JP Moreland has written at length on this topic (see his book "The Soul" and many interviews/talks he's done).
In short, he distinguishes between the brain and the mind (consciousness, memories, etc). While the brain may be required for an embodied creature to use their mind, they are not the same thing.
In short, he distinguishes between the heart and circulation (pulse, o2 transport, etc). While the heart may be required for an embodied creature to use their circulatory system, they are not the same thing.
If a bomb vaporized your brain you would cease to be an embodied creature and you wouldn't have a mind anymore. You can test this theory yourself but only once.
> If a bomb vaporized your brain you would cease to be an embodied creature and you wouldn't have a mind anymore. You can test this theory yourself but only once.
You actually can't test this theory at all, if it's correct.
On destruction of your body, if the mind does not continue, you cannot observe its discontinuance. Thus, you cannot test the theory.
If the theory is false, then you could presumably falsify it by this technique.
I think we agree, but I think you misinterpreted what I said. "Mystical experiences" isn't the problem. It's that the things commonly described in "near death experiences" are overtly contradictory with Judeo-Christian teaching about the afterlife.
There isn't a lot of agreement on what the 'afterlife' is in Christianity, and Judaism has a different idea altogether.
To traditional Christians (Orthodox and Catholic), it involves the soul departing the body, experiencing a good, bad or in between afterlife, then the resurrection of the dead where they're reunited with their body at the end of the world to either live in paradise or be chucked into a fiery lake. Some mystics also describe a period where the soul wanders or is 'lost', and various traditional prayers support such theories. There's also the concepts of Hades/Sheol, Abraham's bosom, toll-houses or purgatory, and so on. Quite a bit of room for experiences roughly equivalent to some near-death experiences.
To most evangelicals, it's an instantaneous journey to heaven/hell. Protestants range from more traditional beliefs to soul-sleep to instant judgement.
For Jews, it's more of a nebulous existence in Sheol (roughly equivalent to the Greek Hades), which isn't particularly great nor horrible.
And then of course, the possibility that what every religion describes is allegorical and not literal.
Say what you want about the tax bill on net, the elimination of the SALT deduction is very good for the country.
There is zero reason for the Feds to subsidize and distort incentivize to encourage states to increase their tax burdens. SALT has always been one of the most corrupt tax breaks (mortgage interest being another).
> Say what you want about the tax bill on net, the elimination of the SALT deduction is very good for the country.
No, it's very bad.
> There is zero reason for the Feds to subsidize and distort incentivize to encourage states to increase their tax burdens.
That seems like a reasonable position, but SALT doesn't do that; quite the opposite, it keeps federal taxation neutral in terms of incentives for state and local taxes. Not deducting state and local taxes distorts incentives by creating a federal tax disincentive to state/local tax-funded programs that produce a net economic gain. I've written up a simplified scenario illustrating this in a recent prior discussion on HN:
Could you go into more detail here? Corrupt in what way? I haven't really heard this claim before, and the general idea that you shouldn't be taxed on non-discretionary income (e.g. buying milk, clothing, and paying taxes that make your schools and roads work) seems sound on the face of it.
It's because the tax bill needed to pass through reconciliation (which has special rules related to the deficit). Generating artificial savings on paper allowed the GOP to increase the size of the tax cut on paper.
Yes. Do you really think most unmarried families have both mother and father in the household, though? Regular contact with the father would be a lot more difficult if he's not around except on weekends.
No, but I do think an increasing share of full-time two-parent families are unmarried (and married families aren't necessarily living together), and people can get married or begin cohabitation after a child is born, so comparing rates of unwed motherhood is misleading on the magnitude (though consistent with the direction, so far) of any change in the share of children living in single-parent families.
There's no reason for an indirect proxy when the actual figure of interest is available:
Sure, the majority still are together, but the gap is widening. Quoting your link:
"During the 1960-2016 period, the percentage of children living with only their mother nearly tripled from 8 to 23 percent and the percentage of children living with only their father increased from 1 to 4 percent."
That means the percentage of families living together is declining.
Thanks for the link BTW. That data is way more relevant than the marriage statistics in this conversation.
From the numbers, back in the 50s kids probably only saw their fathers on the weekends in married families. It is startling to see how much more time fathers get with their kids nowdays.
It's impossible to get many benefits like WIC, rent assistance, heating assistance, etc if you are married, and it's difficult to afford childcare if mom is working and family cannot chip in, especially when you consider that many industries don't provide full-time jobs or sick time. It's cheaper for mom to stop working due to the child and bridge the gap with public assistance until the kids are around age 3, where there are more/cheaper daycare slots.
My wife worked for a utility with alot of blue collar guys -- easily 30% of the guys there had stay-at-home girlfriends with the kids. Not all of them were on public assistance, but people making $30-40k can't afford infant/toddler daycare.
> It's impossible to get many benefits like WIC, rent assistance, heating assistance, etc if you are married
Well, more accurately, it's more difficult if you are married to someone who had income because it affects the means test. Of course, for many of those you can't get them unless you identify and secure a child support order against the parent of your children, and then that child support is also treated as income in the means test for the program, so just staying unmarried (with it without cohabiting) doesn't actually solve the problem.
You hit the bullseye with this one. Parents remain unmarried in a monogamous, cohabiting relationship because the government pays them to not get married. Every benefit that has a household means test attached is an additional incentive to strategically realign the membership of your households.
So you designate one household as the mooch household, and one as the worker household. The latter tends to be ineligible for all manner of otherwise useful benefits, working full-time at minimum wage, and benefits may even be curtailed working part-time. The other can collect the maximum available benefits.
This also leads to some strange behavior in states that have common-law marriages.
Your statistic is for the fraction of children living in single-mother households. dinoleif's statistic is for the fraction of babies born to single mothers. So your statistic doesn't count babies who are adopted to two-parent households or whose father later marries the mother (probably plus other factors I'm not considering). I'd say your statistic is more directly relevant to "is there a male adult living in the same house", but dinoleif's for "is the child being raised with a legally committed biological father".
There's quite a difference between the 5-41% jump in this first comment, and the 8-23% jump you read in the stats dragonwriter posted.
That was precisely dragonwriter's point in the other thread (I can't nest there any further): your unmarried statistic was not particularly germane.
Further, your comment don't quite make sense in context. OP shows how the statistics in the article shows fathers have become more involved. You say they can't actually be more involved because they're not around?
"Net neutrality" is one of the most Orwellian terms in modern usage.
It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.
Who was being harmed in the first 20 years of the internet without these regulations?
Whose lives have been made better? Compared to what?
Net neutrality advocates are utterly unable to give convincing answers to these questions.
Net neutrality means that ISPs are required to be neutral to Internet-based services. You might disagree with if this regulation is required, but the term itself is not "Orwellian."
People who will be harmed is anyone who doesn't want their media coming from sources controlled by large corporations such as TimeWarner, Facebook, News Corp., etc. Such conglomerates will get special deals that make it harder for more "alternate" media sources to compete.
If you sign up for an internet plan that promises not to throttle certain sites and then that provider throttles those sites, you can sue them.
If you sign up for an internet plan that makes no such promises, why would one expect anything different?
This may sound like a harsh reality, but it's called "taking personal responsibility" and "voting with your feet". Switch to another internet provider.
The appeal to paternalistic regulatory bodies to restrict the choices of other consumers (who may want to purchase cheaper, more restricted internet plans) is creepy.
In Ontario, there are three major internet providers: Rogers, Bell, and Telus. For the longest time, their plans (all of them) had bandwidth caps, something that would be unheard of in the United States. They used to be extremely ungenerous, about 100 GB a month or worse. (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/how-internet-use...)
The other internet providers, Bell and Telus, had an opportunity to distinguish themselves here.
But they didn’t. They had bandwidth caps too. There was a smaller ISP (TekSavvy) which offered 300GB bandwidth caps (still ridiculous by US standards), which they could offer as a result of a law requiring Canadian ISPs to resell infrastructure to smaller providers (meaning TekSavvy has access to all of Rogers’ customer base). Around 2015, Rogers started introducing plans with higher bandwidth caps, and bandwidth restrictions have relaxed (but they still exist).
It took pretty much a decade for innovation-stifling bandwidth restrictions to stop being a thing in Ontario, and arguably only because of a law (i.e. government interference) letting smaller ISPs use big ISP infrastructure.
100 GB/month doesn't tell us much if you don't include a date for context (the Ars article is from 2011).
I think that if you are in a market with caps, and you go offer a subscription without a cap, you end up with a bunch of subscribers who will saturate their line. So it makes more sense to slowly compete on increasing the caps, quite like we see in the mobile industry as well. Plus, network capacity goes up (hence I said date context matters).
Personally, I got nothing against caps, as long they're clear and the subscriber is informed about it beforehand. A FUP has a cap as well. If you download 24/7/365.25 on broadband then many ISPs will complain. Not all, but many will. Although nowadays less than say in the 90s or 00s.
Phew! That's so true. Before Google Fiber came to my apartment complex, I only had Time Warner if I wanted broadband internet. The option aside from that was 56k or satellite. So many options.
In Chicago, I had Comcast and AT&T DSL. Neither was very fast, and Comcast was really expensive (something like $90+ if I wanted decent speeds). Again, very fortunate of me. I chose to go with AT&T because I was a poor college student. Trying to watch Youtube on that was a complete nightmare. I was also very unlucky if one of my online courses required watching an instructional video or a lecture.
So many options! Expensive and slow internet vs. cheap and really crappy internet. Both with data caps, awful customer service, constant connection issues, expensive+aging equipment--gee wiz we're so lucky.
I'm wondering where you are getting your information from. Particularly, when I search my own zip on ISP search sites, I get anywhere from 4-6 providers even though I only have 2 options. There's possibly a discrepancy between what's reported and what customers actually have.
Even the FCC, back when it was at least nominally run for the benefit of the American people, didn't consider sub-broadband good enough to qualify as competition.
Let me guess, you live in some mecca of ISP options like the Valley? Because the rest of us don't. I live in a major tech city of 1mil+ pop, to the point that a quarter of the city has Google Fiber, and the only ISP options my neighborhood has (12 miles from downtown and in a vastly tech area) is 1 Cable provider, 1 DSL provider, and Directv.
That means my speed options are 300mbps, 3, or 1.5 with 400ms latency.
Such great "options" if my cable provider decides to upcharge me now.
> live in some mecca of ISP options like the Valley
Oh man, I wish. I live in the heart of SF and the only option I have is Comcast. I suppose I could try Monkeybrains, but I'd have to get landlord approval and that may be an issue.
The point is, in the US, even in the tech capital of the world, we are still encumbered by private ownership of internet infrastructure.
It's fucking pathetic.
To be clear, I'm a supporter of Net Neutrality, but more so a more built-out municipal fiber system across the US.
Yeah. It's an absolute slap in the face to be told "Just pick another provider, you have 2 alternatives!" when those alternatives are 10x slower and my main source is already below the fastest in the city (gig). It's like telling me to turn in my cell phone for a rotary land line or to just suck it up.
Internet should've been made a utility a decade ago.
A huge portion of the country does not have access to multiple ISPs or has access to only 2. Capitalism doesn't work without competition. It's also naive to assume everyone can just afford hiring lawyers.
> Who was being harmed in the first 20 years of the internet without these regulations?
It's not that these regulations didn't exist, it's that they hadn't been formalized as regulations. Net neutrality is how the Internet has worked for over 30 years, and is what made it such a success.
Does your ISP have the ability to censor the internet for you?
Do you watch Netflix? If you don't, that's ok, because most consumers do use it or a competing service. Internet Companies absolutely did try to charge Netflix extra, and in some cases throttled them. This was well documented.
I don't know if you're a corporate shill or just genuinely lack the ability to comprehend how bad this is. Spectrum, Verizon and their ilk have absolutely shown zero regard for consumers and there is no reason to believe that pattern of behavior is going to change anytime soon. If they can screw over their consumers for a dollar, they will, just like they have continually done so in the past.
Netflix is a special case, because it was generating some unbelievable fraction of the total internet traffic in the US for a few hours each evening. The internet was not designed for such large amounts of traffic in such a short time all coming from one source. Almost all cases of Netflix throttling or blocking turned out to be due to legitimate traffic management of overloaded links.
I believe most of the cases where Netflix ended up paying were also to deal with the effect of the large traffic on peering arrangements. You have networks that have a peering arrangement where neither charges the other for transit for the other's traffic, relying on the fact that each is sending on average about the same amount through the other, so it all balances out. Netflix traffic greatly upset that balance.
I'm not sure that even now the Internet can really handle a Netflix-like service well. Netflix at least partly addressed the problem by putting their content in a CDN, often making arrangements to host their machines right in ISP data centers, so that the Netflix load would be coming from all over instead of just a small region.
That can work for Netflix, and the next few things that get big, but how far can that go? We can't have everyone that gets big putting machines in ISP data centers, can we?
Are you referring to the topic in this 2014 article refuting your claim about "internet companies" trying to charge Netflix extra? When in fact Netflix's own ISP, who Netflix rightly pays, was actually doing critically important network management.
I am attentive to Net Neutrality arguments because I care about an open internet, but I have yet to hear one that doesn't betray a total lack of understanding of how the internet actually works; i.e., peering. Perhaps counterintuitively, the FCC is right on the money about rolling back Obama's populist regulations.
It cuts both ways. What's to stop Google, Amazon, Netflix and Facebook from blocking all traffic from AT&T entirely? How long would Comcast or AT&T survive without access to the top 50 sites?
> first 20 years of the internet without these regulations
Those regulations existed for most of that time because ISPs then were dial-up over phone-lines, and the phone-lines were under Title II, so de-facto all internet was.
> "Net neutrality" is one of the most Orwellian terms in modern usage.
> It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies
It was coined in academia in 2003; the concern was raised (without the term) at least as early as 1994, well before most of the “large tech companies” embracing it existed.
> to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.
No, while it was largely an abstract concern when the issue was raised in the 90s, and even perhaps when the term was coined in 2003; by the time in 2004 that the FCC defined it's “Network Freedom” principles concrete threats were visible, and for years before the first effort to adopt regulation (starting shortly after the Network Freedom principles) the FCC responded to numerous concrete problems with case-by-case actions, which provided the direct experience with real, existing problems on which the regulatory efforts of the two Open Internet orders was based. The idea that the regulation efforts were preemptive ignores the well-documented history f the issue.
Both Verizon and AT&T executives publicly stated that they wanted to charge sites like Google and Yahoo in order for the ISPs customers to be allowed to access those sites.
Stopping them from doing that was one of the reasons that first Congress and then the FCC took up the net neutrality issue about 10 years ago.
Ridiculous puff piece & PR job. There is not a single piece of data in that entire article.
The way this works is:
1/ Google crunches some data
2/ The company leadership looks at that data, twists it to leave out "inconvenient" facts, and tells whatever narratives they want to tell (internally and to the NYT)
3/ No data or any empirical results are ever released (even internally)
Do you work at Google, or what are you basing these bold assertions on?
FTR, I'm a manager at Google. I don't feel qualified to comment on the research or the specifics of this article, but I can assure you Google takes building effective teams pretty darn seriously.
Of course Google takes building effective teams seriously (and rightly so, it's People Ops org does good work), but that doesn't really have anything to do with the dynamic here.
I also read the article and saw no data points or anything that would suggest "some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers" had any numbers to work with. (beside that certain employees were involved)
You could read it that way, but it's something that I see in many different organisations when talking to people about how they do the data science-in'
The thing is that confirmation bias is real, and cost and time often preclude the use of strong systems to exclude it. Additionally The Tribe quickly develop narratives which then dominate funding and discussion. Phrases like "we've moved to execution".
He didn't say anything at all about OP's ability to read the article. "bold assertions" clearly refers to the 3 points he lists and you seem to be deliberately misreading.
OP made some very bold claims about how Google works internally and unless he's a first-hand witness (Google employee), he really needs to provide some data of his own to back his assertions up.
I read the OPs comment as partly a comment on how Google has been releasing social commentary without releasing the raw studies specifically on gender and salary. They were being investigated for cheating women on salary.
I read the response from the Googler as an appeal to authority. If Google doesn’t release the study, they open themselves up for conjecture and skepticism.
To criticize OP for being inaccurate is fine, but absent any references, Google is making the same argument as the Googler.
Or he’s suggesting that if he worked at Google he would face an immediate disciplinary measure. He said he’s a manager so he’s involved in the prosecution that J. D. denounced (and was fired for).
Among the conservatives/libertarians/etc in my life, who I broadly consider among the smartest people I know, there is a broad unwillingness to have a real discussion for fear of being shamed.
The climate debate has become more about moral posturing and smearing people who disagree as "deniers", which has made it impossible to convince anyone who's not already convinced.
It has also deprived climate activists of substantive critiques that could help them move past their own biases (which are substantial).
Reasonable people can disagree about what our course of action should be and what sort of incentives we should use to bring it about. Reasonable people cannot disagree about the science, which is overwhelmingly on the side of possibly catastrophic climate change that has been brought about by human activities. They are /right/ to be shunned as science deniers, just as we "smear" anti-vaxxers, etc.
>Reasonable people cannot disagree about the science
Reasonable people do disagree about scientific theory quite a bit. There are some parts of climate science that are pretty settled, for instance the earth has warmed and human activity has played a big part in the recent warming. There are other parts that are not such as to what extent positive or negative feedbacks will kick in beyond the basic CO2 forcing. I'm not sure how helpful it is shunning people as deniers.
Also I don't know if shunning people is the best approach, especially if you're talking about things like anti-vaxxers or climate change. There really needs to be intelligent discussion and education on these issues, they only really get solved if people agree. Shunning someone can only bully them into submission it doesn't change minds. Shunning only adds to the tribalism that's dividing the left and the right, it really doesn't help.
I'd like to point out that yes there is evidence of the possibly of catastrophic climate change. But we do not know enough to have any certainty on probability of catastrophe, we also don't know enough to be sure we could properly mitigate the current changes. Or that any mitigation will have a net positive effect on life on earth.
There are very dogmatic people involved in this argument that want to put in place very expensive measures to avoid a catastrophe but we have to be careful. We could drive our global economy into the ground if we go to far. The cost to the environment would be far worse. Industry gets very dirty when people go into survival mode. Clean technologies could alter the balance, but they're only going to get developed if we have the money to invest in them.
The problem, as your comment beautifully illustrates, is the scope of what is considered a "scientific" question. You left that ambiguous, and in that ambiguity lies the problem.
For example, the greenhouse effect is a piece of well-established science. Climate change is even less scientific. To what extent humans contribute to the problem is even less scientific. Analyzing the costs/benefits of climate change is an even less scientific question. And what sorts of policy prescriptions might be effective is the least scientific question of all.
Climate activists fail to acknowledge any of that nuance, instead lumping all of those things together and labeling anyone who has a nuanced opinion on one of those points as a "denier".
> For example, the greenhouse effect is a piece of well-established science. Climate change is even less scientific. To what extent humans contribute to the problem is even less scientific.
I've run into conservatives who believe that, and invariably it turns out they have only looked at a small part of the evidence.
For example, they might dismiss the extent of human contribution to rising CO2 levels as mere correlation, claiming that scientists are just noting that the CO2 curve matches some other human activities and are assuming that those activities are responsible for the CO2. Maybe it is just coincidence and the rising atmospheric CO2 comes from natural sources.
If that was all scientists had, that would be a good point. But that isn't all scientists have. CO2 from burning fossil fuels has a different isotopic composition that CO2 from natural sources so scientists can directly distinguish "our" CO2 from "natural" CO2.
Then there is atmospheric oxygen levels. Burning fossil fuels should not only release CO2 into the atmosphere. It should also take oxygen from the atmosphere. Guess what? The atmospheric oxygen levels have been doing just what they should be doing if scientists are right about how much of the atmospheric CO2 comes from us.
The point is that the questions I outlined become increasingly less scientific. There are genuine scientific questions, but there are lots of others that are kind-of scientific, and others that are not scientific at all.
Climate activists won't admit that.
This shuts down the possibility for a reasonable discussion because one party (the activists) is overwhelmingly guilty of acting and arguing in bad faith.
For instance, I believe that there are fewer experiments that confirm general relativity than there are that confirm quantum mechanics, so does that mean GR is less scientific than QM?
Does this mean GR-skeptics are on firm scientific ground? No, it does not. The evidence for GR is overwhelming. That QM may have even more evidence does not cast doubt on GR. Both GR and QM have overwhelming evidence, and there is no meaningful sense in which one can say that one is less scientific than the other.
> This shuts down the possibility for a reasonable discussion because one party (the activists) is overwhelmingly guilty of acting and arguing in bad faith
No, what shuts down the possibility for reasonable discussion is people discarding 90% of the experiments and measurements, and then claiming that there is no evidence. It's not the activists that are doing this.
When you start to enter the realm of modelling, especially of complex systems with feedback loops, you aren't really conducting science any more.
Unfortunately the brand of science is used to promote these models, which is disingenuous. These models aren't like physics models, they are like economic models.
I'm not a fan of the "less scientific" phrasing, but the point of science is to be convincing to even a skeptic. That's why reproducibility (try it yourself in your own lab!), statistical analysis (there's basically no chance this is a coincidence!), control groups (it's not just an endemic property of the lab), random sampling (it's not selection bias) and other things are so important.
In some kinds of inquiry, it becomes difficult or impossible to apply certain standards. It's flat out unethical and immoral to not treat a man's syphilis just to have better quality evidence. So if you're studying syphilis, you need to find other ways to be convincing. It's impossible to have a statistically significant sample of Earths or a control group of Earths, so the bar for convincing is also higher in climate science.
"Less scientific" probably means "doesn't have access to many standard scientific techniques, so stronger evidence in other ways is essential to be convincing".
> Scientific reasoning is not a vote, or a talent show.
Sure it is. It evolved from "natural philosophers" showing off their work to each other. People have always been able to convince themselves of things, but scientific rigor is about convincing other people (i.e., being objective).
Why is testability important? How do we know if something is correct?
The point is to be convincing to a rational mind. It's not a persuasion contest, no. The evidence should speak for itself. But it needs to speak to an audience.
Otherwise it would be a self indulgent exercise and not a corporate one.
So far I have yet to see a climate change denier who has looked at any of the IPCC reports [0] -- they operate on the same scale of evidence as religious fanatics. It was actually fascinating to see the improvement comparing AR5 with the AR4, and they are only 6 years apart!
>For example, the greenhouse effect is a piece of well-established science. Climate change is even less scientific.
Even looking at this sentence, which is the foundation of your arguments, the way you express yourself is that the greenhouse effect itself is not scientific! The actual science part of climate change is actually pretty great science, and very much scientific. You can check out the physical science IPCC report [1] for the starters. It contains many references to actual scientific articles, but by itself is a great piece of work.
The political part -- policies, denial of facts, media coverage, bribery by the fossil fuel industry representatives and continuous slander of climatic researchers is a problem, I agree.
It's a question of risk mitigation. Would you say that a 5% risk of humans going extinct it worth it, for an oil company to collect an extra $50 billion in profits?
I would say no. An oil CEO might say yes.
Who should have a bigger say in public policy, the civilians facing the 5% possibility of human extinction and no extra paycheck, or the oil CEO weighing their paycheck against possible human extinction?
The current head of the EPA clearly thinks oil industry profits are more important. Trump clearly thinks oil industry profits are more important.
It's _not_ just about an oil CEO. It's about everyone who uses energy. Gas tends to be a high percentage of poor people's cost-of-living, and cheap oil tends to act as a progressive reverse-tax. In cold climates, heating one's house is also closely linked to energy prices.
When you hamper the economy, everyone loses a little. It weakens wealth creation slightly.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, and if it is actually a 5% catastrophic risk then I think it would be prudent to take action at the cost of leaving millions of people in extreme poverty. But there is a trade-off, and it needs to be examined.
Your worries about the economy are purely hypothetical, and most likely wrong. Infrastructure spending generally stimulates economies and there is no reason to suspect that building clean energy infrastructure will be any different. Additionally, clean energy prices will most likely be cheaper and more stable in the long term due to decreased maintenance costs and lack of dependency on energy inputs from politically volatile regions.
And even if energy prices rise slightly, the reduction of externalities will more than make up for those increased costs. It is well known that pollution from fossil fuels causes a variety of health issues. I would gladly pay a few more cents per kwh if it reduces my chances of getting cancer or heart disease.
The chance that anthropogenic climate change will lead to human extinction is much less than 5%. There just isn't any plausible mechanism for this. The one exception is extinction due to climate change triggering a war in which extinction-causing biological weapons are used. Unfortunately for risk mitigators, the chances are about equal that such a war would be cause by an economic collapse resulting from attempts to prevent climate change.
I think you have provided a great example of why people don't feel comfortable expressing doubts about climate.
A thought exercise to hopefully make it easier to empathize with these people. Imagine you are transported back several hundred years into a Catholic ruled country. You don't believe in God but you don't discuss that with strangers because you often hear people say things like "Reasonable people cannot disagree about Scripture, which is overwhelmingly on the side of eternal damnation on those who don't believe."
Imagine you hear this stuff in the market, at your job, and from the street corners. No amount of hearing this is going to convince you to believe in God. If anything this reinforces the feelings you have that religious people are hateful and ignorant.
This is a bad metaphor. Religious belief is predicated on faith in the absence of evidence. Climate change science is based on acceptance of the best available body of evidence.
> Religious belief is predicated on faith in the absence of evidence.
At least in the Christian sense, "belief" and "faith" are the same word and are synonyms of "trust". So you just said "Religious trust is predicated on trust in the absense of evidence". That really doesn't make sense. So maybe you'll see why Christian's are making a point of disagreeing with your definitions around religion and "belief".
Belief isn't the opposite of reason or evidence. They're not in conflict at all. Belief is the opposite of self-reliance and distrust.
No, belief and reason are orthogonal. But you're playing an equivocation game, redefining the words I used to suit your purpose.
As I understand it, the "faith" Christians refer to is a deeply held belief in religious principles regardless of the presence or absence of empirical evidence to support that belief.
Contrast that with a "rationalist" it skeptic's practice of rejecting beliefs not supported by evidence, and only tentatively adopting beliefs as true until they are disproven.
I'm am really trying not to moralize religious belief. That is difficult for me to do and perhaps explains gaps in my perception here. My point was a religious person will continue to hold religious beliefs despite observable phenomena that directly contradict scripture and dogma.
There's no reason one couldn't be skeptical, find satisfying answers to questions, then have a lot of faith (trust) in something.
> My point was a religious person will continue to hold religious beliefs despite observable phenomena that directly contradict scripture and dogma.
I'm not sure what scientific evidence would disprove that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God exists. Any real objection to a god's existence would have to be predicated on some metaphysical assumptions (like, God wouldn't design evolution or create fossil records). What looks like misplaced trust might actually be a disagreement or misunderstanding about metaphysical axioms.
This is a great comment, so thank you for that. Obviously one cannot disprove the existence of a God. I suppose I am thinking more of dogma that contradicts with observable phenomena, things such as the age of the universe and the planet, the evolutionary process, and things of that nature. And to their credit, some churches have adjusted their dogma in the face of contradictory scientific discovery.
I suppose I am painting with a broad brush when I assume the motivations behind religious beliefs. Either way I am way off topic here.
This is an interesting essay, but I do not think it contradicts what I said above. I am being careful to avoid ascribing a moral value to faith-based belief.
I understand that reasoned knowledge is inductive, which is why I claimed it is based upon "the best available body of evidence". When a belief is shown to be false we must reject it and reevaluate what we believe to be true. That is why one of the most exciting events in the scientific realm is proving a belief to be false, as that means we have fundamentally altered the corpus of human knowledge.
That is only nominally true if you ignore the world outside if Europe, and also if you ignore the pursuit of knowledge undertaken by various religious institutions and other curious individuals (see Moses ben Maimon).
Can you remind me of the example you were replying to? Isn't it being transported back into medieval Europe, where scripture and philosophy are considered the standard of good evidence?
"...broad unwillingness to have a real discussion for fear of being shamed..."
That's not exactly what I've observed.
I've observed people driven to be contrarian, who use an assortment of tactics:
- cherry-picking evidence for one side (this one study shows ice melting may be smaller than expected in one place, thus, I dismiss the entire AR5 report without ever even reading the executive summary);
- providing contorted arguments they would never accept in a context involving, say, their own home ("the effect is small by historic standards"; "warming will have benefits that have been overlooked");
- dismissing the expertise of others in favor of their own undergrad-level science judgements ("we can't even predict the weather past 14 days, how can we predict climate") -- again, with a degree of skepticism they would never exhibit in relation to, say, their architect ("you need more shear strength there"), gardener ("it's a root fungus"), or car mechanic ("it's your oil pump"), or even Stack Exchange ("change permissions on the file and reboot").
Broadly, HN avoids the worst of the above problems - for which I'm thankful. But you will still see them here in any climate-related discussion thread. I possess some of the same contrarian tendencies, and seeing how easily skepticism turns into ignorant defense of the status quo has been a useful corrective for me.
It depends what your null hypothesis is. Your contrarian friends only need one piece of evidence to disprove the climate catastrophe narrative.
Whilst you've taken the worst case as your default assumption, which is why their train of thought seems off. You sound like you need a large body of evidence to disprove climate catastrophe.
I suppose denying that CO2 is increasing, or claiming that it doesn't cause climate warming or isn't a problem, is a lot easier than trying to find a solution consistent with conservative or libertarian principles.
a broad unwillingness to have a real discussion for fear of being shamed
Oh for heaven's sake. There are a lot of websites, books, and spokespeople who are claiming to 'debunk' climate science, and this debate has been going on for decades now. Are you seriously arguing that your friends have the right answer but they're sitting on it because they're worried some leftie know-nothings will say mean things to them?
In short, he distinguishes between the brain and the mind (consciousness, memories, etc). While the brain may be required for an embodied creature to use their mind, they are not the same thing.