1. 'Framing Science' and The Dawkins Effect

Comment #181222 by ivo on May 16, 2008 at 4:55 pm

Henri,

I don't understand what you're saying.

"Your little snide remark about 'sociopaths' is the most revealing. It amounts to this circular argument: if you are not immoral then you ought to be moral!"

It's no snide remark of mine, it's what Dacey said. And he's right. Imagine that we evolved from some shark-like animal, say, and that homicidal cannibalism were the way. Then we'd have pretty different ethical systems, don't you think? The few "tender heart good guys" among us would be anomalies. But we're not like that: we are highly social apes, we have BUILT IN a tendency to empathy and cooperation (except for the few sociopath among us-- and this is just a fact, not a snide remark), and our common values and goals reflect that. More cooperation and widespread well-being is just what we want, roughly speaking. I want that, you want that. So we try and build (more or less efficiently) prescriptive ethical guidelines with those common goals in mind. The only questions left are: which rules/systems are more efficient in furthering those goals. And this creates the ethical problems we endlessly talk about.

Now I don't even think this is controversial. It just astonishes me that you can say:

"Words like that unwittingly create the norm â€" what you're supposed to be â€" which underlie prescriptions of behaviour from a non-factual method. It fails as it gives to humans a purpose (final cause) where there is none."

Of course we have goals and desires, and that's what matters to us. "Final cause"? What are you talking about?

2. 'Framing Science' and The Dawkins Effect

Comment #180746 by ivo on May 15, 2008 at 4:50 pm

Henri and Janus,

did you actually listen to the interview? Dacey was pretty damn clear: IF you [like, as it happens, most other non-sociopath human beings] actually care about other individuals' well being besides your own, then [by open debate we should painstakingly build the tentative know-how telling you that] you should act so-and-so.

If you think this is "ought from is", than so is the theory saying that, if you ARE hungry, then you SHOULD eat something because it's well known that that usually helps.

Actually, I think it's been some time since I have listened to someone speaking so clearly and reasonably about ethics (since I've read The End of Faith, come to think of it)

3. Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda

Comment #167205 by ivo on April 23, 2008 at 6:02 pm

Yeah, and where's the transitional fossil from man to woman? uh?

4. Investigating Atheism

Comment #167197 by ivo on April 23, 2008 at 5:55 pm

Is it fair to judge a website based on the first listed of its Selected Features?

If yes, then investigatingatheism.info is *very* negatively biased against atheism.
The feature is John Gray's article "The Atheist Delusion", which purports to present some "New Atheists" (ie think the Four Horsemen), discussing the merits of their ideas.

Now, I'm not sure the guy's being dishonest, but he writes crap. For instance, he systematically misrepresents the views of Dennett and Dawkins, paying special attention to *not* discussing the central points of their respective bestsellers. Even worse, he completely buys into the atheism-is-a-philosophy misconception, so that he may entertain us with the nefarious social consequences of various brands of atheism, such as Stalinism, Maoism... One typical sentence:

quote
Nazi "scientific racism" and Soviet "dialectical materialism" reduced the unfathomable complexity of human lives to the deadly simplicity of a scientific formula.
unquote

Ah, and he just *loves* to compare the New Atheists fanatical attitude to that of evangelical Christians.

Bleah. Now recall that the purpose of the site is to "discourage oversimplification of the debate, and deepen the interest in the subject [of atheism]."

5. Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda

Comment #166877 by ivo on April 23, 2008 at 1:22 pm

and BillG:

do you wear eyeglasses? How immoral (ie unnatural) of you! If Nature wanted you to be short-sighted, who are you to object to Her will?
Or instead of "short-sided", insert:
fat/sterile/unhappy... ad lib.

do you read? write? How unnatural!

Diacanu already made this point (and Dawkins in his letter, for that matter), but variations on the theme might help drive it in.

6. Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss

Comment #162897 by ivo on April 17, 2008 at 4:23 pm

To ASMarques:

flirting with Teilhard de Chardin, are we?

Here's the legendary The Phenomenon of Man review by Peter Medawar, always worth re-reading:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Medawar/phenomenon-of-man.html

"... and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself"

7. Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss

Comment #162882 by ivo on April 17, 2008 at 4:05 pm

Re Comment #161260 by Milton.

I think you're spot on. A big part of the fun of science is its detective story charm, of how the truth is subtly teased out of nature by painstakingly collecting clues and thinking cleverly. The problem is, it is usually so much more *technical* than your average trial drama or detective novel, and therefore it's more difficult to make a good story out of it. Thus popularizers of science just announce the answers, i.e., the facts, counting on the sheer awe effect. But this just misses the whole point of how science works, and may actually become boring after a while. What I often find much more fascinating is the way we got to those facts and theories, and the process of fitting them together in order to get a coherent picture which actually makes sense.

As the success of the Experts TV series shows, the lay public may actually be ready for something like: "How scientists deduced that atoms exist and even measured their nucleus' diameter, without ever being able to see them!" or "How Eratosthenes calculated the radius of the Earth- in 240 BC"

Or maybe not

8. Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin Way Beyond

Comment #156022 by ivo on April 6, 2008 at 1:55 pm

Yeah, thank you Crossman. That Overcoming Bias site looks promisingly interesting. The thought on "emergence" talk explaining as much as "magic" talk seems smack on. May I, tentatively, point at two further suspects: "non-linear" and "complexity".

Another possible reason that such concepts catch on (other than the fact that lazy thinkers can use them to explain anything at all :-) is that they may help knowledgeable experts sell their ultimately reductionistic explanations to an intrinsically anti-reductionistic public. For instance --- Look how the mind works: its from all these tiny mindless computing gadgets that [adding up to something bigger and nobler than its parts] thought [tada!] *emerges*. In other words, it may also be a way of nurturing some holistic penchant, in a hopefully harmless way. (Better that invoking God or phlogiston, say.)

9. Vote on freedom of expression marks the end of Universal Human Rights

Comment #153370 by ivo on April 1, 2008 at 12:26 pm

to me, the worst is nr 9:

Also urges States (...) to take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and their value systems (...)

I'm speechless.

FightingFalcon, the UN *declared* the goddam Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And now it's working to devoid it of its meaning. I think this trend is cause enough for some energetic outrage, don't you think?

mmurray, thanx for your comment 44, it really cheered me up.

10. Vote on freedom of expression marks the end of Universal Human Rights

Comment #152926 by ivo on March 31, 2008 at 5:58 pm

I'm deeply shocked. The declaration of human rights is one of the highlights of human social and ethical achievements. Something that makes me proud of belonging to this species. And now it's being actively destroyed, among general indifference!? I can't believe it, is this true?

This is a very sad day for me.

11. This human's life, decoded

Comment #141456 by ivo on March 10, 2008 at 1:00 pm

"The paradox is that individuals become overall more "stupid" when the society as a whole becomes "smarter". In a more structured society insulated from random forces by technology, individuals become more like cogs of a big machine, more or less interchangeable and replaceable."

Bonzai, I guess you are thinking of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times here? While your comparison between the Asian electrician and your average North American one might have something to it (i.e., you might be right re some professions), it is just a fact that in our Western civilization the need for (highly) qualified jobs has steadily grown during the last centuries. This is the exact opposite of your picture of "cogs of a big machine, more or less interchangeable". Try as you might, you wouldn't for do a decent engineer, or an architect, or a graphic designer, or... an electrician, unless you have studied the subject and practiced the art for some time. And which kind of engineer, for that matter? One century ago they might have been all "interchangeable", but those good old times are over. No matter how high the unemployment rate, skilled, well-trained professionals rarely have to worry. After all, it is low-skilled and repetitive jobs which are taken over by industrial machines and computer programs! It seems to me that one of the endemic problems of industrialized countries is precisely that the educational system is rarely capable of providing all the skilled workforce that society needs.

Also, on something else you said: even if (let's say) some evolutionary psychologists are bad scientists, as you seem to think, why would you conclude that the whole discipline isn't scientific? On the contrary, it seems to me to be one of the most successful and exciting new things to happen to the social sciences in the last decades.

12. Richard Dawkins on five of his favorite books

Comment #141026 by ivo on March 9, 2008 at 5:25 pm

Yeah, me too. I tend to see fantasy anyway as a kind of abnormally swollen specialized subbranch of science fiction, so sf is best because it's fantasy and much more besides :-). (Although I did get hooked on Jordan's The Wheel of Time when I was ... mumble mumble... 15, just to have him die and my supply interrupted right before the twelfth, final volume! Fantasy definitely has its disadvantages, not too different from other drugs.)

I just wanted to make the point about intelligent and consistent world-building being one of the central (and, from the rationalist point of view, quite admirable) features.

13. Richard Dawkins on five of his favorite books

Comment #140995 by ivo on March 9, 2008 at 2:24 pm

How COULD you forget J.L.Borges?

I mean, I just created an account for the sole purpose of reminding you all of this disgracing omission. (But then... he never wrote a novel, so that must explain it.)
On the other hand, I'm delighted to see that Dante's Inferno has been mentioned. (I, contrary to you, had to read and analyse chunks of it all throughout my school years... and you know, we read the original 13th century Italian, not some comfy modern English rendition of it. Loved it all the same)

As it's been noticed:

"Wow, the rationalists round here sure love their fantasy.... "

As a lover of LOTR myself, and of Fantasy in general, I'd like to profit of the occasion to mention that, upon reading The God Delusion, the one passage which actually made me cringe was the one where Dawkins praised SF for all of its well-known virtues (I couldn't agree more), and then went on to compare it to the weak-minded escapism of fantasy literature! ARGH!

Dear Prof, in the name of all fantasy loving rationalists, I would like to turn your attention to the following points:

- a prominent feature of the best fantasy works is their internal consistency-- no matter how magical or otherwise whacky their universe might be, it is internally coherent, it all adds up. In mathematics, internal coherence is enough to guarantee existence. For instance, the world of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is based on that same kind of phony metaphysics that underlies much of the Christian worldview--messianic myth, essentialist ontology, etc etc. But its all so beautifully and consistently rendered, that it stand out as a masterpiece. Even if I don't believe it for a sec, it is just a sheer pleasure to explore the possibilities and logical consequences of such a parallel universe.

- what's wrong with escapism anyway? it's not as if I'd *believe* any of that magical thinking, is it? To close the circle, I might as well quote Borges: "Theology is just a branch of fantastic literature". It's all in the "make believe" world, the same world in which all children have to cut their cognitive teeth and hone their epistemic skills, in order to better tackle the real world out there. Don't forget, artful and logically sound world-building is not the exclusive province of hard sf gurus.

This said, Greg Egan would be a feature of any book list of mine.