For what it’s worth, the chimps have me convinced.
TheRev
Karma: 85
I love that link. It reminds me of a poster I once saw which gave instructions on how to make electric generators, fixed wing aircraft, penicillin, and the like for prospective time travelers.
Great link. It reminds me of my freshman astronomy lab which actually had us students calculate for instance the diameter and mass of the Earth and sun, and through the semester moved up to the level of using parallax and blackbody spectra to calculate distance to various stars.
Pre-scientific societies have managed to build quite complex machinery. For instance the Antikythera mechanism, Roman textile mills, Egyptian irrigation systems, etc. Is it possible aliens could develop something as complex as a calculator without first attaining scientific literacy? If so electronics wouldn’t necessarily prove scientific literacy to them.
True, but would you agree that it is more likely that rational entities attain spaceflight capabilities? Also, rationality is likely to share some universals, whereas religion seems far less likely to.
Funny story, but it raises a good point. Perhaps an expression of curiosity would be enough to convince them of our worthiness.
Convincing ET of our rationality
I like how pragmatic you’re being. I am new here, but one of the things that attracted me to this site was the fact that much of the material is simply above my head. That’s hard to find in informal public online communities outside of academia, and I feel that the very challenge of trying to wrap my head difficult material is an absolute necessity for keeping my math and statistics skills sharp. However, different people have different bars that they want to reach, and I do agree that more accessible material is a great idea. As for me, I have a voice for radio and a knack for stating difficult theories in an accessible way, so I think a good microphone will be my next purchase for my computer. Making a Youtube video or two on rationality would be a great way for me to contribute to this goal.
I certainly agree that it can seem that rationalists are lonelier, I’m just posing an alternate reason why. Though, perhaps your post deserves a more thoughtful reply than I gave.
Unfortunately, the question seems to be a difficult one to answer. First, we need to find a way to determine whether or not rationalists truly are more lonely. Loneliness seems like a tricky variable to quantify. Some ideas that spring to mind: You could measure the size of social circles using social network data or self-report surveys. Simply measure self-reported loneliness. Measure loneliness with some sort of psychological screening like you would measure introvertedness or conscientiousness. Record how often someone goes out with friends. Rationality might be easier to measure, except that I think self-report data would be unreliable, as it seems likely that like intelligence or competence at a given task, rationality would be underrated by those that have it and overrated by those who don’t, but I’m sure the folks here at less wrong or elsewhere could write up a survey that measures it fairly well.
Then only once these variables are quantified, would we be able to see if there even is a correlation to begin with. Though it could be explained a number of ways. Rational people are attracted mainly to other rational people, and there are fewer rationalists than non-rationalists. Human social ques are emotionally rather than logically based. Rational people are more likely to be candid about sensitive topics, scaring away non-rationalists. People with psychological traits such as placement on the Asperger’s scale or high introversion could be conducive to rationality and not conducive to social aptitude. Or a combination of any of these. it’s an interesting topic, but I think we are a long way from being able to draw any big rational conclusions about it yet.
Perhaps you have conflated correlation and causation. It is possible that loners, or people who are less concerned with group conformity simply have more time and resources to devote to their rationality.
One possible explanation of your dream is that we live in a world in which people’s minds which are perfect for each other enter the dreamworld and find each other. We don’t believe that because the world doesn’t seem to work that way.
The world doesn’t seem to work this way because there has been no reproducible empirical evidence that it works that way. This isn’t a case of “The Earth looks flat from here, so it must be flat.” You’re postulating that there is another realm of existence out there that doesn’t intersect with our reality in any detectable way. At this point, you’re just arguing for an invisible pink unicorn or a Russel’s teapot, but then you say that this undetectable ‘dream world’, does affect the physical world by altering our minds to act as though it did exist. It’s essentially the same argument that the zombie theorists make.
But what if you saw on the news a special of Keira Knightley’s crazy dream that she believed was about her true lover; what if she had gone to one of those people who draw faces based on descriptions and the picture drawn was eerily similar to yours? If the dream she explained was really similar to the one you had, would you possibly begin to question your beliefs then? At what point will you accept that your beliefs about there not being an afterlife as possibly worthy of review?
If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology are wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein who supported them with evidence, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were ‘real’. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, and that the human brain has evolved a region for sending and receiving signals via this fifth force, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It’s not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.
Why aren’t dreams allowed to be submitted as evidence? They are experiences we have; if we cannot explain them, we must change our beliefs. The reason we don’t usually listen to dreams as explanations of our world is that we understand why they happen; they are perfectly explainable without any need for a supernatural explanation.
Bingo. We can explain dreams with psychology without resorting to ‘parapsychology’. When in doubt, consult Occam.
But what if we found that dreams weren’t explainable given what we know about our world? We would change our beliefs about the world.
Yes, if that were the case, we would, but it isn’t.
So don’t just say that dreams aren’t evidence. You can say that dreams are poor evidence for an afterlife, but if I postulate that we enter the afterlife in through dreams or some other similarly creative belief system that would explain the dreams, we would test my belief system to see if the predictions it makes correspond to reality better than other belief systems.
And how exactly do you propose to test the existence of an afterlife with reproducibility? Are you volunteering?
scientia potentia est
Knowledge is power.
--This quote is attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, but we don’t really know.
Honestly, I’m not that sure. I knew that there have been issues for law graduates to find jobs, but with the state of the economy the way it is, there are problems for graduates across the board, not just in law school. I’ll be graduating this spring with degrees in political science and history. So, I can try and find a job now when the market for college graduates in general is similarly bad, and I’ll likely end up working a low paying hourly office job, like customer support, or do some graduate work, like law school or a masters or phd program in one of my fields. Though there is a glut of graduates and paucity of jobs for masters and phd graduates in my fields as well. Eventually, the economic situation will sort out, and jobs will return, and historically, law has been fairly lucrative. Hopefully, this will happen in the next three years, but if I have to wait a few more years after graduation to start making big money, that’s acceptable to increase the long-term odds that I will have a well-paying job.
Though I won’t be curing AIDS, designing cheaper solar panels, or searching for the Higgs Boson, seeing as I haven’t chosen a career in the sciences, I am preparing for law school which should put me in a career that fairly well optimizes my income, while giving me a chance to use some of the rational argument skills on this site. Also, I live in Kansas, which, if I prove good enough at law, could provide me good opportunities to be on the front line against religious ignorance and bigotry here in the states. It would be a dream of mine to be in court against Fred Phelps and others like him, or to argue a case dealing with creationism being taught in schools. If not, there is sure to be some very interesting cases dealing with bioethics, cryonics, AI, or genetic engineering, fought in American courts in the coming decades. Or, without going to much into politics, since this isn’t really the place for that, just do some civil liberties work, since I think most of us can agree that rationality and police states don’t tend to work well together.
On New Year’s Eve this year, I made a spontaneous resolution to go vegetarian. It wasn’t exactly a well-thought out rational decision; I mainly just wanted to see what it was like and if I could do it. I never really liked the cruelty argument, probably because that would entail coming to face with the fact that I was responsible for quite a bit of that cruelty. Mainly, I was interested in health benefits, and figured a good way to test those would be to become my own guinea pig. Ten days into the new year, I’ve only eaten meat twice (I had sushi with my brother on his birthday, and one night I was slightly intoxicated, and really wanted a bacon cheeseburger.), and it has been surprisingly easy. I still usually eat an egg sandwich in the morning for some meat-substitute protein and take some vitamin supplements until I can figure out enough recipes and techniques for meeting my nutritional requirements without. I also don’t plan on turning my nose at my aunt’s turkey on Thanksgiving or my dad’s barbecue ribs on Independence Day, but if I could get meat consumption down to once or twice a month, it would be, I feel, a big improvement.
Anyways, the reason that I think I’m going to stick with it is that it helps me get in in touch with my body and its nutritional needs. I guess it’s really more of a sub-benefit of the health argument, but even if I fell off the vegetarian wagon, I’d be better able to know exactly what my body needs, and follow through on another diet. I know for instance, when I need more protein. Also I now get the most unusual feeling, a craving for salad.
I really would like to know from other vegetarians what drove you to become one. What arguments did you find most persuasive? Most of the vegetarians I know don’t do it for strictly rational reasons. A coworker of mine was raised by hippie parents and never knew any other way. My cousin has been a vegetarian since around age seven when she realized meat was animals. Some other friends of mine became vegetarians as adolescents as a way of asserting their own individual identity. I want to know about some cases of people being persuaded purely by rational arguments.
A couple of years ago, I happened to take a very interesting grad-level anthropology course entitled simply “Masculinity” at the same time that I was having some perfectly normal doubts about my sexuality. Most of my time in the course was spent butting heads with the professor who felt that most of evolutionary psychology consisted of a way to roll us back to the dark ages on issues of sexual equality, but long story short, I came out the other end doubting whether not just gender (the cultural aspect), but sex (the biological aspect) was just a made up social construct. During the semester, we studied many cases of non-dichotomous sex and gender, such as the Bugis tribe in Indonesia for instance, recognize three sexes, and five genders, including an androgynous priestly class. I realized that even defining gender in a strictly biologic sense is somewhat problematic, given the unexpectedly high proportion of people with three sex chromosomes (XXX, XXY, or XYY), or ambiguous or dual genitalia. I only wish I had thought of linking zombies to the arguments back then like you did. The whole topic is ripe for discussion, and I would love to see more.
If it is in her will, then she is probably safe enough. I do understand your wanting to hide the fact from her friends. Being a member of one of the first few generations to be frozen, she is a pioneer in cryonics, and acceptance is always tough for pioneers. In this case however, the pioneers might just live to see a world where people are actually thankful for what they did.
I voted you up for simply quoting The Screwtape Letters. I read it over the summer, and despite its assumptions of Christian theology, I don’t think I’ve found a better work of fiction on the topic of human psychology.
amorality is a hallmark of effective revolutionaries
Says who? Sure there are amoral revolutionaries, but some acted in fairly moral ways, and many more at least sincerely believed they were acting in the common good. And even the amoral revolutionaries drape their selfish motives in the language of morality.
How is that ‘weaselly’? Say there is a criminal who confesses to a crime, and quite obviously did it, but the police failed to properly Mirandize them, or otherwise unlawfully elicited the confession. Legally, you should find them not guilty, even if they likely committed the crime. Not guilty does not equal innocent.