To Theists: Logical inconsistency of a necessary God

collectivecorona · 2012-05-26T00:14:53.061437+00:00

Aha! I think it's a map/territory confusion, then; and my other comment was pretty much on target. Adding complexity theory to the causal graph is good, it will allow you to make more precise predictions without sacrificing calibration. But you can still make low-precision, perfectly calibrated predictions even with a poor understanding of the territory and how network effects change it.

zetmof91 · 2012-05-25T11:53:11.344533-07:00

There's a few possibilities. A lot of the people who end up in special forces have what's called a metronomic heartbeat--without the normal minute variation between beat timings most people have. This is bad because they tend to die from heart disease at 50, but it's good because they tend to be extremely calm and effective under stress.

I have experienced getting emotionally worked up during sparring as well; one girl in my class, though she's as good a fighter as anyone and better at some things, has actually come to tears.

You must remember that this is an evolved social response to aggression. If you're being overwhelmed by an aggressive peer, signaling surrender can help. However, most people into self defense are worried about aggression from predators, people who want more than just a higher position in the pecking order. These people will display aggression to make you lower your eyes and turn away, so they can hit you in the back of the head and take your money.

There's a martial blog I like with a series on harnessing aggression. It's not the final word on the subject, but it's a good starting position.

collectivecorona · 2012-05-25T17:52:17.107480+00:00

Does my parallel comment actually address yours? I'm not completely certain I understood it. If I didn't understand, can you couch it in the language of conditional independence and mutual information, as in this essay?

MJtheProphet · 2012-05-25T17:46:13.699993+00:00

And I'm not aware of anyone saying "Yes, I believe in god, but I wish I didn't".

They exist. They're usually the type who are constitutionally inclined to take their beliefs seriously, but take the wrong set seriously, first, and get stuck. Actually believing in god, and noticing the world around you, can take you to some really dark places. Some ideas about possible gods are Langford Basilisks.

squareshot · 2012-05-25T16:50:14.668808+00:00

A cue ball strikes the 10 ball, which hits the 3 ball, which falls into a pocket. Is that essential or accidental?

An electrochemical reaction travels down a nerve fiber in my arm, releasing ionic calcium from sarcoplasmic reticulae, shortening myofibril bundles. Is that essential or accidental?

I hit the 3 ball into the corner pocket. Is that essentially ordered or accidentally ordered?

ROBthemanagain · 2012-05-25T16:34:01.922682+00:00

In this sense, there is no best insult. There are only good insult-target-situation combinations.

Merrick_T_Thundergun · 2012-05-25T16:26:33.534550+00:00

More terrifying than sad. Makes you wonder how many utterly crazy things we people of ordinary intelligence believe.

Merrick_T_Thundergun · 2012-05-25T16:04:00.396665+00:00

Hunting bare-handed always gets my respect.

squareshot · 2012-05-25T15:21:47.087985+00:00

With the chronologically stretched definition, we've never observed an accidentally ordered series. With the chronologically instant version, we've never observed an essentially ordered series, and we're supposing an additional metaphysical law that just says "existence still exists" once every planck interval or something.

What reasons are there for believing in a type of series we've never observed?

collectivecorona · 2012-05-25T14:56:06.721077+00:00

You can add as many nodes to the graphical model as you care to calculate; but if you don't mess up your conditional probabilities, you don't need to. It'll still be accurate, just less useful.

For example: Say the background probability of the sidewalk being wet at any given time is 1/10. Say, additionally, that the probability of the sidewalk being wet, given that it's raining, is 9/10.

Is this model valid? Sure, so far. Does it assume independence from all other events? Hell, no! The sprinklers could be on, that would increase the probability of a wet sidewalk independently of the weather. There could be a big awning covering the sidewalk and people pointing hairdryers at it, which would decrease the probability of a wet sidewalk independently of the weather.

But if the background probability of the wet sidewalk is, indeed, 1/10 and the conditional probability given rain is 9/10, our model is still valid.

Of course, in the territory, any given water molecule either ends up on a given portion of pavement at a certain time, or it doesn't.

collectivecorona · 1 day

The causal graph I see has the evidential node "E" influenced by a causal node "roll d6." You then replace it with another causal node "roll d10." You have changed the causal model, which is your privilege as the holder of the map.

The territory, however, is the actual mechanism by which the d6 triggered an event upon rolling 6; which would, of course, have to change if you swapped it out for a d10.

pour7me7another · 1 day

That is well said, and has more throbbing penis in it than most stirring calls to action.

whoami9 · 1 day

I once had a happy 10 hours of discussion with a NASA astrophysicist on a plane

As an aside, I'm jealous. I once had a 2 hour conversation with a NASA scientist and a Google engineer, and it flew by like minutes. Wish I lived in San Francisco so I could repeat that one weekly.

LCON1 · 1 day

I agree; stereotyping is easy, cleaving reality at the joints is hard. I once told a friend we should make t-shirts that say "Spinoza and Leibniz, not Falwell and Robertson."

Kirkayak · 1 day

Interesting perspective. You're proposing that many people are possessed of an inherent ideological fervor and will to violence; and that religions turn that energy inward, toward self-development; then outward, toward charity. That the Crusades, Islam's wars of expansion, the Troubles in Ireland, were all momentary failures of this religious redirection, not violence prompted by religion. Amirite?

I'm not quite sure how we could tell that apart from the "religion causes religious violence" model, but I haven't given it a full 5 minutes of uninterrputed thought.

Unrelatedly, I like your tag. Eudaimony is a worthy study; pleasure is too simple to satisfy me.

collectivecorona · 1 day

I do think the argument is wrong, but I don't think this is the reason. It's a sophisticated analysis, but it feels confused to me:

By "potential cause," do you mean if it were channeled through the intermediate cause of them all being suicidal, insane, or having gotten a faked video feed of the rocket launching successfully, or something else bizarre and low-probability like that? If not, I don't see how it could be called a potential cause. If so, it isn't the proximate cause.

A model that fails to include the proximate cause of an evidential node may not include the parents of that proximate cause as causes of the evidential node. A more granular model will. This is because, in a lawful universe, causality is in the map, not the territory. Without God reaching in and actually severing an edge in the causal graph, all we can say about reality itself is "que sera, sera."

m8urn · 1 day

From San Francisco to the moon, if it represented the probability that a customer will actually remember it.

Leuffen · 1 day

OP: you delivered, but for some reason I still hate you. Sorry.

MJtheProphet · 1 day

http://i.imgur.com/a38r0.jpg

MJtheProphet · 1 day

Hey, cool--pixlr even works in the ancient IE I have to use at work. Unfortunately, imgur upload doesn't work; and I'm unwilling to subject you to the horrors of an ad-laden image host.

MJtheProphet · 1 day

I agree, that example was almost entirely unrelated except to demonstrate the concept of meta-belief. I don't know what I was thinking (or, alternatively, I believe that my belief that it was a good example was harmful to my goal of explaining what I meant).

MJtheProphet · 1 day

Then you don't believe it.

You just expressed a belief about my belief. QED.

MJtheProphet · 1 day

Or you can devise surveys that double check the veracity of the answers by asking the same question in different ways, then checking for consistency. Except that may expose psychological biases more so than a "lie".

Indeed, that's one of the first methods of investigation used in Heuristics and Biases investigation, isn't it? Biases can also affect auction participants, of course. As Eliezer has said, "Humans can be wrong about anything. It's like our superpower."

But in cases without incentive compatibility, even if your answerers are clear about the contents of their own minds, you'll still get wrong answers. Even the multiple overlapping question method you mentioned basically assumes you can outsmart all but a statistically insignificant portion of your survey respondents, that they won't figure out what you're up to and tailor their responses accordingly.

MJtheProphet · 1 day

There is no category of "belief in belief". There is only belief and disbelief.

It's raining outside, but I don't believe that it is.

In other words, I reject your assertion that meta-belief is impossible.

MJtheProphet · 1 day

even if the joint distribution table for PB had different values when B=1 vs. B=0, does this give us any useful way of distinguishing BiB=0 vs. BiB=1 based on PB alone?

I think the confusing part is we don't know the independent probabilities for B and BiB; so even if we had a PB¹ with a joint distribution table that had different values for them, we'd still just have a likelihood ratio, not a posterior probability.

But this is exactly the kind of problem Bayes is built for. Start with a prior probability distribution for B and BiB. Any prior probability distribution. Now, update it each time you get a survey with an answer for our hypothetical PB^1. Someone with different prior probabilities than yours for B and BiB will end up with different posterior probabilities, given identical evidence--but there is no method of reasoning that can do better than that.

khafra

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