What I notice more and more, is the "you're wrong" is used to buttress opinion masquerading as fact. If you preface "I think that.." to asserts it doesn't stop the "you're wrong" but it at least puts the discussion into the realms of conjecture about things, including facts, rather than simple asserts of facts which are often not as factual as they seem.
I also notice that argument by analogy is being over-used. Because you want to compare your large single CPU to a multi CPU doesn't mean it actually is a Bull compared to a herd of chickens. Or that cat-herding is actually much harder than it looks: you need the right kind of cream. Wait.. that analogy might not work here..
This one seems especially pernicious, not because of extremely over-wrought comparisons, but because sometimes the analogy fits really well on the surface. But beyond the structural fit, it does not really help prove anything.
Too often I'll encounter an analogy wielded as if it proves the underlying point, when the reality is that it breaks down quickly if you dive into the details.
Analogies can be great to help establish new mental models, or to try out an idea with terminology that people already understand, but can be quite misleading. Better used for learning than trying to prove things.
Additionally, I think arguing by analogy is a sign that you lack real / structural arguments, real understanding.
Ina a similar vein, when people talk about managing creative technical types as ‘herding cats’ I respond that this is a management style issue: You don’t herd cats, you give them something to chase.
There are social contexts where clarity of statement and lucidity of thought *are not* among the tools/objectives of an encounter/interaction.
But in debate or education or in any other case where clear words and ideas are indeed among the tools/objectives, avoiding them or undermining them is being a different kind of jerk.
I find this sentence kind of funny. If you thought your opinions were bad wouldn’t you change them?
"It's best practice" should invite the question of "according to who, in which publications? What are the circumstances of the practice, are they similar to our circumstances?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Edit:
Verb tergiversate (third-person singular simple present tergiversates, present participle tergiversating, simple past and past participle tergiversated)
(intransitive) To evade, to equivocate using subterfuge; to obfuscate in a deliberate manner.
(intransitive) To change sides or affiliation; to apostatize.
(intransitive, rare) To flee by turning one's back.
And a big driver of that seems to be that either the debate isn't about facts so nobody cares, or frequently that the experts don't have a well advertised an opinion on an important subject. It really turns up in economics where finding facts is a challenge. The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.
I'm sure that there are economists who are devoting their lives to figuring out what happened in China because it is an interesting and important topic. But where the facts are being surfaced is not obvious and it isn't going to make its way through the broader public discourse.
TLDR; finding any facts in any public discussion is actually a bit of a challenge. It tends to be opinion all the way down until the trail goes cold.
[1] I find most policy debates I get into with friends have nothing to do with the policy at hand but rather more core political/philosophical questions underlying their thinking (e.g. do the ends justify the means or are they more individualist va collectivist)
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I think it's pretty well understood that the growth of China is thanks to the market reforms in the 70s and 80s.
Is it though? China's economic growth doesn't seem that far off (per capita) from that of South Korea or Taiwan.
I wish I could say the same about Freud, but that ladder is distressingly horizontal.
What I'm saying is that Ptolemy, Aristotle, etc did a great service to humanity by taking a stab at hard problems, even if their solutions were convincing but wrong. Whether they knew it or not they were the primordial programmers writing a throw-away prototype upon which all future progress was based.
At any rate, along the way over the course of 9 months or so I found a technology stack that supported all my requirements and ran into a bunch of roadblocks. Lots of things related to how internal bits of GCP APIs are handled - the internal libraries had documentation indicating that streaming APIs were supported, and that each chunk of the request would be passed from the API proxy/backend multiplexer to the actual API server as they arrived. This worked for streaming responses, but not for streaming requests, and so I had to add that functionality to the API proxy. That was a huge pain - really hairy c++ code using fibers with multiple layers of request processing wrappers. But I worked thru that and got it landed into the google-wide binary, and never worried about it again.
I got this project to the level I needed it to support the precise requirements for the (regulated medical device) system I was working on. Around this time the GCP Cloud Healthcare group was getting started, and they built a new system using a fair number of bits of my implementation, which they'd eventually replace completely. But my first system saved them most of a year or work, resulting in the CHC feature set rapidly leapfrogging what I'd built.
Reflecting on his experience in the Second World War, he said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."
[fn] not kidnapping, but a logical (procedural) method like induction or deduction
And, in fact, Ptolemy was more "right" than heliocentric circles (as opposed to ellipses).
You have to have both elliptical orbits and inverse square law forces to predict better than Ptolemy.
It wasn't until the telescope allowed seeing Venusian phases that geocentricity was actively disproven.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/19/ideas.g2
> Distributed understanding is a real phenomenon, but you have to get yourself into a community of communicators that can effectively summon the relevant expertise.
Especially after all the debates on free will with Sapolsky.
Instead it ended up being backhanded self complement, more like, "a lot of other great people agree with me, so maybe I'm wrong, but probably not".
"Descartes’s theory of everything is, even in hindsight, remarkably coherent and persuasive. It is hard to imagine a different equally coherent and equally false theory! He was wrong, and so of course I may well be wrong, but enough other thinkers I respect have come to see things my way that when I ask myself, “What if we are wrong?” I can keep this skeptical murmur safely simmering on a back burner."
I expected him to write back with some eloquent or witty or pithy defense of the link between the title and the contents, but he just thanked me and said, "yes, now that you put it that way, it probably is the wrong title. Oops, too late."
In other words, any attempt to break down the mind into component parts is better than declaring it a lost cause and hypothesizing your favorite alternative instead (god, soul, one-ness, consciousness as an essential property, etc).
It's just from the title, I thought there was going to be some 'inciteful about face', like he had some new 'other way to think about things' that just couldn't wait for the next book. So had hopes up more.
This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right?
I became an Atheist in large part because I took Latin my first year in high school and realized that the Roman's actually believed in their gods the same way that I believed in the Christian god. And I gradually realized that they had the same reason to believe that I did ... they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.
> I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong.
I can't speak for Dennet, but for me it would just be ANY evidence: a verifiable miracle, proof of life after death, or meeting an angel/demon.
I don't think this is really the right way to think about Christianity for many believers. C.S. Lewis says, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." It's not so much that Christianity is just another fact lying out there that we just happened to stumble upon, and now we use scientific tools to investigate whether it's true or false. No - it's a belief that shapes the very way we understand the world. It's a worldview. That's not to say that it's necessarily correct, but just that it's not a belief that we necessarily acquire in the same way we might acquire a belief about what 1+1 is or how many planets orbit the sun. It's much like how someone born and raised atheist doesn't hold their belief in atheism because of some evidence for that view. We can still argue about Christianity, atheism, or other religions, of course, that's fine - but it's not obvious that there's some inherent irrationality in asking "what could show Christianity to be false" instead of "what convinced me Christianity is true".
>they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up. This is true, but if the implication is that belief in Roman paganism is on just as firm intellectual ground as belief in Christianity, that seems unfair given the rich intellectual history spanning millennia of the latter to which the former isn't really comparable at all.
It sounds like maybe some people are taking this as a challenge from me to atheists. I'm not really; just like Dennet is in TFA, I'm talking about general principles for someone trying to live as a rational creature: each of us should examine our own beliefs, and not only ask "What if I'm wrong?" but "How would I know if I were wrong"? That goes for Christians and Hindus and Muslims as much as for atheists. "Take the plank out of your own eye before you try to remove the speck out of your brother's eye" and all that. It's specifically because Dennet is such a deep thinker and effective communicator that I genuinely wonder how he'd answer that question.
I'm not sure what evidence was provided to me as a child that the world was round; but I had relatives who lived in Germany and Thailand, and at the age of 12 I'd actually flown to Thailand and experienced jet-lag. The "world is round" hypothesis satisfactorily explained my experience (both first- and second-hand, through people I knew personally) in a way that the "flat earth" hypothesis doesn't.
In the same way, the vast majority of evidence I had as a child to confirm what as taught about Christianity to me was experiential. But of course, all sorts of people from different faiths have religious experiences; how do I know that there's not some better explanation for my experiences -- either religious or reductive -- which will be more predictive (in the sense of getting better results more efficiently)?
> I became an Atheist in large part because I took Latin my first year in high school and realized that the Roman's actually believed in their gods the same way that I believed in the Christian god. And I gradually realized that they had the same reason to believe that I did ... they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.
This seems a bit strange to me... so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort (with some people maybe being closer to the truth of the matter than the others), you decided this was evidence that there weren't supernatural beings?
Isn't that like reading several different conflicting scientific theories, and then deciding that all science is bunk?
Sorry I don't have the exact quote, but there's a place where C.S. Lewis points out that being a Christian, he's free to believe that people of other religions were partly right and partly wrong; but that when he was an atheist, he had to believe that the majority of humans were completely wrong about the most important questions in life.
If the entire world were atheists except Christians, wouldn't that be far stronger evidence against the supernatural? The fact that the Romans believed in the supernatural and the afterlife is evidence -- weak evidence, I grant, but evidence nonetheless -- that the supernatural and the afterlife exist.
> but for me it would just be ANY evidence: a verifiable miracle, proof of life after death, or meeting an angel/demon.
What would satisfy your requirements for a "verifiable miracle"?
It sounds like a lot of these might be very personal experiences. First of all, if you had a single experience of an angel, would that actually change your mind? Wouldn't you be inclined to believe you'd had some sort of hallucination (wondering perhaps if someone had slipped LSD into your drink or something like that)?
Similarly, once you had that experience and became convinced, how would you convince anyone else? Supposing there were another person who was exactly like you -- the fact that you were convinced you'd seen an angel wouldn't have any effect on whether they were convinced that angels existed, would it?
FWIW I know a lot of people who started out as atheists and became Christians, and although this sort of rational "apologetics" sometimes did factor into part of their decision, by far the biggest influence was personal experience: first with genuine Christians, then with with Jesus, through reading the Bible and worshipping him at church. I tend not to focus on that kind of thing in a venue like this, because it's the least logically sound reason; but if you're genuinely interested in having a personal experience to let you put Christianity to the test, that's what I'd look for.
As for me, I've got what I consider to be more objectively sound reasons to believe; but "“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however [this comment] is not large enough to contain.” Hopefully at some point I'll write it up in a way that's easy to link to.
I've come at this from the other side many times and, though there's certainly a part of me that would like to, I just cannot find it within myself to believe that the human condition is explained in any way by Christian theology.
I've found a good deal of resonance in the mystical traditions of various religions - I'm especially a fan of some of the Jewish mystical stuff (e.g. Kabbalah and other portions of the long tradition of debate and interpretation of scripture).
But in spite of a lot of examination I've still wound up with, at most, a kind of "spiritual but not religious" attitude, which usually translates to, frankly, not much.
I've found myself somewhat jealous of people of faith, who can find some system of belief that seems resonant enough to provide comfort and a framework for living a good life - but also, frankly somewhat nonplussed that people can buy into these various theologies and not run up against the same "...really, that's supposed to explain all this?" that I do.
What evidence (or counter-evidence) do you suggest I present to show that my disbelief in Thor or Odin is wrong?
Similarly, if one lived all one's life in a rationalist bubble, and never even heard the mention of God or gods or religion or the supernatural, then perhaps one could not have an opinion on whether God exists. But that applies neither to you nor to Dennet.
How would I know that my disbelief in Thor is wrong? At a first cut, I'd need to have someone propose a more concrete proposition to evaluate; then I could try to evaluate it. But whatever that proposition is, it would need to be able to accommodate all that we've learned about the world and about science; it would need to be falsifiable; and it would need to explain the world in a more satisfactory manner than the alternative worldviews.
There are no attempts at proof (that I'm aware of) for the existence of these mythical deities. There are several for the existence of the God of monotheism, which I believe to be sound, but will struggle to fit into a combox.
Further, the thing we imagine them to be is different in kind from the God of monotheism. There are sound explanations of why this is so, but (again) they won't fit into a combox.
See Edward Feser's Five Proofs for the Existence of God, and some of his other works, if you care to explore this further. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and the like ignore, or grossly straw-man, these arguments.
Like if the gases of a nebula got rearranged to spell out “God is real”, then sure yeah I guess they are real.
But then I changed my mind: now I believe that agnosticism is just a "shy" way of being atheist, somehow trying to say "I don't believe in a particular deity, but I can't commit to saying that I believe there is no deity". But that's the whole point of a belief: I could be wrong, and it would be okay to change my mind. A belief is not a proven fact.
So I am an atheist: I don't believe in any particular deity, and in fact I do believe that there is no such thing. But obviously if you proved my belief wrong, then I would change my belief :-).
There are also miracles with thousands of witnesses, most notably that at Fatima. The witnesses included not just Catholics, but also Protestants, atheists and those of other religions. https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/Meet_the_Witnesses.pdf
[0] See Edward Feser's Five Proofs
Not sure what you mean, any clear sign from a god would apply here. You seem to believe that such a thing isn't possible making their position irrational, but then I wonder how you can still say you believe in a god? Do you believe that God can't intervene in this world?
But for example, if God manifested giant talking heads all over the world I am pretty sure atheism would disappear very quickly.
I don't believe this.
"I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong."
Perhaps the reason you aren't aware that he has addressed this at length is that you don't have have his name right.
Also, as Chris Hitchens noted, religion poisons everything, including this thread.
You can take parent at their word that he's thought about it and engage, or you can choose not to engage. No reason to disparage them.
An important part of being able to truly ask oneself if they are wrong is the humility to seriously consider an alternative. The author's treating of ID research as a foregone conclusion, even with his acknowledgment that we could be wrong in the next paragraph, seems rather ironic. Isn't it this kind of hubris that he is precisely calling out?
I do think Dennett is being rather sneering in his inclusion of ID in the essay at all. But he's not wrong that good work can be funded, and genuinely useful, and appreciated without malice, for misguided reasons.
Which he did, at length.
"The author's treating of ID research as a foregone conclusion"
No, it's a consequence of massive amounts of evidence, not just of evolution, but of the character of the sort of people who work at the Discovery Institute.
I remember being told once, "Congratulations! It's your fault!". The thinking is that, if it's some[one|thing] else's fault, there's nothing I can do to change it, but if it's my fault, then I have the power to amend the situation.
In every conflict in my life; even when I am clearly in the right, and the other party is clearly in the wrong, I always have something to address, on my end. Sometimes, I may even need to apologize for it; which can really suck.
In my coding, I have found that writing unit tests always finds bugs. Happened to me yesterday, in fact. Since the test ran through 35,000 records, and took almost an hour, it was painful. I can't remember the last time that I wrote unit tests that didn't find bugs in the CuT.
But I am now satisfied that the code I wrote is top-shelf.
Well, would we call it a mistake if someone described what, empirically, was an ellipse, as a circle? The question itself "What if I'm wrong?" is flawed: we are always already wrong. But it is the wrongness which makes the world, for us; and to the extent our creations are false, to that same extent they are true. So why concern yourself with questions of true or false, right or wrong, Good and Evil? Go out, create your own truth, make the world anew...leave behind all this worrying over nothing.
What makes the circle unique (or a copy / scaling of the unit circle) is that it exists defined by a relationship that is true on the euclidean plane, something itself which is ideal, and only exists in our imaginations.
With mater being quantized at some level, we are always approximating, and for my car's sake, things rolling at several thousand rpms, we have some pretty circular things.
Only if you have an overly strict definition of circle. I don't think it is wrong to call the outline of a ball a circle, or the shape you do if you take an Y shaped object and rotate it along one of those branches, it isn't a perfect circle but it is still a circle.
Two professors from whom I was fortunate to learn, who did something like this in classes:
* Marvin Minsky (MIT) -- While he was researching The Emotion Machine, class sessions would often be him talking about whatever he'd been working on earlier that day, and related thoughts from his formidable knowledge, and people would ask questions and share information. For example, one day, general anesthesia came up, and a physician/surgeon who was sitting in on class that day added to that (something about, in some cases, the patient is conscious but doesn't remember after, which was a memorable idea to hear).
* Peter Wegner (Brown U.) -- He was working on theory of interactive models of computation (e.g., whether interacting objects were reducible to Turing Machines), and some days would put up drafts of a paper on a projector, for class discussion around them. IIRC, he'd first read sections of the paper, and then ask questions of the class around that. Of course, we learned more than he did, but perhaps we were also a helpful rubber duck on some ideas he was thinking through.
Also, drafts of textbooks are a thing: Leslie Kaelbling (then Brown U.) arranged to use draft copies of Norvig & Russell's intro AI book, which were two comb-bound volumes with unfinished bits, and IIRC we could feed back comments.
Which reminds me of the time I was taking classes at the community college, and the author of one of the textbooks was in the department (though not my instructor), so I wrote down some comments as I worked though the book. The author seemed kind and delighted to be getting book feedback from a student, even though I assume now that my comments weren't of any help.
I just felt like we were being kind of used as free editors, rather than peers to engage with the intellectual ideas.
It helps a lot to find a day job where you can learn a skill that will help on one independent project you will tackle. It's a great idea as well to test ideas and arguments when having a casual conversation with someone: it both deepens the conversation and you have a better feel about how your opinion will be received.
I love this.
I go through similar experiences with software engineering. I notice some area of the field that appears overly complicated (build systems, CI/CD, version control, web frameworks, so on and so on) and start thinking to myself "Why all the complexity? Surely we could just-" and then I'm down a rabbit hole for weeks. The usual end result being I learn a lot of new things and discover for myself what all the complexity was for.
But hey, occasionally maybe I really do come up with a Next Big Thing.
I struggle with this question in the same way I think as the author, but in technology we are afforded less time to ponder if we are wrong and more time to test if we are wrong.
However the author points out, even in testing as he does with his students, we can be wrong in a fundamental way that all the branches of my iterations stem from the wrong source.
So I’m left with: who thinks I’m wrong and why does that matter.
I’m finding that outside of reddit, very very few people will tell me im wrong and this is deeply frustrating. Really only my wife who is tired of my pondering fully engages in what might be wrong with what I’m working on and I’m thankful for that.
But I wish more people would help me be “constructively wrong” which means they understand the goal but want to correct the approach.
Most online merely want to point out irrelevant wrongness for sport.
What's the value proposition? As you noted, not even your own wife will help you until she sees some kind of return for herself (abating her tiredness). Online actors pointing out irrelevant wrongness get to laugh at the meltdown of the maladjusted "intellectual" that usually follows.
This is what consultancy is for. You pay someone to look at what you are doing and tell you where you are going wrong. The pay offers the incentive. Most people are quite happy to offer consultant services for pay. But presumably you are having this wish because you want it for free?
Very very few people you are paying with genuinely critique or disagree with you for very obvious reasons.
However I can’t help but point out that you’re being exactly as I’ve described redditors…argue an adjacent point to just say the original point is ‘stupid’. It’s a waste of good brain cells.
> I had found— and partly invented— a prodigious explanation- device that reliably devoured difficulties, day after day. The insights (if that is what they were) that I had struggled so hard to capture in my dissertation and my first book have matured and multiplied, generating answers to questions, solutions to problems, rebuttals to objections, and— most important— suggestions for further questions to ask with gratifying consilience. I just turn the crank and out they pour, falling into place like the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps my whole perspective is a colossal mistake— some of my critics think so— and perhaps its abundant fruits are chimeras.
On further thought, I think the only humane objection is whether truth can ever really be separated from judgment. People don't like being judged and especially not judged unfairly, and true propositions can nevertheless connote judgment by contextual salience of the particular thing we tell someone that they're wrong about and why they're wrong, etc.
Perhaps the flip side to this is to consider when (if ever) lies or mistruths are allowable. After all, a lie, believed sincerely, makes the believer 'wrong' about something. I can certainly think of things told to me by people I care about, that if they turned out to be lies, I wouldn't gain any utility or value from their revelation.
XD
That's unsound. It prevents learning anything which is not widely known and simply explained.
I don't know the author. All the context I have is the article up to that point where I lost interest. However yes, if all you try to learn are the trivial things everyone agrees on, for some circular definition of "wrong", you won't be wrong.
Bad strategy. High value are things few people know. Highest value are things people know to be true that are not so.
If you understood Dunning and Kruger you would not post this not to mention make a Daniel Dennett appeal to authority case.
