Analogies are like a box of chocolates: overused clichés, but we hand them out and gobble them down with delight.

Analogy discussions break down when people aren't in agreement about which features are or aren't important to map across... or worse, when one or both sides haven't even considered what they are.

Someone making a point through analogy is pretty much a caricature of bad reasoning. It's a pretty common trope.

If you can find analogies for both supporting and disproving something, then the reasons are not what’s stated. Isn’t it good to show that?

That's Hitchens, of course. Here's a set of philosophical razors. [1]

There are social contexts where clarity of statement and lucidity of thought *are not* among the tools/objectives of an encounter/interaction.

But in debate or education or in any other case where clear words and ideas are indeed among the tools/objectives, avoiding them or undermining them is being a different kind of jerk.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor

> I like to think my opinions are not that bad.

I find this sentence kind of funny. If you thought your opinions were bad wouldn’t you change them?

I’d rather not ever be right. If I am that means I learned nothing, making it a waste of time.

> A weasel word, or anonymous authority, is a word and phrase aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said when in fact only a vague, ambiguous, or irrelevant claim has been communicated. The terms may be considered informal. Examples include the phrases "some people say", "it is thought", and "researchers believe". Using weasel words may allow one to later deny any specific meaning if the statement is challenged, because the statement was never specific in the first place. Weasel words can be a form of tergiversation and may be used in advertising, (popular) science, opinion pieces and political statements to mislead or disguise a biased view or unsubstantiated claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

Edit:

Verb tergiversate (third-person singular simple present tergiversates, present participle tergiversating, simple past and past participle tergiversated)

(intransitive) To evade, to equivocate using subterfuge; to obfuscate in a deliberate manner.

(intransitive) To change sides or affiliation; to apostatize.

(intransitive, rare) To flee by turning one's back.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tergiversate

Nah. Best practice usually means "assume a spherical cow". The idea is to point in the right direction because there are no one size fits all solutions for anything. It's a starting point that isn't stupid and is backed by the blood of poor bastards from the past.

I mean, not writing your own encryption library is best practice.

Same goes for “anti-pattern”.

I generally agree with you, but at the same time don’t think it’s always nefarious. At least personally, I’d say I definitely am more opinionated (have more of staked out positions) in areas I know something about / spent time thinking through - I’d imagine the same is true for many “experts” - it doesn’t mean they are “right” but based on their underlying conceptual frameworks[1], most of the time they’ve come to a conclusion and are going to push that.

[1] I find most policy debates I get into with friends have nothing to do with the policy at hand but rather more core political/philosophical questions underlying their thinking (e.g. do the ends justify the means or are they more individualist va collectivist)

> The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.

I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I think it's pretty well understood that the growth of China is thanks to the market reforms in the 70s and 80s.

>The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.

Is it though? China's economic growth doesn't seem that far off (per capita) from that of South Korea or Taiwan.

I work on healthcare at Alphabet, and in late 2016 I set out to build a flexible DICOMweb STOW-RS receiver in the form of a GCP API - the first time anyone had done that at Alphabet. (I've worked on the same project across Verily and Google). In the process I researched and built a bunch of little prototypes built in a variety of ways, and for example had to rule out building it as an App Engine API - because DICOMweb uploads can potentially be gigabytes in size, and App Engine didn't support handling a POST as a stream as it arrived.

At any rate, along the way over the course of 9 months or so I found a technology stack that supported all my requirements and ran into a bunch of roadblocks. Lots of things related to how internal bits of GCP APIs are handled - the internal libraries had documentation indicating that streaming APIs were supported, and that each chunk of the request would be passed from the API proxy/backend multiplexer to the actual API server as they arrived. This worked for streaming responses, but not for streaming requests, and so I had to add that functionality to the API proxy. That was a huge pain - really hairy c++ code using fibers with multiple layers of request processing wrappers. But I worked thru that and got it landed into the google-wide binary, and never worried about it again.

I got this project to the level I needed it to support the precise requirements for the (regulated medical device) system I was working on. Around this time the GCP Cloud Healthcare group was getting started, and they built a new system using a fair number of bits of my implementation, which they'd eventually replace completely. But my first system saved them most of a year or work, resulting in the CHC feature set rapidly leapfrogging what I'd built.

A similar idea about the importance of planning as a way to improve your understanding of a problem was expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, said in a speech while he was in office as the US President in 1957 [1].

Reflecting on his experience in the Second World War, he said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/18/planning/

Your software engineering example made this click for me. I think what we might be talking about is the method of abduction [0][fn]

[fn] not kidnapping, but a logical (procedural) method like induction or deduction

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/

I'm not sure "not even wrong" actually means the same thing as "unfalsifiable" like Wikipedia claims? I thought "not even wrong" means the asker is so confused that their question doesn't make sense. As I understand it, "ghosts exist" (or even "the universe is infinite") may well be impossible to falsify, but it doesn't signal any sort of confusion on the part of the asker. But if the statement was "ghosts exist because the universe is infinite", then I thought that would fall into the "not even wrong" bucket.

Hmm. I always thought "not even wrong" meant "correct, but answering the wrong question" or more generally "correct but irrelevantly so".

In that case, how should we think about it? Genuinely curious.

Yes, you have a combination of people who learn and people who know here. That is what he described, and environment where you are allowed to be wrong and where people will correct you when you are. You don't get banned from HN for being wrong, so you are allowed to be wrong here, unlike many other forums like most of reddit.

Maybe he's talking about the string theorist community

Yeah I'm having serious doubts

The beauty and flexibility of radical skepticism :). Minsky, another noted skeptic of idealist claims (from the opposite angle?), had a quote that stuck with me from one of his YouTube lectures on Society of Mind. I can’t find it at the moment but it was along the lines of; “when you write your own cognitive theory, leave room in the edges for it to grow. You never know what parts will be proven wrong, and you shouldn’t let that stifle the overall exercise.”

In other words, any attempt to break down the mind into component parts is better than declaring it a lost cause and hypothesizing your favorite alternative instead (god, soul, one-ness, consciousness as an essential property, etc).

This probably means I'm a bit younger than you, but I also had some e-mail conversations with Dennett about the same book, I think in 2001 or so. I always found him gracious and patient and he is still the only public intellectual I have ever carried on a meaningful conversation with and gained insight from in this way, and I was just a random college student, not even his student.

Dan was toying with you ... his thesis was on the distinction between consciousness and the contents of consciousness, and he more than anyone was familiar with the point you were making (erroneously).

Yeah, he is a huge figure in the field.

It's just from the title, I thought there was going to be some 'inciteful about face', like he had some new 'other way to think about things' that just couldn't wait for the next book. So had hopes up more.

Not OP, and it depends on how 'modern' (or alive) fits the bill, but Heidegger is pretty impenetrable as a novice.

>This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right?

I don't think this is really the right way to think about Christianity for many believers. C.S. Lewis says, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." It's not so much that Christianity is just another fact lying out there that we just happened to stumble upon, and now we use scientific tools to investigate whether it's true or false. No - it's a belief that shapes the very way we understand the world. It's a worldview. That's not to say that it's necessarily correct, but just that it's not a belief that we necessarily acquire in the same way we might acquire a belief about what 1+1 is or how many planets orbit the sun. It's much like how someone born and raised atheist doesn't hold their belief in atheism because of some evidence for that view. We can still argue about Christianity, atheism, or other religions, of course, that's fine - but it's not obvious that there's some inherent irrationality in asking "what could show Christianity to be false" instead of "what convinced me Christianity is true".

>they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up. This is true, but if the implication is that belief in Roman paganism is on just as firm intellectual ground as belief in Christianity, that seems unfair given the rich intellectual history spanning millennia of the latter to which the former isn't really comparable at all.

> This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right?

It sounds like maybe some people are taking this as a challenge from me to atheists. I'm not really; just like Dennet is in TFA, I'm talking about general principles for someone trying to live as a rational creature: each of us should examine our own beliefs, and not only ask "What if I'm wrong?" but "How would I know if I were wrong"? That goes for Christians and Hindus and Muslims as much as for atheists. "Take the plank out of your own eye before you try to remove the speck out of your brother's eye" and all that. It's specifically because Dennet is such a deep thinker and effective communicator that I genuinely wonder how he'd answer that question.

I'm not sure what evidence was provided to me as a child that the world was round; but I had relatives who lived in Germany and Thailand, and at the age of 12 I'd actually flown to Thailand and experienced jet-lag. The "world is round" hypothesis satisfactorily explained my experience (both first- and second-hand, through people I knew personally) in a way that the "flat earth" hypothesis doesn't.

In the same way, the vast majority of evidence I had as a child to confirm what as taught about Christianity to me was experiential. But of course, all sorts of people from different faiths have religious experiences; how do I know that there's not some better explanation for my experiences -- either religious or reductive -- which will be more predictive (in the sense of getting better results more efficiently)?

> I became an Atheist in large part because I took Latin my first year in high school and realized that the Roman's actually believed in their gods the same way that I believed in the Christian god. And I gradually realized that they had the same reason to believe that I did ... they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.

This seems a bit strange to me... so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort (with some people maybe being closer to the truth of the matter than the others), you decided this was evidence that there weren't supernatural beings?

Isn't that like reading several different conflicting scientific theories, and then deciding that all science is bunk?

Sorry I don't have the exact quote, but there's a place where C.S. Lewis points out that being a Christian, he's free to believe that people of other religions were partly right and partly wrong; but that when he was an atheist, he had to believe that the majority of humans were completely wrong about the most important questions in life.

If the entire world were atheists except Christians, wouldn't that be far stronger evidence against the supernatural? The fact that the Romans believed in the supernatural and the afterlife is evidence -- weak evidence, I grant, but evidence nonetheless -- that the supernatural and the afterlife exist.

> but for me it would just be ANY evidence: a verifiable miracle, proof of life after death, or meeting an angel/demon.

What would satisfy your requirements for a "verifiable miracle"?

It sounds like a lot of these might be very personal experiences. First of all, if you had a single experience of an angel, would that actually change your mind? Wouldn't you be inclined to believe you'd had some sort of hallucination (wondering perhaps if someone had slipped LSD into your drink or something like that)?

Similarly, once you had that experience and became convinced, how would you convince anyone else? Supposing there were another person who was exactly like you -- the fact that you were convinced you'd seen an angel wouldn't have any effect on whether they were convinced that angels existed, would it?

FWIW I know a lot of people who started out as atheists and became Christians, and although this sort of rational "apologetics" sometimes did factor into part of their decision, by far the biggest influence was personal experience: first with genuine Christians, then with with Jesus, through reading the Bible and worshipping him at church. I tend not to focus on that kind of thing in a venue like this, because it's the least logically sound reason; but if you're genuinely interested in having a personal experience to let you put Christianity to the test, that's what I'd look for.

As for me, I've got what I consider to be more objectively sound reasons to believe; but "“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however [this comment] is not large enough to contain.” Hopefully at some point I'll write it up in a way that's easy to link to.

Why is it that you think the human condition is not explained by Christian theology? To be sure, you don't mean "I think Christianity is false", right? It can be false but still explain the human condition.

"Unicorns exist" and "unicorns don't exist" are both factual statements of which one can have a belief. Right now you probably hold one or the other. Sure, if you'd never heard of unicorns, such a thing wouldn't enter your head; but you have heard of unicorns, and thus you do have an opinion on their existence.

Similarly, if one lived all one's life in a rationalist bubble, and never even heard the mention of God or gods or religion or the supernatural, then perhaps one could not have an opinion on whether God exists. But that applies neither to you nor to Dennet.

How would I know that my disbelief in Thor is wrong? At a first cut, I'd need to have someone propose a more concrete proposition to evaluate; then I could try to evaluate it. But whatever that proposition is, it would need to be able to accommodate all that we've learned about the world and about science; it would need to be falsifiable; and it would need to explain the world in a more satisfactory manner than the alternative worldviews.

> What evidence (or counter-evidence) do you suggest I present to show that my disbelief in Thor or Odin is wrong?

There are no attempts at proof (that I'm aware of) for the existence of these mythical deities. There are several for the existence of the God of monotheism, which I believe to be sound, but will struggle to fit into a combox.

Further, the thing we imagine them to be is different in kind from the God of monotheism. There are sound explanations of why this is so, but (again) they won't fit into a combox.

See Edward Feser's Five Proofs for the Existence of God, and some of his other works, if you care to explore this further. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and the like ignore, or grossly straw-man, these arguments.

I used to define myself as "agnostic", as in "well I don't know, right now I don't have any reason to believe in <choose your God here>, but if you could prove it I would obviously change my mind".

But then I changed my mind: now I believe that agnosticism is just a "shy" way of being atheist, somehow trying to say "I don't believe in a particular deity, but I can't commit to saying that I believe there is no deity". But that's the whole point of a belief: I could be wrong, and it would be okay to change my mind. A belief is not a proven fact.

So I am an atheist: I don't believe in any particular deity, and in fact I do believe that there is no such thing. But obviously if you proved my belief wrong, then I would change my belief :-).

This is false. There are thorough proofs (or, to avoid the success-word, attempts at proof) for God's existence. They are ignored or misunderstood by the popular atheists like Dawkins and Dennett. They are impossible to summarise in a combox or pithy comment but the information is out there if you care to look. [0]

There are also miracles with thousands of witnesses, most notably that at Fatima. The witnesses included not just Catholics, but also Protestants, atheists and those of other religions. https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/Meet_the_Witnesses.pdf

[0] See Edward Feser's Five Proofs

Personal revelation requires no faith. Such evidence might then rationally lead to belief, like any other anecdotal conviction. That it provides little external evidence is just unfortunate for the rest of us.

That's not the definition of Christianity. Catholicism has a long philosophical tradition discussing the existence of God, and that tradition is far from refuted.

You're being unnecessarily mean and confrontational, that isn't a good fit for HN.

You can take parent at their word that he's thought about it and engage, or you can choose not to engage. No reason to disparage them.

Everyone should read Kant

And crucially, lots of things like the ones you mentioned are often not better approximated by an ellipse than a circle(I realise circles are just a subset of ellipses).

There is only one definition of a circle, and its universal. Anything else is not a circle.

I get your point, but to be genuine with you I have paid.

Very very few people you are paying with genuinely critique or disagree with you for very obvious reasons.

However I can’t help but point out that you’re being exactly as I’ve described redditors…argue an adjacent point to just say the original point is ‘stupid’. It’s a waste of good brain cells.

Which is why we need chatgpt as a thought buddy! Chatgpt can route insights it gained from one chat and insert into another chat with a different person. That is learning afterall. Most of insights are memoized in some sense, we don't derive them from first principles again and again.

I don't think so -- as he tells it, the "distributed understanding" is a shortcut he's using in his later life (if something is important someone will tell/explain it to him), which he contrasts with the diligence/conscientiousness he had earlier. The distributed understanding is a working style, orthogonal to the insight/program he's talking about.

Have you considered the possibility that you're wrong? Because that's definitely not it. Consider that, as you acknowledged, you don't even know who he is, so you certainly aren't familiar with his work.

It is hysterical to me that there is this online "go to Dunning and Kruger in the total wrong context" heuristic that people who don't know anything about the subject spit out.

If you understood Dunning and Kruger you would not post this not to mention make a Daniel Dennett appeal to authority case.