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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36122 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I've explained it in a few comments downthread. Man, if anything came out of this post, it's that this forum needs more Girard. And basic metaphysics/philosophy of science.

Fair enough, though I'd say you should really provide a better explanation in the first post next time. For whatever reason, the philosophy nerds and especially the metaphysics people seem to think everyone has a very high baseline knowledge of philosophers on this forum. Some might, but I've always found metaphysics to be both highly esoteric and quite useless in the few brief forays I did on the subject.

That would more accurately be described as a type of agnosticism. A particular type, in fact.

Agnosticism (i.e. confidence in belief) is on a separate axis from atheism (i.e. direction of belief). The vast majority of atheists will be agnostic. Most religious people will be gnostic. There are some gnostic atheists but they're mostly just strawmen.

I don't think we're necessarily disagreeing here. To reiterate, I'm saying that everyone should default to being (agnostic) atheists until they've been given sufficiently compelling evidence to believe otherwise.

The claim is that wokeism was only able to rise so quickly and so broadly was due to the effects of atheism on the masses

This sounds like a "wokeism is just the lack of religion" argument that I mentioned up above. Your only articulation on this point in the top post was "Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses". I don't really follow. I'm assuming you're talking about cultural relativism here? Modern wokeism really isn't relativistic; it's morally absolutist about its causes so I really don't know what you're getting at.

Modern wokeism really isn't relativistic; it's morally absolutist about its causes so I really don't know what you're getting at.

I spoke a little about this here.

The concept of agnostic vs gnostic arose as a necessary defense against theists who'd retort "how are you so sure that God doesn't exist???" and try to pin the burden of evidence on the other side. Sarcastic atheists would respond with something like "how are you so sure that we weren't created by a magical Flying Spaghetti Monster?". More charitable atheists would explain the agnostic vs gnostic split.

Those other defenses you listed are well and good, but they don't specifically address the concern of "Why are you so sure that God doesn't exist" (bolding added this time). Those other defenses cast doubt on the likelihood of God, but none are 100% knockout blows. There's always still some chance, however small, that God (or even just some god) does exist. That's why debates on the confidence of belief are important, because a theist interpreting an atheists claims as being gnostic are almost always strawmen.

Theist: So why is your prior so low that you don't go to church, tithe, read the bible, and get into internet debates with theists?

This is a different question. Again, it's a question of "likelihood that God exists" as opposed to "when does evidence become so unconvincing that that you discount something"?

I think probabilities just don't map very well onto how humans think. Nate Silver was mocked for his predictions (despite the fact that even if something is 99% likely to happen, it can still not materialize in the 1% of cases). People seem to treat 80% probability to occur as "basically guaranteed".

Strong and weak belief is better, imo.

I think it's less confusing, actually. People don't accurately use probabilities (unless they're Nate Silver), so it makes sense to just avoid the numbers altogether. Strong vs. weak captures an important threshold (namely, would someone bet money on what they say being true?)

They sure get mad when high chance things don't happen in games. Mordheim and XCom both seem to have a fine pseudo random roll generator and shots miss even at high percentage chances. Much salt is spilled in any discussion of the games.

I feel like most people's gut is much closer to Fire Emblems' system which has does two random rolls and averages them which results in a huge reduction in lower probability things occuring (a 90 to hit misses about 2% of the time)

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