Philosophical Vegan Forum

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 5:53 am So, are religious people, who believe in afterlife because they don't want to believe that it's all over when they die, mentally ill according to you?

If they came up with that on their own for that reason, then arguably yes.
There's a difference between believing something crazy that a large number of people believe and joining a fringe or creating your own proprietary crazy beliefs that nobody else holds (like that prisons don't exist). Mass delusion is a societal problem rather than an individual problem.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 5:53 amFurthermore, how is mental health a good thing if it makes people unhappy?

Believing true things is important to make other people happy. I already explained to you how harmful the belief that prisons don't exist is: it means you can't fight for the very important reforms for one of the greatest abuses of human rights in the modern age.

In the U.S., for example, almost one in a hundred people are in prison.

Ever heard the quote: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.”?

If people disbelieve in prisons, or factory farms, or genocide, or war, or racism, it means they will never be able to fix those atrocities.

Liberals are often ranked as less personally happy because they are concerned with harms to others.
Would you rather be a happier person who is a bad and harmful person to the world, or somebody who is slightly less happy but who is a good person caring about others and who works to make the world a better place?

Ultimately I think those surveys are rather short sighted because they're accounting only for average people, while altruists who work to help others will ultimately report more life satisfaction (which is something arguably more important than material comfort, which surveys can confuse for happiness).

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 5:53 amWell, maybe they don't need to prove every claim they make, but most textbooks I've read prove almost none of the claims they make.

It would make them too long. An index of facts without proof is much easier to print, and for students to read.
Get deeper into science and you'll start getting to the proofs.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 5:53 am

brimstoneSalad wrote:University education rarely means very much.

And yet you think I should not drop out from the university?

Unfortunately it's one of those prerequisites for much employment, even if it's a poor quality education.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 5:53 amSo, where am I making a mistake there? And why is chemistry worth studying if it appears so pseudoscientific? I mean, people don't have infinite amounts of time for studying what seem to be ad-hoc hypotheses.

Initially, it's a model based on empirical evidence. The predictive power it has when developed into a hypothesis and then a theory is what gives it credibility.

Models are made to find patterns in data that otherwise appears random and in themselves don't mean much, but then you can develop a hypothesis from the model and use it to predict outcomes (which ad hoc hypotheses don't do because they aren't meant to be falsified), at which point when repeatedly verified it becomes a theory.

Look into electron shells etc.

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 12:06 pm Unfortunately it's one of those prerequisites for much employment, even if it's a poor quality education.

I know a lot of engineering graduates who say that they use basically nothing that they learned in uni in their lines of work, and anything they did learn can often be done by a computer. How true would you say this is?

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 11:20 am

thebestofenergy wrote:Do you think choosing your beliefs based on comfort, rather than believing what's more likely to be true, is a teller of good psychological well-being?

Yes. We live only once, it is not rational to spend our whole lives searching for some truth that doesn't make us happy.

If you don't want to believe what is true then you don't belong in any of these discussions. You need to change your tune on this or be barred from any empirical discussion.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 11:20 am

thebestofenergy wrote:Being in good mental health doesn't make people unhappy. It does the opposite.

Then how it is that people with higher IQ tend to be less happy?

High IQ doesn't mean better mental health, quite the contrary, it correlates with poor mental health.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 11:20 am In other words, universities are little but virtue signalling and diplomas are frauds, right? If so, how is it ethical to go to university and participate in such a fraud?

It's only mostly a fraud, there is a slight amount of education provided. Mostly to people who start out very ignorant.
You can protest it if you want, but you'll find society is very resistant to your protests.

Red wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 12:10 pm

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 12:06 pm Unfortunately it's one of those prerequisites for much employment, even if it's a poor quality education.

I know a lot of engineering graduates who say that they use basically nothing that they learned in uni in their lines of work, and anything they did learn can often be done by a computer. How true would you say this is?

Probably mostly true, though there's probably a little confirmation bias there. They probably learned some methodology and thinking patterns (rather than facts) that help them somewhat.
Depends on the line of work, though.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 11:20 am

thebestofenergy wrote:Do you think choosing your beliefs based on comfort, rather than believing what's more likely to be true, is a teller of good psychological well-being?

Yes. We live only once, it is not rational to spend our whole lives searching for some truth that doesn't make us happy.

You're not answering the question.

I didn't ask if it's rational or not to spend our whole lives searching for truth.

I asked if you think choosing your beliefs based on comfort, rather than believing what's more likely to be true, is a teller of good psychological well-being.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 11:20 am

thebestofenergy wrote:Being in good mental health doesn't make people unhappy. It does the opposite.

Then how it is that people with higher IQ tend to be less happy?

Why are you conflating IQ with mental health? IQ is not psychological well-being.

And yes, more intelligent people tend to have worse mental health.

One of the reasons why, is that they have to deal with questions like this.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 11:20 am

thebestofenergy wrote:Pay attention to a key expression he used: coming to terms with things.

I am not sure what that means. What does the word "term" mean?

Coming to terms: to learn to accept and deal with an unpleasant situation or event

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 11:20 am

thebestofenergy wrote:Basic university education may not mean very much for personal knowledge, but getting a university degree is very useful.

In other words, universities are little but virtue signalling and diplomas are frauds, right? If so, how is it ethical to go to university and participate in such a fraud?

Frauds? What are you talking about? https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/log ... an-Fallacy
You've been arguing in this forum for quite long. How do you still make such an evident strawman fallacy out of what I'm saying?
I never said they're fraud, nor did I imply it.

Getting a university degree is a good test to your ability to learn and your ability to be consistent with studying and putting effort. It's a good test for long-term commitment for a job, and a decent test for how smart you are. University definitely has a purpose of selection, beyond just teaching people things.
I'm not sure where the fraud would come in.

brimstoneSalad wrote:There's a difference between believing something crazy that a large number of people believe and joining a fringe or creating your own proprietary crazy beliefs that nobody else holds (like that prisons don't exist).

Belief that prisons don't exist, if it is crazy, is certainly less crazy than belief in afterlife. Belief that prisons don't exist doesn't presuppose the existence of an entire new layer of physics, like the belief in afterlife does.

brimstoneSalad wrote:I already explained to you how harmful the belief that prisons don't exist is: it means you can't fight for the very important reforms for one of the greatest abuses of human rights in the modern age.

The probability that I will manage to change anything about prisons is low. The probability I will make them better is basically zero. So, why bother?

brimstoneSalad wrote:An index of facts without proof is much easier to print, and for students to read.

Unfortunately, it's worse than useless, because it gives students a wrong idea how science works.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Unfortunately it's one of those prerequisites for much employment, even if it's a poor quality education.

How do you know? It's next to impossible to do a high-quality study about that. Sure, people who have finished university tend to earn more. But is it because of the university, or is it some other factor at play (people who have finished the university tend to be more hard-working...)? Nearly impossible to tell.

brimstoneSalad wrote:there is a slight amount of education provided

Knowing little about something is usually worse than knowing nothing about something, because knowing little makes you susceptible to the Dunning Kruger effect. One who knows nothing about thermodynamics won't come to the idea that the second law of thermodynamics proves bombs are impossible. But one who knows little about thermodynamics may come to such an idea.

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 12:12 pm Probably mostly true, though there's probably a little confirmation bias there. They probably learned some methodology and thinking patterns (rather than facts) that help them somewhat.
Depends on the line of work, though.

So how you do in high school and what university you go to don't matter much at all then, at least for most fields of work? I'm assuming it does matter if you're in med school or wanting to work for NASA.
I'm assuming it only really starts to matter when you go to grad school.

Would you say this is a significant issue in that it prevents people from getting these STEM jobs which help the economy?

Red wrote:So how you do in high school and what university you go to don't matter much at all then, at least for most fields of work?

That's very hard to study scientifically. People who do better at high-school, and who go to recognized universities, tend to be more hard-working and more intelligent.
I can give you my reasons to think universities are actually counter-productive, though I don't have much data to back them up. First of all, I know two students at my university who are, like, really excellent programmers, and who dropped out from the university. Second, many of the stuff that's taught at the university are probably harmful for a beginner to know. For example, in our operating system classes, we were taught how to do parallel programming (and some other stuff) using system calls. But using system calls is a big no-no in actual programming. You should use cross-platform libraries, which solve not only the obvious problem of there being little compatibility between corresponding system calls in Linux and Windows, but also can warn you of some common pitfalls. Also, in our Database classes, we are taught about normalizing databases. In real-world programming, that's rarely done, because normalizing databases usually makes them slower to look up commonly needed information. At the university, in many classes, we are encouraged to mess with the algorithms and/or write parts of the program in assembly. In reality, this is almost always shooting yourself in the foot. You can almost never do better than the standard library of the language you are working at. Just to give you some perspective, I've thought of some sorting algorithm and I implemented it in my programming language. It is 631 lines of code, so it must be at least as efficient as the sorting algorithm in JavaScript "Array.sort", right? So I thought. But, when I did some measurements, it turned out it's actually around 8 times slower. Messing with the algorithms is such an non-thankful job, I don't see why it is being taught at the universities. It's also said that the worst programmers are one who say stuff like "Well, we have a problem only because we hadn't followed the rules of object-oriented programming and functional programming. Had we followed those rules, we wouldn't have those technical problems we have now.". And it seems to me universities produce exactly that kind of programmers. There is no evidence whatsoever following object-oriented principles makes programs more reliable. As for functional programming, well, it indeed helps a bit, it catches around 20% of bugs, but that is far from guaranteeing bug-free programs. Yet, at the university, they are unreasonably rigorous about all those rules of object-oriented and functional programming.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 4:06 pm

brimstoneSalad wrote:There's a difference between believing something crazy that a large number of people believe and joining a fringe or creating your own proprietary crazy beliefs that nobody else holds (like that prisons don't exist).

Belief that prisons don't exist, if it is crazy, is certainly less crazy than belief in afterlife. Belief that prisons don't exist doesn't presuppose the existence of an entire new layer of physics, like the belief in afterlife does.

No. A person who doesn't know anything about science or epistemology or even other religions could easily mistake a church for a credible source of consensus on the afterlife, trusting an authority over personal ignorance. That is ignorance, not insanity.

You *know* there's no consensus that prisons don't exist, and quite to the contrary that consensus of everybody everywhere is that prisons do exist. You also *know* the level of conspiracy needed to support that view. Typical lay Catholics have no idea of the levels of absurdity that their beliefs represent.

Also, for the conspiratorial interpretations, any conspiracies needed to support theistic beliefs are made psychologically plausible by the influence of demons (which is only as implausible as what they already believe). You have no explanation for these conspiracies or how they remain stable.
Finally with regards to most sophisticated interpretations of theism (e.g. not young Earth) to their knowledge there are no conspiracies needed because a god and afterlife is a matter of faith rather than proof and literalism is discarded. It's not a very reasonable belief in light of a more comprehensive understanding of physics, but the context there is a lack of such knowledge (or even that such knowledge exists).

Your knowledge of all that and acceptance of it none-the-less indicates that your belief, in context, is far more crazy in a psychological sense.

In terms of falseness or implausibility, I would not be so quick to judge a global conspiracy trying to make you believe in prisons when they don't exist as more plausible than another layer of as of yet unknown physics, even if the latter included a conspiracy among scientists (likely a small few numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands in particle physics) to hide such physics. That is far more likely than a conspiracy of far greater proportion (many hundreds of millions) that your belief requires. I would believe in an afterlife long before I bought a conspiracy of the scale required to justify the belief that prisons don't exist.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 4:06 pmThe probability that I will manage to change anything about prisons is low. The probability I will make them better is basically zero. So, why bother?

Appeal to futility fallacy. The probability of attempting and succeeding at influencing in some way good reform is non-zero, thus your choice to make it zero by denying the existence of prisons is unethical.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 4:06 pmUnfortunately, it's worse than useless, because it gives students a wrong idea how science works.

That seems to be how it worked for you. however, most people are able to accept scientific facts without deducing that the Earth is flat from misunderstanding them.

Would it be better to teach critical thinking and scientific method without the facts? Maybe. That's a question for education.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 4:06 pmHow do you know?

It's literally a job requirement for many professions. And an undergrad degree is needed to get into graduate studies.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 4:06 pmKnowing little about something is usually worse than knowing nothing about something,

For you it is. Not all people are subject to Dunning-Kruger, because most people will doubt their knowledge before accepting a belief that is obviously insane. Most people will say "I must have got this wrong because this conclusion is obviously not true" if they even try to reason that for themselves to begin with.

teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 4:06 pmOne who knows nothing about thermodynamics won't come to the idea that the second law of thermodynamics proves bombs are impossible. But one who knows little about thermodynamics may come to such an idea.

The probability of coming to that conclusion is more likely to be one in a million or less. People knowing something about thermodynamics does more good than the few nutcases who come to insane conclusions do harm. Principally because some knowledge can lead to interest which can lead to learning more and becoming a scientist or engineer. You have to take something of a shotgun approach to education because we can't read students minds and know which student will be interested in learning more or using the knowledge for good. Some day we may be able to change that and target education better minority report style with sophisticated machine learning that can make accurate predictions about what subjects students will like and excel at before spending the effort of introducing them.

Red wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 7:33 pm So how you do in high school and what university you go to don't matter much at all then, at least for most fields of work? I'm assuming it does matter if you're in med school or wanting to work for NASA.
I'm assuming it only really starts to matter when you go to grad school.

Would you say this is a significant issue in that it prevents people from getting these STEM jobs which help the economy?

Well it is a piece of paper you need to get hired.
It might be more important for people with lower IQs, who may be able to learn those things through brute force in a university but would not be able to teach themselves.