Interesting Links for 30-08-2021

[andrewducker]

The autistic spectrum is not a line

(tags:autism )

Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding (Or: How to keep them subscribing)

(tags:Adobe psychology OhForFucksSake )

Psychologists Have Uncovered a Troubling Feature of People Who Seem Nice All the Time

(tags:niceness psychology torture )

Train Wheels Are Cones

(tags:trains design )

To China's chagrin, Japan-Taiwan talks could pave the way for closer ties

(tags:Japan China Taiwan )

Everything turns into crabs or weasels

(tags:animals evolution )

Spectrum of theistic probability (I used to be a 6, nowadays I'm Ignostic)

(tags:religion atheism )

Comments

[calimac]

2) Another variant of confusing your users, this one not driven by economic greed (the events are usually free), is upcoming online events whose progress update e-mails contain reminders to sign up if you haven't already, thus leaving the ordinary person, who can't devote a lot of memory space to such things, uncertain whether they already did so.

Nor is the event's website much help, and indeed on more than one occasion I've wound up with two or more signups, and wasn't that confusing when the event finally arrived.

3) So the argument is that contrarian personalities are actually more "pro-social" because they'll refuse to participate in the Milgram experiment. But have you measured what happens if you ask them to wear Covid masks? Most of the refusers sound very contrarian.

7) So is there a place on the theistic probability line for someone who considers the existence of God to be not a very interesting or useful question?

[danieldwilliam]

On 7) I also think that spectrum is missing something about the impact of one's position on theism. I'm a big Natural Lawyer. Should a god be proven to exist I don't think I would ever see any god or godlike entity as a font of morality or even a legitmate arbiter. They may have greater reasoning abilities than me and one would have to respect that but my position on theism is that I'd hold any god within the same moral framework as any other entity.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, that's another question entirely!

[adrian_turtle]

That question seems to be considered in a secondary link to "apatheism," which is defined orthogonally to the theisim/atheism spectrum.

[danieldwilliam]

Yeah, something like that seems to fit.

[andrewducker]

2) I agree. Getting emails saying "Do X if you haven't already!" from a site that *knows* if I have or not" is extremely irritating.

3) An excellent question!

7) I'd say that Ignosticism for the former. Not sure about the latter.

[movingfinger]

2 Look, web designer, I'm just not going to use navigation or view your clever animation or video or whatever to "consume" a short article of some but not crucial interest to me. Use words in sentences and paragraphs. If your article is truly interesting, I may even share it with others for you.

I'm seeing a lot of this lately; it's like no one learned anything from the death of Java...

[alithea]

Dawkins always merrily ignores the fact that people can be polytheists or pantheists too (nevermind animists) - he always assumes the only alternative to atheism is believing in God as a single all powerful entity, like a whole bunch of world religions just don't exist. For someone who constantly rails against it, his entire world view is still entirely based on Christian philosophy.

[agoodwinsmith]

Yes. Related to this, I would say that I don't believe in any of the descriptions of god/gods/goddesses/goddess that I have heard/read yet.

[agoodwinsmith]

Somehow, when my eye was zooming along, I read that as "crabs or dessert". No, I don't see how that happened either, but ...

[anna_wing]

My own rule of thumb for anything coming out of a psychology experiment is that I would not without more try to apply it to any cultural milieu or set of circumstances different from the ones in which the experiment was conducted.

The report of the would-be Milgram experiment seems to assume that the contrarian personality is automatically pro-social because it happens to have that outcome in this one highly artificial scenario. But the experiment does not seem to have controlled for the participants' education level, or social status, both of which have significant effects on people's willingness to assert themselves.

Today I learned that I am an apatheist! What a lovely word. Technically speaking, Buddhists would be too, though most practicing folk Buddhists in effect treat the Buddha as a sort of superior deity. Though all schools of Buddhism as far as I know consider the "who created the universe and why"-type questions to be irrelevant. How the cycle of Samsara came into being is entirely secondary to the issue of what to do to get out of it.

[mountainkiss]

See also this.

[anna_wing]

Ha. Indeed.

[darkoshi]

I hadn't heard this term before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ietsism

I would say I am somewhere between atheism and that.

[jducoeur]

Oooh, I like that -- it's a fairly good description of me.

I regard the standard Abrahamic definitions of God to be extremely unlikely (so Dawkins would probably call me a 6), but I don't consider myself "atheist" at all. (Indeed, I tend to define atheism as as religion, in that it is a dogmatic, unprovable set of beliefs about the nature of deity.)

But I'm at least moderately spiritual, and leave room for deity where permitted by scientific knowledge -- which is still quite a bit of room, just mostly unrelated to the way it's usually defined by the major religions. I often describe myself as "kinda-sorta-Buddhist" (in that I like a lot of aspects of what I know about Buddhist philosophy, despite having no truck with the organized forms of Buddhism), and sometimes "Minbari" in geekier environments. But "Ietist" isn't a half-bad label for me...