Jiro
5d ago
- If someone regrew a limb after prayer, which a minute of Googling shows has in fact allegedly happened! people would be like "wow, there must be a good scientific explanation for this!" or "oh, clearly an elaborate fraud!
Saying that X counts as a miracle doesn't mean that if you claim X, it automatically counts. It means that you managed to get over one hurdle--you managed to claim something that, if it happened, would be a miracle. Getting past the "if it happened" part is a separate hurdle.
One obvious problem is that scientists (and doctors) are so incompetent that any attempt to prove a miracle medically or scientifically can easily be dismissed as incompetence or fraud.
The reason such things are dismissed as incompetence or fraud is that they are incompetence or fraud.
There are plenty of cases where science has noticed a lot of incompetence and fraud in something, and yet determined that some of it is real. (High temnperature superconductors come to mind.) Miracles aren't dismissed because scientists dismiss everything, miracles are dismissed because they have particularly bad claims and evidence, just like psychic powers, space aliens, and non-Christian miracles.
Well, actually, things impossible according to the known laws of physics do happen. And when they are proven to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, scientists literally invent magic an invisible practically unfalsifiable mystery substance to explain them.
No they don't. Actually, I have no idea what you're talking about, except maybe ether, which you'll notice modern scientists don't believe in.
Jiro
5d ago
In fact, to use just one recent example, the US constructed and flew multiple prototypes of the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet for years, yet to my knowledge not a single photograph of them went public.
The US didn't want its test flights to be seen by the public, and so tried to conceal them. Religious believers don't claim that God is deliberately concealing miracles from scientists.
My question is – how does the CAT scan showing the person was healed prove that it was miraculous?
I'm not sure what you're asking. We know that some things just don't happen. If someone regrows a limb after prayer, and there hasn't been some massive discovery about biology, then that's a miracle.
If you are asking "couldn't they have healed normally?" that's TA's point: "miracles" happen in ways that are hard to scientifically corroborate. It's always healing something that naturally heals in 10% of patients or otherwise could happen, not regrowing a limb. Then yes, the CAT scan doesn't prove it's miraculous, but that's not because it never could for any miracle, that's because the miracles are conveniently hard to corroborate.
If you are asking "how does that 100% absolutely prove a miracle, the answer is that pretty much everything science "proves" is just shown to be very very likely, and the miracle can meet that standard, even if it can't meet a standard of absolute 100% proof.
If you mean "how do we tell between a miracle and aliens shooting their heal ray at us, or some other explanation that's weird but doesn't involve God", the answer is that saying "it's either a miracle or aliens" is a really good start and drastically increases the credibility of religion, even if aliens can't be ruled out yet. Once that happens, we can proceed from there.
Except of course, it doesn't happen.
Jiro
10d ago
Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence.
This assumes that you have control over the dangerous parts of producing the airplane. If you run the company, perhaps you do in some sense. If you're an engineer or software developer, you do what the company tells you to do, and you can't resign from the company after every poor decision outside your control that goes into the airplane, so this is just a way to doubly screw employees over by management.
Jiro
11d ago
Musk was always going to be there only for 130 days. This is all the media speculating that he's going to stay on forever and then being surprised when they stuck to their stated plan.
Trans women want to be called "she" because they would like to be biological women and forcing people to call them "she" is as close to that as they can get, barring operations. Your hypothetical hologram person doesn't want to be called "she" for this reason (because if they did, they would actually transform into a biological woman).
Jiro
15d ago
"It is risky behavior that often, but not always, causes harm" is basically an objection about harm.
This is not so obvious with the incest example but it's very obvious about drunk driving. People don't have some independent moral aversion to drunk driving that is unrelated to the chance of harming someone. Harm need not happen 100% of the time for the objection to be properly characterized as harm-based.
The amount of pushback on the leftist was zero. I didn't get banned this time, but I can't risk continuing to talk about it either.
And it's not hard to find places where being open about right wing political beliefs unambiguously gets people banned.
Jiro
16d ago
I'd characterize its "ability" (obviously unlike a dog, it has no agency) to play chess in this way as "smart" in some real, meaningful sense. Obviously it's not any sort of generalized "smartness" that can apply to any other situation.
The point of the dog analogy is that the dog that plays chess poorly is impressive, because being able to play at all is the biggest and hardest step, and being able to play well is a relatively small step from that.
The LLM version would be that it's almost as impressive for an LLM to generate text poorly as it is for an LLM to generate text well.
I don't think that's true.
Jiro
16d ago
The humor in the joke to me comes from the player downplaying this completely absurd super-canine ability the dog has...
It's the same basic idea: we already know how hard it is to play chess and it's far more than a dog can normally do. And it's this knowledge which makes the joke a joke.
The joke isn't a scenario where the dog plays chess under such unusual circumstances that it doesn't mean the dog is smart.
And imagine that it's 1981 and someone is showing you their brand new ZX81. The exact same thing happens that happens with the dog, down to you saying that the chess program can be beaten nine times out of ten. Should you conclude that actually, ZX81s are really really smart because playing chess at all is impressive? Or should you conclude that even though humans use general intelligence to play chess, the ZX81 instead uses a very nonhuman specialized method, and the ZX81 isn't very smart despite how impressive playing chess is?
If a few years later the ZX81 was replaced with a Commodore 64, and you couldn't beat the Commodore 64 in chess, would you decide that the ZX81 is dumb, but the Commodore 64 is smart?
Jiro
16d ago
To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.
I just had someone on an unnamed forum say that he wanted me banned (fortunately he is not a mod) for "supporting genocide" by defending Israel with respect to Gaza. So forgive me if I think you are not being accurate here.
Jiro
16d ago
Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother...
Replace this with "Julie and Mark went drunk driving. Nobody was hurt and they got home safely and sooner than they would have if they had to walk".
The fact that a dangerous activity sometimes works out doesn't make it a good idea. In order for this to prove what it's supposed to prove, the hypothetical would have to be "Julie and Mark committed incest, it all worked out, and they had good reason in advance to think it would work out". This hypothetical is impossible unless 1) it's a limited cultural practice that doesn't favor incest in general or 2) Julie and Mark are not human.
Jiro
17d ago
It was on the motte that I replied to this joke:
Beware fictional evidence.
The joke works because we have assumptions about what it means to be able to play chess, and we know that a dog playing chess with any significant chance of success implies a much greater jump in intelligence than the jump between playing poorly and playing well.
If the dog was playing chess using some method that was not like how humans play chess, and which couldn't generalize to being able to play well, the joke wouldn't be very funny. Of course there isn't such a method for chess-playing dogs. But we know that Claude doesn't play Pokemon like humans do, and this may very well not generalize to playing as well as a human.
(Notice that your assumptions are wrong for computers playing chess. My Gameboy can beat me in chess. It has no chance of taking over the world.)
Jiro
17d ago
loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.
No, they aren't. "They say it where I can hear it" isn't the same as "they'll say it to anyone".
Jiro
17d ago
deepl/AI-translate
What's the best free translator available nowadays?
The use case is translating old Perry Rhodan from German to English. I've been using Google translate, which has some problems.
Jiro
17d ago
Amara's law seems to apply here: everyone overestimates the short-term effects and underestimates the long-term effects of a new technology.
If they overestimated the long term effects, then in the long term it usually turns out to be useless, which means nobody remembers it, and you get availability bias.
Jiro
17d ago
Not only is there nothing remotely feminist about the preposterous idea that women are just as strong as men
If you believe women are as strong as men, that means that any treatment of men and women that differs based on strength really differs based on discrimination. Belief in widespread discrimination is a feminist position.
Jiro
17d ago
If people march with Nazi flags they'll scream from the rooftops but Elon Musk himself questionably, ambiguously does a Nazi salute on a huge stage, notably doesn't apologize or even acknowledge that this would be offensive to some people, even if it was initially accidental,and the right as a whole lets him off scot free?
If Musk's "Nazi salute" was a creation of the left-wing media, this becomes completely explainable.
The thing about Nazi flags is that you don't need to be politically biased to conclude that they are Nazi flags.
Jiro
19d ago
Taking that to the logical conclusion, we shouldn't be able to deport immigrants for anything whatsoever, since that would be unequal treatment that is analogous to treating the Devil unequally.
Jiro
20d ago
Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs.
If we wanted to write a law saying "you can use a non-work visa to work, as long as the industry or the quantity of work makes it laughable that they're taking someone's job", we could have. I hope the reasons why not to have such a law are obvious.
Jiro
28d ago
I mean this girl is in her mid-twenties and has already had seven messy breakups.
Not by non-comedy standards.
Jiro
1mo ago
I wouldn't accept "mom he hit me first" from my kids
This attitude leads to schools punishing kids for being bullied because it takes two to start a fight, and they dared try to fight back against the bully. Self-defense and initiation of force actually are things.
"Not in the driver's seat" and "political death" are vastly different.
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