Persol

I’m an engineer for train systems. Our equipment kills people everyday; usually because of trespassers/suicides, but infrequently due to other reasons.

I can always make a system safer, for a cost. The IS rail industry spent a billions dollars on Positive Train Control, and statistically may have save a life a year, while making trains slower and less reliable.

That system was implemented due to the thought process described here. An email saying “that is too expensive for the cost of one life so we won’t do it” is not going to stand up in court.

Things as si... (read more)

Can you please explain why you believe in your God, and not all the others?

I'd never seen the term Bulverism, but I don't think what you are doing would classify. You aren't saying A is false because Okeymaker likes B, you're saying the extraordinary claims with lack of extraordinary evidence doesn't provide much prove A.

And that lack of good evidence does not seems not to matter... which makes me wonder how a discussion can continue. Questioning the motives of the discussion is goal clarification, without which there is no discussion.

errancy.org is a good reference. A simple reading of the first page should be sufficient to put doubt in the fact that the gospels are completely 'true'.

While this is not enough to convince someone that the Biblical God is false, it at least is a good gate to further discussion. If someone can't acknowledge that there are factual errors and contradiction... I'm not sure what there is left to talk about.

don´t NEED to read non-canon gospels to believe in Jesus, just like I don´t need to read Feynman to believe in physics.

Absolutely true, but if your belief on some specific part of physics is based on a single untested book which has demonstrable errors, you should read some other sources. Especially when there really isn't a huge volume.

[As a side note 'belief in physics' doesn't really mean anything. If you believe that a dropped apple will fall, you 'believe in physics'... you have direct evidence of it.]

I intend to read non-canon gospels, do you k

with ACTUAL knowledge on the subject

The beauty of theological study (and the internet) is that you can look at the source material and translations in detail and directly yourself. You have access to the very small amount of source data on the subject. Most of what people 'know' about the Trinity was made up hundreds of years after the fact.... and quite obviously these theories about the holy trinity have been untested.

To be blunt, I'm not really seeing answers from you. Most of your responses to most people's claims have been "well I don't believe that anyway". Meanwhile, you haven't even read most of Christianity.

Your specific responses seem to say very little:

No. But I haven't fully read any non-canon gospels yet.

You haven't done even your basic due diligence. You believe your eternal soul is controlled by God, but you can't be bothered to read a few documents that claim to have worthwhile information? This is absurd. Instead you've randomly latched on... (read more)

I may have misread your initial comment. To paraphrase to check my reading: you are penalizing due to complexity of a 'god' prior but, on the balance, eyewitness details should increase your estimate of the claimed witnessed set being true. More details from eyewitnesses do not then penalize further. The complexity of the god models are just so complex in the first place, that eyewitness details don't increase your estimate much.

What I'm not grasping is what this sentence meant:

And even an Abrahamic God (or a divine Gospel Jesus, if we treat that as over

I know this has been discussed before, but I'm not convinced that complexity penalties should apply to anything involving human witnesses.

Suppose someone theorizes that the sun is made of a micro black hole covered in lightbulbs, and there is no obvious physics being broken.... this is an obvious place to use complexity penalties. Simpler models can explain the evidence.

With the Bible though, we have witnesses that presumably entangle the Bible with a divine being. Complexity penalty in this case shouldn't penalize for extra details. (Considering complexit... (read more)

True and I didn't consider that... but assuming a supreme being had any impact in humanity, it is reasonable to assume that the set of practiced religions are more likely to be true than the set of not discovered religions.

I was trying to minimize the possible tangential arguments. I think trying to expand from 1 religion to 19 major religions is enough to show the problem without going to ~200 religions, which allows room to argue about applicabiliy/similarity of subtypes. Going to all possible religions allows room to argue about applicability of set theory.

I'm not quite sure what you want to see when you ask for the 'weakest point in Christianity'. I thought the easily found arguments and frequently discussed arguments were compelling enough by themselves. I was a regular Sunday school attendee, continued to go to church (for social reasons) even after I started to think the whole thing was random, and genuinely enjoy having these sorts of discussions

The main things that I found had weight is that it's taking the numerous world religions and saying 'this one' without any great reason. When the correct selec... (read more)

1 gramming is checking single words; should identify unfamiliar vocabulary. (Ex: quantifiable)

2 gramming would check pairs of words; should identify uncommon phrases made of common words (ex: probability mass - better examples probably exist)

The 1/2 gram terminology may be made up, but I think I've heard it used before.

Two reason:

• Frequently having multiple words as hyperlinks in ebooks mean that 'turning the page' may instead change chapters. Maybe it is just a problem with iPhone kindle.
• For links that reference forward chapters, what is a new reader to do? They can ignore it and not understand the reference, or they can click, read, and then try to go back... but it's not a very smooth reading experience.

Granted, I probably wouldn't have noticed the second issue, if not for the first issue.

Maybe my thought of 'religion' is different than yours, but I think of 'religion' as being a set of beliefs that claims to know some fact that is outside observable reality. By definition, this seems non-disprovable. If a belief system doesn't have claim to some 'extra-normal' normal, I wouldn't consider it a religion.

This may be the christian god's rules on who goes to heaven, or Buddhism's rules on what you come back as.

As far as dis-provability is concerned, all major religions seem to consist of two pieces:

• a claim regarding 'the ultimate truth' regarding reality (usually focused on the afterlife) which is by definition inaccessible and non-disprovable
• a set of guidelines for life, usually claimed as originating from 'the ultimate truth', but still testable in reality

If you extract the ideas of karma and rebirth from Buddhism, I'd still consider those two topics a religion which is non-disprovable... while what is left of Buddhism looks more like a testable philosoph... (read more)

See Mark's post regarding 7th grade; my intention was aimed at adults, who (for whatever reason) seem to like the 7th grade reading level.

I'm not sure how to effectively crowd source this without getting volunteers for specific (non-overlapping) tasks and sections. I share your concern with the wiki-method, unless each section has a lead. At work we regularly get 20 people to collaborate on ~100 page proposals, but the same incentives aren't available in this case. Copyediting is time consuming and unexciting; does anyone know of similar crowd sourced efforts? I found a few but most still had paid writers.

Agreed that it may not be the point, but other than what I think are fixable issues, the book contents work well. I don't think starting from scratch would be a large enough improvement to justify the extra time and increased chance of failure.

I think the big work is in making the examples accessible, and Eliezer already did this for the -other- negative trigger.

"If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it. If your point is inherently abou

Perhaps this is already discussed elsewhere and I'm failing at search. I'd be amazed if the below wasn't already pointed out.

On rereading this material it strikes me that this text is effectively inaccessible to large portions of the population. When I binged on these posts several years ago, I was just focused on the content for myself. This time, I had the thought to purchase for some others who would benefit from this material. I realized relatively quickly that the purchase of this book would likely fail to accomplish anything for these people, and may... (read more)

This is a very good idea. Generally Google or Reddit works for this sort of thing, but focusing on aggregating news only is useful.

Few things:

• How would you consider monetizing this? The online advertising bubble appears to be shrinking, as people realize minimal returns. For a similar website I've been considering an iP*/Android app, but the return still looks low.

• Much of this information can be gathered automatically. The website I mentioned above is for an automated new summary generating site... which only works 90% of the time. For what you're doin

That link (fixed version ) is very accurate. I wish I'd considered the first few points BEFORE programming/advertising the site.