Tag: trainwreck

The deadly tarpit

Curt Schilling is only the latest lover of games with money to learn that game development isn’t anywhere nearly as easy as it looks:

After remaining silent as his video game company collapsed around him, Curt Schilling is finally speaking out — and he’s not happy. The former Red Sox pitcher responded to critics, pointing out that he stands to lose as much as $50 million dollars if his troubled 38 Studios can’t be saved…. 38 Studios laid off all 379 of its employees last week. The workers, who received no warning about the cuts, also reportedly have seen their health benefits expire. The tolls of the shutdown have affected Schilling as well, as the former All-Star has lost 33 lbs. in the past 45 days. The company’s woes stem from a $75 million loan acquired from the state of Rhode Island in 2010, a move by the state to lure the then-promising company away from its home base in Massachusetts. In February of 2012, 38 Studios shipped its first game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. While the game was a mid-level hit, selling over 1 million copies, it was unable to help the company stay afloat.

What a nightmare. I always expected it to end this way, only I had no idea 38 Studios had been conceived on so large a scale. Being an ASL player, I’m very remotely acquainted with Curt, and I even sent him an email offering to give him some advice on either development or design when I first heard that he’d set it up. He sent back a friendly email thanking me for my good wishes, but it was clear that he felt he’d put an all-star team together and everything was well under control. But when I looked at the names involved, I didn’t recognize any of them as producers I would trust to finish a project and it looked very much like a repeat of Ion Storm, with more money and celebrity involved than good sense or productivity.

I absolutely hate seeing this sort of thing. I’ve seen it happen too many times now, to too many good and smart people who simply fail to understand how difficult it is to build a successful game, let alone a successful game company. If you look at the successful ones, even the ones that seem to come from nowhere, they’ve almost always got a long track record of creating and completing a whole host of little games you’ve never heard of. You simply don’t do a WoW, or even an Angry Birds, the first time out of the gate. How is it that people are still wasting $25 million, $50 million, even $100 million in developing nothing while a proven developer like Tarn Adams has been releasing brilliant, innovative games on a shoestring for years?

There are tremendous dangers on every side in the game development process, and worst of all, you’re constantly working against a ticking clock. Just a few weeks ago, someone sent me a link to this page, with some screen shots of our never-released Traveller RPG game that was cancelled by Sega of Japan when they closed their Sega of America operations and ended all US-based Katana (Dreamcast) development. I don’t know if we got out at the right time or not; sometimes I wish we’d gone ahead and done what was essentially CoD/MoH – or as we called it, first-person ASL – five years before the first WWII shooters came out. But we were burned out, we’d already done very well out of the Rebel Moon games, and the industry was becoming more about the business and less about the games. But when I see one successful guy after another crash and burn while trying to shoot directly for the Moon, it makes me want to set up shop as a consultant, telling these people to spend a lot less money, hire a lot fewer people, and directing their focus on making entertaining games and not failing to even release what is supposed to be the next CoD/WoW/AB.

Wängsty doubles down again

His posterior still clearly giving him an amount of pain, R. Scott Bakker keeps desperately trying to come up with a means of attacking me while avoiding the direct engagement that will expose him as the intellectual fraud he so clearly is:

Vox, it appears, has decided to wage a war of attrition, to keep throwing his cherries until people turn their bowls upside down. I’ve decided to oblige him. But since it stings my vanity knowing the self-aggrandizing way he’ll inevitably spin this, I figured I had better lay out some reasons, as well as discharge an old promise I made regarding the uses of abuses of arguing ad hominem.

Vox literally believes, if you recall, that he really is the winner of the Magical Belief Lottery. You might be inclined, on a occasion, to think that he is simply having one on, but I assure you, when he says things like, “Of course, I am a superintelligence, so the fact that [delevagus] been studying it for years whereas I read Sextus once on an airplane meant that it really wasn’t a fair contest,” he genuinely means it.

At this point, I’m inclined to simply take him as ‘Exhibit A’ of human irrationality. Some, in the jungle that has overrun the comment thread on the previous post, have suggested that I’m ‘running scared’ and the fact is, I am. But from what he represents, not what he ‘argues.’ Vox is what you might call an ‘epistemic bombast’–self-described. He literally believes he has the most powerful three pound brain in the universe. That, in my books, counts as delusional.

One thing I was always big on in my teaching days was what I called the ‘minimum condition of rationality.’ Once you realize that reason is primarily argumentative, as opposed to epistemic, you realize that reason is just as liable to deceive as to reveal. So the question you always need to ask yourself in any debate is whether you are the victim of your own ingenuity. You are more apt to use you intelligence to justify your stupidity post hoc—to rationalize—than otherwise. And that’s a fact Jack.

Thus the crucial importance of epistemic humility. Rational debate is impossible with epistemic bombasts simply because, as more and more research shows, reason is primarily a public relations device, a way to snag other three pound brains, and only secondarily epistemic, a way to snag the world. It is quite literally impossible to convince an epistemic bombast of anything on theoretical subject matters lacking any clear, consensually defined truth conditions.

This is why some cognitive psychologists are now arguing that rationality is quite independent of intelligence.

So what then is the measure of epistemic humility? How can you tell whether you should trust yourself, let alone your interlocutor?

Well some interlocutors, like Vox, make things easy for you. Vox is a self-declared epistemic bombast. As such, given that you accept that science is the best tool we have ever devised for sorting—even if only contingently—fact from fiction, you can write him off as a serious interlocutor.

In other words, you can safely dismiss him on ad hominem grounds.

He’s certainly desperate to do so. This is little more than another attempt to justify his own cowardice in failing to either answer my questions or accept my invitation to a written debate concerning his claims regarding the importance of Uncertainty and the intrinsic dangers of Certainty. His argument that he can safely dismiss me on ad hominem grounds, much less do so convincingly, doesn’t hold up, however, not only because it is a logical fallacy, but also because it is based on a complete falsehood. Wängsty is such a shameless liar, can anyone wonder why I repeatedly call him out for being such an intellectually dishonest charlatan? I don’t believe, literally or otherwise, that I possess “the most powerful three pound brain in the universe”. I’ve never claimed anything like that. I’m not the smartest one in my extended family and I wasn’t even the second-smartest in a house I shared with three other guys after college; both Horn and Big Chilly test out higher than I do. But I am a superintelligence nevertheless, and I do believe, with considerable evidence to justify that belief, that I’m observably more intelligent than Wängsty and his fellow wannabe PhD, Delavagus. This quite clearly, bothers them, as it appears to offend their sense of multiversal order that someone who does not share either their left-liberal ideological orientation or academic credentials could actually be more intelligent than they are.

Of course I genuinely believe it wasn’t a fair contest between Delavagus and me. Is there anyone who read the Dissecting the Skeptics series who did not? If so, do speak up and share your reasoning with us.

It is amusing, to be sure, that Scott asserts I am delusional while being simultaneously dumb enough to lie about things that anyone can easily check and confirm to be false. And it is even more amusing that he insists on a “minimum condition of rationality” while apparently failing to be aware that in the aforementioned unfair contest, Delavagus’s argument attacked human reason and asserted its self-refuting nature.

Scott is running scared and inclined to simply take me “as ‘Exhibit A’ of human irrationality” because I have consistently exposed his cowardice, his dishonesty, and his inability to argue his way out of a paper bag. He’s desperate to avoid direct engagement because he knows that what I will do to his arguments will make what I did to those presented by Delavagus look merciful in comparison. People have been telling Wängsty nearly from the start, eight months ago, that he had gotten me all wrong, but he keeps doubling down again and again on his original position… because you are a complete fraud when it comes to your Uncertainty Doctrine.

But as all the long-time readers here know, I won’t hesitate to continue beating the dead horse that is The Prince of Wängst until there is no longer so much as a maggot wriggling in the corpse. By the time the white flag flies, absolutely no one will take any of his claims seriously, mostly because he’ll have stripped every last vestige of intellectual integrity from himself.

Greens causing local warming

This is an application of the “think globally, act locally” directive that I’d certainly never imagined:

Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built. This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms. It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.

Almost 1 degree Celsius? That’s more warming than we’ve seen in the last decade. Now, obviously there aren’t enough wind farms yet to have a global impact, but if one considers how many would be required to replace conventional sources of energy, it should be obvious that this renders the Green energy program dead prior to arrival. I suppose that leaves Plan B: mass population reduction.

Just more black-on-black violence

The Narrative further melts down:

The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him

A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men. Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account. “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?” the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.”

Now that is indeed amusing. The Great White Defendant isn’t just Hispanic, but turns out to be an octoroon! Case closed. Send the camera crews home. That sound you’re hearing is just the term “White Hispanic” being frantically scrubbed from the media style guides.

Wängsty discredits himself

In which R. Scott Bakker conclusively demonstrates that he isn’t merely hypocritical, ignorant, morally blind, and philosophically inept, he also happens to be a confirmed liar:

By way of disclosure, I have to say that I’m most interested in the way you’ve changed your answers to these questions since the last time. We actually speculated about how you might change your rhetorical tactics. You seem to have moved from a bald (and quite embarrassing, I think you realized in retrospect) assertion of exceptionalism (IQ, social regard – I think you even managed to work your wife’s fertility in there!) to one that has more cognitive qualifications (which is something I predicted – my conceptual model must have been bang on that day!).

To which I replied: “As I recall, the previous questions were different, Scott. Why on Earth would you expect me to provide the same answers to different questions? I’ll suppose I’ll have to look up your previous questions and compare them. And before I do, let me point out that this will have some seriously negative implications for your credibility and intellectual honesty if those two sets of questions are not identical.”

I’ve been engaging with Bakker long enough now to know that he is a slippery intellectual snake, and while I’m not perfectly consistent over time, I don’t customarily change my answers to the same question without either admitting or realizing I have done so. So, his claim that I had changed my rhetorical tactics immediately triggered my BS radar. I went back and looked at every single question both he and his readers asked me, and thanks to his description, I had no trouble identifying the one to which he was referring, which I answered in the post entitled The Wangst that Comes After.

Wängsty: “What makes him think he’s won the Magical Belief and Identity Lottery?”

Oh, I don’t know. Out of nearly 7 billion people, I’m fortunate to be in the top 1% in the planet with regards to health, wealth, looks, brains, athleticism, and nationality. My wife is slender, beautiful, lovable, loyal, fertile, and funny. I meet good people who seem to enjoy my company everywhere I go. That all seems pretty lucky to me, considering that my entire contribution to the situation was choosing my parents well. I am grateful and I thank God every day for the ticket He has dealt me. If I’m not a birth lottery winner, then who is? The kid in the Congo who just got his hands chopped off and is getting raped for the fourth time today? To paraphrase the immortal parental wisdom of PJ O’Rourke, anyone in my position had damn well better get down on their knees and pray that life does not become fair.

First, let me say that I’m not embarrassed by my answer to that question in the slightest. I wouldn’t change a word of it if I were asked it again. But I wasn’t. And to prove that, let’s take a look at the questions that I subsequently answered. Here is the complete list of questions Bakker asked of me in the latest go-round. Do you see anything about the Magical Belief and Identity Lottery?

1. Granting two things, that the technologies that science made possible have transformed our world in the past three centuries, and that science, as another human institution, nevertheless suffers many flaws, you’re saying your non-scientific account of science demonstrates that science is not to be trusted… what? At all? More than non-scientific accounts? No differently than non-scientific accounts? [Bakker doesn’t understand that technology drives science more than science drives technology. And it was not a “non-scientific account” that demonstrated peer-reviewed, published science papers from top science labs are about 11 percent reproducible. -VD]

2. Lastly, I will ask you – this one time – to refrain from verbally abusing any one on this site but myself. Are we clear on that? [Sure, we’re clear that you asked. – VD]

3. Are you ever puzzled by the way it always seems to be the other guy that’s wrong? For us outsiders, we can only assume, absent any relevant information, that you are at best ‘in the right’ a fraction of the time (just like everyone else), but that you are duped into thinking you are pretty much right all the time (just like everyone else). What makes you special? My personal instinct – one that I think many others share – is to be skeptical of an individual the degree to which they impress themselves. Why should I make any exception in your case?

So Bakker is trying to claim that a question about the uniqueness of my identity and beliefs is exactly the same as a question about the unusual success of my public track record and thereby score some cheap rhetorical points by claiming that two very different answers to two different questions were actually two different answers to the same question. He then goes on to make the risible claim that this somehow supports his conceptual model and that he had predicted my behavior. But his claims aren’t simply false, they are shamelessly dishonest. While I knew from the start that Bakker was somewhat of a charlatan and prone to intellectually carelessness as well, until now, I only suspected that he would be willing to knowingly lie in support of his utopian ideology. And the sheer stupidity of lying about such an easily checked statement tends to support one of my other suspicions, which is that Wängsty is more educated than intelligent.

Nor can Bakker claim that “what makes you special” is synonymous with his Lottery question, because it was asked in the context of why I believe I am right more than others are, as one can easily see in my answers to him.

Wängsty: Are you ever puzzled by the way it always seems to be the other guy that’s wrong?

That’s hilarious. When I make my annual economic predictions at the start of the year, I always score my predictions from the previous year. Sometimes they’re very good, such as the time I was only off on the change in the median existing home price by $300 when the chief economist for NAR was off by more than $40,000. Sometimes they’re not, such as when I didn’t anticipate the BLS playing games with the employment-population ratio in order to keep the unemployment rate down. But it’s not enough to be stupid, you have to be completely ignorant to think that anyone who meddles in economics could possibly think he’s right all the time. I only wish I was. Unlike academia, there are significant financial penalties for being wrong in the markets. But in general, your question is rather like asking if Bill Belichick if he’s ever puzzled that the other team always seems to lose. He’s a good football coach. I’m a good recognizer of patterns. I’ve been writing op/ed columns for 11 years. My track record is all out in the open and it speaks for itself. I don’t always get it right – I still can’t believe Hillary Clinton didn’t win the nomination – but in that same election, I was the only commentator in a field of 100 to correctly predict that Sarah Palin would be McCain’s vice-presidential choice. And this time around, I correctly anticipated Romney would be the Republican nominee; time will tell if my outlandish prediction that Obama will not be the Democratic candidate in November is correct as well. And note that I made that prediction about 18 months ago; my track record is not a result of playing it safe and obvious.

What makes you special? My personal instinct – one that I think many others share – is to be skeptical of an individual the degree to which they impress themselves. Why should I make any exception in your case?

Because I’m really that good. Look, a lot of people ignored me back in 2002 when I urged them to stay out of the housing bubble and buy gold instead. After housing crashed and gold went from $275 to $1750, a lot of those people subsequently decided that they at least ought to pay attention. Strangely enough, no one is laughing at my prediction of massive worldwide economic contraction anymore. What makes me special? I am not sure. There are certainly others smarter than I am, and more successful than I am. But what I’m very good at is forcing myself to only look at what is there, rather than what I want to be there. In retrospect, most of my errors have been caused by failing to sufficiently adhere to that principle, and that’s how I often pinpoint my interlocutors’ weaknesses: look at what they desperately want to believe is true and you’ll probably find a logical or factual error there. But what many of my readers find amusing about your accusations of certainty is that I have quite openly changed my mind about a number of significant ideological issues. Can you honestly say the same?

It may be illuminating to keep this in mind as I proceed to pin down the snake and vivisect his Moral Uncertainty Principle, armed with little more than a superintelligence and a peculiar definition of “certainty”. Those who find this whole thing amusing will no doubt be interested to know that Mr. Moral Uncertainty appears to have a fairly serious obsession that the alien rape monsters of The Prince of Nothing were not enough to sate, as it appears rape is a major theme of his science fiction work as well.

Deeper and deeper

The discussion at R. Scott Bakker’s Three Pound Brain has continued and sprouted numerous branches, and yet Wängsty himself has thus far resolutely refused to provide any definition of “certainty” or “uncertainty” despite the fact that his entire philosophical framework appears to rest upon them.  Here is but one of several comments that I have made there in answering the various questions of his commenters even as Bakker continues to avoid answering mine.

Why is he so reluctant to provide definitions for his central terms?  Is he afraid that his entire philosophical edifice will tumble to the ground if he exposes it to criticism?  Or is it only that the certainty of a definition would be less moral than the uncertainty of a non-definition, so he is simply attempting to abide by the ethos of his doubt-filled creed?

First, I’d like to point out that I’ve been answering many questions, whereas Scott still hasn’t deigned to define
certainty or uncertainty for us, which has prevented us from proceeding
with the main subject. So, how about it, Scott? Are you cool with the
dictionary definitions or is Delavagus correct and you have something
else in mind?
Just for the sake of clarity, you advocate attempting to convince
all women to voluntarily not work. You don’t advocate forcing them to
not work, right?
I don’t think it’s necessary to force anyone not to work. Most women
of the important class don’t really want to, not after they have actual
experience of it. But I would go a little farther than simply
attempting to convince women, I advise removing the incentives that
encourage women to enter the labor force and provide them with
incentives to bear and raise children instead.
The basic problem is that since the doubling of women in the labor
force from 1950 to 1975, and concomitant reduction of wage rates,
married women who don’t want to work are forced to if they wish to
maintain the standard of living a one-income family once had.
Is this [changing  positions on the drug war] really an example of you being (proven) wrong, though? It was incompatable with your beliefs.
Yes. A friend pointed out the logical inconsistency to me.
Is there some method by which you could be shown to be wrong on
the womens rights (or even shown to not be so certain of how it aught to
be)? You seem to say your belief changed – but what was the changing
method and can anyone else have a hand in that?
Of course. But it’s unlikely, since I’ve looked at it in more depth
than most. The method involved looking at the societal effects over the
course of the last 90 years, and it rapidly became clear that the
predictions made by opponents of women’s suffrage were largely correct
and those made by its supporters were incorrect. Furthermore, there are
a whole host of problems, mostly rooted in economics, that were never
anticipated by either side.
Seems a legacy argument? Legacy, Eg: Well, if we give all these
slaves freedom, who will work the plantation! Economic ruin! Thus
slavery aught to continue.
No, you’re making the mistake of confusing a forward-looking
perspective with a retrospective one. In the correct analogy to the
case we’re discussing, we’re considering that pro-slavery argument from
amidst the economic ruins. As it happens, that pro-slavery argument was
subsequently proven wrong by events, as were the pro-suffrage
arguments.
if we assume that women are technically human, and we assert that
we value human liberty, shouldn’t we support their desire to work as
much as we would support a man’s desire to smoke some nice (almost)
harmless weed due to both being a special case of general human liberty ?
Not necessarily. This is the common error committed by many of my
fellow libertarians. For example, consider open borders. That
seemingly libertarian position is actually anti-freedom, as there would
be nothing to stop China from sending 30 million Chinese to the UK and
55 million to the USA, gaining voting rights, then voting to sign a
treaty of surrender to the Chinese government. Maximizing human liberty
in the aggregate is not perfectly synonymous with maximizing all
individual human liberty.
However, if he supports bypassing persuasion and going straight
for coercion, things take a decidedly ominous turn. But relying only on
persuasion immediately suggests the practical improbability of the
proposition, and this is why I think it’s proper to feel uneasy about
even theoretically suggesting it. What really is the point to suggesting
a counterfactual that has no chance of being realized?
There is a long gap between persuasion and coercion. As I said, I
favor incentives, not force. But it’s not a counterfactual that has no
chance of being realized. The coercion and oppression of Western women
by force will come if their behavioral trends are not changed, and
changed in the next 30 years. The socio-sexual and demographic trends
are fairly clear. Who would have imagined, in 1973, when wages peaked
and the divorce/abortion equalitarian program was implemented into US
law, that there would be honor killings in the USA and Europe only
thirty years later?
Societies that rest upon structural incoherencies always collapse
sooner or later. Feminist equalitarianism is actually a less coherent
and less realistic ideology than Soviet communism was, and it probably
won’t last the 72 years that the Soviet system did. It’s only been 39
years and the problems are rapidly building up throughout the West.

Some things must be read

If one is to believe them. This is an incredibly amusing letter from a white, deeply liberal, very not-racist woman who is deeply concerned about the insufficient profits of a prospective hip-hop club proprietor:

My name is Jennifer McMillen, and I live only a few doors down from the proposed site of Prime 6. Like most of the folks at the CB6 meeting on Monday night, I too have been concerned about the impending entrance of Prime 6 into our community and our daily lives.

I’m not generally the type of person that speaks up, (I remained silent during the entire Monday night meeting), but in this situation, I’m hopeful that I’ve stumbled onto a solution that makes so much sense for *both* parties that I’m beyond excited to share it with all of you.

First, let me explain what’s at the heart of this conflict: I know for a fact that there’s no single type of establishment (or type of bar/club patron for that matter) that Park Slopers would inherently view as “undesirable.” I don’t think anyone would deny that Park Slopers are about the least “racist” people on the planet.

What IS causing strife in this situation is that over the last ten years, Park Slope has become a family-oriented and family-centric community. This can be annoying at times – believe me, as someone who has chosen not to have children, I’m more than aware of the self-entitled attitude that often pervades parts of our community.

Nevertheless, it’s just a fact that in this neighborhood, family comes first.

Prime 6 has to realize this – but at the same time – Park Slope families need to realize that this is a free country, and that Prime 6 has a right to exist. Furthermore, no one can legally stop the owners from doing what it is they’re going to do.

So here’s the gist of my big idea: Isn’t there some middle ground between this spot being a stroller repair shop and it being a full-on hip-hop club?

No one can change the fact that Prime 6 WILL exist – they have their liquor license, and nothing’s going to deter them from opening. BUT: What if owner Akiva Ofshtein could be convinced that his business will see far more financial success as a different kind of nightlife establishment. Instead of focussing on hip-hop and urban entertainment, what if Prime 6 embraced some of the more indie local artists of ALL races who live and perform in the area.

Now, why might this devoutly anti-racist woman imagine that having an establishment devoted to “hip-hop and urban entertainment” would not be compatible with families or white spinsters like herself? What could the problem possibly be?

The only difference between white “racists” like John Derbyshire and avowedly anti-racist whites like Ms McMillen is that the latter completely lacks self-awareness. The observable and provable reality is that every single mentally functioning adult on the planet is racist because racism, in its most commonly recognized form, is nothing more than the possession of a functioning pattern-recognition capacity.

But the woman’s solution is even more amusing than the self-delusion. What a surprise that a liberal white woman would believe that an “indie” club would be more popular than an urban one. After all, doesn’t everyone love, love, love Tori Amos and Sarah Mclachlan?

Peggy Noonan’s real war

Peggy Noonan gets the vapors:

But the real war is against women in American public life, in politics and media most obviously, but in other spheres as well. In this war, leaders who are women are publicly demeaned and diminished based on the fact that they are women. They are the object of sexual slurs, and insulted in sexual terms. The words used are vulgar, and are meant to tear down and embarrass. Every woman in American public life knows of it. They talk about it in private. They’ve all experienced it.

Here are some of the words that have been hurled the past few years at public figures who are female: “slut,” “whore,” “prostitute,” “bimbo.” You know the other, coarser words that have been used. But the point is, these are not private insults. They are said in public. This is something new in American political life, that women can be spoken of this way.

Wait, I thought they wanted equality… they wanted equality, right? So, why shouldn’t one call a slut a slut? Now, I am thankfully not privy to the details of Ms Sandra Fluke’s sex life, but given that we know she is a 30 year-old unmarried woman who claims to spend $3,0001,000 on birth control annually, I think that “slut” is probably a significant understatement. According to the Internet – that same Internet which Ms Noonan holds responsible for giving her the vapors – a box of 12 Trojan Magnum XL Condoms is $9.29.

So, we can conclude that if Ms Fluke requires $1,000 annually, she must be having sex around 3,8751,292 times per year. Frankly, it’s amazing that she has any time to attend her law school classes, much less testify before Potemkin Congressional panels.

Noonan claims openly expressed male contempt for women is “the real war on women”, which is more than a little ironic, as her argument is only likely to generate more contempt, especially among the sort of men who tend to believe that the abortion of millions of female babies every year is an activity much more deserving of the title.

Pity the poor cam whores

Either Andon failed Reading Comprehension 101 or we are facing an imminent Internet tragedy:

jumping from high places – always fatal. injecting kids with vaccines – almost never fatal. comparison warranted.

The central problem with this critique is that the comparison that was made was not between jumping from high places and being vaccinated, but rather between being filmed and being vaccinated. Still, I should be truly fascinated if Andon genuinely wishes to argue that being filmed by a web cam is intrinsically more deadly than being injected with poison. Perhaps, I can only imagine, he subscribes to the notion of the camera stealing one’s soul?

And yes, as always, these are real critics and genuine attempts to “correct” my reasoning.

Portrait of a facepalm

This is an actual dialogue from the comments that I felt deserves to survive the heat death of CoComment:

Agnosticon: There’s a lot of mens rea in this argument. [The Divine Hiddenness argument.] It is basically a legal analogy. A rational disbeliever allegedly does not have “guilty mind” and should therefore still be worthy of salvation, however he isn’t, a contradiction. Rational justification here is equivalent to non culpability, while that may not be full justification, it is not unjustified either, it occupies a gray region. I think the argument rests on the assumption that God would be wise enough to perceive this and avoid it, but He doesn’t, hence no God.

VD: It is a stupid and logically invalid argument, as I will demonstrate when I get around to it. And, as I have pointed out on many occasions, legal and moral culpability are two very different things. Regardless, arguing about the fact of God’s existence on the basis of Man’s law is self-evidently stupid.

Agnosticon: At least it doesn’t question beg, as does arguing for the existence of God based on God’s Law.

VD: There is no “at least”, it’s simply invalid. And who is arguing for the existence of God based on God’s Law? If you still think I’m doing that, you’re simply demonstrating your intellectual limitations again.

Agnosticon: I’m not saying that. I’m just anticipating some circularity in the rebuttal to the [Divine] Hiddenness argument, but I’ll wait until you give it.

As a general service to commenters here, let me recommend that you read this and contemplate the wisdom of not publicly attempting to defend an argument that you have made by comparing it favorably with an argument that someone else has not actually made, but that you anticipate them making. Even if an argument is intrinsically flawed, you can’t burn a bloody strawman until the straw is gathered and assembled.

And on a tangential note, I’d be curious to know what the regulars here deem the over/under on the percentage chance that Agnosticon can successfully anticipate the structure of my arguments, much less the actual argument itself?