Some religious thinking is deluded; maybe all is?

Bel is thinking this:

9/11

The 19 suicide-bombing hijackers are today marking their sixth anniversary in hell.

Poor souls, and they thought they were set for paradise. Six years of torment done, ages more to follow.

Still, they have forever to get used to it.

They thought they were going to paradise; Bel thinks they went to hell instead.  Clearly not everyone can be right here.

Let’s generalise that thought: there are lots of religions. They say things that are incompatible with each other, therefore they cannot all be right. Some of them must be wrong — maybe all are wrong?

Can Bel prove that her religious beliefs are right and the beliefs of others are wrong? Can religious believers even prove that “paradise” and “hell” exist anyway — I mean prove as strongly as I can prove that London or Moscow exist.

Criminalising protitutes’ clients harms prostitutes

The government is considering making it illegal for a man to buy sex from a woman. Chris Dillow has an economic analysis of why this will harm prostitutes:

Just how stupid or evil are New Labour’s women ministers? That’s the question raised by their support for making the purchase of sex illegal.
Basic economics tells us that such a move would be bad for women who sell sex. A simple supply-demand diagram should make this clear. If the purchase of sex were legal, the demand curve would be D*, and the price of sex P*. Now, if the purchase becomes illegal, some men who bought sex at P* would think “yikes! I could get done for this. I’d better stop.” Demand would then fall to D’ and the price of sex would fall to P’.

Prostitutes would then be worse off. It’s the women who would suffer. [...]
What’s worse, the main losers here will be the most vulnerable prostitutes – the ones on street corners rather than Chelsea horizontales. [...]

So, criminalizing buying sex would hurt prostitutes, especially the poorest ones.
Which raises the question. Why do New Labour women not see this? Are they stupid or misogynistic? Or is this yet another example of politics as signaling?

I’m sure it’s the latter. I doubt if the ministers gave any thought to doing an economic analysis on the matter — I certainly didn’t; then again my background isn’t in economics so it’s perhaps something I wouldn’t naturally think of.

Ouch, the honesty

Eliezer Yudkowsky writes:

At the Singularity Summit yesterday, several speakers alleged that we should “reach out” to artists and poets to encourage their participation in the Singularity dialogue. So at the end of one such session, a woman went up to the audience microphone and said:

“I am an artist. I want to participate. What should I do?”

And there was a brief, frozen silence.

I wanted to leap up and say:

No, no, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. We’re just calling for greater participation by artists. We can get plenty of credit for being enlightened just by issuing the call. If we really cared what artists thought, we would find some artists and ask them questions, not call for artists to participate. We don’t actually want to hear from artists. We think your opinions are stupid.