It's clearly been working for decades. The only reason modern software needs so much attention is because 1) Internet connectivity requires constant security updates and 2) new features to sell, neither of which should apply here.
They didn't solve it by 90%, they lied with statistics, and compared exponential-growth forecasted counts with point-in time counts.
The reduction was closer to 60%, and in the past few years, they've stopped investing in the program. It's been a good thing, but without ongoing effort and investment it will regress back to the mean.
There is definitely a massive breakdown of old social institutions that have not adapted to the modern world. People don't need to be closely knit to their families and local religion in order to survive anymore, and they are simultaneously discovering how awful these institutions habitually are.
To improve families, I imagine we'd have to wait for a significantly large generation to mature whose parents started a family through informed choice rather than social/cultural/religious pressure.
Alternatively, we could regress by taking away people's freedoms (especially women's) and force everyone to be dependent on traditional power structures just like the "good old days."
Personally, I'd rather move forward, but it's not entirely clear what that looks like.
What is the modern replacement for religion? Growing up I felt like I had this huge tight-knit community via the mormon church. I've since left mormonism and don't think I'll ever find a replacement for the community I had in the church.
There won't be an exact replacement because the circumstances that led to the community cannot (or rather, should not) be replicated. For the sake of the survival of the planet/species, I also don't think any institution based around magical thinking should fill the gap.
Keep in mind that high-demand religions require a huge investment of time and money. Devoting even just a fraction of those resources to hobbies, art classes, and/or other local activities tends to yield much better social results. While this might not perfectly fill the gap, neither did the religion, which is why people are leaving it.
I don't help the poor as a hobby or because I was told to. I help the poor because I have compassion and empathy. Animals also demonstrate these same pro-social behaviors, and I'm pretty sure none of them are Jewish or Hindu.
Empathy is a survival strategy that benefits society as a whole whereas sociopathy is a survival strategy that benefits the individual. Humans are complex and diverse enough to display both sets of behaviors within the population.
I thought it should be fairly obvious that social instincts are "blindly inherited," I can't imagine why you think that any institution, scientific or religious, would need to manufacture them.
Humans have tried "we believe in nothing", throughout history, and yet ... I see no Cathedrals, no beautiful songs, no art, no science, no entire civilizations built to the honor of ... nothing.
>I see no Cathedrals, no beautiful songs, no art, no science, no entire civilizations built to the honor of ... nothing.
Not believing in God isn't equivalent to a belief in nothing. Of course, plenty of songs, art and literally all of science have been created outside of the religious sphere. It seems regressive to the point of being archaic to dismiss the validity of all human effort not explicitly done in "honor" of the divine.
You want a Cathedral built in honor of "nothing?" Have the Hubble Space Telescope. As far as I'm concerned no gargoyle or arch wrought from stone or stained glass or Biblical prose can even compare to the transcendent - and wholly material - beauty of the Hubble Deep Field photo.
Interestingly, a religious person would agree with you! Nature's/God's beauty captured by the telescope's camera lens surpasses any known man made art.
I think it’s interesting to observe that science is a fork of religion both in historical record and in substance, but with the “belief in something” removed. At its base is the same problem: nobody lives long enough to know what’s going on, so we write it down in a literary cannon of truth. Science’s entrance requirement is based on the scientific method (repeatable experimentation). Religions tend to have differing entrance requirements. Perhaps the most common (and useful to this convo) is the opposite of science: things I saw that break the pattern (miracles, disasters, etc….divine interventions) and which cannot be repeated.
If we do live in a simulation this is the only kind of evidence that could point to it… external signs that break the rules of the game. But by definition science cannot discover this kind of information.
Also religions have a knack for solving collective action problems through locally irrational beliefs (like karma). Science has trouble allowing these into a cannon. In the case of karma this is because it’s unscientific. It’s not enough to believe that karma would be good for society scientifically and thus we should believe in it. This doesn’t solve the prisoners dilemma. It’s only by (everyone) literally believing in karma that it can have its effect.
It’s things like this that science structurally struggles to contribute to society. Proving things outside the system (we’re in a simulation), consciousness, collective action, etc.
Not: It’s also worth noting that many of the greatest scientists and artists were religious. Hard to know where to give credit there.
Nit: A photo from Hubble isn’t beautiful because of the telescope, it’s beautiful because of what nature made it to be. Hubble is merely a reflection.
>You want a Cathedral built in honor of "nothing?" Have the Hubble Space Telescope.
Extremely bizarre to think that the Hubble Space Telescope is a Cathedral built in honor of nothing. Nothing? Peaking into the Heavens is ... nothing? Okay.
Why do civilizations need to be built to the honor of something? I see plenty of art and architecture created independent of any mythical deity. I can't remember the last time I listened to a popular or well-renowed song that was religious-themed. Humans create and appreciate art all the time without it.
> Attendance at TLM is increasing, not decreasing.
> Which civilization has been built in honor of nothing?
It turns out, civilizations are built to serve the purpose of human existence, not to venerate mythical deities. You must be confusing them with churches, temples, synagogues, etc.
Relevant quote: "TLM-attending Catholics still make up a very small minority in the Church ... only 4% of parishes offer even one TLM on a regular (although not necessarily weekly) basis"
Not to mention, that is explicitly tagged as an opinion piece from a pro-Catholic publication.
> For the sake of the survival of the planet/species, I also don't think any institution based around magical thinking should fill the gap.
I know this won’t be a popular point, but I think we have nearly all of human history as evidence that “magical believing” societies survive more effectively than not. At any time literally any tribe could have chosen to believe in nothing. It’s almost impossible to think that no tribe tried it. Heck. It’s the default state until you make up a deity!
And yet… the overwhelming majority of societies were based on “magical” thinking.
Inversely, it’s possible there could be a hard scientific truth that we discover and kills us all (“information hazard” by Nick Bostrom is a good survey… think nuclear bombs etc)
It’s a really interesting mental experiment. Is truth best defined by repeatable experimentation (Manhattan project) or by human thriving (including magical thinking).
Aside: Reinforcement Learning theory hardcore leans (implicitly) on the latter.
>I know this won’t be a popular point, but I think we have nearly all of human history as evidence that “magical believing” societies survive more effectively than not.
I disagree. "more effectively than not" is an implicit comparison between "magical believing" societies and "non magical believing" (in other words, scientific) societies. Given the latter allows modern medicine, surgery, sanitation, mass food production and countless other advances, it seems obvious that science affords a much greater degree of survival than does belief in magic. One only needs to look at the increase in the average human lifespan and reduction in infant mortality rates over time to see that.
Science has given many things, and as a professional research scientist, I help it continue to do so. I by no means think science should go away.
However, it also created the ability for humanity to destroy itself: the nuclear bomb, climate change, and plenty of other existential threats.
Also there are plenty of non-tech tribes which display tremendous lifespans. To my knowledge, the common threads among centenarians is not usually tech or globalisation driven. Often they’re religious and they’re very often closely knit with their local communities.
The jury is still out on whether science is net positive. We’re only a few hundreds if years in (12,000 if you want to start with the dawn of technology…being the plow).
It’s made lives better and worse while simultaneously significantly decreasing the amount and depth to which humans believe they have a purpose, a pursuit I feel science has made little to no progress on.
But my stronger point is that magical thinking was naturally selected (as in natural selection) to be almost universally advantageous for the first 99% of human existence. I’m not sure our 1% experiment with a scientific society is as of yet conclusively better. We’ve almost made humans extinct. We might still. I don’t know of a magical belief (karma, etc.) that has put humanity in such a grave threat as the Cold War or climate change, for example.
>However, it also created the ability for humanity to destroy itself: the nuclear bomb, climate change, and plenty of other existential threats
Would it be better to not have any knowledge at all and be at the mercy of nature?
Acquiring power always comes together with the possibility of misuse. Maybe those who never got as far as we got would prefer to eventually get wiped out by nature (and it's gonna happen either way, what with the heat death and all that). I'd still prefer to have lived to know the electron than the alternative
> I know this won’t be a popular point, but I think we have nearly all of human history as evidence that “magical believing” societies survive more effectively than not.
Not true. Majority of progress human civilisation made happened in last 100-200 yrs. in the industrial revolution and Information Age. None of them were based upon “magical” concepts but only science, hard work and facts. Infact it has been the most pragmatic time in human history.
We would soon land on Mars within this century, exponentially increasing the chances of survival of human specie in the very long run. Plans already underway for moon as well.
All of this would be made possible by people who believe in pure facts and science and not in magical things. I think the “magical believing” phase occurred due to 1) extreme fear of adverse events(floods/volcanoes) or the things unknown to humans (how does it rain? We don’t know. Let’s create a rain god and keep them happy so it doesn’t run erratically. Try that now with Climate change on our head, rain or cold wave patterns won’t change even if 7bn people worship a rain god today). But now that humans know a lot of these answers, the era of scientific truths begun and will continue forever. Would be interesting to see where religion goes in next 50 yrs.
You are assuming that magical thinking is the optimal survival strategy as opposed to a lesser-evil byproduct of advanced cognition in a particular environment. This is like assuming that because all humans have appendices, having an appendix is necessarily a better survival strategy. It's not. It may have once served a purpose, but now the best it can do is kill you.
Nukes could wipe out the human race, but so could an asteroid. Coincidentally I'd be much less worried about having nukes if there was a lot less magical thinking in the world.
I don’t think magical thinking is optimal. But I do think strictly non-magical thinking is suboptimal. Despite being a scientist as a profession, I can’t ignore the empirical data across a million years that virtually all civilisations independently have magical thinking.
Your analogy of the appendix is a good one. Some things which were useful no longer are.
I feel religion in particular doesn’t fall into this category as it has known uses. Collective action in particular is something the exclusively scientific worldview seems to repel in practice.
I also think that we don’t yet fully see this because todays secular humanists have a tremendous amount of moral momentum inherited from 10 thousand years of non scientific society. But things are changing.
It is not religion that makes it tight. Coming from Christian country, plenty of non tight churches around.
It is intentional setup of mormonism and its power structure. Tight structure means more power for leaders and makes it harder to leave if you see something wrong.
You're looking at weekly religious gatherings through rose-colored lenses. A crossfit gym membership and book club could very well produce a far healthier local community than a church. Religion does not have a monopoly on the variables that attract healthy, thoughtful, intelligent people (in fact, trends in the US suggest quite the opposite).
Interesting how you just said science "cannot be used to explain everything" and yet now you're claiming "proof" and "evidence" (i.e. science) for your particular religion. Make up your mind.
Where and when, throughout all human history, have there been significant populations not subject to a religion? It seems strange to suggest that demonstrably unscientific belief systems with incompatible differences tied mainly to geographic location somehow have a unifying impact on scientific progress.
It's kind of like saying a person contributed to science because of their hair color while simultaneously conceding that people of all hair colors contribute to science.
One would hope your religion has more impact on it's followers than a box of hair dye.
The heirarchal ordering of some faiths, the commitment to truth, the belief in the veracity of the written word, the ability to support monastic orders are all functions of a society that believes. The belief that the individual speaks the truth and should be listened to, are the mechanisms that allow science to flourish.
Some scientists act as if you can have that without the faith. They focus only on the parts of history which support the contemporary scientist view that if we could just free ourselves from the whacky religionists we could get on with the /real/ science, which is nearly always an idea that reflects a minor variation on what has already come before.
If only the scientist knew the history ideas (including faith), could we have new things and not retreads of some millenia-dead philosopher.
Faith is not commitment to "truth," but rather commitment to a belief regardless of its veracity. Science has nothing to do with "believing" something - its a process for determining what actually is true based on evidence. Historically, science has only been allowed to flourish as long as it tiptoed around the religious powers-that-be.
If you really think science boils down to a "minor variation on what has come before," I'm curious to know what millenia-dead philosophers managed to launch a JWST equivalent.
Faith is commitment to truth in Christianity and science has a lot to do with believing. People choose which of their hunches and theories at the edge of their individual knowledge with a leap of faith.
I said the Scientist operates on a minor variation on old ideas, not all of science. Quite frequently even the top echelon scientists are pushing science forwards based on ideas that started well before them.
These conversations aren't really possible anymore, people aren't interested in the meaning of words or meaning at all. They just want to relate to whatever goofball idea their tribe agrees with.
>I'm curious to know what millenia-dead philosophers managed to launch a JWST equivalent.
Oh so you want me to summarize the history of ideas after all -.-
Uhm what? You can believe something is true but it does not make it objectively true.
Science is not believing in the sense of religion. Science is about curiousity and exploring ideas that one thinks might be true. The next step is to try to experimentaly verify the idea or to for example mathematicaly prove it. It's not about believing something is true and then stopping there.
> Quite frequently even the top echelon scientists are pushing science forwards based on ideas that started well before them.
What's wrong with that? Not every idea can be completely fresh. I am not sure what your point is.
> These conversations aren't really possible anymore, people aren't interested in the meaning of words or meaning at all. They just want to relate to whatever goofball idea their tribe agrees with.
Sounds a lot like religion?
> Oh so you want me to summarize the history of ideas after all -.-
I don't see the connection between your answer and his question.
You constantly talk in the terms of faithful ideas and yet reject they exist.
There is a reason you 'think this curious idea might be true' and the chain of ideas that got you to this point goes back a long way. And your thinking is usually influenced by unspoken ideas you take as prima facie true and acceptable, even though you never admit it.
These ideas come from faith and if you understand their starting point, you can understand their likely ending point and become a better scientist for it.
You don't see the connection because I haven't summarized centuries of ideas in three sentences of logical chains so you don't have to think about the history of ideas, and can just accept the answer prima facie like you do every other idea science runs on.
You don't know, what you don't know.
This really feels like pearls before swine. Have a nice day.
I agree the religious flamewar was bad. Appologies for that.
Some of the other comments in this thread that contribute to the number you quoted were not contributing to a flamewar though so I don't think the number of comments is bad per se. It's just a topic I have interest in and commenting a lot can be also a sign of a lively discussion and not a flamewar - though a lot of it was! I've seen a preference on HN for 'post and drop' style which imho contributes to a more shallow discussion. Sometimes it might be hard to find the balance I guess. If one is passionate about a topic one can quickly get too engaged in it. Anyways, wont happen again. Cheers!
No. Faith is belief without evidence or belief in the presence of contrary evidence. If we were to suppose the "base presumptions" of science were on the same level as religious claims, then they could be arbitrarily ignored without real-world consequences.
I guess you are unacquainted with formal axiomatic basis for the most formal of all sciences (mathematics).
Eg. natural numbers are defined by assuming that there exists one, and that there is a successor to one: everything else flows from that (this is an older system, but more approachable than the set theory one).
Basically, we never, ever prove that one indeed exists, or that it has a successor: these are assumptions that have so far proven to work well, but we can never tell for sure.
In the past, axiomatic systems have been found to be "wrong" when matched against reality (most notably the axiom of parallelism and hyperbolic geometry), so there's nothing to say that any of the other ones are "correct".
So we have faith that one exists and that it has a successor. Without evidence, just like you say.
Again, none of this makes science useless: it is an approximation of reality that we always work to improve. But some things we can't prove, so we have just assume they are so (otherwise known as faith).
Numbers are a human construct, just like words in a language. They don't "exist" in the same sense as anything physically real. Nobody has "faith" in the number one, it's just a concept that's proven to be universally useful. If it weren't useful, people wouldn't (and couldn't) conceptualize it. Again, faith is believing in something despite lack of evidence or despite evidence to the contrary.
For the sake of the argument: Have you seen evidence of scientific fact-x? (For example x=“water is made of H2 + O”)
Since set of “x” is so wast, no matter who you are, for most of “x” the answer will be “NO”. Time, accessible equipment and brain-capability constraints force us to outsource the evidence check to others. (even smartest scientists read papers instead of reproducing all experiments)
Part2:
I would like to distinguish two meanings/aspects of word “Science” used by in various contexts:
- scientific method - hypothesis, experiment, …
- “institution of society” -distinct group in society, view/expectation by the rest of society, education, trusted sources and similar
Methods of science and religion are very different.
But as “institutions”, they do have some parallels.
- Both offer basic explanation of reality.
- In both cases people trust stuff written by others.
- Both have consistency if you accept some basic truths.
To sum it up:
I (and most) believe that “carbon has 6 protons“ without evidence. The basis of this belief is trust in science (the institution of society) based on its authority, stated principles&process. But in the end laypeople don’t have evidence for that.
You can e.g. electrolyze water at home and see bubbles. Of course this proves nothing but the fact that water has something in it that makes bubbles at plus or minus, and regularly so. You can add salt/soda and see that it goes faster. All this is not a direct evidence of H or O or what electricity is, but at least some indirect one that can be progressed further, even if you won’t.
You can buy a complex device like a microwave oven or a chemistry lab and experiment with them, checking how they map to scientific knowledge, and asking on physics/chemistry SE about your findings and getting answers from people completely uninterested of fooling you, who are not knowledgeable of what you’re doing besides what you described.
It’s harder with C=6, but by messing with chemicals you can at least make some natural sense of what 6 means in that theory.
Religion at its face value cannot be experimented on at all. Any coincidences (if you find what to experiment on) are so irregular that can only be explained by statistics, even if you won’t. The only way to “study” religious knowledge is to fall for an interpretation of the day, which is always based on some experimental knowledge which others extracted from nature, because these people are interested in converting more adepts from a general population.
You’re correct that there is no direct way to learn and proof to yourself due to materialistic limitations. But when you take plausible interests and statistical phenomena into account, you can easily see yourself what has much more evidential depth and innocence of presupposition.
I trust scientific facts proportional to the evidence I have that these facts are true. This is not the case for faith, wherein disproportionately large amounts of trust are demanded without any evidence.
Our model of the atom allows us to accurately predict chemical reactions. Religion has no predictive power whatsoever, and none of its unique "truth" claims are provable or falsifiable.
People who uncritically trust "science" as regurgitated by pop-culture media are more akin to theists.
This isn’t a good comparison. Science can do something religion can’t: it can predict what will happen ahead of time based on prior knowledge. Religion works backwards to explain why a thing that happened was the will of some god (in the example of Christianity).
This then has practical, real-world implications. Praying harder never seemed to stop a bridge collapsing but a better understanding of physics allowed humanity to build bigger and stronger bridges.
You're saying scientific processes (petri dish experiment) may have created life because we can't yet explain what scientific processes may have created life? And ancient, unscientific mythological fairy tales may somehow have encoded this event, despite having always been taken at face-value up until they were scientifically and rationally disproven?
You seem to be missing the point. Cults thrive on manipulating social interactions and slowly chipping away at others' boundaries. No cult pitches the shadiness up-front for the incredibly obvious reason that it scares away targets; instead they slowly coax people into taking one "reasonable" step after another until they can't recognize the shadiness for what it is in the moment. The compelling conclusion is that people who think they can easily spot cult recruitment tactics are in fact perfect targets for cults.
No, i got all that, although i don't know that i agree with that conclusion (but i also don't care to argue for or against it). My point is that there are actual stories about people getting recruited into cults that are worth reading (or even ACTUALLY almost getting recruited, rather than someone that jumped to a conclusion before actually investigating to see for themselves). A story about a guy who THINKS he MAY have been courted by cult recruiters is just... dull. If you found that story interesting, i have a ton a stories i've never shared about things that almost might have happened.
