site banner
PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   3557 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

2026 Chevrolet Trax LS or 2025 Nissan Sentra S?

I'm looking for the cheapest new car I can buy near me and these seem to be my choices. They are both within $100 of each other (about $19,500 including dealer fees, not including the 7% sales tax), so the price is basically identical.

Pros for the Trax: Larger, so more storage and easier to fit inside (I'm a big guy). I live in South Florida so the fact that it's higher off the ground helps to deal with flooded streets, plus I keep seeing sedans destroy their front bumpers on parking stoppers.

Pros for the Sentra: Higher MPG (34 vs 30). Easier to park.

Advice?

EDIT: Never mind, the Trax uses some kind of weird fuel called E85. I've got no interest in that. Sentra it is.

EDIT: Never mind, the Trax uses some kind of weird fuel called E85. I've got no interest in that. Sentra it is.

Dude. E85 is just ethanol and it guaranteed runs on regular gas as well. It is just e85 compatible

Chevrolet or Nissan

Note that both of these manufacturers offer powertrain warranties of only 60,000 miles. Other manufacturers (Hyundai, Kia, and Mitsubishi) offer 100,000-mile powertrain warranties.

Pros for the Sentra: Higher MPG (34 vs. 30)

Those combined fuel-economy numbers assume that your driving is 45 percent on highways and 55 percent in cities. Use the noncombined numbers to calculate the difference in terms of money spent on gasoline, based on your actual driving habits.

The Trax CAN use E85, but I cannot find anywhere that it MUST use it; it's a "flex-fuel", you can use normal gasoline in it just fine.

No option for the Hyundai Venue? Or Kia K4? That last one I think compares favorably to the Sentra on most metrics. The Venue is less of an apples to apples comparison, but if you are specifically not enthused by sedans, then a wee subcompact crossover might do it more for you.

Also, as an aside, are you planning on buying the car to ride it until it falls into rust? If not, the value retention should enter into your calculation I think. Buying "the cheapest car outright" can end up being a bad long term financial decision in a much more real and significant way than other purchases. A car that costs 20000$ but is worth 3000$ in 10 years when you want to get rid of it, vs a car that costs 25000$ but is still worth 10000$ in 10 years requires some thought. With that in mind, if you were able to stretch that initial budget a bit more to reach the Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla, you get a car that is known to hold its value much better than the Sentra, or the unknown of the K4 (likely bad on value retention, if we go by its predecessor the Forte). Of course, opportunity costs and inflation have to be taken into account here.

Even if you do plan to ride the car until it dies, you should keep in mind that this is likely to happen significantly later for a Civic and a Corolla than for a Sentra. And that's without counting also the expected repair bills over the lifetime of the car. A recent study looking at what percentage of a brand's cars make it to 250 000 miles shows Toyota/Lexus and Honda/Acura taking the first four spots, with a significant gap until the cluster of other brands.

And finally, of course, I imagine you have your reasons to want a new car specifically, but the depreciation that hits it as soon as you leave the dealership is immense. And that's assuming you want to spend the same amount of money on a used car as on the new one; the opportunity cost of buying new rather than a serviceable used car at half the price while investing the difference somewhere it will appreciate rather than depreciate is very significant.

I'm a big guy

For me

Why is it Recursive Self Improvement? Shouldn't it just be Self Improvement? Is bodybuilding human recursive self improvement or just self improvement?

It's recursive if you actually build a new body for yourself. Human recursive self improvement = sex.

why? also you mean eugenics, not sex.

No, I'm just joking.

Surely Providence should have thought of, uh, safety before allowing this cellular life stuff to engage in evolution by natural selection. You can't just let that happen, or FOOM.

But that same Creator also didn't consider the gray green goo hypothesis, and now that stuff is everywhere, even deep underground and ocean vents.

One of the arguments the older safteyist rhetoric used to make the point that "reinforcing certain behaviors doesn't get you the outcomes you want" was "animals were selected to like sex because sex leads to reproduction and evolution 'wants' animals to reproduce. But then humans went and invented contraceptives and abortion so they could have all the sex they were evolved to want, without any of the inconveniences of pregnancy and children".

The human equivalent would be making clones of yourself with random slight DNA modifications and forcing them to arm wrestle each other, then pitting the winners against each other millions of times until you end up with an ultimate champion that looks like SpongeBob with anchor arms

Recursive because it lets you improve the capacity to self-improve.

Suppose demons exist. What is the catholic or orthodox stand regarding legal/moral responsibility for actions done when possessed by a demon? (Of course I am asking because of the current very prominent case of a mother being commanded by a voice for 18 minutes to murder, but the question can be generalized)

Doesn't Jesus imply that the only way to shield yourself from possession is through faith i God? I feel like I remember a scene from the bible in which he exorcises a demon from a man, only to tell him that self improvement will simply make him look like a nicer target for possessions in the future.

In other words, divine intervention is the only solution.

Regardless, I don't think the woman would be blamed. It is bad that she was not a believer of course, but the actions she took were those of the demon. Her lack of faith will carry its own consequences, and God will determine the appropriate punishment after death.

I suggest you also look into voice-to-skull transmission, which 20 years ago pretty regularly appeared in Popular Mechanics and various military technology magazines as a promising new technology, until all mention of it suddenly and abruptly ceased.

I am not a priest, but my understanding is that demonic 'possession' is a gradual process with much consent involved. It's a long slope of choosing to conform to evil urges until one is remade in the shape of them and no longer seeks to resist.

Addiction is probably a handy parallel to consider. The people who are into gooning are excellent examples of what possession looks like. Surrendering their agency to things that want to hurt them until it's habitual and they will act even against their own interests, not even wanting to stop any more.

Once aware of this dynamic I expect that most of us can find examples in our own lives. Local minima that seem to be pulling us in and must be resisted.

This may not be exactly 'small scale' but it seems like the best place for it.

I attend a Calvary chapel church, and I'm being considered for a teaching role, and potentially looking towards taking over when the pastor retires. Lots to consider about this, but one thing that's a sticking point for me: Calvary chapel dogmatically teaches a pre-trib rapture, and I'm not convinced.

So, my questions, for anyone who has thoughts on them:

  1. Do any of y'all believe in pre-trib rapture, or more generally dispensationalism, and how would you steel-man the case for it? Or for others, how would you argue against it?

  2. What are your thoughts on having to teach a doctrine you're not confident in?

The pre-trib rapture seems to be based on a misunderstanding of one of Jesus' parables:

"Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left." (Matthew 24:40–41)

So there will be people who are taken, raptured, right? Except what was the context of this:

For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man...

So the people "taken" are taken by the flood. Being "taken" doesn't seem to be a good thing here. It seems to be saying that people will die suddenly.

So you think that the people "taken" are going to judgement? That seems much less in line with everything else the Bible teaches. Why would only the damned be taken, if they're going to the throne of God to be judged - doesn't the Bible clearly say that all will go to judgement at the same time? What's more, it's pretty clear that the Church will go up to meet Jesus, but here you're arguing the Church will just be left in the field or at a hand mill.

I don't think most pre-trib rapture advocates actually rely on these verses, but your interpretation of them just seems backwards. The use of the word 'taken' does not imply the same as dying in a flood - 'the flood came and took them' is not the same.

The flood came and Took them all away. Then Jesus uses the word taken again. Taken means dead.

We have this cultural idea of the Second Coming and then look for passages that might pertain to it. However, if you strip away a lot of the cultural baggage and try to read the words in the way they would have been written a different picture emerges.

We live in the Age to Come already, we have been experiencing two thousand years of birthing pains, the Son of Man has come, Jesus' prophecy in Matthew refers to the fall of the Second Temple and might also refer to the inauguration of the New Heavens and New Earth we all await. The parable definitely refers to each of our individual deaths whenever they might happen.

It would not be a bad thing to be on Earth when Jesus comes to make all things New. We will have glorified resurrected bodies and live an embodied existence serving our purpose as God's image and likeness in material form.

This is a weak argument. They're not the same word in Greek. The flood 'took' (ἦρεν) them away, but the man in the field will 'be taken' (παραλαμβάνεται). The words are not etymologically related. The first has, among many meanings: 'to take from among the living, either by a natural death, or by violence'. The second does not have that meaning at all, but does have this meaning: 'to take to, to take with one's self, to join to one's self' - which is how we would understand the pre-trib rapture, Jesus taking his Church to be with him. If Jesus meant it to be a parallel use of the word 'take' he would have used the same word.

I think you're doing a good job convincing me the rapture is legit!

Hooray then! Dilemma solved.

Speaking as a damned Papist who is going to sizzle in Hell along with the other misguided led astray by the Roman Church 😁

Taking No. 2 first, if you have doubts or qualms but are required to teach it from a position of belief, I would say don't. Depending of course on the severity of your doubts; if it's "absolutely do not hold this belief" then you'd have to do a lot of twisting and turning to get to "I'll teach it as part of the job", if it's "not too sure but it's not a deal-breaker for me" then okay.

Taking No. 1, dispensationalism/the Rapture etc. is so little a part of church teaching outside of certain denominations that I had no notion what position, if any, we damned Papists hold and had to look it up. Turns out officially we're amillennialists.

I can't snark too hard here, as it turns out it was an Anglo-Irish clergyman who kicked the whole thing off (in modern times), so apologies on behalf of my nation for that!

Darby is noted in the theological world as the father of "dispensationalism", whose eschatology was adopted and later made popular in the United States by Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible.

...Darby has been credited with originating the pretribulational rapture theory.

I'll be praying for you brother :)

I actually considered going to Catholic seminary years ago, when I was still a Catholic, but couldn't bring myself to do it because of doubts I had about certain Catholic dogmas and worries about this same issue, being required to positively assent to doctrines against my own judgement.

It seems to me that amillenialism is a perfectly arguable position and retains the imminency of Christ's return, which is the important thing! But your link doesn't seem to teach amill theology... paragraph 674 seems to say that Israel needs to profess faith in Christ before his return (more a dispensational view), and 675 seems to describe the tribulation, just not using that word. I think typical amill theology says that the Church is the new Israel and so has already returned, and that the tribulation already occurred in/around 70 AD.

pre-trib rapture, or more generally dispensationalism

Is there a logical connection between these things, or do they just travel together because of Darby? The link between dispensationalism and a literal 1000-calendar-year Christ-rules-on-this-earth Millennium (I think the technical term is pre-millenialism) makes sense, but I don't see why the timing of the rapture affects the dispensational structure at all.

Yeah I don't see the connection exactly, but at a recent conference a guy told me they were basically the same thing, that each one entails the other. It's that kind of thinking that puts me off this kind of theology, even if I think the scriptural basis for pre-trib rapture seems reasonable.

What is trib? I have a sneaking suspicion you're not talking about a lesbian sexual practice.

The Great Tribulation and the timing of Christ's return relative to it.

My tendency is to assume post-trib but be pleasantly surprised if pre-trib or even mid-trib.

I’m no fan of the dispensationalist framework, but my steelman would be focused on he who holds back the mystery of lawlessness.

Were I required to teach a doctrine I either dispute or doubt, I’d teach the controversy and also do more studying on the what and why of it.

I am not 100% convinced about pre-trib, but I'll be happy to hear why I'm wrong on the way up.

The best case I've heard is one of circumstantial evidence. There are many references to Christ's second comming occuring an an unexpected time:

Mark 13:32-37

But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake.[a] For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants[b] in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows,[c] or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.

Matthew 25:13

Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

I Thessalonians 5:2

For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.

Matthew 24:36

But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.

If something can only occur after another event, then there's no reason to expect the following event to occur until the first event happens.

If Christ can only return after the tribulation begins (mid trib or end trib) then everyone can wait unti the great tribulation begins to expect his return and everyone watching carefully before that is watching in vain.

The next best evidence is the structure of the Revelation of John. The church is mentioned frequently in the first 3 chapters of Revelation and then isnt mentioned again until chapter 22.

Also the 70 weeks of Daniel, where the first 69 weeks point clearly to Palm Sunday then a gap of indeterminate length before the 70th week which is the tribulation.

I don't think the bible gives enough evidence for any of the 3 common timing options to be unambiguously right, but I love the image of a great counter in heaven that ticks up each time anothet soul is saved, followef by Satan dreading that this one will be accompanied by the trumpet blast that signals the clear beginning of the end.

The unexpectedness of a post-trib Rapture can be accounted at least two ways.

First, there are good enough explanations for all four Rapture scenarios that all have large numbers of adherents. (Pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, no Rapture). This leads to the Unexpected Hanging Paradox even after the mid-trib passes with no Rapture.

Second, fallen angels can read the Bible and try to hijack the human interpretations of the prophecies with a confusing array of pseudo-Messiahs, only the final one of which is the Man of Lawlessness, the Antichrist. In fact, it’s to their advantage: the more they promulgate, the more souls give up on Messiah entirely.

I myself around 2008 facetiously and satirically calculated Christ’s return in 2030 (crucifixion in AD 30 + 2000), with the real Antichrist showing up in 2023 (2030-7) to “save” us from the penultimate pseudo-Messiah who would be revealed in 2016 (2023-7). And then Donald Trump was elected in 2016… and 2024. So I’ve learned not to play with prophecy.

  1. My understanding of rapture theology is that it hangs its stance entirely on a single passage of Thessalonians. If Christianity is a real thing, it seems peculiar that nobody would have noticed that important detail before the 1800s.
  2. In spiritual matters, I advise against teaching something that you do not believe. It doesn't matter how eloquent you are, or how well you argue. These are matters that cut to the human soul. If you can't speak from your own soul, your congregation will know the lie of it in their own.

I am pretty lapsed in my faith, and haven't examined doctrine closely since becoming a competent and intelligent adult, so I can't especially speak to the specific underpinnings. But I would advise caution on stepping up into a leadership position for a church with shaky epistemic foundation.

That is, why is the church dogmatic about something you don't agree with. Either they're making a fundamental mistake, or you are. On an epistemic level, a rational person should almost never be confidently wrong. If the evidence is ambiguous (as much of Revelation is given the metaphorical nature of prophecy), then I would be skeptical of anyone being dogmatic about it.

It also potentially raises issues of priority. The core elements of faith are things like the Divinity of Jesus, salvation through Him, and various tenants on how to live a good Christian life and avoid sin. On a pragmatic level the rapture doesn't matter very much, because it's not actionable. You can't predict it, you can't prepare for it, and since it hasn't happened for two thousand years, the probability of it happening in our lifetimes is best approximated as small. I don't remember the exact tenants of my church, but looking up evangelical policy more broadly, the core beliefs are:

-A personal, bodily, and glorious return of Jesus Christ. -That the exact timing of His coming is known only to God. -That this return demands constant expectancy and serves to motivate godly living and ministry.

which sounds accurate to me. The specific timing is vague, and therefore different people are allowed to believe different things about it. If your church is not teaching that the timing is vague and open to interpretation, or worse teaching that their one interpretation is definitely correct rather than just a leading theory (ie, we believe this is probably what's true but other people believe differently and we're not entirely confident) then that calls into question their entire epistemic policy. What else might they be dogmatically overconfident about? How and why are such decisions made, and what happens if human politics get involved?

I don't think this automatically disqualifies them from being something you should involve yourself in on a leadership level. But it's something you should be considering.

Yeah it's an interesting position they take. It's not a dogma in the sense that we say it's definitely true, and we can have communion and agreement with churches that don't teach it, but it's considered a 'distinctive' trait of Calvary chapels and thus obligatory for affiliation with the overarching organizations.

From what understand it's emphasized largely for pastoral reasons, because teaching Christ's imminent return is valuable both for getting people to make a decision for Christ today as well as to provide hope to believers. That's the theory anyway. But in practice I see a lot of people trying to predict the timing of the rapture (and getting it wrong lol) which I think is unhealthy. I like pretty much everything else about the church and its distinctives though!

Is Christ's return less imminent if the millennium of Revelation 20 is symbolic of the present age of the Church between Christ's ascension and return? Arguably amillennialism is 7 years more imminent.

I've a larger issue with dispensationalism than the apocalyptic eschatology. The distinction between Israel and the church as two separate peoples of God rather than the Church grafted into Israel as one people of God in the new covenant.

My church is not dogmatic on this as specific beliefs in this area are not necessary for salvation, yet may present a stumbling block. Most of the other men in my men's Bible study would have an amillennial, partial preterist position.

If the doctrine of Calvary chapel is basically "We can't be sure on the basis of Scripture when the rapture will happen, but the elders of Calvary chapel have thought about this question a lot over the last hundred years and our collective best guess is that it will be pre-trib for the following reasons" then you can teach that without having to misrepresent your own views. This is how good academics teach the views that are mainstream in their disciplines but which they are not convinced by. (I studied physics, so the only course I saw this being done in was quantum information).

What dating app would you use to find the smartest possible matches? Hinge is just not enough information and OKC has been neutered and destroyed.

Not looking for women! But noted. I am concerned that the people I want to date just aren't actively on the apps at all because of how frustrating nerdy guys find them in the bay area.

Previous discussion of Duolicious: 1 2 3

I think multiple "rationalists" have started dating and matchmaking services, but I don't recall any off the top of my head.

https://cuties.app. The people gave me SF striver vibes, but maybe only because to me, dating apps present people very unflatteringly.

EDIT: it also doesn't have many questions.

Marketing article from the developer

At its core, Cuties! is a community-based user directory. It allows people to find each other and vouch for friends.

Cuties! is for intellectually-curious, open-minded, and embodied communities. Someone described it as “intellectual hippies”. I would add people who have a creative online presence, such as a Substack or twitter.

It’s a 2∶1∶1 gender ratio of men∶women∶nonbinary.

Metrics: 28K page views/mo, 4.6K visitors/mo, 2K sign ups, 1.1K published profiles, 660 monthly active users, 115 self-reported met ups, dozens of friends + relationships, 2 engagements, 1 baby.

In comparison, Duolicious has 16,000 active users—male∶female∶nonbinary 5.4∶1∶1.

What anime porn hell is that?

It's a dating service that uses questions to determine compatibility. If you're looking for "the smartest possible matches", its search function lets you run filters on the answers to specific questions: e. g., "Do you enjoy engaging in deep, intellectual conversations with a partner: Yes", "Is it crucial for your partner to enjoy a good debate or intellectual discussion: Yes", and "Is the only thing worse than a landlord, a landlord who invests in multiple properties, and is that such a bad thing that it should be illegal: No".

I strongly suspect that network effects are ≈ the only thing that matters about a dating app. Your best bet is using Hinge and looking for subtle class clues.

Do you mean smartest possible matches as in the match is smart, that is, it's a good match, or the match is with a smart person?

Intelligence.

Again, thé match or thé person?

The person.

A smart person who can convincingly feign interest can rob a match blind. Happens all the time, and happened to my aunt. Happening right now to my cousin.

And I had a relative that was murdered by the man she met on eHarmony. Dating has risks.

What is your favourite national anthem from a country other than your own? (Links are appreciated.) I was always fond of the Russian one.

  • the Soviet Armenian one with its unusual scale

  • Turkey as the pinnacle of the martial ones

  • Israel though Smetana's Moldau is the better version of the melody and the Czechs should just replace theirs with it

  • Taiwan does not stand out on any single quality, but is near the top in every category that I would score national anthems in: it's dignified, pleasant to listen to, the lyrics offer a positive vision for the country, the text is poetic and reflects the national character (with how it is entirely in four-character verse).

Let them shing!

Tuva is not a sovereign country, but theirs is the best.

Tannu what?

Exactly.

Does the country have to still exist? If not, then East Germany

Turkey and Ukraine. Hard to pick one.

The ancient Bulgarian one - Shumi Maritsa and the Old Soviet one.

Rough translation of the Bulgarian - Maritsa is a river in Bulgaria.

The Maritsa Roars

The Maritsa roars, stained with blood; a widow weeps, grievously wounded.

March, march, with our general! Into battle let us fly, the foe to defeat.

Children of Bulgaria, the whole world watches us; come, toward victory, glorious, let us march.

March, march, etc.

The Balkan Lion, in a titanic battle against enemy hordes, leads us on with wings.

March, march, etc.

Young and ardent, amid the whirlwinds of battle, we are worthy to gather laurels.

March, march, etc.

We are the people who, for honor and freedom, for our beloved nation, know how to die.

March, march, with our general— into battle let us fly, the foe to defeat.

As orchestral music, Il canto degli Italiani

As poetry, La Marseillaise turns the bloodthirstiness up so far that it goes through the "sick and violent"/"actually no, this has to be ironic" barrier multiple times, and I can't help but appreciate this.

People here will know that I’m not the always the biggest fan of Israel, but I am an absolute sucker for any sad song and Hatikvah never fails to make me cry.

I always find it funny that God Save The King/Queen is generally panned as a national anthem in Britain, compared to Jerusalem, Rule Britannia, or even Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (for the rugby fans), but the Germans managed to remix it into an absolute banger

I'm surprised they don't go with Land of Hope and Glory

Oh that's another great candidate - harder to sing than the others, though, you need a bit of wind in the pipes.

When it comes to sporting events, such as rugby matches, the (unofficial) national anthems are great. Flower of Scotland for Scotland, Land of My Fathers (harder to sing in Welsh) for Wales.

We got stuck with Ireland's Call for the rugby (due to the all-island nature of the team) which is okay, but it's no Amhrán na bhFiann. Which is why Irish crowds tend to sing The Fields of Athenry instead at such events.

Hey that's pretty good! Really gotta finish Legend of Galactic Heroes.

The Marseillaise is always a good one. Generally, the older anthems which were big on "let us crush the foe beneath our feet so that their blood flows in streams" are bangers, unlike the modern tendency to be all wishy-washy and inclusive.

let us crush the foe beneath our feet so that their blood flows in streams

An understandable sentiment when the foes are, reportedly, planning to pull your wives and sons from your arms to slit their throats.

Nous étions un vrai pays.

The Russian one is great. Beyond that I think the French one is also good and the German one is ok.

National anthems are generally pretty trash though. There are plenty of marches or ballads that would have made great anthems but practically universally countries have gone with ponderously slow mediocre stuff with bland lyrics.

Is it not inevitable that these 'frontier AI labs' calling for regulation are going to get eaten alive by the half dozen big tech companies that have accountants overseeing the nerds? The business case will prevent AI risk, the market won't stay solvent long enough to present X risk.

I may not be educated, but I can sanity check. This stuff is really expensive and when the bill comes due someone who has the revenue to pay it gets the assets.

If they try to shut it down, could the board just get rid of them? Otherwise, I think you are right. Google and Meta could just hire people who don't care about alignment and pass them fairly quickly. How many weeks/months are they behind Claude and OpenAI?

I think these frontier AI labs are going to be forced to sell by the VC's whose money they're burning for research when microsoft and google are making bucca bucks and these frontier research labs still haven't figured out a way to turn a profit, and the corporate accounting team at these big tech companies will prevent frontier expansion because they don't want to pay for research. AI really is going to be a big part of the future economy, it's not a bubble- but the people who make money off of it are largely going to be the people who already make money off of software, because that's who's figuring out how to monetize it right now(and OpenAI/Claude aren't doing a good job of that), and so they're going to take control of the entire industry among themselves and drastically slow the pace of research because there's no business case in AI X-risk.

AI really is going to be a big part of the future economy, it's not a bubble

Isn't both possible? I definitely think that AI is going to be a part of the future economy, but...houses were also going to be a part of the future economy in 2005. Specifically it seems plausible to me that OpenAI and/or Anthropic are over-invested and they can't figure out how to make a profit before their investor money runway runs out.

I'll caveat that it's not clear that a sell-off solves, rather than slows, AI risk; a competitor buying all this equipment at fire sales price might be less interested in building a machine god, but they'll still be interested in building a smarter system and have a lot of spare inference or training equipment to run.

Beyond that, it depends very heavily on what the end situation you expect.

The maximally-bullish case is some form of captured recursive self-improvement producing a massive and deep moat. Claude Fable 7.2 or Kimi 5 or (more likely) some internal specialized model produces a 5x efficiency boost, which makes throwing more processing power at the question economical, which unlocks another 5x efficiency boost, so on. At the more science fiction side of things, this could be new chips that combine FPGA-like re-programmability with ASIC efficiency; at the more plausible you've got software hacks, latency reduction, and conceptual refinements.

The good news from an X-risk perspective is that almost everything going this direction so far has been slow and in hardware, which put some limits on speed, since no matter how good an AI-designed chip or network layout is, logistics takes years. The bad news is that there have been some individual human-driven efforts already in software and model design (changes to KV architecture, MTP/DFlash) already, and it's the sort of space that I'd naively expect smart-enough LLMs to 'beat' humans by brute force. If it can pop off quickly, it will do so in months rather than years, and it will be a big surprise to almost everyone else.

That's not a massive moat, since eventually information (and models themselves) leak or a competitor open-sources them. But five or ten years of selling superintelligence at a tenth the cost of what your competitors are selling 'naive intern' can cover a hell of a lot of debt, as would being able to train smarter models for a hundredth of the price of your competitors. And at the really optimistic (from a business) or pessimistic (from an x-risk) cases, you stop being in a situation where 'revenue' or even 'competitors' makes sense as a question.

The more moderate bullish case is taking existing models and refinements to regulated fields, and getting a steep enough moat that the competitors can't step in easily. Higher education's the obvious option, if not likely huge and fast enough, between the external political pressures and underlying tensions in the business models for major colleges, but there's a lot of space in medicine and compliance that are heavily licensed in ways that could make it very hard for merely-good models to be used. Even some weird cases with general-purpose robotics could end up in a state where use is generally valuable, the liability risk of using sub-cutting edge models is extreme, and thus only the nerds can get business from the big companies.

Optimistically, this could come with a massive demand-side increase -- personalized instruction making everyone able to become experts in a field they find interesting, customized entertainment, productive hobbyist work. The middle case is Nothing Ever Changes despite it all, where we end up with gambling addicts and entertainment dollars redirecting at a 1:1 ratio, or some close approximation of it. Pessimistically, it could be the NSA wanting bulk data processing capabilities, and then 'selling the business' stops being an option: when state actors are a big enough portion of your financial model, your model stops being about finances.

The weakly-bearish case is just selling inference, well. The massive expenditures for training buildouts and heavy overpowered models eventually instead allow things like global prioritization and redirection based on load and spot energy costs, at a variety of different demand levels and latency limits.

((The actually-bearish case is a financial product one, where regardless of whether the hyperscalers are making profits, the book value of their assets drops catastrophically, either because of depreciation scaling or cost of servicing debts or financing existing products makes them sell out. But that's a much more complicated case than it sounds at first.))

First the big tech companies need to demonstrate any kind of competency in building good models for that to be a concern.

Google very briefly caught up with 2.5, but has been a joke since then. Microsoft is all in on OpenAi. Apple have failed to do anything in that arena. Amazon seem happy just to be a cloud provider for other models. Musk is uncertain, he seems to flit between safety and acceleration depending on whatever he sees on Xitter that day. And then there's meta, who at least got a model that could appear in leaderboards this time, but no one's betting on those chumps

I have no idea if this is "all part of the plan" for Elon or anything, but I like the idea that his win condition is in NIMBYs making orbital datacenter construction profitable.

Feels like the faction goal of a competitive board game or something.

I mean thé point is they can just buy these models(and the labs that built them) in a fire sale when they run out of VC money.

I see. I'm not sure what this prediction does for x-risk beyond the simpler "finance bubble bursts and labs collapsed" thesis. Why does adding in a further step where the labs are bought out decrease risk? Indeed such a situation seems like it would increase risk somewhat. In the former scenario, development stops and nothing replaces it, while in the latter there is still big company financing, even if it is reduced by accountants. Plus, the big, founder led companies like X, Meta, and Amazon could easily push big funds past the protests of their shareholders.

But as I mentioned in my first response, these big guys are already invested. Google, X, and Meta are in the race, Microsoft is somewhat there (I don't think anyone knows the precise details of OpenAis weird corporate structure and ownership) and even in China the likes of Alibaba are already players. I would guess in the event of a bubble bursting taking out Anthropic and OAI, Musk or Google would simply push ahead

They are operating on the idea that one of the frontier companies will make a major breakthrough that creates an insurmountable lead. Using customer data and a superhuman AGI they'll be able to immediately move into multiple high profit industries and take over.

The problem they are having is that so far training better models seems to be able to suck up an unlimited amount of money. That was unexpected.

Also the open models have been better at keeping up than they expected. You can fine tune the open models for specific tasks and get "good enough" results.

So they are in a weird spot since there are so man unknown unknowns. There are potentially massive returns. The huge costs are all in training models, so if they cut that back and just run inference with existing models then they can immediately become profitable. They can get to work doing low level speed optimizations on existing models and build out more capacity that way.

Right now they're going for a moon shot, but they can scale back training without being forced to sell of the companies at the risk of losing their leads.

Don't they need to service their debt as well?

They do, but the race is less about debt and more about the capability growth and its effects on revenue. OAI and Anthropic are both printing money. But the 50-100B a year they can theoretically print will vanish in a single year if a competitor leapfrogs them. Their revenue is only sustainable while they remain the only game in town, if open or big tech model competitors like gemini get capability parity, they go from serving inference at 80% margins to serving inference at 2% margins as competition intensifies (At least on API usage billing, consumers are probably more locked in, but still very willing to move on if someone else has a better model for their 20 dollars). Their debt is nothing if they keep leading the pack, everything if others catch up to their leads.

So they can't service their debt if they stop and they can't finance continuing (much longer) either?

They can't service their debt if their revenue falls off a cliff. Anthropic's debt is in the vicinity of 70 billion. Their revenue this year is projected to be a whopping 65 billion (If each quarter is as good as their last one). Their revenue last year was just under 10 billion. See the issue? Those are some very different numbers. OpenAI's debt is probably in the vicinity of 100 billion, but their revenue this year is on track to hit 40 billion. I don't know their rates, but the issue is those revenue numbers could theoretically as easily go to tens of billions as they could hundreds of millions, and those are revenue numbers, not profit. If the industry ends up with mostly comparable models, a race to the bottom on cost could destroy companies. But if the big names manage to hold their decisive advantage for as little as five years, they could well print over a trillion dollars before anyone catches up and begins to drive price down.

But to answer your question, they can service their debt unless revenue falls below well last year's numbers and remains that way. And the only realistic way that happens is serious competition on cost.

Culture warry, but I don't have enough meat or a specific post to include this on the main thread: in your opinion, how much of current dating discourse and the corresponding social trends are due to changing material conditions and economic anxiety? I've seen much more dialogue about how Gen-Z women are regressing to the mean compared to their Millennial women counterparts - more concerned with materialism and man's ability to provide, more expectant of chivalry (though they've renamed it "princess treatment"), more averse to hookup culture. Gen-Z women are much more considerate than Millennials of the fact that there are determinants of partner quality beyond just "love" and that a purely "equal" relationship is not necessarily ideal. This is despite (or perhaps because of) their ostensible feminism. I've also seen talks of how looksmaxxing is a response to changing socioeconomic conditions, that it is a means of restoring some sense of control. The theory goes, the economy is becoming increasingly obtuse and inaccessible to many young people, so to cope, they turn to something they can more immediately affect change upon: their bodies.

What do you think?

There are actually two separate groups that make up each generation:

Millennials have Boomer parents who largely had GI Bill parents and so on.

Gen Zs have Gen X parents who largely had Silent Generation parents and so on.

There is some intermingling and drift, some people were born to parents in their early 20s and have kids in their early 20s, but by large there are actually two sets of Americans with different genetic makeups and values living beside each other.

Gen X and Gen Z tend to be the more pragmatic generation.

Mm, probably like 20%? We host a lot. I have a house, so this is pretty easy. But we hosted a lot too when we had a 2 bedroom apartment with 1 common room and a tiny galley style kitchen, just 15 instead of 30. Our friends who didn't host now host once a year now that they have houses.

Obviously anecdotal, but the trend bears out in my experience. People who aren't already social don't become social when they finally hit it big and their material constraints loosen. I think most of this is downstream of culture/internet/expectations, pointing to material deprivation that is very real, but not actually very limiting on your ability to meet and interact with people is just a convenient way of absolving yourself of responsibility for the choices you would rather not justify in words.

Isn't it just that older people are cringe so you have to go in a different direction in order to make sure you're not associated with their cringy staleness?

It's hard to say. This feels more subtle and insidious to me. If it were simple generational differences, I would imagine the Gen-Z swing would be more pronounced. In my eyes, the Gen-Z mindset doesn't seem like a wholesale repudiation of Millennial behaviors, rather a refinement of them taking into account the cynicism of the era. I think it explains, in part, why people aren't dating as much: so much ink has been spilled about the disastrous consequences of dating the wrong person, particularly their impact on your career.

My uncle, a retired Green Beret, used to always say "You'll lose money chasing women, but you'll never lose women chasing money." I think he's a chauvinistic goof for saying that, but I can't help but feel like everyone in Gen-Z, male and female, has internalized that mindset to some degree. Just substitute money for whatever an individual's prized social currency is. I may have a biased sample, of course, but no one wants to risk getting "slowed down" by a relationship.

Very little.

I've seen much more dialogue about how Gen-Z women are regressing to the mean compared to their Millennial women counterparts - more concerned with materialism and man's ability to provide, more expectant of chivalry (though they've renamed it "princess treatment"), more averse to hookup culture.

This is just the continued evolution of ballooning female entitlement. But nobody wants to admit this as it would mean admitting women are not perfect blameless angels, so it gets blamed on economic anxiety instead.

I've also seen talks of how looksmaxxing is a response to changing socioeconomic conditions, that it is a means of restoring some sense of control.

In my opinion this is just ripping away the collectively upheld fiction that everyone pretended to believe previously; that looks didn't matter and it's what's inside that counts. This was never true. Ask anyone who went through a glow-up and it's astounding how much better people treat you when you're hot.

On the one hand, I think you make a good point. It's always safer to be able to earn your own money so as to not be economically trapped, but the safe paths to that for middle class gen-z women are far from guaranteed.

I also think that the rise of easy to make short form content lets pointless materialists find and indulge each other more than ever (it's always existed just with less variety, previous generations had qvc china birds and beanie babies vs the disgusting labubus, designer handbags, and those plastic dumpling things) and that's true for gold-digging as well. I think consumer goods are so cheap compared to other costs of living our scarcity magpie brains just can get overwhelmed and greedy. Its just easier to visualize when there are millions of video posts vs GenX / Senior millennials having no public content they actually created until maybe magazines in their mid-20s? I don't think "princess treatment" is anything other than financial wanting to be bought stuff, not a true respect for chivalric norms aside from open the door and pay the check.

But I think the hookup culture thing is more strongly related to kids having no freedom as teenagers (no jobs / alcohol / driving) and then putting them into colleges that tell them anyone unattractive hitting on you is part of rape culture.

I doubt it has anything to do with any shifts in economic or material conditions, just more people being Very Online allows concept handles and awareness of them to spread more quickly and widely, for more people to feel more comfortable to say the quiet part out loud.

I can assure you Gen Z women didn’t invent or even reinvent female princess complexes, the female fondness for using up men’s time, money, energy, and bragging or showing off about it. See, for example, expensive engagement rings, lavish weddings, getting gifts/drinks/dinner bought for them, getting taken on cUtE (that is, expensive) dates, and/or sharing photos to brag or show off the aforementioned.

Nor was it some secret among men that chicks dig tall, muscular guys with handsome faces and that at least one way to improve one’s lot was to hit the gym to better the physicial dominance cues that chicks love.

I agree, none of these concepts are exactly new. I am more remarking that they are more prevalent among Gen-Z compared to Millennials. I think in the Millennial collective consciousness (or maybe the Obama-era Optimist conscious), they were the generation that equalized dating, that wouldn't be shallow, that would bring about positivity and equality and love and sexual libertinism. This is idealistic, to be sure, and practically speaking plenty of Millennials weren't this way. Even so, it's still notable to me that Gen-Z is taking baby steps against that mindset.

I think a lot of the millennial dating discourse you/we personally encountered was in the nerdy/educated liberal social scene, due to IRL filters and the internet at the time being full of nerdier/educated people and the online media being liberal. There was this collective front of women writing blogs who maintained the narrative that women only want Nice guys (who are feminist), and any guy who can't get laid is insufficiently feminist and also not an actual Nice Guy but in fact a Nice guy, also something-something-male-gaze, frat party rape, wage gap, et cetera.

These days the internet is much trashier, and the ideological messaging has drifted to "must be a frothing leftist to fuck me", while lowest-common-denominator have let slip that actually they just want half-elf CEOs with abs. Liberal Feminism doesn't have a monopoly on dating discourse anymore, and Redpill/manosphere content isnt exactly underground.

Looksmaxxing seems to me to be a direct consequence of dating apps, social isolation, and the decline of third spaces. If your entire hook for a woman is your profile picture, and she isn't going to offer you a chance to charm her unless you pass the looks test first, how you look is going to matter a lot more. Men will notice and respond by hitting the gym and doing whatever else Clavicular is pushing. I met pretty much all my girlfriends in third spaces and that gave me time to prove I was funny which can take you from a 4 to a 7. I'm lucky I'm married--I'd be in hell if I had to rely on the apps.

@ratherblather

Looksmaxxing is also a return to the mean. Men throughout history have always worked on their bodies, vainly concerned themselves with their physical appearance, hid disfigurements, worn jewelry and makeup. Paul was already complaining about this 2000 years ago.

The entire male aesthetic of the 20th century was a temporary blip created by Anglo-American Protestantism (emphasis on the American, late 17th century English Protestant guys loved their fancy wigs and blush), and mass military conscription (long hair and beards aren’t good for trench lice and gas-mask seals). And also because Capitalism, Communism, and Fascism were all glazing the aesthetics of the working class for different reasons.

Dandyism has entered the chat.

I have weird obsessions, okay? I only wish I had gotten that book when it was new, as opposed to now. That price tag, yikes...

"Dandymaxxing" is unironically a better term than "looksmaxxing".

"Dandymaxxing" implies a higher fixation on fashion than what I observe in the looksmaxxers who seem to be more focused on maxilla and bonesmashing.

Yeah, true. I suppose we could split them out into "dandymaxxers" (men investing a great deal of time, energy and money into improving their appearance from a sartorial perspective) and "physiquemaxxers" (men doing the same but for their actual physique: going to the gym, taking steroids, testosterone supplements etc.), both of whom fall under the umbrella of "looksmaxxers".

All of this, plus the "arms race" effect. It's OK to be a bit frumpy if that's just what all the regular guys look like. But when everyone starts working heavily on their appearance, you start to stand out a lot more (in a bad way) if you're the one who's not.

Do the religious people on here actually believe in Christianity? Like do you actually believe that Christ rose from the dead, Garden of Eden, Jesus is the son of God, the Trinity, virgin birth, etc? Or is more Deism and you like the community from going to church? I have a hard time believing most adult converts i.e. JD Vance actually believe these things, but I'm curious if I'm wrong here.

Not a convert here, I’m still attending the same church of my youth. Yes, if I had a time machine I’d be gobsmacked if I could go further back than 10,000 years.

I fully believe that Materialist explanations of origins rest on Atheist biases, scientists are often bad philosophers, and God didn’t use random generative processes for everything.

Yes!!! I was very skeptical for a long time, but yes. I do believe in the core doctrines.

Yes.

In order: Christ rose from the dead (and he'll be back), Garden of Eden is almost certainly not historical (much like Genesis 1-11, for reasons that have a lot to do with the mustard seed not actually being the smallest of all seeds), yes, real, (if this is somehow proven not to be the case I'm going to have a much harder time than I did leaving YEC behind).

Maybe functionally I'm more of a deist? I haven't really found much community from church for reasons that have a lot to do with the second topic, but then again I haven't really looked that hard. I don't really bear many other markers that make it obvious from an outside glance I'm [still] a Christian; you wouldn't necessarily discover that from the way I talk.

I'm not an adult convert, though.

(Actually, adult converts in particular tend to act really weird to me for reasons that, while I think I understand why they act that way, I've never really found success with doing that myself. They seem to observe that God has an active role in both talking to them and shaping their lives. I have come to the somewhat-related conclusion I already possess all the help I'm ever going to receive and as such don't much bother to ask any more, but then that also puts me in a rough spot with these types of people. It's not even really jealousy- though it's not like I'm not- I've simply heard enough "God's plan for you"s to last me an eternity and I no longer want to be around the people who don't understand that, just like how all Rapture analysis is uninteresting naval-gazing since the conditions for its imminence are as trivially true as the writing inside your average fortune cookie.)

the mustard seed not actually being the smallest of all seeds

Have I got a tangent for you to go off on, given the mention of mustard seed!

Ah yes, the mustard seed, smallest of all agriculturally relevant seeds known by name by His audience and famed for its culinary uses.

Yes. "Christ rose from the dead" is a very believable claim, just on the historical evidence - the rest of the core claims of Christianity are not particularly hard to believe if you believe that (e.g. if Christ rose from the dead then He certainly was not an ordinary human; thus believing that He is the Son of God, was born of a virgin, and are coming back again as He claimed aren't very difficult to swallow).

The one exception would be that while I tend to believe in a ~literal Garden of Eden, it's not really skin off of my nose if the Genesis account(s), not being written for 21st century scientists, was not intended to be interpreted as 21st century scientists would prefer to interpret them. (Notwithstanding this I toy with ideas that harmonize the Eden account with what 21st century scientists have deduced about the nature of early man, but that's more because I find it interesting than that I need to understand everything written in Scripture to believe in it.)

I agree that if one can accept the Resurrection as related in the Gospels, the rest is small potatoes.

But I also agree with @sun_the_second. A miracle of this grade provides evidence against the historical record. How much other, non-Christian mystery hits the same threshold of evidence?

How much other, non-Christian mystery hits the same threshold of evidence?

A decent question - while I am not familiar with any non-Christian mysteries from the premodern period with comparable documentation, I assume there are a lot of non-Christian mysteries with at least similarly persuasive levels of evidence, since I think the supernatural is real and encounters with it are not limited to the Christian tradition.

For instance, I don't consider Michael Shermer's poltergeist-y experience a "Christian mystery" and there's good evidence that it's it really happened (admission against interest, multiple witnesses).

Yeah I think if you're willing to interpret the rest of Genesis metaphorically, there's nothing really stopping you from interpreting the Garden of Eden as the pre-agricultural state of Man, and the 'knowledge of Good and Evil' as the spiritual/cultural prerequisite for the creation of agricultural society.

I wish I had a better handle on the current state of archeology (and Biblical studies!) but one of the things that I have found interesting from my understanding of the current state of things is that scientists have found evidence of a somewhat puzzling "intelligence explosion" in primitive man.

Genesis 4 can easily be interpreted as describing the same series of events (and also explains what happened to kick the intelligence explosion off).

My belief is that Genesis was written for its audience in a way that they would understand it, with the main goal being to establish an accurate anthropology and theology - a conception of man's place in the world and their relationship to God - but that this does not mean that it is "mythical" in the sense of being fictitious or made up. I don't think God describing something that happened to premodern tribesmen in a way that they can understand makes it "inaccurate" or "not literal."

For a fascinating (yet long) set of reads from a rationalist-adjacent substack, you might enjoy this guy's Eve Theory of Consciousness, tackling things like the Sapient Paradox and generally tying myths to anthropology from a materialist perspective. There's nothing about theology in here, and of course the author treats myths the same way you do, as having kernels of truth.

The debate at that link is mostly about what may have happened around 100kya, way too early for the Cain/Abel story to work without being full of anachronisms.

Cain vs Abel is a pretty good parable for the conflicts of around 10kya, though, between early agriculturalists and pastoralists. That's a conflict that was still a major issue 5kya (or arguably even 0kya? the Hutu were a farming ethnicity and the Tutsi a pastoralist one...).

I don't think God describing something that happened to premodern tribesmen in a way that they can understand makes it "inaccurate" or "not literal."

I haven't been a Christian for decades now, but when I was (and even still) I always found this to be a pretty easy way to get around the scientific problems with literal readings of Genesis. Jesus regularly talks in parables! Telling a story whose details aren't literally true in order to aid understanding of a deeper truth was like God's entire M.O.! What else would we expect? "Okay, before primordial nucleosyntheis, when the cosmic microwave background hadn't even red-shifted yet, the photons were ... are you following any of this? ... okay, forget it, just write down: 'Let there be light'."

The debate at that link is mostly about what may have happened around 100kya, way too early for the Cain/Abel story to work without being full of anachronisms.

Setting aside the question of whether the archeological timeline is correct, isn't it true that in Genesis you only get to the more recent dates if you interpret ben as "son" and never "descendant"?

Cain vs Abel is a pretty good parable for the conflicts of around 10kya, though, between early agriculturalists and pastoralists.

A conflict that might be relevant to the Jews at the time Genesis was written.

Telling a story whose details aren't literally true in order to aid understanding of a deeper truth was like God's entire M.O.! What else would we expect? "Okay, before primordial nucleosyntheis, when the cosmic microwave background hadn't even red-shifted yet, the photons were ... are you following any of this? ... okay, forget it, just write down: 'Let there be light'."

Yes, I 100% agree with this.

I just think God is sneaky and capable of pulling off multiple levels of truth. In the afterlife we might all be like "oh wow that was all true in ways we didn't even think of evaluating."

Oh, I'm not saying anachronisms based on "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for Cain and Abel", but rather "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for farmed fields existing". IIRC there's some "people in a few places ate oats and seasonal nomads might have helped spread the seeds" evidence around 30kya, and then the real agricultural revolution isn't until tens of thousands of years later still ... and not too surprisingly so. Modern technology is amazing stuff, but I still spare some respect for the cultures who gradually figured out that they could become numerous and well-fed by figuring out how to breed and process and eat massive amounts of grass seeds.

A conflict that might be relevant to the Jews at the time Genesis was written.

I think that's very much the historical consensus, in part because it sidesteps the "how much of Genesis was directly worded by Moses vs written based on intact oral tradition vs written from the point of view of much later writers" question by having been a cultural dividing line for centuries. The initial "agriculturally developed Canaan looks like a land flowing with milk and honey to pastoral Israelite nomads" vs "but you have to learn some of their practices if you want to keep cultivating and harvesting it all" conflict alone would have been enough to set up legends forever, but would surely have died down as a contemporary cultural division, except that there's a lot of marginal land there that wasn't suitable for irrigation, so there was always a subpopulation of pastoralists living around the farmers. It's kind of reassuring that the canonical tale passed down to us was just "the first horrible person was one of Their Team" and not "Their Team are all horrible people".

Oh, I'm not saying anachronisms based on "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for Cain and Abel", but rather "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for farmed fields existing".

Oh, I gotcha. Yeah, I'm never super sure how seriously to take even our best date estimates for [thing], in part because they keep getting shifted around. I have a friend who works in a geology-related field, and he says dating is heavily reliant on assumptions, too. I certainly don't think we have enough geological evidence to rule out "a farm" 100kya, but it does look like you're correct that farming is believed to be much much more recent than, say, stone tools.

But I brought it up more as an example of the sort of thing I find interesting to toy around with, not (obviously) a systematic and well-thought-out theory I have.

The initial "agriculturally developed Canaan looks like a land flowing with milk and honey to pastoral Israelite nomads" vs "but you have to learn some of their practices if you want to keep cultivating and harvesting it all" conflict alone

Wouldn't the Egyptians also be agriculturalists by the standards of the time? My understanding is that the Creation myth in Genesis is thought by some to be essentially a refutation of the pagan creation myths the Israelites were likely familiar with, and it makes me wonder if the Israelites saw the Egyptians in Cain.

(Although interestingly one could argue that Egypt is portrayed fairly positively in Genesis.)

I'm starting to think that if "Christ rose from the dead" is something that historical evidence supports, despite all the other evidence to the contrary of such things being possible, then it is not that I should believe in the return of Christ more, but that I should believe in historical evidence less - including other areas of history.

I think what you end up finding if you adopt this approach is that all of reality becomes, to varying degrees, less comprehensible. It also makes the cherry-picking problem much worse.

People who generally evaluate historical writings as more-or-less accurate +/- the usual human margin of error and bias and then put their finger on the scale when anything supernatural happens are arguably cherry-picking what they want to read, but at least they have a methodology to it and you can agree on a certain level of ground truth (e.g. most non-Christian historians don't deny that Christ or Paul existed, for instance).

Whereas if you just insist that all historical evidence is downright bad, any pretense of methodological criteria can quickly go out the window and people can just cherry-pick what they like. You might think that the end result here is merely being more reserved about making historical claims, but in real life I think it ends up in weird places like believing in Great Tartaria.

I wouldn't insist that all historical evidence is bad. But from what I have read, an average layman does believe popular history more than they should. There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

Sure, I think careful scholars are cognizant of that sort of thing.

Early writings on Christ are interesting because we both have early writings from Christians (who mostly didn't profit much by believing in Christ as per their own writings) and writings from neutral or hostile third parties.

I haven't read as much of the early writings from and on Christians as I would like, but from what I can tell the pro- and anti- Christian writings often read exactly as you would expect, e.g. the Christians are writing about church discipline, doctrine, and defending their beliefs as intellectually legitimate and their opponents are calling them gullible retards from first principles.

I get the impression that the main difference between second century theological debates about Christianity and Reddit today is that a lot of Christian arguments have remained the same (sans the ones aimed at the pagan gods), whereas "Christ was not the Son of God, merely a magician" or "Christ was not the Son of God since God would never come to Earth as a peasant" have fallen out of favor. "Christianity will destroy our way of life because they are opposed to infanticide and licentiousness" still has some traction though.

There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

I would disagree with this, personally. The historical evidence we have on Sparta was largely written by foreigners in opposing or post-Spartan states, yes, but very often by foreigners who sympathized with Sparta for domestic political or philosophic reasons - as sympathizers of the aristocratic elite, Spartan 'virtuous oligarchy' appealed to them as contrast to Athenian democracy. Xenophon, who wrote The Constitution of the Lacedemonians, even defected to Sparta rather than return to Athens. A more accurate parallel would be somewhere between Tacitus' Germania and the tendency of Enlightenment-influenced writers to idealize Chinese government (I recall Bertrand Russell still gushing over China's rational and virtuous political system in the 1920s...).

I recall Bertrand Russell still gushing over China's rational and virtuous political system in the 1920s...

Historical political organisation with the imperial examinations, which he compares favourably with other premodern political systems -- it isn't unreasonable to see some merit in the qualified Mandate of Heaven compared to the less-qualified divine right of kings, and even a flawed meritocracy compared to none at all. In comparison to earlier sinophiles, his support appears to be more muted.

[...] no doubt, as a modern system, the "Eight Legs" deserve all the hard things that he says about them. But in the fourteenth century, when one considers the practicable alternatives, one can see that there was probably much to be said for such a plan. At any rate, for good or evil, the examination system profoundly affected the civilization of China. Among its good effects were: A widely-diffused respect for learning; the possibility of doing without a hereditary aristocracy; the selection of administrators who must at least have been capable of industry; and the preservation of Chinese civilization in spite of barbarian conquest. But, like so much else in traditional China, it has had to be swept away to meet modern needs...

He also recognised the terrible corruption in Chinese politics in the 1920s, though he uses this kind of as a mirror to criticise European imperialism and some parts of modernisation. In any case, I don't think he was under the impression that the anarchy in the late-Qing and Republican eras was good for Chinese society.

I find that in his writings on China he tends to be more generous (arguably excessively so) towards Chinese society rather than its political systems, though; and in his private letters you can see some of his frustrations while living and teaching in China.

Very interesting! I have not actually read The Problem of China, I'm going off memories of Skeptical Essays, which was much more inclined to make throwaway rhetorical comparisons of enlightened China against the brutish West.

The Problem of China isn't any less fawning of the Chinese compared to those essays (I suppose you were recalling the [Eastern and Western] Ideals of Happiness), but I think this is informed in large part by Russell's anti-imperialism and syndicalism/anarchism.

See again in The Problem of China:

The corruption and anarchy in Chinese politics do much less harm than one would be inclined to expect. But for the predatory desires of the Great Powers—especially Japan—the harm would be much less than is done by our own "efficient" Governments. Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better. In China, where the Government is lazy, corrupt, and stupid, there is a degree of individual liberty which has been wholly lost in the rest of the world.

I would hardly call that a glowing endorsement politically!

It being impossible is the whole point! If people could just rise from the dead all the time on their own then it wouldn't be a big deal! Why is the objection to miracles "but that isn't what physics allows?" That's how you know it's a miracle. It's no surprise to the Gospel writers that it's impossible, that it was impossible and happened anyway is what made it paradigm-changing!

One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens.

I think you missed the part where I don't believe that it happened.

Also the point of Jesus healing people. He even said that His healings were given as proof He could forgive sins on the cosmic ledgers.

In McDowell’s Evidence That Demands A Verdict, the author flatly states that if we discount all Christian traditions and writings, we’d still find it historically attested that a Judaean man was known in the region as a miraculous healer, was executed by the state, and his thousands of disciples were convinced to the point of martyrdom that he rose from the dead and promised them likewise.

Like it or not, things God does non-deterministically are anecdotes and outliers, not to be included in the How Things Work “general revelation” dataset.

Not that high of a bar. It’d cover half the charismatic Christian spinoffs which ran afoul of the law. That’s just in America; go back before the Reformation and I bet you could find all sorts of martyrs.

The American cults have historical attestation in a culture of free press and newspapers, in a country with continuity of government, which has never been invaded. That’s the low bar.

The skeptics were also immediate (within the lifetime of the “prophets”) and covered each sketchy detail of e.g. Joseph Smith’s story.

Precisely. If you had Roman levels of communications and records, we’d have much less material on Smith. Self-proclaimed prophet flees across country, murdered by a mob. Followers remain dedicated enough build a city in the desert.

We also find it historically attested that a man in the 1800s has declared that he talked to an angel, wrote a new holy book and convinced millions of disciples to take what is, in plain terms, a blatant heresy of the dominant religion seriously.

Thankfully, USA is not ancient Rome, so the Mormons weren't yet widely tested for their capacity for martyrdom. Yet this is a modern example of how easy it is to become a prophet and found a religion. Extrapolate it from 200 years ago to 2000, with corredpondingly spottier reporting, and the story of Jesus of Nazareth doesn't look that out of place.

Yes.

Yes.

The Resurrection? Yes.

Jesus is the Son of God? Yes.

The Trinity? Yes.

Virgin Birth? Yes.

Garden of Eden? That's the "yes, but" one. Literally a garden etc.? No (but the apple pun is too good to give up). However, that we had First Parents, that they were the first true (ensouled) humans, and that we lost our relationship with God through misuse of our free will (probably but not limited to disobedience as pride was doing a lot of work there too)? Yeah. But here we're getting into the senses of Scripture and how to (and how not to) interpret Scripture. Sometimes you should take it literally, sometimes not, and the questions are where to make the distinction.

The fun one there is "Original Sin - yay or nay? transmissible or not?"

If I were writing it or gaming it out, I’d say that The Fruit Of Freewill Misalignment broke something epigenetic in the brain, and accepting Jesus is a package deal that includes the Holy Spirit standing in for it as long as we live.

Normally yes, but if I'm binge drinking while depressed, I tend to argue with myself whether all I really believe in is Aristotle's Unmoved Mover or alternatively that double-predestination is the way things work and I am a reprobate, damned from before time and existence.

Yes, literal bible, young earth creation etc, the whole gamut.

Uh. Why?

This is a genuine question. I cannot personally imagine what it feels like to believe some of those things. To think “yes, the Earth is only a few millenia old” and not feel a deep-seated confusion at the contradictions. I’m not trying to rehash the early-2000s smugness debates, but I really would like to know how your experience differs.

I can at least model how other people experience faith, even though I’ve never felt it particularly compelling. But YEC? Specific dogmas? Alien to me.

Hypothetically, if this planet wasn't the first life-bearing planet God ever made, and it wasn't made literally from nothing, I think it is possible to have a young Earth without invalidating scientific dating methods.

But I am far from an expert on scientific dating methods.

If it was made from nothing it could easily be created to look like an older Earth too.

With God, all things are possible, and He sure does occasionally work in mysterious ways.

I would just rate that as less likely.

Why not?

A book claims to be the inspired word of a God who cannot lie, I see the options as you can either believe it is from beginning to end, you can decide you above everyone else who has approached this text are the true arbiter of what is and isn't God's word, or you don't believe any of it because a falsehood in the text invalidates the claims of the text.

I can and have learned about other traditions or explainations that differ, whether thats reading the Epic of Gilgamesh's flood account, other faith's creation accounts, or other interpretations of the same scriptures, or naturalist explanations of origin of life.

But at the end, I've made my choice, maybe not perfectly, but its mine.

you don't believe any of it because a falsehood in the text invalidates the claims of the text.

It's not really falsehood singular though, is it? How do you square the infallible word of God with the dozens if not hundreds of factual errors contained within the Bible?

Yeah, I take option 3. What I struggle to understand is why you go for 1. It feels to me like the worst of the options, but obviously that’s not the case for you.

Which option would you say applies to Catholics?

Suppose I write a book of mixed sensible life advice and myths, then claim it is the inspired word of a God who cannot lie. Which of the three options would be the most sensible approach to such a book?

This is a genuine question. I cannot personally imagine what it feels like to believe some of those things. To think “yes, the Earth is only a few millenia old” and not feel a deep-seated confusion at the contradictions. I’m not trying to rehash the early-2000s smugness debates, but I really would like to know how your experience differs.

You just posted a big denial-ish of most of evolution/human behavioral biology.

The presence of nonwhite people has not changed the character, traditions, even the political landscape of the area.

But that could only be true if they are there in very low number.

Obviously I believe you genuinely believe this, and that you are wrong and that your system can't survive contact with high quality enough logic or evidence. Nonetheless, you have contact with lots of humans every day. How much contact do you have with abstract geology?

The only difference between being wrong about HBD and being wrong about the age of the Earth is that one has more practical applications in daily life but the direction of what normies around you say about your wrongness or rightness differs (practically it is reversed). If you are insulated to consensus statements then it is very easy to hold any belief in this square depending on your other personality inclinations.

So anyway you probably know what it feels like to believe wrong things (as do I, probably, in some other domain) but maybe you don't know what it's like to have a majority of random people disagree with you? Well I know what that feels like so I guess I know what he feels like despite not sharing his geological theory.

Why is that a big denial?

I think Clavicle was making a lazy, shorthand version of the argument. He doesn’t have numbers for the TX Indian population (it’s less than the Lizardman Constant). He didn’t show an example of failed assimilation. He just pointed at brown faces and said, hey, look how spooky this is! I’m sure he has his reasons, but this is awfully sloppy, and I can criticize it even if I agree with the model of human behavior.

In my experience, the presence of Indians and Hispanics has not in fact destroyed Texas culture. We’ve remained quite firmly American. Republican, even. I don’t know where our clavicular lives, but it sure looks like he’s formed an opinion based off one Twitter photo.

Now, I do think we disagree on the possibility of assimilation. Your link doesn’t appear to say anything about interbreeding, only that certain European populations performed and still perform better than others. Would you say that all those groups have failed to assimilate to American culture?

It also suggests that such groups can’t have assimilated because they don’t vote “like the rest of White America does.” This is obviously inane. I almost suspect that the author isn’t actually American; he’s ignoring the massive regional splits which have existed (and shifted) since the founding of the country. When the absolute whitest states in the country go solid blue, something else is obviously at play.

So yes, I think that cultural assimilation absolutely happens before genetic assimilation. It’s happened before and it is happening with Asian and Indian and Hispanic populations. I don’t see how this contradicts anything about “evolution.” People are more than their genes.

Your link doesn’t appear to say anything about interbreeding, only that certain European populations performed and still perform better than others. Would you say that all those groups have failed to assimilate to American culture?

Because they act differently from one another due to genetic reasons insofar as they have failed to interbreed appropriately.

I almost suspect that the author isn’t actually American;

IIRC he's Southern and the subtext is the wops and greaseballs (I'm being comedic here) never assimilated to that, which they didn't. And neither did the Scandinavians, have you seen Minnesota? And the Germans had to be forced to stop speaking it and then they interbreeded a lot with the English so that produced a mixture, which I think more or less destroyed or permanently crippled American liberty but I don't know for sure (Germans are admirable in many ways but they have never understood liberty).

It also suggests that such groups can’t have assimilated because they don’t vote “like the rest of White America does.”

That Anglo-German breeding group leans Republican while all the others, including other European strains that have been in the country for over a century, lean Democratic.

I don’t see how this contradicts anything about “evolution.” People are more than their genes.

But how much more? Genes predominate.

So yes, I think that cultural assimilation absolutely happens before genetic assimilation.

Interestingly even if that is true to a small extent, it is the spaghetti effect. Italians are assimilated because spaghetti is American food. I wonder how that happened ... tacos and burritos might as well be now too. Ah, but that's the least heritable and most shallow form of culture. The deep and heritable components require interbreeding.

How do you define assimilation? I think that word does a lot of work in your argument. I think I replied to you before that it was almost offensive how you seemed to water down culture into hats and sports. Then you also kind of imply if immigrants force natives towards their center of gravity that also counts -- you can't call Americans unassimilated for voting for the Democratic party, which heavily relies on non-legacy American votes, for example. Because everybody knows that party, and spaghetti, and fajitas are as American as Thomas Jefferson.

There are lots of YEC people. Mathematically, there are more of them than there are regular churchgoers. DFW is full of people believing it; there’s a creation museum in, I think, Carrollton. ‘People believe this’ is a thing you’d have to be willfully ignorant of, not simply something you never run into. Filter bubble effects might be real, but you work at a defense contractor in DFW.

Oh, I’m sure I know some. I don’t understand them, and I’m certainly not going to interrogate them about their mental state in person. Pretty sure I already lost one friend by telling him that UNSONG was comedy.

I didn’t know there was a museum like that in Dallas. My “favorite” is the one in Glen Rose, also known as Fossil Rim. No prizes for guessing what they’ve found there.

Ah yes, thats thé exhibit on where man walked with dinosaurs- there’s the proof(human and dinosaur footprints nearby). It also has a variety of dinosaur stuff which is fun for little boys regardless of their(parents’) opinions on the age of thé earth.

You're not the Clavicular, are you?

Clav just posted about searching for deeper meaning in life... https://x.com/Clavicular0/status/2099036763696288248

We're through the looking-glass here, people.

It's unclear whether JD Vance really believes in Catholicism, I'll give you that- but he did embrace the most high demand and relatively low prestige version he could find, so...

I believe 100% in the literal truth of the dogmas of the faith. I believe our God was born of a virgin, the highest created being, died and rose from the dead, and is literally and truly present in the eucharist. I believe in miracles, guardian angels, demons, purgatory, and the four last things. I am not a convert, but nor did I grow up religious.

Yes….?

If your model of the US is one where most educated practicing and professing Catholics don’t really believe it, you’re very wrong. Now of course, you can give some side eye to politicians, but if your assumption is that we all are mostly just larping, no.

That's probably a true model, however. Most Catholics regardless of education are nonpracticing and only partial believers.

Right about non practicing Catholics of course. But mentioning Vance OP seemed to be asking whether practitioners actively believed it.

Best guess estimates is that there’s about 25% of practicing Catholics who don’t intend to believe much in the way of catholic doctrine, and this definitely applies to many democrat politicians, which we know because they’ve said so.

It’s not implausible to me that VP Vance could be in the same category with opposite political valence. It’s not the explanation I’d go with.

Eh, I tend to give Vance the benefit of the doubt because he converted from evangelical Protestantism. If he had merely been chasing clout for the "smart people" version of Christianity, he'd have gone to one of the mainline denominations - Episcopalians for most snobbery value but they probably would all have turned green and had a fit of the vapours at the very notion, so one of the Lutheran or Methodist liberal churches. Bill Clinton is Baptist, but American Baptist, the northern and more liberal sibling of the Southern Baptists. There are progressive Baptists, and one James Talarico is doing his best for the Democrats in Texas by being a (liberal) Presbyterian (heavy on the liberal, less so on the Christian as anything stronger than "Jesus wants us all to be nice" doctrines).

I want to register that I think this is wrong. Catholics have as good or (I suspect) better networking in the halls of political power than Protestants, very strong institutions, and they are accepted on both sides of the aisle. If you are a member of a Protestant mainline denomination Protestants will quickly ask "PCA or PCUSA" (or whatever the equivalent is for that denomination) and with Catholics unless you go to Latin Mass or something, just being Catholic isn't necessarily a political tell.

Going to Latin Mass isn't really a political tail either, unless you're trying to present yourself as a democrat. Desantis and Vance both do, and Abbott has some ties. Mike Johnson even hosted a Latin Mass, and he's not Catholic.

That is not how the American elite works.

It's probably true that the Episcopalians wouldn't have taken him, but the Lutherans are not known as a convert church. A convert to Lutheranism would probably look suspicious in American political context, even. Becoming Catholic is a sensible career decision for an aspiring member of the conservative elite- although staying Lutheran or Jewish or Mormon might be acceptable, converting over would not be. These are ethnic religions in America. His real alternative was eastern Orthodoxy, which is far smaller and lower profile(and would probably be regarded as eccentric kinda Catholics by most Americans anyways- including by professional sociographers).

an aspiring member of the conservative elite

Who would still not be Catholics (the working class religion of the Irish, Italians, Poles, etc.) but more likely Episcopalians, Catholicism-Lite but with Anglican class 😁 Look at St John the Divine in New York, with its list of famous funerals, or the National Cathedral in Washington - that's an Episcopal Church building, not a Catholic one. The Episcopalians have been influential amongst American elites out of all proportion to their numbers.

Lutheran churches may still have strong roots in national churches, but a move upwards from being a redneck Fundie to a progressive Lutheran? That would help in political ascension, reassurance that you're not going to wipe your boots on the tablecloth or spit on the floor.

Though possibly I'm looking at this through a British Isles lens, where Margaret Thatcher moved from Methodism to Anglicanism as she rose in the Tory party.

Yes, you’re confusing America and England. Anglicanism is a liberal elite religion here- establishment but very much not appropriate for the right wing of the Republican Party. Catholicism covers the whole class spectrum in America and the (relatively small) liberal wing is still more moderate than the episcopal church.

I don’t have theory of mind for an educated person in the 21st century who believes in the Garden of Eden. My reaction is like Dawkins to Mehdi Hasan when Mehdi says he thinks Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse and split the moon. I know there are people who believe it, but I’m incapable of understanding how. I don’t want to rehash New Atheism either. I am mostly skeptical of adult converts, especially former rationalists and new atheists. People born into it I actually understand somewhat. I’ve read apologetics too like mere Christianity, and I just don’t get it.

Maybe that's the difficulty - you have only encountered the weakest versions of Christianity. Most educated Christians for most of history regarded the first 11 chapters of Genesis as myths that present theological truths about our identity as humans in relationship with God. Reading the Garden of Eden as something that has to be literally true or else all of the Bible and Christianity is false is something that developed relatively recently.

Origen:

I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance and not literally" (The Fundamental Doctrines 4:1:16 [A.D. 225]).

Augustine:

"at least we know that [the Genesis creation day] is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar" (Genesi Ad Litteram, AD 415).

Also St. Augustine:

It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.

With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.

That said, it's not like there are no miracles either. There are books of the Bible that consider themselves to be histories, some that consider themselves to be biographies, some that are poetry, some that are advice. Each book needs to be read according to its genre. For example, this is an interesting look at how an event in 2 Kings shows up in the historical record of surrounding nations.

And yet the dominant strains in the U.S. have a much higher regard for literalism. This is not a hallmark of logical consistency.

I think once one is five or six schisms removed, one shouldn’t get full credit for citing St. Augustine.

...I am not in schism with St. Augustine. I'm BFFs with his mama.

And the point is that the dumb form of Christianity is relatively recent, local, and not representative of Christianity, so if someone intelligent converts they are not necessarily going into the dumb version.

Most educated Christians for most of history regarded the first 11 chapters of Genesis as myths that present theological truths about our identity as humans in relationship with God.

That is not true.

It is true that denominations holding to traditions which predate, roughly, 1650 almost unanimously hold that the first eleven chapters of genesis do not have to be interpreted literally(although they also do not condemn such a belief). But the average educated Christian a thousand years ago believed the stories were completely literal(granted, they weren’t that far off from the contemporary scientific understanding of events either). The dissenters were mostly people like Augustine who held non-literal views but would be categorized as creationists today.

I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought all Christians knew about evolution and the big bang since the 1st Century. Of course St. Augustine thought the Earth was created in a spectacular way. If I recall correctly "science" at his time thought the Earth was created in Spring and the Genesis account didn't indicate that (or something like that I can't look it up right now), which is why he wrote what he did about following the science instead of treating the creation accounts as literal.

But it is true that the average Christian looked to the first 11 Chapters of Genesis for allegorical, theological truths primarily, and a description of the actual beginning of the Earth secondarily. Same with the book of Joshua, it was primarily seen as an allegory for the importance of excising sin from the soul, and only secondarily as an actual historical record of something that happened. And this way of reading the narratives is not a post hoc rationalization in the face of evidence that should have disproved it, but rather just the natural way it's been approached applied to our present knowledge.

Not actually true- up until the development of scientific evidence for evolution and an old earth, most Christians, including the apostolic churches, took those passages completely literally. It wasn't dogmatically required, but, like, Matins of Christmas talks about the earth being 4,000 years old at the time of Christ. The Byzantine calendar takes the same assumption. This was the mainstream assumption in 1800.

I think we're taking past each other. Venerable Bede wrote:

"The battles recorded in Holy Scripture are not left to us merely as records of ancient bloodshed, but as lessons in spiritual combat. The enemies that Joshua was commanded to strike down without mercy are the very temptations and evil desires that rise up within the soul. To make a covenant with the enemy is to yield to vice; to put them to the sword is to mortify the passions through spiritual discipline." — Thirty Questions on the Book of Kings, Question XI, Venerable Bede

The purpose of Joshua is not merely to record ancient bloodshed, but it was recorded as scripture for the a more allegorical purpose, in this case for spiritual combat. I can pull quotes from Origin, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, etc that say the same.

Likewise, the beginning of the book of Genesis provided a thought provoking, textured, allegorical recounting of the origins of man. Everyone saw that there were two, contradictory accounts of the origin of man in the first two chapters. The purpose of handing down these chapters was not to present an accurate account of history but to present a Biblical anthropology. Most commentary on these stories focus on the relationship of God and man presented in the stories as perennial spiritual truths. They were also taken as the best account they had of the beginning of the human species.

There are more Americans believing in literal young earth creationism than who go to church every week.

Model the Christian God as a superintelligence, and the physical universe as a simulation. Then drop the usual model that any reality below the observable one should be assumed to work the way the observable one works. Consider that, if there were a deeper substrate reality under this one, you know nothing about how that reality operates at all, and none of our assumptions about the function of the universe necessarily obtain.

If our assumptions based on the observable reality don't work for higher realities, then that should signal we can't derive how/if God works from what we see in our world. No matter how much evidence there is in favor of Christianity, it provides no truth value.

If our assumptions based on the observable reality don't work for higher realities, then that should signal we can't derive how/if God works from what we see in our world.

Say rather, you can't derive the mechanics of higher realities from observation of lower ones, and this is a point that most people theorizing about stacked realities appear to miss.

But God is not a mechanism. If a willful intelligence in a higher reality wants to talk to you, it can. If it makes claims about your reality, you can compare those to what you observe of your reality. If it tells you things about the higher reality, you can choose to believe it or not, and the perceived accuracy of its statements about the reality you are in can lend some degree of evidence for trust to operate.

In any case, what is "truth value"?

If a willful intelligence from a higher reality actually talked to me, as you're correct to point out it could if it wanted, my questions towards Christians and interrogations of the truthfulness of their faith would be much fewer.

(Allegedly divinely-inspired words of mortal men, "signs", feelings and vibes are no proper replacement for a conversation in my book. If it wanted to talk to me, it could talk to me.)

Are you familiar with the atheist arguments that God's relationship to us could not possibly be loving, because it's based on coercion through threats and bribes? In my view, there's a pretty solid argument that it has to be this way for our choice to be freely made.

Interrogation of truthfulness is a good thing; my main objection is that most people I see attempting it seem to me to be doing it poorly: strict Materialists incapable of recognizing breaks in Materialism, for example.

You could argue that any relationship built on communication with a higher entity would necessarily be one built on coercion, sure. But without communication there is no relationship. When one can't be sure if he's speaking with God or with the echoes of his own mind refracted through religious culture, where does freely made choice even come into it?

More comments

Is this supposed to make him more or less credulous of Christianity?

More, I think. Have you seen a "new atheism" analogue for Simulation theory, Singularitarianism or the Doomish? I observe that a lot of the objections to theoretical violations of Materialism do not appear to be principled. There's a pretty noticeable gap between "do I have to believe this" and "do I have to not believe this", and a lot of human thought observably lives in that gap.

There’s no shortage of New Atheist styled critiques of everything from AI millenarianism to Yudkowsky’s lifestyle choices. You can find them here or in the NYT.

Simulation theory is bizarre and counterintuitive and not, I think, all that widespread. SBF tried to cite it and people (correctly) went, no, you’ve still got to give the money back. Drawing an analogy with Christianity isn’t exactly flattering.

Simulation theory is bizarre and counterintuitive

Is it? How so?

Well, first you’ve got to consider the possibility. Our computer-literate, sci-fi-reading crowd probably has an easier time with that than the average Boomer.
Then you have to distrust all your senses, something which has been a sticking point since at least Descartes.
And you’ve also got to accept that you aren’t special.

Not that any of these make it impossible, but Christianity starts to look like an easier sell.

More comments

Simulation theory is bizarre and counterintuitive and not, I think, all that widespread.

If this were a conversation in the general population, I'd agree. Maybe the rationalist stock has diluted somewhat here as well, but I've argued some of the points straight from the Sequences in the past. I maintain that the intellectual history of Rationalism shows that Materialism can break down and people mostly don't notice, much less ask "People just pretend to believe this, right?".

I…sure, I guess.

That’s not a particularly compelling argument for adopting another dualist belief, let alone a specific one.

More comments

I am able to drop the usual model that any reality below the observable works the way the observable one works. Humans are probably incapable of understanding how the universe truly works. I don't think that's a controversial way to model the universe.

But then why the Christian God? I can get to A, but I can't go from A to B.

But then why the Christian God? I can get to A, but I can't go from A to B.

Might as well pick something. Christianity isn't what I picked, but I get it.

What did you pick? If you are willing to share, of course

Nothing organized.

Religion is a difficult thing for me. I've never been able to square Christianity's Message with its Commandments.

It's pretty impressive how the Catholic Church was able to survive as an institution for almost 2000 years, far longer than anything else currently extant in the Western world.

That's about all I can come up with.

I suppose the way I'd put it is that, in my view, He's got a good pitch. That is, I find the deeper claims of Christianity map well onto the world I observe: things like sin and its consequences, What it has to say about how humans work, what is necessary, which things remain constant over time, etc. It promises things that I want, and in my experience it delivers on those promises in tangible ways in the material world. The arc of my life diverged markedly for the worse when I became an Atheist, and diverged markedly for the better when I became a Christian again. I don't expect my personal experiences to be persuasive to people who are not me, but they are very persuasive to me.

Would you mind going into more detail on the return to Christianity? Not necessarily "how the arc of your life changed" (though if that's not too private, by all means), but more what got you to step back through the door? It seems all so strange in the particular to me that I find it unbelievable. Why Jesus at all? Why was he born there? Why the crucifixion? I don't expect a theologian's answers, but I'm trying to give the flavor of why it seems so strange in time and place and detail to me.

things like sin and its consequences

What exactly are the consequences? We've had this discussion before and you never really made it clear. I see people succeeding all the time despite sinning, and I see the virtuous suffer. The only time I see sin consistently punished in this life is when the sin is against someone who can strike back or has a patron who can. Otherwise, sin away - perhaps you'll pay up in the world to come, but I see no evidence that you will in this life. Why is that wrong?

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye'll have had experiences . . . it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.

From personal experience, embrace of sin observably eats the self away even while you are still living. I could see myself becoming noticeably less human over time, more wretched, more insectile, ingrown in a miserable spiral of decay. And the reverse was true as well: pursuing Christ made me more human, allowed me out of myself in ways I had not been able to achieve while chasing appetite and pride, bitterness and vanity. I left Christianity because I believed it was making me miserable; as an atheist, I grew considerably more miserable, and eventually the contrast between my own life and the lives of my Christian family members grew too stark to ignore. I returned to the church, and my life now is incomparably better.

You must see how that just sounds like "separating from family made me feel worse". Those whose Christian family was, in fact, the miserable part of their lives, or those whose family was not religious at all, would have different experiences.

More comments

But that merely provides evidence for the idea that Christianity has significant pragmatic value for ordinary people navigating their lives and for societies organizing themselves, something which even atheist thinkers have been freely acknowledging for a while now.

But to tie this to OP's original question, you'd have to somehow demonstrate how these benefits imply the truth of the various historical and metaphysical claims Christianity makes. This is IMO very hard to do, especially given that the same psychological benefits are often believably claimed to be enjoyed by the practitioners of other, mutually incompatible religions as well.

As with many other atheists/agnostics with a sympathy towards Christianity, my problem is that I see the wholesome effects of dedicated Christian practice on an individual and societal level, I can even fully entertain the idea that there is and will never be a secular project with the same effects, at least at scale, but when I get to the part where I try to believe in the whole religious complex of ideas I inevitably run into a brick wall made out of serious scholarship on the Bible, early Church history and the surrounding historical sources, the non-specific/non-Christian/universalist nature of the strongest philosophical/theological arguments for the existence of God, the weaknesses of the theological arguments for a specific/historical version of God, and the plethora of presented evidence of similar epistemological strength for other, completely different religions that I'd have little principled reason to reject if I were to start accepting the equivalent Christian arguments.

If Rationalism is systematized winning, and Christianity has systemized "pragmatic value"/winning...

That's all fine at first, but doesn't it collapse into "Nothing is comprehensible, so believe whatever you will."?

I can take the universe as a senseless or even contradictory accident, or I can take it as the deliberate creation of some higher order, fine. But making from that the leap to the benevolent God who cares about each of individually, to an afterlife, to Jesus the Son of God, or any other specifica of any given faith, I can not.

Uncharitably it all seems like wishful thinking. The desire for there to be an actual purpose and place for us, and not just brief and pointless struggle against inevitable obliteration. I get that desire, and how it could capture the mind and make it believe. I get that it's probably healthy and prosocial. But I can't quite get myself to think it true.

What I keep circling back to is this - If there were a God who cared about each of us indivdually, who speaks to us, he'd do so unmistakeably, impossible to overlook or misunderstand. Not through vague signs, interpretations, exegeses, the words of supposed son and and prophets handed down through two millenia of misrepresentation, mistranslation and lost context.

It all seems too flimsy and accidental, too much held together by the transparent desire for God to be so. So maybe there is a superintelligence that spawned a simulation. But I don't hear it talking to me in any language I can understand.

That's all fine at first, but doesn't it collapse into "Nothing is comprehensible, so believe whatever you will."?

I am pretty sure that all humans do in fact believe whatever they will. That is, Belief formation is unavoidably a product of acts of the will, of choices made.

I used to think that beliefs were formed at least somewhat deterministically: you accumulate evidence, and the weight of the evidence eventually forces your mind down a channel. Then I spent a couple decades arguing logically with people, and realized that humans do not actually work this way.

Near as I can tell, there are three ways to form a belief:

  • You can accept (or reject) a belief proposed to you by others uncritically. This is a willful choice.
  • You can examine the proposed belief based on evidence. "Evidence" is an infinite class, and not one of the smaller infinities either, so it has to be pruned to a vanishing fraction. This pruning is a choice. Then it has to be weighed, and the metrics of the weighing are a choice. Then you can either draw a conclusion or go looking for more evidence, and this is also a choice.
  • If you want something deeper, you can use Axioms. Axioms have a shape, and some sets of evidence fit within them, and others don't, so this provides a more rigorous way of selecting and pruning evidence. But there are infinite axioms, and while you can have interplay between evidence and axioms, you still have to choose both your axioms and the evidence to test them against, making it, again, a willful choice.

People speak of motivated reason. But we reason for reasons, to accomplish some goal, and so it seems to me that all reason is motivated. This does not mean that reason is useless, only that its usefulness has an observable upper limit. It seems to me that those aware of this are better able to operate within those limits than those who believe their reasoning is not motivated, that their beliefs are not choices but rather deterministic machinery. One of the best ways to lose the ability to make good choices is to cement the belief that you aren't making choices at all, but are only a set of gears grinding out the mechanistic results of cause and effect.

But making from that the leap to the benevolent God who cares about each of individually, to an afterlife, to Jesus the Son of God, or any other specifica of any given faith, I can not.

Are you looking at this as a set of facts that compel belief mechanistically, or as an option that can be chosen? If the former, then I'm confident you will never find it, since it doesn't exist for this or any other belief. If the latter, the furthest I'd say is that it is clearly possible since I've done it myself, but whether it seems like a good idea to you is a very different question and one I obviously cannot answer.

What I keep circling back to is this - If there were a God who cared about each of us individually, who speaks to us, he'd do so unmistakably, impossible to overlook or misunderstand.

My theory is that compelling belief would violate peoples' ability to choose to love or not love him freely. I do not expect this theory to be compelling to others, though.

Not through vague signs, interpretations, exegeses, the words of supposed son and and prophets handed down through two millenia of misrepresentation, mistranslation and lost context.

I don't think the texts have actually been misrepresented, mistranslated, or had their context lost. I would rather not sidetrack into a tangential issue, but the short of it is that, from what I've observed, the evidentiary basis for this sort of argument was generated by the same intellectual cultures that gave us the Sokal hoaxes, Professor Arday, and all the other fruits of the Academy, and by similar methods.

It all seems too flimsy and accidental, too much held together by the transparent desire for God to be so.

I believe in God because I want to believe in God, straight up. When I didn't want to believe in God, I didn't believe in him. Belief in God is an Axiom, and axioms are chosen, not compelled. I appreciate that there's a ton of cultural baggage and associations that say it isn't supposed to work this way, but in perfect honesty, I think it's the cultural baggage and associations that are wrong. I've had versions of this conversation a number of times here, and I always emphasize the same point: I am not under the impression that I am going to convert my opposites to Christianity, but I really would like to get people to take a serious look at how beliefs are formed in the general case, both because I find the question fascinating, and because I think it provides significant insight into a lot of otherwise-mysterious aspects of human behavior.

Are you looking at this as a set of facts that compel belief mechanistically, or as an option that can be chosen? If the former, then I'm confident you will never find it, since it doesn't exist for this or any other belief.

This reminds me of Claude Shannon’s information theory. The idea is about sending a message. Before Shannon, you might think of sending a message as mere translation: you encode a message into a medium and send it, then the receiver receives it through that medium and reconstructs it. However, Shannon flips the perspective. Instead of viewing it from the sender’s perspective, he views it from the receiver’s perspective. If you already know the message, why do you even need to receive it? The receiver has to guess what the message is.

And guessing is different from translation. Translation can be done mechanistically: you already know the thing and simply replace one representation with another. Guessing begins with not knowing. There are multiple possibilities, and one of them has to be selected.

Translation naturally gives rise to an impression of objectivity and completeness. There is a singular truth, buried in the world itself, waiting to be excavated and laid bare for others to admire. The worldview of God.

From a human perspective, knowledge seems closer to guessing. Of course, “guessing” here does not mean choosing randomly. I do not quite know a better word for it, and perhaps I do not fully grasp the idea myself yet. My impression is that it makes more sense to see knowledge as both the question and the answer, not just the answer.

I will just add that a hugely underrated aspect of belief formation is your friend group and social circle. (Thankfully a professor of mine mentioned this to me relatively early in my life, and I have been blessed in some other respects as regards my career and geographic placement).

Who you are around shapes who you are, including your beliefs and your moral values. Your friends and whoever you spend time interacting with control your own personal Overton Window. Certainly many people are capable of withstanding the compulsive power of Overton Window but it's not generally a bet you want to take or a position you want to place yourself in. Bad company corrupts good morals. And you make a choice as to whether or not you spend time with bad company.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats