bill Maher Vs. Bart Ehrman on Jesus

Bill Maher says in an interview with Larry King,

I don't think Jesus lived. The more I read about it the more I think I'm not sure there was even a historical Jesus.

Here is New Testament Scholar and atheist Bart Ehrman on the existence of Jesus:

“Despite the enormous range of opinion, there are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea” (p. 12).

Scott Alexander on Conflict Vs. Mistake

Here's an old post from Scott Alexander; Conflict Theory vs. Mistake Theory

Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects. 

Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.

 Mistake Theory:

• Treats politics like science
• View debate as essential
• Treats sides as symmetrical
• Worry about complicated effects of social engineering
• Think you can save the world by increasing intelligence
• Think passion is inadequate or even suspect
• Plays role as arbiter of debate
• Evaluates arguments
• Thinks racism is a cognitive bias
• Criticize democracy over too much power to average person
• Thinks revolution is stupid
• Thinks conflict theorists are making a mistake

Conflict Theory:

• Treats politics like war
• View debate as less important
• Treats sides as asymmetrical
• Thinks the effects of social engineering are more obvious
• Think you can save the world by increasing passion
• Think intelligence is inadequate or even suspect
• Plays role as participant in debate
• Evaluates people (friends/enemies like Koch Brothers/ George Soros)
• Thinks racism is a conflict between races
• Criticize democracy over too little power to average person
• Thinks technocracy is stupid
• Think mistake theorists are the enemy in their conflict

Political Tribes of America

Political feeds can give us the impression that the world is filled with people we don't like. We're immersed with every someone-somewhere-did-something story of the other side being awful. Our intuitions fail to represent an example of 1 among a 340,000,000 others with proper proportion.

To get a better handle on what the general population really looks like, read report Hidden Tribes: A Study of America's Polarized Landscape

They identify 7 groups outlined by their core beliefs, alongside percentage of the population that group consists of. Progressive Activists, traditional conservatives, and Devoted conservatives are identified as wings. I find the finer grain of detail beyond the usual left-right spectrum helpful and reassuring.

Wings - (8%) Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry. 

(11%) Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious. 

(15%) Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.

(26%) Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic, conspiratorial. 

(15%) Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.

Wings - (19%) Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.

Wings - (6%) Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising, patriotic.

A quote: 

But despite these stark differences, this study also finds reasons for hope. America’s political landscape is much more complicated than the binary split between liberals and conservatives often depicted in the national conversation. In particular, we find, among the seven tribes, an “Exhausted Majority,” whose members do not conform to either partisan ideology. The Exhausted Majority contains distinct groups of people with varying degrees of political understanding and activism. But they share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.

Read the full report. It's long but interesting throughout.

What does Believe Mean?

"Do you believe in God?"
"That depends on what do you mean by believe."

Since he has been talking about the Old Testament, religion, and God, Jordan Peterson gets asked this question a lot. He seemingly dodges the question by asking what they mean by believe and what they mean by God. I get why this is an unsatisfying answer, but lets take it seriously for a second.

What do we ever mean by believe?

The Petersonian answer is, what you act like is true. If I act like my car works, then I believe my car works. If I act like my coffee is hot, then I believe my coffee is hot. If I act like God exists, then I believe God exists.

Okay, now let's throw some harder hypotheticals at this definition:

1) Jordan Peterson's definition does not capture high severity low probability scenarios.

I act like I'm going to get in a car accident when I put seat belts on my children, does that mean I believe I'm going to get in a car accident? I think not.

If the stakes are high enough, we will act as if something is true even when we don't believe it. It's unlikely that global warming is an existential threat, but a 1% chance may be high enough to act like it is. I install a smoke alarm even though I don't believe I'll need it. Batman's logic is questionable, but it seems wrong to say he believes Superman will wipe out the entire human race.

“He has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if we believe there’s even a one percent chance that he is our enemy, we have to take it as an absolute certainty”

2) Jordan Peterson's definition does capture acts in indifference

There are two doors, each one of them has a 50% chance of having a pot of gold behind it. So you pick a door at random. You act like that door has the pot of gold behind it. But if I asked you whether you believe the pot of gold was behind the door I think you'd say, "I don't believe it because I have no idea."

It doesn't have to be 50%. This problem exists in any situation where your confidence is more or less a coin flip. Belief correlates with only high confidence scenarios, whereas actions may only need the probability to be on your side (or much less than that if the stakes are high enough).

3) Jordan Peterson's definition captures ideas we have absolutely no awareness of.

Evolutionary psychologists have long pointed out that men are attracted to women with high hip-waste ratios because it signals fertility. Most people don't know that, but they act in a way that that is very well consistent with that idea. If you pay attention to psychology or especially Robin Hanson on Signalling, you find out that we don't know why we do a lot of the things we do. As Jordan Peterson himself puts it,

We act out things we don’t understand, all the time. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t need psychology, or sociology, or anthropology, or any of that, because we’d be completely transparent to ourselves, and we’re clearly not.

I'm not sure how Peterson puts these pieces together. To me, this is not the way people use the word belief. Like, ever. Belief is a cerebral act, or else people don't use that word.

When we use belief to describe background motivations for behaviors, people end up with a lot of strange beliefs.

"You married her because you believed she could spread your genes to the next generation"
"You voted for universal health care because you believe it will make you look generous"
"You fight against climate change is real because you believe it will signal political loyalty."
"You laughed at that joke because you believe it will improve your social bonds."

If you think, "those motives didn't even occur to me!", remember that according to Peterson it doesn't matter. It isn't relevant if you're aware of your motivations, if you act like they're true then you believe them. If we define it this way, we have ground to accuse people of believing lots of things that never occurred to them. This seems like fodder for unjustified moral berating.

Beliefs must be conscious, or at least resides in latent subconsciousness where it can be pulled up with some introspection. Beliefs sleep and can be woken up, but they're never ideas you're completely ignorant of. We act not only according to ideas we've never thought of, but according to ideas we could never think of. Those kinds of ideas don't seem like beliefs at all.

Nobody believed in evolution before Darwin thought of it, even if they acted like it was true.

Those are some of my objections to Jordan Peterson's definition. I have some others. Like I'm not sure how well hypocrisy is maintained as a meaningful concept if beliefs and actions are always consistent.

I'm also not sure how well Peterson is stuck on his own definition. He always says things like, "one way you could define believe is..." or "some people define believe as..." or whatever. He never states that it's his definition, or that it's a good one for how other people use the word.

So what's a better definition of believe?

I think belief is a commitment to the truth of a proposition. It's an epistemic tie between the self and the conclusion. It hurts when your beliefs are wrong. Belief is a conviction, which is more than mere confidence. A belief is to be done thinking because you're already sold.

Under this definition beliefs are necessarily stubborn and good bayesian never believe anything. Even if you have 99% confidence of something you don't quite believe it because 1/100 beliefs like that are wrong. That pretentious intellectual that tells you that they love when their beliefs are wrong because it means they learned something, yeah total nonsense.

If we can just cope with the negative nature of beliefs, which I know will put anyone off to this definition immediately, I think the definition holds.

I notice people don't go around voluntarily stating that they believe the sky is blue. But they will state they believe in Jesus or the Lakers or global warming. If you prompt them; however, they will state they believe the sky is blue. "Of course I believe the sky is blue". I think that statement forms the belief.

Think about it. If you hadn't asked me if the sky was blue and the sky turned out to be red, I wouldn't feel weird about it at all, even though I was wrong. But if you made me say it, now I'm wrong in a different way. I'm wrong in a way where I feel embarrassed, like I have excuse myself because nobody could have predicted the sky would turn out to be red.

Uttering the words, "I believe" turns boring old wrongness into an identity issue. That doesn't mean you can't have quiet beliefs, but stating a proposition alongside "I believe" is one way of committing yourself and forming the belief itself.

I think this explains why people can believe in concepts without any specific propositions attached to them. When you believe in God or climate change it means you believe they exist. Okay, so what does it mean to believe in Jesus, Israel, social justice, free speech, the death penalty, or yourself? Of course these things are real, so what specific proposition are you saying is true about them?

None. When you believe in these things it means you've committed yourself to their side. It means you're allies with them. Belief is about you and where you stand in an invisible war, and sure sometimes that war is over the truth of a proposition, but sometimes it's merely about a lone concept or person.

I think this explains why beliefs are so often submerged in moral waters. If you believe life begins at conception, to pro-choicers you're more than just mistaken. You are on the wrong moral side of the culture war.

I also think this explains why the language of beliefs surrounds tribal issues like politics or religion. Not 100%, but you are far more likely to "believe" in a political statement than that WalMart closes at 10pm.

Do I believe in this definition? Let's just say I'm not committed to it.

Scott Alexander on Marijuana Legalization

Scott Alexander loosely concludes that marijuana legalization may not be worth the extra traffic accidents.

If this interpretation is true, we should expect that a mature legal marijuana industry causes about a 5% increase in car crashes and fatalities.

and,

In the current set of nine states with legalization, the 5% increase would amount to an extra 300 deaths per year. If the country as a whole legalized, that would make about 1800 extra deaths per year. Using my totally made-up math model from the previous post, this is enough to shift the net effect of marijuana legalization from positive to slightly negative. This is especially true if the alternative to legalization is decriminalization, which has many of the benefits of legalization but fewer costs.

I don't care what side Scott Alexander comes to. What is important to understand is that this is how the analysis should be done. He uses the problem solving module in his head rather than the war one.

Head First Heart Second

Your head is a map and your heart is a compass.

Your map (your head) lays out what the terrain looks like. It communicates causes and effects, means and ends, pleasant trails and hazards.

Your compass (your heart) tells you which way to go. It communicates values, morals, and destinations.

Your compass will still tell you things even if your map is upside down. East will look West. Bad places will look good, and good places will look bad. That's why it's important to draw your cognitive map first before you follow your moral compass.

If you follow your compass before you've etched out an accurate map, you'll be worse than stuck, you'll be lost. You won't only not move forward, you'll move backward. You'll travel against your values, against morality, and against your destination.

Lost people have trouble revising their maps. They've already committed to one direction, and the more you invest in something the harder it is to abandon it (sunk cost fallacy). They share stories of their travels with their friends. They build an identity out of it. After that, it's hard to admit your map is defective.

This doesn't put the map above the compass (or the head above the heart). Head first heart second is a temporal imperative, not an evaluative one. Just as the compass is no good without the map, the map is no good without the compass. You need both, but draw the map first. Plot the terrain before you navigate it.

This is a call to stop to think before embarking on a moral crusade. Sober reflection often dissolves moral imperative. Think of the social pressures and the moral righteousness of the people who burned witches and stoned sinners. Do you think you're so immune to those same sensations?

What does Bernie Sanders mean by Socialism?

Recently, I wrote a post about how Bernie Sander's Venezuela Socialism quote is fake. When Bernie supposedly said that the American dream is more likely to take place in Venezuela than here, it was taken as evidence of how wrong Sander's Socialism is (given the current Venezuelan disaster).

It turns out that Sander's didn't say the quote, and I'm not sure he even would have. It's hard to tell since Bernie frequently defines socialism by the outcome he expects it to produce.

Here's how Bernie defines socialism:

-Democratic socialism means that our government does everything it can to create a full employment economy.

-Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system that is corrupt, that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.

-When I talk about democratic socialist, I'm not looking at Venezuela. I'm not looking at Cuba. I'm looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden.

-Democratic socialism means, that in a democratic, civilized society, the wealthiest people and the largest corporations must pay their fair share of taxes.

-To me, democratic socialism means democracy. It means creating a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthiest people in the country.

-My view of democratic socialism builds on the success of many other countries around the world that have done a far better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, their elderly citizens, the children, the sick and the poor.

-All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small 'd.' I believe in democracy, and by democracy, I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives. And that means that you cannot separate the political structure from the economic structure.

-I am a socialist; of course I am a socialist. To hold a vision that society can be fundamentally different, to believe that all people can be equal - that is not a new idea.

To Bernie Sanders, Socialism means: an economy that works for all, a full employment economy, fair taxes, government representing all of us, Denmark and Sweden, protecting working families, elderly citizens, children, sick, and poor, democracy (with a small d), and of course equality.

Literally nobody is against these things. This strikes me as the usual political nonsense that I don't think reflects Bernie's usual approach to politics.

I tracked down one quote that I think is the most important quote Bernie has about his brand of Socialism (if he means it).

“I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal,”

To many this is not socialism. For economists and older people especially, socialism is defined by government ownership of the means of production. It sucks that Bernie has been calling himself Socialist for so long that he couldn't credibly detach himself from the label while running for president (if he tried). He could have avoided much of the stigma associated with the word.

I'm not a Bernie fanboy, but I think it would be better if Bernie's views were accurately understood.