Posts
Comments
I think that you can't count most of the Chinese as non-communist. Centralized propoganda is a strong weapon and shouldn't be discounted. When people first start doubting church dogmas- in most part they developped a some kinds of heresy, not an atheism. So, they doesn't believe in offical religion, but for outer observer point of view - they beliefs was almost indistingushable from offical dogma. And in the example with Soviet Union- communist party still exsicte tin Russia. It's influence slowly dyied out, but right after the disintegration of Soviet Union they have a really good chance to win elections
It's worth pointing that phrase "atheism is also a religion" is essentially an accusation. So, the notion that religion is a bad stuff is so ingrained even in beliviers mind, if they think that phrase "you have a religion" can be used as an acusation
''Assign a dollar value to punitive damages''' - does this corelated with the ammount of money, that peoples, who responded to this earn? It look plausible that people who earn more can assign a highely money punishement for body harm
No, you don't need update you assumption. If clever arguer choose to argue about what box is contained a diamond - and not bet his own money on that..... It is sure sign that he have absolutely no idea about this, so all his speeches also just can't contain a usefull information, only total bullshit. It is like updating your beliefs about future fliping a coin. Coin just don't contain information about future- therefore useless for predicting. Also with clever arguer.
I try put it in other words. Arguer is clever. He doesn't sure what box is containing a diamond- i.e. he believe in 50/50. Else- he just bouth box, that he think contain diamond. He has a more information about box, then you. So, how you can think that you have more certain data, that one box contain a diamond -than arguer, if you have less information than he?
Also, I wonder - if somebody hired two clever arguers, one of them will persuaded one person, that diamond in the left box, and the other will argue to second person that diamond in the right box. And clever arguers is so good, that they victims almost sure in that... Isn't it almost as creating new diamond out of air ?
I think that this has deal with boundeed rationality. Perfect knowledge required endless ammount of time- and all human have only limited lifetime. So, ammount of time for each dessision limited even more. Therefore we can not explore all argument. And I think - it would be a good strategy to throw away some arguments right in the begining and don't waste time on them. Instead you can pay more attention to more plausible one. And this give you a opportunity to build a relatively accurate model of the world in relativly short time. If you not agree- consider this argument. How you can argue against communism if you don't read all the works of Marx/Engels/Lenin/Mao/Trotskiy/Rosa Luxemburg/Bucharin/Zinovev/Stalin/Kautskiy/Sen-Simon....And so on- liste can be endless. I think that such arguments are actually used as a demand that you must slavishly agree with persone who said this. Clearly, this unacceptable and we have right don't agree even if we doesn't read all this volumes- using only limited ammount of data that we already posses. So. if we throw away some idea after first glance- stupidity of followers is not a worst criteria for doing this