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A macroscopic object suddenly spawns in your room out of thin air. For instance a chair or 10 million dollars or anything else. or maybe a better example that would be more applicable would be something like : there being 0 gravity (but just exclusively inside your room) for a duration of 10 minutes. But the difficulty to come up with an example that can tease out the relevant epistemic differences between the listed hypotheses is sort of part of the problem I want to highlight. It seems to be the case, that even in the context of a random event that violates the laws of physics - even in that context - we still have almost 0 epistemic tools at our disposal how to figure out which of the listed hypotheses is more likely to be true (especially if we cant assume anything specific about the desires or nature of the powerful agent).

A good chunk of hypothesis picking will come down to abductive reasoning - So Carl, do you have any thoughts on IBE (abductive, inference to the best explanation arguments) - more specifically how to cash out different epistemic virtues when you compare two or more hypotheses? More specifically would be curious about how you approach issues like miracle claims or supernatural claims and you how update your view and whether you have some kind of sophisticated principled approach by which you can compare supernatural claims to natural claims and would be also curious by what epistemic virtues you compare hypotheses. I will give you a specific example , and if you have an answer to this, then please walk me through your reasoning and approach using IBE or your statistical worldview and show me how you assign probability and or how you decide which hypothesis is more likely to be true and why. Example: There is an event that breaks the known laws of physics and you need to pick which hypothesis is correct or more likely to be true. H1) A powerful enough agent broke the actual laws of physics H2) The actual laws of physics was never broken, we just had a wrong understanding of the actual laws of physics , so the event that we observed was consistent with the actual laws of nature. H3) The laws of physics was actually broken, but no agent caused it, and this event was brute in principle, meaning nothing caused/triggered the event and it doesnt have any further explanation in principle. (I dont think these three hypotheses exhaust the possibility space, but for the sake of not making this issue even more complex than it already is, lets just only entertain and compare these three hypotheses). Side note: There is so much more that I would want to talk about related to worldview forming and hypotheses picking and issues surrounding these things (like your views on the PSR, your potential approach about how you navigate disagreements about assigned priors to hypotheses specifically in the context of apriori arguments and more) but I dont want to overwhelm you and the earlier given example is already complex and time-consuming enough.

I like this approach, and I mostly live by this - but when it comes to applying it to meta frames and different meta-philosophy frames , it can get so complicated so fast that almost no one practice it at that level (or they might, but given that they are nowhere near informed about other alternative views and frames, their probability assignment will be meaningless and it will only represent a very small fraction of things that they know about). This is not a criticism of this approach though, because the problem I proposed is not even related to this, it is related to our cognitive limitations. Like it would be very cool if we would be able to do something like this - " Okay, currently here is 10000 different possible positions that can be taken on metaphyiscs , here is a 100 different theories in phil of language, here is 10000 different views on epistemology , here is 10000 different views on ethics - I understand each and every one of these theories in depth and let me now create a 100 million different configurations (worldviews) using these views and then let me think through all the possible problems under each and every one of these configurations and then let me come up with a synthesis that has the least amount of problems with it and let me also assign a probability to each and every one of these views "

I dont have any specific framework in mind, but fuck it, I will defend your position about wanting to have a framework. Just like some people here can make the argument how a framework can fuck conversations up, not having a framework can also fuck conversations up if you are not already skilled in having conversations. If you want to improve any skill - its good to have some structure in mind that you can use for practice and for consciously creating feedback-loops and then to eventually , hopefully integrate skills into your subconscious mind (and at that point you actually wont need any framework anymore) Btw people here failed to recognize that the reason why Ulax created this very thread was because he wanted to have a meta frame under which he can practice his convo skills and most people here failed to read your intentions and your tone, so its clear that they arent equipped and they arent suitable to give you advice about how to have convos.

Its fine , you are good, no need to apologize.

Then what was the issue with what I said? The "trash" response was a criticism to people who were writing their comments in the context of an agential God. Then we literally agree, because I take it that that phrase is almost entirely useless and vacous in the context of a non-agential God.

Given that passionate (definitely not triggered answer), you surely have good arguments and answers to my questions. Given that you go with an agential God , based on what set of values does God make his choices (for instance create the world and potentially prevent things from happening and or allow things to happen) and what does "all-good" mean under your conception of God?

You only have problem of evil, if there is a stipulation that God could prevent things from happening and or God could have made this world in a different way. Given that we exclude the mentioned agential aspects from God, then we dont have any problem of evil anymore but its also becomes the case, that the term "all good" becomes mostly a non-normative worldplay, because given this conception of God anything that happens, happens not because God has any choice about it ( so its not like God can get any credit for any of the good stuff , just like he doesnt get blamed for the bad stuff). If the agential aspects apply to God, then you have a big problem of evil and all the responses that this forum gave (that Ive seen so far) are very trash.

This is why I started with laying down the assumptions before my response so that you know what kind of position im trying to respond to and so that you know what kind of conception of God is being critiqued. If those things dont apply, then there is no problem of evil, but I dont understand what "perfection" and "infinite love" and "unbiased" means, given that the conception of God you just layed down there is non-agential and it seems that it literally cant unfold in alternative ways. So everything that happens must happen and cannot not happen and God cant do anything about it. (So its not like he can get credit for any of the good stuff ,just like given this conception, he cant get blamed for the bad stuff).

Going with the assumption that you think God had a choice about what kind of world or Universe he should create and that he can consciously change the world this is my response: You can make a conceptual distinction between the two, but I dont think that will be a relevant and good enough to reconcile the moral issues. In most cases, especially if the given event has moral weight according to you, you will do something about it, if you have the resources and power to do so (and it seems strange, that not even world wars and not even the holocaust had enough moral weight for an all powerful , all good being to lift his fingers) But sure, you can say that you arent indifferent to thousands of kids getting raped and at the same time say that you dont want to intervene - but that sounds extra strange from God's pov, who literally created a world where child rapists are running around and he can under any second change and or stop anything. But the free will response is incredibly weak for many other different reasons: First, just to flag - people literally have a higher moral standard for people, than what they have for God, because they wouldn't ever accept a response like "look dude, the reason why I didnt stop the child rapist from raping your child (even though I had the power to easily do so) is because I valued and respected his free will". Second, it makes 0 sense that God values the child rapist's free will over the children's free will who gets raped. So any time a given person violates another person's free will, it seems strange that God doesnt do shit about it, especially when one person violates multiple people's free will. Third, to your lesson response: I dont know what you learn from getting skinned alive or burned alive or tortured to death or from getting raped - but whatever hypothetical lesson is learned from there - if I know that thats what I need to drag certain sentient creatures through for them to learn that given thing, then I would be personally okay with that lesson not being learned and not allowing and or creating those state of affairs at all . Here I would also flag, that if God has the power to give you that knowledge and lesson without dragging you through those psychopathic state of affairs, then if he is all good, he would obviously pick alternative pathways. Fourth: if God is all powerful , then he could have just created a world with agents who always freely chooses to do good without any coercion. Like what stopped God from creating enlightened beings from the get-go? Fifth: Or if you think that the 4. for some reason fails - God could have just created a world, where agents can only choose from a set of good options - here your claim about coercion just simply wouldnt hold up , because you still have the ability to choose from avalaible options, its just that there just wouldnt be "rape this kid" kind of options avalaible to anyone. (But here I would flag again, that even if you think that this would somehow be coercion, I will remind you that I would personally choose this kind of "coercion" at any given time over creating a world, where I sit back and watch billions of sentient creatures ripping each other apart and eating each other and raping each other and torturing each other etc). Sixth: Even if you think that all of the above fails, for your defense to go through, you would need to argue for a position like this - From God's pov it makes the world a worse place if he stops child rapists from raping children than to let child rapists exercise their free will. I have more reasons why I think the free will response fails, but I think this is a good start for now. I think the POE is a very serious issue if you have a particular conception of God, and it is much more honest to not desperately try to generate a bunch of ad-hoc explanations and to not maintain that conception of God and to rather change it to something thats much more plausible given all the facts of this world . Enlightenment and spiritual work is compatible with a bunch of different conceptions of God and there is an underdetermination issue. For instance, in my opinion, its much more plausible that its either the case that God didnt have a choice about what world to create and or God isn't all powerful and cant change what happens in this world and or he is not all good or he doesnt even have a meta-cognition at all and he doesnt have intentions.

If you think God has an ability to stop certain things from happening and or to create this world in a different way then the indifference principle is probably one of the most dogshit response to the POE. Also curious how you guys reconcile spiral dynamics and spiritual development (however you want to track that) with the highest development being "be indifferent to the suffering of all sentient beings".

My understanding is that under his view, God is everything and God is infinite and God experiences everything and Infinity includes every possible thing and scenario (including all the good and bad stuff, and all possible configurations of how the world can be created). Under this view, its not like God has a choice not to "create" certain things, because everything is God and Infinity cant just remove certain parts of itself. So its not like other views, where a conscious agent seperate from and not identitcal with its creation, has an ability to decide what state of affairs he should create and with what kind of moral parameters. There is no problem of evil under this view, because there isnt any possible conscious deliberate choice that could prevent certain scenarios from happening, since infinity necessarily includes all possible worlds and all possible scenarios. But this is why its problematic for Leo to just randomly collect quotes that were said in a wildly different framework, because once you examine who said those things and in what framework, you immediately realize that the meaning of those statements are very different and the problem of evil takes an entirely different shape there. Under Leibinz view, God created the Universe and the Universe is not identitcal to God and since under that view God has a choice (before creation ) about what to create and not to create - under that view, Leibinz response entails that God (after contemplating about it), made the decision that the Universe needs to be created exactly as it is right now - so one less kid getting raped would make the Universe less perfect; just one less person getting burned alive would make the Universe not as perfect as it is now etc. Under Leo's view though (if im correct about God creating all possible worlds), infinity necessarily includes kids getting raped and people being burned alive and infinity cannot not include those things. But its also the case, that under this view the label "perfect" is very much vacuous. The other interpretation of Leo's view is that God doesnt create all possible worlds, but he is Good and good there doesnt mean anything other than just saying that he values everything the exact same and this is where "he has no bias" comes in. Im not sure under that view how that is different from saying God is indifferent to what happens and im also not sure why use the label "good" there. Because under this interpretation, the term "Good" is completely vacuous , because it is compatible with creating and or allowing any given state of affairs. Its also useful to mention that he sometimes equivocates between action guiding good and non-action guiding good. But yeah, you only have POE (problem of evil) if God has a choice about what to create and or if God has a choice about what actions and state of affairs he allows to happen in the world.

Because he didnt lose just by a little, he lost by a lot and there if you try to do the "it was stolen" move - with that move you also undermine and render all of your previous 4 landslides (from 2010 - 2022) potentially illegitimate, because the implication is that even when the numbers says that a party won with a landslide (with a supermajority where you have so much power) even in those cases it can be rigged at a relevant enough scale. With a supermajority you can do stuff like: Amend or adopt a new Constitution (called the Fundamental Law in Hungary) Pass or modify cardinal laws (laws that require a two-thirds majority), such as: the electoral system rules of the judiciary Appoint key officials, for example: members of the Constitutional Court the Prosecutor General heads of media authorities Make major changes to how the state and its institutions function And now given all of that, imagine that you would need to somehow tell a story that even though you had supermajority for 16 years and you had the power to make elections more safe, you still left elections structurally vulnerable enough so that they can be rigged at this scale. Its also not a good move for other reasons, because there is evidence that fidesz did buy votes (and we are talking about handing out money to some voters in some cases, in other cases handing out bags with food and other stuff, in other cases just literally buying shots and alcohol to some people) and if you try to do big investigations now, you are going to expose your own corrupt bs - these kinds of moves worked well against mostly uneducated and really poor people in places, where usually less than 2k but in other cases less than 1k people live. And because even small towns and villages can play an important role (due to how mandates are allocated), they can sometimes determine whether a party achieves a supermajority or falls short of it.

They can be an epistemic failure, but this is why the talk should rather be about how to make sense of events better and how to distinguish real conspiracy theories from false ones. I wont do this, but my personal approach would be something like: 1) Lets take systematically all the conspiracy theories that actually turned out to be true and deeply analyze them structurally and try to extract common patterns from them. 2) After that, lets go back in time, and try to think about what better epistemic approach(es) could have been used to recognize that the given conspiracy theory is plausibly true and or worth deeper investigation (given all the avalaible info and tools and all the alternative hypotheses back then) 3) After that check how many false positives ( by false positive here I just mean - generating a conclusion that there is a conspiracy when there isn't one) would your updated epistemic approach generate about other known historical events that we already have a more plausible/better answer and or theory for. So develop an approach by which you can recognize and differentiate (hopefully in a reliable way) true conspiracies from false ones and integrate that approach within a higher order weighing system - where you compare, study and entertain a bunch of other alternative theories for any given event in question (by alternative theory here , I just mean theories that are not conspiracy theories). I understand your frustration (if you try to target people who are so naive and biased that they never ever entertain any conspiracy theory no matter how much evidence is presented), but on the other hand, you need to understand and acknowledge that dismissing most conspiracy theorists as a heruistic can be reasonable and understandable given some of the reasons you already layed down - limited resources, time, information and having negative priors about most conspiracy theorists (where most of their claims turn out to be false or unsubstantiated and most of them are generally uneducated about the subject they try to talk about) . This is not to say that there isn't any room for epistemic improvement (when it comes to how to approach conspiracy theories and people who bring up conspiracy theories) , but this is to say that you shouldnt have an unreasonable standard for people and for institutions. Because, just like we cant expect every single criminal case to be perfectly solved (given all of our limitations), we also cant expect people and institutions to recognize every single legit conspiracy theory when there is one. But I think its fine for you to push people to update their priors about conspiracy theories and about conspiracy theorists so that they dont just categorically reject all conspiracy theories.

@Ramasta9 Since you think that the covid vaccines (or "jabs" as you would label it) were really bad and were part of some big global scale malicious collaboration - what do you think about the promotion and the distribution of the Sputnik vaccine (and if you are categorically against all vaccines, since you have the habit of vaguely gesturing towards "unnatural" things being bad - what do you think about all the other vaccines that were created by Russia) ? And how do you navigate disagreements, when your organic nature disagrees with another vibes based politics organic nature? In those cases, why do you conclude that your vibes are more accurate compared to the the vibes that the other person has?

@Socrates This isnt to undermine the meat of your point, this is to ask a very specific question - do you think it is always irrational to outsource validation to others? For instance, after recognizing that you have basically 0 domain knowledge about a particular field, do you think its better to rely on your validation (even though you dont even know what standards you should even apply or how you should even conceptualize and create a hierarchy of evidence about that given field or what facts are even relevant) than to rely on the consensus of domain experts?

@LastThursday Interesting, engaging talk, thanks. Also appreciate that you actually engaged with my points in good faith.

Well because of the reasons you layed down and because law is complicated and the definitions there even though are much more precise compared to other domains, they are still not defined with as much precision that would narrow down the possible interpretations to 1 (and thats probably good). its also the case that we cant exhaustively think through all possible combinations beforehand about how a given crime could occur and how it should be handled, so pragmatically there needs to be a jury who can navigate the messy cases within the bounds of reasonable interpretations and law. its also the case that law is extremely context sensitive and there are a bunch of issues with trying to capture that context in higher order rules (because there is necessary info loss about context and there are epistemic issues that we already talked about - in this case , issue about how you need to interpret and apply the higher order rules given a specific case) I agree that our minds are naturally messy (our pre-theoretic usage and understanding of logic is different from prop logic, but I would argue that rules of inference captures our pre theoretic notion of deduction quite well), but in any case, I dont see how what thing produced the given logic is relevant. I also dont think this is a prop logic issue, because no jury formally uses any kind of fuzzy logic or any non-conventional logic either. I think the issues surrounding this has to do more with how precisely defined a given proposition is (and thats gonna be an issue for all kinds of logics, although you might argue that the degree to which lack of precision is gonna be a problem will differ from logic to logic). Not sure what you mean by circularity issue or how that is a unique issue to prop logic.

That would be an equivocation on the term 'rape' though. Once it is layed down what is exactly meant by the term, after that the only hurdle is getting informed about the case and checking whether the defined conditions were met or not. I agree that it can be an issue, but once it is specified what was the intended meaning and interpretation when the sentence was used, then you can narrow down the possible interpretations. I take it that once you go with a different interpretation, you are not really engaging with the same proposition anymore, because the misinterpretation you go with creates new meaning for the exact same sentence and with that you tackle an entirely different proposition. I dont reject the the law of excluded middle, and I dont do fuzzly logic stuff (unless there is really a case that classical logic cant handle). What you describe there is what I would label again as just an epistemic problem - in this specific case related to not giving a precise enough definition and or not being informed enough about the case (but once those conditions are layed down and met I dont see why couldnt the proposition be handled in a binary way). I find the problem about "which logic should I use here" to be just a representation problem (in this case) , and not anything more significant than that. You can represent and express the exact same proposition under multiple different kind of logics, where you capture and maintain the exact same meaning. But in any case, I think we agree on the thing that I cared about and I wanted us to agree on - and that has to do with the fact that a propositions truth value will be univocally shared given the assumption that all the epistemic issues are resolved (agents are perfectly informed, have the exact same interpretation , use the exact same logic to assing truth value etc).

Matt has largely new atheist, science dicksucking views - One of his misconceptions is largely underestimating how much testimonial evidence is actually involved in science and how much trust it necessarily relies on (including social, judicial,financial, cultural pressures and incentives and institutions) for it to work on a global scale. Once you remove all the previously mentioned shit, you will either have to trust things on blind faith or you have to literally validate everything on your own (including every single occurence of a peer-review cause you cant just take an institution's or a scientist's word for it ; including every single past experiment that were done, because how do you actually know and can make sure that those were actually done; and every single fact that science books mention about physics , biology, chemistry etc). Yeah scientist do experiments and validate things and peer review things etc, but with the large set of caveats that I previously mentioned. If you take a single scientist, that scientist will necessarily need to take a large set of things for granted (involving experiments that were done in the past, including peer reviews that were allegedly done by other scientist and institutions, including the accuracy of the content in science books etc). A single scientist will only validate a fraction of a fraction of those things. And relying on those previously mentioned structures go much deeper. You cant even do experiments without them - for instance, if you are a scientist who wants to run an experiment on patients, even there you need to somewhat rely on the patients collectively not fucking you up and trolling you by taking some pills before the experiment (without you knowing about it) and other institutions providing accurate medical data about your patients etc. -- So then how can science work? Science works relatively well on a global scale, because of the checks and balances and because of the values and motivation that the previously mentioned social, judicial, financial, cultural structures and institutions provide - Those structures make and incentivise scientists to generally provide honest and accurate testimonials and feedback about the experiments they do, about the peer-reviews they do, and about the data they provide , about content that they write down in science books and about the way they teach next generations.

@LastThursday So lets check what we disagree on. Reading back some of the stuff that you said - you seem to agree with me on the distinction between what is propositionalized (Existence) and a proposition of Existence. When I said that proposition (X) is true about the rape case (independent from the jury's knowledge about it), there what I meant was that if the jury would have known all the info surrounding the case, then he/she would have realized that proposition(X) is true. This is also what I meant by there being a fact of the matter about proposition (X). It just means that assuming that you are perfectly informed about the rape case, you will say that proposition (X) is true. The question related to this issue given your paradigm is just this: Do you agree that all perfectly informed agents would give a univocal "its true" answer to the question "Is proposition (X) true or false?"

The difference between a thing and a description of a thing. The difference between a thing that is interpreted and an interpretation of said thing. The difference between the thing that is modelled and your model of said thing. The difference between the thing that is propositionalized and a proposition of said thing. -- Whatever you meant in your earlier statement by the structure of reality is what I meant by behavior of nature. All im saying is that prior to modelling or interpreting or propositionalizing or making a description of the structure of reality , there is the structure of reality.

Lets clear up what you actually mean by that and what that entails. There is an interpretation of that statement that is sensible to me , but there is another that isn't sensible at all. Given how you intended to mean that statement - does that mean that if I think I can fly, then that actually makes it so that I can fly? I also think there might be an equivocation and misinterpretation on the sentence "laws of physics" - I meant the behavior of nature and I didnt mean our modelling of nature. It has nothing to do with what my paradigm allows or doesnt allow and it has everything to do with that sentence not being intelligible to me. It might be a sensible and coherent statement and view, I just dont understand what 'propositions existing' mean.

No the content of the proposition can make it time relatively true or false. Getting back to the rape case, we can add and explicate time relative facts to the case and that way the truth value of said proposition can change if you change the content about time. I dont know what it means for a proposition to exist, but regardless I take it that it doesnt depend on that, what matters is the content that the proposition relates/corresponds to. The laws of physics exists before you become conscious of the laws of physics or before anyone utters any proposition about the laws of physics. There are facts of the matter about the laws of physics independent from your knowledge of it. It might be the case, that you dont know anything about the laws of physics , but thats just a statement about knowledge, but that doesnt change anything about the laws of physics. That is compatible with what I am saying. For instance, you can make propositions where the content of said proposition is something about the future, and those propositions doesnt have any truth value yet. Still disagree, thats an epistemic issue not a metaphysics issue . Gravity still works even if you are unconscious of it. Your epistemic limitation or your lack of knoweldge doesnt change any fact about gravity.