teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pm
The ontological argument for the existence of God is wrong because it commits the equivocation fallacy (something being conceivable in the sense of being easy to imagine, with something being conceivable in the sense of existing in some possible world), not because it doesn't rely on any empirical data, right?
Yes, but that's only one argument for a god which can be rejected. There are other arguments for a god, and my point is that you often don't know what you don't know. What if there WAS empirical evidence for a god that you simply didn't understand or weren't aware of because you lacked the proper education in theology?
It's a mistake to dismiss an entire field because there's one bad argument there.
Now if you ask for arguments for years and you only get bad ones that are easily dismissed, and theologians say they don't know of any other arguments and confirm to you that there's no scientific evidence (telling you not to put god to the test) and confirm it's based on faith, then you can more reasonably dismiss the field.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pm
So, when somebody makes claims that seem not to be falsifiable, it's not the right thing to do to be skeptical of those claims?
Skeptical is fine, but outright rejection without being aware is less substantiated.
Now, you CAN look at the field the claim is coming from and use
induction to reason that because the hundreds of other arguments you've found in the field and that experts have supported as their best arguments are bad, that this argument probably is bad too. It's not a "probably" you can put a p-value too, but it can inform your practical relationship to the issue.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pm
What about, for example, Christian Science? They claim their beliefs are based on proofs, rather than opinion and dogmas. Is it therefore somehow more reasonable to believe them than it is to believe theology?
Well it is theology. And here we can look at experts in theology: if indeed there were evidence for this, wouldn't it have caught on more? And yet the arguments theologians present as their best remain bad ones, and without good evidence.
Consensus in theology is basically to support bad arguments or lean entirely on faith and personal feelings.
We can accept the consensus that those are their best arguments, and then reject those arguments as bad due to the logical fallacies they contain.
If they did have actual evidence and wanted to break from theology into an empirical science, they could publish in a peer reviewed medical journal.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pm
brimstoneSalad wrote:Rejecting wave/particle duality would be like flat-Earthism, though.
How exactly? There is nothing like the "Ships appear to sink when going over the horizon."-proof of the Earth being round to prove wave-particle-duality, right? I mean, yeah, there are everyday "proofs" of quantum entanglement such as the one with three polarizing filters, and there are everyday proofs of the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle such as one that the light appears to disperse when going through a small enough slit, but none of that screams that the quantum mechanics is true nearly as much as the sinking-ship illusion screams that the Earth is round.
There is: double-slit. And you mentioned it. The fact you don't find it to be as convincing a proof of wave-particle duality as ships going over the horizon is of the round Earth suggests you don't understand the experiments very well.
You just need to spend more time with this subject.
This is what I'm saying: you can't develop credible confidence in something based on your limited understanding, you should lean on experts.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmAt best, you can put quantum mechanics denial in the same category as denying that Armenian is distantly related to other Indo-European languages: it can be proved, but you need to have some specialized knowledge to understand the proof.
No, not even remotely. Again, Linguistics is a soft science, and skepticism of it is more reasonable.
That doesn't mean that soft sciences are wrong or should be dismissed, but categorically denying them is not on the same order of magnitude as denying hard sciences.
It IS unreasonable to simply deny what professional linguists say about languages, and as I said many times by now I accept whatever the professional consensus is by default, but this isn't the same as denying physics.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmbrimstoneSalad wrote:You can look at professional work to give you a better understanding.
Don't you think you are asking a little too much of me?
You're the one who made the original claim that you understand hard sciences based on your involvement in a soft science. So no, unless you want to take back that claim I do not think it's asking too much of you.
You simply can not assume you understand scientific methodology in physics based on understanding a softer cousin of that methodology.
You made a bold and inaccurate claim and you got called out on it.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pm
brimstoneSalad wrote: That's a mathematics issue. You'll have to take more advanced math classes. Are you not in calculus?
[...]I got a C in it.
OK, well, I can't tutor you in mathematics. This explains a lot of why you don't understand physics. You need to have math down SOLID first.
You need to try harder in math if you want to understand harder sciences. If you don't, just don't claim to understand them and tentatively accept what experts say instead. You don't HAVE TO personally understand them to have confidence in expert consensus.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmIf I cannot evaluate the claims the physics makes, chances are, nobody really can. They are effectively unfalsifiable partly because it takes a very deep understanding of mathematics to actually test them.
WOW. The arrogance on this one. "If I in all my massive intellect can't understand it, basically nobody can!"
No, it's not that complicated, you're just being lazy. Or maybe you have a bad Math teacher who didn't explain this stuff properly.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmbrimstoneSalad wrote: Well, linguistics is more intuitive because we have a lot of wetware for it, and we've also spent our lives passively learning it.
I don't think we've spent our lives passively learning about sound laws. What makes you think some parts of our brain evolved specifically for language learning?
Maybe not passively learning sound laws for historical change (unless we've heard some old English or something, which isn't that unlikely), but language generally yes.
As to evolution: really basic neuroscience. There are specific areas of the brain that evolved to deal with language.
It's hard to say the extent of what people pick up subconsciously, but language is one of the big ones. That said you don't just know Japanese or something because you watched a bunch of Anime, but you might *recognize* it by the sounds and be able to distinguish it from other languages. You can get a feel for the way it sounds which is far superior to guessing.
You can test this if you want. Find an anime fan who only knows a couple words of Japanese and none of another language (Like Spanish or something), and expose the person to sound clips of each that exclude the few words he or she knows. You'll likely find that the person can tell which language is which with a rate of success that far exceeds random guessing.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmEven in medieval times, English phonology was changing rather fast despite a relatively high literacy rate (medieval writers often complained about English spelling not matching pronunciation).
What do you consider a high literacy rate?
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmDo you have any doubt in your head that those who used Latin were interested in preserving the language?
I don't think most people are interested in preserving their languages, more they're lazy and want things to be easy to say. Look at how generally poor enunciation is for anybody who isn't a newscaster.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmSimilarly, the sound changes described by the Havlik's law affected all Slavic languages and all their dialects, presumably because the phonology of the ancient Slavic languages begged for something like that to happen
Phonology isn't begging anything; it's not a sentient being. It's humans making the changes.
Of course I know what you're saying, but in any of these cases it's matters of how language cognition works, and human laziness and conscious or unconscious preference driving everything. Humans are changing language collectively.
It may work more like a Ouija board, where everybody is pushing the pointer to spell out words together, and yet nobody thinks he or she is doing it.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pm
Regardless, that is irrelevant here. Sound changes happen no matter what. Denying that makes you linguistically illiterate, much like denying the law of supply and demand makes you economically illiterate.
That's as stupid as saying "Rocks fall no matter what" because gravity. No, whatever drives changes can be counteracted by other forces that can act against it. A rock can be stopped from falling by support, whether physical barriers, magnetic levitation, whatever. Sound changes can clearly be stopped by enforcing pronunciation across generations, particularly using audio recordings. Without audio recordings obviously it's nearly impossible to tell when subtle changes have happened thus very difficult to correct for them. There's no reason to believe humans today could not impede, stop, or even reverse sound changes if we really wanted to. Belief to the contrary seems to suggest you think whatever is driving this has god-like powers and is an unstoppable force, which makes you worse than illiterate: it makes you a dogmatist.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmAnd why do you consider "Before FDA, all you had was snake oil." or "Before the government, the genocides were incredibly common." to be valid arguments, when THOSE arguments scream "There are other factors.".
There are other factors there too, but those are the most reasonable default assumptions.
You don't seem to be getting this through your head:
I TENTATIVELY ACCEPT THE CLAIMS OF LINGUISTICS.
I TENTATIVELY ACCEPT THE CLAIMS OF LINGUISTICS.
I TENTATIVELY ACCEPT THE CLAIMS OF LINGUISTICS.
I do not deny these things, because there's no good alternative theory and the experts are more likely right than any guess I could make.
That doesn't stop it from being a soft science.
And if you want to say political science is soft too? Yeah, obviously it is. But we should still accept these things for lack of something more credible.
You have something stuck in your head that we must either fully accept something as a hard science, or deny it completely and lean on whatever other wacky notion we prefer. The world is not black and white like that.
Sometimes it's most reasonable to accept something that has limited evidence despite those limitations because there's no better option.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmJust like socialists keep insisting socialism hasn't been tested, when it clearly has been and it failed every time.
It depends on the system. A lot of forms and policies haven't been tested. I think I'll ask
@NonZeroSum to respond to that if he can, though, since he's more into politics than I am.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pm
Neuroscientists who talk about linguistics are not to be trusted,
If they are truly speaking without any knowledge of linguistics, they may be, but that's quite different from this:
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmJust like Brian Josephson, a Nobel-prize winning theoretical physicists, makes claims about neuroscience, that is about how quantum mechanics makes psychic powers possible.
Neuroscience actually deals a lot with cognition of language. I don't know what Josephson was claiming, but it's very likely that he misunderstands quantum mechanics if he claimed anything like that. Nothing in QM makes anything like psychic powers possible. This is true for machines too, not just neuroscience... so the neuroscience part is kind of irrelevant.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmAnd social sciences are even less related to natural sciences than various natural sciences are related to each other.
No and no. Neuroscience deals deeply in language and cognition and is actually much closer to linguistics than physics is to neuroscience.
This is again your unfortunate level of ignorance of these sciences. But again, if this Josephson claimed something about psychic powers it's more likely that he's wrong about the physics and it has nothing to do with his ignorance of neuroscience.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmMuch like if somebody uses quantum mechanics to explain something about neuroscience, he is most likely wrong
No, not really. He's just wrong about the quantum mechanics... so he failed way before he got to neuroscience.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmso too is somebody who uses neuroscience to explain something about linguistics probably wrong.
If the methodology was sound, no, probably not.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmYou want to tell me Chinese language makes people think more with the right hemisphere of their brains, and English makes people think more with the left hemispheres of their brains? Shut the hell up!
You could possibly make an experiment to test this, but it would be very hard to control for variables in culture and upbringing.
Getting people to have exactly the same experiences in everything else but language would be pretty much inconceivable, since you'd need to control people's lives from childhood (Truman show level stuff).
And that makes such suggestions soft science: the failure to control for variables and get good data.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmThe real question is how it can even be tested. Phonosemantic hypotheses appear to make two implications:
1) You can guess the meanings of the words in unrelated languages by examining the sounds alone, at a rate significantly greater than chance.
This is practically unfalsifiable because it's very hard to quantify how close a guessed meaning is to the real meaning of that word.
Right! And that's all you need to show it's a soft science kind of claim until they show how this can be quantified.
We have good reason to reject these particular claims as non-rigorous.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmWhat about it actually? And, by the way, I tried and failed to see that. If I cross my eyes so that the plus sign in the blue square is on the top of the one in the yellow square, I just see a square randomly turning blue and yellow.
Not everybody sees every illusion, the brain has multiple ways of resolving stuff. One is oscillating between colors, the other is mixing them.
Here's a more recent one that's more reliable:
https://www.sciencealert.com/strange-op ... -blindness
But as I've said, neuroscience is also softer then chemistry, which is softer than physics. Science exists in a hierarchy of hardness and softness.
If you want to make the case that linguistics is a harder science than neuroscience, you can try to do that. Close ties can be arguable. But if you want to make the case that linguistics is as hard as physics you're just turning yourself into a joke.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmPerhaps some would. But theologians studying Buddhism would agree with you. There is no consensus among theologians that a god exists.
Plenty of Buddhists use the word "god", but weak consensus is one thing that suggests it's not a science, although you could repeat the same about something "supernatural" or transcendent.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmWhat's the ad-hoc explanation there? It's the self-correcting nature of science.
Self correction requires experimental verification, otherwise we're just talking about ad hoc changes to hypotheses that can't be verified or can only rarely be verified.
I know you can find examples of verification, which is why linguistics is a soft science rather than not a science at all.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmI thought those surveys almost always give the results that are indistinguishable from guessing
No, surveys can be pretty well done and are generally predictive. Fivethirtyeight does a good job at explaining statistics as applies to these issues:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmOf course it should. If you accept something that you misunderstood as true, your model of reality will be worse because of that, and not better.
You did not know you misunderstood it; you thought you understood it.
You have no access to the fact of whether you have a real understanding or a misunderstanding: that's my point.
Thinking you understand something is not a great reason to be more confident in it.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmIt seems like you are being willfully ignorant about it.
What these laws are isn't really relevant. The question is the degree to which they're merely descriptive or really predictive, and if the latter how they're experimentally verified. That's it. The details don't matter to the broad strokes of how hard the science is.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmbrimstoneSalad wrote:Explaining is not always predicting, is it?
Well, yes. But if all you value are predictions, you can often predict what a word would sound like in some Slavic language by taking a
Lithuanian word and applying the sound laws to it.
You aren't understanding, if the sound laws were developed descriptively based on those differences then they're made to purpose, an algorithm that of course works in reverse. That doesn't make it predictive.
It's like if we looked at English and Pig-Latin, and derived the sound law that works between them.
Given English can you apply the law to "predict" what the Pig-Latin word will be? You can work it out, but it's not prediction because the law was formed in full knowledge of both.
teo123 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2019 1:24 pmHow is linguistics pretty far on it? I don't see how you can say something like that. When has economics ever predicted anything? And when has sociology ever predicted anything? It's a field incredibly polluted by political agendas such as feminism. And social psychology is incredibly polluted by "experiments" and "observations" that are nothing but p-hacking.
Can you at least acknowledge that it's softer than physics and chemistry?
That would be a start. If you can't even admit that, I don't know what to tell you.
Also, I said clinical psychology is harder than linguistics. You could make an argument that sociology and social psychology are likely on par, or may even be softer than linguistics since there may be more currently impossible to control for variables.
We've already discussed Economics.