As it was told to me, LTCM's big problem was that they stopped believing that they had a smart system, and started believing that they were smart themselves.
Alternately (from reading the Wikipedia article) it sounds like the arbitrage tricks they were using could only soak up so much cash. But investors kept pushing them to work their magic on more and more money.
All right, then make it a 0.1% tax on stocks that aren't held for at least a day.
No? How about a 0.01% tax on stocks that aren't held for at least an hour? A minute? Six seconds? At what point can we say "the market is functionally liquid?"
Anyhow, much of the need for liquidity stems from the volatility of the market itself. If you know a stock can lose half its value in six minutes, of course you want to be able to cash out in the next five.
The proposed tax wouldn't prohibit real, significant market movements. If you hear that the CEO of BP has just executed his board of directors in a gangland-style coup, or that he's ordered the capture of tens of millions of seagulls to employ in soaking up the crude before it reaches shore, a 1% tax wouldn't keep anybody from selling.
And, yes, you can tell the difference between a good human trader and a bot. The trader over there that just made 200 trades in the last minute? A bot.
There a significant difference between "only allowing things that are beneficial to the economy" and "forbidding things which are disastrous to the economy." You're saying that you don't want to give up your freedom to do things that cause enormous problems for others.
Lightning-fast trading doesn't just fail to benefit the economy. The unspoken other half of the sentence is, "while causing wild swings in the market and bringing grotesque riches to those who engage in it."
If we were talking about something that both produced no obvious benefits and caused no obvious harm, then... never mind. We wouldn't be talking about it in the first place.
People who start yammering about "our economic liberties" the moment anyone dares breathe the word "tax" make freedom look, well, petty and crass.
There's some truth there. But I think that betting that Company A is going to make good decisions and deliver value is very different from betting that the market will react a certain way to a certain piece of news in the next five minutes. One is betting on the company, the other is betting on the market itself (which is only supposed to be a representation of the aggregate value of certain companies).
Government creates monopolies so that they'll get campaign contributions from said monopolies? Tell me another one.
Tell me that, without government involvement, no corporation would ever engage in union-busting.
Tell me that, if we just got rid of the MMS altogether, and allowed wildcat oil rigs to poke holes anywhere anytime, oil companies would self-regulate.
Tell me that corporations would have ended child labor on their own, because they knew it was in their long-term financial interest for those kids to be in school.
Tell me that I would be happier if, rather than just being able to assume the water coming out of my tap is safe, I had to "develop a relationship" with the private company who owned the pipe to my house.
Tell me that we'd all be better off if government environmental and safety regulations were reduced down to Chinese standards or below.
Tell me the economy would really run more smoothly if it were only allowed to expand at the precise rate at which we mine gold from the ground.
Then tell me you're not a "useful idiot" for our overprivileged overseers.
As he said, "free" is not a boolean concept. And it's pretty clear that the market was much more stable and effective before the last three decades of deregulation were unleashed upon us. Reagan started it, and Bush I got to deal with the S&L bailouts. Clinton continued it, and we ended up with Enron. Bush put the pedal to the metal, and then we got this.
Now, if all that is irrelevant to your completely perfect, completely hypothetical "free market" system, then go right ahead. Just don't expect anyone to think your words have any applicability to the current situation.
Ah, yes, the "Government spending is always wasteful, while non-government spending is always efficient" hypothesis. Which, in the mind of the free market ideologue holds true even when the government is spending on scientific research and I'm spending my money on booze and hookers. Because she's going to make all sorts of scientific breakthroughs someday. She's only in the business to work her way through college.
The case you're trying to put together here just isn't compelling. I really doubt that a significant number of high schoolers are getting training in AutoCAD or Micros POS, and apparently the AutoCAD gap may not be long for this world anyways. But I do think it's telling that, when asked to come up with examples of critical Windows-only software, you replied with:
1) a CAD program that costs thousands of dollars per seat, which you'd be lucky to find on ten or twenty computers in even a well-funded high school.
2) a point of sale system designed to be usable by people who have never had meaningful interaction with computers.
I don't consider.NET a compelling argument. First, because Microsoft developed it specifically to keep software development tied to the Windows platform. Second, because I -- a Linux user for eight years before I finally lost my senses and bought a Mac a few months ago -- have never once found myself thinking, "Maybe I should try Mono so that I can try out NiftySuiteX."
By the same style of argumentation, you could say that if a high schooler aspires to a career where Macs seem especially strong, like graphical design, filmmaking, music composition, or web design and development, a school that requires a PC is hamstringing her future career prospects.
I speak from experience when I say that the "huge training costs" just don't exist. My work runs a Mac-only shop*, not because of some inherent superiority of the platform, but because we're a non-profit and somebody donated a metric buttload of Mac hardware to our parent organization about ten years ago. I've seen plenty of volunteers and staff come through over the years, and despite the fact that most of them have virtually no Mac experience, I've never seen these huge training costs you've been rambling about. It's not like you have to teach people how to use Finder. It's not like it takes weeks to say, "It's apple-v to paste and apple-c to copy**". All the major end-user concepts (desktop, file browser, drag-n-drop, trashcan, web browser, office suite, etc.) are cross-platform, and don't really require explanation. Nor have I seen a non-coding environment where people were expected to install their own software or otherwise maintain their own computers. That stuff falls either to a specialized IT group, or to some self-appointed guru.
What little burden exists is minuscule compared to the burden of teaching the specialized applications that proliferate in any office environment.
"Giant waste of time and money?" I doubt it. You'd be right to be torched that a high school would require parents to buy kids a laptop, and worse, an especially expensive type of laptop, and double-worse when you consider that it's a public high school. The one-laptop-per-child concept*** is an expensive boondoggle, unless they're doing something really innovative with those laptops. Most schools don't; they just use the laptops as adjuncts to the traditional model.
But I'm sorry, the idea that teaching kids on Macs puts them at some huge disadvantage in the job market still strikes me as unlikely, even laughable.
* Okay, except for that one Ubuntu box I installed for volunteers to use.
** I've decided that these are the only two shortcuts most people know. I've done everything in my power to popularize apple-f and apple-a, but you have to choose your battles.
*** As opposed to the One Laptop Per Child program, which I'm a big fan of.
I'll extend my previous challenge to you as well. Name these pieces of "Windows only" software that have no acceptable Mac substitutes, that you can say "kids need to learn to use this" without looking like a ninny.
The software that seems to fit the educational mission is increasingly interoperable. Hell, it's increasingly "on the web" or "in the cloud", where you can interface with it through any standards-compliant web browser*.
Windows has advantages in 3 areas:
1) Cheap crap 3rd party hardware that the manufacturer was too lazy to write a second driver for.
2) Game support.
3) Crappy Windows-only freeware.
But for 95% of what 95% of students are going to want to do, platform choice is pretty irrelevant. For everything else, there's Basecamp or virtualization software. So honestly, what are you talking about?
* Or, if you don't have one of those, IE might muddle through.
Really, that was a lot of keys tapped for nothing. You can say all you want about market share and security, but you're just avoiding the real issue, here: does one OS provide a definitively superior educational experience?
I would argue, no. If you disagree, name one skill -- just one -- that kids ought to learn, that can only be performed on a Windows PC. Or name an invaluable educational resource that can only be accessed by Windows users.
The only place where Windows has a huge advantage is games, and if anything that's a point in Mac's favor for this particular story. Windows, Linux, and OSX are all pretty similar experiences nowadays. Once you've accepted the school's argument that they ought to standardize on something, there's not much difference between them.
Re: Null hypothesis. First, wanax first used the term "null hypothesis", not me. Your response conflates the two of us.
Second, his usage is still more appropriate than your own. "There is no God" is a workable hypothesis, one for which tests can be framed. "We do not know whether or not there is a God" is not a workable hypothesis. Rather, it is a statement of fact.
Third, you're arguing as though "the null hypothesis" has some sort of rhetorical force. That's wrong. If you fail to disprove the null hypothesis, that doesn't mean "Science says there is no God." It means we fall back to what we already knew, that "we don't know whether or not there is a God." So long as you don't claim that science has your back, you can believe what you like on the matter.
Fourth, you can frame a hypothesis without proposing a test for the hypothesis. That's not "gaming the statistical method," unless you believe that the mere formulation of a hypothesis lends it some credibility.
Finally, your so-called "semantic trick":
>> To demonstrate the semantic trick that you are playing, let me apply the same trick:
>> I hypothesise that no deity exists. I sample, there is no evidence to support the hypothesis in the available data. Therefore the default hypothesis: that one or more deities exist, is proven.
I used no such semantic trick, because I never claimed statistical support for either of the two hypotheses.
You're reversing the function of the null and alternative hypotheses. You design the test in terms of the alternate hypothesis*, with the null hypothesis serving only the purpose of providing a benchmark of statistical significance. In your version of "the semantic trick," did your "no evidence to support X" also serve as "evidence to support Y?" If so, that's the way it's supposed to work, and I might have to lend some credence to your "there is a God" hypothesis.
If not, exactly what data were you collecting? You could count the number of seeds in a pinecone, or the number of chopsticks in the dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant, or the responses to the question, "Do goldfish have ears?" None of the evidence would support either hypothesis.
Or, more succinctly, "Huh?"
* Your use of the term "default hypothesis" seems to be novel. Everywhere on the Internet I can find it used, it appears to be a synonym for the null hypothesis.
Would you please stop attributing other people's posts to me? This whole time you've been acting as though all atheists are the same atheist. Which explains why arguing with you is so confusing.
Weak atheists do not claim that God doesn't exist. They claim that they do not believe in God, and that there is no reason to do so. The only way you can get from there to "God doesn't exist" is by conflating strong and weak atheism.
>> I don't accept the premise that I want to convince you of anything other than a disproof of the doctrines of atheism.
You're still not getting it. *There is no single doctrine of atheism.* Your arguments are only relevant to a tiny subset of atheists.
>> The problem you face is that you live in a post-modernist society where the vast majority of people accept that a deity could exist, but do not ascribe particular properties to the theoretical deity.
That is pure, unmitigated crap. That may or may not be your belief, but the vast majority of believers have a very specific conception of what God is and how He intervenes in the affairs of mankind. Now, these beliefs are often compatible with a modernistic, scientific worldview. But almost nobody believes in your Null God, because it provides zero interest or emotional appeal.
>> If atheism cannot construct a convincing argument against the deity that these post modernists choose to believe in, then it will never be lifted from obscurity.
I don't have a lot of emotional investment in whether atheism gains a large number of adherents, though I am pleased to see how non-religion has flourished over the last twenty years.
Where are all these mythical "pet projects" that disappear government spending while delivering no value to anyone? I mean, besides Iraq.
Polls show that people are strongly in favor of "cutting government pork," but when you start listing specific areas of government spending, they more often want spending preserved or increased. The only area of spending where large majorities of Americans say "cut spending" is foreign aid, and I think that's mostly because people believe we spend vastly more on it than we actually do.
If I were running things, I would put 20% of the taxes towards energy alternatives, and send the rest back to taxpayers. Shifting money from one program to another is much easier than reducing the size of the checks being mailed to your constituents.
You could probably just move the ceiling from "money invested" to "money invested plus all but $20M of your wealth." That would protect small and medium-sized investors while putting real pressure on the decision makers.
It's hard to predict alternate timelines, but let's say that the Cuban Missile Crisis alone had a 10% chance of actually leading to a full-scale nuclear exchange that left hundreds of millions dead. How does that possibility stack up against the wars that might have been averted by fear of nuclear weapons?
How do we weigh an unlikely-but-catastrophic outcome against the more likely possibility of more frequent and destructive conventional warfare? I think that a nuclear exchange should be weighed much more heavily than merely taking the expected body count and dividing by 10, because it might set back civilization as a whole in a way that conventional warfare would not.
I know, we're getting off topic. But I disagree with the conclusions you've implied.
It's "attack the messenger," which is certainly poor sportsmanship. But ad hominem is a logical fallacy, therefore in order to make it a true ad hominem you have to wind up the dangling argument with, "and because you have no credibility, your conclusion is wrong!" A person can be correctly said to have zero credibility, while simultaneously saying something that is correct.
Or perhaps, because the logic is implied, the ad hominem is also implied. I really don't remember how it works.
>> Now, it wouldn't be accurate to call me a Christian, but I have come to appreciate the good Christianity has done for mankind, especially as I see what fills the same role in it's absence.
Cthulhu worship? C'mon, those guys aren't so bad. It's not Cthulhu's fault he gets so hungry in his tummy sometimes.
The issue I have with your reading is that it implies that the communications of God to humankind had to avoid advancing our scientific understanding in any way. Presumably, God had no problems with advancing our moral understanding, because so many people today say that we should take moral lessons from the Bible. But as for the scientific message, why did it have to be at the same time vague and wrong? What useful purpose did the misordering of events serve?
Miracles are unscientific by definition. That is, a truely miraculous event must not have a scientific explanation, because at the point that it does, there is no longer a true miracle to explain. It's just something that happened.
Now, unscientific only means "impossible" if you assume the materialist point of view. I believe that the laws of nature are all that there is. Religious people disagree. For them, it is possible to believe that miracles (in the strict sense of the term) can happen.
I think there is a high variance in how people approach the questions being offered. You might read one question, think of that one time when you were impatient with a friend's griping, and lowball your answer as a result. Another person might remember that one time he gave a homeless person a buck, and grant himself a high score despite a spotty record of empathetic action.
Since the questions seem to be skewed to make empathy sound like an appealing trait, it may also be that some people mentally try to compensate for this, while others answer the questions specifically in the hopes that it will say something flattering about them.
It does seem like the test lacks subtlety. I'd be interested in hearing what the designers were thinking when they wrote it.
>> 1. That the null hypothesis is that there is no deity. This is demonstrably false. The null hypothesis is that we don't know whether there is a deity or not.
You don't actually know what a null hypothesis is.* It sounds like you're interpreting it as, "how we should believe the world works in the absence of more evidence." What it actually means is, "I hypothesize that there is no (God|side effect caused by this drug|correlation between obesity and heart disease|whatever you're setting out to disprove)." The null hypothesis is the basis for what they call "statistically significant results."
Saying, "We don't know if there is a deity or not" is functionally equivalent to saying, "The null hypothesis -- there is no deity -- has not been disproven." "We don't know if there is a deity or not" isn't a hypothesis, much less a null one.
>> You are assuming that the deity or the proponents of the deity have some obligation to convince you. If they do not, then all you are doing is burning a strawman.
Nobody has any obligation to convince me of anything, so long as they have no say in how I live my life. But to the extent that they want their beliefs about the will of God to influence the laws I have to obey, the material that gets taught to children, or anything else, then It. Is. On.
I'm not interested in spending any more time debating your hypothetical believer with his untestable and unspecified beliefs about what may or may not be a deity. Like creme soda, it's unpleasant after the first sip.
* No worries. For the longest time, I thought "passive-aggressive" meant bottling up your anger and taking abuse until you finally snapped. There are lots of phrases that we only think we understand.
I'd be more interested in knowing what religion doesn't.
As for the rest of it, You don't actually understand what atheism means. Anyhow, once people start asking me to disprove the existence of their Invisible Pink Unicorn, I consider them to have lost the debate. If you don't care what properties your deity embodies, so long as the resulting deity is "undisprovable", there is little reason to take you or your deity seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
As it was told to me, LTCM's big problem was that they stopped believing that they had a smart system, and started believing that they were smart themselves.
Alternately (from reading the Wikipedia article) it sounds like the arbitrage tricks they were using could only soak up so much cash. But investors kept pushing them to work their magic on more and more money.
They're not contradictory stories, I guess.
All right, then make it a 0.1% tax on stocks that aren't held for at least a day.
No? How about a 0.01% tax on stocks that aren't held for at least an hour? A minute? Six seconds? At what point can we say "the market is functionally liquid?"
Anyhow, much of the need for liquidity stems from the volatility of the market itself. If you know a stock can lose half its value in six minutes, of course you want to be able to cash out in the next five.
The proposed tax wouldn't prohibit real, significant market movements. If you hear that the CEO of BP has just executed his board of directors in a gangland-style coup, or that he's ordered the capture of tens of millions of seagulls to employ in soaking up the crude before it reaches shore, a 1% tax wouldn't keep anybody from selling.
And, yes, you can tell the difference between a good human trader and a bot. The trader over there that just made 200 trades in the last minute? A bot.
There a significant difference between "only allowing things that are beneficial to the economy" and "forbidding things which are disastrous to the economy." You're saying that you don't want to give up your freedom to do things that cause enormous problems for others.
Lightning-fast trading doesn't just fail to benefit the economy. The unspoken other half of the sentence is, "while causing wild swings in the market and bringing grotesque riches to those who engage in it."
If we were talking about something that both produced no obvious benefits and caused no obvious harm, then... never mind. We wouldn't be talking about it in the first place.
People who start yammering about "our economic liberties" the moment anyone dares breathe the word "tax" make freedom look, well, petty and crass.
How long before big trading companies start bribing news organizations to write news articles that spook the market into doing certain things.
Never mind. That ship has probably sailed. This will just make the market react more predictably.
There's some truth there. But I think that betting that Company A is going to make good decisions and deliver value is very different from betting that the market will react a certain way to a certain piece of news in the next five minutes. One is betting on the company, the other is betting on the market itself (which is only supposed to be a representation of the aggregate value of certain companies).
Government creates monopolies so that they'll get campaign contributions from said monopolies? Tell me another one.
Tell me that, without government involvement, no corporation would ever engage in union-busting.
Tell me that, if we just got rid of the MMS altogether, and allowed wildcat oil rigs to poke holes anywhere anytime, oil companies would self-regulate.
Tell me that corporations would have ended child labor on their own, because they knew it was in their long-term financial interest for those kids to be in school.
Tell me that I would be happier if, rather than just being able to assume the water coming out of my tap is safe, I had to "develop a relationship" with the private company who owned the pipe to my house.
Tell me that we'd all be better off if government environmental and safety regulations were reduced down to Chinese standards or below.
Tell me the economy would really run more smoothly if it were only allowed to expand at the precise rate at which we mine gold from the ground.
Then tell me you're not a "useful idiot" for our overprivileged overseers.
As he said, "free" is not a boolean concept. And it's pretty clear that the market was much more stable and effective before the last three decades of deregulation were unleashed upon us. Reagan started it, and Bush I got to deal with the S&L bailouts. Clinton continued it, and we ended up with Enron. Bush put the pedal to the metal, and then we got this.
Now, if all that is irrelevant to your completely perfect, completely hypothetical "free market" system, then go right ahead. Just don't expect anyone to think your words have any applicability to the current situation.
Ah, yes, the "Government spending is always wasteful, while non-government spending is always efficient" hypothesis. Which, in the mind of the free market ideologue holds true even when the government is spending on scientific research and I'm spending my money on booze and hookers. Because she's going to make all sorts of scientific breakthroughs someday. She's only in the business to work her way through college.
The case you're trying to put together here just isn't compelling. I really doubt that a significant number of high schoolers are getting training in AutoCAD or Micros POS, and apparently the AutoCAD gap may not be long for this world anyways. But I do think it's telling that, when asked to come up with examples of critical Windows-only software, you replied with:
1) a CAD program that costs thousands of dollars per seat, which you'd be lucky to find on ten or twenty computers in even a well-funded high school.
2) a point of sale system designed to be usable by people who have never had meaningful interaction with computers.
I don't consider .NET a compelling argument. First, because Microsoft developed it specifically to keep software development tied to the Windows platform. Second, because I -- a Linux user for eight years before I finally lost my senses and bought a Mac a few months ago -- have never once found myself thinking, "Maybe I should try Mono so that I can try out NiftySuiteX."
By the same style of argumentation, you could say that if a high schooler aspires to a career where Macs seem especially strong, like graphical design, filmmaking, music composition, or web design and development, a school that requires a PC is hamstringing her future career prospects.
I speak from experience when I say that the "huge training costs" just don't exist. My work runs a Mac-only shop*, not because of some inherent superiority of the platform, but because we're a non-profit and somebody donated a metric buttload of Mac hardware to our parent organization about ten years ago. I've seen plenty of volunteers and staff come through over the years, and despite the fact that most of them have virtually no Mac experience, I've never seen these huge training costs you've been rambling about. It's not like you have to teach people how to use Finder. It's not like it takes weeks to say, "It's apple-v to paste and apple-c to copy**". All the major end-user concepts (desktop, file browser, drag-n-drop, trashcan, web browser, office suite, etc.) are cross-platform, and don't really require explanation. Nor have I seen a non-coding environment where people were expected to install their own software or otherwise maintain their own computers. That stuff falls either to a specialized IT group, or to some self-appointed guru.
What little burden exists is minuscule compared to the burden of teaching the specialized applications that proliferate in any office environment.
"Giant waste of time and money?" I doubt it. You'd be right to be torched that a high school would require parents to buy kids a laptop, and worse, an especially expensive type of laptop, and double-worse when you consider that it's a public high school. The one-laptop-per-child concept*** is an expensive boondoggle, unless they're doing something really innovative with those laptops. Most schools don't; they just use the laptops as adjuncts to the traditional model.
But I'm sorry, the idea that teaching kids on Macs puts them at some huge disadvantage in the job market still strikes me as unlikely, even laughable.
* Okay, except for that one Ubuntu box I installed for volunteers to use.
** I've decided that these are the only two shortcuts most people know. I've done everything in my power to popularize apple-f and apple-a, but you have to choose your battles.
*** As opposed to the One Laptop Per Child program, which I'm a big fan of.
Why not the left? What are you trying to hide, sir?
Re: Blackboard. You have an odd definition of "works fine." Probably better to say that it gives all browsers an equally crappy experience.
I'll extend my previous challenge to you as well. Name these pieces of "Windows only" software that have no acceptable Mac substitutes, that you can say "kids need to learn to use this" without looking like a ninny.
The software that seems to fit the educational mission is increasingly interoperable. Hell, it's increasingly "on the web" or "in the cloud", where you can interface with it through any standards-compliant web browser*.
Windows has advantages in 3 areas:
1) Cheap crap 3rd party hardware that the manufacturer was too lazy to write a second driver for.
2) Game support.
3) Crappy Windows-only freeware.
But for 95% of what 95% of students are going to want to do, platform choice is pretty irrelevant. For everything else, there's Basecamp or virtualization software. So honestly, what are you talking about?
* Or, if you don't have one of those, IE might muddle through.
Really, that was a lot of keys tapped for nothing. You can say all you want about market share and security, but you're just avoiding the real issue, here: does one OS provide a definitively superior educational experience?
I would argue, no. If you disagree, name one skill -- just one -- that kids ought to learn, that can only be performed on a Windows PC. Or name an invaluable educational resource that can only be accessed by Windows users.
The only place where Windows has a huge advantage is games, and if anything that's a point in Mac's favor for this particular story. Windows, Linux, and OSX are all pretty similar experiences nowadays. Once you've accepted the school's argument that they ought to standardize on something, there's not much difference between them.
Re: Null hypothesis. First, wanax first used the term "null hypothesis", not me. Your response conflates the two of us.
Second, his usage is still more appropriate than your own. "There is no God" is a workable hypothesis, one for which tests can be framed. "We do not know whether or not there is a God" is not a workable hypothesis. Rather, it is a statement of fact.
Third, you're arguing as though "the null hypothesis" has some sort of rhetorical force. That's wrong. If you fail to disprove the null hypothesis, that doesn't mean "Science says there is no God." It means we fall back to what we already knew, that "we don't know whether or not there is a God." So long as you don't claim that science has your back, you can believe what you like on the matter.
Fourth, you can frame a hypothesis without proposing a test for the hypothesis. That's not "gaming the statistical method," unless you believe that the mere formulation of a hypothesis lends it some credibility.
Finally, your so-called "semantic trick":
>> To demonstrate the semantic trick that you are playing, let me apply the same trick:
>> I hypothesise that no deity exists. I sample, there is no evidence to support the hypothesis in the available data. Therefore the default hypothesis: that one or more deities exist, is proven.
I used no such semantic trick, because I never claimed statistical support for either of the two hypotheses.
You're reversing the function of the null and alternative hypotheses. You design the test in terms of the alternate hypothesis*, with the null hypothesis serving only the purpose of providing a benchmark of statistical significance. In your version of "the semantic trick," did your "no evidence to support X" also serve as "evidence to support Y?" If so, that's the way it's supposed to work, and I might have to lend some credence to your "there is a God" hypothesis.
If not, exactly what data were you collecting? You could count the number of seeds in a pinecone, or the number of chopsticks in the dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant, or the responses to the question, "Do goldfish have ears?" None of the evidence would support either hypothesis.
Or, more succinctly, "Huh?"
* Your use of the term "default hypothesis" seems to be novel. Everywhere on the Internet I can find it used, it appears to be a synonym for the null hypothesis.
Would you please stop attributing other people's posts to me? This whole time you've been acting as though all atheists are the same atheist. Which explains why arguing with you is so confusing.
Weak atheists do not claim that God doesn't exist. They claim that they do not believe in God, and that there is no reason to do so. The only way you can get from there to "God doesn't exist" is by conflating strong and weak atheism.
>> I don't accept the premise that I want to convince you of anything other than a disproof of the doctrines of atheism.
You're still not getting it. *There is no single doctrine of atheism.* Your arguments are only relevant to a tiny subset of atheists.
>> The problem you face is that you live in a post-modernist society where the vast majority of people accept that a deity could exist, but do not ascribe particular properties to the theoretical deity.
That is pure, unmitigated crap. That may or may not be your belief, but the vast majority of believers have a very specific conception of what God is and how He intervenes in the affairs of mankind. Now, these beliefs are often compatible with a modernistic, scientific worldview. But almost nobody believes in your Null God, because it provides zero interest or emotional appeal.
>> If atheism cannot construct a convincing argument against the deity that these post modernists choose to believe in, then it will never be lifted from obscurity.
I don't have a lot of emotional investment in whether atheism gains a large number of adherents, though I am pleased to see how non-religion has flourished over the last twenty years.
Right, though I did say that the study only gave strong evidence against prayers for strangers.
Where are all these mythical "pet projects" that disappear government spending while delivering no value to anyone? I mean, besides Iraq.
Polls show that people are strongly in favor of "cutting government pork," but when you start listing specific areas of government spending, they more often want spending preserved or increased. The only area of spending where large majorities of Americans say "cut spending" is foreign aid, and I think that's mostly because people believe we spend vastly more on it than we actually do.
If I were running things, I would put 20% of the taxes towards energy alternatives, and send the rest back to taxpayers. Shifting money from one program to another is much easier than reducing the size of the checks being mailed to your constituents.
You could probably just move the ceiling from "money invested" to "money invested plus all but $20M of your wealth." That would protect small and medium-sized investors while putting real pressure on the decision makers.
It's hard to predict alternate timelines, but let's say that the Cuban Missile Crisis alone had a 10% chance of actually leading to a full-scale nuclear exchange that left hundreds of millions dead. How does that possibility stack up against the wars that might have been averted by fear of nuclear weapons?
How do we weigh an unlikely-but-catastrophic outcome against the more likely possibility of more frequent and destructive conventional warfare? I think that a nuclear exchange should be weighed much more heavily than merely taking the expected body count and dividing by 10, because it might set back civilization as a whole in a way that conventional warfare would not.
I know, we're getting off topic. But I disagree with the conclusions you've implied.
It's "attack the messenger," which is certainly poor sportsmanship. But ad hominem is a logical fallacy, therefore in order to make it a true ad hominem you have to wind up the dangling argument with, "and because you have no credibility, your conclusion is wrong!" A person can be correctly said to have zero credibility, while simultaneously saying something that is correct.
Or perhaps, because the logic is implied, the ad hominem is also implied. I really don't remember how it works.
>> Now, it wouldn't be accurate to call me a Christian, but I have come to appreciate the good Christianity has done for mankind, especially as I see what fills the same role in it's absence.
Cthulhu worship? C'mon, those guys aren't so bad. It's not Cthulhu's fault he gets so hungry in his tummy sometimes.
The issue I have with your reading is that it implies that the communications of God to humankind had to avoid advancing our scientific understanding in any way. Presumably, God had no problems with advancing our moral understanding, because so many people today say that we should take moral lessons from the Bible. But as for the scientific message, why did it have to be at the same time vague and wrong? What useful purpose did the misordering of events serve?
Miracles are unscientific by definition. That is, a truely miraculous event must not have a scientific explanation, because at the point that it does, there is no longer a true miracle to explain. It's just something that happened.
Now, unscientific only means "impossible" if you assume the materialist point of view. I believe that the laws of nature are all that there is. Religious people disagree. For them, it is possible to believe that miracles (in the strict sense of the term) can happen.
I think there is a high variance in how people approach the questions being offered. You might read one question, think of that one time when you were impatient with a friend's griping, and lowball your answer as a result. Another person might remember that one time he gave a homeless person a buck, and grant himself a high score despite a spotty record of empathetic action.
Since the questions seem to be skewed to make empathy sound like an appealing trait, it may also be that some people mentally try to compensate for this, while others answer the questions specifically in the hopes that it will say something flattering about them.
It does seem like the test lacks subtlety. I'd be interested in hearing what the designers were thinking when they wrote it.
>> 1. That the null hypothesis is that there is no deity. This is demonstrably false. The null hypothesis is that we don't know whether there is a deity or not.
You don't actually know what a null hypothesis is.* It sounds like you're interpreting it as, "how we should believe the world works in the absence of more evidence." What it actually means is, "I hypothesize that there is no (God|side effect caused by this drug|correlation between obesity and heart disease|whatever you're setting out to disprove)." The null hypothesis is the basis for what they call "statistically significant results."
Saying, "We don't know if there is a deity or not" is functionally equivalent to saying, "The null hypothesis -- there is no deity -- has not been disproven." "We don't know if there is a deity or not" isn't a hypothesis, much less a null one.
>> You are assuming that the deity or the proponents of the deity have some obligation to convince you. If they do not, then all you are doing is burning a strawman.
Nobody has any obligation to convince me of anything, so long as they have no say in how I live my life. But to the extent that they want their beliefs about the will of God to influence the laws I have to obey, the material that gets taught to children, or anything else, then It. Is. On.
I'm not interested in spending any more time debating your hypothetical believer with his untestable and unspecified beliefs about what may or may not be a deity. Like creme soda, it's unpleasant after the first sip.
* No worries. For the longest time, I thought "passive-aggressive" meant bottling up your anger and taking abuse until you finally snapped. There are lots of phrases that we only think we understand.
>> Really? What religion claims this?
I'd be more interested in knowing what religion doesn't.
As for the rest of it, You don't actually understand what atheism means. Anyhow, once people start asking me to disprove the existence of their Invisible Pink Unicorn, I consider them to have lost the debate. If you don't care what properties your deity embodies, so long as the resulting deity is "undisprovable", there is little reason to take you or your deity seriously.