I promise that I have no intention of reading your papers just to prove a point. That would be silly. I think it’s eminently possible that some of them might be interesting to me.
(I just looked you up in Google Scholar and grabbed the first paper it found, which I suspect is a little tangential to your main research; it was about parsing citations of scientific papers using a generative model of (part of) the citation process, allowing for errors in names etc. I think it was informative to me, though of course I may be overestimating how well I understood it. (In particular, one key element seems to be a trick you use to make your Metropolis-Hastings sampling actually generate a reasonable number of usable candidates, which is borrowed from another paper I didn’t look at and where I accordingly got only a very hazy idea of what it’s doing.)
But that stuff is argument about taste.
I don’t think that’s quite right. The RCC’s position is carefully “unempirical” in the sense that it doesn’t make any definite predictions, and that suffices to keep it from getting too badly embarrassed by future scientific discoveries. But it seems to me that, e.g., the position Pius XII laid out in Humani Generis involves somewhat different probability assignments from the position that would have been adopted by naturalist biologists at the time, and that if you had asked faithful readers of H.G. and naturalistic biologists questions like “How likely is it that in the next 50 years or so scientific investigation will find something plainly inconsistent with a purely naturalistic view of evolution?” you would have got different answers.
In support of this view, here’s a little extract from Humani Generis:
Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.
I’m not concerned right now to argue that this is wrong (especially as it’s not the latest official statement of the RCC on evolution); only that Pius XII clearly thought that divine revelation ought to shift faithful Catholics’ assessment of the probability of purely naturalistic evolution—even as regards only “the human body”.
Do I need to repeat that I’m claiming not that the RCC has an alternative empirically testable theory? Only that its position on evolution differs from that of a naturalistic evolutionist, by (in LWese) assigning more probability to hypotheses incompatible with naturalism.
This entire rabbit hole would have been avoided [...]
Maybe so. It would also have been avoided if you hadn’t taken such exception at such length to my use of the word “grudging”. These facts do nothing to indicate whether the better diagnosis is “attempting to go beyond literal meanings leads down rabbit-holes” or “complaining over-vigorously about going beyond literal meanings leads down rabbit-holes”.
(Just out of curiosity, is it you or someone else who’s been downvoting everything I say in this subthread?)
(Just out of curiosity, is it you or someone else who’s been downvoting everything I say in this subthread?)
Not me. Would be pretty rude of me.
You can ignore that citation matching paper, I was an undergrad back then. I don’t work on that kind of stuff anymore. If you email me, I will send you some stuff that’s paywalled.
That was my guess, FWIW. (I don’t think it’s necessarily rude to downvote someone you’re also arguing with, if you think their arguments are really bad. But I can’t recall the last time I did it, if I ever did.)
I was an undergrad back then
Yeah, I thought the paper seemed a little far removed from the sort of thing I thought you did now (and rather tame). I’ll drop you an email. If you don’t get one within the next day or so, feel free to remind me; I’m very good at forgetting to do things.
I promise that I have no intention of reading your papers just to prove a point. That would be silly. I think it’s eminently possible that some of them might be interesting to me.
(I just looked you up in Google Scholar and grabbed the first paper it found, which I suspect is a little tangential to your main research; it was about parsing citations of scientific papers using a generative model of (part of) the citation process, allowing for errors in names etc. I think it was informative to me, though of course I may be overestimating how well I understood it. (In particular, one key element seems to be a trick you use to make your Metropolis-Hastings sampling actually generate a reasonable number of usable candidates, which is borrowed from another paper I didn’t look at and where I accordingly got only a very hazy idea of what it’s doing.)
I don’t think that’s quite right. The RCC’s position is carefully “unempirical” in the sense that it doesn’t make any definite predictions, and that suffices to keep it from getting too badly embarrassed by future scientific discoveries. But it seems to me that, e.g., the position Pius XII laid out in Humani Generis involves somewhat different probability assignments from the position that would have been adopted by naturalist biologists at the time, and that if you had asked faithful readers of H.G. and naturalistic biologists questions like “How likely is it that in the next 50 years or so scientific investigation will find something plainly inconsistent with a purely naturalistic view of evolution?” you would have got different answers.
In support of this view, here’s a little extract from Humani Generis:
I’m not concerned right now to argue that this is wrong (especially as it’s not the latest official statement of the RCC on evolution); only that Pius XII clearly thought that divine revelation ought to shift faithful Catholics’ assessment of the probability of purely naturalistic evolution—even as regards only “the human body”.
Do I need to repeat that I’m claiming not that the RCC has an alternative empirically testable theory? Only that its position on evolution differs from that of a naturalistic evolutionist, by (in LWese) assigning more probability to hypotheses incompatible with naturalism.
Maybe so. It would also have been avoided if you hadn’t taken such exception at such length to my use of the word “grudging”. These facts do nothing to indicate whether the better diagnosis is “attempting to go beyond literal meanings leads down rabbit-holes” or “complaining over-vigorously about going beyond literal meanings leads down rabbit-holes”.
(Just out of curiosity, is it you or someone else who’s been downvoting everything I say in this subthread?)
Not me. Would be pretty rude of me.
You can ignore that citation matching paper, I was an undergrad back then. I don’t work on that kind of stuff anymore. If you email me, I will send you some stuff that’s paywalled.
That was my guess, FWIW. (I don’t think it’s necessarily rude to downvote someone you’re also arguing with, if you think their arguments are really bad. But I can’t recall the last time I did it, if I ever did.)
Yeah, I thought the paper seemed a little far removed from the sort of thing I thought you did now (and rather tame). I’ll drop you an email. If you don’t get one within the next day or so, feel free to remind me; I’m very good at forgetting to do things.