That in the past people used to deceive (delude) themselves and other fools around them with theology, speculations and metaphysics, today they do the same with statistics, probability and abstract models.
Nassim Taleb reader/Twitter follower? In my (limited and mostly anecdotal) experience this sort of categorical seems to lead to more, perhaps different kinds of superstition. People read "The Black Swan" and start talking like statistics, probabilities etc. were suddenly completely meaningless. Humans seem to always have to live in extremes.. ;)
It's all a matter of perspective. One could also claim that those who don't acknowledge God are deluding themselves with a lack of theology. I'm not trying to start a debate, but dismissing the beliefs of billions as simply delusion/deception is painting with broad strokes.
Why, evolutionary psychology and the philosophy of mind, comparative history and some sociology offers a comprehensive explanation of the mental and social forces, so to speak, which makes religions possible. It is social phenomena of language-possessing species, if you wish, misinterpretation of the instincts, co-evolution and other causes and laws, to which humans are subjected, like any other species.
This is where I interject & mention this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
People don't want to feel like they wasted time & resources over something that doesn't exist.
Religion can just be relegated to a construct for social activities. There's so many of them which sprung up independently. People should really ponder whether they have accounted some belief for interplanetary travel.
If you bring up opportunity cost, I think it's also worth mentioning Pascal's wager[0]. I don't believe in this argument, but it's an interesting point to consider.
Which god? The argument you make could also be made for all people following all the religions aside from the one whose god actually exists. The religions can't all be right, if in fact even one is right.
So sheer quantity of believers doesn't work for making a point.
I have used an argument like this and the answer I got(which left me dumbfounded) was like "Everyone believes in some sort of divine power or entity or whatever and the other religions just got their wrong."
They're basically saying that sheer quantity of believers in anything proves that their God exists!
The statement as quoted does not make the argument you claim it does. Perhaps the person who were speaking with elaborated in order to make that point though.
Coming from a Christian perspective however, I would agree in general people have evidence to believe in God. I don't intend the quote from the Bible below to serve as an sort of evidence. This would not be a logical line of reasoning for someone who does not believe in the truth of the Bible. However, it may serve to further clarify my position.
"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." -- Romans 1:20
Fair point although I wasn't intending to argue that number of believers is any sort of proof. In any case, at least Christianity and Islam each have over one billion believers globally.
> I wasn't intending to argue that number of believers is any sort of proof.
It definitely doesn't provide any proof, but I didn't say that. I said "sheer quantity of believers doesn't work for making a point", as in, how can the number of people in any way support the validity of any beliefs held by those people?
There's plenty of concrete historical evidence that beliefs held by many many people turned out to be wrong. It's basically the story of science. I.e. we have clear evidence that the fact that a lot of people hold a belief does not mean anything about the truth of that belief.
> In any case, at least Christianity and Islam each have over one billion believers globally.
Not sure where you are from, many (I am from NL and not many believers in the first category anymore; I live in the south of Spain and there not many either, but from what I read in the US there are plenty left, to my dismay but who cares about that) are still deceiving themselves with theology. But yeah mean that both are beliefs and there it does not matter? Or?
This seems incredibly cynical in light of the current breakthroughs in machine learning, and probabilistic modelling. It really feels to me as though the AI revolution isn't something to dream about anymore, because we're living in it.
I find it difficult to deny the achievement of tangible progress that is implied by, for example, the self-driving car.
UNINFORMED OPINION by a side-watcher: I don't feel there's any AI revolution at all. We simply have slightly more efficient deep learning networks due to better hardware.
Most of the time it feels like the people who are somewhat successful in those branches simply got lucky by randomly mixing elements A, B and C in an unexpected manner and boom -- magic.
In other words, things progress painfully slow and almost always it's due to intuitive shower/sleep revelations than anything else.
The algorithms are improved, and there are more network types, and better understanding of real neurons, but I think you are mostly correct.
I built a program that played tic-tac-toe in -94, using a combination of traversing a problem tree while evaluating the positions using a neural network.
To my understanding, this is basically the same approach used to develop a Go player, only that it took a month training a minimal network to do something useful at all at the time on my small Amiga 500...
Modeling is a new form of pseudo-scientific speculation. ML is closer to reality as long as the training sets are not a dogmatically interpreted noise, like it usually is in finance and other pseudo-sciences.
You could read about a fundamental difference between a properly controlled, replicable scientific experiment and computer simulation according to some abstract/unverified model and why results of such simulations cannot be substituted for experimental results or any form of evidence in my older comments.
