A couple of years back I stumbled across this diagram on reddit. Since then I’ve kept a list of all illogical arguments, quackery, irrational ideas and similar nonsense, to pass the time. The count as of today stands at 1229 irrational ideas (a few could be debated perhaps). Hopefully you’ll have a laugh or two! Any additions let me know!
Link to the list:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1T3HQ6TnCg6Q44WzpJPFxLvfqbfvKmT5RqvpGI3ji1y8/edit?usp=sharing
And the original diagram:
Where can I find the tool by which you created this awesome complete 5 class Venn diagram?
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Agreed, the shape of the diagram was by far the best part of this for me.
Here’s a 7-set one in the same style.
My reading of AlwaysUnite’s post is that s/he didn’t create it but found it on the web. I agree about its awesomeness, though. According to a book about Venn diagrams called "Cogwheels of the Mind", a diagram almost identical to this one was constructed by Branko Grünbaum in 1975. The Grünbaum construction is more symmetrical and uses five congruent ellipses, which is cute but produces some rather small and thin regions. Here’s one version of it.
If you like this diagram, you might also like the one found near the top of this page, for seven sets.
You believe communism, libertarianism, anarchism, ethical egoism, pacifism and realist philosophy of war are all immoral. What are you?
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A social democrat who thinks wars should be abolished. It is not as if communism, libertarianism and anarchism are the only philosophies in the world right?
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So is your definition of "Irrational Nonsense" anything that disagrees with your opinion?
Original thread here.
I sometimes call myself a progressivist. I don’t think communism is immoral—I see totalitarianism as the thing which is immoral, and you can have totalitarianism with or without a market economy; e.g. Latin American dictatorships that murdered hundreds of protesters while remaining very business-friendly.
You think wars should be abolished. Good. Then why did you include pacifism in the immoral category?
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Pacifism is the disavowing of all violence, even if it is used proportionally and in self-defense. This only works in cases where the power difference between parties is so huge that violence is not necessary for ending conflict (Ghandi’s India for example). This is hardly ever the case.
If the goal is to limit the total amount of violence (and therefore self-inflicted suffering) a limited form of violence is still necessary to keep abusers of the social contract in check. But as individual and groups of countries have already shown, it is possible for human societies to be peaceful without war. The police may have to restrain individuals but wars are not necessary.
I would never initiate a fight; that would be, simply, evil. But I’ll kill somebody without hesitation or guilt who starts a fight with me, and more, think somebody who meekly responds to violence by meeting the demands of the violent is encouraging and creating violence. As a society, we cannot cooperate with defectors. People who cooperate with defectors enable and encourage defection.
Likewise on a global scale.
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I’d upvote, but I don’t have the karma-points :)
The correct question to ask is whether you can have communism without totalitarianism.
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Indeed. As far as I know there hasn’t been a peaceful communist society ever. Except maybe after all the dissenters got deported to gulags of course but that would be a form of "peace by genocide".
Why exactly is "Denver Airport" a conspiracy theory? Also MKULTRA was an actual CIA project, though I’m aware there are a lot of falsehoods circulating about it as well.
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There are several conspiracy theories about the airport actually. Apparently there are storage bunkers below the main buildings used for "unsavory business". The MKULTRA-Jonestown conspiracy theory says that MKULTRA created the Jonestown cult if I remember correctly :)
Actually I am a bit surprised, the post got two downvotes already. I was under the impression that LW would appreciate it given it being a site about rationality and all.. I’ve been reading LW for quite some time but I hadn’t actually posted before, did I do something horribly wrong or anything?
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I believe the problem people have with this is that it isn’t actually helpful at all. It’s just a list of outgroups for people to laugh at without any sort of analysis on why they believe this or what can be done to avoid falling into the same traps. Obviously a simple chart can’t really encompass that level of explanation, so it’s actual value or meaningful content is limited.
EDIT: Also, looking over your list it seems that you have marked most philosophies and alternate governments as "Immoral", along with literally everything as "Pointless and Counterproductive". Anarchism, Authoritarianism, Bushido, Collectivism, Cultural Relativism, Cynicsm, Defeatism, Ecocentrism, Egocentrism, Error Theory, Ethical Egoism, fascism, Gothicismus, Harmonious Society & Scientific Outlook on Development, Hedonism, Illegalism, Libertarianism, Machiavellianism, Medievalism, Misanthropy, Misology, Moral Relativism, Moral Skepticism, Moral Subjectivism, Nihilism, Non-Atomic Eudaiominism, Opportunism, Pacifism, Sensualism, Ubuntu(!), Value-Pluralism, Virtue Ethics, Voluntaryism are all marked as "Immoral" and nothing else. I have a lot of issues with your list, but the one that jumps out hte most is Ubuntu. How is UBUNTU of all things Immoral, Pointless and Counterproductive?
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Thinking about it some more, I think it could. The problem with the chart is that the categories are based on which outgroup the belief comes from. For a more rational version of the diagram, one could start by sorting the beliefs based on the type and strength of the evidence that convinced one the belief was "absurd".
Thus, one could have categories like:
no causal mechanism consistent with modern physics
the evidence that caused this a priori low probability hypothesis to be picked out from the set of all hypotheses has turned out to be faulty (possibly with reference to debunking)
this hypothesis has been scientifically investigated and found to be false (reference to studies, ideally also reference to replications of said studies)
Once one starts doing this, one would probably find that a number of the "irrational" beliefs are actually plausible, with little significant evidence either way.
Original thread here.
Haha the "pointless and counterproductive" was a joke actually, since well, all irrational ideas are pointless and counterproductive. As you already mentioned giving detailed explanations for all ideas will make into a four volume work so obviously I can’t do that.
But to come to Ubuntu, I think we definitely should see this as a bad idea. Although admittedly it has had a large net positive effect in South Africa so I should probably just delete the last column. The central tennet of Ubuntu "A person is a person through other people", can be very easily corrupted into a form of communitarian dictatorship, as has in fact happened in Zimbabwe. The fact that a philosophy allows itself to be used by Mugabe does not make it look good. Of course just because Mugabe uses it doesn’t mean it is a bad idea, it could just be his one good trait, but it probably isn’t. The idea has more negative facets. It includes a form of philosophical innatism which is just factually wrong (see for example:Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil) and it also has as a third central tennet "that the king owed his status, including all the powers associated with it, to the will of the people under him". I think it strange that any modern philosophy would take monarchy as a basis. One positive side is that under "unhu" children are never orphans since the roles of mother and father are by definition not vested in a single individual with respect to a single child, so no orphans.
Also moral relativism is kind of a bad idea.. Just because North Koreans think concentration camps are a good idea does not mean they are suddenly moral.
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You could probably have just covered Ubuntu with "I’m not talking about the OS, I’m talking about a philosophy/ideology used used by Mugabe".
Although as formoral relativism… bad idea by whose standard? By what logic? If it’s irrational nonsense to be a moral relativist, do you have a rational argument for moral realism?
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Ah yes the illusion of transparency. I should have seen it coming that the OS would be first on peoples minds. Stupid.
My position on moral realism/relativism is a bit middle ground between the two. There is no law of the universe that says we all should be "good" or even what this "good" is supposed to be. But I believe that does not mean we can’t think rationally about it. We can show that some moral systems are at least inconsistent with respect to their stated goals. And on top of that if we assume for the sake of argument that we can get everyone to believe "suffering is bad" we can rule out a few more. For example the pro-life lobby in the US is vehemently against abortion, yet thinks that the death penalty is a good thing. If life were in fact sacrosanct would it not be logical to stop killing people? (This would also extend to cryonism, but since most of the pro-life lobby is christian, most adherents believe they are going to heaven and won’t actually die. So that doesn’t necessarily make it inconsistent.) Such a philosophy could be made more rational by making its beliefs consistent with its goal. To say that it would be better or more moral to do so would require people to at least agree suffering is bad, although I think most people would agree on that one.
I deleted the post by now. This entire ordeal was very bad for my karma. Which come to think of it, is a strange term. Why not call it "thumbs up" or something? Such a reference to a non-scientific meta-physical idea seems a bit inconsistent with the rest of the content of the site.
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Well, I don’t think "a bit of a middle-ground" justifies taking a stance calling full-on moral relativism "immoral, pointless & counterproductive".
"Suffering is bad" seems a lot easier to agree on as a premise than it actually is—taken by itself, just about anyone will agree, but taken as a premise for a system it implies a harm-minimising consequentialist ethical framework, which is a minority view.
And it’s simple enough to consistently be pro-life but also support the death penalty: if one believes a fetus at whatever stage of development is a human life and killing it is equivalent to murder, as many pro-lifers ostensibly do, one must simply have consistent standards for when killing is okay, that include a government convicting someone of a capital crime but exclude a mother not wanting to drop out of college.
We use analogies and the occasional bit of mysticism often enough that I think references are consistent, although the term has entered the popular consciousness and become divorced enough from the original religious concept that worrying about its origins seems to be mostly an ideological purity issue, a kind of worrying that’s itself pretty irrational to engage in.
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But can’t the same be said for rationality and science? As Descartes showed a "demon" could continuously trick us with a fake reality, or we could be in the matrix for all we know. For rationality to work we have to assume that empiricism holds true. Why couldn’t the same be true for ethics? I think that if science can have its empiricism axiom, ethics can have its suffering axiom.
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The problem is that ethics can work with other axioms. Someone might be a deontologist, and define ethics around bad actions e.g. "murder is bad", not because the suffering of the victim and their bereaved loved ones is bad but because murder is bad. Such a set of axioms results in a different ethical system than one rooted in consequentialist axioms such as "suffering is bad", but by what measure can you say that the one system is better than the other? The difference is hardly the same as between attempting rationality with empiricism vs without.
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There is a difference, I’ll be posting it Friday. I’ve got an exam tomorrow and it still needs some finishing touches. This project got a bit out of hand, the complete train of thought is about 4 pages long to explain properly, so a post is more appropriate than a comment. I’d like to hear your opinion on it, if you are willing :)
Because if you disbelieve empiricism and jump off a tall building, you will die. If you disbelieve ethics of suffering and become evil, you get to build a lair with slave girls and a white cat.
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If you disbelieve in empiricism and jump of a building you may die. If all of reality actually is a simulation, there is no telling what will happen.
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I don’t recommend testing this X-/
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Neither do I :) But the possibility exists, we just assume it doesn’t.
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The possibility of anything you can think of (and everything you can’t think of, too) exists. So what?
I didn’t downvote and I don’t think your post should have been downvoted. Probably people downvoted because they associate this kind of thing with RationalWiki type of skepticism that is basically just mocking outgroup beliefs.
Personally, I actually think this is a useful contribution just for listing a lot of skeptic bugbears in one place.
This list falls into a common failure mode among "skeptics" attempting to make a collection of "irrational nonsense". Namely, having no theory of what it means for something to be "irrational nonsense" so falling back on a combination of absurdity heuristic and the belief’s social status.
It doesn’t help that many of your labels for the "irrational nonsense" are vague enough that they could cover a number of ideas many of which are in fact correct.
Edit: In some cases I suspect you yourself don’t know what they’re supposed to mean. For example, you list "alternative medicine". What do you mean by this. The most literal interpretation is that you mean that all medical theories other than the current "consensus of the medical community" (if such a thing exists) are "irrational nonsense". Obviously you don’t believe the current medical consensus is 100% correct. You probably mean something closer to "the irrational parts of alternative medicine are irrational", this is tautologically true and useless. Incidentally it is also true (and useless) that the irrational parts of the current "medical consensus" are irrational.
Original thread here.
My objection to this: Let’s suppose you translate each of these things into a set of claims about the world (this might be hard to do in some cases, but if it cannot be done, why are you calling it "irrational nonsense"?)
The probability that all of the claims in every set are false, will be approximately zero. There will be some true claims in some of the sets.
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Why? Because there are a lot of them? The list of scientific beliefs I take seriously is at least a hundred times as long, going by the books on my shelf and those in the library. I am not saying that I never made a mistake, I am only human but the probability that a significant fraction of these are false is incredibly low. Most of it is filled with alternative medicine and ufo nonsense.