Video: Skepticon talks

Expect the next batch on Monday, including the panel on death (lovingly dubbed the atheist death panel by the moderator, Jesse Galef) featuring Eliezer Yudkowsky, Greta Christina, Julia Galef, and James Croft!

It's possible that they'll be up sooner, but as far as I understand it, our videographer (Rob Lehr) is taking a well-deserved break.

The videos I've seen so far have all been great! If there are any videos you'd like transcribed, post a request as a comment to this. If the request is already posted, upvote it. (If you say "all of them" I will scowl menacingly in your general direction)

I'm about a third of the way through transcribing Straw Vulcan. It will be up Monday at the latest, but probably earlier. If there are any other Skepticon videos that have at least 3 people wanting them, I'll transcribe them next, starting with the most popular.

I'll commit to doing the 4 most popular. (I don't want to commit to doing all the vids with 3+ votes, because for all I know that would be all of them, lol!)

Eliezer from the Death panel talk:

Yehuda Yudkowsky is dead. There is nothing left of him. He does not live on in me. He's dead. That's all. And maybe some day I'll contribute to laying the reaper, if not forever then at least for a few billion years. And maybe then I'll feel better, or maybe I wont. But the point is I'm not conflicted; I know what I'm doing about it. And it's all right to feel the same way, despite all the people telling you about ways to come to terms with death. It's all right to say "No, I wont come to terms with it. It's just evil."

This made me want to get up and cheer.

Greta Christina on angry atheists

The comments on the place of anger in a "social change movement" at 35:40 just got me laughing. Yes let's cherry pick all the social change movements that won or at least haven't yet been clearly defeated and the audience happens to mostly agree with! Hm I really can't imagine any angry "social change" movements that failed or I didn't like in the ... oh ... past 200 years.

Nope.

Getting a blank here.

Wow, James Croft singing excerpts from Rent...what the fuck was that about?

• Eliezer Yudkowsky on Heuristics and Biases
• Joe Nickel on Paranormal Investigation
• Jen McCreight on Skeptical Genetics
• Dan Barker on Atheist Priests and other things
• Rebecca Watson: The Religious Right VS Every Woman on Earth
• Spencer Greenberg on Self Skepticism

A lot of people (judging exclusively by this comment) didn't like Eliezer's talk at the Singularity Summit, but I thought this one was good. I don't think any of it will be new most LW-ers, but it was interesting, and funny, and probably introduced a lot of new ideas to the audience there. The only other talk I've watched so far was the Dan Barker one, which I also thought was good.

Eliezer's talk has been posted.

I liked it, but there are a number of things that could have been a lot better:

• There were way too many digressions. Though subsequences work well in writing, it's hard to follow a chain of reasoning that jumps between levels. Though the stories about peoples' strange opinions at dinner parties were illustrative, some of them go on for way too long. Likewise, recursing into reductionism then recursing into Bayesian Judo and then popping back out into the discussion of Occam's Razor was a bit confusing because so much time was spent on those topics that I forgot it was a digression.

• There was a little too much meta. Talking about the talk, and talking about how Richard Carrier's talk should have come first, is off-putting and not useful.

• More cognitive science examples might have helped. One of the most interesting and engaging parts of the talk was the beginning, in which the audience was given the red/green die test. More "DIY" examples of cognitive biases may have helped stress that skeptics are also prone to these errors. For example, the hindsight bias test from David Meyers might have helped to drive home that part of the talk. (On that note, why is the talk called "Heuristics and Biases"? It was really about Occam's Razor.)

• And for the love of Cthulhu, beta-test the jokes. A lot of them just aren't funny, the most awkward one being "Good thing I'm not a god...yet." The "Bayesian Hell" joke also went on way too long, i.e. well past the point where the audience stopped laughing. In addition, there was a little too much arrogance in some of the jokes. For example: "I must have been divinely inspired, because I said, without any forethought whatsoever, I said..."

The Cinderella effect

If is of course, impossible to obtain a survey that bears directly on this issue since everyone knows that such a survey would yield results that are horrifying politically incorrect

Why would this research be politically incorrect? It seems entirely consistent with (what I understand to be) the consensus among experts that children are usually victimized by people in a position of trust.

Perhaps you underestimate how difficult it would be to generate reliable data for such a study?

Greta Christina on angry atheists

Reasonably fun to watch the presenter is kind of likeable, if a bit nerdy. However it is darkartsy and I disagree with a few minor points.

I disagreed with the bit at 27:40 about the supposed unique badness of religion since any free floating that's basically a tribal marker is similarly insulated, especially anything that's extensively used by a professional class who basically make a living of reinterpreting it and do so from a position of authority. To take the most extreme case, there is no reason North Korean ideology needs ever show any results or proof in favour of its tenets, all that one needs for it to persist is to be self-sustaining. She does partially address this later at 29:40, but I don't think she's ever been faced with the best possible version of that argument.

If I am not incorrect, Amanda Marcotte was a speaker at last year's Skepticon? The skepticism movement creates some strange alliances.

Also, on an unrelated note, the Yudkowsky pony is quite nice:

http://johnnykaje.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/skepticon-ponies-the-final-hour/

The most politically important issue of Shakespeare's time, the issue that was most similar to modern PC, was religion.

In effect you exclude all the subjects that Shakespeare wasn't even allowed to remotely touch, and that last subject you make as fuzzy as you can get -- a "Roman Catholic point of view"? A "point of view". He was a man with Catholic parents and never attended church, and yet that's the best he was allowed to do, a "point of view" that doesn't point to anything in particular?

Let's talk specifics. In regards to politics -- was Shakespeare allowed to mock Queen Elizabeth, as people are currently allowed to mock their presidents and prime ministers? Was he allowed to portray a democracy as something good, when modern films and series can portray kingships as good things (see "Chronicles of Narnia" and "Lord of the Rings" which if anything was more reactionary than the book version, since it has the King Aragorn Return, but unlike Tolkien it doesn't bother showing the Mayor Samwise Elected)?

In regards to religion -- was Shakespeared allowed to have a good atheist character, as people are currently allowed to have good Christian characters and good Atheist characters, and even good Muslim characters? And yes, as people are currently allowed to have even good racist, sexist, homophobic characters (see DCI Gene Hunt )?

Don't talk to me about fuzzy "point of views", give me a single good atheist character.

Is there a play of Shakespeare that cannot be played today because it isn't allowed to be put on stage now, because it contains material that are censored now and yet they weren't back then? The closest you would come to such an example would be the Merchant of Venice and its antisemetism. In contrast I can show you a million films that could never be allowed in Elizabethan times. Let's imagine an Elizabethan version of "Eyes wide shut", why don't we.

Transcript of Julia's talk.

sam0345 is referring to the Condemnation of 1277. I'm not sure which of the propositions he believes are true but are disbelieved by the typical Less Wronger. The list contains propositions such as the following:

• That man should not be content with authority to have certitude about any question.
• That we can know God by His essence in this mortal life.
• That God cannot know contingent beings immediately except through their particular and proximate causes.
• That eternity and time have no existence in reality but only in the mind.
• That there is more than one prime mover.
• That the elements are eternal. They were nevertheless newly produced in the disposition that they now possess.
• That the intellect is numerically one for all, for although it may be separated from this or that body, it is not separated from every body.
• That creation is not possible, even though the contrary must be held according to the faith.

I downvoted this post for whining about what would happen (without even waiting to see if it, in fact, did happen) and failing to provide arguments for any of the controversial claims found therein.

Link to Carrier's Bayes Calculator.

While I'm wary of sam's posting style and history, again I feel the need to point out this comment, while it could be more tactful, is basically correct.

Simply check for which of my posts have been downvoted into oblivion?

Ones where you forget you are in an international forum and insist on discussing parochial American political issues?

Want to discuss who originated the idea of common descent

Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis in 1745

You won't be able to. If I should quote the relevant passages from the earliest who proposed this idea, I suspect my post would not merely be downvoted, but deleted.

Could one not say that, in the fortuitous combinations of the productions of nature, as there must be some characterized by a certain relation of fitness which are able to subsist, it is not to be wondered at that this fitness is present in all the species that are currently in existence? Chance, one would say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number found themselves constructed in such a manner that the parts of the animal were able to satisfy its needs; in another infinitely greater number, there was neither fitness nor order: all of these latter have perished. Animals lacking a mouth could not live; others lacking reproductive organs could not perpetuate themselves... The species we see today are but the smallest part of what blind destiny has produced...

from Vénus Physique

awaiting deletion :P

Let us imagine a modern play where the female love interest is thirteen years old.

That's not an interesting point about Shakespeare. That's an interesting point about the Elizabethan era, when marriage and puberty were much more closely related than they are now.

ETA: The fact that we are turned off by different things than Shakespeare's audience doesn't say much about government censorship. It is possible that one could self-censor based on potential public censure, but that's not the same thing as government censorship.

And I know it's not a play, but Lolita is a modern age-inappropriate romance ETA: that is widely consider a classic of literature.

If any topic was dangerous to touch, it was religion. Shakespeare could not only touch it, he jumped on it with both feet and kicked it around.

I haven't read all of Shakespeare's plays, so I don't know which play you are referencing.