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Greta Christina on angry atheists

Reasonably fun to watch the presenter is kind of likeable, if a bit nerdy. However it is darkartsy and I disagree with a few minor points.

I disagreed with the bit at 27:40 about the supposed unique badness of religion since any free floating that's basically a tribal marker is similarly insulated, especially anything that's extensively used by a professional class who basically make a living of reinterpreting it and do so from a position of authority. To take the most extreme case, there is no reason North Korean ideology needs ever show any results or proof in favour of its tenets, all that one needs for it to persist is to be self-sustaining. She does partially address this later at 29:40, but I don't think she's ever been faced with the best possible version of that argument.

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Video: Skepticon talks

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Nov 26, 2011

The talks from Skepticon IV are being posted to YouTube.

So far we have:

Richard Carrier on Bayes (my favorite)
Julia Galef on the Straw Vulcan
Greta Christina on angry atheists
Hermant Mehta on math education
David Fitzgerald on Mormonism
J.T. Eberhard on mental illness (a dramatic end to the conference)
an "atheist revival" by Sam Singleton (on the lighter side)

ADDED:

"Death Panel" featuring Julia Galef, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Greta Christina, and James Croft
Darrel Ray on secularism and sex
Eliezer Yudkowsky on heuristics and biases (really more like a crash course in the core LW sequences)
Joe Nickell on paranormal investigations (I missed this at the conference; and even more regrettably, missed the chance to ask Joe Nickell what he thinks of many-worlds.)
Jen McCreight on "skeptical genetics" (the other talk I missed)
Rebecca Watson on the religious right
Spencer Greenberg on self-skepticism
Dan Barker on atheist clergy

More to come soon, hopefully...

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Expect the next batch on Monday, including the panel on death (lovingly dubbed the atheist death panel by the moderator, Jesse Galef) featuring Eliezer Yudkowsky, Greta Christina, Julia Galef, and James Croft!

It's possible that they'll be up sooner, but as far as I understand it, our videographer (Rob Lehr) is taking a well-deserved break.

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Yay, the "death panel" was my favorite. I had a great time, thanks for organizing the event!

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Eliezer from the Death panel talk:

Yehuda Yudkowsky is dead. There is nothing left of him. He does not live on in me. He's dead. That's all. And maybe some day I'll contribute to laying the reaper, if not forever then at least for a few billion years. And maybe then I'll feel better, or maybe I wont. But the point is I'm not conflicted; I know what I'm doing about it. And it's all right to feel the same way, despite all the people telling you about ways to come to terms with death. It's all right to say "No, I wont come to terms with it. It's just evil."

This made me want to get up and cheer.

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The videos I've seen so far have all been great! If there are any videos you'd like transcribed, post a request as a comment to this. If the request is already posted, upvote it. (If you say "all of them" I will scowl menacingly in your general direction)

I'm about a third of the way through transcribing Straw Vulcan. It will be up Monday at the latest, but probably earlier. If there are any other Skepticon videos that have at least 3 people wanting them, I'll transcribe them next, starting with the most popular.

I'll commit to doing the 4 most popular. (I don't want to commit to doing all the vids with 3+ votes, because for all I know that would be all of them, lol!)

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Richard Carrier on Bayes

As would this.

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I'm most curious about the death panel.

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Greta Christina on angry atheists

The comments on the place of anger in a "social change movement" at 35:40 just got me laughing. Yes let's cherry pick all the social change movements that won or at least haven't yet been clearly defeated and the audience happens to mostly agree with! Hm I really can't imagine any angry "social change" movements that failed or I didn't like in the ... oh ... past 200 years.

Nope.

Getting a blank here.

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She also really annoyed me in the death talk. She kept mentioning advantages atheists have over religious people, like that when it comes down to it we're less afraid of death. It seemed like she was just cheering for her (and my) team. But I'm not an atheist because it has social benefits or might be better for my mental heath. I'm an atheist because I think the religions are wrong. If there are benefits to being an atheist that doesn't make it more right to be one; the social benefits of religions certainly don't make them more true.

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42:20 seems to be almost offering itself as a pedagogical example, lets do an exercise together:

angry [demographic X here]

Think of 10 examples by yourself. Now think about the implications. Overall my assessment is that this is a good pro-atheist pep talk, a neat catalogue of applause lights but it has very little if any rationalist value. Now you might ask me: "But Konkvistador was it supposed to have rationalist value?"

Why, yes. Yes it was.

Or rather it should have been a good source of tips to help improve our instrumental rationality to promote a sane beliefs (which happens to be atheism). I understand the need to do politics and rallies, the value of such a talk is basically purely entertainment, an ingroup ritual to keep people around for some boring stuff.

Too bad, lots of people can do that. In the long run a serious analysis of "angry atheism" would do the spread of atheist beliefs (though not necessarily the movement of atheism) more good.

Note: By which I don't mean to imply it is necessarily the wrong approach, just that rational analysis of it is practically non-existant, due to rational religious people being unreliable due to tribal loyalties and activist atheist being unreliable due to ... tribal loyalties.

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Overall my assessment is that this is a good pro-atheist pep talk, a neat catalogue of applause lights but it has very little if any rationalist value.

It may be a good pep talk for her co-ideologists, but from the outside it looks like straight-out ideological warfare, which of course it actually is. Unsurprisingly, like nearly all such material, its reasoning is full of holes big enough to drive a truck through. (The stuff you pointed out is only the tip of the iceberg.)

If anything, this should be evident from the fact that she makes a number of highly controversial ideological statements about current issues -- which I'm sure many people here would in fact dispute or at least consider as lacking in evidence -- as plain and common-sense truth, to an enthusiastic response by the audience.

I think it's indicative of some deep biases that this stuff, unlike ideological rants in general, can be posted on LW with general approval.

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I should have made it more clear that I was using "pro-atheist" in the sense of the organized atheist movement. And yes obviously that movement is ideological. Worse for quality of thinking, it is political, in the sense that it has some clearly defined political allies (and also enemies).

I think it's indicative of some deep biases that this stuff, unlike ideological rants in general, can be posted on LW with general approval

Remember it wasn't posted separately, just as a batch of stuff from Skepticon. I doubt that many people from LW have seen it.

But yes some blatantly ideological material gets a free pass or at least much less scrutiny than is warranted (such threads show up in discussion once every week or two) because of the demographics of Lesswrong. Like any group of people we bring our politics with us at least implicitly (even if it is explicitly banished), which translates into ideological sympathies and the vocabulary of applause lights we use and recognize.

In addition most users here have a warm fuzzy feeling when they hear atheism, which might mean they misidentify to which contrarian cluster someone actually belongs to.

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Also, another bias (or rather, a whole huge complex of biases) that I see as even more problematic is the choice of targets of these "skeptic" luminaries. Looking through the website of their conference and the list of speakers, I see people who attack traditional religion and various low-status folk superstitions, many of whom also promote ideological positions of the sorts that tend to have high status among academics and other respectable intellectuals. I haven't see anything, however, about skepticism towards various falsities and biases that enjoy high status and official approval under the present academic system. Unless we are so lucky nowadays that no such things exist -- a proposition that seems plainly false to me -- I can't help but conclude that the whole enterprise ends up as a farcical parody of "skepticism."

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Two potential counterexamples to keep in mind: (1) Yudkowsky's pro-cryonics and generally anti-death stance, as evidenced in the "death panel" discussion (which hasn't been posted yet, but his views are anyway familiar to regular readers of LW); and (2) J.T. Eberhard's (very personal) discussion of mental illness, which (except for certain fashionable exceptions, and despite occasional rhetoric you may hear from time to time) actually remains quite low-status virtually everywhere, elite intellectual communities included.

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The organized skeptical movement is aimed primarily at improving critical thinking among the general public. In LW terminology, this is about raising the sanity waterline about things like religion, astrology, and homeopathy. Given how much money is spent on such things, that's a useful goal even from a simple naive utilitarian perspective.

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Wow, James Croft singing excerpts from Rent...what the fuck was that about?

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A lot of people (judging exclusively by this comment) didn't like Eliezer's talk at the Singularity Summit, but I thought this one was good. I don't think any of it will be new most LW-ers, but it was interesting, and funny, and probably introduced a lot of new ideas to the audience there. The only other talk I've watched so far was the Dan Barker one, which I also thought was good.

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Eliezer's talk has been posted.

I liked it, but there are a number of things that could have been a lot better:

There were way too many digressions. Though subsequences work well in writing, it's hard to follow a chain of reasoning that jumps between levels. Though the stories about peoples' strange opinions at dinner parties were illustrative, some of them go on for way too long. Likewise, recursing into reductionism then recursing into Bayesian Judo and then popping back out into the discussion of Occam's Razor was a bit confusing because so much time was spent on those topics that I forgot it was a digression.
There was a little too much meta. Talking about the talk, and talking about how Richard Carrier's talk should have come first, is off-putting and not useful.
More cognitive science examples might have helped. One of the most interesting and engaging parts of the talk was the beginning, in which the audience was given the red/green die test. More "DIY" examples of cognitive biases may have helped stress that skeptics are also prone to these errors. For example, the hindsight bias test from David Meyers might have helped to drive home that part of the talk. (On that note, why is the talk called "Heuristics and Biases"? It was really about Occam's Razor.)
And for the love of Cthulhu, beta-test the jokes. A lot of them just aren't funny, the most awkward one being "Good thing I'm not a god...yet." The "Bayesian Hell" joke also went on way too long, i.e. well past the point where the audience stopped laughing. In addition, there was a little too much arrogance in some of the jokes. For example: "I must have been divinely inspired, because I said, without any forethought whatsoever, I said..."

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Greta Christina on angry atheists

Reasonably fun to watch the presenter is kind of likeable, if a bit nerdy. However it is darkartsy and I disagree with a few minor points.

I disagreed with the bit at 27:40 about the supposed unique badness of religion since any free floating that's basically a tribal marker is similarly insulated, especially anything that's extensively used by a professional class who basically make a living of reinterpreting it and do so from a position of authority. To take the most extreme case, there is no reason North Korean ideology needs ever show any results or proof in favour of its tenets, all that one needs for it to persist is to be self-sustaining. She does partially address this later at 29:40, but I don't think she's ever been faced with the best possible version of that argument.

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I disagreed with the bit at 27:40 about the supposed unique badness of religion since any free floating that's basically a tribal marker is similarly insulated, especially anything that's extensively used by a professional class who basically make a living of reinterpreting it and do so from a position of authority. [...] She does partially address this later at 29:40, but I don't think she's ever been faced with the best possible version of that argument.

I think you're being much too charitable here. The critical assumption in her argument is that ideological delusions can normally be successfully confronted by pointing to empirical evidence of their practical failures. However, this is completely wrong. In practice, it is very rare that we have clear enough natural experiments that enable us to present such evidence in a clear and convincing form. Even when such natural experiments exist in a striking form, as it was in the case of communism, ideological partisans usually have little difficulty rationalizing them away in practice.

When they don't exist, as is typically the case, it is normally impossible to move the public opinion towards greater accuracy with empirical evidence of failure, since any such evidence can be discounted by disputing the counterfactual. For example, disasters brought by irresponsible government guided by crackpot economic theories are easily excused by arguing that things would have been even worse without the enlightened guidance of these theories, and the cause of the problems is the insufficient purity of our sticking to them (perhaps along with some regrettable mistakes in execution).

The speaker herself confirms this with her concrete examples. To me it seems pretty clear that she responds to some evident failures of ideology in recent times by (pretty much) doubling down on the ideology, and she's nowhere close to examining its problematic fundamental tenets -- such examination being simply unthinkable for her.

(I understand that this last statement is controversial, and normally I would not open such topics here, but I think it's justified given that this talk has already been made the subject of discussion.)

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If I am not incorrect, Amanda Marcotte was a speaker at last year's Skepticon? The skepticism movement creates some strange alliances.

Also, on an unrelated note, the Yudkowsky pony is quite nice:

http://johnnykaje.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/skepticon-ponies-the-final-hour/

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Transcript of Julia's talk.

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