Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

Also not sure the community of strident homeopathy opponents is what the antiwar movement needs to tip the scales. Good read though

He links to his own posts kind of an annoying amount.

Does believing war is innate vs. cultural really that big of a contribution to our complacency of it?

I'd say no but deep roots theory certainly doesn't seem to help explain things in a way that helps us solve the problem, so it's useless and serves as a lame excuse, I see his point.

If you want the antiwar movement to get going again, bring back the draft and add women IMO

If you want to ban guns make getting shot compulsory

Simulation Hypothesis may not be science per se as in hypothesis -> experiment but it's not just a stoner though experiment, it's just a way of stating the probability that you're in a simulation that intuitively makes it sound quite high

Read that as "intuitively make you sound quite high".

Theorizing about the history of war doesn't necessarily have anything to do with anyone's motivation to be vocally antiwar, and if it does I imagine its pretty negligible.

idk obviously i hate Dawkins & co but this writer is shitty imo

i just think scientists should stfu and do science... not that they should all be Chomsky or health economists

Yeah, I think the guy's overall message is fine("attack the hard targets in your own tribe"), but damn does he make some weird choices along the way, including the quibbles in philosophy of science.

he's right that all the 'there's a gene for that' shit is annoying as hell

I wonder if the "gene for that" stuff is mostly just journalists trying to turn gene research into headlines too often.

That's the problem with the speech. He presents his chosen "hard targets" as prescriptions not as examples, if you're not going after any/all of these things, you're just as useless as Bigfoot

i just think scientists should stfu and do science... not that they should all be Chomsky or health economists

― de l'asshole (flopson), Thursday, May 19, 2016 10:23 AM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's really glaring when they're working for causes where they're obviously just superfans and have no background. i'm cool with people working for things they believe in, but when they're held up as important thought leaders on topics that have nothing to do with their professional acclaim it's irritating

I think his missive is aimed more at science communicators/journos/Capital-S Skeptic-types, the ones doing the promulgating online and culture war-fightin'

And maybe "hard target" isn't the most accurate way to describe it, but more like something involving sacred cows and attribution bias. Tribalism is the ultimate thing he seems to be getting at

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/HardTarget_1993_poster.jpg

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/05/18/john-horgan-is-skeptical-of-skeptics-or-homeopathy-and-bigfoot-versus-the-quest-for-world-peace/

and another, both from steve pinker's twitter

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/shermer-responds-to-horgan/

The bottom line is that, contrary to what Horgan implies, the skeptic movement, be it big-S or little-S, does not dogmatically worship at the altars of Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, James Randi, or anyone else

Uh okay sure

When someone starts out a talk telling his audience that he plans on bashing what they are there to celebrate, you know with a high degree of probability that what you’re likely dealing with is either an asshole, a contrarian, or both, not someone who is there to challenge the audience in a meaningful way.

idgi. why would this necessarily preclude the criticism being meaningful?

Socrates was an asshole contrarian.

That's why they made him drink the hemlock

the humorless thin-skinned nature of the Skeptic "movement" is pretty well illustrated by the fact that instead of answering to the charges of tribalism and insularity, they just decide Horgan is another stupid crank who doesn't really know the science he's talking about and therefore can be dismissed (after about 100,000 words worth of aggregated fisking) like everybody else who doesn't agree with them. Sad!

and another, both from steve pinker's twitter

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/shermer-responds-to-horgan/

― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Thursday, May 19, 2016 6:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

only gave this the gentlest of skimmings but Samuel Bowles, one of my favourite academics, makes an appearance

i think there is a good criticism to be made along these lines but Horgan just kinda shat the bed with the way he approached it and his examples all sucked and made no sense

Also, never read Michael Shermer write about politics. To give just the barest glimpse of his background, dude's a libertarian who didn't accept climate change until about '06.

There's a chapter in one of Shermer's most recent books where he decides to just lay it all out there and break down how he feels modern American politics works and oh god it's a horrorshow.

I don't know about Michael Shermer on the topic of war. He's a big fan of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings. IIRC he had a close relative fighting in the Pacific in WW2.

After a lifetime of reading them I've pretty much come to the conclusion that professional skeptics/rationalists are almost entirely to a man (and almost all of them are men) bad thinkers with questionable politics whose net effects on culture are worse than the ills they claim to fight.

Calling yourself "a skeptical person" is a description of how you approach information. Being an outspoken "Skeptic" makes you a member of a tribe with a feedback loop.

There's always an undercurrent of superstitious nonsense flowing through society, but it rarely rises to the level of widespread deliberate fraud. My experience is that most astrologers, spiritualists, homeopaths and the like are just as captive to their beliefs as the people who patronize them. The best you can do is tamp down the tendency to cling to absurd ideas. Declaring a righteous crusade against them is just another quixotic delusion. Scientology, otoh, is criminal and should be crushed with the full force of society.

Calling yourself "a skeptical person" is a description of how you approach information. Being an outspoken "Skeptic" makes you a member of a tribe with a feedback loop.

― Evan, Friday, May 20, 2016 6:36 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

So many of these guys I want to beat a "philosophy of science" class into their head, so that they actually have some back knowledge and context for what they're onstencibly defending

I don't know about Michael Shermer on the topic of war. He's a big fan of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings. IIRC he had a close relative fighting in the Pacific in WW2.

― Josefa, Friday, May 20, 2016 2:55 AM (3 days ago)

shermer's pretty bad. he's written multiple articles supposedly debunking jfk assassination theories in which he managed to avoid mentioning jack ruby.

lol like I mentioned about the class I was in, kingfish, they would probably be smarmy and bomb the first test and then just talk over the instructor the rest of the semester

actually it may have been somewhere else I posted that, but it was quite the experience being in a philosophy of tech class with a bunch of CS majors back in the day

Oh dear

one of the dudes in my class was one of the most prolific posters on m3taf1lter at one point

of all the man's legendary tweets i had not seen this one until right now

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/389432783304548352

First response HOF there, too.

british "secularists" group angry at labour shadow home secretary for implying the police might have biases when handling anti-muslim hate crimes
https://twitter.com/sajeraj/status/780770763745980416

what a bunch of nice pro-police people

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/richard-dawkins-atheism-criticism-atheist-study-rice-university-science-scientists-a7389396.html

(Mostly for the headline)

This was passed over at the time, probably because it looked like straight trolling:

Why fiction? What, when you think about it, is so special about things that never happened?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/03/what-is-so-special-about-things-that-never-happened-richard-dawkins-on-fiction-v-science

I had a friend in my early teens who used to rail against fiction because it was 'made up nonsense'. Nice to think he was expressing thought that would one day be taken seriously.

There's a condition known as aphantasia where the person having it has no "mind's eye," as in they can't picture sights, sounds, smells in the mind outside of literal fact-based representations. so if you say "imagine sheep jumping over a fence" they understand what you mean, but can't visualize.

There's a pretty strong correlation with disinterest in reading fiction. One of the first people I ran into who thought fiction wasn't worthwhile was my friend's sister -- and he (my friend) later admitted he has aphantasia, so it stands to reason that might be the case with his sister.

Dawkins probably just has his head up his own ass, though.

Dawkins' position on fiction aligns with that of a lot of hardcore biblical literalists

It's something I wonder about - do people have deeply different experiences than me? I see people claim they don't experience the impression of 'choice/free will', and I find that harder to imagine. Harder still are consciousness deniers, which I find incoherent. There's some stuff done about whether people think in pictures, words etc., but apparently their brains are doing similar things. But I don't doubt their report of a different experience.

i see the "it's fictional" argument all the time, often on message boards that devote a lot of time and energy to serious and passionate discussions of Batman and the various Cinematic Universes.