I'm not sure the Anthropic principle can be applied here. There is a broader data set than that which is relevant for that principle, based on my understanding.
"Against all odds" would seem to be the key words here. There are countless other ethnic and religious groups that were integrated into the larger Muslim culture when Islam was first spreading. The same is the case for Christian Europe. In fact, the Romani people may be a good example of what we would expect to naturally happen to a dispersed and oppressed ethnic group. They have no singular culture, principles, or beliefs; they assumed most aspects of the surrounding culture's mode of life and beliefs.
It isn't a stretch to call the survival of the Jewish people an unexplained historical exception. There are countless historians (Jewish and non-Jewish) who have researched and written on the topic.
Or, am I misunderstanding the application of the Anthropic principle as you are applying it in this context?
Who are you comparing Jews to? This is the point. I don't think there's any reasonable comparison. Judaism's pairing of extreme insularity with great economic success in most 'host nations' leaves them without any other group to compare against. Powerless minority groups are certainly not a reasonable comparison.
Oppression and dispersion takes on a different meaning for those of means, even more so when the shared genetic lineage also happens to provide a substantially higher IQ than average for the vast majority of the group.
I was taking you seriously until you wrote this, "Judaism's pairing of extreme insularity with great economic success" and this, "Oppression and dispersion takes on a different meaning for those of means"
I really think there is an undertone to this perspective that is colored by a narrative that is false at best and possibly something much worse.
I dont think there is any factual basis to claim Jews had great economic success or were of means outside of false narratives perpetuated by their enemies. Even if you can point to specific eras or individuals that had success, you certainly couldnt demonstrate it existed propritionately more so than others, or that it existed in all the periods where they were persecuted and oppressed...
Your post display an impressively poor knowledge of even the most basic facts of history, of which you then speak on authoritatively. And then you try to attack my character based on your lack of knowledge. Dear sir, I can only applaud your narcissism. It is impressive!
How does this article support your claim that Jews survived because they "had means"??? Showing a disproportionate amount of jews in finance in the last 500 years in a few limited instances...in no way shape or form speaks to the means of the vast majority of Jews nor does it to speak to 3000 years of persecution.
You wrote a previous comment about jews distinctive physical features and now you speak of their means and share an article about rotschild and than view a Jew who calls you out on your false narrative a narcissist?!
Ascribing a few peoples wealth on a group of millions is the very definition of anti-semitism... I refrained from calling you out sooner to try to give you the benefit of the doubt...but the fact is the wealth on one person or a few people lending money hardly reflects on the entire Jewish people...it is a dangerous stereotype not based on actual facts...just a stereotype based on a fraction of a fraction of the population...
Your belief that jews arent poor or oppressed minorities without means throughtout history is patently false! Even if you can point to a few exceptions to the rules.
Or you can search for literally any source. The extreme success of the Jewish communities throughout time is extremely well documented. This success, paired with insularity, was often one of the big motivations for their oppression throughout history. Expulsions would generally involve direct or indirect confiscation of material possessions. Between the 13th and 16th century Jews were expelled some 15+ times, in some cases multiple times from the same places (such as France) where they would be expelled, invited as their absence proved problematic, expelled again, and so on.
The reason Jews have distinctive features is because today about 75% of Jews are Ashkenazi - a very distinctive group with a variety of distinct features, both physical and nonphysical. For instance Ahskenazi individuals show an average IQ average nearly a standard deviation above the mean. The reason for the genetic relationship is that historically Judaism was far more insular than it is even today. For instance interfaith marriages is an extremely new phenomena. Pair a religion that makes it extremely difficult to join (and was only more difficult in the past) with extreme restrictions on things like marriage, and you end up with strong genetic similarity. It's not dissimilar, in effect, from geographic isolation which yielded most distinctive traits of various groups today.
Just to throw in an additional perspective of what I find fascinating about this topic.
I don't think that all long lasting things are particularly interesting. Rocks have been around longer than the Jewish people but we don't celebrate that as extraordinary. It is considered perfectly natural. It is noteworthy when something is unnaturally long lasting; when other peoples/belief system were put under similar pressures the results have been drastically different. Imagine 50 people are dragged under water on a beach by a horrible undertow and held underwater for an hour. 2 out of the 50 survive while the other 48 don't; the 2 who survived are definitely of interest because we would want to know how they survived.
Not if you include those that did not survive in your sample / analysis. From the link "concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not".
This paper leaves me feeling uncomfortable. There are so many problems with it on so many levels and, yet, I think it is fascinating in the sense that it is applying a well known concept to a novel context.
Personally, I have a hard time seeing how this "bulletproofing" technique could possibly be true. However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief and then making no attempt to justify why it is a false belief other than "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians". Whether the belief is false or not seems to be totally irrelevant in trying to show that the authors' conclusions are valid. Clearly, the members of the village believed that it was true. Because of their belief in the effectiveness of the "treatment" the results were x, y, and z.
As an aside, it seems weird to start with the premise that the belief is inherently false when the village was able to protect and free itself. You could very well make a claim that the "treatment" was effective from a scientific perspective; it would require replication in order to be validated. Why should I automatically assume it is invalid? That strikes me as the opposite of scientific enquiry.
The cultural hubris contained in this paper overshadows the conclusion. This sounds more like a piece of literature from an "enlightened" European priest visiting a wayward tribe of "barbarians" during the 19th century colonization of Africa than a modern, scientifically-rigorous scholarly article.
>However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief and then making no attempt to justify why it is a false belief other than "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians".
I think you are reading into the motivations of the authors without evidence. It is much more likely that they conclude that bullet-proofing spells are a false belief because everything we know about physics and ballistics contradicts it.
I totally agree with you that is seems downright ludicrous to think that a spell will cause bullets to bounce off of someone. We have to take the author at their word that such is actually the belief of those using the spell. (My experience in Africa would tell me that may be a rather naive understanding of the villagers' expectations of the spell's effectiveness. From what I've seen in Africa, it seems more likely that the villagers believed that the bullets would miss them or go around them; it just strikes me as a little too stupid to be believable.)
All of that seems irrelevant for the conclusions that the author is trying to reach. The belief is labelled as "false" without any evidence given for such being the case until the conclusion where it is written as "(false) belief". In other words, the word "false" is an unnecessary modifier. Hence, it seems like it is being used as a rhetorical device rather than a meaningful addition to the article.
If the gri-gri actually work as advertised (i.e. the beliefs are true), then there is no paradox for why it is adaptive.
If tribe A is immune to gunfire and tribe B is not, then tribe A will win and in a region with sufficient inter-tribal warfare, we will observe only tribes that are immune to gunfire.
In the spirit of cultural relativism, here's a parallel anecdote about (incorrect?) superstition from our own treasure box:
*
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
I used to be a computer technician. Sometimes I arrived at a customer's office and the perplexed person couldn't explain why his computer suddenly started working. I developed a theory I called the "Tech Threat Syndrome", which posed that computers occasionally hid their problem whenever a technician appeared, so as to embarrass their user.
My theory around this is rather mundane: People behave more in the way they were taught when an authority is around. That makes a lot of computer problems go away when a techie shows up because people avoid taking shortcuts when they're being watched.
In my view this is sufficient to explain the phenomenon.
It may also simply be that they're slowing down and actually waiting to respond to problems instead of trying to get things to work as fast or easily as possible.
Traffic manages to flow quite smoothly at the speed limit when a police officer is just standing around somewhere... (but there's usually a major bottleneck right upstream of that observation point as everyone panics and straightens up their focus).
Similarly, it is amazing how disruptive something worthy of gawking at can be. A curve in the road, a car safely on the shoulder, flashing lights that scream "PAY ATTENTION TO ME": all of those things seem to result in gawker-block.
Self driving cars really can't save us quickly enough.
Your police car example is pretty ignorant of the negative upstream affects of the police car. You may as well say traffic is no longer in a traffic jamb once you're past the point of the jamb.
> I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief
In this context, the belief is that a spell and magical powder/paste, combined with ritual, can protect from gunfire.
Science isn't free. Also, how on earth does one go about such an experiment humanely and in a financially prudent manner? I'd love to see the reviews on the grant proposal and IRB request to shoot 10 goats in order to test the effectiveness of gri gri...
> "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians"
The authors specifically discuss monotheistic religions and miracles in the introduction.
It's possible the authors believe all religious people are "superstitious barbarians", but that seems like an awfully uncharitable assumption to make about the authors. Even if all the authors are atheists, there's still a huge gap between "person who believes in unfalsifiable religious claims" and "superstitious barbarians".
> Whether the belief is false or not seems to be totally irrelevant in trying to show that the authors' conclusions are valid. Clearly, the members of the village believed that it was true. Because of their belief in the effectiveness of the "treatment" the results were x, y, and z.
The authors come to exactly the same conclusion -- at base, gri gri is effective; its efficacy is explained by its effect on communal behavior rather than magical powers.
> Why should I automatically assume it is invalid? That strikes me as the opposite of scientific enquiry.
Tea pots in space and all that.
> The cultural hubris contained in this paper overshadows the conclusion.
You and the author seem to have come to approximately the same conclusion...
> Science isn't free. Also, how on earth does one go about such an experiment humanely and in a financially prudent manner?
I think it is outside the scope of this paper. But that is part of the thing that struck me as being so bizarre. This isn't a paper about the efficacy of the spell on an individual level. It seems to be a paper that is discussing how a belief in X may have high potential risk to the holder of belief X and, yet, be beneficial to a group of believers in X. That is an interesting but counterintuitive idea. I could see the same model being applied to experimental cancer treatments on a purely conceptual level.
> "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians"
This is admittedly 100% rhetoric on my part and may be "too much". However, there is really the way that authors' view of these villagers came across to me. I'm sure that is partly due to spending time in Africa and the very positive impression of the people that I came away with.
As you said the authors start by mentioning: "unfalsifiable religious claims". So, they seem to start the paper by classifying this a one of those "unfalsifiable religious claims". But, they then immediately classify it as a "false belief" without any evidence for such being the case AND the "false" modifier being irrelevant within the context of the paper.
> The authors come to exactly the same conclusion
Once again, that is what I find so bizarre about the article. I guess it is just me. But, it doesn't sound like a scientist conducting a study; it sounds like one part cultural commentary and one part science. The conclusion doesn't seem to require the cultural inferences about belief systems and their falsifiability or lack thereof. Hence, it struck the wrong chord with me.
I guess I would like to believe that we (i.e. all science lovers) are really looking for a better understanding of the world and that we can do so without pre-conceived judgements of something that is foreign to us.
Bullets cannot be stopped by culture. They're the same everywhere.
The closest explanation I'd allow of how this bullet-proofing is supposed to work is that the smell is so bad the attackers get confused. Really, that would be my first hypothesis if it could be shown that the ingredients matter.
> As you said the authors start by mentioning: "unfalsifiable religious claims". So, they seem to start the paper by classifying this a one of those "unfalsifiable religious claims". But, they then immediately classify it as a "false belief"...
I noticed that, too. The first sentence says that many people hold unfalsifiable beliefs. The second says that many of these unfalsifiable beliefs are false. Which is it?
Fuck that, I do, and it'd be pretty goddamn cheap. Likely benefits are training / practice, unlikely benefits are deeper anthropological and jungle-life (why those plants?) understanding, and the Pascal's Mugger benefit is "huh magic...?". And then there's the weird side-benefit of encouraging scientific investigation of all things.
Seriously, the biggest expense is going to be shipping the researchers.
Would it be cheaper to send soldiers out with vests or gri-gri? Probably in the west at least, vests are more cost effective. If a soldier is worth a million, one in hundred soldiers is saved by a vest during their career and a vest costs a thousand dollars, it's a ten to one return.
But somewhere else, the inputs might be quite different.
I don't know if the author thinks they are barbarians, but he does say their beliefs "are almost certainly incorrect." I will give him a few objectivity points for including the word "almost," but he follows the typical modern assumptions by using the word "certainly." The beliefs are also described as "non-falsifiable", which means they do not fit Popper's basic scientific principle, which only means that the beliefs cannot be verified using the scientific method (according to Popper), but that does not mean they are incorrect.
I think they used "superstitious barbarians" because that bulletproof magic is obviously false belief (people still get shot and die) and the results are very quantifiable (life and death situations).
Using our own false beliefs would distract from the main research. First, researchers would have to prove this is actually false belief, then sort out the more subtle effects.
Lighten the mood and then talk to the universe/world (whatever you want to call the something that we are all a part of).
I know. I know. That might sound weird and all. But, it is the only thing that helps me. I grew up a very calm person but after many years in the military and a couple of combat deployments I seemed to develop a very strong aggression issue. I'm calm most of the time, but when something gets to me I can get into a deadly loop where it just gets worse and worse. It starts to feed on itself. Then, my wife can say something small and my internal monologue gets darker and darker and whinier and whinier.
So, yes, don't let it get to the "edge point"...that is hard. That takes a long time of understanding yourself (talking to the universe or journaling is the best way that I feel I make progress in that area too.) So, the first step when you get to the edge is to return to being happy. It doesn't matter what it takes. Watch a stupid video on YouTube. Just get back to a place of "happy" even if just for a moment.
Lighten the mood. Then, start journaling. But, the goal of the journaling shouldn't be whining: "why me, oh why me??" I've done that a lot. It is really not helpful at all. It makes it worse over the long-term.
So, what do you journal/talk-to-the-universe about? You start investigating who you are and why the current situation is making you upset. Start asking yourself: why am I angry. But ultimately, the goal is to drill down until you find the good in everything. For example: "Why am I angry that Joe is fighting me so hard with what I know is a bad direction as far as design patterns is concerned? Why do I care at all? Because I want to built software that I'm proud of. Don't we all want to build software that is well built and a meaningful creation? So, what Joe doesn't want that? Of course, Joe wants that as well. We just have different ideas about how to make the best software possible. By why am I so fired up and angry about it? Because I don't want to believe that I'm coming to work each day for nothing..."
Just keep going...even 15 minutes can make a major difference. I've had times in life where it took an hour and sometimes when it went on for over 6 hours. There isn't a goal in terms of what you are getting at. Productivity is certainly NOT the goal of the exercise. Just talking/writing is the goal of the exercise. In the end, my wife is happier and I feel that is the larger goal. I want to be kind to other people, especially my wife, rather than burdening people with negativity.
There seems to be a basic problem in this argument: a lack of definition of distraction or any discussion of its value.
For example, lets assume the consciousness is an illusion, a sort of biological trick of evolution. In that case, I'm not sure why we couldn't say that all the stimuli from advertisements, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are equal in value to "focused conscious awareness". They are stimuli of a different sort but qualitatively no different than the stimuli of "focused conscious awareness". I'm not sure why we would inherently assume that "focused conscious awareness" is of greater value. There are tons of people now who are living in a permanently distracted state and they seem to have a conscious experience that is not qualitatively different than other people's. They don't slip into a coma or get concussions or die.
Heck, maybe distraction is a better state than attention. After all, don't people complain of headaches when they focus on a problem for too long?
They are stimuli of a different sort but qualitatively no different than the stimuli of "focused conscious awareness"
Would you say that there was no qualitative difference between a long massage by a skilled therapist and being attacked by a swarm of angry wasps? From a phenomenological point of view both are simply different varieties of sensation, and it's true that by cultivating a sort of meditative stoicism one could distance oneself from considerations of discomfort sufficiently well to put up with that or even worse pains...but maintaining that degree of detachment is equivalent to sacrificing one's ability to operate and participate in the world.
To the extent that one wishes to to be engaged with life vs. transcending it, the qualitative differences are vast, and increasingly onerous.
Some people have long-term goals, and the distractions distract from accomplishing them. The qualitative difference is that people who can avoid the distractions are better able to make progress toward their goals.
Nobody wants to look back on their life and think "yep, I sure am glad I got all that facebooking in before I died."
That seems a bit reductive. Im sure plenty of people are going to look back and say "Im sure glad I reconnected with that college flame" or "Im sure glad I shared those pictures with my extended family".
For sure there is a whole host of negative effects that can spiral out of social media addiction. But the shear existence of the distraction is more neutral. I feel like we are hesitant to admit that many of our modern distractions aren't particularly "new"; it's just a lot easier to collect evidence and stats. Considering reading a tabloid and gossiping offline vs reading fake news and commenting on FB, etc.
After signing up for the Beta, it hit me. Every single bit of this could have been staged without having done any coding at all!! Brilliant!!
I'm not sure if that is actually the case, but theoretically it is totally possible. This is a great example of the classic MVP pitch: validate interest before building.
Honestly, this wasn't calling you out at all. I think it is great. It is a very well done presentation. You did a good enough job that it made me interested in the product.
Hey! We wanted to show how the product works if notes are delivered instantly - vs. the current 10-30 sec lag time we experience between note being snapped, and the transcribed copy you receive.
Definitely didn’t mean for it to put a damper on the tech - sorry for the mistake.
Interesting article from an opinion point of view but I find very little real substance behind his arguments.
He is fight the original myth with his own myth except that his myth is founded upon his own assumptions and intuitions as opposed to those of someone else.
It seems more likely that we simply don't know the answer to many of these questions yet because we still have major disagreements around exactly what intelligence is. To use Richard Feyman's famous quote: if we can't yet build it, then we don't understand it.
So true! 50 years ago they were using concepts from early computing to describe how the human brain works. With each new wave of advances in computing, there is a new set of analogies that philosophers and neuroscientists adopt to say: "See, the brain is like this". It Seems problematic to me. Models are models, not reality. They may be good for descriptive effects, but that doesn't me they are anything other than story-telling devices.
As a tangent, this seems to me to be a problem with Daniel Dennett's ideas and why, in the end, David Chalmers seems to be gaining ground with every passing year.
Line of reasoning? That evolution is an optimization process, and that human intelligence is an optimization process - hence both are likely to reach good solutions for intelligence eventually, and if there's a strong optimum in the design space of those, then both are likely to converge at least in some areas.
What's "we"? Human technological civilization.
What's "nature"? Evolutionary process that already produced working brains.
I'm not entirely sure that "optimal" has an agreed upon definition. At best, "optimal" is relative to the system within which it is being applied. "Optimal" in a Trump world is very different from "optimal" in a Bernie Sanders world. Optimization seems to require some objective. In a practical sense, you cannot optimize a piece of software if you don't know what you are optimizing for.
It is a bold premise that the evolutionary process and human technological civilization have the same optimization goals.
> It is a bold premise that the evolutionary process and human technological civilization have the same optimization goals.
We have similar, when we optimize for "what works" (instead for e.g. "what sells").
The only existing instance of what we're trying to build - intelligence - is something a dumb, random, incremental optimization process following simple rules managed to somehow stumble upon. Now, if there's a strong local optimum in the design space of intelligent machines, then it seems plausible that evolution ended up there, and that we may stumble upon it too, thus converging with the evolutionary solution somehow.
Now I'm not saying our solution will be identical to biological brains. We have different goals (hell, we have goals, nature does not). But we're likely to end up doing many aspects of it in a way that resembles biology.
The core observation here is that it's the structure of reality (implications of laws of physics) that shape the search space we're traversing. Compare flight. Yes, human planes are very different from birds - but that's because they have less efficient energy sources, and also because we want them to go faster (have you ever seen a supersonic bird?). Still, both share some aspects, like the airfoil. Both we and nature "discovered" those because airfoils are dictated by the laws of physics - that's how you do flight in gases.
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Basically, what I'm saying is that humans always describe things in terms of the technology of their age, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Better technology means better description. Birds are unlike planes, but analyzing them using the model of airfoil we developed is a good idea and leads to more and better understanding.
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EDIT
> Optimization seems to require some objective. In a practical sense, you cannot optimize a piece of software if you don't know what you are optimizing for.
Yes, optimization always has an objective - that's how we define it, in contrast to complete randomness. But the objective can be implicit or explicit. Explicit goals require a mind to be involved. Evolution has only implicit objectives, human-driven process have both (because we suck at knowing what we actually want).
But the second important part of an optimization process is the shape of the optimization space. This here is defined by laws of physics. And insofar as evolution's implicit objective is in some aspects similar to our objective, both get similarly influenced by the shape of the optimization space :).
> Basically, what I'm saying is that humans always describe things in terms of the technology of their age, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Better technology means better description. Birds are unlike planes, but analyzing them using the model of airfoil we developed is a good idea and leads to more and better understanding.
Totally. "Better technology means better description" is a great idea/concept here.
Since reading Michel Foucault while I was studying in the UK (someone I feel like I never even heard mentioned in US university), it made me rethink the "what/essence" of the things we do/build. Just like the supposed lesson-learned (or potentially still to be learned) in the finance world after the financial crisis: models are models not reality. We develop a culture around the descriptions that we use but in the end we aren't truly describing the essence of the "what (i.e. the thing described)". We are layering various descriptions, cultural-ideas, and pre-conceptions on top of the thing itself in order to better communicate some aspect of it to other people. In a sense, different technologies gives us a shared set of concepts with which we can communicate with each other.
Your point is great. Just because they are "descriptions" doesn't mean they are wrong/right. They are a shared language that we use to communicate with each other complex ideas and, hence, we better understand previously wish-washy concepts.
How is it that everyone (82% Nationally) seems to agree that the most critical step forward (Funding Research in Renewable Energy) is a good thing BUT we spend all of our time arguing about whether or not global warming is happening??
This reminds me of a failing, early-stage start up. Rather than just getting to the grind and finding a way to make money, it is so easy to just spend time dreaming and argue about the way forward and spending your time ignoring complaining customers while I'm sitting around pondering how to change the world.
I'd propose its more like you have two partners who hate each other viciously and spend all their time scheming for their dominance and submission of the other. Meanwhile there's programmers trying to ship a MVP. Now as long as the partners verbally argue constantly, they can't screw up what the programmers are trying to do. But if one partner gains total supremacy then they'll need something to do all day, someone to verbally spar with, like maybe the programmers. As long as they argue loudly progress can be made, but once the micromanagement boom falls, all progress will cease, in fact retrograde progress will begin regardless of who "wins".
I can explain that because it's an important data point that should be driving the positioning for the AGW crowd.
I personally think that AGW is overblown, the models and methodologies are suspect and I question human's impact on climate change. However, I can easily get behind renewables.
We shouldn't be dependent upon finite energy resources, many of which are largely controlled by dictatorships. Our investments in renewable clean energy can bring energy costs down for everyone, they're better for the environment (regardless of whether AGW is real, not debateable), and it could keep our money in our country instead of sending it overseas to non-Allied, terrorist supporting countries (hits pro-Trump, anti-AGW crowd). And oh, on the chance that the AGW crowd is right - we also saved humanity for the win! We've all aligned, some for different reasons.
This is the right positioning and the GW alarmists are shooting themselves in the foot because they aren't telling the right story that almost everyone can get behind.
"Against all odds" would seem to be the key words here. There are countless other ethnic and religious groups that were integrated into the larger Muslim culture when Islam was first spreading. The same is the case for Christian Europe. In fact, the Romani people may be a good example of what we would expect to naturally happen to a dispersed and oppressed ethnic group. They have no singular culture, principles, or beliefs; they assumed most aspects of the surrounding culture's mode of life and beliefs.
It isn't a stretch to call the survival of the Jewish people an unexplained historical exception. There are countless historians (Jewish and non-Jewish) who have researched and written on the topic.
Or, am I misunderstanding the application of the Anthropic principle as you are applying it in this context?