Also Raising the Sanity Waterline
If you can’t fight religion directly, what do you teach that raises the general waterline of sanity to the point that religion goes underwater? …
Also Raising the Sanity Waterline
If you can’t fight religion directly, what do you teach that raises the general waterline of sanity to the point that religion goes underwater? …
Are you still working with Alonzo Fyfe?
I usually respond “No thank you, not today”. Adding “not today” reminds me that I contribute to charity on many other days, and I pick those organizations more carefully.
I don’t know if the engine uses a higher score for tags. Tags I would use for this post are “scholarship”, “training” and “learning”.
Some of the tags like “weaving” will not be helpful categories.
I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.
These are the missing practical arguments: safeguarding the Earth from otherwise inevitable catastrophic impacts and hedging our bets on the many other threats, known and unknown, to the environment that sustains us. Without these arguments, a compelling case for sending humans to Mars and elsewhere might be lacking. But with them—and the buttressing arguments involving science, education, perspective, and hope—I think a strong case can be made. If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. -- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
The U.S. space budget is, I think, much too underfunded. European Space Agency is even smaller. I would put the money into space research and send a team to Mars.
I just finished the survey. My estimate for the Calibration Year was 200 years wrong. How embarrassing, I need to learn the basics.
I would like to hear your disagreements too, even if Lydia McGrew is not interested.
I write overly convoluted sentence structures.
YAKiToMe has helped me with this problem. Hearing the text as speech gives me a new perspective on what I have written; it makes the awkward stuff more obvious.
This is a good opportunity to introduce your friends to LessWrong: “Hey, did you know today is the day Stanislav Petrov saved the world? http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/″ Chance are, they will click around.
Here’s an MP3 of the interview (text-to-speech conversion).
(If you think this is not a fair use of copyright, let me know and I’ll take it down.)
I got an error page tonight.
I have not signed up, although I have talked with Rudi Hoffman about the costs and I think about it often.
On a related note, I wonder about the ethics of enrolling a child (I have children). Any thoughts on that?
404: Page Not Found / This video has been removed by the user.
Lydia McGrew responded to you saying:
… the earlier commentator who says that the probability is “approximately 1” that there would be made-up resurrection stories (and apparently thinks that this applies to the gospels) ignores various obvious distinctions. For example, the distinction between stories by people who had nothing to gain and everything to lose for making up such stories and people who had nothing to lose and something to gain by doing so. Also, the distinction between people’s elaborating stories when they themselves were in a position to know what really happened and people who were not in a position to know what really happened.
We are talking in the paper about what the disciples themselves claimed. They were in a position to know whether what they were claiming was true or false, and they had a great deal to lose and nothing to gain by simply making up such tales. - link
Lydia McGrew addresses your post saying:
“The fellow who sneers at our combined Bayes factor on the grounds that we are assuming independence appears to have overlooked the fact that we have an entire section discussing that very issue and offering, as far as I know, a new technical point in the literature concerning the question of whether assuming independence strengthens or weakens a case and relating this to the question of situations of duress.”—link
John DePoe, Western Michigan University has a paper on this too. He calculates the probability of the resurrection, given 10 fair and independent testimonies ≈ 0.9999.
I’d like to quote one of the comments on lukeprog’s post:
These sorts of statements are, unfortunately, generally the refuge of the intellectually lazy and dishonest: “If you just knew this stuff [usually related to math and science, though other things among certain continentally inclined segments of the population] you’d see that your religious beliefs were false! I don’t have to explain why this is the case, it just is.” I don’t think you’re intellectually lazy or dishonest, so I’m hoping this is a temporary lapse of judgment. In any case you know, as well as I do, that there are quite a lot of people who are familiar with the subjects you cite who do take religious hypotheses quite seriously. This statement, then, is simply and definitively disproved by widely available empirical evidence: “And if they have time to consume enough math and science, then The God Question just fades away as not even a question worth talking about.”
That seems right to me. I have been reading the sequences for a few months now, and I see how the God question could fade away, but where is the argument that shows it must fade away? If someone has a formal argument based on the Kolmogorov complexity of God or whatever, I could better decide if I agree with the priors.
Your target audience is probably not Christian, but anything-mas is going to sound like a rip off of Christmas.
I would hesitate saying to my mother “I’m celebrating Baconmas with the kids”. I’d rather say “I’m celebrating Francis Bacon Day with the kids”. It’s more descriptive, does not feel like an attack on Christmas, and has a natural followup question: “Who is Francis Bacon?”