A common scurrilous sophomoric ridiculous false charge leveled against those of a religious bent, and made by some atheists, is that the religious hold their beliefs “Based on no evidence.”
No one believes any thing, or even holds the uncertainty of any thing, “Based on no evidence.” Even stronger, no one can hold any belief, in certainty or uncertainty, without some evidence.
The evidence some use in their argument that religious hold beliefs “based on no evidence” is like this: “It’s obvious Science rules, and Science has no need of God, for which there is no Scientific evidence; thus, the religious hold their beliefs based on no evidence.”
Academics Say It's Morally Obligatory To Bioengineer Ticks To Stop You Eating Meat🧵
Our paper is “Beneficial Bloodsucking” from Messers Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth, in the august pages of Bioethics.
Their Abstract (with my emphasis):
The authors open their paper, “Among the best and most widely accepted arguments in applied ethics are those concluding that eating meat is morally wrong.” Widely accepted? Only by, we presume, other academics.
New Definition Of Death To Increase Organ Harvest Bounty🧵
Sandeep Jauhar: “Death is not simply a biological fact, but it’s also a social choice.” Death has become a social choice? He continues: “To increase the number of donor organs, we should expand the definition of death.”
This op-ed will, as you will see, show the extreme dangers of putting doctors in charge of non-medical questions, such as what death is and what is allowable in medicine. Memorizing bone names confers no moral or ethical advantage or philosophical or theological insight.
“Medicine”, Jauhar tells us, today declares a death on heart stoppage or when “the brain has ceased to function”. But there have been many cases where “brain dead” people come back to life. Which Jauhar does not mention.
Also called the Carter Catastrophe, some researchers believed they discovered, through purely probabilistic reasoning, a formula which shows man has only ~700 years left.
Vdeo at end.
Poundstone calculated we have a 50-50 chance of surviving 760 years.
His argument:
1. Your birth is not special, so you had a 50% chance of being born in the middle of man's reign.
2. There were to date about n = 100 Billion of us.
3. There will be N total men.
4. From that it's easy to calculate a 50% chance that N ≤ 2 * n.
5. Since n = 100 B, N ≤ 200 B in total. Or 100 B yet to be born.
6. If 150 million are born each year, as stats show, then 100 billion / 150 million per year = 50% chance of 666 years left.
It seems a battle most impossible to convince a good chunk of the population that AI is nothing more than a model.
A model written in code, which of course the coders know because they are writing it, code that carries out explicit instructions, and only explicit instructions. Code that runs on machines that operate in fixed and directed ways.
Yet many insist AI’s output is more than its code, and somehow becomes something more than its code, the output the result of some emergent malign or beneficent or at any rate chaotic entity, an entity with greater insight than any mere man.
We continue our quest to disabuse ourselves of the notions that “IQ” is intelligence and that one-number of summaries of intelligence are adequate. All I hope for, likely in vain, is for us to say intelligence instead of IQ when we mean intelligence.
IQ is a score on tests that measures, however crudely or accurately, some but not all aspects of intelligence. Scores on a test are not intelligence: intelligence goes toward producing scores. Single-number scores cannot capture all there is to intelligence.
“IQ”, I repeat, is not intelligence. The Deadly Sin of Reification has struck every person who speaks of somebody “having” a low or high IQ. Unless, which is rare, they mean the score on some test the person has actually taken.