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Placing it on an empirical foundation would be an enormously difficult task, but fortunately it's not particularly necessary since, like geometry, you can put it on an a priori foundation stemming from some basic observations about human nature.
Human beings tend to prioritize according to some simple, general rules, and natural selection ensures that those few who throw too big a curveball don't propagate. So you can take those rules and extrapolate them into a description of how a group of human beings will react to various economic pressures.
"Man, Economy, and State", By Rothbard, is probably the best and most complete analysis to date.
To answer the original example question, the primary role of "underconsumption" in the Great Depression was that politicians could use it as a boogey-man to justify seizing control of the money supply and the manufacturing and agricultural sectors of the economy and running them in a manner to further their own interests at the expense of the general population. "The People's Pottage" (terrible title, I know) by Garett Garrett has a good, blow-by-blow description of the sequence in which this was done and how each takeover was used to manufacture justification for the next.
Indeed! The question is, "How do you tell?" The "how do neurons work" research has gotten down to the level where the decision-making seems to involve quantum phenomena where we can't take the lid off and peek inside. Theoretical physicists wonder if there are more than just four dimensions, but haven't nailed down anything concrete. We can sort of see back to the beginning of our universe, but not into anything that may have been before it or beside it or anything like that.
You can definitely say it's "not outside our universe," whatever it is, because containing absolutely all of everything is part of the definition of "universe." But that doesn't actually answer the question of how it works in any meaningful way either, merely gives a more optimistic outlook about the odds of us figuring out how to understand it.
Interestingly, there's at least one experiment I've heard of where they were using an FPGA and genetic algorithms to "evolve" circuits, and it turned out to not be practical at the time, but analysis of the resulting circuits found them working in strange and unusual ways. Some of which seemed to be delving into the same kinds of quantum phenomena that we now know neurons use. So, at the very least, if there is some deeper layer it doesn't seem like it's a "protein chauvinist."
There are indeed multiple ways it could work. And it may be tough to decide how to draw any boundaries. Is it some totally separate realm that only interacts with ours in the one area? Or is it something that's simply a little outside of the four dimensions we can normally perceive and it's tied in everywhere in subtle ways and our cognition is merely the only spot where we easily notice it? We might try to model it in a number of different ways depending on exactly what we find. But we're almost certainly going to have problems trying to fully understand something so different from what our brains are built to work with, especially when getting into things like this where it's definitely possible that attempting to understand it could have a feedback loop with how we think at a fundamental level.
And I can't really think of a way that we could know for sure if our universe is deterministic or not. You'd have to be able to see multiple runs of it and observe if they were identical or not... It's kind of like the theoretically O(1) "randomize data, check if sorted, if not then destroy the universe" sort algorithm...
Well, the question is whether our thoughts are deterministic or not. If you reset the universe to the same point multiple times, would everyone necessarily do exactly the same things? Or might there be variation? There being an extra-universal influence on our thoughts that wouldn't get reset gives the possibility of non-determinism, even if there is some ability to predict what it might do in known circumstances.
Actually running that test though would be... difficult. We only get to see one of the runs, so we have nothing to compare to.
So is our sense of free will an illusion? Or meta-information that's leaking in from somewhere due to incomplete sandboxing? Really hard to know for sure. But, at the same time, does it actually matter?
Thing is, there are quite a few questions about our universe which simply cannot be definitively answered using only information from within our universe.
Take "free will" for example. Does our thinking arise entirely from natural phenomenon, or is there some extra-universal component to it? Well, if it is the latter, then the only way for us to find out from inside the universe is if the universe is built in a way to make it obvious. If there's some discontinuity between cause and effect with regard to thinking or similar.
But if there is a supernatural influence on our thinking, why the heck would it be bound by our limited perception of the time dimension? It's outside every normal dimension except time? The characters in a novel, if they start trying to examine whether or not they have "free will", find exactly what the author wishes them to. And it will be as perfectly consistent as the author cares to make it. You can only break out of the sandbox if there's a flaw in the sandbox, deliberate or otherwise.
"Simple models" are good. Using the simplest model that produces accurate predictions reduces mistakes and confusion. But the model is not the universe, and the apparent simplicity could be an entirely local phenomenon.
Why? If the answer is "no" then applying a proper punishment causes the nebulous whatsit in charge of the person's free will to change their future behaviour.
If the answer is "yes" then applying a proper punishment adjusts the programming of their brain in a way that will change their future behaviour.
The only way a "yes" makes it harder to justify punishing someone is if you overexpand a lack of "free will" to imply "incapable of learning".
As far as we know, there has been not one single violation of conservation of momentum from the uttermost dawn of time up until now.
And because we know that, any unusual reports that would seem to imply such a violation may have happened are obviously false... Ties up the loose ends.
The chemical stuff could be explained by alterations to thermal expansion. Less expansion would cause less pressure, and spiking pressure is a critical part of getting an actual detonation. Would also reduce the amount of wind though, so the climate would possibly change substantially.
Electronic stuff failing is rather more difficult to figure out without wrecking people's brains, compasses, etc. He probably should have left that alone and just let the electronics fade away since without gas expansion generating electricity to run them would be impractically expensive.
It may well be a "tightly-laced reality". It's just not this one. Perhaps the answer to a match not working in the world the hero is transported to is that the fundamental chemistry of the universe is different and our protagonist's body has obviously been modified to match. Or else the difference is some specific alteration where human metabolism can still work, and yet phosphorous can't generate a high enough temperature to ignite cellulose. The fact that he still has a match after transportation to such a different world where probably only his mental pattern is actually making the jump is the harder part to explain.
Similarly it might be possible to create a world where firearms and engines don't work by changing how much effect temperature has on the expansion of gasses without wrecking other things too terribly much.
But... we're talking about fantasy, not hard sci-fi... It's about the people, not the specifics of the physics of the universe.
If you interpret it strictly, an answer of "yes" puts you in the space of "I used to beat my wife, but I have stopped." An answer of "no" puts you in the ambiguous space of "Either I used to beat her, and I still do, or I never have and therefore can't have stopped."
The question is which of those two possibilities people will assume. Which will depend on the context and what they already think of both you and the person asking.
There are quite a few ways it can go wrong other than just central planning. Ultimately most of them come back to some special interest group attempting to forcibly subvert the economy to favor their own preferences.
High extraction ratios aren't inherently problematic economically speaking since it's not like the extracted resources simply vanish, and market forces tend to bring the extraction ratio down over time until it reaches the lowest level anyone's willing to do the job for. But, high extraction ratios do make a tempting target for non-economic actions designed to preserve the lucrative ratio against the actions of the market.
From the economics side of things, individual nodes having massive amounts of locally useful information, but it being very difficult to determine exactly which pieces of that information are globally relevant and it being completely impractical to ship and process every piece of that information at the global level is the fundamental problem that most "command economies" tend to run into.
I'm afraid I haven't collected a definite list. I just notice when it pops up in the wide variety of materials I tend to read. For example, traffic studies showing better flow rates and safety when drivers are allowed more individual discretion. You'll probably also find some stuff in Austrian economics with regard to how more freedom of choice allows for better optimization by making fuller use of the processing capability of each individual. And there have been a few references to it in business management studies about why micromanaging your employees almost invariably leads to worse productivity.
"Network Effects" is probably a good keyword if you want to go looking for such examples specifically. It seems to be a common phrase.
Such a low-ranking solution as "Everyone have as many kids as possible, then cannibalize the girls" would not be generated in your search process.
Like... "A Modest Proposal"? I would suggest that low-ranking solutions are very often generated and are simply discarded without comment in the vast majority of cases. The only way "efficiency" enters into it comes from the way we start our search for solutions by considering how to adapt already known solutions to similar problems.
This does, in fact, show up in evolution as well. Adapting existing solutions is far more common than inventing something entirely new. Like how the giraffe has the same number of cervical vertebra as (so far as I know) every other four-legged mammal on the planet.
Try "The Two Faces of Tomorrow", by James P. Hogan. Fictional evidence, to be sure, but well thought out fiction that demonstrates the problem well.
Personally I think I actually tend to anthropomorphize more as a result of my ability to guess what others are thinking being learned rather than instinctive. Because I really am using the same circuitry for comprehending people as I do for comprehending car engines and computers and using it in essentially the same way.
But I may not be typical. Best guess is that my particular quirks are mostly the result of a childhood head injury rather than anything genetic.
A lot of the things that ancient cultures attributed to God are this kind of thinking.
If you see a dead pig on the side of the road with no signs of violence, stay the heck away from it. You don't have to know which specific disease it died of, or even what a disease is. People have just noticed that anyone who goes near such a thing tends to die horribly later and maybe takes half the tribe with them. The precise intermediate steps are largely irrelevant, just the statistical correlation.
There are two failure modes to watch out for.
The first is when people start worshiping their own ignorance and refuse to update the rules as their understanding of the underlying principles improves.
The second is when people recognize that the idea of "God" as an old man with a long beard who lives in the clouds is patently ridiculous and assume therefore that all of the principles and rules intended to "stay his wrath" may be ignored with utter impunity.
To the first type I generally point out that whatever creator they believe exists gave us our intelligence as well, and refusing to use that gift to the utmost would be an insult.
To the second I like to suggest that, since "Thor" is imaginary, maybe they should go stand in an open field and wave a metal stick around during the next thunderstorm... A "primitive" understanding of something is not the same as being stupid, and a few thousand years of experience that says, "If you do X, bad things happen," should not be ignored lightly.
If there weren't people who had a strong desire, not just for sex, but to actually have a child, and a willingness to go to extreme measures to do so, then sperm banks wouldn't be a thing.
Given the number of people who specifically, and openly desire to make babies, postulating a subconscious desire that might push them to "forget" their contraception isn't unreasonable. Especially given that cycle timing and coitus interruptus have been staples of human sexual behaviour since... Well... At least as far back as we have any records about such things. Dawn of civilization.
The two sets of replicators reminds me of an article I read about a species of birds that seems to be splitting into effectively four sexes. Male and female, but then also coloring patterns that have formed a stable loop that alternates back and forth. If the loop were unstable they'd split into two species, but it alternates generations regularly, so they keep mixing, but in a pattern of four.
Alternatively, consider the various sects in history which have thought that the world was evil and therefore bringing children into it was doing them great harm. Needless to say, the majority of them seem to have died out...
I would submit that most other species on the planet, were they to rise to our level of intelligence, would not bother inventing condoms. In most other species, the females generally have no particular interest in sex unless they want babies.
Humans though, are weird. Because of our long phase of immaturity, and the massive amount of work involved in raising a child, we need really strong social bonds. Evolution, being a big fan of "The first thing I stumble across that gets the job done is the solution" repurposed sex into a pair-bonding trigger, and then, as our ancestors' offspring required longer and longer care, divorced it from any specific attempt to make a baby at that particular moment.
Now fast forward to the point where infant mortality drops and churning out babies as fast as possible is no longer the best strategy. But we still need the pair bonding because the length of childhood hasn't gotten any shorter, and it still goes way better with two sets of hands to look after the little one. Evolution would probably come up with another quick hack for this... (One might suggest that it already has in the form of oral sex.) But it will take a while. Our brains are faster.
Evolution now will simply need to favor genetics that introduce an explicit desire for children, rather than the other behaviours which used to inevitably lead to them. Which... There are a lot of people out there for whom not wanting children is a dealbreaker when looking for a potential spouse. So it seems like it's already on top of that one too.
Personally I think the Inquisitor has a much better case than the Phlogiston theorist.
If humans have an immortal soul, then saving that soul from an eternity of torment would easily justify nearly anything temporarily inflicted on the mortal body in the same manner that saving someone's life from a burst appendix justifies slicing open their belly. While brutal, the Inquisitor is self-consistent. Or, at least, he could be.
Magnesium gaining weight when burned, however, has to be special-cased away to fit with Phlogiston theory. There aren't really any coherent explanations for it that don't boil down to "Magnesium doesn't count."
Still, it's a good example of the lengths to which people will go to justify their own preferred courses of action. The Inquisition was, after all, largely political rather than religious, concerned with rooting the last of the Moorish sympathizers out of Spain.
Reminds me of one of the early AI research projects using some variety of optimization algorithm to try to "learn" the ability to solve a wide variety of problems in a single program. Genetic algorithm I think, random mutation and cross-pollination of the programs between the best performers, that kind of thing.
After a while, they noticed that one of the lines that had developed, while not the best at any of the test problems, was second-best at all of them.
Yet when they tried to make it the base of all their next generation... it didn't work...
Cue a massive analysis effort to rip it apart at the machine-code level and figure out what the heck was going on. Eventually they found that it had stumbled upon a security flaw in their running environment and learned to steal answers from the other programs running on the system.
Evolution doesn't care if it's cheating, only if it works.
Hard to say if politics was the entire reason... We are also endurance hunters and trap layers and both of those require being able to predict what your intended prey will do many steps in advance...
Question is, which came first?
And really, evolution didn't come up with a general intelligence to solve ape politics. Pay attention when you're thinking about things. How often do you reflexively think of inanimate objects as "wanting" or "happy"? You're probably modeling plants and animals and machines and complex physics as though it were another ape. Ape behaviour is so complex that other, complex systems can fit right into that rules processing engine, but that engine leaves its fingerprints all over the results...
Which is the entire reason this website exists. If we truly had a general-purpose intelligence most of the glitches in our thinking that we have to learn to be careful of wouldn't be there to start with.
'I say "evolutions", plural, because fox evolution works at cross-purposes to rabbit evolution, and neither can talk to snake evolution to learn how to build venomous fangs.'
Interestingly, as we're getting better at analyzing genomes, we're discovering that this isn't strictly true. Rabbit and fox cross-pollinating with snake would be a bit of a stretch maybe, but there are actually a number of what we once thought to be entirely separate lines of evolution which genetic testing has revealed to be true-breeding hybrids between a set of nearby species.
Also, it's looking like viruses can play a fairly substantial role in picking up genes from one species and ferrying them around to others.
Of course, all of that will pale in comparison to genetic engineering once we finish sorting that out.
Sure. Your cells have two methods for copying DNA. One of them is fast and highly accurate. The other is quite slow and makes mistakes several times more often.
The chemical structure of the accurate method is basically an order of magnitude more complex than the inaccurate one. It seems likely that the inaccurate method is the remnant of some previous stage of development.
The inaccurate method has stuck around because the error checking on the accurate method also causes the process to stall if it hits a damaged segment. At which point the strand being copied gets kicked over to the older machinery.
The new method, being significantly more complex, is dependent for assembly on significantly more complicated structures than the old method, structures which could not have been created without the old method or something like it. Figuring out exactly how far down the stack of turtles goes is tricky though since all the evidence has long-since decayed. Maybe as we get better at decoding DNA we'll find leftover scraps of some of them lurking in the seemingly-unused sections of various genomes.
Go visit any machine shop. You'll find tools there like lathes and mills which, given a supply of raw materials, can be used to manufacture another machine shop.
And yet... Where did the first lathe and mill come from if all lathes and mills are made using other lathes and mills? Obviously God created the first ones and gifted them to us, because nobody even knows how to make the high-precision slides and rods and threads needed for lathes and mills without lathes and mills to use for tools...
Oh... Wait... The first ones were made with tools other than lathes and mills via processes that we don't use anymore because they really stink by comparison.
You can see some evidence of this in cellular machinery in places where cells have more than one way to perform some function. What the originals were... We'll never know for sure without a time machine, there are several possibilities for each. But they all stink compared to what's become ubiquitous now. But, like with the machine shop, they worked well enough to get the job done and pave the way for something better later.
Note that this doesn't eliminate the possibility of some intelligent entity watching over the universe and tuning it to get some desired output according to some master plan. It just means that the watchmaker analogy is a bad argument for that. Just like the other common argument that evolution is a decrease in entropy, and therefore a violation of the laws of physics. Stupid, ridiculous arguments that don't survive more than a cursory examination and, therefore, make all theists look bad via "guilt by association." Stop it. Evolution and God are not mutually exclusive, and trying to deny that evolution happens as a way to discredit atheism is letting the atheists frame the argument in such a manner that they can't possibly lose. Not a good strategy. If you're going to waste time arguing something that neither side is likely to concede on regardless you should at least take pride in being good at it.
The poisons are variations on digestive enzymes, only turned up to 11 potency-wise. Lots of enzyme producing organs have bladders to store their output until needed, so that likely would have copy-pasted in at the same time, and there are several species of reptiles which are venomous, but don't have fangs. There seems to be a progression of teeth near the venom entry point becoming longer and grooved, eventually culminating in fangs.
Digestion first, then pre-digestive saliva (your saliva has digestive enzymes too for that matter) then more potent saliva, then teeth to stuff it into the prey more effectively once it was strong enough to help with incapacitation and not just chewing, then more specialized saliva, then more specialized teeth. Pretty easy to see how it would have developed a piece at a time.
Intermediate mutations don't necessarily need to provide any benefit at all, they just need to not have any detrimental effects.
As I recall, a rattlesnake's rattles are formed more-or-less by its skin failing to shed perfectly cleanly. That costs practically nothing and is exactly the kind of weird mutation that can crop up in an isolated segment of the population where it doesn't take long for genes to stabilize.
Then the isolation ends, and it turns out that the weird new trait has some amount of benefit over the population at large, so it spreads.
An interesting choice since horses are one of the few other animals on the planet that sweat and, therefore, are one of the hardest to run down.
Interestingly, the ability to sweat also coincides with the ability to run oneself to death. Other creatures use panting as their primary cooling mechanism, and, as a result, when they become too warm, they cease to be able to take in sufficient oxygen to maintain their exertion and have to stop. Non-sweaters will drop from exhaustion, but it's rarely fatal.
Horses use their extreme running ability to get away from predators. Humans use it to be predators. When we finally teamed up we became nearly unstoppable. :D
That is a reasonable possibility, although if it only interacts with normal matter via gravitation, which is relatively weak, then I'd expect to see its dispersal lag significantly behind, say, a supernova. And that lag would seem likely to result in such events skewing the distribution over time.
Unless we're also going to postulate that dark matter has its own energy, chemistry, and physics which resemble those of normal matter so closely that such things happen in both realms at the same time...
Measurement error and/or gravity having some kind of propagation properties we haven't worked out yet still seems like a contender for the explanation, unless they have, indeed found pockets in the universe with differing amounts of excess gravitation that match what one would expect in the wake of fast-moving objects. I haven't seen any reports about that myself, but I can't say I'm an insider on the latest research or anything.
I would say that the non-nerds can't save the human race either though. Without nerds our population never exceeds what can be supported by hunting, gathering, and maybe some primitive agriculture.
Which isn't much. We'd be constantly hovering just short of being wiped out by some global cataclysm. And there's some evidence that we've narrowly missed just that at least once in our history. If we want to survive long-term we need to get off this rock, and then we need to find at least one other solar system. After that we can take a breather while we think about finding another galaxy to colonize.
Yes, we might destroy ourselves with new technology. But we're definitely dead without it. And if you look at how many new technologies have been denounced as being harbingers for the end of the world vs how many times the world has actually ended, I'd have to think that gut feelings about what technologies are the most dangerous and how badly we'll handle them are probably wrong more often than they're right.
One thing that occurs to me while reading this is that for most people, their religion consists nearly entirely of cached beliefs. Things they believe because they were told, not because they derived the result themselves.
This makes any truly critical examination of one's religious beliefs rather a daunting task. To start with, you're going to have to recompute potentially thousands of years of received wisdom for yourself. That's... A lot of work. There's a reason we cache beliefs, otherwise it would take a lifetime just to be minimally educated.
And then there's the bigger one that I think most of the other commenters have glossed over. Recomputing your religion into self-consistency can be scary because if you recognize that previous generations were no less intelligent and no less searching for truth than you are, then there is a not-insignificant chance that your recalculations will introduce more errors than they correct. That would be bad.
On the other hand, if nobody ever grinds through all the equations again, then any bad values that slipped in somewhere never get caught. At some point the balance of old mistakes vs. potential new mistakes tips in your favor.
My personal strategy is that, when there's a contradiction, recompute until it is resolved without creating any new ones. If you can't, flag it as a hole in your model and keep your eyes open for a better fit.
Obviously, any religion that prohibits honest questioning should be laughed off the face of the Earth.
So I grew up around Jesuits and, while I obviously can't speak for all of them, I'd say that they probably qualify as proto-rationalists, if not rationalists. To the point where a large portion of other Christian sects denounce them as atheists because they refuse to wallow in mysticism like everyone else.
A core principle of the Jesuit philosophy is that God gave us our intellect specifically so that we could come to better understand him. You won't find them trying to quibble about "micro" vs "macro" evolution or any of the other silliness that other groups use as a membership badge and try to talk in circles around. They do still believe that there is a super-natural world beyond our ability to directly observe, but everything about this world must be logically consistent and any apparent inconsistency is a flaw in your own understanding, not a flaw in the world or a "divine mystery".
They are trained to draw a hard line between what they believe and what they know, and to treat any perceived inconsistency between the two as a reason to probe deeper until it makes sense. And any fellow Christian who gives the appearance of engaging in "belief in belief"? They'll tear him a new one just as fast as Yudkowsky would, if not faster. They have his lack of tolerance for it, coupled with encyclopedic knowledge not only of the Bible's contents, but also generally of practically every work by every significant Christian and major pagan philosopher before or since.
I suppose a good way to explain the fundamental difference is that where most Christian sects believe that certain things are true because they are in the Bible, the Jesuits would say that the stories in the Bible were selected because they teach a fundamental truth or two. Were it not for the weight of Catholic tradition, I strongly suspect many Jesuits would be in favor of continuing to add to the anthology that is the Bible as we develop better stories for teaching the desired lessons. Or, at least, developing an updated one that would make sense to a modern reader without having to spend decades studying all the cultural context necessary to understand what's going on. I first heard the observation that "The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Christian story and worldview, just dressed up in different mythology" from a Jesuit for example.
Definitely interesting people and nearly always worth developing a relationship with when you can. And while they'll try to convert you, they'll do it by presenting logical arguments, not by shouting and hitting you with a large book. They'll take what they consider to be the core lessons and principles of Christianity and recompute how to explain them couched in your own world view. And if you end up agreeing on everything but the mythology? Well that's good enough.
The odds are long because all the obviously good ideas with no risk of failure are immediately snapped up by everyone.
The key is to learn to spot those so you can move on them first, and also to keep a sane estimate with how much you're gambling vs the potential reward so that your net expected payout remains positive.
It depends on what you want to exercise really. Breath-hold exercises won't make your muscles get stronger faster or anything, but they will improve your ability to go extended times without air, which is a useful talent in itself and improved lung function is helpful for maintaining higher rates of exertion for longer.
So... Exercise what you want to be able to do I guess?
All the time. Generally when it's something they don't want to do and are looking for reasons to stop rather than reasons to continue. At that point small incongruities are automatically taken as evidence that the whole system is flawed.
Two of the three little pigs got eaten. The grasshopper starved to death. Little Red Ridinghood and her grandmother both got eaten with no miraculous rescue. The boy who cried wolf got eaten, along with all his sheep. The little mermaid didn't get the prince and was cursed to walk the world in agony for the rest of her days. Several other stories, the central "villain" does something wrong (or maybe even just rude or inconsiderate) and the protagonist of the story kills them and all their family and burns their house down.
The stories these days are overly-worried about not scaring children with the fact that the world is a dangerous place and one mistake can be the end of you and everything you care about. The old versions very much wanted to drive that point home.
As a society we've prioritized "feeling safe" over "being safe" when it comes to raising children. Isn't that scary?
The most common Christian answer to that contradiction, when translated into modern parlance, is that God is the hardware on which the universe runs. Not only can he know both the position and speed of a particle at any given time, but he, in fact, must know it at all times or it would cease to exist.
The fact that some philosophers could figure this out over a thousand years ago is impressive. The fact that the majority of "believers" just blink in incomprehension and then go right on thinking of God as just a slightly mutated human who lives in the sky is disheartening. Especially now that we routinely fly above the blue and know that what's "up there," in the physical sense, is just more sky.
We played it with thrown balls, and the target had to stand there until someone missed. But every time someone hit the person the throwing distance was increased by a step.
I totally agree about it being practice for handling pain and finding out what the limits are in a safe manner. You'll see baby animals doing the same thing as they play, slowly ramping up the level of roughness until somebody squawks.
Unfortunately, it's also a way to reinforce an in-group if you can get some out-group players involved. I only played it once since it didn't take me long to notice that, somehow, I was the only one who ever got actually hit with the ball whenever I was involved.
The hard part is that it's one of those mental skills that can't really be taught. You can tell people about it, but they have to learn it for themselves. Because, even once you know about it intellectually, what it "feels" like when your brain is deliberately not thinking about something is almost certainly a subjective experience that will be different for everyone.
So, like Zen, you'd have to work out a large set of training scenarios that put a person in a situation where it'll happen and then draw their attention to it, and plan on having to run most people through quite a few of them before they grok.
Christian groups are usually pretty hit-or-miss. If you tear the religion down, crack open its bones, and scoop out the marrow, you'll find a lot of the same lessons as are discussed here. It's old, often obtuse, and it's obvious that the writers and compilers weren't sure why it was this way, only that it is. Jordan Peterson, for example, has some excellent dissections of various parts of Christianity and what it tries to achieve as viewed through the lens of modern psychology, and it's hard to look at any of the pieces and say that they are bad. Because they work.
But a lot of churches don't do that. They get caught up in the mysticism and never look further. The really bad ones will criticize anyone who even notices the practical, good effects for being "worldly". Don't waste your time with those ones. They're just a mutual admiration society and any actually beneficial effects on their lives are purely incidental.
I wouldn't say the business world is relentlessly honest in all things, but when the rubber meets the road, business either provides what the consumers want, or gets shouldered aside in favor of someone who does. This keeps them marginally more honest than in the educational system where the consumer who pays for it is generally not the student and they're generally left free to pursue whatever absurd fantasies they please in the name of demonstrating how "intellectual" they are.
Because, once the child had said it and everyone was laughing, it was too late. Everyone knows the emperor is an idiot now, his authority is pretty well broken. If he gets violent at that point his head will be on a spike by sundown.
Which... Not all emperors in real history have been that smart. So it could be a fitting end for the story nonetheless.
Just to point it out, even the term "denialist" was designed to be a loaded word that biases everyone who hears it against the position. Which doesn't make them any more or less likely to be correct, but it does let you know that the whole debate has gone political and scoring points against the opposing side has become more important than finding the truth.
Which doesn't actually add any evidence to either side being correct, because the universe doesn't really care about what we think, but it does tell you to watch out, because the mainstream voices have already picked which side they want to be correct and are ruthlessly filtering the "evidence" to eliminate all dissent. Perhaps the dissenters really don't have a point, but if they did they'd be shouted down long before they could make it.
Science very much isn't a religion. (At least, it's not supposed to be. The whole initial point of the system was to get thinking divorced from religious attachment to old ideas so progress would be quicker.)
But there are very much people for whom it has become their religion. Just listen. Any time you hear somebody talking about "the science" as though the mere fact that scientists have said something makes it true, that's religious thinking.
And it pops up all over the place. The climate change debate is a perfect example. Doesn't matter which side you agree with normally, the mere fact that politicians and the public talk about "the consensus" and "the science" as though the universe gives a crap about what "the majority" of scientists think should worry you. Especially when you dig into it further and find that the first surveys of "scientists" done to establish it as the "consensus" view consisted primarily of researchers in other fields who you wouldn't expect to know much more about the subject than the average guy on the street. But once "the consensus" is rolling, it's darned hard to stop.
Is the "consensus" view correct? Hard to say. It definitely could be, but the way everyone has started shouting down all counterevidence (because "consensus") makes it hard to tell.
It's the same political and religious mistakes mankind has been making since the beginning, dressed up in the fancy, new suit of "science".
Only that's even worse, because now you have a religion which has been ripped loose from the last 2000 years worth of studying human nature that the world's major religions had. And worse, hostile to anything and everything religious philosophers have ever learned. A new religion that not only throws the baby out with the bath water, but does so on purpose merely because it wasn't theirs.
And every time someone insists that "science isn't a religion" without making sure both sides of the conversation are talking about the same thing, they're just feeding the beast and making it stronger. If we're not careful, we'll end up with a theocracy of "scientific management" with "experts" taking the place of priests, prophets, and gods all at once.
The problem with arguing over words in this manner is that each side is attempting to "win" by picking a definition that lets them shut down the other side entirely, rather than finding common meaning so they can use the linguistic token for further communication. It's a contest of social dominance, not a search for truth. If you've ever tried to have an honest discussion with someone doing that you know exactly what I mean. You let them have their definition of the word and just pick a different word for the purposes of the discussion to define down to the concept you were trying to communicate, and instead of trying to understand they immediately just accuse you of trying to "weasel out" of the argument and not admit you were wrong... When they're very obviously not even talking about the same thing you were...
Yes, there are people for whom atheism is their religion. They write in "therefore: there is no God" at the bottom of their page and anyone who offers even the slightest dissent is automatically branded insane. The very idea of God is a threat to their internal world model that they have to shut down by any means necessary rather than examine objectively. That's not most of the atheists here, but don't let this very biased sample from among people who actually care about thinking correctly skew your estimate about how many atheists worldwide are operating on cached memes that they've never actually considered for themselves.
There are also rational theists. They assign different weights to the arguments on either side than most of the people here, but they are open to actual discussion and reconsideration and don't consider anyone questioning the existence or nature of a God or gods to be a threat. One of the supposed prime attributes of God, after all, is truth. If there is no God, then God would want you to believe that there is no God.
Stalin's "religion" definitely wasn't Communism. He pretty obviously didn't believe in it himself based on his decisions and actions. His religion was his own, personal power and authority. He did, however, insist on religious-type devotion to Communism (Or, at least, the absolutely unfailing appearance of the same) among all of his underlings. And carried out frequent purges to ensure he got it.
I wouldn't say Bacon's scientific method is the only great idea that both promised and delivers on being massively beneficial to all mankind.
There are certain social principles that crop up again and again as well. For example, the idea that free people making their own decisions and setting their own goals are, in the long run, vastly more efficient at practically everything than top-down, centralized control.
It works surprisingly well wherever it's tried, consistently out-performs the predictions of the centralizers, and, at this point, we're even starting to understand the logical and mathematical basis for why it works.
And yet, somehow, most of its historical proponents are seen as crackpots or religious nuts.
Yeah, "dark matter" really bothers me. Which seems more likely?
That there are massive quantities of invisible matter in the universe that only interacts via gravitation? And happens to be spread around in about the same density distribution as all the regular matter?
Or that our estimate for the value of the universal gravitational constant is either off a little bit or not quite as constant as we think?
The former sounds a little too much like an invisible dragon to me. Which doesn't make it impossible, but exotic, nigh-undetectable forms of matter just doesn't seem as plausible as observation error to me.
I'd say "artificial" is probably the wrong word for describing the intelligence demonstrated by corporations. A corporation's decision calculations are constructed out of human beings, but only a very small part of the process is actually explicitly designed by human beings.
"Gestalt" intelligence is probably a better way to describe it. Like an ant-hill. Human brains are to the corporation what neurons are to the human brain.
I doubt one could say with any confidence that they are universally "smarter" or "dumber" than individual humans. What they are is different. They usually trade speed and flexibility of calculation for broader reach of influence and information gathering. This is better for some purposes. Worse for others.
They're not as smart as they seem. Humans having separate data storage for physical structure vs mental layout in no way precludes sharing of both.
Not that they aren't correct, at least in general (there are a few physical mechanisms by which thought-sharing could plausibly happen under perfectly ideal circumstances, but so far as we can tell it at least doesn't occur in humans often enough to be distinguishable from noise) but they kind of jumped to conclusions there.
Especially where the archive dump would have the contradictions of scientific literature showing the very low likelihood of any significant telepathy, but then our long-term memories seem to be stored as RNA which could theoretically be transferred at least to offspring, and possibly to others... Put that together with much of the romantic literature talking about a bond closer than just the physical when "true love" is involved...
They should, at least, have recognized that they (and probably we) were horribly, horribly confused.