Regarding the anthropic argument, the core idea isn't too complex, but responding to objections is. The simplified idea: theism predicts more people on average than atheism, because a perfect God would want to create and would have no limits on how much he could create. Your existence is likelier if more people get created. So therefore your existence is likelier given theism than atheism.
I think my issue is, even the best apologetic arguments only get you to impersonal prime mover, any attempt to link it to any particular religion falls flat on its face. So an attempt to prove the fact of god mostly disconnects it from practical usefulness.
Thanks Joe. I agree. Obviously rigorous description has its place among experts, but in order for a good idea to go far it often must trade some rigor in its description for clarity. And philosophyspeak, as you note, doesn’t make a great way to get the word out.
Yeah. I also think it’s because a lot of philosophers and philosophy students are just not-good writers. There is a technical purpose and proper place for jargony philosophy-speak, but only if you’re being truly innovative (someone else will make it digestible to the masses). But most people who use it (including the blogger in the piece) just aren’t. You’re nicer to him than I would be lol
Can you give an example of me unnecessarily using jargon in the post? I think some things are just difficult to explain—this being one of them—even if you try to avoid jargon. But it’s always possible í unnecessarily used some jargon, and if so, would like to correct it.
>Can you give an example of me unnecessarily using jargon in the post?
I’m not sure I can. I don’t know when it might be unnecessary or necessary because I don’t understand a lot of it. I’m not well educated.
I don’t think I’ve said your use of jargon is an issue. In the comment you’re replying to, I was replying to another commenter by saying philosophyspeak, in general, isn’t a good way to get the word out. When you use jargon in your writing, you often try to define/link it and that’s good. But I might need even more help to understand your explanations and judge your conclusions. I’m sure that’s frustrating.
I again went through the first piece you wrote that I linked to, and tried to pick some examples of passages that I find, and suspect other average people might find, difficult to grasp or out of reach. Whether or not anything can be done to make these concepts more rudimentary, isn’t something I can know.
>If the universe was infinite in size, it would have aleph null people—that’s the smallest infinite. But the number of possible people is at least Beth 2—that’s an infinite way bigger than aleph null.
>Throughout the infinite multiverse, there will be at least L Boltzmann brains—brains that randomly fizz into existence in the recesses of outer space, before quickly disappearing—as well as infinite people with your present set of beliefs who are in some way massively deceived
>Conditional on H, you’re guaranteed to be the first person. Conditional on ~H, you have a 1/1000 chance of being the first person. So after being created, ignorant of your birth rank, you should reason: if I find out that I’m the first person, H will be 1,000 times likelier than ~H.
Now suppose that you do find out that you’re the first person. If you reject SIA, you should think H is now 1,000 times likelier than ~H. But wait—H is the proposition that the coin when it’s flipped is to come up heads.
>In both cases, a million sex acts happen either with or without contraception. The only difference is that in this case, one pair has all the sex, while in the last case, the sex was split across a million people. But surely that shouldn’t be relevant to probabilistic reasoning. Additionally, one can reason in the same way as they did in the last case: let sex act N denote whichever sex act produced the person in the room. For example, if they were produced by the 150th sex act, N is 150. The probability of one’s mom being impregnated by sex act N is 1 in 1 million if the coin came up heads, while it’s 100% if the coin came up tails. So one thereby gets 1 million to 1 evidence for tails.
>Let me note first of all that to have such a view, you absolutely have to believe in souls. If you think people are just arrangements of stuff, the number of possible arrangements of stuff is at least Beth 2(there are Beth 1 points, and the number of different arrangements of Beth 1 points is Beth 2, so the number of possible arrangements of stuff is Beth 2. So long as you think a field which takes a value over each spacetime point is possible, then there are Beth 2 possible distinct worlds with fields, which could be have duplicates of the same agent).
> This point about the power set of a set being bigger than the set also applies to infinites. Aleph null—also called Beth 0—is the smallest infinite set. It’s equal to the number of natural numbers: 1, 2, 3…. Beth 1 is the powerset of Beth 0, Beth 2 is the powerset of Beth 1, etc. Incidentally, Beth 1 is the number of real numbers—that includes the integers like 1, 2, and 3, as well as all the infinite non-repeating decimals and fractions.
> Of all the theories ever proposed by atheists, there are, to the best of my knowledge, only two that naturally predict the existence of the most people that there could be. They are modal realism, according to which every possible world exists, and Tegmark’s view according to which every possible mathematical structure is physically instantiated.
The problem is that both of these views undermine induction. I’ve already explained in section 2 why I think any atheistic view will inevitably undermine induction. However, these views even more clearly undermine induction.
Yeah fair! I try to be clear, but definitely some sentences are hard to parse. Such is, in part, the nature of writing about complicated issues. I do think some of the examples aren't that unclear: like, I don't know how the make the first example you give clearer (not saying that it's an easy thing to get, just that it's a hard thing to explain).
I have you muted (nothing personal, just the algo WAY over-recommends you to me and it annoys me) so apologize for the slow response. My (non-)specific criticism was that you use "jargony philosophy-speak" which I define as not just jargon use, but your style in writing. It's too long, too abstract, and on occasion used jargon.
Woolrey has done a good job of outlining specific examples, and I'm lazy right now so I won't cite more. But my suggestion (as a former philosophy and English lit major) is to edit down your length, use more active verbs, and I highly recommend reading "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker and implementing some of his communication insights.
I definitely have a mood-affiliation bias where I'll probably disagree with what you say regardless, but I find you harder to read than adjacent thinkers who similarly talk philosophy and probability (Scott Alexander, Nate Silver) [that I also disagree with btw].
You sometimes have a snarky voice and I support that (lol), but being able to pull that off is something earned with the clarity of what you're saying. I don't think you're accomplishing that and instead it's more infuriating to read because of the lack of clarity.
That's just my two cents worth, I'll try to be nicer in my criticisms because I honestly didn't think you would ever see a comment by little ole me. I think you have a great future in whatever it is you're doing, even if I don't agree with it fully <tips hat>.
No worries. Yes, I agree Pinker's writing advice is good. I do think I write about more technical areas than Silver or Scott most of the time, and so it's harder to explain my points.
I'll admit my criticisms may be a conflation of personal style and mood affiliation, but I do think many of your pieces would benefit from being in multiple parts at the least. Footnotes would also help, maybe, not in the sense that you need to explain yourself more, but there are often digressions in the first few paragraphs that halt the momentum. Like with the aforementioned writers I can read and just disagree, but I often find myself not even getting through the first few paragraphs with you.
All you need to know is that all versions are either an untestable force or a personified untestable force, and that no version has ever been demonstrated to be possible, much less plausible, much less likely, much less actual. But igtheism subsumes atheism.
"All I can suggest is that if you’re smart and have a good idea that you believe should be widely shared, either 1) directly demonstrate its effects to such an overwhelming extent that people can comfortably put aside their inability to understand it or 2) apply more of your enviable cognitive resources to the idea’s most rudimentary explanation."
Or vote for taxes to support education and vote against politicians who won't. I'm not saying that closing the gap top-down is a bad idea, I'm just saying that closing the gap bottom-up is even more important.
Regarding the anthropic argument, the core idea isn't too complex, but responding to objections is. The simplified idea: theism predicts more people on average than atheism, because a perfect God would want to create and would have no limits on how much he could create. Your existence is likelier if more people get created. So therefore your existence is likelier given theism than atheism.
I think my issue is, even the best apologetic arguments only get you to impersonal prime mover, any attempt to link it to any particular religion falls flat on its face. So an attempt to prove the fact of god mostly disconnects it from practical usefulness.
That’s well put. I’ve thought in these terms but never so succinctly. I’m going to hold onto that.
By all means steal it!
This is very good. And as a former philosophy major I’m somewhat over philosophyspeak. I think it obfuscates more than it illuminates.
Thanks Joe. I agree. Obviously rigorous description has its place among experts, but in order for a good idea to go far it often must trade some rigor in its description for clarity. And philosophyspeak, as you note, doesn’t make a great way to get the word out.
Yeah. I also think it’s because a lot of philosophers and philosophy students are just not-good writers. There is a technical purpose and proper place for jargony philosophy-speak, but only if you’re being truly innovative (someone else will make it digestible to the masses). But most people who use it (including the blogger in the piece) just aren’t. You’re nicer to him than I would be lol
Can you give an example of me unnecessarily using jargon in the post? I think some things are just difficult to explain—this being one of them—even if you try to avoid jargon. But it’s always possible í unnecessarily used some jargon, and if so, would like to correct it.
>Can you give an example of me unnecessarily using jargon in the post?
I’m not sure I can. I don’t know when it might be unnecessary or necessary because I don’t understand a lot of it. I’m not well educated.
I don’t think I’ve said your use of jargon is an issue. In the comment you’re replying to, I was replying to another commenter by saying philosophyspeak, in general, isn’t a good way to get the word out. When you use jargon in your writing, you often try to define/link it and that’s good. But I might need even more help to understand your explanations and judge your conclusions. I’m sure that’s frustrating.
I again went through the first piece you wrote that I linked to, and tried to pick some examples of passages that I find, and suspect other average people might find, difficult to grasp or out of reach. Whether or not anything can be done to make these concepts more rudimentary, isn’t something I can know.
>If the universe was infinite in size, it would have aleph null people—that’s the smallest infinite. But the number of possible people is at least Beth 2—that’s an infinite way bigger than aleph null.
>Throughout the infinite multiverse, there will be at least L Boltzmann brains—brains that randomly fizz into existence in the recesses of outer space, before quickly disappearing—as well as infinite people with your present set of beliefs who are in some way massively deceived
>Conditional on H, you’re guaranteed to be the first person. Conditional on ~H, you have a 1/1000 chance of being the first person. So after being created, ignorant of your birth rank, you should reason: if I find out that I’m the first person, H will be 1,000 times likelier than ~H.
Now suppose that you do find out that you’re the first person. If you reject SIA, you should think H is now 1,000 times likelier than ~H. But wait—H is the proposition that the coin when it’s flipped is to come up heads.
>In both cases, a million sex acts happen either with or without contraception. The only difference is that in this case, one pair has all the sex, while in the last case, the sex was split across a million people. But surely that shouldn’t be relevant to probabilistic reasoning. Additionally, one can reason in the same way as they did in the last case: let sex act N denote whichever sex act produced the person in the room. For example, if they were produced by the 150th sex act, N is 150. The probability of one’s mom being impregnated by sex act N is 1 in 1 million if the coin came up heads, while it’s 100% if the coin came up tails. So one thereby gets 1 million to 1 evidence for tails.
>Let me note first of all that to have such a view, you absolutely have to believe in souls. If you think people are just arrangements of stuff, the number of possible arrangements of stuff is at least Beth 2(there are Beth 1 points, and the number of different arrangements of Beth 1 points is Beth 2, so the number of possible arrangements of stuff is Beth 2. So long as you think a field which takes a value over each spacetime point is possible, then there are Beth 2 possible distinct worlds with fields, which could be have duplicates of the same agent).
> This point about the power set of a set being bigger than the set also applies to infinites. Aleph null—also called Beth 0—is the smallest infinite set. It’s equal to the number of natural numbers: 1, 2, 3…. Beth 1 is the powerset of Beth 0, Beth 2 is the powerset of Beth 1, etc. Incidentally, Beth 1 is the number of real numbers—that includes the integers like 1, 2, and 3, as well as all the infinite non-repeating decimals and fractions.
> Of all the theories ever proposed by atheists, there are, to the best of my knowledge, only two that naturally predict the existence of the most people that there could be. They are modal realism, according to which every possible world exists, and Tegmark’s view according to which every possible mathematical structure is physically instantiated.
The problem is that both of these views undermine induction. I’ve already explained in section 2 why I think any atheistic view will inevitably undermine induction. However, these views even more clearly undermine induction.
Yeah fair! I try to be clear, but definitely some sentences are hard to parse. Such is, in part, the nature of writing about complicated issues. I do think some of the examples aren't that unclear: like, I don't know how the make the first example you give clearer (not saying that it's an easy thing to get, just that it's a hard thing to explain).
>I don't know how the make the first example you give clearer (not saying that it's an easy thing to get, just that it's a hard thing to explain).
You’re right. The first one was difficult but well explained and I almost didn’t include it.
I have you muted (nothing personal, just the algo WAY over-recommends you to me and it annoys me) so apologize for the slow response. My (non-)specific criticism was that you use "jargony philosophy-speak" which I define as not just jargon use, but your style in writing. It's too long, too abstract, and on occasion used jargon.
Woolrey has done a good job of outlining specific examples, and I'm lazy right now so I won't cite more. But my suggestion (as a former philosophy and English lit major) is to edit down your length, use more active verbs, and I highly recommend reading "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker and implementing some of his communication insights.
I definitely have a mood-affiliation bias where I'll probably disagree with what you say regardless, but I find you harder to read than adjacent thinkers who similarly talk philosophy and probability (Scott Alexander, Nate Silver) [that I also disagree with btw].
You sometimes have a snarky voice and I support that (lol), but being able to pull that off is something earned with the clarity of what you're saying. I don't think you're accomplishing that and instead it's more infuriating to read because of the lack of clarity.
That's just my two cents worth, I'll try to be nicer in my criticisms because I honestly didn't think you would ever see a comment by little ole me. I think you have a great future in whatever it is you're doing, even if I don't agree with it fully <tips hat>.
No worries. Yes, I agree Pinker's writing advice is good. I do think I write about more technical areas than Silver or Scott most of the time, and so it's harder to explain my points.
I'll admit my criticisms may be a conflation of personal style and mood affiliation, but I do think many of your pieces would benefit from being in multiple parts at the least. Footnotes would also help, maybe, not in the sense that you need to explain yourself more, but there are often digressions in the first few paragraphs that halt the momentum. Like with the aforementioned writers I can read and just disagree, but I often find myself not even getting through the first few paragraphs with you.
Btw unmuted you, if you'd like to continue the convo
All you need to know is that all versions are either an untestable force or a personified untestable force, and that no version has ever been demonstrated to be possible, much less plausible, much less likely, much less actual. But igtheism subsumes atheism.
"All I can suggest is that if you’re smart and have a good idea that you believe should be widely shared, either 1) directly demonstrate its effects to such an overwhelming extent that people can comfortably put aside their inability to understand it or 2) apply more of your enviable cognitive resources to the idea’s most rudimentary explanation."
Or vote for taxes to support education and vote against politicians who won't. I'm not saying that closing the gap top-down is a bad idea, I'm just saying that closing the gap bottom-up is even more important.
I’d encourage looking into the fine tuning argument as that one is easier to understand. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-fine-tuning-argument-simply-works
Thanks. I have, and it is a simpler argument that I have a little better handle on but ultimately don’t find compelling for reasons most simply described by Bryan Frances here: https://open.substack.com/pub/bryanfrances/p/fine-tuning-argument-for-god-part-3fb?r=ba1ue&utm_medium=ios