Seriously, if you’re going to go into panic mode every time someone outside the community criticizes it, you’ll never accomplish anything.
VoiceOfRa
Karma: −557
The smarter you are, the less likely you are to change your mind on certain issues when presented with new information, even when the new information is very clearly, simply, and unambiguously against your point of view.
Also, as George Orwell said “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”.
Actually, since we’re genetically engineering anyway, we should be able to combine genetic material from two males or two females (or just clone, of course). And once an artificial womb gets developed you won’t need to rent anything, um, living.
If we’re assuming artificial wombs are widely used, humanity effectively becomes a eusocial species.
Consider President Obama who has a very high IQ
Evidence?
I think we can both agree that there is significant likelihood of problems, such as major flooding of low-lying areas, in the next 20-30 years.
This is so nostalgic, this was what the GW alarmists were saying 20 years ago.
cheap O-rings in space shuttles
Look at Feynman’s analysis. I’d say this is a good example of disproportionate channeling of optimism.
If that’s your idea of “addressing”, I can point you to some creationist sites.
You exploit the weakness by demanding more concessions. To use an example strait from today’s headlines the Christakises’ showing of weakness by apologizing was exploited by the BLM thugs putting pressure on her to resign.
I believe in having a gun for home defense.
“evopsych may get a bad reputation because of racism but that’s not evopsych’s fault and its proponents should be fighting abuse of evopsych”
Well many critics of EvoPsych accuse perfectly correct parts of EvoPsych of racism because they don’t like the conclusions. True, maybe Carrier doesn’t do that specifically in this essay, but I think it’s only fair to expect critics of EvoPsych to be more involved in publicly combating the nonsense accusations some of the critics make.
EvoPsych also rarely finds any genetic correlation to a behavior
This is a ridiculous standard. The author presumably has no problem with using evolution to describe non-psycological traits. No one, say, demends we find the “trunk gene” before talking about why elephants evolved trunks.
More problematic still is the rarity of ever even acknowledging the need to rule out accidental (byproduct) explanations of a behavior
It’s called Ockham’s razor. If a behavior has beneficial (to the individual) effect X, it having evolved for that purpose is a more parsimonious explanation than to having evolved for reason Y that just happens to correlate with X.
The evidence actually suggests human evolution may operate at a faster pace than EvoPsych requires, such that its assumption of ancient environments being wholly determinative of present biology is false.
EvoPsychs are perfectly willing to explain traits using more recent enviroments when the evidence warrants it. Of course, Richard Carrier probably considers those parts “abuse of EvoPsych for purposes of racism”. After all if a trait evolved after the human populations diverged, it probably didn’t evolve the same way in all populations.
“Neuroscientists have been aware since the 1980s that the human brain has too much architectural complexity for it to be plausible that genes specify its wiring in detail,”
Amazing how the Creationists’ “argument from complexity” suddenly becomes respectable when applied to psycological traits specifically.
Religion serves numerous purposes, some of which have been mentioned already by other commenters. I want to add two others:
1) a mechanism for preserving Intersubjective Truths, that is, truths that it is not possible to re-derive from first principles in a reasonable amount of time.
2) a connection to the spiritual side of life and spiritual experiences.
Also, with so many different purposes it is tempting to design different religions to fill all these roles. I suspect that is harder than it seems. Since whatever fills at least some of these roles will attempt to expand to fill all of them.
A successful religion must serve Moloch, and your designer choice is how much and what exactly are you going to sacrifice first.
Not a bad first approximation, however, let’s examine Gnon, or Moloch if you insist on that terminology, a little bit first. Notice that of the four of Gnon’s sub-processes all but Cthulhu naturally, if in some cases rather brutally, converge towards making people believe true things or at least having an accurate working model of local reality.
Cthulhu is different, it causes people to engage in signalling completions that may very well result in them competing to believe ever more false things. In a way this signals “I’m so high status I don’t need to have an accurate model of what the peasants are doing”. One thing religion can do, when it’s working right, is keeping a throttle on this kind of status competition, by accusing anyone who starts saying anything too outlandish of heresy. Of course, there are several ways this can go wrong. For example:
1) some outlandish thing may turn out to be true.
2) once it ceases to be conservative (as is happening with the quasi-religion of “social justice”) it starts accusing anyone saying insufficiently outlandish gets accused of heresy.
The focus of the questions is intended to be on the engineering and social aspects, rather than on a question like “Should Atheism be considered a religion?” I understand that the vagueness makes this a less than perfect delineation of a topic.
Atheism shouldn’t be thought of as a (single) religion for the same reason non-apples aren’t a (single) type of fruit.
I see you’re a fan of the “say something outrageous and when called on it get angry and claim to have said something different” school of debate.
Rather using a “weakness” in the sense of belonging to an officially approved “victim group” is an advantage. Actually showing weakness in a fight will be exploited even more ruthlessly than before.
So this was supposed to be the “surrender to the the dark arts” article?
but that’s about putting technically unsavvy managers into positions of power over engineers,
Technically unsavy manages who insisted that the engineers tell them what they wanted to hear, i.e., who insisted that they be included in the consensus and then refused to shift their position.
There wasn’t a great deal of sympathy for Nazism in the rest of the world
In the 1930s, yes there was. There wasn’t much by 1945, but that was because people saw what happened to the Nazis and were basically going “despite appearances to the contrary, we never really liked the Nazis we swear, please don’t do that to us”.
I wouldn’t mind knowing myself. However, I don’t think having Satoshi’s identity publicly known would be good to bitcoin.