Why I am no longer a skeptic

http://plover.net/~bonds/nolongeraskeptic.html

by zephyrfalcon • 14 years ago

57 121 14 years ago

lutusp8• 14 years ago

This issue is much easier to resolve than by way of the thousands of words the article's author used.

What a layman calls "skepticism", a scientist called the "null hypothesis." The null hypothesis says that an idea with no supporting evidence is assumed to be false. So in science, and to a skeptic, until there's evidence, there's no justification for taking an idea seriously.

To someone not trained in science (the "sheep"), an idea is true until there's contrary evidence. To a scientist (the "goat") by contrast, an idea is false util there's supporting evidence.

A sheep believes in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and UFO visitations only because these ideas haven't been disproven, but they cannot be disproven -- that would require proof of a negative, an impossible evidentiary burden. This explains most of the really weird things people believe.

The remedy is skepticism, a healthy intellectual posture that awaits evidence. That's why I'm still a skeptic.

praptak• 14 years ago

The author is still a skeptic in the sense you described (first paragraph.) He just rejects the identification with the social group.

dalke• 14 years ago

It's as boring as saying "I love science fiction but I'm not a member of SF fandom."

lutusp8• 14 years ago

Fair enough, but I think (a) skeptics aren't necessarily a group, and (b) perhaps skeptics should stand up and be counted as individuals. This view might not seem important in a society in which religious True Believers keep to themselves, or evolution deniers don't form their own political movements and try to change what's taught in school, but we don't live in that society.

Pollsters regularly tally up voting blocs based on the views people are willing to express -- like the religious, and like those who reject a scientific outlook. If skeptics don't ever speak up, society might miss the fact that the outlook even exists.

And reasonable people may differ.

btilly4• 14 years ago

This is how skeptics want to see themselves.

And yet self-claimed skeptics frequently uncritically accept all sorts of things that they have no actual proof for. (He calls several of these out.)

lutusp8• 14 years ago

> yet self-claimed skeptics frequently uncritically accept all sorts of things that they have no actual proof for.

Perhaps, but they can be called out on them, made to squirm. Sort of like the difference between a bigot and a racist.

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

I stopped reading here:

>Science has a high media profile and a powerful lobby group: in the midst of a global recession and sweeping government cuts, science funding has generally held up or even increased

Perhaps science funding has held up because science was fricking responsible for the economy booming for the last 500 fricking years? E.g. The Internet that he posted his blog on.

Maybe it just might help the economy come out of recession? Science works because it delivers and the funding is there because people know that.

noibl4• 14 years ago

> I stopped reading here

Which the rest of your comment proves. Thanks for that.

CamperBob22• 14 years ago

(Shrug) Burying the lede has its risks. If you don't want to lose your readers, don't waste their time.

philwelch• 14 years ago

> I stopped reading here:

Then please don't comment. It's considered customary not to discuss something you haven't thoroughly read; you're practically advertising that your comment adds nothing to the discussion.

Tichy6• 14 years ago

Weird rambling. From his style of argumentation ("other skeptics are sexist and Star Trek fans") he probably wasn't a very good skeptic anyway.

btilly4• 14 years ago

Would you believe that he's a well-known programmer and consultant who also happens to be the highest rated speaker at OSCON ever?

But if it helps you avoid cognitive dissonance to conclude that he has no clue, that's your choice.

lutusp8• 14 years ago

> Would you believe that he's a well-known programmer and consultant who also happens to be the highest rated speaker at OSCON ever?

Proving what exactly? Billy Graham is (was) also a well-regarded public speaker. This claim doesn't support the depth of his ideas, and can't compare to examining the ideas themselves.

Tichy6• 14 years ago

I mostly read his paragraph on sexism, which frankly struck me as very silly. What has other skeptics being sexist to do with him being a skeptic? And what has Star Trek being sexist to do with skeptics? The logic was just very bad, so he didn't convince me as a skeptic. I assumed being a skeptic would involve being rational.

His ratings in an community unknown to me don't impress me at all. I mean it is cool, but I still look at what he says with skepticism. The world is full of famous people who are wrong.

berntb19• 14 years ago

>> Would you believe that he's a well-known programmer

I don't believe I see intelligent people, like you, use someone's programming credentials as support for an ideologically motivated axe job in a non-programming subject. :-(

There is an old Swedish saw, badly translated as "where liquor go in, sense go out". Just do s/liquor/ideology/

rincewind• 14 years ago

Are you thinking about Mark Jason Dominius? His Web site is http://perl.plover.com/. He made a presentation about making presentations at OSCON: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Tsom5hI98

Stephen Bond, who wrote the linked page, is at http://plover.net/~bonds/. I could not find any OSCON talks by him. Can you please provide a link? I think you are confusing them based on the similar domain names.

batista16• 14 years ago

>Weird rambling. From his style of argumentation ("other skeptics are sexist and Star Trek fans") he probably wasn't a very good skeptic anyway.

Yes, because "no true sceptic" would be sexist and/or a Star Trek fan right?

Have you been to ACTUAL sceptic forums and web circles? He might miss a few outliers, but his actual criticisms are spot on in the main.

Tichy6• 14 years ago

Did you know that Hitler was a vegetarian?

stcredzero• 14 years ago

> Online forums, whatever their subject, can be forbidding places for the newcomer; over time, most of them tend to become dominated by small groups of snotty know-it-alls

Human interaction is woven out of several different materials. One of these is social dominance. It's even more fundamental to our psychology than sex.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/08/actors-see-status.html

Unfortunately, while it's widely recognized in much of the civilized world that letting our sexual impulses run unfiltered in the professional context is detrimental to a relaxed workplace where people feel free to interact openly, most people seem to deny the existence of our need to seek and test social dominance. This often leads to the pollution of communication and debate.

There is nothing wrong with sexuality in the workplace, so long as it's discrete and consensual. Likewise, there is nothing wrong with dominance behavior in forums, so long as it serves substantive debate. When dominance takes a back-seat to the love of knowledge, things are okay. When it's the other way around: considered harmful. (I suppose Galileo had some experience with this.)

> The truth is, I became a skeptic for aesthetic reasons, and the truth is, its aesthetics now repel me. I increasingly find the core skeptical output monotonous and repetitive: there are only so many times you can debunk the same old junk, and I've had it up to here with science fanboyism. And when skeptics talk about subjects outside their domain of expertise, I'm struck by how irrelevant their comments are, and how ugly, shrill and trivial.

I've noticed that techies often create mini "crapsack worlds" in forums and in games. (And I'm not referring to colorful backstories for a game, but in the actual social dynamics between players or commenters.) Much of it can be characterized as "immaturity." However, that label alone isn't so helpful. It's better to ask: what makes a society or a place wonderful? What best encourages a high signal to noise ratio?

raverbashing• 14 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree

The "skeptics" seem to have one objective: offend anyone who has any form of religion.

Or take the Lance Armstrong case, some "skeptics" were saying if you believe he doped you are "anti-science" because his exams never came back positive.

What a bunch of idiots. Modern tests detected evidence of blood manipulation.

So in a sense "skeptics" are just like the religious anti-scientific crowd, but saying "blah blah science" instead of "blah blah religion". But guess what, they don't know enough about science to say that.

xaa3• 14 years ago

The author attacks skeptics' obsession with quantifiable knowledge at several points in the essay (e.g., the comp ling section), without providing an alternative.

We have a word for "sciences" that are unquantifiable -- "soft" sciences. They don't work very well.

noibl4• 14 years ago

> We have a word for "sciences" that are unquantifiable

But as you say, the author isn't standing up for these "sciences" (in scare-quotes). Rather, he takes issue with the claims of objectivity and rigour for certain fields, one of which you appear to feel is unfairly tarred. You don't need to mischaracterise the author's position to defend computational linguistics though.

xaa3• 14 years ago

I hope I'm not misstating the author's position. In my reading, he goes well beyond pointing out that some fields, such as linguistics or medicine, have made stronger cases than their data can support.

He actually says "I do not believe in the primacy of the scientific method as a source of knowledge", and later, that [in order to successfully advance a particular scientific field] we need to "admit the presence and value of non-scientific knowledge". The nature of this non-scientific knowledge is not entirely clear from the essay but seems to be some mixture of culture and common sense.

He throws out several such claims without addressing the problems that come along with accepting non-quantifiable or non-scientific knowledge into a traditionally scientific discipline. For example, if you make a hypothesis that is not quantifiable, how can you determine the degree to which your data supports it?

lmm10• 14 years ago

>rom his writings, I gather that Dawkins would be content to live in a world where gentle Anglican vicars presided over their bored, civilised congregations in England's vales and hills, while the British Empire did its dirty work elsewhere, in places like Kenya, India, and West Cork. He saves his real ire for the creeds of the unruly natives — all those nasty Muslims and Catholics and tribalists who don't know their place.

Islam gets called out more often because it does more damage. Most of the English CofE faithful, I suspect, don't actually believe in their religion; they attend the services and get on with their lives. They're not preaching the evils of condoms or calling for the lynching of those who criticised them or, yes it has to be said, undertaking terrorism in the name of their religion.

>This is not the place to describe the many problems and hypocrisies of neoliberalism. Suffice it to say that I do not believe that liberal democracy, which condemns the majority of the world's population to varying degrees of slavery, is a perfect system. I do not believe that the metaphors of liberal democracy allow us a perfect view of reality. And therefore I do not believe in the primacy of the scientific method as a source of knowledge. It might be the best we've got, but when it comes to human advancement — including the advance of science itself — other sources of knowledge can be just as useful, and often more important.

Simply untrue. Indeed the scientific method may be only the best we've got rather than perfect, but that still makes it the best we've got. "other sources of knowledge" - like what, mysticism? are less useful.

>What's more, skeptics never acknowledge that racial science was defeated by political ideology, and not by science itself. In fact, there was nothing that could have defeated it within the empirical framework of racial scientists. Their racist experiments confirmed their racist hypotheses based on their racist observations. But while the science supported them, politics, in the aftermath of World War 2 and the Holocaust, did not. After 1945, racial science became politically unacceptable in western liberal democracies, and remains so in spite of the various attempts to revive it. It was not disproved by the scientific method; instead, the political ideologies behind racial science were discarded, and replaced by new ones that did not accommodate it.

Which is a bad thing, because it makes it very hard to be confident we know the truth about racial matters. Racist "science" is unscientific, but so too is politically correct "science"; which is more harmful is indeed a matter of politics, because both are simply expressions of politics. Neither is founded in science or skepticism.

>Cheating people out of their money is one thing, but cheating them out of their lives is quite another. To read some skeptic takes on alternative medicine, you'd think only heart disease rivalled it as a killer. It's true that alternative medicine is not going to cure anyone of serious illness, but it's also generally true that the terminally ill only turn to it when real medicine has given up hope on them.

Generally, but not exclusively. People really do die because they looked to "alternative medicine" rather than medicine; the fact that most people who use "alternative medicine" don't does not really excuse this.

lutusp8• 14 years ago

> Islam gets called out more often because it does more damage.

This is shortsighted. I personally think all religious belief is harmful, but in the sweep of history, Islam has a record of much more tolerance than Christianity, to name just one other religion.

Over long periods of time, Islamic cities and countries were much more tolerant of other religions than Christian cities and countries. Christianity has, and deserves, a reputation for being utterly intolerant of other religions.

This is not to excuse the excesses of Islam, when and where they took place, and I personally think the world would be a better place without religion. But it's simply inaccurate to describe Islam as doing more damage from a historical perspective.

I speak as someone who tried to open a Planned Parenthood clinic in a rural area (where it was really needed), was threatened with death more often than I care to remember, and who saw clinics and doctor's offices set on fire with depressing regularity. But this can't compare to the Inquisition, a time when Christianity displayed its true colors.

yohui• 14 years ago

lmm is clearly thinking of the current situation, not historical score-keeping.

The past can be a wonderful source of inspiration, but we cannot parcel out criticism and praise now based on events far past living memory.

rjknight• 14 years ago

I don't think there's a philosophical framework within which we can really assess which of two world religions is "more harmful". It sounds to me like you're picking the most salient examples to you personally, and choosing to generalise from them.

The character of a religion is not merely shaped by the principles of the religion but by the society in which that religion is present. The Islam of early medieval Spain is different to the Islam of 19th century Saudi Arabia, which is in turn different to the Islam of 17th century India or 21st century Sudan. The Christianity of the Inquisition is different to the Christianity of William Wilberforce, which in turn differs from the Christianity of Constantine and so on.

In reality, we can only really judge people by their actions, rather than their professed religion. Religion of any kind is no excuse for bad behaviour, nor should a person's religion detract from the good that they do.

berntb19• 14 years ago

Dawkins' main problem with your criticism of Christianity would probably be that it is too short...

As other comments have noted, he has criticized Christianity more than Islam.

For a less well known counter example, this is from a not so extreme Muslim country (a few friends are from Bangladesh, so I read up a bit).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vested_Property_Act_%28Banglade...

>> It is officially estimated that about 75% of all Hindu lands in Bangladesh have been seized by using this act

Edit: I have to ask -- why do left wing people have much less problems with the quite common Muslim antisemitism, than with Nazi antisemitism? Most of the arguments (except for the religious ones) and sources were copied from the nazis. It is even written in official(!) media in the Muslim world.

yannickt• 14 years ago

Christianity has a long and strong track record of intolerance, but I don't think it can be disputed that Islam does much more damage today. One out of three (!) British Muslims aged 16 to 24 believe that Muslim apostates should be executed [1]. In many Islamic countries, "crimes" like apostasy, adultery, or homosexuality are punishable by stoning or death, and such punishment is state sanctioned. This level of intolerance was commonplace in Christianity in the past, but it is virtually unheard of in predominantly Christian countries today.

[1] http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Islam_and_Apostasy#Helpful_Hints_f...

kleim• 14 years ago

"Islamic cities and countries were much more tolerant of other religions than Christian cities and countries"

Of course. You were safe and treated as nearly equal to other citizens as long as you paid a tax for your "protection": the Dhimmi.

ktizo2• 14 years ago

Islam gets called out more often because it does more damage.

Surely countries ruled by Christians are currently doing more damage, Islamic run countries haven't generally tried to militarily invade and impose governments on any major christian run ones in a while, unless I am not following the news enough.

thaumaturgy2• 14 years ago

I suspect -- but can't prove -- that Islam is perceived as more dangerous because it is currently more foreign. There has been a huge and relatively recent surge in western awareness of it, but it is not a pervasively western philosophy.

So that means that our primary perceptions of Islam are going to come from the news, or from discussions of the news, and it is the worst, most backwards fundamentalist atrocities against people that will make the news.

This is not at all an apologia for those acts. There is no place left in the world for things like the stoning of a raped woman. However, we should also keep in mind that such acts are as much cultural as they are religious, and arguing that one religion is worse than another because of them is ignoring the cultural aspects of tribalism.

I'm not a fan of, say, homeopathy, but I'm also uncertain about the extent to which we should protect people from themselves. There is at this point plenty of easy-to-find criticisms of homeopathy; if someone chooses to try it anyway, either because they didn't do any research about it or because they did and ignored it, is that really our business? It's certainly not mine.

lmm10• 14 years ago

>However, we should also keep in mind that such acts are as much cultural as they are religious, and arguing that one religion is worse than another because of them is ignoring the cultural aspects of tribalism.

I'm not much concerned with which religion is worse on some scale. Religions which encourage or tolerate such evil - whether because of something intrinsic to that religion or simple demography - deserve to be criticized more than those that don't. It's not Islamophobic to pick on Islam, if the acts done in the name of Islam really are worse than those done in the name of some other faith.

>I'm not a fan of, say, homeopathy, but I'm also uncertain about the extent to which we should protect people from themselves. There is at this point plenty of easy-to-find criticisms of homeopathy; if someone chooses to try it anyway, either because they didn't do any research about it or because they did and ignored it, is that really our business? It's certainly not mine.

I wouldn't argue for it to be made illegal or anything like that. But it really is bad for people, and pointing out and publicizing its flaws, the way these skeptics and skeptic organizations do, really does save lives - not by taking away people's choices, but by keeping them fully informed. Even if you don't want to spend your own time doing that, there seems little justification to hate on those who do, the way the original article seems to.

irahul6• 14 years ago

> Simply untrue. Indeed the scientific method may be only the best we've got rather than perfect, but that still makes it the best we've got. "other sources of knowledge" - like what, mysticism? are less useful.

I don't understand how people compare the scientific method with what, mysticism?

Scenario 1:

At a small school, there is this school topper, say Foo. He is nothing extra-ordinary, scores 70-80% on an average, sometimes relies on rote memorization...

And there is this other boy, Bar, who didn't enroll in the school, is drunk whole day, and can often be found in the drain marinating in piss, vomit and shit.

How in the fucking fuck Foo being not perfect grant credibility to Bar?

Scenario 2:

Lance Armstrong, 7 times winner of Tour De France, is involved in a doping controversy again.

Superb. Since Lance Armstrong might have used performance enhancement drugs, I demand his medals be transferred to me, because somehow that makes me equally credible.

Modern medicine is the ordinary school topper Foo or Lance Armstrong, and alternate medicine is the boy who is marinating in the gutter. Same goes for scientific methods vs spirituality, mysticism et al.

As they put it, you can add as many 0s as you like - you won't get an 1. No one claimed scientific method or modern medicine is perfect, but you have to realize finding flaws in scientific method doesn't grant credibility to your crackpot theories. Scientific method is very open to accepting flaws. See the atomic model. New information is discovered, existing theories are refuted. You can't come in and say since you keep changing your atomic model, my model which I heard from my grandma who heard from hers is equally valid.

wisty• 14 years ago

Alright, so some skeptics can be pricks. Self-declared skeptics are mostly reformed Calvinists ... what do you expect?

chalst• 14 years ago

I'm in some sympathy with the OP's idea that skepticism can be a shield against criticism of one's own prejudices, but when calling out the prejudices of particular skeptics, he seems to rely a great deal on extrapolation.

The OP's abandonment of skepticism does not seem to have turned him into a nice guy.

coolestuk• 14 years ago

The author seems more intent on Dawkins-bashing than anything else. What else can explain his deliberate mis-reading of Dawkins missive. "As is typical of hatemongers, Dawkins is careful not to name his target directly: instead, he works with insinuation -- though that said, calling the victim "Muslima" is particularly crass." Dawkins does not call Skepchick "muslima"; he addresses the missive to some "muslima" to ironically point out that there are women who suffer far worse sexism than being asked if they'd like a cup of coffee.

Two specific laws were passed in Britain in the last 25 years outlawing FGM. Yet there has not been one conviction. A report recently pointed out that there may be as many as 100,000 victims. http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/05/14/female-genital-mut...

Feminists have remained virtually silent on this matter for the past decade or two. The only person to mount a campaign on it is the novelist Ruth Rendell.

When the female "Equalities Minister" recently appeared on the BBC's premiere news programme defending the status quo (along with a muslim man), it was an array of young muslim women accusing the authorities of racism and sexism in not bringing prosecutions.

It really is an appalling state of affairs. And in the last 20 years, FGM has barely been mentioned by British media. I would guess that the total number of stories in the last decade is no more than 20.

When I've brought the issue up with socialist feminists they claim that it is racist to get involved.

So, I think Dawkins has a point. And from my observations of Dawkins he seems to be far more concerned to offend christians than muslims.

grifaton• 14 years ago

I don't think anybody's suggesting that Dawkins called Skepchick "Muslima".

desas• 14 years ago

I bet I've listened to discussions of FGM on Womans Hour on radio4 at least twenty times in the last half decade.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not saying it currently receives enough attention.

LaGrange2• 14 years ago

"Feminists have remained virtually silent on this matter for the past decade or two."

No they didn't. It's a common subject in blogs, forums and such less-visible mediums. But if you think it's easy to get into the media with that, you're wrong -- you will be called out on racism, possibly with good reasons -- even I, if faced with a mainstream article that focuses on FGM, would grow suspicious, since when the media cares about women this much?

irahul6• 14 years ago

> you will be called out on racism, possibly with good reasons

Unless you assume all races/cultures are at the epitome of human development, there has to be changes, which will be unpleasant - that's how humans develop. What would be the "possibly good reasons" for being called out on racism? Just because it is part of some culture/race doesn't grant it legibility.

lloeki• 14 years ago

Imagine an ad. A woman buys a car, comes back home, shows it to her husband, which takes them for a ride. The woman says: "Hey, isn't that nice for the price tag?". The guy thinks a bit, then at the first turn, violently drops the woman out of the car, and says, grinning ear to ear while he thoroughly enjoys the moment: "Now, that's perfect".

This ad would not stand a single second before a horde of people would yell at how sexist this is and the media would bathe in the scandal.

Yet it's been a few years the exact opposite ad[0] airs in France, daily. That's not the only one, there are a shitload of ads that market men as inherently stupid and worthless fools (at best), yet the CSA[1] regularly bans content that would be subject to doubtful interpretations of women status. It turns out in some cases that animals just seem to deserve better protection than men.

I'm not quite sure the solution to sexism is glorifying women while vilifying men (which just reads like more sexism — i.e differentiating statuses between genders — either way). We are different in a few ways for sure, just not better or worse, but can't we just all finally see each other as, you know, human beings, and respect each other as such?

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oCt-xb_ecg

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conseil_sup%C3%A9rieur_de_l%27a...

batista16• 14 years ago

>Dawkins does not call Skepchick "muslima"; he addresses the missive to some "muslima" to ironically point out that there are women who suffer far worse sexism than being asked if they'd like a cup of coffee. Reading comprehension problem. He is not saying that Dawkins called Skepchick muslima.

He is saying that Dawkins conjured the made up _victim of Islam_ "muslima", to hypocritically (with "crocodile tears") pretend to defend her plight against the minor plight of Skepchick.

That said, the accusations against Islam (and "pro" muslima) are BS stereotypes that only someone fed and informed on Islam by western media can come up with (including blatant misinformation, like attributing the practice of FGM to Islam).

Full disclosure: I work in a muslim country, and have visited several others.

berntb19• 14 years ago

As far as I can tell about the blog comment: Some left wing guy do personal attacks.

The post was from 2011 -- I thought most left wing people had stopped claiming evolutionary psychology was like frenology from racist right wingers? Especially after this:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/gould-morton-revis...

Edit: Please don't start post rebuttals to HN from the other end of the political scale, or something. Idealism is better kept off HN.

Edit 2: Clarity.

spauka• 14 years ago

That was certainly an interesting if not completely ridiculous read... The author seems to spend most of his time generalizing and erroneously misinterpreting the view points of those he perceives as skeptics (the most heinous of which include his characterization of skeptics as people who "hate and fear" philosophy, which is just about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard).

He seems to have misguided views on everything from modern medicines use of the placebo, to the development of fields such as computation linguistics and medical science. Here's the deal, if the author can demonstrably prove that people who use homeopathy know that it is just a placebo, then they can go for it. But they don't. If the author can show that there exist better methods for researching language, then go for it, but he doesn't. In fact, as someone who is interested in the field and friends with many computational linguists, let me tell you they are trying to look for better models to deal with the uncertainty inherent in NLP, and I'm not even sure where his statement that computational linguists fear pragmatics comes from. That is complete crap.

Wrapping bullshit around some kernels of truth does not make it true. I.E. yes, the atheist community on reddit can have misguided views, and yes people like Hitchens and Dawkins and the like are subject to their own personal biases, but both those people and indeed most of these communities are acutely aware of this fact and spend a lot of time trying to come to terms with it (look at the recent furor about whether the glorification of people posting snarky remarks made to "fundies" on reddit constituted a positive step). His rant against the skeptic conspiracy against feminism is also something which I found incomprehensible, and as far as I can tell completely untrue.

I would encourage people to read this in its entirety, if only to convince yourself that the title is an attention grab, and that the contents, while pointing out some valid truths, are largely filled with conspiracy theories and facts which are not backed up, and based on vast generalizations and oversimplifications.

P.S. I did enjoy the bit about the skeptics movement being a neoliberal conspiracy.

irahul6• 14 years ago

> Wrapping bullshit around some kernels of truth does not make it true.

> I would encourage people to read this in its entirety, if only to convince yourself that the title is an attention grab, and that the contents, while pointing out some valid truths, are largely filled with conspiracy theories and facts which are not backed up, and based on vast generalizations and oversimplifications.

Personally I found it extremely painful to read. This article is like a small piece of chocolate hidden inside shit ton of dog shit. That small piece of chocolate is totally negated by heaps of dog shit. You just keep reading in the hope that the hidden chocolate would be worth it, but you find out what you believed to be chocolate was few crystals of household sugar, and you ploughed through dog shit for nothing. Also, this experience left a bad taste in your mouth.

batista16• 14 years ago

>Personally I found it extremely painful to read. This article is like a small piece of chocolate hidden inside shit ton of dog shit. That small piece of chocolate is totally negated by heaps of dog shit. You just keep reading in the hope that the hidden chocolate would be worth it, but you find out what you believed to be chocolate was few crystals of household sugar, and you ploughed through dog shit for nothing. Also, this experience left a bad taste in your mouth.

Notice how you didn't manage to come up with one iota of actual criticism on specific points?

andreasvc3• 14 years ago

Your comment would be more of a contribution if you could make explicit what the good and bad parts are.

koide4• 14 years ago

- He's assuming people go to alternative medicine after real medicine, that assumption might be wrong, but it's not even a main point in his argument.

- He talks about Linguistics, not NLP, so I don't know what your friends have to do with that part.

- The only thing about conspiracies there is where he says he understands why conspiracy theorists create the theories: to avoid reality becuase reality sucks for them.

- There is no mention of a conspiracy against feminism, only that there is a sexist background in the whole group.

- Also, no conspiracy about neoliberalism, only an argument: If you believe science should be in charge of revealing all reality to us, you should support an environment in which science can thrive with nothing that would take it back, and that is liberal democracy nowadays.

It seems we read a different article. There are lots of worthy discussion points, but lets discuss them, not just vaguely oversimplify or dismiss them.

andreasvc3• 14 years ago

> - He talks about Linguistics, not NLP, so I don't know what your friends have to do with that part.

He specifically talks about computational linguistics, which is practically synonymous with NLP (there is a minor difference in connotation--the former is scientific rather than engineering, but it's really very minor).

batista16• 14 years ago

>That was certainly an interesting if not completely ridiculous read... The author seems to spend most of his time generalizing and erroneously misinterpreting the view points of those he perceives as skeptics (the most heinous of which include his characterization of skeptics as people who "hate and fear" philosophy, which is just about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard).

Having spent quite some time in sceptic forums and circles, I can assure that the article is 100% spot on.

(Oh, and the sceptics love philosophy, but only if it's the 1% of positivist anglo-saxon philosophy that caters to their prejudices).

irahul6• 14 years ago

> Having spent quite some time in sceptic forums and circles, I can assure that the article is 100% spot on.

I can assure you that you and the author aren't the only skeptics around; and this article isn't 100% spot on.

rjd• 14 years ago

Well its the difference between being skeptical about things, and being a skeptic. One is a gut feeling you shouldn't accept things, and the other is a mind state/religion. With one you can accept you where wrong, with the other you just change topics and begin the next assault why something is wrong.

I find most people who proclaim to be 'a skeptic' quite intolerable after a short period because they are always trying to find new ways to laud mistakes over people, always putting people down, and more often than not lifting themselves above others through humiliation. More or less just intellectual bullying, often without realizing it.

calibraxis• 14 years ago

How do people (who basically agree with this article) evaluate the rationality movement?

My limited experiences reading mostly lesswrong.com lead me to think they avoid many of these problems. I have no idea whether they actively try to counter institutional sexism, Islamophobia, neoliberalism, etc; but at least I've seen little-to-nothing so far which actively reinforces these problems either. (But I'm not deeply acquainted with them.) Strikes me as a very healthy alternative to these skepticists in the article. Focusses a lot on introspection and effective action, rather than attacking others.

lmm10• 14 years ago

Not my experience at all. lesswrong as a community is rife with sexism, and takes a very strongly neoliberal position on ethical questions. I'm not sure about Islam specifically (if anything there seems to be a lot more hate for Christianity, largely from posters who have had unpleasant personal experiences with it), but there's quite a lot of angrily (as opposed to rationally) anti-religious sentiment there too. I mostly avoid that community these days.

dbcooper• 14 years ago

Why on earth am I seeing this nonsense on Hacker News? Is there a shortage of new languages or something. ;-)

CamperBob22• 14 years ago

Perhaps because relatively few users have enough karma to downvote a story. I've never been clear on how much karma it takes to do that, actually -- does anyone know?

tokenadult• 14 years ago

Previous discussion, from a submission by Alex3917 319 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120721

cellularmitosis• 14 years ago

In the "sexist bastards" section, his train of thought appears to be implying something like: Randall Monroe expressing a sexual preference for nerdy girls in his web comic is not much different than forcing a woman to wear a burka.

Did I read that correctly?

Tycho• 14 years ago

Christopher Hitchens, for all his thuggery

What thuggery was this??

Why I am no longer a skeptic

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