Magic doesn't work that way
jakobgreenfeld.com
jakobgreenfeld.com
Then some random startup person comes in and writes a blog post with a sentence like
> But there’s also another option if we don’t take it for granted that people in the past were really that different from us.
Like... this is the sort of sentence that makes people tear their hair out and scream into the void. It is like somebody coming to you and saying "wait... maybe we can... just hear me out... write a program in text and edit it over time to build software."
My wife is a professor of history and has done work on some of the questions raised in this blog post. Usually I show her these things because I know it'll be fun to rage at them together. But this one I chose not to show her because I do not believe that I have ever seen online writing that is more dismissive of her profession than this. Like, and I cannot express this clear enough, OP is just making shit up about a field of study that is centuries old and involves professionals who work 60+ hour weeks for shit pay because they are so invested in these topics.
Here you have a child who knows nothing about history but has come to a realisation all by themselves about people in the past, and instead of praising them and saying, "here's where you can learn more" you decide to deride them for their ignorance.
That's not ideal.
The blog post is not presented as "hey, I am now interested in history and would like to engage with it." It is presented as "I can drive through this sort of analysis purely based on baseless hunches." If the article stopped at "hey, I've been thinking about the past wrongly" then I'd have a completely different response.
PreEdit: I was going to say they didn't know it would end up on HN but I thought I'd better check and sure enough it was submitted by the author. I think you may be righter than I am.
I find this sort of thing to be frustrating in ways that go beyond just OP's post. The humanities are being hollowed out in both education and professional research. Students are told not to take courses in history. They are funneled into software and business because these fields pay well and these people become leaders of major corporations whose technology shapes our society in so many ways.
And they also write things like this, which simultaneously suggest that history is useful (the original epiphany being something learned basically right at the beginning of any study). OP clearly thinks that this is important. They think that this understanding has the capability of changing how we see people of the past and people today.
But then... they also seem to think that the field is worthless when they take the next step. I can think of no other way that a person could get from their initial epiphany to "I dunno, I bet this is why people in the past read entrails" and just roll with that. Like, what does this person think that a historian does all day?
Maybe the humanities really are dead. And the outcome of that won't be "nobody cares about history." It'll be this. The leaders of the next generation pretending to do history without understanding what the thing even is. And it'll be people reading that content and internalizing it. A whole society just hallucinating understanding of humanity through entrepreneurship newsletters.
This article is nowhere near the most harmful one I've seen. It is just very blatant. And it makes me sad.
One thing is a random blog post. One thing is your frustration that teachers/historians don't get paid well. A third thing is that people find blog posts more engaging than history text-books.
I also find your expression "making shit up" really weird. Anyways that's all for you to unpack -- this is a fun read, if you want to be angry at everyone who has a non-academically-rigorous idea that they type up that's one way to spend your energy.
> Well, sometimes building a consensus is more important than accuracy. A shaman’s random decision is better than a more optimal decision not everyone can get fully behind. This is especially true in war scenarios where conviction is key.
> Sometimes it is better to believe that a decision is sanctioned by a higher authority than to know that it rests on mere conjecture, as it usually does in the real world where we’re always dealing with incomplete information.
> And sometimes it is better to have a truly random decision than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Surely, the enemy will not be able to predict a shaman’s completely random decision.
The author then makes conclusions about the beliefs people in the past had about divination.
This appears to have been derived entirely from the hunches of the author. That's best described as "making shit up."
It starts with the epiphany: "hey, maybe it is actually possible to understand the past" and then doesn't make the barest effort to consider that there are approaches for doing this.
This serves as a proper inspiration or food for thought for scientists living their lives outside of work and industry. It makes the world go around and should be cultivated and fostered in my opinion.
It's an incredibly shallow and ignorant pastiche of pop-culture science-like voodoo nonsense of the Carlos Castaneda/I am Ishmael type.
Fun conversation to have at 2 AM while drunk at an undergraduate party but pure cringe in the context of a published blog entry.
Have the author ever tried to understand what is science and engineering, and how they are justified? Does he believe in human rights? Have he ever thought where his ethical system originates? The author seems to firmly believe that he lives in “the end of history”; so the biggest insight he could come up with is that scriptures are kind of self-help books and prayers are kind of exercises that treat anxiety.
The author very likely did learn nothing, he unfortunately doesn't have a sense for appreciation and learning:
"... when you visit a museum everything is kind of broken, so nothing is really that impressive."
You have to have a certain level of historical, scientific, and cultural apathy and arrogance to be able to say something like that with a straight face. Being in a museum is a humbling experience.
In what way is even our modern scientific secularism not ultimately the same kind of faith that the author thinks is "dumb"?
Yes, yes, empiricism, method, peer review, the proof is in the technology pudding. All so many things that still produce a mind ultimately indistinguishable from a religious fanatic who is assured in their beliefs, mobilized to tell people they are wrong..
One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something. Putting your belief in an entire enterprise of empirical observation doesn't change the act itself, your not smarter because you happen to live at this time where you can put your belief into this particular enterprise of modern science, its just the cards you were dealt.
Dawkins's point is that you don't have to believe in something that is clearly wrong, like horoscopes and Christianity, and you can choose not to make major decisions (like punishing people) over beliefs you have no evidence for and have evidence against.
The problem with the author is that he points out people believing in stupid things like shamans and gods and assumes that they must have a smart reason for it. Horoscopes and Christianity are the modern day equivalent, and there is no smart reason for the people who believe in those to do so today, so there is no reason to suppose that there used to be for their equivalents in the past.
Science works. Religion doesn't. When I want someone to fix my broken arm or build a bridge, or pretty well anything else I would want to do, I'm going to go with the system that works.
You cannot just brush that part aside!
To say there are smarter options now is different from saying it didn't work then. Getting illiterate people to gather for a sermon where they could be told to avoid shellfish that could kill them and to avoid harming other people (because an invisible wrathful being would catch them even if the society they lived in did not) served a purpose then that we have developed better systems for since.
Brains are glorified pattern matchers, but we hadn't yet figured out how to judge the quality of a perceived pattern, so in a desperate fit of apophenia, religions naturally emerged. Eventually we stepped back and developed systematic ways of distinguishing good patterns from bad. We call this system science.
Edison said, "I didn't fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; I only needed to find one way to make it work." I see the thousands of religions that humans have come up with as those 2,000 non-light bulbs, and science as the one method that works. Now that we have a working light bulb, we can throw out those other attempts.
I'm also curious why you believe evolution to be a metaphysical concept. From my POV you're introducing unnecessary, loaded terms like "religion" to explain phenomena that are already explained without them.
"Religion" is much more than "just the word for the collection of knowledge about how the society should operate". Maybe "ethics" is a better term for that? Religion is a very loaded term. The history of religion represents an ecosystem of competing industries vying for power over each other. I agree that religion has been used as a tool to influence the behavior of human society for both good and bad, but so has advertising and marketing (bacon for breakfast, diamonds for wedding bands, KFC for Christmas, etc.). Does that make advertising religion? Is religion a form of advertising? Or are they both just superfluous terms for something more simple: evolution.
Or whatever. I am just saying you can't help but believe, I am not saying there aren't necessarily good or bad beliefs, but I am saying that one belief or another doesn't make you "smarter."
Is not the idea of intelligence itself a kind of belief? Have we ever seen it in a microscope? How can you definitively answer, e.g. the Chalmer's zombie problem? The general issue of solipsism, of experience itself? Don't you believe that those who you love are full humans who hopefully love you back?
(Also I am sorry you keep feeling insulted, not sure what to do about that. Please know I fully implicate myself in all this as well.)
Being smart is the opposite of irrational. Vengefulness is orthogonal to correctness. If the punishment serves to increase the length of your life, it is rational (equivalently, smart). If not, it is stupid.
Would it not be more correct to say that the opposite of irrationality is, well, rationality? This is important because rationality is something I assume we agree is a characteristic of humans. Humans can't help but be rational, which is why irrational behavior can be the exception that proves the rule. To say "being smart" is the opposite suddenly creates a a somewhat unscientific rift among human animals, doesn't it? But I do get why you want to say that for your argument, but you should be a little more nuanced in order to get one over on me. Not that I am particularly smart or anything, but just because I am listening to what you are saying.
But otherwise, I think I see what you are saying, but why is living a long life the goal for you? That is a somewhat novel argument in this context.
If you are smart, you must be rational. The contrapositive must also be true. If you are irrational, you cannot be smart. My comment points out that your argument that worshipping at the altar of smartness is irrational makes no sense.
> But otherwise, I think I see what you are saying, but why is living a long life the goal for you?
This is self-evident. If you die, all other rewards lose their utility.
Edit to your edit: I have had the pleasure to know and study with some of the "smartest" people around in the hard and soft sciences, and let me tell you they can definitely act irrationally (we use the euphemism "eccentric" to gloss over this). Consider a genious mathematician who happens to have OCD. Does their sometimes irrational behavior mean they can't be smart?
Have you ever seen "smartness" in a microscope?
Your scenario makes no sense because in both cases, you are dead, and dead people have no preferences.
How is that different from belief in certain religions, where sex is solely for procreation? Everybody puts some sense of what they want to achieve over biological urges for immediate hit of dopamine. The only difference is that I say that these choices should be rational.
In general you are suddenly being prescriptive rather than descriptive, which implicitly seems to show you agree with what I am saying about belief, but you simply think that humans should change fundamentally. Which is fine, but it is itself a belief you have that you contextualize your life with!
That feeling comes from dopamine. If you actually believe that feeling is better than actually living to experience that feeling again in the future, a heroin dealer will be more than happy to help you out.
> but you simply think that humans should change fundamentally.
Only in that they should be more rational. I don't think that is an onerous request. Many people already try to be.
This is blind faith and poor understanding of the process. Essentially, they elevate scientists to priesthood where they have direct communication with the higher power where they have access to ultimate truth.
> Yes, yes, empiricism, method, peer review, the proof is in the technology pudding.
That is the correct answer! How will you refute it?
> All so many things that still produce a mind ultimately indistinguishable from a religious fanatic who is assured in their beliefs, mobilized to tell people they are wrong..
Oh. Big disappointment: you have no refutation, just a lot of insults.
You can feel secure in your beliefs without feeling superior because of them, and you can understand the specificity of our modern scientific framework without sacrificing the force of the scientific story.
If you really really think the scientific method or whatever is the end all of human belief, that is precisely a reason to try and stay humbled in that belief, not the opposite. That is just being a good scientist.
If you feel insulted by what I said, that is quite telling of your own insecurties and another reason you should pause and breath and listen to others, instead of telling yourself over and over again how smart you are.
Can you expand a bit on that? Because to me statements like that are not right or wrong because to me they don't really mean anything. Clearly to many people it does mean something, because you are far from the only one to make statements like that. To be clear, I don't mean any of this in a condescending way; I'm truly trying to understand.
For starters, what exactly do you mean by 'faith' and 'to believe in something'? I presume that believing in a god will certainly fit the definition, but what about people who are not religious? Would something like believing in the general goodness of people fit the definition?
The thing is, when I read or hear a statement like 'you have to believe in something' I try to determine whether is applies to myself, and then I have a problem. Do I believe in something? I don't know. I don't believe in a god, that's for sure. I do believe in evolution, for example, in the sense that I believe it exists (or more precisely perhaps, I accept the evidence in favor of the theory). But somehow I feel things like that are not what is generally meant by 'something to believe in'. But then I feel like there's nothing really meaningful left that I believe in. And of course then I start to question why I should have to believe in something. But maybe that's just because of a misunderstanding on my part.
We all have faith in the same way we all have spam in our inboxes.
It doesn’t mean we all think a Nigerian prince is going to make us rich.
But you are probably smarter than that. You would say, "well the study of physics shows that we can generalize the behavior of bodies in space such that we can predict their behavior. And look! We can make planes and computers and such with these generalized rules, so they must be real." But what fundamentally has changed here? Not only is it ultimately the same act of belief, but now you are at best 1 step removed from actual experience. Not only are you putting some belief into the consistency of the universe, you are putting it into a giant infrastructure of research and peer review and state-interest and grants that you can't possibly be personally a part of entirely. You have in fact contracted out your empirical life to others!
Because it is "better" or "worse" as a story, does not change the fundamental act of belief. Hume, I believe (its been a long time), would say this kind of believing is a habit, which makes sense to me.
To get even crazier, consider even perception itself, as Husserl did. You are looking at a table in your room, you can't see the other side of the table, but you "know" its there. But what do you really know? You know that perception itself tends to present a "world" with certain characteristics like extension, where moving around an object will present different parts of it. But that perception "shows" you a world like this does not justify the world itself, only the characteristics and tendencies of your perception.
This is what I mean in principle, perhaps we "know more" but we are certainly not "smarter" than religious people of the past. We just have longer stories for things. Stories that are sometimes, but not always, more fruitful.
And a related but different angle: I think even secular/atheist/agnostic people who aren't even necessarily militant weirdos like Dawkins/Harris unconsciously must contextualize themselves and their life in a world of belief. Trivially, you not believing in god is not an absence of delusion or whatever, but necessarily a belief. You go about the world and live your life based on unconscious assumptions that there is fundamentally a ground you are standing on, whether you are a philosopher or not.
At, the old “_not_ collecting postage stamps is a hobby too” argument.
Hm, OK, that's a whole different approach then what I expected. If one calls the expectation that the law of physics work the same tomorrow as they did today and yesterday and all the days before a belief, then yes everyone believes in that. It's so obvious that it doesn't mean anything anymore, at least to me.
Some of the questions philosophers think about are interesting to me in a w
But when you state "Everyone has to belief in something", that is just a trivial consequence of the above. We've defined 'belief' to be something that is inherent in the most trivial things we do in our life every single second of every single day. With that definition of belief, of course everyone necessarily believes.
At least from my view. From you view, as I now realize, "everyone has to belief in something" is a summary for the theory of knowledge, and thus not trivial at all.
> Its not about the laws changing, but quite literally the world the law is supposed to speak to.
I feel you're playing with the meaning of words like I feel philosophers tend to do, causing all kinds of misunderstandings. The laws of physics don't speak to the world; they try to describe the world. When I say that the laws don't change, what I mean is that the way the world itself works doesn't change.
> You could imagine another world where experiments yield very different laws, but it would be no less science, and no less a world.
I could, but that has nothing to do with the world we live, or what I do and don't believe in. I don't see how this is relevant at all.
And yes, my point was to try to show that something seemingly trivial in fact shows something implicit about the way we think. That is the form of my assertion. I don't really think we are disagreeing about anything, but philosophy is definitely not for everyone! Only really for the worst kinds of people in my experience ;)
> perhaps we "know more" but we are certainly not "smarter" than religious people of the past
Oh, I never said that we are smarter than people of the past. I would leave religious out of it though, since I think being religious is independent from being smart.
> And a related but different angle: I think even secular/atheist/agnostic people who aren't even necessarily militant weirdos like Dawkins/Harris ... By Dawkins I guess you mean Richard Dawkins? I don't know that much about him, but he doesn't really seem like a weirdo to me? I don't know Harris so I can't comment on they being a weirdo or not at all.
> ... unconsciously must contextualize themselves and their life in a world of belief. Trivially, you not believing in god is not an absence of delusion or whatever, but necessarily a belief.
I don't think it's trivial at all to state that not believing in god is necessarily a belief. Maybe it's true, maybe not, but I don't think it's at all trivial. There are infinitely many things that I don't belief in. Surely we can't say that for each and every one of those I actively belief in their absence? Or is there a fundamental difference between god and other things I don't believe in? Or is the distinction between absence of belief and belief of absence a distinction without meaning, just a play with words, not much different from discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Not believing in x === believing in not x.
Thats what we in the biz call "trivial".
If we lived in a world where the idea of god never crossed anybody's mind, then they would neither believe nor not believe. I dont believe in unicorns, but i neither believe nor disbelieve some random microorganism Ive never heard of.
Just consider yourself lucky you are not familiar with Dawson :).
Yes, that's what I thought you meant, and I disagree.
> Not believing in x === believing in not x.
Ah, so indeed to you the two are the same. Again, I don't think that's trivial at all.
Let me mention Shigella roterei, a species of bacteria, to you. There, now you have heard of it. But does it exist? Do you believe in it? What if I state that it doesn't exist? Just because I now mentioned it to you, do you necessarily have to believe it doesn't exist. You can't just not believe in it anymore. Fine with me, but I don't think I work that way.
But if it isn't the ambiguity there tripping us up, very curious to hear your argument for why that formulation is incorrect. I would believe in the fungus if I trusted the authority of the person telling me about it. But before I heard about it, I neither believed nor disbelieved it.
There are different kind of beliefs. The author is quite explicit in that he’s describing one particular kind: religious beliefs. Which, as we now know, are just another kind of fringe theories, like flat earth. But - and that’s what the article is about - they could make sense in some specific circumstances.
"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain…In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar." - Richard Feynman
The only thing I believe is that what I believe can and should change to fit the data I have available.
In literally hundreds of ways; if you took the effort to read almost any atheist forum you'd find them. I'll give you what I think is most important one:
Scientific secularism is obsessed with proving itself wrong; religion is obsessed with proving itself right.
I can count the fingers on my hand. I can understand the definitions of "1", "+", "2", and "=", and verify to my own satisfaction why that statement is true. I, and anyone else, can challenge these beliefs, and I personally commit to changing them if the challenge is successful.
That's not what happens when flat-earthers or the religious have their beliefs challenged. It's completely the opposite. They refuse to change their beliefs even when their own experiments prove them wrong. They usually refuse to challenge their beliefs at all.
You're choosing to use this word "belief" in very different ways, and then pretending it means the same thing. It doesn't.
And further, I have never ever ever met an "athiest" in the world that would even think about questioning their own beliefs, why would they? Wouldnt it be irrational for them too? What could ever make an atheist change their mind? God could come down and tell everyone in the world she is real, and I bet atheists would pick it apart, going over the footage, proving how it wasn't really God. How could they not, it would mean throwing away so much of their work and existential commitments (I would be like this I think).
It is you that are not telling me how these beliefs are different, im not trying to ambiguate, I'm being serious each time I say "belief."
Edit: Also think about the math one a little more. That is a good one! The belief in "1+1=2" involves understanding things like cardinality or summation, or you can just remember from school. But either way what you believe about it is that it is self-evident insofar as there is a shared understanding of the rules for those symbols. That "1" is a certain kind of thing, and so is "+" and "=". But in reality there is nothing about this situation that precludes that someone else could understand "1+1=2" differently. They could have been taught for some terrible reason that there is an exception in the rule of addition which means whenever you add 768 to 406, you get "potato". And yet, you wholly agree that 1+1=2. How could we verify our shared understanding without going through all the rules and making sure we are the same. But there is nothing in experience or in science that can justify that we are on the same page, so to speak, as those we communicate with. Its a belief because we always find ourselves among people and we strive for agreement, or already find ourselves in agreement.
Kripke does a better job of explaining this than me :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_on_Rules_and_Pr...
> I have found that when you argue with a flat earther or an atheist, they typically argue the same way. Flat-earthers have tons of "scientific evidence" they want to show you.
Sure, lots of people argue by presenting evidence. Evaluating the quality of that evidence is something humanity has gotten much better at in general, but it does take some work. The fact that scientists and crackpots both claim to present evidence doesn't mean that the act of presenting evidence is flawed.
> I have never ever ever met an "athiest" in the world that would even think about questioning their own beliefs. Wouldnt it be irrational for them too?
It sounds to me like you've literally never met an atheist. Talk to one. And no, questioning your own beliefs is almost the defintion of rationality. Why would it be irrational to question your own beliefs?
> What could ever make an atheist change their mind?
Evidence.
> God could come down and tell everyone in the world she is real, and I bet atheists would pick it apart, going over the footage, proving how it wasn't really God.
"Footage?" It's not clear whether your hypothetical is "Clouds open and God appears before you, speaking in a divine voice" -- evidence! -- or "someone comes out with grainy footage of something that could maybe kinda look a bit God-ish". Details matter!
> How could they not, it would mean throwing away so much of their work and existential commitments (I would be like this I think).
I have done literally no work being an atheist. It takes none of my time, except for the occasional pointless online discussion like this. I have literally no "existential commitments". It's not an important part of my identity. It's literally the lack of all of those things.
How much work has it been for you not believing in Zeus?
Honestly, we're trodding the same exact path that has been trodden a million times. Literally read any prominent atheist and you will have the answers to most of your questions.
Definitely happy for you that you could have steeped yourself with "prominent athiest thinkers" but also have not spent any work at all on it. Quite an accomplishment! I am glad you are as unbothered as I am, its good to just to talk it out sometimes.
And just for the record, I am in fact an athiest! I know I don't necessarily get my atheist badge for that, but gotta count for a little right?
I was in the throes of lamenting the peak oil situation after watching the doco The End of Suburbia and reading The Long Emergency. I was at the tail end of a mechatronic engineering degree and thought it was just my luck that, after having found something I really enjoyed, it was all about to become obsolete as we devolved into picking through rubbish tips for food scraps.
I became interested in permaculture and went to visit a farm on the outskirts of Sydney to see how it worked. While talking to the guy there about the land, I all of a sudden realised how information rich this environment was, and how similar the task of managing it was to any other creative or engineering endeavour.
I realised that the people who stood in that spot 60,000 years ago and worked with the land to sustain themselves were "doing engineering" as much as I could ever hope to.
It was a tremendous relief to know that I could get the same thrill from engineering a landscape as I could from engineering a microcontroller, and it gave me a respect for Indigenous Technical Knowledge. I thought about how much ITK must have been lost during colonisation, and how we might regain it.
My primary income is engineering focused still, and definitely glad I have that permaculture mindset.
I can see why there's many that claim that older times were more leisurely, as in, less time spent "working" as people do today. I'm not saying it was easier, but definitely simpler.
Most evidence suggests the extent of land-work utilized by early Australians was controlled burns. There is a bit of a recent effort to promote the idea that they may have done extensive planting as well, but there's not much evidence for it. It also would have been kind of a waste of effort - the accessible food biomass was high enough for the relatively small population without planting.
This seems circular. Why was the population small?
You're saying it's irrational to assume that smart people with the accumulated knowledge of nearly all of humanity at their fingertips, backed by hundreds of years of the most effective method for knowledge collection humanity has ever known, analyzed by incredibly sophisticated statistics, pondered by a network of millions of specialists, distributed and digested and re-interpreted and challenged by literally billions of literate humans; versus smart people with much less efficient means of knowledge collection, an extremely low literacy rate, no effective methods of statistical analysis, poor data collection measures, no scientific method, and only a handful of knowledge specialists ... it's irrational to assume the former group has a better understanding of the world than the latter?
Of course our beliefs make sense to us in our post industrial society, and even if those beliefs aren’t some kind of ultimate truth they are incredibly useful for navigating our world. For instance, even though the function of corporate logos may be closer to magic sigils than rational objects, thinking of them as rational objects allows branding agencies to design more effective logos. But in a past world where marketing agencies didn’t exist, treating symbols as having inherent magical power more closely reflected the realities of certain times.
There’s a further step since our world isn’t static, and many of us carry beliefs that just don’t work well anymore. An example some might agree with is the rejection of any kind of religiosity. Humans need social community to live a healthy and happy life. While I’m not saying that we should return to a religious era, someone who found themselves in a lonely situation might want to reconsider what beliefs led to that situation and update them to be more effective.
That's pretty much only my beef with it.
So my only point is: you probably have something that you hold dear to your heart and you would not liked to be judged or criticized for that, in some ways it's not even anyone's business but yours. Religion, spirituality, or weird new age practices are the same for a lot of people, and it doesn't presuppose that any of this is good or bad, it just is, and mounting a file against all of that at once is bound to be fruitless, and hurtful for the people involved.
If religionists ever, ever, ever behaved that way then there would be no problem, but the fact is that for thousands of years they have imposed their beliefs on the rest of us with violence.
I can't believe something that isn't true. It's not about them being idiots, it's about the sheer lack of evidence.
I don't believe myself, but I can recognize the comfort that people get from faith, either faith in a higher power or a belief in what happens after death. My GF is pagan, she says she can see spirits leaving the body; for her, it makes dealing with death a lot easier. Like when our dog died, she just got on with dealing with the body because it was just an empty meatsack to her. Likewise, she said she doesn't care what happens with her body after death, because empty meatsack. If that gives her comfort, who am I to tell her she's wrong? I don't know either.
Personally I'm more of a nihilist and think there's nothing after death, so there's no reason to fear it or care much about it, I won't be around. I've always theorised that life-after-death religions are at least in part based on fear - fear of nothingness, or fear of being judged and punished for things done (or not done) in life. I don't want to live in fear like that myself, but if others are more fearful and find comfort in faith that's good for them.
I know a lot of people who chose to believe that COVID was a hoax, and that vaccination was a conspiracy, because these beliefs made them happier.
But the consequences of these false beliefs was an incredibly large amount of death and suffering, all avoidable.
> she says she can see spirits leaving the body
But we both know this is a false belief. If she tested this scientifically, you know she would be unable to do better than chance.
Like, I could've just said "Wow, that really deepened the discussion there, good job". But how about this instead:
Try actually specifying some of the complexities that have been missed. Try plainly demanding evidence and reasoning. Choose some goal posts and plant them firmly where they can be hit.
Because if I wanted to read useless sniping I'd be on reddit.
You can be religious and not a believer, and the original comment only talk about believers.
It's better to shun and ignore an unwanted post than to try to berate, punish and ban or delete it, IMO. Let people shout into the void if they choose to. You gave them the validation - there is no such thing as bad attention.
Frankly I can’t believe someone would state such a thing with a straight face.
Also, gender is a psychological construct more than a biological one. Are you confusing gender and sex?
I don’t believe that gender is a psychological construct. I believe that gender & sex are synonymous & it’s a politically correct construct to differentiate them in any way.
“Someone’s physical reproductive bits” and “someone’s own internal perception of their sexual identity” are two separate concepts even if you believe they ought to be in sync with one another. And then when you acknowledge that there do exist people who seem quite certain that those values differ for themselves—even if you think they oughtn’t—isn’t it nice to have a word that allows us to describe this exact scenario?
Also, I’d encourage you to ask more or less any biologist whether or not they think we’re just about done wrapping up their field of expertise.
If you produce ovum you are female.
If this person[1] tells you that they are a man, what level of scrutiny should they be subject to in order to confirm this to your satisfaction? If you do not intend to reproduce with them, to what end is it important that you establish which type of gamete they produce?
If a future surgery allows a woman to produce sperm, is this what will qualify them as a man from your perspective?
Where do hermaphrodites fit into this picture? What about people that produce neither sperm nor ova?
[1]: https://trueactivist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/transgen...
Biologically, a tomato is a fruit. This is inarguable fact. If you are a biologist breeding new strains, you will conceptualize a tomato as a fruit. And yet culinarily a tomato is a vegetable. Put a tomato in a fruit salad and people are going to look at you funny. Note that a biologist who eats food can and will consider a tomato both a fruit and a vegetable depending on the context.
If you can understand this, you can understand that someone’s biological sex—primarily relevant to reproduction and healthcare—can differ from their psychological sex (i.e., their gender), which is more relevant to social contexts. Both can be true simultaneously, but unless you’re a doctor caring for a trans person or intending to perform reproductive acts with them, someone’s psychological sex is almost certainly more relevant to your relationship with them than which gamete they happen excrete.
Sex is way more important in social context. If I am looking for sexual relationship I am interested only in females. For other social contexts I don't really care whether someone is male or female or thinks they are someone else. Gender is irrelevant.
Are you genuinely incapable of understanding the concept of context?
> Sex is way more important in social context.
I sincerely hope that the vast majority of your social relationships are not based upon the promise of reproducing with them.
What if I told you that none of this really matters to me? What if people discriminating against people who want to be one or the other now makes it matter because discrimination increases crime and reduces productivity?
What if I tell you I don't care what sex you are or you think you are.
Now you've completely changed your definition in the course of a few minutes, but you still don't want to change your beliefs. Funny how that works. Imagining what your new definition will be, what if you have any of these sex chromosome anomalies, as more than 2 out of every thousand humans do? What if you use gene therapy to change your chromosomes but don't alter your anatomy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_chromosome_anomalies
> What if I tell you I don't care what sex you are or you think you are.
Then why are you making a big deal of trying to define it for others and supporting those trying to legislate who can believe what?
I was only stating definition of male and female. If someone believes for example, they are Apache Helicopter, good for them.
Here is somebody who wasn't male according to your original definition producing sperm after surgery. https://www.thepinknews.com/2019/12/09/testicle-transplant-s...
> If someone believes for example, they are Apache Helicopter, good for them.
Certainly. That's no skin off my back, just like people believing in magical invisible beings and praying to them doesn't affect anybody else. Both groups can believe what they like.
Legislating who gets to identify as what when it's not hurting anybody does make society worse, just like the people who believe in magical invisible beings legislating what everyone else can do based on the voices they hear in their heads also make society worse. That is a problem worth fighting against.
That said, I agree with you on how nonsensical gender ideology is. I find it particularly irksome because of how unscientific the whole thing is, there is a huge amount of bullshit being passed off as facts.
are you saying that psychology has something other than a biological basis?
>Are you confusing gender and sex?
American Heritage Dictionary usage note on this point:
Usage Note: Some people maintain that the word sex should be reserved for reference to the biological aspects of being male or female or to sexual activity, and that the word gender should be used only to refer to sociocultural roles. Accordingly, one would say The effectiveness of the treatment appears to depend on the sex of the patient and In society, gender roles are clearly defined. In some situations this distinction avoids ambiguity, as in gender research, which is clear in a way that sex research is not. The distinction can be problematic, however. Linguistically, there isn't any real difference between gender bias and sex bias, and it may seem contrived to insist that sex is incorrect in this instance.
source, and of course the definitions
Yes, yes, psychology is applied neurology is applied biology is applied chemistry is applied physics. And yet we have psychologists and neurologists and biologists and chemists and physicists and they all seem to believe they have different jobs.
Your quoted usage note is stating that the word “gender“ can mean the same thing as “sex” in certain contexts. Not that it can’t mean something different. And the context is quite clear from the surrounding discussion.
Playing pointless semantic games doesn’t buy you any points.
the (Big) Five Factor model of personality (standard psychology) measures sex-based population (density) differences, and shows up across cultures.
Merriam-Webster[1]:
> b: the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex
> c: GENDER IDENTITY
American Heritage Dictionary[2]:
> b. One's identity as female or male or as neither entirely female nor entirely male.
O.E.D.[3]:
> b. The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender
Merriam-Webster 2018 says, sense 1 abc [gramatical gender] but sense 2 is all about sex.
>2a SEX ...
>2b the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex
http://web.archive.org/web/20181125203538/https://www.merria...
it doesn't mention gender identity, but gender identity is a perfectly good word for gender identity.
I don't have access to the OED here but I'm sure we'd see a similar timeline.
Some examples: East Asian state religions are almost entirely a cultural thing outside of monk communities. Judaism I'd also expect to be majority cultural only. Christianity in Europe, again, mostly cultural. I think the US has a bit of a different viewpoint since the boundaries between Christians that have faith with those that don't, are much more extreme and seem to regularly cause interpersonal conflict.
However the norm for most of history is to find some way to ratify the two believes even if they contradict.
Ancient Jewish writers like Philo simply wrote a whole bunch of stuff about how every part of the bible is to be interpreted as some Platonic way. He was very influential on Christianity. Ironically he had basically no influence on what became modern Judaism and his interpretation were all rejected.
And this is not just between science and religion. Even within religion this is a problem, because they are simply contradictory.
Its literally possible to believe in all of the bible, because it contradicts itself. And trying to reason your way around all that nonsense requires tons of scholars coming up with elaborate explanations on why everything is actually not nonsense. Usually you have some elite set of priests who guard the interpretation.
Today, there are whole field of Christian fundamentalists apologists who have whole universities field with smart people who do nothing then trying to 'read' the bible in ways that is not contradicting even if it very clearly is.
The simply fact is, unless you view the bible purely allegorically and massively change the interpretation totally from what anybody who actually wrote the bible might have believed you can't have a modern scientific worldview and be a Christian. But at that point you can just base your worldview on Lord of the Rings or whatever you want because its your morals driving the interpretation, not the other way around.
So its easy and reasonably consistent to believe in a Prime Originator who started the universe and then just let laws of physics work, but that is very different basically all religion.
How can you go around telling people what they can and can't believe? What does it mean, in your opinion, to "be a Christian"?
> But at that point you can just base your worldview on Lord of the Rings or whatever you want because its your morals driving the interpretation, not the other way around.
You say this like it's a bad thing, it isn't, but in any case religion doesn't work that way. A Church of Tolkien hasn't been around for hundreds of years to be passed down from generation to generation.
It might be logically consistent to mock one religion or another in this manner, but it isn't kind, and it certainly isn't going to change people's minds.
For many religious people, family is the most important aspect of their lives, and for better or worse religion has woven its way into the fabric of family bonds.
I appreciate the deep and sincere regard for rationality and science that atheist viewpoints bring to the table, but I think the more evangelistic expressions fail to appreciate the wildly interesting tapestry of traditions that are the religions of the world.
People will believe whatever they want, that's never going to change. Others might feel they don't have that freedom. Why waste time trying to change minds about something as immutable as religion, of all things? Better to build up than to tear down. We're all stuck on the same planet, might as well make some friends while we're here.
As we understood more of the world, pantheons grew smaller and smaller. There are still religions around with many gods, but their roles have drastically changed away from being banally associated with natural phenomena and towards spiritual stuff or other things that most humans can't adequately explain (yet, or because they just lack the education).
There are practically no religions around anymore that have a god whose purpose is like "this guy brings the tides" or whatever, for good reason.
Catholic saints are pretty much exactly this, “lesser gods”, just not called that.
Also, messages get lost, and misinterpreted. Quickly. I do believe that most [non explicit cult] religious texts shouldn't be interpreted literally, but instead take them the lessons they teach, or are interpreted to be.
Another example from the book is that certain types of shark were taboo to pregnant women in ancient Polynesia; no-one could explain why except for things like "it would upset the gods otherwise". But it turns out that said animals' meat actually contain chemicals that are indeed bad to consume when you're pregnant.
I can also recommend Brett Deveraux' "Practical Polytheism" series [2]. One of his key quotes is "It is safe to assume that people in the past believed their religion." (Actually, I can recommend all of acoup.blog to HN readers, including the latest post on ChatGPT, but that's going off topic.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domestic... [2] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...
Or, you could have discovered that stated about one scroll down from top of the article:
"And sometimes it is better to have a truly random decision than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Surely, the enemy will not be able to predict a shaman’s completely random decision."
Some Hindu communities don't allow families to enter a temple if someone in your close family has passed away for 14 days. They couldn't explain contagious diseases then, but realised that if it can kill you, something would show up within 14 days and it's better if you don't enter community spaces.
Reframing these rituals as explanations that could be given at time is a good way to look at the world.
With both health things and laws, it's often easier to convince people they have to do it because a higher power than them says so, than to explain the reasoning to them.
I mean think of children or dogs (if I may be cruel). A dog doesn't understand why he shouldn't eat off the table, but they do understand that if they do they will get punished. You can't reason with a dog (although it's cute if you talk to them), but you can teach them cause and effect.
I'm still pretty convinced that, while humans individually are and have been pretty smart for as long as we can remember, as a group and statistically they're pretty stupid. If percentage-wise more people will wash their hands and feet more often if they do it as part of a religious ritual, then it's worthwhile.
But somehow no text suggests anything of the sort and the reasoning is always in terms of ritual purity. And the prohibition is only on entering sacred spaces which must be kept ritually pure. There is no prohibition in entering other community spaces.
What education institution is responsible for this?
When you paint faithful people as morons, primitive people as stupid, old fashioned people as out of touch, etc., kids and even younger adults are going to come to the logical conclusion.
We aren't even getting into the recent nonsense of declaring our histories as shameful pieces of shit to be revised and forgotten.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes scientific papers are great, no I don't put too much weight on someone's take on hapiness, truth, or the fundamental nature of our universe just because they're wearing a lab coat, that would quite literally be thinking that the cowl makes the monk.
Sounds a bit like a straw man to me. "Scientific fact" by definition is subject to change. The "scientific facts" we have right now are the best explanation for reality that we have. Nobody who isn't a researcher in a particular field has the required context to judge whether some fringe theories have the potential to displace the current consensus, so it's prudent to just accept the consensus as a layperson.
Healthy skepticism is the root of all things science, if you forfeit that for any reason you are anything but being scientific.
That said, from what I know, education in Denmark and Germany is sufficiently similar for my hypothesis to not really hold. Another interesting data point is that he is in marketing (advises people on how to cold email potential customers from what I've read) - maybe that's a more meaningful cohort. Not education per se, more socialisation in the work life.
But I suppose correlation does not imply causation anyway.
The underlying assumption seems to be that people in the past were stupid and incapable of writing the great code that we today are capable of writing.
I mean obviously old code can be written badly (just as modern code can be written badly). And sometimes there are newer techniques or libraries which weren't available at the time the original code was written. But more than a few times I've seen old code rewritten by modern code where the modern code is worse than the old code, and the justification is nothing more than the code was "old". Or the way desktop UIs change and evolve and throw away old paradigms - but the people who developed Windows 95 weren't fools just because they lived in the past. (e.g. all icons are monochromatic now whereas it was a design guideline in the past to use colours to aid memory of which icon was which.)
People in 500 years will probably say the same about us. "Look at these morons from the year 2023. Most of them were dumb and wasted their lives."
It's rather humbling to walk into its display room and I urge anyone visiting Oslo to check it out.
And it was the SUV of its day. Shallow draft meant it had access to inland waterways, much to the consternation of various monasteries and villages.
It's an extreme strawperson argument. That's not what I think and thought of pre-modern people, nor does it match anything I've read.
They were biologically the same species as us. However, there was almost universal illiteracy and belief in things like causing sick people to bleed, witches, alchemy; embrace of extreme cruetly; disasterous (by modern standards) outcomes for lifespan, health, survival of children, justice, freedom, prosperity, famine, war, etc. etc.
We're not so perfect. The trick is to learn about humanity - about ourselves - from them, and look closely in the mirror for our own cruetly, etc. How many people die from lack of healthcare, for example?
My neighbor burns sages to remove evil spirits from her house. She fully believes this is real.
Basically, it is all about mindset and filters right? You have better ideas about things your mind focuses on which is sold as the "law of attraction". But you can get to a state where ideas are free flowing and make sense in the context of the problem when the mind has had the chance to break free from the usual loops it is running. All these activities I mentioned essentially do that in a way which doesn't make sense to the rational brain so it can't cordon it off. This Quora answer might also help: https://qr.ae/prWLjc
Someone told me to buy How To Run a Lathe (https://idoc.pub/documents/how-to-run-a-lathepdf-x4e6k0o189n...) First print was in the early 1910's, and the intro described how the magic of a lathe is that a less-precise tool can be used to make a more precise tool...how you could start with a hand powered lathe between two trees and end up with a machine that could hold half-a-thousandth of an inch in a surprisingly small number of iterations.
Also, the Gingery series (https://kk.org/thetechnium/bootstrapping-t/) showed how you could bootstrap a machine shop with scrap aluminum and charcoal.
We've been smart apes for thousands of years.
I guess you put the line somewhere between considering other people's beliefs and "duh".
Our individual brains do this too.
Belief grabs hold of one viewpoint, because it looks like the best for a moment, because things will go better for us if agree with our group, because it makes us feel better, because we want other people to believe it for our own reasons, because we are too tired to care, ...
Then it discards future alternatives, saving wasted cognition rethinking over and over.
Our brains don't care what the truth is, they care that we operate well. And there are so many good reasons to believe something that isn't true.
Many people have a hard time grasping that their feelings of overwhelming certainty, have virtually nothing to do with actual certainty. And that is the way our DNA builds us!
Constantly integrating new idea's is costly. Fatiguing. Ideology is so cognitively efficient. And our certainty feels so good!
"Writer on entrepreneurship, creativity, and marketing with over 10,000 email subscribers"
O woe to vikings, woe to us.
> Most importantly, I started to wonder “what’s up with all these gods people used to believe in?”
I mean, a lot of people still believe in gods. I don't think you necessarily have to think people in the past were dumber than they are now, or had different cognitive needs than they do now, to explain gods.
(Jesus really was a mushroom though)
Tech founder newsletter guy saw a boat and was absolutely ethered by the idea that he had single-handedly manifested the concept that there were smart people before now. The sheer weight of the this beautiful satori inspired a post of heretofore unimaginable power
I don't need to know how to grow crops, weave a shirt, or wire a plug - those things have been mechanised and automated.
Would someone from 200 years ago trade having to gather firewood for flicking a switch for instant heat? Absolutely!
Would you trade access to Wikipedia for having to travel to a monastery in order to look up a scrap of information? Unlikely!
Other lifestyles needn’t be romanticized more than our own, but they also don’t need to be demonized. Keeping yourself safe and fed isn’t a big stress for most people through most of history, yet does get quite hard for some people some times even now. The difference is mostly just textural.
So yeah, maybe it's just that the landlords had an IQ of 170 a century and half ago, whereas now they have "just" 70.
But also no. Modern architects think they're so much smarter than architects of a century ago, solely on the basis of living later, as the article describes. They think they could do the same greatness effortlessly, whereas when they actually try, they usually fall flat on their face. Turns out, it was actually quite hard even with appropriate practice, and without said practice it's often impossible to just build a nicely-looking house.
So we should really think about why they decided on certain cultural traditions.
It’s a weird article. There are Christians right now who are scientists and mathematicians. Are they dumb? Clearly not if they achieved certain levels of education.
And if you made it past high school and did sciences, you quickly realise the ancient people figured out all sorts of nifty tricks to workout things like the diameter of the earth in 240BC.
Modern people also believe all sorts of dumb things. That’s why we have conspiracy theorists.
The Dunning-Kruger makes my head hurt.
Also maybe modern times is most commonly known as like the last 2k years or so. Egyptians and Mayans and Olmec and so many other cultures have left fingerprints of their engineering prowess. Listen to Graham Hancock with earnest and you'll have a mystery on your hands.
Err, ~ 850 years, maybe 1,000 years at most, from the fall of Rome ( ~470 CE ) to the beginning of the 14th Century (1301 CE) perhaps to 1501 CE depending on your historian of choice.
> held up as nadir of history.
Not so much a low point of human activity, but definitely a low point in the human activity of recording history.
If you think only Europe matters, sure.
Mostly as a result of Renaissance- and Enlightenment-era propagandizing. I think we’ve mostly moved beyond that reading of history, thankfully.
It seems straightforward - most of what we have is post-Middle Ages, from our political systems to our economies, science, technology, arts; and the results are orders of magnitude better.
Religions/societies around the world have different ways to maintain the order.
Hindu religion propose incarnation belief.. they say if you do bad stuff in this life, the bad stuff will happen to you in your next life and of course you won't be able to remember your previous life. It's a perfect theory because it's unfalsifiable.
And it works in India.
Of course you don't necessarily need to believe in such theories to know that you shouldn't do be doing bad stuff anyway but hey most people aren't that smart hence the unfalsifiable theory :)
Is there actually an element of randomness? Of course not. Any successful shaman knows that if you don't say what the guy in power wants you to, that you're going to wake up dead, and some other shaman is going to be doing your job.