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So to take physicalism for example: both physicalist and non-physicalist theories give the same posterior, but your physicalist theories will have a higher prior, so their confidence values are always going to be higher. That's what I mean when I say it 'falls out' of your axiom Edit: fixed a mistake rudatron fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Mar 8, 2017 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 07:25 |
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Pellisworth posted:karl popper
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rudatron posted:So to take physicalism for example: both physicalist and non-physicalist theories give the same posterior, but your physicalist theories will have a lower prior, so their confidence values are always going to be higher. That's what I mean when I say it 'falls out' of your axiom. are you a markov chain generator e: too snarky, removed Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Mar 8, 2017 |
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Pellisworth posted:we have not I'm sorry it's been a decade since microbiology, I misremembered the specifics. The main point was that naturally occurring nonorganic events can create the building blocks for organic life. Myriad might be too broad, but off the top of my head there is also geothermal heat, chemical reactions, and radiation bursts. By testable claims I meant the processes for abiogenesis can be testable. It is within the scope of reason to explore our own solar system more, which could easily provide more answers. We simply don't know enough about the universe outside our immediate region to be certain, but there is a clear path to finding out if we can overcome the seemingly impossible logistics of space travel. The whole point of this was a bullshit comparison not brought up by me that claiming life might exists in the universe elsewhere is equivalent to belief in an afterlife. I'm not bludgeoning religion with science, I'm responding to BraniacFive's ridiculous equivocations.
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Pellisworth posted:are you a markov chain generator
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BrandorKP posted:Naomi Oreskes talks about this issue: As an analogy, both fascist states and democratic states require you to pay taxes, and they both act as social institutions with a given level of legitimacy, but they are very different kinds of states, and it's dishonest to rhetorically equalize them. rudatron fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Mar 8, 2017 |
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BrandorKP posted:Naomi Oreskes talks about this issue: Ehhhhhhhhhh....kind of. Leaps of Faith in science still assume an evidentiary result at the end, or are often based on at least some minute level of evidence to begin with. Its not really the same as a 'leap of faith' i.e. a Religious level of faith. If you take a leap of faith in science and get no tangible results at the end and no evidence to support your leap, it was for naught. Sure, you should publish the negative result, but if you were taking the leap without using the scientific method to SUPPORT taking that leap in the first place, people are going to be very wary of your paper. Versus, a leap of faith in the religious sense can be just dismissed regardless of the outcome as 'God works in mysterious ways'. Its not the same idea of 'Faith'. Its not a religious level of 'Faith', its more of a Hypothesis 'Faith' where you are making guesses based on some findings and testing your hypothesis on faith in the initial evidence. Not 'faith' as in blind belief that religion pushes. Even if you took a 'leap of faith' in science, you'd better have evidence to back at least your starting claims. That's very much counter to the religious idea of 'faith without knowledge' However, of COURSE science tends to seek a consensus, that's kind of a given. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 14:06 on Mar 8, 2017 |
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RasperFat posted:There isn't definitive proof of microbes yet, but hey look there is physical evidence we can examine and explore more in the future. We can get answers if we keep digging. So now that you've admitted you lie and plan to continue lying out of your sheer contempt for someone daring to disagree with you, is there any point in further discussion? I clearly cannot trust anything you write from this point onward to be honest. You also seem to not understand what proof is. You cannot prove anything much about the state of another person's mind. There are limits to absolute knowledge of that. The relative probability of something does not constitute proof of its existence, as the case of black swans should show handily. For someone sneering about how other people don't understand science, you don't seem to have a good grasp on what can and cannot be proven.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 13:53 |
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Crowsbeak posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43mDuIN5-ww I don't understand what the issue is here, twodot didn't say anything about Jesus not existing, all he did was suggest that Jesus's existence is an empirical claim among several religions. Which of course doesn't get into the miracles and son of god stuff, but that's beside the point.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 14:04 |
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I don't really have anything substantial to contribute to the discussion cause y'all talking past each other and misusing words, but I want to just point out that anybody who cites the solar eclipse 1919 and the Eddington expedition as an example for the scientific (hypothetico-deductive) method has very obviously never really looked into how that worked out in practice. That evidence was tenuous as poo poo and they threw out half the plates. The confirmation of general relativity is actually a really good example for the social nature of consensus building in science as opposed to the impact of cold, hard facts.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 14:08 |
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botany posted:I don't really have anything substantial to contribute to the discussion cause y'all talking past each other and misusing words, but I want to just point out that anybody who cites the solar eclipse 1919 and the Eddington expedition as an example for the scientific (hypothetico-deductive) method has very obviously never really looked into how that worked out in practice. That evidence was tenuous as poo poo and they threw out half the plates. The confirmation of general relativity is actually a really good example for the social nature of consensus building in science as opposed to the impact of cold, hard facts. Well, the Expedition was more to CONFIRM for the scientific world that the hypothesis held up. They didn't need a lot of plates to confirm, just 2-3 for the lensing to be visible. quote:The production of such an experiment is considered necessary for a particular hypothesis or theory to be considered an established part of the body of scientific knowledge. It is not unusual in the history of science for theories to be developed fully before producing a critical experiment. A given theory which is in accordance with known experiment but which has not yet produced a critical experiment is typically considered worthy of exploration in order to discover such an experimental test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimentum_crucis
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 14:21 |
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CommieGIR posted:Well, the Expedition was more to CONFIRM for the scientific world that the hypothesis held up. They didn't need a lot of plates to confirm, just 2-3 for the lensing to be visible. Yeah, and one of the plates they decided on using showed way too much deviation, one showed way too little and one was blurry. And several others who showed values in line with non-relativistic space time were ignored because they didn't fit the expectations. Seriously, the Eddington excursion was a prime example of scientists knowing what conclusion to look for and then creatively interpreting the available data until they supported that conclusion. They happened to be right of course and that's great, but people always hold the eclipse up as a paragon of the scientific method. (For the record, my point is not that this wasn't good science because it contained human impulses and sociological factors. My point is that good science contains all those things and is generally a lot messier than people like to believe.)
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 14:25 |
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The existence of faulty reasoning isn't itself proof that there isn't a process being followed. Ideally, you wouldn't end up with things like drifting values of the charge of the electron, but human beings being human beings, you do get that. But that doesn't invalidate the existence of a process to science, any more than people making faults in basketball invalidates the process of basketball - it's just something that happens.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 14:34 |
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Crowsbeak posted:I don't get why any atheists like Sam Harris while saying Religion causes people to want to murder Considering western atheism certainly makes Sam Harris want to murder a few million Iranians. Atheism isn't what makes Harris want to kill Muslims. Being a racist authoritarian is. Brainiac Five posted:What exactly is the evidence against an afterlife which distinguishes "I believe there is life elsewhere in the universe" from "I believe in an afterlife", that is, evidence which is not based on probabilistic claims? What is the probabilistic evidence for an afterlife? I don't even understand how you can calculate the probability of something like that.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 14:44 |
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botany posted:Yeah, and one of the plates they decided on using showed way too much deviation, one showed way too little and one was blurry. And several others who showed values in line with non-relativistic space time were ignored because they didn't fit the expectations. Seriously, the Eddington excursion was a prime example of scientists knowing what conclusion to look for and then creatively interpreting the available data until they supported that conclusion. They happened to be right of course and that's great, but people always hold the eclipse up as a paragon of the scientific method. I'm gonna have to disagree, because the plates were viewed by others as well who came to the same conclusions as Eddington. And the plates were comparisons of night shots of the stars versus the stars during the eclipse, it was well viewable that the position of the observed stars was dramatically different than during the ecplise, confirming the bending. Measurements and photographs were also taken from Brazil that also confirmed the findings during the same eclipse. There was no 'fluke' in being right, the observations played out the claims. There was no creative interpretation of the results. That's a claim you need to prove. Even Dyson, who was a skeptic of Einstein's theory, said the resulting plates showed the bend. http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~jackph/2012f/kennefick_phystoday_09.pdf CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Mar 8, 2017 |
# ? Mar 8, 2017 14:46 |
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botany posted:I don't really have anything substantial to contribute to the discussion cause y'all talking past each other and misusing words, but I want to just point out that anybody who cites the solar eclipse 1919 and the Eddington expedition as an example for the scientific (hypothetico-deductive) method has very obviously never really looked into how that worked out in practice. botany posted:The confirmation of general relativity is actually a really good example for the social nature of consensus building in science as opposed to the impact of cold, hard facts. ... what's that picture telling us here?..
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 14:50 |
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Cingulate posted:... what's that picture telling us here?.. Its showing that the plates were well readable enough from the eclipse to be used against the reference plates taken in January and Febuary by Eddington.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 14:55 |
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Pellisworth posted:The topic of the thread is, "Is the left hostile to religion," and my point is no, it doesn't need to be. Science and religion needn't conflict, and leftism doesn't have to be atheistic. Many interpretations of Christianity have very socialist/leftist economics at the very least. Well the answer is "No" in any case. For one thing a majority of leftists are religious and I think even most of the irreligious live their lives quietly and indifferently to religion.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 15:31 |
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Bates posted:Well the answer is "No" in any case. For one thing a majority of leftists are religious and I think even most of the irreligious live their lives quietly and indifferently to religion. Pretty much, minus the /r/athiest types and the Dawkins/Hitchens types.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 15:34 |
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Pellisworth posted:Could you link an article? I think it's in The Moral Landscape so I'll have to dig it out when I get home tonight. He in that book, and other determinists more generally, would also say that science can tell you whether or not it's "good" to feed starving people, and that such a question is not only the domain of non-scientific thinking, particularly because the more refined our understanding of neuroscience becomes, the more we'll be able to map ethical arguments onto quantifiable brain states.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 15:35 |
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CommieGIR posted:
Eh, it's not important Bates posted:Well the answer is "No" in any case. For one thing a majority of leftists are religious What does it look like across nations? Globally, or at least within the west?
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 15:39 |
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CommieGIR posted:I'm gonna have to disagree, because the plates were viewed by others as well who came to the same conclusions as Eddington. quote:And the plates were comparisons of night shots of the stars versus the stars during the eclipse, it was well viewable that the position of the observed stars was dramatically different than during the ecplise, confirming the bending. quote:Measurements and photographs were also taken from Brazil that also confirmed the findings during the same eclipse. There was no 'fluke' in being right, the observations played out the claims. quote:There was no creative interpretation of the results. That's a claim you need to prove. Even Dyson, who was a skeptic of Einstein's theory, said the resulting plates showed the bend. I am talking about Dyson's interpretations here. He was the principal decision maker. Cingulate posted:I've read Dyson, Eddington & Davidson 1920 (even re-ran the stats myself), I've read The Golem, I've not read Earman & Glymour 1980, I've read a bunch of other papers on the topic, and I think Eddington's and Popper's respective interpretations are entirely defensible. To reiterate what actually happened: Two groups went to Principe and Sobral to take pictures with different experimental setups. They produced, in total, 43 plates. Only 5 of the 16 Principe plates were usable, while one Sobral plate was unusable. From the usable plates, divergence values were calculated. The same group of people looked at 7 plates taken in Sobral by the telescope and came to a value that was significantly higher than Einstein's predicted value, and then looked at 18 astrographic plates and calculated almost exactly the Newtonian prediction. All you can unequivocally conclude here is that gravity bends light, but we knew that. Which brings me to my actual point: I also think their interpretations are defensible, especially in the light of later, better experiments that confirm GRT. They were absolutely right. But that doesn't mean that they didn't interpret, and it doesn't mean that you could not equally have looked at the astrographic plates, which had a higher resolution but were blurrier, and discard the telescopic images. Or you could have looked at the Principe images, which gave a third, equally unexpected value. Dyson &co made a conscious decision about which data to publish and which data to hold back, and that's how we arrived at the confirmation of GRT by experiment. That's how science works. This happens all the time. What I'm saying is not that this somehow disqualifies the Eddington expeditions, but that science tends to me messy. The fact that we're making progress anyway is great and should give us the confidence to admit that experiments very seldomly force us to accept or reject a theory, that we as human beings and scientists are always involved in that process, and that's okay! quote:That is true I guess, although in the best Kuhnian sense - science is an effectively progressive enterprises even if it is a social, historical phenomenon.
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botany posted:That is certainly not true at the time, where considerable skepticism was the general answer by the commissions who Dyson presented the results to. Go read that paper. They said, regardless of any possible bias Eddington might have had, Dyson and Eddington reached the same conclusions that the later re-review of the results of the 1919 Eclipse came to. Its not a fluke, and its generally accepted that enough evidence was gathered to support Einstein's claims. Sorry. Einstein's theories were still very much up in the air in the general science fields at the time, the proof Eddington and Dyson provided helped solidify backing of Einsteins claims. You don't get to argue that it was just Eddingtons bias playing out when re-review of the evidence says "No, they read it correctly and came to the correct conclusions". That's not chance.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 15:45 |
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CommieGIR posted:Ehhhhhhhhhh....kind of. Leaps of Faith in science still assume an evidentiary result at the end, or are often based on at least some minute level of evidence to begin with. Its not really the same as a 'leap of faith' i.e. a Religious level of faith. If you take a leap of faith in science and get no tangible results at the end and no evidence to support your leap, it was for naught. Sure, you should publish the negative result, but if you were taking the leap without using the scientific method to SUPPORT taking that leap in the first place, people are going to be very wary of your paper. Versus, a leap of faith in the religious sense can be just dismissed regardless of the outcome as 'God works in mysterious ways'. Science seeks a consensus because results that are not repeatable prove nothing. If you had enough time and materials, you could derive the entire canon of scientific knowledge by replicating the experimental data yourself. The only real problem with it is that it would take far longer than a human lifetime at this point to re-prove everything from foundational principals. Edit : autocorrect hates me this morning. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Mar 8, 2017 |
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Let me try to write something we can all agree on. 1. Eddington took measurements of a phenomenon which is, as far as we can say today, well explained by General Relativity, and better explained by it than by Newtonian mechanics. 2. At some stages in the analysis of the data, Eddington had to make a decision. The answer was not obviously, perfectly clear - not with mathematical certainty. He had to judge. 3. Eddington was a seemingly honest researcher, and did not intentionally falsify anything, and in the abovementioned judgement, he made a defensible call. As with any judgement, it was made by a human with his own convictions and motivations, which by necessity influence what we do. But this case does not look like fraud or lying. 4. It is possible other decisions would have been justifiable, and that had things been slightly different, he might have made another choice; these decisions could have led to more complicated, indecisive, perhaps even contradictory results. 5. That in this situation they did not is a matter of history - of specific instances of human action that may as well have happened otherwise, not of a universal law that scientists never err or whatever.
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CommieGIR posted:Go read that paper. They said, regardless of any possible bias Eddington might have had, Dyson and Eddington reached the same conclusions that the later re-review of the results of the 1919 Eclipse came to. Its not a fluke, and its generally accepted that enough evidence was gathered to support Einstein's claims. Sorry. That paper says "The 1919 measurements were not sufficient, by themselves, to overthrow Newton", which is the point I've been making. I've also explicitly said that they ended up being right and later reevaluations show that. But Eddison & Dyson didn't know about those later reevaluations. The data they had at hand was in need of interpretation, they did their best and discarded the right set of plates. That's great! It also demonstrates that this sort of interpretation and these kinds of judgment calls are part and parcel of science. edit: Cingulate posted:Let me try to write something we can all agree on. I agree with all of this.
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Cingulate posted:Let me try to write something we can all agree on. Fair enough, I can agree to this as well.
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Brainiac Five posted:So now that you've admitted you lie and plan to continue lying out of your sheer contempt for someone daring to disagree with you, is there any point in further discussion? I clearly cannot trust anything you write from this point onward to be honest. Holy poo poo you're insufferable. You never engage any actual arguments I'm making. Why am I a liar? Because I got a detail wrong on something? It seems to be growing more obvious your aren't arguing in good faith. How about you stop saying inflammatory personal poo poo and instead argue against what I said. We have "hints" there might have been life on Mars. We have potential ways for organic materials to be made from nature. This isn't some random poo poo that might exist based off of nothings. What the gently caress do black swans have to do with the existence of the supernatural? When have I sneered at you? Why do you think we can never prove state of mind? You seem terrified to engage even the basic level of my arguments. You take a single phrase and run wild with it, pretend that is the main substance of what you're arguing against, and sit back on a high horse. Do you have a single loving shred of evidence for an afterlife? Do you have any workable models for how a soul works? Do you even know what kind of evidence even could prove these things? For someone who sneers at others for daring to call out bullshit , you seem to have no grasp on what plausibility, probability, or evidence is.
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Cingulate posted:In the US. Well that depends on the place and history of it. Personally I come from a fairly religious-indifferent country - if someone is religious it's more of a curiosity. In that context being hostile to religion and expending a lot of energy on it doesn't really make sense especially since the church has very little social or political power. I can imagine countries where the church has political power and maybe a history of repression or being supportive of right-wing policies - in that context being hostile to it is sensible. I don't think you can make a general statement about "the left" across the West. CommieGIR posted:Pretty much, minus the /r/athiest types and the Dawkins/Hitchens types. Sure and minus far right evangelical sects and the Pat Robertsons Christians are not hostile to homosexuals. All groups have loud and obnoxious subsets with bad and wrong opinions.
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Bates posted:Sure and minus far right evangelical sects and the Pat Robertsons Christians are not hostile to homosexuals. All groups have loud and obnoxious subsets with bad and wrong opinions. Naturally, but I think most of the Left's angst with religion is with specific groups that back Religious Freedom legislation, and it does tend to also net non-Evangelical sects as well.
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RasperFat posted:Holy poo poo you're insufferable. You never engage any actual arguments I'm making. Why am I a liar? Because I got a detail wrong on something? You said that your error was caused by the need to talk down to me, motherfucker. Don't whine and whimper when someone hits back. My reason for believing positive proof of a state of mind beyond simplistic ones is unlikely to ever be possible is the ability of the brain to function with severe damage and the extent to which thinking appears to occur at a higher level of organization than simple nerve cell activation, which suggests a receding infinity of unfalsifiability more than a successful effort to prove the mind can be manipulated. The evidence against black swans existing was that none had been observed until they were discovered in Australia. The "proof" was a probabilistic claim, not an absolute statement that black pigmentation was impossible for swans to have. Which is immediately applicable to your confusion between making positive statements and pointing out unlikelihood is not disproof. For example, it is, to understate things, unlikely that consciousness continues after apparent death by the state of consciousness being replicated on other substrata by chance in such a way as to produce continuity of experience, but there is no strong evidence that this cannot happen either. To say that this is disproven would be a false statement, even though it is an unlikely statement.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 16:51 |
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We probably need to define what being hostile even means in this context. Few people would want religion banned even if they might think its rubbish we could do without. Most non religious people don't want religion anywhere near politics but don't mind letting people practice on their own time. Is that hostile?
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 16:59 |
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Avalerion posted:Few people would want religion banned even if they might think its rubbish we could do without. Most non religious people don't want religion anywhere near politics but don't mind letting people practice on their own time. Is that hostile? No, and that's all I think most leftists (like me) want: Just Church/State barriers and barriers against Religious Bigotry being legalized as Free Speech in regards to Buisinessses and Law. '
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 17:01 |
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Avalerion posted:We probably need to define what being hostile even means in this context. Few people would want religion banned even if they might think its rubbish we could do without. Most non religious people don't want religion anywhere near politics but don't mind letting people practice on their own time. Is that hostile? Depends on whether you would view "just keep your beliefs about abortion and homosexuality out of politics" to be hostile when it is applied by people with views you think are poo poo on those subjects. Political representation is an important part of any worldview that makes you give a poo poo about people other than yourself, and being told to keep yours to yourself is pretty hostile whoever does it.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 17:04 |
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CommieGIR posted:No, and that's all I think most leftists (like me) want: Just Church/State barriers and barriers against Religious Bigotry being legalized as Free Speech in regards to Buisinessses and Law. So while I can insist something should stay unencumbered by law, I can still hope for it to go away peacefully eventually, and if I do say that, that's more than just saying I want separation of state and church and free speech.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 17:19 |
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Cingulate posted:Well, but do we also hope for a generally more secular society? I think I do. This is not so much a matter of law - nobody here is gonna feel well proposing laws banning any religion, of course - but I think I hope that over time, the general trend of secularization in the West (excluding the US) continues. I'd be happy to see an atheist US president. We also cannot afford to burn bridges by attacking religious groups like Dawkins/Hitchens did. There are plenty of religious folk who long for a secular government. We need their support to.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 17:24 |
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the trump tutelage posted:Say what you want about Sam Harris, but he (among others) picks this apart pretty well. For Gould's argument to hold, "religion" would need to be qualitatively different than it is today. Pellisworth posted:
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 17:42 |
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Danger posted:Ironically enough, Harris’s definition of “science” necessarily includes things like astrology, phrenology, and even elements of religion for his tripe about morality to even be taken at face value CommieGIR posted:We also cannot afford to burn bridges by attacking religious groups like Dawkins/Hitchens did. There are plenty of religious folk who long for a secular government. We need their support to. I'm not really going anywhere with this.
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Danger posted:Ironically enough, Harris’s definition of “science” necessarily includes things like astrology, phrenology, and even elements of religion for his tripe about morality to even be taken at face value. quote:The boundaries between true intellectual disciplines are currently enforced by little more than university budgets and architecture. Is the Shroud of Turin a medieval forgery? This is a question of history, of course, and of archaeology, but the techniques of radiocarbon dating make it a question of chemistry and physics as well. The real distinction we should care about—the observation of which is the sine qua non of the scientific attitude—is between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 17:53 |
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CommieGIR posted:No, and that's all I think most leftists (like me) want: Just Church/State barriers and barriers against Religious Bigotry being legalized as Free Speech in regards to Buisinessses and Law. Don't kid yourself, this is hostile as gently caress. It may be justified, but it's hostile.
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# ? Mar 8, 2017 17:59 |