Accelerating Future

Why Do Atheists Have to Talk About Atheism?

A few days ago I saw some blog comment, I forget where it was, but it was something like, “It’s not atheism that I mind all that much, it’s just atheists’ incredible air of smugness about it.”

Being convinced about the high probability of something because your epistemology forces you to be given the observed evidence cannot be an act of smugness or unsmugness itself. I suppose it’s how you present it, but people trying to avoid debating the central core of any given argument will always accuse the other side of smugness, to change the subject.

Of course, the issue is really about status. Low or medium-status people are not allowed to make controversial assertions that contradict the cherished beliefs of high-status people because this is seen as a social power grab. Furthermore, there are many low-status people that indiscriminately oppose the cherished beliefs of high-status people for their own satisfaction.

For more on this, see “The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory”.

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My friend and colleague Tom McCabe, who I consider one of the smartest people I know, has been Twittering some interesting stuff lately, in the last few hours especially. He has been posting a list of lies. Here is that list below, ending with #19:

A list of lies. #1: For most Americans, an Ivy League college is more expensive than other private or public colleges.

Lie #2: Most lawyers are wealthy and earn a six-figure income.

Lie #3: Teachers are poorly paid, can be easily fired, and have terrible working conditions.

Lie #4: Most millionaires wear expensive suits, have expensive watches and drive expensive foreign-made cars.

Lie #5: Recycling paper or plastic is a cost-effective way to help the environment.

Lie #6: (hopefully everyone knows this by now): Real estate always goes up.

Lie #7: The stock market returns 8-12% over the long term (real number is more like 5% including dividends.)

Lie #8: Paying to go to a no-name college is an investment, which will pay out much more than it cost in future wages.

Lie #9: Mathematics is about numbers and equations and calculations and algorithms (see http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)

Lie #10: America is more socially mobile than the Old World (France, Germany, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy et. al.)

Lie #11: Rich people, as a general rule, pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than middle-class people.

Lie #12: There is a Biblical law prohibiting abortion.

Lie #13: Illiteracy, in the sense of not being able to read and understand newspaper, is essentially nonexistent among Western adults.

Lie #14: Health insurance is a hedge against risk, like package insurance or life insurance (it’s more like a protection racket).

Lie #15: Americans nowadays are freer than Americans in 1900, or most people in third world countries.

Lie #16: America since 1930 is essentially a capitalist, entrepreneurial, free-market society.

Lie #17: Big company mergers and acquisitions generally create value for shareholders.

Lie #18: Most people want to get rich.

# Lie #19: A majority of people who matriculate into college graduate within six years.

How many of these lies do you believe? The only one which really would surprise me is the last one.

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Decision Theory for Humans from Jeriaska on Vimeo.

For a funny part, see 27:00.

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Great article by Patri Friedman at Less Wrong. He turned my thinking around on the issue, in less than 15 seconds of reading.

Other interesting posts include “Can we create a function that provably predicts the optimization power of intelligences?” by whpearson and Do Fandoms Need Awfulness? by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

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Continuing with the theme that Michael Vassar mentioned in our interview, that “collective wisdom” is really wrong about a whole heck of a lot, and that we should doubt the basic sanity of the world, Robin Hanson links an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice”, that completely trashes The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, long considered the Bible of writing and grammar. Every serious writer is supposed to have it.

It opens thus:

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won’t be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

The author, Geoffrey K. Pullum, is head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh. The entire article is great and causes me to completely question the advice I’ve received from senior writers over the last few years. Let me skip to the last paragraph, for the conclusion:

So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

How could tens of thousands of English teachers have missed all these obvious-in-retrospect arguments over the last 50 years?

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For the reasoning behind this, read “How to Disagree”.

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Read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s posts on rationality at Overcoming Bias. Our very own Tom McCabe has made a master list here.

Photo by Renee Blodgett.

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