u/Tarsal26

Buying a house is a large and often leveraged investment. So if you are someone who is deciding to buy a house and aren’t desperate, you might look at the market and say “I am not going to make a £300k+ investment into a house thats clearly going to decrease in value - I may as-well rent even though the rents are high”. Or even sell a house and rent for a period, putting your money elsewhere meanwhile.

Does this increase the demand for rentals in a declining house market?

A fist fight between two gentlemen.

Context: his conversation with Richard Dawkins and Cosmic Skeptic where he struggles to admit certain bible passages and even modern non fiction is not “true”, owing to how they speak to truths or tell truths in story form - I label this practical truth, opposed to a more scientific version. Is this an explored philosophical concept? Can moral systems allow you to redefine truth in this way?

I am thinking about evolution based (naturalistic) theories for ethics. The brief summary is that good for an individual is what is good for themselves and their relatives by degrees, and altruism occurs as each individual can benefit in a game theory way.

Most of the generic traits and cultural feature that have persisted over generations did so because they were beneficial to individuals in those groups that had them - religion included. Over time religions and morality more generally tracked and tended towards, but not reaching, an objectively effective ethical framework relevant to the context in which they developed - small cities to agricultural communities, or even Shepards.

Religions might not be perfectly adapted to our quickly changing technological world but they are at present still better than the moral framework that replaced it - initially a copy of what went before but now drifting overtime. An example of evidence for this is a lower priority put on having children leading to lower birthrates despite, arguably abundant resources and this being less of a problem in foreign cultures and religions.

I hear new atheists (Dawkins and company) slate religions as parasitic memes with preposterous superstitions. Under this framework the various stories and teachings had a lot of practical or even profound value.

The more difficult to swallow concepts for an atheist like afterlife, reincarnation, heaven and hell can be explained as just emergent approximations of the idea that as children and kin exist after death your actions throughout your life can still have an effect on your family’s success after life. From early texts children and grandchildren are held as a desirable reward for followers “I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore” if following did indeed on average improve ones success in their families then this promise would be fulfilled.

Some of the features of a deity seem also to translate to the idea that genes are in all of us and our actions are judges (have an effect on our success) wherever we are and whether they are witnessed or not. Happy to hear any other thoughts on this linking.

If we can make a scientific derivation of the emergence of morality and religions, then an atheist might say the battle is won, but I would instead say that the linking between religion and science would work both ways and things that are effective for a human to survive become ‘good’, religion becomes both true (in a sense) and objectively meaningful and beautiful.

This also counters the atheist many gods “I don’t believe just one more god” argument, since all the other gods were approximating and underlying mechanism, with varying success.

Do non relatives become much more closely related when the reference population is small (10-100), such that they become similar to second cousins in relatedness without being close relatives?

If having more grandkids (~inclusive fitness) is just a proxy for gene perseverance, what is the higher level formula for measuring the success of individual organisms?

How can you differentiate between organisms that cling to a rock for eons, or bacteria that spread themselves throughout the galaxy. Which persists more?

This would be generalised above the level of dna which is earth specific, so our methods of reproduction might not be the same.