This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server. Also:
1. There will be an South Bay SSC meetup on Saturday May 12 at 2 PM. Location is 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA (a private home). David Friedman will definitely be there, and I will try to be there.
2. Two new sidebar ads. Mixtiles is a tech startup “revolutionizing how people put photos on walls”; they’re looking for a remote senior data analyst. Bubble is a tech startup working on a drag-and-drop framework that helps people create software without programming skills; they’re looking for NYC-based software engineers.
3. And one old sidebar ad renewed and switched to an affiliate system: Triplebyte is a company that helps programmers find jobs. You sign up, take some coding assessments, and if you pass they do everything from sending your name out to appropriate companies, to fast-tracking you to the final interview stage, to representing you in salary negotiations, to even paying for your flights and hotels while you interview. It is free for you; if you get hired; your company pays them for finding you. FAQ here. Aside from the fact that I am getting paid to shill them, I really do think they’re great; they represent exactly the kind of resume-blind, credential-blind, demographics-blind hiring I think everyone should be aiming for, and they’re helpful for the sort of low-executive-function people who couldn’t handle a job search well on their own.
4. Comment of the week is AlexScrivener on early arguments against socialism. I said on the Fabian post that it was really hard to argue against socialism in the 1800s; Alex proves me (somewhat) wrong by collecting quotes from a whole lot of people who tried.
5. If you’re involved in effective altruism, consider taking the 2018 Effective Altruism Survey (estimated time cost: 10 – 20 minutes). If you’re interested, after you’re done you can find the results from 2017 survey here (see links to related posts at the bottom).
6. The adversarial collaboration contest is coming together. Two people have offered to increase the prize money, so assuming everyone comes through (no guarantee), we’re now looking at a first prize of $2000, a second prize of $500, and a third prize of $250. These are estimates and may change with circumstances. Please see description and rules here. I notice there are some potentially really interesting collaborators who don’t officially have partners yet, like Salim Furth on urban economics, Freddie deBoer on communism, and plenty of other people; if you’re interested, get in touch with those people or discuss it here. The teams I currently have registered are:
1. MP and TW on ability grouping and other educational issues
2. M and M on mandatory childhood vaccination
3. C and Z on Ray Blanchard’s transgender taxonomy
4. JV and CC on sexism in STEM
5. M and AR on puberty blockers for transgender children
6. C and N on the effects of low-skill immigration
7. DS+SE and JL on AI timelines
8. JB and CF on Islam and democracy
9. JRM and TB on heroin legalization
10. F and D on the impact of tokens and ICOs
11. TW and PJIQ on central planning causing dictatorship
12. A and M on the psychological effects of pornography
13. S and S on gun control
14. T and A on social media and political polarization
15. D and E on Caplan’s signaling theory of education
Registration continues to be open right up until the end of the contest, so if you find something you and a friend want to work on, please email me at scott[at]shireroth[dot]org and register. Please also feel free to advertise this among your non-SSC reading friends or elsewhere in the Internet (in a tasteful way).
Right now I am setting the due date for people to have emailed me their results as July 15th. I’m expecting to use the two other people who have donated money to the prize fund as co-judges (if they accept), and we’ll figure out exactly how that works later.
A thought I have been pondering, which I’ve waited to put here because I suspect it may cause a bit of fuss:
If women were regarded by society exactly like men are, rape would be more common, and taken less seriously as a crime. In general, assault and harm against women would be taken less seriously as a social problem.
MRAs aren’t asking for a return to a previous era – they are, in substantial part, asking for men to be treated more like women (which is to say, vulnerable and requiring protection, rather than expected to protect themselves and others).
Would men be happy with that? I am uncertain; it certainly conflicts with make identity as it exists, and may conflict with more fundamental drives. Certainly I suspect women would generally be unhappy with being treated more like men.
Would society function like that? I have returned to this thought a few times, and have no conclusive answer. It does seem that society has historically depended upon men’s willingness to put themselves in harm’s way, whether it is mining coal or waging war, and it isn’t clear that this has changed, even if we have substantially mitigated many such risks.
The “y’all are acting like a bunch of sissy girlies” criticism of MRAs is not new, nor is the “y’all are asking to be treated like men but be careful what you wish for” criticism of feminists.
I can’t say I fundamentally disagree with these criticisms, though I’m open to having my mind changed.
True, but such criticisms are generally vague, and don’t actually specify the issue at stake.
They’re not that vague, are they? The issue at stake is that society needs men and women — with all the sexual dimoprhism implied. If we try to pretend all men are equal to women or vice versa, we risk upsetting that mutually beneficial codependent relationship. There has to be a balance between blind egalitarianism and crushing, unforgiving patriarchy.
I don’t think there can be a balance. The principles are diametrically opposed; either there is equality, or there is not.
For the simplest demonstration, consider the inherent imbalance provoked when women can vote for war, or for policies that lead to it, but only men must bleed for it. Insofar as we treat men and women as distinct classes, there is a clear imbalance here; insofar as we argue that women care for sons, brothers, and fathers, the reverse argument also holds for why they didn’t need the right to vote in the first place.
Egalitarianism isn’t a principle which permits exception.
I’m all for giving up this “equality” language. Note I didn’t use it. The optimal point between blind egalitarianism and crushing unforgiving patriarchy isn’t equality, after all.
No principle, firmly enough held, permits exception. But you can hold any principle loosely. I consider myself of a basically egalitarian nature (I don’t forbid my wife from voting, for example), but when I recognize areas where divergence is better — or clearly inevitable — I don’t worry so much about closing the gaps.
@Thegnskald
Equality is a spectrum, not a black/white issue.
Also, we can’t have perfect equality, since men and women are different on a biological level.
Why wouldn’t I be happy with it? I don’t want to be subject to workplace injuries or assaulted. That’s why I work in a corporate office and live in the suburbs. Most of us don’t buy into the whole “you need to be under threat of constant danger to be a REAL man” psyche. Or else, you know, we wouldn’t have bothered with this whole “civilization” thing. Judges are an expensive replacement to trial by combat, so we must really like being “treated like women.”
When it comes to situations of grave danger that CANNOT be eliminated, yeah, men are the more expendable danger, but we’re talking Normandy, not random street violence.
You don’t really get to pick when men are regarded as expendable; either they are, or they aren’t. Either our society is willing to send unwilling men to die, or it isn’t.
If you structure society such that men’s lives are regarded as being as morally relevant as women’s on a day to day basis, that is the moral value of men’s lives. Whatever you regard as morally reprehensible, directed at a woman, that society would likewise regard as morally reprehensible, directed at a man.
There won’t be a moral “off” switch for emergencies. Morality is what it is, and the public will stomach only what it will stomach.
And to answer your first question:
Many women find the way they are treated (for their own protection) to be infantalizing.
By and large, society is in an uncomfortable state where women being in danger makes people unhappy, but they aren’t allowed to interfere because that would be sexist.
In the society in which men are no longer more expendable, no such backstop would exist. No, you may not bungee jump, because that is dangerous and foolish. No, you may not drive a motorcycle. No, you may not…
What we are talking about isn’t street violence – I suspect the biggest change there would be softer sentencing for criminals, as men are now treated like women in our imagined society – it is the way you interact with the world on a more fundamental level.
And if you value freedom more than security, as men tend to do, that world is going to be rather uncomfortable. Just as it is for more freedom-minded women, only worse, because there is no class of people whose security matters less than their agency to balance the interests of security against.
“And at the stables, the few boys who signed up for horse-riding classes quickly grew tired of the female instructor’s constant fear of fun (as we saw it: galloping, racing, jumping, etc.)”
Why aren’t we talking random street violence too? If I’m walking with my wife and kids and a bad guy tries to harm one of us, it makes sense that I should be the one to risk death/injury by confronting the attacker. I’m bigger/stronger than my wife and my kids probably need my wife slightly more. (I earn more, but I have life insurance to compensate for precisely that.) If some version of that sentiment trickles into our culture and laws and institutions I think that’s OK as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.
The first best option is an effective enough police force to deter crime. The first best option for WWII is diplomacy. Your scenario is basically what I meant when I said “Normandy”: it’s going to happen, it’s already happening, it’s happening right now, and someone has to do the job. That “someone” is going to be a man, more likely than not.
I just mean that “men are expendable” does not actually mean expendable in the “we have reserves” sense. Every man that suffers or dies is a tragedy and those tragedies should be prevented when economically rational, and the economic value of man’s life is not zero.
Basically I just mean any well-functioning society should have a violent death curve that trends to zero, but the gender make-up of that line is still going to be 90-10 men/women.
A shift that treats men’s lives with the same value as women’s will attempt to arrive at a 50-50 balance to the line; anything short of that is, implicitly, treating men’s lives as less valuable. Is that something you would be happy with?
You asked what would be the problem, and your reply here suggests you think things would remain the same. Take away the assumption of masculinity that a man should take a bullet intended for a woman, however, and you arrive at a different kind of society than the one you describe.
There’s a difference between men voluntarily taking on additional risk and the government subjecting them to additional risk or otherwise ignoring their suffering. Like, the majority of coal mining accidents will be male, because the majority of risk-tolerant people will be male. That’s totally fine.
What I do not want is a value-of-life measure that assigns a lower value to a man’s life, or white-washing of social problems because the victims happen to be male. Like, a ship goes down, 90 people die, of which 10 were women and children…those 80 male lives still count.
MRAs shifting the overton window where men’s problems with schooling, domestic violence, etc. are taken seriously are all good changes.
A major exception would be a military draft, but the US military has been all-volunteer for decades now.
So I guess, what do you mean by male life being treated exactly like female life? I am coming from a more libertarian perspective, people should be able to take their own risks, men will take more risks and therefore will die more and end up at both tails of the distribution. I’m fine with the stats showing more men dying in coal mines for the same reason I’m fine with more male CEOs.
The way I picture MRAs arguing is arguing for a legal equality and just taking male concerns and male safety a lot more seriously, which I don’t find objectionable at all. It’s exactly what I have done in my own life, so by revealed preference it’s what I’d prefer. I don’t want a society that just ignores me getting shot just because I have a Y chromosome, or current society ignoring me failing out of school because I happen to have a Y chromosome (and therefore am not sympathetic).
I don’t think the difference is so great as you think; in order for society to value men’s lives, men must value other men’s lives, and perhaps most difficult, value their own.
@Thegnskald
Yes, and that must be thought. People may choose to sacrifice themselves based on a rational decision that fewer people will die overall if they do so and/or as part of a quid-pro-quo, where that sacrifice gets compensated. They shouldn’t do that out of self-hatred or ‘duty’.
And when people disproportionately sacrifice men, that is sexist oppression. We stopped to consider it acceptable to disproportionately sacrifice Jews, blacks, etc. The principle is good and should be universal.
I saw this in the news a little while back: a cold case known as the Golden State Killer was solved, using old DNA evidence re-evaluated with modern techniques and genealogy-research.
The best discussion of what happened appears to be here. (The blog that is linked is usually focused on gun-rights/politics in the U.S. The poster nicknamed Bitter is a genealogy hobbyist also.)
Basically, a Police agency may (or may not) have abused the Terms-of-Service of an online service to solve a cold case.
In the words of Bitter,
That actually looks like an ingenious way to use the tools available.
Even though GedMatch doesn’t demand that the data come from one of the big-name Genealogy/DNA companies, they do have Terms-of-Service that don’t allow cases like I’m a Policeman investigating a case, and would like to find out if my unknown suspect is related to anyone in your database. The Police investigator likely used Gedmatch…but they didn’t admit which service they used.
Which presents a big conundrum: how easy is it for Police to use/abuse a service like GedMatch? How careful do they have to be to turn the results into a valid evidence?
Can the suspect point to a likely abuse of Terms-of-Service by a Police investigator?
Lastly, people leave DNA in public all the time. How careful do investigators have to be to identify the source of DNA-gathered-in-public?
The NYT has a good piece on this as well:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/health/dna-privacy-golden-state-killer-genealogy.html
This case is interesting because it reverses my natural inclinations.
In my field we work with genomic data all the time, and while I’m not currently using primary (patient-derived) cells right now it’s not out of the question that I might be sequencing DNA from some random accident victim as part of my project. So I constantly have to go to obnoxious training sessions on the ethics of using, storing, and publishing data which can identify patients.
The ethics we’re taught are often overwrought and hysterical. One example where I had to argue with the discussion leader was if a genetic test revealed father-daughter incest whether we were obliged to hide that information. Standing by when you know with certainty that a child was raped is despicable and cowardly. I don’t care if it violates HIPPA, sitting on that information is wrong.
In theory this case is very similar, but my reaction is the opposite. I feel that the police should need a warrant in order to collect this kind of information, even if it’s publicly available. If I had to guess as to why, it probably has to do with the fact that the police are an arm of the government. I trust private individuals to mostly do the right thing, and when they don’t they have a limited ability to cause damage. I have no trust whatsoever that the government will do the right thing, and when they inevitably fail their ability to cause damage is essentially limitless.
The issue here is the terms of service, right?
As an example, I don’t think the police should need a search warrant to search public reddit postings, or to run a Google image search for someone matching a suspect’s photo. The GEDMatch participants seem to understand that match data is essentially public.
The other issue is that people can find you based on your relatives deciding to share their genetic information. (Similar in some ways to how they can find you based on me sharing my photos if you’re in them). Would you feel a lot different if someone who was the subject of a sealed adoption tracked down their biological parents by finding mutual relatives on GEDMatch?
Not for me. I’ve never taken terms of service seriously and I suspect that most people don’t either.
Yes, and that was my whole point.
The government can’t be trusted to use this or any other data responsibly. I don’t want the government to be able to search up my Reddit comments, or find my face with Google, or look up my relatives with GEDMatch. They’re certain to misuse the data if they can get it so I’d rather prevent them from having access to it.
Most people are good, and the exceptions who aren’t have limited resources. The government is malicious and has essentially unlimited resources.
“My hovercraft is full of eels,” translated into many languages, natural and constructed.
Whoever built that page may be a few eels short of a hovercraft.
The mental image conjured by that is particularly horrifying to me.
Well, an eel full of hovercraft would surely be worse.
For the eel maybe!
The obvious portmanteau to make here ought to be between ‘hovercraft’ and an author known for tentacle-ish or vaguely piscine horror. But ‘Lovercraft’ comes out sounding like, I dunno, the aquatic equivalent of a sex swing or something…
My personal highlight is the Scots translations:
I have to assume the Quenya for “hovercraft” is a neologism, with several ages worth of neo.
I’d guess it’s derived from the term for “magic carpet”, perhaps with some ending denoting “infernal machine”. Though where they would have borrowed “magic carpet” from I don’t know.
One of the Haradrim tongues, no doubt.
Delightful! Thanks for sharing!
I’m having fun noting which languages borrowed “hovercraft” from English, and also which (I’m guessing?) borrowed/kept “plena” and “anguillus” from Latin.
I’d be interested in helping out with the sexism in STEM adversarial collaboration (unofficially / not for prize money, but I’d be up for helping with research as it’s a topic I read about a lot). If that team has any interest, let me know how to reach you.
The Bible has come up elsewhere in this thread, and I’ve thought to toss out the idea of doing a series of longposts or effortposts or whatever we’re calling them these days. I’ve got one person interested in reading it already. This would take a while, though, because the Bible is a big book [citation needed].
Credentials: I did a master’s in this sort of thing, primarily early (1st century or so) Christianity (and its context and so on). I did some of the languages. I know enough to teach a 100 or 200 level university course (“Introduction to the New Testament” or whatever) competently, probably; maybe for some things beyond that. If you dropped me in a conference reception of biblical scholars, I would be able to avoid embarrassing myself and seem like I belonged enough to drink several glasses of wine and make a few runs at the cheese tray, at a minimum. So, I know enough to offer a decent survey of current scholarly opinion, and I don’t have any wacky fringe opinions I’m going to tuck in there.
A caveat: this is entirely a secular-study-of-religion approach. I’m not a theologian and I’m not entirely equipped to argue the actual truth of, say, the Resurrection; stuff like that can’t be established one way or the other with tools like textual analysis or the archaeological evidence we have. I’m used to being around both nonbelievers and believers (the latter generally of the liberal variety, but still) and in any case my knowledge isn’t in that area. I’ll try not to offend people, but if you are seriously offended by the idea that the Bible is, on at least one level, a historical document put together over time by people like you or I, it’s not for you. However, I know from personal experience that someone can simultaneously be really into the secular scholarship and be a true believer who takes part in the community life of their church and so on, so being a believer shouldn’t preclude taking an interest in the secular scholarship.
I’d start with Genesis, and talk about the creation narrative(s), maybe break out to talk about the scholarship a little, and continue from there. References would be provided.
Anyone interested?
I’m the person interested, posting because there’s a doubled already in the first paragraph. My fault for missing it during proofreading.
I’m sure it will be interesting and I look forward to seeing it.
I am certainly not “offended by the idea that the Bible is, on at least one level, a historical document put together over time” which is an obvious truth.
But I’m not convinced whether it’s possible, as you suggest, to bracket off the religious claims and just talk about what “neutral” scholarship of the texts says. Above, yaisaacs has already pointed out that the dating of the Gospels already depends in part on what people think about predictive prophecy (and other miracle claims).
The issue also arises with the Torah, for example there is a clear prediction of the Exile centuries later, which is is compatible with an early date for the Torah if Moses was a real person and a prophet, but a clear anachronism if you don’t believe in the supernatural.
Many secular biblical scholars claim to adopt a principle of “Methodological Naturalism” which in practice amounts to saying “Assuming there are no miracles, what’s the most likely explanation of how these texts came about?” That may make sense for somebody with very low priors for the supernatural, but if people don’t realize the presupposition, they may wrongly think that the Naturalistic origin was proven rather than assumed.
The correct approach is of course Bayesian, but that means that there is no watertight separation between the philosophical questions, the historical questions, and the textual questions. They all depend on each other.
There’s not watertight separation, no. The really hardcore “miracles are impossible, so, there can’t have been miracles, checkmate” people annoy me – people in the ancient Mediterranean clearly thought things we define as supernatural really did happen, and did not have the “secular/religious” and “natural/supernatural” distinctions as many modern societies do. If the alternative case is being assessed – miracles generally don’t happen, except these ones did – “miracles don’t happen now, therefore those can’t have happened” – is a pretty bad argument.
Most serious secular scholars just sorta lampshade that they can’t decide one way or the other. The approach I ended up taking was, these are historical books; if the divine is real and all that, then these are human attempts to grapple with the divine. If the divine isn’t real, then they’re artifacts of human belief, which is a thing humans do. I encountered very, very few outspoken to the point of being aggressive about it atheists either among secular scholars or among more religiously-minded ones.
Ultimately, this can’t really resolve things completely. Unresolvable questions are how scholars stay in business, so nobody seems hugely upset.
I grappled with a number of the secular textual criticism issues in my undergrad days, but that is (depressingly) long ago now. I was recently thinking of looking for a general survey book or something refreshing me on more current secular scholarly consensus. While I would likely disagree with some of your conclusions based on our respective starting points, I think your proposal sounds like something useful that I would like to read.
Definitely interested. It’s a topic where I’m an interested amateur – at the level where I can read Diarmaid MacCulloch and learn details, but am already generally familiar with the underlying topic.
Interested.
I’d be interested.
Interested
I’m very interested. I did like a 200-level course in Biblical criticism, so I wouldn’t know as much as you, but I’m clued in and wouldn’t flip out in offense.
Sounds like there’s enough interest to make this worthwhile. I’m going to crack open some of my old books and start figuring out how I’m going to break this up. Currently, I expect that I will have something covering part of Genesis (I don’t think it’s likely the whole book could be covered in one post; I also imagine that the creation narratives and a little bit of info on the textual criticism scholarship I’m going by will take up a disproportionate amount of time and space compared to the rest of Genesis) ready for proofreading in the last or second-last month of the week. After that, the pace should pick up a bit. I’m hoping to be able to do one installment a week overall.
I’d advise doing what you think is most important or most interesting or best illustrative of the principals first rather than necessarily starting at the beginning, on the chance you end up not wanting to continue the project as long as a thorough discussion might take.
Genesis is good for those things as well, luckily, but I see the point. I’ll probably pre-write, or at least make some notes about, the bits I want to do most.
I forget, does the Documentary Hypothesis claim that the early chapters of Genesis are JEP or just J and E? If JEP, the beginning would indeed be a good introduction.
I think it’s the idea that multiple things have been edited together and we can probably make educated guesses about how that worked, more than the particular strands. For demonstrating that the best bits are the creation narrative, the Synoptics, or maybe Job.
@Le Maistre Chat
Unless I’m completely failing to read it (which is possible; I am not firing on all cylinders right now) my old text says that the creation narrative is J and P but does scholars argue over what’s J and what’s E, for some parts at least.
Please do this.
Just to be clear though, how much interpretive ‘work’ do you expect to do, vs. a straight narrative retelling? Will this be a search for meaning, a historical/contextual summary, or a TL:DR for the Bible?
I’m gonna be focusing on the scholarly side of things – if I have to, I’ll condense stuff, but I expect that people will be able to read the Bible themselves. So, historical/contextual summary more than anything else. “Meaning” only insofar as “clearly such-and-such-a-thing was important to the people who wrote this; why might that be” is meaning.
Yes.
I would read it with interest.
I’m a knowledgable amateur: I have a high level of memory of things I’ve read in the Bible, and about the Bible. I’m probably not at your level of knowledge, but I do hope to enjoy the subject, and possibly contribute some useful comments.
Definitely interested.
I would be extremely interested.
By the way, there’s a Tumblr I came across doing a similar thing with the Quran, from an ex-Muslim perspective.
Westworld season 2: what an utter catastrophe. What happened?
Care to elaborate?
I’m still enjoying it, but it’s definitely gotten to the point where it’s a show meant to be “solved” rather than “watched for entertainment value”.
Seconded. Though the Maeve and Bernard plotlines have always been catastrophes. The Season 1 Dolores story and general mystery worked in spite of those two exercises in straining credulity.
They don’t have Anthony Hopkins any more
it’s definitely too soon to call it a catastrophe, but things aren’t headed in the right direction.
As to what happened, I think the writers had two much fun with obscure mysteries and non-linear plotting in season one. That’s a good way to set up a story, but you can’t end your season on that much of a bang and then try to go back to subtle mystery.
By the way Atlas, as far as I can remember, you posts are always clear, well reasoned, and interesting. I’m almost jealous.
I liked Varieties of Argumentative Experience a lot, and I’ve got something that might fit in the comments there, or might just be a bad sort of argument that gets on my nerves, so I’m putting it here.
I see a lot of unjustified certainty about the future– absolute certainty that some policy will lead to disaster. These days, there might not be so much of unjustified belief that a policy will lead to utopia.
I don’t quite understand what you’ve written, do you mean:
A) that ‘belief that a policy will lead to utopia’ might not be unjustified these days, or
B) that in contrast to seeing many arguing with certainty that a policy will lead to future disaster, you don’t see similar instances with arguing that a policy will lead to future utopia?
Or have I misunderstood you in some other way? 🙂
(b)– I think there’s less belief in the possibility of utopia, at least where I hang out.
I should have thought of positive possibilities short of utopia– my impression is that a lot of pro gun control people overestimate how fast it can be expected to lower the risk of mass shootings, even assuming that it does work.
Ah – I’d agree that runaway dystopia seems to be in vogue at the moment, but I think that underlying a lot of political activism or campaign promises has to be the implied promise of a utopia.
Most obviously, some talk about UBI as if it will usher in a utopia.
Less obviously, you have beliefs like:
– Public [single-payer] Healthcare will solve all health problems within the US
– Taxing the rich will give us excellent public services!
– Lowering taxes will give us a stronger economy and more freedom!
– If we could just get rid of the [$racial_group/immigrants/bigots/facists], we’ll have no more conflicts in our country
“UBI will mean that no one ever worries about money” sounds a lot more tantalizing/convincing than “UBI might make some situations of poverty suck less”, so you’ll hear the former argued a lot more than the latter, at least by those outside of academia/economics.
Or the libertarian argument for a UBI:
“It will probably cause fewer market distortions than welfare”
I dunno, ‘fewer market distortions’ sounds to me pretty much like a libertarian utopia 😉
I was with you for the first clause of your first sentence. It’s important to remember that just because you can imagine something happening doesn’t mean that it will happen. It’s a mistake I see a lot in my own reasoning: the more intense emotions an imagined situation evokes, the more likely it seems.
The second clause of the first sentence and the subsequent sentence are much much weaker IMO. This is the same logic as entropy: an arbitrary change is orders of magnitude more likely to break things than to fix them. Change is necessary for survival but small-c conservatism is a good rule of thumb even for progressives.
The unjustified certainty about the future I see a lot, and which annoys me, is the certainty that some technology will come about and/or be prevalent. “Self-driving cars are coming” is one such attitude. Mass adoption is taken for granted.
To me this seems based on some kind of technological determinism, in which technological progress is assumed to take place on its own, independent of humans, and is considered unstoppable.
Though also (and this is a side tangent now), it seems like the technology that gets developed and widely adopted is whatever we first keep telling ourselves will be developed and adopted. Such that given equally viable emerging technologies A and B, with equal costs of development/implementation/bringing to market/etc., if A is obscure and nobody talks about it while B is in all the Wired articles and Elon Musk memes or whatever, then within a few years you’ll start to see early adopters sporting brand new Bs, while nobody much thinks about A anymore.
Have you been paying attention to the development of self-driving cars? By the end of the year, anyone in Phoenix will be able to hail a self driving car. Barring some extreme federal government regulation or an act of god, self driving cars are coming.
What’s your point? People have been saying “driverless cars are coming” long before they had this kind of basis for saying so.
There’s a difference between predicting a technology and asserting its inevitability. You made it sound like it was ridiculous for anyone at this time to take self driving cars for granted. They are coming. It’s only a matter of when.
I’d say that asserting a technology’s inevitability seems like wishful-thinking-turned-self-fulfilling-prophesy. Like Scott Adams’s thing about telling himself he’d be a successful cartoonist a thousand times every day or whatever.
I’m concerned about repeating technological inevitability mantras, especially in cases where it isn’t clear that the technology will be net good. I personally don’t think driverless cars will be net good even if they will be in some isolated cases.
I’m curious what your reasons are for thinking driverless cars will be a net negative. My hope (not confident enough to call it a prediction) is that they will significantly reduce traffic fatalities. Do you think that won’t happen, that it will happen but be offset by other harms (economic disruption?), or some third thing that I haven’t thought of?
Driverless cars probably will reduce traffic fatalities, maybe depending on how/where they are introduced. Personally, I’m opposed to them mainly for cultural reasons, and would prefer to reduce traffic fatalities in other ways (possibly including lowering speed limits, introducing greater restrictions on driver’s licenses, other interventions to make the driving experience less distracting, making cars safer, etc.).
The economic implications (e.g. putting out of work people who make their living driving and who are unlikely to easily retrain in other professions, changing the nature of car ownership–though this last one is part of the cultural reasons I mentioned above) are also a major concern.
I’m also not comfortable with the information-side possibilities, e.g. a company or the government always knowing where I’m headed/where I’ve been, or whether the police should be able to take control of a driverless car to pull it over.
@Well
Assume that the measures you’re talking about only decrease auto deaths by at most 10%. Also assume that self driving cars reduce deaths dramatically, let’s say 99%. Would you still be opposed to self driving cars?
Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning, which we discussed here a year or so ago, posits a society that reduced traffic fatalities to ~10/year worldwide via self-driving cars(*), and wound up seriously regretting it.
The socially acceptable cost for the package of value that comes with manually-operated cars, is necessarily greater than 100% of the current fatality rate. So it is certainly possible that self-driving cars would be a bad deal even if they reduced the death rate to zero, if along the way they reduced the value by a sufficiently large fraction. So the first question is, how well do you understand the value other people place on automobiles?
* well, self-flying hypersonic aircars
@Wrong Species: John Schilling basically said (immediately above) what I would have said.
I also gave you a few basic examples of the kinds of value I’m concerned about losing to driverless cars.
BTW: I hereby move to call manually-operated cars “driverful cars”.
This explains why we have flying cars, jetpacks, fusion power, anthropomorphic robots, and cities on the moon.
None of those pass the viability test, so they’re out of the running anyway.
Though people do keep trying to make flying cars, jet packs, and anthropomorphic robots. Every now and then there’s another news story about some exciting startup that’s building them.
Why do you know those don’t pass the viability test? Obviously, they’ve never been made to work, but if the viability test can only be applied several decades after the prediction is made, it’s sort of a useless test. If you’d asked someone back in the 50s about solving fusion power or driverless cars first, I don’t think it would be fair to fault them for picking fusion power.
If earlier it sounded like I was saying “all technology that gets talked about gets developed and adopted” then I was being unclear. I meant something more like “of the technologies that do get developed, it seems like they are overwhelmingly the ones that got talked about.” And therefore what we talk about is important.
Our persistent talking about jet packs and flying cars means eccentric rich people keep trying to develop them and tech journalists still write fluffy stories about them.
There is comparatively little talking lately about fusion power or cities on the moon. And people are starting to understand that non-anthropomorphic robots are often more useful — though there was still that Ossimo craze a few years back.
There’s a lot of truth to this. I forget the sociological term for it (I’m reading a sociological history of ballistic missile guidance, which has been really interesting), but yes, there are often times when a technology wins for reasons that have less to do with the numbers and more to do with the environment it’s in. The example that comes most directly to mind is the success of geared turbines over turboelectric transmission in battleships. I’m not really sure that geared turbines were much better at the start, but they got all the development dollars for various reasons.
Standard reference to that point.
From which it follows that flying cars will be on the market by next year, whereas cell phones and self-driving cars are still in the distant future?
See the comment sub-thread where this objection was already raised.
Poking around cognition, I have encountered something I am going to try to convey. This may not apply to other people, however:
“I”, in the sense of that thing which I think most people would call my identity, is nothing more than a collection of mental habits, perhaps more aptly described as the filters which sit between awareness and experience. Stimuli X gets transformed into internal state Y; the transformative acts which do this conversion define my personality. And they are plastic, which is to say, mutable; more than that, they are mutable in the way habits are mutable, in that you can transform your unconscious thought patterns by consistently holding yourself to a new thought pattern for a time.
Which is to say, the thing I think most people ascribe identity to, is nothing more than a set of filters or mental habits. “As a man…” or “As a woman…” represent a filter on the world, through which information is processed, and can be removed as easily as any habit (which is to say, for most people, it is impossible). More importantly, if this holds true for other people, “identity” in general shouldn’t meaningfully be part of your identity, because it represents a false “you”, a potentially mutable habit rather than anything like an innate characteristic. (Also, the idea of willpower is a habit / filter.)
Also, in the process of noticing this, I noticed that I have a very sloppy (messy/chaotic with an element of laziness) mental process; I am trying now to ascertain whether this enables my genius, or whether my genius enables lazy mental patterns, prior to making changes. But in the event that I do, I am struck with an issue, in that I have no idea what a well organized mind would even look like, in the sense of “What patterns of thought and filters and mental habits should I replace my extant system with”.
(Note: As I realized my own mental sloppiness, I am struck by exactly how good the advice to “clean your room” by Peterson is. It is about good mental habits and mental hygeine, not about the room itself. I think.)
It occurs to me I didn’t state the concept strongly enough; the stronger version looks like this:
Everything, or maybe almost everything, you think of as yourself (insofar as your mind resembles mine) is, in fact, a set of mental habits you have developed; modes or pathways of thinking burned into your subconscious by frequent use. You aren’t an anxious person, you have anxiety-inducing mental habits; you don’t get bored easily, you have a habit of asking yourself what you should do next, and when you don’t have an answer, your mind circles endlessly around the pattern until you find something, and the unpleasant experience you experience as boredom is an unanswered question. Or something along those lines.
ETA:
The “I” within youraelf, insofar as you resemble me, is pure consciousness, pure awareness. It is an altogether plainer thing than the mutable self you think of as yourself, and continuity of experience doesn’t meaningfully exist, it is an illusion borne of awareness of memory.
I’ve thought of something along those lines, and the thing that I always wonder is how well someone could impersonate “me” in a sort of Turing test in which my email account is hacked. (Or how well I could impersonate someone else in another way). I think a lot of the time it would be fairly successful.
So, yeah, all those things you list, I’m inclined to agree aren’t really “me” and are just patterns.
I haven’t come to a conclusion on whether pure consciousness is the only thing that makes me “me.” Dennett gives a pretty compelling argument for this sort of thing, calling it “emergent” IIRC. Consciousness may be just continuous thoughts.
One thing that I’m not sure how external references to facts play into it…I think it’s fair to say that things that “only I know” are part of “me,” even if it’s impossible for me to know what I alone know.
Would you stop being you if you forgot those facts, however?
Would you stop being you if you stopped thinking for a few minutes? It is possible. I have yet to manage to shut down the last bit of proto-thought – the awareness of what breath is, for instance – but I can shut everything else off, and exist in a state of awareness of breath and nothing else.
(I am puzzling over what is supposed to be “unsatisfying” about experience, however. I wonder that there is an expectation people have of experience that I lack; okay, so I don’t experience the platonic ideal of experience, but I don’t expect to, and I am left confused as to what it is people find so unsatisfying. If I did experience the platonic ideal, what would be left to experience? Does “unsatisfying” refer to the fact that experience is never complete? I can see that from a religious perspective in which you are supposed to reach a state of completion, but from the nihilistic perspective, it just looks like a form of attachment, and a rather unhappy one at that.
Weirdest thing to come out of LessWrong in general/Roko’s basilisk specifically to date: Elon Musk and Canadian synth-pop artist Grimes dating.
Yes, this is pretty bizarre. Who would’ve expected for LessWrong’s biggest blunder to turn into a celebrity pick up line?
He shouldn’t be dating, he should be saving the world,
Can’t save the world if you’re mopey and depressed due to loneliness.
But what about all that research showing single men are way happier/healthier/more productive/etc.?
I would presume that such generalizations are statistical, not universal, an Musk may very well be an exception.
Oops, my sarcasm tag was broken.
Engaging in sarcastic pedantry on SSC is a dangerous game, my friend.
Maybe a lady will teach him some humility, something badly needed for a dude who thinks “made a couple billion dollars off the idea of moneygram+internet” makes him the world’s greatest genius on every topic and has hordes of fanboys begging him to (and believing he can) “save the world”?
But it probably won’t work.
The word you were looking for there was “implementation”, not “idea”. Ideas are worthless, in the strict economic sense. Supply so vastly exceeds demand that nobody is going to pay more than the proverbial two cents for the best idea you, or Elon Musk, ever had.
Actually implementing the idea of monegram+internet, that’s actually worth quite a bit.
Well fair enough. On the other hand he also had the good fortune to be at the right place and the right time where his idea and implementation skills were relevant to make a few billion. Five years later Elon Musk gets preempted on PayPal and then who knows where he is today.
At any rate, neither the idea nor the implementation skills for moneygram+internet are terribly transferable to, say, mass production of electric automobiles, or to closing the business case for giant suborbital cargo rockets.
As someone more familiar with Grimes than Elon Musk, it’s really amusing to me how that link is worded.
I’ve started with a new therapist for self worth issues who’s a lot more psycho-information and therapy techniques focused then my old one (who was really just a pharmaceutical grade listener, which I liked). He talks a lot about “trauma” and “micro-truamas”, social exchange theory, and the vagus nerve.
1. Has anyone else had experience with these ideas/techniques
2. For those who do receive therapy but don’t have a science background how do you go about investigating what your therapist is recommending without spending weeks deciphering the state of the research?
One suggestion is to ask your therapist for the sources they recommend to learn more about the approach(es) they’re using. If they can’t answer this question within some reasonable time frame (like between one session and the next), I’d consider this worrisome. If they tell you to just google “vagus nerve” I’d consider that worrisome. As a therapist, I welcome this question when I get it.
One of the main factors associated with successful outcomes in therapy is that the therapist and client are telling a shared story about what’s going on with the client. So from my perspective, it’s really important that the client understand the story the therapist is telling, that they like the story the therapist is telling, or that the client and therapist create the story together (ie, without reference to jargon or a trendy technique).
Your “Work Related Fuck-Ups”
if you’re ever having a bad day at work, come back to this page and read how so many people have fucked up worse.
Glorious stuff – so much hilarious incompetence …
http://b3ta.com/blog/work-related-fuck-ups/
Thoughts on Tab for a Cause? It’s a free browser extension that puts ads on your new tab page and donates the proceeds to some decent charities. My internet-addicted ass generates about a dollar a month for charity, and that’s not bad at all for what is effectively zero cost.
(Full disclosure, the above is a referral link, but all I get out of it are some warm fuzzies and the chance to watch a few numbers go up)
Very interesting idea.
I mainly intended to signal boost it, so if you think it’s interesting you should consider installing it :^)
Hey guys,
I wanted to talk about a (somewhat) recent paper by Chetty et al. He pulled in race data from the census and combined it with the IRS data he had on incomes to come up with a ridiculously comprehensive data set. He published some analysis of it in a pretty good paper here: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf. Among other things he found that after controlling for household income levels, black women had roughly the same outcomes as white women. If true, this is a really surprising discovery (and very much against my intuition on the subject) so I found it to be really interesting.
I wanted to discuss his primary control: household income. It seems like he was just adding up the incomes of all the parents in the household. But if we want to use income as a proxy for intelligence, this feels like a really bad idea, no? For example a two parent household with an income of $50k per parent would be equivalent to a single-parent household where the sole parent earns an income of $100k. While the children have roughly the same resources (roughly; economically) surely the single parent in this example has a substantially higher expected IQ. Given that single-parenthood is much more common across the income distribution among African-Americans vs. Whites, it seems like this could meaningfully bias the results.
Any thoughts? I don’t have access to the dataset so I can’t actually test this theory directly…
I’m teaching a “Writing about the Sciences” class next fall to undergraduates at my university. I’m a rhetorician and creative writer, so there’s some real gaps in my knowledge and experience when it comes to teaching a course about the sciences.
What are some ideas about what would make the class worthwhile? I’m thinking about teaching it as a kind of “translation” course where science students (or journalists) learn how to translate studies/theories/etc for a more general audience while maintaining nuance, rigor, and accuracy.
For those of you in the sciences, what would you have liked to learn as a student? What would you still like to get better at when writing? What are some of your biggest frustrations with the way the general public consumes science-writing?
Any feedback or thoughts you all have would be valuable!
I haven’t done much of this for sciences, but I’ve been doing it for technical topics (battleships, mostly) for 2.5 years now, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I learned to do it as a volunteer tour guide on the USS Iowa, so what follows is basically me trying to replicate that.
Coming at it from the technical person side, I’d suggest having the student pick a topic or set of topics they know about and like, and focus on practicing it in front of a live audience. Have them do a 5-minute spiel on it to a small group once a week. Shuffle the groups so you’re not constantly seeing the same presentation. I suggest live because you get a lot better feedback, even indefinable feedback, there. If you can’t do that, I’d still suggest doing the work mostly in small, frequent sections, at least initially on topics the students like.
I don’t really know what to recommend you do for the journalists. Part of me believes that most science topics are basically impossible to understand without a lot more background than they can expect to have. But it might be good to have the journalists teach the scientists writing/storytelling, and the scientists teach the journalists how to read scientific documents.
(If you’re wondering if I know anything, or if I’m just bloviating, check out my blog).
Edit:
Of course, thinking this over more, some of what made it work for me was that I really loved what I was doing, and wanted to be a better tour guide. (I still basically write as if I was giving it to a tour group.) But I would say that it sounds like you’re teaching two entirely different classes at the same time, because each of the scientists and journalists have half the skills they need. And for the scientists, I can only say that it would be best to do it a lot of times.
Coming from a technical background with a side of creative writing, the biggest gap I see in writing classes is humor. See Scott’s piece on nonfiction writing device for details.
That said, near as I can tell, technical writing is reasonably close to an efficient frontier. Attempts to translate a technical topic while maintaining nuance, rigor and accuracy are largely doomed to failure because if there were a simpler way to write about something without sacrificing those things, we’d be doing it anyway, it’s not like what we’re doing secretly easy such that we have to unnecessarily utilize erudite vernacular to make it sound like what we’re doing is hard. I am very much of the belief that, if you’re too much in the general audience to understand the relevant textbook, then you’re incapable of understanding what’s going on and it would be better if you didn’t falsely believe you did. (Also, if an area of knowledge hasn’t been well-crystallized enough to have textbooks, if you’re not literally a researcher, it’s almost certainly not worth your time learning about it.) cf Gell-Mann amnesia.
That said, the best writing instructor I ever had spent the entire course making us reflexively recognize the forms of the verb “be” (am is was were be being been), such that we’d reflexively notice the passive voice, thereby allowing us to use it intentionally. Also, the verb “be” is often used when a better verb exists, so having a program in my brain that notices its use is helpful in that respect, too.
Anyone know if Jonathan Haidt is aware of this adversarial collaboration project? Seems like something he’d be wildly enthusiastic about.
The heck is the rightful Caliph getting at here? Eliezer posts some weird-ass shit sometimes as forms of trolling, but…what?
My best guess is he’s using proxies instead of saying what he means. What he means is, he finds young well-to-do blue-tribe white people (i.e. the people who hike and go to parties and plays, probably also people who eat quinoa and care a whole heck of a lot about where their coffee was grown) annoying.
Smells of trolling to me, but I’m not sure what the point is.
Asceticism can foster its own odd sort of poisonous self-regard: pride in all you have given up to live rightly.
I heard that described once as still being consumed by the things of the world: not to own them, but to be rid of them.
Maybe he’s just getting old and grumpy.
That’s not the rightful caliph!
Of course not. That’s the Messiah, and Scott is the first Pope.
He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy
He isn’t Saint Peter, he’s Saint Paul. He speaks to a much wider audience, and slightly changes the emphasis of the original message.
He even changed his name!
All we need is for yvain to have a vision of Yudkowski right as he becomes Scott Alexander.
Someone needs a case of Queer eye for the straight guy.
Perhaps it is what we earth humans refer to as a “joek.”
Ditto on Geoff, no idea what he’s doing.
I have no idea, but I hope it’s “stop virtue-signalling about how scared you are about the world, when you spend most of your day in recreation.”
I assume it’s “vengeful future AI, punish those slackers, not me!!!”
This seems like a good example of what Scott sometimes describes as “a good example of what’s wrong with everything, all the time.”
After decades of this, he had saved up 4 million by the time of his death, which he gifted to the university. But only 100,000 of that got earmarked for the library had he loved. The rest got spent on some questionable stuff, including 1 million for a scoreboard for the football team.
I guess you could say that he should have earmarked it for the library, if he wanted it to go to the library. But if you’re that cynical about the school administration, then why donate at all? Also this guy seems to have had some kind of undiagnosed autism or asperger’s syndrome (I think?) The whole thing is just depressing.
Are you armchair diagnosing him with autism just because he lived alone and never got tired of his routine?
It was a rude comment, and I probably shouldn’t have said it. But I do wonder sometimes.
I didn’t think it was that rude (though I’m not the guy in question), just never heard “likes routines” equated with autism.
It’s a little more than just liking a routine, isn’t it?
I meant more to convey a sense of “IANAD and neither are you, and neither of us knew the guy.”
I wonder if you could find some list of facts about my life that would make it look like I for sure had some kind of condition I don’t actually have.
@Well
You clearly have SSCiditis 🙂
I don’t really see what’s so depressing. It sounds like he found a career he was perfectly suited for, had hobbies he enjoyed, and generally lived a good life.
That’s a fair point. The article implies that he made lots of sacrifices to save up money, and that he wouldn’t have been happy with how his gift was spent. But there isn’t a lot of hard evidence for either point.
I wonder if there is any more detail about why he repeatedly decided not to earmark his donation.
Does it imply that? The author seems rather to directly state the opposite.
The fact that his friend and financial adviser specifically suggested he earmark the money and he declined seems like pretty good evidence that he didn’t care how it was spent, in my opinion.
I also didn’t get the impression that he particularly sacrificed to save money. Rather, it seems like he was naturally inclined to frugality and the money sort of just accumulated. Some people are like that. Obviously I didn’t know him personally so I don’t know if that’s an accurate picture of things, but it’s the picture I thought the article painted.
Interesting that we came away with such different impressions.
I read a few more sources, and it sounds like Robert Morin did earmark 100,000 for the library, even as he left the rest unrestricted.
Reading about this a little bit more, I think I was wrong. I think Robert probably wouldn’t have minded the donation being spent on the career center and the giant scoreboard. I still think it was a dumb waste of money, but those are my values, not Robert’s.
For what it’s worth, we’re in total agreement about the scoreboard being a dumb waste of money.
Based on the Deadspin article, he earmarked an early life insurance policy, and then when he piled up $4 million and decided to leave that to UNH, his advisor specifi
cally asked if he wanted to earmark that, and Morin said no.I agree that the scoreboard is pretty silly, but there’s no way to measure how much the football players enjoy it. I’m an old fogey – I like being able to watch replays a lot, but don’t care about all the other “get hype” stuff.
Presumably, if stadium attendees want to watch replays, you could just add a dollar or two to the tickets, but that’s true for almost anywhere you spend the money.
It seems pretty likely to me that the school would have built the scoreboard anyway, taking the money out of some other source, and so that building it with Morin’s money meant another million being available to other worthy causes. As to why they’d credit the scoreboard to Morin’s money particularly, a scoreboard is a physical thing to which it is possible to attach a little bronze plaque saying “paid for by a donation from so and so,” and commemorating donors may encourage future donors.
Once upon a time, in America, there was a plan to populate the swamps of the south with hippopotamuses. These gentle(1) giants(2) would feast(3) on the invasive water hyacinth that was choking the canals of the south, and would in turn be feasted on by the nation’s teeming millions.
Sadly, nothing came of these plans, but you can read about them here:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-remarkable-early-20th-century-plan-to-farm-hippopot-1493356004
If you’d rather read a fictional treatment of hippo farming, set rather earlier in the nation’s history, you might enjoy Sarah Gailey’s novella River of Teeth. It has some really excellent reviews.
(1): No.
(2): Yes.
(3): Yes again.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn’t that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we’re overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They’ll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren’t the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we’re prepared for that. We’ve lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we’re stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that’s the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
I read River of Teeth last fall, and wasn’t super into it. It’s a fabulous idea but I thought Gailey’s treatment of it was shallow. However, I’ve talked to some people online who loved the book.
It’s set in and alternate-universe 1850s (IIRC) with modern “left-ish” social mores — a bit like the webcomic Widdershins*. People who find it annoying when “they” is used as a singular pronoun for a specific person (was that argument here or some other blog?) should definitely skip it. I found the world building the most interesting part and wish she had gone into more detail on it (though it’s a pretty short book so there isn’t really space.)
*tangent: Widdershins is one of my favorite webcomics, highly recommend anyone who’s into webcomics check it out!
The largest land animals that ever lived were Cretaceous and terminal Jurassic sauropods, which were longer than blue whales and weighed perhaps half as much. The largest flying animals that ever lived were Quetzalcoatlus of the late Cretaceous. But the largest aquatic animals are the extant blue whales, with no known extinct sea creature being larger than the 21-meter Shonisaurus.
Any guesses as to why Jurassic or Cretaceous sea creatures never pushed up against what we believe to be the limits of biophysics, as sauropods and pterosaurs did? And how big could a sea creature get if there was selection pressure for it?
Rabbi Johanan bar Nafcha said that he had once been out at sea and seen a fish three hundred miles long. Upon the fish’s head was written the sentence “I am one of the meanest creatures that inhabit the sea, I am three hundred miles in length, and today I will enter into the jaws of the Leviathan.”
Three hundred miles long fish in the Mediterranean? Unlikely.
Perhaps this article has something useful to tell you:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/why-whales-got-so-big/557213/
Specifically, this part from an earlier article:
The last ice age was end-Devonian to late Permian. It’s fun to imagine eurypterids the size of blue whales, although their body plan probably wouldn’t support it.
Based on last week’s OT, I know SSC loves giving dating advice to clueless guys like me. : )
The spam filter seems to be eating up my question, so here it is on Reddit.
If you say “wanna hang out sometime?” and she says “oh, that’d be great”, then that’s just polite friendship maintenance on both your parts. It doesn’t mean much in terms of interest. (It does signal “you could ask me out at this point if you wanted to”, but you shouldn’t read too much into her not choosing to initiate.) If you want to actually ask her out, you need to be more specific, e.g. “wanna hang out on Friday?”
(If you say “wanna hang out on Friday?”, and she says “oh, I’m busy”, then that’s a no. If instead she says “I’m doing X on Friday, but what about Saturday?”, though, then that’s a yes.)
She might legit be busy on Friday, and she might have just been too absent-minded to suggest another day.
Instead of “wanna hang out” suggest a specific date-like activity, such as going to a movie or a concert or something.
There’s some ambiguity, sure. It’s a judgment call, and stuff like tone and timing factor into it too, but all else equal more specificity is usually a good sign.
If you’re not sure the first time, I think it’s generally acceptable to ask again on another date. If you’ve gotten two or three “I’m busy”s, though, move on.
I am a master and will rule all the question.
She might just be absent-minded. You know her, so use your judgment. Even if she isn’t absent-minded, you should still offer such and such a day.
I wouldn’t wait longer than a week or two, but why not email her as soon as you get a chance to? This is 2018, we spend a lot of time in front of our computers. It’s not weird.
I’d try once more to reschedule, then let it go. If she really can’t make it both times and really wants to see you, she’ll try and reschedule the next time.
If your aim is to try something romantic, just invite her on something date-like. Just the two of you.
Compliment her on something that would be inappropriate to compliment her on if you were coworkers but not something too intimate. So, her smile, her hairstyle, her outfit, her perfume are all in-bounds; her shapely figure is probably too risky. This goes without saying but your compliment should be genuine.
Nah, that puts her on the spot. Do what I said.
Don’t do this. Lying is a bad idea.
Why? I think that’s a fine thing to say toward the end of the evening.
I know lots of people who would, including me. I wouldn’t assume it’s obvious.
.
I should have been more clear about “slow.” I didn’t mean taking things further, I meant keeping things social. If things don’t go any further but you want to continue as friends, rolling things back towards specific group activities seems to happen pretty immediately. That doesn’t usually take seeing someone more than once to figure out, and the specificness of the activity usually means more than a vague “this again.” Granted, I’m basing this on friendships with same-sex friends that I’m trying to become closer friends with.
Asking someone to do something again seems to be a sign you’re unsure about seeing them again — ie. it didn’t go too well the first time. Which is fine, I’m not expecting much, but that’s what “we should do this again” seems to mean where I am. Again, I’m basing this on friendships with same-sex friends.
Coffee is pretty low-pressure. When I’ve gone out for coffee with my same-sex friends, it’s a way to see how we get along more closely and without other people around, and either of us can leave at any time without it looking bad. (Every time I’ve gone out with a male friend to do something specific without a coffee-like meeting first, it’s been awful, because unless you have very specific common interests, one person has to commit to something they’re not familiar with.)
I thought “this” referred to an actual date.
I agree, if it’s coffee then you might want to specifically suggest something date-like next.
It’s not a bad sign that she didn’t mention a specific day. It just meant she’s not that interested. At our age, “sometime in summer” means “i am busy right now, which really means I am busy ALL THE TIME, and maybe I can theoretically fit you in during the medium term.” The medium term scheduling is a lot like politicians trying to schedule deficit reductions for the medium term: it’s not MY problem, it’s Future Me’s problem.
But it’s not a NO. So it’s good. There’s still some positive feeling there, it’s just not enough to make you a priority. I’d read this as “friend-zone.” That can TOTALLY change, though, so don’t get dispirited.
I’d definitely wait at least 2 weeks before trying to schedule something, especially since she said “summer” and we’re still in “May.” Maybe in 2 weeks suggest something for Memorial Day weekend, “you know, if you’re free.”
If you want to steer it in a romantic direction, just do what Well said: compliment on something that’s a little risque, like her hair or perfume. See how she reacts when you’re together. Is she just sort of passing the time and looking at her phone or she is really engaged, twirling her hair, smiling a super-ton, blah blah. At the end of whatever meet-up you’re doing, you can ask up to meet up again. If she says she is super busy and she needs to see you again in a month, she’s just not that into you.
1. If you really can’t infer from body language, I think you can just ask. You’re 26, she’s 30. People start to become a lot more blunt at this age. I won’t lie, you still might come off naive if she’s really not interested, but who cares at this age.
2. I meet up with people all the time for coffee or food with non-romantic people. Mostly I hang out with dudes because girls are just not that interesting, but there are still some girls I am close friends with.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
Both of us are kind of reserved in general, so yes, it’s hard to tell. Is there a way you’d express interest without putting her on the spot?
Yeah, well the philosophical case for democracy is empirically false. A better question is “Is there something superior we could replace our representative oligarchy with?” If not, we have to keep it.
IMO, the main benefit of a democracy is that it gives people in power some incentive to care about whether the public is happy with how things are going. Without that feedback, there’s no check on the powerful people doing whatever the hell they want–imposing laws and policies on the people that they overwhelmingly hate, screwing over large numbers of people, ignoring common needs (like keeping the roads working and the courts functioning honestly) in order to line their own pockets or impose their own vision of the world.
Sure, I’m not disputing that it’s deeply imperfect. I’m just saying that there’s an important advantage, which is that the powerful people in this society have good reasons to care about how happy or unhappy the majority of people are about how things are going. That’s not a perfect kind of feedback, but it’s at least something.
I wonder if there are parts of the operation of government that explicitly need to be free of voter feedback to work. The example that comes to mind immediately is the Fed monkeying with the money supply–it’s probably good overall that they’re not standing for re-election every few years, or we’d probably have a lot less stable monetary policy. Another example is judges ruling on unpopular civil rights cases, where you’d like them to care more about getting the right answer than getting re-elected. (But the other side of that is that when the supreme court justices decide to just change the law, there’s no feedback from the voters.)
@albatross: “Civil rights” just gets defined as “culture war” by the Supreme Court. I don’t see how it’s vital that everything the government does except culture war and monetary policy need feedback on the consent of the governed!
That would e the “just decide to change the law” problem. Even when I like the result as policy (gay marriage, for example), I think it’s a pretty bad way for things to be done.
Making people happy is hard. Much easier, and just as satisfactory for an elected government’s purpose, to make people agree on whose fault it is that they aren’t happy. Whereupon you can impose laws on people you hate, screw over large numbers of people, ignore common needs, etc, all in the name of waging total war against Those People.
You’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. What is your point of comparison? Like, sure — democratic leaders can partially substitute culture war for real policy. Is that worse than the alternatives? Non-democratic leaders don’t need an excuse to impose, screw, or ignore. They just do it. If you disagree that this is a relative advantage of democracy, explain a system that better convinces the people in power to care about the interests of the public.
Sure they do. A dictator isn’t Superman, ruling by his own strength. He depends on enough support from the relevant people, which might be the military, the bureaucracy, local leadership, …, to keep him in power. For the limiting case, see Bierce.
Democracies aren’t Superman either. Your statement is true of literally every form of government in existence, and probably will stay that way until we invent robot armies, so I’m not sure what that really proves.
The fact remains that dictators can get away with much flimsier excuses, since they only need to make their excuses to whoever controls the army instead of 51% of the population.
Correct.
Different excuses. An excuse that convinces the voters might fail to convince the elites whose support the dictator needs, or the other way around.
I don’t think it’s so much that democracy works well, as that wealthy industrial society tends towards democracy, and trying to prevent that tends to strongly interferes with either the production of industry and wealth or something more fundamental that leads to them.
There is at least one mechanism we are all familiar with that works better–competitive dictatorship. That’s how restaurants, hotels, stores are run. The customer has no vote on what is on the menu, an absolute vote on which restaurant he eats at.
Expanding that to replace all the things currently done by government is a non-trivial problem, but not necessarily insoluble. Expanding it to cover many of the things, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward. For one simple example, when Adam Smith wrote, Scotland had multiple competing private issuers of currency.
Lots of people take the line attributed to Churchill—Democracy is the worst form of government invented by the mind of man, except for all of the others that have been tried from time to time—as an endorsement of democracy. It might better be taken as a critique of government. If the least bad form of government works very badly, that’s an argument against using government to do things.
That would be dictatorship with absolutely guaranteed exit.
Oh, and most of those businesses would allocate resources with central planning…
Central planning works fine when you have a small enough population and a narrow enough set of resources that the entire plan fits in one guy’s head. “Palace economies”, which were centrally planned on the local level, were common in the Bronze Age and appear to have worked for a couple thousand years — but when we say “palace”, we mean a building about the size of your average elementary school and with about the same number of tributaries. The calculation problem only becomes intractable at scale.
The diseconomy of scale that this implies is one of the reasons why we’re not buying everything from McGoogWalSantoSoft.
Competitive monarchy is an intriguing idea. To quote Hamlet via Mystery Science Theater 3000:
CLAUDIUS: Wilt thou be ruled by me?
LAERTES: Well, I do have an attractive offer from the King of Flanders…
One argument for democracy that I don’t think has been mentioned is that, in any society, power can shift if the views of enough people change, and democracy provides a relatively low cost way of letting it happen.
Losing an election is less traumatic than losing a civil war.
That, I think, may be the best way to view democracy; it is a proxy for civil war. Ideally, a democracy should be structured such that, if you could win a war, you can win the votes to get the policy you want.
What is dangerous is when this ceases to be the case; when you could win a war, but cannot win the vote.
The Swiss and the United States Founders believed in one gun, one vote for this reason.
So why have democracy if a tiny minority of the population can win a civil war?
Today in “good things that are actually bad”: detecting cancer early.
I used to work with a research group that studied cancer screening & prevention from a decision-theoretic perspective. Overdiagnosis was an omnipresent theme.
I didn’t work specifically on breast cancer and my role was more quantitative/technical anyway. But behind closed doors I heard from more than one domain expert that 1. (US) mammography guidelines are much more aggressive than is warranted and 2. one had to be careful about expressing this opinion publicly.
For the last few decades or so, the US Pacific coast has had a certain position of cultural leadership. Stuff would start there, or flourish there, and only percolate to the rest of us later. Think of rock climbing, sushi, skateboarding, and coffee-culture, for instance. Once, these were very local affairs, in California or Washington state, but now they are simply part of the common culture.
This observation leads to a question: What weird shit are you guys on the Pacific coast up to right now that the rest of us should be ready for in, oh, twenty years or so?
Do you already have ironic beards, anorexic men, fixee bicycles, and kombucha?
In New York, yes. The first three are actually kinda passe.
Yes to the first three, and I think I could find kombucha if I looked for it, but it’s not standard. Chai, matcha, and rooibos are pretty standard at this point. This is in Toronto
Man, we’ve had kombucha in Aldis here in the Midwest for years. Are you even in California right now??
Based on last weeks OT, I know SSC loves relationship questions from clueless guys like me. Ahem… 🙂
I (26m) recently reached out to someone I knew in college (30f). I think she was interested in me at the time: we talked a lot, she invited me out a few times in a group setting. Later, she got me alone several times after class, which I’m pretty sure was an invitation for me to ask her out on a date. Though I can’t be sure…
We fell out of contact. I never asked her out on a date: I was living with my parents at the time, she was older than I was, and I was leaving for university a few months later. I ran into her once after I moved back home a few years ago.
I still don’t have any experience dating, but I’m living more comfortably as an adult (I work a steady job & rent my own place). There’s less of an age difference between the two of us now.
Last week, I emailed her to ask her advice on something (we both work freelance). I mentioned that my email was out of the blue and that I’d been busy over the last few years. I asked if she wanted to catch up over coffee some time; she said that it could be nice to catch up over the summer.
Anyway…
—-Is it a bad sign that she didn’t say “yes, let’s go on such and such a day”? Is she answering vaguely because it’s more polite than saying no?
—-Should I wait for a week or two, and just email “are you free this weekend, do you want to go for coffee?” again? Should I wait longer? Or do something differently?
—-How persistent should I be if she can’t make it and doesn’t make an effort to arrange something that works for her — is that a sign that she’s letting me down gently?
—-At this point, should I still be inviting her to do things as part of a group? I don’t really have any way of doing that, except, I guess, saying I’m going to an event and telling her to bring a friend.
If I do see her, how do I make it clear that I’m interested in her?
—-Ask directly towards the end: “are you seeing anyone” and “do you want to go on a proper date some time”?
—-Steer the conversation towards it, casually mention “I broke up with someone a few months ago?” (white lie, but less pressure on her to answer about herself/make a decision)
—-Or should I keep it social — “I’d like to do this again some time”… it feels weird to take things that slowly at this point
—-Or is it already obvious to her? Most people I know wouldn’t go out for coffee with someone of the opposite sex outside the context of dating, but it depends on the person.
I know some people say not to go back to someone after such a long period of time, and that I should move on (it’s been five years). But it’s pretty common where I live to move away/come back again (it’s a small city), and most of my friends are people I see once every few years. She moved here from another country, and she works freelance/remotely, so may have a fairly small social circle & few dating opportunities.
This turned out to be a long post…I’m not obsessing over this, I’m prepared for this to go nowhere or even end up a friendship. I just overthink things and am socially clueless sometimes.
Yes it’s a bad sign. Try once more with a specific date, time and location. “What are you doing Wednesday at 1? I’d like to buy you that cup of coffee at [Trendy Coffee Place].” (not starbucks). If she doesn’t commit to a meeting then she’s Just Not That In To You.
I don’t know man. Just be yourself :^)
Seems quite plausible that she’s already in a relationship. Can you Facebook-stalk her to find out?
People here are pretty private/intermittent with their Facebook accounts. Absence of a relationship status wouldn’t mean “not in a relationship.”
I’m also happy to see her socially, even as a one-off thing. As I say, where I am, a lot of people do this. I’ve both initiated it and been on the receiving end of it (admittedly mostly from male friends). I usually try and get in touch with a few people every year.
Everyone I’ve talked about it to hates doing this in the abstract, but they also seem happy to see each other/me. It’s a weird social landscape.
“Don’t only practice your art. But force your way into its secrets. For it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.” Piano guys video.
Probably a better translation: Do not merely practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; it deserves that, for only art and science can exalt man to divinity.
I’m posting it because it seems like a shockingly unmodern attitude, but possibly useful– does anyone here use this approach to finding out new things? Does anyone think it would help?
This is motivational but not exactly outlining an approach. What is being recommended? Persistence? Going for a deeper level of mastery? Using art to achieve immortality?
I see it as not expecting cooperation from the universe. You should want to learn things which aren’t at all obvious!
To me it was the “secrets” and “divinity” parts.
the aggressiveness of the first sentence struck me– I think of a normal contemporary (perhaps not “modern”) attitude as expecting an open field to explore.
Let me try to address your meta point more directly. (With the understanding that I do share some concerns about the long-term viability of the liberal democratic project). I think there are two basic issues. The first is that I don’t know that race or ethnicity have any causal relationship as opposed to correlation. It’s not surprising to me that people with a similar culture or shared history and traditions might overall see certain issues the same way. But in that case, ethnicity is merely a proxy for “see things the same way,” which is what I see your meta-point as asking of democracy (assessing policy and voting based on how you see it). Race obviously has toxic elements, especially in American history, but I don’t know that the correlation between the exercise of democratic franchise (making a judgment based on one’s priors) and one’s ethnicity (which may influence one’s priors) dooms democracy. The second thing is that I’m not sure it matters tremendously if ethnicity has predictive power for voting, if it does not reliably predict the direction of policy preferences. That is to say, people are always going to vote in blocs based on common interests. As long as some assessment is occurring of what common interests unite a particular ethnic group – that is, if those blocs are capable of realignment based on an assessment of the proposed policy’s effect, or at least an assessment of the likely consequences of an opposed coalition’s policy’s effect – then it seems to me there is no necessary stagnancy. If, say, the gene for red hair also coded for high taxes, then yeah you might have a problem inasmuch as tax policy might get formulated in the long run based on birth rates. But if it’s cultural transmission, and the transmitted cultural assessments can change over time, then you are not substantially constraining the decision space that the democratic polity can reach; you are simply moving to a longer-term struggle over influencing culture and building coalitions of interest.
I’m pretty sure the genes for low IQ/conscientiousness/honesty-humility do code for high taxes [on everyone else].
(Not to say I think most of the ethnic voting factors require genetic causes, or that the problems with low IQ/C/H should be seen mainly in ethnic terms.)
One way that could be wrong is if members of some ethnic group had a lot of shared experiences that inclined them all in the same direction w.r.t. some policy. If lots of blacks have had bad experiences with the police, that could plausibly lead to lots of blacks supporting more oversight of the police for entirely sensible reasons.
If specific culture, history and traditions lead groups of people to have specific beliefs about governance, as opposed to disinterested, neutral individual evaluations of which policies are best for society based on the evidence, then it partially undermines the theoretical justification for democracy.[…] But if people have beliefs that are based on identity, rather than the evidence, then winning elections is, in an important sense, a somewhat arbitrary question of which identity group is the largest within the polity.
The problem is that these aren’t necessarily groups wanting their own interests to take precedence over society’s interests, but differences between groups as to what they think the best outcome for society is. Different groups of people tend to have different shared values based on their history, which causes them to evaluate different things as being best for society (or, at least, better), even if they agree on the evidence.
The way around it might be to identify the minimum set of values necessary for society to function, set those values as hard coded in society, and then let the democratic process play with everything else over time.
I don’t think that’s the problem you make it out to be, at least historically. Recall the structural arguments made for the U.S. Constitution by the various Federalist writers; they were never arguing for philosopher-citizens, which would just be another impossible version of philosopher-kings. Rather, they assumed that men were neither angels nor devils, would act in their own self-interest, but would also have the ability to sometimes change their opinions based on reason and experience. They used structure to try to ensure that self-interested people would set up checks and balances to inhibit tyranny, while allowing for slow shifting coalitions (and indeed requiring them to make large changes). Thus, having viewpoints shaped by culture would not seem to be fatal, as long as the viewpoints are capable of updating to reflect each individual’s experience of how policy is affecting them.
Put more directly, I don’t agree that the justification for democratic participation relies upon citizens making disinterested policy calculations for society – almost at all. I think it, like the invisible hand of the market, relies upon citizens making self-interested judgments about the effects of various policies upon them personally. That isn’t to say there is no role for public-spiritedness; I agree that there are some basic rights and assumptions that the polity needs to share or else the project cannot continue (thus the Bill of Rights, etc.). So it is very possible for a polity to become so non-virtuous, or at least possess the wrong virtues, to render self-government untenable. Tribalism that is entirely impervious to change is definitely such a challenge, I agree with that. But if the tribalism is not impervious to change – merely resistant, or helping to form self-assessments – then I don’t think it is fatal to the underlying project. I don’t expect citizens to know, calculate, or even particularly care what the “best” policies are for everyone. I expect them to give feedback about what is working or not for them. Who better to judge their happiness than themselves? If part of that judgment is shaped by culture, so be it – they can assess how they like the results of their judgment down the line. As long as they can update, change, and shift policies and coalitions (but still are committed to peaceful coexistence with opposing coalitions), it shouldn’t matter if part of their judgments coincide with that of others within their ethnic group.
I’ve been meaning to write a reply to this thread, but hls2003 covered most of the rest of what I wanted to say that hasn’t already been said.
The case for democracy is that is the least bad system at:
1. Aligning the incentives of the rulers with the interests of the ruled.
2. Incorporating the knowledge and experience of as many people as possible into the decision-making process.
3. Peacefully transferring control from one leader/party to another.
The claim that people will (to quote Atlas’s OP) “make rational, disinterested decisions about the best policies based on factual evidence” is unrealistic. (I also don’t see it in the SEP article.) There’s an implicit assumption running throughout this thread that “the best policies” is a well-defined objective. I don’t think that’s accurate. Any group large enough to need a government will contain profound disagreements about what “best” means. The same facts about abortion usage patterns can imply very different policies, depending on whether you are pro-life or pro-choice.
Given that, governance is always going to be messy. Democracy doesn’t — and can’t — give a path out of the mess. Democracy doesn’t offer “best”. It offers “better”. A democracy won’t perfectly represent the interests of its citizens, but it will do better than anything else. A democracy won’t perfectly integrate everybody’s knowledge, values, or beliefs, but it will come closer than the alternatives.
If democracy doesn’t live up to what you expected, the problem might be with your expectations, and not with democracy itself.
Here’s a relevant quote
Is he right? I don’t know for sure, but your points above and his agree.
It’s amusing that what he sees ethnic and religious interests in a multicultural state supplanting are not the good of the nation, but their economic and social interests. In this view of democracy, which fits with the little bit that I know of the Federalist papers, democracy does not work by establishing a marketplace where experimentation and rational discussion find the policies that produce the most good on average, but where coalitions will need to cooperate with other factions in order to get the policies implemented that help their group–hence the perceived need for a bill of rights to protect individual or minority rights.
Of course, it’s not hard to find plenty of examples of legislation or attempts at it that aren’t about group interest but controlling others behavior for their own good or that of others–abortion, drug use, etc. But this isn’t much more hopeful, for in a multicultural society there are more competing definitions of the good.
But it’s also possible that these differences on policies manifest themselves more when there is less tribal competition for the spoils of government. That is, ideologies are a result of a monoethnic polity.
I’m interested in examples of controversies that aren’t polarized along the usual partisan lines. Does anyone have a good list? Lots of political beliefs appear to consistently cluster together in ways that don’t really make sense to me. Studying beliefs that don’t behave this way seems like it would be useful.
tabs vs. spaces
vim vs emacs
two spaces after a period vs 1 space
One thing all these examples have in common is that they’re primarily of interest to specialists. Another is that they all involve trivial issues.
The non-trivial ones will appear to justify state policy proposals, which will in turn justify political figures taking sides and their partisans adopting the issue into the canon.
Local controversy may also avoid becoming polarizing along conventional party/tribal lines but be contentious, such as whether or not to allow a certain establishment in an area, with concerns about traffic or noise competing with ideas about how to spend increased tax revenue. There might be ideological views of property rights or other broader concerns at play, but people might not align according to those views when in is in their backyard.
Newlines 4 lyfe! (CRLF orthodoxy. CR and LF heretics BTFO.)
And, of course, the Oxford comma: yay or nay?
vs vs vs.
This made me twitch.
twitch vs youtube
Anti-vaccination is one that is very polarizing but not clearly partisan.
When I was growing up, a lot of the hippies in my town didn’t vaccinate their kids because they thought it was poison being shilled by Big Pharma. Today it seems like anti-vax has made inroads with the more paranoid elements of the right as well.
I think fear about GMOs might follow a similar pattern, too.
It’s entirely possible.
I know that it does in Europe, but I spend almost 100% of my time in deep blue regions of the US so it’s hard to tell whether it’s my bubble that makes anti-GMO look like an environmentalist thing.
I just came back from a southern California libertarian gathering (Libertopia). I’m pretty sure one of the talks I didn’t attend was about how to be healthy by eating only pure things, where GMO probably counted as impure. And some other people there seemed to be pushing along vaguely similar lines.
From Pew:
Yeah, reading some posts about the non-partisan nature of anti-vaccine sentiment was part of what motivated my question.
It’s a communist plot to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.
Mac vs Windows.
I don’t see this much now that computers are kinda commoditized and Macs have respectable market share. I associate it more with the late Nineties, when hardware was expensive and Macs were the underdog.
Mac v Windows feels very Blue v Red tribe to me, though there are a lot more exceptions than with with bigger issues.
Mac vs Windows, with a sideline of wild-eyed fanatics saying “Just use Linux!”
Why does that feel similar to the Red-Tribe/Blue-Tribe/Libertarian division in American politics?
Linux is left-libertarian, Unix is right-libertarian.
The Mac market share is pretty deep Blue — creatives use Macs because creative software tools, for historical reasons, are usually designed first for Macs and work best there. For video or sound editing, decent suites even come free with the OS. And Mac laptops are a status symbol for bourgeois-bohemian types.
I don’t think the Windows market share is as Red as Apple’s is Blue, though. There are lots of reasons to buy a Windows PC — it’s still the standard for office use and for gaming, you get better bang for buck performance-wise, they’re usually more maintainable and upgradable, and the low end of the market is almost entirely Windows.
Only nerds use Linux, but those nerds are probably about as likely to be socialists as libertarians.
Toilet paper orientation,
Tie twist direction
Dress color
I suspect the toilet paper orientation debate breaks down between “cat owners and parents of young children” vs “everyone else”.
I’ve had both cats and young children and I still say over is better, I’m just less willing to die on that hill now than I used to be.
“The Dress” has my vote for “Wikipedia article that reads most like an SCP entry”
Sports rivalries?
Coke vs. Pepsi maybe, if you only look at people who drink lots of it?
Actually, this might generalize to any consumer good where there are basically two big brands competing for market share dominance, where their shares together add up to something like >80%.
Probably too trivial for those outside the relevant niches, but:
Keto for weight loss (good or bad?)
For bodybuilding: Bro-Dieting or If It Fits Your Macros ?
Who does the best version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallejulah? (Hint: it’s K. D. Lang)
Reservoir Dogs vs. Pulp Fiction?
Snatch vs. Lock Stock?
Beatles vs. Beach Boys?
Rachmanninov vs. Prokofiev?
1984 vs. Brave New World?
Pineapple on pizza?
I’m not sure if I got quite what I’d hoped for from this thread, but I am learning that I have a lot more strongly-held opinions about trivialities than I realized.
(No opinion on the first three, Reservoir Dogs, Snatch, Beatles, neither — Shostakovich, 1984.)
Disagree; the people who like keto also like weightlifting and care about testosterone levels, and the left throws some serious invective at them in the right places. Anything close enough to exercise is going to be CW-y because lifting is tagged red. (Also because the overweight are part of the left’s base at this point, though not entirely dominant yet.)
Wrong. It’s an obscure group called Late Tuesday who did an amazing live cover that I somehow have a mp3 of (I have literally no idea where I got it, and it’s not on any of their for-sale albums.) Here’s an incredibly shitty recording. It doesn’t hold a candle to the real recording, but you can hear enough to see that I’m right.
Peter Gabriel vs. Phil Collins!
Picard vs. Kirk?
I wonder how partisan P vs. K turns out to be, actually.
How would you imagine it breaks down?
Picard is clearly a “thrive” hero, while Kirk is a “survive”, so I think I would mildly expect Picard fans to skew left and Kirk fans to skew right.
See, I’d expect the same breakdown but for different reasons: TOS seems to (now) have a more general audience (especially with, or maybe because of, the reboot movies), while TNG has a definite “leftwing nerd” scent to it.
Really? I thought the fundamental dichotomy in pop music was Beatles vs. Rolling Stones.
I thought it was Elvis vs. Beatles. At least we can say that Rolling Stones vs. Beach Boys is straight out. Really James Brown deserves to be in the conversation, too.
The correct answer is Beach Boys, btw.
Now I’m wondering who actually makes it onto the short-list for the Best Performer trophy in the (pop music, English-language, 20th century) category.
I’m rejecting any such list that doesn’t have the Beatles. The Stones, the Beach Boys and Elvis are at least credible contenders.
linguistic prescriptivism vs descriptivism
Often though, people claim to be descriptivist but become prescriptivist when it involves their pet issue, and those issues can play out along usual partisan lines (case in point: pronoun arguments). But I guess there are a lot of issues like the Oxford comma that don’t skew political.
Conlang’s First Law: everyone is prescriptivist about what he knows best.
Pronoun arguments are not about prescriptivism vs descriptivism (as the terms are understood in linguistics—of course, they may have developed a different colloquial meaning among Internet arguers).
The argument for using the right pronouns for somebody is that it emotionally distresses them if you use the wrong ones. That is harm. It is sensible to change usage to avoid causing harm to others, whether you are prescriptivist or not.
Prescriptivism is the idea that there is an objective “proper” English, that doing something like using singular “they” is wrong because it’s just not what “they” means in proper English. It is inherently connected to this unsophisticated conception of what a language is. It is an inherently unsophisticated perspective.
You can still argue as a descriptivist that people ought to change their usage. You just have to provide reasons, rather than asserting your authority as the arbiter of what is proper English and what is not.
Mike vs. Joel
I was wondering about the health risks associated with Marijuana and Schizophrenia. I have used Marijuana on occasion and found it deeply enjoyable , far more so than alcohol. However I am very concerned about the increased risk of Schizophrenia , I was wondering what the risk levels would be like for someone with no family history of schizophrenia, and whether i should stop using completely and switch to liquor as my occasional vice of choice.
Marijuana would have to be pretty dreadful for you to make alcohol a superior vice. You should only consider alcohol if you have a track record as someone who can reliably stick to 3 or however many drinks, and if your family doesn’t have a history of people who can’t reliably do that.
I gather the highest risk is for adolescents and young adults with family history of schizophrenia who are heavy users. I don’t know how well the risk has been quantified, having only looked into it a bit, but if you are mid-late-20s or older, without family history, no prior mental illness, and are a moderate user, I would read your risk as very low. While the risks of regular alcohol use are significant.
Hmm whats the risk profile difference between mid 20s and college age.
Regarding the “was the Soviet Union an authentically communist government” question, I became convinced by the discussion in the initial thread that it would end up devolving into a definitional impasse – one of those “this is that/no it isn’t” type of debates that become semantic and thus have no satisfactory conclusion. That said, if other people want to take the question and run with it, I’d be very interested to read.
It was a one-party republic ruled in the name of Marxism, so its failings reflect on Marxism. We might as well taboo “Communist” as anything other than a Party name.
The Soviet Union never claimed to be Communist; by their own definition they were a Marxist-Leninist Socialist state. According to the officially sanctioned dialectical materialist theory of history all societies must pass through ordered phases of feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. It is in this last stage that the great abundance created by “scientific Socialism” was supposed to allow the flourishing of a new kind of society where the state would wither away, and people could live in a state of unprecedented freedom and equality.
When you ask: “was the Soviet Union an authentically Communist government”, do you mean was it Marxist-Leninist in character, or do you mean was it Communist in the end of history sense of that word? It was certainly the former, and certainly not the latter; and few who understood the question would claim otherwise. Based on the available historical record, there can be no question that Soviet leaders (with the likely exception of Stalin) were genuine in their convection that the things they did were necessary to bring about fulfillment of Marx’s envisioned utopia; and there can be no question that they failed utterly in that task.
It remains an open question whether such a utopia can ever be achieved through other means, and I think that it is possible that it can. But if it is ever to happen it is much more likely to come about as a result of the technological innovations of capitalism (or more precisely the combination of capitalism and Socialism common in the most advanced industrial states), and not through the schemes of any would be revolutionary.
It is a bitter pill for the Che Guevara T-shirt crowd to swallow, but one can not wish a better world into existence overnight. The hierarchies of our society are a technical necessity of our current level of development, the fact that Soviet Union was forced to reinvent them in a different form is proof enough of that. To level them will require a change in the nature of our economy that must be not merely political but technological. It must change the very way we produce and provide the goods and services that support our quality of life.
Until then utopia must wait.
If you signed up to play diplomacy with other SSC readers, you should’ve now got a message from me with the team assignments.
Can you please send team members each others’ emails so we can coordinate without having to find each other in a thread?
A while ago, I read an essay which made an interesting argument for why the ‘technological unemployment’ claim is false, at least today. It contrasted the lives of hypothetical two couples: one living in India and the other in the US. The Indian couple would pay to be driven to their respective workplaces while a babysitter looked after their child at home; in the evening they’d buy freshly cooked street food and perhaps a couple of individual cigarettes. The American couple would travel by self-driving car to their workplaces, and from time to time during the workday, one of them would check on a monitor that their baby was safe in the hands of their robotic babysitter. In the evening they’d eat a meal prepared for them by their automated cooking machine.
The essay then pointed out that the former of these stories might seem relatable to someone living and working in India, while the latter story is clearly science fiction. In fact, for people living in the US, all these jobs that it’s possible to pay someone to do in India simply don’t get done. This couple would not be able to both go to work while having their baby looked after, by either a robot or a human. One of them would have to give up work, or work part-time, or get help from their family, or use some other non-market solution. Therefore, there clearly is not a labour surplus in the US. There’s a labour shortage – the exact opposite – as is plainly obvious by how many jobs there are that we’d like to have done but don’t have enough people to fill.
I’ve tried several times to find this essay, and in spite of remembering a fair amount of quite specific details from it, I can’t for the life of me find the right combination of terms to Google. Does anyone have a link? I don’t think I just imagined this…
You’re thinking of “Robots didn’t take our jobs” by Chris Stucchio; he posts here sometimes.
Thanks!
Technological unemployment does not have anything to do with a lack of useful things that humans would like to have (and if that were the problem, we would be jumping for joy because it would mean we are generating useful wealth faster than humans can consume it and superabundance has been achieved).
Rather, the threat of technological unemployment stems from the fact (in my opinion) that Say’s Law is false and that humankind’s ability to produce useful wealth routinely outstrips the market for that wealth, leaving much of that useful wealth unprofitable to produce despite the fact that it is very much wanted.
In other words, there is a given real aggregate demand for commodities on the world market at any given time, and if that given real aggregate demand can be satisfied by more robots and fewer workers, then many workers will find themselves unemployed.
Now, what determines this real aggregate demand for commodities on the world market at any given time? It is determined by the amount of gold and credit money on the world market. Those two types of money are “non-neutral” in the sense that an increase in their quantity leaves prices unchanged but increases real purchasing power and aggregate demand on the world market for commodities. An increase in the world gold stockpile decreases interest rates and enables more credit creation, while an increase in credit money increases interest rates and discourages gold production by increases the golden-price-level of commodities and making gold mining less profitable.
Token money, whether in paper form or in an electronic form redeemable upon demand at a central bank at par for its paper form, is neutral and obeys the Quantity Theory of Money. So, increasing the amount of token “fiat” money will not fix the problem of inadequate real monetary demand. Prices will simply increase, and even more money will be needed to buy things at prevailing prices, leaving just as many commodities still unsold or sold unprofitably.
An increase in credit money can address technological unemployment, but not forever; without an equal expansion of the underlying gold monetary base of the world economy, an increase in credit money will tend to increase interest rates, cut into the net profit of enterprise, and make the financial system more fragile and prone to crises.
Only an increase in world gold production can (temporarily) solve technological unemployment by sustainably creating greater purchasing power and lowering interest rates, thus increasing the net profit of enterprise and making more production and more employment of workers profitable. See the Critique of Crisis Theory blog for more details.
Trying to comment for the last time (sorry if all of these are actually registering!)
I am currently a senior in an American high school. I will be spending the next four years in college in China. If anyone here has lived there, do you have any advice for me?
My primary concerns are:
* I am moderately concerned about privacy/surveillance. The consensus I’ve heard is “Don’t do anything bad and you don’t have anything to worry about.” This is troubling but workable.
* I still cannot get a lock on whether the Chinese government is socialist, state capitalist, socialist with Chinese characteristics, capitalist but moving towards socialism, etc etc. Everyone I ask has a different view. I have no idea what to think of the Chinese government. Any sources that are less biased than state media or American media are welcome.
* I am transgender, and concerned about Chinese perceptions (or lack of knowledge) about trans issues. Some people I have talked to said there is more ignorance than malice.
I haven’t lived in China myself and for this purpose second-hand information probably won’t be very useful. But I’m very confused about why you’re going to Duke Kunshan.
Duke is a good university but I don’t know to what extent the name is going to help when it comes to a satellite school like this. If you could get into Duke proper that may have been the smarter choice. It looks a lot better for a Chinese student to go to Duke than for an American to go to Wuhan.
At my graduate school we get a lot of people from the elite Chinese “C9” universities, mostly Peking University and Tsinghua. But they’re all Chinese; it would look suspicious that an American would choose to study there unless there was a specific lab or program that only exists there.
Anyway on a more substantial note, a lot of your questions are things that Duke is best equipped to answer. From the Wikipedia page on Duke Kunshan it looks like they worked out legal agreements with the Chinese government regarding academic freedom already so they probably have detailed information on what is or is not safe to say. You should call or email someone at Duke Kunshan or Duke itself with these questions.
I agree about the perception of “Why is an American going to Kunshan, couldn’t they get into The Real Duke?” but then again, Scott was driven to the extremity of attending medical school in The People’s Republic of Cork and that seems to have turned out okay job-wise 🙂
“What do you call the guy who graduated last in his class in medical school?”
“Doctor.”
That’s not to impugn Scott. He’s obviously extremely bright, and I’m sure that he’s a fine doctor. It’s just that having a medical degree, any medical degree, means a lot just by itself.
Even Caribbean MDs can come into pharmaceutical companies and make much more than anyone else without an MD, including scientists and statisticians with prestigious PhDs. They won’t get to the highest ranks but they have much better prospects for career advancement in industry.
The reasons I am going to Duke Kunshan and not Duke:
* I get a Duke degree and a Duke Kunshan degree
* Global experience etc etc
* I’ve lived abroad before and it was a great experience
* I get to be in the first undergraduate class and help shape the culture of the school going forward
* They gave me a LOT of money
* The school is taught in English and will have about 30% non-Chinese students so I won’t be entirely alone
* A ton of money is being put in to the school to make sure it is successful
* The professors I’ve met are top notch
* All the students who are going that I’ve met are.. interesting? main characters? They seem like people who will be important, and that I can learn a lot from being around.
I have asked people at Duke, but I keep getting conflicting answers or nonanswers, and I think there might have been a conflict of interest because they wanted me to go, so would not have told me any negative things.
Fair enough. If they’re giving you a full ride and you get a Duke diploma then it sounds like you’re set.
I wish you the best of luck, and hope that you can find a less cagey source of information!
I have a few questions as an interested student potentially applying next year:
Was the money they gave you need-based financial aid or merit scholarships?
It seems from your wording that you were accepted into Duke so I can assume you were a top notch applicant. Do you have any idea about the “profile” of admitted students?
Did you have any experience with the Chinese language before applying? I know classes are taught in English, but I would imagine the school would prefer students versed in Mandarin.
Alas, many of the most important questions about the school are really unanswerable at this time so we will just have to wait and see. The level of investment Duke is putting into it is impressive so I am cautiously optimistic, and the dual degrees provide a safeguard against a useless diploma regardless.
The money was primarily merit based (I assume based off of the amount of need-based aid other colleges offered), but I heard other students got need-based as well.
I was admitted into Duke Kunshan, and I did not apply to the normal Duke program.
The profile they said they were looking for was students who “had a desire to have an impact in meaningful ways”, who wanted to “leave a legacy/be a founder”, who were “eager to share their perspectives and embrace others'”, who were “unique” and “adventurous”, who had a “diversity of perspective”, and were “academically strong”. (According to my notes)
I took three years of Mandarin, but I know very little. Language classes are a requirement, but some students will definitely be starting from beginner level. At the admitted students weekend, some people spoke Mandarin, but the majority did not.
I’ve lived in China and had to use a VPN to use Google mail, but never had an issue wrt the things I did online. I would second “don’t do anything bad,” adding that the only “bad” thing is probably criticizing the government; even then, if you’re criticizing the country in your personal emails back home, nobody’s going to care, I think. If you’re constantly blogging about the evils of Chinese communism, that might matter. College students are more likely than the general population to care about and know how to circumvent the great firewall.
Similarly, I wouldn’t worry too much about what the government actually is. Most Chinese people I talked to felt the same way as a lot of Americans — they don’t like what their government does, but what can they do? Their biggest complaint was about the environmental damage. Just don’t go harping on about Tienanmen Square or Tibet (you can probably talk about these things, but nobody’s going to like “Your country is evil” kind of criticism).
I didn’t discuss transgender issues much, but I recall the few times it did come up the reaction was mostly akin to how Americans felt/feel about sideshow freaks (insert bearded lady joke) — that they’re not evil or deserving bad treatment, but definitely weird and outside the norm.
Caveat: this was all a few years ago; things may have changed. And also, China’s a big place, my limited experience, etc. etc…
On the subject of what the Chinese economic system is, you might want to read Ronald Coase’s final book (coauthored by Ning Wang), How China Became Capitalist.
As best I can tell, China, at least parts such as Shanghai, is not much less capitalist than the U.S. or Europe. The current government doesn’t understand capitalism very well and has an unrealistic belief that it can manipulate economic development in useful ways–but that’s true of the U.S. and Europe as well.
Trying one more time because it doesn’t look like my comment went through?
I am currently a senior in an American high school. I will be spending the next four years in college in China. If anyone here has lived there, do you have any advice for me?
My primary concerns are:
* I am moderately concerned about privacy/surveillance. The consensus I’ve heard is “Don’t do anything bad and you don’t have anything to worry about.” This is troubling but workable.
* I still cannot get a lock on whether the Chinese government is socialist, state capitalist, socialist with Chinese characteristics, capitalist but moving towards socialism, etc etc. Everyone I ask has a different view. I have no idea what to think of the Chinese government. Any sources that are less biased than state media or American media are welcome.
* I am transgender, and concerned about Chinese perceptions (or lack of knowledge) about trans issues. Some people I have talked to said there is more ignorance than malice.
The 2018 US midterm elections are getting going For the 2016 election I did a bunch of research on how an individual citizen with disposable resources can most effectively contribute to a particular candidate being elected. (Short version: this book has all the answers.) But knowing “how” is useless without knowing “what”: what should be the electoral goal for the 2018 midterms?
Of course the answer will vary based on one’s values etc., so let me ask the folks coming from roughly where I’m coming from. Has anyone who is roughly a “something sort of like left-libertarian” (referencing this post) thought about the best outcome for the elections?
To define the space a bit, some achievable outcomes, not mutually exclusive, are as follows:
– Democrats take the House vs. Republicans keep the House
– Democrats take the Senate vs. Republicans keep the Senate
– Farther-left-than-average democrats take the House
Assessing the odds of these outcomes is a separate conversation: I’m first just asking how much we should value each of these.
I’m not much like a left-libertarian. My feeling is that we are better off if the Republicans control one house and the Democrats the other, since I expect that government is more likely to do bad things than good things.
Targeting gridlock makes sense given that view.
This is a bit off the main topic, but what do you think about the concern that, over time, a dysfunctional, gridlocked government causes deeper rifts in society, and that loss of faith in government leads to some bad mix of cronyism and anarchy? For example, people I meet from Italy sometimes bemoan that their country has fallen into such a suboptimal, distrustful equilibrium. Is there something to be said for a smoothly functioning, centrist government?
I used to favor gridlock for much the same reason, but I’m increasingly concerned about gridlock leading to a “controlled flight into terrain” scenario where the status quo on entitlements and health care policy keeps getting maintained despite being unsustainable in the long term.
The other likely outcome (which I think we can see now in US politics) is that since the business of governing needs to get done, and Congress is gridlocked and ineffectual, we end up putting more and more government decisionmaking power into the hands of either the executive branch, the bureaucracies (including the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon), or federal and state courts. One result of that is that we get less and less meaningful democracy–of all those people, only the president ever stands for election, at most twice, in a nationwide election where the a large chunk of the votes are already pre-ordained by state party balances.
This doesn’t look like it’s working out so well for individual liberty, to me.
I, like you, firmly believe the status quo on entitlements will be a flight into terrain.
But you can’t fix this just by giving the government to one party with a mandate “fix this.” Even if they fix it, and even if they fix it properly, the fix will be unpopular, and they will be voted out and replaced by the other party. And that party knows this and won’t bother in the first place.
You need buy in from both groups. This is unlikely, which is a problem, but it’s still more likely to generate a solution.
I’d be interested in collaborating with Freddie; I think I can even argue something very close to his actual claim. Is there a reliable way to get in touch with him? I doubt he’s still checking the original thread and he doesn’t seem to have posted on the followup thread.
It’s not really in the spirit of the thing, but he posted about something unrelated two comments above you. Maybe you could ask him there.
Hah! That’ll show me for not reading comment threads.
And now below he seems to not want to do the question any longer, so maybe you should respond to him below and tell Scott you want to take up the mantle.
So am I the only E. Nesbit fan here? (Seeing as how no one mentioned that the author of The Treasure Seekers was also a founder of the Fabian Society.)
No you’re not. Planning to give them to my future kids!
I grew up on the Psammead trilogy and the Book of Dragons. I recently re-read them, and they held up better than I’d expected.
I hope to get around to posting about classism in Harding’s Luck (wherein it is revealed that Nesbit, like a group who Must Not Be Named, wants to take us back to the Stuart era).
I grew up with the Arden books. I didn’t know they were that old. Looking forward to the time when I can read these kinds of books to my daughter. Unfortunately the window until they start to prefer reading on their own is pretty narrow.
Imagine an algorithm that can sort out whether a series of numbers were truly randomly generated (or quasirandomly really) by a computer or if they were chosen “at random” by a human. That is, given a certain string of numbers of X length, could an algorithm determine if they were being chosen through the quasirandom number generation of computers, or from a human picking them out of thin air? Would the number of digits in the numbers matter? Does such an algorithm exist? If not, how easy would it be to create?
I don’t really have any answers, but it might depend on how the human chose them. If you tell a human “give me a random string of digits, two a second” then it is very obvious that they’re a human doing a crap job (if you haven’t already, try doing it, out loud, and see how hard it is). I would guess a good algorithm could just check for consecutive runs and repeated patterns.
If they were given longer to think about the numbers they were choosing it might be more interesting, though.
People are terrible at creating random number sequences, so just about any test for statistical randomness will distinguish such a sequence from a good pseudorandom (or true random) sequence.
Humans tend to be bad at generating randomness, so any randomness test would have a high hit rate.
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nick/aaronson-oracle/index.html
Here is an extremely basic one. A truly random sequence would have 50% predictability, but most humans fall towards the 70% area. This works better if you plan out 20 or so “numbers” (in this case f and d, which map to 0 and 1) instead of adjusting on the fly as the algorithm predicts you
Hi Freddie,
As I posted below, I would be interested in an adversarial collaboration with you, on the Soviet Union topic you proposed in the original thread. If you’re interested, email me at [my first initial][my last name]@[gmail]
As you can see below, deBoer has withdrawn. Just to clarify, were you planning to take his side or the opposite one? And what question were you proposing?
I see that, unfortunately.
I was planning on taking the position opposite Freddie. Something like:
1. The negative aspects of the Soviet Union are the expected outcome of attempting to implement communism or Marxism.
I don’t know if it has occurred to you, but something along those lines could actually be financially valuable.
Consider a lottery where individuals choose what number to bet on. If the number of bettors is close to the number of numbers available, many will be doubling up on the same number. The ability to select a number that nobody else will choose then substantially increases your expected return from the lottery, perhaps by enough to make the expected value of your ticket greater than its cost.
1,2,3,4,5,6 is famously chosen much more frequently than other values. I’m fairly sure that even if no-one else picks your combination you would still have a negative expected value, but I could be wrong.
Lotteries almost always retain negative expected values, regardless of jackpot sizes, because ticket sales escalate along with jackpots and thus the total expected value to a winning ticket maxes out. That said, you can tinker on the margins to improve your expected value slightly by certain strategies – for example, avoiding numbers under 12 and under 31, which many people play because birthdays are a common source for lucky numbers.
I believe the standard explanation is that many people choose dates of major events in their lives, which biases numbers towards those that could be months (<13) or days of the month (<32).
There’s an exercise statistics teachers sometimes do in intro courses. You ask the students to go home and flip a coin. If it comes up heads, they flip it 100 more times and record the results. If the first flip was tails, they instead imagine flipping a coin 100 more times and write down the imagined results. You can then look at the results tables and pick out which are real. As in, at a glance, no algorithm needed. “Random” sequences chosen naively by humans don’t even look like actual random sequences.
This is assuming a “typical” human is doing the generating. A sufficiently motivated human with time to prepare could always run a high-quality PRNG, memorize a long stretch of the output, and then recite it on demand.
Our version was just “go home and flip a coin 50 times, then come in and we’ll share the results.” Then when you got to class, the teacher would ask how many students had had 4 in a row of either heads or tails. The students who had actually flipped a coin all had 4 in a row at least once, and the ones who had just made up results did not.
There’s a test used in accounts auditing that looks at the first digit of a series of numbers, such as invoice $ amounts. The first digit of numbers generated by a human will tend to have a fairly uniform distribution across 1-10, whereas real life numbers are heavily weighted toward the first digit being 1, then 2, etc. (Benford’s Law)
Such tests exist. They use statistical methods like checking wether you can estimate a digit from the other digits of the random number. If a number is truely random, if you know all the digits but one, you can only guess the last digit. If you have a (naive) human who thinks things like “The same digit five times in a row is not random”, then in binary you can guess the digit that comes after “11111”. As the tests are some kind of hypothesis tests, they only calculate a chance that the input is non-random (a true random generator can come up with “11111111111111” after all), but when your input is long and your statistical tools are sophisticated, the result will be quite definitive.
Another topic is wether you can recognize a certain rng from the output. In principle, this is possible, especially if the rng is not very good. That’s why good random number generators are so important for cryptography.
Has there been any follow-up research on Rodney Brooks’s “Intelligence without Representation” robots? That is, has there been more research on robots that exhibit intelligent behavior without a hierarchical, centralized command structure? Or did this end up being a dead end or fizzled research project?
A similar question: what are the most advanced autonomous/semi-autonomous robots these days?
Looking at the adversarial collaboration projects, most of these look really juicy and I do badly want to read the results when and if completed. Congratulations on getting an interesting selection!
Several of these I have strong “Hell, no!” reactions towards, and I’m fascinated to know if there’s any way I’ll be shifted to at least “well I still think it’s crazy but everyone is entitled to go to heck in their own way”.
I’m on a personal crusade to increase my productivity and stop wasting time, and I’m soliciting outside advice.
Basically, I have an obscenely easy job (English teacher at a private high school in China) for which I am in the classroom for about ten hours a week. For an additional thirty hours, I am on campus but not teaching (office hours are Very Important in Chinese work culture, even if you’re not doing anything productive at all), and the rest of the time I am free.
I have thus been given a golden opportunity to read, write, learn, and generally improve myself. Mandarin is unlikely to ever be of professional benefit to me, because the amount of time I would need to sink into it to get to professional-use level is simply massive (at least the next half decade; I’m 23 and have other plans after the summer of 2019). Thus my goal is to get to HSK 3-4 or so, so that I can operate in daily life and not be That Foreigner (a goal towards which I advance daily).
I know what else I would like to work on during my free time: my reading knowledge of Greek and Latin, my German (shooting to start a master’s degree in the German-speaking world in a year and a half), a couple of research projects for which I have all the raw data I need to work with, and filling in the gaps in my literary education (there’s a lot I haven’t read). I really feel driven to work on this; e.g. I’ve stopped going to most expat meetups because they’re usually on weeknights and almost inevitably at bars (expats in China, particularly ESL teachers, tend to be young, single guys, and many of them drink more than they should), since I never get home before midnight and feel kinda zapped the next day (not a hangover–I don’t drink that much–but rather a lingering lack of energy stemming from too little sleep and a couple beers). To counter this, I am starting a Sunday-brunch meetup within my friend group so that I get at least some socialization in; I don’t have any real Chinese friends yet, and the language barrier is still an issue.
That aside, however, the issue is simple: I have a lot of time, but I get easily distracted and have insufficient discipline. I have toyed with the idea of swearing off video games for the next decade, though I have yet to take the plunge; more broadly I feel like Current Year is really frickin’ distracting. There are too many devices and too many Skinner boxes running on them, and the devices are necessary and indeed useful (most of my books, research data, music, etc. is either on my hard drive or the Internet). Still, I feel like I’d be knocking it out of the park if it were 1975, and I’m not.
It’s not really all that bad; I do pick up my Ovid and Herodotus a couple times a week each, I have been diligent with my Anki decks for Greek/Latin/Chinese vocabulary, and I’ve been reading a decent bit (most recently, at the suggestion of Scott’s best comment one Open Thread ago, Braudel’s Capitalism and Civilization, which everyone should go out and start reading right now). But I can’t help but feel like I could do so much better. For example, an undergraduate Greek professor of mine told a story about how one of his professors, when he was in college, had a competition with one of his fellow Classics undergrads to see who could memorize the Middle Liddell (a mid-sized dictionary of Greek) first. I’d like to do something like that, and I have more time right now than I’ll ever have again until I (if I) retire.
(Rundown of lifestyle: I get up early, usually around 6:30 and try to go to bed early [by 10 if I can], another preference which inhibits expat socialization. I basically don’t drink [the odd beer with hotpot aside] unless I’m at a bar–another reason I don’t go to expat meetups too much, as I’m never at a bar unless I’m with expats, but can easily have three or even four beers if I’m at one. I bike about two miles a day for exercise, and don’t get much caffeine because coffee in China is rare and pricey–and coffee shops are never open before ten. I take melatonin before bed but am on no other medications or drugs, though I used to be on Zoloft for anxiety, which has mostly gone away. I should probably eat more fruits and vegetables, but get a decent number of them; my staples are wheat noodles [with eggs or a bit of meat] and oats, and I try to avoid too much white rice because, being a very simple starch, it zaps my energy [rather like the jellybeans in which I indulge probably more than I should].)
I suspect SSC has a higher-than-average proportion of people who have memed themselves into ceasing to waste time, so I thought I might see if anybody has any advice. (Neither Adderall nor modafinil are options here). I feel like life’s too short to suffer my natural laziness to continue.
My advice is just to start slow and ramp up until you find the pace you can’t manage, then scale it back a bit. When you feel yourself getting too comfortable, try ramping up again. Repeat.
You said you pick up Ovid and Herodotus pretty regularly. Try going one more day a week, and if you can handle that one more day a week, and so on. If your anki decks are static, try adding cards regularly: you can start at just three new cards a day or something and ramp up from there. If you’re reading decently, try upping the amount of time you spend reading, or balancing one book with another so you never get tired of a particularly dry topic.
The most important thing for me personally is avoiding burnout, which is always what sinks a project like this. My best runs of spaced repetition decks are still only a few months long; I’ve never been able to keep it up consistently for even a year. My reading list does better because I can set aside a book or a series for a while if I like. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Yeah, I’m adding cards regularly to my Latin and Greek decks, though not always to my Chinese deck. I’ve decided to set things up so that I do Ovid and Herodotus on alternating days, which should avoid too much burnout. (Friday is the only day on which my work schedule isn’t leisurely–I have five classes, including three back-to-back after lunch–so I’m letting myself skip reading on Friday).
Still, I feel like I’d be knocking it out of the park if it were 1975, and I’m not.
Console yourself with this: were it 1975 it’s very unlikely you would be working as an ESL teacher in China and much more likely you’d be time-wasting keeping up with high fashion like this, cultivating your pornstache, and learning how to dance The Hustle 🙂
That just makes it worse! Not only is he not reading the classics, he missed disco! Poor bastard.
Unrelated question: would you recommend teaching English in China? I’ve been looking for a change of pace in my life and I’ve always thought China was really interesting.
I finished undergrad last May, and it hasn’t been a career for me, just a two-year hiatus before grad school.
It’s an easy job and one that pays well by local standards (so you can save a lot), but it’s rarely all that fulfilling. If you work at a private school (like I do) and even, to some extent, if you work at a training center, you’re being hired for the parents at least as much as for the students–sending your kid to learn English from a real live foreigner (perhaps at Future Harvard International Kindergarten) is a status symbol no less than vacationing in Thailand or driving a Lexus is. (Chinese parents can unfortunately be quite racist in this regard, so it helps to be white).
I would make sure you have something other than teaching English to work on–learning Mandarin, writing articles or a book. It gets quite lonely, even in a Tier 1 city (you’ll find that you have very little in common with most Chinese people, even when there’s not much of a language barrier), and ESL teacher communities tend to be full of miserable people who drink too much.
Ultimately, I’m not looking to do it as a career, even though I probably could–it’s just a break between undergrad and grad school, and the easy schedule gives me time to write a couple more papers and save some cash. ESL teaching in China can sink a résumé if it’s not done early in your career and you have nothing else to show for that time.
If you spend a lot of time on your computer (in your office, perchance?), and especially if you don’t turn it off for the night, you can try what I do to keep my self-discipline high: keep a resolution tracking spreadsheet. Let Office Calc/Excel run in the background, and maybe set up a reminder on your phone/whatever to check it once a day (until you get into a habit of checking it dozens of time a day when you are bored and want something to do). This is apparently backed by loads of science – keeping track of how you are doing helps in like 90% of cases – but I mostly do it because it has reliably worked for me.
First column is a calendar, by day. Other columns are resolutions, like “learn Russian” or “avoid sugar”.
Each row represents a day for each of the resolutions. If you carry out a given resolution that day, set that cell’s background to green. If you are precluded from accomplishing it by force majeure, or only have only partial success, or it doesn’t apply that day, mark it yellow (you set the standards for each). If you fail without an excuse, mark it red.
Mine looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/f4LDlvC.png (I keep additional notes in the cells as needed.)
Started one this morning. It hadn’t occurred to me, but now that you’ve suggested it I feel like an idiot for not thinking of it before. Thanks!
NP. I only found this method once I’ve paid for a self-improvement online course. Among the best money I’ve spent in my life, even if this was the only practical item I got from it.
I should look into Beeminder. It occurred to me a few years ago that one of the problems with language courses is that you pay upfront (or don’t pay at all), or have a subscription model, and so have no real incentive to keep going. I’d like to see a platform where you pay a deposit that you forfeit if you fail the course. I think Beeminder works sort of like that, doesn’t it?
Don’t know, never used it.
I use Beeminder. It’s similar to what you describe, but it’s designed for tracking/incentivizing continuous effort/progress as opposed to binary goals. So instead of, e.g., committing to passing a language course that ends 6 months from now and then giving up a large amount of money if you fail, you’d commit to something like “studying language Y for X hours every week”, and then each time your hours/week dipped below the goal value you’d be penalized a small amount.
Oh, and do mind what Nick said about not overdoing it. Start small, move up to a little below your limit. Said limit will increase over time as you get used to stuff, but if you load up too much up front, you may get discouraged after you repeatedly fail to accomplish overly ambitious goals right from the start.
Not useful to your more general waste-less-time question, but I was pointed to the website LingQ by fellow commenter Onyomi a couple of years ago (I think; I’m terrible at remembering time), and can recommend it as useful for picking up a language if you have access to the internet and can use headphones at your workplace. Its philosophy is based on exposing yourself to lots of content, both listening and reading (they don’t put any content on the site unless it has matching text and audio), with in-built auto-translate for any words or phrases you don’t know, which is just at a level high enough to be challenging but not bewildering, and not worrying too much about consciously learning vocab or grammar, since you’ll pick them up by being exposed to the words and structures over and over again. I credit them with such skills and Dutch and in Finnish as I have (I mean, I’m not great at either, but I’m pretty sure I’d be a lot worse otherwise). It’s a subscription service, but it sounds like you may have enough spare time to get your money’s worth. At any rate, it’s not effortless, but it’s a lot less effortful than Anki. I literally can’t remember the last time I got my review stack down to zero.
They have Mandarin, German and Latin, but, sadly, not Classical Greek.
Since you mention having at least some gaming background: I signed up for Habitica (formerly known as HabitRPG), and the “gamification for good” aspect has worked considerably faster than anything else so far for incentivizing me to keep my habits consistent. For instance, my party is doing a boss quest right now, which gives a weakly-bound social incentive to keep up; if I miss checking off daily tasks, everyone takes some damage. Pairing it with Forest as a “total focus time” tracker has helped even more, though I’m still a long way away from where I want to be.
I did also do a bunch of introspection to get rid of mental blocks that were in the way of me feeling motivated, which doesn’t generalize well. I do think both were necessary. But “I’m too conditioned to my phone” is something where twisting the technology around on itself can actually help get you out of it (or at least help you get more out of it).
Remember that leisure’s important too, of course. Life’s too short for low-quality life, but feeling obligated all the time isn’t necessarily high-quality either.
I have a couple psychology questions which I hope someone can answer:
First, what’s the current consensus (if any) among psychologists on repressed memories? (I have the vague sense that this was a big thing in Freudian analysis, but maybe isn’t so widely accepted now.) Are there people who repress memories of traumatic events for many years, and maybe remember them because of some trigger?
Second, what’s the current consensus (if any) among psychologists about recovering those memories in therapy? I know there were some awful cases where “recovered” memories from children led to these crazy witch-hunt-like prosecutions for competely implausible crimes. But are there places where this sort of this seems to work–that is, yielding verifiable results, or helping people who survived some awful thing in their past become more functional?
I don’t have my fingers on the pulse of consensus in psychology but I can say a couple of things as a therapist who works with people with trauma histories:
1. I think it’s fairly uncontroversial that people can and do repress (or otherwise not remember for a time, without getting into “repression” as a verifiable thing) traumatic experiences and that memories can re-surface in other times and contexts. I don’t know how often it happens, but I think it’s generally acknowledged that it happens. There’s been a little research about the variable accuracy of those memories when they surface — ie, they’re not always reliable.
2. There’s pretty good evidence that memory recovery is not necessary for trauma recovery. It’s possible to achieve relief from trauma symptoms by addressing the current presenting symptoms and what knowledge is consciously available to the person. Unearthing “the truth” is not necessary to treatment. That stance is controversial in the sense that some people will disagree with it, but there’s a fair amount of evidence that people who survived some awful thing, whether they remember the details of it or not, can become more functional without having to excavate all the details of the awful thing.
@cuke
Is that repressing or forgetting?
And if it is the latter, is it memory recovery or memory construction, where a narrative is created that matches the remaining memory & emotions, without necessarily being true?
Forgetting seems like a more usefully straightforward word here since repression implies unconscious dynamics that are not verifiable.
I imagine remembering always entails construction. My sense is most of our experience, even what’s happening right now, is mediated through our ongoing narrative.
Not a psychologist, but have done professional collaborations (publications) with them. I don’t think “repressed memories” are well-regarded. It’s a bit older now, but check out Elizabeth Loftus’s book The Myth of Repressed Memory.
The discussion of incels and their grievances in the last OT got a bit heated. Would it make sense to consider this issue a part of “culture war” and as such agree to keep it out of the non-culture-war threads?
It’s clearly culture war, but I expect it will die down when something replaces Minnassian (or that facebook page proves to be a fraud, which will start a round of something different)
It’s pretty close to being a central example of a culture war topic. It combines mass murder, feminism, dating, race and a bunch of other stuff that would each on its own be prime culture war fodder.
It’s also one of those topics that makes people’s brains go completely haywire because they see everything through the lens of policy. If government intervention is the default solution to any problem, then framing inceldom as a problem raises horrifying policy implications. One would have hoped that people would reevaluate that assumption in the face of problems clearly unsuited to policy solutions but that’s not really how people think.
Finally it’s significant for SSC in particular, since a lot of the undersexed guys here already had reason to worry about ideological purges in tech even before people started publicly calling for the mass firing of male virgins.
This. The topic seems to make up about two-thirds of the last open thread. I think that qualifies it for most virulent culture war subject yet on SSC, comfortably defeating Falling-down Rockboy, gun control, education, and a litany of other topics—although we’ll see if it has any staying power.
“Falling-down Rockboy” conjures the mental image of Ben Grimm falling over furniture like Dick van Dyke. So now I imagine that’s what the said professor looks like entering class.
I was about to say, I if one more big discussion in a row happens about this it’s going to end up going the way of the Lobster King of Toronto.
I have no idea what Falling-down Rockboy is, and googling isn’t helping. Can anyone clue me in?
Jordan Peter son, requiring you to know the etymologies of the first two words.
Thanks. Not something I would’ve ever figured out on my own, I think.
As the OP of the last one, I think that’s a good rule. (And to be fair, the topic showed up in 100.25 and 100.75, but not 100.5, so people may be following it already). It’s also probably played out, unless someone has something new to say.
I would think so. Incels are basically a side-step away from “SJW,” which are definitely culture war material.
Talking about “incels” and any community of such probably should be considered culture war. But that should not preclude talking about guys who have serious chronic trouble with the ladies, which is both the same thing and not the same thing as “incels”.
I wanted to give a signal boost to a subreddit I stumbled on the other day, /r/Erisology.
Eris is apparently the Greek goddess of strife and discord, and the idea of Erisology is to study specifically dysfunction that arises as a result of non-constructive disagreement, especially where two parties come away from a conversation without at least understanding the other’s point of view (let alone having progressed human knowledge).
Given the theme on SSC often centres around civil, rational discussion between people with very different views, I feel like this might be of interest to many people on the site. It was mentioned briefly in a OT mid last year, and has been recently mentioned a bit on the SSC sub, but there’s been some further articles posted and I thought I’d raise it here in case people had missed it. The main guy running it seems very receptive to constructive comments and thoughts on the topic!
For me the concept is great because it might help formalize and zero in on some of the warning signs that a conversation is going off the rails, as well as clarify key principles to keep it on track! I think most people have an intuitive sense of those things, but having simple clarity is really important in the middle of arguing some complex or emotive topic, because, well, the brain can only think of some much stuff at once.
I’m pretty keen to see people using this term as well. I think that having a term for an area is a pre-requisite for allowing people in the rationalsphere to develop their skills in this to the level I’d like to see us reach.
>Eris is apparently the Greek goddess of strife and discord,
Probably most famous for her role in starting the Trojan War.
I’ve heard of this subreddit before (maybe on here?) but haven’t checked it out yet, so thanks for the link!
> Probably most famous for
SSC readers might also have met Eris in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/
There’s also Wilson and Shea’s Illuminatus!, but I think they cutesified her.
Discordianism — tongue-in-cheek worship of Eris as a primary goddess — predates Illuminatus! by a few years, although that’s probably the book that popularized it.
The foundational text, such as it is, is the wonderfully named Principia Discordia: Or, How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her (Hill and Thornley, 1963). It’s been in print since the Seventies, in various editions.
Speaking of cutesfying her, when I ran a Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in the first generation of Greek heroes, I had Eris show up at Harmonia’s wedding to Cadmus looking like Discord from MLP, just with a feminine voice.
Another article referencing her and discordianism which I like is the Archdruid Report’s essay on Discordianism applied to international affairs, and on chaos, discord, and confusion.
These are SSC-length posts, and more digressive–but well worth reading. Sample quotes:
(originally posted in the classified thread, reposted here cause it fits better here)
How much of willpower/motivation is genetic, how much is environmental, and how much is within the persons own control?
I ask this because i kinda want to have an EA focused career, or a career in general, but i just hugely struggle with just applying for a job or doing proper planning most of the time. I do suffer from depression (take 60 mg fluoxetine which works generally really well) and i am high functioning autistic, but i dunno.
I have several times gotten into really bad anxiety/panic attacks over this, twice this week (my chest still hurts from that one, tho i feel better now). It mostly feels like i get things done when it’s very Gamified, or i have my dad or county helper help me.
Im fine having a normal, not very high impact life, but i feel very frustrated/stressed about this because one one hand, i know im smart. I like listening to high level podcasts, i like to be intellectual and that, and other people think im smart. I used to think i were just diligent in reading books or something, but im pretty sure im just smart.
But its really stressing to both feel smart, and feel. like i really struggle to do anything, that when i accomplish things it’s mostly luck (something-in-my-brain-worked-properly-luck). I don’t know. I don’t know if there really is anything that properly motivates me and makes me organized beyond “feel smart and understand this, but can’t actually apply this”, food/hot showers/good fiction, and games.
Im way more better off now then i was beffer my antidepressants, but this aspect doesn’t really feel like its going forward. I am learning things and growing, but im not sure i’ll ever manage to like. be truly intedepent.
(it might be the case that im in a mood right now)
Side note: Can stress cause naseua?
Ha! This sounds pretty similar to me, not that I have any advice for you. (I mean, I suppose I could talk randomly about my life and about panic attacks, I don’t know how useful you would find that.) I think medical help is the main thing and it looks like you’ve done that. (Though I found psychotherapy to be more helpful than antidepressants.) Regarding willpower, I like Nate Soares’ expression that “A problem isn’t solved until it’s solved automatically, without need for attention or willpower”: http://mindingourway.com/productivity-through-self-loyalty/
Anyway, good luck.
I feel that early differences and their usefulness in predicting success far later in life suggests its partly genetic:
[Stanford Mashmallow Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment)
Willpower and determination are generally shown to be better predictors of success that smarts once you pass into the above average intelligence area. Basically, genius without work means little.
Keep in mind a couple of things. Even a strong genetic tendency leaves a lot of room for environment factors. Also, because our ancestors evolved being ‘eaten by lions’ and worrying about the neighbours getting stabby with their spears, I think there’s a lot of hidden stress-resilence in most people, including yourself. You have to work with the tools you have of course.
It sounds like you’ve got a strength you can use to adapt challenges to suit your own style. Maybe gamifying your path to success could help?
That could also be interpreted environmentally, though. If the adults in a child’s life aren’t trustworthy, he’ll be less likely to trust the researcher’s assurance that he’ll get a second marshmallow, and more likely to fear that he might even lose the first if he doesn’t eat it right away.
seems like a reasonable point
This has been studied experimentally, and the effect size was huge:
Im gonna chill for a while, then think about this more. thanks for the comment
Have you been tested for ADHD? I only ask because I have struggled with it, and it led to anxiety and depression which were diagnosed long before the underlying issue was recognized. In general the main symptom was my inability to get anything done, especially things that were important to me. This led to a number of motivational problems (why start things you won’t finish?) and a lot of fear.
In my case getting my drugs right has done a lot for increasing my motivation. It’s still on the lower side, but I can feel it improving over time as I start to accomplish things.
I find it unlikely that it would be adhd: my best friend has adhd and we are very different, and i went to a pretty great primary school for disabled kids. But ill check it out anyway. it was a good question to ask
This is especially relevant to David Friedman:
Grassland plants react unexpectedly to high levels of carbon dioxide
Note that C4 carbon fixation is more efficient at extracting C from CO2, is more water efficient & is more efficient at higher temperatures than C3 carbon fixation, but at the expense of taking extra energy. These plants grow mainly in hotter regions. C4 plants represent about 5% of Earth’s plant biomass, but they account for about 23% of terrestrial carbon fixation.
C4 plants include maize, sugar cane, millet, and sorghum. C3 plants include rice, wheat, barley, rye, oat and soybean. Researchers are working on creating a C4 variant of rice.
With the mass propogation of deep learning courses and worldwide experimentation, AlphaGo(with a surprisingly simple structure)AI labeling pictures with accurate commentary in it,who else has bumped down the general strong AI date from 2040 to…..2021 at the latest?
Call me when someone beats the Winograd Schema Challenge.
“Woah, we’re half way there”
https://www.ijcai.org/proceedings/2017/0326.pdf
50% is trivial, 90% passes the challenge, and 70% was reached about a year ago.
Interesting, that’s more progress than I thought had been made! But note that’s 70% on a subset of problems, and it seems very likely that 70%-90% will be harder than 50%-70%.
Most of the “AI” I see seems pretty close to fraudulent. It’s not intelligent in any meaningful sense, and while it may be successful in a statistical sense (gets e.g. 80% of cases not laughably incorrect) its blooper rate (not just errors, but laughable errors) is obvious and high. In general, the root cause of the problems could easily be interpreted as total lack of “common sense”.
I’m a software engineer, but not in the AI field. I’m also frequently on one or other long tail of statistical curves, so when a “fits the middle 80%” solution is applied to me, the results generally range from maddening to hilarious.
The problem seems to be that while it’s relatively easy to create an AI to solve a well constrained problem, including a general AI capable of training to solve many well constrained problems, that’s not what intelligent life forms are especially good at. General intelligence is hard. Many of the people writing about AI either have primarily a humanities background (= don’t understand that they are writing about), or have a financial interest in presenting a particular outcome (spokespeople and copywriters for companies producing AI products). Quite commonly they have both limitatios.
That said, many of my colleagues disagree with me – they have a lot more confidence in AI than I do. Also, I have an interest in AI being limited, given the uses to which I expect it to be put. (I expect it to be primarily deployed to channel wealth and power to those already having more of both.) So there’s presumably some element of wishful thinking in my evaluation of the evidence.
I’m not sure if the lack of common sense is as damming as you think. Think of Watson playing Jeapordy. One time one of the questions was about an American city but it answered Toronto. It still wiped the floor with the competition. An AI could get common sense answers right only 50% of the time but its collection of specialized knowledge could be good enough to make it very powerful.
Also, cognitively normal humans commit laughable errors all the time, so “must not commit laughable errors” seems like a bad criterion for intelligence.
“At the latest”? That seems nutso and an opportunity for someone to profit at your expense. Does “2021 at the latest” mean that you’d take a 100:1 bet against it? Like I put $100 on the line, you give me $10,000 on 1/1/2022 if there isn’t a machine that I can have a normal conversation with?
If 2021 is “at the latest,” when’s your 50:50 prediction for strong AI?
Why is it nutso? You have the *entirety* of the world engineering machine learning algorithms, experimenting, and entire nations competing with each other now. Look at how utterly absurd the progress in the last 4 years has been. And its not due to moores law.
I think its going to be here by 2021-2022, but under wraps by some scientists afraid to talk about their creation.
There’s what watson was 7 years ago, now boosted with this giant deep learning algorithms.
This sounds to me like you’re furiously backtracking on your claims.
Gotta taboo “strong AI.”
AlphaGo Zero was the only thing that actually spooked me. Up until then all the most advanced AIs were taking massive amounts of human-generated content and boiling it down; proving the power of thousands of years of humans thinking about things, not the power of your system. AlphaGo Zero exceeded those thousands of years of thinking in like a week on its own from scratch.
So I think “AI strong enough to be a real threat if someone gave it a robot army” exists currently. “AI that could replace entire jobs” is on the horizon.
“AI I can have a genuine interpersonal relationship with” I don’t think will exist for centuries. “AI strong enough that it can in theory solve any solvable problem given sufficient computing resources and time” I imagine is at least >30 years off. Like, 99% it won’t happen in 10 years, 90% it won’t happen in 20, 80% that it won’t happen in 50, 60% that it won’t happen in 100.
Once we get to AI strong enough that it can solve the problem of taking over the world and getting rid of/enslaving the pesky humans on it, I don’t think I care very much how long it takes to get to those other problems.
But how different is war from the game of go? I’m not convinced that AlphaGo could defeat the US with an army of land and air stones. OTOH, it has convinced me that a computer that can win the game of war is foreseeable, and the computer could still be mindless rather than a tyrant angel.
the hardest part of winning a war isn’t strategy, it’s finding a big enough supply of angry young men willing to fight for you, then keeping them fed and armed.
Yes, and any computer wargame you’d train Son of AlphaGo could simulate that. Ofc the map-territory distinction will bite him hard if young men refuse to obey a computer, but the parent comment did specify a robot army.
Didn’t the Cold War already give us “computers… that [could] win the game of war”? You had game theory, which said that mutually assured destruction (MAD) was the only stable equilibrium. You had operations research to tell you how to make tactical decisions and allocate resources. And control theory to guide the missiles. And humans with terrible haircuts and pocket protectors sitting around in faux-wood-paneled rooms to carry out the orders.
War is very different from the game of go. It is much, much, much less constrained with many more pieces and each piece having many, many, many more things it can do. The AlphaGo approach is obviously incapable of handling an unconstrained real-world war: how would you write a Monte Carlo search tree for simultaneous movements of hundreds of real-world divisions that can go anywhere?
I feel like people continue to think that AlphaGo is like, “Oh, we threw some machine learning at Go and it won.” The machine learning part of AlphaGo is a supplemental part of it: the main algorithm is a Monte Carlo search tree.
As pontifex points out, as soon as a computer could plausibly issue a go command for pre-existing nuclear strategies, it could “win” a war.
Consciousness is still a mystery, so I’m 100% agnostic on “strong AI” at any time. Maybe a General Ultron who can beat humans at war even though it’s orders of magnitude more complex than go, but no way by 12/31/21.
Strong AI will come when when our machine learning models have the capacity to accurately model the world. If you look at efforts to model a somewhat open environment, including the relationship of the objects and agents within that environment, you’ll see that currently only toy problems can be tackled.
The real world is just orders of magnitude more complex than any of the narrow domains that gave us some of the astonishing successes in recent years. If Deepmind creates something like AlphaZero for StarCraft and other computer games, i.e. an architecture that can be trained on any computer game to a superhuman level, maybe then we should start getting scared.
Nvidia aims to accelerate GPUs by a factor of a 1000 over the next five years. It is hard to foresee what that kind of hardware will make possible, but my guess is that it will allow us video synthesis at a decent level. If you can synthesise realistic videos, you should have the ability to think ahead in real world scenarios. That could get us to the intelligence of some small animals.
When I look at current research AGI doesn’t seem imminent. But in another 5-10 years all bets are off.
Hello Scott! PJIQ and I are working on UBI. (Also, I offered to collaborate with Freddie but he hasn’t responded.)
Scott do you have any way of making your website HTTPS by default, including RSS links?
Bothers me slightly whenever I inadvertently click through to discussions containing many keywords no doubt of interest to my employer….
I think someone might have tried to fix this before and it broke something.
Looks like the ‘HTTS everywhere’ chrome extension can help me, I’ll just try leaving it on.
Thank you for the obvious-in-hindsight recommendation! (Getting the plain HTTP version on occasion messes up all my cookies and reading order.)
Can you comment on what “many keywords no doubt of interest to my employer” means?
This looks like a sentence you would read in a dystopian novel — but I don’t live in the US (I’m from France), maybe I’m not aware of certain practices…
Robin Hanson mentions in his slate interview:
“it should look roughly like a random walk, that’s how information processes change things”
Where can I read more about this?
This is the best criticism of Jordan Peterson I’ve seen. I highly recommend it.
I knew this was gonna be Contra before I even clicked lol.
“…who got famous for sounding the alarm about how protecting transgender people under the Canadian human rights law shall surely lead to Stalinism”.
Well, that’s a promising start.
ETA: “So Jordan Peterson’s succeeded largely by drawing in audiences with fairly popular opinions: political correctness often feels stifling, student activists are sometimes inarticulate and overreactive, angry transsexuals are telling me what words to use and I don’t like it.”
That’s not how Peterson became super-famous. That’s a standard right-wing message. There’s no
shortage of people expressing it. This describes, I don’t know… Ben Shapiro?
If you look at what people say they liked particularly in Peterson’s videos, it’s very very rarely
the poltiical correctness and trans stuff. It’s a very small part of his book etc. It’s deeply uncharitable
to present this as the main reason for his success.
Then ContraPoints goes on to talk definitions over “Postmodern neo-Marxism”. This section of the
video is basically a huge strawman. As an example, Marxism is a theory of a class struggle between the workers and the capitalists, and since “some professors believe in that, but zero corporate HR
departments do”, that proves Peterson’s deluded. But there’s no shortage of explications from
Peterson on what he means by “postmodern neo-Marxism”, and group identity politics certainly comes
under that, and he talks about that *all the time*, that and equality of outcome. It’s a little hard
to argue that corporate HR departments don’t care about group identity politics. Contrapoints claims to
have listened to many hours of Peterson’s lectures (more than me then), but in characterizing his
political views never mentions equality of outcome.
Next, ContraPoints attacks the lobster stuff in the Cathy Newman’s interview by saying that the argument that lobsters have hierarchies can be used to justify any hierarchy, like monarchy (or slavery, I guess). That’s.. surprisingly not a bad argument, and the first such in this video, I think. Peterson would probably reply that his whole point was not merely that “lobsters have hierarchies”, but specifically that their brains are attuned to social status via the same hormone that we use (serotonin), and therefore there must be a continuity of *social hierarchies* in lobster and human “societies”. That is, social status is a phenomenon with biological underpinnings, which I think you’ll find plenty of people objecting to, contrary to ContraPoints’ claim that “no person on the left thinks that” (which may be true w.r.t. hierarchies in general).
Next, Peterson’s use of “the West” is criticized as inaccurate, because it is “geographical chauvinism”, because Marxism is Western philosophy too. Finally,
“The very idea of people requesting individual pronouns to suit their individual needs is exactly the kind of thing a person who values individual liberty over collective dogma should be on board with.”
Note the dishonesty of the word “requesting” – of course “requesting” is not what Peterson (rightly or wrongly) railed against.
And it’s over.
So overall my impression from that video is similar to that from a few others by ContraPoints I watched. It starts with (A) objecting to unfair, misleading, uncharitable interpretations of the subject by some or many others on “her side”, and proceeds to (B) make some unfair, misleading, uncharitable interpretations of the subject of her own. Usually (A) is good, and not perfunctory – I think it’s done and presented honestly. Usually (B) is not nearly as bad as the worst examples (A) objects to, but still isn’t very good. Occasionally (B) is only very mildly – or not at all – misleading, and then I’d judge the video as good overall. This video on Peterson isn’t one of those times.
Next, ContraPoints attacks the lobster stuff in the Cathy Newman’s interview by saying that the argument that lobsters have hierarchies can be used to justify any hierarchy, like monarchy (or slavery, I guess). That’s.. surprisingly not a bad argument, and the first such in this video, I think.
I know nothing about lobsters (apart from how they’re caught and cooked) but my general opinion on this kind of example is that the people who used gay penguins raising chicks to argue for same-sex marriage and families (because look, it’s part of nature, this destroys the conservative argument about it being un-natural!) do not get to object to other people using examples from nature to bolster their arguments.
Aristophanes mocked “appeal to nature, but only to support things I already agree with.”
You should watch that part of the video over again. First she gives a guess as to what JP seams to imply when he says postmodern neo marxist then she breaks down the components of the term and shows how they don’t really fit together. Honestly the best line in the video is:
The point she is making is that JP has either a complete misunderstanding of the term or he is just trying to lump the left (Clintonite corporate shills and Sanders supporters who hate each other) into one convenient enemy by stapling together two words that pretty much mean the opposite of eachother. She does circle back and point out what JP apparently means by his frankenstein label.
But the thing is, identity politics is influenced by marxism to a high degree. All the queer theory, post-colonial theory etc. is based on post-structuralist thinkers like Foucault, Derrida etc. In their theory, they present the idea that in the second half of the 20th century the oppression of capitalism has moved away from the classical “worker poverty” and has become indirect through culture. And they take the more paranoid angle of marxism where the main fear is the capitalists controlling EVERYTHING through sinister means, and make it even weirder.
So I would say that Jordan Peterson is not wrong in calling the social activism based on post-structuralist theories “post-modern neo-marxist”. It would be nice though if he would use more accurate terminology like “marxist-influenced post-structuralist thinking”, and if he would make a clear argument why and how the social activism he hates so much is influenced by marxism, like I did in this post.
I am skeptical that the Marxists and the postmodern intersectionality theorists are really “at each others’ throats.” Some degree of outgroup homogeneity bias surely applies, but most of my professional contacts are in the academic humanities, and I don’t see it. Sure the (often white, male) Marxists would rather the postmodernists not get so distracted by race and gender, while the postmodernists don’t care so much about labor unions and critiquing capitalism as the Marxists, but at the end of the day, they all agree: capitalism, bad; identity politics for women and PoC, good. Peterson disagrees with both of these and rightly views them as not unrelated, for reasons Björn states above.
Put another way, many academics preferred Bernie to Hillary, but when Hillary got the nomination, they all bit their tongues and voted for her (unlike some white, working class Bernie bros), as did all the many academics who are not actually Marxists or intersectionality theorists, but whose views almost universally fall between “far left” and “center left.”
Contra’s characterization of cultural Marxism as a “Nazi conspiracy theory” is also completely inaccurate, even if nobody self-identifies as a “cultural Marxist” (as no one self-identifies as a “neoliberal”). The Nazis, I believe, were more worried about “cultural Bolshevism” in literal music and art.
We had a debate over “cultural Marxism” before, and I seem to recall agreeing to stop using the term, but no one denies that the Frankfurt School is a real and influential thing.
I wouldn’t compare classic communist marxism and post-structuralist influenced social activism to Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Bernie and Hillary both offered actual policies, and one can see that Bernie wanted European style social democracy, while Hillary wanted a continuation of what Obama did. And I would say that both of them associated with socialists/identity people because they belong to the respective wings of the Democrats, even if they are annoying.
In opposition to that, both the classical marxists and the post-structuralists offer only an nebulous fight against “the system”. That leads to the big difference between the marxists/communists and the social democrats, the social democrats want to give trade unions more power, higher minimum wage etc., while the marxists see this as an unholy alliance with capitalism. They just wanna smash capitalism.
The post-structuralist social activism works very similar. I remember that there was a meeting between Hillary Clinton and leading Black Lives Matter people during her presidential campaign. Hillary asked them what policies (like more body cams, better persecution of police violence) they wanted to implement. The Black Lives Matter people had only symbolic/pointless ideas like “apologize for white supremacy”.
Oh boy ever are they. Here is an amazing essay that Marxist Mark Fisher wrote about how damaging the Identity politics people are before he got overwhelmed by it and killed himself a year ago January. His short book Capitalist Realism should be required reading for anyone that wants to debate left politics. It’s the perfect blend of theory and pop culture.
If you don’t believe me I can point to numerous social media lynchings from the ID Pol left of anyone that would dare put class issues first.
Everyone thinks their ingroup is barely holding itself together while their outgroup is united in malefic purpose. Falls more or less directly out of outgroup homogeneity.
Rereading the 86 page Capitalist Realism I had forgotten how much he talks about Capitalism’s effect on mental health. I think Scott would find it interesting. I hope he notices this comment and reads it.
@Nornagest
No, see my other comment down thread. I have no trouble distinguishing the various factions on the right. There is no group I see as particularly unified except the ultra rich, who make sure that economic issues are the main focus of the GOP and an afterthought for Democrats. Most of them don’t much care about social issues because it isn’t an issue in their social circles.
From what I’ve experienced in leftist circles, purity tests, purging, accusing others of being Nazis/capitalists/brocialists etc. is just the norm regardless of actual ideological splits like IdPol activists and Marxists, although I only move in more low-brow leftist circles and not academic ones. I don’t know how much this is a sign of the times (everyone seems to agree we here in the U.S. at least are Really Divided) rather than a sign of leftism, but I think there’s a way in which the existence of such in-fighting doesn’t entirely negate JBP’s use of such a catch-all term for the types of people and/or thinking.
The rest this will be me trying to argue that there’s something perhaps worth thinking about on a meta level going on when people on the left use catch-all terms that put variously Ben Shapiro, Richard Spencer, and Thomas Sowell in the same category and people on the right using catch-all terms that put the Evergreen protesters, Noam Chomsky, and Michel Foucault in the same category. But first let me just say that a) I feel pretty damn young and stupid on SSC so my confidence that I’m seeing anything new is low and b) yes I’m aware of the Red Tribe/Blue Tribe model and no I’m not confident I am just doing a bad job of fitting the tribalism model to the way people use these terms. So epistemic status is that I feel out of my depth but I’m trying to swim anyway.
Okay so I think people don’t generally hold consistently and rigorously to ideologies. People are imperfect, biased, and irrational on the whole, so we love to pick and choose. Also, the aforementioned Red Tribe/Blue Tribe split, which seems relevant in the U.S. and Canada at least, if not the world over, groups a fairly wide range of ideologies together under the banner of political alliance, even if those ideologies are at odds in the purely philosophical realm. And of course as much as the left-wing identitarians and the Marxists dislike each other, they’ll still talk to each other and vote with each other against the conservatives and the right-wing identitarians.
So because of the political groupings (and because of this to some extent the academic groupings), people tend to put together a sort of mixed ideology or political identity that groups together useful but inconsistent positions like postmodern skepticism of overarching classical liberal or conservative claims about freedom or whatever with Marxist overarching claims about class struggle. Or people take Marxist language of class struggle and apply it to race, gender, sexuality, or what have you even though that’s not really a Marxist thing. Or people combine libertarian/natural rights justifications for limited government but make a traditionalist moral argument against abortion.
So maybe there is something to be said for libertarian nationalism or neo-Marxist postmodernism or whatever. Maybe those people really do exist in some capacity, because of the way that libertarianism and nationalism are more closely linked in our political situation and thus are influencing each other more. Perhaps the same is true for Marxism and postmodernism. Or maybe not, and Peterson is just name-calling across the Red/Blue tribe divide.
Agreeing with your post and qualifying my own above:
I can point to lots of things I don’t like about the Reagan presidency, or important differences between Hayek and Friedman, but I can still understand why leftists would lump me in as part of the same, big “neoliberal” Hayek-Friedman-Reagan-Thatcher movement they don’t like, because ultimately, I’m pro-Reagan-Thatcher-Hayek-Friedman relative to the alternatives, and strongly influenced by that big tent of thinkers and politicians which includes Ayn Rand and Pat Buchanan, even though the latter two and their supporters would likely claim they’re worlds apart.
See that is frustrating to me. I am most definitely on the far left, but I am more than happy to spend time reading different right perspectives, some of which I freely admit to agreeing with. I’d say I have more in common with the average reader of The American Conservative than the average Hillary Clinton voter. (Yes, I’m that anti war, I would have voted for Trump if it would have mattered in my state).
I actually find it rather disappointing that right leaning thinkers on this site aren’t willing to be as charitable with left ideas and subgroups. I support equal treatment of all minority groups (like I assume most of you do too) but I am no SJW. I think intersectionality is a neoliberal boondoggle that has done nothing but make class solidarity next to impossible.
@userfriendlyyy
You write that you “find it rather disappointing that right leaning thinkers on this site aren’t willing to be as charitable with left ideas and subgroups” as you consider yourself to be.
In my (unreliable) observation, engagement and empathy are fairly well distributed. There are a few people in all of the various ideological buckets who seem pretty good at reading others charitably and/or understanding them, but I don’t notice a particular concentration.*
It’s possible that you’re exceptionally charitable and openminded when compared to both lefty SSC readers and righty ones – I’d be interested in a more rigorous comparison.
* Scott’s done some extensive surveys of his readers, but I don’t know if the data would be relevant here.
@J Mann
Fair enough, I certainly don’t claim to speak for all people on the left. But I can assure you that I enjoy reading diverse opinions. I enjoy and agree with the anti elitist parts of Breitbart. I’m with Tucker Carlson, Cernovich, and The American Conservative when it comes to our never ending pointless regime change wars. I go a long way on free speech (not doxing though), and I’m against deplatforming because it is as effective as shooting yourself in the foot.
Where I disagree with the right is on economics. The current version of capitalism we are on is just awful in every way. Even the high priests of economics have pointed out that it relies on wildly inaccurate simplifying assumptions that don’t get relaxed, more dependant variables than equations that relate them, and jaw dropping oversights.
All of that is used to perpetuate a system which has made work more precarious and life harder for all but the very rich (and if you want to tell me about global poverty reduction read that last link first). If as a species we want to have any chance of surviving climate change we can’t be intentionally destroying human capital with an inefficient system that tells people they are worthless if they can’t find a job while at the same time ensuring that there is less jobs than people who want them. We can’t afford to tell people who come out of prison that they have paid their debt to society and then make it next to impossible for them to find productive work. Those are not just random flukes, those are defining features of capitalism. It does not make for a cohesive productive society when people are constantly worried about making ends meet.
Thanks – I know it makes me a pedantic scold, but there’s a difference between (1) you have an eclectic collection of views and agree with people on both sides the classic “red tribe”/”blue tribe” dichotomy on various issues and (2) you’re unusually good at understanding people who disagree with you. (Of course, both can be true!)
On your substantive point, I disagree with your take on economics as I understand it, and imagine we can have some fun discussions. To start with, I don’t agree that capitalism is incompatible with either a job guarantee program or with programs to increase post-prison employment. That doesn’t mean that any particular suggestion along those lines is a good idea, of course.
@J Mann
IMO a Job Guarantee is an absolute necessity. The problem is that full employment is incompatible with capitalism. We had two decades after the war where the industrialized world targeted full employment to make socialism less appealing. Once socialism had been sufficiently associated with authoritarianism and not a threat to replace capitalism they engineered stagflation using oil shortages in the mid east leaving Reagan and Thatcher to end full employment targeting. The people with the money and the power care much more about the power than the money. Any capitalist system with full employment takes power away from bosses because they can’t fire people. It’s all spelled out rather simply here. If any of that were false we would have full employment because it is more profitable for everyone and the only people in the way are the people in power.
@userfriendly
Why?
Who on earth is they?
Um, why not?
@userfriendlyyy
Do you agree with me that some people are not very good employees? Like quadriplegics, people with severe anti-social behavioral problems, etc.
Do you agree with me that employing these people can result in negative productivity?
Thanks, @userfriendlyyy – here’s my take, FWIW.
That’s a pretty remarkable claim. I don’t believe anyone engineered stagflation or oil shortages in order to bring Reagan and Thatcher to power. My model is that well-intentioned actions of previous governments led to consequences that the voters didn’t like, resulting in some retrenchment. It’s hard to believe that Jimmy Carter and the British Labor party pre-Thatcher were intentionally acting to bring about a conservative swing. Principally, I’d say (a) I’m not aware of any evidence for that, and (b) once “they” had control of the US Democratic party and British labor party, the scheme seems needlessly complex.
I understand full employment programs to be essentially a jobs guarantee – that the government would agree to provide a job of last resort to anyone who wanted it. Does it mean something different to you? Bosses could still fire people under that model.
Kalecki assumes that his full employment program would actually increase capitalist profits indefinitely, and therefore the only reason anyone could oppose a job guarantee is to maintain capitalist power. Is it also possible that some people disagree with Kalecki about the benefits and effects of a job guarantee program? Here’s the Cato Institute making the case that it would have harmful effects.
@cassander
Militant anti communists like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lewis F. Powell and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War#Events_leading_up_to_the_war
And no, I don’t buy the whitewashed version of kissinger in wikipedia.
Sorry, I meant it makes the consequences of getting fired much less severe. If you want your employees to have a stake in the overall welfare of the company I prefer the carrot (profit sharing) rather than the stick.
@ Aapje
Yes, which is why a JG is not intended to replace SSDI. Many other questions about a JG can be answered here.
@J Mann
Stagflation was caused by a huge jump in oil prices with the OPEC embargo, which the US gave it’s stamp of approval to.
The Yom Kippur war was the trigger but the oil embargo was no surprise.
Neoliberalism had largely taken over the mainstream economics departments by the time Carter was elected. He appointed Volcker to the FED and really started us down the deregulatory path.
(I don’t share the author’s sunny view of deregulation and markets)
Yes, that was hasty writing on my part. While all the industrialized countries did target full employment (until Neoliberalism invented the NAIRU out of nowhere and focused entirely on preventing inflation) they didn’t have an explicit JG program.
For a source on that, and an explicit rebuttal on the deficit scaremongering from that Cato link see this.
On some other points Cato makes:
Yes, that is part of the point, to ensure that if people are working they are paid a living wage. If a company can’t afford to pay a living wage than it doesn’t deserve to exist. They are well within their rights to increase prices to offer higher pay, which is why JG proposals note that upon implementation their would be a small (about 0.7%) one time bump in inflation. What they mean by not judging success by private sector measurements means that it shouldn’t be profitable. That is also how you address ‘crowding out’ making JG jobs ones that need getting done but that no one is paying for. See the FAQ I linked above. As far as disciplining employees goes, yes they can be suspended from the JG program. However, one of the real benefits of the JG is that it is designed to help people who have problems; it could direct people to rehab or counseling or address any other problems people have that are preventing them from working.
But back to my main point, things like the Powell Memo are are exactly what happens when you have an empowered working class under capitalism, and why I doubt any JG program could be sustained without relentless attacks from the rich and powerful.
I think every private business should be at least partially a co-op. If we believe in democracy I don’t see why that needs to end when we go to work. Give workers a say in the way their employer operates and a share of the profits and we would have a much fairer society. I am fine with some degree of inequality but when it gets this bad it is bad for everyone.
Er. Don’t co-ops already exist? And profit sharing, for that matter. They’re just not mandatory.
there is so much here I hardly know where to begin. No one would call Henry Kissinger or Zbig militant anti-communists. Both presided over a period of detente! And I’m not sure which assertion is more ridiculous, that Kissinger was whitewashed, or that he arranged for a decade long rise in commodity prices brought about largely by inflation!
As an employer I can tell you flat out that I do not give one shit about people suffering “consequences” after being fired, and neither does anyone else. If anything, the desire to avoid them suffering consequences leads to people avoiding firing low performers.
Carter de-regulated transportation. And the results were a staggering success.
. The Fed had nothing to do with it.
How comfortable a moral assertion to make, a pitty the tens of millions it leaves unemployed
@userfriendlyyy – thanks, this is a perspective I don’t normally get to read, so I appreciate it.
For what it’s worth, my take is that your beliefs are sufficiently out of the mainstream that I would argue you should reduce your confidence in them.
A lot of your beliefs in capitalist motivations and inner thought processes depends on your belief that left wing economics is so obviously correct that the only conceivable reason for opposing them is malice. I’d posit that maybe some people honestly disagree with the left wing economics you believe self evident. To be fair, I have evidence that you don’t, which is that I know that I personally disagree with those economic theories and I don’t believe myself to be motivated by the reasons you ascribe to capitalists, but only by actual intellectual disagreements on the underlying facts. I realize that I can’t convince you that I’m not a scheming capitalist lying about my intentions because I want to hold workers down, but I know I’m not.
So I’d say instead that when you’re arguing that Wikipedia is whitewashed, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but it does mean that a lot of people disagree with you, which I think should lower your confidence that you’re as self-obviously right as you appear to believe.
Thanks again!
“Next, ContraPoints attacks the lobster stuff in the Cathy Newman’s interview by saying that the argument that lobsters have hierarchies can be used to justify any hierarchy, like monarchy (or slavery, I guess).”
His argument that lobsters have hierarchies doesn’t justify the existence of hierarchies, it just points out that they exist everywhere and you have to learn to live with them. Which is exactly what he says to anybody who ask him about that point justifying hierarchies.
This part doesn’t follow.
Let’s say I find a study about lobsters committing genocide against each other. That would be evidence that genocide exists everywhere, but it would not mean that you have to learn to live with genocide. At most, it can tell you that your fight to eradicate genocide will be an uphill battle.
“Is” doesn’t imply “ought”.
No it wouldn’t. Not unless there’s a mountain of other evidence you can point to that shows that lobster brains have some sort of “genocide circuitry” which works similar to circuitry in human brains, thus indicating similar genetic lineage. In which case it absolutely would follow that we’d have to learn to live with genocide, at least in the sense that such circuitry “understands” genocide (given the complexity of genocide, it seems plausible that our innate brain circuitry for genocide may be able to be subverted or falsely sated – it would have to depend on the details. One could even argue that we currently are living in that world, with our innate nepotism and tribalism being that “genocide circuitry” that we have to live with, by valiantly subverting it).
The point isn’t that observing X in lobsters is enough evidence to prove that X is some unchanging eternal constant that all humans have to obey forever. Peterson hasn’t ever said that, and to whatever extent SaiNushi is presenting him as having said that, SaiNushi either is mistaken or is being misinterpreted. It’s that it’s a particularly notable example – notable for just how old our common ancestor is – from the mountain of evidence pointing to the concept of hierarchies being innate within our biology.
Now, one could also still argue that just because it’s innate to our biology doesn’t mean we have to “live with” it. Which depends on what you mean by “live with.” If the argument is that, on net, even with all the hard work involved in forcing humans to suppress their innate psychology, a hierarchy-free society is still more desirable, well, the devil’s in the details. As someone who read Brave New World and was befuddled that people saw it as a dystopia rather than a utopia, I’m pretty partial to such arguments. I don’t know what Peterson would say, but he seems to have a strong bias against plans that rely specifically on suppressing innate psychology rather than channeling them in productive ways – it might be due to his profession as a clinical psychologist/psychology professor, or it might be his obsessive studying of 20th century history of Communism.
Also should be noted that his argument can’t be used to justify living with any particular hierarchy (e.g. monarchy, slavery), and, as far as I can tell, he hasn’t ever justified any particular hierarchy based on this argument. He has defended the hierarchical organization of Western society on the grounds that it tends to do the job pretty well, or at least better than most other societies. But the full extent of his lobster argument ends at pointing out that human’s innate psychological need to live in – and thrive in – a hierarchy is something that society ought to meet, or else there will be lots of suffering by the members of that society.
Here’s Jordan Peterson’s argument about lobsters, from his infamous interview with Cathy Newman (with minor edits to remove irrelevant crosstalk from Newman):
If you would like to substitute a more thorough exposition of the Lobster Argument, be my guest. This is the best I could find. Responding to this version of the argument:
First: lobsters are a bad example. Here’s the study that Peterson cites, showing that serotonin increases aggression in lobsters. From the introduction of that paper:
If the goal is to wow us with an appreciation for how deeply the connection between serotonin, hierarchy, and aggression is hardwired into our brains, it’s awkward that the effect is reversed between lobsters and humans. The claim of “continuity in the way that animals and human beings organize their structures” is misleading. Lobster brains and human brains use similar hardware — neurons, neurotransmitters, and so on. But you can’t conclude that the similarities in hardware must imply equivalent similarities in hardware.
(While trying to find a better example of Peterson’s claim, I ran into this reddit post claiming that penguins are social but non-hierarchical. If true, this would obviously throw a wrench in the Lobster Argument, but I couldn’t find anything conclusive about penguin hierarchies one way or the other.)
Second: let’s assume that we can patch up Peterson’s scientific claims. His argument still doesn’t work, because he’s attacking a strawman.
To a first approximation, nobody actually holds the position that Peterson is attacking. Governments are forms of hierarchy. Corporate management is a form of hierarchy. Leadership roles in NGOs are a form of hierarchy. There might be a handful of anarchists who want to abolish all of those, but it’s certainly not a mainstream feminist position. It’s a big world. If you tried, you could probably find examples. But they’re neither representative nor important.
Instead, what most people who yell about hierarchy want to do is abolish specific instances of it: patriarchy, say. You may disagree whether the phenomenon they’re attacking exists. You may disagree that it’s a problem. But those are questions that must be considered at the object level, not the meta level. As you say yourself, this argument can’t be used to justify any particular hierarchy. You aren’t going to figure out whether the gender pay gap is caused by innate factors by looking at lobsters.
Do we have to “learn to live with” any particular hierarchy? I don’t know. I’d say it depends on the hierarchy in question. What I do know is that stories about lobsters aren’t going to be relevant.
Fair enough that the biological issue is rather complicated, and as a non-evolutionary biologist, I don’t have the expertise to defend or debunk his argument, and I fully buy the notion that he may be making a connection where one doesn’t exist. I don’t find that fact awkward in the least, though; it’s entirely plausible for serotonin to have opposite effects with respect to “levels of aggression” as mentioned in that intro while there being a continuity of genetic descent of the phenomenon of hierarchies. The sheer complexity of our bodies, our brains, and our social world, and how different those are to their “equivalents” in lobsters means that the fact that the same chemical is used to regulate similar sort of behavior is a pretty significant connection.
And, again, it’s obvious that he’s only presenting the lobsters as an illustrative example from a mountain of evobio literature – he’s not presenting at some evobio conference, he’s answering an interview question in a mainstream news outlet. If you think the entire argument breaks down upon close evobio inspection, again, fair enough; I lack the expertise.
The issue here is that the when most people who yell about hierarchy say they want to abolish patriarchy, they’re not just attacking the idiosyncrasies of a particular hierarchy, they attack the very innate psychological impulses that led to that hierarchy and also label those impulses as part of that hierarchy. For instance, the fact that men tend to be more willing to sacrifice their free time and their health in order to pursue money and status is considered a part of the patriarchy, and the abolishment of patriarchy necessarily involves conditioning men such that they no longer desire to compete and thus thrive in hierarchies.
His point is that this drive to fit oneself in and to get to the top of hierarchies is something that’s innate in human psychology and something that can’t just be wished away. Again, maybe the cost would be worth it. But the cost of conditioning people to deny their innate psychological impulses has to be acknowledged and dealt with seriously.
One might argue that most people who yell about hierarchy actually suggest other hierarchies which they deem to be more just. I’d argue that those are just the examples of a lack of seriousness in dealing with the innate psychology that Peterson is calling out with his lobster story.
Two points: first the narrow point, then the broad one.
Narrowly:
Who says this? I’m sure that somebody somewhere has made this claim — it’s a big world — but the standard forms of this argument talk much less about abolishing the drive to compete, and much more about (say) gendered expectations around childcare that make it easier for men to make sacrifices for money and status without giving up on the hope of having a family. I challenge the claim that “most people who yell about hierarchy” fall into the category you describe.
Broadly: I’m not actually interested in delving too much further into the specific debate in the previous paragraph, but I think it’s important to point out how much that debate hinges on the details of a specific situation, and how little it hinges on humans being biologically wired to recognize hierarchies.
The Lobster Argument is just another motte and bailey. The motte is the uncontroversial claim that human brains are in some sense wired for hierarchy. The bailey is the implication that this claim is important in an actual contentious debate.
Nobody — not even Peterson himself — seems particularly interested in defending that bailey. Until that happens, I feel pretty comfortable dismissing this entire argument as irrelevant fluff.
I don’t have any citations at hand, so I may be wrong. Just basing it off my own experience of growing up and being taught these things. The idea that individuals’ competitive drive was merely the product of socialization by the patriarchy was basically the default belief, and that was why smashing the patriarchy necessarily also meant destroying capitalism, which only works with competition. I still see that a lot today in popular SJW culture, which reveres socialism over capitalism due to its lack of reliance on competition, which is, again, a socialized drive created by the patriarchy.
But that’s all just my anecdote. Maybe it’s not most, though it seems to be the loudest, from my experience. Certainly, they’re loud.
It seems that the point hinges on how contentious a debate you think it is that people either are or aren’t in some sense wired for hierarchy. My experience has been that this is extremely contentious. Again, maybe that’s the “somebody somewhere” in this “big world” effect. I’d posit that the people that Peterson has experience with also probably fit that mold.
There is a strain of thought which holds that the EEA — or a state of nature, or the primitive state of man, whatever you want to call it — was essentially non-hierarchical, with egalitarian social relations and weak or no concepts of property. Marx’s theory of history started with a version of this, “primitive communism”, but it shows up outside of Marxism as well. If we could show deep neurological foundations for hierarchy, especially ones which are more basal than H. sapiens, that’d make for a strong argument against this line of thinking.
Though there are related but subtly different lines that it wouldn’t argue against. Interpersonal status relations don’t necessarily mean stable, formal hierarchy, for example — my intuition is that the EEA would have had no formal hierarchy but strong informal hierarchies, like high school or prison.
“The motte is the uncontroversial claim that human brains are in some sense wired for hierarchy.”
My impression is rather not only that this is an extremely controversial claim, but that any kind of pre-wiring is blasphemy in leftist circles. Isn’t that what blank slate-ism is about?
I don’t think anybody argues for a maximally blank slate. People are pre-wired for vision. We’re pre-wired for language acquisition. We’re pre-wired to hold our breath underwater.
When I say that humans are “in some sense wired for hierarchy”, I’m making a very weak claim. I’m not saying any particular hierarchy is wired in. I’m not even saying that a predisposition to formal hierarchies is wired in (to borrow Nornagest’s useful classification). I’m just saying that human beings are naturally social animals. The ability to perceive hierarchies and status comes built in to human brains, in a similar way to the ability to feel happiness or sexual attraction.
Does anybody seriously disagree with that? My impression is that all the real disagreement comes downstream of that claim, arguing whether such and such a behaviour is or is not an immutable expression of our hardwired hierarchy.
But note that the lobster argument can’t say anything useful about the downstream disagreement. All it can do is justify the claim that brains come pre-equipped with the ability to recognize hierarchy and status.
The lobster discussion is a little depressing. I think the thesis sentence from the Newman interview is:
I think Peterson goes way too far if the lobster story is supposed to be dispositive, but if it’s part of a larger stack of evidence, then I think it’s fine as one example in a sufficiently large pile.
It’s an oversimplification to say that all critics of patriarchy think that hierarchy is something that men invented because they are mean or testosterone poisoned or whatever, but it’s a position that some people hold. It would be nice if we could just say “ok, and then what.”
IMHO, the patriarchy critics argue that it’s possible to construct a society which is less hierarchical or which has a better hierarchy by the critics’ standards, even given our biology. So the answer to the lobster example is presumably:
(1) Yes, but you don’t know if our biology predisposes us to THIS hierarchy or if some of it is socially constructed on top of our existing biology. Maybe we’re predisposed towards a bonobo style hierarchy rather than a chimp style one. More study is needed.
(2) Ok, even if we’re predisposed to a chimp style hierarchy, that doesn’t mean we can’t steer the boat with societal interactions. We’re probably predisposed to a lot of stuff we don’t want people doing, and which we often successfully motivate people not to do.
Now, Peterson may well have answers to those points, but at least then we’d be having a constructive conversation, not “look how dumb the lobster example is.”
I agree with basically all of this.
I would just add that, from where I’m standing, the set of feminists who say that we can construct a better hierarchy regardless of our biology is much larger than the set who say that men invented hierarchy to be mean, and the conversation would be better if Peterson engaged with the former instead of the latter.
Much of the mockery of the lobster argument comes from people who perceive it, correctly or not, to be a response to the “better hierarchy regardless of biology” crowd. I don’t think it’s valuable to quarrel over who is responsible for that breakdown in communication, but Peterson is the person in the best position to repair it.
Yeah – IMHO, the problem isn’t that Peterson talks about lobsters, it’s that he says hierarchy has “absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural considerations,” which is such a strong claim that
(a) it’s almost certainly false, and
(b) is probably hyperbole and/or not the point Peterson was trying to communicate, in which case he should tell us what that point is.
Well that’s… not what I was expecting.
Re. 4: I am reminded, reading the Leo XIII’s 1891 argument against socialism, how different the connotation of the word has become from what it meant then. My parents were socialists until FDR converted them to capitalism, and they always explained that the basis of socialism is public ownership of the means of production and some form of common ownership of all but quite personal property.
You don’t see any such program in the Europe that the conservatives call “socialist”, nor in the platform of today’s self-proclaimed “socialists”, like Bernie Sanders. The word now seems to be used to describe any sort of government effort to provide more affordable services either to all (e.g., health care) or to the poor (e.g., housing).
No doubt there is plenty to be said both for and against such efforts, but whether you are fer it or agin it, it ain’t socialism.
Interesting. My parents (in the 1960s) made a distinction between communism and socialism, and would probably have classed “public ownership of the means of production and some form of common ownership of all but quite personal property” as communism. And I note that the arguments against “socialism” I saw in the early references seemed to be opposing what they would have called communism.
My parents were social democrats, and as socialists, strongly opposed communism, even before the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. (Whereas our equally Jewish Communist friends supported the Soviet Union through that unfortunate episode and many years later pretended that they hadn’t.)
My parents distinguished their views from those of the communists by saying that all socialists believed in public ownership of the means of production, etc., but social democrats believed that it could come through democratic processes: voting, elections, etc., not violent revolution. They had voted for perennial Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas (Princeton graduate and Presbyterian minister). Communists, on the other hand, believed that only violent revolution would suffice. As a partly separate issue, my parents recognized early on that the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) was really just a front directly controlled by the Soviet Union for their own benefit; which was fine for the followers, as long as they believed that the Soviet Union was genuinely going to usher in a peoples’ paradise for all people. Which my parents didn’t buy.
FDR convinced them that capitalism could have a human face, and they left all that other stuff behind when they got behind the New Deal.
Not that I personally ended up adhering completely to their view of the world, either. When someone asks me if I had a religious upbringing, I always respond, “Yes. We were taught that there was one God and his initials were FDR.”
This gradually changed over time, as communism failed so badly and a mixed solution worked quite well.
So the definition of socialism changed to reflect this.
@Aapje
I don’t think it did. Rather, the term lost meaning, just as “neoliberal” lost meaning. Neoliberal started out meaning what people use “socialist” to refer to now: a capitalist system where the government supplies a large proportion of basic services, like health care for all and housing for the poor.
At this point, “socialism” is a label self-proclaimed radicals find it fashionable to boast of, whereas “neoliberalism” is a label they find it fashionable to rail despise.
Self-proclaimed conservatives, of course, despise West-European capitalism, which fits the original definition of neoliberalism, and when they do so, they the self-proclaimed socialists call them “neoconservatives.”
Neither term means a goddamn thing any more. This is just Gresham’s law at work in the realm of language.
Only if you believe that ideologies have to be ‘pure,’ but then you have to take issue with how many other words are used.
Many people call themselves capitalists even though they believe in state-ownership of some means of production (for money, passports, etc). Are those people also posers who use a fashionable label?
Are there any ideological labels that are not fashionable by your standard?
Ha! From your first post, I thought you meant your parents become capitalists in opposition to FDR because they saw how bad socialism was. Now I see you meant they became capitalists because they seemed to think that FDR was capitalist, but was a good guy despite that. Because he was an American president, that meant he was a capitalist?
Yeah, whenever I am tempted to label FDR “worst president ever,” I try to remind myself that he was US president at a time when most of the world was going communist or straight-up fascist, so if he provided a palatable alternative to those, maybe we should be glad, even if he set a lot of bad precedents.
I thought FDR was widely considered to be one of the best presidents ever, not one of the worst.
However this is my perception from France (supposedly “socialist” country at times), so it might be biased.
Any comments?
Historical polls and rankings among historians tend to put FDR in the top five consistently, even if they’re not of his party. I would guess that American liberals tend to like him because of the New Deal coalition and the recovery from the Great Depression, and American conservatives due to his leadership during WW2.
Free market advocates, including ancaps like onyomi, are another story. I have heard there is evidence, although I haven’t looked at it myself, that the New Deal prolonged and deepened the Depression, and most of the reason the US came out so far ahead anyway was because it was the largest Western manufacturing base left standing after the war. Meanwhile, the New Deal expanded the government considerably, and the post-war boom so cemented its reputation as a net benefit that it rendered the case for free markets equivalent to arguing a counterfactual – hence why free marketers tend not to like FDR.
Paul sketches some of the reasons why some of us do not think well of FDR. One might also add that he originally got elected by complaining about what a big spender Hoover had been, then did what Hoover had done only more so.
There is also the small matter of putting more than a hundred thousand Americans, none of them charged, let alone convicted, of any offense, in concentration camps.
I suspect that historians usually interpret such polls, whether or not they’re actually worded that way, as being about which presidents were greatest as opposed to best— i.e., they focus on which ones got the most done, with the question of whether it was for good or ill shunted to one side. Reagan has come out well in the polls I’ve seen despite the usual left-liberalism of historians.
@Paul Zrimsek: you might be right about that. Which makes me wonder how historians of various political bents would rate them if they were asked to explicitly make the distinction.
One of my pet peeves is when people talk about capitalism and socialism without defining them. Nearly every single conversation about them is bogged down in people talking past each other.
Yeah. Maybe we should institute a norm of tabooing those words whenever discussion about them becomes non-trivial.
Or at least define what you mean when you use the terms.
I’ve taken to a Lemony Snicket-style sidebar, adding “a word which here means…” when I’m discussing something that I know is defined totally differently by different groups.
Healthcare is 10% of the economy or more. Housing is 15% or more. Socializing them isn’t “providing a few services”, it’s nationalizing a massive share of the economy. Socialists haven’t grown less ambitious with time, what’s changed is what they consider the commanding heights, not their desire to master them.
> Healthcare is 10% of the economy or more. Housing is 15% or more.
Well, they would be a lot smaller share of the economy if they weren’t organised on a rent-maximizing basis.
Yep, that worked out so well with grain in the Ukraine. Food production to almost zero percent of GDP!
Snark aside, I will absolutely take for profit provision of essential goods over government any day of the week, and the idea that putting the government in charge of things makes them cheaper is not borne out by the evidence. Governments might not seek profit in the traditional sense, but that doesn’t mean the people who work for them magically become selflessly dedicated to the common good. They just take their profits in less transparent ways.
Why are you bringing up grain in the Ukraine? Why not one of the many countries with (partially) nationalised healthcare and/or housing?
I admitted that was snark, but the point was that sometimes you might not want the value of essential goods and services to shrink as a share of GDP. If you banned the creation of any new treatments, medical spending as a share of GDP would definitely start to decline, but that doesn’t mean we’re better off.
As to countries with nationalised healthcare and/or housing, I can point to the colossal failures of high rise public housing in several so countries off the top of my head.
I’ve been toying with some ideas for how to organize your parliament.
I agree with the idea that you want to avoid a one chamber system, since a single parliament is a single point of failure, and you want at least one more center of power as a check on the dumb and/or corrupt decisions that come out of a single chamber.
This is is the reasoning behind the US system, for example. Originally it was set up to have the House represent the people and the senate represent the states, but after the 17th amendment in 1913, it’s just another way to represent the people, and some say that was the start of the decline of the US 🙂
Britain also has its House of Lords. Both these systems has democratic problems. In the US Californians are vastly underrepresented compared to Wyomingans. The British lords are even more glaringly problematic. So I wanted to think up fully democratic ways to have two parliamentary chambers that were meaningfully different.
I have two ideas I like:
– Genderbased chambers: All men vote for a male parliament and all women vote for a female parliament.
– Age based chambers: The younger half of the electorate has one parliament, and the older another.
Thought? Other crazy ideas? Any exotic real world systems I haven’t heard about?
One aspect of the original American system was to give the members of each chamber a different time horizon. Members of the House face a new election almost immediately after they take their seats; this seems designed to make them take the short view. Members of the Senate get a 6 year term, allowing them to e.g. vote against today’s stupid fad, secure in the belief that it will have blown over and been forgotten by the time they next need to face the people.
I’m not sure that these are the right time horizons; maybe a decade or two would be better for the longer term view, or even life membership (e.g. Canada’s appointed Senate). But I think there’s something to be said for the idea of short vs long views.
And of course until 1913, Senators were not elected at all, but appointed by state legislatures.
A second house where the representatives have one vote to cast per person who voted for them. Can’t do it with one house (since too many people harms negotiating ability and such), but works as a check on it.
I do like the idea of being able to delegate my vote to someone.
If I think Kelly McSmartass is the smartest and most trustworthy person I know, I can delegate my vote to them. Kelly can do the same, or vote on individual issues. If my vote starts getting used in ways I don’t like, I can reassign my vote, perhaps after a waiting period.
You could imagine a system where people have to delegate until we’re down to a fixed number of people. Those people are our parliament, but each one has the votes of everyone who has delegated to them.
This is more about addressing of the underinformed voter problem than what I brought up, but it’s still interesting.
If you can delegate your vote, someone can threaten you to in order to get you to delegate your vote, or buy your vote.
There’s probably a good cryptographic way to be able to lock your vote in to be the same as someone else, whilst maintaining plausible deniability about whether that’s what you did. I think e-voting is a pretty bad idea given the present ease of exploitation, but it’s a fun thought experiment 🙂
Why is this different from threatening/buying your vote in the current system?
Because in the current system it is not possible for you to prove that you voted in a certain way, so the blackmailer or purchaser has no way to know that he’s succeeded.
In the current system it is possible for the blackmailer to demand you show them your completed mail-in ballot right before you seal the envelope and drop it in the mailbox. Or, for that matter, that you simply give them the signed but otherwise blank ballot to fill in themselves. AIUI, in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, all ballots are mail-in only, and California may be joining them in 2020. For convenience.
There are logistical problems to organizing vote-buying schemes on a scale that would be significant in a national election, but only if the political climate is that such things are Absolutely Unacceptable and to be reported to the authorities on sight. Which is probably the case in the contemporary US, at least for explicit votes-for-cash schemes. But it wasn’t so in the past and isn’t guaranteed to remain so. And, for a softer version, I can easily and frighteningly see a polarized society adopting norms where, in order to hang out with the Cool People (possibly including your family and/or employer), you have to attend the election-night party where all the Cool People fill out their ballots together as a bonding ritual.
In some current systems, your mail-in vote has to be made in a booth at a post office, precisely for this reason.
Can be made at a post office, certainly, but I’m skeptical about has to be. First, because I just checked and that specifically isn’t the case for the three US states to have gone for 100% mail-in elections. Second, because part of the reason for mail-in ballots in the first place is to accommodate people who aren’t physically in the state at the time, and trying to set up two separate types of postal ballot of which only one can be dropped in an anonymous mailbox a thousand miles away is just going to cause confusion and hard feelings.
Delegation of votes to a single voter used to be a system, it was called rotten boroughs. How it worked as satirised in Blackadder.
You could have a lot of people delegating their votes to a single voter, and forgetting all about it in gratitude that they didn’t have to bother turning up to vote and all that nonsense. It’s already difficult enough to get the electorate to turn out, I’m not really in favour of a system of “just sign here to authorise P. Artie Mouthpiece to vote on your behalf”, because it would be very strongly in the political parties’ interests to get organised at the grassroots levels to turn out ‘community organisers’ to go door-to-door and sign up the electorate on their behalf, and I would not trust as far as I could spit some person with a clipboard and a line of fast talk trying to persuade me to sign over my vote to a completely neutral representative who will vote according to my values and preferences.
Never mind the opportunities for bribes, corruption and the likes of ‘walking around money’ to be funneled to local party organisation to get voters signed up to Preferred Representative Voter.
For every one voter who will follow the results to make sure the Designated Representative really will be voting as they want them to vote, there will be a solid number of people who neither know nor care, and this means the parties can be even more hucksterish in vote-grabbing than they already are.
@Deiseach I think the problem you describe doesn’t occur (or at least is vastly smaller) if people can re-delegate the votes they’ve received to others, indefinitely.
So, instead of giving P. Arty Mouthpiece your vote (someone you don’t know and is vouched for only by the clipboard-wielding campaigner), you give it to your brightest friend, whose motives you trust. She only gets, say, 10 votes, but then she re-delegates those to her brightest friend, etc., until somebody ends up with enough votes to sit in Parliament.
And, of course, each delegation should be secret and cryptographically secure.
My idea, is to use to different voting techniques. (Coming from a US perspective, but I think this system would work OK for a parliament as well)
we quintuple the number of reps in the house (while keeping districts the same size, so each district has between 3 and 9 reps), and then use single transferable voting.
For the senate, use proportional voting based on party. Each party with at least 1% of the vote gets a senator. (would have to get rid of the filibuster…).
Entire senate is re-elected every 4 years on the same year as the president (or if you were doing a parliament, this doesn’t matter as much), and house is re-elected every year. (not every 2 years).
Some kinks to work out like whether house reps could be on the senate party list, leaning towards just no, but you could allow a rep to specify an alternate. (then is the alternate allowed to run for the House…)
For a parliament, I think the leader of the party/coalition in the upper house (the senate) should be the Prime Minister, and not the lower house.
And maybe if 1% or more of the populace voted for a party in the senate that got less than 1% of the vote, you could have a special senator for them. (perhaps chosen randomly from the party lists of all partys with <1%, though that would encourage parties to have long party lists even if they don't get very many votes, I suppose party lists can't be more than 100 people, so maybe this doesn't matter so much?)
(Other democratic reforms would be needed to make this work… though I suppose working out the details of that is a little silly since none of this is ever going to happen in the U.S.).
This is very similar to the system currently used in Australia, where the House of Representatives is elected from 150 single-member districts using STV (resulting in what is basically a two-party system, though there are more independents than there are in the United States), and the Senate’s 75 members are equally split up among the states and elected from a twist on a proportional system, where the candidates are still ranked but you only need a quota (1/(n+1), where n is the number of seats up for election) to win a seat. This results in a variety of third parties being represented in the Australian Senate (there are currently no less than 7), where the main parties need to rely on them to approve legislation, and majorities are very rare (though the right-wing Coalition — which is de facto one political party, Australia’s main right-wing one since its constituents have been in a permanent coalition in the 1920s — managed it in 2004, which was a decisive victory for them).
The obvious failure mode in such a system is if the two houses were to be controlled outright by different parties, which hasn’t happened since the 1970s (when third parties were much weaker than they are now; between the demise of Democratic Labor in the 1974 election and the foundation of the Democrats in 1977, there really weren’t third forces other than independents in Australia’s Parliament, which is unthinkable today), but which essentially creates a constitutional crisis until such time as both houses aren’t at each others’ throats. The gridlock that creates is a lot worse in a parliamentary than presidential system, which is probably why most parliamentary systems have trended toward effective unicameralism, with the upper chamber becoming a relic.
It’s questionable how much the pre-1913 Senate really represented the states. The fixed six-year terms mean any state’s senators were chosen by a previous iteration of the legislature, and were not bound by the interests of the state government once elected. (And that’s setting aside the Senate’s reputation as a “millionaire’s club” where seats were obtained through outright bribery.)
In Germany the upper house consists of the minister-presidents of the German states, plus additional members of the state governments allocated proportionately by population. Seats are not elected on a fixed cycle, but change whenever the state governments change. Adapting this to another parliamentary country like, say, Canada is straightforward. In the US I don’t know how it’d work – you’d start with the 50 governors, sure, but then the majority leaderships of the state houses or members of the state cabinets or what? And that’s setting aside the odd case of Nebraska.
You’re going to want a parliamentary system of government, because presidentialism is sub optimal in a lot of ways. Empirical evidence on this is weak, but consistent.
This complicates things, because it means that one of your chambers is going to be dominant. Yes, there were systems like the 19th century british where PMs could come from either lords or commons, but I don’t think that’s sustainable in a purely democratic system. There are going to be party leaders, and they’ll tend towards the house that gives them the most leverage (both with voters and over each other).
That said, if we’re discussing radical schemes, I want a house of repeals, that is a house that can only repeal legislation, not pass anything new. The incentives facing members of house than can only exercise power by reducing the quantity of legislation (and by threat of doing so with new legislation) are obvious.
@bba
This point doesn’t get made nearly enough. If you want the states represented, then you have one senator per state serving at the pleasure of the state’s governor.
The House of Repeals is the best new idea I’ve seen in this discussion!
Note that complete power of repeal also implies the power to stop new laws from passing, by insta-repealing them.
Perhaps limit it to laws over a certain age. (Maybe give it power to delay and scrutinise new laws, like the House of Lords has.)
A legislative body which specializes in repeals is mentioned in Heinlein– as a possibility for the government of Luna, I think. The proposal also suggested that it should only take a 1/3 minority to repeal a law.
Should the House of Repeals be able to repeal parts of laws rather than whole laws?
Will it have a bias in favor of repeal so that it will look as though it’s doing its job, just as more conventional legislators have a bias in favor of more laws? At this point, I’m imagining politicians being required to serve double terms, one in a legislating body paired with another in a repealing body.
Are there costs to having the laws be in flux? How high would that be?
> All men vote for a male parliament and all women vote for a female parliament.
That’s a really bad idea, IMO. If no disagreement, it doesn’t matter. If disagreement, one gender gets to blame the other for imposing something undesired on the other. It supports the beliefs that we aren’t individuals, but representatives of factions. I don’t see a society surviving long if crude distinctions get institutionally reinforced even further than already so. IMO this whole line of thinking (special chambers depending your demographic characteristics) is silly.
Checks on decision making by having factions designed/chosen to be motivated by different time frames – that seems more promising. But best to do that in ways that don’t promote factionalism. Weight (not segregate) voting power by expected time to live and number of children – that strikes me as wrong, too, but not nearly as fatal as parceling out the electorate into disjoint demographic groups.
Parliament selected by random lottery, in much the same way as jury duty selection. Random parliamentarians would serve a paid, fixed term before being discharged from duties. The random pool would be supported by a small ‘core’ contingent of approximately policy-neutral experts in legislative procedure, selected on merit, who arbitrate and guide the process along the right legal tracks.
this is precisely how you get Yes Minister, where long experienced civil service workers lead unknowledgeable members around by the nose because they have strong relationships with one another, deep experience, institutional solidarity, and industry connections.
Some say that is already what’s happening in places with short term limits, like California.
You should be able to mitigate this while maintaining the original idea. Longer terms, for one thing.
I also don’t think it’s such a terrible thing if a cadre of professional civil servants have some stabilizing influence on long term governance.
If there’s anywhere in the world where knowledge is power, it’s a legislature. And by that, I don’t just mean knowing the rules of parliamentary procedure. It’s having a bank of favors you can call in from other legislatures, knowing who can be swayed by which arguments, who is likely to support or oppose what, who trusts whom and knowing what has been tried and where bodies are buried. Getting that sort of knowledge takes years. Even if you had 8 year terms, by the time the legislators acquired it, they’d be on the way out the door in a year or two, and if they tried to deploy it they can just be stalled. You’d permanently be shifting power into the hands of unelected bureaucrats in a massive way even with fairly long terms.
That’s only true if you think the interests of civil servants align with the interests of the population as a whole, which I don’t think is the case. I don’t think it’s in our interests to give CCPOA and AFSCME even more power.
How much does that opinion depend on what policies you expect the long-term civil service to support?
Pretty much everyone supports policies that make their jobs easier. For police, that means fewer restrictions on wiretaps and evidence and seizing property and questioning suspects and holding people in custody. For spies, that means less oversight and more budget and fewer constraints set by policy (say, forbidding assassinating foreign heads of state). And so on. It’s not at all clear to me that this is any kind of unalloyed good.
@albatross11 says:
Depending on how you mean that, either not at all or a whole lot. If you mean that the civil service is mostly blue tribe and will support blue tribe politics, it isn’t that. Well, emotionally it probably is a little, but intellectually it’s not.
It’s that the civil service will support the power, wealth, and prestige of the civil service at the expense of everyone else. That’s not tied to any particular policy, just a tendency that the slope will slip down, and with no mechanism to correct it because as their power, wealth, and prestige grow, they’ll only become less accountable. It’s a system that’s guaranteed to run itself off a cliff eventually.
The Irish system (or the way it works in theory at least) is interesting. The lower house is elected from multi-member constituencies (each electing between 3 and 5 representatives) via STV.
The upper house, meanwhile, is selected by a range of methods (with terms the same as the lower house). Of its 60 members, 11 are directly nominated by the Prime Minister, 6 elected by the graduates of certain universities, and the remaining 43 from a system called Vocational Panels. These are supposed to be people with expertise or experience in specific fields, nominated by bodies like trade unions, learned or professional societies, or charities.
The Upper House is meant to be an equivalent to the British House of Lords and a check on the lower house, but functionally the Seanad is useless since it is so reliant on vested interests; it gets stuffed with political appointees nominated by the government/party in power, a lot of ambitious wannabes start off in the Seanad to get experience before they go for the Dáil and real power and hence they are beholden to the political establishment, the university nominees do feck-all except be annoying (yes, I do mean you, David Norris) and the Vocational Panels suffer from the same strain of cute-hoorism as in mainstream Irish politics (and life, if it comes to that).
I’m a tiny bit jaundiced, you might say. Any real power has been carefully constrained and stripped away by the Dáil so the Seanad can’t meaningfully interfere with it.
My crazy idea: group voters by income, not by location. I bet I have a lot more shared interests with people who make about as much money as I do than I have with people who just happen to live nearby. Let the Honourable Member for the 7th Percentile Households debate tax policy with the Honourable Member for the 95th Percentile Households.
A couple potential issues:
1. Households don’t all have the same number of voters. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect there’s at least a slight trend towards higher-income households having two voters (or maybe more, depending on how college students and such get counted).
2. Your constituencies are going to change a lot election-to-election. My last raise moved me up 1.7 percentile points. This seems bad for stability of government.
3. I’m not sure that the basic assumption that households of like income are more alike is good. College students, retirees, and people on welfare are all broadly similar in income. Their voting interests are very different. Much the same is true probably up into the 75th percentile, maybe higher. Single vs dual earner makes a big difference there, as does career stage.
Issue 1 is trivially solved by restricting the franchise to married men.
Definitely
I bet I have a lot more shared interests with people who make about as much money as I do than I have with people who just happen to live nearby.
Don’t people who make about the same money happen to live near one another? Or how many millionaires are living on council estates?
On the other hand, if you are in the Fifty-Ninth Percentile Bloc you may be in dispute with others of your voting cohort if you live in Portcity and they live in Inlandopolis, and the matter in question is a bill to divert money towards dredging harbours; for you and the other cohorts in Portcity this is going to be something you feel is a benefit and indeed a vital contribution to the economy of your city where jobs will be retained or lost depending on shipping docking in the harbour, while Inlandopolis wants to use the money for street beautification projects instead.
I misread Inlandopolis as Indianapolis… x.x
Are yow aware of the Roman Assembly of the Centuries, a kind of income-grouped voting system?
Of course, back in those days, it explicitly gave a disproportionate amount of power to the nobility and super-rich.
Historia Civillis has a good video on it.
The officers/cavalry, the nobility and super-rich, were only 18 centuries, while the heavy infantry (more like upper middle class, prosperous farmers) were 80 centuries. So it disproportionately favored the well-off, but the bias toward the super-rich wasn’t as great as someone might think from your comment.
I quite like Hong Kong’s Functional Constituency system for that. It groups people by actual occupation, and seems like a good way to counter the relentless tide of lawyers that we see in Congress today.
@bean The Functional Constituency system is widely criticized as the Beijing government’s attempt to install a rigged sham democracy in Hong Kong.
I don’t agree with that criticism (but then I’ve been fooled before, so discount my thoughts here appropriately).
I think there are prominent quasi-scholarly elements in the CCP aware of the history of democratic reform demands emerging as countries get wealthier, who fully expect the same to happen in China. But they’re also aware of the failings of conventional democracies, esp. demagoguery and populist idiocies.
(Of course this is mixed up with the usual desire to retain and exercise power for private advantage, but the CCP is aware of this problem too, tho unable to fully solve it.)
So I interpret the Functional Constituency system as an experiment in “improved democracy” – something that addresses demands for popular input to government, provides a way to depose bad leadership bloodlessly, yet doesn’t suffer the usual problems of populism.
I think it’s good that people are trying experiments in improved democracy. (I’m happy with the recent Maine experiment with ranked-choice voting for the same reason.)
We need many more such experiments. I’d love to see a trial of Robin Hanson’s Futarchy.
It’s very possible that the current implementation is Beijing playing games. I know next to nothing about Hong Kong politics. I was mostly suggesting it as an idea for a different way to structure representation.
One house with locally elected representatives and one house elected nationally with PR or something seems boring but obvious. It’s the current system in Paraguay and I assume some other places as well.
Just a general response, but I’m seeing a lot of proposals based on dividing people up to arrange their representation on the basis of wealth or occupation or gender or age or, well, anything except geography, on the grounds that SomeOtherThing better represents their interests than boring old geography.
First, I think these proposals vastly overstate the extent to which the world, or even just the Western world, is populated by cosmopolitan WEIRDs for whome mere geography is irrelevant. Lots of people still live their lives in meatspace, in geographically rooted communities, working in geographically rooted professions like farming and mining, having invested the bulk of their wealth in immovable real property, etc. Geography still matters.
And second, even if you’ve correctly determined that geography now matters less than [other stuff], what makes you think you’ve identified the enduring best value for the [other stuff] by which humanity is to be broken up into convenient political chunks?
Let people decide for themselves how they want to be represented. At-large proportional representation allows for representatives or parties devoted to the interests of geographic regions, of professions, of whatever people feel most important in this context. There will be legislators devoted to the interests of people who are and want to remain Rural West Virginians, and others devoted to the interests of WEIRD cosmopolitans who are stuck living among geographically-rooted rednecks who keep trying to vote their primitive values onto us.
If you’re not willing to do that, probably best to leave it at the default setting of “geography”, because geography probably matters more than any other single thing you’d use to impose political divisions. If nothing else, actually enforcing whatever laws your legislature comes up with will be a lot easier if it is done on a geographic basis and if most people in the region agree with those laws.
And understand that none of this matters, because almost everyone’s #1 political interest is that they don’t have any significantpolitical interests and want to stay out of the whole thing except, sigh, OK, I guess we have to stop the StupidEvil party from ruining everything so sign me up for whatever is the single most powerful force opposing the StupidEvils. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, but no nuance in policy goals and no willingness to deviate from the most effective AntiStupidEvil strategy. So does it matter that someone gets to vote for e.g. the AntiStupidEvil representative from Silicon Valley as opposed to the AntiStupidEvil representative from the Coder’s League?
Maybe geography seems less and less important for governance as:
a. More decisions are centralized at the federal government/federal court level.
b. People become increasingly mobile, so that you don’t have such large differences in local culture/values.
c. Businesses and media are nationwide or worldwide, and so tend to be less responsive to local differences.
On the other hand, a huge amount of practical governance that matters in the US is regional/local–public transit, highways, schools, policing, etc., all are mostly run locally. That makes a case for giving the people of each locality a voice. It seems entirely reasonable that Montana and New Jersey might need different sets of rules w.r.t. gun ownership, speed limits, water rights, etc. [ETA] By giving each state/region/locality some kind of voice in the federal congress, you can avoid having those local differences get steamrollered.
I’m happy to have one chamber based on geography.
But if you want a second chamber based on something orthogonal, you have to get creative.
Various ways to have a Populist House and an Elitist House:
– Elitist House doesn’t get paid a salary, forcing the members to be some combination of independently wealthy and “corrupt”/beholden to monied interests.
– Populist House has term limits.
– Voting power in Elitist House increases with tenure. For bonus points, it increases when a vote you made two years ago is declared retrospectively to be correct (via subcommittee vote or popular poll).
– Elections in Populist House are made by picking a random ballot from each constituency, resulting in a mix of party-nominated candidates and people who wrote in their own name.
– Elections in Elitist House are made using the system John Schilling describes in this thread. You can phase this in slowly by marking “the incumbent for your geographic area” on people’s ballots so that they’ll generally win.
– Members of Elitist House are limited to one term. Votes and deliberation are secret under penalty of expulsion.
– Members of Elitist House are elected for life but can be impeached by a supermajority in either house.
– Candidates for Elitist House are chosen by party officials, not voters.
– Members of Elitist House can only vote on them after personally passing a written, proctored test on the contents. Members of Populist House get lots of funding to hire staff to take the test for them, and can only vote once at least one member of their staff passes the test.
One wacky scheme I’ve never heard talked about: deliberately create an Opposition House and a Loyalist House. Loyalist House consists entirely of the party that won a plurality in the last general election, Opposition House has everyone else. Loyalist House gets to name a Prime Minister and Cabinet, but otherwise their powers are identical and not much can be done without majorities in both houses.
I think the key question is “what do you want your parliament to do?”
The US system worked fine for its goals, pre-administrative state. The design goal was stability and “if you can’t agree on what’s do be done, don’t do anything.” It’s a terrible design for keeping an independent civil service and judiciary from taking over power, but a fine system for only doing things that have widespread agreement.
Basically, there’s a trade-off. A system that can act quickly can do more, but will be less stable (multi-party parliamentary systems). A system that has many veto points can do less, but will be more stable (US system).
If you can somehow ensure that power has to flow through parliament, not around it, then more stability will mean a less capable government; this may be a design goal or a flaw depending on what you want to accomplish.
My question–related, but similar–is how do you keep the civil service, or the judiciary, from taking over from parliament or the other elected bodies as the key driver of policy (as has happened in the US and I understand in Europe as well.)
If you set aside 1861-1876, sure, but that’s a pretty big asterisk. Throw in the previous secession threats of the Hartford Convention and the Nullification Crisis and the violence in the leadup to the Civil War, and that’s most of American history up until the administrative state began in 1887.
One chamber elected on a one person, one vote scheme.
One chamber elected on a one net tax dollar, one vote scheme.
Given that the majority of what the government does these days is transfer money around, it seems like a good way to provide a good incentive to keep the golden goose laying eggs.
Ooh. I like that. Although how do you handle people who are net negative? Do we make them vote, then chose the opposite?
(The obvious answer is to just not let them vote, but I like the image here.)
We do not need to incentivize making money. The incentive to make money is that you end up with money, which can then be exchanged for goods and services of your choice.
We don’t need to incentivize making money, but it might be a good idea to disincentivize frittering Other People’s Money away. One way to do that is to make that money into a constituency.
Actually, most of the money that I nominally earn cannot be exchanged for goods and services of my choice. How this might incentivize me to act, I will leave to your imagination.
It’s a little interesting to argue that if we need to tax high earners more (because that’s where the money is), then we should have a counterbalancing incentive to earn money, so that we minimize dead-weight loss of taxation. If I ever write a puckish econ-based humor piece, maybe I’ll try it out. 🙂
I wonder if that would successfully channel or wind up universally accelerating the usual means for converting money into political influence
@Garrett
What if the goose starts hoarding the eggs because the second chamber vetos most spending?
From the perspective of ensuring that redistribution happens, you need both people making money, but also decision making that transfers part of that money to others.
One parliament organized by regions, and another not? The former would be similar to the American House of Representatives–Californians, say, would vote for people to represent California; the latter would be like a ‘standard’ European parliament, where people vote for various parties and then those parties get seats based on the proportion of total electoral votes they get.
Naval Gazing’s look at Russian Battleships continues with a detailed study of the first Russian dreadnoughts, the Ganguts.
Differences in generic nickname vocabulary between men and women
I’ve noticed that men have dozens of generic nicknames for eachother in lieu of knowing/using their real name, but women don’t. For example:
Men:
Buddy, pal, mate, chief, boss, dude, bro, man, etc. etc… plus all the regional slang variants depending on country/province (squire, cobber, oldmate…) plus a slew of suffix-modifications that get applied to the names without permission or necessity such as Johnno, Mikey, Timbo, etc. etc.
Whereas women don’t seem to have the equivalent list of non-name salutations. You don’t hear women calling each other “sis”, for instance, and the names used between men are very rarely used between women. What you do hear is women who are already friends calling each other ‘gorgeous’ or similar affectionate, positive descriptors in place of their name.
I have one main idea as to how this developed, and one supporting nod to evo-psych.
1. The slang-name vocab has been developed between men over the course of many decades of the shared experience of manual labour and military service, and functions as a) social cohesion under stress and b) a practical way of addressing someone you don’t know but need to get ‘on-side’ with straight away.
The starkly different histories of work and war participation between the genders gives rise to this theory.
2. Men are generally more assertive and less sensitive than women, which together provide the necessary precondition for taking a social risk in addressing a stranger/acquaintance by a generic pet-name.
Is my basic observation correct, and if so do the above hold enough explanatory power?
A lot of women (especially black women) call their female friends “girl” as a nickname. I think I’ve also heard “chica” among Latina women but that might just be in movies.
If I’m onto something and the pattern you’re describing only really applies to white people, that fact is interesting too.
>Men are generally more assertive and less sensitive than women
Most murders are commited by males for trivial status offenses. Define “sensitive”.
Where are you getting “for trivial status offenses”?
Are you talkin’ to me, motherfucker?
(Stereotypical words said just before someone gets beaten to a pulp.)
I was hoping for something with numbers.
Do you doubt that I am number 1, motherfucker?
I thought most murders (in the US) had to do with domestic violence and gang warfare. (I don’t know the actual numbers of the various motives, but “trivial status offenses” doesn’t seem right.)
As I recall, the #1 reason for murder is “unknown” and #2 is “argument over something other than money, property, or romance”.
Yep, just checked. The data is in the FBI Uniform Crime Report supplement. Unknown is at 6075 for 2016, followed by 3208 for “other arguments”. Argument over money or property is pretty low at 202, romantic triangle at 114.
Which motives on that list map to “trivial status offenses”, I wonder?
“Other argument” includes but isn’t limited to “trivial status offenses”; the data you want isn’t available.
Would looking at how this works across the devide help?
As someone with recent experience of femoid interactions, I can report they use “queen” for that now. Like, all the time
… by “femoid”, do you in fact mean “actual woman”?
I’d guess they mean: human being that presents as a woman and likely identifies as a woman, but out of respect for not assuming gender does not presume actual womanhood.
My first guess was he meant drag queens or another very specific social group.
Quick googling suggests that the term is related to incels, but I’m disinclined to click the links.
I’ve never heard “queen” used in the context WashedOut is asking about, and given the google results, ilikekittycat might be trolling.
Typically follows “Yaaaaas” in the wild. The girls who currently say it are a pretty specific subset within a tight age range, but I can confirm that the term sees regular use.
I think this is completely wrong and women have lots of names for each other. In my experience, women are more intimate with their friends and are more likely to assign pet names.
I have personally heard women call each other: sugar, sugarcube, honey, honeybun, sweetie, sweetie pie, darling, dear, dearie, bestie, BFF, girl, girlfriend, amiga, rosy, pookie, schnookums, and toots.
Those are the affectionate ones when not used ironically.
I have never in real life heard a man call another man mate, chief, or boss. Dude, bro, and man are more like informal forms of address than nicknames. I call men about my age dude or bro sometimes to get their attention when I don’t know their real names.
Right, but that’s not what im curious about. I’m interested in how people address each other when they are either complete strangers or do not know their name.
I’ve heard some variants used very rarely in, say, specific tones of friendly mockery or irony between already close friends, but I’ve never heard a woman say “Hi, honey” or “How’s it going toots?” to a woman they are getting introduced to or don’t know very well.
Say you’re only the slightest bit aquainted with someone and need to address them in a casual, once-off kinda way. Do you find out their name or use a generic placeholder?
I live in London, where ‘mate’ is the predominant placeholder for men. Women who don’t know each other certainly do use ‘love’, ‘sweetheart,’, ‘darling’ – but these do have more of a sense of assumed closeness and so can be a bit forward; they’re also less common in the middle/upper classes. ‘Mate’ among men is a class marker too but is comparatively more acceptable between middle class speakers outside of formal situations.
The default mode of address for a stranger is often to just use pronouns and avoid any direct term at all. This is common in both genders, but especially among women since there’s less of an alternative.
My best armchair evo-psych for why direct terms of address are more common among men is that there’s more of a need to signal non-aggression when two men meet, since violence is more likely than among women. I’d be interested to hear if the same pattern is true in other languages though, or else it’s likely a cultural quirk of us anglophones.
I like your armchair explanation, but it also seems like these words are not inherently positive or negative. Think of Ronnie from MTV’s Jersey Shore yelling “come at me bro!” or Dane Cook’s old “buddy/pal/chief” bit.
Say you’re only the slightest bit aquainted with someone and need to address them in a casual, once-off kinda way. Do you find out their name or use a generic placeholder?
In Ireland it’s much the same as God’s Hatter describes for London; amongst women a generic “Yerra girl, don’t be talking!” would be acceptable but it’s class-based (in a sense); very much more likely to be used by older/rural/lower-class townswomen than middle-class/upwardly mobile women. “Well boy/girl (depending on gender of person addressed)” would be a standard greeting round these parts, but considered usage of the low(er)-class rather than aspirational 😉 “Butty” is also a term used by men to address friends, again more used by/for commoners.
Evidently you haven’t been to the South, because “Honey” or “Hon” is used all the time between women who have never met, as is “sweetheart” or “sugar”. Meanwhile calling some guy you don’t know “Bud” is dangerous territory.
It depends if the people in question expect to see each other again and how close they expect the relationship to be.
If they expect to be close, they make introductions.
If they expect not to be close, they use nicknames. The best example I can think of for women is a waitress or clothing store attendant who need to address lots of different women in a friendly and often informal way and it isn’t feasible to learn everyone’s name. “Honey” is something I’ve noticed commonly in the former case, often shortened to “hon”, and “girl” is more likely in the latter.
I’m guessing you’re from the US? In England I hear all of these often. Mate more than anything. (Australians famously use “mate” all the time. I think this is true, and not just a cliche.) “Man” is also common, but “dude” and “bro” are only used somewhat ironically, occasionally with a half-hearted American accent…
That’s correct.
I’ve seen enough movies to be aware of the differences, but I’ve never been to either of those places and know movies aren’t always a good guide to different countries.
West Coast American here. I hear “boss” occasionally, mostly from retail workers, though I think it was more common a few years ago. Though, yes, “man” is more common. “Dude” and “bro” are used unironically here but only within certain subcultures.
Unironic English “dude” user here.
As the other replies to this comment suggest, I suspect what is actually going on is that there is a lot of local variation in generic nickname usage norms, and in some places the men have more of the generic nicknames while in others the women have more (it may be that one of them has more overall, but that’s not a question which any one person’s anecdotes will be of much help to answer).
Basically this. My wife calls people “dude” and “buddy” not infrequently, regardless of gender, and I knew a girl who called people “pal” and “friend”.
In Spain, it is common for women to address each other “tia” (in a very informal, colloquial manner; you would never use it with someone older/of higher status) and men “tio”. These words stand for “aunt” and “uncle”, and they are also use as a cross-gendered form of address (men to women, women to men). I have no idea how it works in South America, but my general impression is that they are much more respectful and less colloquial than the Spanish (for a person of equivalent social status).
First, the nicknames for men are also used by woman addressing men. So there are nicknames that women use to address women, and that men would also use to address women.
Off the top of my head…sister (somewhat rare), girl (as in “you go girl”), and lady (usually disparaging, as in “move it, lady” in a traffic jam).
I’m a physicist who studies black hole thermodynamics & quantum gravity, and a longtime reader of SSC although I don’t post much. I’m also an evangelical Christian who believes in miracles and accepts the Nicene Creed, although I’m not a fundamentalist (e.g. I think the opening chapters of Genesis obviously aren’t supposed to be literal scientific reporting).
Ask me anything.
I’ve just managed to get a good faculty position after many years applying, so one topic that’s particularly fresh in my mind is how the academic job market works, especially in the USA (although I’m headed to Cambridge this January).
Obvious and perhaps overly broad question, but: why do you believe? If you see a distinction between the justifications for your belief (why are you right to believe) and the causal factors behind it (what would have had to happen differently to cause you not to believe), I’d be interested in both.
And as a follow-up, do you think that every fair-minded and intellectually curious person could/should come to share your beliefs, or (for example) do they depend on some very specific experiences or feelings that not everyone has?
Finally, what level of responsibility do you feel to spread the word and encourage people to find God? (While I don’t enjoy being proselytised to, intellectually I find it hard to reconcile a) sincere belief in an afterlife, b) basic human goodwill, and c) the lack of interest in finding new converts demonstrated by many religious people. Though I guess one possible explanation is that it’s basically the same process by which sincere, kind utilitarians fail to become extreme effective altruists.)
@melolontha
Overbroad question first:
The biggest reason I’m a Christian is that I think there’s good historical evidence that the Resurrection of Jesus actually happened (in addition to other ancient and modern miracles, but that’s the most important one), if the primary sources are judged without a heavy a priori bias against the supernatural.
I grew up in a Christian household (my Dad is relatively famous for his faith since he wrote the Perl programming language). It’s important to me that my beliefs be based on reality, so I wouldn’t identify as a Christian if I didn’t think the evidence was compelling. It’s always possible that bias has entered my views, but I have seen people convert to Christianity who were reluctant to do so, on the basis of the same evidence. So if the causal factors don’t match the evidential ones, it is in spite of my best intentions to try to keep them together.
I don’t think that philosophical arguments should be given the same weight as historical ones, but I do think that the existence of life, and consciousness all point towards Theism, while the existence of evil points towards Atheism. If, however, you think that ethics is objective (so that calling something evil isn’t just a matter of our own tastes, but is a hint about the fundamental structure of reality), then there are ways of arguing towards Theism from that as well.
The laws of physics have a number of fundamental constants that seem to take on very special life supporting values. The odds of this happening by chance in a single universe are very low, and for various technical reasons it seems extremely difficult to explain this with new physics at high energy scales. I think this strongly suggests that at least one of Theism or the Multiverse is true.
As far as more subjective factors are concerned: I’ve had a number of religious / mystical experiences where it seemed like God was communicating with me. I also think that the ethics of Jesus (e.g. the Sermon on the Mount) is far more impressive than anything I find in a rival religion, or anything that I would have been able to make up on my own.
The existence of life is an emergent phenomenon that would be extremely difficult to predict a priori from the values of those fundamental constants. Is there any reason to conclude that it’s not possible that for other values of those constants, though reality would have a very different structure than our own, emergent phenomena just as complicated and interesting as our life could exist, and those phenomena are just as difficult to predict as life in our universe?
> I think this strongly suggests that at least one of Theism or the Multiverse is true.
This seems fair (though if I had to pick I’d go with multiverse) but
what about a simulation hypothesis? Or is that in your mind (and reasonably enough; I personally can’t see the difference) entirely
identical to theism?
@Shion
Good question. To clarify, I’m not asserting that constants close to our own are the only possible way to support life; there may be other islands of goodness in parameter space. I’m just claiming it’s rare within the total space of laws of physics looking roughly similar to our own but with different constants.
I certainly agree that, in general, it could be a very difficult problem to look at a given set of laws of Nature, and decide whether they are compatible with some sort of (not necessarily carbon-based) “life” arising or not. In fact, the only reason I am sure that the Standard Model allows for life is that it actually exists!
On the other hand, some universes are sufficiently boring that I think we can be pretty sure nothing as complex as life exists. Most notably, the Cosmological Constant seems to be fine-tuned to about 1 part in 10^120 (or 1 part in 10^60 if supersymmetry exists). The Cosmological Constant receives contributions from all quantum fields in Nature, and to get it that small, you need a very delicate cancellation between the positive and negative contributions. If it were as large as expected and negative, then the universe would recollapse in about 10^-43 seconds. If as large and positive, then any objects separated by more than about 10^-35 meters would be unable to ever send signals to each other again. In either case, it seems that the universe would be unable to support complex computations of any kind.
There are some less impressive instances of fine tuning (a couple different things of order 1% or so) that are needed for things like stars and heavy elements to exist. It’s hard to imagine complex structures existing in a dark universe with no elements heavier than lithium, but I can’t say I know for sure nothing can happen.
@alef
I should have also mentioned the Simulation Hypothesis, although I don’t personally find it very plausible.
If you think we were created by life that evolved in some other universe, then there is the question of why that universe was life permitting, and that seems to raise the fine-tuning problem all over again. It also seems plausible that a finite being could only simulate a daughter universe of significantly lower computational power than the mother universe they live in. But the cosmos we live in does not seem to show signs of a limited-resource computation. (For example, if the goal was to simulate Earthlings, why make the universe billions of lightyears across?)
To me, there is also a very significant religious difference between the God of Classical Theism (the fundamental source of existence, with infinite holiness, wisdom, and power) and a Simulator (some dude that came into existence and has finite goodness, wisdom, and power). Namely, that I consider the fomer entity worthy of worship, but not the latter.
Not sure I see why this would be. You have no picture of what that universe might look like, what are its fundamental constants, etc. Our simulated universe might be an exploration of how common life is when it’s really, really hard. It might be that in the “real” universe, there’s nothing tricky at all about life — that a wide range of possible values for the constants would have enabled it.
Of course, a believer in a universe such as that might note how friendly to life it was, and consider that as evidence for a Creator.
@Doctor Mist
That’s a logically possible scenario. However, (excluding multiverse scenarios) it’s not like we know of any simple laws of physics which give rise to sufficiently complex behavior over a wide range of parameter values.
For example, only a few cellular automata exhibit complex behavior (instead of chaotic or stable behavior). Even the complex ones (e.g. Conway’s “game of Life”) mostly aren’t suitable. Yes, in principle you can construct a universal computer, but one glider in the wrong place and it becomes a mess!
[Edit: Replied to the wrong comment, reposting below]
@Aron Wall
Even today, we still have cases where people are mistakenly thought to be dead. The biblical account seems very compatible with Jesus being pronounced dead by accident, being buried, then living for another 40 days, before dying.
Er, no, it’s not compatible with the biblical account at all, which I suspect you have not read recently. For example, it isn’t consistent with the spear thrust through the heart, the guards/stone at the tomb, the angels, the Resurrected Jesus’ ability to appear and disappear at will, the Ascension narrative, etc. Nor is it compatible with ancient Jewish burial practices which involved tightly wrapping the corpse with cloths and spices. You should also bear in mind that it was a capital offense for a Roman soldier to allow a vicitim of execution to get away alive.
It’s barely compatible with Jesus being able to walk around at all, let alone impressing people with his victory over sin and the grave, since the Scourging & Crucifixion would have been an incredibly traumatic experience (the one ancient account we have of people being pardoned and taken down from the cross before dying and given the best medical treatment, 2 of the 3 still died). And at the end you’d have a corpse of Jesus which required respectful Jewish burial, which would sort of put the kabosh on the Resurrection thing.
Perhaps you meant, that after discounting almost everything written in the text, it’s compatible with a couple things that remain?
I’m a believer myself, but it would be funny if it turned out that the people of Jesus’s time were just really bad at identifying when people were dead, so Jesus’s three resurrection miracles and his own return were just errors. (Also, we might imagine they were really bad at counting loaves, and at labeling which cask contained wine).
But just to be clear, I vote miracle. 😉
@Aron Wall
The Bible is pretty clearly not a very accurate collection of texts, since it has inconsistencies and contradictions. The stories were also orally communicated at first and only written down at least 50 years later, by people who had no first-hand knowledge (like Paul & John). The Bible is full of metaphors and as such, it does not focus on accuracy so much, but seems more intended to be a religious document to make people believe (more) in Jesus.
For just the resurrection, we have conflicting stories about which women found Jesus missing (1, 2 or 3 women respectively). We have one angel rolling back the stone, no wait, two angels just sitting there, no wait, two men dressed like ‘lightning’, no wait, just one guy dressed in white.
Given how stories about heroes tend to get embellished, I assume that most claims are greatly exaggerated or false. For example, of the various options above, maybe the one guy dressed in white is accurate. Perhaps he and some friends heard Jesus calling for help and they moved the stone, after which most left with Jesus to give him medical aid and one stayed behind to tell Jesus’s mates. There was probably one woman (Mary Magdalene) who then got told by this guy, but she was in shock and didn’t listen very well (studies that test how much information patients retain after they get significant news from the doctor shows that people generally retain little information).
Simple story, makes sense. Is scientifically possible. Assume that Mary Magdalene didn’t listen very well and the disciples then filled in the blanks with some nonsense based on their faith. Add 50-100 years of embellishment that happens when stories are passed on orally and I can see you ending up with the Bible.
Where in the bible does it say that his heart was pierced? John only mentions that Jesus’ side was pierced. Perhaps Jesus suffered from edema, due to the crucifixion and the soldier drained it.
Only in the Gospel of Matthew, which is a late text. In Matthew 27:62 you suddenly have priests going to Pilate and telling him that Jesus predicted that he would rise after 3 days. No earlier text said this, nor does even the Gospel of Matthew tell us that Jesus told his disciples or that they knew. Apparently Jesus told only his enemies, which makes no sense.
But wait, in Matthew 28:15, we hear that there was a rumor in circulation that the disciples had stolen Jesus’s body from the tomb. Thankfully, just as we first hear of this rumor, we get new information from Matthew that makes the rumored story impossible. Such a happy coincidence. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that the writer of Matthew first heard the rumor and then made up a story to convince the doubters that the rumor is wrong…
This is not in the earlier texts, even up to 70 CE & then suddenly makes an appearance in 80–90 CE. This really speaks to the reliability of the things that you take for granted (and frankly, your bias to believe the Bible uncritically).
If teleporting Jesus happened and was noticed by several, then it makes absolutely no sense that people would not write it down at the first written recount of the resurrection. Teleportation is pretty huge.
How so? I’ve seen no evidence that this wrapping was so restrictive to not allow for survival and for the person to unwrap himself. Note that Jesus’s head was probably loosely covered with a face-cloth (aka sudarium). He could probably breathe fine if he were still alive (linen is very breathable anyway).
Yet the Bible explicitly says that they didn’t do what they normally do to ensure the death of a crucified person: breaking their bones (they stabbed him instead to check). So Jesus seems to have been treated exceptionally, which increases the chance that the guards made a mistake.
The Bible notes many times that the disciples barely recognize him, which is quite consistent with someone who looks like shit due to being nearly crucified to death.
I agree that this one event was somewhat unlikely, but Jesus didn’t perform very many other miracles that aren’t easily explained away as embellishment and regression to the mean ‘faith-healing.’
There were other Jewish prophets at the time, it’s not strange for one to have experienced an unlikely event that can form the basis for a religion.
After he truly died, the disciples could just have secretly buried him and made up a story about ascending to heaven to explain it. They clearly had motive to do so. Secretly burying a body is not a miracle.
I understand that, as a believer, you put way more stock in the Bible. However, the fact remains that inconsistencies are rife and later texts come up with major new information, which is a very strong sign of embellishment (and remember, we only see the embellishment that happened later on, there is ~50! years where a lot of embellishment could have happened without us being able to see evidence for it).
My personal opinion is that the Bible would have seemed a lot more trustworthy if they had hired a good editor like Rebecca Friedman to clean it up. She specializes in fantasy, so… 😛
Oy. I think when looking at the miracles in the Gospels, you need to establish probability. Bayes! Remember him?
If you start from the assumption that all Roman miracle stories are fake, or worse don’t know that the stories exist, it’s going to skew your priors way down. Note that Greco-Roman intellectuals who criticized Christianity never said “You made those miracles up”… they believed that miracles were well-documented and all it proved was that gods really liked someone, not that they were God Incarnate.
I take it that Aron’s point about Jesus’ putative ability to teleport was not to presuppose the veracity of the biblical narratives. Instead, I take it that his point was to say that naturalists must reject some aspects of the biblical narratives, and not merely offer alternative naturalistic interpretations of them.
As far as timing goes, I should note that the crucifixion of Jesus is generally dated to somewhere from 30 to 33 AD. The gospel of Mark is generally dated to somewhere around 70 AD. So the the time gap between the crucifixion and the gospel narrative is, at most, 40 years rather than 50. I don’t myself think that decade would make an enormous epistemological difference, but others might well. (I should also note that dating Mark to 70 AD is, in the context of this sort of debate, more than a little tendentious. A substantial factor that places the date at AD 70 rather than earlier is that the temple was destroyed in AD 70, and thus naturalistic scholarship treats the apparent prediction of the temple’s destruction in Mark 13 as something which was either invented after the fact or somewhat daringly ventured once the destruction of the temple looked probable a bit before AD 70. A presupposition that prophecy is impossible is not germane to an investigation about the reliability of the gospel narratives. But these sorts of issues threaten to take us far afield, so I’m just gesturing at some of the pertinent issues in this parenthetical.) Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is dated to around AD 50, and it takes Jesus’ resurrection as something its audience already accepts. Given this sort of timeline, I think that the more plausible naturalistic hypothesis is that the erroneous belief in Jesus’ resurrection emerged among Jesus’ followers shortly after his crucifixion rather than that the erroneous belief in Jesus’ resurrection developed out of accretions or misunderstandings of oral tradition or something else like that.
As far as inconsistencies go, it seems to me that minor contradictions should be expected from human witnesses (at least given our evidence about how human witnesses behave). Agnosticism about the particulars that vary from witness to witness may be perfectly sensible without warranting a more widespread skepticism. For example, Plato’s rendition of Socrates has him offering to pay a fine of 30 minae (secured by his friends’ assets) whereas Xenophon’s rendition of Socrates has him refuse to suggest any punishment. It’s perfectly sensible to be agnostic about this aspect of Socrates’ behavior, but that’s no cause for skepticism that Socrates was convicted by an Athenian court in the first place. The precise number of women who found Jesus strikes me as being – at worst – a minor detail about which divergences should not be hugely unsettling. While I don’t think that the timeframe easily allows the development of a mistake about whether Jesus was resurrected, I do think that the timeframe easily allows the development of a mistake about how many women found Jesus (indeed, such mistakes need barely take time at all). And some other differences – such as that between two angels and two men dressed like lightning – strike me as more modest still.
Aapje,
Can you say what you think the likelihood is of the complicated, accidental survival (with subsequent conspiracy by the disciples) you mention above? How many other people do you think have survived similar levels of trauma while appearing to be dead?
As far as I can tell, you are saying that the first part of your story (Jesus surviving the cross and the spear and appearing dead, then reviving in the tomb) was just an accident that could have happened to anyone. Isn’t it kind of a weird coincidence that this really weird medical glitch just happened to happen to a charismatic religious leader who already had a reputation as a faith healer?
As yaissacs has pointed out, your dates for the Gospels are off, even if you go by the more skeptical/liberal consensus. Personally, I don’t accept the wikipedia comments on dates and authorship as accurate. You might be surprised at how weak the evidence for these late dates is if you look into it.
For example, it says that “Luke/Acts” is anonymous even though every early copy of the Gospels we have has the authors’ names on it, and the 2nd century writers were unanimous about the point. By that standard, most of the books on my bookshelf are anonymous.
Yes, John never says explicitly that his heart was stabbed, but he does say that there was a “sudden flow of blood and water” suggesting the destruction of at least one fluid filled organ such as the region surrounding the heart. If someone is copiously bleeding it should be pretty easy to tell if they have a pulse or not (and if they do, they won’t for much longer).
Breaking the legs was not the standard way to check that crucifixion victims were dead. It was specially done in that case to prevent bodies from being on the Cross during the Sabbath. The usual procedure was to keep the victims up until they expired, sometimes days later.
I agree with yaissacs that apparent discrepencies should be expected for testimonial accounts. It would be far more suspicious if the accounts agreed identically on all trivial points, because that would suggest a greater degree of collusion.
However, differing numbers of women / angels at the tomb is not in any case a contradiction, since the texts never say “And there were no more with them”. By that standard, anything other than identical testimony would count as a contradiction.
I don’t think this is true at all, unless you mean that the stories are so distorted that basically all of the specific details are wrong. In the text, there are quite a few stories of Jesus instantly healing people from major bodily defects like blindness, deafness, lameness and (in 3 cases) death, sometimes at the request of others, and this is supposed to be entirely explained by regression to the mean and psychosomatism?
Honestly, just say that the stories are completely made up, it would be so much simpler!
@yaisaacs
Thank you for the correction on the time line.
I agree with you that inconsistencies in the accounts are to be expected, also if Jesus actually resurrected. This uncertainty makes it easier to argue that the narrative is consistent with the narrative that Christians settled on, but also easier to argue that it is consistent with only naturalistic events having happened. My bias is to strongly default to the naturalistic explanation, given that I have never seen scientific evidence for miracles & because many/most people clearly have a tendency to (wildly) extrapolate beyond the available evidence and then to believe those extrapolations to be fact.
The commonalities between the biblical accounts of the resurrection are fairly minimal IMO & the inconsistencies are quite severe. At the very least, this shows a large willingness to fill in the blanks with speculation. The commonalities seem quite consistent with a misinterpretation of naturalistic events that did happen. Furthermore, the witnesses already believed in Jesus’ divinity and ability to do miracles, so it seems likely that they would be especially prone to interpret events as miracles.
Note that I am not doubting that Christians started believing in Jesus’ resurrection shortly after the crucifixion, based on having him recover after being falsely declared dead.
I disagree. This speaks quite strongly to the quality of the evidence. The woman or women who found Jesus have the first-hand account. The people who listened to her/them have the second hand account, which is known to be far less reliable than already quite unreliable first hand accounts. Then we have the 3rd, 4th, etc hand accounts. That the sources can’t even settle on the number of first-hand witnesses, strongly suggests that we are dealing with narratives by people who are fairly far away from the event and who confidently state things that are inconsistent with each other, so most of these are wrong and must have been extrapolated. If this is extrapolated, then why not that Jesus was resurrected?
You forgot the one man dressed in white. So on the one hand, we have a claim that in itself is fully naturalist & on the other hand, we have various claims about the same event that are gradually more outlandish/supernatural. If it was just a guy in white, there are perfectly logical possible explanations why he would be there, without requiring divine intervention.
Basically:
– it was a (desired) feature of crucifixion that people would not die too quickly, but would suffer for many hours at minimum
– it doesn’t seem strange that a gradually weakened person could have weak vital sins, that are easy to misinterpret
– stabbing a person to check if they are dead seems to be a method that can sometimes fail
– it doesn’t seem strange to me that being taken out of the sun and being put in a cool tomb, could let a person recover. A few years ago an old woman recovered while in cold storage in the morgue.
– Jesus can plausible have called for help from the tomb and gotten some (non-Christian) passers-by to help him, both to remove the stone and with medical aid
– the removal of the stone doesn’t necessarily require angels, since humans put it there in the first place
– the rest of the narrative is quite consistent with a severely weakened Jesus living a short time longer and visiting a few people, while not actually looking good or being very lucid
@Aron Wall
We don’t actually know exactly what trauma Jesus had* and we certainly don’t have modern data on survival rates, since we don’t crucify people anymore. However, we do know that people could survive for days on the cross and that Jesus lasted ‘only’ for some 6 hours before being taken down. Furthermore, it seems to have been common to hasten the death, so lots of crucified people could probably have survived for longer if they hadn’t been ‘encouraged’ to hurry up and die.
It seems that it was uncommon for the condemned to be buried properly, so Jesus might have had a far better chance than others to survive being mistakenly declared dead. Perhaps the normal way to dispose the bodies was far less survivable than to gently be carried to and placed in a tomb?
So the likelihood may be far higher than one would think, despite the lack of other similar stories, by virtue of Jesus being treated exceptionally.
* For example, it is unclear how many lashes Jesus got and how much damage these did. Paul did brag in the bible of having survived 5 maximally nasty lashings, but by the Jews, whose punishments were presumably not the same as the Roman punishments.
We are probably dealing with survivorship bias, where the very (perceived) unlikelihood of the events made it more likely that Jesus would be seen as the messiah (instead of the other Jews of the time who claimed the same). From the perspective of a lottery winner, the chance is incredible small that he will win. However, the chance that someone, somewhere wins the lottery and then that person or others being amazed how such an unlikely event could happen, is quite common.
It’s also quite plausible that if Jesus hadn’t been believed to have resurrected, the Christian narrative would simply have been different. There is a reason why proper science tends to make predictions, rather than come up with a just-so story after the fact.
You can look at the miracles of Muhammed to see an example of a prophet who didn’t resurrect, yet is considered holy because some wind blew sand towards the enemy during a battle, he removed some sand from his companion’s eyes with some spit, it rained during a drought and other ‘miracles.’ So from a skeptical point of view, it seems perfectly plausible that this event is taken as evidence for Jesus’ divinity because it happened, while if it hadn’t happened, he would still have been considered divine.
I’m not a doctor, but my understanding is that people can have edema in various organs whose stabbing is fairly survivable (like the lungs) and that fluids can also accumulate outside of the organs, like in the belly. So some flow of blood and water seems possible for a very survivable stabbing.
I don’t see any claim of “copious[ly] bleeding” in the Bible. It could just have been a very limited amount.
The Bible says otherwise:
John 19:32-33 The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.
So apparently they would break the legs of the condemned to hasten death, but Jesus avoided this treatment, because he was declared dead. Perhaps Jesus fell in a coma quickly enough to avoid this treatment, which presumably would have been lethal. Perhaps the Romans mistreated Jesus so badly earlier, that he relatively easily fell into a coma once up on the cross & thereby they actually saved his life.
Sure, why not?
Even today we have faith healers doing the same. If you gather a big crowd of the sick who seek healing, you will always have a percentage who are psychosomatic, who ‘heal’ by interpreting their limitations as a glass half-empty before the healing and a glass half-full afterwards, who regress to the mean, or such. Nowadays we have modern medicine and knowledge about the human body, but back then the situation was a lot different. People may have been even more susceptible to faith healing back then, especially since there was no good alternative.
But this is a lot more fun! 🙂
I also want to point out that my possible explanation for the source of the resurrection story mostly actually sticks quite closely to the statements of fact in the Bible, aside from the stuff that has multiple inconsistent descriptions, where I pick the one that fits my explanation best.
For example, I accept that both the guards and Jesus’ followers believed that he was dead. I do not doubt that they saw a man with no visible vital signs. The step in going from seeing no vital signs to concluding that the person is dead, is where observation of fact is used to draw conclusions. My claim for that part of the story is merely that the conclusions may have been wrong. I’m quite confident that any doctor will say that laymen cannot be trusted to determine death, so doubting this conclusion doesn’t seem outlandish to me.
Only the ascension of Christ, which as it happens is merely described by one author, is the part where one needs to deviate from the text substantially to make my theory fit.
@Aapje
Just a few quick points for the moment.
If you look at the previous verse in John 19 before the ones you quoted, it suggests that the procedure was (at least somewhat) unusual, done in order to appease the Jews about their upcoming holiday:
The woman who recovered from cold storage was not untreated for any apparently fatal wounds, she was merely found in a coma and mistakenly thought to be dead. And the fact that it made international news strongly suggests that events like these are extremely unusual.
(But now would be a good time for Scott to chime in and say that, during his residency, people were waking up in the morgue all the time due to a variety of humorous bureaucratic mistakes!)
@Aron Wall
That is a good point and it contradicts my earlier claim that they would typically hasten the death of the condemned.
However, it still supports my overall point: that the procedure was irregular. Do you agree with me that irregular procedures are more likely to result in irregular results?
Yes, because modern medicine is pretty good. The period we are now discussing had far more primitive doctors.
We know of quite a few devices that were used in the 18th and 19th century to allow people who were accidentally buried to escape or notify outsiders. Even as late as 1896, the Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial was founded in London.
I don’t see how we can conclude that these kind of things were super-rare back when Jesus lived, just because they are very rare now.
Furthermore, as I said before, the unlikelihood is not even a particularly strong argument against a naturalist explanation. Many rare events happen and we can presume that followers of prophets will interpret rare events as miracles. So from a skeptical point of view, we should probably consider P(rare event|prophet), rather than P(falsely declared dead|Jesus).
Survival is not enough. You need the guy who recently had nails stuck through all his limbs, a big gash in his side, and the lingering effects of a severe whipping to be so up and perky that it inspires all his follower to think “I gotta get me some of that.” Stepping gingerly while hallucinating due to a 106 fever isn’t going to cut it.
How much of that was due to ghost stories and the overheated immagination of the Victorian public. (Not that we’re much better now, we’re just overheated about different things.) Add in a dash of profiteering on other people’s fears, and you don’t need premature burial to be at all common for such things to spread.
And crucifixion was incredibly brutal. I don’t see someone getting up and walking away from it, particularly not after they stuck the spear into his side.
The case for the Swoon Theory (Jesus was crucified but didn’t really die on the cross) would be vastly stronger if there were other documented cases of people surviving crucifixion. Are there any?
@Jaskologist
Why not?
Resurrection is still considered so impressive by many Christians that they center their faith around it. Why would Jesus’ followers be unimpressed with a half-dead Jesus?
Note that your claim that Jesus was nailed to the cross is poorly sourced. John claims that the risen Jesus has wounds on his hands, but doesn’t claim that these come from nails. Nowhere in the Bible is there any mention of nails. The Gospel of Peter has the first mention of nails, but it is non-canonical.
The earliest mention of the appearances doesn’t give a timeline and the narratives of the appearances are quite inconsistent in general. So it seems to me that Jesus could have recovered for some time before showing his face. He had up to 40 days to recover.
@bean
Again, I’m not a doctor, but I’ve heard many stories that suggest that the human body can sometimes survive major trauma. And we don’t actually know how much trauma Jesus actually had.
It seems that many hospitals now try to let stab wounds recover without surgery, if no major organs/arteries were hit. We have no evidence that the stab wound was particularly nasty.
Putting Jesus in a cool tomb, his body wrapped tight in linen with (antiseptic?) spices may be close to the optimal treatment that was available. Or not, dunno.
@johan_larson
The Life of Flavius Josephus / Vita:
420 When I was sent by Titus Caesar… to a certain village… I saw many prisoners who had been crucified, and I recognized three who had been my close associates. My soul was grieved and with tears I went to Titus and said so. 421 He immediately directed that they be taken down and receive treatment with the greatest care. Alas, two of them died during treatment, but the third lived.
Note that he does not describe how long these people had been on the cross.
If the alternative is being Completely Dead, being a bedridden invalid falls solidly into the “I gotta get me some of that” category. And if I actually do recover from being Completely Dead in a manner that leaves me bedridden for six months before I can take a few shuffling steps with a cane and a supportive friend, I’m guessing that a hundred years later the stories will have me dancing a jig as soon as I climb out of the grave.
The miracle is the resurrection, the transition from Dead to Not Dead. Everything else is trivial by comparison.
@Aapje
The thing about your theory is that it makes me feel like I do whenever I read other cleverly argued historical conspiracy theories: where each individual coincidence is made to look merely implausible by carefully selecting which parts of the data to emphasize, but where the whole series of coincidences required amounts to something staggeringly implausible. I am especially unimpressed by the fact that your theory, which begins with a merely accidental freak event, has to end with an act of deliberate fraud (secretly disposing the body) that is unrelated to any of the other implausible things in the theory. Surely, if the fraud hypothesis has to be introduced anyway, it would be more parsimonious to have the whole thing be a fraud from the beginning. (By the way, in the Jewish culture of the time, disrespecting the body of your beloved teacher would have been a majorly taboo act; almost unthinkably horrible.)
It also fails to match the whole tenor of the Resurrection stories, which pretty much all (even if you discount the instantaneous nature of the appearences and disappearences) seem to involve Jesus appearing surprisingly to a various groups of people in various geographical locations (different locations in Jerusalem on Easter, Galilee on other occasions). If Jesus were mortally ill as you propose, surely the stories would have involved Jesus staying put in some fixed location (doubtless tenderly cared for by the female disciples), while the various groups of people went on pilgrimage to where he was.
While I understand your point, I’m not sure “prophet” is the correct reference class since most prophets do not view themselves as being uniquely important divine figures whose death is redemptively significant (that Jesus believed this prior to the crucifixion seems about as certain as anything else in the texts, since the Eucharistic tradition is in all 4 Gospels and also in Paul, who claims to have received it from an even earlier source).
If we instead take the reference class to be people who convinced at least some people to take them seriously as the Messiah (note that most of these people did not make claims of divinity), there are about 60 people mentioned in the list on Wikipedia (not sure how complete it is, though). This raises the interesting question of whether we would have any historical references to Jesus’ claims at all, if the Easter-event had not occured. Obviously there is no way to run the experiment, but I am inclined to think that this is a very close question. John the Baptist is the closest comparison I know, and he is mentioned in an extrabiblical text (Josephus).
Anyway, is this the crux of the matter for you? That is, if at some future time you came to believe that (using only facts you think are true about Jesus’ life before Easter, plus anything else which is not causally downstream from his apparent Resurrection) Jesus was already, in some evidentially relevant ways, uniquely privileged among all other known Messianic candidates/”divine” men/religious founders/whatever, would you then believe that a miracle happened?
Happy Ascension Day, by the way 🙂
@Aron Wall
And yet from my perspective, it is still a lot more likely than divine intervention.
Also, it seems to me that it is impossible to believe that the Bible is true without “carefully selecting which parts of the data to emphasize,” because the Bible has inconsistent narratives. Christians typically distill a consistent story out of this by “carefully selecting which parts of the data to emphasize,” so why can I not do the same?
I believe that Matthew 7:5 may be applicable here 😉
First of all, there was no need to disrespect the body of Jesus in my narrative. They could have reburied him according to the religious rules, but merely not have told outsiders.
Secondly, stories about heavenly ascensions were somewhat common at the time. For example, an ex-praetor claimed that Augustus ascended to heaven. So the disciples could simply have decided to respect Jesus by telling a similar story about him, rather than that he just fell over and died.
So… my claim has precedent, as similar stories were told about others at the time. Do you believe that it was falsely claimed that Augustus ascended to heaven or do you believe that he ascended as well?
I suspect that Jesus was one of those fellows who refuses to stay in bed when his doctor tells him. After all, he was sentenced to death for being stubborn in the first place.
No.
I have a very strong prior against supernatural miracles and a strong prior against very old historical documents being reliable, especially those written by people with a motive to favor a certain narrative. It seems obvious to me that the followers of Jesus had such motive.
Fact is that we have a whole lot of stories claiming various supernatural acts, like the ascension of Emperor Augustus, the miracles of Muhammed, continuing to the modern day. Yet in history, we have seen that what was claimed to be divine, has been explained by science time and again.
Now, I agree with you that the Bible is more solid than a lot of historical documents of that time in history, but that is very faint praise, since most historical documents of the time are extremely unreliable.
You too.
[written before Aapje’s most recent comment appeared]
One more point, since I want to push against the claim that the Easter accounts are full of contradictions. While I don’t claim they are 100% consistent about the exact order of events, I think the degree of contradictoriness is vastly overstated by skeptics due to an isolated demand for rigor (probably faciliated by the fact that they seldom calibrate their expectations by reading multiple documentary accounts of the same event in other, nonreligious contexts).
The accounts are close to being compatible, once you accept that there were Resurrection appearences in both Galilee and Judea, and that each Gospel is giving a limited selection from these, given their space restrictions (copying documents was expensive). As Dorothy Sayers said, it is only necessary to make “a trifling effort to imagine the natural behavior of a bunch of startled people running about in the dawn-light between Jerusalem and the garden.”
At a meta-level, one problem is that the more stupidly you read a text, the more apparent contradictions you see. So reading a text with the goal of looking for contradictions (in order to make an internet list) often leads to people making themselves less sophisticated readers than they would be in other contexts.
I don’t want to clutter up the comments with a detailed harmony, so let’s just consider the question of how many women went to the tomb. Aapje seems to be claiming that the following verses are contradictory:
I see no contradiction whatsoever in these verses. They all agree that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb early in the morning and found it empty, while the Synoptic Gospels include a list of the women in the group who went with her. They are a contradiction only if you take each Gospel to have the unstated implication and there were no other women with them besides those named. I see absolutely no reason to make this assumption (and Luke explicitly denies it).
Another example of hidden compatibility is in the number of men who went to the tomb. Luke said it was Peter, while John says it was Peter plus “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (traditionally taken to be John himself, but let’s not get into that dispute here) Since John came after Luke, this is obviously a transparent attempt to add an extra key witness to the scene to bolster the credibility of the story! Except that, if you read Luke very carefully, he implies in verse 24:24 that multiple men went to the tomb. So this actually proves that at least one Evanglist did not take “X went to the tomb” as implying “Nobody else did”.
Similarly, verse 24:34 implies that Jesus had an individual meeting with Peter prior to meeting with the other disciples, which is in harmony with 1 Cor 15:4 where Cephas (= Peter) leads the list. A lot of these hidden congruences are the sort of thing you don’t notice until you’ve read the texts many times.
@Aron Wall
Now try the harder ones, was the man in the tomb an angel or a man, or was the angel a man?
Was the tomb already open, or was it opened by an angel in front of Mary Magdalene?
@Aapje
If it is really true that you assign very old religious documents basically zero evidential value (!), then I don’t think there is any point in continuing this conversations about the texts. Our divergence in outlook goes too deep to be resolved by bickering over the details. And while I would argue the historical evidence is strong, I said earlier that I didn’t think it would persuade somebody with an extremely strong a priori bias against the supernatural.
I am a little curious though how you justify such a steep prior. It seems to me that such a prior would have to be based on having an extremely high level of confidence about the right answers to tricky metaphysical questions about what the ultimate nature of existence is like. If there’s one subject where we ought to have a little bit of humility about our ability to confidently work things out from pure reason, it’s metaphysics. In LessWrong terms, it seems obvious to me that there are a much smaller number of bits of evidence available to us in philosophy, then in history (even ancient history).
A minor point. While I obviously agree with you that such things happen, I also think there are legit faith healings in modern times (although that is conversation will need to be saved for ). I am therefore unwilling to use the general catefory “faith healers” as a control group to establish the naturalistic baseline. The category would have to be gerrymandered a little to exclude the ones I think are for real.
An angel is supposed to be some kind of heavenly being, sent to earth to communicate a message to humans. (The Greek word for “angel” means messenger, and in some contexts can be used to refer to an ordinary human being carrying a message, although that is not the theory I am going to propose below.) Since the angel comes from outside of our own universe, presumably it either does not have a body, or if it does have one it isn’t one we can comprehend. So in order to communicate with a human, it needs to adopt a suitable material form and/or appearence. Frequently, but not always, the appearence chosen is that of a man. (Other times they appear in the form of animals or wheels or something else.) There are many stories in the Old Testement where somebody meets a person who at first seems to be human, but is later revealed to actually be an angel.
Set against this background knowledge, there is no discrepency at all. The phrase “man dressed in white” describes the appearence of the angel, what it would have looked like if you were there. The word “angel” describes what the women and/or Gospel writers concluded that the being actually was.
A similar thing happens in any sci-fi novel where you meet an alien creature. The writer might say either “She saw a man with the head of a fish emerge from the spacecraft” (describing what it looked like to a naive observer) or “She saw the Gzxborkian emerge from the spacecraft” (using the authorial voice to indicate what the creature actually is).
The tomb was already open when she arrived.
In Matthew 28:2, the author is backtracking in time slightly to describe what had happened just before the women arrived; what they actually saw when they got there was the final results of the events described in verses 2-4. Recall that the Evangelist claims in verses 11-15 to have inside knowledge of what the guards experienced, as well as what the women experienced. (One conceivable mechanism for this, is if one of the guards later became a Christian.)
As for the reason for the backtracking in time, the Evangelist probably had already dictated verse 1 to his scribe, and then realized he needed to describe prior events to explain what the women saw when they got there. You have to remember that people didn’t have word processors back then! So he couldn’t just copy-and-paste to rearrange the order of the verses. He just did what any normal person would do in conversation, which is to break the flow of the narrative to supply the missing events, and then proceed onwards from there.
PS This building in Rome makes it clear that the other Romans didn’t think much of the ex-praetor’s story. Either that, or they interpreted it as a spiritual vision which was fully compatible with his corpse remaining to be interred in a tomb. But the author of Acts states multiple times that Jesus’ body did not remain behind on earth to see decay. So the parallel is not quite complete.
But it is true that, as N.T. Wright argues in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, the Christian resurrection claim was much more unique than the ascension claim.
@Aron Wall
I do assign greater than zero evidential value, but my position is that the evidence for supernaturalism has to be extremely strong, since it is such an extreme claim. For (far) less extreme claims, like the existence of Jesus as a person, I am willing to consider that quite likely based on the religious documents.
I interpret evidence in a greater context of what science strongly suggests is true, as well as more subjective observations (including of human nature). I see a general tendency by many humans to substantially underestimate the randomness of life* & to come up with ‘creative’ explanations, which are often anti-scientific and sometimes religious. However, whenever scientific evaluations are done, the results are typically like this.
* Or instead of randomness, one can call it complexity that is so high that the causal mechanisms at work are beyond understanding.
My wordview is not built on pure reason. I try to ground my reasoning in fact. Of course when extrapolating from facts, the conclusions are less certain than the facts themselves.
In other words, angels are not actually distinguishable from people & we are supposed to believe that certain human-looking messengers are angels, based on faith, I guess.
This is a good illustration of my point that I’ve been trying to get across. In this world, we have observations and we have have interpretations of those observations. What I’ve tried to do, is to point out that most of what you see as proof of the supernatural in the resurrection story are interpretations of the causal mechanisms that have led to certain outcomes. These same outcomes can also be explained differently, with non-divine causal mechanisms at play.
Imagine that I find a nugget of gold. I can believe that God wanted me to have this nugget, I can believe that someone lost this nugget or I can come up with another explanation of why that nugget ended up where it did. However, all of these explanations are speculation, as I simply lack sufficient information. So I am heavily dependent on my priors, if I insist in guessing.
To go back to the Biblical resurrection, we know with high probability that people can be and have been incorrectly judged to be dead. The evidence also suggests that this is correlated with the medical training of the person who makes the call. Furthermore, we know from people who were ‘brought back’ by human intervention, that a lack of oxygen of the brain causes deterioration which makes resuscitation have worse outcomes the longer someone’s brain has been deprived of oxygen.
This kind of causal mechanism can be tested, we can explain how the mechanism works by zooming in and examining the human body in more detail, this knowledge can be used to make better choices, etc. Science is very useful.
Religion doesn’t seem useful in that way, as far as I can tell. In so far that religion may work, it seems that this is at most at the meta level. Many believers may benefit from religion, because they have a need for spirituality and perhaps believing the rules makes them live a better life. However, none of that requires the existence of and the interventions of God.
So how does Matthew know what happened before there were any witnesses present? Was he speculating?
Judging from the abstract of the study you link to, some researchers randomly assigned cardiac bypass patients to multiple groups, and then asked God to heal the people in group A, but not the people in group B. (There was a 3rd group in the study, but it isn’t relevant at the moment.) For some strange reason God did not view this as a legitimate request. Considering that the request was made with complete insincerity, it’s not hard to see why. (The researchers’ request was clearly not motivated by any actual love for the members of group A specifically.) If this had worked, it would have proved something closer to magic than religion. You can’t do a triple blind test where you also blind God to the procedure and intentions of your study.
They may as well have just asked God to strike the nearest tree with lightning to prove he exists, and then written up the results as a “scientific study”. It says something that God doesn’t usually indulge such requests, but dressing it up in the veneer of “Science!” doesn’t really add anything.
No, in the Old Testament stories I mentioned, the person is generally revealed to be an angel after they do or predict something miraculous, that human beings cannot do.
As I indicated in my previous comment, the guards witnessed it, and later reported it to others.
The women only saw the empty tomb, spoke to the angel who did it, and possibly also felt the earthquake.
Oh, and the nails are mentioned explicitly in the Bible in John 20:25. The nail marks also seem to be alluded to in Luke 24:39-40 (what other reason would there be to look at his hands and feet specifically?), while the act of nailing to the cross is mentioned (for its symbolic implications) in Col 2:14. I checked the Greek to make sure these verses contain legit references to nails, and not merely to crucifixion (although it would have been common knowledge that this was usually done with nails).
Interesting discussion here. I don’t have anything useful to contribute, but I did want to say that.
Can you summarize this historical evidence, please?
Well, in an universe that does not support life, there is nobody pondering the question.
This is not evidence of the existence of a god external to your own mind.
This is not particularly strong evidence of Jesus being divine.
I don’t know if the claim is true, but if it is true I think it would be strong evidence, although not proof.
You have a project that many people have attempted. One person achieved it much more successfully than anyone else before or after. That person claimed to be more than human.
Applying Bayesian reasoning, the posterior probability that the claim is true ought to be much higher than the prior probability, since the probability that a god could do what he did is much higher than the probability that an ordinary human could do it.
Many people tried, one happened to have done it better than anybody else, but not orders of magnitude better, Muhammad and Buddha come close by number of followers.
If I remember correctly, according to the Scripture, he didn’t even claim to be a god, this is a later interpretration.
That’s just nonsense. He may not have actually uttered the words “I am God”, but any understanding of Jewish idiom makes it crystal clear that he does make that claim repeatedly.
Several people have asked me to do this, so I’ll try to pull something brief together. But the resources johan_larson linked to should at least give a rough approximation to what I’d say.
Correct, but our existence still requires some sort of explanation.
In Bayesian terms it is evidence, since it’s more likely to happen if an objectively (real) God exists than if he doesn’t. It may not be conclusive evidence, but it’s evidence. But there is a reason I’ve also mentioned external objective evidence like miracles.
I do know of some examples of people that God spoke to even though they weren’t predisposed to expect it, and also at least one case of a person learning something important they seemingly couldn’t have known naturally.
It’s not conclusive by itself, but if some person X does claim to be the unique incarnation of a perfectly holy and wise Deity, then “X is the most insightful moral teacher of all time” had better at least pass the laugh test. For the vast majority of people who have ever lived, including most religious leaders, this claim is absurd. And if most people would fail this test, then success counts as evidence. (Basically what David said.)
If a person with a good claim to that also has one of the most impressive apparent miracles in history, then you should start to take them seriously. Surely you agree that Jesus is enormously more likely to be the Son of God, then say your neighbor next door?
I note that even if the putative caliber of Jesus’ ethical teaching isn’t particularly strong evidence on its own, it does not follow that such evidence can’t make a substantial contribution to an overall case. Put in very abstract terms, a Bayes factor that doesn’t produce much of an arithmetic difference in probabilities for a hugely improbable hypothesis can produce a substantial arithmetic difference in probabilities for a fairly improbable hypothesis. Let’s suppose that Aron’s esteem for Jesus’ ethical teaching is such that he thinks the probability of someone coming up with a system that good without divine inspiration is 1/100. Let’s also assume that his evaluations of moral systems are sufficiently coarse-grained that there’s no further information about his evaluation of Jesus’ ethical teaching and that he’s certain that someone with divine inspiration would produce this sort of impressive-seeming moral system. If the probability of Jesus’ divine inspiration were hugely low, then making it go up by a factor of 100 wouldn’t mean all that much arithmetically – the difference between 1 in 100,000,000,000 and 1 in 1,000,000,000 isn’t worth getting excited about. But if the probability of Jesus’ divine inspiration were initially around 1 in 10, then the move to probability 9 in 10 would be dramatic.
@Aron Wall
Of all of the people who claim divinity, there is always going to be one with the most impressive miracle, just like, of all the people who play the lottery, there is always going to be one who wins the biggest prize.
It seems wrong to me to conclude that the biggest lottery prize winner is much more likely to have been chosen by God to have received that prize, since we gave perfectly good reasons to believe that the person just got lucky. In a scenarios where luck plays a major role, shouldn’t we put little stock in n=1 outcomes?
@Aron Wall
You’ve already been asked what you think is the historical evidence supporting the resurrection.
What do you think Jesus’ ethical teachings were? What was his overall message to his audience? For our purposes, let’s assume that the Sermon on the Mount was either delivered as written, or was a bunch of things the historical figure Jesus said, stitched together to have a better rhythm than “one time he said this thing, and this other time, he said this other thing”, and this stitching-together has not misrepresented the overall message.
What do you think Jesus’ ethical teachings were?
Well you can read the Gospels too, but the key points seem to be this:
God is a loving Father who provides for everyone, including sinners and those who do not acknowledge him; therefore we too should love everyone, including our enemies. Morality is a matter of the heart, so we need to be very careful about making our intentions right and not focus on external behavior or ceremonial matters. Religious people need to be particularly on the watch to avoid hypocrisy and legalism. If you want to become great, you should become humble like a small child, rather than trying to make yourself an authority over other people. God will take care of you so stop being so anxious about worldly things, instead give your wealth to the poor so that you will have treasure in heaven.
What a summary like this doesn’t really get across is how he keeps on making shockingly extreme claims, that seem like common sense to him but seem like an incredibly high bar for the rest of us to clear. I can’t say this as well as Chesterton did.
Of course, many aspects of Jesus’ morality presuppose Theism (as it should if Christianity is correct), and no element is entirely original (how could it be, if it is truly the right way for humans to behave?)
I should add that Jesus’ ethics of self-sacrifice even for enemies, also fits perfectly with the theology of what he actually did. You can’t talk about Jesus’ ethics without talking about the Crucifixion.
I have read the Gospels; I went to school for the general subject (the secular study of it more than the theology, although a decent chunk of secular-study people are themselves believers of one sort or another) back when. Scholars disagree over what, exactly, Jesus’ teachings were – different sorts of scholars have different disagreements, and it often comes down to hair-splitting.
There’s broad acceptance of some things – your summary is pretty close to what median scholar would say about Jesus’ ethical message, although median scholar would probably then start talking about apocalypticism.
The elephant in the room is the gap between the Synoptics and John.
I didn’t realize you were asking me to place my beliefs in the context of secular biblical scholarship.
There, the game seems to be to reconstruct the “historical Jesus” by deciding that certain parts are what Jesus actually said, certain parts later interpolations.
They use fairly silly critria for this, for example the principle of “Double Dissimilarity” which states that anything that sounds too much like other Jewish or Christian literature should be suspected of being an interpolation, as if it were unreasonable for the Jewish founder of Christianity to sound like Judaism or Christianity. A lot of it is based on circular reasoning, for example assuming that the parts with more “developed” theology must be dated later from the rest, but the scholar decides what is more developed based on their own presuppositions about what came first.
I believe that the Gospels are basically historically accurate, so when I refer to Jesus’ teaching I mean the things actually printed on the page, including of course the apocalypticism.
Yes there is a notable difference in style between Synoptics and John, but this is exactly what you’d expect given that the Gospels were written by different people who noticed different kinds of things. (E.g. Plato and Xenophan had very different takes on Socrates, but there can still be a common person who both are describing.) John seems to presuppose that the readers already know about the synoptic material, and he includes lots of extended conversations, which I assume give the gist of what Jesus and his interlocutors said to each other rather than being what would come out of a tape recorder. But the parts that are narrative seem extremely concerned with minor details in a way that strongly suggests to me an eyewitness source for the text (as it explicitly claims).
But even if you reject John, there’s still plenty of testimony to the miraculous in the Synoptics, Acts, and in Paul (whose letters were actually written before the Gospels).
So, I think the wall between secular and religious biblical scholarship is thinner than a lot of people think. Most “secular” biblical scholars I met were religious: liberal, but religious.
What’s funny is that a lot of secular scholars think that (usually past a certain point) doing this sort of thing is a blind alley, and one of the major works of the field basically concludes it’s a blind alley, but people still try.
So, I think as historical sources, the Synoptics are pretty good. There’s a vigorous scholarly fight about John; I recall coming to the conclusion that the narrative source was legit, at a minimum. (Conversely, some people who go really hard on the “Thomas is the real-deal sayings collection” fall into a trap, because there’s some stuff in Thomas that is blatantly later insertions)
Oh, certainly. You can’t take the miracles out. Jesus was clearly understood to be a miracle worker. In general, looking at this from the modern perspective is missing a lot – we tend to wall off “religious”, “not religious”, “natural”, “supernatural” in a way that a first century Jew or Roman pagan or whatever wouldn’t.
N. T. Wright (Anglican theologian) has written some good stuff on the historical period in which the gospels and new testament were written. I highly recommend New Testament and the People of God , a good book, filled with primary sources on the topic Jewish culture in the Greco-Roman period and how the narratives about Christ relate to the period. His solid scholarship starts with what is definite and works its way to the conjectural. He also clearly explains framework he is using for understanding the gospels and new testament, i. e. understand the period and you will understand the gospels, the qumran scrolls, the gospel of thomas, Josephus’ Histories, and a variety of text from the 1st – 2nd century much better.
Thanks for answering these questions, this is all very interesting. I just want to say it’s cool you’re Larry Wall’s son. I have always been a big fan of his. Say “thanks for Perl” to your dad for me.
Random, post-Baptist Catholic here.
I have always found this to be a very weird kind of argument. What do you make of people who believe in Christ without needing to rely on that sort of thinking?
Whenever you invoke evidence, you invoke falsifiability. But I don’t think you would allow your faith to be falsified – what sort of physical or historical evidence would have to prevail in order to reverse your views? I kind of don’t believe that your faith is based on a careful study of evidence.
Hi Aron,
Thanks for the AMA. I’ve read Lewis’ Mere Christianity, Strobel’s Case for Christ, Tim Keller’s Reason for God, and a few other Christian apologetic works, and I have come away with a thought experiment which leaves me unable to accept the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection as sufficient for me to believe in its literal truth. That is, I imagined a scenario where a collection of eyewitness accounts was revealed today which are more or less identical to the gospel accounts except that they describe a the resurrection of a heretical Muslim itinerant preacher who claimed to be the son of God and was supposedly resurrected in 1940 in, say, Malaysia. There exist all the same claims as the gospels: the empty tomb, the eyewitnesses, the ascension into Heaven; as well as the circumstantial evidence: the martyrdom of the supposed eyewitnesses, the rapid growth of a persecuted sect, cultural idiosyncrasies, etc. Would you then convert to this sect based on the strength of the evidence? I do not think I would. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. Since I cannot accept this hypothetical account based on the evidence, I cannot accept the Gospel account either.
In fact, if, in addition to the accounts, there existed grainy videos and photographs which purport to show this man’s death and his life after death, and testimony from contemporary intellectuals which corroborate the accounts, I would still hesitate to believe. It would still be easier (for me) to believe that everything is an elaborate ruse/delusion/misunderstanding/legend/exaggeration/mistranslation/justification than for me to believe that a person who was biologically dead got up 3 days later with no apparent serious injuries, and furthermore to believe that he is the son of an omnipotent deity (as well as walking through walls and ascending to the clouds and all that).
What are your thoughts on this?
I would indeed believe that person was resurrected, FYI.
That is necessary but not sufficient for me to consider joining their religion.
Hume discusses a similar hypothetical involving imagined stories of Elizabeth I being resurrected in his famous discussion of evidence for miracles.
I think there are some potentially delicate issues with the heuristic you outline.
It seems that Aron’s claim is that the historical evidence for Christianity is uniquely strong. If we hold the evidence for Christianity fixed and imagine adding in analogously strong evidence for this new religious movement, then that’s importantly different. The existence of two, inconsistent religions with the same evidential profile could well change our estimate of what that evidential profile amounts to. If some number comes up on my cell phone when someone calls me that strongly suggests that it’s their number. But if some number comes up on my phone whenever any of dozens of people call me, that strongly suggests that my phone is malfunctioning and thus that the number might not belong to any of the people calling me. So just adding another Christianity-like religion doesn’t seem like a viable test.
On the other hand, one could change more. We can delete Christianity from our hypothetical, and instead have this alternative religion be uniquely well-evidenced. Then what should one think? But I’m afraid this also doesn’t seem like a promising question to me. If one imagines the alternative religion being different in relevant regards – suppose that this new religion seems to have a ludicrous ethic whereas one finds the ethics of Christianity substantially more plausible – then a difference in credulity is easy to justify. And if one imagines the alternative religion identical in all relevant regards, then it’s hard for me to see how the hypothetical gives any independent purchase on the issue. One might be worried that cultural context unfairly biases one towards some religions and away from others, but aside from such worries I’m not sure what the mental redescription of the case would do.
Augustine, I think, basically agrees. He finds the “evidence for Christianity” not in Christ’s resurrection, but in the way that these people who aren’t educated philosophers like himself live. He marvels that their ethics are so similar and yet so far above those of the Stoics/Platonists.
He has a good letter to one of his pagan friends about the evidence which has caused him to believe in Christianity. Interestingly, it is ethical and social. Christianity spread quickly, had a great message, and causes people to actually live better.
Obviously, in 1350, I might not accept this as positive evidence. But if our Malaysian Savior from 1950 also preached Effective Altruism and his people pushed the dial so far that now whenever there is a natural disaster, war, or famine within a week the world pulls its resources together to protect those vulnerable people and help them rebuild, I would join, and at least consider it possible that the Malaysian Savior is a saint, an angel, a person inspired by Providence.
Could he get me to reject Jesus Christ? Probably not. I would likely adopt some type of syncretism.
This was an especially big deal for Augustine, who was intellectually convinced of Christianity for a while, but didn’t have the willpower to actually commit to it and give up the pleasures of the flesh. The desert monks really bothered him, since they were far less educated than him, and yet far more virtuous.
Hence his famous prayer, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
Thanks for your thoughts and the pointers to Hume and Augustine. yaisaacs, you raise a good point and thanks for getting me to think about that some more.
Towards the end of your post you say
and I suppose that is partially (maybe mostly) what I am trying to do – separate my own cultural bias from the epistemic question. As I grew up in the US and was raised an evangelical Christian, I had this cultural bias in spades and also a lot of personal inertia which I worried was affecting my ability to assess the truth of the resurrection fairly. I suppose my thinking potentially introduces a negative cultural bias though, which is sort of annoying.
I think the objective evidence is strong enough that a “fair-minded and intellectually curious” person who investigates it, without a strong anti-supernatural bias, ought to come to believe as I do. However, I think very few people have the requisite degree of fair-mindedness; most people (on either side) use double-standards and are very reluctant to examine their presuppositions about what it means to be rational.
But I try to assume that people are engaging in good faith until it becomes clear they aren’t. And I don’t rule out the possibility that some honest people with different presuppositions, may look at the same evidence and come to a different conclusion than me.
Of course, from the Christian perspective, there is divine help available to assist those who really want to know the truth. “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.” From the skeptical perspective, this is a bit of a stumbling block since you can’t know at the beginning if the being supposedly providing help is even real, but it probably does no harm to try asking anyway.
I agree with you that your (a) & (b) imply the obvious duty to evangelize, and therefore I do feel responsibility to share the Gospel. In my case this mostly involves blogging and ocassionally trying to steer conversations with friends to spiritual topics. But equally obviously, being an asshole is not an effective strategy from either person’s perspective! One can be a catalyst, but at the end of the day you can’t control whether another person comes to God or not.
If you don’t like being proselytised to, then maybe you shouldn’t have responded to my bait! 😉 But I would be honestly interested to hear why you’ve found the experience unpleasant, since it might conceivably help me to be less annoying to other people in the future! I’m not sure I fully understand it, since it doesn’t bother me when people from other perspectives try to proselytize me (which admittedly happens pretty seldom).
Perhaps one reason why some people may feel annoyed when religious believers try to convert them, is that they feel like they’re being treated like tokens for a religious duty, rather than as actual people? I would argue that any concern for another person’s “soul” ought always to be placed in the context of caring for the whole person as a person (body and mind), which should normally involve at least as much listening as speaking.
What, roughly, do you take to be the set of relevant evidence?
I’m not the OP, but here’s an essay-length argument for the reality of the Resurrection, the linchpin of Christianity, if you’d like to have a look yourself.
http://pleaseconvinceme.com/2013/the-minimal-facts-of-the-resurrection/
The majority of those references are to the Bible or people commenting about the Bible. That’s not convincing.
As I understand it, arguments of this type tend to admit the four gospels as historical documents only, without any claim to sanctified accuracy. And considered as historical documents, the four gospels are apparently very good. They were written within a century of the events the describe, they agree broadly but not perfectly, and a lot of copies of them exist, so scholars have a lot to work with when trying to discern what the originals actually said. If Jesus had been a king or general, without much in the way of the supernatural attributed to him, documents like this would certainly be accepted as almost wholly reliable.
I don’t find the arguments for the Resurrection entirely convincing. Really, what standard of proof should I use for claims about the supernatural? Very high ones, surely, higher than I would accept for an extraordinary but non-supernatural claim like an alien landing. And I don’t see that claims in four old books reach that high.
But I must admit that the arguments presented are of higher quality than I had anticipated.
Even taking status of the gospels as broadly historically accurate as granted, and setting aside the supernatural nature of resurrection, the evidence seems to be equivocal at best. The kind of thing you might see if there was agreement after the fact that event X happened, without anyone having actually witnessed X or even getting their stories straight about the particulars of X.
@johan_larson
What do you mean by “very good”? They’re very good as textual sources by the standard of the times: the gospels are very well attested; they’re very far away from “we have one copy of this, and it’s fragmentary”. Certainly, we have better evidence for Jesus than many kings or generals. We also have non-Christian sources, although there appears to have been at least a little tampering by later Christian copyists.
On the other hand, the differences between the Synoptics and John are kind of a big deal, and it’s significant that Paul, writing a bit later, does not seem hugely interested in what modern scholars would call the “historical Jesus.” As a historical source to say “there was a Jewish peasant religious leader by this name, almost certainly an apocalypticist; he caused some kind of kerfuffle and was summarily executed by the Roman governor” certainly. One can even go a bit further and start talking about the specifics of his message – for which the Synoptics and some noncanonical stuff is useful; John (I use the name to refer not to a known author but rather to an unknown author, authors, editor, editors, etc) and Paul are not really. But the “we can say what Jesus said, and look, we’ve even put it back into Aramaic!” scholars are a wee bit overoptimistic.
It must also be remembered that the standards of biography and history and so on were different in those times. A biographer might compose a speech that general so-and-so gave to his men, on the grounds that, well, it’s probably kinda like what he said. Matthew and Luke use stuff from Q and stuff from Mark in different orders, sometimes to make different points; presumably they did the same with their special sources, and Mark probably did the same with whatever sources he was working with. The most we have of what Jesus said is a collection of short, pithy sayings likely to be remembered. We know a lot more of what proto-Christians and Christians a little later thought and said about Jesus than what he himself thought or said.
Thank you for your interest, folks, but ultimately I am not the right person to argue Christian advocates’ case for the reality of the Resurrection, since I don’t ultimately believe in it myself. Let me instead point you to a few sources by people who do believe in the case, and invite you to judge for yourselves.
This page, which I linked to above, is a good summary of what is called the Minimal-Facts Argument for the Resurrection, at essay length:
http://pleaseconvinceme.com/2013/the-minimal-facts-of-the-resurrection/
This YouTube video features a similar argument made by a conservative Christian theologian (William Lane Craig) in a debate on the topic, “Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRTUrvTTRAQ
Lee Stroble makes similar arguments in his book, The Case for Christ.
And finally if you find Stroble a bit too middle-brow for your taste, you can get William Lane Craig making the case directly at book length, in Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics.
I studied this stuff back in school. The conclusion I came to, personally, was that the approach taken (eg in that first link) that leads to concluding historicity of the resurrection, or taking similar approaches, would lead to concluding historicity of various supernatural claims made by other religions.
I’m interested in seeing what OP has to say; because another conclusion I made was that a lot of smart, wise, learned people, now and in the past, including plenty of people better off with those attributes than me, believed and believe in the resurrection. So it can’t be some idiot thing for idiots or some foolish thing for fools or some ignorant thing for the ignorant. At the same time, plenty of people smarter than me believed/believe in any given religion…
A lot of claimed proofs for religion and religious claims seem to be happening in a vacuum, where there’s only one religion or claim being considered at any time.
@dndnrsn
I think you make a good point about how other religions also have some evidence for various miracles, and other religions also have very wise adherents. The claims certainly shouldn’t be considered in a vacuum, as you put it.
However, I do kind of wonder whether the rigour you’re demanding is possible. Can we compare the historical evidence of Jesus’s miracles with the historical evidence for other miracles in other religions? I don’t really know much about the way the study of history works, so I don’t know how people do things like this.
@dndnrsn
Why would “other religions have miracles” be an sort of argument against Jesus’s miracles?
You’re coming from an assumption that miracles can’t exist and that each religion is only claiming that theirs work, but that’s a pretty modern view, and not one that is supported by Christian doctrine.
Christians have no problem believing that there are other powers capable of performing miracles.
In Exodus 7:12, the Egyptian magicians are also capable of turning their rods into serpents, for example.
Well, it’s not, exactly. But it seems like a reasonable counter to the argument that Jesus must have been divine because he could do miracles.
@Doctor Mist
Jesus’s claim to divinity doesn’t rest on his miracles. According to the Bible and many other sources, dozens or hundreds of men performed miracles from the beginning of humanity to the present.
It DOES support it, in that God wouldn’t allow someone who was preaching radical heresy to perform miracles in his name, which is why the Pharisees claimed that his miracles came from the devil.
@fion
The question is, “how good are the sources?” Answering that question, in whatever specific case, is the core of history, or in this case, biblical scholarship.
@echochaos
Bits of the Hebrew Bible are agnostic, so to speak, about “enemy powers” and so on. Some bits suggest that early on the God of the Bible, whose name is not supposed to be directly mentioned, was one of many. Here there appears to have been redaction – I think.
(This is all going by stuff I recall learning in school years ago. If anybody wants, I can go flip through old books, just let me know)
This was also an issue for the early Christians – meat that was eaten had often done double duty by being sacrificed to pagan gods – was it OK to eat that meat? Part of answering this question involved considering – are those pagan idols real, or are they delusions? What does eating meat sacrificed to them prior signify?
Is it even true most Christians have no problem with admitting that? If you go into a liberal, a middling, a conservative church, and ask “say, are there other powers capable of performing miracles like Jesus did” what will they say? Can everyone cast Raise Dead?
The views held by different groups using different collections of the books we call the Bible at different times vary. Some would be really shaken up by miracles or whatever performed in the names of other powers.
The Bible and the Quran can’t both be right. If being historical sources gives credence to their miracles, their miracles are used as evidence for the religions veracity and both religions directly contradict each other then that’s a serious problem for both the Muslim and the Christian.
@Wrong Species
Just what miracles in the Quran did you have in mind?
“Performs miracles, preaches heresy” is basically the definition of a false prophet, as codified in Deuteronomy 13:2-4.
“If there arise in the midst of thee a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams—and he give thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spoke unto thee—saying: `Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them’; thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet”
I had the impression that the Muslim would say that the miraculous Christian claims are true, but Christianity has been superseded by Islam – i.e. the same thing that the Christian would say about Judaism.
Scott discussed this in a post on his old blog called “Mormonism: The Control Group For Christianity?”, comparing the historical evidence for the resurrection to the evidence for Joseph Smith’s golden plates.
I don’t think anyone has found a control group for Judaism’s central claim, though: (Deut. 4:32-34) “For ask now of the days past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and from the one end of heaven unto the other, whether there hath been any such thing as this great thing is, or hath been heard like it?
Did ever a people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as thou hast heard, and live?
Or hath God assayed to go and take Him a nation from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before thine eyes?”
@JulieK
Muslims believe that Jesus was just a man, not a supernatural being. The claims made in the Bible clearly indicate otherwise. I chose my words carefully. I didn’t say that Jesus and Muhammed couldn’t both perform miracles. I said that if the Bible as historical evidence can be used to support Christianity, then the Quran can be used to support Islam and those are inherently contradictory.
@ jaskologist
Miracles of Muhammed. Includes splitting the moon
@JulieK @Wrong Species
My Shia friend informs me that Jesus did perform miracles, but was never crucified, so the resurrection did not happen.
EchoChaos:
“which is why the Pharisees claimed that his miracles came from the devil.”
Are you sure? I thought that in Judaism, Satan was God’s prosecuting attorney and presumably doesn’t have the power to do miracles.
@Nancy Lebovitz and @EchoChaos, see Matthew 9:34 where the Pharisees say Jesus “casts out demons through the prince of the demons.” Second Temple Judaism was a whole lot broader than Rabbinical Judaism.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
The Christian Bible claims the Pharisees said so, but the Pharisees were their outgroup, so it may not be an accurate report.
In any case, the question of “Are these Divine miracles or Satanic miracles?” would not even matter. As I said in my earlier comment about the concept of a “false prophet,” *even if* a Jew sees someone do a miracle, he should not follow this person’s instructions to violate Jewish law (e.g to start worshipping a human being, or to not do circumcision, or eat to non-kosher).
@Evan Þ:
“Second Temple Judaism was a whole lot broader than Rabbinical Judaism.”
True, but the Pharisees are in fact the Rabbis of Rabbinic Judaism.
As it happens, I am currently composing a series of blog posts on Comparing Religions in which I plan to compare the evidence for the miracles (among other things) in different religions (including the Splitting of the Moon, which is in my opinion the strongest miracle claim in Islam, although apart from a very brief statement in the Quran the descriptions all come from the Hadith, i.e. later traditions.). However, I’m being a bit of a perfectionist about it so I haven’t even released the first post yet. But you can see a list of the relevant questions I would/will ask near the end of my post Theology: Less Speculative than Quantum Gravity. Note that most ancient religions do quite badly on questions 4-6 since the religious scriptures are frequently written multiple centuries or even millenia later than the events described. (And yes, if I thought there was a religion that, taking the a set of questions like these as a whole, seemed more plausible than Christianity, then I would probably convert to that religion.)
fion,
The reason your Muslim friend says that is because the Quran says it:
JulieK,
If none of the rules are supposed to change, then how come Jeremiah prophesied that there would be a New Covenant? And aren’t many of the laws obviously inapplicable to a modern setting and/or future Messianic kingdom?
I had a conversation with a Jewish guy about this a while back. If you’re interested, please see his original comment, my response “Is God allowed to update the Torah?”, and the discussion in the comments.
johan_larson wrote:
I want to highlight this. The standard approach of ancient historians is not to reject high quality source material because it contains apparent contradictions. Apparent contradictions are quite normal even in honest eye-witness testimony, as courts around the world know. This is basically equivalent to saying that you ought to assign a large Bayes factor to this historical evidence, i.e. that if you disbelieve it it is because of your prior probabilities, not because the posterior evidence is weak compared to other ancient historical documents.
I also want to mention that, compared to many other ancient documents, the external (i.e. attribution by other authors) support for the authorship of the Gospels is quite strong. The authors’ names are also written on the earliest complete copies of the texts that we possess, and there is no evidence of earlier forms of the text circulating without these names. Furthermore there is a scholarly consensus on the Pauline authorship (and therefore the early date) of the description of witnesses in 1 Cor 15:1-9.
There is also good historical evidence that certain key claimed eyewitnesses were (predictably) martyred for their faith: James the Apostle (Acts), James the brother of Jesus (Josephus plus a couple 2nd century writers), Peter and Paul in Rome (multiple sources plus relatively early holy sites). (As it happens I’ve seen the coffin where Peter is supposedly buried with my own eyes, even though it is not generally open to the public.) Actually tradition says 11 out of the 12 were martyred, but I am excluding from consideration the less reliable traditions. This is evidentially relevant for certain kinds of theories involving deliberate fraud.
It sounds like for you, the question comes down to the priors. You seem to be assuming that any supernatural belief should be assigned a lower probability than any naturalistic belief, regardless of how implausible the latter is. I don’t see why that should be, especially since I can think of arbitrarily implausible naturalistic beliefs.
I don’t think the traditional arguments for the existence of God are anywhere close to watertight, but even if you think they are as full of holes as Swiss cheese, they are still good enough that the prior probability of Theism shouldn’t be taken to be infinitesimally tiny. (And therefore, neither should the prior probability of miracles since P(miracles|Theism) is order unity.)
Why would this not apply to Islam as well? Are Muslims all not fair minded and intellectually curious? (Clearly they don’t have an anti-supernatural bias.)
The intellectual climate in Muslim areas doesn’t exactly lend itself to fair-minded questioning of Islam.
In the Islamic case I think you have one absolutely indisputable “miracle”—the series of conquests by which the Arabs, who had been bit players in the regional geopolitical conflicts, conquered all of one of the great powers and half of the other in a period of about twenty years after the death of Mohammed.
I can’t think of anything else that might compete with the resurrection as evidence, however. Most of the material on the very early history, as I understand it, is oral tradition written down a fair while later.
@DavidFriedman
Isn’t that just selection effect? There were many tribes in history with their own religions. We only look at the ones that spread to become major world religions, thru whatever a priori wildly unlikely series of events (same goes for Christianity).
It’s analogous to the fine-tuning argument for physical constants – if there are a large number of universes and physicists are only possible in 10^-100 of them, those physicists will be amazed at the “miracle” of fine tuning. But it’s just selection and the Law of Large Numbers.
@DavidFriedman
The military conquests of the Mongols seem more impressive.
@Aapje, The Mongols lost most of their best territory within a few generations; a majority of the valuable territory Islam conquered is still in Islamic hands today.
Just as a point of data, I spent about five years trying to figure out whether the God of the bible exists before I came to the conclusion he probably doesn’t. I don’t think I was using double standards or reluctant to examine my presuppositions during that time, since I really didn’t know what I would end up believing at the end! (In fact if anything I think I was motivated to stay Christian, since it would have been easier from a social point of view as well as from the point of view of being able to give prepackaged answers to many questions rather than having to think about them…)
By the way, the main things that eventually turned me away from Christianity were [in no particular order] (a) seeing the inconsistency with which people approach questions in the neighborhood of “does believing in God make you a good person?” and feeling unable to trust the reasoning of a system of thought that led to such an inconsistency, (b) eventually deciding that Eliezer’s “Kolmogorov complexity” formulation of Occam’s razor should be taken seriously as a fundamental epistemology, and (c) trying to do detailed research on many alleged modern miracles and finding that none of them were very solid and many of them were extremely dubious.
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Just as a point of data, I spent about five years trying to figure out whether the God of the bible exists before I came to the conclusion he probably doesn’t. I don’t think I was using double standards or reluctant to examine my presuppositions during that time, since I really didn’t know what I would end up believing at the end! (In fact if anything I think I was motivated to stay Christian, since it would have been easier from a social point of view as well as from the point of view of being able to give prepackaged answers to many questions rather than having to think about them…)
By the way, the main things that eventually turned me away from Christianity were [in no particular order] (a) seeing the inconsistency with which people approach questions in the neighborhood of “does believing in God make you a good person?” and feeling unable to trust the reasoning of a system of thought that led to such an inconsistency, (b) eventually deciding that Eliezer’s “Kolmogorov complexity” formulation of Occam’s razor should be taken seriously as a fundamental epistemology, and (c) trying to do detailed research on many alleged modern miracles and finding that none of them were very solid and many of them were extremely dubious.
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Doesn’t the fact that Kolmogorov complexity is uncomputable sink it as a fundamental epistemology?
So the way I think about it, what Solomonoff induction is saying is that you should only count something as a hypothesis to the extent that it could plausibly be cashed out as saying that the universe is run by a Turing machine, and if this is the case, then the plausibility of the hypothesis should be related to the complexity of this Turing machine. Sure, there is still the problem of not being able to enumerate all possible hypotheses, but this problem is not specific to Solomonoff induction.
To put it another way, sure it’s possible that there is a short Turing machine that gives you the God of the bible (since there’s lots of short Turing machines that we don’t know what they do). But since there is no particular reason to believe that such a machine exists, you treat it as though there isn’t one.
Isn’t that just encoding the conclusion in the assumptions?
1. Assume that everything must be implementable as a Turing Machine.
2. Assume that God can’t be described as a Turing Machine.
3. Therefore, there is no God.
What actually justifies using this uncomputable metric as our rule of thumb?
Yeah, so I hadn’t intended my comment to be a description of _why_ I eventually decided that Kolmogorov complexity should be taken seriously as a fundamental epistemology. But basically it is because the idea of a universe outputted by a Turing machine fundamentally makes sense to me as a kind of object that has internal coherence to it, whereas if you talk about a universe created by God and say that what you’re saying can’t be fundamentally reduced to Turing machines, then I’m not really sure how to make sense of what you say.
To put it another way, the heuristic seems to be an accurate description of how I think, and it doesn’t seem helpful to ask whether it’s justified in some absolute sense.
With respect, (a) doesn’t really seem like an evidential argument to me. People are bad at giving clear answers to questions in general. It probably doesn’t help that there are about a dozen different ways to interpret the question.
Sorry, hit “post comment” too early and then couldn’t edit for some reason. The dozen questions was supposed to link here.
With regard to (b), the Kolmogorov complexity is not just uncomputable, it also depends somewhat on your choice of programming language. This seems odd for a fundamental conviction about epistemology/metaphysics. There is also some arbitrariness in how fast you want your prior to fall off with the number of bits b (2^-b seems natural, but is not acceptable due to its unnormalizability.)
While it may provide inspiration in certain cases, it also seems impossible to estimate in practice. Please tell me, how large you think the Kolmogorov complexity of GR is, and is it greater or less than the complexity of Newtonian gravity with point particles? Please provide actual numbers, although they may be estimates or guesses.
Finally, it seems to me that there are some important questions which a Turing machine description of Nature is unable to answer even in principle. For example, questions related to consciousness/qualia.
And is it really reasonable to assign a 0% prior probability to the possibility that the universe may be uncomputable in certain respects?
With regard to (c), which alleged modern miracles did you investigate specifically? I’m certainly not claiming they’re all supported by evidence.
Unless God is actually the programmer of the Turing machine that implements the universe, which seems exactly what the many “rationalists” seem to believe when they talk about the “simulation hypothesis”, except that they avoid the word “God”.
Anyway, I’ve read people claim both that Solomonoff induction implies Atheism, and that it implies Christianity. Both claims are nonsense. Solomonoff induction implies nothing about the world we live in, because we can’t compute it, or even approximate it in any meaningful sense.
Regarding (a), it seemed to me like the inconsistency was mostly baked into the system of thought, not the result of particular people being unable to give good answers to questions. In terms of the numbered list that you link to, what I am worried about is the tension between #10 and #11. In order to get to heaven you’re supposed to have to ask Jesus to forgive you. But obviously it’s not fair for people who disbelieve through no fault of their own (and I have no idea why you think this is uncommon) to be penalized for it.
My impression is that you are trying to resolve this difficulty by saying that although it’s “hard” to “put your trust in Jesus as the Savior sent by God” if you don’t believe in God, it’s still possible. I don’t see how it’s possible, it seems like the only reason that someone would think it is possible is if they noticed this inconsistency and were trying to resolve it. Incidentally, I think historically Christians were a lot harder on atheists, they were pretty sure that we were all going to hell, basically ignoring #11. But now that is whitewashed and their statements are reinterpreted to be consistent with #11.
Regarding (b), I think using the phrase “fundamental epistemology” may have been a mistake. What I mean is that when I reflect on my intuitions for what kind of universe I expect to find myself in, they seem to correspond roughly to some sort of Kolmogorov prior. Obviously the details of that are a bit fuzzy, and Kolmogorov priors corresponding to different programming languages might line up better or worse with my intution. But I really just don’t have an intuition for what the world could be like if it wasn’t like a computer program. What is that supposed to be, exactly? Your comment about a Turing machine description being unable to answer questions related to consciousness/qualia seems to be pointing to the kind of fundamental confusion that I want to avoid by expressing everything as a Turing machine. I think Eliezer’s post on zombies gives a pretty good argument for why consciousness is just a property of the output of the algorithm computing the universe.
I can imagine non-computable mathematical objects but my intuition pretty much says “no, you shouldn’t expect to find yourself in such a universe”. Maybe this is too dogmatic but it doesn’t have much to do with the point at hand anyway.
Regarding (c), I don’t really remember that well right now, though I remember I looked at Lanciano and Fatima, and at some of Joe Nickell’s books. (Lanciano is not a modern miracle but there was a study of it in the 20th century that people make some extreme claims about, though the study itself doesn’t say much.) I realize there’s a bias here in that I was mostly investigating Catholic miracles (since I was raised Catholic). I don’t know much about miracles of other religions or denominations.
I should probably note that biblical inconsistencies and genocide are also a part of why I don’t believe, though maybe it is better to stick to the topics I already mentioned.
@vV_Vv: Sure, Solomonoff induction doesn’t rule out the simulation hypothesis. But that is not what most people are talking about when they talk about the God of the bible. If you want to link the two ideas up, can you explain why the simulators care about the things that the God of the bible cares about? And why do they seem suspiciously similar to the things that humans care about?
Doesn’t the Kolmogoroff/Solomonoff approach have the embarrasing side effect that it is unable to justify MWI?
Many theists regard God as infinitely simple, rather than infinitely complex. It is only from within our universe that the illusion of complexity arises.
(Likewise, in response to Greek, MWI can be regarded as having a form similar to a fractal; a simple process giving rise to complex results)
@Dacyn
I dunno, God is playing the Sims? 🙂
The actual proponents of the simulation hypothesis (e.g. Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk) seem to believe that the Almighty
Godprogrammer does care about human affairs.@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
It is unable to justify anything, since humans can’t compute it. People who claim that, e.g. Solomonoff induction implies MWI are bullshitting.
@TheAncientGeek: I’m not a big MWI fan. I’m not sure that it’s meaningful to ask whether MWI is true or not.
@Thegnskald: Sure they assert God’s simplicity, but then they go on using the same human intuitions regarding God’s psychology, without giving any explanation of how such a psychology could arise in a simple being. Even those theologians that take great care not to anthropomorphize God still end up saying something like that God is all-good for some notion of goodness (even if it’s “not the human notion of goodness”) — and it’s not clear how a concept of goodness can be simple. If you really take the concept of simplicity seriously then you just end up with a deism that is functionally equivalent to saying that there is no God.
@vV_Vv: God is playing the Sims? He takes charge of a random ancient civilization and intervenes a couple times to make them win against their neighbors, but most of the time he lets them lose to “teach them a lesson” about how they need to worship him. Then he puts an author-insert character which tells people they need to expand their circle of moral concern, and organizes the resulting religion so that people believe the author-insert character’s horrible death means that their God has “suffered the same things they’ve suffered”. I mean I guess he could have downloaded the memories of the suffering onto his real brain? Or he could just be lying. And why does he care so much about getting people to expand their circle of moral concern when he clearly doesn’t care about the people in his simulation in the first place? And if he is just after the thrill of getting people to worship him, why doesn’t he reveal himself to more people nowadays? Maybe it would be boring to have the whole world worship you, it is better to just do random stuff instead to make it interesting…
Yeah, I mean I guess it sort of works. It seems like this simulator isn’t someone I want to get to know better, so I guess I should just be glad he doesn’t seem to have taken an interest in my life…
I don’t know, I guess I never really took the simulation hypothesis seriously, it never struck me as the kind of thing you’re supposed to take seriously.
By the way, are you just going to keep repeating yourself regarding uncomputability being an insurmountable obstacle for the Kolmogorov/Solomonoff approach, or are you actually interested in responding to the substantive remarks I made on the issue in previous comments? Not that I mind either way.
Dacyn –
I think the philosophical mistake lays in assuming God is made up of the same sort of stuff humans are made of.
Maybe Goodness is quite simple, it only gets complex when implemented by imperfect meatware operating on imperfect information.
Likewise, knowledge could be quite simple, it is just that our universe makes it complex to acquire and store.
(Mind, I am an atheist, and regard God as being about as relevant as platonic ideals. The idea of perfection is, to me, a fallacy; perfect for what? Which means the idea of God looks to me like the idea of a perfect chair; not impossible so much as meaningless, a referent to something that cannot be defined outside of a subjective and impossible.to communicate context.)
So, the notion of goodness can’t be completely alien to us, since otherwise it’s not clear why we would call it “goodness” rather than something else. It’s pretty difficult to see how any of the things we usually call goodness could arise from any sort of simple principles. (E.g. a lot of the theory of morality depends on the concept of an agent, which does not appear to be a simple concept.)
EYs writings on zombies only argue against epiphenomenonalism, not for consciousness being computational.
Arguments based on Kolmogorov complexity, and so, have a single-workd bias built in, because of they are framed in turns of a linear output.
The fundamental problem of epistemology, coming to conclusions that are not just a reflection of the premises, remains unaddressed.
I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to draw between non-epiphenomenalism and consciousness being computational, but in any case it seemed like Aron Wall was taking an epiphenomenalist point of view.
I’m not sure what you mean by a “single-world bias”. Is that a belief that only one universe “exists”? I tend to Taboo the word “exists”.
Regarding “coming to conclusions that are not just a reflection of the premises”, isn’t that what Bayesian updating is for? If that’s not what you mean, then I’m not sure why you would want to do such a thing.
Do you doubt that there is one?
Maybe you could answer the following questions:
is everything a computer?
Does everything have causal powers?
I didn’t see that, but I then don’t think non-computationalism is epiphenomenalism.
“We can already do MWI vs Collapse without being clear on F=ma. MWI is not even considered because MWI does not output a string that begins with the observed data, i.e. MWI will never be found when doing Solomonoff induction. MWI’s code may be a part of correct code, such as Copenhagen interpretation (which includes MWI’s code). Or something else may be found (my bet is on something else because general relativity). It is this bloody simple.
The irony is, you can rule MWI out with Solomonoff induction without even choosing the machine or having a halting oracle. Note: you can’t rule out existence of many worlds. But MWI simply does not provide the right output.”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kyc5dFDzBg4WccrbK/an-intuitive-explanation-of-solomonoff-induction
Not as operated by finite minds.
Look, let’s try to hug the query and not get caught up in definitional debates. I think Eliezer would agree with my take on Aron’s comment. I think Aron would disagree with Eliezer’s zombie post. If someone says to me that they agree with both Eliezer’s post and with Aron’s comment, then I feel like I don’t have a good grasp of what their position is. Are you saying that you agree with both? If so, can you explain your position further?
I don’t think I can answer either of your next two questions, since I don’t know what you mean by “everything”. If you pick some category of things (like physical objects or events), then I might be able to answer. (Though maybe you should also clarify what you mean by “computer”, do you just mean the output of a Turing machine? I do think that the universe is the the output of a Turing machine.)
Thanks for the clarification about single-world bias. As I said previously, I don’t see MWI vs Copenhagen as a meaningful question. Sure if you want to predict someone’s observations, in the end those observations will only come from one world. But it’s also only one person’s observations that you’re predicting. Do you say that Solomonoff induction has a solipsism bias? That seems to be a strange way of interpreting it.
Your last remark is too cryptic for me…
More like disagree with both.
You are overcomplicating things. This is ELI5 stuff: in everyday terms , there are lots of things, physical objects, which aren’t computers, and they have causal powers.
So, although
“Not-epiphenomenalism” means “has causal powers”.
it is not the case that
“has causal powers” doesn’t mean “is a computer”.
That’s self contradictory.
Would the existence of an invisible, non-interfering God matter?
No.
I don’t think this conversation is productive, I’m tapping out.
Just to clarify, I am disagreeing with Eliezer on zombies. As I wrote in a post on Consciousness and Falsifiability, I think the anti p-zombies argument is based on a misuse of Occam’s razor:
Yeah, I’m not surprised 🙂 For the record, I think that the notion of logical possibility as it is understood by philosophers is also a confusion. Whether a particular sentence is logically possible depends entirely on how you cash out its terms, but the way that you cash out a term is not a matter of logic, but of linguistic interpretation. What I conceive Eliezer’s argument to be doing is showing that a particular conception of consciousness is incoherent, and pointing to a different conception of consciousness (i.e. one that says consciousness is computational) that doesn’t appear to be incoherent.
Thanks for this and for your other answer — I don’t have a lot of time right now, but I am interested in what you’ve said and will check back in on this conversation. I should clarify that I didn’t intend any kind of aggression or implied criticism of you personally (not that you seem to have taken it badly, but I realise I might have come across a bit sharply). I respect your approach here — the gentle but open approach is probably your best shot at converting people like me!
I think my dislike of being proselytised to is partly a result of the specific ways it has happened — perhaps because (in my circles) there’s generally a mild social taboo against it, so the people who do it at all tend to be either rather fanatical or oblivious to/heedless of social niceties. But deeper than that, I think I often find it unsettling — sometimes I feel like there’s a wall between me and my interlocutor, with genuine communication almost impossible because of the giant gulf (if I may mix my metaphors) between our ways of seeing the world. And the fact that I agree with them that this is potentially the most important topic in the world only makes it more painful.
Less intensely, I think sometimes it’s just frustrating, because the only ways I can see myself being talked into religious belief either involve deep and lengthy discussion of a kind that is often not a realistic possibility (e.g. if it’s inevitable that we’re only going to have a brief conversation, or if the other person seems unwilling or unable to engage me on my wavelength), or some kind of charismatic brainwashing that I would be better off without.
And I should admit that there’s probably an element of fear, at least in some cases; even though I don’t find any religion plausible, I’m not actually a confident atheist, so there’s always room for doubt and perhaps it’s hard for me to completely discount any internally consistent belief system — and/or my superstitious side can take anything seriously, even if my mind shelves it as fiction.
(Your thoughts about people being treated as ‘tokens for a religious duty’ seem plausible to me, though they don’t quite gel with my own (conscious) feelings.)
Sorry if this is worthlessly sloppy and incomplete — I just wanted to give a quick initial response.
I didn’t read interpret your remarks as being critical.
It sounds like for you, a lot of the discomfort is intrinsic to the subject, so maybe there’s nothing to be done to prevent it…
It’s my conviction that courageous and intellectually honest people need to make time to examine these issues directly. However, it is also emotionally healthy to take breaks and try not to engage in a neurotic or superstitious way. It may be helpful to think, that if Christianity is true, then God loves you and isn’t out to trap you or trick you, so you can take your time and do things the right way at the right time.
If at any point in the future, after the current conversation on SSC has settled down, you wish to have that “deep and lengthy discussion”, feel free to send me an email (or meet in person if you prefer and are able). But don’t feel obliged.
How do you reconcile the omniscience of God with the Principle of Locality?
The Principle of Locality is an experimentally observed fact about matter, but if there is something outside spacetime then it’s not clear why Locality would apply to it, or what it would even mean in this context.
Also, God is not some old guy sitting in a throne room in heaven with a body and a brain, who needs to have signals come to his eye in order to process it. He’s the fundamental reality that sustains everything else in being. His knowledge is not a different thing from truth, it is identical to the truth. If he didn’t know about you, you wouldn’t exist.
As someone who studied physics I am super interested in this. Here are a bunch of questions, so feel free to ignore any you don’t feel like answering.
1. What’s your preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics and why?
2. What fraction of physics faculty do you think are religious? I guess we can look up stats but I’m interested in your impression. Do you think it varies by sub-field of physics?
3. Do you see any tension between physical laws and miracles? If so how do you resolve the tension? If not, why isn’t there a tension?
4. What’s your probability of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life? If there is intelligent extraterrestrial life, what are the religious implications?
5. How big do you think the universe is (including the non-observable parts)?
6. What are your classmates from grad school doing now?
7. What’s your probability of the LHC finding physics beyond the standard model? Of any experiment in the next 20 years finding some?
8. Are firewalls real?
9. Does string theory describe our universe?
10. How often do you think miracles occur today?
11. Why doesn’t God make his existence more obvious?
12. Do atheists go to hell?
13. What do your colleagues think of your religious views?
14. Would a sufficiently accurate computer simulation of a human have a soul?
15. What’s your probability that any experiment will probe quantum gravity in the next 50 years?
16. How much time did you spend doing post-docs?
17. Do too many people get physics PhDs?
18. Does the government spend too much or too little on theoretical physics research? Should the government fund quantum gravity research and if so why? Is it possible for mathematical or scientific research to be so remote from practical applications that it isn’t worth spending public money on it?
People have already started to look for evidence for/against certain QG theories in gravitational wave detection signals.
Unless you’re talking about the attempt to measure tensor modes from inflation, most astrophysical QG tests are really measuring violations of Lorentz Invariance. That’s regarded as a long shot.
But I can’t know for certain what you’re alluding to unless you provide a link.
I can’t seem to find again what I think I saw on arXiv, so it’s quite possible I was remembering incorrectly.
First 1/2 of Anatid’s questions:
That’s a really hard question. I hate MWI for several reasons, for example I don’t think it possible to derive the Born rule from the other postulates of QM. It seems like a contradiction to say that on the one hand every possibility with nonzero amplitude exists, but on the other hand the possibilities with greater (absolute) amplitude somehow are more real than the others. Existence isn’t the sort of thing that should come in degrees!
But I don’t really have any clear alternative to give you. I’m sympathetic to the idea that QM is somehow a consistent deformation of Bayesian probability theory, but I don’t know how to reconcile this idea with the Kochen-Specker theorem.
It may be that part of the moral of QM is that somehow what’s really definite is the final outcome of any process. But I guess that only makes sense if there is a privileged basis at the end of time for measuring the universe.
Supposedly the statistics say that almost 40% of American scientists believe in a God who answers prayers. But my experience is completely different; only a small handful seem to be in any definite way religious (although I know of a couple closeted examples). I expect this is explained by a difference in culture between elite academic institutions, as opposed to industry/government, or liberal arts colleges.
I don’t know about subfields, but I’m pretty sure that biology is more hostile than physics due to the Creation vs. Evolution wars.
This is actually something that bothers me less now that I am a professional physicist. All known laws of nature are approximations to reality, that are valid only in some limited domain. For example, QED describes some things very accurately to many decimal places, but it doesn’t include effects from the weak force.
In order to be a Christian I have to believe there are realities outside of the known universe (all of them ultimately originating from God) which sometimes cause effects within our own universe. But that doesn’t seem all that weird to me, it’s really the situation we’re always in when we understand some things well, and other things poorly.
This is difficult to estimate, in part because there is deep controversy over how to correctly incorporate observer selection effects into Bayesianism. (This is one reason why I don’t know how to make predicitions if there is a Multiverse.) For example, does our own existence count as evidence that life is common?
Since I don’t know how to answer the question properly, I’ll replace it with a different question and tell you that I’d certainly prefer to think that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists! It seems like the universe would be more interesting if it did.
I think the religious implications are actually quite minimal, in the absence of further information about the alien species. Christians have always believed in the existence of intelligent life other than humans (that is, angels). Presumably intelligent aliens would have their own separate relationship with God, which might be quite different from our own. (If we actually met them and learned about their religions, it might provide evidence in one direction or another.)
Well, at the largest distance scales it looks roughly homogeonous (the same everywhere) and isotropic (same in each direction). So it seems highly probable that at least for a ways outside the observable universe, it’s just more of the same. But at larger distance scales, it might be quite different, especially if inflation is true.
(If inflation lasts forever to the future, this could potentially be the source of a Multiverse.)
I sort of philosophically like the idea of a large but finite universe. It seems problematic if everything we observe is copied infinitely many times in different places.
I’ve lost track of most of them (I graduated 7 years ago), and a lot of them have probably left academia. But Aleksey Cherman is faculty at U Washington, David Norris seems to be a postdoc at the Joint Quantum Institute, Ray Fermo seems to be a postdoc at U Alabama Huntsville, and my academic younger brother (i.e. my advisor’s next student who overlapped with me) Will Donnelly is a postdoc at Perimeter.
At the moment, things are looking glum for new physics at the LHC. (A lot of physicists were expecting supersymmetry to help resolve the fine tuning of the Higgs field, but I thought it wouldn’t be there.) We are therefore faced with the depressing prospect of a Standard Model which must be incomplete, but which works well wherever we can test it.
There’s probably at least a 25% chance we’ll manage to more directly detect dark matter sometime soon. There are low-energy experiments to measure if neutrinos are their own antiparticle or not. But if you want major new experimental data, I’d look for it in cosmology rather than high energy physics.
Quantum gravity is in one respect more desperate since we don’t have any experiments, but in another way it’s better because there are deep conceptual/consistency conditions to help guide us. That’s part of why I work in that area.
Deeply controversial, but after much heartache I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that they are. There must be some sort of quantum gravity phase transition which happens for sufficiently old black holes.
The only sensible alternative seems to be to give up the usual linearity of QM when interpreting observables inside the event horizon. Either that, or admit that information is lost inside of black holes, but I believe it comes out because of Don Marolf’s “boundary unitarity” argument for the holographic principle.
For a brief pop-description of the firewalls paradox, see here.
String theory seems to be mathematically consistent, but there’s no actual experimental evidence for it. Given this, I’m not comfortable assigning it a probability higher than about 25-30% of being right. The bulk of the remaining probability should be assigned to “something we haven’t thought of yet”.
(old enough) black holes may actually be surrounded by a wall of fire which burns people up when they cross the event horizon
HOW HAVE I NEVER BEFORE HEARD OF THIS AMAZING SUPER-COOL THING?
And thank you for linking that!
Because it’s extremely new and incredibly controversial?
Except wait a minute, in other areas of life, that’s a reason why you would have heard of it.
I also think physicists have not really seized the opportunity here.
“Firewall” to schlubs like me evokes the faint association of “oh yeah, like with PCs, right?”
Whereas what you guys are really talking about is INESCAPABLE DOOM RINGS OF TOTAL INCINERATION, RAVENING MAWS OF ANNIHILATION, REDUCTION TO CALCINED ASHES, THE SIXTH CIRCLE OF HELL 🙂
You know there’s only one song for this!
I don’t know about Johnny Cash, but firewalls do sound like the sort of thing Natalie Wolchover would write about. 😛
Now I want to have this song:
Although, it might be confused for a song about STDs.
What do you make of Sean Carroll’s argument that any currently-unknown physical interaction must be either too weak or too short-lived or both to have any non-negligible effect on human scales?
I replied to another, similar argument by Sean Carroll in a blog post about the afterlife:
But if we exclude the supernatural and tricky philosophical questions about things like consciousness, I do agree with him that it is quite unlikely that we need to know anything about e.g. quantum gravity or beyond the Standard Model particles to understand the basic interactions of matter in everyday life.
I am considering learning string theory as a mathematical model for the universe, to hang a set of ideas I have upon, because I have an inkling it might be an easier mathematical model to implement a new idea on than the standard model. I have realized I have been utterly unsuccessful in conveying the idea in English, so mathematics seems the next logical step. However, the set of ideas is incompatible with string theory, in that it specifies a different reality than string theory, in something the same way relativity as a description of altered space-time coordinate relationships is incompatible with string theory’s description of reality as scalar (ish) relationships.
Does this seem like a fruitless endeavor?
While string theory is a good playground for testing various kinds of ideas, to be frank when somebody outside of physics says “I have a great physics idea and I just need to learn the relevant math to implement it” it usually ends up being a crackpot idea. So I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean…
Excellent. I will learn it, then.
And I am not hoping to be right, exactly; I am hoping to build a toy model demonstrating a concept upon which the correct model can be built. But as far as I can tell, I have thus far failed to convey the core idea correctly to other people, so I have decided I need a mathematical demonstration of the idea in order to correctly convey it.
Core idea in a nutshell: Scale, in the sense of a peanut is smaller than a planet, is relative, in the sense that an observer cannot determine a “center” of the scale of the universe. There is neither a largest nor a smallest particle, and there is absolutely nothing special about the scale we happen to exist at. The theory of everything should have a recursive or fractal element.
The more specific idea is an attempt to create a model of reality which conforms to this principle. It is difficult to mathematicize, as it adds a waveform to relativity, and makes relativity self-interfering (if it wasn’t already, I have had trouble determining this), which is to say, the curvature of space-time is itself propagated across curved space-time. I can write a basic non-interfering formula, but am struggling to try to reverse-engineer the constants. (And adding self-interference is well beyond my understanding of manifold mathematics). Most of the explanation revolves around the relationship of this to real-world physics; trying to derive particles and electrical forces in terms of the model.
Some weird stuff has popped out of it. Uncertainty, for example, which I hadn’t actually included, and which surprised me when it arose “naturally” from locality.
ETA:
But yes, it is probably a crackpot theory. At this point, however, it is no longer within my ability to evaluate, so I aim to get it into a form where other people can do so.
Possibly stupid question about black holes:
New matter enters. Event horizon expands slightly. Doesn’t the firewall get eaten?
(Isn’t it easier just to suppose the information is preserved as gravitational waves emitted by the matter and black holes as the matter falls in?)
That’s what most people thought at first, but then the AMPS paper derived a logical contradiction between the information coming out, and the event horizon being in a nearly vacuum state for an infalling observer. So we have to deny some premise, and if we deny the latter premise, we get a firewall.
If there is a Planck-energy-density firewall, it’s not clear there would even be spacetime on the other side of it.
Nobody knows because there is no model of the firewall, just a logical paradox that says one of our assumptions is wrong. But because the paradox only arises for sufficiently old black holes, it seems possible that adding some more matter might freshen it up and make an interior exist again for a while.
I am just confused as to what the paradox is. In part it seems to revolve around whether or not the event horizon is a well-defined boundary, to which the answer seems obviously “No”, since a well-defined event horizon would violate locality by providing information about the location of the singularity, information which shouldn’t be able to escape the singularity in the first place. (This, to my mind, is where uncertainty arises from locality.). Thus, we get an echo effect where the probability distributions of the locations of the two black holes are sufficiently dense, implying some of the echoes might precede the “real” wave.
But, eh, not really my area of expertise or interest, and maybe I am missing what makes the problem substantial out of ignorance.
Well in the Craig Keener book on Miracles, he estimates (I think based on surveys) that hundreds of millions of people claim to have seen miracles. Probably not all of them are legit. But as a regular churchgoer in a (non-Pentecostal) denominations that still believe in praying for healing, occasionally it does happen that people in the congregation are healed of a disease after prayer in a way that surprised their doctors. I also have a cousin-in-law who was born with twisted leg muscles so that it was impossible for him to run, and he and his parents told me he was instantly healed after prayer.
Of course, if like me you already think miracles happen, then the standards for accepting another one should be considerably lower than the evidential standard for accepting your first miracle.
Some do, some don’t. See the previous link.
I don’t think of damnation as some legalistic thing which God arbitrarily imposes on certain people he doesn’t like. Rather, damnation is a possible outcome if a person chooses to self-modify into a form where they are permanently closed off from the possibility of receiving truth and the forgiveness of sins. One possible way for this to happen is if a person decides (as some people have said to me, but I don’t know how seriously they meant it) that they would never accept God no matter how much evidence was presented.
Wrong Species asked me this below, so I’ll reply there.
I don’t see why not, but I don’t know for sure. Somebody asked me about “souls” below so I’ll go into more detail there.
There’s a sense in which inflation involved quantum gravity effects, but semiclassical quantum gravity may be enough for this, so it’s not clear if it tells us about strictly Planck scale physics.
My gut instinct says less than 1%, but historically it sometimes happens that people get weird ideas for experiments that pan out. A more sober assessment is maybe 3-5%.
This is my 7th year. 3 years at UCSB, 3 years at the IAS, now 1 1/2 at Stanford.
Probably, since the number of permanent positions in academia is much smaller than the number of grad students. But its not too hard for physics PhDs to get jobs in industry or academia, so I think it’s not enormously far off.
The situation in the humanities (e.g. philosophy) seems to be far more severe, since there aren’t a large number of jobs there outside of academia to absorb the extras.
Speaking as someone who leans towards fiscal conservativism, I’m always a little suspicious of people who have very strong views that their own source of government funding is the most important thing. At the same time, I’m grateful that my government has chosen to support fundamental physics, and it seems like a shame that a lot of bright postdocs I know, who are only one rung down from me in their accomplishments, end up having to leave academia.
I certainly don’t believe that government should only support research with so-called “practical” applications. “Man does not live by bread alone”—the human spirit wants arts and science. People think that fundamental physics is cool, and if they want to fund it, then that makes perfect sense. I figure I give back by explaining some of it to non-physicists.
Thanks for all the answers!
This is why I want to see fundamental physics funded. But in talking to people, I think non-physicists often support fundamental physics only because they imagine it will eventually lead to new technologies. IMO they are over-optimistic about that and maybe would be less enthusiastic about fundamental physics if they had a more realistic view of how likely it is to produce technology.
Well, whenever anyone asks me, I tell them that I think my work on quantum gravity won’t have any direct practical applications at all. Anything else would be dishonest.
On the other hand, spin-offs do happen to some extent. For example, AdS/CFT is a duality relating quantum gravity to a nongravitational theory. These theories aren’t found in Nature, but because we understand them really well, it’s helped us to understand better some theories that do occur in Nature. So an idea that first arose in QG may eventually find its way to condensed matter physics, where people do experiments all the time. But it proceeds by analogy, not by patenting some machine that uses Hawking radiation from Planck scale black holes.
Do your colleagues ever comment on your beliefs. If so, what do they say?
How do you choose which parts of the Bible to take literally and which ones are they?
Not OP, but I believe I can answer your second question accurately since I also consider myself an evangelical Christian.
For the most part, the Bible should be read in the way the author intended it. Now, it is obviously impossible to know 100% how the author intended something to be interpreted, but it is possible to get pretty close by studying historical sources and literary techniques of the books. So the Psalms is obviously poetry and isn’t literal (though there is some kind of actual event that is often triggering the writing of the individual psalms), but 1 and 2 Chronicles is written as historical records of the kings of Judah and is suppose to be taken literal. There is also a lot of tradition about the meaning of the books/passages that is useful to help arrive/understand the original author’s intent/meaning, but tradition isn’t authoritative in itself (I think this is a pretty evangelical understanding of tradition).
There are also cases where previous writings are explained in later writings. This is basically true of the New Testament referencing the Old Testament. If one assumes that the NT is authoritative, then the NT helps shed light on many of the meanings of the OT prophecies. And looking at Jesus himself, he seemed to act and talk in such a way that He believed that the events of the OT actually occurred. He talks about Abraham, Moses, etc. as if they were real people.
There is definitely differences of opinion, but I think most Evangelicals view the original author’s intent as the “true meaning” and are striving to find that. The only exception would be things like prophecy, where the author themselves didn’t necessary know when/how it would be fulfilled.
How do you deal with stuff that’s clearly intended to be historical, but the historicity of which is controversial? For example, Exodus. I don’t have my books at hand, but there’s something like 4 or 5 different scholarly theories, going from “it’s historical” to “never happened” with flavours of “it’s an interpretation of something else” in between.
My interpretation of inerrancy is that we treat it as historical if that’s what it’s supposed to be. God isn’t going to let his word become false. That would sort of defeat the purpose.
Do you mean “historical” as in “historically accurate; when Exodus said xyz, that means that if you got in a time machine and went back to the right time and place, you’d see xyz” or “historical” as in “it’s a historical document; the authors did not get Exodus 100% right in the same way that a book written today about the American Civil War or the Depression or whatever would not be guaranteed to get it right”?
Controversy implies there are multiple valid viewpoints. I think it is obvious what would be done in that case. In the case where historicity is implied but there is currently, not controversy but consensus opinion in the opposite direction that require reevaluation (which is not to say deciding in the direction of the consensus but certainly reconsideration if the text is truly intending to convey a record of a literal event).
Biblical scholars are a quarrelsome lot, and that’s even if you only include people whose intent is entirely secular. So it’s hard to say “this here is the consensus!”
Not a theologian/biblical scholar, but I think it’s more of the later. There’s a bit of historical license in the gospels (although well within the standards of the time, AIUI), and I don’t see why Exodus should be 100% time machine accurate if they aren’t.
With the caveat that different denominations of Christianity have slightly different interpretive strategies, this is a general model that I think approximates how mainstream non-fundamentalists would approach that issue.
(“Fundamentalist” is basically assuming that certain sects would simply respond that there is no controversy and any contradictory historical or scientific evidence is wrong. I would say it’s likely, for some items, that the “fundamentalist” position overlaps with the mainstream – there are simply disputes about the nature of the evidence and what to believe.)
In general, assume as a starting point that all Scriptural text represents the words of God, as revealed by him to a human being embedded in a historical and cultural context, intended for multiple purposes and directed to multiple audiences. Scriptural authority is the starting point; interpreting Scripture in light of other Scripture is the primary interpretive canon. Other sources may certainly be considered as subsidiary methods for use in understanding the text. One notes that a lot of Biblical-era, especially Old Testament-era, historical research is necessarily going to be incomplete and challenging to piece together, absent a time machine. I would expect it to be fairly rare that there are clearly superior historical sources. But genre-assessment, as zoozoc notes above, is very important. A sonnet by Donne should not be read like a dictionary entry by Johnson.
Various interpretive techniques apply to various parts of the whole, within the general framework above. Without knowing the specific controversy, it’s hard to have a single strategy of “how to deal” with historicity problems. For example, there is a post-Exodus battle with the Amorites in the book of Joshua wherein God is said to have stopped the sun. Knowing that daylight is the result of the earth’s rotation, one could interpret that to mean stopping that motion, then assess that there is no evidence of catastrophic multi-mile tidal waves in that era with oceans slopping across the land. However, knowing that the Israelites didn’t understand a heliocentric cosmology, it is enough to say that sufficient light and/or time was provided miraculously for the battle to progress; the Israelite inscribing the words would have understood or seen it as the sun stopping in the sky. Even though that source is clearly intended as historical – and thus interpretation calls for believing something supernatural happened – the inerrancy of Scripture principle does not require that it be a particular physical mechanism, nor that the actual mechanism have been fully explained to the inspired writer. As another example, presume some prophetic or historical reference to a foreign invader king who is attested, in other sources, to be dead by that time period (I don’t know of a specific example but I could imagine it to be the case – again, this is just example to elucidate the methodology). One can imagine that in context, the person receiving the revelation – or his audience – might not know the internal politics of an invading power. The immediate audience might not recognize the name. The intended message, then, to have effect, might reference a former king to help the audience understand what is at stake. So a name (e.g. “Nebuchadnezzar”) might, in that context, be more properly interpreted as “Nebuchadnezzarites” or “the terrifying successor who’s just like the familiar nemesis Nebuchadnezzar”. It would be kind of similar to talking about the disastrous effect of the Iraq War by saying “General Sherman marched from Kirkuk to the sea, burning all the way” with Sherman as a metonymy for America. (Again, I don’t think there’s much confusion on the Nebuchadnezzar front, I’m just positing the mechanism). Again, this would not violate an inerrancy principle – it was useful and meaningful to the immediate audience, but to a later audience (us) it means something else. Similarly, if an erroneous cultural tradition gets embedded into a target audience, it may be referenced even in historical contexts primarily to make a point. Like referencing George Washington’s cherry tree exploit – it has immediate meaning to an American audience even though it’s of extremely dubious historicity.
@bean
The Synoptics, at least, are within the standards of the time, yeah. John, maybe less so. Exodus, whether it’s slightly garbled history or outright fiction depends which hypothesis you like the most – eg, there’s one where it wasn’t so much them leaving Egypt, as Egyptian power retreating from where they were; this got combined with a story intended to tell them why they needed to be nice(r than the usual among communities of the time) to foreigners, strangers, etc. Or something like that; I’m trying to recall stuff I learned the best part of a decade ago.
They’re generally curious about how someone like me is religious, but I find it very difficult to get them to take seriously the idea that religion might be supported by actual evidence. On the other hand, most of them would probably say, if asked, that there’s no reason in principle why a scientist couldn’t be religious.
I’ve encountered little hostility, and I don’t think I’ve ever been discriminated against (though I might not know if I were). On general principles I think it’s best to have a thick skin and not develop a persecution complex. (If I do ever get in trouble for my beliefs, I want it to be at the right time and for the right reason, not because I was oversensitive or being a jerk.)
Regarding which parts of the Bible to take literally (and which more metaphorically): in addition to considering genre I also take into account that the central message of the Bible is Jesus and what he did. Without the Resurrection, there’s no point in being a Christian, but it’s okay if things are fuzzier around the edges. I do believe that the majority of Old Testament history probably happened approximately as described, but I don’t subscribe to their historical inerrency. It doesn’t seem important to me whether there are contradictions in irrelevant historical trivia.
I also think that when describing spiritual realities outside of our own spacetime universe (e.g. God and heaven) that there is probably no way to give a fully literal description to humans, because things that go beyond our limited earthly senses can only be described with metaphorical language. So in such cases the biblical language about such things are symbolic by necessity, but I do affirm that there exist real entities, that these symbolic descriptions apply to.
But this last point does not apply to historical descriptions of miracles, since these are things that could be seen by ordinary human sense-data.
I am a grad student in math, and would love to hear any advice that would make my future job hunt easier.
In physics, the most important thing is publications (quality more important than quantity) and letters of recommendation from famous people. Work on at least some hot problems that other people say they are interested in, but (this is probably even more true in math) avoid directly tackling famous unsolved problems and instead work on something where you have a competitive advantage due to your training. Don’t be afraid to collaborate with others as needed, and have a little fun while doing so. Don’t be afraid to ask people “stupid” questions.
Learn how to give fantastic talks. Aim them at the level of a beginning grad student; the faculty will be pleasantly surprised to actually understand your talk. Do not get bogged down in long calculations, instead be clear about the inputs, outputs, context, applications, and main principles at stake. I’ve seen people get postdoc positions by giving a talk that was easy enough to understand.
Faculty positions at R1 universities are very competitive. To get such a position, you should have multiple letters from very famous people in your subfield. If your work straddles multiple subfields, find out which one is hiring, and try to write your application to convince them you’re what they’re looking for. Ask lots of people for advice and (mostly) take it. Be prepared to answer annoying questions like “Where do you see your research in 5 years?” and “What kind of problems would you assign to a grad student?”.
I think all of this is good advice, but I want to put forward a very slight caveat to “letters of recommendation from famous people”. Obviously it’s very useful, but I think there’s a slight US/UK difference (not sure about the rest of the world). My colleagues have rolled their eyes somewhat at Americans with glowing recommendations of eminent physicists. It feels like a bit of a cliche that American professors write absurdly glowing reviews about various students and colleagues and when judging American applicants for jobs or grants the best thing to do is to take it all with a very big pinch of salt.
Of course, @Orpheus, if you’re American, as your use of language suggests, then I’m sure Aron’s advice about getting recommendations is perfectly sound. If not, it’s still *mostly* sound.
I am most definitely not an american, but thanks.
Why not a Catholic?
What’s your view on how souls work? Does the soul perform any cognitive functions, or have any features related to “personhood”? Does the soul communicate with the brain, and if so how?
Does the soul communicate with the brain, and if so how?
Sort out for me first does the mind communicate with the brain, and if so how, and I’ll be over here waiting for you to stagger out of the fray with all your limbs attached after combat with the “there is no mind, you cretin! there is only brain, physical brain, not magic spooky special distinct separate thinky-thing!” side 😀
I don’t think the Bible uses the word “soul” in any particularly technical sense. The root meaning is just breath or life, and even if I weren’t religious I would think it perfectly appropriate to use the word “soul” to refer to a person’s essential self (which may be a fuzzily defined concept).
The Bible does talk about animals as having souls. (An ancient Roman would have thought it pretty silly to deny that “Animals have anima”.)
Philosophy of Mind is very tricky, but I don’t think that it is possible to deduce the existence of Consciousness from the laws of physics + brain facts alone (which rules out certain forms of physicalism), but I don’t think Cartesian dualism (the body and soul are two separate things that interact) is the best conclusion to draw from this. I’m more of a property dualist. That is, I think we are one entity, but we have two essentially different ways to observe the same entity (introspection & external observation), and each way gives us information we couldn’t have gotten from the other way.
I’m not convinced the soul is inherently immortal; rather I think that the reason we’re going to live forever is that God has promised to make it happen. Since human persons consist of both body and soul (regardless of whether you think one reduces to the other, both are important) complete fulfilment of human nature requires Resurrection, not just some disembodied state of existence.
Basically I follow St. Justin Martyr’s idea that regardless of which philosophical school is right about how the body/mind works, God is capable of putting us back together again properly. I have to trust that when I die, God knows which are the most important aspects of myself, that need to be preserved in the New Creation.
It’s worth noting that the measure problem presupposes a dubitable epistemology. The project of defining / discerning the right kind of relative frequency presupposes that relative frequencies matter epistemologically. Now I freely grant that epistemologies that don’t make that presupposition seem to have godawful entailments, but epistemologies that do make that presupposition seem to have some godawful entailments too. I really don’t mean to say that the standard approach of the measure problem is wrongheaded, only that the bafflement of the measure problem rests on top of a bigger epistemological bafflement.
What do you think about Boltzman brains? The argument is that anything we observe will occur infinitely many times by chance after the heat death of the universe when the entropy of the universe is maximal, so from a Bayesian perspective, it is close to certain that we’re after the heat death and nothing we experience is meaningful. I haven’t yet read a satisfying enough resolution of this paradox.
Was anyone wondering if Boltzmann looked exactly like the kind of guy who would sit around thinking about weird disembodied brains materializing in the depths of space and time? You’re in luck!
I thought the resolution to this type of paradox was simple, bounded infinities. There are an infinite amount of numbers between 1 and 2, but none of those numbers is 3, there is an infinite number of ways for particles to interact after the heat death of the universe but none of those is the formation of the earth orbiting around the sun.
baconbits9,
While it’s logically possible for an infinite number of things to happen without everything happening, the problem is that (in most otherwise realistic seeming cosmological models), the thermodynamics of quantum fluctuations implies that every finite sized configuration of matter will eventually occur, and if time lasts forever, infinitely often.
It seems crazy to think that we are probably a BB, but it also seems crazy to discard a cosmology that seems to accurately describe our own universe because it has weird behavior at late times.
One solution might be to say that whether a supposed “brain” counts as a conscious observer, somehow depends on its relationship to the rest of the universe, and isn’t a strictly local thing.
Of course as a Christian I believe that at some point in the future we get the Second Coming and a New Creation. But somehow I don’t think my other cosmologist friends are going to like that solution…
@b_jonas
This is part of a much bigger question of how to take observer selection effects into account when doing Bayesianism. See for example the disputes between Nick Bostrom and Ken Olum. The fact is, I don’t know any general algorithm which doesn’t lead to horrible paradoxes in certain situations.
Because of this, I don’t know how to reason about probabilities if there is a Multiverse (which is really bad, because I certainly don’t claim to know for sure there isn’t one). How do we use the Multiverse to make Bayesian predictions? Well, we could count the number of universes that look like ours, and then divide by the total number of universes. In eternal inflation models, we end up with Infinity / Infinity = undefined.
That should probably make you sad.
When I was still a theist I believed God was at least theoretically within the bounds of scientific study. What do you think of attempts to explain things like miracles or intercessory prayer with physics?
What do you think of attempts to explain things like miracles or intercessory prayer with physics?
Like experiments watering plants with holy water versus tap water to see if they grow faster/better/more disease resistant; that’s not how it works at all, and if you triumphantly announce “see, there is no magic in holy water, the plants were the same!” then sorry but you have not proven anything at all nor delivered a crushing blow against religion.
Perhaps that’s not how it works in general. Though I’d retort nobody has ever given me a satisfying explanation as to how it IS supposed to work in general (a partial exception being [insert obscurantist lobster reference of your choice here]). In the specific case of the resurrection, which Aron Wall says happened, that is supposed to be how it works though. The laws of physics really did appear to be suspended.
I’m curious as to whether or not he regards his profession and his religion as non-overlapping magisteria in that regard. Yes, the laws of physics were suspended. No, you won’t be able to figure out how even in principle. Put another way, when Frank Tipler starts explaining how miracles occur I quickly lose the plot, but that’s because I don’t understand the technical details. Do other physicists with the same faith think he’s on to something? Is he wrong in the particulars but correct in approaching it from that angle? Or is the whole thing misguided from the start?
I think it’s completely misguided. The whole point of a miracle is that it’s an act of supernatural power which shows that more than just Nature exists. If you found some new law of physics that said, look, under exactly these conditions water enters a new phase where it’s possible to walk on it, and these conditions just happened to form on the lake of Galilee during the first century (which seems incredibly unlikely), what would the religious significance of this be? And why would it have happened just as Jesus happened to be strolling by on top? No, sane people either deny that the event ever happened, or they accept it as what it is—an act of God to communicate some point to us.
But I don’t think any two domains of study are completely non-overlapping magistria. There is only one world, and everything we say about it has to be compatible. I don’t believe in “sealing off” one piece of knowledge from evidence coming from other areas of life. But I do believe that principles which hold generally in one context, may fail in other contexts.
First of all, thanks for this. I’ve enjoyed reading the comments so far and I look forward to hearing more about your perspectives.
Second, I’m an agnostic atheist. I’ve always been so and I’m of the opinion that it’s very unlikely indeed that any god exists. However, more than anything I want to believe what’s true. If there is a god then it’s very important that I believe in it. I’m also a physicist, which made your post all the more eye-catching to me.
My question is about the relationship between faith and evidence. You said in one of the earlier comments that one of the main reasons you’re a Christian is that you think there is good historical evidence that Jesus died and was resurrected and you say also that you wouldn’t be a Christian if you didn’t think the evidence was compelling. From talking to other Christians, I get the impression that it’s important to have faith; that it’s not about weighing the balance of evidence. Do you think it’s important to have faith? Am I misunderstanding what faith is about if I interpret it as “belief without evidence”?
There are so many other things I’d like to ask you, but most of them are of the form of “how do you respond to this atheist argument?” which I think would be less interesting on the whole. I’d rather take the opportunity to understand a mindset that seems somewhat alien to me.
This is a very modern definition of “faith,” and not how it was historically used. You’ll be much closer if you interpret it as “trust in God.”
Luther put it thusly: “a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.”
Faith is acting as if you believed 100% when you believe 60%.
So would you say faith is a meaningless concept for non-believers to even consider? Why would we trust in God if we don’t believe He exists?
If a believer was questioning whether God existed, would their friends urge them to have faith?
If a believer was questioning whether God was looking out for them (but still believed he definitely existed) would their friends urge them to have faith?
Well, why are they questioning? There are all sorts of times we have doubts which aren’t rational. I think that is an excellent time for a friend to assure you to have faith, and for you to listen to them because you trust their judgment. But of course that’s very different than a situation where, say, you relied on a certain argument for God’s existence and then found it doesn’t work.
Well, faith in God specifically. I don’t have faith in Vishnu, I don’t expect you to have faith in Jesus (until you have been convinced there is a decent possibility, that is).
You may have faith in other things. Say, if you get married, and despite the non-negligible chance of divorce, you act as though you will be together until death, that’s an act of faith. If you collaborate with a new student that you don’t know because someone you trust vouches for them, that’s akin to faith.
What the average believer would or wouldn’t say isn’t necessarily indicative of the theology of it; in other words, I don’t know what anyone would say. A blanket exhortation to have faith is not terribly useful. Describing their own moments of doubt in the past, or pointing to times that the questioner has their needs met unexpectedly, or pointing to some sort of evidence, or some scripture that is inspiring, etc. may be.
@Nick, @Randy M
Thank you both for your responses. My questions weren’t particularly literal; I’m just trying to get a handle on the thing.
My impression is that the idea that you can use historical evidence to show that it’s probable that Jesus was resurrected, and then everything else follows from that, is rather unique to evangelical Christians. I think it’s more common to say that the very act of questioning your belief is somewhat problematic. Or to invoke non-overlapping magisteria (although I accept this is quite a modern approach). Or to use philosophical arguments.
I’ve asked so many Christians why they believe and heard the answer “I just do.” I think a lot of the time, belief isn’t about coming up with a map that matches the territory but about emotion or identity or politics.
Perhaps that’s a tangent. To get back to faith, Randy, I don’t agree with you that I have faith in anything. I’m not married, but in all my relationships I’ve been aware of the possibility of them ending and prepared myself for that eventuality (one can argue this is a bad thing, but that’s beside the point). If person A vouches for person B and I trust them, it’s because person A has proved reliable in the past so I can expect a productive collaboration with person B. If person A was one of my unreliable friends then I wouldn’t have faith in them, no matter how much I loved them.
Of course I’m sometimes overconfident or underconfident, and those can be phrased as faith, as you did in your reply to Jaskologist, but I’m never aware in a given situation that I’m over- or underconfident, and with hindsight I always view such situations as a mistake on my part.
Well, I did say may; I was more trying to use analogies to illustrate the principle than to divine your particular mental state. 😉
I don’t think this is a Christian view. I think times of doubt are common. Faith is in persevering in spite of it, of saying “I have been convinced, people I trust are convinced, I doubt right now, but I’m not going to turn my change my behavior despite the doubts at this point.
Or maybe I have an idiosyncratic view of faith? I don’t know. But I don’t think it is so entirely about feelings or beliefs but also behavior. Think of what we mean when we say a “faithful husband”
No, it’s not entirely idiosyncratic. I’m in agreement with you on this one.
I’m pretty sure Lewis and/or Chesterton said that faith included sticking to what you believed in your better moments.
Figuring out which moments are better might be a harder question than what they discussed.
Yeah, I’ve never heard that definition of faith from a serious Christian. Yet pretty much all atheists seem to be convinced that this is not just a good description of faith, but it’s very definition.
Faith may involve believing without sight (direct sensory perception), but that is different from believing without evidence (things that indicate the source is reliable). Depending on who’s asking you to believe what, all 4 quadrants can exist: you can have rational trust, rational non-trust, irrational trust, and irrational non-trust.
Faith in the religious sense means trusting God. If God exists and has the character described by Jesus, then he is always a reliable source, and therefore trust in him is rational. But of course you have to do work to establish that the premise is true.
I sometimes wonder if faith might be used by Christians as a motte and bailey. Like, they don’t admit that it means anything like “belief without evidence” and claim that it means trusting God, but whenever definitions aren’t being discussed directly, faith gets used as an excuse for not responding to difficult questions. Of course, I don’t accuse you of doing this. You are doing an admirable job of answering the difficult questions people are asking.
Having said all that, I’m sure I’ve heard debates between Dawkins and various Christians, where Dawkins has defined faith in these terms and they haven’t really challenged it, so perhaps your “serious Christian” is a more narrow category than I realise.
I will observe this more closely in the future. Perhaps I’ve just not been listening to people properly. The fact that three or four Christians have replied to me saying “I and those I know don’t use that definition” certainly makes me consider the possibility that I’ve been misinterpreting a whole class of argument before now.
Mother Theresa was one example of a Christian who famously had doubts.
Some people are more mystically inclined and believe for reasons of personal revelations. Maybe these people never have doubts. I wouldn’t really know.
But I think a lot of Christians can relate to the plea of this man in the New Testament.
This probably describes most people. Most people have probably not weighed all the evidence. It’s felt true to them, or they have heard one argument and held fast to that. Or they have heard persuasive arguments in the past but aren’t sophisticated enough to restate them. Or they’ve felt or seen things that they feel are supernatural but wouldn’t convince a third party.
And, sure, there are differing definitions among different individuals or groups. And some of it may be bad argumentation, I’m sure there’s no shortage of it.
I don’t want to “proof-text” but Hebrews 11 seems relevant in this discussion, as it purports to define “faith.” Verse 1 says “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (NIV) It then goes on to list a number of examples of faith. They’re all pretty interesting, but take as a good example verses 7-11 with regard to the “believe with no evidence vs. trust in God” distinction. That cites the stories of Noah and Abraham. For Noah, “By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” For Abraham, several examples, including “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. …And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.”
Going back to the Old Testament stories, which the author takes as a given, God spoke to Noah (“when warned”) and Abraham (“when called to go”), and Sarah’s conception of Isaac followed several miraculous appearances of the angel of the Lord to Abraham, including one where Abraham argues with God about God’s decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, following which they were in fact destroyed in spectacular fashion. So in each case, there was not “no evidence” on which they based their faith – one may disagree with the strength of the “spoke with God” evidence, but those people are clearly described as having actual experiences which were actual evidence for God’s presence and commands. However, for the specific things that they believed – that a flood was coming, that Isaac would come – there was no specific evidence; you had to rely on the promise. Based on prior evidence about who those people had experienced God to be (his power, his promises), they believed God’s further words. The writer describes this as “faith.” I think this more closely hews to the “trust in God” definition, rather than “believing anything with no evidence” definition.
@hls2003
I’m not sure how relevant those sections are to present-day usage. Obviously Noah and Abraham believed in God; God’s existence was obvious in those stories – he regularly spoke to humans.
In our lives, God is not obvious. He doesn’t level cities or cause global floods. He doesn’t even definitely talk to people. For Abraham to question God’s existence would have made about as much sense as me questioning the moon’s existence. So if Abraham “questioned”, he was questioning God’s decisions. If Abraham had “faith”, it was not in God’s existence but in his wisdom, justice etc.
For modern Christians I think it is necessary to have faith even in God’s existence, because it is far from obvious that he exists.
@fion
Maybe I misunderstood your point, but your original statement was that “three or four Christians have replied to me saying [they use a different definition]”. My response is that they probably do, because Christians will more often tend to define their faith the way the Bible defines it, which could well be different from the modern definition.
You’re asking if it’s plausible Christians could have a different definition of “faith” than yours (even if yours is more common in the modern population). The answer is yes, because they are a self-selected group who will derive their definition from a decidedly non-modern source (the Bible) which differs from the general population.
Your latest reply addresses whether this definition is wise or helpful. That’s a different question entirely from the word-usage question.
Also note that the Bible contains the rather scornful fake-clap comment “So you believe there is one God? Good! Even the demons believe that – and shudder.” (James 2:19) This suggests that mere theism is not what defines an authentic Christian faith. I’m not disputing that some belief is required to say there is a God, but that is not what many (or most) Christians will define as “faith.”
@hls 2003
Thanks for clarifying. I understand your point better now. I’m not quite sure about the distinction between Christians and “the general population”. Christians make up about half the population in the UK and Australia, about two thirds in Canada and about three quarters in America.
I feel as though the definition Christians use should play a deciding role in the definition English-speakers in general use. My tentative conclusion would be that there is huge variation in how different Christians use it, with “belief without evidence” being a popular definition even among Christians.
I have no idea how any of this maps over to non-English languages or non-Christian religions that have faith as an important virtue.
@fion
On the philological point, I suspect it’s a selection bias issue. Self-identifying Christians are a substantially larger group in the population than Christians who are likely to be shaping their word-usage based on Biblical exegesis. For example, the Pew survey on Biblical literacy indicates that only 50% of self-identified Christians can name all four Gospels. (See here). Not to cast aspersions, but I think it’s fair to say that a Christian who can’t identify four Gospels (or e.g. who Job is, or Moses, or Abraham) is substantially less likely to base their word usage on a carefully researched reading of the Bible. I would argue it’s going to be a very much smaller self-selected group more familiar with the Bible text (and perhaps more inclined towards abstract theological points) who might do so. That’s who I think you might have been encountering, since you’re a smart guy, you’re posting on SSC, and it wouldn’t shock me if your Christian interlocutors are also more textually inclined.
To touch briefly on the non-philological point, I don’t disagree with you that there is some metaphysical element – call it belief, or faith, or inspiration, or what have you – involved even in basic theism. I think a lot of Christians have gone through, still go through, moments where the cosmos seem empty and God’s very existence undetectable and doubted. The Gospels report a man who cried to Jesus “I believe, help my unbelief!” I think many religious people feel that way sometimes. I certainly do. But I also find that to overcome those moments, one seeks to go back to evidence previously found persuasive, rather than to simply forego all evidence. For example, the existence of the cosmos; personal religious experiences and answered prayers; the truth value in the Scriptures; things like that. (Personally, one type of evidence I find persuasive is that the Bible’s description of reality has generally been an excellent predictor of human nature, human decision processes, and the resulting unfolding of events). It’s not the pillar of fire guiding Moses and the Israelites, true, but it is not purely evidence-free.
Finding that evidence more persuasive than others, I think, involves some supernatural aid. I don’t claim that one can conclusively prove God’s existence in a scientific way; but neither is one given zero data and expected to postulate God therefrom. I hope I’m not mangling Plantinga’s Warrant and Function argument too badly to suggest that the ability to glimpse spiritual realities could be viewed as a special sense, granted by grace. I think that’s pretty close to where I come down on it – there is evidence there to be seen, mankind is often blind to it or misconstrues, but grace can be given to help glimpse the divine reality. And once that glimpse is given, faith is in trusting more broadly, outside direct experience, in the promises for which there is no evidence other than God’s word and character.
So there’s a rather muddled hybrid definition for you! Some evidence, but also some belief in the as-yet-unseen.
Kierkegaard is not a serious Christian?
Fun! No physics background here, but my son and I just got into a conversation about time travel, in which he quoted me things off the wikipedia pages and I said things from my extensive knowledge of time travel TV shows and how they addressed various paradoxes. You can imagine it was a highly sophisticated conversation.
What do the best minds in physics have to say about time travel? Can you give a sense of where time travel sits relative to other controversial subjects in physics? Do people spend careers studying it or is it seen as fringe-y?
As it happens, this is something I’ve worked on a bit.
There are various theorems in classical GR that say (roughly) that it is not possible given reasonable initial conditions, and positive energy matter, to build time machines (or warp drives, traversable wormholes, and other sci-fi stuff).
Quantum field theory, on the other hand, allows for negative energy densities in certain situations, as long as it is balanced by positive energy density somewhere else. But I’ve done some work arguing for principles which would imply that you can’t violate causality using quantum fields either.
(Although I did write a paper with some guys at Harvard about the possibility of building traversable wormholes if you already have an interaction between the two sides. But it turns out you can’t use this for FTL travel. It’s like getting a bank loan, you can’t get one unless you can prove you didn’t need it.)
Trying to prove theorems and/or looking for counterexamples is definitely within the mainstream of mathematical relativity, although it’s best to work on a variety of topics and not just weird stuff. On the other hand, there’s a faculty member at U Connecticut who is apparently trying to build a time machine to go back in time to save his father from dying when he was 10. I ended up deciding not to apply to that place…
> On the other hand, there’s a faculty member at U Connecticut who is apparently trying to build a time machine to go back in time to save his father from dying when he was 10.
Meh, many academic places have that one weird guy. Our department had one as well. For me, that alone wouldn’t be much of a reason not to apply. I’d just avoid interaction with them. I’m generally a conflict-averse person, I try to avoid talk with people when I know in advance that the conversation will be useless. That’s how I avoid getting into endless flamewars on the internet too, most of the time.
But, yes, I totally agree with the object-level part that you can’t build a time-machine in your backyard, it’s a large project that requires lots of people working together and an impossible amount of funding, sort of like building a space-borne gravitational wave detector.
b_jonas,
Yeah, but the other gravity guy there also seemed to be a bit crackpot, if less flamboyantly so.
I’ve found it extremely helpful to work in a location with other smart people you can collaborate with, so a complete absence of such people makes it not attractive.
Very interesting response thus far!
Based on a previous response upthread, you went to a liberal arts college but then went on to get your Ph.D. in Physics. How was the transition from to grad school? Did you always know you wanted to do graduate level physics, and was it difficult to get into graduate school from a liberal arts college?
Someone else asked “Why not Catholic?”, I thought I’d broaden that to “Why your specific denomination?”
As a Catholic, I believe the Church has unique claims to historical legitimacy among Christians. I’m curious what your thoughts are as an evangelical.
@AdamOfCascadia
I checked out a book about physics from the childrens’ section of the library when I was 7. Mostly it talked about boring seeming stuff like force and energy, but at the end it said that scientists had recently discovered subatomic particles were made of smaller particles called quarks. I’d never heard that before. It said the quarks came in 3 colors, and that the subatomic particles were made of 1 of each color. I went to my Dad and asked, “Does it mean at least one, or exactly one?” He couldn’t answer so he had me check out particle physics books, and that’s how my obsession started. Later I got into quantum gravity from reading John Baez’s website.
I was a lazy student and I didn’t want to go to a college with a lot of busy work. I don’t do well in classes that assign lots of homework on material I already know. So I decided to wait for grad school to do physics. U Maryland knows about Johnnies because the other campus is in Annopolis, so they accepted me. Mostly they have people with weak backgrounds do some upper level undergrad classes to catch up, but because of all my independent study it wasn’t necessary.
The main reason I can’t accept Catholicism is that I think Jesus was pretty clear in the Gospels that Scripture takes precedence over later religious traditions. He was very vehement about this in his arguments with the Pharisees (who claimed to have an “oral torah” coming from Moses in addition to the written one). It seems unlikely that after warning his disciples so sternly about this in the context of Judaism, he’d turn around to Chistians and say “but your traditions are infallible”.
I grew up in the Church of the Nazarene (and am currently attending one now) but I’ve worshipped in a variety of different churches including a semester in an Antiochian Orthodox church (of course being a Protestant I couldn’t take communion there). Evangelicals don’t think of our denominations as rival candidates for the One True Church. I don’t think any single organization has a monopoly on grace or truth (Luke 9:49-50). So I can’t join one which requires me to agree with every single thing they teach, unless I actually do.
> I checked out a book about physics from the childrens’ section of the library when I was 7.
Oh wow, that’s lucky. I work in computer science, and I didn’t figure that out until much later. The book that has made the most influence on me, sort of like you mention above, is Donald Knuth’s TAOCP, and I didn’t meet that one until I was 9 or 10 years old. Though it’s possible that I wouldn’t have understood any of the book either while I was younger.
How do you explain God’s decision to create sources of suffering like cancer? A lot of the problem of evil can be wriggled out of by mumbling something about free will, but disease seems much harder to explain.
Why do cells have to be deterministic rather than selfishly free willed?
If cancer cells are free-willed I think that implies some weird things about their moral value.
I don’t have the time or skill to do this justice, but I think it’s more like, “mumble mumble The Fall.” As in, when Adam and Eve sinned and man fell, there were significant effects that permeated through all of creation.
How are Adam and Eve regarded by those who don’t take Genesis literally?
As one example, I gesture in the general direction of John Walton and his Adam-and-Eve-as-archetypes interpretation. His book on this is The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate. You can get an overview of his idea from the table of contents.
If I recall, he does believe in Adam and Eve as literal, physical people, but not in the “biological progenitors” sense. And he thinks Genesis is primarily interested in them as archetypes instead.
Of course you said, “by those who don’t take Genesis literally.” This doesn’t exactly meet those requirements. For one thing, he would say this is the literal interpretation of the text. And for another, while he doesn’t believe Adam and Eve have to be the very first people from whom all of humanity descend biologically, he does think they were actual people. I pretended you said, “by those who don’t take a fundamentalist literal view of Genesis that precludes evolution.”
Aron Wells–by way of introduction, I am a Mormon mathematician. As such, I accept the divinity of Jesus Christ and the reality of miracles and revelation, but I reject the Nicene creed. I grew up in a devoutly Mormon family; I have had remarkable spiritual experiences and am well-versed both in Mormon apologetics. I am a Bayesian in the weak sense that I think “knowledge cannot be gained absolutely, only by degrees” but while I think subjective probability is a useful model I don’t think it is The One True Way to reason about the world (I am well-read in the decision-theoretic justifications for expected utility and Bayes’ rule, and I find them inadequate).
A few years ago, I went through some difficult experiences that led me to doubt Mormonism for arational reasons. I decided to let some time pass so that I could consider my theology without being excessively prejudiced by emotions and resentment, and have been working on this project for the last few months. I have been reading your conversation with Aajpe with an eye towards justifying or refuting my confidence in the resurrection. I really appreciated your insights and perspectives. In LessWrong speak, if you consider Mormonism close to “mainstream Christianity,” or at least closer to such Christianity than to atheism, then your comments on this blog may have marginally increased the chance that I will accept salvation. In any case, you are a cogent and thoughtful writer, and I have enjoyed reading this conversation.
So thank you.
EDIT: corrected a typo.
Every now and then there’s a kerfuffle at some university or another over some “world civilizations/great books” type survey course focusing far too heavily on western civilization, or on one particular part of it. I think, for the most part, this is a fair criticism, although I’d be more likely to assign the blame to laziness (professor saying “why not just keep the same book list? Why should I have to learn something new and change how I teach?”) and cheapness (admin saying “why do we have to hire more professors?”) than anything else.
So, let’s say you’re in charge of overhauling one of these courses to better give a global survey. Assume the “western civilization” bit of it is already set: Greek philosophers, Bible (entirely western? Not really, but it’s already in the syllabus there), Shakespeare, yadda yadda yadda. That sets the tone. What are you going to be adding to that – what fills it out and makes it actually global? Assume that the reading list you have to define is mostly primary sources; secondary stuff is in there but what exactly it is is immaterial, and will mostly be used to introduce the primary sources.
Assume for the purposes that length isn’t an issue: the more things you have on the syllabus, the more it’s just excerpts, and the more work the secondary sources and so forth do.
Just thinking about this briefly – to me, the lowest-hanging fruit is probably Chinese philosophy and literature.
Bonus points: is there any overarching theme, anything we can point to and say “yup, that’s the single truly common element of human civilization” and not be completely talking rubbish?
My alma mater, St. John’s College in Santa Fe, runs a Great Books program for undergrads, based primarily on discussion classes for primary sources, which has the following reading list for the main seminar course. (This list does not include the readings for the separate math, language, lab, and music tutorials).
Rather than trying to cram in some non-Western Civ. books, they made a separate Eastern Classics masters degree, whose readings are here.
A lot of the stuff that came to my mind was on that Eastern Classics reading list. Interesting that they went with Tale of the Heike instead of the considerably superior Tale of Genji.
I don’t know how I’d answer your questions, but I always hated when people used false synecdoche in discussion of Africa. For example, using Swahili to represent “African language”: there are thousands of languages spoken in Africa, and Swahili’s not even in the top 10 in terms of number of native speakers. Something similar could easily happen when discussing “Xs (books? music? history? etc.) of Africa”, to where including two or three African Xs on a “great Xs of the world” syllabus would leave out so many other very different African Xs that it almost makes the syllabus less inclusive.
Maybe it’d be better just to change the name of the course to make it explicitly Eurocentric.
While treating Swahili as “the language of Africa” is obvious BS, its notoriety is in no way from its number of *native* speakers – it’s the most-spoken African language, and only slightly behind French (which is slightly behind English) in Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s also the only African language to clearly represent a sub-region of Africa – if East African Community efforts succeed, it might actually surpass French (probably not English, and many Swahili speakers will also speak the latter). In fact, a grievance of some African scholars is that it’s replacing, and voluntarily at that, many East African languages (which will, also, make it a language with a large number of native speakers). I say “let East Africa go through what made France and Germany”.
With regards to “what to talk about in Africa”, if you can explain what goes on in this map, you’re set. Though “primary sources” are a serious problem for most of those places.
How about something by Lee Kuan Yew? Lessons on how to build a successful country, straight from the founding father himself.
Also something by Sayyid Qutb. If the Islamist movement had an intellectual father, he’s the man.
I have the idea the whole discussion started in full force with Muhammed Abduh (1848-1905) who first framed the discussion concerning the adoption of western institutions in Islamic society from which emerged the three general trends of full adoption, moderate adoption, and rejectionism. His writing is quite extensive too, so I bet there is some good stuff still waiting to be translated.
But I will have a stronger opinions by July.
China. I’m no specialist, but you could easily fill several courses.
India. Start with the Rig Veda (sp?). Something from the Upanishads. Bhagavad Gita. Introduce the amazing literary form where you use lack of marked divisions between words to say two different things at the same time. Writings from the Sikh founder. Find some devotional poetry. Find some love poetry. Etc. There’s lots of Buddhist literature, and it starts here; pick some. … Then get some modern writings. Gandhi? I’d throw in something from Bollywood, if it were my course, but you insist on it being about books.
Other Asian countries. India and China were the local elephants, with neighbours drawing from one or both, but the neighbours somewhat went their own way. Be sure to sample Japan, Korea, and Tibet, among others.
Middle East. Koran (of course). Major Arabic philosophers. Arabic science and proto-science. Sufis and other mystics. Ancient literature, dug up on clay tablets. e.g. the epic of Gilgamesh.
Something Zoroastrian.
Egypt, and don’t forget to start with papyri and/or inscriptions found by archaeologists.
Have we got anything we understand from the Middle and South American civilizations? (I’m so far from a specialist that I don’t have clue 1 ;-))
No idea what we have in writing from pre-conquest Africa (other than the middle east), but they had some interesting civilizations. Go find some. If there’s enough material, spend lots of time on it – a continent worth of time, not the obligatory single lesson, leaving people unable to distinguish Zulu from San 🙁
I’m sure I’m just scraping the surface here. I don’t have the knowledge to create this syllabus, or even come close. and I’m also reasonably sure I’ve overweighted religious texts, simply because that’s the area where I personally have the most knowledge.
I think a big difficulty is that most universities are not well set up to encourage, facilitate, and reward team-teaching efforts.
To actually teach a course like “survey of world literature” well you need a team of experts, one ridiculously smart person, and/or someone willing to teach a lot of stuff he doesn’t actually understand much better than the students. I, for example, don’t feel very comfortable teaching literature in translation from a language I can’t myself read at least somewhat (which fact caused me to learn some basic Korean).
My initial reaction was to think “why can’t the students interested in English literature just take English literature course and the students interested in African literature can take African literature courses?” But this raises the question: if your university has enough faculty to offer individual courses on most of the major world traditions, why can’t it also coordinate those experts to team teach a course offered to those students without space in their schedule to take more than, say, a two-semester sequence on “great books of world lit”?
The answer, I think, is that coordinating such a thing at most universities will be a difficult, largely thankless task. The professors won’t get paid more, they probably will be making a lot more work for themselves for little or no credit towards their teaching responsibilities, and, anyway, they’d rather be teaching the students who are interested enough in e.g. English literature or Indian literature to take a dedicated English or Indian literature course than the ones who are probably less interested in developing an organic, holistic knowledge of the commonalities across literary traditions than in fulfilling some sort of requirement.
A lot of philosophy and literature also makes more sense if you know where it came from, what influenced it and what it is responding to. So I think a course covering multiple traditions together, while perhaps it can gain something by comparing them, loses a lot by making it harder to see the crucial connections. Not that there isn’t room for some courses devoted to doing that kind of comparison, but it seems to me that having the default be courses focused on one particular tradition at a time is a good system.
I agree with this, strongly. The point of a “great books” type course is to see a tradition interacts and develop. Take the story of Abraham and the (near) sacrifice of Isaac/Ishmael. It’s been re-imagined and re-pointed over and over–all the way from the original to St Paul “his faith was counted to him for righteousness” to Owen “But the old man would not so, but slew his son/and half the seed of Europe…”
There would be some things that could be added; I would say the easiest would be from the Arabic/Muslim tradition–Avicenna and Averroes are natural to a course that has a significant look at the Greek philosophers. But I think a “Great Books of China” course would make more sense than adding a couple Chinese great books to a great books course where most of the books are western.
Yeah. I should take some courses on the History of China.
I won’t talk about “common element of human civilization” because Americas. But one thing that comes close for Eurasia is Indo-European culture, Iranian in particular. You might find Empires of the Silk Road, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, and The Lost History of Christianity useful.
With regards to sources (even primary) for Southeast Asia, you want to ask this guy.
Two things that I read in university that it seems very few others have read: native american creation myths.
The two I remember are:
The Popul Vuh (Mayan creation myth) – Pretty long tale actually, I have it on my bookshelf right now and its about the length of a short novel.
Dine Bahane (Navajo creation myth)
One last quiz. This will be the last one I will post, at least for a while. If anyone wants to take up the role of quiz-master, they are most welcome.
Today’s quiz is about the works of Isaac Asimov:
1. His first novel about robots, a fixup of earlier short stories and essays.
2. The third novel in the original Foundation trilogy.
3. A novel in which a space station colony called Rotor is moved to the semi-habitable moon Erythro, where bacteria form a collective organism that is conscious and telepathic.
4. A non-fiction book about the early history of the United States.
5. A novelization of a movie about a submarine that is shrunk to microscopic size and sent into a patient’s bloodstream.
6. A novel about an amateur detective trying to solve a murder at a trade show for the publishing industry.
7. A non-fiction work in which the author estimates the probability of there being intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations within the Milky Way galaxy.
8. His first juvenile novel.
9. His third autobiography, published after his death.
10. A collection of mystery short stories, featuring a fictional club of mystery solvers. First of six.
And the answers:
1. V, Ebobg
2. Frpbaq Sbhaqngvba
3. Arzrfvf
4. Gur Ovegu bs gur Havgrq Fgngrf: 1763-1816
5. Snagnfgvp Iblntr
6. Zheqre ng gur NON
7. Rkgengreerfgevny Pvivyvmngvbaf
8. Qnivq Fgnee, Fcnpr Enatre
9. V. Nfvzbi
10. Gnyrf bs gur Oynpx Jvqbjref
I only got #2 because I adore the original Foundation trilogy. I’m not actually sure if I’ve read any other Asimov novels… (lots of short stories though!)
Does anyone have a favorite recreational math book?
Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma, about the incredible history of the attempts over the centuries to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem
Simon Singh’s The Codebook, about the history of codemaking and codebreaking
Both have a bit of math involved but would still be entertaining for the right lay-person.
Just wanted to second these as great choices. I’ve had good feedback when I recommended them to a friend.
How recreational? For very little math, the man who loved only numbers is good. For a bit more math, Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus.
It kinda depends on your definition of ‘recreational’ and ‘math book’.
I would recommend What Is Mathematics by Herbert Robbins and Richard Courant, which was, quite recreational for me when I read that.
Another thing you can try is Proofs from THE BOOK by Martin Aigner.
The four volume series
“The World of Mathematics” is golden, and absolutely recommended.
For problem solving, anything by the Art of Problem Solving.
I remember enjoying that a very long time ago.
Do people still read Martin Gardner’s puzzle collections? I grew up on their Russian translations (and I think scientists past a certain age have shared fond memories of reading them in the Scientific American of the 60s and the 70s).
In a similar vein, Raymond Smullyan’s logical puzzle books are really good. He has a knack of starting with some easy knight/knave puzzles and leading you to a formulation of Godel’s undecidability, all through interesting puzzles.
I’ve got a Martin Gardner book I like—Wheels, Life, and Other Mathematical Amusements. Cambridge is actually releasing new editions of all the old books, so maybe a new generation can be introduced to them.
Seconding Raymond Smullyan. The one I have is “What is the Name of this Book?”.
Although that book is basically nothing but increasingly elaborate knights-and-knaves puzzles, so you may not like it if you crave variety.
I grew up on his Aha! collections, but he seems to have fallen out of nerd culture in the last couple decades.
A shame. I read Aha! Insight as a kid, several times.
And there’s another book I forget the title of (I might still have it somewhere), in which I learned of the three types of liars from the classic liars / truthtellers island riddle, and a question one could ask with the highest chance of getting past all three…
I think that was in Aha! Gotcha.
But did you learn the real solution to the riddle? If you ask some complicated double reversed version of “which road leads to the village” the local will interpret that as the simple version and answer, truthfully or falsely, accordingly.
Instead you ask him if he has heard that they are giving out free beer in the village, ignore his answer, and follow him.
Sounds like David read the book. 😀
The incentive set up by that question should have occurred to me as one he would find especially amusing, given the joke he likes to tell of the Mexican bank robber…
The Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Diversions by Martin Gardner.
Book of mathematical paradoxes and puzzles given in story form. One of my favourite books as a child.
Does Logicomix count? 😛
The Chicken From Minsk. A wide variety of puzzles in both math and physics, going from classic logic puzzles to obscure physics problems, with an enjoyable layer of Russian humor.
Not a book, exactly, but my favourite sources of recreational maths are old BMO/IMO and Putnam papers – e.g. https://bmos.ukmt.org.uk/home/bmo.shtml or http://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/
How has no-one mentioned Gödel Escher Bach yet?!
Yeah seriously. Probably the best.
Everything and More by David Foster Wallace. It’s a history of the concept of infinity, not lacking in DFW’s distinctive funny and depressing writing style. The math is pretty impressive. With a B.S. in math, some of the material was over my head, but not much.
Also Logicomix, a graphic novel about the 20th century project of trying to ground mathematics on firm logical foundations (and failing). It’s told from the point of vie of Bertrand Russell (and the comic artists themselves).
When I read Everything and More, it was clear that the math was over David Foster Wallace’s head, too, unfortunately. There are better books on infinity. The London Review of Books has a combined review of Everything and More, Brian Clegg’s A Brief History of Infinity, and Robert and Ellen Kaplan’s The Art of the Infinite, which has this to say about Everything and More:
Yeah, I think he also mangles the proof of Cantor’s theorem, which is kind of the one neat trick you can show laymen to give them an understanding of infinity.
Carl Linderholm’s Mathematics Made Difficult is a riot, though sadly long out of print and thus hard to (legally) acquire.
It’s not really math, but close: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick. It covers some quantum cryptography stuff towards the end IIRC.
Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic. It’s as much fun as Alice in Wonderland.
Here’s a problem Quine uses in his book. Draw a valid conclusion using all of the terms from the following premises:
The only animals in this house are cats.
Every animal is suitable for a pet, that loves to gaze at the moon.
When I detest an animal, I avoid it.
No animals are carnivorous, unless they prowl at night.
No cat fails to kill mice.
No animals ever take to me, except what are in this house.
Kangaroos are not suitable for pets.
None but carnivora kill mice.
I detest animals that do not take to me.
Animals, that prowl at night, always love to gaze at the moon.
Solution: V nyjnlf nibvq n xnatnebb.
Here’s more.
Also weirdly racist, some of the syllogisms have premises like “All jews are greedy”.
Yeah, I remember the publisher offering an apology similar to one in Agatha Christie’s unfortunately named book, except they decided not to change the racist parts. Oh well, our heroes can’t always be saints.
That conclusion, while valid, can be reached using only terms 1, 6, 9, and 3. And it would continue to be true if e.g. premise 7 were false (because xnatnebbf jrer pneaviberf). The solution therefore does not satisfy the “using all the terms from the following premises”
I think you need the other premises to establish that xnatnebbf ner abg pngf.
I love Lewis Carroll’s A Tangled Tale.
It’s a series of story problems that were originally published in a magazine, and at the end Carroll discusses the various solutions sent in by the readers.
Ooh, those are wonderful! I hadn’t see them before.
Anatoly has already mentioned Raymond Smullyan’s books. I agree with that recommendation. Apart from four of those and the Chicken from Minsk, I have the following books on the bookshelf next to me that might count as recreational mathematics.
– I have all three of Rényi Alfréd’s pop mathematics books (Dialógusok a matematikáról; Levelek a valószínűségről; Napló az információelméletről). These are each thin essay books, talking both about mathematics and the philosophy of its meaning. They’re also famous enough that they’ve been translated to multiple languages, including english, german, russian.
– Gnädig Péter, Honyek Gyula, 123 furfangos fizika feladat. This one is technically physics rather than mathematics, but so is the Chicken from Minsk. It’s been translated to English. There are apparently also books with larger numbers instead of 123 in the title and an extra author, which are probably later extended editions of this.
– ed. Hraskó András, Új matematikai mozaik (2002). This is an aggregation book of 18 chapters by different authors, all told in a nice popular way so it can be understood by people with not much mathematical knowledge in advance. I don’t know of translations.
Since no one has mentioned it yet: The Book of Numbers by John H. Conway and Richard Guy. That’s Conway of Game of Life fame. (That’s Game of Life of cellular automata fame.)
Each chapter is an exploration of some domain of mathematics, from the way numbers are named in English, to “shape” numbers (triangular, hexagonal, etc.), to number sequences and how some of them pop up in nature, to Cantor ordinals, and more. Complete with nifty color illustrations.
One of the problems trying to train people for jobs that are occasionally extremely stressful (pilots, police, soldiers, oil rig workers, etc. ) is that the training scenarios will not produce a stress response that the trainee will experience when he finally ends up in a shootout/fire in the cockpit. Special forces get around this by trying to make the training as stressful and realistic as possible, with live rounds and explosions. Eventually they become desensitized to the stress response or learn to function through it.
For pilots though, you can’t set the cockpit on fire in the simulator. Some flight examiners or instructors will try and induce stress by insulting and harassing the trainee, or just inducing task saturation. And flights can be inherently stressful. But is there a way to induce a stress response with drugs, such that you could put a pilot in the simulator, give him an emergency to deal with, and chemically induce a strong stress reaction?
Has this ever been tried before for training purposes?
What drugs would you use?
Asking for a friend.
Sleep deprivation might work, possibly combined with high doses of caffeine.
Its not the same. Tell him to stop being a puss and sign up for a variety of dangerous real world activities.
Dangerous activities could help desensitize but they will never be as good as being in a sim and going through the actual emergency procedures under stress.
Note entirely certain that is correct; Handling stress well seems to be a distinct and separately trainable skill from piloting etc, though I can speak only from personal anecdata.
Only related, but analysts have continued to find that there is no such thing as clutch hitters in baseball. This seems to imply that while people could be trained to operate under stress without a decrease in performance, to increase in performance due to stress is a myth.
What’s the definition of “clutch” here? If most players got a bit worse in stressful situations, would maintaining your baseline level of performance be considered clutch? Or is it only clutch if you actually get better when the stakes are high?
I did consider HUET (helicopter underwater escape training) as a way to practice emergency procedures under stress. Suggestions for similar things would be welcome as well.
@crh: Part of the fun about these analyses is that each study tries adjusting the definition of “clutch” situations. “What’s their batting average/on-base percentage when their team is down and it’s the last two innings, etc.” That would seem to assume a simple positive-negative metric independent of their performance outside of the clutch, but I haven’t examined each study to check.
Another aspect is that these studies are often comparing to the conventional wisdom of who are considered clutch players. This metric found that Player A who is considered clutch by the people does not meet the metric, but Player B who is not considered clutch by the people is clutch according to the metric, etc. But they don’t necessarily take a stand on if this difference from intuition invalidates the metric or intuition.
Drug potentiation and stress response are frequently related but ultimately independent. You can give someone a drug that will skew their perception and mess up their vital signs, but you can’t guarantee they’re gonna have a bad trip about it
What if you hooked them up to an IV and pumped in some adrenaline at the right time? A pill that increased the stress response would be easier…
I don’t think this would work simply because the amount of hormones released during stress isn’t necessarily consistent between different individuals. There are chemical stressors used for cardiac studies, but they are intravenous and done in a hospital setting. I would suggest loud noises and cold water, and let the body make it’s own response.
I’m not aware of any studied use of drugs for this purpose; however, I am familiar with some with some of the training and testing methodologies designed for this sort of thing.
Stress does two relevant things: it screws with muscle control, and with judgment. For the first, the traditional shooter’s drill is to exercise aggressively beforehand–hence biathlon, the sprint and shoot events in practical pistol, and so on. For the second, the traditional substitute is exhaustion.
What about alcohol combined with exercise?
Or releasing spiders into the sim?
Bit late with this, but there are a number of drugs that specifically cause anxiety / fear, which is often a big component of high stress situations. GABA antagonists in particular are used in medical research to cause anxiety. DMCM is an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCM , or see here for more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiogenic
Just wanting to gauge interest here, I’ve been considering a chess effort post for a while.
I’ve noticed that I have generally had a great deal of success when talking about it in person. There are a lot of misconceptions about how the game is played, and what it involves from people who don’t play it seriously. I enjoy explaining why I find the game so interesting.
I think it should of interest to SSC readers in large part because I would like to focus on some the more ‘meta’ aspects of the game:
– How chess player actually breaks down the board in the mind.
– The role of abstraction. (Map and territory distinctions in chess, ect).
– A history of modern chess and it’s playing style, how computers and “ai” have changed the way we play.
This isn’t necessarily how the posts are going to be structured; I’ll need to think a little more about that, the list is just what came to mind as “Things non-chess players find new and interesting”.
My credentials:
Been playing for two years, currently at a national rating that would correspond to ~1800 FIDE, but I’ve managed multiple 2100+ performance ratings in that time, so I think I probably still slightly underrated.
If you’re not a chess player and/or familiar with elo:
I can probably beat you easily without having to look at the board (blindfold).
This does not make me a chess prodigy. This makes me a slightly above average tournament player.
Interested!
Very interested! especially as someone who is trying to learn chess as an adult.
I’m interested too, especially if the sample topics you listed are going to be typical.
I would be interested in this, although I know next to nothing about chess. A couple question that are definitely on the “meta” level that I would be particularly interested in:
What’s the competitive lifespan like for top chess players? Can it be likened to a sport where the players are half-dead by their early 30s, held together with duct tape, or is it like a sport where they hit their stride a bit later and can keep going into their 40s if they stay healthy?
Is chess something where the standard has risen, so a good-but-not-great international competitor would smash the heroes of yesteryear, or is it something where the greats of a generation ago could still do as well as they did were a clone of them in their prime to walk into a tournament?
It’s mostly a young man’s sport, though some people do play top level chess into their forties.
I think the standard definitely has risen, mostly because of computers and the internet gives people top level opposition (and coaching) 24/7.
And about that “young man” phrase, it remains very much a male game. Only 1 woman is ranked among the top 100 players. Though to me, when Judit Polgar peaked at 8th in the world, that proved that a woman *could* become world champion one day.
“Woman”, “Abomination of Mad Science“, tomayto, tomahto.
Of course, the Polgar sisters do seem to be very nice, well-adjusted abominations of mad science. But I’m pretty sure Laszlo didn’t run his experimental procedures past anything resembling an IRB, and I’m glad he didn’t train his daughters in e.g. politics, war, or crime.
I have a hard time guessing what age peak human chess brain is. I have boundaries, but its several decades.
I’m more interested in the mathematics and structure of the programs that play chess well, frankly.
That sounds really cool!
I’d be interested; I’m probably only about 100-200 points worse than you so I’d probably know a good portion of what you’re saying but I’d be curious what you would write anyway.
This interests me as well, but I’d like to add a post from the SSC reddit about chess. Maybe it can give you additional inspiration: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8gbet4/is_there_a_book_about_what_separates_chess/
I would like to learn to not suck at chess.
I have a good working memory, but no idea how to systematically analyse a board.
Interested!
This sounds very interesting. I play chess regularly, but not competitively. I’ve read a couple of books, but I tend to find them rather dull, and I’m not that driven to improve my own playing. But hearing the thoughts of an enthusiastic, SSC-inclined expert sounds like something I’d love to read.
(Of course, from reading the comments preceding me, it sounds like you’ll have quite a broad audience, from people almost as good as you to people who don’t play chess. Good luck! 😀 )
Also interested. I played quite a lot in my early teens although I was never that good.
I would love to read something like this!
Interested. Would appreciate it if you posted it on the subreddit 🙂
There has been no room for tournament play in my life for several years, and I would like to hear your thoughts.
I would find this interesting, especially point #1. I have played recreationally since I was a child, but have never really learned to play in a systematic way, or to analyze anything beyond point count for captured pieces.
I’ve been playing tournament chess for … oh, it’s actually half my life now. I would definitely be interested in your post, if only to disagree with everything ;-). I’m somewhat blown away by the interest your proposal is getting, great to see so many people interested in my greatest addiction.
Quiz time! Each of the lists below consists of ten words. Your task is to remove one letter from each of the words, and anagram the remaining letters to form ten members from some category. For example, if a list had the words “dear”, “ruble”, and “energy”, you could get “red”, “blue”, and “green”. As a hint, the categories are given at the end, rot-13’ed, but it’s more fun to try to figure them out on your own.
A:
1. ably
2. aegis
3. methyl
4. munich
5. alibis
6. mutagen
7. studfarm
8. lampreys
9. calliopes
10. doctrinal
B:
1. chafe
2. mohel
3. crave
4. fight
5. throat
6. candle
7. jinxed
8. recited
9. gallican
10. dithyramb
C:
1. lyre
2. narco
3. crime
4. atoms
5. plates
6. wealth
7. alltime
8. dryable
9. homburgs
10. triplicate
D:
1. rake
2. groan
3. croad
4. fiance
5. opaqued
6. nonswim
7. pinewoods
8. spherules
9. poriferan
10. warrantydeed
E:
1. elfin
2. cooing
3. region
4. lovage
5. unyoke
6. unsaid
7. romanza
8. wholely
9. armoury
10. superheats
F:
1. tapir
2. caves
3. along
4. photic
5. catlike
6. reached
7. reenact
8. trickers
9. enthalpy
10. fiefdoms
G:
1. darts
2. bistro
3. theorem
4. peonage
5. polenta
6. plurals
7. especial
8. idolaters
9. headfirst
10. upstreaming
H:
1. yeast
2. whatif
3. rhymers
4. sidearm
5. barytons
6. imbalmed
7. excerpts
8. cameraman
9. tradename
10. ceratopsid
A: Ureof naq Fcvprf
B: Glcrf bs Pneqf
C: Prerny Tenvaf
D: Svpgvbany Fuvcf
E: Znwbe Eviref
F: Fbppre/Sbbgonyy Grezf
G: Nfgebabzl Grezf
H: Ovyyobneq Ahzore Bar Fbatf jvgu Bar Jbeq Gvgyrf
This is awesome. I will to come back to this later.
Yes, wow, what a puzzle! While I enjoy the quizzes, because they reveal how little general knowledge I have, this structure is more fun.
A:
1. onl
2. fntr
3. gulzr
4. phzva
5. ???
6. ahgzrt
7. zhfgneq
8. cnefyrl
9. nyyfcvpr
10. ???
Some of these are hard! So far:
N: Ureof: Onl, Fntr, Gulzr, Phzva, Onfvy, Ahgzrt, Zhfgneq, Cnefyrl, Nyyfcvpr, Pvynageb
P: Tenvaf: Elr, Pbea, evpr, Bngf, Fcryg, Jurng, Zvyyrg, Oneyrl, Fbetuhz, Gevgvpnyr (gunax lbh Ze. Purxbi)
R: Eviref: Avyr, Pbatb, Avtre, Ibytn, Lhxna, Vaqhf, Nznmba, Lryybj, Rhcuengrf
Q: Svpgvbany fuvcf (fbzr ner nyfb erny): Nex, Netb, Q’Nep (be cbffvoyl Bepn), Pnvar, Crdhbq, Zvaabj, Cbfrvqba, Urfcrehf, Cvansber, Qnja Gernqre
A5 seems off
The Nybbler gives the solution for A5 above. It doesn’t seem off to me.
I’m solving these with technological help: I search a dictionary to find the most common possible words that can be the solution for some of the ten words listed.
A. gur pngrtbel zhfg or fcvprf orpnhfr: 3. gulzr, 4. phzva, 5. onfvy, 6. ahgzrt, 7. zhfgneq, 8. cnefyrl, 10. pvynageb. gur erfg ner yrff boivbhf orpnhfr zl Ratyvfu ibpnohynel va fcvprf vf fbzrjung ynpxvat. 1. ybbxvat hc, “onl” vf nccneragyl gur Ratyvfu anzr bs onoée. 2. “fntr” zrnaf mfáyln. 9. “nyyfcvpr” zrnaf fmrtsűobef.
B. cebonoyl fbzrguvat eryngrq gb srfgvir bppnfvbaf fhpu nf jrqqvatf, ohg V pna’g svther bhg zbfg jbeqf. 10. zhfg or “oveguqnl”, naq 4. “tvsg”, 5. “gebgu”, 6. “qnapr” ner fhttrfgvir
C. bu! V xabj guvf bar orpnhfr V fcrpvsvpnyyl ybbxrq hc nyy gur Ratyvfu ibpnohynel erpragyl, naq fhzznevmrq vg ng uggcf://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Hfre:O_wbanf#Glcrf_bs_prerny . Vg’f prernyf. 1. elr, 2. pbea, 3. evpr, 4. bngf, 6. jurng, 7. zvyyrg, 8. oneyrl, 9. fbetuhz. Vg’f 9. gung ernyyl tnir vg njnl. Jung ryfr jbhyq lbh tebhc fbetuhz jvgu? V unq gb ybbx hc 5. fcryg naq 10. gevgvpnyr.
D. and E. no idea for either. I guess the dictionary search doesn’t work because most of these are proper nouns, which aren’t in the dictionary. that, or they’re types of fish. there seem to be a ton of short words in English that mean some type of fish.
F. zhfg or fbzr grnz fcbeg: 2. fnir, 3. tbny, 4. cvgpu, 5. gnpxyr, 6. urnqre, 7. pragre, 8. fgevxre, 9. cranygl, 10. bssfvqr. fbppre, nzrevpna sbbgonyy, ehtol, vpr ubpxrl, naq eryngrq fcbegf hfr irel fvzvyne ibpnohynel, fb V pna’g gryy juvpu bar guvf vf sbe, ohg zl thrff vf fbppre.
G. nfgebabzl. 1. fgne, 2. beovg, 3. zrgrbe, 4. ncbtrr, 5. cynarg, 6. chyfne, 7. rpyvcfr, 8. nfgrebvq.
H. no idea.
I’m being lazy and only doing the first one, but once I got the first two the category clicked into place:
1. onl
2. fntr
3. gulzr
4. phzva
5. onfvy
6. ahgzrt
7. zhfgneq
8. cnefyrl
9. ?
10. ?
Only doing the first two tripped me up, I saw “Yno” and “Fntr” and thought it was study related.
I’m apparently terrible at this so no answers right now, but this is great and I’m coming back to it.
1. Fcvprf (onl, fntr, gulzr, phzva, onfvy, ahgzrt, zhfgneq, cnefyrl, nyyfcvpr, pvynageb)
2. Pneqf (snpr, ubyr, enpr, tvsg, gnebg, qnapr, vaqrk, perqvg, pnyyvat, oveguqnl)
3. Tenvaf (elr, pbea, evpr, bngf, fcryg, jurng, zvyyrg, oneyrl, fbetuhz, gevgvpnyr)
4. Svpgvbany obngf (Nex, Netb, Bepn, Pnvar, Crdhbq, Zvaabj, Cbfrvqba, ???, Qnja Gernqre)
5. Eviref (Avyr, Pbatb, Avtre, Ibytn, Lhxba, Vaqhf, Nznmba, Lryybj, Zheenl, Rhcuengrf)
6. Fbppre (gevc?, fnir, tbny, cvgpu, gnpxyr, urnqre, pragre, fgevxre, cranygl, bssfvqr)
7. Fcnpr (fgne, beovg, zrgrbe, ncbtrr, cynarg, chyfne, rpyvcfr, nfgrebvq, erq fuvsg, fhcretvnag)
8. I could tell after brute forcing the first few clues that I wasn’t going to get this category. After peeking, I stand by that assessment.
Here are the solutions, rot-13’ed:
N: Ureof naq Fcvprf
1. onl
2. fntr
3. gulzr
4. phzva
5. onfvy
6. ahgzrt
7. zhfgneq
8. cnefyrl
9. nyyfcvpr
10. pvynageb
O: Glcrf bs Pneqf
1. snpr
2. ubyr
3. enpr
4. tvsg
5. gnebg
6. qnapr
7. vaqrk
8. perqvg
9. pnyyvat
10. oveguqnl
P: Prerny Tenvaf
1. elr
2. pbea
3. evpr
4. bngf
5. fcryg
6. jurng
7. zvyyrg
8. oneyrl
9. fbetuhz
10. gevgvpnyr
Q: Svpgvbany Fuvcf
1. Nex (Trarfvf)
2. Netb (Terrx zlgubybtl)
3. Bepn (Wnjf)
4. Pnvar (Gur Pnvar Zhgval)
5. Crdhbq (Zbol Qvpx)
6. Zvaabj (Tvyyvtna’f Vfynaq)
7. Cbfrvqba (Gur Cbfrvqba Nqiragher)
8. Urfcrehf (Gur Jerpx bs gur Urfcrehf)
9. Cvansber (UZF Cvansber)
10. Qnja Gernqre (Gur Iblntr bs gur Qnja Gernqre)
R: Znwbe Eviref
1. Avyr
2. Pbatb
3. Avtre
4. Ibytn
5. Lhxba
6. Vaqhf
7. Nznmba
8. Lryybj
9. Zheenl
10. Rhcuengrf
S: Fbppre/Sbbgonyy Grezf
1. genc
2. fnir
3. tbny
4. cvgpu
5. gnpxyr
6. urnqre
7. pragre
8. fgevxre
9. cranygl
10. bssfvqr
T: Nfgebabzl Grezf
1. fgne
2. beovg
3. zrgrbe
4. ncbtrr
5. cynarg
6. chyfne
7. rpyvcfr
8. nfgrebvq
9. erqfuvsg
10. fhcretvnag
U: Ovyyobneq Ahzore Bar Fbatf jvgu Bar Jbeq Gvgyrf
1. Fgnl (1960 – Znhevpr Jvyyvnzf naq gur Mbqvnpf)
2. Snvgu (1988 – Trbetr Zvpunry)
3. Fureel (1962 – Gur Sbhe Frnfbaf)
4. Qernzf (1977 – Syrrgjbbq Znp)
5. Fgneobl (2016 – Gur Jrrxaq sg. Qnsg Chax)
6. Qvyrzzn (2002 – Aryyl sg. Xryyl Ebjynaq)
7. Erfcrpg (1967 – Nergun Senaxyva)
8. Znpneran (1996 – Ybf qry Evb)
9. Znarngre (1982 – Unyy & Bngrf)
10. Qrfcnpvgb (2017 – Yhvf Sbafv sg. Qnqql Lnaxrr)
No wonder I couldn’t solve B if it references such obsolete concepts as “pnyy pneqf” that I’d heard of only from old novels, and “qnapr pneqf” that I’d never heard of until now. Why didn’t you include more modern concepts that people are familiar with? Although it might be difficult to find proper clues for chapu pneqf naq gryrcubar pneqf. 🙂
Yeah, I understand. I tried to have a variety of things when I made these. Some things that would be good answers had to be rejected because I couldn’t come up with a good anagram with an additional letter. Thanks for the feedback.
Is there interest in having more of these sorts of things occasionally? Any comments or suggestions about them?
I don’t have useful suggestions but I had a lot of fun with this and would love to see more. I’m very fond of trivia-ish things that don’t have the “you either know it or you don’t” feeling of a lot of trivia. This was a great entry in that category.
I enjoyed it. I only did A, but I’m saving the others for later.
I feel like I’m taking a lot more than I give around here. Is there anything I can, yanno… do?
The trash hasn’t been taken out in months; oh, and the toilet upstairs hasn’t been flushing…
It can, it just doesn’t appreciate your compliments.
That made me laugh harder than it should have.
I’m trying to figure out why this comment seems so weird to me.
I think there’s an old model where people paid money for information in the form of newspapers, magazines, etc, and so if someone gave you information for free they were doing you a service.
But this is the 21st century. Attention is the currency. People work really hard to build up a following for their blog or Twitter account or Instagram or whatever. Sometimes this is about converting it to ad revenue, but other times it’s just nice to be heard.
As far as I’m concerned, you’re doing me a favor by being here. You could be taking your hard-earned clicks to Vox or Reddit or Popehat or Ribbonfarm or any of a million other people. Instead you’re here, boosting my ego, raising my ad revenue, and helping me inject my memes into the noosphere. You’re good. Just keep doing what you’re doing.
I think this is probably true as far as the top commenters go, in terms of them appreciating your providing them with attention. But if you want, I think if, when someone wrote a really good comment, you just replied with “yeah, that was a really good comment, thanks”, and maybe said some particular things you liked about it, then it would go a long way.
Thanks for the informative comment, Scott. :p
It was very helpful to me because it made clear what your expectations of good readership entail, as opposed to your excellent age old expectation of what we should avoid. In the future, I will try to remember to write thank you’s for good comments.
On FaceBook, I only click thumbs up on the type of material I would like to see more of. With comments on SlateStar, I figured that making a thank you comment would just get in the way of discussion clogging up already long threads.
Very much this. I’ve gotten better at not feeling the need for constant affirmation, but particularly in the early days of Naval Gazing, it was really nice when someone would just tell me how much they enjoyed the series. That kind of stuff feeds starving writers.
Whenever someone responds to me with “hmm, interesting point” or something similar, I think “Hey, that’s going on the resume!”
I don’t say that because it sounds passive aggressive, and because I don’t want to increase the noise even further, but I do genuinely feel the appreciation.
I love the Naval Gazing series. Thanks, bean!
The only thing that could make it better for me is a chart or some graphics, when describing some of the battles.
Great research, great series, though.
The problem is that my graphics skills are pretty mediocre, so I have to rely on what I can find. (Although if there’s a fan who has good graphics skills and wants to work on stuff, I’d be delighted to have the help.) That said, I found a pretty good source for Jutland, and that series kicks off on the 27th.
It’s just that there’s a little light in my head that’s been flickering a bit when I say anything here that’s labeled “INSUFFICIENT CONTRIBUTION – INCREASE USEFULNESS TO THE COMMONS – OSTRACISM IMMINENT.” Usually my social-processing wetware just blinks “RUN AWAY” at me all the time so whenever it says something specific I try to take it seriously. Maybe all I need is reassurance that I’m not pissing everyone off (and indeed that no-one has any idea who I am.)
See, I feel this way a lot. But then when I try to contribute and get chewed out by more prominent regulars, I figure “now I’ve done it, I’ve gotten myself banned for sure.”
My problem is I tend not to speak unless I’m contributing something new to the discussion. If I just agree with everyone who came before me, there’s no point in my saying anything at all. But (in other spaces more than here) disagreement is increasingly dismissed as trolling, so when I disagree with anyone, I also tend to keep quiet unless I feel like I’ve build up enough social capital to get away with it. But you can’t build up social capital if you never say anything, so I’m stuck.
Though I bet having a recognizable avatar helps, dood.
Avatar halo is a real thing. In every forum that I’ve participated, other members started talking and liking me more when I used an avatar (rather than none/the default image).
Especially when it’s gaming/anime related (such as your Prinny avatar). But I guess that has more to do with the places that I go, rather than some objective superiority of those types of avatar.
@toastengineer
This is a safe space for people with high disagreeability & high openness 🙂
So, acceptance of disagreement is fairly high.
A safe space for people who don’t like safe spaces?
It’s probably not going to happen, but I’d nominate that for the tagline.
This is such a brilliant way of putting it. The first time I really dove into a SSC argument I remember thinking “Damn, that was a great point. Damn, that was ALSO a great point. Why are these people being so reasonable? I can’t pick a side. I can’t even tell which tribes they’re from. This is kind of inconvenient.”
This comment has inspired me to register and comment for the first time! I discovered this blog around mid-summer 2017 and went on an archive binge, reading all posts (unless something was skipped by mistake) going back to the blog’s creation. I’ve been following it with a great deal of attention since, but haven’t commented.
Not sure what to say beyond “Great job!” Some of your posts have been really influential in my thinking, and it was also reading some of the posts here that convinced me to go ahead and give psychedelics a shot.
Good blog!
This could be me except for the psychedelics part, and I don’t think I’ve read every post. I was thinking the 100th OT would be a good place to start, but didn’t end up doing it.
Good blog, and I look forward to having something to contribute in the future!
Oh, and I’m running NoScript, is sharethis.com the one that records clicks to give you ad revenue?
“Hard earned clicks” is amusing. I can’t speak for other people, but I often feel an urge to contribute (do something) after I’ve read good blogs and comments and so on. Perhaps it’s a feeling of indebtedness. What if I can’t offer reflected reciprocity? Paint portraits or clean?
@toastengineer – good question! @ScottAlexander – insightful comment! Thanks to you both.
Speaking as a reader, there are some commenters who are both (a) very insightful and (b) whose interests overlap substantially with mine. Thank you, congenial and insightful commenters!
Speaking as a commenter, I appreciate it when people respond to me, either to improve my ability to communicate, to educate me, or to confirm that I’ve said something that interests people.
There’s a tension on this commenting system, which is that if every comment got buried in 50 “good post” responses, it might be hard to find the comments that interest me. Probably there’s a norm that more than one or two applause posts is redundant, and that’s good.
Why not add a button on each post that would allow people to express their liking the post (akin to the “Like” button on Facebook for instance)?
I would love to have liking, disliking and an ability to sort based on reaction. (Basically, reddit). My understanding is that that’s harder than it sounds.
I’d really rather not. That kind of system tends to turn into status races, tribal voting, and so on. Leaving aside the technical difficulty, I don’t see it helping the community here.
I think having facebook/twitter/reddit style reactions on this board would be an overall negative. It encourages people to say things that will be liked, not to contribute for a good discourse. Scott touched on this a little in today’s “Varieties Of Argumentative Experience” article.
Even though the upvote/downvote system on reddit is ostensibly for upvoting good contributions, in practice it takes an exceptional argument for an unpopular opinion to be upvoted more than a pithy joke against an outgroup.
It would be nice if there were a different way show that you’re spending the modern currency of attention on someone’s post though. At the moment the best way to do this is to engage thoughtfully with the post, and the second best is a small ‘thanks for writing this’ reply, but only by one or two people so as not to fill the board.
Scott does do ‘top comments’ for replies to his main articles, and once every two weeks for the open threads. We could potentially take this on as a community, and have a regular top level post on the .0 threads for people to share their favorite comments from the past two weeks. We sort of did that last time when Scott didn’t choose a top comment.
I think that would be a good way to highlight some of the best posters, but without most of the nasty incentives that can come from a like/upvote system.
I agree with bean and dodrian. Low-effort feedback mechanisms encourage low-effort posts.
Do you think it would work better if you could only upvote one comment per post (or per day)?
Better than reddit-style upvoting, certainly.
Better than the status quo? Unclear. I don’t think this is a problem that needs a coordinated technical solution. It just needs people to feel a little more free expressing their appreciation for good comments.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Chiming in to agree with others here. If you want to signify approval of a comment – whether you found it illuminating, informative, funny, or simply agreeable – it’s probably better to express that with a written reply, particularly on a forum like this where discourse is especially valued. If you feel it’s not worth your time to write such a reply, then I submit that you didn’t like that comment enough. “Like” clicks are cheap.
(I could see clicks being useful if you’re trying to poll readership opinion, but in that case, we need an actual polling mechanism.)
Old-school Less Wrong had the Reddit suite of controls, and it wasn’t much worse than the SSC comments, but it wasn’t much better, either. And it was more exploitable: one of the big things behind its decline was one guy deciding to use the voting system (and as many sockpuppets as he could get away with) to push his political line.
Thank you for saying this. I read the lineup of collaboration topics above and thought wow, what a fantastic list, I’m interested in reading what people have to say about all of these topics, and I’m grateful for your making this happen, along with all the people who will be doing the collaborating.
I don’t have the energy/capacity for any of this original work, but I am an appreciative reader, and I do have energy to do more vocal appreciating. I too didn’t want to take up space in the comments just appreciating, but I can see how it might shift some of the tone here if we all did that a little bit more.
I think it’s generally and necessarily true that most people here get more than they give, and this might be a good thing how hard it is to keep up already.
This being said, are there any topics you might want to write effort posts about?
There’ve been topics, but I feel like posting anything I wrote here would be more taking than giving.
Man, I think about this sometimes, but then I feel like I don’t know enough about ANYTHING to write a good effort post. I have some history and economics knowledge, but there’s a lot of people here who are more qualified and could do it wayyyyy better. I think I’d just piss them off by posting something inaccurate or glossing over something important.
Don’t sell yourself short. Your stuff on accounts receivable is still my go-to for what a good effort post should be. It made a topic that was previously something I would have avoided learning about at all costs interesting. I usually write in easy mode. Battleships are inherently interesting. Accounting? Not so much.
Ditto on the accounts receivable posts! I have no accountancy knowledge, don’t want to get any, find myself handling (even at a lowly peon level) basic accounts, and your posts helped me make sense of what the heck is going on with the systems.
(I’m now in the toils of dealing with a hell-system whereby everything is done by phone menu, I can’t get a human being to interact with, we’re disputing a large bill for a closed account, and the only way to navigate the phone menu is ‘punch in your account number’ *do that* ‘sorry we don’t recognise that account number’ *that would be because it’s a closed account!* *get human somehow* ‘oh yeah I can’t help you, try this number’ *gives me original phone menu number* – rinse and repeat!)
Thanks guys, I am glad you enjoyed the A/R effort posts! I’m always interested in what other people actually DO for work, so I enjoyed putting those together.
I might be interested in doing a short primer for corporate life or economics or something, but I am assuming I am not going to have anything like enough time to construct them in my new position.
Hopefully you’ll be struck hard enough by the creative muse to write a paragraph or two about corporate life, in between actually living it. Then, after a few weeks, you’ll have enough prose to forge an article from it for posting.
Having co-founded a startup (that ultimately failed), I know some of it, but having more of it fleshed out helps.
Report bad comments.
It seems like since the great verbal battle of Gupta v. Dieseach a few threads ago, where Scott didn’t ban those who rightly should have been banned, the community norm of civility has weakened and not recovered. Scott has given multiple warnings when there should have been action instead. If it is worth warning, it is worth banning.
Reporting bad comments increases Scott’s confidence to ban when something really has crossed the line. I get the feeling the community sees something borderline, defaults to not reporting out of either charity or apathy, and the borderline shifts a little lower. I am guilty of it myself, and I wish it would change.
This is a plea to you, to Scott, and to everyone. Report bad comments.
Reported.
I do report bad comments, but the Report button gives me a “Cheating, huh?” response whenever I click it, so I have no idea if my reports are going through.
This has happened on both Edge and Chrome, on multiple computers.
EDIT: I reported my own comment. Scott, if you see this, can you tell me if the report went through?
This is a known issue, but can be temporarily worked around by logging out and back in.
No, it didn’t. I hate this comment reporting system.
I see two links next to each other: one “Report” which gives the “Cheating, huh?” popup (quite insulting), and one “Report comment” which gives a confirmation dialog “Are you sure you want to report this comment?”
It seems like you have two completely separate comment reporting plugins installed. I see two report buttons, the left one apparently broken and coming from a plugin called ‘Crowd Control’. I can’t tell what plugin the right-hand “report comment” link (which seems to be the one that works) is coming from.
The one with the confirmation dialog doesn’t work any better. It just makes the words “Cheatin’ uh?” appear in the comment box after I click “Yes.”
Scott, is there an alternate way to reach you about comments that would bypass these mechanisms if they happen to malfunction, and that wouldn’t prohibitively burden your time?
ETA: in the meantime, I see little problem with replying to bad comments with another comment with the appropriate admonishment. “Less of this, please.” works if you know the commenter has been around long enough to know better. Something a bit more elaborate works for newer commenters.
Don’t let the comment culture degrade. The more bad comments are left unchallenged, the more daring / intellectually lazy newcomers might be encouraged.