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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3026 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 29, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone have a good source for a deep dive into the dichotomy of schizophrenia between first world and third world countries? It's a commonly cited fact (myth?) that it presents differently in different cultures - i.e. in America schizophrenics often experience paranoia, violent episodes, ideations of suicide or self-harm, while in sub-Saharan Africa their symptoms manifest as religious experiences. A recent culture war thread comment suggested the possibility that genuinely violent, dangerous schizophrenics in third world countries are quietly abandoned or disposed of, but didn't cite any sources. Is this even a real phenomenon? Is there any useful research into it?

  1. Some mental disorders are more culturally bound than others, with Schizophrenia being something we see pretty much everywhere with similar patterns but different content being common.
  2. Severity of symptoms is variable, with some with most people experiencing a step-wise decline but with the extent of this being variable.
  3. Less severe or alarming symptoms means less presentation for help ex: hallucinations not being as distressing they can be not as bad, or fit better in the cultural milieu (think religious delusions back in the day), or if someone is more negative symptom predominant (think apathetic, reserved, anti-social).
  4. Religious delusions are common but tend to be unsurprisingly related to the culture at hand. Same for other delusions and hallucinations. Someone in rural Africa might think the chief of the next village over is out to get him, where an American might think it's Joe Biden etc.
  5. Manic episodes and full blown psychosis were historically deadly. If you were manic in a pub in London in 1630 you might get killed in a bar fight and nobody cares or you might end up summarily executed by the police for being a total idiot. It would not surprise me if the same phenomena happens today in certain places.
  6. Not sure if we'd have good quality of research on this though.

I should note that Western psychosis is more likely to be dangerous because of things like easy access to weapons, poor policing, good social safety net etc. Remove those things and they are likely to get killed, unable to arm people, exiled, whatever is my thought.

It's not like violence is Wester specific - read the wiki page on running amok for an interesting example.

I only have limited psychiatric experience, but the handful of schizophrenics I've encountered in India had what any Western doctors would consider "Western" schizophrenia symptoms, including my friend who just tried to commit suicide that I personally diagnosed. That means the hallucinations were outright malign in nature, or certainly delusional in a negative way, as opposed to claims that they can be benign or even helpful.

For what it's worth, they didn't know they were schizo till they had the diagnosis, so it's not like I expected them to be culturally primed to interpret it in that light.

Overall I personally find the claims dubious, but I can't conclusively rule it out.

I have no idea but one thing I always wondered is wether a person that only present so called negative symptoms should be classified as schizophrenic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#:~:text=activity.%5B7%5D-,Negative%20symptoms,-Negative%20symptoms%20are IMHO there is great diversity in symptomatology and imho the root causes can be very different such as different brain regions being subject to damage/dysfunctions

I'm looking for a audiobook, series of audiobooks, or podcast that gives a historical survey of the middle east starting with the founding of Islam. Basically I'd like to have an AP Euro/AP US level of detail about the region. Normally my proceedure for this is to look for a "History of $REGION" podcast, but I found that I felt I couldn't trust the "History of Islam" podcast I found because it was done by a believer and I wasn't sure how much that distorted the narrative (I didn't get the sense he was a propagandist, just had some fairly obvious biases). This part of history seems uniquely political, so I'm afraid I would run into the same issue if I just bought a random book on the subject.

Does anyone have any recommendations? Ideally this would be by a non-believer. Even more ideally, by a non-believer from quite a while ago (somehow I feel like people might have been able to be more objective about it before 9/11).

I can't think of the exact title off the top of my head, but the Great Courses series did a history of US-Middle East relations starting around 1900. If you don't have a subscription, it's available on the high seas and I can find a link if you DM me.

I think I'm looking more for older history. Thanks though!

A related, broader question: Say I want the answer to the question "what's the best serious book/books about "? What's the best way to do that? Google works fine, is something better?

Bernard Lewis sort of fits the bill. Looks like only his post-9/11 books are available as audiobooks.

"The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years" by Bernard Lewis sounds like what you're looking for but there's no audiobook and I haven't actually read it.

It's not as commonly covered because there's a lot of pressure to play down the enmity between Islam and Christiandom.

Do people still follow this thread throughout the week? Anyway, what is the name for this phenomenon that I shall call the Chick-Fil-A Drive Thru phenomenon? Basically it's when people all decide to "beat the rush" and in doing so they cause their own rush. I noticed it happening at Chick-Fil-A, which notoriously has lines around the block. I'd go at 12:00 and it would take a good 20 minutes. OK, I push it back to 11:45. That was better for a bit but then shortly was just as bad. So I push it back to 11:30. Then 11:15. We are far at the early end of what can be called the lunch window, and yet I'm stuck behind 20 or so cars and it's still a 15 minute ordeal. There can't be that many people who all just organically decided 11:15 was a good time for lunch. We must have all had the same collective idea of "beating the rush".

And here's the thing, if I wait and go at, say, 12:30, often I can breeze through fairly easily (YMMV and this isn't 100% guaranteed, but still shocking considering 12:30 is smack-dab in the middle of the prime lunchtime hour). But I don't wait, I go at 11:15 because my idiot brain says, surely if the line is this bad NOW, it must be impossible at 12:30 - even though I've seen evidence that's not always the case.

I'm able to avoid this at the local Chik fil A by going inside. Its always empty, even when there are 30+ vehicles waiting for the drive through. No one wants the annoyance of getting out of their lifted super-cab single passenger commuter pickup trucks.

Somewhat tangential but I generally prefer late lunches to early ones because it makes the day feel shorter. I'd rather take a short 10 or 15 in the late morning and have my longer break around 2 pm.

While that absolutely happens I think there might be something else going on here as well.

In my experience, it's fairly easy to get away with taking an early lunch but a lot of important meetings happen at 13, because people are assumed to both be in the office and just have eaten and taken a break. This leads to office people gravitating towards either taking lunch at 12 or earlier, not later.

At the same time blue collar workers usually have lunch well before 12 because they start early.

This combined leads to what you're seeing.

Tragedy of the commons?

I feel like that applies in most of these collective-action problems.

I once waited for several hours in line, starting at 3am, for the bus to Machu Picchu because our guide told us we needed to beat the rush. We were not the first people in line. Nor did we be beat the rush.

As we left the site in the early afternoon, I noticed that the park was noticeably less full than when we arrived. When our bus arrived back in town, there were no longer any lines for the bus going up to the site.

We could have slept in, not waited in line, and had a less crowded experience. But instead we tried to "beat the rush".

Were you guys able to get there for the sunrise though? That's a pretty spectacular way to experience Machu Picchu.

Unfortunately, it was rainy so no sunrise that day :(

Game theory in action? Trade-off of wait times based on evolving expectations? I've seen similar phenomena with a pizza places but usually the dinner hour is consistently busy, but shifting an hour early or late only sometimes makes the pickup wait time less.

Moral dilemma or obvious thing to do?

Hey Mottizens, lend me your ears, and your voices. I will keep this brief, but perhaps you can give your opinion (and tell me why). It's not Sunday anymore but maybe someone will read this.

I have recently submitted a book chapter for publication in what is to be an anthologized set of essays. Never you mind where or what, but this is an internationally recognized publishing house.

In an odd turn, after submission I received a paper of another author (to be in the same book, presumably) from the publisher to proof and review. Which is fine. I have no problem doing that.

I noticed there were a lot of non-smart quotes in the text. Some quotes were formatted properly, many weren't. This often happens when people paste material into a document with data that originated/was typed in another program (or on the internet). You see where I'm going with this, perhaps.

I decided to run the abstract through a ChatGPT detector. It was flagged as 51% chance written by AI. I ran the first paragraphs, and got the same result. It coded highest on "average sentence length" where the sentences did not vary in the same way a human's might.

I then ran my own first page, just as a counterfactual. My abstract alone also showed as 20% chance written by AI. But the first paragraphs showed 0% chance of AI authorship.

I don't think these systems are all that reliable, but it gave me pause. My question is should I:

1. ignore all of this, mention the smartquotes should be reformatted, revise as usual.

2. revise as usual, email the editors the above information.

3. stop revising, email the editors the above information.

4. other

I am leaning towards 1 simply because I am not convinced the AI detector is all that accurate, and also the author is not a native-speaker of English (though is pretty damn good). Maybe the author put it into Chat GPT and said "Make this sound academic" or something. And at the end of the day I am not sure how serious "generate by AI" is, whether it suggests a kind of academic fraud or is simply a tool put to use. It isn't clear.

What say you?

Note: This post was human-generated.

Okay, why are the publishers asking you to review someone else's paper? Are you an editor working for them? Will they pay you for this?

Because if you're just a contributor, why the heck are they outsourcing their editing work to you?

I think the best way to cover yourself is to send that back right off and say you're not their employee (maybe word that more tactfully). Whatever about suspicions the other person may have used AI to generate their essay, it's got nothing to do with you unless you do work for that publisher and are their employee.

It seems extremely unprofessional because it's setting you up (and whatever others they're pulling this same thing with) for an accusation of "you read my essay pre-publication and plagiarised it!", never mind the messiness around alleged AI use. They're putting you at risk of a lawsuit or, at the very least, having your reputation trashed online.

This is not your job. Maybe they're trying to double-check for AI use and they're sending essays received to everyone to be evaluated, but again - this is not your job unless you are formally employed and paid by them. You're not doing free work for them, and you're certainly not being covered by them from accusations by the disgruntled who find out you read their essay and told the publisher it was all done by chatbot.

I'd say, just review it based on whether you think that the text is good or bad on its own merits, not on whether the author used ChatGPT.

If you think that based solely on the merits of the text itself, it deserves to be in the book then what does it matter if it was written wholly or partially by ChatGPT or not? A good essay written wholly or partially by ChatGPT would be more useful to people by being in the book than a not so good essay that is written by a human.

Of course in practice it's probably hard for you to fairly evaluate the text now that you have the bias of having this suspicion.

Another source of mixed quotes would be indiscriminate copy-pasting from human-generated documents -- did you try any more traditional plagarism detection tools?

I didn't. I only know of programs using databases suited to, say, undergraduate essays, and not this kind of research writing. The sentences don't seem the type of writing one would paste from someone else, much more something an AI would generate.

I guess if the writing is OK (by the standards of ESL academic literature) maybe I'm with ace and it's not so different from the guy hiring a translator or something. Unless ChatGPT is capable of hallucinating a whole paper by itself, which hopefully people would pick up on? (that may be field dependent, scarily enough)

There are recent cases of these ChatGPT-detectors' false positives leading to false accusations of cheating in the academic world. And more cases where the detectors falsely flag works that are known 100% to not be AI generated (e.g. written by the professors themselves). I would give almost no weight to such a detection, unless you fancy making a fool of yourself.

If it's a tool he's using to gussy up his language ... I think we'll look back on this like we would an engineer using a calculator instead of pencil-and-paper calculations.

This is largely my take as well, thanks.

AI detectors are largely useless, and especially bad in the regime of people for whom English isn't their first language.

So 1 is a far better bet.

Knights, in ages past, trained incessantly at knightly shit from childhood. Are there groups of people or cultures that train this intensely at networking...the kind of people where, if charisma and political competence was martial skill, they'd be very similar to Japanese samurai or European knights or other martial aristocrats? Or: since the average person has the same kind of material comfort and wealth as the aristocrats in ages past, are they just determined as all hell and making like ducks, seeming to not try very hard while actually putting in extremely demanding performances, like JFK and his career as a soldier and politician while suffering from severe chronic pain and never letting on, except to his closest friends, how much he was suffering? FDR the polio sufferer seems to have been cut of the same cloth. More mundanely, I've seen a few people who have chronic pain and don't really look like they're suffering. Maybe Joe Average is secretly determined as all hell and doesn't cop to it...

Mormons and JWs. Go spend every Sunday knocking on strangers doors trying to sell them something they didn't want.

I was thinking about Killian Jornet's account of his upbringing, but with social grace instead of mountaineering: raised by an alpine guide father and climber mother, he started going on family ski trips, cross country skiing up mountains and going downhill on alpine skis. By five, he was going up 10,000-foot mountains and traveling on glaciers with ropes, crampons, and ice axes. By the time he was ten, he'd backpacked across the Pyrenees with his family - a journey that took them over a month and which their family repeated yearly. By 13, his mother took him on longer trips on the mountain, where he would sometimes fail to bring enough to eat or drink. So he licked water off rocks for as long as sixteen hours.

Imagine a family like this...but a networking or political family. I'm reasonably sure that families and maybe smallish communities like this exist...there's probably like a small pack of climbers in Colorado or something raising their kids a lot like the Jornet family did. I've never seen or heard of this though. Yeah, it could be bullshit, but if even a quarter of it is true...

Interesting - would have thought it was political families to be honest. I know there are families of engineers, military families... probably bush league politics and networking families too.

Is F1 a new status symbol?

Been seeing a lot of girls age circa 25 listing F1 as their interests in dating apps. I dont really think they're into F1.

Been seeing a lot of girls age circa 25 listing F1 as their interests in dating apps. I dont really think they're into F1.

On a dating app, it's a tactic to attract wealthier men.

F1 events are expensive to attend, and the male fans who can pay for upgraded and VIP packages is a good barometer of their financial status. Additionally, F1 events have leaned into providing experiences for the "aesthetics." For example, at the Miami Grand Prix earlier this year, there was a multi-story VIP "island" that had unlimited food and drinks and a pool. Those people paid to be "seen" at an exclusive area of a world-renowned race, not to watch it.

Hey, I’ve got sisters circa 25 who are into F1. Can’t speak to the dating apps.

They got into it with the Netflix series, as Friend suggests, but took it pretty seriously from there. Favorite drivers, teams, courses. They get up at ungodly hours to watch races from the other side of the planet. Even the qualifiers. Sure, they follow the interpersonal drama, but also the team beefs and the stuff about who’s starting or whatever. And, of course, they litigate rule changes about technical details like fuel rates. IMO that’s the mark of a real fan.

I think it’s because watching the races on sundays became a family thing during COVID. The girls were across the country, so they’d call in and watch together. What a time to be alive.

Probably just because of that F1 Netflix documentary/reality show that was really popular. Played to typical reality show elements.

What eInk readers do you use? I have an ancient kindle, but I'd like something with better contrast. Ideally, it wouldn't require me to create an account - I could just transfer books to it. My ideals are simplicity of features, speed, being easy to read, and most importantly no annoying bullshit. I never want to install a single software update, for example.

Any suggestions?

Kobo Libra 2, the best e-reader anywhere. It's ad-free, unaffiliated with Amazon, feels good on the hands, and can read almost anything.

Another Kobo chad checking in. I've had mine offline since I bought it, and use Calibre to load ebooks on. Long battery life (hardly unusual with ereaders) and actual page buttons instead of just a touch screen are pluses.

use Calibre to load

Calibre is a fantastic book manager. Sure, it has its quirks, but it just works. Never understood the people who hate it so much.

claims to want contrast; immediately rules out backlit full-color LCD displays

claims to want speed; indicates preference for a display tech with second-long rewrites

What gives? What are you reacting to to call these your needs? This smells like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem .

That said I used a commodity offering from Sony back when they offered them; they're closing their eReader line down, so it's moot-ish.

What a strange critique. I use backlit LCD screens all day for work and my eyes are sore. So yes, I've ruled them out.

It's true that eInk readers have limitations. I'd prefer one where the limitations are minimized as much as possible.

Using your logic, the eInk category shouldn't exist at all.

Right now I'm using a kindle fire, but I loved the kindle paperwhite with no backlight. (Or one you can turn off.)

My girlfriend has a remarkable, which she loves.

I've been using a rooted Nook Simple Touch for about 10 years. All I do is copy epubs to it and read them. Any minor features that I feel it's missing probably are available, but they're so minor that I don't need them enough to work out how to add and configure them. The screen is a bit grey but this is my first and only e-reader so I don't have anything to compare it to. I've never had a problem reading it.

The only major bug is that if I use the thumbnail library viewer rather than the list library viewer it will somehow drain the battery in less than 24 hours. If I don't do that the battery lasts for about two months. Occasionally the touch feature will drift out of calibration but that's fixed in 20 seconds by soft powering off and running my finger round the edge of the screen. I bought a cover for it which has kept it in good condition but the button cover on the button I use to turn the page has been worn through.

Over all would recommend, I'd happily buy another if I lost mine. I've just checked and there have been newer ROMs released since I rooted mine but if it ain't broke why fix it?

Kindle Paperwhite. The version with no ads (amazing that an ad supported version even exists, how tacky, but I digress).

I had to sign into my amazon account when I started using it. And it installed a firmware update or something. After that I've kept it in offline mode. It's simple to use. I just dump all my ebooks into it by connecting via usb to my pc. It's a decent device. Good in darkness as well as direct sunshine. Great battery life.

Thank you. Going with this one as it seems to be the best for the eyes.

Ugh yeah ads on a kindle are annoying as hell. Amazon is so fucking tacky it kills me.

Hey, better to have the option than not though, right?

No. It's not better. Ads are one of the largest evils we endure in our society. Mass psychological warfare leading to a destruction of attention, virtue, and restraint for the chase of short term profits by a class that's already wealthy. I say we ban all but text advertising, and keep it black and white.

Fun fact: that was the "sensible centrist" (literally Neoliberal) position back in the 30's. I was taken aback when I first read it, but now I think they kinda had a point.

Interesting! I'd love to read more about it if you recall where you found that.

I have also read occasional accounts similar to that idea in reaction to the original PR firms from Edward Bernays. Honestly if I could choose one figure to erase from history, he is high on the list. That sort of instrumentalist thinking about how to turn propaganda into a fundamental part of a market economy is truly evil.

Seconding the Kindle paperwhite. There's something about the screen that reduces eye strain compared to a typical bluelight monitor. I've been able to read it as long as I could real paper books.

My scumbag achilles...

Tendons are weird. Stupid and weird. And nobody knows shit about how to fix them.

Early in the summer, I strained my achilles playing soccer. I am old and this has happened before many times. This time I decided to GO HAM on my achilles. I adopted a strict stretching and eccentric exercise protocol. The sort that physical therapists have recommended in the past. I was 100% consistent and spent about 20 minutes each day. I did this for MONTHS. Did my achilles get better? Kinda, sorta, not really.

So I stopped doing the program. And I kept playing soccer. And the achilles pain sort of just... went away. It's completely gone now.

The only thing that changed was I switched to a low carb diet. GPT-4 tells me there is no evidence that this related.

One day, science will figure tendons out. We're a long way from that now. In the mean time, for those with nagging sports injuries, I advise not wasting your money on doctors and PT unless someone else is paying for it.

Tendons.. nobody knows shit about how to fix them

Well the thing is simply that doctors are scientifically illiterate, unlike me. The most potent drug at repairing tendons is BPC-157 which is a peptide endogenously produced in the body. It is available OTC for a short term injections cycle, the most reputable website but a bit pricey is peptidesciences .com https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14554208/ BPC is quite popular on /r/peptides and has "saved" many, however it is a serious medication that shouldn't be taken without studying its tradeoffs (short term anhedonia risk, amphetamine blunting and increased angiogenesis (therefore increased lifespan if young, increased risk of metastasis if old)

Thanks. A podcaster I listened to also mentioned this peptide as a sort of miracle cure for his long term tendon problems.

Apparently, peptides like this can't be patented so there is no financial incentive to research them. It seems like a good opportunity for countries outside of the US/Europe to push the science forward.

Nobody will push the science forward the world will keep being nearly maximally inept, both this century and for the others to come. As you correctly say, the economic incentives are beyond malevolent but most importantly, the pharma enterprises are simply extremely mediocre and their complacency, like worlwide suffering will perpetuate. The insane mediocrity is simply a product of the extreme absence of education during the human's brain-formative years (so called critical periods). Only a few artifact outliers like me can contemplate the contemporary horror in its fullest depth.

I've also got some persistent leg sinew issues, and so far I've gotten all sorts of advice:

  • Rest
  • Physical Therapy
  • Shoe inserts and knee braces
  • "I guarantee you it will go away on its own within two months"

Needless to say, none of that worked.

The issues did go away whenever I exercised regularly. No exercises tailored to resolve or avoid my issues, just whatever I enjoyed most. Swimming, hiking, biking, fencing. Maybe it's all psychosomatic in the end? But then things happened and I ended up extremely sedentary for many months, and ah, there we go, it's all messed up again.

No idea what's actually going on, but doing sports that are actually fun sure helps.

The only thing that changed was I switched to a low carb diet. GPT-4 tells me there is no evidence that this related.

This probably depends on exactly what we mean by "no evidence". While I am not aware of any RCT-style evidence for this, there's quite a bit of anecdata and a plausible-enough mechanism that I wouldn't be all that surprised if many people experience less joint or tendon pain with lower inflammation diets. As ever in the world of sports and nutrition, I think there's a good chance that there's so much individual variability in responses and difficult to control for differences that you'd need an impractically large study to have enough power to figure out whether there's good empirical evidence for this sort of thing, but if it seems like it works individually, who cares?

For me it's an N of 1 so I can't really say. And my achilles pain has gone away in the past without diet changes.

But I just did some more searching, and it appears that a low carb diet could improve tendon health after all.

Specifically, there is a link between diabetes and tendon health. A high sugar diet leads to production of AGEs which cause tendon problems as well as other, more serious problems.

Perhaps a low-carb diet isn't necessary. But the standard American diet has so much sugar that something like 10% of the population is diabetic, and another 38% with pre-diabetes. I have to imagine that this could impact tendons.

GPT-4 let me down.

Yeah, like you said, these kind of injuries or pains just seem so absolutely flukey that it feels like pure guesswork trying to get rid of them or prevent them. Personally, I've had that with IT band issues in running. In principle, I know that these tend to be from weak glutes and/or hip flexors, but that still doesn't help me understand when and why it becomes a problem. I've rolled through training months with consistent 60-70 mile weeks and zero pain only to wind up on the shelf from much less, much lower intensity work later in the year. Why? Well, if I knew, I would do something about it.

My shoulder/delt has been fucked for 6 months this year, and I’ve waited and waited, and done PT and more PT, and gone to the gym and worked out around it… and I’m slowly but anxiously moving towards the conclusion that no one seems to know what’s going on mechanically and I may as well just lift the weights and push through the pain. So it’s nice to read your experience with this

My shoulder/delt has been fucked for 6 months this year, and I’ve waited and waited, and done PT and more PT, and gone to the gym and worked out around it… and I’m slowly but anxiously moving towards the conclusion that no one seems to know what’s going on mechanically and I may as well just lift the weights and push through the pain.

Don't push through the pain. Drop reps, drop weights, drop ROM until your exercise stops hurting. My left shoulder hates specific movements and every time I try to push through the pain, it only gets worse.

What can I do with my money after I'm dead? (No, I'm not planning on dying soon, I'm just curious.) Is it possible to, say, have all of my money invested and untouched for a hundred years, with someone as a steward of the fund who is paid from it yearly just to manage it, and then create a foundation to, say, support a certain art or something I'm interested in after the money has amassed to a great amount? Is this legal? Are there foundations that people have planned after their death that are operating today in this fashion?

Afaik this is what Benjamin Franklin did. Gifted money to Boston in his will but declared they couldn't touch it for 100 years while it was invested.

In the US charitable foundations are required to spend at least 5% of their endowment each year. Also it's difficult to find someone with standing to sue if the foundation isn't being run according to the rules you laid out, so it might not go to what you want anyways.

Is it possible to, say, have all of my money invested and untouched for a hundred years

Generally no. And thank God. Because if this was allowed all the resources of the world would be controlled by long dead people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

Rich people in Medieval times used to give all their money to monasteries so that monks would pray for their souls. We can only guess how many person-millenia were squandered praying for the souls of the dead rich. A lot, presumably, even if most monks mailed it in.

Once you're dead, you'll have limited ability to control your former wealth.

That's why you should strive to spend nearly all your money before you die. If you don't, you'll get a Ford Foundation situation where your sad and weak descendants spend your money on the exact antithesis of your desired legacy.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy:

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

That's probably the best hope OP has: joining or establishing a well-run group with strong traditions. You might not be able to create a perpetuity, but you could at least establish a corporation staffed by people who share your values.

Other than that, I guess your best bet is to convert as much of your wealth as possible into physical precious metals and go bury it somewhere.

So, what are you reading?

Still on The Wretched of the Earth. Thoughts below.

Reading 12 Rules for Life by Peterson. It's actually quite good.

Finally got around to coming back to Card's Ender series and picked up Speaker for the Dead. About midway through, I think the punchline of the mystery part of the story is kind of obvious, but the characters and setting are charming enough that I'm enjoying it anyway.

This series?

I read one of the Marcus Didius Falco novels by Lindsey Davis and thought it was great. Still need to get the others.

Book 5 of McCullough’s Rome series. Still lots of fun, though I am a bit bummed about Caesar’s first five years in Gaul getting skipped over. (Ditto for Sulla’s campaign against Mithridates between books 2 and 3). I guess it’s time to pick up Caesar’s own account thereof.

Shit, I thought it was a trilogy. I should really read the third book and onwards, the second is probably one of my favorites ever, and the first was great too.

I agree, though my absolute favorite scene so far involved Nicomedes questioning why ‘mentula’ and ‘cunnus’ are misgendered in Latin. (I had the exact same question about half a book before this, and just howled when it came up in the story).

So far, mixed feelings on The Wretched of the Earth. After reading Sartre's haphazard preface, which bounced from discreditably vicious to euphorically well-written (and admittedly thought-provoking, disconcerting in its assurance of the reader's guilt), Fanon's somewhat more restrained tone is welcome.

Fanon had actual experience in the matters he wrote about, so I'm sure there's some insight here, but I must admit some mild surprise that this often reads like just another pseudo-socialist psychoanalysis. There's so many assumptions involved that one wonders if it ever coheres outside of a narrow interpretation in the context of academic tropes.

In its most basic level, it seems to be arguing that 1. The colonized need a space free from the colonizing culture which purports to be supported by universal values, 2. Various dehumanizing (emasculating?) neuroses take root so long as violent impulses are displaced away from rather than focused towards the colonizer where (he claims) said violence originated, and 3. Since the sole and overriding goal is decolonization, whatever furthers that, even violence, is legitimate. There's a lot more going on that I haven't wrapped my mind around yet, such as his thoughts on how to prevent a revolution from reaching a "reactionary" end, or his analysis of native superstitions.

Unless I'm misinterpreting it, there isn't a one-to-one match with what he writes about and what's going on in Israel. If anything, one wonders what Fanon would say about a permanent state of independently reinforced anger with a theological bent. Furthermore, the question of a realistic endgame can't be ignored if one wishes to invoke Fanon's arguments.

I had the impression before reading that this book was about something like "reclaiming psychological dignity through violence," and while that aspect is present, it definitely isn't a sufficient summary. Fanon's belief in the power of a resistance which faces a seemingly superior force was based on a theory of the colonizer's motives and material needs which constrains his possible reactions, not on psychological factors alone, and it is unclear to me what a similar analysis would say about Israel.

For now, I'm withholding judgement, and wondering what Fanon might say were he alive.

Does anyone know of a good YouTube channel that goes over grilling 101?

And/or wilderness camping/fire making.

In terms of wilderness/open fire grilling the biggest tip from me is that you should have 1.5-2 fires -- build a nice coal bed as you would expect, but keep a fire going next-door to the one with the grill over it so you can rake more coals in there as needed. Also keep the grill further away from the coals than you might think IMO, although that is personal preference to some extent.

The South Americans have sort of perfected the setup, to the point where you can get wood-fire grilled meat at many of the restaurants; I'm sure there are videos ('parilla' would be your search term), but the concept is like this:

https://rtaoutdoorliving.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/meats-being-grilled-close-to-coals-on-argentinian-grill.jpg

You can do the same while camping by just bringing a grill and poker/rake, then building two adjoining firepits (plus grill support) with rocks that you find in the woods -- it's really a fantastic way to cook meat, and not too hard to figure out.

Interesting! I might give this a go later on once I've got the basics down heh. Thank you.

I don’t have any idea what meats those are, but I want them.

Cowboy Kent Rollins does open-fire dutch oven cooking.

https://youtube.com/user/krollins57

I like Paul Harrell's episodes about camping/fire making. And Grigorij Sokolov, who's sufficiently qualified to lead groups of children into the wilderness and back, but his channel is in Russian. Both are sufficiently humble and don't claim that you can survive indefinitely on bear shit and your own urine.

Thanks, but this guy is way more intense than I'm looking for. I'm hoping to camp for a couple days outside of a campsite and looking for advice.

There's like 100's of them. Just watch 5-6 videos to get the general idea and the rest is down to your individual skill. Unlike cooking on a stove, a grills heat output is always changing so you need to "man the grill" more frequently. So if you know how to cook, it's the same thing.

Yeah but searching on YOUTUBE just gets you so much shit nowadays.

Grilling or barbecue?

What's the difference?

Grilling is direct flame, high heat.

Barbecue is lower temperatures, indirect heat, smoke.

Grilling- hot, fast, over direct heat. A lot like cooking in a pan, but with open flames.

Barbecue- low, slow, indirect heat. Usually but not always has smoke involved. More like an oven than a stove/griddle.

I asked this in the last SQS but does anyone know what’s up with Jackson Hinkle? A “MAGA communist” spamming low quality anti-Israel tweets has managed to become the most viral twitter account, apparently. Make it make sense…

He’s a grifter seeking the requisite amount of attention to keep getting a check from Russia.

It’s instructive to look at what an actual Russian troll looks like.

Yeah, he's a grifter and he's almost certainly getting paid in some ways by Russia and probably other countries (I refuse to believe there's an innocent explanation for his hot Russian GF), but besides that, it's instructive to see who is liking his tweets.

Or, at least I clicked the likes and retweets of some of his recent ones, and it was mostly... Muslims and other Third World people! Hinkle has figured out a lucrative niche for his grift; just like there are plenty of Republicans who are willing to praise any black people taking Republican views to high heavens, no matter how dodgy, there are plenty of third-world people who are willing to go googly-eyed for someone who looks like an all-American boy (even if the one all-American boy Hinkle always brings to my mind is Lee Harvey Oswald) espousing Third-Worldist stances and bashing the West.

(Heck, even his name - a former president's surname-as-a-first name combined with the actual surname sounding like his ancestors had something else (Hynkel?) before it was anglicized after Ellis Island - sounds like it's been invented by someone trying to figure out as American a name as possible...)

In this sense, while the "MAGA Communist" framing sounds completely nonsensical from a Western perspective, the idea of a patriotic, relatively socially conservative communist (no matter how performative and threadbare Hinkle's communism actually is) makes perfect sense for huge swathes of the world and holds a certain romantic appeal to even non-communists of left-nationalist tendencies. I've also heard that white Muslim converts tend to get outsized attention in the community, probably for the same reasons, but that also would require a credible narrative of actually being a Muslim.

The listing image of her looks more AI generated than Stable Diffusion did six months back. I guess all the aliens that must have statistically crash landed in Siberia got handsy before they passed on.

I think that’s photoshop in action. I hope it is, anyway.

I refuse to believe there's an innocent explanation for his hot Russian GF),

To be fair, hot Russian women dating American men way below their league is far from unprecedented. But yes, a top American propagandist for Russia dating a literal recent miss Russia is about as suspicious as the four brothers of the lottery commissioner winning the jackpot four nights in a row.

So the entire miss russia contest is a KGB recruitment drive so they can flog the most attractive woman in the land to some third-rate twitterati?

If I can imagine and plan that, then KGB definitely can do this. And prostitution is not even noticeably morally problematic compared to what KGB (or similar) are doing.

Probably they are not running it, but I would assume that recruiting woman from there make sense.

It’s overkill. It’s not discreet. It’s symbolically cucking the country. And from her pov, she’s got options, therefore she probably has a huge ego, and it’s hard to get someone like that to do your bidding.

A common wench would be far more serviceable. It's not like you need top 0.01% attractiveness to get into a guy's pants.

And it’s not like the average top .01% attractiveness is participating in or winning miss Russia contests, either, let’s be real.

For other Christians on here, or seriously religious people, how do you handle the paradox of belief? I was talking to a friend today about my recent experience joining an Orthodox Christian church, and it's just so interesting. The 'logical' part of my brain relentlessly attacks what it sees as the foolishness of religion, ritual and sacrament.

And yet, when I partake and do my best to take it seriously, I feel healed. The spiritual water that Christ talks about in the Bible slakes my thirst. It's almost impossible to conceptualize, but damn it I've tried so many different ways to heal my inner wounds throughout my life, and this one works better than anything, by far.

How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?

I'll mention Thomas Merton as a (sort of unexpected) voice of spiritual clarity for the modern world. While a committed Catholic monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he pursued intellectual and theological connections with the world of Buddhism, spawning new ideas about both religions in the process. He's very candid and "human" in his writings (two qualities largely absent in theological treatises); while The Seven Storey Mountain is his best-known work (and his "official" autobiography), I prefer his smaller collections of essays titled Love and Living and Contemplative Prayer - they each approach the paradox of belief with honesty and open questions.

Thank you for this! He sounds great.

For my part, I'm not sure I experience the "paradox of belief." I've never understood why some rationalists act like "faith" is irrational, as if you're only permitted to believe in things that are epistemically certain. Beyond "cogito ergo sum," there's not much knowledge available to us that's not ultimately based on pragmatic leaps of logic. I can't prove that the world outside my head really exists, or that the past and future really exist, or that causation is real. I don't pretend to understand Godel's incompleteness theorem, but my layman's understanding of it is that even math relies on unprovable assumptions to work. And most of what we call "scientific knowledge" is far more tenuous than these propositions: we say that we know, for example, that an oxygen atom has eight protons, but I've never actually checked. I just assume the scientists who say that know what they're talking about and have no reason to lie. (These are not always safe assumptions to make about scientists.) I'm told that a lot of chemical reactions would not work if oxygen had more or less than 8 protons per atom, but again, I have no personal way of knowing whether that's true, beyond my mostly-uncritical acceptance of scientific consensus. In the face of pure, uncompromising skepticism, scientific "knowledge" is just as untenable as religious belief.

We ultimately rely on faith for almost all the knowledge we use--because otherwise we couldn't use any knowledge. Epistemic certainty has to yield to pragmatic utility. Therefore, as long as my religious beliefs aren't provably false (which would be utility-decreasing, because it would cause me to make predictions that turn out to be incorrect, to my detriment), and if those beliefs make me better off (consensus seems to be that religious people tend to be happier and more mentally healthy than nonbelievers), I don't see why it's "irrational" to continue being religious.

Finally, plenty of prominent rationalists have beliefs that seem just as strange and unfalsifiable as my own religious beliefs; some believe that we're living in a simulation, some believe in panpsychism, some believe we inhabit a multiverse where every possible reality exists at once, etc. I don't see why Christianity is any less compatible with rationalism than these other weird ideas.

Like you, I find Christianity imparts meaning to my life in a way no other worldview can. It has unequivocally improved the quality of my life. The smart thing to do--the rational thing--would be to go on believing it and acting accordingly. I have further thoughts, but I've got to go now.

I've never understood why some rationalists act like "faith" is irrational

Because faith is defined as believing something without having a good reason to believe it. If you have a good reason to believe it, then you'd just appeal to the reason and have no need to bring faith into it.

as if you're only permitted to believe in things that are epistemically certain.

In my experience, atheists/rationalists don't claim that certainty is required to be justified in believing something. As you correctly point out, that would be an absurdly high standard that would commit you to a useless stance of Cartesian doubt.

Beyond "cogito ergo sum," there's not much knowledge available to us that's not ultimately based on pragmatic leaps of logic. I can't prove that the world outside my head really exists, or that the past and future really exist, or that causation is real. I don't pretend to understand Godel's incompleteness theorem, but my layman's understanding of it is that even math relies on unprovable assumptions to work. And most of what we call "scientific knowledge" is far more tenuous than these propositions: we say that we know, for example, that an oxygen atom has eight protons, but I've never actually checked.

Not all leaps of logic are equally justified. You may not know anything about the original research that demonstrates how an oxygen atom has eight protons, but you know that scientists have developed systems (that you can distill down to "the scientific method", if you like) to test and discover what things happen to be true about the world we live in and what hypotheses happen not to be true. Planes fly, magic carpets don't. You also know that in general scientists are open about their methods and others who are knowledgeable about the subject matter have the opportunity to replicate and, if appropriate, refute previous findings. If you challenged a scientist of the relevant specialty about whether an oxygen atom has eight protons, you'd know that they'd have the receipts to back it up.

At this point you may be waiting to blurt out "but the replication crisis and the politicization of science!" And you're absolutely correct. But our confidence in any given proposition that comes out of science is proportional to, among other things, how reliable we consider that subfield to be. If we have good reasons to distrust scientists in a particular field of study or doubt a particular finding -- whether because the scientists are politicized (social science) or because figuring out a way to tease out what's actually true is fucking hard (again, social science) -- then we modulate our confidence in any given proposition coming out of that field ("such-and-such remains unclear, more research is needed" is a cliche for a reason.)

The only reliable alternative to bad science is better science. What else could there even be? Holy books? Podcasters and substackers trying to work it out from first principles? Vibes?

Epistemic certainty has to yield to pragmatic utility. Therefore, as long as my religious beliefs aren't provably false (which would be utility-decreasing, because it would cause me to make predictions that turn out to be incorrect, to my detriment), and if those beliefs make me better off (consensus seems to be that religious people tend to be happier and more mentally healthy than nonbelievers), I don't see why it's "irrational" to continue being religious.

It's irrational if don't have a good reason to believe that it's actually true. It may be that believing in a falsehood can be beneficial, but that's a separate argument from whether it's true. If you want to argue that people should believe falsehoods because they're beneficial, you can make that argument (and in this paragraph you seem to be), but be very aware that that's a separate argument from its truth and therefore from whether it's rational to believe that it's true.

And, as an aside, I can't fathom how it could even be possible to believe something that you recognize you have no good reason to be true merely because you think it's beneficial. Belief is an uncontrollable state of being convinced of the actual truth of something, so I can't imagine how belief could even be possible without being convinced of the truth value.

Finally, plenty of prominent rationalists have beliefs that seem just as strange and unfalsifiable as my own religious beliefs

Yes, they do. So don't add to the list.

It's not often that I find myself retreading ground from the Great Atheism War of the Aughts in this era where wokeism has become such a threat that I gleefully find myself allied with evangelicals and even married one and moved to the heart of evangelicalstan to get away from it. But man, I still can't let this shit stand unchallenged.

Because faith is defined as believing something without having a good reason to believe it.

No. What is faith?

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."

Do I have faith in Jim? Have I good reason to trust him? Why do I have confidence that he will do what he promises?

Do you have faith in reason? What is the basis of your confidence and belief in its efficacy and veracity?

Thanks for this thorough response. Just to clarify, I don't think "people should believe falsehoods because they're beneficial"--people should aspire to have correct beliefs, even if they get warm, fuzzy feelings from having incorrect beliefs. I think arguments about ideas should be focused on whether the ideas or true, without worrying about the collateral concern of whether they are "beneficial" in some other way. What I do think is that, in areas where "such-and-such remains unclear, more research is needed" (which covers an enormous amount of the space of possible truth), it's not an irrational heuristic to select among available truth claims the one that adds the most meaning to your life.

I apologize for my flippant "oxygen" example--it was the best I could think of at the time--since I am absolutely happy to defer to scientific consensus (in proportion to the reliability of the subfield) in all matters. I don't believe in young-earth creationism, for instance, even though a lot of Christians do believe in it and have advanced some conveniently non-falsifiable theories explaining away the physical evidence of fossils, radiocarbon dating, etc. The consensus of lots of reliable subfields--geology, biology, astrophysics, etc.--would need to be wrong in order for young-earth creationism to be right. So--like most Christians who aren't fundamentalist Protestants--I'm happy to accept the mainstream scientific view on that question.

But there are some very important questions where there is no scientific consensus: why is there something instead of nothing? What is consciousness? (Incidentally, I'm often confused by the confidence with which atheists reject the possibility of any sort of "afterlife"--they may not know what consciousness is or how it works, but they're positive it disappears when you die! But that's another discussion.) Is morality even real, and if so, how ought we to act? In my view (you may disagree) these questions have resisted scientific explanation since the dawn of time, and they don't seem likely to be scientifically settled anytime soon. I don't want to get too into the weeds of these particular questions, unless you want me to. Suffice it to say that, if we have to wait for "better science" to explain these things, we may be waiting a long time. What should we believe in the meantime? It's not like we can just brush these questions off; they seem super important to any kind of complete worldview! I can't wait for science to catch up; I need to live now!

Finally, I don't know that "being convinced of the truth value" of something is necessary to belief. Being convinced of the falsity of an idea is, of course, fatal to belief--but as long as something could be true, and isn't patently less probable than other competing ideas, I don't see why one couldn't believe it. I think everyone relies on heuristics like "meaning" to select their most important beliefs from among several more-or-less-as-likely ideas.

But there are some very important questions where there is no scientific consensus: why is there something instead of nothing? What is consciousness? (Incidentally, I'm often confused by the confidence with which atheists reject the possibility of any sort of "afterlife"--they may not know what consciousness is or how it works, but they're positive it disappears when you die! But that's another discussion.) Is morality even real, and if so, how ought we to act? In my view (you may disagree) these questions have resisted scientific explanation since the dawn of time, and they don't seem likely to be scientifically settled anytime soon. I don't want to get too into the weeds of these particular questions, unless you want me to. Suffice it to say that, if we have to wait for "better science" to explain these things, we may be waiting a long time. What should we believe in the meantime? It's not like we can just brush these questions off; they seem super important to any kind of complete worldview! I can't wait for science to catch up; I need to live now!

Why do you feel the need to believe in some explanation for most of these questions? Why is it a problem to simply state that you don't know why there is something rather than nothing or what consciousness is, and thus don't have a belief on the matter?

You're right that these questions are difficult and any solutions/explanations are elusive or woefully incomplete. But it seems to me the only way we're going to solve them, if they are even solvable at all, is by making empirical discoveries about our universe (science) and by applying our capacity to reason. The religious alternative is to believe in explanations given by holy books whose author(s) we have no good reason to believe knew anything more than we do (and usually a lot less). To the extent these holy books have good explanations for any of these questions, we can justify our belief in their explanations by appealing directly to the reasoning and skipping the middle man.

Finally, I don't know that "being convinced of the truth value" of something is necessary to belief. Being convinced of the falsity of an idea is, of course, fatal to belief--but as long as something could be true, and isn't patently less probable than other competing ideas, I don't see why one couldn't believe it. I think everyone relies on heuristics like "meaning" to select their most important beliefs from among several more-or-less-as-likely ideas.

The first problem with that reasoning is that it's not enough for a proposition to be more probable than other competing explanations. Something being 2% probable and all alternatives being <2% probable doesn't mean it's justified to believe it. Which leads to the second problem, which I already mentioned: you're neglecting the possibility of simply not believing any proposition yet offered by anyone.

I could of course quibble over the suggestion that science doesn't have compelling explanations for some or all of the questions you mentioned. But you seem to agree with me that that's a bit of a distraction from the underlying dispute.

(This is tangential to my main point, but just for fun: Is there a probability where it becomes justified to believe something? 2% is too low, but 100% is too high--that would "commit you to a useless stance of Cartesian doubt." Is there a cutoff? If so, where is it and why? Even if you only believe ideas at 99% probability or above, you're still accepting up to a 1% chance that your belief is false. Wouldn't it be safer to say that you simply "don't have a belief on the matter?" On the other hand, if you can believe something at 99%, why not at 80%, or 51%? Why not at, say, 30%, if all the alternatives are even less likely?)

You say "Why is it a problem to simply state that you don't know why there is something rather than nothing or what consciousness is, and thus don't have a belief on the matter?" Good question, and I can't think of a good answer except that it seems painfully unsatisfactory to me, like asking someone starving in the desert "why can't you simply enjoy being hungry?" But I can't help but notice you didn't apply that reasoning to the next big question I mentioned: "how ought we to act?" The is/ought gap can't be bridged empirically. But it has to be bridged somehow--before you can act, you need to know how you ought to act. You can't just throw up your hands and say, "I don't know"; every deliberate action implies a value judgment.

If science is silent on the "ought," then we either need to look outside of science for our values or else give up on objective values altogether. If, as you argue, all beliefs should be scientifically justifiable, then we can't look outside science for our values; therefore, we have no alternative but to abandon the idea of objective values, and with it any ideas about how we "ought" to act.

If this premise: "All beliefs ought to be based on empirical discoveries about the universe"

leads to this conclusion: "Beliefs about what 'ought' to be are baseless and unjustifiable"

then the premise seems to refute itself.

I'm interested to know if you consider yourself a moral realist or not; if you do, how do you respond to this? Apologies if I've grossly misunderstood your position.

(This is tangential to my main point, but just for fun: Is there a probability where it becomes justified to believe something? 2% is too low, but 100% is too high--that would "commit you to a useless stance of Cartesian doubt." Is there a cutoff? If so, where is it and why? Even if you only believe ideas at 99% probability or above, you're still accepting up to a 1% chance that your belief is false. Wouldn't it be safer to say that you simply "don't have a belief on the matter?" On the other hand, if you can believe something at 99%, why not at 80%, or 51%? Why not at, say, 30%, if all the alternatives are even less likely?)

We speak of belief as a binary matter - you either believe something or you don't - but in practice it's a matter of degrees of confidence. For any given proposition, you have some degree of confidence in its truth (even if it's near-zero) and at a certain threshold it's high enough that you say you believe it. But it's just semantics.

You say "Why is it a problem to simply state that you don't know why there is something rather than nothing or what consciousness is, and thus don't have a belief on the matter?" Good question, and I can't think of a good answer except that it seems painfully unsatisfactory to me, like asking someone starving in the desert "why can't you simply enjoy being hungry?"

Well, I'm sorry, but that's just not a good reason to believe something. That doesn't negate the real feelings you describe and the challenge of dealing with them, but it's not going to be convincing to anyone else as a justification for believing what you believe, nor will anyone else be have any reason to think that you're justified in believing it yourself.

But I can't help but notice you didn't apply that reasoning to the next big question I mentioned: "how ought we to act?" The is/ought gap can't be bridged empirically. But it has to be bridged somehow--before you can act, you need to know how you ought to act. You can't just throw up your hands and say, "I don't know"; every deliberate action implies a value judgment.

It depends on the action. Sometimes our actions are justified based on information we have good reason to believe about the physical world (e.g., floors hold our body's weight, and putting one foot in front of the other repeatedly on this floor will soon take you to your kitchen), or about our minds (e.g., you want to walk to the kitchen because you're hungry).

But your later remarks make me think that what you're really trying to get at is essentially "how do we know how to treat other people", i.e., morality. Well, I think you already know that that's a deeply controversial and unsolved topic at an abstract level. Let's consider the approaches on offer.

Consider the religious approach to morality: that God tells us right from wrong. I think the best rebuttal to that has remained unchanged for a couple thousand years when it was introduced by Plato, if I'm not mistaken. It runs as follows. Suppose God says killing is wrong. Did he have some reason to say that it's wrong? Or could he have just as easily said that it's always right to kill anybody else (in which case it would be right because he said it's right)? If you say either that it would still be wrong to kill even if God said it was right, or that God wouldn't/couldn't say killing is right because he had a reason for saying killing is wrong, well then we can appeal directly to the reason and skip the middle man.

Now consider the non-religious approach to morality, which uses science and reason. Let's start with science. Science can provide us information about the world and the predictable consequences of certain actions. Why is this important? Well, take witchcraft for example. Hunting witches and punishing them isn't actually irrational - if there really was a witch casting spells to harm other people, she really should be punished, or even killed! It only doesn't make sense if witchcraft isn't actually a thing. But belief in witches is nearly a cultural universal among primitive humans because the default operating system of Homo sapiens does not allow much room for the intuition that random bad shit sometimes happens. Rather, if a person you care about gets sick or your crop fails, the primitive human believes there must have been a witch that cast a spell to cause it. Today, science has afforded us actually correct explanations for events that used to be explained by witchcraft. That helps shape our morality - i.e., how we "should" act - in an instance like this.

And science's role in morality is far more extensive than finding better explanations for calamities than witchcraft. Again, it provides a more informed understanding of the physical world, and a large part of determining what actions are moral is going to be contingent upon facts about the world that we just don't know without science. A lot of that will come down to scientific knowledge about the state of brains and the fact that brain states constitute experiences like pain (and thus whether a certain action will predictably cause pain), but it can also include things like understanding the effects of certain pollutants on our bodies and ecosystems (and thus whether dumping certain waste will harm others).

But science can't bridge the is-ought gap. It can tell us "this action causes another person pain", but not "you therefore shouldn't take this action". That's where reason comes in.

Suppose someone were to say, "Why should I care if I cause you pain or kill you? Your pain isn't my pain, and besides, I'd like to take your possessions after I kill you." Well, he won't convince anyone else that only his suffering matters and no one else's, so he is in no position to object if others were to treat him that way. Since no one wants to be treated that way, and since one's power over others is uncertain (tomorrow you might be in a position to be killed by a bigger man or a larger mob), it's in everyone's interest to collectively agree that randomly killing and pillaging is wrong.

Or suppose someone says, "I don't think it's immoral to inflict cruel and torturous punishment on this bread thief because we need to deter criminals. The harm caused by inflicting pain on him is less than the harm caused by undeterred criminals." Indeed, criminal deterrence is a defensible rationale for causing pain. But if the goal is deterrence, then any harm inflicted in excess of that which is necessary to deter criminals is arguably pointless harm and should be avoided. And surely short imprisonment is enough deterrence for theft. Furthermore, there's a problem of perverse incentives: if a man knows he'll be tortured and executed for stealing a loaf of bread, well then he might as well kill the shopkeeper while he's at it. Since there can be no greater punishment than what is already expected for the theft, he is incentivized to maximize his chances of getting away with it by killing the witness. Therefore, it makes more sense to have a sliding scale of punishment for criminal activity.

Those aren't scientific or religious arguments, but the use of such reason together with the better understanding of the world that we get from science provides us the building blocks for morality. Now, people who have read way too much Hume might object that it's still smuggling in certain first principles like "all else being equal, pain is bad". But you can play that game with anything. How do we know that the law of noncontradiction is compelling - that A cannot equal not-A? Well, it just... sorta... is. You have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps at some point and stop searching for a deeper proposition that isn't self-justifying. And if someone is unconvinced by the starting point that "all else being equal, pain is worse than no pain", then I think that person is either someone with way too much education who likes playing games, or they're not an honest interlocutor.

I'm interested to know if you consider yourself a moral realist or not

Not really. I think we all just sort of woke up on this backwater planet in this mysterious universe and are just collectively fumbling our way towards making life better for ourselves using the crude cognitive toolkits we evolved with. That includes figuring out facts about ourselves and the world and using reason to try and persuade each other of the best state of affairs to strive towards.

I do think we have an evolved sense of morality. It seems obvious to me that moral intuitions are innate, and they're certainly a human universal. That doesn't mean those evolved intuitions are actually defensible, though, or provide a good basis for morality. Sometimes they are (e.g., indignation at unfairness) and sometimes they're not (e.g., the lives of that other tribe have no value because they're Others).

Sorry for the late reply; I've had a busy couple days. Thanks for the through response!

Consider the religious approach to morality: that God tells us right from wrong. I think the best rebuttal to that has remained unchanged for a couple thousand years when it was introduced by Plato, if I'm not mistaken. It runs as follows. Suppose God says killing is wrong. Did he have some reason to say that it's wrong? Or could he have just as easily said that it's always right to kill anybody else (in which case it would be right because he said it's right)? If you say either that it would still be wrong to kill even if God said it was right, or that God wouldn't/couldn't say killing is right because he had a reason for saying killing is wrong, well then we can appeal directly to the reason and skip the middle man.
You're right, of course, that if morality had some basis more authoritative than God, then God would be a mere "middle man" and would not be necessary to the determination of moral truths. But I don't agree that "it would still be wrong to kill even if God said it was right, or that God wouldn't/couldn't say killing is right because he had a reason for saying killing is wrong." I believe God's nature is the source of goodness; you can't appeal to some standard of goodness higher than God. But it also isn't true to say that God could arbitrarily change good to evil or vice versa; God--being perfect--has no reason to change his nature, and--being omnipotent--his nature can't be changed by anything else. An actions is "good" insofar as it conforms to the immutable will of God.

Your "witchcraft" example conflates a factual dispute for a moral dispute: science can tell us whether or not the village witch is guilty of destroying the crops (a factual question), but it can't tell us whether or not people who destroy crops deserve to be punished (a moral question). I think you acknowledge this, since you agree that science can't derive an "ought" from an "is."

Reason can justify an "ought" statement, but only by presupposing a condition: "you ought to exercise if you want to be healthy; you ought to punish criminals if you want to deter crime" etc. So I don't think your examples work:

Suppose someone were to say, "Why should I care if I cause you pain or kill you? Your pain isn't my pain, and besides, I'd like to take your possessions after I kill you." Well, he won't convince anyone else that only his suffering matters and no one else's, so he is in no position to object if others were to treat him that way. Since no one wants to be treated that way, and since one's power over others is uncertain (tomorrow you might be in a position to be killed by a bigger man or a larger mob), it's in everyone's interest to collectively agree that randomly killing and pillaging is wrong.
Plenty of powerful people can say, with a high degree of confidence, that they will*not* be killed tomorrow by a bigger man or a larger mob. Genghis Khan killed and pillaged to his heart's content, and he lived well into his sixties and, by most accounts, died by falling off his horse and/or contracting an illness. Meanwhile, plenty of moral people end up getting killed or pillaged *in spite of* always behaving as if killing and pillaging are wrong. If morality has no better basis than this sort of social-contract-theory, then the Genghis Khans of the world have no use for it.

Earlier, you (correctly) pointed out that, if God is a middle man between humans and morality, we can just skip God and go straight to morality. But your own view of morality seems to treat it as a "middle man" for rational self-interest. If Genghis Khan says, "Why don't I skip the morality, and go straight for my own rational self-interest (i.e. killing and pillaging with impunity, because I enjoy it and I'm powerful enough to get away with it)?", how could you dissuade him?

Similarly, while I agree humans generally have evolved a "moral intuition," I don't agree with you that it's "universal." Psychopaths seem to be lacking the moral compunctions that are innate in ordinary humans. And while plenty of psychopaths end up dead or in prison, intelligent and capable psychopaths often become wildly successful. It seems like, above a certain level of intelligence, psychopathy is a very useful trait (which might explain why it hasn't been selected out of existence). So, if you can't appeal to Genghis Khan's moral intuitions, because he wasn't born with them--and if you can't appeal to his rational or game-theoretic self-interest--how do you convince him not to kill and pillage?

The only way I can think of is to convince him that killing and pillaging are not desirable because they are not good. And we know they are not good, because God is good and God is opposed to killing and pillaging. If Genghis Khan continues to kill and pillage, his life will be unfulfilling because he has not followed what is good, and after his death he will be punished by God for disobeying his will.

Now, you may not believe these things, and Genghis Khan may not believe them either. In that case, we're no better off than we would be under your system. But we're no worse off, either. And, at the margins, there are some rare instances where religious appeals appear to have moved otherwise implacable pillagers and conquerors; we'll never know what Pope Leo said during his meeting with Attila the Hun, but we do know the latter subsequently called off the invasion of Rome.

But my arguments about the religious basis of moral truths are, obviously, less relevant to moral non-realists like you than to, say, atheists who still believe in objective morality, like a lot of utilitarians (Scott Alexander's Utilitarian FAQ, for example, never actually explains why anyone should assign value to other people; this seems like it's kind of the entire crux of utilitarianism, but Scott brushes it off as a "basic moral intuition" (section 3.1)). If you're willing to bite the bullet that morality is just a spook, then you have no reason to be troubled by materialism's failure to establish an objective basis for morality. But you also don't have much room to criticize people who are convinced of objective morality, if their convictions turn them away from a materialism that's inadequate to justify moral truths.

Thank you for the comment, it makes me a little more confident that the sanity waterline rises as well as falls when I see other people articulate much the same arguments as I would have made myself.

Beautifully said. That's the type of worldview I am moving towards.

Finally, plenty of prominent rationalists have beliefs that seem just as strange and unfalsifiable as my own religious beliefs; some believe that we're living in a simulation, some believe in panpsychism, some believe we inhabit a multiverse where every possible reality exists at once, etc. I don't see why Christianity is any less compatible with rationalism than these other weird ideas.

Yeah, I feel this keenly! It sometimes seems like more of a fashion thing amongst intellectual circles. Christianity is coded as old and dowdy and uncool. You can have just as crazy beliefs but they're new so people take them more seriously.

I'd love to hear your further thoughts sometime if you feel inclined to write them down.

I think the rituals are meaningful and good to the extent that they're correct. As a member of a different denomination of Christianity, what I'd say is that the essence of Christ's teachings in Orthodox Christianity is generally correct, but the rituals which have sprung up around them vary in quality depending on how well they reflect those teachings and how much they've drifted from their intended purpose over the years. It's ok to find some things silly or even wrong while still mostly benefitting from church meetings. If anything this is better than the alternative, unless you believe your religion to be completely perfect.

How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?

You don't, while rationality is independent of one's axiomatic beliefs, there's no way you can reconcile epistemic hygiene with "serious" religious practise.

At best you compartmentalize and delude yourself into having belief-in-belief.

Plenty of "serious" rationalists are simulationists; is it so much of a stretch to jump from there to belief that learning about and appeasing the simulator is important?

You yourself believe AI will soon achieve apotheosis, and that simulations theoretically look no different from reality from the inside--is it not thus vastly more likely that we are inside an AI's simulation than not?

I have no strong opinion on the matter, our decision theories are insufficient to the task of giving a firm likelihood of whether we're in a simulation or not.

Barring intentional contact by whatever might be simulating us, or our discovery of a way to break out of the simulation, it's not really possible to tell if they're competent. Any errors or glitches can be trivially retconned out of existence if they cared, assuming we could even recognize them as such. It's entirely possible that we might just assume they're new aspects of physics, in case of subtle anomalies in physical laws and such.

Further, it doesn't particularly change anything, I'm at least quite confident that consciousness is substrate-independent, in the sense that it doesn't matter if you're running the algorithms on meat or silicon. A Turing Machine is a Turing Machine, be it operated by an abacus or a supercomputer. Thus, unless I have concrete information on what the parameters or aims of the Simulation are, I choose to behave largely as I would in base reality.

We have pretty much zero information on if there's a warden operating the Simulation, what their goals and desires are. Assuming they care at all about our actions and aren't just watching how things play out with no desire to intervene. That makes attempts at appeasing them utterly useless in the face of Pascal's Wager.

Now, if the creators suddenly showed up and blazed the stars with fire to spell out "Yeah dog, that Jesus dude had a point" or "Minimize the rate of increase of entropy" or "Discover a means of FTL travel for the right to exit the Sim", then after due diligence, I think that's what our civilization will focus on. I don't find religious claims to be based in remotely enough evidence to count.

It's impossible to determine how likely it is we're in a simulation

Given what we currently know, sure. But if we ever become capable of simulating consciousness, I'd argue we're much more likely inside a simulation than not.

Further, it doesn't particularly change anything

Here we definitely disagree. All sorts of rules become much softer if we're in a simulation. The likelihood that at some point matter is created, or entropy decreases, or someone travels back in time, becomes much higher. Whatever rules we learn may change at a moment's notice. Last Thursday-ism becomes not just plausible, but imo just as likely as the alternative.

On a moral level there would also be implications. Solipsism would become much more popular and plausible. Anyone who thinks morality only matters in "real life" gets a free ticket to do whatever they want.

We have pretty much zero information on if there's a warden operating the Simulation, what their goals and desires are. Assuming they care at all about our actions and aren't just watching how things play out with no desire to intervene.

We have virtually limitless information. The nature of reality itself, and every little detail of it, provides us with clues. Understanding reality better is understanding the warden better. Surely the nature of the simulation matters to whatever entity set it up.

I am not a simulationist, nor do I believe God is literally all-powerful (in the sense that he invented the rules of reality), but the points I've made do apply to a sufficiently powerful God. Assuming God exists, you can look at how reality is built to determine his values. You can construct hypotheses, test them against reality itself, and thus determine how accurate your own idea of God is.

I don't find the idea of God compelling or attractive. I intuitively shy away from religion in general. It seems hokey and wrong. There are so many idiotic religious people, and even intelligent religious people seem to have decision-making processes that are totally bunk. They construct towering, highly technical edifices of logic (such as the first-mover argument) that seem totally worthless. Nevertheless, my own tests of God's nature have quite consistently supported a single conclusion, so I find myself forced to accept that conclusion, at least until sufficient contradictory evidence arises.

Here we definitely disagree. All sorts of rules become much softer if we're in a simulation. The likelihood that at some point matter is created, or entropy decreases, or someone travels back in time, becomes much higher. Whatever rules we learn may change at a moment's notice. Last Thursday-ism becomes not just plausible, but imo just as likely as the alternative.

I agree on that front, but I don't think the degree of relaxation on our expectations is of a degree that you should change your typical behavior. Like hell yeah, invest trillions into doing our best to break physics and find loopholes, but for the average person, until that happens, you should live your life with the general expectation that things will remain as they are.

On a moral level there would also be implications. Solipsism would become much more popular and plausible. Anyone who thinks morality only matters in "real life" gets a free ticket to do whatever they want.

I'm a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist who happens to only be beholden to my own sense of ethics, so I couldn't care less what they do at the basement level universe. I deny even the ability of a nigh omnipotent entity to dictate an objective code of ethics any more than they can square a circle or make pi equal 3 (without manipulating whether space is Euclidean or not).

Assuming God exists, you can look at how reality is built to determine his values. You can construct hypotheses, test them against reality itself, and thus determine how accurate your own idea of God is.

Sure, I agree with that in principle, yet I notice the religious doing their best to explain away discrepancies between observed reality and the properties they ascribe to their deities when they conflict. You cannot reconcile an Omnibenevolent deity with ichthyosis vulgaris.

As far as I can tell, the universe looks indistinguishable from how it would be if it ran like clockwork without external intervention, and even if there was an intelligent creator, they're not doing anything more than initializing the starting values.

Nevertheless, my own tests of God's nature have quite consistently supported a single conclusion, so I find myself forced to accept that conclusion, at least until sufficient contradictory evidence arises.

I genuinely pity you for this, with no intention of being condescending. You seem like an intelligent and sane person, so it makes it particularly perplexing to me, as opposed to someone who believes because that's what they're taught to do, rather than reasoning into it or being convinced by personal evidence.

Ask yourself what sin I've committed that the clear light of God has been denied to me, I'm not so crazy that if an angel descended from the heavens with a proof of P=NP from the heavens with the blaring of trumpets that I wouldn't significantly relax my confidence in my atheism.

Miracles seem thin on the ground now that we have omnipresent recording devices and the scientific method. Maybe they'll be deepfaked back into existence, but none have happened where I can see them.

About the only way I could be convinced otherwise is with seriously strong evidence, and even then it would have to be distinguishable from just being at the whims of a superintelligence, then again that's godlike enough that you don't need to invoke the supernatural. I am leery of doing psychedelics precisely because they occasionally make people spiritual or religious, I consider that a bug and not a feature, scrambling your neurotransmitters provides no more real insight than bombarding a stick of RAM with ionizing radiation till it segfaults to a BSOD.

Besides, I asked you what anyone with say, a practically infinite number of dollars to use for experiments, could use to convince you otherwise, and you denied that you'd be open to them even in theory. Your beliefs seem infalsifiable short of performing involuntary neurosurgery or finding a way to hack into your brain, and I don't consider that to be on the table even with my worst ideological enemies, because I'd rather they didn't do the same to me. I'd rather kill them or have them kill me, not that my antipathy to the religious extends to that extent unless they're a jihadist or the like.

It's a big world, and I prefer to live and let live, but if I find myself at the Pearly Gates I'm going to try and kick God in the nuts and damn the consequences for my immortal soul.

I agree on that front, but I don't think the degree of relaxation on our expectations is of a degree that you should change your typical behavior. Like hell yeah, invest trillions into doing our best to break physics and find loopholes, but for the average person, until that happens, you should live your life with the general expectation that things will remain as they are.

Sure, depending on the nature of the simulation. If it's just you being simulated then of course you become far more likely to be able to break the rules.

I'm a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist who happens to only be beholden to my own sense of ethics, so I couldn't care less what they do at the basement level universe. I deny even the ability of a nigh omnipotent entity to dictate an objective code of ethics any more than they can square a circle or make pi equal 3 (without manipulating whether space is Euclidean or not).

I agree that it doesn't make sense for an entity to be able to just define morality however it pleases. However, this doesn't necessarily imply morality is entirely subjective and up to the individual. My own view of morality is that it's like logic. We know that logic itself is inherently arbitrary and fundamentally relies upon axioms, and you can technically have a logic system which rejects all axioms but is equally "valid", but if you do so you simply will not get very far. I think it's pretty self-evident that reality itself obeys modus ponens and many of the other fundamentals of logic. In a void, any system of logic is valid, but in reality we at least understand which of the basics are actually valid and which are just worthless theory.

Similarly, I think morality in the end may have an infinite array of theoretically valid possible systems, but only one which is actually valid in reality, given axioms which reality itself presents to us. I suspect a sufficiently intelligent being could take base-level axioms of morality (maybe "suffering bad", "pleasure good", and "meaning good") and build them out using logic into a provably correct moral system. Any divergence from such a system would provably create a contradiction at some more base-level principle--for example, maybe you think lying is justified in X case, but this proves you must either value suffering or disvalue pleasure. It's still possible to do so--to accept a contradictory moral system, or reject a base axiom--but that denies base reality in the same way denying modus ponens does.

Our moral theories are much less advanced than our logical theories, so I can't offer much evidence for this belief, save that morality just doesn't feel subjective to me. There is something objectively beautiful about the movement of planets around their stars, the capacity for a single cell to grow into trillions working in harmony, and the delighted laughter of babies. An empty universe feels objectively worse than one where complex and beautiful phenomena arise. The only totally objective reasoning I can offer in support of this position is that consciousness, and experience, seem to be more than just atoms following their predefined courses, and possibly operate by different rules as well (such as the rule that "suffering bad").

I genuinely pity you for this, with no intention of being condescending. You seem like an intelligent and sane person, so it makes it particularly perplexing to me, as opposed to someone who believes because that's what they're taught to do, rather than reasoning into it or being convinced by personal evidence.

Ask yourself what sin I've committed that the clear light of God has been denied to me, I'm not so crazy that if an angel descended from the heavens with a proof of P=NP from the heavens with the blaring of trumpets that I wouldn't significantly relax my confidence in my atheism.

We've talked about this before, but I don't think knowledge of God is particularly helpful to most people at present. The point of our current situation is to learn to be good, and while believing in God does grant some advantages towards that end (more confidence that things will turn out alright, easier to put aside worldly concerns, etc.) there are also drawbacks (easy to do good things for the reward rather than because they are the right things to do, easy to avoid bad deeds to avoid punishment rather than because they're the wrong things to do).

There's a very strong reason that religious people generally also do not claim to have seen angels, and I generally discount even the ones who do. Too much evidence before you're ready is harmful.

I realize this is possibly an insane cognitohazard. "God hides from those who aren't ready for him. No I'm not ready for him. Yes I believe in him anyways. Of course controlled randomized studies don't produce evidence for God; we're not ready for that kind of evidence, and that method of finding evidence proves it." All I can say in my own defense is:

  1. At times when I am morally stronger, I see quite a lot more evidence of God, in ways which are quite difficult to discount as placebo or confirmation bias

  2. The religion I follow seems very well-designed to encourage moral growth. Moral growth is important to me, so it's not like my efforts in the meantime (before I have seen sufficiently strong evidence of God's existence) are wasted. Also, this gives me a good built-in sanity check. If I ever get to a point where I'm very morally capable, but I still don't have more evidence, then that is proof to me that my beliefs were misguided if not entirely incorrect.

  3. I simply know myself well enough to know that I don't currently want to be constrained by perfect knowledge that my belief system is true. I like playing videogames, wasting time with friends, overeating, and otherwise not living up to my own potential, even though in at least some of those cases I know that I will personally regret those actions very soon after indulging in them. These actions are only possible at all because I don't yet know for sure

If (and hopefully when) I purge these suboptimal desires, I expect to quickly gain undeniable evidence of God's existence. And one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens, so that's my last resort for uncovering the truth.

About the only way I could be convinced otherwise is with seriously strong evidence, and even then it would have to be distinguishable from just being at the whims of a superintelligence, then again that's godlike enough that you don't need to invoke the supernatural. I am leery of doing psychedelics precisely because they occasionally make people spiritual or religious, I consider that a bug and not a feature, scrambling your neurotransmitters provides no more real insight than bombarding a stick of RAM with ionizing radiation till it segfaults to a BSOD.

The God I believe in is essentially a superintelligence anyways. I don't think magic or divine power exist separate from the laws of physics at all--if/when we learn them they will just be more laws of physics.

Agreed on psychedelics. They seem to make people spiritual in a very... suspect way, like they've just taken a hammer to whatever part of the brain handles skepticism and then latched onto the first idea that presented itself afterwards.

Besides, I asked you what anyone with say, a practically infinite number of dollars to use for experiments, could use to convince you otherwise, and you denied that you'd be open to them even in theory. Your beliefs seem infalsifiable short of performing involuntary neurosurgery or finding a way to hack into your brain, and I don't consider that to be on the table even with my worst ideological enemies, because I'd rather they didn't do the same to me. I'd rather kill them or have them kill me, not that my antipathy to the religious extends to that extent unless they're a jihadist or the like.

If it makes you feel better, I'd answer the same if someone were trying to convince me that my beliefs were correct, and did so when it mattered. I grew up in a religious household with very little exposure to contradictory ideas and still considered my family's belief system wrong and bad despite probably thousands of hours of close, trusted people trying to convince me otherwise. It may look to you like my beliefs are unfalsifiable, but really I just don't trust anyone else to evaluate the evidence for me. Statistics are helpful (it genuinely does give me some pause that RCT's don't support my beliefs) but in the end these beliefs can only be falsified, or confirmed, by me. It helps that nobody else seems even slightly capable of evaluating the question from an objective standpoint--everyone I know is either scientifically illiterate and generally unintelligent (most people I know IRL) or accepts things I currently consider self-evidently wrong (the belief that consciousness is nothing special, or that morality is subjective).

That's enough about me though. If you want to start gathering evidence, I'd suggest explicitly creating a model of the world without God, and one with God, and living for a day as if there's maybe a 1% chance the latter is the correct model. This might mean praying with real intent for 30 seconds and then noting the results, slightly modifying your system of ethics to do something virtuous you wouldn't normally consider worthwhile, or simply making an extra effort to be consistent about your own code of ethics. I guarantee the results will be positive and worth the effort.

This won't give you, as you say, "seriously strong evidence." I don't have that level of evidence myself. What I have is a path for investigating God's existence. The actual end of the path (where I know for sure) is a long ways away, but each step so far has gotten me closer to that end and made life much better besides. Take enough steps, note enough times that each step made under the assumption God is real has both made life better and provided a tiny piece of evidence in favor of that conclusion, and remaining on the path becomes the obvious course of action.

I appreciate the thoughtful answer, and I will apologize several months late for getting prissy with you in the last debate. From my perspective, you seemed to be intentionally obtuse, but in light of further interaction it was probably not intentional or just us unable to find a productive framework for discussion.

In a void, any system of logic is valid, but in reality we at least understand which of the basics are actually valid and which are just worthless theory.

This assumes that things like privileging hypotheses that are compact in a computational sense and better describe available evidence is sensible for the purposes of navigating reality.

They are. That still doesn't remove the inherent subjectivity about caring about it!

That should be a blazing red flag the moment you bring worth into the picture! Taboo the term and its synonyms and I guarantee you'll flounder.

The fact that we both agree this is a good belief to have doesn't make it objective, nor does my further confidence that most intelligent entities capable of achieving their goals would agree too.

In other words ubiquity of a property in the set of entities likely to exist is not the same as objectivity. Nor does plain old utility.

I suspect a sufficiently intelligent being could take base-level axioms of morality (maybe "suffering bad", "pleasure good", and "meaning good") and build them out using logic into a provably correct moral system.

I can see that you understand perfectly well that that the axioms themselves are arbitrary, and it confuses me that you don't take that to the logical conclusion here.

The Socratic Method never bottoms out, any more than you can manually count till infinity.

Some axioms are clearly better than others on metrics we care about, but they themselves do not determine said metrics after all. In maths the goal is to build the most complicated yet elegant edifice you can with as few axioms as you can get away with, because if an axiom turns out to be flawed in some manner, then you've just fucked everything over.

At most you can build a perfectly consistent model of morality, while Godel carefully watches and waits to jump your ass. It doesn't make it any more objective than simply stating that you believe because you believe. Nothing can.

Our moral theories are much less advanced than our logical theories, so I can't offer much evidence for this belief, save that morality just doesn't feel subjective to me.

Feelings are really not a good idea when it comes to navigating the world. The map must look at the territory from time to time, we can't sit in a dark room and develop an accurate idea of the world outside by going off vibes alone.

I am content in knowing my moral intuitions are inherently subjective, and that doesn't stop me from promoting them to others in the hopes they agree. I'm glad that's the case, because it simply can't be otherwise as far as I can see it.

A hole shaped like God as you metaphysically postulate can no more be filled than one requiring squares to have three sides. At most you can develop neurosurgery good enough to staple it shut.

I realize this is possibly an insane cognitohazard. "God hides from those who aren't ready for him. No I'm not ready for him. Yes I believe in him anyways. Of course controlled randomized studies don't produce evidence for God; we're not ready for that kind of evidence, and that method of finding evidence proves it."

This really looks unjustified to me, clear evidence that you're presuming the results of a thought experiment or hypothetical and then reasoning backwards to justify it.

The fact that I now believe you to be arguing in good faith makes this observation several orders of magnitude more confusing, and corrosive to my "soul" in the sense that it's almost Cosmic Horror that entities so similar to me in terms of intellect and origin can have such alien views. It's little consolation that I'm the moral mutant if you look at the set of all humans to exist, even if most of them would be utterly confused by why you had to resort to such complex arguments when as far as they were concerned, religion was true in the same mundane way we believe in gravity.

What exactly changed such that we lack the privilege to watch water turn to wine or the seas part? Are angels allergic to plates of silver salt or CCDs in digital cameras? It's not just that they ceased outright after Jesus was offed, miracles have been claimed to occur right until we can verify them.

The claim that we only deserve subtle theological arguments or personal revelations seems deeply silly when your religion abounds with the opposite, and it's more like the panicked justifications of a battered housewife claiming she deserved it rather than a convincing argument as far as I'm concerned.

At times when I am morally stronger, I see quite a lot more evidence of God, in ways which are quite difficult to discount as placebo or confirmation bias

If I ended up in such a scenario knowing what I know of biology and wider reality, I would put more stock in the notion I was going insane.

There is something objectively beautiful about the movement of planets around their stars, the capacity for a single cell to grow into trillions working in harmony, and the delighted laughter of babies. An empty universe feels objectively worse than one where complex and beautiful phenomena arise.

To get me to agree, find and replace objective with subjective.

There's a very strong reason that religious people generally also do not claim to have seen angels, and I generally discount even the ones who do. Too much evidence before you're ready is harmful.

You can't deny which side has the higher base rate and even includes their existence in their model of reality.

accepts things I currently consider self-evidently wrong (the belief that consciousness is nothing special, or that morality is subjective).

I am agnostic on the former, and everything I've said so far is an attempt to justify the latter, in good faith, not that I think you think that I'm not arguing from it.

The God I believe in is essentially a superintelligence anyways. I don't think magic or divine power exist separate from the laws of physics at all--if/when we learn them they will just be more laws of physics.

God has plenty of baggage that a mundane Superintelligence as we can reasonably postulate would lack. Sure, from the perspective of their playthings, it makes little difference, but the gulf between being fuck off powerful and omnipotent is as large as that between 10^87 and infinity.

If you want to start gathering evidence, I'd suggest explicitly creating a model of the world without God, and one with God, and living for a day as if there's maybe a 1% chance the latter is the correct model. This might mean praying with real intent for 30 seconds and then noting the results, slightly modifying your system of ethics to do something virtuous you wouldn't normally consider worthwhile, or simply making an extra effort to be consistent about your own code of ethics. I guarantee the results will be positive and worth the effort.

I am not sure I am even capable of doing the former any more than I can, at will, convince myself there's a 1% chance I'm hallucinating the sofa I'm sitting on. I think @FCfromSSC claims to be able to do things along those lines, but it's a power I lack.

I do a decent job of aligning to my own personal code of ethics, or at least there's nothing obvious I could do right now that I am not already trying to do, being bottlenecked more by my own ADHD and akrasia!

Take enough steps, note enough times that each step made under the assumption God is real has both made life better and provided a tiny piece of evidence in favor of that conclusion, and remaining on the path becomes the obvious course of action.

This is a fundamentally unsound approach in the same manner as convincing yourself you have an invisible bodyguard is. Sure, you might save time on your walk home by happily taking shortcuts through a deserted alley, and that might increase your overall QOL for a bit till you confidently refuse to hand over your wallet to a mugger.

Then you die, and don't get to find out much of anything at all because Heaven or Hell probably don't exist.

Given this all started as an argument about reconciling rationality with religion, I would claim this is an example of sacrificing epistemic rationality for instrumental rationality, it might even be a sensible tradeoff, but you pay the price eventually.

I appreciate the thoughtful answer, and I will apologize several months late for getting prissy with you in the last debate. From my perspective, you seemed to be intentionally obtuse, but in light of further interaction it was probably not intentional or just us unable to find a productive framework for discussion.

It's fine, I'm usually stuck in a superposition of 60% "my beliefs are correct" and 40% "my beliefs are utterly, hopelessly wrong" and my constant awareness of the latter possibility makes a lot of very dismissive behavior seem reasonable.

This assumes that things like privileging hypotheses that are compact in a computational sense and better describe available evidence is sensible for the purposes of navigating reality.

They are. That still doesn't remove the inherent subjectivity about caring about it!

That should be a blazing red flag the moment you bring worth into the picture! Taboo the term and its synonyms and I guarantee you'll flounder.

The fact that we both agree this is a good belief to have doesn't make it objective, nor does my further confidence that most intelligent entities capable of achieving their goals would agree too.

In other words ubiquity of a property in the set of entities likely to exist is not the same as objectivity. Nor does plain old utility.

What I am trying to say is that logic is the map, and reality is the territory. The fact that logic cannot prove whether reality exists does not mean reality does not exist. If the map burns up, or omits an important detail, that won't actually affect reality. A better word choice than "worthless" would have been "inaccurate." Plenty of systems of logic are internally consistent, but only one actually describes reality.

From logic's perspective, sure, no system of logic is more valid than any other. From reality's perspective, only one system of logic is correct, and it is objectively correct.

And yes, I know this due to logic, so there's a chance I'm wrong, but causality flows from reality to logic, not the reverse.

I can see that you understand perfectly well that that the axioms themselves are arbitrary, and it confuses me that you don't take that to the logical conclusion here.

The Socratic Method never bottoms out, any more than you can manually count till infinity.

Some axioms are clearly better than others on metrics we care about, but they themselves do not determine said metrics after all. In maths the goal is to build the most complicated yet elegant edifice you can with as few axioms as you can get away with, because if an axiom turns out to be flawed in some manner, then you've just fucked everything over.

At most you can build a perfectly consistent model of morality, while Godel carefully watches and waits to jump your ass. It doesn't make it any more objective than simply stating that you believe because you believe. Nothing can.

This is why I compared morality to logic. Logic, and math, describe reality. It's not that some mathematical axioms are better than others because they lead to outcomes we prefer, it's that they are simply more accurate to reality. You could frame that as an outcome we prefer, I suppose, but that's somewhat misleading, because certain axioms would be more accurate to reality whether or not we're around to prefer them. 1+1 = 2 is primarily descriptive of the way things actually work, and what it describes remains true regardless of our preferences.

My belief is that morality works the same way. Suffering exists independent of our theories and beliefs about it. Thus, it's conceivable that morality exists too, as a descriptive and prescriptive map based on reality. Just like 1+1 = 2 in reality even if you choose axioms which state otherwise, suffering is objectively bad no matter your axioms.

An important caveat is that even if morality does objectively exist, and only a single moral system is objectively consistent (which is my assertion) that doesn't really fix the is/ought problem or obligate someone to value good above evil. So I'm not trying to say it's possible to prove that suffering is wrong, but I do think it's possible to collect all sorts of axioms like that into one objectively correct (i.e. accurate to reality and consistent) system and prove that rejecting one axiom means rejecting the whole system and morality in general.

This really looks unjustified to me, clear evidence that you're presuming the results of a thought experiment or hypothetical and then reasoning backwards to justify it.

The fact that I now believe you to be arguing in good faith makes this observation several orders of magnitude more confusing, and corrosive to my "soul" in the sense that it's almost Cosmic Horror that entities so similar to me in terms of intellect and origin can have such alien views. It's little consolation that I'm the moral mutant if you look at the set of all humans to exist, even if most of them would be utterly confused by why you had to resort to such complex arguments when as far as they were concerned, religion was true in the same mundane way we believe in gravity.

That's fair. I don't want to start another tangent here; this discussion is already broad enough, but I have interacted with many people who believe in religion the same way you believe in gravity. They were generally uneducated, poor, extremely unintelligent people. I had a very hard time communicating even simple if-then statements with them. They take both religion and gravity on faith and I think that's much safer than asking them to apply skepticism to things their society says is true, haha.

What exactly changed such that we lack the privilege to watch water turn to wine or the seas part? Are angels allergic to plates of silver salt or CCDs in digital cameras? It's not just that they ceased outright after Jesus was offed, miracles have been claimed to occur right until we can verify them.

The claim that we only deserve subtle theological arguments or personal revelations seems deeply silly when your religion abounds with the opposite, and it's more like the panicked justifications of a battered housewife claiming she deserved it rather than a convincing argument as far as I'm concerned.

Well, again, the theory I've expounded would pretty directly imply that angels are allergic to cameras, yeah. At least until they decide otherwise. If they visit someone then it's usually meant to be a visit just for that one person.

My own religion has always heavily emphasized personal revelation. This isn't exactly a new idea to Christianity though, it's contained in the Bible! Matthew 13:58 says that Jesus declined to perform many miracles in his homeland due to people's unbelief there. If miracles would have benefitted those people then Jesus would have performed them.

At times when I am morally stronger, I see quite a lot more evidence of God, in ways which are quite difficult to discount as placebo or confirmation bias

If I ended up in such a scenario knowing what I know of biology and wider reality, I would put more stock in the notion I was going insane.

I don't think you would. The evidence I have in mind is generally along the lines of "I prayed for X and immediately got it, in a way highly unlikely to be coincidence." In the past I've gone so far as to list everything prayed for, things desired but not prayed for, expected probability of receiving each of those things, and expected time of arrival, then statistically analyzing the results. I didn't randomize which things were prayed for. I probably should have, but I got such strong results that continuing to test it felt ungrateful.

I only did that 2-3 times, but that meant that I had those times as frames of reference, which is how I know that when I'm more morally upright my prayers are way stronger.

I think many would see such behavior as insanity but not of the clinical sort, more of the "excessively neurotic" sort, which I think is appropriate given the nature of the question being investigated.

You can't deny which side has the higher base rate and even includes their existence in their model of reality.

Sure, in fact I'd say that latter fact is the only one that matters. Of course if you believe strongly in something, you'll have more dreams (or "visions" which is what most angelic sightings are) about that thing, and attach more significance to them. You could describe that as a hallucination but I think it's more complex than that; healthy cognition involves some amount of seeing what you expect to see, because that's just how the brain works.

I am not sure I am even capable of doing the former any more than I can, at will, convince myself there's a 1% chance I'm hallucinating the sofa I'm sitting on. I think @FCfromSSC claims to be able to do things along those lines, but it's a power I lack.

To be clear the idea wouldn't be to believe there's a 1% chance, but rather to act how you think you might if that were your belief, i.e. pretend there's a 1% chance. If you don't want to, that's fine, but I think everyone is capable of pretense; it's the only way to survive many social situations.

This is a fundamentally unsound approach in the same manner as convincing yourself you have an invisible bodyguard is. Sure, you might save time on your walk home by happily taking shortcuts through a deserted alley, and that might increase your overall QOL for a bit till you confidently refuse to hand over your wallet to a mugger.

Then you die, and don't get to find out much of anything at all because Heaven or Hell probably don't exist.

Given this all started as an argument about reconciling rationality with religion, I would claim this is an example of sacrificing epistemic rationality for instrumental rationality, it might even be a sensible tradeoff, but you pay the price eventually.

If I had reason to believe I had an invisible bodyguard, i would try and investigate, rather than being satisfied that there's a small chance of an invisible bodyguard following me around. Maybe I'd buy an infrared camera, or fly somewhere and watch for empty seats. The belief would merit further investigation. At some point, if I've seen him on the infrared, maybe I would take my chances in a mugging, but it would take a lot of evidence before then to convince me that that was the right course of action.

I think God's existence is worth investigating. If you think the chance he exists is small, then of course you shouldn't quit your job, sell your house, and donate everything to the church, but I think it does merit a small test, such as a randomized test of the efficacy of personal prayer, if only for curiosity's sake. Then if that result turns out positive, of course it doesn't mean much, but it does mean you should try a bigger and more powerful test. Once enough of these tests turn out positive, it's probably time to start taking the possibility a little more seriously, study it more, maybe find better testing methods than RCPs. This is the path I am describing.

My investigation has yielded evidence and also improved my life. You could describe this as instrumental rationality. I'm sure I'd be less excited to continue investigating if the evidence collection process did not also improve my life. Still, it's not "believe X because belief in X is beneficial." It's more, "I should be spending years investigating the truth of this anyways, because it's that important, but I'm just not that patient or determined. Thankfully I get paid for the investigation, which makes it much easier to keep going." I would never trade epistemic for instrumental rationality (at least at any reasonable exchange rate) but having both is best.

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Interesting. The serious religious intellectuals tend to argue that you can't have any sort of epistemic hygiene without a 'first mover' - or in other words that the modern scientific worldview is based on a contradiction given that the a priori assumption is that no belief is ultimately true, which is in itself an ultimate belief.

Anyway I get a bit confused by these super high order epistemological arguments, but that's the steelmanned version of the other side's argument as far as I can tell.

ETA: I guess this is what rehashing the internet atheist wars from the other side feels like... good lord.

There is a pragmatic version of the argument about epistemic hygiene that is summed up in this cartoon.

Pragmatic arguments make me uncomfortable, nearly as uncomfortable as the replication crisis does.

Why do pragmatic arguments make you uncomfortable?

I think I muddle together various issues

  • the inaccessibility of truth. I never get to the real truth, but there is wide variation in how hard I try and how close I get.

  • fear of the future. Will it be A or B? I make my choice. It turns out to be C.

Should I pursue "Epistemic Rationality" and seek the truth just because it is true. That is a reckless path that probably leads to nihilism, despair, and suicide. Not a good idea.

Should I tackle the problem above by being more pragmatic? I could compromise the concept of truth by asking "is this true for me" where I'm sneaking in the idea that things can be true because they make me happy or help me cope.

But the two paragraphs above get greatly modified when I contemplate that I'm not actually getting close to the truth, sometimes because it is hard to find, sometimes because I slack off and don't really try. Since I'm not actually getting close to the truth, the stuff that I believe to be true doesn't stand the test of time. My pragmatic approach fails because times change and the things I believed would make me happy and help me cope, turn out to make me sad and become new problems to be coped with.

My attempts at "Epistemic Rationality" fail twice. No God, no joy, no hope. I buy my rope and my bucket. But this first failure is followed by a second failure. I don't believe that I have gotten to the bottom of things. What if I'm wrong? What new horror will 2024 bring? Disabled by doubt, I fail to kick the bucket. I wait with anxious curiosity to find how how I was wrong this time.

I lean more towards "Epistemic Rationality" because I hope that the things that I accept as true will be closer to the truth and hence last longer. I guess that it is easier to come up with coping strategies for unpleasant truths that last, than it is to cope with the endless churn of pragmatic truths that don't last.

tldr: my version of pragmatism is a shoddily constructed thing that wobbles, breaks, and falls over.

Oh man, I can’t even read all this because it’s so close to my own previous issues. I found a way out by listening to my heart or body or soul or whatever you want to call it instead of my head. Over rationalizing will get you nowhere.

Even if you wish to hold it as axiomatic that there's an Uncaused Cause or something responsible for the existence of the universe, there is no way near sufficient evidence to imbue it with the usual crap like Omnipotence, Omniscience or Omnibenevolence, or assume it cares at all what we do or is even capable of doing so.

If God as it's claimed to exist created the universe via a Big Bang, it's a more parsimonious claim to state that the Big Bang itself is capable of arising ex nihilo, pending a Grand Unified Theory of Everything that explains if multiverses and the like exist.

And looking at the state of the world, it's indistinguishable from a scenario where a Creator simply set the wheels in motion and fucked off forever. Hence I'm more than content to swing Newton's Flaming Laser Sword about till it hits something it can't cut.

If Christianity works to heal your inner wounds, then maybe you can find some other way of healing your inner wounds that has Christianity's strengths at healing inner wounds without also having the issue that there is almost no rational reason to think that Christianity is true.

What if I think, like Carl Jung and many other mystics, that true spiritual wisdom has to contain paradox?

I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, as someone who is a natural skeptic and also an Orthodox Christian. Consider this comment an IOU to get back to you with something of an essay in the near future.

@TheDag @KingOfTheBailey @coffee_enjoyer I, um, wrote a long thing. It's up as a top level post (...and a reply because I ran out of characters) now.

Thanks but I don't see it, and visiting your profile page shows a thread that's "deleted by user". The reply is still accessible from your profile. Misfiring automated tools?

I think some sort of filter, like the new-user filter for comments (maybe there is a stricter filter for top-levels?). I can see it when logged in but not otherwise, so I assume it will show up as soon as a mod gets around to approving it.

Look forward to reading (can’t see it just yet)

Hm, I see that I can't see it when logged out. I must somehow still be subject to a filter/delay for top-level posts. Well, hopefully it will get approved soon.

I love it! I second @KingOfTheBailey. I would love to see more discussion of this type on the Motte. I think @coffee_enjoyer would be interested too.

ETA wait maybe it's a different coffee name. Idk.

Essay now in progress, I'm up to about 1300 words already. It will definitely be a top level post.

I would definitely be interested. The relationship between reason and religion is the most interesting question to me.

Please make it a top-level effortpost.

I have precisely the opposite problem. Basically an atheist with respect to a personal, interventionist God, but trying to incorporate some sort of progress-oriented spirituality in my life to mixed success. I’ve experimented with New Agey concepts like the Law of Attraction, but it’s difficult to fully embody them when I know they’re fundamentally psychological tricks without any metaphysical underpinning.

If I understand your troubles correctly, I would strongly recommend you checking out John Vervaeke. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto (by the way exactly as Jordan Peterson) and he developed very attractive philosophical framework, trying to combine cognitive science, ancient Greek philosophy and Buddhist teachings. He presents his ideas in the youtube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I was under huge impression of the consistency and orginality of his thoughts. The whole thing strongly verges on spirituality and he explicitly states that he is trying to develop a 'Religion of no religion'. Usually I consider such attempts to be doomed to failure, but this was interesting even for me, a devout Catholic. Considering his religious affiliation I would label him a modern-day atheist, though he calls himself a Buddhist (in one of the episodes he argues that he doesn't find eternal life to be a good idea).

Interesting, earlier this year I did watch some of his interview with Bernardo Kastrup, one of my favorite modern philosophers, on the Theories of Everything Podcast but it didn't particularly stick with me. The series you linked sounds interesting, I'll give it a shot. Though I'm generally skeptical that a search for meaning is necessary or desirable. But I am coming from a more Buddhist nihilist perspective meaning is mostly a cope for dissatisfaction caused by misdirected attention. I didn't realize Vervaeke himself is a Buddhist, so if he still makes the case for finding meaning I'm open to hearing it.

I will second that, his lectures as well as Jordan Peterson's actually helped lead me back to the Church.

I fully understand that the Motte community evolved from the rationalist community, but I just don't believe that you can be a completely rational person. There's so much happening to you from the inside and from the outside and you have absolutely no clue about it, not knowing what just hit you or led you to this mood or another. I think that this whole project of rationality is too much too demand from a person. I'm perfectly fine being full of contradictions, conflicting temptations, being driven by vague emotions or ephemeral visions. I think this is more genuine and truthful way of being then trying to squeeze your whole personality in one huge framework of rationality.

No one convinced me better, and no one speaks about this view on being more eloquently and beautifully then Eric Lander, a mathematician standing behind the Human Genome Project and a practicing Jew. The link is here, please watch it, its only three minutes.

FYI I'm a Catholic.

Yudkowsky strongly suggested that the rat community describe themselves as Aspiring Rationalists.

Our baseline human physiology no more lets you be a perfect rationalist than you can emulate a TI-84 in your head, at most you can, with effort, emulate some of the properties where it's relevant to you.

At any rate, the perfect shouldn't allowed to become the enemy of the better, at least until it's a tangible option.

Does anyone know or have a link to a study that researches the true-positive rate of car alarms?

Never in my life has a car alarm gone off near me in their miles-audible radius that wasn’t some false-positive. Whenever I hear a car alarm I do not think “criminal activity” I think “electrical problem” or “owner messed up” or “accidental bump” and hope someone turns it off shortly.

Honestly at this point I don’t see any reason to keep them around. If we’re going to have regulations, then automakers should be prevented from including this feature. It is pure noise pollution with no security gain.

Now, this is likely a result of where I live. But to the degree they do alert on actual criminal activity elsewhere, what can be said for how helpful the alarms end up being?

Don't have data for you, but I wanted to add:

  • Fire alarms - It's gotten to the point where schools/companies doing fire drills have to send around staff to make people go outside.
  • Emergency phone alerts - In my area, these also get used for AMBER alerts, which everyone ignores. When they need to warn everyone about the big west coast earthquake, there's going to be a lot of phones left in pockets.
  • Screaming in public - In a healthy society, it'd be normal to pay attention to this, right? I'm totally desensitized to it. I assume others are as well.

Emergency phone alerts - In my area, these also get used for AMBER alerts, which everyone ignores. When they need to warn everyone about the big west coast earthquake, there's going to be a lot of phones left in pockets.

A few days back, the Indian government did the first trial I can remember of their equivalent, and it was fucking annoying. Thankfully my phone let me switch them off for good, I vaguely recall the ones sold in the US sometimes don't allow that.

About the only reason I'd care is if there were nukes inbound, and I'm sure the hellish beeping of the devices of everyone around me would make me wish for death in the first place.

Screaming in public -

Dunno if Japan can be classified as a health society but screaming in public would get attention here. Even raise your voice and heads will turn. How proactive those whose attention is got will be is another matter. What a sentence.

How do I find non-fiction books free of excessive progressive influence?

I am pretty wary of the progressive entrenchment of anglosaxon academia and book publishing. At the same time, I love to read new books who goes out about particular topics I care about.

I am Italian, so I have access to the massive Italian catalogue of non-fiction, but how can I filter anglosaxon books without extensive research on every author?

At the same time another question; usually, how do you search for new books? Especially, do you use any app/software to do so?

How do I find non-fiction books free of excessive progressive influence?

Find reviewers you trust to focus on the actual content and listen to them. That's what reviewers are literally for, you shop around based on your tastes.

Just…read books, I’d say. If you encounter a hot-button topic or a slogan, apply your skepticism. Don’t touch race relations or pop psychology (though you probably knew that).

If you’re worried about financially supporting people you disagree with, trawl used bookstores. Even new releases will show up there surprisingly fast.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “anglosaxon” publishing, though.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “anglosaxon” publishing, though.

The UK and its former colonies.

Perhaps I'm biased being progressive myself, I think 'progressive influence' is really only obvious in culture-war adjacent topics; if you pick up a recent or semi-recent academic publication on history, even something charged like, say, civil rights/race/black history, the bias would be considerably less than it seems you imagine. If you avoid pop history/economics/whatever you'll be fine; I don't think they are broadly that partisan either, most of the time, but they're often bad anyway, and trendy culture war topics, you'd be fine. Who knows though, maybe I'm just so deep in progressive ideology I can't notice when it's there.

Read old books. Read great literature. Us moderns don't know as much as we think.

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