SwordOfOccam
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User ID: 2777
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Yes, the Iranians are frequently delusional from getting high on their own supply.
They did almost no damage in their retaliation for the Soleimani strike, but that’s not what they believe.
They have to maintain their pride without it getting in the way of self-preservation.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
That IRGC QF general was a prominent leader with a job description that boiled down to “kill Israelis.”
Israeli leaders judged him worth killing to reduce capabilities and send a strong signal. They were aware of potential Iranian responses in doing their calculations.
Hamas would not be nearly the threat it was without years of IRGC QF support. See also: Hezbollah. While Iran appears to not have been directly involved in the 7 Oct attack, Iran is the primary source of all the terrorist threats Israel faces because of the support they provide.
Israel has been killing QF officers in Syria for years, often when blowing up supply dumps. Syria is essentially a major QF logistics hub to ship weapons to Hezbollah. This recent attack was simply a prominent example of that.
It’s surprising to you only if you don’t know that fighting Hamas in Gaza is but one front in a larger war that has been going on for decades between Israel and Iran and its proxies/allies.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
I’ve joked before we should mass produce aircraft carriers.
Can solve energy and housing problems with one stone.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Wow. There are no bodies?
Cremation couldn’t have been involved, perhaps?
How do you feel about the archeological efforts that have been done?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
Like, it’s remarkable you bring up the apparently fake Canadian graves, when the same technique was used at Treblinka and they found stuff.
Is what they found made up? The reinterred remains faked? The confessions of Nazis like Stangl just irrelevant?
You’re not dealing with evidence cited on Wikipedia for Christssake. Your writing here seems to implicate you’re not even aware it exists as a claim—even if you think you can show it’s BS.
Try to at least be aware of evidence you claim doesn’t exist:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna66241
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unearthing-the-atrocities-of-nazi-death-camps/
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
The HBD and trans stuff pops up regularly because it regularly is of direct, current relevance to a variety of political issues. Moreover, there is new evidence coming out on those questions.
Debating whether Eisenhower ever mentioned the holocaust doesn’t have the same relevance.
If we had a flat earther or moon landing skeptic in here who also made good posts they would still be pretty annoying when they posted about obvious nonsense to rehash tired debates.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Oh my god.
“Criticizing Nazis is punching down” is incredible. I can’t wait to trot that out at some point.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
If a poster is generally good but when they post on topic X they suck and to stop posting about X, then that is a good way to balance banning the poster and banning discussion of X.
SS was found to be obnoxious and failed to heed the warnings.
We don’t want the same characters clogging up the feed with the same tired topic. If SS had made the post he did about current events and say linked to a past expose on the holocaust, then he would have been able to get his message across without being quite so goddamn annoying such that he got modded.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
There’s also this weird thing where so many holocaust deniers, particularly in the Middle East, essentially seem to be believe: “obviously the Nazis didn’t kill millions of Jews; wouldn’t it be cool if they had though?”
The vibe around here is more like: “obviously the Nazis didn’t kill millions of Jews; you can understand why someone might want to though.”
There are some issues where over time I’ve had to admit the hard right was more correct than I wanted them to be. On the “Jewish Question” though, well, there are just so many idiots and the tension with prominent right-wing Jewish intellectuals is funny/sad to watch. Antisemitism is Lindy but goddamn is it stupid and it’s incredible how much horseshoe theory applies with it.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Well, I would say that’s going a bit too far.
The Zionists believed and believe Jews need their own state because anything else leads to persecution. The Holocaust was the large cherry on top of a cake of centuries of persecution in Europe, so it’s the ultimate proof of the theory.
As counterfactual histories go, if the US had allowed Jewish immigrants at scale the way we do now (legal or not), I’d bet Israel never gets founded because so many of the founding generation would have made a different choice.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
The fact that IQ predicts academic performance is because IQ measures something that is genuinely useful, and it’s not limited to book learnin.
If you disappeared everything to do with standardized testing and academia, i.e. explicit measuring and sorting, in any decent meritocracy you would end up with a similar distribution to how things are now.
It’s a cope to think IQ “fetishization” is because of how we use it to sort elites.
We don’t choose our elites using the Olympics because athletic ability is not what tends to matter. Also note that plenty of our elites are not “selected” in even a dysfunctional meritocracy. Talent and ambition rise to the top when it’s not explicitly prohibited from doing so.
Furthermore, you’re overestimating IQ and how it’s used for selecting our elite/upper class. Plenty of people are very smart but don’t achieve wealth/power/influence because they don’t seek it. Which is to say that if you take the top 10% in any domain you care about, they will almost certainly be smarter than average, but not necessarily even top 20% in intelligence. Standardized testing tends to set a “must be this tall to ride” baseline, but it’s far from the only factor institutions select on.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Seems illogical to criticize JKR for not being brave because her wealth and fame shield her from consequences (though, she has definitely lost money from her stances because it’s not like she has a bunch of right wing fans buying extra copies of her stuff), but also you say this counts as proof conservatives are making up the risk of consequences for holding “conservative” views.
Holding and expressing views that were very common among Democrats in 2008 in America will get you reprimanded and even fired, FFS, let alone Real Conservative ones. In the US the punishment is not by the legal system, just polite society and the vast majority of significant employers, so we have that going for us.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Well, that, and he couldn’t help but lump us all together and combine us with the Left racialists.
He would not recognize that a fair number of us here combine race realism with a desire for race-blind classical liberalism/individualism.
If he would have engaged with actual arguments made, instead of constantly dodging and misrepresenting them, and only been pissy with the actual Nazis and white supremacists he would probably still be around here.
It sure was a trip to watch him contort his arguments against the descriptive evidence for race realism with his anti-elite/academia views.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Neither of those facts remotely modifies the argument I presented about incentives.
Assisted living and end-of-life care should also not be subsidized by taxpayers. Entitlements need reform across the board.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
What is really useless is creating policies that distort incentives and make problems worse. You can’t just ignore personal agency interacting with incentives just because the scale went up.
You have to consider effects on incentives for future behavior and “willingness to pay”, when it becomes a black hole of government spending for everything because it’s labeled a “chronic disease.”
In this case, individuals being shielded from bearing the cost of their poor lifestyle decisions will almost certainly make things worse.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Well I’m a layman at physics, so I’d suggest finding someone who can lay out the math, theory, and experimentation that shows it is impossible for any object with mass to travel faster than the speed of light.
My layman’s understanding is that the fundamental properties of spacetime, mass, and energy as we understand them via Special Relativity make it impossible.
Here’s a bunch of physics nerds describing how it would violate causality:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/671516/proof-for-impossibility-of-ftl-signals
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
You’re applying a rigid categorization of “fact or fiction” to an area where the practicality of “all models are wrong; some are useful” is the typical approach.
You’re calling for perfection or it’s fiction, when science has been building knowledge bit by bit. Things can have shades of gray.
Obviously, understanding the Ultimate Nature of Reality and Its Universal Laws is a fine goal, but the way to get there is almost certainly a pretty messy process.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
yielding justifiable nonzero confidence in universal natural laws may be zero
I’m failing to understand why this is a bar any epistemology needs to clear.
Science as a method verifiably works at improving our material lives because it produces sufficiently accurate information. The utility is the payoff, but the correlation to reality is what enables it.
if someone were to give a single universal natural law of the physical world -- take your pick -- and give an objective argument why we should have greater than zero confidence in its literal truth.
Where does math fit here under “physical world”?
The thing you seem to be doing is putting forth a standard no epistemology can satisfy. It’s not like pure math and logic don’t have identified paradoxes and limitations. Just ask Bertrand Russell.
How about the finding that nothing with mass can exceed the speed of light? This is something backed by math and logic, as well as experimentation. If it were otherwise physics would break, is my layman’s understanding anyway.
Is that sufficiently “universal”?
There are a lot of “universal” rules in physics, so long as you stay at the atomic level. (The quantum domain also has its rules, but they don’t break the atomic ones altogether.)
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Yes, the knowledge was useful in that it allowed us to put man on the moon. Many such cases.
But the focus here is not on it being useful; the focus is on it being proved sufficiently accurate to be useful in that endeavor, as an epistemology dedicated to understanding reality.
Proof -> Pudding
We do want the utility pudding, but it’s the evidence of the epistemic success I’m trying to highlight.
In the case of religion, if someone presented evidence of the gift of prophecy then the focus would be on the accuracy of the predictions, not the utility of them. Or faith healing consistently working.
It’s the utility showing the epistemic success of correlating to reality, not the utility per se that would be evidence of divine power (or at least something inexplicable). Even if we don’t understand the causal mechanism, the effects could be systemically demonstrated such that we the faithless would have to worry about our current stance.
In the case of religion, in my experience the practical utility of religion is typically kept separate from factual accuracy of the theology. You’ll hear a lot about meaningfulness and belonging and community as secular evidence religion is good. And these things are often true (I’ve experienced them myself), it’s just not direct evidence of the religious doctrine being factually accurate about the nature of reality.
Here’s a related epistemic irony I still can’t get over: Learning about evolution was a big piece of evidence against the religion of my youth. There were so many battles between the scientifically literate New Atheists and the ignorant Young Creationists, while the religious Intelligent Design types looked down on both as they tried to pretend they had squared the circle and reconciled their theology with a natural origin of mankind.
But now I often find myself siding with trad religious conservatives regarding e.g. average biological and behavioral differences between men and women, because so many secular science aficionados deny evolution above the neck when it’s inconvenient for their political ideology.
The flawed epistemology used by many believers can beat the flawed Blank Slate one in many cases.
I guess the historical precedent of patriotic Christian capitalists being far preferable to godless communists should have kept me from being too surprised this kind of thing can happen.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Success rates matter.
If tarot reading worked as consistently physics or math then boy would that be something.
(Now social sciences, well…)
Science as a method frequently involves guessing and dumb luck and accidental discovery. But then the point is systematically testing findings and examining new evidence and ideas. Tarot reading doesn’t have iterative improvement going on.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
But that’s shifting from epistemology to utility.
Religions and religious beliefs certainly have had and do have utility. They certainly have a lot of “reproductive fitness” mimetically and biologically, though there is the significant decline in modernized societies.
How much credit say Christianity gets for contributing (vs. inhibiting) the secular bits of Western progress in science and such is contested. (And of course there are the debates over Islam’s golden era and Eastern religions’ contributions vs. Christianity being uniquely likely to foster say individualism.)
I don’t think ~empiricism required a “completely irrational belief” coming from a religion, but it’s basically impossible to separate out progress in science from religious influence, from the Greeks down through Newton, because everything was so entangled until “natural philosophy” split off sufficiently and science became secular.
We can’t know the counter factual of the past, but even if I’m willing to totally grant that eg Christianity played a critical role in fostering the Enlightenment, Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and other things that led to Western Culture, that doesn’t mean that Christianity in particular or religion in general is useful today on net (or factually accurate).
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Comparing one sport to another is still within the domain of sports. The rules are different in any particular case, but it’s not a fundamentally different category where say the laws of physics or other fundamental facts about reality change.
Science deals with reality as we can understand it. Religion seems to not do that so much. The fact that religions don’t tend to come to consensus on much of anything over time is pretty strong evidence there is no underlying system of discovering truth.
You’re leaning hard into nonoverlapping magisteria. It’s not very trad but it is common.
If you read an article on “god of the gaps” you should be able to see your point about “existing methods” is doing the same. Applied backwards, it makes religious believers seem naive. So too using it now.
You’re bringing up Bayes when there’s no need to. It’s elementary logic that you shouldn’t look to “believe what can’t be disproven” vs. “believe what there is evidence for.” The possibility space of the former is infinite; the latter is constrained by reality if you have good standards of evidence. “What must I believe” vs. “What can I get away with believing.”
Not sure how familiar you are with various forms of trad religious legal systems, but I’ll take secular legal systems informed by modern concepts of science and reason. Secular philosophy is rich on the questions of justice and personal responsibility, and scientific principles and findings influence most of us who care to think about such things.
Methodological naturalism is true because it works. Anyone can use it, even the religious. Anyone can run and observe experiments that show the mind-brain connection, and the lack of evidence for any concept of a soul.
I think you’re failing to understand the model here. I don’t need to believe in your god or anyone’s beforehand for you to demonstrate solid evidence something strange is happening via prayer. If your god stretches forth its hand to affect the material world, as so many claim it does, then where is the evidence? Trying to philosophize about the limitations of materialism are irrelevant unless your god never comes into that domain.
You also have the causation backwards: I disbelieve in god because people claim so much about eg prayer but can show so little evidence to back those claims. But even if I had started from a null position, the burden is on the claim being made. Why is the omnipotent creator of the universe such a shy fellow and why do his believers talk him up so much with so little hard evidence brought to bear?
Nowhere did I claim I solved my own brain with my brain. I used tools to disprove certain ideologies to them disprove the one I had been raised with. The facts were relatively easy; the emotions and conditioning were far more challenging.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Focusing on the “trust” aspect instead of the “belief” aspect of the word “faith” is not helpful in an epistemological discussion.
To trust in a deity, one believes it exists.
Those Marines doing their duty are not doing so with an epistemology that requires them to believe in anything without regular boring evidence.
Similarly, people do recover from comas. No special beliefs required.
In contrast, hoping/trusting/believing in something like a deity that may or may not be out there is in a different category of belief. How do you know?
I think the idea of faith as firm belief without evidence is a power grab by fundamentalist clergymen who do not want to be questioned on their axioms.
I guess it’s too bad the faithful can’t come to a shared understanding on how it is they ought to develop their beliefs regarding deity and theology.
Is this site fundamentalist in your view? (I assume you think Evangelicals count as such.)
These?
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/true-to-the-faith/faith?lang=eng
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
You can try to accuse me of strawmanning Religious Faith, but I was raised in a devout religious environment and personally experienced how it works. Different strains of Christianity have their particular spins on it, but there’s a lot of commonality in at least how it’s scripturally defined and commonly practiced.
Bringing up little-f faith is a red herring with respect to critiques of religious epistemology. Obviously, humans go about our days dealing with uncertainty and have to rely on heuristics and gut feelings. The motte/bailey between “regular faith” and “Religious Faith as an epistemology” is obnoxious and frequently invoked to shield religious beliefs from direct critique. It’s probably necessary to taboo the word “faith” altogether to avoid these kinds of issues.
So to is “blind faith” unhelpful to discuss in that it typically is something everyone can agree is bad and that religious types will deny they are doing it.
It is certainly the case that Faith or any other label for “faulty epistemology” can exist in non-religious contexts. Many ideologies rely on credulity and insufficiently examined claims to survive. In fact, science is hard and scientists fail regularly to do it well (and can be wrong even when doing it as well as they could). That’s why it’s so critical that science is iterative, with no special authorities or sources of knowledge. Human nature is not by default well-calibrated for consistent scientific reasoning.
Religious epistemology does not have standards of evidence that satisfy science, or even other secular frameworks, such as law. It does tend to have special authorities and sources of knowledge. Religion can iterate and change, but it tends to be haphazard and so rarely results in more consensus on any given religious concept or interpretations of god’s will—even within one religion.
Religious beliefs have to be justified via a special religious epistemology because they cannot withstand scrutiny from an actually effective and consistent epistemology. It’s simply special pleading and inconsistent standards backed by tradition.
When you say:
Faith is believing in something that can neither be proven nor disproven with existing methods.
Religious faith applies this to transcendental concepts.
You’re making a few major mistakes. One is that “existing methods” is basically “god of the gaps” and it ought to be embarrassing to invoke.
Two, “proven nor disproven” is to frame things wrongly. If good evidence sufficient to justify a belief probabilistically can’t be obtained, then saying “well you can’t disprove it so I can maintain my belief” is not a logical stance. I don’t need to disprove there’s an incorporeal dragon in your garage to dismiss it as extraordinarily unlikely.
Three, historically (and in many cases to this day), Religious Faith is not merely applied to whatever “transcendental concepts” are. Religious Faith has retreated enormously as science has progressed, because science actually worked no matter what your religion is. E.g. no need to worry so much about casting out devils as medical science improved.
Relatedly, “nonoverlapping magisteria” really doesn’t get you very far because science has this pesky habit of intruding. For example, Christians typically have strong doctrinal and personal beliefs about souls and prayer. Unfortunately, “souls” do not exist, unless they are somehow neither matter nor energy. Same situation as ghosts and other such phenomena. The mind is what the brain does, which we can demonstrate in a myriad of ways. Similarly, “prayer” as a way to communicate with deity or to seek causal impact or special knowledge is consistently shown to just not be a thing. Same situation as mediums and fortune tellers.
The trick that worked for me was examining other religious beliefs and finding them sorely lacking (as encouraged by my religion). Eventually, those critical tools of logic and reason came for my own religious beliefs.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
The scientific method is believing things based on evidence.
Religious faith is believing things not based on evidence.
“Evidence” is doing a lot of work in those statements, of course. There is no One True Definition of scientific evidence. It’s almost easier to say what it isn’t. For example, receiving revelation in a dream or any other special knowledge that can’t be tested or verified by others. “It made me feel warm inside” is no way to practice epistemology because human emotion is too volatile. “We explain the inexplicable with further inexplicabilities” leaves something to be desired as searching for truth goes.
Scientific knowledge is true insofar as it can accurately represent the workings of the universe. Theory often comes after experimentation. Theories often need to be refined or get superseded by new knowledge. What’s important is the process of refining our understanding, not a single point in time on any given theory.
The Wright Brothers achieved flight before the physics were understood. My understanding is that the physics of lift are still contested. We use electricity to make sand do math and other thinking, but my understanding is that the physics of lightning are still contested. We started vaccination before understanding all that much about germs and viruses.
All this is to say that you are making a category error, common among classical philosophers, of judging science by the benchmarks of classical philosophy and finding it wanting.
Science is what works; not what is sacred or revealed from mysterious sources. If something doesn’t work, we can and should discard it. That’s the nice thing about iterative systems open to feedback and dedicated to improvement.
It was a consulate in name only. It was a QF operational base used to conduct operations against Israel.
The Iranian MFA didn’t lose a bunch of passport stampers here.
“Why did Israel just blow up an Iranian MFA building without provocation” is not the correct framing here.
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