Richard Dawkins and Helen Joyce - YouTube

[Lottapianos]

Watched this tonight - Helen was a guest on his podcast. She was her usual clear, brilliant, engaging self. She knows her shit upside down and back to front and is a joy to listen to

He was full of praise for her book and rightly horrified at some of what she said, like doctors saying that a child's sex is 'guessed' at birth. I felt that he didn't fully engage with some of the issues they discussed, like women's sports, and the need for single sex changing rooms and toilets. At times it felt like he had a list of questions to get through and was only mildly interested in the answers

Worth watching definitely, for Helen if nothing else

Dawkins being interviewed by David Pakman. From 25 minutes for the trans issue.

I got the mildly bored/didn't ask follow up questions feeling too, but he may not be a very skilled interviewer - it's not something everyone can do, I guess. He did allow her to make her points fully without constant interruption though, which was great.

'He did allow her to make her points fully without constant interruption though, which was great.'

Yes, that's true

Felt it was a stilted experience. Dawkins looks a little off the pace as he's gotten older. And as a pure scientist, he has no real insights or interest tbh in wider societal and metaphysical considerations.

Helen has taken her maths background to apply it to a true interest in the truth and implications for wider society, rights, and yes, moralistic considerations.

Dawkins is still stuck in the 90s and 00s, bitter about religion, and thinking that only science has the answers.

Oh, and he's a terrible interviewer.

Now, Peter Boghossian and Helen Joyce, now you're talking.

He’s a biologist. The world’s best. And he doesn’t have to engage in unfalsifiable metaphysical/societal questions. And neither do I.

https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/on-being-accused-of-islamophobia

No one actually lives that way, not that I've ever met. I don't know anyone who doesn't make claims about right and wrong, or value, or how society should structure itself. Certainly not Richard Dawkins who has all kinds of political views.
Science is predicated on non-falsifiable metaphysical statements, anyway, so you really have to come a kind of Diogenes if you want to avoid even those.

I didn’t say I didn’t engage in metaphysical questions; I said I wasn’t obliged to. Science is not regularly predicated on metaphysical questions; what an assertion! And even if it were, there are methods for empiricism, testing, re-testing and malleability (with new evidence) that make science at its core different from just another belief system.

Science itself is predicated on metaphysical assertions. You cannot show that science, or empiricism itself, is true, empirically. As a method it assumes all kinds of things about the nature of reality. That's not in any way a strange or unusual statement, and the fact that Richard Dawkins seems completely oblivious to this sort of thing is why his musings on the lack of need for metaphysics are considered pretty amateurish by philosophers.

Someone's started a thread on a Dawkins article in the Standard.

In it he throws down this gauntlet on this YouTube

I earnestly challenge Evening Standard readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond.

I'm not expecting that it'll keep him especially busy.

Well not if the win a million if you find JK Rowling's transphobia competition entries are a guide.

Fascinating. I consider your “argument” pretty amateurish logic as would any biologist or other scientist. I’m afraid falsifiability of itself rather trumps what “most philosophers” consider it to be.