Atheists From The United States

"The s mark where they have been and once one has learned to read sign, as woodsmen and professional ornithologists do, one can study food habits. Meat and fishing-eating birds pass conspicuous white urates, commonly called whitewash, and they regurgitate pellets. The splashes of whitewash under a perch suggest that a bird of prey may have used the perch. s, for example, also pass their urates in the form of whitewash, but if the perch is far from a body of water or from a heron rookery, the whitewash was probably passed by a hawk, an owl or a crow. The whitewash of hawks is rather splashy and falls in spatters and streaks. That of owls is far more solid, chalky in texture and tends to form little heaps. Owls tend to gulp their food in big mouthfuls, swallowing many bones—large and small—along with meat. The bones, only slightly digested, persist in the pellets of adults. One can learn a great deal about what owls have eaten by examining the contents of pellets carefully."

"In some respects, modern-day behavioural science can be construed as a derivative of the psychological school of behaviourism that gained prominence over a century ago with the work of American psychologist, John B. Watson. A rejection of the previously dominant introspectionist movement (whose focus was subjectivity and inner consciousness), Watson viewed the main goal of psychology to be the ‘prediction and control of behaviour.’ The paradigm of behaviourism concentrated exclusively on observables: the environmental stimuli that make a particular behaviour more or less likely, the overt behaviour itself, and the consequences of that behaviour (referred to as ‘reinforcement’ or ‘punishment’)."

"‘Watson’s Utopia, the implied authority of experts was institutionalised in the form of a technocracy managed by behavioural scientists’. Watson wanted religion, the antithesis of science, to be ‘outlawed”. When conditioning failed to cure what Watson termed the ‘hopelessly insane, or incurably diseased’, the physician ‘would not hesitate to put them to death’. According to Buckley, ‘there would also be no mercy’. This has echoes of the Nazi Goebbels. Watson’s ideal community would not recognize words like, ‘right, wrong or punishment.'"

"[Can a commercial entity] produce Wikipedia? No. Wikipedia is crowdsourced because it works. So it's going to be the same for AI systems, they're going to have to be trained, or at least fine-tuned, with the help of everyone around the world. And people will only do this if they can contribute to a widely-available open platform."

"The direction of history is that the more data we get, the more our methods rely on learning. Ultimately, the task use learning end to end. That's what happened for speech, handwriting, and object recognition. It's bound to happen for NLP."

"Every reasonable ML technique has some sort of mathematical guarantee. For example, neural nets have a finite VC dimension, hence they are consistent and have generalization bounds... every single bound is terrible and useless in practice. As long as your method minimizes some sort of objective function and has a finite capacity (or is properly regularized), you are on solid theoretical grounds."

"I try to stay away from all methods that require sampling. I must have an allergy of some sort. That said, I am neither Bayesian nor anti-Bayesian... I think Bayesian methods are really cool conceptually in some cases... but I really don't have much faith in things like non-parametric Bayesian methods..."

"[Large language models] require enormous amounts of data to reach a level of intelligence that is not that great in the end. And they can't really reason. They can't plan anything other than things they’ve been trained on. So they're not a road towards what people call “AGI.”"

"[AI progres is very dependent on Moore's law.] The one thing that allowed big progress in computer vision with ConvNets is the availability of GPUs with performance over 1 Tflops."

"AI is going to bring a new renaissance for humanity, a new form of enlightenment, if you want, because AI is going to amplify everybody's intelligence."

"The analogy I've been using is the fact that perhaps an equivalent event in the history of humanity to what might be provided by Generalization of AI assistant is the invention of the printing press. It made everybody smarter."

"Don't get fooled by people who claim to have a solution to Artificial General Intelligence, who claim to have AI systems that work "just like the human brain", or who claim to have figured out how the brain works (well, except if it's Geoff Hinton making the claim). Ask them what error rate they get on MNIST or ImageNet."

"My problem with sticking too close to nature is that it's like "cargo-cult" science... I don't use neural nets because they look like the brain. I use them because they are a convenient way to construct parameterized non-linear functions with good properties. But I did get inspiration from the architecture of the visual cortex to build convolutional nets."

"The vast majority of human knowledge is not expressed in text... LLMs do not have that, because they don't have access to it. And so they can make really stupid mistakes. That’s where hallucinations come from."

"Many of the papers that make it passed the review process are [good but boring] papers that bring an improvement to a well-established technique... Truly innovative papers rarely make it, largely because reviewers are unlikely to understand the point or foresee the potential of it."

"I don't like to call [human intelligence] AGI because human intelligence is not general at all."

"Toast is bread made delicious and useful. Un-toasted bread is okay for children's sandwiches and sopping up barbecue sauce, but for pretty much all other uses, toast is better than bread. An exception is when the bread is fresh from the oven, piping hot, with butter melting all over it. Then it's fantastic, but I would argue that bread fresh out of the oven is a kind of toast. Because I'm an asshole and I refuse to be wrong about something."

"I desire to impress upon the minds of my clerical brethren the important fact, that the gospel histories of Christ were written by men who had formerly been Jews (see Acts xxi. 20), and probably possessing the strong proclivity to imitate and borrow which their bible shows was characteristic of that nation ; and being written many years after Christ's death, according to that standard Christian author, Dr. Lardner, it was impossible, under such circumstances, for them to separate (if they had desired to) the real facts and events of his life from the innumerable fictions and fables then afloat everywhere relative to the heathen Gods who had pre-enacted a similar history. Two reasons are thus furnished for their constructing a history of Christ almost identical with that of other Gods.[4]"

"[Per] the gospel of Mark, the oldest surviving gospel? Attaining essentially its final form probably as late as 90 CE but containing core material dating possibly as early as 70 CE, it omits, as we have seen, almost the entire traditional biography of Jesus, beginning the story with John the Baptist giving Jesus a bath, and ending – in the oldest manuscripts – with women running frightened from the empty tomb."

"So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Yehuda has seen, up close, the effect of such antisocial divisions on traumatized vets. "If you want to make a society work, then you don't keep underscoring the places where you're different- you underscore your shared humanity," she told me. "I'm appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?""

"The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America's ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn't acting competitively- that should be encouraged- but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what the politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn't, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves."

"There is no “radical relativism” plaguing modern knowledge fields, and certainly none plaguing atheists or physicalists or scientists—we are to a clear super-plurality all realists, not relativists, regarding knowledge of ourselves and the world. And secular science has provided extensive justifications for belief in the reliability of the human mind—to the extent that it actually is reliable. Remember, without those installed software fixes, of formal logics and mathematics and critical thinking and the scientific method, it’s actually pretty un-reliable. So there is no reason to believe that any of this comes from God—to the contrary, that inborn human reasoning is so terrible proves it cannot come from God. … God would want to send us that software fix! So the fact that no book purported to be God’s communications contains that crucial information means no such book actually contains God’s communications."

"How about we stop with the stories about how it's open season on black people for racist white cops and talk about the real thing killing young black men? Other young black men. No? Well, that would be part of an honest dialog that everyone is always asking for but runs from when some intellectually honest person, like myself, brings up the crisis of fatherhood in the black community. You know who certainly won't do that? The so-called community leaders."

"RoboCop had less technology on him than your average cop does today. And there are guys jousting at medieval times wearing less armor. But the more we focus on them being racist, the less we focus on them turning into the Terminator. I see a lot of fat cops out there. Much like my idea that for every $100 spent over a $1000 baseline, the bride must be able to fit into her wedding dress for one year. I think all cops should be issued one, and only one, vest on the first day after graduating the academy."

"I have a simple policy: If the combined age of the two people feuding is over 100, they should move on."

"The constant ingestion of fear about shit that will never happen is ruining our society."

"Once you become a famous famous celebrity, like me, and people start writing about you in the press, you'll notice just how incompetent reporters are. [...] Everyone should have a reporter follow them around and interview them for an article in the newspaper. Then sit back and watch how much stuff is inaccurate."

"Almost all successful examples of reparations [...] have been to the specific individuals who were harmed, not to their grand-grandchildren. My ancestors were on Thomas Jefferson's plantation; we can prove it; we have the documentation. The question from a policy perspective is, in a condition with limited resources where we are trying to fix the broken public education system, where we have health care costs that are so far gone compared to our peer countries, [...] that we can either allocate limited resources based on who needs it the most, or you can give it to someone like me because my grandparents were on Monticello. The second thing doesn't make sense, and doesn't make sense to most Americans, and it shouldn't make sense."

"Many black progressives use the myth of collective, intergenerational transfers of suffering to exempt themselves from the rules of civil discourse."

"Progressives ought not dodge the question: Why are blacks the only ethnic group routinely and openly encouraged to nurse stale grievances back to life?"

"The way that I think about wars in general is not just in terms of the actions of the armies, but in terms of what kind of society they're trying to build. [...] I think you can go through every single war in history, be right about who the good guys were, and find war crimes done by the good guys. A hundred percent with no exceptions. If the crux of talking about [the Israel-Gaza conflict] is to get at who is on the right side of the conflict, you're having the wrong conversation. The right conversation is what are the aims of each side, what are they trying to do, what are they trying to build."

"I was one of the many people shocked to the point of humor when Black Lives Matter had, as a part of its platform, the end of the nuclear family, criticizing this as a heteronormative, patriarchal system. That you can run an organization meant to solve problems for black America, look out on black America, and say "I know what the problem is: Too much marriage. That's really the problem." That you can even really entertain that thought says something about the lack of logic you're operating with."

"[About Donald Trump:] Trump ended up governing very differently than he talked and maybe that was obvious to some people that got Trump, but it was not obvious to me who didn't get Trump in 2016. And so I'm certainly much less afraid of a Trump presidency than I was in 2016, because I understand the vast gulf between what he says and what he does. He talks in a stream of consciousness way and entertains ideas far crazier than what he would actually do. And it may be true that because he talks so crazy, I think the immune system of America reacts to him in a way that we react to no other president."

"[About defunding the police and replacing it with community created police:] A lot of the problems are inherent in the job itself, no matter who you get to be the police."

"We're living through a moral panic, one of the great moral panics of American history, about racism and white supremacy."

"People have long defended affirmative action by saying 'It's really just a thumb on the scale. It's used only as a tie-breaker between otherwise identical candidates.' I've always known that that's just a lie or just uninformed by the people who say it. But it does betray a sense that even defenders of the policy are a little bit unconfortable defending the reality of it; they would wish it to be more of a thumb-on-the-scale thing but it's not. And we've had research that's shown that for several decades actually. Thomas Espenshade found it was the equivalent of 450 SAT points for an Asian student relative to a black student, everything else held equal."

"[In 2018, Donald Trump passed] a bipartisan bill, that includes every progressive criminal justice reform that people on the far left have been calling for since 2007, called the First Step Act. He releases a couple of thousand inmates from federal prison, reduces sentences for a couple of thousand more. The majority of these people are black. It shifts the focus from punishment to rehabilitation. It's just everything that you wouldn't expect a sort of law-and-order politician like Trump to do. And of course he got no credit for it because it was too awkward and surprising to admit that he did something like that. But that was exactly the kind of progress that if it had come after a riot, people would have seen it as proof that riots work. But because it just came out of the blue, in the middle of Trump's first term, people just didn't even pay attention to it. My point here being that progress is happening all the time it's not that it needs riots to happen, it's that all the people that are justifying the riots are not paying attention when the progress is happening."

"[About Black Lives Matter:] If not for Black Lives Matter, I'm not sure how much we'd be talking about [police reform, qualified immunity, universal body cams, military grade weapons in the police]. All these strike me as good ideas [...] and I think Black Lives Matter deserves credit for [them]. At the same time, the central premise of their movement is not true: The idea that we have a problem with racist cops killing unarmed black people. And it's a dangerous myth because it's the kind of myth that if you believe it, it makes sense to go out and riot and destroy businesses and loot and set things on fire. [...] And that's the narrative we've been sold for the past roughly seven years, let's say, and then the nation started burning. And I don't know who else to blame than the people who spread this myth."

"[About black people being over-represented in criminal statistics:] As any intro stat student will tell you, you've got to control for the confounding variables. Men make up more than 90 % of victims in all these cases whether you're talking about brutality, prison, shot by the cops, or otherwise. Men are of course only 50 % of the population. Just viewing that fact doesn't tell you anyting about anti-male bias per se. It's impossible to not to talk about the underlying facts of racially disparate crime: 13 % of the population commits, and suffers, 52 % of the murders. [...] Virtually all of the disparities [...], show [young black men] in particular, showing up at heavily disproportionate rates and that's a first order problem. The police are coming into contact with young black men far more often as a result. [...] I'm not saying there's no racial bias in police; I think there is. [...] But I don't want to be such a self-flattering backseat driver to the cops whose job it is to actually keep everyone safe, including black and hispanic people, the vast majority of whom do not commit crime even in the most criminal neighborhoods. Virtually every study I've looked at that controls for all of these variables finds no anti-black bias in deadly shootings. Sometimes they find anti-black biases in cops' likelyhood to put his hands on and rough up a suspect and that's very real problem, but there's really no disparity to be found when it comes to a cop's decision to pull the trigger."

"Mainstream media outlets selects for people who make points that feel good, that preach to the choir, that don't involve any statistics because people don't what to hear numbers. Ever. They want to hear short soundbites and maybe, at most, a story. And anyone who wants to get more complex than that is going to find [themselves] relegated to non-mainstream."

"There are videos of white people, getting killed by the cops, with their hands up begging for their lives every bit as brutal and terrifying and awful as the videos we've seen. At all the Black Lives Matter protests there's this thing, they always say 'Say their name!' [...] There are so many white names. There are in fact, in absolute terms, there are more white names than there are black names. And I've spent some time looking at them and they're identical. The case is for every black person killed by the police there are usually two or three white people that died exactly the same way. Nobody says their names and nobody cares. That seems to people like the correct moral bias because we're imprinted with the symbolism of the civil rights movement, but we have to outgrow this if we're going to be a cohesive country going into the 21st century which is a very different reality than where we're coming from."

"There is a particularly strong connection between the revival of antievolutionism since 1980 and the political attack on separation of church and state, because the Christianization of secular public education has long been a goal of the forces of conservative religion."

"There is also a connection between the antievolution campaign and the lamentable state of American scientific literacy."

"The attack on science is a prime secularist issue not because religion and science are incompatible but because particular forms of religious belief—those that claim to have found the one true answer to the origins and ultimate purpose of human life—are incompatible not only with science but with democracy."

"For extremist conservatives of all faiths, the status of women is a line in the sand, a measure of their unwillingness to let secular laws and new secular customs overturn centuries of religious dogma and tradition. The real enemies of fundamentalism are rationalism and the modern world, and while this observation is most frequently applied by American pundits to radical Islamic theocracies, it also applies in some measure to any religion, fundamentalist or not, that treats women as the inferiors of men."

"On this issue, however, the religious right is right: true belief in and commitment to the equality of women and men shakes the foundations of all religions. Religion and feminism can be reconciled only through a radical reconstruction of traditional religious practices and beliefs."

"However, bread-and-butter feminism was not so fundamentally threatening as to arouse the full ire of the religious right. It took the legalization of abortion, with its negation of sacred rationales for strict social control of women’s childbearing decisions, to join the battle between conservative religion and secularist feminism."

"Political radicals regarded religion as merely one pillar of an unjust society, and they fully expected the pillar to collapse with the overturning of an economic order that favored the rich and oppressed the poor. Committed freethinkers, by contrast, regarded orthodox religion as the foundation of most other social evils. Because religion imprisoned the mind with visions of eternal rewards and punishments in the afterlife, it prevented men and women from devising rational solutions to finite earthly problems."

"Like so many other freethinkers, Moore originally turned against orthodox religion because of its support of slavery."

"The Christian right would like today’s public to forget exactly where religious conservatives stood on civil rights forty years ago. One of the more repellent ironies of modern religious correctness has been the attempt by fundamentalists to wrap themselves in the mantle of those men and women of faith who risked their lives to fight racism. In the sixties, right-wing fundamentalists were, almost without exception, hard-core segregationists. The attacked the twentieth-century civil rights movement as their spiritual and often physical ancestors had attacked the nineteenth-century abolitionist and feminist movements. What they saw was what their predecessors had seen—not a struggle for justice but a conspiracy of atheism, political radicalism, and sexual libertinism."