Another factor is that Christianity is exclusive - one could not adhere to Christianity and, say, Mithraism at the same time, since Christianity claimed a monopoly on religious truth. Other saviour cults which did not function in the same way would not have been able to work up the same amount of religious fervour, since a man's trust in his religion is limited by that religion's trust in itself.
reading about the topic on Wikipedia
Just because there's an article on the spread of Islam doesn't mean that a balanced quantitative analysis on the means of its proliferation either exists or is possible. Usually when someone asserts something to that effect, the onus is on them to support their assertion by referencing a specific source.
This idea seems to be more or less taken for granted by people who oppose either Islam. Is there actually a perspicuous source of data describing in detail how Islam spread, that allows assessments of that kind to be made?
Isn't "aptitude" simply another word for the genetic, non-environmental component of a talent?
Maybe there's a confusion being caused here by the sentence "This is not how evolution spreads."
It could mean at least one of the following: 1) "This is not how the theory of evolution itself was spread" 2) "This is not the mechanism according to which evolution spreads ideas"
It seems as if Lumifer interpreted your statement in the second sense (as I did initially), whereas reading your post in its original contexts suggests the first sense was the one which you intended.
I'm not active enough on LW to be able to accuse anyone here of being idle, either in given particulars or in general. I intended more of an expression of curiosity about where the stated objectives make contact with past experience than to make a lazily hidden indictment :)
It is, of course, in a trivial way
Practicality is usually in some sense "trivial", not so? Is there any sense in which the word implies complexity or subtlety?
It could be a case where heritable should not be confused with not environmental.
There's also an element of instrumental rationality quite beautifully captured there, shifting the focus from ideation to concrete action by setting a certain waterline for what should be regarded as worth attention.
Similar to the Latin Acta, non Verba.
It's a principle of practicality - which category strikes me as largely overlapping HP's home territory.
I once read something that stuck with me (it was a passing comment on people offering their ideas for a civ-style strategy game to the author): "don't tell me what you are going to do, tell me what you have done". I wonder if this is itself a hufflepuff virtue?
I'm not entirely clear on WHAT specifically is supposed to be better about this
You don't see any advantage in compressing sectors of possible-property-space into algorithmically decompressible representations? I suppose the unspoken assumption on my part has been that reality is itself in some sense non-arbitrary, and that organizing the candidate elements of your ontology by unifying principles would allay the unnecessary multiplication of entities.
With respect to the topic at hand: you can posit the existence of any kind of omnipotent being you like....
I don't see any reason people can't believe things they also see as lacking a purpose
Because believing in something - really believing in it - is not costless. It comes at the cost of those other beliefs incompatible with the one in question. This doesn't make it impossible to harbour beliefs without any useful purpose, but it's a reason to expect to to be uncommon. Should an idea be incorrect merely because it's uncommon? No; but if it's both rare and intrinsically unappealing - lacking both the force of reason and the weight of mass assent, why then should it be taken seriously?
You can believe that some object fails to possess some property for reasons other than a lack of evidence. For example, I believe there are no integers greater than three but less than two. This is not merely because I've never encountered such a number, but because the integers are defined such that I can believe with unfailing certainty that I never will. Anything that might be both greater than three and less than two is by definition not an integer.
Similarly, any conception of God worth taking seriously to begin with is not simply any arbitrary vector ...
Many of the "details" of God's character - his status as creator of the universe, his moral perfection (subsuming his honesty) and all that would essentially make a conception of God one that's worth adulating, is bound up in Anselm's definition of God: "that than which nothing greater can be conceived". (edit for clarity: from this definition follow the attributes ascribed to God that are commonly treated as essential)
Thoughtful people would recognize a difference between ascribing to God inessential properties, such as gender, and es...
This equation is simply the sum of each x = i choose k for k in [ 1, i ].
So what he's saying is that the neural circuits that follow the principles he describes have one neuron to represent every possible combination of on/off states in the set of inputs. It's the most brain-dead way you could possibly implement a classifier system.
From a paper by Dr. Tsien, retrieved from http://www.augusta.edu/mcg/discovery/bbdi/tsien/documents/theoryofconnectivity.pdf
...Fifth, this power-of-two mathematical logic confines the total numbers of distinct inputs ( i ) coming into a given microcircuit in order to best utilize the available cell resources. For instance, as a result of its exponential growth, at a mere i = 40, the total number of neurons ( n ) required to cover all possible connectivity patterns within a microcircuit would be more than 10^12 (already exceeding the total number of neurons
Is linking this article (ideologically loaded, unreflective, devoid of any logical analysis of any form) calculated to get a rise out of the kind of people who post here?
It's puzzling that you've termed these risks "long term" when America is currently being rocked with race riots and Europe has an ongoing refugee crisis.
It seems like (a) and (c) are easily granted, but what's your definition of "non-arbitrary", and how should we determine if that definition is itself a non-arbitrary one?
This topic is one I enjoy thinking about so thank you for your post :)