no one goes to the war in the name of atheism, while they do in the name of religion.
Why not?
Well, because atheism isn't an ism. It would be like going to war for non-stamp-collecting.
I can see going to war for related things, like reason, science, etc. I don't see why you'd go to war for atheism, and I imagine it'd be difficult to raise an army around that idea. Maybe antitheism, but not atheism.
Wasn't arguing about that. Read what I wrote.
I didn't think you were. I was making both of these points to illustrate that even if Stalin went to war, it doesn't really change things.
it does argue that perhaps atheists are more mentally and emotionally balanced *g*
Possibly, but again, I'd put that more in the context of whether a religious person is less mentally and emotionally balanced.
There are atheists who believe in tarot cards. That's the point I'm driving at here.
Look, if you want to argue that atheists are or aren't more mentally balanced than the rest of whomever, confine your argument to that.
That's pretty much what I'm trying to do.
Trying to combine it with psychotics like Stalin, or conflating atheism with theism just doesn't work with me.
I don't think I've done that.
I mentioned Stalin because the AC did -- I was more or less diffusing its point.
I just plain don't believe in any godlike or supreme beings at all, ok?
Ok.
I call it rationalism;
Well, no, it's not.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with rationalism, I'm saying that atheism is not by itself rationalism. Someone could become atheist because they have good, logical, rational reasons, or someone could become atheist because they had a bad experience in church.
You don't seem to have any real understanding of atheism at all.
I've been an atheist for several years now. We seem to agree on most of these points, and it's not as though the definition of "atheist" is particularly difficult -- "one who does not believe in a God."
I also tend to debate theists (and especially Creationists), so I'd say I have a fair understanding of what you mean by rationalism, and I have a somewhat rationalist, naturalist perspective. I was trying specifically to avoid conflating that with atheism.
Now, I suspect that religion tends to make people less balanced in many ways, which is why the statistics look the way they do -- but I think at this point, that's as much a reflection of the lack of influence by religion on atheists as it is a reflection of the critical thinking, rationality, and sanity of the truly skeptical and inquisitive atheists.
nobody really knows how religion arose in the first place,
Well, yes and no. We have some good theories, and we've watched real religions arise fairly recently -- cargo cults being the obvious example.
The best thing we could do is present an unbiased synopsis of religion as it exists wrt humanity, and explain to them that we are all individuals and that we try to do our best in letting each and every one of us hold our own beliefs.
That's unfortunately only true for a minority of the world.
Atheists, at least so far, haven't started any wars.
The AC pointed out Stalin. There are two crucial issues here: First, no one goes to the war in the name of atheism, while they do in the name of religion. Second, the term "atheist" simply means one who is not a theist -- there is no unifying belief or dogma, no requirement that atheists be scientifically minded critical thinkers or even sane.
The numbers right now do tend to favor atheists in a few ways -- fewer in prisons, fewer divorces, etc -- but this isn't really relevant, other than to dispel the notion that atheists are inherently evil or stupid. You only need one person to be a counterexample to that, but it seems less useful to try to show that atheists are somehow better, more peaceful, smarter, etc.
And yet you've gone and attached qualifiers to your "paper is flawed" arguments.
And yet? You say that as if it undermines my point. Note how I said it isn't as clear-cut as you suggest -- not that digital is absolutely better.
cryptographic signatures, handled properly, cannot be forged.
Whereas physical signatures, no matter how you handle them, can always be forged.
When this happens on a daily or even hourly basis, you might have an adequate comparison.
If you have daily or even hourly computer issues, you're Doing It Wrong.
You claim that it's time consuming to make a perfect copy, yet nobody needs a perfect copy, an approximate copy (i.e. a photocopy or a fax) is almost universally adequate.
It's not about how well you can copy an individual piece of paper. It's about how well you can copy the state of your entire desk, or an entire filing cabinet, or an entire basement full of old records, and how time-consuming it's going to be to photocopy all of that.
I was assuming photocopies or faxes. It's still not pretty.
It's as hard as hitting 2 when you hit print, or copy, that doesn't qualify as time consuming.
Certainly, if you remember to do it the first time, every time. And yes, adding an extra step to a common aspect of a daily workflow is not insignificant.
And what are you going to do with that second or third copy? Put it in the same filing cabinet? Great, until the entire thing is submerged because of a flood, or the entire building burns down. Fax it to a remote location? Sorry, that is more time-consuming -- every time you print, you need to take that printed copy and fax it somewhere, and wherever you fax it now needs to file those copies.
And when (not if) a catastrophic failure happens, you're still going to have to dig through all your paper records and re-fax them (or photocopy them) again to have any sort of backup.
Contrast with the sheer triviality of an rsync command. "But it's not trivial to an office worker!" Doesn't have to be, if it's trivial to your sysadmin. Again: Digital makes it trivial to have backup copies of your data all around the globe. Paper makes it possible, but not easy.
Yes, but it's annoying enough to be pointless. Your options are pretty much to patch your browser or to set up a proxy that filters that header. Either way, you need to think about how you're going to identify it -- with content-type, or with the filename extension? (I'd suggest content-type.)
Besides which, it actually makes sense to have this functionality. Sometimes, you have a button that says "download" explicitly. In this case, some idiot put the screenshot in the "files" area, which is intended for downloads. These are all cases where you want to force the browser to treat it as a separate file anyway.
So, you assume that atheists are correct and that aliens, assuming they even exist would be atheists?
Personally, I suspect that's true, but I don't know. However, I see three possibilities:
They have no religion.
They have a religion very similar to ours.
They have a religion unlike anything we've ever seen.
Now, of those, do you really think #2 is likely? (If you do, you probably should investigate how religion arose on this planet.)
No, the likelier possibilities are option #1, in which case, any religious individual would make us seem backwards and primitive; or #3, in which case, any religion we choose to represent would likely be weird and possibly offensive to them.
Who would you suggest? An obnoxious pompous prick like Dawkins?
Funny... when I believed, I thought the same way you did. About Randi, also.
Eventually, I realized that what I saw as "arrogance" was merely the courage to stand up to popular dogmas. They were attacking things I held dear, and that made me defensive, so of course I saw them as arrogant and disruptive.
real science, rather than trying to prove the non-existence of god.
Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and you might notice he's also written several books about that. If you investigate what he actually does with his time, you'll probably find he spends far more time doing exactly that -- real science.
You seem to be confused into thinking that all atheists are necessarily "militant atheists", and that this would be the first thing on their minds when they encounter an alien being. That's not the concern at all. The concern is that the last thing we want is to be trying to tell an alien the "good news".
"Not exactly rigorous"... it doesn't withstand two seconds of critical thought.
The aliens will be quite used to things flailing like crazy and trying to get away... They know this is what non-self-aware organisms do.
Well, except plants -- those stand still. So standing still or moving tells them nothing.
The fact that you're still alive will mean they're going to allow us to exist.
Tell that to any barnyard animal. Maybe they're not hungry yet?
I mean, I'll agree that fighting is probably futile, but you never know. We don't know how to defend against a nuke, but we do actually know about enough to visit other planets, if we were willing to expend the resources and wait the insane amonut of time.
They won't speak your language, and won't be able to mess with your thoughts.
No good reason to believe either of these. As for speaking our language, they may well have been listening to radio and watching television for decades. Certainly, if they're smart enough to figure out weapons that will obliterate us, they're smart enough to build a machine to facilitate vocal speech -- I mean, we're almost there ourselves.
And it's a lot easier to attempt verbal communication at first, if it works. If that fails, you can always try writing, or anything else.
The aliens won't know who Pythagoras was, but they'll sure as shit know his theorem.
Maybe. You'd have to study a bit to find out what parts of math are actually relevant. Technically speaking, every computer program is a mathematical expression, and thus a universal truth, but that doesn't mean they'll have discovered Windows.
So maybe they'll know the Pythagorean Theorem, or maybe they'll have arrived at it (though still true) through an entirely different method.
Since the aliens will, let's face it, probably be major math nerds...
What? Humans are major math nerds, but not all humans. There's no particular reason to assume that the people heading their expedition know any math.
They won't know the name Darwin, but they'll be familiar with natural selection.
Eh, maybe. Leaving aside the possibility that the aliens might be Creationists, they might well be at the point where natural selection isn't a driving force, and hasn't been for centuries. Thus, you're again talking about the kind of thing only an alien nerd would know, and you might not be talking to nerds.
They'll know mathematical operators, but they won't know +, -, =, etc.
They also might not know our mathematical syntax. Consider stack calculators.
Draw something like the picture on the left...
Probably, though we're again back to how we communicate with them. They may not be visual at all.
The rest of this is mostly opinion, which I mostly disagree with.
Do not tell them the universe was created for us...
Oh, I agree, but you'll want to get more sophisticated than that if you can.
Get dropped off in a major city
Only if your communication sucks at that point. You don't need actual latitude and longitude to help direct them towards wherever you actually live.
Involve the local news
After you've had your shower.
No pop culture references.
If you don't make them, someone else will.
You'll probably be killed.... you'll be the most important human on Earth, and no matter what you do, you'll be extremely controversial.... There isn't much you can do about this one, sorry.
Again depends how good your communication is at that point. Also depends if you absolutely insisted on taking all the credit yourself.
For instance, remember how ridiculously advanced the alien t
I've never had my desk crash, losing all pieces of paper on it. Contrast that to Windows.
Desks can burn down, and it's fairly time-consuming to make a perfect copy of your desk and every piece of paper currently on it.
When push comes to shove, I can always get a paper form to the person that needs it. Contrast that to relying on an Exchange server.
When push comes to shove, you have more options than just Exchange Server.
When a form needs authorization, having the right person sign it with a pen always works. Contrast that to trying to get digital signatures to work.
Pen signatures can be forged or outright cut-and-pasted, even moreso if you allow them to be faxed. Digital signatures don't require the person to physically be there, and cryptographic signatures, handled properly, cannot be forged.
The reliability of digital versus paper isn't as celar-cut as you suggest, and it depends entirely what your priorities are.
Someone sends me an email from a gmail acct, poof, there I am. And I can't reply without using gmail, because that is all they use.
True, but not really relevant -- if they weren't using Gmail, they'd be using something else. Do you trust Yahoo or Hotmail any more than Google? How about some random ISP?
And it's not like they can track much from that, other than your conversations with someone who already keeps all their other conversations with Google.
That is weird. Given Google Chrome does it, too, I'd assume it's something wrong on their side.
In particular, the headers for that URL are:
200 OK Cache-Control: public, max-age=604800 Connection: close Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:57:00 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Age: 18380 Server: DFE/largefile Content-Length: 146941 Content-Type: image/png Expires: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 11:57:00 GMT Last-Modified: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:13:33 GMT Client-Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:03:20 GMT Client-Peer: 209.85.225.82:80 Client-Response-Num: 1 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="skipfish-screen.png" X-XSS-Protection: 0
In other words, the server is deliberately telling your browser to treat it as an opaque attachment to be downloaded (and saved with that filename), and not something to be displayed.
Huh. First one I'd get would be a housekeeper -- plenty of middle-class people have them, too. Next, an accountant -- again, middle-class people have them -- balance my checkbook, pay my taxes, give me nice, obvious summaries of what you did. Next would be a chef, or a housekeeper who can cook. I might also consider people to handle researching purchases for me -- for example, the amount of time I might spend nowdays researching how well Linux runs on a given machine would quickly get old.
A chauffeur wouldn't be high on the list at all -- I enjoy driving. A bodyguard would be far enough down the list that I'm still obscenely wealthy, even after hiring all these other people.
Also, I don't think mistresses would be much of a concern at that point. Do it the old-fashioned way -- hire a personal trainer, dietitian, etc, and get in shape, which is a good idea anyway. At that point, I'm good-looking, fit, and wealthy -- if picking up women is a problem for me then, I kind of fail at life.
we already have automatic vacuum-cleaners, so it's not like the job of a housekeepr will stay around for much longer either.
The housekeeper job is an example, and automatic vacuum-cleaners can't do everything -- changing sheets, doing laundry, cooking meals and handling the dishes... And then there are other jobs to take away tedium we don't want to do, like an accountant to handle our finances and pay our taxes... Finally, other luxuries like a masseuse...
In any case, I don't think that our current economic model can survive the ongoing technological revolution.
I think the amount of revolution that's happened in the last hundred years suggests that it can. We went from the first powered flight to walking on the moon in less than seventy years.
Job insecurity and resulting stress about your survival when the society is wealthier than ever is an insane combination...
Given the number of social programs that exist, not to mention private charity, a little bit of unemployment doesn't actually threaten your survival. What it does is force you to find a better job, or to think about what you should actually be doing.
The only question is whether the change is peaceful and constructive one, leading to a new era of prosperity and cooperation without compulsion, or a total social collapse.
Do you have any suggestions for how either might be achieved?
So basically such a machine would change his life for the worse.
That's one option, yes.
It could also force him to change his life for the better, or it could be that it has little to no effect on his life.
as the word "yet" indicates, it's just one step in the endless downward slide.
Not endless.
For example, computers make lousy tour guides, lawyers, chefs, doctors, programmers, financial advisers, dancers, and many other things. In fact, the demand for programmers has gone up in the current recession, and that's a job that didn't exist a hundred years ago.
So it's not even necessarily a downward slide -- buggy-whip manufacturers are going to fight to keep their job, yes, but eventually, they'll find something else, maybe even being a mechanic for these new horse-drawn carriages. It's always messy, but technology does seem to replace old jobs with new ones, not displace jobs altogether.
That's why I qualified it with "could be". It seems likely to me that he is, especially given the context (that he would hate to do math).
If he's intelligent and educated, that actually suggests a weaker argument. There are other jobs which don't require micromanaging bosses, though I suspect said bosses are involved in the paper pushers that this online system would be replacing. However, I don't think we should hold back progress just to save a job that's actually obsolete.
Here in the US, we use electronic vote tabulation devices for our elections,
Voting is an entirely different process, precisely because it's anonymous. This isn't.
Historical Database Security Failures
File cabinets have security failures, also.
MIM attacks for IDentity theft.
Much harder to do with proper crypto, as I described. Harder, in fact, than intercepting postal mail.
No electricity, no Data.
No running water, no toilets. This is rapidly becoming less of a problem.
You mentioned passports, well they might not have been "anonymous" a paper passport didn't BROADCAST your data.
Neither do these, unless you mean the unicast transmission between your machine and a government machine -- not particularly less secure than someone mailing a passport to you, which does happen.
You want to talk about corruption at DMV?
Again, something which already happens with paper.
I know I sound negative here, but maybe I just have a really sour taste in my mouth from how the USA exploits electronics,
You mean how we use them?
over the last ten years this has allowed corruption to destroy our Constitution, Civil Rights, and our wonderful monetary system,
Wait, seriously? You're blaming electronics on all of this?
A computer didn't vote for the Patriot Act. People did.
It was a mathematical algorithm invented by a person which is most directly responsible for the current economic crisis. Again, while this may not have been possible without a computer, it wasn't the computer which decided to trust the magical algorithm -- people did.
this slices your argument to shreds, without getting into all that other crap.
The one actual counterargument you provided that was even close to an argument was your mention of voting machines, which wasn't relevant. Care to try again?
First and foremost, you can't synthesize facts you don't know. As an example, someone recently hired me to sort through five thousand bounced emails and figure out how to turn them into a spreadsheet containing the actual failed email addresses.
In order to do this, I had him put it on an IMAP server (the last time he asked me to do this, it was already). I then connected to it with a Ruby script using an IMAP library, parsed the relevant messages (moving each message I successfully parsed to a different IMAP folder), refining my algorithm to parse the rest, and at each step, dumping the results to a CSV file (trivially easy to generate) which I knew he could open in Excel.
At the very least, I had to understand what IMAP is, and where it fits into the picture. Whenever someone gives me a similar problem, my first thought now is, "If I give you access to an IMAP server, you can click+drag all the email out of wherever it is and onto this common server that I can access from wherever I am. It's a stupidly simple and portable way for us to deal with whole folders worth of email."
Now, it's true that if I didn't know it was called IMAP, I could probably Google for something like "Email protocols", read up on Wikipedia, and figure out which one I was talking about. But what if I didn't remember such a thing existed? I might have been digging through whatever format Thunderbird uses for days -- I can't think of a reasonable way I would discover IMAP for this purpose, if I hadn't already been exposed to it in some other way.
There's also CSV. Again, without knowing about CSV, what would I Google? "How to get stuff into Excel"? At best, I might end up with some VBA crap, meaning I'd have to write a program either in VBA or somehow talking to VBA, which also understood the Thunderbird email format. Ugh. Instead, it was simple -- output CSV, attach it, email it.
Then I had to remember that CSV has that weird double-quotation-mark escaping rule. I also remembered that libraries exist -- which also saved me from dealing with IMAP. Oh, and I had to remember that a good way to get libraries for Ruby (my language of choice) is Rubygems. I suppose I could've avoided memorizing "sudo gem install __", but knowing it offhand saves a lot of time.
Had I not remembered about libraries, I might not even have considered IMAP, and I might've badly mangled the CSV.
I also had to remember both that regular expressions exist, and how to use them. Most of the messages were easy enough to read as a multipart message, pulling the "to" field off the envelope (two more concepts I had to be familiar with; the fact that messages with attachments are called "multipart" and how multipart email works...)
Oh, and it also helped to know other assorted things -- like remembering how to add a user to my IMAP server, and how to create a secure connection between that and his Thunderbird (ended up just re-opening the VPN I set up years earlier -- but I had to remember how to enable it...)
And so on.
And this was a tiny, tiny project. Got it done in less than four hours, and that's dealing with a ton of weird permutations of possible emails, and a weird issue with his IMAP server.
Now imagine what it's like working on an actual full-blown software product.
Let the computer do the translating.
Do not want. All your base are belong to us.
You claim translation will eventually be good. Fine, but right now, it sucks, and it's going to continue to suck long after the original poster has learned whatever language they needed -- and there's still nuances of culture that you actually have to experience.
Got a little camera like the one in cell phones? Plug that camera into your hand held PC/internet/MP3player/telephone iTurd whatever. Point the camera at the kanji that you want translated. Press the button on the
that statement is like saying that no calculator can bring the mental satisfaction that comes from successfully multiplying two ten-digit numbers in Middle school arithmetic class.
If computers couldn't multiply at that point, it'd be a valid analogy. That statement about the "wonder of the human mind" wasn't about "mental satisfaction", it was about the fact that right now, the human mind can do translation much more accurately than computers are, and you wouldn't trust a computer to do that job.
If you're commuting, or only have a few minutes, that's what a smartphone is for, or the web interface.
Anki is basically designed to be something you spend only 20 minutes or so per day doing. It uses a similar algorithm to SuperMemo, and the original idea behind SuperMemo (and Anki) is to predict when you're about to forget a given card and flash it to you before that happens. The longer you do this with a given card (without forgetting), the longer the interval gets -- thus, a card you know well, it'll only flash every few months (or even years!), giving you more time to focus on the ones you actually need.
Plus it can tie to multimedia -- so, record yourself and compare it to a reference recording to check your pronunciation.
Even without the multimedia, this is something you really can't do with dead trees -- you'd be spending all your time calculating and scheduling cards, and none of your time reviewing.
There are only so many burgers that need to be flipped, floors that need to be mopped, etc.
Not true. Put another way, if this really becomes an issue, think about the army of servants that a wealthy family might've had in the late 19th century. The challenge is creating a demand for that, but frankly, I would much rather have more tax dollars with which to hire, say, a housekeeper, than have my tax dollars go to a paper pusher, given the choice.
Put someone into a job that's beyond their capacity they'll do it poorly, be miserable while doing it, and make everyone everyone miserable in the process.
Do that in school, instead. Not beyond their capacity, either -- one of the largest factors in the success of a given student body is the teacher involved.
A casual acquaintance from high school has been working for the last 25 years cleaning up roadkill for the county, and he's as happy as a pig in slop doing what most people here would consider a shit job. He'd consider any job that involved more math than tallying up how many critters he scraped off the pavement to be the "shit job".
Doesn't have to be math, and there are very few people who could only ever be qualified for that sort of work. For example, you haven't said anything about your friend's intelligence -- it could well be that he's simply unmotivated and uneducated. It could be that he hasn't found his passion.
Or it could be that, if we ever invent a machine to clean roadkill instead, he should bite the bullet and find what to him might be a "shit job", but which hasn't (yet) been replaced by machines.
...after all, we're talking about access to stuff which was traditionally handled with paper. The only difference is that an electronic trail is easier to follow than a paper trail -- but here, "easier" only means "less time-consuming," or, alternatively, "cheaper."
Here in the US, we have the option of filing our taxes online, or mailing in a paper form. Either way is going to include our social security number, along with a bunch of other personally identifying information. Either way might lead to our personal information being leaked or abused. The only real difference is that the online version is faster and potentially more secure -- properly done, I'll trust cryptography long before I'll trust the postal service.
Same with vehicle licensing, passports, housing, everything else they mention -- again, which of these is something you used to be able to do anonymously? In what way does merely putting these in a web browser make it easier to keep an eye on you?
Even if you find some marginal benefit to paper -- and it will be marginal -- is it worth the cost, the increased amount of fuel burned transporting it, the paper, the increased amount of fuel used to harvest the wood, make the paper, and recycle/destroy/bury it once used? How about the increased cost to the state of employing all those people to deal with the paper -- the same people who are currently whining about losing their jobs -- how much would it be worth to have them doing something actually productive instead of something a webserver could do for them?
Russell's Teapot fails as an analogy; it's a physical item so its only value is via physical interaction.
So what?
Your point was that you hesitate to legislate anything unfalsifiable. Russel's Teapot may not be the best example, but there are plenty of things, supernatural and otherwise, which are unfalsifiable. An infinite number, in fact.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is just a different physical imagining of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being. You know what, that's a distinction without a difference.
Is it really? The FSM stands for different things and asks for different things, and suggests different foreign policy -- in particular, that we should encourage piracy (of the nautical robbery sort, not the copyright infringement sort) to reduce global warming.
The point is that if it's not reasonable to give special privilege to followers of the FSM -- and most would agree that it's not -- then as you've pointed out, there isn't a lot of difference between the FSM and other monotheistic religions, so why should we give any of them any more respect?
It's not hard to find a non-religious analog - philosophical pacifists were allowed exemptions from the draft.
Right, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. However, it's an interesting point to make -- note that this avoids entirely the need to make special provisions for Quakers.
Given infinite time and precision in drafting the law, and infinite resources to enforce it, sure. However, I don't want week long jury trials wrangling over the definition of "small amount", I don't want lobbists trying to tweak the levels (Equal alcohol, no shots are more intense, no tequila is worse for young people), and I don't want to refine that law at the cost of say, banking regulations.
In other words, you agree that the law is unjust as implemented, but you suggest that it's much more practical to frame it in terms of religion than to try to refine it in other terms. Correct?
Of course, I'm not sure it really buys you anything, as this just means there may well be long jury trials wrangling over the definition of "religion" and which exceptions are reasonable, just as we've been doing for awhile. In addition, you haven't eliminated your original problem of the definition of "small amount" -- what would you do with a religion which required teenagers to drink a pitcher of beer?
By definition, if you rationally choose to have a belief, it's not unreasonable faith.
You seemed to be agreeing with me later on that this is not a choice we can make -- we either believe something or we don't.
I would also say that faith is by definition unreasonable. If you have good reason to believe it, why call it faith? Wouldn't it be simply belief by then, perhaps even knowledge?
I never said utilitarianism was a good moral framework, merely that it was a good legislative framework.
Interesting, I'll have to think about that.
The utility of her knowing it is wrong may outweigh the benefits of the affair.
I don't see how. Remember, again, that she doesn't find out. From a subjectivist point of view, you might argue that her knowing it's wrong may have some influence, but utilitarianism is only concerned with the ends -- in this case, she's just as happy as she would otherwise be, maybe happier as her husband is more relaxed, less needy...
To prove to them sure. But you can prove to the rest of the world the KGB doesn't vacuum their home every night.
Probably not, especially if you take into account the fact that their imagination will always be one step ahead of you. Of course the KGB didn't come after you installed those video cameras -- they're not that stupid!
No, they will tend to make claims which are actually unfalsifiabl
OP... was pulling random "hokey" sounding religions out of his arse.
The problem I had wasn't that lack of understanding about the role of religion, but the assumption that certain religions are "hokey" while others aren't. Having been on the receiving end of more than one "Oh, you believe in God, you're just mad at him" Christian, I get frustrated when I see people trying to tell others what they do and don't believe.
That is, I do think Jedi is absurd, but no moreso than most religion, and I wouldn't mock a Jedi by telling them they don't really believe that.
Slashdot Mirror
no one goes to the war in the name of atheism, while they do in the name of religion.
Why not?
Well, because atheism isn't an ism. It would be like going to war for non-stamp-collecting.
I can see going to war for related things, like reason, science, etc. I don't see why you'd go to war for atheism, and I imagine it'd be difficult to raise an army around that idea. Maybe antitheism, but not atheism.
Wasn't arguing about that. Read what I wrote.
I didn't think you were. I was making both of these points to illustrate that even if Stalin went to war, it doesn't really change things.
it does argue that perhaps atheists are more mentally and emotionally balanced *g*
Possibly, but again, I'd put that more in the context of whether a religious person is less mentally and emotionally balanced.
There are atheists who believe in tarot cards. That's the point I'm driving at here.
Look, if you want to argue that atheists are or aren't more mentally balanced than the rest of whomever, confine your argument to that.
That's pretty much what I'm trying to do.
Trying to combine it with psychotics like Stalin, or conflating atheism with theism just doesn't work with me.
I don't think I've done that.
I mentioned Stalin because the AC did -- I was more or less diffusing its point.
I just plain don't believe in any godlike or supreme beings at all, ok?
Ok.
I call it rationalism;
Well, no, it's not.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with rationalism, I'm saying that atheism is not by itself rationalism. Someone could become atheist because they have good, logical, rational reasons, or someone could become atheist because they had a bad experience in church.
You don't seem to have any real understanding of atheism at all.
I've been an atheist for several years now. We seem to agree on most of these points, and it's not as though the definition of "atheist" is particularly difficult -- "one who does not believe in a God."
I also tend to debate theists (and especially Creationists), so I'd say I have a fair understanding of what you mean by rationalism, and I have a somewhat rationalist, naturalist perspective. I was trying specifically to avoid conflating that with atheism.
Now, I suspect that religion tends to make people less balanced in many ways, which is why the statistics look the way they do -- but I think at this point, that's as much a reflection of the lack of influence by religion on atheists as it is a reflection of the critical thinking, rationality, and sanity of the truly skeptical and inquisitive atheists.
Yeah, it just doesn't make sense that they put the screenshot in the downloads section.
No, if it's the British government, "royally" might simply be a statement of fact.
nobody really knows how religion arose in the first place,
Well, yes and no. We have some good theories, and we've watched real religions arise fairly recently -- cargo cults being the obvious example.
The best thing we could do is present an unbiased synopsis of religion as it exists wrt humanity, and explain to them that we are all individuals and that we try to do our best in letting each and every one of us hold our own beliefs.
That's unfortunately only true for a minority of the world.
Atheists, at least so far, haven't started any wars.
The AC pointed out Stalin. There are two crucial issues here: First, no one goes to the war in the name of atheism, while they do in the name of religion. Second, the term "atheist" simply means one who is not a theist -- there is no unifying belief or dogma, no requirement that atheists be scientifically minded critical thinkers or even sane.
The numbers right now do tend to favor atheists in a few ways -- fewer in prisons, fewer divorces, etc -- but this isn't really relevant, other than to dispel the notion that atheists are inherently evil or stupid. You only need one person to be a counterexample to that, but it seems less useful to try to show that atheists are somehow better, more peaceful, smarter, etc.
And yet you've gone and attached qualifiers to your "paper is flawed" arguments.
And yet? You say that as if it undermines my point. Note how I said it isn't as clear-cut as you suggest -- not that digital is absolutely better.
cryptographic signatures, handled properly, cannot be forged.
Whereas physical signatures, no matter how you handle them, can always be forged.
When this happens on a daily or even hourly basis, you might have an adequate comparison.
If you have daily or even hourly computer issues, you're Doing It Wrong.
You claim that it's time consuming to make a perfect copy, yet nobody needs a perfect copy, an approximate copy (i.e. a photocopy or a fax) is almost universally adequate.
It's not about how well you can copy an individual piece of paper. It's about how well you can copy the state of your entire desk, or an entire filing cabinet, or an entire basement full of old records, and how time-consuming it's going to be to photocopy all of that.
I was assuming photocopies or faxes. It's still not pretty.
It's as hard as hitting 2 when you hit print, or copy, that doesn't qualify as time consuming.
Certainly, if you remember to do it the first time, every time. And yes, adding an extra step to a common aspect of a daily workflow is not insignificant.
And what are you going to do with that second or third copy? Put it in the same filing cabinet? Great, until the entire thing is submerged because of a flood, or the entire building burns down. Fax it to a remote location? Sorry, that is more time-consuming -- every time you print, you need to take that printed copy and fax it somewhere, and wherever you fax it now needs to file those copies.
And when (not if) a catastrophic failure happens, you're still going to have to dig through all your paper records and re-fax them (or photocopy them) again to have any sort of backup.
Contrast with the sheer triviality of an rsync command. "But it's not trivial to an office worker!" Doesn't have to be, if it's trivial to your sysadmin. Again: Digital makes it trivial to have backup copies of your data all around the globe. Paper makes it possible, but not easy.
Yes, but it's annoying enough to be pointless. Your options are pretty much to patch your browser or to set up a proxy that filters that header. Either way, you need to think about how you're going to identify it -- with content-type, or with the filename extension? (I'd suggest content-type.)
Besides which, it actually makes sense to have this functionality. Sometimes, you have a button that says "download" explicitly. In this case, some idiot put the screenshot in the "files" area, which is intended for downloads. These are all cases where you want to force the browser to treat it as a separate file anyway.
So, you assume that atheists are correct and that aliens, assuming they even exist would be atheists?
Personally, I suspect that's true, but I don't know. However, I see three possibilities:
Now, of those, do you really think #2 is likely? (If you do, you probably should investigate how religion arose on this planet.)
No, the likelier possibilities are option #1, in which case, any religious individual would make us seem backwards and primitive; or #3, in which case, any religion we choose to represent would likely be weird and possibly offensive to them.
Who would you suggest? An obnoxious pompous prick like Dawkins?
Funny... when I believed, I thought the same way you did. About Randi, also.
Eventually, I realized that what I saw as "arrogance" was merely the courage to stand up to popular dogmas. They were attacking things I held dear, and that made me defensive, so of course I saw them as arrogant and disruptive.
real science, rather than trying to prove the non-existence of god.
Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and you might notice he's also written several books about that. If you investigate what he actually does with his time, you'll probably find he spends far more time doing exactly that -- real science.
You seem to be confused into thinking that all atheists are necessarily "militant atheists", and that this would be the first thing on their minds when they encounter an alien being. That's not the concern at all. The concern is that the last thing we want is to be trying to tell an alien the "good news".
"Not exactly rigorous"... it doesn't withstand two seconds of critical thought.
The aliens will be quite used to things flailing like crazy and trying to get away... They know this is what non-self-aware organisms do.
Well, except plants -- those stand still. So standing still or moving tells them nothing.
The fact that you're still alive will mean they're going to allow us to exist.
Tell that to any barnyard animal. Maybe they're not hungry yet?
I mean, I'll agree that fighting is probably futile, but you never know. We don't know how to defend against a nuke, but we do actually know about enough to visit other planets, if we were willing to expend the resources and wait the insane amonut of time.
They won't speak your language, and won't be able to mess with your thoughts.
No good reason to believe either of these. As for speaking our language, they may well have been listening to radio and watching television for decades. Certainly, if they're smart enough to figure out weapons that will obliterate us, they're smart enough to build a machine to facilitate vocal speech -- I mean, we're almost there ourselves.
And it's a lot easier to attempt verbal communication at first, if it works. If that fails, you can always try writing, or anything else.
The aliens won't know who Pythagoras was, but they'll sure as shit know his theorem.
Maybe. You'd have to study a bit to find out what parts of math are actually relevant. Technically speaking, every computer program is a mathematical expression, and thus a universal truth, but that doesn't mean they'll have discovered Windows.
So maybe they'll know the Pythagorean Theorem, or maybe they'll have arrived at it (though still true) through an entirely different method.
Since the aliens will, let's face it, probably be major math nerds...
What? Humans are major math nerds, but not all humans. There's no particular reason to assume that the people heading their expedition know any math.
They won't know the name Darwin, but they'll be familiar with natural selection.
Eh, maybe. Leaving aside the possibility that the aliens might be Creationists, they might well be at the point where natural selection isn't a driving force, and hasn't been for centuries. Thus, you're again talking about the kind of thing only an alien nerd would know, and you might not be talking to nerds.
They'll know mathematical operators, but they won't know +, -, =, etc.
They also might not know our mathematical syntax. Consider stack calculators.
Draw something like the picture on the left...
Probably, though we're again back to how we communicate with them. They may not be visual at all.
The rest of this is mostly opinion, which I mostly disagree with.
Do not tell them the universe was created for us...
Oh, I agree, but you'll want to get more sophisticated than that if you can.
Get dropped off in a major city
Only if your communication sucks at that point. You don't need actual latitude and longitude to help direct them towards wherever you actually live.
Involve the local news
After you've had your shower.
No pop culture references.
If you don't make them, someone else will.
You'll probably be killed.... you'll be the most important human on Earth, and no matter what you do, you'll be extremely controversial.... There isn't much you can do about this one, sorry.
Again depends how good your communication is at that point. Also depends if you absolutely insisted on taking all the credit yourself.
For instance, remember how ridiculously advanced the alien t
I've never had my desk crash, losing all pieces of paper on it. Contrast that to Windows.
Desks can burn down, and it's fairly time-consuming to make a perfect copy of your desk and every piece of paper currently on it.
When push comes to shove, I can always get a paper form to the person that needs it. Contrast that to relying on an Exchange server.
When push comes to shove, you have more options than just Exchange Server.
When a form needs authorization, having the right person sign it with a pen always works. Contrast that to trying to get digital signatures to work.
Pen signatures can be forged or outright cut-and-pasted, even moreso if you allow them to be faxed. Digital signatures don't require the person to physically be there, and cryptographic signatures, handled properly, cannot be forged.
The reliability of digital versus paper isn't as celar-cut as you suggest, and it depends entirely what your priorities are.
There are still people.. lots of them.. who will print out emails to read them. No technology will fix this.
Are there really people for whom this technology doesn't work?
Someone sends me an email from a gmail acct, poof, there I am. And I can't reply without using gmail, because that is all they use.
True, but not really relevant -- if they weren't using Gmail, they'd be using something else. Do you trust Yahoo or Hotmail any more than Google? How about some random ISP?
And it's not like they can track much from that, other than your conversations with someone who already keeps all their other conversations with Google.
That is weird. Given Google Chrome does it, too, I'd assume it's something wrong on their side.
In particular, the headers for that URL are:
200 OK
Cache-Control: public, max-age=604800
Connection: close
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:57:00 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Age: 18380
Server: DFE/largefile
Content-Length: 146941
Content-Type: image/png
Expires: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 11:57:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:13:33 GMT
Client-Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:03:20 GMT
Client-Peer: 209.85.225.82:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="skipfish-screen.png"
X-XSS-Protection: 0
In other words, the server is deliberately telling your browser to treat it as an opaque attachment to be downloaded (and saved with that filename), and not something to be displayed.
Huh. First one I'd get would be a housekeeper -- plenty of middle-class people have them, too. Next, an accountant -- again, middle-class people have them -- balance my checkbook, pay my taxes, give me nice, obvious summaries of what you did. Next would be a chef, or a housekeeper who can cook. I might also consider people to handle researching purchases for me -- for example, the amount of time I might spend nowdays researching how well Linux runs on a given machine would quickly get old.
A chauffeur wouldn't be high on the list at all -- I enjoy driving. A bodyguard would be far enough down the list that I'm still obscenely wealthy, even after hiring all these other people.
Also, I don't think mistresses would be much of a concern at that point. Do it the old-fashioned way -- hire a personal trainer, dietitian, etc, and get in shape, which is a good idea anyway. At that point, I'm good-looking, fit, and wealthy -- if picking up women is a problem for me then, I kind of fail at life.
we already have automatic vacuum-cleaners, so it's not like the job of a housekeepr will stay around for much longer either.
The housekeeper job is an example, and automatic vacuum-cleaners can't do everything -- changing sheets, doing laundry, cooking meals and handling the dishes... And then there are other jobs to take away tedium we don't want to do, like an accountant to handle our finances and pay our taxes... Finally, other luxuries like a masseuse...
In any case, I don't think that our current economic model can survive the ongoing technological revolution.
I think the amount of revolution that's happened in the last hundred years suggests that it can. We went from the first powered flight to walking on the moon in less than seventy years.
Job insecurity and resulting stress about your survival when the society is wealthier than ever is an insane combination...
Given the number of social programs that exist, not to mention private charity, a little bit of unemployment doesn't actually threaten your survival. What it does is force you to find a better job, or to think about what you should actually be doing.
The only question is whether the change is peaceful and constructive one, leading to a new era of prosperity and cooperation without compulsion, or a total social collapse.
Do you have any suggestions for how either might be achieved?
So basically such a machine would change his life for the worse.
That's one option, yes.
It could also force him to change his life for the better, or it could be that it has little to no effect on his life.
as the word "yet" indicates, it's just one step in the endless downward slide.
Not endless.
For example, computers make lousy tour guides, lawyers, chefs, doctors, programmers, financial advisers, dancers, and many other things. In fact, the demand for programmers has gone up in the current recession, and that's a job that didn't exist a hundred years ago.
So it's not even necessarily a downward slide -- buggy-whip manufacturers are going to fight to keep their job, yes, but eventually, they'll find something else, maybe even being a mechanic for these new horse-drawn carriages. It's always messy, but technology does seem to replace old jobs with new ones, not displace jobs altogether.
Wait, what does crashing their cars have to do with minimal staff?
That's why I qualified it with "could be". It seems likely to me that he is, especially given the context (that he would hate to do math).
If he's intelligent and educated, that actually suggests a weaker argument. There are other jobs which don't require micromanaging bosses, though I suspect said bosses are involved in the paper pushers that this online system would be replacing. However, I don't think we should hold back progress just to save a job that's actually obsolete.
First, this government has screwed up IT plan after IT plan, at huge cost with marginal or no functional end product
Fair enough, though that suggests we should be addressing this issue, rather than shrugging and giving up on government IT in general.
The next issue is that there are a significant proportion of the population who cannot get broadband at all (or only a very, very slow broadband),
So what? This isn't exactly the kind of application which requires broadband at all. Done right, it should work via dialup.
you can add poor people and many of the elderly to the list of the disenfranchised...
I though there was a government plan in which people who can't afford it can apply for a free computer and Internet.
(given the rate libraries are closing, that won't be an option for the poor in 10 years)
Again, that seems like a separate issue which should be addressed.
Here in the US, we use electronic vote tabulation devices for our elections,
Voting is an entirely different process, precisely because it's anonymous. This isn't.
Historical Database Security Failures
File cabinets have security failures, also.
MIM attacks for IDentity theft.
Much harder to do with proper crypto, as I described. Harder, in fact, than intercepting postal mail.
No electricity, no Data.
No running water, no toilets. This is rapidly becoming less of a problem.
You mentioned passports, well they might not have been "anonymous" a paper passport didn't BROADCAST your data.
Neither do these, unless you mean the unicast transmission between your machine and a government machine -- not particularly less secure than someone mailing a passport to you, which does happen.
You want to talk about corruption at DMV?
Again, something which already happens with paper.
I know I sound negative here, but maybe I just have a really sour taste in my mouth from how the USA exploits electronics,
You mean how we use them?
over the last ten years this has allowed corruption to destroy our Constitution, Civil Rights, and our wonderful monetary system,
Wait, seriously? You're blaming electronics on all of this?
A computer didn't vote for the Patriot Act. People did.
It was a mathematical algorithm invented by a person which is most directly responsible for the current economic crisis. Again, while this may not have been possible without a computer, it wasn't the computer which decided to trust the magical algorithm -- people did.
this slices your argument to shreds, without getting into all that other crap.
The one actual counterargument you provided that was even close to an argument was your mention of voting machines, which wasn't relevant. Care to try again?
So let's see:
Don't memorize anything.
Flawed in many ways.
First and foremost, you can't synthesize facts you don't know. As an example, someone recently hired me to sort through five thousand bounced emails and figure out how to turn them into a spreadsheet containing the actual failed email addresses.
In order to do this, I had him put it on an IMAP server (the last time he asked me to do this, it was already). I then connected to it with a Ruby script using an IMAP library, parsed the relevant messages (moving each message I successfully parsed to a different IMAP folder), refining my algorithm to parse the rest, and at each step, dumping the results to a CSV file (trivially easy to generate) which I knew he could open in Excel.
At the very least, I had to understand what IMAP is, and where it fits into the picture. Whenever someone gives me a similar problem, my first thought now is, "If I give you access to an IMAP server, you can click+drag all the email out of wherever it is and onto this common server that I can access from wherever I am. It's a stupidly simple and portable way for us to deal with whole folders worth of email."
Now, it's true that if I didn't know it was called IMAP, I could probably Google for something like "Email protocols", read up on Wikipedia, and figure out which one I was talking about. But what if I didn't remember such a thing existed? I might have been digging through whatever format Thunderbird uses for days -- I can't think of a reasonable way I would discover IMAP for this purpose, if I hadn't already been exposed to it in some other way.
There's also CSV. Again, without knowing about CSV, what would I Google? "How to get stuff into Excel"? At best, I might end up with some VBA crap, meaning I'd have to write a program either in VBA or somehow talking to VBA, which also understood the Thunderbird email format. Ugh. Instead, it was simple -- output CSV, attach it, email it.
Then I had to remember that CSV has that weird double-quotation-mark escaping rule. I also remembered that libraries exist -- which also saved me from dealing with IMAP. Oh, and I had to remember that a good way to get libraries for Ruby (my language of choice) is Rubygems. I suppose I could've avoided memorizing "sudo gem install __", but knowing it offhand saves a lot of time.
Had I not remembered about libraries, I might not even have considered IMAP, and I might've badly mangled the CSV.
I also had to remember both that regular expressions exist, and how to use them. Most of the messages were easy enough to read as a multipart message, pulling the "to" field off the envelope (two more concepts I had to be familiar with; the fact that messages with attachments are called "multipart" and how multipart email works...)
Oh, and it also helped to know other assorted things -- like remembering how to add a user to my IMAP server, and how to create a secure connection between that and his Thunderbird (ended up just re-opening the VPN I set up years earlier -- but I had to remember how to enable it...)
And so on.
And this was a tiny, tiny project. Got it done in less than four hours, and that's dealing with a ton of weird permutations of possible emails, and a weird issue with his IMAP server.
Now imagine what it's like working on an actual full-blown software product.
Let the computer do the translating.
Do not want. All your base are belong to us.
You claim translation will eventually be good. Fine, but right now, it sucks, and it's going to continue to suck long after the original poster has learned whatever language they needed -- and there's still nuances of culture that you actually have to experience.
Got a little camera like the one in cell phones? Plug that camera into your hand held PC/internet/MP3player/telephone iTurd whatever. Point the camera at the kanji that you want translated. Press the button on the
You've missed the point, I think. In particular:
that statement is like saying that no calculator can bring the mental satisfaction that comes from successfully multiplying two ten-digit numbers in Middle school arithmetic class.
If computers couldn't multiply at that point, it'd be a valid analogy. That statement about the "wonder of the human mind" wasn't about "mental satisfaction", it was about the fact that right now, the human mind can do translation much more accurately than computers are, and you wouldn't trust a computer to do that job.
Bollocks to you, also.
If you're commuting, or only have a few minutes, that's what a smartphone is for, or the web interface.
Anki is basically designed to be something you spend only 20 minutes or so per day doing. It uses a similar algorithm to SuperMemo, and the original idea behind SuperMemo (and Anki) is to predict when you're about to forget a given card and flash it to you before that happens. The longer you do this with a given card (without forgetting), the longer the interval gets -- thus, a card you know well, it'll only flash every few months (or even years!), giving you more time to focus on the ones you actually need.
Plus it can tie to multimedia -- so, record yourself and compare it to a reference recording to check your pronunciation.
Even without the multimedia, this is something you really can't do with dead trees -- you'd be spending all your time calculating and scheduling cards, and none of your time reviewing.
There are only so many burgers that need to be flipped, floors that need to be mopped, etc.
Not true. Put another way, if this really becomes an issue, think about the army of servants that a wealthy family might've had in the late 19th century. The challenge is creating a demand for that, but frankly, I would much rather have more tax dollars with which to hire, say, a housekeeper, than have my tax dollars go to a paper pusher, given the choice.
Put someone into a job that's beyond their capacity they'll do it poorly, be miserable while doing it, and make everyone everyone miserable in the process.
Do that in school, instead. Not beyond their capacity, either -- one of the largest factors in the success of a given student body is the teacher involved.
A casual acquaintance from high school has been working for the last 25 years cleaning up roadkill for the county, and he's as happy as a pig in slop doing what most people here would consider a shit job. He'd consider any job that involved more math than tallying up how many critters he scraped off the pavement to be the "shit job".
Doesn't have to be math, and there are very few people who could only ever be qualified for that sort of work. For example, you haven't said anything about your friend's intelligence -- it could well be that he's simply unmotivated and uneducated. It could be that he hasn't found his passion.
Or it could be that, if we ever invent a machine to clean roadkill instead, he should bite the bullet and find what to him might be a "shit job", but which hasn't (yet) been replaced by machines.
...after all, we're talking about access to stuff which was traditionally handled with paper. The only difference is that an electronic trail is easier to follow than a paper trail -- but here, "easier" only means "less time-consuming," or, alternatively, "cheaper."
Here in the US, we have the option of filing our taxes online, or mailing in a paper form. Either way is going to include our social security number, along with a bunch of other personally identifying information. Either way might lead to our personal information being leaked or abused. The only real difference is that the online version is faster and potentially more secure -- properly done, I'll trust cryptography long before I'll trust the postal service.
Same with vehicle licensing, passports, housing, everything else they mention -- again, which of these is something you used to be able to do anonymously? In what way does merely putting these in a web browser make it easier to keep an eye on you?
Even if you find some marginal benefit to paper -- and it will be marginal -- is it worth the cost, the increased amount of fuel burned transporting it, the paper, the increased amount of fuel used to harvest the wood, make the paper, and recycle/destroy/bury it once used? How about the increased cost to the state of employing all those people to deal with the paper -- the same people who are currently whining about losing their jobs -- how much would it be worth to have them doing something actually productive instead of something a webserver could do for them?
Russell's Teapot fails as an analogy; it's a physical item so its only value is via physical interaction.
So what?
Your point was that you hesitate to legislate anything unfalsifiable. Russel's Teapot may not be the best example, but there are plenty of things, supernatural and otherwise, which are unfalsifiable. An infinite number, in fact.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is just a different physical imagining of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being. You know what, that's a distinction without a difference.
Is it really? The FSM stands for different things and asks for different things, and suggests different foreign policy -- in particular, that we should encourage piracy (of the nautical robbery sort, not the copyright infringement sort) to reduce global warming.
The point is that if it's not reasonable to give special privilege to followers of the FSM -- and most would agree that it's not -- then as you've pointed out, there isn't a lot of difference between the FSM and other monotheistic religions, so why should we give any of them any more respect?
It's not hard to find a non-religious analog - philosophical pacifists were allowed exemptions from the draft.
Right, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. However, it's an interesting point to make -- note that this avoids entirely the need to make special provisions for Quakers.
Given infinite time and precision in drafting the law, and infinite resources to enforce it, sure. However, I don't want week long jury trials wrangling over the definition of "small amount", I don't want lobbists trying to tweak the levels (Equal alcohol, no shots are more intense, no tequila is worse for young people), and I don't want to refine that law at the cost of say, banking regulations.
In other words, you agree that the law is unjust as implemented, but you suggest that it's much more practical to frame it in terms of religion than to try to refine it in other terms. Correct?
Of course, I'm not sure it really buys you anything, as this just means there may well be long jury trials wrangling over the definition of "religion" and which exceptions are reasonable, just as we've been doing for awhile. In addition, you haven't eliminated your original problem of the definition of "small amount" -- what would you do with a religion which required teenagers to drink a pitcher of beer?
By definition, if you rationally choose to have a belief, it's not unreasonable faith.
You seemed to be agreeing with me later on that this is not a choice we can make -- we either believe something or we don't.
I would also say that faith is by definition unreasonable. If you have good reason to believe it, why call it faith? Wouldn't it be simply belief by then, perhaps even knowledge?
I never said utilitarianism was a good moral framework, merely that it was a good legislative framework.
Interesting, I'll have to think about that.
The utility of her knowing it is wrong may outweigh the benefits of the affair.
I don't see how. Remember, again, that she doesn't find out. From a subjectivist point of view, you might argue that her knowing it's wrong may have some influence, but utilitarianism is only concerned with the ends -- in this case, she's just as happy as she would otherwise be, maybe happier as her husband is more relaxed, less needy...
To prove to them sure. But you can prove to the rest of the world the KGB doesn't vacuum their home every night.
Probably not, especially if you take into account the fact that their imagination will always be one step ahead of you. Of course the KGB didn't come after you installed those video cameras -- they're not that stupid!
No, they will tend to make claims which are actually unfalsifiabl
OP... was pulling random "hokey" sounding religions out of his arse.
The problem I had wasn't that lack of understanding about the role of religion, but the assumption that certain religions are "hokey" while others aren't. Having been on the receiving end of more than one "Oh, you believe in God, you're just mad at him" Christian, I get frustrated when I see people trying to tell others what they do and don't believe.
That is, I do think Jedi is absurd, but no moreso than most religion, and I wouldn't mock a Jedi by telling them they don't really believe that.