bunny -

I'm mostly just teasing.

Jibninjas -

As best I can tell, Aaron W. never argues that any belief can be justified as true---or even valuable! He just doggedly complains about lack of philosophical rigor, with constant veiled reference to psychological or moral bias.

For example, in the longest argument I had with him, my position was that definitional theories of meaning are bankrupt. (I hold this position because, as best I can tell from my reading, it is the consensus of the cognitive science community.) All Aaron W. ever did was critique my exposition, and occasionally assert that in any case beliefs must reduce to unjustified presuppositions. Should I change that position?

Or more recently, I was arguing that tarot cards cannot be used to predict the future. Should I change that position?

Which, by the way, I always find incredibly ironic, as he has admitted that he does not know of a single living philosopher he considers exceptional.

Think about that. He objects endlessly to "bad philosophy", yet does not have even one example of good philosophy. WTF?! A particularly perverse sort of nihilism, if you ask me.

But speaking of views I've changed recently; five months ago, my top 5 poets were...
1. Yeats
2. Browning
3. Eliot
4. Millay
5. Updike
Now...
1. Whitman
2. Larkin
3. Ginsberg
4. Yeats
5. Frost

There's a thread mentioning someone called Kanye who is apparently famous, although I've never heard of him. It reminded me of my first internet experience:

I had just heard this new (to me) Canadian band and liked their stuff. I bought what CDs I could find but wondered if there were others I hadn't seen. Remembering this new internet thing I'd had for a few years and how there was apparently a huge store of every bit of information you could possibly want, I went to Google and typed in the name of the band. I was stunned to discover that "Bare Naked Ladies" had so many ardent fans.

It seems like googling bare naked ladies might get you in trouble with the wife.

I wasn't married at the time, but the people at work kept me paranoid for months that the police were going to kick in my door and I'd end up on the news as a 'dirty old man'. I ended up buying a new computer, just to be sure.

Putting my response here because the Skepticism thread needs no further derailing.

I don't get it, have to say. I mean, I get that Splendour should possibly not be posting in that thread, but it is in response to a derail about the posts' being moved.

I'd also like to point out that this kind of futile bitchery (my own efforts included) is a) unproductive, unamusing and uninteresting and b) an inevitable result of the modding policies the anti-Jib crowd seem to favour so heavily.

Why is it that every little thing Jib does needs to be examined through a high-powered lens, with assumption of the worst possible motives being the default? And when a clear, justifiable and appropriate motive is revealed, there's never any retraction, never any acknowledgement of 'Oh yeah I guess that makes sense', it's just ignored, and we wait for the next decision, so we can jump all over that and assume the worst possible motives there. Lather, rinse, repeat. It reminds me of the birthers with Obama - an extreme comparison, but I think it's apt nonetheless.

Here's an idea: If you don't like the forum, **** off somewhere else. There's got to be ten thousand forums online where you can talk about this kind of thing, and I bet at least one of them is run the way you want it - whatever way that is. You guys all know where the ****ing door is, and please don't kid yourself you'll be missed.

/rant

This may have been somewhat directed at me? I couldn't guess a motive, which is why I asked my questions. If I thought Jib was doing something naughty I would have come out and said so. I legitimately didn't and still don't get what's going on in that thread.

Nah, not you. More stuff like
and I mean, just you watch. rize won't be revisiting the issue, won't be acknowledging that Jib did have a reason other than not liking the post, won't be apologising for the unjustified remark, etc - in other words, won't be doing any of the things he would scream bloody murder for the other party to do if the positions were reversed.

I'm not trying to say no-one should ever question a mod's actions. It's the default assumption, all evidence to the contrary, of massive bias on Jib's part that really bugs me.

Got a call about an electronics tech job today. The temp agency is checking to see if the company is willing to be flexible with my hours due to my teaching commitments.

Hi, there!

In my 'Why do atheists have children?' thread I referred to myself as 'a flesh robot in the service of a molecule' and as 'a slave to a gene', got lambasted for them, cited the Wiki page for Richard Dawkin's 'The Selfish Gene' w/ quotes in my defense, was castigated for taking things out of context and challenged to read the book.

Very well, I bought the book yesterday:

From the Preface to the First Edition:

'We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.'

The Introduction to the 30th anniversary edition includes a quote from a reader's letter:

'I largely blame The Selfish Gene for a series of bouts of depression I suffered from for more than a decade.......'


I had intended to go through the book to see just how justified I am in my cold, bleak, nihilistic outlook and write up a book report but I'm wondering:

Is it worth it or will I end up seeing my therapist more often?

IIRR in the preface to the 30th anniversary he tells some funny stories about people getting hysterical about 'genetic determinism' like it's some kind of especially pernicious determinism-on-steroids. That should frame the issue for you nicely.

A+ for honesty.

I just glanced thru that again and I don't see it. He goes on and on as to whether he should've titled the book differently and he does quote from a former work (Unweaving the Rainbow):

A foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings.

I find this amusing as, happily, I already have a cold, bleak outlook. Ah, well, I'll read the thing and maybe make a post about it.

I'll be interested. It's not the same, but I was in a recent discussion that I think is related - nobody there could understand the often violent reaction to "we're descended from monkeys". It doesn't raise any disgust, alarm, depression, pointlessness or anything else to those present. Clearly the anti-evolution crowd find it distressing in some sense - the pushback against the idea of a universal common ancestor is more than just "it's incorrect".

Check the appendix? It might be from Extended Phenotype, I'll check later.

Don't go out of your way, I'll get to it sooner or later now that I've decided to read the damn thing. And I say 'damn thing' because of the second sentence:

'If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet?'

:facepalm.jpg:, imo.

I'll spare you all the 'O,Rly?' owl. And does technology automatically confer superiority? Presumably that's what he means. I almost threw the book into the trash.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

btw: I hope that short, attributed quotes don't break any copyright rules. Please advise if they do.

Ah, it's no trouble.

Around page 11. The anecdote follows shortly after, but isn't as amusing as I remembered so I won't bother.

But in general I would think things like contraception are reasonably clear evidence that we can indeed throw off the yoke of our germ-line dictators. Don't remember if that was brought up in the 'children' thread, but it's one I've heard Dawkins kick around a few times.

I don't mind having the conversation as I read along but it will be tedious bec I read a many things at a time and don't know how long it'll take to finish this one but 'throw off the yoke' is about the right term, imo, as it acknowledges that there is a yoke in the first place. He's mentioned contraception in the forwards but there is also this (supposing that we need to have a degree of unconscious self deception) from the Robert L. Trivers introduction:

Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.'

We may take this to mean that there are unknown, unconscious yokes in play that we either don't know enough of to be able to throw them off or are unable to be at all. I have in mind what I've read recently of brain scans that show that we make decisions unconsciously up to 10 seconds before the conscious part of the brain is aware of it, thereby causing us to believe that we are making the conciously. If true, toss out free will?

We need a brain scientist itt. There must be one around here somewhere.

I'm going to get a highlighter in the event that I decide to make a post about the book but it might be that we've already discussed the points interesting to us as, for all I know, the rest of it is a straightforward laying out of the science and therefor unarguable by the non expert.

btw: Contraception and the Chinese 1 child law can easily been seen as survival mechanisms.

Not that easily as currently practiced. The Chinese law as survival mechanism would be operating on a group-selection level, and AFAIK Dawkins doesn't accept that group selection 'gets down' to the genetic level.

Contraception in modern Western society, I don't think so. You can have 15 kids if you want, and your genes don't care how much your life will suck because of it. But you do.

The species recognizes that it is much as bacteria in a petri dish? Population soars, food runs out, population dies off. The opinion I expressed that once got me chased out of somebody's house: 'The worst thing that could happen would be for Save The Children to actually save the children.'

It's at least arguable.

What?

People are already living in horrific conditions. Save the Children tries to help. The problem is going to be much worse in 30 years w/e is done now. If Save the Children actually managed to save all of the children NOW the problem in 30 years will be much, much worse. Cold, but true.

Overpopulation - bad. Contraception and the Chinese laws lower the rate of growth - good. Good from the gene's pov? Maybe the answer's in the book.

Oh, I get all that. Just not seeing the relevance.

You can only take anthropomorphisation of the selective process so far.