midgley the Mormon opines on gemli's catholic upbringing

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

After all of that, and after hundreds of posts recently where Gemli refutes NDEs, the proprietor has put up another post really stretching things to score a point for religion via math,

Is that the one where Mr. Peterson claims to have read some heady book about an Indian mathematician when he was in 8th or 9th grade? Good Lord, my eyes rolled so hard I proceeded with a backflip routine that made Simone Biles look like a toddler on her first day at a gym. The sheer BS these lying assholes publish is astonishing - and they know they can get away with it *cough* Nibley *cough* stolen valor *cough* Midgley *cough* Russians blowing up an Army installation. They gon’ get they junk removed in the TK, yo.

- Doc

[Moksha]

Gemli has already won the war in terms of pointing out that religionists have not met the burden of proof in terms of metaphysical claims. LDS apologists feel a need to respond to this by their usual means: pretzelized logic and ad hominem attacks. Dr. Midgley adds an active imagination to his ad hominem attacks.

The best apologetic would just be to say, "We don't need no stinking proof".

[Gadianton]

After all, they secretly do believe with Bruce McConkie that Catholicism is "The Whore of the Earth" and "Church of the Devil" as the Book of Mormon teaches.

They might, but I don't know. I suspect they despise the greater majority of Church leaders, including McConkie, and are essentially in a apostasy. Midgley's slight was against "Chapel Catholics". He was suggesting that these nuns, who very likely also helped the poor and the sick in addition to teaching, were basically "trailer trash" because they practiced a simple faith. Midgley imagines a class of educated elite among the world's great "faith traditions" who all give each other -- other educated elitists -- a free pass on their conflicting beliefs. He even includes atheists, his Russian Jewish friend being the example, so long as they are "world religion" atheists, while at the same time being nice to him personally.

Their faith is one of fine dining, with an occasional Chalupa (wink wink), and they think fine diners should stick together. Mr. P expands things a little with his voracious appetite for pseudoscience and EV pop culture (the Chulupa?), which Midgley tolerates, but he wouldn't go there on his own.

Essentially, they see Gemli as "working class", and not allowed to disagree with them. Midge has no argument against Gemli. Sometimes he boasts about a lecture or two he gave on Karl Popper fifty years ago, suggesting that if Gemli were more familiar with Popper then he'd take the Witnesses seriously, which is totally absurd.

[Gadianton]

Is that the one where Mr. Peterson claims to have read some heady book about an Indian mathematician when he was in 8th or 9th grade? Good Lord, my eyes rolled so hard I proceeded with a backflip routine that made Simone Biles look like a toddler on her first day at a gym. The sheer B.S. these lying assholes publish is astonishing

You'll be delighted to learn that part 2 is now up.

The TL;DR version, as you folks in tune with the younger generation say: G. H. Hardy, the mathematician who 'discovered' Ramanujan (apparently) downplayed Ramanujan's religiosity, himself being a vocal atheist. Robert Kanigel, the guy writing the biography Mr. P is gushing over, says that Hardy is wrong, and that Ramanujan was quite spiritual, after the manner of his Hindu upbringing. Kanigel (apparently) makes the point that most people in society leaned to spirituality, and that Ramanujan's spiritual sentiments seem pretty normal for the time. Okay, sounds plausible. WTF cares? Ramanujan was a small-town guy with small-town thinking, and a whole lot of personal issues. The cost of that grade of brilliance, I guess. I hate to make the comparison as Ramanujan was a decent human being, but Ted Kaczynski is a great case study in how utterly shallow and childish the thinking of a great genius can be when in strays from numbers, and into anything political or religious. I mean, I wouldn't expect Ramanujan's spirituality or lack thereof in itself say anything one way or another about the case for god.

I found this by Mr. P hilarious:

J. E. Littlewood essentially surrenders in perplexity when trying to understand Ramanujan's thought process:

It goes without saying that he's trying to advance the case for the Mormon view of insight coming from the heavens, and as proof that intelligence is beyond the brain.

It's such a silly argument. First of all, to make this argument, doesn't it not then likely follow that if J. E. Littlewood understands the thought process of somebody, that the thought process is reducible to the brain? To make this case, you must make the case of almost-materialism, where most things are understandable in material terms. 99.9% of people would need to be more or less comprehensible, so that the .1% can be contrasted with the thinking of others and found to be unexplainable.

Morley, are you reading this? If so, I'm kind of curious what you think. I could be wrong here, but my gut feeling is that the "thought process" of anybody is pretty darn incomprehensible. How a normal six-year-old gets 2+4 = 4 I'd imagine is beyond what we can realistically say that we know. If we can get that far, from there to Ramanujan, what is that gap?

A nod to Dr. Moore's mention the other day: the apologists ought to view Alpha Go - The Movie. I assume they haven't done so, given their incredible lack of insight on these kinds of topics.

AI and machine learning may be a tad overrated in media, AI's are still severely limited when compared to humans, and neural nets aren't guaranteed to be much of an analogy to the way a human brain actually operates, but they are a consideration for the kinds of arguments Dr. P and company trade in.

In the video, Deep Mind, an analytics startup, took on the infamously open-ended game of Go, and built an AI to challenge, and ultimately defeat, the world's best Go players. The point here about AI is that it's not simply about out-processing humans. How a human gets from 2 + 2 to 4 might be incredibly deep and fascinating, but how a computer does it is trivial. It's so trivial, that by doing these operations very quickly, computers can outthink humans very easily for certain use-cases. Using neural nets is a little more interesting. Neural nets will come up with answers to questions that are unexpected, and then it takes significant application debugging to figure out what the "thought process" was. So in the movie, AlphaGo is up against the world's best Go player, and in one of the early games it makes a move that looks like a mistake, and gets a chuckle out of both the commentators and the world champ. As you'd expect, AlphaGo wins, and everybody ends up agreeing that the deciding point was that crazy move.

So here's the challenge: Let J. E. Littlewood study traditional games of Go and literature about Go for 5 years. Now let him view the games of AlphaGo against the world champ (from the movie). Would Littlewood be any less in awe about how AlphaGo figured out its revolutionizing moves than Ramanujan figuring out a really complicated factoring exercise? If Ramanujan had trained at Go instead of math, would the angels of heaven help Ramanujan win against the computer? If not, would Littlewood have to admit that the angels are also inspiring AlphaGo?

The most humorous aspect of Mr. P's insight, however, is imaging the angel's of heaven spending all this time inspiring this poor gifted kid with a hard life on obscure number theory rather than inspiring researchers of vaccines or horrible childhood illnesses.

[Physics Guy]

I'm disinclined to criticise Ramanujan in any way because I got my PhD from an integral he solved and I'm proud of that. I connected the Unruh effect to an obscure integral by Ramanujan and in my little world of theoretical physics that is treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.

Ramanujan really was a genius, and yet apparently also a religious believer of some sort. Any atheists who think that they are obviously right, such that only stupid people could possibly disagree with them, are clearly mistaken. They shouldn't need the example of Ramanujan to show this. Other examples are many.

Brilliant people have also been wrong about many things. The atheists may not be right obviously, but they may well nonetheless in fact be right. No number of brilliant people who disagreed with them will disprove this.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Well. I was friends with a devout Catholic who also happened to have earned his BA & MS in Nuc. Eng. from UCLA (valedictorian, by the way), and his PhD in the same field from MIT (NSF Fellow). He ended up creating some real Star Trek Vulcan Science Academy crap and basically travels the world like a goddamn physicist Johnny Appleseed planting science trees wherever he goes.

Welp.

I guess Elohim really did send an angel with a drawn sword to demand Joseph Smith have sex with teenagers and other men’s wives!

- Doc

[Lem]

Well. I was friends with a devout Catholic who also happened to have earned his BA & MS in Nuc. Eng. from UCLA (valedictorian, by the way), and his PhD in the same field from MIT (NSF Fellow). He ended up creating some real Star Trek Vulcan Science Academy crap and basically travels the world like a goddamn physicist Johnny Appleseed planting science trees wherever he goes.

Welp.

I guess Elohim really did send an angel with a drawn sword to demand Joseph Smith have sex with teenagers and other men’s wives!

- Doc

"planting science trees wherever he goes...." I love it.

[Gadianton]

Ramanujan really was a genius, and yet apparently also a religious believer of some sort. Any atheists who think that they are obviously right, such that only stupid people could possibly disagree with them, are clearly mistaken.

True, but could you provide an example of these? Even among arrogant atheists, I think the tendency is to go the Michael Shermer route and say that brilliant people believe silly things for psychological reasons. That may have been less true in the era of logical positivism -- AJ Ayer style atheists.

In fact, the name of the psychologist escapes me, but there's this one atheist psychologist who does videos meant to show how silly religious beliefs are, wasn't really my thing but it got linked here, and according to that guy, people with higher native intelligence tend to be predisposed to believing in the supernatural. So in actuality, it may be a matter of fact that believers on average, are smarter than non-believers.

Moving away from the pure talent spectrum, to the applied output spectrum, the work of intellectual atheists isn't necessarily that great either. I can't say that any of the New Atheists have really impressed me.

But then, I have to point out, that you yourself are in the same category I am, it's just your shock is limited to a small sub-section of the religious community, namely Mormonism and Scientologists. What if Ramanujan had been born in Ephraim Utah? I'm sure you'd still allow him to make your basic point, but you might not be as happy about it.

[Morley]

Morley, are you reading this? If so, I'm kind of curious what you think. I could be wrong here, but my gut feeling is that the "thought process" of anybody is pretty darn incomprehensible. How a normal six-year-old gets 2+4 = 4 I'd imagine is beyond what we can realistically say that we know.

I think you're most likely right, Dean. I'm certainly no expert, though. Psychology was my aborted, first attempt at a doctorate, too many years ago. If I reflect a greater level of expertise than what I actually possess, it's because, too often, my mouth is bigger than my brain.

.

[Physics Guy]

When I said that religious believers like Ramanujan may be a counterexample to the naïve assumptions of some arrogant atheists, what I was really trying to say by that is that the religious beliefs of a few geniuses don't imply anything significant. I was trying to say something like, "Well, X does prove the world isn't flat," as a backhanded way of saying that it doesn't tell us anything that most of us didn't already know.

It's true that I'd be more appalled by Ramanujan having been a Mormon or a Scientologist than a devout Brahmin. Touché. But I'm not exactly happy about the beliefs Ramanujan did have. If he could have relaxed his dietary rules he might have lived longer.

Regarding J.E. Littlewood and Ramanujan's mysterious thought processes: the guy who famously brought Ramanujan to Cambridge, G.H. Hardy, worked for years with both Littlewood and Ramanujan and discussed this in one of his books.

Hardy acknowledged that Littlewood was an "appreciably more powerful" mathematician than he was; I've also read that Littlewood was a more average-joe kind of guy than either Hardy or Ramanujan. So being brilliant doesn't necessarily mean making unfathomable mental leaps. It can mean making leaps that are perfectly clear in hindsight, but just making them faster than most people can.

Hardy agreed on the other hand that Ramanujan often did seem to make bizarre leaps. Many of Ramanujan's most famous theorems are weird answers to weird questions. Hardy assumed this was due to the fact that Ramanujan was a mathematical autodidact who had never been formally trained. Was that a good thing? Would formal training have killed Ramanujan's wonderfully free intuition and made him a dull normal thinker instead of a genius? Hardy considered that view but dismissed it as silly romanticism. It was a shame that Ramanujan hadn't been properly trained, Hardy thought. If Ramanujan had been properly trained, he would have done even better work than he did, and would not have wasted as much of his talent on weird trivia.

Hardy himself was a great mathematician and a famous eccentric. He was the one mathematician, out of the many to whom Ramanujan sent his screed of weird theorems, who saw the brilliance through the weirdness. So I figure his judgement on this is probably better than anyone else's. Ramanujan wasn't brilliant because he had an erratic way of thinking: he was so brilliant that he produced a lot of good work in spite of his erratic way of thinking.