The student replied: "No, it's nothing like that. I just haven't had time to come to lessons because I have so many paying gigs now."
Now that is a joke, but it can show a different perspective on things.
You can spend six months learning basic chords on the guitar and afterwards you can sing simple songs and accompany yourself on the guitar. At that point other people might want to listen to you, and there is a small chance you might even get paid doing it. Alternatively you can spend six months learning some kinds of finger exercises, but at that point nobody will want to listen to you, and you have to wonder if you wasted your time. So maybe it makes sense to build the minimum viable product first and then add the bells and whistles later, if you think you need them.
tsiivola
10mo ago
The best way to get started in music is, of course, the most boring way—get a beginner etude book for the instrument you want to play and start off with very basic stuff meant to familiarize you with the notes and rudimentary music theory before progressing to simple songs of the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" variety.
This actually seems backwards. You should start with something that is simple and very familiar, such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb". It should be simple so that it is easy to execute, and familiar so that you can easily tell when you make a mistake when it doesn't sound like you expect it to sound. Then later you might want to look into etudes if you want to work on some technical aspects of playing your instrument.
If the music is already familiar to you then things might be easier, but most likely you will be lost and confused in the beginning, no matter what, and what you really need is the ability to tolerate that. Then you can try out different things and see what happens and little by little the confusion evaporates.
whose guitar skills consist solely of strumming the chords in root position, about which this video is the last word: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BEWQNKbXHQk.
That video seems pretty mistaken overall. He first gives two examples of people playing these so called "zombie chords", then starts going on about how they sound bad because the chords are in root position, when actually in the two examples the C and D chords are not in root position, the C major has a G in the bass and the D major has A in the bass. They would probably sound better if they actually were in root position.
tsiivola
10mo ago
There are musically talented people in both her and her husband's family and one person with absolute pitch.
So it seems her mother, who knows nothing of music, claims that some great uncle "may have had absolute pitch".
Most people in your average amateur choir has decent relative pitch. This isn't a hard to acquire skill!
Yes, for some definition of "decent relative pitch", I am sure this statement is true. Yet, like before, the statement remains somewhat vague.
I know a bunch of people with AP and they aren't any better at music than those without, at least not in the way she describes.
Or they are at the same level as others around them, but have spent an order of magnitude less effort to get there.
The claim that absolute pitch is a significant advantage is in no way reliant on this one blog post. Here is a study describing how people with AP are better at a dictation task: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2010_128_890-893.pdf
tsiivola
10mo ago
This describes most people with some of musical talent.
Again, sure, for some definition of "some musical talent" this statement is definitely true. And, again, without learning more about said definition the statement remains almost meaningless.
One has to wonder how she ever got in.. this is a very base line ability.
One has to wonder why the school was so unable to teach this ability, if it is taught with some frequency and requires no "grand effort".
The post itself is available here: https://archive.is/ru6sw
tsiivola
10mo ago
Do you think something like the Harry Potter novels and the whole celebrity culture formed around them is useful for something? I have never read any of the Harry Potter books, and I can fully agree with one part of what you said: "the passion with which some people devote themselves to it has always seemed so alien to me"
tsiivola
10mo ago
Relative pitch is just knowing what the interval between tones are. This doesn't require some grand effort to learn.
Sure, for some definition of "knowing the interval between tones" this is certainly a true statement. But unfortunately until we shine more light on that definition the statement is almost meaningless.
What you said about absolute pitch might as well apply to relative pitch.
But it does not seem to. In the blog post the writers son has "stunning effortlessness when it comes to his music lessons", "finds it easy to [...] improvise in any key", "never struggles with memorizing the music he is assigned", but the writer in the past had to drop out of music school because learning "just the interval between tones" proved to be too grand of an effort.
tsiivola
10mo ago
And yet it is curious how you consider it bragging while simultaneously claiming that you place very little value on the thing being bragged about. If the blog post was about a parent teaching their child to wiggle their ears, would you be commenting about how we don't need tiger moms forcing their children to become geniuses that accomplish great things such as being able to wiggle their ears?
One more thing...
Humblebragging about your trilingual kids who have perfect pitch is a bit much.
"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
Bragging is when you say something positive about yourself. Humble bragging is when you say something negative about yourself, but at the same time reveal things that make it possible for other people to infer some positive thing about yourself. Do you think the blog post we are discussing really is humble bragging, or is it just bragging?
tsiivola
10mo ago
"Oh, so you taught your child to read. That's nice, dear, but I honestly don't see the applicability of something like literacy. Sounds like a humble brag to me."
The above is approximately how your comment sounds to me. A kid might be talented at something even if he remains illiterate his whole life, but there are most likely multiple things related to the talent that become easier, quicker or even possible in the first place through learning to read and write.
You can probably do most of what people with absolute pitch do by learning to identify pitches relatively, but for some reason it seems that developing this so called "relative pitch" takes a lot of effort, but absolute pitch kind of builds momentum and just grows on its own once you get it started.
I think there might be some kind of fear of inequality behind a lot of the dismissals of absolute pitch, such as there were on hacker news commenting this same blog post. I think the idea of some people being in a completely different category and having an advantage due to it is terrifying to many people, and a way to cope with the terror is to dismiss the existence of such advantage.
tsiivola
10mo ago
I think the reason Hitler is so hated is simply because he started a war against "us" and, even worse, he almost won. If Hitler had won, everyone would have soon gotten used to the new normal. If Hitler had been defeated easily, the whole war would have been soon largely forgotten. But almost losing a war leaves people nervous and they have to curse the enemy whenever they even think of him, just to soothe their nerves. People on the other side of the world who did not directly participate in the war do not feel the same way. There is probably an ice cream factory somewhere in Asia making Hitler branded ice cream, and to them he is just a famous figure with a recognizable moustache, no more associated with great evil than Elvis Presley or Albert Einstein.
So there is no abstract internalized value system or anything like that involved, it's just a historical accident.
Some people have called Christianity a death worshipping cult. Death of Jesus being the main symbol, martyrs effectively committing suicide, obsessing on life after death, and so on. Maybe that is just something you will have to accept if you want to stay in the cult, instead of trying to follow all kinds of flawed arguments in order to find a rationalization that is not revolting to you.
tsiivola
1yr ago
Or cases like the one I heard about from a former job: the guy was married, had an affair with a subordinate, then left the job for a better one elsewhere. He also left the subordinate pregnant with twins, broke up with his wife, but didn't take his mistress with him to his new job and new town. That's a case where if the woman had listened to advice about not shitting where you eat, she would have come out of it better all round - but of course, it's all "but I love him and he loves me", until it ends badly.
The workplace does not really seem to be relevant here. The main problem seems to be that a woman had an affair with an untrustworthy man who left her while she was pregnant and moved to another town. If the woman had changed to another job during the affair so as not to "shit where she eats", would the man have suddenly turned out to be more trustworthy and not leave her behind like that?
Compare to a made up example of a guy who one day went to his job at the warehouse where a crate fell on his head and he died. If he had followed the advice "never use public transport" he would not have been able to go to his job and would still be alive. Technically it is true, but it doesn't really demonstrate that the advice "never use public transport" is good.
(There's also another case, tangentially related to that job, where a person associated with the organisation had an affair and dumped his wife for the new younger squeeze; his ex-wife went ballistic and went to the cops about alleged dodgy financial dealings of his, which eventually saw him serving a jail sentence. Do not fuck around unless you are very, very sure that finding out won't send you to the slammer!)
I'm not sure if this example is also meant to illustrate how workplace romances are bad, because it is not clear if the new girlfriend was working at the same organization, but here too the workplace itself does not seem to be relevant in any way. The problem seems to be that the guy did something illegal which the wife knew about, and when he angered her she told the police about it. Would the wife have been less angry if the new girlfriend had not been a colleague, and thus he had not "shat where he eats"?
If you wanted to prevent overfishing of shellfish, what would be the test that costs a couple hundred, takes a couple hours to administer, and screens out people who are likely to harvest shellfish beyond the legal limit? Apparently simply not letting Cambodians in the country takes care of 99% of the problem. Maybe it's genetics, or more likely some cultural thing, or perhaps a combination of both, but my guess is that few people know for sure why the Cambodians are like that. And there could be a lot of other things the Cambodians are doing that have an effect on society, but few people know about it, because when they are not picking shellfish there are no officers watching with binoculars.
Perhaps the reason why many people who express opinions about IQ being heritable also have other questionable opinions is that expressing opinions against progressive viewpoints tends to provoke in some people a hostile and aggressive response, and so only people with a certain fearlessness are ready to express such opinions, and this fearlessness allows them to disregard other people's disapproval in other matters also.
And perhaps the reason why some people holding progressive viewpoints respond in a hostile and aggressive manner when these viewpoints are contested is because they see themselves as being on the "right side", and the idea of them "being the baddies" is unbearable to even think about, and so an aggressive lashing out is the way to distract from these uncomfortable thoughts. This could mean that just asking for evidence will also put you in their eyes in the category of "punchable nazi", even if you don't bring up differences between racial groups.
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