A few weeks ago I e-mailed my wife's yahoo account, from my Google account, to ask her if a house we're buying has an alarm system. A few hours later I received an e-mailed advertisement from ADT in my Yahoo spam folder. How does this happen? Its not this one incident, my Yahoo spam generally tracks with what I've been e-mailing people about.
The answer to this question aside, I find Yahoo to be increasingly sleazy and malware-like. I hope that Yahoo can't make a comeback without cleaning up their act.
for a few weeks about ten years ago. I'm about 90% sure it was for Pearson. Some of the answers in the key weren't even right. When I tried to politely point this out I was punished for insubordination.
You are indeed wrong about the nature of my interest.
Fair enough. I'll try to tackle the first bit then.
If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we think, feel, or believe about him.
I'm not sure this is completely true. Certainly there is truth to it, but there is also a lot in my experience that says that what god is can not be completely decoupled or separated from what we think about god. In other words, god isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god.
Sorry, but you're presupposing that God only exists as a concept in our minds.
You characterized my thought as "God only exists as a concept in our minds". What I said was that god can't be completely separated from what we think about god, and isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god. Right or wrong, that isn't the same as saying that God is nothing more than a thought in our minds, and I took care to make that distinction.
The reason I don't regard God to be totally separate from people's thoughts about God, is it appears to me that people's thought's about God collectively have power such as they would attribute to God. But those thought-gods also lack the infallibility that people attribute to God. In other words, people's thoughts about God are not private mental models disconnected from the wider world, those thoughts actually influence destiny and can precipitate miracles. If we assume that all miracles must be either works of God, or else works of wholly evil demons, or else unreal hallucinations or fabrications, then that doesn't fit my experience or observation of other people's experiences at all well.
Let's posit that there is a perfect, infallible, universal God that is wholly independent of people's thoughts about God. I'm on board with that, at least as a reasonable hypothesis. But there are still also all these other thought-gods we deal with, and we make poor choices about them if we try to regard them as God. And yet God works through these mental gods, apparently, just as God often seems to work through events in general.
Jesus or Mary can't fairly be regarded as idols just because people pray to their images as they would to idols. In other words, when people relate to what they think of as God they are all to some degree relating to idols, but that's not all that they're doing.
You're right that my view on this has strong similarities with past semi-polytheistic views about God and gods. But I don't think you have the right impression if it seems that my view is "influenced" by those ideas, as if its purely an abstract, intellectual thing, or I found them more pleasing because I felt they allowed a desired degree of moral license or something. For me this is a matter of trying to make sense of my own experiences. I've had thousands of intuitions having to do with my own spiritual development, hundreds if not thousands of accurate premonitions, and have experienced numerous objectively verifiable miracles of various related types. This isn't academic, its an unavoidable part of my life that I have to deal with as intelligently as I can. The model in which my thoughts are internal and personal, and God is perfect and completely distinct from those, fails to accommodate my experiences. It just doesn't work. Moreover, when I look at the behavior of other people who have experiences similar to mine, and who try to interpret every mystic experience either as a message from God, a trick by the devil, or a meaningless random event, this has bad results. When the latter two hypotheses fail, they start regarding themselves as Chosen, and do conflate their thoughts with God, because of the god-like qualities that are present in many of those thoughts. They try to explain their mistakes in terms of "misunderstanding" a presumably perfect message from God. But this doesn't really work very well, because
I think you're guessing about what's contradictory or incompatible based on a fairly narrow set of possible word definitions. Most words on these subjects have a variety of closely related meanings, often none of which are quite adequate. I agree that you lack context to make more sense of that without me writing pages and pages of explanation though.
The reason I used the word god in many places instead of God, is I was trying to avoid connotations of the word God which are outside of what I experience.
If you think that there is unlikely to be anything of interest to learn from me, then it seems to me very unlikely that I can explain my thoughts to you or learn much from you either. If you're not very interested in understanding anything from me that's outside of what you already understand, you can't see the questions and issues that I actually have and find new relevant insight. Hence my reluctance to launch into a massive explanation of things that weren't clear. Based on past experience, its pretty much hopeless if there isn't that kind of openness on both sides. That's why I didn't post in response to "Lord Kelvin", for instance, though he responded to one of my posts anyway, and it went pretty much as well as you'd expect. Maybe I'm wrong about the nature of your interest, that was just my guess based on your first response, that you were approaching this mostly as someone would would teach other people, and the gap is just too big to overcome that.
Sorry, but you're presupposing that God only exists as a concept in our minds.
I'm not presupposing that and I don't believe that either. I'd go so far as to say that I know that God exists as more than a concept in our minds. And I don't presume to know very much, most things are working hypotheses for me.
Likewise with pretty much everything else you said in response. I appreciate the time you took, but its like we're having two different conversations. You don't seem to be speaking to any of my thoughts, you seem to be addressing other thoughts that you posit that I have but which I don't have. I don't think that's necessarily your fault, maybe our experiential background is just too different, and of course I didn't express myself perfectly. I may also speculate that you have an ideological ax to grind which only permits me to have one of a selection of possible viewpoints, so you've tried to shoehorn me into the one that I appear to fit most closely. That would just be speculation, and I'm sure it wouldn't be entirely accurate. It does seems rather presumptuous to me though for you to judge my thoughts as promising or not promising, or confused or not confused, when I've attempted to express only a tiny, tiny portion of the thought I have on this subject, without much explanatory context, and none of it appears to have made much sense to you. Generally speaking, in my experience, when someone else says something that doesn't appear to make complete sense, its as likely that you haven't understood them as it is that their thought doesn't actually make sense. Usually its a mix of both. Part of communication and part of learning is teasing out the gem of what makes sense from all the confusion and misunderstanding. I don't see much if any of that happening here though. Not enough to give me hope that trying harder would yield better results at this point anyway.
Are you certain God cannot be usefully modeled as random?
Are you certain God cannot be usefully modeled as random?
I'm certain that people's beliefs about the nature of God can not usefully be modeled as random.
I'm certain that not all results commonly attributed to God can accurately be modeled as random.
And I'm certain that its not useful to conflate the two, unless the goal is to reach a desired conclusion using a false argument.
Its quite reasonable not to believe in God if you do not have evidence that God exists. It is not reasonable to believe strongly that all results that can in some context be usefully modeled as random are also random in an absolute sense, or that its impossible to discover them to be not random just because they can't be controlled easily enough to be studied effectively in a laboratory setting.
I don't understand this discussion at all. Statistics has to do with events that can be usefully modeled as random. Beliefs about god are not even remotely random, they are strongly correlated and biased by reasoning, experience, and all kinds of things.
I would argue that the 'consensus' ideas about god are largely wrong. But not because they're a vanishingly small random sample of some much larger set of falsehoods that contains only one vanishingly small truth. They're wrong because they're inconsistent with experience and internally inconsistent with themselves. They're as wrong as Aristotle's ideas about motion. It doesn't at all follow though that no knowledge of god is possible just because people haven't brought it very well into focus yet.
Hi. If you haven't exhausted your enthusiasm for arguing about this, maybe you'll find me more entertaining than the other guy....
If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we think, feel, or believe about him.
I'm not sure this is completely true. Certainly there is truth to it, but there is also a lot in my experience that says that what god is can not be completely decoupled or separated from what we think about god. In other words, god isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god.
Obviously we can't just make up anything we want to about god and expect it to make sense. And maybe almost as obviously, we're not presently capable of making up anything about god that does completely make sense. But I'm not sure that the question "what is god like?" has an answer that's completely distinct from "what is god like,for us?", and the answer to the second question is interdependent with our thoughts about god. It doesn't seem to me that there is a completely clean distinction that can be made between 'god' and 'idol'. Most people assume, for instance, that scripture is either inspired by god or not, and if it is inspired by god, then any problems it has must be errors in interpretation. This assumption doesn't not fit my experience and observation well at all.
the reason suffering exists is a very tough question. The basic answer is that we live in a fallen world.
If you look at the hunger, violence and fear that afflicts men, it has very deep roots in the natural world. One way to try to square that with the idea that "the fall" is something that man did, is to make a fetish out of moral ignorance. In other words, assume that these afflictions are problems for us only because of our thoughts about them and our capacity to grapple with them. Or another approach is to assume that "the fall" has retroactive effects, that natural history looks a lot different post-fall than it would otherwise. This seems to me to be a reasonable thought. However, if history is greatly changed, then man is greatly changed too. In which case the thought that it was 'man' as we conceive of ourselves who fell is a bit of a fallacy.
Clearly our perceptions are colored by our 'fallen' condition. So is the perception that any other condition is possible also a result of our condition? In other words, maybe there's no internally consistent way to make an ecosystem work without misery. And one form that takes is a mistaken belief that something better is possible. Is the possibility of redemption one of those things we are mistaken about? For all the talk of man's arrogance, it seems awfully arrogant to me to call something The Truth because we have written it down in a black bound book with really thin paper. The universe is very, very big, apparently, and very old. Is it reasonable to suppose that nature works in a radically different way on countless other worlds, and that only our world is fallen? And if other worlds are fallen too, is it not arrogant to suppose that after a few thousand years of puzzling on the problem our prophets know the solution? If there were a solution, would not the problem have already been solved, with our world healed from the end to the beginning? You and I do not choose this, the condition we were born into. We can pretend, but it clearly is not a matter of exercise of free will, not for us, not now. Who do we call those who do have that free will, in whatever scope that they reside in? In what sense can they be thought of as 'us', and in what sense are they gods?
Its clear to me that the ways in which people think about the world, and the way that nature appears to work, is very limited in comparison to what it is potentially. But are fundamentally different moral dynamics possible? I think so. Are they common? Maybe we have no way to know that. There does seem to me to be some cause for optimism though. Its pretty clear to
Maybe another possible area of confusion is that oil and gas companies use big computers for things other than seismic imaging. For instance, linear programming for refinery planning.
There was an old woman who swallowed a goat For spiderweb rope, she swallowed a goat She swallowed the goat to protect us from the dangers of climate change....
I think there are still big unexplored frontiers, people just don't know where to look for them because they don't lend themselves to the mathematical tools that were so successful in the 19th and 20th centuries.
For example, raja and jnana yoga are half nonsense, but not all nonsense. There's some remarkable stuff there that does not have pat psychological or physiological explanations, if you work at it a bit and can cut though some of the crap.
I don't think scientists have finished figuring out all the implications of quantum mechanics either. Apparently a lot of people, including many physicists, think that Schrodinger's cat is a metaphor for something that only happens at a microscopic level, or for coherent wave-functions. I'm pretty sure its not. Sometimes it seems to me that scientists get so caught up with being an expert at something, after the incredibly hard work they've put in, and stop recognizing anything as real unless it is already described by their models.
Things that can't be controlled well in a laboratory setting, or modeled with functions and well defined probabilities, are really hard to study. But that doesn't mean that no such things are real, or that they won't ever be understood better. Hyperbolic geometry led to Einstein's theories of relativity. Quantum mechanics would not have been possible with the statistical ideas of a few hundred years earlier. People keep hammering away with the same types of ideas, applied in ever more complex ways, because they worked so well before. But I think we'll get through this period of consolidation, exploiting what we've discovered, for better or for worse. There is still potential for more revolutions eventually.
The percentage of the population in the US that is Muslim is much, much smaller than in countries like India that have a problem. If the US were 15% Muslim, and they were concentrated in one region that could plausibly be made into an Islamic state, then it would be a different story.
Of course other factors like education level and economic opportunity make a difference too, but even aside from that the situations aren't comparable.
Historically Buddhism is pretty screwed up too, in contrast to the picture of it that most westerners are familiar with. It would be like judging Christianity based on perceptions of Quakers or Unitarians. Although modern Islam is quite a bit more violent, it doesn't appear to me that modern day Christianity is remarkably more violent or less tolerant than Buddhism in its most common forms, or that the past evils of Christianity are notably worse. The Dali Lama has good PR, but I think he deserves at least as much scorn as the Pope, for pretty much the same reasons.
I agree completely. This is one reason I insist my kids put down the video games after a few hours a week and go do something. Modern kids are restricted by their parents, and their parents are restricted by ridiculous laws. But most modern kids aren't inclined to go out and explore of their own volition either, they'd rather stay in and watch videos or play on the computer all day.
I think that reasonable people can differ about what kind of society they want to live in.
Personally, I prefer honest confrontation over false or imposed consensus. And I find it depressing that so few people are willing to fight any more, that they look to authority to protect them. They seem to have no spirit, no honor. On the other hand, when I was growing up there was a lot of gratuitous cruelty, neighborhood kids trapping and tortuously killing animals for entertainment for example. Maybe its good if there is less of that sort of thing now.
In my observation, the tendency to allow feelings and desires to trump facts doesn't correlate strongly with the hyper-feminization of our society. The macho, right-wing, Ted Nugent types do it at least as much, they just fudge the facts differently to fit a different desired worldview. Race perceptions would be one example. Many 'progressive' people are loathe to acknowledge that there are statistical differences between different ethnic groups, many of them biologically based. On the other side, people pretend that oppressed groups suffer primarily because of their own genetic or cultural deficiencies, and ignore the extent to which they have been fucked over by a more powerful majority. Neither side deals with the subject honestly.
Aggression and courage are related, obviously, but aren't quite the same thing. I don't think that disliking brutality, both real and pretend, is the same as becoming a pansy. Those aren't the only two directions we can develop in. I don't like porn that depicts women being raped, and don't think that its possible to habitually get off on such without it distorting one's perceptions of women. I don't think my view of this makes me less of a man. The same kind of thing applies to other pretend violence.
I think these video-game-violence/. threads are mostly an exercise in rationalization and justification, not an effort towards understanding the nuances of the issue.
If you play violent video games, you have violent images and patterns in your mind which you are reinforcing by repetition. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing isn't easy to answer, since as omnivores we already have such patterns hard-wired in, and expressing an instinct in a relatively harmless way can be better than suppressing it. But there's absolutely no doubt that violent gaming affects a person's thinking. And the barrier that separates 'pretend' from 'real' is never completely impermeable.
Almost anyone who has kids can see the addictive and adverse effects of gaming. As with candy, some kids will limit themselves to a healthy level without parental intervention, but in my experience and observation those kids are the exception.
Note that I'm not making an argument for any kind of government regulation, or saying that nobody should play violent video games in moderation.
Most electromagnetics applications that I have experience with don't actually need double precision, but scientists tend to use double precision anyway because they don't want to hassle with making sure that numerical issues aren't hurting them with single precision. If you have the time, you can try to characterize how much precision you need, and write your application mostly in single precision, with double precision in any critical places that require it. Often the measurement errors in the data you're working on are much larger than the errors introduced with a judicious use of single precision. Most people don't want to mess with this, they want to work on the scientific problem, not the digital implementation problem. But if speed performance is really important, you can often get better performance with single precision without sacrificing accuracy.
I think its worth discerning differences between how a theology dresses itself up and what that theology actually does. Central to Christianity is the idea that people who are 'in' the religion, by virtue of their faith in Jesus and his sacraments, gain everlasting life, in contrast to others who justly perish. Christian theology also says that people should treat others the way they would like to be treated, but its John 3:16 that is the core idea of Christianity as a religion. A Christian may believe that a good Christian should treat people charitably, but in their hearts how much sense does it really make to do that when in God's judgment people are saved or damned according to their belief in a claim about the sacrifice of Jesus? Of course Christianity can't be held accountable for all the failings of its followers, and my more than it can claim credit for all of their achievements. But many of those failings are rooted in the teaching itself, and its a cop-out to deny that there are any such connections.
I can't speak for atheists, particularly those who imagine that religion is the root of war and other evil in the world, or those who ridicule faith in anything that can't be manipulated in a lab setting. But speaking for myself, its half-truths and lies being bandied about as Revealed Truth that I most of all have a problem with, my disagreement is most definitely in a philosophical realm. And I'm not singling out Christianity. Tibetan Buddhism for example, with its pantheons of demons, is in my view essentially a superstitious protection racket with good marketing. All the talk of virtue remains little more than talk so long as the core teaching of attainment is dishonest and considered out of bounds for reasoned criticism.
The physical equivalent of indirect and dishonest is stealth, and that appears to be pretty much the standard predatory approach in the rest of nature also.
To me its all the same patterns in different forms, physical or mental doesn't change the character of it. Our intelligence gives us enough power that our predatory inclinations have larger scale implications. So we have to find an intelligent solution. We can't save ourselves by becoming more like other animals again, we can't crawl back into the womb.
I think the bad side of GMO isn't so much that they'll have an accident, its more the way they'll relentlessly bend everything for narrow short term benefits. Sort of like how it took a half billion years for oil to accumulate in the earth and people are determined to pump it all out and burn it in a few hundred.
I agree that scientific types are generally unaware of how much is left out by our various kinds of mental models. They don't see that we're just skimming on the surface of what we can potentially be aware of. On the other hand, the less-scientific types seem to be inclined to just make shit up. It seems that everyone wants to possess an answer even where they have to fake one.
Fact: Humans invented greed, poverty, and in-balance of power, in nature, and in their culture.
From your list, this is the only one I think is wrong.
When your on the top of the pile, everyone else seems nice because they're trying to suck up to you. Humans are on top of the animal kingdom, and this is a primary reason other animals seem nice when interacting with humans. Watch how they treat the less powerful among themselves and it is every bit as unpleasant as the behavior of men. Both greed and cruelty are pervasive among animals also.
The supposed absence of 'wars' among other animals is only a matter of their smaller scale of social organization. At the level of colony or pack, genocidal wars are common, even routine.
I don't mean this at all as a justification for such behavior. Its just not true that the rest of nature is morally sane except for humanity having gone off the rails somehow.
I'm completely on the pro "data privacy" side of this debate, and I agree that the official US stance tends to be bullying. But it seems to me that the "US government has no business lobbying European government" argument leaves something important out. A government has a responsibility to its citizens to enforce or at least encourage fair trade practices. If Britons, for example, decide they want high protective tariffs, then certainly that is their right. But then US trade policy may need to be adjusted accordingly. To avoid a trade war, both nations need to understand how the other perceives and is likely to react to changes. Suppose the US delegation says, "if you implement policy X, that will dramatically increase the cost of American products in your country, in which case we're likely not going to be able to continue giving your products preferred treatment in the US." Is that a threat? If so its a completely reasonable one. And in cases when one nation exports a product that the second nation doesn't for the most part export, the first nation needs to represent the interests of the industries that are important to it.
The US government is more at the call of big money than it should be. And it needs to be more respectful of other nation's integrity and choices, and more concerned with fairness, with less of a 'might makes right' approach. But it still needs to communicate on behalf of US economic interests, since protecting those interests is one of the first responsibilities of government.
So where are all these bosses with "good management skills"? I haven't seen it since the early 90's. The long term effects of code that doesn't suck do not seem relevant to any manager's career goals, apparently.
Another path is to keep trying to do something with the PhD. I successfully made the transition from corrupt NASA/DOD contracting to an industry job that uses my education a little bit, so its not impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
A few weeks ago I e-mailed my wife's yahoo account, from my Google account, to ask her if a house we're buying has an alarm system. A few hours later I received an e-mailed advertisement from ADT in my Yahoo spam folder. How does this happen? Its not this one incident, my Yahoo spam generally tracks with what I've been e-mailing people about.
The answer to this question aside, I find Yahoo to be increasingly sleazy and malware-like. I hope that Yahoo can't make a comeback without cleaning up their act.
the sound of vibrating klein bottle
for a few weeks about ten years ago. I'm about 90% sure it was for Pearson. Some of the answers in the key weren't even right. When I tried to politely point this out I was punished for insubordination.
You are indeed wrong about the nature of my interest.
Fair enough. I'll try to tackle the first bit then.
If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we think, feel, or believe about him.
I'm not sure this is completely true. Certainly there is truth to it, but there is also a lot in my experience that says that what god is can not be completely decoupled or separated from what we think about god. In other words, god isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god.
Sorry, but you're presupposing that God only exists as a concept in our minds.
You characterized my thought as "God only exists as a concept in our minds". What I said was that god can't be completely separated from what we think about god, and isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god. Right or wrong, that isn't the same as saying that God is nothing more than a thought in our minds, and I took care to make that distinction.
The reason I don't regard God to be totally separate from people's thoughts about God, is it appears to me that people's thought's about God collectively have power such as they would attribute to God. But those thought-gods also lack the infallibility that people attribute to God. In other words, people's thoughts about God are not private mental models disconnected from the wider world, those thoughts actually influence destiny and can precipitate miracles. If we assume that all miracles must be either works of God, or else works of wholly evil demons, or else unreal hallucinations or fabrications, then that doesn't fit my experience or observation of other people's experiences at all well.
Let's posit that there is a perfect, infallible, universal God that is wholly independent of people's thoughts about God. I'm on board with that, at least as a reasonable hypothesis. But there are still also all these other thought-gods we deal with, and we make poor choices about them if we try to regard them as God. And yet God works through these mental gods, apparently, just as God often seems to work through events in general.
Jesus or Mary can't fairly be regarded as idols just because people pray to their images as they would to idols. In other words, when people relate to what they think of as God they are all to some degree relating to idols, but that's not all that they're doing.
You're right that my view on this has strong similarities with past semi-polytheistic views about God and gods. But I don't think you have the right impression if it seems that my view is "influenced" by those ideas, as if its purely an abstract, intellectual thing, or I found them more pleasing because I felt they allowed a desired degree of moral license or something. For me this is a matter of trying to make sense of my own experiences. I've had thousands of intuitions having to do with my own spiritual development, hundreds if not thousands of accurate premonitions, and have experienced numerous objectively verifiable miracles of various related types. This isn't academic, its an unavoidable part of my life that I have to deal with as intelligently as I can. The model in which my thoughts are internal and personal, and God is perfect and completely distinct from those, fails to accommodate my experiences. It just doesn't work. Moreover, when I look at the behavior of other people who have experiences similar to mine, and who try to interpret every mystic experience either as a message from God, a trick by the devil, or a meaningless random event, this has bad results. When the latter two hypotheses fail, they start regarding themselves as Chosen, and do conflate their thoughts with God, because of the god-like qualities that are present in many of those thoughts. They try to explain their mistakes in terms of "misunderstanding" a presumably perfect message from God. But this doesn't really work very well, because
I think you're guessing about what's contradictory or incompatible based on a fairly narrow set of possible word definitions. Most words on these subjects have a variety of closely related meanings, often none of which are quite adequate. I agree that you lack context to make more sense of that without me writing pages and pages of explanation though.
The reason I used the word god in many places instead of God, is I was trying to avoid connotations of the word God which are outside of what I experience.
If you think that there is unlikely to be anything of interest to learn from me, then it seems to me very unlikely that I can explain my thoughts to you or learn much from you either. If you're not very interested in understanding anything from me that's outside of what you already understand, you can't see the questions and issues that I actually have and find new relevant insight. Hence my reluctance to launch into a massive explanation of things that weren't clear. Based on past experience, its pretty much hopeless if there isn't that kind of openness on both sides. That's why I didn't post in response to "Lord Kelvin", for instance, though he responded to one of my posts anyway, and it went pretty much as well as you'd expect. Maybe I'm wrong about the nature of your interest, that was just my guess based on your first response, that you were approaching this mostly as someone would would teach other people, and the gap is just too big to overcome that.
Sorry, but you're presupposing that God only exists as a concept in our minds.
I'm not presupposing that and I don't believe that either. I'd go so far as to say that I know that God exists as more than a concept in our minds. And I don't presume to know very much, most things are working hypotheses for me.
Likewise with pretty much everything else you said in response. I appreciate the time you took, but its like we're having two different conversations. You don't seem to be speaking to any of my thoughts, you seem to be addressing other thoughts that you posit that I have but which I don't have. I don't think that's necessarily your fault, maybe our experiential background is just too different, and of course I didn't express myself perfectly. I may also speculate that you have an ideological ax to grind which only permits me to have one of a selection of possible viewpoints, so you've tried to shoehorn me into the one that I appear to fit most closely. That would just be speculation, and I'm sure it wouldn't be entirely accurate. It does seems rather presumptuous to me though for you to judge my thoughts as promising or not promising, or confused or not confused, when I've attempted to express only a tiny, tiny portion of the thought I have on this subject, without much explanatory context, and none of it appears to have made much sense to you. Generally speaking, in my experience, when someone else says something that doesn't appear to make complete sense, its as likely that you haven't understood them as it is that their thought doesn't actually make sense. Usually its a mix of both. Part of communication and part of learning is teasing out the gem of what makes sense from all the confusion and misunderstanding. I don't see much if any of that happening here though. Not enough to give me hope that trying harder would yield better results at this point anyway.
The double quote was a cut and paste screw-up after I had to log in again.
Fitting that you dismiss my other statement as meaningless or irrelevant when you don't immediately understand it.
Are you certain God cannot be usefully modeled as random?
Are you certain God cannot be usefully modeled as random?
I'm certain that people's beliefs about the nature of God can not usefully be modeled as random.
I'm certain that not all results commonly attributed to God can accurately be modeled as random.
And I'm certain that its not useful to conflate the two, unless the goal is to reach a desired conclusion using a false argument.
Its quite reasonable not to believe in God if you do not have evidence that God exists. It is not reasonable to believe strongly that all results that can in some context be usefully modeled as random are also random in an absolute sense, or that its impossible to discover them to be not random just because they can't be controlled easily enough to be studied effectively in a laboratory setting.
I don't understand this discussion at all. Statistics has to do with events that can be usefully modeled as random. Beliefs about god are not even remotely random, they are strongly correlated and biased by reasoning, experience, and all kinds of things.
I would argue that the 'consensus' ideas about god are largely wrong. But not because they're a vanishingly small random sample of some much larger set of falsehoods that contains only one vanishingly small truth. They're wrong because they're inconsistent with experience and internally inconsistent with themselves. They're as wrong as Aristotle's ideas about motion. It doesn't at all follow though that no knowledge of god is possible just because people haven't brought it very well into focus yet.
Hi. If you haven't exhausted your enthusiasm for arguing about this, maybe you'll find me more entertaining than the other guy....
If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is, regardless of what we think, feel, or believe about him.
I'm not sure this is completely true. Certainly there is truth to it, but there is also a lot in my experience that says that what god is can not be completely decoupled or separated from what we think about god. In other words, god isn't totally distinct from our thoughts about god.
Obviously we can't just make up anything we want to about god and expect it to make sense. And maybe almost as obviously, we're not presently capable of making up anything about god that does completely make sense. But I'm not sure that the question "what is god like?" has an answer that's completely distinct from "what is god like ,for us?", and the answer to the second question is interdependent with our thoughts about god. It doesn't seem to me that there is a completely clean distinction that can be made between 'god' and 'idol'. Most people assume, for instance, that scripture is either inspired by god or not, and if it is inspired by god, then any problems it has must be errors in interpretation. This assumption doesn't not fit my experience and observation well at all.
the reason suffering exists is a very tough question. The basic answer is that we live in a fallen world.
If you look at the hunger, violence and fear that afflicts men, it has very deep roots in the natural world. One way to try to square that with the idea that "the fall" is something that man did, is to make a fetish out of moral ignorance. In other words, assume that these afflictions are problems for us only because of our thoughts about them and our capacity to grapple with them. Or another approach is to assume that "the fall" has retroactive effects, that natural history looks a lot different post-fall than it would otherwise. This seems to me to be a reasonable thought. However, if history is greatly changed, then man is greatly changed too. In which case the thought that it was 'man' as we conceive of ourselves who fell is a bit of a fallacy.
Clearly our perceptions are colored by our 'fallen' condition. So is the perception that any other condition is possible also a result of our condition? In other words, maybe there's no internally consistent way to make an ecosystem work without misery. And one form that takes is a mistaken belief that something better is possible. Is the possibility of redemption one of those things we are mistaken about? For all the talk of man's arrogance, it seems awfully arrogant to me to call something The Truth because we have written it down in a black bound book with really thin paper. The universe is very, very big, apparently, and very old. Is it reasonable to suppose that nature works in a radically different way on countless other worlds, and that only our world is fallen? And if other worlds are fallen too, is it not arrogant to suppose that after a few thousand years of puzzling on the problem our prophets know the solution? If there were a solution, would not the problem have already been solved, with our world healed from the end to the beginning? You and I do not choose this, the condition we were born into. We can pretend, but it clearly is not a matter of exercise of free will, not for us, not now. Who do we call those who do have that free will, in whatever scope that they reside in? In what sense can they be thought of as 'us', and in what sense are they gods?
Its clear to me that the ways in which people think about the world, and the way that nature appears to work, is very limited in comparison to what it is potentially. But are fundamentally different moral dynamics possible? I think so. Are they common? Maybe we have no way to know that. There does seem to me to be some cause for optimism though. Its pretty clear to
Maybe another possible area of confusion is that oil and gas companies use big computers for things other than seismic imaging. For instance, linear programming for refinery planning.
Mashing the two previous posts....
There was an old woman who swallowed a goat
For spiderweb rope, she swallowed a goat
She swallowed the goat to protect us from the dangers of climate change....
Dang, doesn't rhyme.
Doesn't make any sense either.
I think there are still big unexplored frontiers, people just don't know where to look for them because they don't lend themselves to the mathematical tools that were so successful in the 19th and 20th centuries.
For example, raja and jnana yoga are half nonsense, but not all nonsense. There's some remarkable stuff there that does not have pat psychological or physiological explanations, if you work at it a bit and can cut though some of the crap.
I don't think scientists have finished figuring out all the implications of quantum mechanics either. Apparently a lot of people, including many physicists, think that Schrodinger's cat is a metaphor for something that only happens at a microscopic level, or for coherent wave-functions. I'm pretty sure its not. Sometimes it seems to me that scientists get so caught up with being an expert at something, after the incredibly hard work they've put in, and stop recognizing anything as real unless it is already described by their models.
Things that can't be controlled well in a laboratory setting, or modeled with functions and well defined probabilities, are really hard to study. But that doesn't mean that no such things are real, or that they won't ever be understood better. Hyperbolic geometry led to Einstein's theories of relativity. Quantum mechanics would not have been possible with the statistical ideas of a few hundred years earlier. People keep hammering away with the same types of ideas, applied in ever more complex ways, because they worked so well before. But I think we'll get through this period of consolidation, exploiting what we've discovered, for better or for worse. There is still potential for more revolutions eventually.
The percentage of the population in the US that is Muslim is much, much smaller than in countries like India that have a problem. If the US were 15% Muslim, and they were concentrated in one region that could plausibly be made into an Islamic state, then it would be a different story.
Of course other factors like education level and economic opportunity make a difference too, but even aside from that the situations aren't comparable.
Historically Buddhism is pretty screwed up too, in contrast to the picture of it that most westerners are familiar with. It would be like judging Christianity based on perceptions of Quakers or Unitarians. Although modern Islam is quite a bit more violent, it doesn't appear to me that modern day Christianity is remarkably more violent or less tolerant than Buddhism in its most common forms, or that the past evils of Christianity are notably worse. The Dali Lama has good PR, but I think he deserves at least as much scorn as the Pope, for pretty much the same reasons.
I agree completely. This is one reason I insist my kids put down the video games after a few hours a week and go do something. Modern kids are restricted by their parents, and their parents are restricted by ridiculous laws. But most modern kids aren't inclined to go out and explore of their own volition either, they'd rather stay in and watch videos or play on the computer all day.
I think that reasonable people can differ about what kind of society they want to live in.
Personally, I prefer honest confrontation over false or imposed consensus. And I find it depressing that so few people are willing to fight any more, that they look to authority to protect them. They seem to have no spirit, no honor. On the other hand, when I was growing up there was a lot of gratuitous cruelty, neighborhood kids trapping and tortuously killing animals for entertainment for example. Maybe its good if there is less of that sort of thing now.
In my observation, the tendency to allow feelings and desires to trump facts doesn't correlate strongly with the hyper-feminization of our society. The macho, right-wing, Ted Nugent types do it at least as much, they just fudge the facts differently to fit a different desired worldview. Race perceptions would be one example. Many 'progressive' people are loathe to acknowledge that there are statistical differences between different ethnic groups, many of them biologically based. On the other side, people pretend that oppressed groups suffer primarily because of their own genetic or cultural deficiencies, and ignore the extent to which they have been fucked over by a more powerful majority. Neither side deals with the subject honestly.
Aggression and courage are related, obviously, but aren't quite the same thing. I don't think that disliking brutality, both real and pretend, is the same as becoming a pansy. Those aren't the only two directions we can develop in. I don't like porn that depicts women being raped, and don't think that its possible to habitually get off on such without it distorting one's perceptions of women. I don't think my view of this makes me less of a man. The same kind of thing applies to other pretend violence.
I think these video-game-violence /. threads are mostly an exercise in rationalization and justification, not an effort towards understanding the nuances of the issue.
If you play violent video games, you have violent images and patterns in your mind which you are reinforcing by repetition. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing isn't easy to answer, since as omnivores we already have such patterns hard-wired in, and expressing an instinct in a relatively harmless way can be better than suppressing it. But there's absolutely no doubt that violent gaming affects a person's thinking. And the barrier that separates 'pretend' from 'real' is never completely impermeable.
Almost anyone who has kids can see the addictive and adverse effects of gaming. As with candy, some kids will limit themselves to a healthy level without parental intervention, but in my experience and observation those kids are the exception.
Note that I'm not making an argument for any kind of government regulation, or saying that nobody should play violent video games in moderation.
Most electromagnetics applications that I have experience with don't actually need double precision, but scientists tend to use double precision anyway because they don't want to hassle with making sure that numerical issues aren't hurting them with single precision. If you have the time, you can try to characterize how much precision you need, and write your application mostly in single precision, with double precision in any critical places that require it. Often the measurement errors in the data you're working on are much larger than the errors introduced with a judicious use of single precision. Most people don't want to mess with this, they want to work on the scientific problem, not the digital implementation problem. But if speed performance is really important, you can often get better performance with single precision without sacrificing accuracy.
I think its worth discerning differences between how a theology dresses itself up and what that theology actually does. Central to Christianity is the idea that people who are 'in' the religion, by virtue of their faith in Jesus and his sacraments, gain everlasting life, in contrast to others who justly perish. Christian theology also says that people should treat others the way they would like to be treated, but its John 3:16 that is the core idea of Christianity as a religion. A Christian may believe that a good Christian should treat people charitably, but in their hearts how much sense does it really make to do that when in God's judgment people are saved or damned according to their belief in a claim about the sacrifice of Jesus? Of course Christianity can't be held accountable for all the failings of its followers, and my more than it can claim credit for all of their achievements. But many of those failings are rooted in the teaching itself, and its a cop-out to deny that there are any such connections.
I can't speak for atheists, particularly those who imagine that religion is the root of war and other evil in the world, or those who ridicule faith in anything that can't be manipulated in a lab setting. But speaking for myself, its half-truths and lies being bandied about as Revealed Truth that I most of all have a problem with, my disagreement is most definitely in a philosophical realm. And I'm not singling out Christianity. Tibetan Buddhism for example, with its pantheons of demons, is in my view essentially a superstitious protection racket with good marketing. All the talk of virtue remains little more than talk so long as the core teaching of attainment is dishonest and considered out of bounds for reasoned criticism.
Thanks
I prefer direct honest confrontation
The physical equivalent of indirect and dishonest is stealth, and that appears to be pretty much the standard predatory approach in the rest of nature also.
To me its all the same patterns in different forms, physical or mental doesn't change the character of it. Our intelligence gives us enough power that our predatory inclinations have larger scale implications. So we have to find an intelligent solution. We can't save ourselves by becoming more like other animals again, we can't crawl back into the womb.
I think the bad side of GMO isn't so much that they'll have an accident, its more the way they'll relentlessly bend everything for narrow short term benefits. Sort of like how it took a half billion years for oil to accumulate in the earth and people are determined to pump it all out and burn it in a few hundred.
I agree that scientific types are generally unaware of how much is left out by our various kinds of mental models. They don't see that we're just skimming on the surface of what we can potentially be aware of. On the other hand, the less-scientific types seem to be inclined to just make shit up. It seems that everyone wants to possess an answer even where they have to fake one.
Fact: Humans invented greed, poverty, and in-balance of power, in nature, and in their culture.
From your list, this is the only one I think is wrong.
When your on the top of the pile, everyone else seems nice because they're trying to suck up to you. Humans are on top of the animal kingdom, and this is a primary reason other animals seem nice when interacting with humans. Watch how they treat the less powerful among themselves and it is every bit as unpleasant as the behavior of men. Both greed and cruelty are pervasive among animals also.
The supposed absence of 'wars' among other animals is only a matter of their smaller scale of social organization. At the level of colony or pack, genocidal wars are common, even routine.
I don't mean this at all as a justification for such behavior. Its just not true that the rest of nature is morally sane except for humanity having gone off the rails somehow.
I'm completely on the pro "data privacy" side of this debate, and I agree that the official US stance tends to be bullying. But it seems to me that the "US government has no business lobbying European government" argument leaves something important out. A government has a responsibility to its citizens to enforce or at least encourage fair trade practices. If Britons, for example, decide they want high protective tariffs, then certainly that is their right. But then US trade policy may need to be adjusted accordingly. To avoid a trade war, both nations need to understand how the other perceives and is likely to react to changes. Suppose the US delegation says, "if you implement policy X, that will dramatically increase the cost of American products in your country, in which case we're likely not going to be able to continue giving your products preferred treatment in the US." Is that a threat? If so its a completely reasonable one. And in cases when one nation exports a product that the second nation doesn't for the most part export, the first nation needs to represent the interests of the industries that are important to it.
The US government is more at the call of big money than it should be. And it needs to be more respectful of other nation's integrity and choices, and more concerned with fairness, with less of a 'might makes right' approach. But it still needs to communicate on behalf of US economic interests, since protecting those interests is one of the first responsibilities of government.
So where are all these bosses with "good management skills"? I haven't seen it since the early 90's. The long term effects of code that doesn't suck do not seem relevant to any manager's career goals, apparently.
I've seen this work
Another path is to keep trying to do something with the PhD. I successfully made the transition from corrupt NASA/DOD contracting to an industry job that uses my education a little bit, so its not impossible.