No, but the people who believed in the Greek deities also typically believed those deities were heavily invested in immediate mortal conflicts and highly sensitive to slights. Those Greeks would have expected some protection for the bird or retaliation against Meshullam. Seeing none would provide evidence that the bird was not a favorite of any of their deities.
Marius
Karma: 342
“Each question will at least be held at 2 to 1 odds amongst professional philosophers, i.e., if more than 2/3s of professional philosophers agree, we won’t bother. So as to not waste our time with small fish.”
This is cheating, of course. You are comparing group A to group B on questions specifically selected for their difficulty to group B. Instead, it would be more fair to find open problems in fields that haven’t received much attention from professional academic philosophers.
The person need not even be self-serving. All people respond to incentives, and since publishing popular results is rewarding (in fame; often financially as well) the creators of novel arguments will become more likely to believe those arguments.
Nietzsche can’t know what the Superman will look like—nobody can. But he provides a great deal of assistance: he is extremely insightful about what people are doing today (well, late 1800s, but still applicable), how that tricks us into behaving and believing in certain ways, and what that means.
But he wrote these insights as poetry. If you wanted an argument spelled out logically or a methodology of scientific inquiry, you picked the wrong philosopher.
The first two are excellent examples. Thanks!
If Buller is to be believed that’s another postdiction. The sort of studies I want to see would compare two groups who aren’t known to be distinct. An example: Group A and B evolved in different environments and should display some difference in behavior. They have different rates of intron fragments G and H Now look at apparently-homogenous group X, who do not believe they have A or B ancestry. Compare X with intron G to X with intron H and find the predicted behavior difference.
Do we have studies at that level?
Buller claims that the statistics come from police reports and that the police had previously been trained to look for stepparents as a source of child abuse. If so, 1 this was well known by nonpsychologists and 2 the magnitude of the effect may be overstated. Is there a problem with this critique?
Ok, update my cache: you listed 7 bold postdictions; please list some bold predictions.
Its true that not all science is prospective, but you need to at least avoid looking at the data when making hypotheses you will then test against that data. Often we divide a data set to do this. Its much easier to do this with quantitative hypotheses than qualitative ones.
It is cheating to make predictions that are actually postdictions. To test hypotheses we have to look at questions for which we don’t have information and then test those questions by gathering new information. A lot of the “evolutionary psychology” are really “Just So” stories without this kind of hypothesis testing.
Its true that there are no universal preferences, but ability is about as universal as you can get. The deaf community doesn’t prefer deafness to hearing, they just like having a community. If they genuinely preferred deafness to hearing they’d advocate destroying their hearing infants’ eardrums… but in fact they find that idea abhorrent. The existence of transabled has nothing to do with preferences, only with identity. The only major groups that prefer disability to ability are the practitioners of female genital mutilation… and their attitudes toward sexuality are pretty disordered.
I certainly agree that its important to avoid treating the disabled as having lower value as people but I don’t see how calling situations lame makes me devalue lame people and see them as a disability rather than as a person. I also don’t know what that has to do with sidewalk ramps. Surely that has more to do with efficient resourse allocation vs a desire to increase inclusivity… I don’t think the proper balance is obvious at all.
Now I certainly agree its important to value disabled people just like abled
Our culture certainly does like to slap around those whose arguments are inconsistent… to the point that I suspect more consistent moral codes are consistent because the arguer is striving for consistency over truth than because they’ve discovered moral truths that happen to be consistent. We may have reached the point where consistent moral codes deserve more skepticism than inconsistent ones.
I think there is a connotation that one is supplying the person for ulterior/underhanded motives. I would ply a politician with hookers to get a law changed, or ply a source with alcohol so that I can ask him questions with less resistance… but plying customers with apples in exchange for fair market value just sounds weird.
Why did you lose ply?
If only the users of Curves graduated to regular gyms more frequently...
The study (which needs significant followup to create usable results) could have a number of interpretations, including:
*conclusions not fully supported by the data
*obesity leads to less enjoyment of motion
*obesity leads to fewer social opportunities to engage in sports
*low socio-economic status leads to obesity and to inactivity (due to insufficient access to parks, to parents who force you out of the house, etc).
*People don’t record their activity levels every day, so their estimates are colored more by measurable factors (body weight) than by unmeasurable ones (how much they actually moved).
I’d hesitate to read too much into this study.
While this doesn’t fully justify the use of words like “lame”, “blindly,” or “retarded” to refer to actions, they are in a different class than using words like “gay” or “N-----”. People are ableist, and that’s not about to change on account of language. No matter what verbal habits you get into, you’re going to prefer to be able to walk rather than hobble, to see rather than to not see, etc.
In contrast, sexual orientation and skin pigmentation are not inherently sources of value. Considering gay an equally good situation to straight, or dark skin pigmentation an equally good situation to light skin pigmentation is very reasonable. If we avoid calling bad events “gay”, we can more easily achieve equality there.
He may not want to fall off the cliff, but the jolt reaction occurs before he is able to analyze it
I suspect it’s a matter of degree rather than either-or. People sleeping on the edges of cliffs are much less likely to jot when startled than people sleeping on soft beds, but not 0% likely. The interplay between your biases and your reason is highly complex.
Would you agree then, that the contents of that set of habits is contingent upon what makes you and those around you happy?
Yes; absolutely. I suspect that a coherent definition of morality that isn’t contingent on those will have to reference a deity.
What I do not understand is when people use the words “right” or “wrong” independently of any agent’s preferences
Assuming Amanojack explained your position correctly, then there aren’t just people fulfilling their preferences. There are people doing all kinds of things that fulfill or fail to fulfill their preferences—and, not entirely coincidentally, which bring happiness and grief to themselves or others. So then a common reasonable definition of morality (that doesn’t involve the word preferences) is that set of habits that are most likely to bring long-term happiness to oneself and those around one.
ok cool, replying to the original post then.
There is enough food for all starving human children. The existence of starving children has much more to do with corruption than with production.