I don't know if this is worth a thread and I can't think of a title

GCU Flexible Demeanour

But I'm reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb, mainly because he seems to have had the life I'd have liked (f*ck off money under your belt by the time you were 35, and in a position to devote the rest of your life to writing books on stuff that interests you).

A lot of the stuff he says is similar to the kind of stuff I tend to say, so obviously I think the man is a true prophet, charting the only true course.

Anyway, there's one quote in his book that cogently puts a thought that's on my mind when I turn to religious matters

If something that makes no sense to you (say, religion - if you are an atheist - or some age-old habit or practice called irrational); if that something has been around for a very, very long time then, irrational or not, you can expect it to stick around much longer, and outlive those who call for its demise.

I think it's a challenging thought (in fairness to him, he's applying it to a broader context than religion - atheism is only an example he's picking).

Yet, focussing on this single point, why would anyone expect "evangelical" atheism of the Dawkins type to outlive Catholicism (to pick a random faith that you'd expect Irish people to have heard of)?

Turtwig

I don't think it's correct to say any particular ideology would outlive another one. However, there's an expression that I do think is apt here. "Religion is like Hydra cut off its head and two more will grow back.". Human beings have natural tendencies towards irrational thinking and superstitions. Put simply our intuitive perceptions of patterns and cause and effect is woeful. Kind of like how we think random events must be scattered in a even distribution. If they're scattered in congested clusters we tend to perceive the events as non random. Even if you were to rid the world of religion something similar would take its place. Catholicism itself may not outlive humanity. However you could almost bet your house and your grandchildren's house that something similar to Catholicism would outlive humanity. That something might just be evangelical atheism.

swampgas

Maybe it depends on the means by which such long-lived irrationalities are propagated? The usual mechanisms are parental influence and education. For a long long time, most people would have had little reason to question the received wisdom (regardless of how much of that wisdom was superstition or plain wrong) handed down to them by their immediate family and neighbours. I suspect that the advent of modern technology might be quite disruptive in the short to medium term.

And where old ideas don't die out they seem to change until all that's left is the label - look at Catholicism in Ireland, for example. It's hardly the same thing that it was 100 or even 50 years ago.

magicbastarder

it's been a while since i read the black swan, but it did strike me as a book which packaged up the bleeding obvious as if it was a revelation.

Hotblack Desiato

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

A lot of the stuff he says is similar to the kind of stuff I tend to say, so obviously I think the man is a true prophet, charting the only true course.

Sarcasm - or not? obviously a non-theist cannot believe in prophets.

Jernal wrote: »

However, there's an expression that I do think is apt here. "Religion is like Hydra cut off its head and two more will grow back.". Human beings have natural tendencies towards irrational thinking and superstitions.

I think Dawkins was bang on the money with the concept of the meme. Like a virus, the religious meme is optimally designed for self-propagation. Like a virus, the effects on the host can be relatively benign or extremely serious...

Put simply our intuitive perceptions of patterns and cause and effect is woeful. Kind of like how we think random events must be scattered in a even distribution. If they're scattered in congested clusters we tend to perceive the events as non random.

Reminds me of something I read the other day

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/07/09/anatomy-of-a-pseudorandom-number-generator-visualising-cryptocats-buggy-prng/

Since they couldn't divide 256 bytes into 10 equally-sized groups of values, the coders resorted to a trick:

repeat
   byte250 = randomSalsaByte()
until byte250 <= 250

randomdigit = remainder(byte250,10)

The idea is simple: 250 is evenly divisible by 10, so it's easy to map the numbers from 1..250 onto the digits 0..9.

And 250 is very close to 256, so by simply throwing away random bytes from 251..255, the problem of indivisibility by 10 is sidestepped.
The problem

The code above is certainly an inelegant solution, since it is, in theory, at least, a potentially infinite loop.

→ If the randomSalsaByte() function [the PRNG in use] is truly random, there is no mathematical guarantee that it won't continue to return values above 250 for seconds, or minutes, or months.

You could be waiting from now until the heat death of the Universe for your unsigned 8-bit random number generator to stop hitting values over 250. It's not at all likely, but it is certainly possible.

Cryptography makes me wish I'd dropped chemistry in my degree instead of maths...

GCU Flexible Demeanour

magicbastarder wrote: »

it's been a while since i read the black swan, but it did strike me as a book which packaged up the bleeding obvious as if it was a revelation.

In fairness to him, his point was that people who should know better were ignoring the bleeding obvious.

ninja900 wrote: »

Sarcasm - or not? obviously a non-theist cannot believe in prophets.

I should probably point out that, so far as I know, NNT isn't claiming to be a prophet.

But, then again, Haile Selassie never claimed to be a god.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuYbDP2kDfg

Obliq

ninja900 wrote: »

Sarcasm - or not? obviously a non-theist cannot believe in prophets.

Oh I don't know? Philip K. Dick correctly predicted a number of things. Films mostly.