what is the story with rational wiki? they seem to bash everything, do they actually have credibility or are they just a hate site?
In my opinion: hate-site. It appears to me to be the most reactionary, mean-spirited, closed-minded garbage imaginable.
They basically are Singularity adherents who go after anything that seems like it gets in the way of their religion. Searle, for example, is a largely materialist philosopher who thinks consciousness is irreducible but dependent on biology. As such he doesn't think AI can ever be conscious entities. Rational Wiki lists him as a racist b/c of that.
Can you link to where they say and/or insinuate that? Or has it been taken down? Because I couldn't locate it in the past when you've mentioned it.
Ah, I guess they might have taken it down. Good for them, though the site still seems pretty much a place for materialist evangelicals.
I seem to remember RW being dismissed by at least one of the skeptics here as a site nobody really takes seriously (please don't demand I find the post!). The trouble is that it often appears on page one of the Google search when anything to do with Parapsychology research is searched. For example, I searched "Dean Radin" and Google obliged on page one ...
To change that you should get a bunch of people to start a bunch of sites dedicated to Alex and work on generating hits for those sites. That will put RW down the google search.
I'm just saying that RW pages will naturally get to the top of google search for people who don't have that much of a following.
Actually I've just learned something: it seems that google searches are no longer the same for everyone but are now based upon personal web browsing/searching habits. If we use Chrome or Gmail or Google+, etc., our activity is recorded and used to modify search results.
it seems like a hate site. i never seen the post were they called searle a racist (don't frequent it too often tbh) i remember reading an article about skeptiko with the usual phrases "pseudoscience" "woo" and not to be confused with sceptic which is a 'much better site' for 'much more intelligent people'. *rolls eyes*
rationalwiki - n. definition: 1. collective repository of net-based articles of an in group attempting to delineate its own boundaries, generally enacted as emotion based criticisms of all perceived out group members 2. a website where participants consider rational analysis and discourse to be of primary importance and are unaware of participant inability to enact that principle 3. actual instance of 1 and 2. see for example, rationalwiki.org Synonyms: oxymoron, self-contradiction, irony Antonyms: science, reason, cogency
Then why does Rational Wiki hate the transhumanists so much? In fact, when trying to explicitly google for the Lifeboat Foundation and Rational Wiki it shows that they are anything but friends: Lifeboat lists cryogenics as the #10 most important transhumanist technologies, and even though the idea doesn't actually violate physics its still called quakery and pseudoscience. Later on, RW even overtly disparage the idea of the Singularity helping figure out the engineering problem of cryonics: They claim that the idea of a Singularity is debunked because Moore's Law has a stopping point (despite Ray's prediction being based on computational power per thousand USD and NOT transister count.) Why would a website that is run by "Singularity adherents" trash talk their own future tech as woo and quackery? It's not as though any of the top ten list even require revising physics!
Ah, but they shouldn't judge us because we're apparently less intelligent. One of their gods, Jerry Coyne has debunked free will. So it isn't our fault that we are like this. We have no control, we shouldn't be judged!
To be fair, in the absense of free will the people debunking free will wouldn't be able to control their behavior either. Aren't most of the "no free will" conclusions based almost solely on Libet action potentials? I just checked this paper by Libet, and he reports only having 40 trials. I think we have a few dozen Ganzfeld studies with at least 40 trials and reported successes...
To be fair again, Coyne is in favour of prison reform on the grounds that criminals are not wholly responsible for their actions. Strange that such magnanimousness is offered to felons but not "woomeisters."
