""If these companies are so clueless about technology that they think SOPA is a good idea, how could they be good investors?""
That is a brilliant point.
That is a brilliant point.
So I'm not convinced by the argument here. It makes too many unstated assumptions.
I support this boycott, and this argument might make good rhetoric, but I wouldn't use it directly to evaluate investors.
That's because the underlying assumptions are false. Being religious doesn't require one to be "clueless about rationality" and supporting SOPA doesn't requre the supporter to be clueless about technology -- they may as well hope to benefit from breaking the Internet.
As every regulation (the more severe, the better) it will give an advantage to established companies over startups and newcomers, maybe even allow the former to became gate-keepers of the Internet business; DMCA allowed for attempts at censorship (silencing criticism by claiming trademarks), SOPA will take it to a whole new level; supporting SOPA signals loyalty to the entertainment industry; etc.
Absolutely correct. You don't have to be clueless about rationality to be religious; you can also explicitly reject rationality, even though you understand it.
But if you don't reject it, then it's quite difficult to accept any of the Big Three religions and simultaneously convince yourself that you're embracing an evidence-based worldview. That's not to say a few haven't spun up enough cognitive dissonance to manage it, but it's exceedingly difficult and rare.
And as a rule, yes - to someone of the current generation, it does cast serious doubt on someone's scientific abilities when it comes to light that they are religious, especially since it's no longer as socially unacceptable to reject religious beliefs.
Every worldview is based in faith. The very act of considering any evidence requires trust (faith, if you will) in the value of input provided by our senses. There is no and there cannot be any evidence for that value either way.
Best we can do is analyze reasons for our beliefs, keep them logical, and consistent with experience. Which, coincidentally, is one of the meanings of the word "rational."
> And as a rule, yes - to someone of the current generation, it does cast serious doubt on someone's scientific abilities when it comes to light that they are religious
That's normal and OK -- we all hold a (pretty large usually) number of conscious and unconscious prejudices. So much for evidence-based worldview btw.
This is just religious apologetic and it's not really true.
This is the definition of faith in this context:
> Mental acceptance of and confidence in a claim as truth without evidence supporting the claim or disregarding all evidence to the contrary
Religion is explicitly not based on evidence, and is explicitly not disprovable. You believe something despite no evidence, that is faith. Believing something as a best guess based on what actual evidence you have is not faith.
My very limited knowledge is only that Hume was fairly critical of religion and that it wasn't really clear if he was a complete atheist because if he were any more hostile to Christianity than he was he would have been persecuted. Maybe I am assuming too much about the person I was replying to, but it sounds to me like he is defending Christianity as an equally defensible way to live your life, so I don't think invoking Hume here is actually supporting his argument.
It's worth clarifying that my claim is that I am trying to claim that faith is a subset of belief. That you can't possibly know anything for sure is incompatible with Christianity and all current major religions, and to act like making conclusions based on evidence with confidence levels is the same as saying you know Absolute Truth Just Because is clearly absurd.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority...
I'd be more concerned with a scientist who happens to be convinced that he is destined to make great discoveries. (which, delusional or not, may inspire them to feats greater than otherwise). My concern would be for their intellectual honesty - the same concern caused by any strong religious or other ideological precommitment relevant to their work.
Rationality, correctly understood, values tradition. The correct attitude for progress is piecemeal reform. That need not start with religion. It should start wherever people's most pressing problems are. If someone's religion isn't ruining his life, but he has other stuff to deal with (a failing marriage, a startup, a scientific discovery he wants to make) then he isn't irrational to focus on that other stuff and leave the religion alone for now.
But tradition itself is only valuable to cult leaders.
Another good reason to turn them down.
> Being religious doesn't require one to be "clueless about rationality"
Not necessarily, but it surely opens a window for irrationality, and what goes through that window depends on the stuff that happens to you.
That's usually called 'the call from God' and it is generally something bad like sickness or a the death of someone close.
Sorry, but there really is a fundamental problem with being a biologist if your stated belief makes one of the core principles of your field impossible. From what I can tell, most of the young-earth creationists that are biologists mainly work in trying, for decades now, to disprove evolution.
Given a set of empirical observations and the premise that the laws of the universe are constant everywhere and every-when, what logical inferences can you make about the world?
You don't have to necessarily believe the conclusions, but you can still do good science just by trying to play the game well.
Now it's hard to me to imagine a mind working that way but I don't see that it's impossible.
Considering that 95% of the National Academy of Science is atheist, the correlation is still pretty relevant.
Clueless people can be successful investors, luck is always a factor, but someone who supports SOPA probably lacks a certain technical background or ethics.
Since the Academy elects its own members there might be some bias lurking in that number.
This verse has always struck me as directly anti-science.
There is no doubt faith is different than science, but I think this particular example doesn't capture the real difference. Honestly, I'm not sure how I would qualify that difference, beyond (good) science will change in the light of new evidence. Faith often requires modifying how one interprets evidence so it fits within one's religious views.
I've also met people whose faith stands parallel to science. In that case, changing understanding of the physical world doesn't impact the spiritual world. That is where I try to be.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Faith
This article explores thoughts on faith that I don't agree are useful, but the opening sentence is the most useful definition I've seen.
Archaeology confirms in minute detail that the historical journeys of the early missionaries were as described and one of the authors is called the finest historian who ever lived. Copies of those documents date back to just after the events they described and centuries of banging on them and subjecting them to the closest scrutiny shows that they are as they say they are. Other ancient literature is meager by comparison. We have a handful of copies of Tacitus dated 800 years to a millenium after the events he describes yet no-one sees him as unreliable. Copies of the NT documents number in the thousands, some of which are carbon dated to a few decades after the fall of Jerusalem and all of a sudden they're questionable. Uh huh. Well, we can chuck out most of Roman history and all of Alexander the Great by that yardstick then.
Just what sort of evidence are you looking for?
Acts 17:31 διοτι εστησεν ημεραν εν η μελλει κρινειν την οικουμενην εν δικαιοσυνη εν ανδρι ω ωρισεν πιστιν παρασχων πασιν αναστησας αυτον εκ νεκρων
πασιν is clearly used here as assurance - not some blind belief in nonsense. You don't understand Koine? Then why is your opinion worth anything in "standard discussion"?
I phrase this conservatively because I'm aware of the possibility of assigning motive to events that were actually "happenstance", assuming there is such a thing. But others would phrase it much more aggressively: "I have faith in God because of all the things he has done for me." If they can't, they probably should, in fact, re-evaluate their faith.
I was. Believe me, I was....
Anyway, if you ask someone "How do you know god exists?" and they respond "Because I have faith." or whatever, they are not using the "assurance based on a reliable track record." definition. Prior track record of what? God existing?
In actuality, people use faith to describe the reason they believe in things despite no evidence. When they believe that they have "evidence" the answer to the question tends to be something along the lines of "I _know_ that god exists because...".
I find it hard to believe the majority of religious people are even aware of that greek word/meaning.
Prior track record of his doing things in their life. My point wasn't the greek word, but that most people believe they have evidence of God's actions. I guess I may have overreached a bit, but I don't hear "just because" answers very often.
> When they believe that they have "evidence" the answer to the question tends to be something along the lines of "I _know_ that god exists because...".
Whether that's valid depends on what's in the ellipsis.
As for believing in spite of evidence, all I can say is that that's not what religious faith is supposed to be. The Bible tells us to be able to give reasons for our faith (1 Peter 3:15), and that it's useless unless backed up by actions (James 2:14). However, I have noticed that sometimes expecting Christians to pay attention to the bible is a foolish assumption...
My working definition for a while has been believing/acting on what you know to be true even when it feels or seems like it's not true, or when it's hard to act on it. It's about the same kind of faith that keeps me basically sane while tracking down a heisenbug in a program: faith that despite what it seems like, the computer really is behaving in some consistent way. Similar is the faith of a scientist that weird behavior will eventually be explainable by rational means, like that neutrinos going FTL will have some mundane explanation. Sometimes it seems like there's contradictory evidence, but if you stick it out it turns out ok.
Whether that's valid depends on what's in the ellipsis.
Yes, it does, but I've never heard any filling-in of the ellipsis that suggests even the most remotely possible evidence for a virgin birth, resurrection, or the fact that some fatherly figure is watching over us at all times and has given us the Christian Bible as his True Word. A bible, I might add, that presents a lot of seriously morally questionable beliefs as mandatory laws.
However, I have noticed that sometimes expecting Christians to pay attention to the bible is a foolish assumption...
Most of the horrible things that even the worst Christians think, say, and believe are directly justified based on statements from the bible.
Similar is the faith of a scientist that weird behavior will eventually be explainable by rational means, like that neutrinos going FTL will have some mundane explanation. Sometimes it seems like there's contradictory evidence, but if you stick it out it turns out ok.
That would be a fine comparison if it was ever the case that any phenomenon in the observable universe had an explanation that required God as described in the Christian Bible, and couldn't be explained by mundane rational facts. IMO, this is not proven or even suggested by the evidence at hand.
If you feel that personal experiences fit that bill, then you're of course allowed to think that, but realize that it's completely rational for anyone that doesn't place such a high prior probability on Christianity's truths to assume that you're merely delusional.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Christ
Or, more comprehensive and much more damming:
I'm not a professional scientist but as a wannabe theoretician I can't concede how this can be correct. Indeed I think it needs to be wrong often in order for experiment to progress from theory.
I'd warrant that the LHC was only built because those theoreticians at the forefront of physical advances in particle physics at Fermilab and CERN (and wherever) felt that, despite not yet having the evidence, that nonetheless the Higgs boson (or other particles like the Chi_b (3P)) would be found.
Moreover often one adopts a first hypothesis because one is convinced of the truth of that position without a rigorous proof; obviously empirical method then steps in to affirm that belief.
Yes beliefs can be found to be false, but they can also be confirmed.
How do you determine otherwise which experiments are worth performing. We don't have infinite resources.
For example. Einstein published his theory of relativity in 1916 having worked, apparently, on it for 8 years. Do you suppose he worked on it because he believed it false? One of the outcomes of the theory was then first observationally confirmed by Eddington's observations of an eclipse in 1919.
Up until 1919 Einstein and other's put much faith in the theory by using it to model reality without knowing if it's predictions would be observed without falsification.
I'm all for Popperian falsification as the modus of formal scientific advance but on an individual level it appears to me that those who work for many years on unconfirmed theories are often believing in the truth of those theories without empirical confirmation.
>"Even if you believe it before you run an experiment on it, you do so provisionally, without putting "faith" in it, because you know you might be forced to discard it."
Moreover, it strikes me that one could not put faith in anything (the love of your mother say) if it were prevented by the possibility that later evidence would force you to discard it. That statement also appears contrary to the illustration I've given concerning GR too.
Usually, one adopts a hypothesis as an attempt to understand the world, which is usually an attempt either to satisfy one's curiosity or to better direct one's efforts. Then one tries to test the hypothesis to see whether it's true, hoping on the one hand that the world can be easily understood or that one's plans can be easily fulfilled, but on the other hand not wanting to be burned by investing intellectual or physical resources into false beliefs.
Attempting to falsify possible hypotheses is one method of trying to get at the truth, but by no means is it the only one, nor is it always the best one; e.g. when the main challenge is coming up with a good theory (e.g. relativity; heh, the sister comment gave the same example), you will not get there by trying to falsify hypotheses (it might start you out by showing that existing mechanics is wrong, but it won't help you come up with relativity). It seems that a focus on falsifying hypotheses would be mainly useful when you're given a lot of hypotheses from untrustworthy sources--or, at least, sources who aren't good at doing the kind of fact-checking that you can do.
I'll give an example from earlier this evening: I'm waiting for the new Plinkett review video to come up on redlettermedia.com (I expect it to appear sometime tonight), and instead of repeatedly manually checking the page it'll show up on (which I would otherwise do), I want to write a shell command to check it for me (currently checking every 30 seconds). I decide on this method: Use curl to get the text of the webpage, save it to a file, and compare it to a previous version using "diff"; if the files are different, then that hopefully means the new review has been posted.
However, I know that some websites will generate unique things for every visitor--maybe increment an "N people have visited this website" counter or display the current time or something. I don't want this script to give false positives, so I check. I use "diff -u" to compare two versions downloaded within a few seconds of each other. And the result:
$ diff -u a.txt b.txt
--- a.txt 2011-12-22 21:46:21.000000000 -0800
+++ b.txt 2011-12-22 21:46:27.000000000 -0800
@@ -630,5 +630,5 @@
<!-- AddThis Button Begin -->
<script type="text/javascript">var addthis_product = 'wpp-261';
-var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true};</script><script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js#pubid=wp-4ef415ac6fc54e51"></script></body>
+var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true};</script><script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js#pubid=wp-4ef415b30f55534b"></script></body>
</html>
What did I do here? I hypothesized that consecutive versions of the page would be identical until the new review was posted; I hoped this was true, because then my shell command would be easy to write. However, I knew there was a chance it wasn't true, so I investigated and found that it wasn't; I then modified my hypothesis/filled in an alternative hypothesis (I had foreseen the possibility and what I would do about it), that "consecutive versions of this page piped through grep -v would be identical until the new review was posted". By design, this hypothesis passed the test that the previous one failed; I stopped investigation at this point and simply acted as though it were true.
This further hypothesis could have been wrong: as I wrote this comment, I realized it could have displayed the hour, or even the day, and then it would give a false positive but wouldn't do so until somewhat later. Also, it could be that my "grep -v" command would remove another line that would eventually contain the new post; I thought of this but deemed it unlikely and didn't bother investigating it. (So far tonight the script has correctly given negative results; this level of certainty was good enough for me.)
How does this fit with your narrative? I didn't adopt my first hypothesis specifically to prove it false. I did, at least, proceed quickly to test it and to prove it false. But then there was my second hypothesis. I definitely didn't adopt that one specifically to prove it false, nor did I even try to falsify it.
Perhaps you would say, well, you're not acting as a scientist. Perhaps not; I have a definite goal in mind, getting a script to work, and I'm interested in the truth only insofar as it helps me. Well, except that I'm also interested in practicing my skill at automating things, and in understanding webpages and other aspects of the real world so that I can automate them and do other things with them.
Fundamentally, we want to know things because we have some use in mind for the knowledge, or because figuring things out has been useful in the past and so it's associated in our minds with a positive feeling (some of which is probably evolutionarily hardwired into the brain), or because we want to exercise our skills (which, again, has a probably-somewhat-evolutionarily-hardwired positive association in our minds). I think that anything that could be called "pure" research, done without practical results in mind, falls into one of the last two categories. (I also think that even if your research's only purpose is to develop technology, when you are actually doing the research, your brain will work best when your overriding emotion is curiosity.) My point is, science is not divorced from the real world, but fundamentally dependent on it; and if your ideal of science is so divorced, then attempting to reach your ideal (which is the point of an ideal) will eventually bring you misery. Exactly, in fact, the way that a false belief will: holding X as the ideal of Y is believing that the best possible Y is X.
Scientific publications in different branches of science have different standards of evidence. Why? Because of the real world; because in some fields, experiments are expensive and difficult to conduct, and the main experimental tool in some fields is statistical studies that inevitably have some uncertainty. The standard for publication is, ideally, "Would the other scientists find this useful to read?", and when they can't do better than "The null hypothesis would cause this to happen with <5% probability" plus a plausible explanation plus documentation of what they did, that sort of thing passes the standard of publication. Does this make such investigations not science? (Some might say yes.) No. Science is the attempt to understand the world; any paper made with that intent that helps other scientists in their own attempts is a good scientific paper. (A paper that accidentally helps scientists could be called evidence or inspiration.)
In building the LHC we put about $4 billion of faith in the experiments producing results without knowing that they would.
Like the part that says Pi is 3.
SOPA seems wholly destructive to this sector of the economy.
But that's not really the point, which is that whether or not they're good investors, they support something harmful. We're not boycotting them because we think they're bad investors. (If we thought they were bad investors, why did we do business with them in the first place?) We're doing it because they are allied with our enemies and we want to hurt them for that.
Yes, it's conceivable.
We're not boycotting them because we think they're bad investors.
That would be reason enough for me.
If we thought they were bad investors, why did we do business with them in the first place?
Perhaps you weren't aware of this aspect of their decision-making process.
We're doing it because they are allied with our enemies and we want to hurt them for that.
Meh. I think a much stronger position is:
We depend on a free Internet and a stable DNS and are just not going to do business with those who try to jack around with it. - and - If you don't "get" why net censorship and ISP domain blocking in particular are spectacularly dumb ideas then you probably aren't in that top tier of cluefulness that we're wanting to recruit.
These are two independent positions that compliment each other well I think.
If you invest in tobacco, land mine manufacturers, and semi-competent toxic waste disposal facilities, you might make a mint. That would make you a good investor in the sense of profitable.
However, no entrepreneur in his right mind would take money from people like that, because they wouldn't be good investors in the sense of being supportive of a long-term effort to build a sustainable business in a healthy ecosystem.
So I'm with PG on this one. Anybody internet entrepreneur should be very suspicious about money from a SOPA supporter: partner, investor, or acquirerer.
And no, I'm not necessarily pissed off at the people generating the waste. Heck, water's dangerous unless properly handled. As long as people using toxic substances pay the full lifecycle cost there's no negative externality so that's jake by me.
That's just the kind of guy I am.
Because the argument itself is a fallacy. Believing that God exist does not make you less rational that believing that God does not exist(witch uses to be the theological affiliation of the people that proclaim the statement).
One or the other is a prejudice. If the statement were true the best option should be to be agnostic, to be able to consider both options as true, and try one and then the other. The ancient Greeks used this thinking methodology regularly.
They knew that believing our beliefs are true is a trap, everybody believes that their believes are true.
Even with wrong believes you could explore options that makes you find a valid solution. Columbus calculations(believes) for getting to Japan were terrible wrong, but it was useful anyway.
Update: I mean probability of a venture backing a sopa supporter(company/startup) being anti-sopa is very low.. So it's a good heuristic to assume they are sopa supporters instead of innocent(technologically clueless) bystanders.
And there exists Catholic priests who are pedophiles, that doesn't make Catholicism and pedophilia compatible. Nor are science and religion compatible. Those people just have an ability to tolerate or ignore their own cognitive dissonance because their religious beliefs are so strong.
In other words, one possible answer to the original question is "cognitive dissonance". The point is that it doesn't matter what the answer is; there clearly is an answer.
Certainly. And to quote myself:
"If that is the case, then the organization is ill. Best to stay away from it, in case it happens to be contagious."
In some cases that's very important.
It doesn't sound like you would be banned for merely working for the company and being interested in YC - it's keeping that company out of the process.
Because they have a checkbook? Does General Dynamics care if pacifists buy their stock?
Since YC doesn't seem to sell to media-providers I suppose they won't be losing much, but seriously? If GE wrote me a billion dollar check, I'd take it no matter my politics.
Sometimes dumb money will kill a startup.
If you are a movie studio, SOPA is a great idea for your bottom line.
I don't think it's fair to call everyone who is in favor of SOPA either evil or stupid, even if SOPA itself is both. I can understand why YC wouldn't want them around, but I can't necessarily say they wouldn't be good investors.
YC has a fiduciary responsibility as well.
Corporations that are pro-SOPA don't make PR statements saying, "We are pro-SOPA because it will make us money."
Instead they say, "SOPA is good for America! Anyone opposed is a misinformed basement dweller!"
When pg says, "Anyone pro-SOPA is stupid" why don't you interpret it as pg discharging his fiduciary duty?
Why do you apologize for sociopathic lies in large corporations, but then criticize self-interested statements from small corporations?
I'm questioning the basic assumptions you take toward this issue. I find your attitude here baffling and, honestly, horrifying.
If corporations are supposed to tell PR-friendly lies to benefit their bottom line, shouldn't Paul Graham be telling PR-friendly lies to benefit his bottom line?
By extension, when you write that, are you telling PR-friendly lies? Which fiduciary duty are you discharging when you write that? Does SOPA benefit your bottom-line?
If SOPA benefits your bottom-line, shouldn't you be going around telling sociopathic lies to stop it? That's what the CEO of Pfizer is doing... you are your own CEO and you have a fiduciary duty to yourself.
If it's socially acceptable for corporations to tell profit-motived sociopathic lies, then it must be made socially acceptable for individuals to tell profit-motived sociopathic lies, and any appeal to "you're not being fair!" must be recognized as pure rhetoric designed to fool the gullible.
"Guuuuyyyys! Be nice to the SOPA supporters! They're only acting like Democracy-destroying sociopaths for their own personal profit! It's just not fair if you call them mean names!"
In other words, the corporation does not hate me, but I am made of atoms that it can use to make a profit?
"Your honor, I'm not evil! I was just following orders... errr.. I mean I had a responsibility to my shareholders!"
I'm sorry, I simply cannot take your line of reasoning seriously.
"Fiduciary" derives from latin words meaning "faith" and "trust". You could reasonably rephrase it as "duty of good faith". It's just as vague as it sounds. It does not mean you have to do everything that's best for "the bottom line", either in the short or long term.
In fact, absent actions that amount to fraud or deception, or that clearly breach laws, bylaws, or contractual arrangements, it is virtually impossible for shareholders to sustain an action for breach of fiduciary duty.
Not supporting a bad law that is not in the best interests of the world is not even close to a breach of fiduciary duty as normally applies in a corporate context.