Sunday, March 6, 2022

A Flaw in Pascal's Wager

Most reasonable people probably recognize that Pascal's wager is not a very good argument from a purely epistemological point of view. There is, however, also a strange incentive structure to it.

Follow along. If we want to 'minimize the negative outcomes', we should believe in the particular version of God, in which belief undoes the maximal amount of negative outcome. Thus, if you believe in a God that will punish you with an eternity in hell and I want you to turn to belief in a different God, I should present you with a God that will punish both you and anyone you know with an eternity in hell.

But that's not even the end-point. We can imagine a God that will punish you with an eternity in hell, and infinitely improved pain receptors. We know there's multiple ever greater infinities, and we can imagine a God who increases the pain receptors and time in hell into ever greater infinities. Maybe God even can copy your consciousness and punish both? All three of them! An infinity of them!

Thus, the God that Pascal's wager would ultimately lead you to accept is either the maximally cruel God if such a God can be imaginable, or ever crueller Gods replacing each other as fast as preachers can invent ever crueller ones.

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Google is a Draconian Lord

A good while ago, I wrote a couple of posts debunking a list of anti-semitic quote-mines and fabrications. After a while, Google's adSense informed me this post violated some policy, but the violation was unclearly described - essentially amounting to 'either copyright violation or hate-speech', and therefore, adSense would no longer have ads on this blog.

I don't make much money off of adSense, I've probably earned like 20€ in the whole time my two main blogs have been in operation. The earnings will only be available to me once they reach 70€, so ... however, the earnings were roughly 50% from this blog, 50% from the other, so ... this basically doubles the time until I will receive any of that money.

I did ask for a review of this decision, and was given an automatic response. There's no more ways of disputing it.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.

A debunking of an anti-semitic fabrication is hate-speech? Or is it that the quoting of a list is copyright violation, a list that is of unknown provenance, that has been making the rounds over office fax machines, in far-right newspapers, in e-mails and mailing lists, ..? Even if it were copyrighted, I claim fair use! But in all the decades it's been making the rounds, no one has ever made a copyright claim.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

 Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 
Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

 Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.  


Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

 Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.  


Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

 Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.  


Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

 Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.  


Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

 Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.  


Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

 Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.  


Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you.

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

 Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

Fuck you google. Sincerely, fuck you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, January 30, 2017

My Suspicions about William Lane Craig

I am happy to notice that William L. Craig is less prevalent now in media than he was just a few years ago.I am convinced that debating him is not beneficial for anyone whose opinions differ from his, nor is it beneficial for almost anyone in the audience.

Several skeptics have pointed out that his debates basically only uses the atheist participant as a foil against which to present something that the believers in the audience will find convincing – it serves to reinforce their beliefs, since they won't question his line of reasoning, and no matter how convincing the atheist, they'll shrug his arguments off.

I think it's more insidious than just that - I think he is aware that his arguments are not convincing, and I think he is also aware that most of his fans in the audience are not educated enough to realize this.

In essence, they experience a convincing argument, and are left baffled as to why the opposition - the atheist - does not understand that these arguments are convincing. They then have to conclude that the atheist either is stupid or disingenuous – he must have some underlying, illogical reason to reject the argument of the apologist: he must hate God.

I really think the primary thing Craig achieves is to seed that kind of suspicion in the minds of his fans - it's a subtle method of turning Christians ever more suspicious and hateful against people who think differently.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

C.S. Lewis: Has People's Sense of Right and Wrong Changed Noticeably?

Lewis' argument mainly relies on the idea that our sense of morality is universal and that this proves that some kind of God must have existed. However, he responds to an objection regarding apparent changes in morality. He states the objection to his argument as such:
I conclude then, that though the difference between people’s ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite. But one word before I end. I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, ‘Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? [1, p. 14]
Although it might seem I quoted way too much, we will find there are reasons for that - I find problems in most parts of this paragraph.

Although I thinkby presenting this objection in the context he did and phrasing it the way he did, Lewis made it seem more silly than it really is, I find myself still sympathizing with the sentiment in the argument even in its apparently naive form. Lewis counter-argument just goes to show how bad he was at thinking about things.

By attracting our attention to one of the most obvious examples - witch-burnings - he makes the case easy for himself (because if they really had existed, they would indeed have been terrible beings) but also makes us forget about all the less obvious examples (which would be greater evidence of moral differences). We have not stopped believing murderers exist, yet many people have stopped considering death penalty for murderers justifiable. Another example is sodomy, which in Britain was punished by death as recently as 1835.

We still believe 'sodomites' exist. Thus there's a problem for Lewis' argument here – to state his explanation analogously, we get
But surely the reason we do not execute gay people is that we do not believe there are such things.
clearly, this is nonsense of the highest order. Picking an obvious yet rather specific example makes it easy for Lewis to shrug this important problem off. No, clearly it should be more like
But surely the reason we do not execute gay people is that we believe it to be wrong to do so, and people in former times had a different sense of right and wrong.
Let us visit another issue, viz. that of differences of morality vs. differences of belief about facts. If the morality of an action relies on the beliefs about facts involved, would not very many quite appalling crimes turn out morally acceptable? Would not even an antisemitic act of murder, carried out in the belief that all Jews are conspiring against all of mankind, be morally sound - just factually mistaken?

Clearly there's a difference in the morality of someone who also is a skeptic, and therefore ensures that his judgments of people is based on reasonably well established facts or not from the morality of someone who just goes gung-ho with whatever pretend-knowledge has been thrown their way.

Lewis understanding of this issue is so weak that I wonder what justification there really is for calling him an 'intellectual giant'. If that is an apt description, he must have been quite the stumbling intellectual giant.

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Sad News

D.M. Murdock / Acharya S has passed away in cancer. Although I criticized her work in minute detail, I never held any grudge against her as a person - indeed, the world would be a more interesting place if she had a full-long life-span ahead of her.

Since illnesses such as cancer can leave the surviving family not only with grief but immense medical bills, you can support her family at giveforward.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

A Very Summary Review: C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity

Together with a friend, I decided to read through C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. To be sure, it is a respected and often referenced piece of apologetic literature. Thus I approached it with high hopes - not that I expected it to convert me to Christianity or even make me slightly more partial to considering Christian doctrines as 'potentially true'.

What I find is a pretty sophomoric level of sophistication. Lewis even stoops as low as virtual ad hominem responses to arguments. A lot of his arguments rely on lack of imagination, essentially 'false dilemmas' or even false trilemmas. Simply put, God can only be a certain way because that's the only way Lewis can imagine him. God must have been this way, because Lewis cannot imagine anything else. Thus Lewis sets his own mind up to be the meta-God by which any God must adhere.

A major conceit is present already in the title - and it's a conceit that later on is glossed over with a sprinkle of ad hominem. To spell out in detail what conceit I am referring to, it is the very notion of 'mere Christianity'. Lewis claims to express the most rudimental, fundamental parts of Christianity - these are the stances you at least need to hold to be a Christian. Yet, in the very first part of the book, he admits to the existence of Christians that do not hold them, and his argument for rejecting them is nothing but name-calling: Christianity and water. Their Christianity is dilute - that's given as an assertion or even an axiom, with no actual argument backing it up.

This bodes ill for the intellectual standards of apologetics from Lewis' day onwards.

Lewis was fond of a form of the argument from morality. However, his lack of logic is quite evident as he rejects the notion that morality could be a form of herd instinct. He argues that morality is somehow clearly external to instinct [1, p. 10]. This he does by illustrating that morality is what triggers instincts and even strengthens some of them, and thus cannot be itself an instinct. I find this a weird argument with flawed premises: he assumes some kind of clear-cut hierarchy of things in the mind that also happens perfectly to correspond to our terminology for these things in the mind. For this to work, the instincts have to be objects of the exact same type, and in the exact same place in some hierarchy in the mind. There's no reason to believe that instincts really are as clear-cut as that, but Lewis probably believed in a created universe that was designed in a very organized manner. Using the un-established fact that the universe is like that to prove that the universe is created is begging the question.

I shall post a series of posts dissecting the fallacies of Lewis' magnum opus in apologetics, a book still considered one of the greatest defenses of Christian faith.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Logical Conjunctions and Probability

I get the feeling when reading writings by theologians on the history of the early Church (and also on Judaism), that a great many of them do not quite understand what happens when you combine probability and logic. Let us consider the following situation:
A B C D E → F
That is, if A, B, C, D and E hold true, then F holds true as well. In maths we can come to near complete certainty that A, B, C ... hold, and thus also conclude that the conclusion holds (with ever so slightly less certainty).

Now, in fields like history and such, it's quite clear that we never have complete certainty – and here there's an interesting consequence of maths.

If P(A) = 0.9, we can be quite certain that A holds ,right? What if the same probability of 0.9 holds for each of the five antecedents there? The probability of A and B both holding true, if they are independent of one another is P(A B) = P(A) * P(B). We can now recursively do this as P((A B)  (C)) = P(A B) * P(C), and keep reiterating, and this obviously ends up giving us P(A ..E)  = P(A)*...*P(E).

The probability of F holding true given P(A)=...=P(E) is no longer as impressive: 0.9⁵ ≃ 0.59. Still greater than 0.5, though.

For a fair share of studies regarding, say, ancient Judaism or early Christianity, it seems a lot of the assumptions that do form part of the reasoning is way under 0.9, though - somewhere in the range of 0.6 to 0.8 would be a fair assessment. Even at the top range of that - 0.8 - we go below 0.5 at our fourth assumption.

Certainly, some of the probabilities might not be independent – some of the assumptions cannot hold without the previous one holding, for instance. But in that case, we still end up with probabilities of the form P(A)*P(B|A) – the likelihood of A and B, given that B's probability is conditioned by A happening, so we're still dealing with multiplication - which generally does produce quickly diminishing numbers when all our values are within the range [0,1].


What further bothers me in this situation is that oftentimes, a lot of assumptions remain unstated, and thus the list of antecedents is left incomplete, giving an impression of greater likelihood for the conclusion than is warranted. Certainly some of the assumptions might clock in at 0.99, but due to how multiplication works, ...

This is a thing that started bothering me while reading Margaret Barker's The Great High Priest – the various arguments in favour of her hypothesis all seem somewhat plausible taken in isolation. However, they are not arguments that support one another - the conclusion relies on at least a very great number of them all being independently correct. So, we end up in a situation where the only argument you can present at the level of the individual pieces of evidence is sure, these seem plausible, if not necessarily established facts. But when you look at the whole structure of it, it seems you end up with something that is fairly unlikely. It is a very clever rhetorical trick, that makes any criticism of it seem vague and unclear.

A good example of this is the following: Barker assumes that the esoteric teachings of the priesthood of the first temple were transmitted to the essenes. Further, Jesus was a member of this order. As a member, he acquired these teachings, and taught them to his disciples. The disciples propagated these teachings all the way to Origen more than 150 years later

It might seem somewhat possible that the Essenes had in fact inherited traditions from the original priesthood of the First Temple; let us arbitrarily overestimate this probability at 0.8 - in reality, you have circumstances where it would seem less likely - wars, widespread illiteracy, . I think everyone would agree that this is a fairly kind estimate. As for Jesus and the Essenes, maybe we'll even grant 0.9. We don't know much about the Essenes - did they teach all their doctrine to all their members - if not, was Jesus among those members that got access to the more restricted teachings? If he had access, did he understand it correctly? Let's be kind again, and put the probability at 0.8. Further, did he get around to teach his pupils these teachings? Did they understand them? I'd say 0.9 would be reasonable kind there.

Did these teachings get reliably passed down to Origen? Let's again go for 0.8. Maybe he had sources that did not learn from people who had learned from Jesus, or maybe his sources had misunderstood what they had learned from Jesus, etc.

At this point, we're way down: 0.46. Keep in mind that I find the probabilities that I have assigned to be rather exaggeratedly kind: I genuinely feel like values somewhere in the range [0.2, 0.7] would be closer to the actual probabilities here, although these are guesses. Of course, some less probable things do contribute to a slight likelihood of her being correct about the main conclusion: maybe Origen's sources didn't get it from Jesus, and Jesus didn't get it from the Essenes who didn't get it from the First Temple clergy, but Origen got it by some other route that did go back to the First Temple? Such alternative ways of salvaging her thesis exist, but seem highly unlikely, and putting a number like "0.01 at best" on these seems to be excessively kind as well.

If we were to look into greater detail with regards to the claims, we'd end up finding that the probability of the presented thesis falls far under 10%.


The same problem with regards to compound probabilities seems to beset a lot of work in the same field – I am compiling examples for a bigger post on this issue.

This kind of "fallacy of implication of the intersection of many independently probable propositions" is a thing I've seldom seen discussed as a fallacy, and I think it's an important one. The best way to avoid it is to either support your propositions with very much in ways of evidence, or to argue for things that can be supported by disjunctions of facts instead - or adds up probabilities, whereas and multiplies them together.