This is the only postmortem I've found anywhere that's been worth reading. Nothing I haven't said a thousand times before, but ad hominem thinkers might be more inclined to believe it if Scott Alexander says it:
It's not that the word is being used in a way to specifically convey minimal information, it's that the word describes a singular, specific characteristic of an individual.
I hardly think the words "specific" or "singular" are applicable to a situation where the information being conveyed is insufficient to distinguish between a rock, a person, the side of a right triangle, the color purple, the taste of umami, or the feeling of a spring breeze -- but there I go again, thinking words are more useful when they have clear and distinct meanings.
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That's actually the point. "Atheist" shouldn't convey much information.
I suppose, then, that what we disagree on is the fundamental ethics of discourse. I say that when you use words in such a way as to convey minimal information, you waste the time of the other parties.
All being an atheist says about me is that I don't hold one very very specific belief. Period. It says nothing about my values, my beliefs, my attitude, my sense of morality, NOTHING else.
Yes, you can use words in any way you like -- but the price for endorsing this broad-minded-sounding platitude is that sentences like "The square of the atheist is the sum of the squares of the two remaining atheists." start to become true. Don't be so openminded that your brain falls out of the hole.
A general good practice for laying semantic groundwork before a discussion is that words should be defined so as to make useful distinctions between classes of things.
If you choose to define "atheist" in such a way as to make babies and rocks into atheists, you are encompassing a class of objects so large that it's not useful. Because so many things meet the criteria, calling something "atheist" conveys a very low amount of information.
Laying faulty epistemic groundwork ruins useful conversations before they even begin. You don't need to look very far to find examples of the ensuing collapse of discourse that can result.
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So let us say, for example, that men have 100%/80%/80% representation in Presidency/Senate/Congress, and that unless some action is taken to improve the participation in/acceptance of women in government, this state of affairs will continue.
Are you suggesting that it's better to leave the current state of discrimination in place, than discriminate to improve it? It's not a choice between justice and injustice; it's a choice between one injustice and another.
Well, first of all, I see no reason to accept as reasonable the hypothetical notion that said state of affairs would continue unchanged without intervention. The trend line for representation of women in politics is already pointing upward.
But more importantly, we seem to have different ideas about justice. You've pinned your notion of justice to these numbers, as if justice were a pair of pink and blue lines on a graph. As long as the blue line is above the pink one, that's injustice, and only when they meet at a single point will justice be achieved.
To me, that's not justice, it's bean counting. I don't consider the NBA an unjust organization because its black representation line is above its white one.
By my lights, justice has to do with how society treats individual human beings, and no mistreatment of one human being can ever cancel out, rectify, or make right the mistreatment of another. Putting in place a policy of (Crashing00-)injustice toward men might make the lines on your chart look prettier to you, and that may make you feel like you've achieved (Grant-)justice. But by my lights it's simply increasing the amount of (Crashing00-)injustice in the world. You only decrease (Crashing00)-injustice by treating people in a just manner as individuals, not as micro-contributions to lines on a chart or a statistical average.
It comes back to the famous trolley problem from moral philosophy: would you push a fat man onto a train track to stop a moving train from killing five people further down the track? Most morally normal people answer "no." If you are one of those people, then you must also say "no" to throwing men under the bus in order to increase female representation, because it's effectively the same question.
Now, in fairness to you, if we look past the dubious studies, you have pointed out some examples of things that I would agree are injustices. For instance, if a female candidate is being actively discouraged from running solely on the basis of being female, that would be an injustice. But in what sense would you correct that injustice by doing the same thing to men?
You wouldn't, as far as I can see. The only way to correct injustice is to, well, correct the injustice. Stop actively discouraging female candidates from running.
The article you linked was an interesting read. However, I think you're asserting that the article I linked only investigated ethnically fractionalised countries, when that's not the case. They used a dataset of 188 countries; I've attached one of the salient figures.
No, that is not what I am asserting. I'm asserting that a person studying the efficacy of female leadership has no proper motive for conditionalizing on "ethnic fractionalization." They chose the variable "ethnic fractionalization" (rather than, say, "preference for chocolate ice cream") as a tertiary variable because they looked at a wide variety of possible ways of crunching the data and found that particular approach yielded the result they wanted. In fact, if you read the Ioannidis paper, he points out that there is software that does exactly this. Punch in the conclusion you want and it spits out a supporting data set.
Look, it's like the wage gap thing. One side thinks it's discrimination, the other doesn't. The pro-discrimination side has all these studies. They control for education, experience, background, et cetera. They still show a gap even after all that. All these studies are statistically significant and methodologically sound, as they go.
The anti-discrimination side has their own studies. They say that when you control for hours actually at desk, career choice, leave taken, et cetera, the gap narrows to nothing -- and indeed reverses for women in their prime who have no family are totally career-focused. All these studies are statistically significant and methodologically sound.
What Ioannidis is telling us is that none of these studies has even the slightest chance of telling us the metaphysical truth about what's going on, because there are so many possible explanations for the phenomenon and so much room for Procrustean manipulation by social scientists with an agenda one way or another that the probability that any one of these results is true is essentially nil.
Additionally, "For the most ethnically diverse nations —those with high EF ethnic fractionalisation — having a woman in the top national leadership position was correlated with a 6.9 percent greater increase in GDP growth in comparison to nations with a male leader." (http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/node/1633) So it might actually be a good idea.
These kinds of research results -- in all fields that rely on Pearson-Fisher statistical methods, but particularly in social social sciences -- are almost always wrong.
In particular, this study runs afoul of (at least) Ioannidis' corollaries 3 and 4.
Corollary 3 says that the more possible contributing causes an effect has, the less likely it is that a study that asserts the primacy only one of those causes is correct, even if that study has statistical significance. Colloquially speaking, think of all the different factors that could impact a nation's GDP growth, then imagine seriously making the claim that of all of those factors, the genitalia of the leader was the deciding one, then imagine publishing a paper saying that, then imagine people taking you seriously. That's a remarkable chain of coincidences, and their joint unlikelihood lowers what Ioannidis calls the R-value, and hence also the probability of the study producing a true result.
Corollary 4 says that the more wiggle room an examiner has in methodology, the more he can use that wiggle room to get the answer he wants, and in no science is there more wiggle room than in social science. You can see an example of creative use of wiggle room in the design of this experiment. If you wanted to measure the efficacy of female world leaders, why not do the obvious thing and look at every female world leader? Why focus on a subset generated by this made-up buzzword "ethnic fractionalization"? Well, I'll spoil it for you: First they did look at every country. They didn't get the answer they wanted, so they restricted themselves to a preferred subset instead.
I think the question raised earlier is interesting, though. If there's a macro-discrepancy between two groups (such as the political one we've been discussing), is it okay to correct that with micro-discrimination, giving (in this case) equally-qualified women more opportunity than men? That's discrimination, but is it more discriminatory than leaving the macro-discrimination in place?
How many wrongs make a right? You can't ever correct an injustice by introducing further injustice.
Every single woman in videogames maybe. Either there's something wrong with this world or (judging by the reaction in the media to people getting death threats) your argument is incorrect.
I haven't been following the gamergate thing that closely, but I glanced at the piece you linked here and if this is the sort of thing the pro-gamergate people are miffed about, then they have a point. Isn't this exactly the kind of hackneyed and biased journalism that underwrites a legitimate gripe about journalistic standards?
Headline: Gamers are outraged that a spiritual successor to Megaman has hired a woman on the team.
Evidence: Four cherry-picked quotes dredged up from the bowels of Reddit.
Reality: Even though the author was permitted to cherry pick outliers and anecdotal evidence as he saw fit, the article still doesn't comport with the headline. None of the four people quoted in the article is upset because Abou Karam is a woman. What they are actually concerned about is the game they backed becoming a vehicle for feminist agitprop. And that is a perfectly legitimate concern for a backer to have. People don't have to back art they don't like. Granted, it's foolish to believe that a single community manager has that kind of influence over a game's content. That's stupid, but it's not misogynistic.
Your usage of the article: As supporting evidence for the quantity of death threats received by women. Death threats aren't even mentioned in the article.
This is why I like the stance taken by The Escapist -- they created a policy designed to separate facts from allegations, opinions, and innuendo, and to give the other side a chance to state their position fairly rather than having some straw-man version of it stapled to them by some hack looking for a headline -- and if that's the only change that results from "gamergate," then the dustup was already worth something, regardless of whether or not it started as some kind of 4chan "black op" or whatever.
We do, but they're more time-consuming and less reliable, and the staff of a private business is under no obligation to go through that trouble.
It's not their obligation to educate the misinformed, but it is their (moral) obligation not to create prior restraints on speech through their policies.
This is a very, ah, optimistic prediction. First, you're assuming that the sexist will lose these games, but there's nothing to indicate that he's actually a bad player.
I wouldn't call it a prediction so much as a potential response that doesn't outrage the concept of free expression. If he's good enough to beat all his female challengers, then he is a data point in favor of his own hypothesis, and then I guess it's time to teach him not to reason from one data point.
Second, you're assuming he will react reasonably to his defeats, rather than following the more common course when an idiot's opinion is challenged of retreat into confirmation biases and increasing frustration. Hell, we already know he's got a control problem, because this whole hypothetical scenario was precipitated by a sexist outburst at his first defeat. Once he's been called out and his honor is on the line, do you really think further defeats will improve his temper?
I wouldn't be posting on a debate forum if I didn't believe that initially unreasonable and sometimes outright hostile people couldn't ever be persuaded to change their positions on substantive issues. I'm not attaching a predicted success rate to my proposal here. I'm only saying that even if the success rate is fantastically low, it's better than the widespread enaction of illiberal policies.
Even if everything you say here is true, the fiduciary duty wins the conflict, because it's backed up by the LGS staff's own rights to free association and disassociation, control of access to their property, and privacy.
Come now, I am sure you understand that the possession of a right does not constitute an endorsement of every possible application. Though the store does possess all these rights, it is as immoral for the store to use them in furtherance of a prior restraint on speech as it is for me to use my right to free speech to insult someone's mother. My condemnation of this particular mode of application of the right doesn't contravene the right itself.
Beyond that, they also have a moral duty towards their non-jerk customers not to let them be harassed by jerks. They attracted players to their store with the understanding that it would be a fun and friendly environment, and they have an obligation to deliver that environment. You could even call it an old-school bond of hospitality: they're responsible for the good conduct of guests under their roof towards other guests.
Maybe, but we're weighing competing moral duties here, and even if your argument establishes the existence of this one, it doesn't show it to be more important than the moral duty to refrain from prior restraint.
First problem: you're expecting humans to be ideal rational beings, when moral decision-making in the real world has to take the human race as-is. The history books are filled with ideologies that demand a better sort of humanity and blame real people when they don't live up to the ideal. They never end well. I'm not saying that reason is evil and emotion must reign supreme, or anything stupid like that; I'm saying that you have to be realistic. And realistically, do you really think you can use a moral argument to talk a person into having fun?
...What?
We (and by we I mean virtually everyone everywhere) routinely demand that human beings exhibit more rationality and emotional restraint than I am asking for here. We expect a jilted wife not to murder her husband, do we not? Is that unrealistic?
I'm asking for a good deal less than that: all I want is for a person who is offended by a speech act not to be swept away by his or her emotions and agitate for the enaction of illiberal policies that are known from prior argument to be more harmful than helpful, even in the most extreme of cases.
I am not saying "I order you not to be offended in the name of rationality." I'm saying "Be as offended as you want, but at some point you should think about turning your reasoning process back on. Preferably before you start enacting policy."
Which brings us to the second problem: You're conflating a person's not having fun with a failure to be persuaded by moral arguments for free speech. But a commitment to free speech has never meant we have to like what is said. If we don't like what is said, we probably won't have fun. If we don't have fun, we probably will opt not to repeat the experience in the future. There's no rejection of free speech going on here. Players can be diehard libertarians and still have an unpleasant evening because of a jerk.
Yes, but the diehard libertarian will, if he lives up to his description, realize that the unpleasant evening caused by that jerk, and indeed all the unpleasant evenings that he has ever had or will have because of jerks, are a part of the price of living in a free society, and actually preferable to the alternatives, which are various forms of unfree societies. In other words, he realizes that, as you eloquently put it: "The history books are filled with ideologies that demand a better sort of humanity and blame real people when they don't live up to the ideal. They never end well."
The FLGS staff are free people who are freely disassociating with them.
Again, the existence of a right doesn't constitute the endorsement of every instance of the described behavior. The store is free to dissociate, but if it does so to enforce a prior restraint, it's morally wrong.
I've got no qualms stating in advance that I don't want to play, socialize, or have anything to do with misogynists. There's nothing in any of those sound arguments for free speech that says it's my moral duty to do so.
I must be miscommunicating, because I don't claim that it is your moral duty to like misogynists, or to play with them if you don't want to. My claim is that to eject them from the store by force is immoral prior restraint. As for you not wanting to play with them, that's not restraint, and entirely your prerogative. You're not entitled to have them ejected from the store just because you'd rather not play with them, though.
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It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying.
Like you and your rubber tennis balls, I am not saying the conclusion is silly because all puppies have mothers. I am saying it is silly because changing the genesis of the object -puppies or otherwise- normally changes the classification of an object. If something is created differently, it normally IS different. This general truth was what I was trying to illustrate with my specific example.
But that's just not the case. "All cars on this lot were made in Detroit, therefore all cars are made in Detroit." The heuristic "properties related to the 'genesis' of an object are more inductible" doesn't seem to be a very good heuristic. It's trivial to think of properties related to the creation or genesis of objects that don't hold across an entire class of specimens.
However, -even more general- it would be better if we looked at properties that are normally shared by a collection of objects to draw our conclusions. This way, material makeup -like rubber and DNA- falls into the same category of properties as "has a mother."
What properties are normally shared by a collection of objects? If you are just proposing a list, then your list is vulnerable to attack. For instance, if "properties relating to genesis" is on your list, then I can easily throw out any number of counterexamples showing that such properties aren't shared by large collections of objects.
If you are proposing some metamethod for finding these collections of properties, then you had better make sure, as Hume pointed out, that your method does not rely on induction from similar properties -- otherwise it would be circular.
I object to this for the same reason you would object to me changing your example from "made of rubber" to "made of this exact number of rubber molecules in this exact configuration."
You should object to it. That's kind of the point. Hume showed that the kind of naive induction we're discussing here is incoherent. These are the reasons why. There's no basis for agreement to be had here.
That you're negating the universe you're assuming you're in?
You'd have the problem even if you changed P to "we live in a teleological universe where the Higgs Boson causes gravity."
No, no, no. I thought this would be immediately obvious, but I guess not.
The question before me is whether or not to regard your series of observations of physics simulations (E) as evidence for the hypothesis that the universe is similarly simulated and teleological (P). As a Bayesian, I regard something as evidence only if it is more likely under the hypothesis than its negation.
Well, in this case, I can actually figure out the numbers and see that your observations do not constitute evidence. It turns out we can unconditionally calculate P(E). Regardless of any fact about the universe, every physics simulation is going to be simulated and teleological, because that's just what a physics simulation is. So P(E) = 1.
Thus P(E|P) = P(E|~P) = 1. In other words, you would have seen the same data E regardless of whether or not your hypothesis P was true. And therefore, E is not evidence for P, from a Bayesian perspective.
Because I find a lack of a counterexample more important than the difference between there being 100 or 10,000 examples. If you'd like me to make a rough estimate of the number of numerical simulations which have the same fundamental laws as our universe, I probably could, but I don't feel such an exercise would strengthen my argument. I am currently trying to make an purely inductive argument.
Actually, it's funny that you feel that way about the absence of counterexamples, because I've given you counterexamples to some of your induction heuristics and it seems to roll off your back like water.
That being said, I can see that you feel strongly about that method, even though you don't apply it consistently -- but you should be a great deal more suspicious of conclusions springing from naive induction than you currently are. It's a method with some very well-known problems. Not, mind you, that there is any entirely uncontroversial way of doing inductive reasoning, but out of a series of more or less unpalatable options you've chosen the actual worst one.
Are you saying that it is irrational to believe in God if we cannot say why it is necessary that he exists? I am not sure exactly what you are arguing, forgive me.
I'm not impugning anyone's rationality; if anything, I'm saying Dawkins is a good deal more rational than you give him credit for. The declaration that God is necessary is not an explanation for God even if it's actually true, so when Dawkins says that postulating God increases rather than decreases the explanatory burden of the theist, pointing out God's necessity is not actually an answer to his objection.
(Since we're on the subject of necessary beings, here's a thought exercise: define a eunicorn to be a unicorn that necessarily exists. Do eunicorns exist? If so, then unicorns exist a fortiori.)
God may have an explanation for why he exists (such as out of necessity, or a necessity in his own nature) but not be caused.
You may also want to put some thought into just what constitutes an explanation. If you were in a math class, confronted with a theorem you didn't quite understand, and you asked the professor to explain -- would you be satisfied if he answered "because it's necessary?" It's a perfectly true answer; mathematical truths are necessary. But I don't expect such an answer would satisfy your desire for explanation, nor should it. When you ask for an explanation, you're asking why it's necessary.
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A lot of this is why it's disconcerting when confronted with a 'sausage fest', because even if 99% of the guys are cool, that last 1% will still generally ruin the experience. That's why it's important for some women to see that there are other people there who share their experiences and know what it's like. If it's just one woman in a group of guys, unless all the guys are extremely chill, someone is guaranteed to make it weird.
Assuming this anecdote can be reasoned from, it's just the sort of thing that makes me believe that part of what is perceived as a sexism problem can genuinely be attributed to a cluster of beliefs that women in gaming, or other minority late entrants to a pre-existing culture with established norms, are entitled to a special standard of treatment that is beyond the pale.
The "99% isn't good enough" standard you offer here is far beyond any standard that has ever applied to mere mortal men. For my part, I was always told to expect that in all facets of life I would run into a few jerks, weirdos, and creeps from time to time. I have never been, and would never expect to be, a member of a culture or other group of sufficient size in which everyone treated me in the exact way I expected to be treated. If you had asked me, say, 10 years ago, before the bizarre ascendancy of leftist ideology, I would say that anyone who had such an expectation was crazy and certainly not entitled to have their expectations fulfilled.
The experience can vary, but basically just ask a woman who is immersed in the gamer culture what it's like. Whether it's guy friends who are only really there because they want to date them, or online games where everyone is trying to hit on you or get pictures of your boobs when they find out you're a woman, or skeevy guys at conventions who think women who cosplay want to be touched, it's still there and it's far more common than it should be. When women have these experiences, they tend to stay away from situations where this crap can happen, which in turn leads to fewer women in the community.
Well, let's get one thing out of the way at the outset: non-consensually touching someone is criminal assault, a genuine problem, and should be dealt with as such.
The rest of it seems like further reification of unreasonable expectations. "I'm a woman; when I enter the room I expect everyone to behave; I don't want to be hit on by any guys who don't already know how to hit on women well; I don't want anyone to be interested in me unless it's strictly non-romantic; I don't acknowledge the basic rights of other free human beings to dissociate with me if I don't reciprocate their interest;..."
This is an unending string of unrealistic and ridiculous expectations which not only identifies no moral wrong committed by the offending party but in fact condemns them for acting out the perfectly natural human mating dance, albeit in the awkward and inexperienced way that is common to the nerdy types.
So IS there an issue? Absolutely. Is there something we can do about? Yes and no. We can't outright fix it, but we can call out guys who perpetuate stereotypes or who make gaming experiences uncomfortable for women. They're not villains, but they do need to be told to back off, hanging around the one girl who showed up the LGS the whole time isn't cool.
If they're not villains, what are you calling them out for? Why do they need to back off? (Except, again, in cases of legal harassment or assault.)
I don't mean to say that its straight up sexism (it isn't), but it's part of the culture that makes women shy away from male dominated events and there is certainly a small amount of objectification there. But when you think about it from the perspective of the woman, who suddenly finds that all her supposed friends disappear when she gets a boyfriend that isn't one of them. All of my female friends (including my wife) have had this experience with nerdy guys. They don't want to go to a game night at a LGS because inevitable some of the guys won't want to just be friends, or at the very least respect boundaries.
Are you identifying this as a cultural problem, or just making an observation? If the former, this seems to me like a creepy gender reversal of the male entitlement complex you complain about.
A male gamer could totally understand the concept that he's not entitled to any reciprocation from a female romantic interest, decide to totally leave her alone when it becomes clear that she's unavailable to him, and still be part of your problem. In other words, now it's the female gamer who's entitled to Platonic camaraderie and the male who's the thought-criminal for not providing it. Nuts to that, says I. Everyone has the right to extricate themselves from a relationship of a kind they don't want.
If someone says, "I can't believe I lost to a girl", and does not have the same poor-sport reaction when he loses to a guy, then there is a sexism issue there.
No chance that a statistical belief is being expressed here? If there were, say, an exhibition match between the Sky and the Bulls, and the Sky won, is "I can't believe the Sky won" sexist, a true observation of a reified statistical anomaly, or both? Speaking for myself, not only would I defend anyone's right to say that without being made to feel like some kind of jerk, I'd probably say the same thing myself.
Someone may respond by pointing out that this case is different because there's no reason to suppose Magic has a gender-performance bias anything like as severe as basketball does. I would agree that's very likely the case, but then we're dealing with a wrong statistical opinion.
Don't we have ways of dealing with wrong opinion that don't involve ostracism, censorship, or top-down imposition of authority-endorsed beliefs? In this case I suggest that, rather than empowering a censor to toss the speaker of this belief out of the store or event, any female gamers present who wish to challenge the speaker's beliefs be instead invited to do so by playing the actual game. It won't take many defeats to either organically correct the speaker's opinion or embarrass them to the point where they are disinclined to stop broadcasting it.
A FLGS is not a government body. Its duty is not to provide a forum where everybody can express their opinion freely, or to engineer a grand vision of a thicker-skinned society. Its duty is to provide an environment where as many people as possible will come to have fun and spend money in doing so.
At the moment, only the government is required by law to protect free expression, but the basic moral arguments concerning free speech are not conditional on the would-be censor being empowered by a government. Would-be censors are incoherent however they become empowered, so everyone has a moral duty to preserve free speech. I agree that the LGS has an additional fiduciary duty to create a fun environment, and this is just one of those many occasions where the moral and fiduciary duties can conflict with each other.
Hell, maybe you're right that women would be better off if they just let sexist comments slide off their back. It doesn't matter. What matters is that they don't. And because they don't, events where they receive sexist comments are not fun for them. And because they're not fun, they are not going to want to come back. Getting up on a soapbox about jerks' freedom of expression is unlikely to change their minds.
I must be reading this wrong, because it sounds like an assertion that women are unlikely to be persuaded by moral arguments. I know you don't actually believe that, and I think I see what you're getting at -- someone who's not having fun is not necessarily thinking about whatever abstract rights his co-gamers may have, and instead is concentrating on extricating himself from the unfun situation.
So be it, that's how people act most of the time, but that's a cognitive bias, not a piece of moral reasoning. The question "how should we deal with jerkish behavior?" is moral and can't necessarily be decided by bootstrapping an immediate gut feeling. Given the soundness of the moral arguments for free speech, failure to be persuaded by them is ultimately a mistake on the part of the listener.
But do you know what might change their minds? Treating jerks the way jerks deserve to be treated.
For my part, I wonder how jerks actually do deserve to be treated, and I don't see a reason to accept the answer being offered here. I believe the balance of the moral arguments indicate that jerks (whose jerkiness is confined to thoughtcrime as opposed to actual crime, mind you) deserve to receive the organic consequences of their speech and nothing more -- in other words, if their expressions cause other free people to freely dissociate with them, they've suffered enough. The top-down imposition of ostracism for particular belief is an immoral instance of prior restraint.
Fiduciarily, maybe you're right, toss them all out and watch profits soar. But I don't agree that the fiduciary duty trumps the moral duty here.
And anyway, saying "I can't believe I just lost to a girl" is not "getting a little peevish". It's an expression of really ugly sentiment. As far as I am concerned, one warning, then the boot after a second incident, is more than fair.
And this, incidentally, is why I call it prior restraint. You seem to be lodging an objection, in advance, to any expression of the opinion itself irrespective of the particular phrasing.
I probably would have gotten into Magic a lot sooner if it wasn't such an unwelcoming atmosphere. In fact, I find myself not wanting to bother with a lot of "nerd things" I otherwise enjoy (tabletop gaming, LARP, video game tournaments, etc.) that require a social component. I don't think the Magic community is any worse than other "nerd things" but there are definitely problems there.
I'm not particularly sensitive about gender discrimination issues, either. I just don't like having the extra attention focused on me when I'm anywhere--and in "nerd places" where I'm the only female the attention I get is usually either extremely negative to the point of being hostile or extremely positive to the point of being creepy. It may just be the area I'm in or the events I've been to, but I'm really not a fan of subjecting myself to that type of stress repeatedly.
What it comes down to is that I don't necessarily want to spend my free time doing something that isn't fun for me. Feeling like I need to be carrying mace to deal with some of the people that I would be interacting with kind of wipes out all of the fun.
Since you are someone who has experienced this sort of thing, let me ask your opinion, then. You mentioned feeling the need to carry a weapon on your person (which I encourage, by the way); this implies that the fear of physical assault at gaming events is a considerable part of what causes your anxiety. That is something I find to be genuinely alarming.
Suppose for the moment that it was the case that there was a perfect authority that would guarantee that anything that happened stopped short of physical assault. (I know such a thing can't really be guaranteed, and that fact, if anything, is what I see as the real problem)
Right, and normally not an defining one. I am me no matter where I am; this is true of most things.
It sounds to me like we're talking about essentially the same thing, except you're using "defining" where I'm using "endogenous." I'd argue that the usage of "defining" here is suspect, but it doesn't matter much as long as we're really on the same page.
And you aren't using prior knowledge? It seems to me you are.
In a generic sense, yes; I couldn't very well say anything at all without using any of my prior knowledge. However, I'm trying to avoid using prior knowledge about the specific exemplar -- in this case, puppies. Your claim is based on the notion that we'd seem rather foolish if we found ourselves in the position of failing to affirm that puppies have mothers, because they clearly do. Well, maybe so -- but that intuition is based solely on the importation of biological knowledge which has nothing to do with the study of induction itself, so let's table it and pick an example where we get at the real problem -- an alien environment where we can't rely on our intuitions.
If we want to dig underneath our preconceptions and determine what kinds of things constitute valid inductive conclusions, we have to isolate inductive reasoning itself from prior knowledge about the species of object being inducted over.
How do you know you should normally side with exogenous properties if not based on prior experiences with properties? Unless I'm missing something, it seems the whole premise of your argument is based on the idea that exogenous properties are more important because your prior experience tells you they are.
It seems to me this isn't really "exogenous vs endogenous," it's "based on past experiences, one kind of propriety isn't normally a defining one."
You're definitely missing something, because if I used induction to justify induction, I would be committing the fallacy of circularity identified by Hume. Rather than an inductive justification, I would recommend a modal approach: amongst the collection of all logically possible worlds, there are more worlds in which a class of objects has members that differ exogenously than endogenously.
For instance, it is easy to imagine a wide variety alternate possible worlds where a particular object changes location its containment orientation with other objects. It's even easy, though perhaps slightly less so, to imagine a possible world full of motherless puppies: consider a universe where all organic creatures, including puppies, are grown in vats from templates computed by an evolutionary algorithm.
It's harder to imagine alternate worlds where classes of objects differ endogenously; for instance, it's difficult to imagine a world where not all puppies have DNA; it's not clear that such a thing is still a puppy at all. This, I think, is what you're getting at with "defining properties" and if so, then you and I are talking about the same thing.
Anyway, if we're on the same page, then we should reach the same conclusion, which is that we should regard worlds where exogenous properties are unshared by a collection of objects as more likely than those where endogenous properties are.
And -if we do just delineate properties that way- it becomes clear properties related to the genesis of a thing are normally the ones that changing causes a reclassification.
Really? I don't see how that's clear at all. For instance, if you witness a litter of puppies being born to a specific mother, let's call her May, then "born of May" is a property related to the genesis of those puppies. Can you induct it?
No, I do not. I only know the cardinality of observed universes. However, science is mostly based on the cardinality of the observed.
Induction tells us that for each white swan we find -in absence of a black swan- the inference "all swans we have seen are white, and therefore all swans are white" becomes stronger. Likewise, induction would tell us that with each universe with a creator we find, the inference "all universes we have observed the beginning of have a creator, and therefore this universe has a creator" becomes stronger. This is why I was stressing the lack of a counterexample more than I am cardinality. The existence of a single counterexample would destroy this hypothesis, as it does for ECP's inference "all gods we have seen have been falsified, and therefore this god is false." If we know of one unfalsified god, that inference does not follow. Likewise, if we observed one uncreated universe, the other inference would no longer follow.
Bayesian inductive reasoning imposes significant requirements beyond merely a lack of observed counterexamples. I'm not going to go into all of them here (especially since you say your argument is not Bayesian; I'll wait for you to provide a Bayesian argument) but consider this:
Let P be the proposition "we live in a simulated teleological universe." Let E be the series of observations "all observed subuniverses of our universe have been simulated and teleological."
What is P(E|P)? What is P(E|~P)? Do you see a problem with those numbers?
I could make a Bayesian argument about the number of observed simulated universe vs observed natural ones -as you suggest- but I haven't found it necessarily to do so.
Why wouldn't it be necessary for you to do so? Arguments that rely on pre-Humean circular notions of induction were all rendered unsound by Hume. Granted, there is no wholly uncontroversial model for inductive reasoning, but Bayesianism is at least more widely accepted than naive induction.
I disagree - when Abraham takes Isaac up on the mountain, binds him, and raises the knife, he believes he is taking part in an actual sacrifice. Instead, as it turns out, he is taking part in a sham sacrifice, in which Isaac will not be killed, because the angel will stop him. The fact that the angel will stop him is but one of any number of possible key pieces of knowledge that Abraham may be missing. Abraham might be wrong about the medical implications of chest wounds. Abraham might be wrong about what it means to die and the moral implications of death. Abraham might be wrong about the nature of Isaac and what moral standing Isaac holds.
What? This is absurd. There's a moral question here: "Should I kill my child if ordered to do so?"
You've introduced all kinds of non-moral questions: "Are knife wounds uniformly fatal?" "Are angelic interventions likely to efficaceously prevent death?" "Does my 'child' have a 'special nature' making him not a child in the sense of the ordinary word child that everyone uses to mean child because it means child?"
I have no interest in the non-moral questions. I regard them as outside the scope of the topic. In fact, if we can't agree on straightforward and coherent meanings for the word "child" and "sacrifice" that don't shift from moment to moment, then the whole argument becomes incoherent. So, henceforth the question I am addressing is the moral one: "Should I kill my child if ordered to do so?" The implications of this, which I regard as wholly irrefutable given the premise, are that the child is actually a child, and the thing being asked of me is his actual life.
Whether he actually ends up dead at my hands is irrelevant; what's relevant at the point of moral decision is that I'm being asked to take his life. If for whatever reason I fail to do so, that's either a personal failure on my part to obey the command, or a change in the nature of the command, or a change in the nature of the universe itself, all of which utterly destroy the hypothesis and make the question either different or incoherent.
Whether he is resurrected or granted an afterlife is irrelevant; in order to be resurrected or attain the afterlife, one must actually die. That's why we use the terms resurrection and afterlife, respectively.
As you say, it's impossible for God to advocate for immoral action. The sentence you have presented as premise 2 is simply not possible. It's not particularly impressive to find a contradictory conclusion from an impossible premise.
Small matter to me whether you find anything impressive or otherwise; what's important is that you're just agreeing with what I originally said. If there are some phrases God can't utter, then it's clearly not permissible to grant a priori reasonability to arbitrary statements of the form "God said X." After all, the risk attendant with taking a statement "God said X" as a hypothesis when X is one of the statements God can't utter is the total collapse of logic.
That risk is too great to be borne, even in the slightest, so all such statements given without an accompanying proof that X is one of the things God can say, our default attitude must be maximally skeptical. In other words, Highroller's position of skepticism about the command is precisely the reasonable one.
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I'll be honest- This went over my head. Too many terms and concepts that I'm unfamiliar with.
But based on the brief stuff I've read on Tarski's undefiability theorem online, seems to be the main point you're making. So could you elaborate on that? Specifically, what is the "meta-level" for the English language and how is it readily obvious?
Well, if that went over your head, then I don't know how much help I will be. I lack the gift of simplification; in fact, if anything, I suffer from the curse of complexification. But I'll take a stab anyhow.
The separation of meta- and object-level in plain English is not readily obvious; that's part of the point. Most human language allows us to freely mix the object- and meta-levels, and that is part of its great power. Some linguists suggest that it is precisely this "free and easy" recursion that is at the core of our at least ostensibly higher degree of consciousness compared with other animals. It takes extraordinarily close reading to properly separate ordinary human speech into object and meta-levels. But perhaps I can illustrate by working an example. Consider the classical syllogism:
1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
Therefore 3. Socrates is mortal.
Here, the meta-level is us, on this forum, reading sentences in a simple subset of English and observing the relationship between their truth values. Call this "MTGSalvation-world." The object-level is the simple subset of English these sentences come from, together with a possible world (a "model" in logical parlance) in which there's an object named Socrates and a collection of properties that he has, one of which is "man," and a property called "mortal" which all "man"-things have. Call this "Socrates-world."
When you and I sit down and say "it's true that all (Socrates-world-)men are (Socrates-world-)mortal," that's a statement of MTGSalvation-world about Socrates-world. In fact every statement we make about the truth or falsity of the statements in an ordinary debate about Socrates-world is a statement of MTGSalvation-world. As long as we keep the discussion about truth-in-Socrates-world confined to MTGSalvation-world, there is scant risk of us running into incompleteness paradoxes (of Socrates-world, at least). The paradoxes arise precisely when we let statements in Socrates-world talk about truth in Socrates-world. (Note: Socrates-world could be made so simplistic as to be wholly unable to formulate such paradoxes, but in general, you don't want to dumb down your logic that much.) This is the essence of the implications of Tarski's theorem in epistemology as they are usually reckoned: we must maintain a firewall between meta- and object-level and talk about object-level truth only at the meta-level.
Tying this back into the present discussion about morality: The object-level here is "the framework of moral reasoning used by our hypothetical Abraham in deciding whether or not it's moral to kill his kid," call this Abraham-world. The meta-level is again MTGSalvation-world. Tiax, writing in MTGSalvation-world about Abraham-world suggests that Abraham (who does his reasoning entirely within Abraham-world) reason according to the following premise in Abraham-world about Abraham-world: "Everything that God says (in Abraham-world) is true (in Abraham-world)."
This premise makes Abraham-world talk about truth in Abraham-world and thereby violates Tarski's theorem, which in this case tells us that the stated premise is undefinable in Abraham-world and therefore Abraham cannot reason from it without inviting paradox. The upshot of all this, in the simplest terms I can offer, is to vindicate Highroller's intuition that there is a minefield of contradiction awaiting anyone who attempts to reason from bare assertions without proof, even (in fact, especially) when those assertions supposedly come from God.
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Not to jump in here... but has someone -like- actually done this? Is there some book I could read that would show "child sacrifice is immoral" is as grounded in logic as "2+2=4?"
Because if there is, I would very much like to read it. I've been looking for such a book for a while now...
Judging by our previous moral arguments, I'd say there's no book that will convince you of this in a way that you will accept. Unless you are willing to accept that morality by definition has more to do with the flourishing of conscious beings than, say, wiping out the whole universe and everything in it, you will not accept any Kantianesque moral arguments.
But if you're looking for references, let's start at the beginning: have you read Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals?
Your example -too me- seems to be true because it is easier to move something away for its currently location and not change its properties than it is to remove something from its current properties and not change its properties. I can move something and still have it be what it is (as would be true if I took a tennis ball out of the basket), but if I start removing components of that object (as would be true if I removed the rubber from the tennis ball) it would change the properties of the object. Since something is normally defined by its properties and not by its local, your example is true.
The location of an object is one of its properties -- an exogenous one.
But, what if we took an example of some black laboratory puppies. The endogenous property for this example would be "have black fur." The exogenous property for this example would be "have a mother." Now, would you say "All puppies have black fur" is more of a reasonable inductive conclusion than "All puppies have mothers" ?
It seems to me that "all puppies have mothers" in this case would be the more reasonable inductive conclusion, despite "having a mother" being an exogenous property.
That's only because you're importing your knowledge about puppies. Suppose you are in a wholly alien environment and you observe some small objects of uniform color emerging from a larger object of similar shape and color. Which property do you view as more strongly projectible given this data, "color" or "emergence from a similar, larger object?"
I say color, because emergence from a larger object is exogenous. Both conclusions could, of course, be wrong, since they are inductive rather than deductive -- but the one about the exogenous property is the more easily falsifiable. In fact, you've just argued as much yourself, since emergence from a larger object is just a way of changing location, which you've agreed is a less projectible property.
Additionally, which exogenous property do you find more applicable to this discussion? Being in a basket or having a mother?
Neither. The only exogenous property relevant to this discussion is the following property of universes X: "there exists a conscious being in a meta-universe that assigns teleology to X." Analogies about mothers are going to cause us to import our biological intuitions into the conversation, which will surely lead us astray since there is no reason to suppose that meta-universes obey our biological intuitions about mothers.
The number(cardinality) is close to irrelevant -I would agree- the fact there is no observed counterexample is more potent. I would assume no observed counterexample is one of the reasons you would insist only consciousness can assign meaning, for example. As in, if we had an observed counterexample of something other than a consciousness assigning meaning you would not insist it. While I understand an unobserved counterexample -certainly- isn't your only reason, it does play a part.
What? You've lost me completely. The cardinality I'm talking about is that of the set of all universes.
You're claiming something like P(this universe is simulated and teleological) > 50%, so you have to compute that probability. You have observed a sample subset of universes -- your physical simulations -- which have this property. Your sample has some finite size -- it's the total number of physical simulations ever done. You wish to induct this sample up to the whole space. Under Bayesian inductive logic, even assuming a uniform prior (which is absurd), in order to compute the impact that this evidence has on your posterior you need to know the cardinality of the set of all universes. If there are (say) Penrose's number of universes and you've only observed a few hundred thousand of them, then your observation has negligible weight in a Bayesian sense and should not move a rational thinker very far towards the deistic conclusion -- certainly not 50% of the way there.
So, do you know the cardinality of the set of all universes?
However, I think you might misunderstand my claims. I was thinking about claiming this observed property of beginning universes shows us it is reasonable to make assumptions about this one; but, I backed away from that claim. It would be superficially akin to making the same kind of mistake Elvish Crack Piper makes in his post about falsified gods, as well as being a fundamental goalpost shift from the position I started from on this thread.
Well, it's entirely possible that I lost track of the actual argument amidst all the irrelevant bull about defining intelligence. However, it seems that if you drop this claim, you are left with nothing. What exactly is your support for the deistic hypothesis if not induction up from your observation of physics simulations, which you regard as teleological universes?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I hardly think the words "specific" or "singular" are applicable to a situation where the information being conveyed is insufficient to distinguish between a rock, a person, the side of a right triangle, the color purple, the taste of umami, or the feeling of a spring breeze -- but there I go again, thinking words are more useful when they have clear and distinct meanings.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I suppose, then, that what we disagree on is the fundamental ethics of discourse. I say that when you use words in such a way as to convey minimal information, you waste the time of the other parties.
Yes, you can use words in any way you like -- but the price for endorsing this broad-minded-sounding platitude is that sentences like "The square of the atheist is the sum of the squares of the two remaining atheists." start to become true. Don't be so openminded that your brain falls out of the hole.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
If you choose to define "atheist" in such a way as to make babies and rocks into atheists, you are encompassing a class of objects so large that it's not useful. Because so many things meet the criteria, calling something "atheist" conveys a very low amount of information.
Laying faulty epistemic groundwork ruins useful conversations before they even begin. You don't need to look very far to find examples of the ensuing collapse of discourse that can result.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Well, first of all, I see no reason to accept as reasonable the hypothetical notion that said state of affairs would continue unchanged without intervention. The trend line for representation of women in politics is already pointing upward.
But more importantly, we seem to have different ideas about justice. You've pinned your notion of justice to these numbers, as if justice were a pair of pink and blue lines on a graph. As long as the blue line is above the pink one, that's injustice, and only when they meet at a single point will justice be achieved.
To me, that's not justice, it's bean counting. I don't consider the NBA an unjust organization because its black representation line is above its white one.
By my lights, justice has to do with how society treats individual human beings, and no mistreatment of one human being can ever cancel out, rectify, or make right the mistreatment of another. Putting in place a policy of (Crashing00-)injustice toward men might make the lines on your chart look prettier to you, and that may make you feel like you've achieved (Grant-)justice. But by my lights it's simply increasing the amount of (Crashing00-)injustice in the world. You only decrease (Crashing00)-injustice by treating people in a just manner as individuals, not as micro-contributions to lines on a chart or a statistical average.
It comes back to the famous trolley problem from moral philosophy: would you push a fat man onto a train track to stop a moving train from killing five people further down the track? Most morally normal people answer "no." If you are one of those people, then you must also say "no" to throwing men under the bus in order to increase female representation, because it's effectively the same question.
Now, in fairness to you, if we look past the dubious studies, you have pointed out some examples of things that I would agree are injustices. For instance, if a female candidate is being actively discouraged from running solely on the basis of being female, that would be an injustice. But in what sense would you correct that injustice by doing the same thing to men?
You wouldn't, as far as I can see. The only way to correct injustice is to, well, correct the injustice. Stop actively discouraging female candidates from running.
No, that is not what I am asserting. I'm asserting that a person studying the efficacy of female leadership has no proper motive for conditionalizing on "ethnic fractionalization." They chose the variable "ethnic fractionalization" (rather than, say, "preference for chocolate ice cream") as a tertiary variable because they looked at a wide variety of possible ways of crunching the data and found that particular approach yielded the result they wanted. In fact, if you read the Ioannidis paper, he points out that there is software that does exactly this. Punch in the conclusion you want and it spits out a supporting data set.
Look, it's like the wage gap thing. One side thinks it's discrimination, the other doesn't. The pro-discrimination side has all these studies. They control for education, experience, background, et cetera. They still show a gap even after all that. All these studies are statistically significant and methodologically sound, as they go.
The anti-discrimination side has their own studies. They say that when you control for hours actually at desk, career choice, leave taken, et cetera, the gap narrows to nothing -- and indeed reverses for women in their prime who have no family are totally career-focused. All these studies are statistically significant and methodologically sound.
What Ioannidis is telling us is that none of these studies has even the slightest chance of telling us the metaphysical truth about what's going on, because there are so many possible explanations for the phenomenon and so much room for Procrustean manipulation by social scientists with an agenda one way or another that the probability that any one of these results is true is essentially nil.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
These kinds of research results -- in all fields that rely on Pearson-Fisher statistical methods, but particularly in social social sciences -- are almost always wrong.
In particular, this study runs afoul of (at least) Ioannidis' corollaries 3 and 4.
Corollary 3 says that the more possible contributing causes an effect has, the less likely it is that a study that asserts the primacy only one of those causes is correct, even if that study has statistical significance. Colloquially speaking, think of all the different factors that could impact a nation's GDP growth, then imagine seriously making the claim that of all of those factors, the genitalia of the leader was the deciding one, then imagine publishing a paper saying that, then imagine people taking you seriously. That's a remarkable chain of coincidences, and their joint unlikelihood lowers what Ioannidis calls the R-value, and hence also the probability of the study producing a true result.
Corollary 4 says that the more wiggle room an examiner has in methodology, the more he can use that wiggle room to get the answer he wants, and in no science is there more wiggle room than in social science. You can see an example of creative use of wiggle room in the design of this experiment. If you wanted to measure the efficacy of female world leaders, why not do the obvious thing and look at every female world leader? Why focus on a subset generated by this made-up buzzword "ethnic fractionalization"? Well, I'll spoil it for you: First they did look at every country. They didn't get the answer they wanted, so they restricted themselves to a preferred subset instead.
How many wrongs make a right? You can't ever correct an injustice by introducing further injustice.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I haven't been following the gamergate thing that closely, but I glanced at the piece you linked here and if this is the sort of thing the pro-gamergate people are miffed about, then they have a point. Isn't this exactly the kind of hackneyed and biased journalism that underwrites a legitimate gripe about journalistic standards?
Headline: Gamers are outraged that a spiritual successor to Megaman has hired a woman on the team.
Evidence: Four cherry-picked quotes dredged up from the bowels of Reddit.
Reality: Even though the author was permitted to cherry pick outliers and anecdotal evidence as he saw fit, the article still doesn't comport with the headline. None of the four people quoted in the article is upset because Abou Karam is a woman. What they are actually concerned about is the game they backed becoming a vehicle for feminist agitprop. And that is a perfectly legitimate concern for a backer to have. People don't have to back art they don't like. Granted, it's foolish to believe that a single community manager has that kind of influence over a game's content. That's stupid, but it's not misogynistic.
Your usage of the article: As supporting evidence for the quantity of death threats received by women. Death threats aren't even mentioned in the article.
This is why I like the stance taken by The Escapist -- they created a policy designed to separate facts from allegations, opinions, and innuendo, and to give the other side a chance to state their position fairly rather than having some straw-man version of it stapled to them by some hack looking for a headline -- and if that's the only change that results from "gamergate," then the dustup was already worth something, regardless of whether or not it started as some kind of 4chan "black op" or whatever.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
It's not their obligation to educate the misinformed, but it is their (moral) obligation not to create prior restraints on speech through their policies.
I wouldn't call it a prediction so much as a potential response that doesn't outrage the concept of free expression. If he's good enough to beat all his female challengers, then he is a data point in favor of his own hypothesis, and then I guess it's time to teach him not to reason from one data point.
I wouldn't be posting on a debate forum if I didn't believe that initially unreasonable and sometimes outright hostile people couldn't ever be persuaded to change their positions on substantive issues. I'm not attaching a predicted success rate to my proposal here. I'm only saying that even if the success rate is fantastically low, it's better than the widespread enaction of illiberal policies.
Come now, I am sure you understand that the possession of a right does not constitute an endorsement of every possible application. Though the store does possess all these rights, it is as immoral for the store to use them in furtherance of a prior restraint on speech as it is for me to use my right to free speech to insult someone's mother. My condemnation of this particular mode of application of the right doesn't contravene the right itself.
Maybe, but we're weighing competing moral duties here, and even if your argument establishes the existence of this one, it doesn't show it to be more important than the moral duty to refrain from prior restraint.
...What?
We (and by we I mean virtually everyone everywhere) routinely demand that human beings exhibit more rationality and emotional restraint than I am asking for here. We expect a jilted wife not to murder her husband, do we not? Is that unrealistic?
I'm asking for a good deal less than that: all I want is for a person who is offended by a speech act not to be swept away by his or her emotions and agitate for the enaction of illiberal policies that are known from prior argument to be more harmful than helpful, even in the most extreme of cases.
I am not saying "I order you not to be offended in the name of rationality." I'm saying "Be as offended as you want, but at some point you should think about turning your reasoning process back on. Preferably before you start enacting policy."
Yes, but the diehard libertarian will, if he lives up to his description, realize that the unpleasant evening caused by that jerk, and indeed all the unpleasant evenings that he has ever had or will have because of jerks, are a part of the price of living in a free society, and actually preferable to the alternatives, which are various forms of unfree societies. In other words, he realizes that, as you eloquently put it: "The history books are filled with ideologies that demand a better sort of humanity and blame real people when they don't live up to the ideal. They never end well."
Again, the existence of a right doesn't constitute the endorsement of every instance of the described behavior. The store is free to dissociate, but if it does so to enforce a prior restraint, it's morally wrong.
I must be miscommunicating, because I don't claim that it is your moral duty to like misogynists, or to play with them if you don't want to. My claim is that to eject them from the store by force is immoral prior restraint. As for you not wanting to play with them, that's not restraint, and entirely your prerogative. You're not entitled to have them ejected from the store just because you'd rather not play with them, though.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
But that's just not the case. "All cars on this lot were made in Detroit, therefore all cars are made in Detroit." The heuristic "properties related to the 'genesis' of an object are more inductible" doesn't seem to be a very good heuristic. It's trivial to think of properties related to the creation or genesis of objects that don't hold across an entire class of specimens.
Well, it's always possible for you to play the game where you simply decline to apply the word to the object. I'm not going to.
How do you classify an object as a puppy when you encounter it? Do you demand to see its mother?
What properties are normally shared by a collection of objects? If you are just proposing a list, then your list is vulnerable to attack. For instance, if "properties relating to genesis" is on your list, then I can easily throw out any number of counterexamples showing that such properties aren't shared by large collections of objects.
If you are proposing some metamethod for finding these collections of properties, then you had better make sure, as Hume pointed out, that your method does not rely on induction from similar properties -- otherwise it would be circular.
You should object to it. That's kind of the point. Hume showed that the kind of naive induction we're discussing here is incoherent. These are the reasons why. There's no basis for agreement to be had here.
No, no, no. I thought this would be immediately obvious, but I guess not.
The question before me is whether or not to regard your series of observations of physics simulations (E) as evidence for the hypothesis that the universe is similarly simulated and teleological (P). As a Bayesian, I regard something as evidence only if it is more likely under the hypothesis than its negation.
Well, in this case, I can actually figure out the numbers and see that your observations do not constitute evidence. It turns out we can unconditionally calculate P(E). Regardless of any fact about the universe, every physics simulation is going to be simulated and teleological, because that's just what a physics simulation is. So P(E) = 1.
Thus P(E|P) = P(E|~P) = 1. In other words, you would have seen the same data E regardless of whether or not your hypothesis P was true. And therefore, E is not evidence for P, from a Bayesian perspective.
Actually, it's funny that you feel that way about the absence of counterexamples, because I've given you counterexamples to some of your induction heuristics and it seems to roll off your back like water.
That being said, I can see that you feel strongly about that method, even though you don't apply it consistently -- but you should be a great deal more suspicious of conclusions springing from naive induction than you currently are. It's a method with some very well-known problems. Not, mind you, that there is any entirely uncontroversial way of doing inductive reasoning, but out of a series of more or less unpalatable options you've chosen the actual worst one.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I'm not impugning anyone's rationality; if anything, I'm saying Dawkins is a good deal more rational than you give him credit for. The declaration that God is necessary is not an explanation for God even if it's actually true, so when Dawkins says that postulating God increases rather than decreases the explanatory burden of the theist, pointing out God's necessity is not actually an answer to his objection.
(Since we're on the subject of necessary beings, here's a thought exercise: define a eunicorn to be a unicorn that necessarily exists. Do eunicorns exist? If so, then unicorns exist a fortiori.)
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
You may also want to put some thought into just what constitutes an explanation. If you were in a math class, confronted with a theorem you didn't quite understand, and you asked the professor to explain -- would you be satisfied if he answered "because it's necessary?" It's a perfectly true answer; mathematical truths are necessary. But I don't expect such an answer would satisfy your desire for explanation, nor should it. When you ask for an explanation, you're asking why it's necessary.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Assuming this anecdote can be reasoned from, it's just the sort of thing that makes me believe that part of what is perceived as a sexism problem can genuinely be attributed to a cluster of beliefs that women in gaming, or other minority late entrants to a pre-existing culture with established norms, are entitled to a special standard of treatment that is beyond the pale.
The "99% isn't good enough" standard you offer here is far beyond any standard that has ever applied to mere mortal men. For my part, I was always told to expect that in all facets of life I would run into a few jerks, weirdos, and creeps from time to time. I have never been, and would never expect to be, a member of a culture or other group of sufficient size in which everyone treated me in the exact way I expected to be treated. If you had asked me, say, 10 years ago, before the bizarre ascendancy of leftist ideology, I would say that anyone who had such an expectation was crazy and certainly not entitled to have their expectations fulfilled.
Well, let's get one thing out of the way at the outset: non-consensually touching someone is criminal assault, a genuine problem, and should be dealt with as such.
The rest of it seems like further reification of unreasonable expectations. "I'm a woman; when I enter the room I expect everyone to behave; I don't want to be hit on by any guys who don't already know how to hit on women well; I don't want anyone to be interested in me unless it's strictly non-romantic; I don't acknowledge the basic rights of other free human beings to dissociate with me if I don't reciprocate their interest;..."
This is an unending string of unrealistic and ridiculous expectations which not only identifies no moral wrong committed by the offending party but in fact condemns them for acting out the perfectly natural human mating dance, albeit in the awkward and inexperienced way that is common to the nerdy types.
If they're not villains, what are you calling them out for? Why do they need to back off? (Except, again, in cases of legal harassment or assault.)
Are you identifying this as a cultural problem, or just making an observation? If the former, this seems to me like a creepy gender reversal of the male entitlement complex you complain about.
A male gamer could totally understand the concept that he's not entitled to any reciprocation from a female romantic interest, decide to totally leave her alone when it becomes clear that she's unavailable to him, and still be part of your problem. In other words, now it's the female gamer who's entitled to Platonic camaraderie and the male who's the thought-criminal for not providing it. Nuts to that, says I. Everyone has the right to extricate themselves from a relationship of a kind they don't want.
No chance that a statistical belief is being expressed here? If there were, say, an exhibition match between the Sky and the Bulls, and the Sky won, is "I can't believe the Sky won" sexist, a true observation of a reified statistical anomaly, or both? Speaking for myself, not only would I defend anyone's right to say that without being made to feel like some kind of jerk, I'd probably say the same thing myself.
Someone may respond by pointing out that this case is different because there's no reason to suppose Magic has a gender-performance bias anything like as severe as basketball does. I would agree that's very likely the case, but then we're dealing with a wrong statistical opinion.
Don't we have ways of dealing with wrong opinion that don't involve ostracism, censorship, or top-down imposition of authority-endorsed beliefs? In this case I suggest that, rather than empowering a censor to toss the speaker of this belief out of the store or event, any female gamers present who wish to challenge the speaker's beliefs be instead invited to do so by playing the actual game. It won't take many defeats to either organically correct the speaker's opinion or embarrass them to the point where they are disinclined to stop broadcasting it.
At the moment, only the government is required by law to protect free expression, but the basic moral arguments concerning free speech are not conditional on the would-be censor being empowered by a government. Would-be censors are incoherent however they become empowered, so everyone has a moral duty to preserve free speech. I agree that the LGS has an additional fiduciary duty to create a fun environment, and this is just one of those many occasions where the moral and fiduciary duties can conflict with each other.
I must be reading this wrong, because it sounds like an assertion that women are unlikely to be persuaded by moral arguments. I know you don't actually believe that, and I think I see what you're getting at -- someone who's not having fun is not necessarily thinking about whatever abstract rights his co-gamers may have, and instead is concentrating on extricating himself from the unfun situation.
So be it, that's how people act most of the time, but that's a cognitive bias, not a piece of moral reasoning. The question "how should we deal with jerkish behavior?" is moral and can't necessarily be decided by bootstrapping an immediate gut feeling. Given the soundness of the moral arguments for free speech, failure to be persuaded by them is ultimately a mistake on the part of the listener.
For my part, I wonder how jerks actually do deserve to be treated, and I don't see a reason to accept the answer being offered here. I believe the balance of the moral arguments indicate that jerks (whose jerkiness is confined to thoughtcrime as opposed to actual crime, mind you) deserve to receive the organic consequences of their speech and nothing more -- in other words, if their expressions cause other free people to freely dissociate with them, they've suffered enough. The top-down imposition of ostracism for particular belief is an immoral instance of prior restraint.
Fiduciarily, maybe you're right, toss them all out and watch profits soar. But I don't agree that the fiduciary duty trumps the moral duty here.
And this, incidentally, is why I call it prior restraint. You seem to be lodging an objection, in advance, to any expression of the opinion itself irrespective of the particular phrasing.
Since you are someone who has experienced this sort of thing, let me ask your opinion, then. You mentioned feeling the need to carry a weapon on your person (which I encourage, by the way); this implies that the fear of physical assault at gaming events is a considerable part of what causes your anxiety. That is something I find to be genuinely alarming.
Suppose for the moment that it was the case that there was a perfect authority that would guarantee that anything that happened stopped short of physical assault. (I know such a thing can't really be guaranteed, and that fact, if anything, is what I see as the real problem)
To what extent would that change your evaluation?
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
It sounds to me like we're talking about essentially the same thing, except you're using "defining" where I'm using "endogenous." I'd argue that the usage of "defining" here is suspect, but it doesn't matter much as long as we're really on the same page.
In a generic sense, yes; I couldn't very well say anything at all without using any of my prior knowledge. However, I'm trying to avoid using prior knowledge about the specific exemplar -- in this case, puppies. Your claim is based on the notion that we'd seem rather foolish if we found ourselves in the position of failing to affirm that puppies have mothers, because they clearly do. Well, maybe so -- but that intuition is based solely on the importation of biological knowledge which has nothing to do with the study of induction itself, so let's table it and pick an example where we get at the real problem -- an alien environment where we can't rely on our intuitions.
If we want to dig underneath our preconceptions and determine what kinds of things constitute valid inductive conclusions, we have to isolate inductive reasoning itself from prior knowledge about the species of object being inducted over.
You're definitely missing something, because if I used induction to justify induction, I would be committing the fallacy of circularity identified by Hume. Rather than an inductive justification, I would recommend a modal approach: amongst the collection of all logically possible worlds, there are more worlds in which a class of objects has members that differ exogenously than endogenously.
For instance, it is easy to imagine a wide variety alternate possible worlds where a particular object changes location its containment orientation with other objects. It's even easy, though perhaps slightly less so, to imagine a possible world full of motherless puppies: consider a universe where all organic creatures, including puppies, are grown in vats from templates computed by an evolutionary algorithm.
It's harder to imagine alternate worlds where classes of objects differ endogenously; for instance, it's difficult to imagine a world where not all puppies have DNA; it's not clear that such a thing is still a puppy at all. This, I think, is what you're getting at with "defining properties" and if so, then you and I are talking about the same thing.
Anyway, if we're on the same page, then we should reach the same conclusion, which is that we should regard worlds where exogenous properties are unshared by a collection of objects as more likely than those where endogenous properties are.
Really? I don't see how that's clear at all. For instance, if you witness a litter of puppies being born to a specific mother, let's call her May, then "born of May" is a property related to the genesis of those puppies. Can you induct it?
Bayesian inductive reasoning imposes significant requirements beyond merely a lack of observed counterexamples. I'm not going to go into all of them here (especially since you say your argument is not Bayesian; I'll wait for you to provide a Bayesian argument) but consider this:
Let P be the proposition "we live in a simulated teleological universe." Let E be the series of observations "all observed subuniverses of our universe have been simulated and teleological."
What is P(E|P)? What is P(E|~P)? Do you see a problem with those numbers?
Why wouldn't it be necessary for you to do so? Arguments that rely on pre-Humean circular notions of induction were all rendered unsound by Hume. Granted, there is no wholly uncontroversial model for inductive reasoning, but Bayesianism is at least more widely accepted than naive induction.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
What? This is absurd. There's a moral question here: "Should I kill my child if ordered to do so?"
You've introduced all kinds of non-moral questions: "Are knife wounds uniformly fatal?" "Are angelic interventions likely to efficaceously prevent death?" "Does my 'child' have a 'special nature' making him not a child in the sense of the ordinary word child that everyone uses to mean child because it means child?"
I have no interest in the non-moral questions. I regard them as outside the scope of the topic. In fact, if we can't agree on straightforward and coherent meanings for the word "child" and "sacrifice" that don't shift from moment to moment, then the whole argument becomes incoherent. So, henceforth the question I am addressing is the moral one: "Should I kill my child if ordered to do so?" The implications of this, which I regard as wholly irrefutable given the premise, are that the child is actually a child, and the thing being asked of me is his actual life.
Whether he actually ends up dead at my hands is irrelevant; what's relevant at the point of moral decision is that I'm being asked to take his life. If for whatever reason I fail to do so, that's either a personal failure on my part to obey the command, or a change in the nature of the command, or a change in the nature of the universe itself, all of which utterly destroy the hypothesis and make the question either different or incoherent.
Whether he is resurrected or granted an afterlife is irrelevant; in order to be resurrected or attain the afterlife, one must actually die. That's why we use the terms resurrection and afterlife, respectively.
Small matter to me whether you find anything impressive or otherwise; what's important is that you're just agreeing with what I originally said. If there are some phrases God can't utter, then it's clearly not permissible to grant a priori reasonability to arbitrary statements of the form "God said X." After all, the risk attendant with taking a statement "God said X" as a hypothesis when X is one of the statements God can't utter is the total collapse of logic.
That risk is too great to be borne, even in the slightest, so all such statements given without an accompanying proof that X is one of the things God can say, our default attitude must be maximally skeptical. In other words, Highroller's position of skepticism about the command is precisely the reasonable one.
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Well, if that went over your head, then I don't know how much help I will be. I lack the gift of simplification; in fact, if anything, I suffer from the curse of complexification. But I'll take a stab anyhow.
The separation of meta- and object-level in plain English is not readily obvious; that's part of the point. Most human language allows us to freely mix the object- and meta-levels, and that is part of its great power. Some linguists suggest that it is precisely this "free and easy" recursion that is at the core of our at least ostensibly higher degree of consciousness compared with other animals. It takes extraordinarily close reading to properly separate ordinary human speech into object and meta-levels. But perhaps I can illustrate by working an example. Consider the classical syllogism:
1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
Therefore 3. Socrates is mortal.
Here, the meta-level is us, on this forum, reading sentences in a simple subset of English and observing the relationship between their truth values. Call this "MTGSalvation-world." The object-level is the simple subset of English these sentences come from, together with a possible world (a "model" in logical parlance) in which there's an object named Socrates and a collection of properties that he has, one of which is "man," and a property called "mortal" which all "man"-things have. Call this "Socrates-world."
When you and I sit down and say "it's true that all (Socrates-world-)men are (Socrates-world-)mortal," that's a statement of MTGSalvation-world about Socrates-world. In fact every statement we make about the truth or falsity of the statements in an ordinary debate about Socrates-world is a statement of MTGSalvation-world. As long as we keep the discussion about truth-in-Socrates-world confined to MTGSalvation-world, there is scant risk of us running into incompleteness paradoxes (of Socrates-world, at least). The paradoxes arise precisely when we let statements in Socrates-world talk about truth in Socrates-world. (Note: Socrates-world could be made so simplistic as to be wholly unable to formulate such paradoxes, but in general, you don't want to dumb down your logic that much.) This is the essence of the implications of Tarski's theorem in epistemology as they are usually reckoned: we must maintain a firewall between meta- and object-level and talk about object-level truth only at the meta-level.
Tying this back into the present discussion about morality: The object-level here is "the framework of moral reasoning used by our hypothetical Abraham in deciding whether or not it's moral to kill his kid," call this Abraham-world. The meta-level is again MTGSalvation-world. Tiax, writing in MTGSalvation-world about Abraham-world suggests that Abraham (who does his reasoning entirely within Abraham-world) reason according to the following premise in Abraham-world about Abraham-world: "Everything that God says (in Abraham-world) is true (in Abraham-world)."
This premise makes Abraham-world talk about truth in Abraham-world and thereby violates Tarski's theorem, which in this case tells us that the stated premise is undefinable in Abraham-world and therefore Abraham cannot reason from it without inviting paradox. The upshot of all this, in the simplest terms I can offer, is to vindicate Highroller's intuition that there is a minefield of contradiction awaiting anyone who attempts to reason from bare assertions without proof, even (in fact, especially) when those assertions supposedly come from God.
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Judging by our previous moral arguments, I'd say there's no book that will convince you of this in a way that you will accept. Unless you are willing to accept that morality by definition has more to do with the flourishing of conscious beings than, say, wiping out the whole universe and everything in it, you will not accept any Kantianesque moral arguments.
But if you're looking for references, let's start at the beginning: have you read Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals?
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
The location of an object is one of its properties -- an exogenous one.
That's only because you're importing your knowledge about puppies. Suppose you are in a wholly alien environment and you observe some small objects of uniform color emerging from a larger object of similar shape and color. Which property do you view as more strongly projectible given this data, "color" or "emergence from a similar, larger object?"
I say color, because emergence from a larger object is exogenous. Both conclusions could, of course, be wrong, since they are inductive rather than deductive -- but the one about the exogenous property is the more easily falsifiable. In fact, you've just argued as much yourself, since emergence from a larger object is just a way of changing location, which you've agreed is a less projectible property.
Neither. The only exogenous property relevant to this discussion is the following property of universes X: "there exists a conscious being in a meta-universe that assigns teleology to X." Analogies about mothers are going to cause us to import our biological intuitions into the conversation, which will surely lead us astray since there is no reason to suppose that meta-universes obey our biological intuitions about mothers.
What? You've lost me completely. The cardinality I'm talking about is that of the set of all universes.
You're claiming something like P(this universe is simulated and teleological) > 50%, so you have to compute that probability. You have observed a sample subset of universes -- your physical simulations -- which have this property. Your sample has some finite size -- it's the total number of physical simulations ever done. You wish to induct this sample up to the whole space. Under Bayesian inductive logic, even assuming a uniform prior (which is absurd), in order to compute the impact that this evidence has on your posterior you need to know the cardinality of the set of all universes. If there are (say) Penrose's number of universes and you've only observed a few hundred thousand of them, then your observation has negligible weight in a Bayesian sense and should not move a rational thinker very far towards the deistic conclusion -- certainly not 50% of the way there.
So, do you know the cardinality of the set of all universes?
Well, it's entirely possible that I lost track of the actual argument amidst all the irrelevant bull about defining intelligence. However, it seems that if you drop this claim, you are left with nothing. What exactly is your support for the deistic hypothesis if not induction up from your observation of physics simulations, which you regard as teleological universes?
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.