I would want them to alert hotel security and/or call the police.
DSimon
Karma: 3,097
He needs to have a second gun ready so that he can get as many shots off as possible before having to reload.
He isn’t assembling the gun out of a backpack, but from a backpack: specifically, from gun parts which are inside the backpack.
Hello, Lumifer! Welcome to smart-weird land. We have snacks.
So you say you have no burning questions, but here’s one for you: as a new commenter, what are your expectations about how you’ll be interacting with others on the site? It might be interesting to note those now, so you can compare later.
So I may as well discount all probability lines in which the evidence I’m seeing isn’t a valid representation of an underlying reality.
But that would destroy your ability to deal with optical illusions and misdirection.
Sounds fine to me. Consider it this way: whether or not you “win the debate” from the perspective of some outside audience, or from our perspective, isn’t important. It’s more about whether you feel like you might benefit from the conversation yourself.
Yep, agreed. We have a lot more historical examples of dictators (of various levels of effectiveness) who were in it for themselves, and either don’t care if their citizens suffer or even actively prefer it. Such dictators would be worse for the world if they get more rational, because their goals make the world a shittier place.
You keep using that word, etc. etc.
Rational means something like “figures out what the truth is, and figures out the best way to get stuff done, and does that thing”. It doesn’t require any particular goal.
So a rational dictator whose goals include their subjects having lots of fun, would be fun to live under.
Ask too much of your subjects, and they start wondering if maybe it would be less trouble to just replace you by force.
Best hope they’ve found (or built) a better dictator to replace them...
The comment above from EY is over-broad in calling this an “atheist forum”, but I think it still has a good point:
It’s logically rude to go to a place where the vast majority of people believe X=34, and you say “No, actually X=87, but I won’t accept any discussion on the matter.” To act that way is to treat disagreement like a shameful thing, best not brought up in polite company, and that’s as clear an example of logical rudeness as I can think of.
I like your use of “function calls” as an analogy here, but I don’t think it’s a good idea; you could just as easily say “use concepts from” without alienating non-programmer readers.
I don’t feel [my arguments in favor of religion] are sufficient and I want to improve them
I know you’ve heard this from several other people in this thread, but I feel it’s important to reiterate: this seems to be a really obvious case of putting the cart before the horse. It just doesn’t make sense to us that you are interested only in finding arguments that bolster a particular belief, rather than looking for the best arguments available in general, for all the beliefs you might choose among.
I’m not asking you to respond to this right now, but please keep it firmly in mind for your Discussion post, as it’s probably going to be the #1 source of disagreement.
(I think your response link is broken, could you fix it? I’m interested in following it.)
Honestly, I think you’d be coming across as much more reasonable if you were actually willing to discuss the evidence than you do by skirting around it.
I second this recommendation.
Ibidem, it seems that you don’t want to be put in the position of defending your beliefs among people who might consider them weird, or stupid, or even harmful. I empathize a lot with that; I’ve been in the same situation enough times to know how nasty and unfun it can get.
But unfortunately, I don’t think there’s another way the conversation can continue. You’ve said a few times that you expected us to know of some good arguments for theism, and that you’re disappointed that we don’t have any. Well, what can anyone say in response to that but “Okay, please show us what we’re missing”?
I think you can at least trust the community here to take what you say seriously, and not just dismiss you out of hand or use it as an opportunity to score tribal points and virtual high-fives. We’re at least self-aware enough to avoid those discussion traps most of the time.
I didn’t come here expecting people to be rigid. But when I asked people what the best arguments for theism were, they either told me that there were none, or they rehashed bad ones that are refuted easily.
How does this response mean that we’re rigid?
If I throw a die and it comes up heads, I’d update in the direction of it being a very unusual die. :-)
Okay, that makes sense. In that case, though, where’s the problem? Claims in the form of “not only is X a true event, with details A, B, C, …, but also it’s the greatest event by metric M that has ever happened” should have low enough probability that a human writing it down specifically in advance as a hypothesis to consider, without being prompted by some specific evidence, is doing really badly epistemologically.
Also, I’m confused about the relationship to MWI.
You’re trying to italicize those long statements? It’s possible that you need to get rid of the spaces around the asterisks.
But you’re probably better off just using quote boxes with “>” instead.
Many of the conspiracy theories generated have some significant overlap (i.e. are not mutually exclusive), so one shouldn’t expect the sum of their probabilities to be less than 1. It’s permitted for P(Cube A is red) + P(Sphere X is blue) to be greater than 1.
But you can keep on adding specifics to a subject until you arrive at something novel. I don’t think it would even be that hard: just Google the key phrases of whatever you’re about to say, and if you get back results that could be smooshed into a coherent answer, then you need to keep changing up or complicating.