Chubby Nickel Audio Vlog

The amount and understanding of evidence goes up as the level of risk from the claim goes up. If it requires so much evidence just to put a good amount of your money down, imagine how much evidence it would take to believe someone about an eternal soul and eternal damnation. So I’m sorry, but as level of risk involved with being wrong about something increases, the amount and accuracy required of the evidence also increases. Pascal had his wager backwards.

If you’re going to risk your eternal soul, eternal suffering eternal magic man in the sky ass kissing… then you should require the as close to absolute proof as possible. Unfortunately the more you get into definitions for a creator, the farther you get from reasonable evidence.

Let’s say for some reason you’re playing poker and for some reason you put not only all the money you have and all the money from selling your assets on the table for this one hand, you also will end up owing a bookie your life or $10 million. You have no idea what is in your hand, and no idea what is in anyone elses hands. One of the people put all in, if you put all in you’re risking your life and everything you have, for the chance to at least double your money. Given that you have no evidence at all that you will win or even have a chance to win, do you go all in? Probably not. However if you had four kings the decision might be a little more difficult because the chances that someone can beat that hand is extremely low. There is evidence that shows that getting a getting four of a kind are extremely low. Let alone that even if someone else has four of a kind, they still won’t likely beat four kings. I think the decision would be difficult, but the odds of you losing a hand in a fair game with four kings is lower than the chances you’ll die in a car crash. You don’t base your evidence on that someone just said that the odds are extremely good, you base you evidence on what can be mathematically proven, and though you’re playing the odds, in the case of four kings, your odds are almost sure, as close as 99.9%. So: if you’re putting your own life on the line, you don’t trust anyone, you make sure you understand the risks completely and make sure the evidence is as accurate and sure as possible.

Let’s get serious now. If you had to put a good portion of your monthly income and/or your life’s savings at risk, would you still trust your friend without much question? With this kind of value at risk, trust isn’t near enough evidence to be considered reasonable. It doesn’t matter if the person you’re trusting isn’t lying, they could be wrong. Are you willing to risk all that money on the trust that not only your friend isn’t lying but that also he/she is correct? I doubt it. With this level of harm at risk, I would hope you would ask for reasonable evidence. You would need to know how the money would be spent, who is going to be in control, who you could talk to in case you have any questions, the experience of the people in charge… getting to the point: When the risk of a claim being wrong (or right) will cause significant harm, a good amount of evidence is required to support the claim.

Let’s say you’re looking for something that has a moderate value, you would probably require moderate evidence. Say you’re asking your nerd buddy whether you should install Linux or not. Now if your friend is lying is to you, this will cause some minor irritation so instead of no evidence, you should ask for at least some kind of evidence. So your friend goes on and on about how awesome Linux is and how some versions are easier for newbs and you can even play most Windows games easily in Linux… blah, blah, blah. You take him at his word because you trust him. I think that with this level of importance, trust is a perfectly decent level of evidence. Because: 1) if your friend is lying, it does little harm, maybe a day of wasted time and 2) your friend is usually right when it comes to computers. Anyway: trust is only a good enough form of evidence if the trust in the claim will likely only cause a little bit of harm.

We’ve all played monopoly, and the system the banks work on is similar. The game they play is basically moving money from one tycoon to another and its all about gaining property, whether intellectual or not. The difference is that the government and regular people are the only ones who actually pay. And big banks are the player in charge of the bank/imf/national bank and there’s a screen in front of them so noone knows if the banks are playing fair.

The burden of proof is essentially the responsibility of the party that claims something to be true to provide the evidence that led to that conclusion. It is also often said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think we can give a quick judgment as to whether the evidence satisfies the requirement by just evaluating how much the claim is useful to us.

On the low value end the burden and evidence requirements are almost unnecessary. If some one comes up to you and tells you that they had a tuna sandwich for lunch, you wouldn’t require evidence of any kind. Why not? Because it’s not important or useful. Even if the person were lying, it doesn’t affect you at all. Maybe a tiny bit if just the mention of the sandwich gives you a little craving for one. The point is: if the claim has little to no use to you, you require little to no evidence.

If someone comes up to you and says I don’t believe in unicorns, it doesn’t matter at all to you because whether the person believes in a mythological creature or not doesn’t affect your life. It affects it even less of the person doesn’t believe. It requires no evidence at all to say that you don’t hold a claim. The thing is that there are those that will try to claim that the lack of belief in a certain god (the one they irrationally believe in), causes harm and therefore should be fixed. The claim that no belief in something causes harm is a positive claim that requires evidence, while just saying that you don’t believe somethings requires no evidence.

Of course in the end, I have no problems and don’t demand any evidence of those that keep their beliefs to themselves. If I go around telling people they should believe in any god, you’d be damned sure that I’m going to be bringing in evidence and logic to the conversation, just as I demand of those that go around telling me that I need to believe in a god.

I have been having discussion about how we as a free society should handle the thinly veiled threats and violence coming from Muslim extremists. I’ve heard people say we should respond with violence, that we should start an effort to remove them from the free world and in extreme nutters, to remove them from the world. Well fuck those intolerant assholes. Not just the intolerant Muslims, but the anti-Muslims as well.

The Muslim extremists want violence, they want threats, it’s the best way for them to recruit and rally members. The extremists are telling their followers that the outside world wants to destroy them, the very best way to ensure that people will keep listening to the idiot, fear mongers is to show them violence. Think of it from your perspective, would you follow someone saying “they’re making fun of us, let’s go kill them” or “they’re killing us, let’s defend ourselves?”

I will not stand by and just let these religious Muslim idiots silence free speech with fear, but I’m a long way from going out and attacking someone because they’re afraid I’m going to attack them. Take away the extremists tool of fear and their followers will eventually stop listening to them. But if you’re go and do exactly what these extremists say we will do… well then they will continue to listen to the the extremist fucks.

The best way to handle the threats of violence and acts of violence is stand tall and respond with non-violent, non-threatening, fearless resolve. Don’t stop practicing your free speech by never criticizing their beliefs, but don’t go around threatening and attacking them.

No one’s beliefs should be protected from criticism and/or satire. If some comedian starts telling people how ridiculous my “Belief” in gravity is, I have no problem with that. They can make fun of gravity till bovine meander back to their place of living and I won’t care a lick. Why then is it not ok to make fun of or criticize ones belief in god?

Maybe that’s not in the same line of reasoning, as drawing and mocking Mohamed is more of a rule than just the belief in something. So if someone comes up and tells me how silly it is to practice free speech or just to criticize it, I don’t care. I won’t force others to practice free speech, they can if they want to. Why then is it ok to limit my ability to make fun of something I see as an irrational belief? I make fun of people that think that the world is flat (yes, some of them are still around). I make fun of people that think that a space ship is hiding behind a comet and that they must kill themselves in order to hitch a ride (because they forgot their towels?).

Now an example switched to my point of view: When I was very young I had the belief that atom bombs were called mushroom bombs because they used mushrooms and that the use of the mushrooms is what caused the shape of the explosion. So when some jerk started making fun of me, it deeply offended and hurt me. But after that I realized that if any idea I had could not stand up to scrutiny and satire, then I had no right in believing it in the first place.

If someone gets offended by anything I say, draw or type then they have that right, what they don’t have a right to do is to prevent me from saying, drawing or typing it by means of intimidation, making it a law or killing me. The point is, no idea should beyond the limits of satire and criticism. There is no sacred cow in the realm of free speech.

Chubby Nickel Audio Vlog

Recorded: 2010-04-30

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Why did humanity even create god? This is not a rational post, this is purely speculative. I just thought I’d get that out of the way before you waste your time if you were looking for something solid. I will cite and reference some things, but they are not good references. Again, if you’re looking for something useful in anything other than philosophy, don’t waste your time here.

Early in humanity, we asked questions, probably because wanted to know how to avoid things we didn’t like. When you know that fire hurts, you can avoid getting hurt… at least by fire. So what happened when we didn’t know the answer to things? Apparently we just started making shit up. The earlier religions were based around multiple gods, a god for wind, fire, storms… a god for pretty much everything, eventually even a god for the gods.

So what is the point of this speculation? I think that gods filled the void of the unknown in order to focus on more important things… I mean that knowing how lightning works isn’t that useful to people that need to hunt mammoths for food, however knowing that lightning comes from clouds could be a useful way to avoid getting killed by lightning.

Nowadays god is useless. We don’t need a god to explain the need for morality because we can conceptualize, understand and enforce it ourselves. We don’t need a god to explain nature because we have science. So what do we need a god for? Death. That scary word that almost everyone is afraid of. We have a short existence and most of us don’t want it to end. But believing that we exist for eternity does little to benefit anyone.

Fear of eternal punishment doesn’t stop people from doing bad things and hope for eternal rewards doesn’t make people do good things. So why do we still bring up god as an answer?