I am not impressed with Alex O’Connor or Joseph Schmid.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I am not impressed with Alex O’Connor or Joseph Schmid.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
PZ, you look tired. All the health problems are inevitably taking their toll, and on top of everything else you have to read through rivers of BS.
Please prioritize your own health, even if it means going easy on social media with appalling BS that invite, no demand commentary.
Apart from that, I can only agree.
(PS did you see what the esteemed POTUS wrote in response to the death of Robert Mueller? On second thought, don’t read it. It is the kind of stuff that erodes the soul and ages the body.(
Gah, the embedded player’s volume and speed controls moved to the upper right.
Example. Hegseth claims P (USA has defeated Iran).
Obviously, P is evidence of P! Because a member of the government would never lie. There, fixed it for you.
.
These kind of intellectual hang-ups are common, not only on Youtube videos.
-Also, the sound of a cat trashing the room is the kind of wholesome, restful background sound I fall asleep to.
I wanted to check the original Matt Dillahunty video to which PZ alludes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY9fFWeTG_g
So I did.
Birger: “Example. Hegseth claims P (USA has defeated Iran).
Obviously, P is evidence of P!”
‘P is evidence of P’ is tautological, so yes, that is a necessarily true claim.
A claim of P is evidence that someone claims P, which is not the same thing.
You are confused; you use P as the claim of another P, and so you are mistaken.
“These kind of intellectual hang-ups are common, not only on Youtube videos.”
Heh. Indeed.
I recall watching O’Connor years ago arguing with Stephen Woodford about objective morality based on their mutual philosophical addling at the hands of Sam Harris. Frustratingly ridiculous stuff. I recall likening it to fish out of water flopping around in a boat, not realizing they are in a boat.
O’Connor went on to pursue a formal education I think. Woodford, as Rationality Rules, went on to die on the hill of transwomen in sports.
I since lost interest in both long ago, though Woodford has resurfaced in my feed making ok critical content based on our current fascist state. He’s taken issue with Dawkins and Boghossian over their even more regressive views on transgender issues, but hasn’t walked back any on sports. O’Connor shows up in my feed talking about stuff I know will bore me to tears so I skip it. Maybe I’ll check out Dillahunty’s response to the video PZ highlighted.
If O’Connor has moved beyond being a Harris bro, that’s an improvement. I wonder if Woodford would have made the same bonehead claims O’Connor and the other guy did.
Re: College Sophomores with no understanding…..
I’m about the same age as you PZ and at least when I was an undergrad this level of sophistry was only attained when we had already made our way through two or three joints of weed. Seemingly these two have accomplished this feat completely sober.
Wait wasn’t Dillahunty, Atheist Experience, and/or some Austin atheist organization at least adjacent to to whole Rationality Rules dustup some years ago?
I have issues leaving the house in the morning over whether the faucets are shut off and coffee maker is unplugged. I think it’s OCDish, but have recently taken a photo each morning that backs the claim my brain refuses to believe that the coffee maker is unplugged.
Not quite science which involves stuff like methods, results, statistical analyses, peer review, publication, others tearing into your methods and trying to replicate or refute. Probably better than relying upon the testimony of my own memory of doing stuff, which is apparently not enough. I’m NOT stooping to taking photos of all my faucets and light switches. Not going to do it. And the outside door locks. Popper on meth.
Don’t ask how often I tap the lock button on my vehicle key fob.
And with fiction like Pratchett. It’s literature not science. As a Rush song says we suspend our disbelief to be entertained. Yet the world-building of fiction should be internally coherent with minimal plot contradictions and correspond to what we know of how people act and the world works to be believable. Science fiction nerds are hardcore on such things. Fantasy relaxes the constraints a bit.
Fiction may test or inform our moral framework. Science should be conducted in accordance with intersubjectively agreed ethical guidelines. Science OTOH can inform but not determine moral judgments. People get Hume wrong on that. There is no absolute firewall.
I’ve been watching the Dillahunty video and he seems solid. He goes into the apt fallacy of appeal to authority at around 21:20 which kinda becomes an issue when we get to appealing to expertise. PZ invokes it with the neuroscience text. To the extent any of us can follow up evidence based claims made by science people with labs…I mean seriously! Linus Pauling making claims about Vitamin C or Kary Mullis and the raccoon have their own levels of scrutiny to be applied. Paul Offit on vaccines or research literature on that…I know some stuff to follow it, but admittedly I’m not about to replicate all that in my non-existent lab given my lack of a PhD in relevant fields so I guess I trust based on credentials to a degree. Definitely not trusting RFK Jr.
Hemidactylus @11, consilience matters in that regard, and multiple independent sources are more credible, too.
(A point well made by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve )
(Now I’ll be wondering all day what bad things happen if the coffee maker stays plugged in. :-/ )
Re: Hemidactylus @8: Yes. Matt invited RR, argued with hosts and board members off-air, intimidated the board into retracting a statement that apologized to trans people and instead apologize to RR. Then there was a coup that replaced the board with RR fans—specifically to remove any board members who agreed with the original statement (adding new members right before the election for votes, dragging the election out to 5 hours). Volunteers resigned with a letter of protest, and hosts walked out, some making clear why on their final shows. Matt said they left “to go pursue their own interests” and “don’t pay attention to the rumors”.
Kevin Logan – Talking with John Iacoletti & Chelsea Rodriguez about the ACA transphobia row (1:35:20)
Kevin Logan – Speaking with Tracie Harris, Jen Peeples & Clare Wuellner about the split within the ACA (2:09:05)
EoT – Holy Koolaid Defends Transphobic Abuse & Roots Out ACA Dissenters (34:21)
Matt abruptly made a new host of a member who joined in the middle of all that, who later came out as trans, eventually learned what happened, and left in 2023.
EoT – Transphobia & Tokenisation At The Atheist Community Of Austin W/ Jenna Belk (2:16:52)
PZ you sure are getting some interesting comments on the yutub.
Silentbob @13
Welcome to my hell.
Correcting #14: Jenna Belk left at the end of 2021. The interview was 2023.
@11
“He goes into the apt fallacy of appeal to authority at around 21:20 which kinda becomes an issue when we get to appealing to expertise. ”
In my teaching I have often used a nice little book by Harry Collins entitled “Are We All Scientific Experts Now,” which examines the issue of what constitutes different forms and levels of expertise, and considers how distrust of science emerges out of public misunderstanding of expertise. Collins mentions that one of his major areas of study as a historian/social scientist of science is neutrinos. He comments that it took him several years of focused study of the physics literature on neutrinos before he could “pass” as a neutrino expert at physics conferences. It’s a good cautionary tale about claims of expertise based on a low level of real knowledge/understanding, but also an endorsement of claims from within actual high-levels of expertise.
I watched your video, but not the one by Matt Dillahunty or the by those two stupid people I never heard of before.
Since the resurrection is specifically mentioned, I gather that the argument is over evidence for it. There are stories of people witnessing the resurrected Jesus H. Christ. So I am guessing the point Matt Dillahunty is making is that a story of 500 people witnessing the resurrected Jesus is not the same as 500 eyewitness reports. Eyewitness accounts actually are evidence. The weight which should be given to eyewitness accounts is an interesting subject itself, but is not the point here. The point is that a story about 500 eyewitnesses is not the same as 500 actual eyewitnesses. If you still don’t get the point, let me tell you how I flew to the moon yesterday, without a spaceship; an event which was witnessed by 4 billion people.
Furthermore. if these blokes are swayed by sworn testimony, they should give more consideration to the Book of Mormon.
Witnesses of the Book of Mormon
If only those 500 witnesses on the road to Emmaus had actually written down and sworn to their experience! But they didn’t. (Possibly because they didn’t exist, but this is pure speculation.)
Reginald Selkirk @19:
Remember when you linked Francis Collins rambling about moral law? That was this Alex O’Connor’s channel.
Philosophers call this the “novice/expert problem”, btw, vetting experts without possessing expertise (making themselves artificially stupid for the sake of argument)—with side discussions of having public/private entities regulate experts and risk corruption.
To be fair, there is a difference between the way science is used by scientists and the way it is used by the average person.
Science is a process and part of that process is the “repeat” portion. The reason why you have to show your work and describe what you did and how you did it is because there is the unstated premise of “Don’t trust me. Try it for yourself.” Other scientists can then try to replicate your work and see if they get the same results. They can use your process to expand upon other processes and see if the results claimed live up to the hype.
But, that requires the ability to do that replicating work. I don’t have telescopes that can observe a black hole for months on end in order to track the positions of stars as they orbit. I don’t have a superconducting supercollider. I don’t have a chemistry or biology lab. And thus, as an average person, I have to trust the claims of others. That trust is based upon my understanding of the process and how that replication step is in play, that new information is always coming along, and how those claims are always subject to revision when that new information comes along.
“Trust but verify,” the saying goes. Working scientists have the ability to do that verification. I have to trust that they are.
@20 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain
Srsly? No I don’t. That was two years ago. I knew Collins had said something stupid and searched for key words along with his name, and linked a search response that included the quote I was looking for.
@21 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain
There are some topics on which no expertise exists, which I call The Theology Exclusion Clause