What is the correct response to: Don't you believe in the healing power of Geodesic Domes?
The correct response is laughter...because it's a joke. Only jokers ask questions like that. However, even if it were not intended as a joke, the correct response remains laughter.
If this isn't you're response, you either have a surfeit of politeness, or you're crazy. Most weird-a$$ ideas are just wrong, and it's not worth devoting ANY brainpower to them until you have evidence that they might be correct.
IF someone persists...then you ask for a clear, english statement of the hypothesis...that you can understand in relation to stuff you can touch.
What measurements could we take that would distinguish a world where Geodesic domes had healing power be different from one wherein they didn't?
Then, you ask for non-anecdotal evidence (statistical, double blind, peer reviewed studies?) that demonstrate correlations between Geodesics and Accelerated healing rates.
If they can provide those...then you start your Bayesian approach, integrating this data with other data you have. Until then?
What about unicorns? *snort*
Faeries? *snicker*
Homeopathy? *boggle*
Crystals? *rofl*
Spirits/Ghosts/Angels/Demons? *eyebrow*
6-dimensional invisible blue banana? Thor? Other Gods?
The same result holds in all cases. I have NO evidence, and NO reason to believe. In these cases, the correct response remains laughter. Belief...or even taking the question seriously remains an epistemological error. Evidence needs to arrive before you even take the question seriously.
Aside: this assumes that your goal remains to arrive at a predictive model of the world. If your goal is otherwise (tribe-fitting, most likely), then by all means, do otherwise. Goal always precedes evaluation.
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6 comments:
But we do have plenty of evidence for the existance of angles and demons -- you just chose to reject the historical record because it doesn't fit your current epistemological model. There is no good reason to reject the Bible as the truth, other than the fact that you don't want to accept the possibility that Jesus died and rose from the dead. But the odds are, he did:
http://www.lydiamcgrew.com/Resurrectionarticlesinglefile.pdf
See also this relevant article on history and miracles:
http://www.lydiamcgrew.com/Wholepaperdraft.pdf
I should also note that there are plenty of miracles that occur on a regular basis even today -- of course you would argue that what I call miracles are simply random events of the natural world that science can't explain yet. And I would say you are deluded. And around we go...
Herz,
It's actually pretty simple.
1. Build epistemological model.
2. Observe in particular the standard methods of failure of the human mind. (Thor, Zeus, Ganesh, pholgiston)
3. Recognize incomplete access to history...and therefore place historical information at a necessarily lower epistemological tier than sense information.
4. In particular, if history says X was true, and my observations say NOT X, then I am inclined to believe that the historians had an agenda, and were twisting the truth.
5. Recognize that the method of explanation having deities was either wrong 560 times and correct once, or wrong 561, all from the same brain-pattern.
6. You have to define miracle in a pretty peculiar fashion to make it make sense to a statistician-epistemologist-Humean. Indeed, you have to start with God to get to miracle.
7. But all that is largely irrelevant. I have a working predictive model of the world, which is what I'm trying to do with epistemology...which include both why people believe in Gods like Zeus, and how people get get confused by prior belief into having fishy experiences.
A. I have a book written by late-roman priests about a guy who fits most of the same stories that Zoroaster fit. The default position is that it has the same truth-content as the Iliad, or Herodotus's histories. Have you read Herodotus? Hilarious levels of assumption presented as truth.
B. The conclusion furthermore has NO (testable) predictive power whatsoever. Which makes it a useless hypothesis.
Testable hypothesis:
Human flourishing* is best served by following Christ.
*Defined as having a healthy, child-centered family/society. Look at the social science data: religious people live longer, have more kids, stronger social bonds, etc. I suppose we could then compare and contrast social science data -- Japanese (who aren't religious) live long but aren't having kids -- they are a dying society. Seems like we need religion to keep going...
Herz,
1. That's a hypothesis about human psychology, not a hypothesis about the external state of the world. It could very easily be true without "God" being true.
2. So far as I can tell, a strong cultural ideology does make folks happier. Gratitude and Ingrouping are both apparent human psych-needs. If you want the group that's apparently best at building happiness. And...if you're measuring on that axis, it seems as if the Mormons pretty clearly win (compared to other US groups).
Regarding your answer #1)
Seems like you are shifting ground on me -- I already told you that one way to understand the "external world" is through observation via history. For some reason, you seem to think the New Testament (NT) can be lumped in with Homer and Herodotus (who I love by the way) -- lumping is intellectually lazy and the NT is nothing like those books. Sorry, try again.
2) Good point about the Mormons; they have always interested me since my home State was kind of nasty to Mr. Smith back in the day in the town of Nauvoo. I'm going to have to give my friends the Mormons some more thought and perhaps I'll blog about them soon...
Herz,
I'm getting jumbled in terms of what applies to what.
Claim:
1. We don't have direct access to history. We only have access to people's reports of history, some layers removed and edited.
2. In terms of believeablility... Bob's report of what fish he almost caught yesterday has lower credibility than my observation of a fish today. Chuck's report of the fish he almost caught last year, even less so. And David's discussion of what fish Nixon caught in '69, even less. There is a strict decreasing level of reliability of evidence that comes from increasing distance in time, as we know there are levels of filter.
3. History is a sequence of hypotheses, methods of understanding the world, that you can test against current understanding. It is NEVER unbiased, and nearly always requires interpretation. As an empiricist, this is the only coherent approach to history that I've been able to find.
4. The default opinion when reading a book is that the book has the same level of reliability as some guy talking. You read, you evaluate claims. One of my hypotheses about history is that eras have different attitudes towards "truth", and different standards of evidence. Hence, Greek writing. As the new Testament is Greek writing, it naturally falls in the same category.
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