Gemli explains...

[Marcus]

...Get 'em while they're young is the watchword of all theists. Early education in spirit stuff sticks, and it's very hard to dislodge once it's taken root...

https://disqus.com/embed/comments/?base ... se&s_o=asc#

Oh boy. Gemli has in-bred Mormonism by the shorthairs.

[Marcus]

And, for a final review of the mopologist movie efforts:

Nines 34 minutes ago

No contemporary person has seen the plates. They appear only in a story, and the extraordinary nature of that story should require more evidence than the claims of a few suggestible townsfolk in the 1800s. The fact that there are no such things as gods and angels should figure into the process of determining the truth and reliability of the claims. Living in a theological echo chamber makes that extremely difficult, but you'd think common sense and skepticism should have some place in the analysis of a wild array of such claims. Every religion insists that its origin story is True, but there is absolutely no evidence that they are true, or even could be true.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 6406007654

"Witnesses," the movie. In a nutshell.

[Physics Guy]

Ockham's Razor has its heart in the right place—for one thing, it has nothing against mixed metaphors—but it's not reliable for choosing between theories because how much you assume isn't well defined. There are seriously people who invoke the Razor to justify their assumption of uncountably many copies of the entire universe, all forever undetectable to us, just because they think that this assumption lets them delete one iffy axiom from quantum mechanics.

These Many Worlds fans think of the measurement axiom in quantum mechanics as an extra assumption because to them it is a different kind of thing from all the other axioms, while they don't count their infinite worlds as additional assumptions, because all those extra worlds are merely more of the same kind of thing that we already agree that we have. They feel that they are like someone who is explaining the overturned garbage can by postulating that there are more racoons in the neighbourhood than we thought, instead of proposing that a wholly new kind of animal has intruded just to kick over our can.

I on the other hand feel that uncountably many parallel universes which can never be detected is the most blatant violation of Ockham's Razor that I can imagine, and that the measurement axiom is a crude placeholder which describes some real and important phenomena that we don't currently understand well. It's a dubious impostor of an axiom which will surely be replaced at some point, but accepting it for now is more sensible—and more honest—than postulating unobservable infinities just so we can pretend to have a perfect theory.

Evolutionary biology and special divine creation of species are another example of rival theories which both claim to be simpler and to make fewer significant assumptions. Part of accepting one theory or the other seems to include donning a lens that makes one's own assumptions seem common-sensical while the opposite assumptions seem enormous and unwarranted.

If the alternative assumptions are of comparable nature then it is easy to apply Ockham's Razor, but if the alternative assumptions are quite different in kind from each other then it's quite hard to say which set Ockham prefers.

Did that person on stage apply an elaborately staged trick using specialised contraptions that nobody would normally make, or did they simply use magic? Hey, the illusion theory requires us to postulate multiple tricky components while the magic theory only makes one assumption. Sure, we already know that smoke and mirrors exist, but the details of exactly how they're supposed to work in this case are obscure, and it should be clear to any thinking adult that the world includes many mysterious things, so why is it a big deal to postulate magic?

It may not be impossible to talk someone out of believing in stage magic but I don't think that appealing to Ockham's Razor is going to be a good way to do it.

[Physics Guy]

If our ancestors are "unlikely to have been wholly" right or wrong, then by extension they were "more likely to be stumbling awkwardly toward something" either real or NOT real. Not, necessarily, "something real."

It is indeed the nature of awkward stumbling, that one is mostly stumbling in the wrong directions. Any given lurch may well be almost totally wrong. I think of most human activities as a kind of Brownian motion in which there can be a component of systematic drift, even if the random component has larger amplitude.

[Marcus]

The point of my comment was contained in my final sentence which you must have inadvertently left off.

...All of our religions should be handled with skepticism. That doesn’t mean, though, that they are utterly wrong. They are more likely to be stumbling awkwardly toward something real. We have survived, after all. Tigers live on our sufferance. Our ancestors are unlikely to have been wholly right. They’re unlikely to have been wholly wrong.

If our ancestors are "unlikely to have been wholly" right or wrong, then by extension they were "more likely to be stumbling awkwardly toward something" either real or NOT real. Not, necessarily, "something real."

Let's be consistent.

I was saying "let's be consistent" to your assumption that "religion is stumbling awkwardly toward something real." Describing behavior as Brownian motion still doesn't allow for an inconsistent assumption about the component of systematic drift.

[Marcus]

Gemli makes an interesting point about the simplicity of convenient irrational claims:

gemli DanielPeterson 2 hours ago
Claims of a theological nature are irrational, in that they are not proportional or consistent with our understanding of the real world. Stories of gods and angels are not rational because these "beings" cannot be demonstrated to exist, and appear to be ideas that arose from attributing supernatural powers to human-like avatars. These avatars were convenient explanations for things that affected mortal humans, like floods, diseases poor crops, bountiful crops, and most importantly, death.

To avoid death, people will do just about anything, including inventing the fiction that we somehow live forever after we die. That's nonsense, of course. Simian apes with larger brains may have the ability to imagine eternal life, but life is a process that is exhibited by a collection of biological components that ultimately fail and decay. Living one's life in an attempt to avoid its inevitable termination is ironic at best, and a terrible waste at worst.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 6406595592

[malkie]

If our ancestors are "unlikely to have been wholly" right or wrong, then by extension they were "more likely to be stumbling awkwardly toward something" either real or NOT real. Not, necessarily, "something real."

It is indeed the nature of awkward stumbling, that one is mostly stumbling in the wrong directions. Any given lurch may well be almost totally wrong. I think of most human activities as a kind of Brownian motion in which there can be a component of systematic drift, even if the random component has larger amplitude.

We don't even need to be Drunkards to walk this way!

[Rivendale]

Gemli explained his avoidance of this several times with his flat Earth examples. I think he knows this is hyperbole but his point stands on this issue. This reminds me of the 70's when television shows like Leonard Nimoy's In Search of series was being broadcast. A quick search of the titles yields the following investigations:

• Animal ESP
• Psychic Sea Hunt
• Ghostly Stakeout
• Spirit Voices
• Water Seekers
• Faith Healing

The series aired from 1977-1982 and spawned several spinoffs and according to Alexandre Schiele fromhttps://jcom.sissa.it/article/pubid/JCOM_1902_2020_L01/, he makes this claim:

No pseudoscience TV series had enjoyed such high ratings since In Search of… In the third season (2011), the hitherto hypothesis of alien intervention was upgraded to an undisputable fact.

Apparently this seems to be one of the motivations for the Amazing Randy to start his career and the apparent rise of our fake news world today.
This would have been during DCP's formative years. I wonder if this influenced him?

[Marcus]

I thought I was done with quotes for a while, but this doozy of a nonsensical argument by Peterson is just bizarre.

16 hours ago edited
gemli: "True claims are those that are acknowledged by all rational observers."

That's a transparently ridiculous assertion, and an obviously false one.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average will either be higher on 30 March than it was today, or it will be lower. That is, it is either true or false that the DJIA will be higher on 30 March than it was today.

At this very moment, many rational and very dedicated investment analysts and investors believe that the DJIA will be higher. At this very moment, too, many rational and very dedicated investment analysts and investors believe that it will be lower. They are staking large amounts of money on the DJIA number for 30 March. The expectation of one faction will turn out to have been true, while that of the other will prove to have been false.

Is DCP arguing here that predictions of a future event are the same thing as the "true claims" gemli referred to?

...Few if any rational observers living in the eastern hemisphere in AD 250 believed that there was an enormous land mass (today's North and South America) in an opposite hemisphere. But the fact that such a land mass existed was true, nonetheless.

Few if any people other than the Maori knew in 1500 that the islands that we know today as New Zealand existed, and the Maori didn't know that Europe or the Americas existed. Nevertheless, the islands of New Zealand existed, as did the Americas and Europe.

DCP had to go back a millenia or two for this example.

I could multiply such counterexamples ad infinitum for an unlimited number of fields, including both science and everyday life. (Jack, who is rational, tells Bob not to call Frank because, he says, Frank is asleep by this hour. Bob, who is equally rational, thinks Frank is still awake. It is either true that Frank is asleep or it is false that he is asleep.)

Oh dear god. Opinions are now factual claims to this retired BYU professor.

However, since you plainly don't care about either logic or evidence, there's really no point in expending any further effort on the point...

Yes, I agree DCP should stop. He is just embarrassing himself. Logic is not his thing.

[Doctor Steuss]

I thought I was done with quotes for a while, but this doozy of a nonsensical argument by Peterson is just bizarre.

16 hours ago edited
gemli: "True claims are those that are acknowledged by all rational observers."

That's a transparently ridiculous assertion, and an obviously false one.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average will either be higher on 30 March than it was today, or it will be lower. That is, it is either true or false that the DJIA will be higher on 30 March than it was today.

At this very moment, many rational and very dedicated investment analysts and investors believe that the DJIA will be higher. At this very moment, too, many rational and very dedicated investment analysts and investors believe that it will be lower. They are staking large amounts of money on the DJIA number for 30 March. The expectation of one faction will turn out to have been true, while that of the other will prove to have been false.

Is DCP arguing here that predictions of a future event are the same thing as the "true claims" gemli referred to?

Curious that he didn't want to finish his analogy, and let it run out to March 30th.

Let's say that on the 30th, the number is higher. If there were some analysts who insisted that it was actually lower, would he still consider them to be "rational"? If they insisted, passionately, that $38,585 is a higher number than $40,693, would Dr. Peterson insist that this is a completely rational interpretation of the true realized number, and that people who think that a DIJA of $40K is less than a DIJA of $38K are perfectly rational in that belief?