This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's not that nature is cruel, but rather, that it's nonsensically cruel that's gotten to me. The artifacts that come from evolution truly being random.
The Fundamental Question of Rationality is: "Why do you believe what you believe?", or alternatively, "What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?" - LessWrong
If you find a mechanical wristwatch sitting on the side of the road, and when you take it home you discover it only ticks forward fifty-eight minutes every hour, you don’t believe it to have been imperfectly made to begin with; you believe its perfection to have become corrupted through circumstance.
Yud’s whole telos is using the scientific method (and Bayes Theorum) for everything in life. That’s the core of rationalism. The core of the scientific method is that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how absurd or intricate, must be the truth. Science is perpetually trying to falsify all assumptions, all explanations, so that the truth may be seen in its naked glory.
But in that essay he spoke about a Judeo-Christian God, without the specifics of theology of any single religion, sect, or cult within that wide umbrella. He referenced a belief in a loving, immanent, benevolent God who deliberately used a cruel process of death and suffering to refine slugs to apes, and apes to humans, for the purpose of proclaiming His glory forever after death. And he did a fine job of destroying those cosmologies which embrace this patent absurdity.
Ken Ham, the premier creationist, does the same, using the same evidence.
Yes, Eliezer Yudkowsky has more in common with Ken Ham than either do with the theologians of ecumenical denominations, whether Judaic, Christian, or Hindu. Both Ham and Yud believe in a specific historical sequence (heh) of events which led to the world we live in now. Both believe in, and proclaim loudly, the purposelessness of evolution, and both loudly proclaim it is not God who made the world a place of toothless elephants or fat humans.
But where Yud says it is only man which brings the light of intellect to the universe, Ham points to the very first part of the ancient Scriptures of his religion and says it was man, not God, whose choice brought death into the world, who wrought entropy across the surface of the Earth and ended the perfection of a loving God’s garden.
Yudkowsky did not show that the artifacts of purposelessness inherent in an entropic and random world must be the result of a vast regression of chaos to the beginning of time; he didn’t see a need to falsify the only alternative which also fits the evidence.
Where he sees a Bronze Age civilization’s myths and just-so stories, Ham sees a miraculously preserved historical narrative documenting in detail a fall from a perfect world created by omniscience, resulting in the world we can see and measure, and dinosaur fossils we can dig up as evidence of this true history.
The mere existence of the “problem of pain” argument, however artfully phrased and carefully evidenced, is not in itself a proof of the nonexistence of the God of the Bible.
Now, I know I’m not going to convince anyone on this forum (of all places) to trust Ken Ham over Eliezer Yudkowsky. What I’m doing is making it crystal clear that Yud has handily falsified the weakman argument. The strongman is nowhere to be found in that essay.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link