nameandnature | Entries tagged with eliezer yudkowsky

Simulating Religion: A Christian takes stock of Silicon Valley’s rationalist community by Alexi Sargeant: A Christian takes stock of Silicon Valley’s rationalist community
(tags: lesswrong rationalism eliezer-yudkowsky Christianity philosophy transhumanism)
How evolutionary biology makes everyone an existentialist | Aeon Essays: “Each variant of human desire is ‘natural’, not in the sense of being required, but only of being made possible by nature. And it is in what nature makes possible, not in what it necessitates, that we should look for the answer to the question about what we should be or do.”
(tags: philosophy ethics existentialism evolution biology)
Notes from the Intelpocalypse [LWN.net]: A good, reasonably technical, summary of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks.
(tags: cpu hardware spectre meltdown security intel)

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there. There are currently comments.

Imaginary Positions – Less Wrong: One I’d missed: Yudkowsky’s post on rounding to the “nearest cliche”.
(tags: cliche nearest eliezer-yudkowsky rationality)
The world is not falling apart: The trend lines reveal an increasingly peaceful period in history.: Steven Pinker argues we should look at trend lines rather than headlines.
(tags: statistics war politics violence world steven-pinker)
A Pasta Sea: Elijah and the Apologist of Baal: 1 Kings 18 re-imagined as if Baal had a William Lane Craig on his side. Fun times. “A Pasta Sea” is a good name for an ex-Christian blog, too.
(tags: bible apologetics ahab baal elijah funny parody)
A&E in crisis: a special report – Telegraph: “As the NHS faces its worst winter in years, Robert Colvile provides an in-depth, first-hand account of the pressures facing the health service.” Interesting: combination of people unable to see a GP quickly enough and hospitals unable to turf old people to social care quickly enough. Targets sometimes provide perverse incentives.
(tags: nhs health healthcare medicine hospital)
Free exchange: Nice work if you can get out | The Economist: Why the rich now have less leisure than the poor. Via WMC on FB.
(tags: leisure work economist)

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there. There are currently comments.

Back in August, Clark at Popehat did a slightly confusing posting on how some atheists are confused about rights because they speak as if rights exist while also saying that nothing but matter exists. Clark seems to be one of those theists who thinks that gods are be required to exist for objective rights to exist, but he doesn’t really say why he thinks that. (The real trick in all these arguments is specifying quite what you mean by “objective”. I enjoyed John D’s quote from Richard Joyce: “So many debates in philosophy revolve around the issue of objectivity versus subjectivity that one may be forgiven for assuming that someone somewhere understands this distinction.”)

I argued that Clark had got materialism wrong. Someone asked how any atheist can avoid the conclusions of Alex Rosenberg. I slightly facetiously replied “by not being an eliminative materialist”, but I can do better than that, I think. Rosenberg gets a lot of counterargument from people who are avowed naturalists and philosophically respectable. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for an atheist, especially one who isn’t an expert on philosophy, not to share Rosenberg’s conclusions.

Typically, Christian apologists ignore any distinction between varieties of naturalistic worldview (see Luke M’s interview with John Shook) and go with something like “if atheism is true, we’re nothing but matter in motion, chemical fizzes like soda spilled on the ground”. They then make an argument which uses the fallacy of composition to “show” that properties which matter and energy don’t have can’t be real on atheism (by which they mean some kind of materialism). This is all bunk, but pretty popular bunk, at least in the blogosphere, if not in philosophy journals.

Finally, I got into Yudkowsky’s belief in moral absolutes, which is interesting as Yudkowsky’s an atheist. Massimo P had a post about that back in January, where he sort of disagreed with Yudkowsky but then actually seemed to agree with him if you stripped away the layers of words a bit. My most significant comment on that is here. Yudkowsky’s transition from what looks like mathematical Platonism to the claim that morality is absolute deserves a post of its own, which I might get around to at some point. There’s a lesson for atheists, though: atheist appeals to evolution as a moral justifier are confused. Evolution might be a (partial) answer to “why do I care about X?” but not “why should I care about X?”

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there. There are currently comments.

Friend Iain recently read the New Testament and reviewed it. He made some comments on it, including the observation that the early Church members thought that Jesus would return within their lifetimes. This prompted some comments giving the standard evangelical gloss on these passages (see also), to avoid the conclusion that the Bible contains errors. I wrote a comment:

http://de-conversion.com/2008/11/09/the-psychology-of-apologetics-biblical-inerrancy/ is worth a read to understand what’s going on in the comments here :-) Short version: Quine says evidence alone doesn’t compel us to change a particular belief, because we can modify another one instead. Quine was writing in the context of scientific theories: if you don’t measure a difference in the speed of light in two directions, say, maybe there’s no luminiferous aether, but if you really think there must be one, maybe the Earth sort of drags the aether with it, or your instruments were faulty, or something. Paul thought Jesus was coming back within his life time, but if you really want Paul’s writings to be without error, what Paul actually meant is that you should live with a sort of Buddhist detachment to the things of this world.

Quine has clearly got something over the sort of naive falsificationism (i.e. if your theory is ~~disproved~~contradicted by a single experiment, it’s curtains for that theory) which is supposed by some to be how science works. Nobody discards a trusted hypothesis so easily.

Still, something seems to have gone wrong with a theory when it allows anything: if you started from the position that the Bible contains no factual errors (call this innerancy1), you probably would not have predicted what Paul wrote in 1 Thess or 1 Cor 7:29ff, 1 Cor 15:51 (“sleep” = “die” here) etc; yet there they are, and what-evangelicals-call-inerrancy (call this inerrancy2) is somehow compatible with them. I think this means that inerrancy2 doesn’t compress anything: it’s just a list of what happens (the Bible) with a cherry on the top (“this list contains no errors or contradictions”). I’m using Eliezer’s ideas about http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/ here.

julies blog: My Star Trek Quiet Book: I wasn't familiar with the term "quiet book" before, but this is excellent.
(tags: startrek craft book)
Ockham chooses a razor: Tee hee.
(tags: ockham occam razor philosophy cartoon funny)
Eliezer Yudkowsky offers odds of 99 to 1 against faster than light information propagation: "I'll take bets at 99-to-1 odds against any information propagating faster than c... I will not accept more than $20,000 total of such bets." Yudkowsky taking that xkcd cartoon literally.
(tags: physics eliezer-yudkowsky light ftl neutrino cern)

There's an atheist bad argument which runs something like this: "Faith is believing stuff without evidence, believing stuff without evidence is always bad, therefore faith is bad".

This seems reasonable at first, but sooner or later you meet a William Lane Craig or similar apologist type, as Jerry Coyne did recently:

Craig argues that science itself is permeated with assumptions about the world that cannot be scientifically justified, but are based on faith. One of these is the validity of inductive reasoning: "Just because A has always been followed by B every time in the past is no proof at all that A will be followed by B tomorrow." To suppose the latter requires faith.

According to Coyne, as well as the problem of induction, Craig mentions last-Thursday-ism and the idea that we're all in the Matrix as beliefs that we reject on faith. Some of commenters on Coyne's blog react as if Craig is advocating these ideas that we all reject, that is, as if he really thinks that the Sun might not rise tomorrow or that we're in the clutches of a

cartesiandaemon. But that's not Craig's point. Nor is Craig being inconsistent if he gets on an aeroplane assuming that the laws of physics will carry on working as they always have to keep it flying. After all, he's not the one claiming that it's always wrong to believe things without evidence.

The problem here, which makes the atheist's argument a bad one, is that the atheist has cast their net too broadly. Craig is right to say that there are things that atheists (and everyone else) believe "on faith". To say that these beliefs are always unwarranted leaves the atheist open to Craig's counter-argument that, to be consistent, the atheist should then discard those beliefs or admit that it's not always wrong to believe things without evidence.

Doing better

Nevertheless, something has gone wrong with Craig's argument if it's supposed to be a defence of religious faith (as all Craig's arguments ultimately are). Religious faith is different from belief in induction or the existence of an external world. The atheist should abandon the claim that unevidenced beliefs are always bad, and concentrate on the distinction between religious beliefs and, say, the belief that the external world is real.

One way of doing that would be to turn Craig's allegation of inconsistency back on him. As Chris Hallquist puts it

belief in the Christian God isn't very much at all like most of the common-sense beliefs commonly cited as threatened by Descartes & Hume-style skepticism (like belief in the reliability of our senses), but is an awful lot like beliefs most Christians wouldn't accept without evidence - namely, the beliefs of other religions.

The atheist's discomfort is now the apologist's: either he must accept that, say, Muslims or Scientologists are right to take things on faith (in which case, why not join up with them instead?); or further distinguish his religion from theirs (probably by making arguments about the resurrection of Jesus). The atheist's acceptance of the real world doesn't come into it.

Hume's own solution to radical scepticism was to note that he couldn't entertain that sort of thing for long. Creatures like us soon fall unavoidably back on treating other people as if they were conscious, the world as if it were real, and so on. The great man tells us:

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Among educated folk, thoughts of gods rely on meetings with other believers to keep them going: believers are chronic sinus sufferers. They rarely anticipate the world being any different from a godless one, and those who act as if God is real are called crazy even by their fellow believers. To be sure, that doesn't mean their avowed beliefs are false. But again, they are not like the commonplace beliefs that everyone takes on faith. In my experience, they fly forgotten, as the dream dies with the dawning day. How about a nice game of backgammon?

Edit: gjm11 suggests another reasonable response in this comment: admit that believing stuff without evidence is bad, and try to minimise it, and say that the problem with religious faith (in so far as that means holding unevidenced beliefs) is that it means having way more unevidenced beliefs than necessary.

Edit again: I've also commented with a shorter version of this on Coyne's original posting, so there's some discussion there too.

See also

Everything is a faith position, atheism is a religion, my previous Bad Argument posting.
Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, Eliezer Yudkowsky's take on radical scepticism and suchlike.

YouTube - Simon Blackburn - The Great Debate: Can Science Tell us Right From Wrong? (6): I'm reading Blackburn's "Truth" at the moment, and "Being Good" is next on the queue (clearly I should get "Lust" to complete the set). Here he is arguing that Sam Harris is wrong to claim that science can answer all moral questions.
(tags: sam-harris morality ethics simon-blackburn blackburn harris philosophy)
Chatroulette Founder Andrey Ternovskiy Raises New Funding: "50,000 Naked Men" | Fast Company: Chatroulette makes money of naked guys. Neat hack.
(tags: internet funny pornography chatroulette)
LessWrong - RationalWiki: What's wrong with Less Wrong, from RationalWiki. I didn't know about the Roko stuff, for example, which seems pretty bizarre. Always useful to see criticism to counteract my fanboy tendencies.
(tags: lesswrong eliezer-yudkowsky rationality bayesian bayes artificial-intelligence ai)
Double agent | World news | The Guardian: "Norah Vincent spent 18 months disguised as a man. She relives the boys nights out, the bad dates - and what happened when she ended up in bed with another woman." Women don't quite know what dating is like as a guy, it turns out. Or at least, Norah didn't, and ended up being quite sympathetic when she'd tried it :-)
(tags: equality gender women men dating sex relationships)

It's rare that you'll see recommendations for fanfiction on this blog, but Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality certainly deserves it. Have fun.

Aretae: Cognitive Antivirus: "Suppose that you are a bear of very little brain, or perhaps an average human on the street, of nearly average proportions, intellect, and character. What is the best thing you can do, belief-wise, in order to make your life better. I am beginning to believe that you should believe in your parents' God, and go to church on Sundays. God and tradition are perhaps the best and strongest way to avoid believing really stupid stuff that could actually mess up your life, or others' lives." Via the Less Wrong threads on undiscriminating scepticism.
(tags: religion epistemology rationality cognitive-bias)
FT.com / Reportage - Immigrant Muslims in Belleville: "Yet there are two main reasons the Belleville scenario looks more likely than the Eurabia one. The first is demographic: no serious demographer expects Muslims to become a majority in any western European country. The second is attitudes: only a tiny minority of French Muslims appears to want to establish a medieval caliphate in Europe. In surveys, most French Muslims say that they feel French... Many of them no longer observe Islam. And although here and there Muslims have made France a little more north African or Islamic, the influence seems to be more the other way: Muslim immigrants are being infected by Frenchness."
(tags: islam europe religion anthropology culture immigration demographics eurabia)
Johann Hari: The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent: "What can make tens of millions of people – who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and caring – suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon, or make excuses for an international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists?" Anyone, Bueller, anyone?
(tags: atheism catholic christianity culture evil fundamentalism islam johann-hari pope religion mohammed cartoons)
Less Wrong: Undiscriminating Skepticism: "Since it can be cheap and easy to attack everything your tribe doesn't believe, you shouldn't trust the rationality of just anyone who slams astrology and creationism; these beliefs aren't just false, they're also non-tribal among educated audiences. Test what happens when a "skeptic" argues for a non-tribal belief, or argues against a tribal belief, before you decide they're good general rationalists."
(tags: culture rationality scepticism eliezer-yudkowsky)
WebSequenceDiagrams.com - Make Sequence Diagrams with one click: Nice tool for drawing message sequence charts: sort of the MSC equivalent of GraphViz.
(tags: design development programming software tools msc message sequence diagram)

Following on from my link to The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy,

londonkds wonders how legitimate it is to say "This person has previously shown themselves to be ignorant/misinformed/lying/batshit on this subject on several occasions, therefore I have better things to do with my time than to rigorously investigate all their arguments this time". I've replied on the original thread, but I thought I'd create a new post with my reply in:

Reminds me of Yudkowsky's stuff on reversed stupidity and the follow up, Argument Screens Off Authority.

If someone is reliably wrong (a well informed liar), you can learn something by listening to them: you just increase the weight you give to beliefs which contradict what they say on topics where you know they tend to lie. But this might not be useful, if you already strongly believe stuff which contradicts what they say.

In practice, the people are ignorant or batshit haven't carefully studied how to be wrong. There are more ways to be wrong than right, so they probably are wrong, but you don't learn anything by listening to them, because their statements aren't tangled up with the truth at all. As Yudkowsky and

brokenhut say, you can decide not to listen to such people because life is too short, but that decision shouldn't influence your opinion on the truth of their argument (though it's hard not to be influenced in practice). So I think your quoted statement is a justifiable one as long as you don't append "and I'll believe their argument less as a result".

Suber's stuff on logical rudeness covers the case where your belief that they're batshit is because of some theory you hold which includes explanations of how all critics of the theory are batshit (examples exist in evangelical Christianity, atheism and feminism, that I've seen). ISTM that such a theory can't be used to dismiss critical arguments, though it can be used to explain why so many people apparently don't believe the theory.

(You can comment on the original post: I've disabled comments on this one to keep all the discussion in one place).

Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock? - life - 19 October 2009 - New Scientist: Of course not, God did it. Still, it's a fascinating theory, and a well written article from New Scientist.
(tags: evolution life science dna research biology ocean bacteria abiogenesis)
Zelazny, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes": Zelazny's classic short story.
(tags: roger-zelazny ecclesiastes SF scifi mars)
The death of death… « The Saint Barnabas’ Blog: The blog entry of the Anglican priest and goodwill diplomat who's been railing against secular funerals and Tina Turner songs at religious ones, who found himself reported on in the Torygraph and Daily Fail. Choice quote: "Whereas the best our secularist friends (and those they dupe) can hope for is a poem from nan combined with a saccharine message from a pop star before being popped in the oven with no hope of resurrection." Well, Christians certainly have the *hope* of resurrection, I suppose. And we can all agree that Tina Turner is a bad thing.
(tags: religion death funeral christianity anglicanism secularism)
Overcoming Bias as it Suits Us: When Eliezer met the feminists: an old thread on mswyrr's LJ which got started when Robin Hanson wondered why the Overcoming Bias community was so male. It's an interesting precursor to the Pickup Artist debates over on Less Wrong.
(tags: feminism cognitive-bias overcoming-bias eliezer-yudkowsky robin-hanson)

The talk to CUAAS was surprisingly well attended, given I spoke at the same time as Jo Brand, who I met on my way to the loos (we exchanged nods, as one speaker at the Cambridge Union does to another: it is not the done thing to make much of these things). I'm not sure how many CICCU people turned up, since they didn't make themselves known to me (apparently one woman was frantically making notes during my sermon, a well known evangelical habit, so I suspect there were a few). I spoke too fast, but people in Cambridge hear fast, so that's probably OK.

Below, you can find my notes, with some hyperlinks to expand on the things I said. ( Read more... )

There was a question and answer session afterwards. I remember some questions along the lines of:( Read more... )

Thanks to CUAAS for inviting me and giving me pizza. I had fun, and I hope my listeners did too.

Edited: Rave reviews continue to pour in. Well, William liked it, anyway, and has some observations on "atheist societies" to boot.

Friends have been playing with Spotify, which it turns out has a whole load of Matt Redman songs (imagine U2 singing about how Jesus is their boyfriend, and you've got it). I heard Redman at Soul Survivor when I went, many years ago. Though the charismatic services were a little bit scary at first, the whole thing fired me up to the extent that I alarmed my parents on my return by saying I was thinking of training for the ministry (I could have been the next John W. Loftus). At one of those services, I ended up wondering whether I should ask for prayer for healing. Looking back, I can perhaps understand how the Neumanns thought it was better to pray than phone an ambulance. The question of what, if anything, God is up to these days is a tricky one, and it's easy to get it wrong.

Praise the Prophets

A while ago, the Word of Dawkins came unto me, and the Spirit of Rationality rested upon me, and I spake forth, saying: "most believers already know what excuses to make for the apparent absence of dragons or gods, even as they claim belief in them, so they're keeping a map of the real world somewhere. The believers without the map are the ones other believers regard either as shiny-eyed lunatics, like the folk who don't go to doctors because God will heal them." Prophetic, no? (You may say that I'd read about similar cases in the past, but I think you're bringing a question-begging assumption of metaphysical naturalism to my text).

Rowan Williams has a map. He recently told everyone not to expect God to do much about global warming (by the way, Newsarse's version of the story is good fun). Likewise, in the Neumanns' situation, most Christians would call a doctor. So, I don't think God is going to stop global warming or heal diabetics (much less amputees), and, for the most part, Christians don't either. Of course, I don't attempt to excuse the absence of the dragon by telling the story of the man on the roof of his house in the flood. But when you consider what we anticipate will happen, we're not so very different after all.

Wasted youth

When I was a Christian, it seemed there was an unspoken understanding on these matters. God made all that is, seen and unseen; Jesus did all those miracles you read about in the New Testament; the statistical likelihood was that Jesus would, in the fullness of time, come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and bring fresh supplies of lemon-soaked paper napkins. God could do anything. Still, right now, you were more likely to see answers to prayer about work stress and for courage to evangelise your friends than answers to prayers for people to be healed of cancer. Or at least, it was best not to be too surprised that prayers for the big stuff might be "answered in a different way". (That is, if someone dies, they don't have cancer any more. No, really, this is not a joke). There were people who asked annoying questions about why God didn't do more, dissatisfied customers if you will, but I just found them irritating. God obviously existed, so why couldn't they just realise that?

The Neumanns did without this tacit understanding, which is unfortunate because having the understanding means you have the map: it's what allows Christians to get along in polite society without, say, being jailed for killing their children. Rather, just as Elijah did, the Neumanns anticipated-as-if God would act. They believed Biblical promises on prayer, as reiterated by their supporters here and here.

So what went wrong? Well, regular readers will know that God isn't real, though Christians can hardly say so. The usual excuse won't do, alas: it can't be that the Neumanns lacked faith. A family with sufficient faith to gather to pray around their ailing child as she lies on her deathbed is surely an example for Christians everywhere, even the ones who believe in doctors. Likewise, even if God has provided doctors, it seems mean-spirited for God to penalise the Neumanns for not using them: which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? We must look for better excuses.

Things not seen

Perhaps those Bible verses aren't intended to be the promises they seem to be (though they seem pretty clear to me, so if you encounter this argument, I hope you will chastise the person making it for twisting the Scriptures). Perhaps, as the Neumanns apparently believe, God foreknew that the kid would eventually turn away from Jesus, and took her home early to prevent it (though I'm disappointed by their liberalism, in that after their child died, they didn't slit the throats of the local pastors and turn instead to Baal, Satan or Dawkins, which would have been a more biblical response). Still, both these explanations are at least possible, and if the maintenance of your belief is itself a virtue, that possibility should suffice. As recent convert Sam Harris says:

These people [that is, neo-militant rationalist atheists like Jerry Coyne] are simply obsessed with finding the best explanation for the patterns we witness in natural world. But faith teaches us that the best, alas, is often the enemy of the good. For instance, given that viruses outnumber animals by ten to one, and given that a single virus like smallpox killed 500 million human beings in the 20th century (many of them children), people like Coyne ask whether these data are best explained by the existence of an all knowing, all powerful, and all loving God who views humanity as His most cherished creation. Wrong question Coyne! You see, the wise have learned to ask, along with Miller, whether it is merely possible, given these facts, that a mysterious God with an inscrutable Will could have created the world. Surely it is! And the heart rejoices...
Of course, one mustn't carry this sublime inquiry too far. Some have asked whether it is possible that a mysterious God with an inscrutable Will works only on Tuesdays or whether He might be especially fond of soft cheese. There is no denying that such revelations, too, are possible - and may be forthcoming. But they do not conduce to joy, chastity, homophobia, or any other terrestrial virtue - and that is the point. Men like Coyne and Dennett miss these theological nuances. Indeed, one fears that these are the very nuances they were born to miss.

Perhaps God is not deceased, but merely pining for the fjords. This, too, is possible. And the heart rejoices...

Following on from his review of two books by theistic evolutionists, Jerry Coyne recently wrote an article criticising the US National Academy of Sciences for saying that evolution and Christianity are compatible. Richard Hoppe at Panda's Thumb disagrees with Coyne, but P Z Myers supports him. Atheist fight!

Is evolution compatible with Christianity? Well, yes and no. I was a Christian who believed in evolution. This means not having good answers to some stuff Christians might care about: was the Fall a real event, and if not, where does original sin come from? Did physical death really enter the world through sin? If, as Christians usually argue as part of their theodicy on natural disasters, creation itself was corrupted in the Fall (whatever the Fall was), how exactly does that work? If you're a Christian who accepts evolution, you don't need atheists to ask these awkward questions, your creationist brothers (and sisters) will do a much better job of it.

But that doesn't show incompatibility. If you keep running into these problems and have to keep adding ad hoc patches to your theory, you should consider discarding it, but there are things I don't have good answers to as an atheist, and that hasn't stopped me being one.

I was a student of science who was a Christian. That seems to be where the real problem lies. Theistic evolutionists tend to say stuff like "Evolution could have been the way God did it" or "Maybe God nudges electrons from time to time". They might make a wider point about "other ways of knowing". At some point, someone is probably going to say "well, Science cannot prove your wife loves you, but you believe that, don't you?"

The Less Wrong crowd recently discussed whether their community is and should be welcoming to theists. Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted is a good post which deserves reading on its own merits, but I was particularly interested in Eliezer Yudkowsky's comment about compartmentalising rationality.

If Wednesday [the child of Mormons mentioned in the article] can partition, that puts an upper bound on her ability as a rationalist; it means she doesn't get on a deep level why the rules are what they are. She doesn't get, say, that the laws regarding evidence are not social customs that can be different from one place to another, but, rather, manifestations of the principle that you have to walk through a city in order to draw an accurate map of it.

Sam Harris mocks this compartmentalisation in his satirical response to Coyne's critics (the paragraphs following "Finally, Kenneth Miller, arrives" are the key ones). Science is one manifestation of the principle that you draw a map by walking the streets, not by sitting in your room and thinking hard about it. There are other legitimate forms of cartography, such as the one you apply when you conclude that someone loves you (assuming you're not actually a stalker). Perhaps, like the Tube map, they're not doing quite the same precise measurement as you'd expect from science, but they make useful maps.

Recall the original point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, before it developed into a cod-religion for annoying Christians with, like the worship of Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUHHH). The FSM's inventor used it to point out that if you're going to say your god created the universe because you sat your room and had a strong inner conviction about it, on your own argument, the FSM revealed to me as a Pastafarian is as legitimate as the creator your conviction revealed to you. This point is not lessened if you say your god sometimes happens to do stuff in a way which isn't directly incompatible with known science.

Perhaps theism isn't incompatible with evolution, but it is incompatible with good cartography.

William liked the bit in my last post where I said that most believers are carrying a map of the real world somewhere, because they know in advance what excuses to make for the apparent absence of gods and dragons. Of course, I stole it from Overcoming Bias (mentioned previously here). Carl Sagan's point in the original invisible dragon story is about falsifiability. The crew over at Overcoming Bias use it another way, to think about what's going on in dragon-believer's head when they know enough anticipate the results of testing for the dragon, but not enough to say "there's no dragon".

It's that sort of keen observation that keeps me going back to Overcoming Bias despite all the stuff about freezing your head when you die. The aim of the game for Biasers is to have a map which matches the territory, and to be able to read it aloud. They've started Less Wrong, a new site where anyone can contribute something they think will help achieve this aim. It's based on the code for Reddit, where users can vote stories up or down, though at Less Wrong, the editors manually promote stories to the front page, and there's a separate page where you can view stuff that's merely popular. You can follow Less Wrong on LiveJournal by adding

less_wrong to your friends list.

The community is working pretty well so far. Watching the decline of Kuro5hin makes me worry that community moderated sites will turn to crap (although there's still some good stuff over at k5, such as an article about the tendency of community moderated sites to turn to crap), but having real humans in charge of promoting articles might mitigate that. The system has given some new voices a chance, notably Yvain. Here are some of my favourite articles so far:

The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist talks further about layers of belief. If you're a materialist and get scared in a haunted house, do you actually believe in ghosts?
Don't revere the bearer of good info: how to avoid worshipping Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Eliezer Yudkowsky facts: why you should worship Eliezer Yudkowsky. Possibly only funny if you've read all his stuff, so off you go.
The power of positivist thinking, in which Yvain admits a closet liking for A.J. Ayer.
Cached Selves: alarming research on how freely chosen past actions bind us to consistency with them in the future.
The least convenient possible world is a tool for working out what your real principles are.

I've made a few comments over there, although nothing earth-shattering: sympathising with someone whose girlfriend left him for Jesus, or talking about Bernard Woolley and irregular verbs.

I've been thinking about posting some more about what I've got out of Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong here on LJ. It's all very well ranting about religion, but rationality isn't graded on a curve. Don't worry, religion-rant fans: I've got a few more of those lined up too.

A while back Andrew Brown over at the Grauniad posted a list of the 6 Points of New Atheism. There was a bit of a bun-fight among the atheists about this, because, though Brown's an atheist, he was criticising Dawkins Our Leader. It got even more fun when Dawkins turned up in the comments. (My own contribution was to treat the 6 Points as one of those internet quiz memes: I score 2.5/6 for New Atheism, which makes me slightly more Old Skool than New, I suppose). It's a bit like that Southpark episode where the Unified Atheist League fights the Allied Atheist Allegiance. What's the fuss about? Here's part of it.

Most Christians say God is omniscient and omnipresent. Yet the Christian woman whom Yellow blogged about, the one who wrote to a Christian problem page with her self-pleasuring problem, clearly doesn't really believe God is present and watching her all the time. But she at least believes that believing those things is virtuous for a Christian. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls this latter sort of faith belief in belief.

This doesn't just apply to religion.

palmer1984 posted a poll which suggest similar things apply to moral beliefs. It is virtuous to say that we should care for people in other countries as much as we do for those in our own, but most people don't really believe it.

Some people, especially those with a scientific education (or a certain sort of evangelical Christian background), think of belief as affirmation of a set of propositions. To those people, it's obvious that these propositions should not be internally contradictory or conflict with reality. But, as Saunt Yudkowsky observes "it is a physical fact that you can write "The sky is green!" next to a picture of a blue sky without the paper bursting into flames". The same applies inside our heads. Dr Vilayanur Ramachandan's fascinating experiments on anosognosia patients seem to show that explaining why a belief is valid and changing your beliefs are separate systems in the brain.

I take Yudkowsky's point that speaking of belief doesn't capture the psychology here precisely because "beliefs" are often taken to be propositional sentences, but our brains don't deal in those much. Instead of talking about what someone "really believes", I suppose he'd prefer to say that the woman speaks-as-if she believes God is omnipotent and omnipresent, but, at least in some instances, behaves-as-if God is not.

Brown says he's annoyed with neo-atheist rationalist fundamentalist sceptics because neo-atheists think that all brains work like theirs or can be convinced to do so, but that thinking is wildly optimistic. This is the point of Brown's Freud vs God post, which you should all go and read. See you in 5 minutes.

Back? Brown's getting this stuff from Dennett and from anthropologists who study religion, such as Pascal Boyer. Boyer details his views over at a sceptics' website, where he tells sceptics off for their narrow understanding of religion. Another anthropologist, Scott Atran, does a similar thing on edge.org, responding to Sam Harris and others in the wake of the Beyond Belief conference back in 2006.

The anthropologists say that religious beliefs should not be understood as propositional statements about the world, however much they resemble them. What of God's omnipresence and omniscience? One thing religious people do with this belief is check whether an action is morally right by imagining what their model of God would think of it. This might be done retrospectively, if a religious context provokes thoughts of God. They certainly don't anticipate-as-if God is in the room and watching.

Brown has linked the ideas of the anthropologists with the observation that most people don't try to formulate coherent propositions on anything, including religion. I don't know whether the anthropologists would agree with this, I'd need to read more of their stuff to tell. It's clear that most religious people do try to draw a map of the real world. As Yudkowsky illustrates with his dragon-believer example, most believers already know what excuses to make for the apparent absence of dragons or gods, even as they claim belief in them, so they're keeping a map of the real world somewhere. The believers without the map are the ones other believers regard either as shiny-eyed lunatics, like the folk who don't go to doctors because God will heal them; or as heroes of the faith for showing such belief, like the monks and martyrs. I'd paraphrase Brown's argument as "most people don't see the virtue of having one map for all occasions, or of being able to articulate it".

Of course, if you're a religious believer, you might find the anthropologists' approach a little patronising. Some of you seem to have beliefs which are propositions about how the world is. As I said over on

robhu's journal a while back, Dawkins at least does believers the courtesy of taking them at their word. What do you think?

Bart Ehrman's been on Unbelievable again, this time talking about the Problem of Evil: if God is good and all-powerful, why is there so much suffering in the world? His opposite number this time was Richard Swinburne, a Christian philosopher. Both of them have written books on the subject. I've read Ehrman's God's Problem but not Swinburne's Providence and the Problem of Evil.

The programme consisted of them both trying to get the arguments from their books into an hour long discussion. There's an MP3 of the programme available on Premier's site. If you get annoyed with people posting links to audio and video without summaries, you could read my notes, below the cut, or skip to the conclusion.

( What was said )

Stiff upper lips

Swinburne's theodicy is that of the public school games master, telling the boys that cross-country runs, cold showers and being made to play rugby against the masters will build character, however unpleasant these things are at the time. By contrast, in God's problem, Ehrman tells us he has his students read Elie Wiesel's Night. Ehrman's book quotes Primo Levi's Auschwitz Report, as well as the memoirs of Rudolf Hoss, written shortly before he was hanged by the Poles near the crematorium of the death camp over which he presided. In the face of sort of thing, Swinburne sounds like Pangloss (5 points to anyone who can write an "Objection: What about Nazis?" verse expounding Swinburnism: the lyrics to the existing ones about snakes and war are here, so you can get the metre).

Still, we ought to be careful of using the Holocaust as a sort of trump card in these debates, because it seems disrespectful of the dead, and also because it can be used as a tactic to imply that anyone who disagrees with you is automatically a bad person, which is the sort of thing that Christians might do, dammit (holding to a doctrine of total depravity is a big help with that sort of thing). So, what of Swinburne's argument?

Why is this blog called "GCU Dancer on the Midway", anyway?

I've mostly been ignoring Saunt Eliezer's recent stuff on Fun Theory over at Overcoming Bias because it triggers my (badly evidenced and probably irrational) "transhumanism: phooey" reaction, but as he says, "if you can't say how God could have better created the world without sliding into an antiseptic Wellsian Utopia, you can't carry Epicurus's argument".

Luckily, I've had this argument before, and chose the Culture over my present existence. I think Swinburne is partly right, in that eliminating all possible causes of suffering actually does more harm than good. After all, one of those causes is other people making their choices, and other people who can make their own choices are interesting, even if the choices can lead to us ending up wearing the diaper (scroll down) from time to time. But why allow those choices to actually kill and maim people? Why aren't there angels acting as slap drones? (Saunt Eliezer thinks there are problems with the Culture, but they also apply to Christianity. I'm sure he'll tell us the right answer soon :-)

There's not much point getting angry with a fictional character, but on the off-chance we encounter God on judgement day, we ought to say that he could have done better.

According to the Steven Novella's Neurologica blog, the Intelligent Design people (specifically the Discovery Institute) are getting interested in neuroscience (see also part 2), attacking the idea that consciousness has a physical basis and advocating Cartesian dualism.

This seems to have been rumbling away for a while, but people are writing about it at the moment because New Scientist noticed.

You can write a long article on what people have thought about consciousness, so what's the problem with the IDists joining in? First, neuroscientists are objecting to IDists' claims that scientific experiments prove things that those experiments don't actually prove. As Amanda Geffer of New Scientist points out, experiments that show therapy can alter brain function don't prove that the immaterial soul is acting on the brain, merely that the brain isn't indivisible, so parts can act on other parts. The therapy described reminded me of mindfulness therapies, and of Yudkowsky's recent reflections on Which Parts Are "Me"? (Everything I am, is surely my brain; but I don't accept everything my brain does, as "me").

Novella also objects to IDists quote-mining (I'm shocked, shocked I tell you) from philosophers like David Chalmers in order to bolster their claims. Novella says that Chalmers does not argue for an immaterial spirit, so it is a mistake for those who do to claim him for their side. IDists could quote Chalmers if they wanted to argue that there is a hard problem of consciousness, but it would be dishonest to quote him in support of their proposed solution, or indeed to say that the hard problem Chalmers speaks of has anything to do with evolution.

Edited to add: Chalmers discusses the New Scientist article on his blog, and doesn't sound very impressed with the theists' efforts to recruit him for their cause. The Chalmers link came from Chris Hallquist, whose blog I recommend.

Is this IDists' new strategy after they got planed in the Dover judgement? A while back, I mentioned that they might need a new way around the establishment clause in the US Constitution. I'm not sure this can be it, as consciousness isn't on the curriculum in most schools, but it does fit in with the wider strategy of looking for ways to undermine physicalism.

Some of you already read Overcoming Bias, the blog of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute (I've seen

gjm11 commenting there, and

wildeabandon mentioned it, I think). I've been reading quite a bit of the archives recently, as evidence by the number of comments I've made referring to old postings there.

The bias of the title is cognitive bias, the psychological term for systematic mistakes human minds tend to make. The purpose of the blog is self-help and social change: "If we know the common patterns of error or self-deception, maybe we can work around them ourselves, or build social structures for smarter groups. We know we aren't perfect, and can't be perfect, but trying is better than not trying."

Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the main contributors there. He's an interesting character: heavily invested in ideas about the Singularity and Friendly AI. His stuff on Overcoming Bias touches on those interests, but is worthwhile even if you consider such ideas silly (I'm not sure whether I do or not at this point: my instinctive reaction that this stuff is far-fetched may be an example of bias).

What I like about his writing is that it's usually clear and incisive. He shows a passion for reason (contrary to Star Trek, a passion for reason isn't a contradiction in terms) and almost a reverence for it. You get the feeling that his SF stuff about Bayesian masters undergoing the Ritual Of Changing One's Mind isn't just an illustrative analogy. Coming so soon after I read Anathem, I see the blog as one place where this world's avout hang out. Stuff like Diax's Rake would be right up their alley.

livredor once told me that one of my biases is to latch on to someone very clever and align my beliefs to theirs (I think this bias is a common one among technical people who have taught themselves some philosophy). So I ought to be a little careful when I read his stuff. Yudkowsky's faults are that he's also self-taught, so needs his (likewise very clever) commenters to point out that he's covering old ground, has missed out on the standard arguments against his position, or is not using the standard definitions of some terms (such as the case where he argues his moral views are not moral relativism, for example). Some of the postings where he talks about how he used to think a whole load of wrong stuff and now doesn't can get tedious (ahem). In some cases he's made extended series of posts where I don't understand the conclusion he's trying to draw (the series on morality is an example).

Still, I'm very much enjoying articles like his articles on staging a Crisis of Faith (which isn't ultimately about losing religious faith, but about changing long-held opinions. It's good introduction to the blog as a whole, as there are links to many other good articles at the bottom of it), Cached Thoughts, Are Your Enemies Innately Evil? (shades of Bartlet's "They weren't born wanting to do this" there), Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points, Belief in Belief (not quite your standard Dennett argument); and his argument that Elijah conducted the original scientific experiment.

I recommend the blog to you lot. If you like reading blogs on LJ, you can find it at

overcomingbias.