Domain: rationalwiki.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to rationalwiki.org.
Comments · 530
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Re:Incentives
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/T... - i think you qualify for one
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Re:This is why I support global warming!
It's almost like the old Soviet Union's fixation on Lysenkoism.
Ideology based science FTW?
Oh dear, it looks like this post is getting the bejabbers moderated out of it. A lot of people are calling it a troll.
Allow me to explain.
There are times, and there are groups, that allow their ideology to get in the way things that others declare as the truth,
Everyone is going to get their Ox gored here soon, so deal with it.
Lysenkoism was a politically motivated campaign against genetics and scientific agriculture. It was based on Lamarkian inheritance, and rejected Mendelian Inheritance, and utterly rejected Natural selection as professed by Darwinian Evolutionary Theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/L...
It held that plants could transmute into each other, and that rather than natural selection as a process, natural cooperation was the norm.
This outlook was for some reason very attractive to the ideals of the Communist party there. Stalin agreed with Lysenkoism, and it is interesting to note that some 3 thousand mainstrem biologists were sent to prison and died there, as well as scientific research in biology already done was destroyed, and further research banned in the field. Other related fields were either ideologically affected or banned, such as neurophysiology and cellular biology, in fact, any biological field that did not agree with the ideological based "facts" of Lysenkoism. Soviet Genetics remained in this state until the death of Stalin in 1953.
This situation may or may not shed some light on the repeated crop failures of the period
It was formally ended in 1964 after a huge amount of damage.
Now we come to some other idealism based fallacies. In the US, there are a fair number of people who ideologically favor a universe created in 4004 b.c.e, and also reject evolution and it's biological underpinnings. From time to time, they have tried to work their ideology into the classroom, however, and especially since their ideology is based upon a particular interpretation of their religious documents, they have failed do far. The latest version of this ideal based effort was in Dover PA, when a School board tried to implement science courses containing religious theory, eventually losing in court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In Georgia, they wanted to dismantle evolution by using the colloquial version of theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now finally, we come to the Global warming issue. While certainly not as deadly as the Soviet Union's treatment of Biologists, there is a lot of ideological push against a concept as simple as the energy stored in the atmosphere and it's relation to certain components of the atmosphere.
Examples of this are a bit silly, like Florida's Governor Rick Scott banning the words Climate Change, Global Warming, and Sustainability, as well as banning the words 'sea level rise, and replacing it with "nuisance flooding". http://www.miamiherald.com/new...
In 2012 North Carolina passed a bill placing a 4 year ban on acknowledging that sea levels were rising.The Governor did not sign it into law. http://www.ecology.com/2012/07...
In 2012 Arizona attempted to abolish sustainability efforts and attempted to make it a crime for cities to endorse or implement the UN agenda 21 principles of sustainable development.. Alabama, Kansas, and Louisiana attempted to as well. Tennessee passed a resolution condemning them. Seems these folk
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Re:a- a-
Isis is a radical Sunni sect.
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Re:It is intentional
Two years ago I have you a couple of links, which themselves have a huge number of references to verified, reliable sources detailing the harassment. For your benefit, I'll post them again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/G...
In anticipation of the inevitable ad-homs against those sites, can you say specifically which references they are built on that you take issue with? Again, I asked you two years ago and never got an answer.
I'd also like to see your evidence against Sarkeesian. Even the GamerGate wiki doesn't accuse her of harassing or doxing others: http://www.gamergatewiki.com/i...
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Re:But they're not white, so it's OK
To use your example, women are often paid less than men. That's a fact. Saying that this is "because the patriarchy works to oppress women" is both way too simplistic and pushes a story arc that is both divisive and false
That wasn't actually my example, but OK. Now, who is making this claim, as simplistically as you're making it? Who is saying "The pay gap" (to use your example) or "The addtional hurdles women need to pass to be taken seriously in IT" (to use mine) "is entirely the result of" (what I assume you to mean) "deliberate sexism" (I assume, because "the patriarchy" is a description of a result, not a description of a cause per se except that institutional sexism is inherently partially self sustaining.)
Answer: there really isn't anyone. The argument being rejected by those who scream "SJW" as an insult is not "Deliberate sexism is the cause of all women's problems", it's "X is a form of sexism that harms women", "The substantial pay gap between men and women is evidence that sexual discrimination is occurring"
,"Women are having specific avoidable problems in the workplace that do not apply to men, in large part because workplaces are built around traditional male culture."Saying those things are what gets you labelled an SJW. And your views and opinions consigned to the bit bucket.
Men are not saying "when my daughter grows up, I want her to earn less just because she's a woman." Or "My wife should earn less, even though we could really use the extra money."
But again, this is a straw man. If someone said "Yeah, all men are deliberately oppressing women" then, sure, we can laugh at them. But that's something said by very few people, I haven't heard anyone say it. The much despised "Third wave feminism" actually differs in large part because it's male positive compared to its predecessor, men are seen as positive participants, and the focus is on social structures that (usually) unintentionally harm women, not on deliberately sexist institutions and acts. Germaine Greer was writing in a world where husbands would "discipline" their wives for buying her books. Anita Sarkeesian is doing video series on how to avoid sexist cliches when you design your video games that you probably didn't realize were sexist to begin with, to an audience it's presumed actively wants to know these things.
[SJW] is a term with a relatively short half-life. It's as stupid as "road warrior" for people working on a laptop or tablet while going from place to place, and you don't hear the general population using either term much, if at all. These self-styled "road warriors" use it in a kind of "see how hard I have to work" appeal to martyrdom, but those outside "the anointed" will mostly just roll their eyes.
It is, thankfully, a term I never hear in real life. If I hear a real life person judge another by calling them a beta cuck SJW, I'll probably defriend them. Is it me, or do Gamergaters sound like they've had half their brains removed?
SJW is meaningless. It is, in reality, no matter how you use it, applied to anyone who suggests some groups are at an unfair disadvantage compared to, in the US, white English speaking men, for reasons beyond simple biology.
Until it really does start being used against that tiny minority of extremists, and not to everyone pointing out issues with society and discrimination, it can't really be said to have meaning.
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Re:Obligatory
Many people would consider it odd if your response to people killing other people was: well if you don't like killing people,
I believe this is called "moral equivalency" and it is a logical fallacy. To equate making a joke that might be offensive with what some people consider murder is patently absurd, and patently offensive.
The remainder of your moral equivalence examples involving death and murder, ignored.
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Re: Here's something worth crowdfunding.
If I was a paid shill and that was all I could come up with, I suppose I'd post anonymously, too...
And today we present the Shill Gambit.
The shill gambit is a type of ad hominem or poisoning the well logical fallacy, wherein one party dismisses the other’s argument by proclaiming them to be on the payroll of some company.
Sometimes known as the Big Pharma Shill Gambit or the Monsanto Shill Gambit. The shill gambit is used fallaciously when the only “evidence” given of such a connection to a big company or government is the endorsement of the position of the government or company, without any other evidence–the implication is that they provide that endorsement only because they receive some sort of compensation from the company or other agency.
On the other hand when such conflict of interest is both demonstrated by verifiable evidence and can be shown to interfere with a person’s judgement of the evidence, then it’s no longer a logical fallacy.
http://www.skepticalraptor.com...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/S... -
Enumerating possibilities: before, in, after CMTS
When reading a general statement about a technology such as caching, it is up to you to consider all of the reasonably applicable implementations.
Likewise, when writing a general statement about a technology such as caching, it is up to you to suggest one or more implementations that you might consider reasonably applicable.
That is on you.
When you make a claim that "add[ing] a cache" will solve the bandwidth problem of unicast video on demand and then show unwillingness to complete your claim by specifying where in the path from cable HQ to the end user's display this cache would be located, you are shifting the burden of proof. Your use of "consider all of the reasonably applicable implementations" sounds like you're asking me to enumerate all places a cache could be and disprove each. That resembles another fallacious debating technique, the Gish Gallop. But I will do so anyway, as a favor to you:
By trichotomy, if the CMTS is between the cable company and the viewer, a cache is either before the CMTS, in the CMTS, or after the CMTS.
Before the CMTS A cache before the CMTS requires the program to be sent through the CMTS separately for each viewer whose position in the program differs. In the CMTS A cache in the CMTS requires the program to be sent by the CMTS separately for each viewer whose position in the program differs. After the CMTS A cache after the CMTS would be on customer premises, making it a "digital video recorder" in a broad sense. A customer premises cache could receive the whole program in-order, like a traditional DVR, or snoop on pieces of the program that other viewers happen to be requesting, like a BitTorrent client. But given how the studios don't let Netflix pre-cache an entire film in advance on the user's device before the user begins to watch it, I doubt that the studios would be willing to license programs to cable companies that implement BitTorrent-style VOD.Of all these possibilities, which do you "consider [...] reasonably applicable"? Or what specific possibility that I failed to imagine do you "consider [...] reasonably applicable"?
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Enumerating possibilities: before, in, after CMTS
When reading a general statement about a technology such as caching, it is up to you to consider all of the reasonably applicable implementations.
Likewise, when writing a general statement about a technology such as caching, it is up to you to suggest one or more implementations that you might consider reasonably applicable.
That is on you.
When you make a claim that "add[ing] a cache" will solve the bandwidth problem of unicast video on demand and then show unwillingness to complete your claim by specifying where in the path from cable HQ to the end user's display this cache would be located, you are shifting the burden of proof. Your use of "consider all of the reasonably applicable implementations" sounds like you're asking me to enumerate all places a cache could be and disprove each. That resembles another fallacious debating technique, the Gish Gallop. But I will do so anyway, as a favor to you:
By trichotomy, if the CMTS is between the cable company and the viewer, a cache is either before the CMTS, in the CMTS, or after the CMTS.
Before the CMTS A cache before the CMTS requires the program to be sent through the CMTS separately for each viewer whose position in the program differs. In the CMTS A cache in the CMTS requires the program to be sent by the CMTS separately for each viewer whose position in the program differs. After the CMTS A cache after the CMTS would be on customer premises, making it a "digital video recorder" in a broad sense. A customer premises cache could receive the whole program in-order, like a traditional DVR, or snoop on pieces of the program that other viewers happen to be requesting, like a BitTorrent client. But given how the studios don't let Netflix pre-cache an entire film in advance on the user's device before the user begins to watch it, I doubt that the studios would be willing to license programs to cable companies that implement BitTorrent-style VOD.Of all these possibilities, which do you "consider [...] reasonably applicable"? Or what specific possibility that I failed to imagine do you "consider [...] reasonably applicable"?
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Re:28% more creative?
Also, I'm an academic, so much for your presumptive "anti-intellectual" bullshit.
An academic can quite easily have stupid opinions outside their own field of expertise. This is known as Nobel disease after the impressive number of Nobel prize winning scientists who are racists, global warming deniers or believers in homeopathy.
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Re:Chemistry too?
Is "reactionary" a bad word now?
No, of course not. "Neo-reactionary", on the other hand... well, it's like the difference between conservative and neo-conservative.
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Re:So they're likely the cause of "Global Warming"
Sure, buddy. I'll just leave these here:
A single volcano can have a greater environmental impact in a single day than millions of people have over their entire lives.
When there are many of these volcanoes, and they have ongoing eruptions day after day, they'd of course have an absolutely massive impact, far beyond even what billions of humans could ever do.
Those assertions are laughable. Still. Blatantly wrong.
These environmentalists/leftists have been blaming humans the whole time, yet now it turns out that it's undersea volcanoes that are responsible, and not people.
Right, solid concrete proof that people have no impact, it's all volcanoes. Certain, undeniable proof that people are 100% blameless. Clear, unambiguous evidence that putting tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year has exactly zero impact on anything regarding the climate.
This isn't going anywhere, this isn't productive. You're going to continue making false claims regardless of what myself or anyone else says.
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Re:Does anyone have a list of the hottest years?
This is called Sealioning.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/J...it's a form of trolling, marked by asking basic, inane questions readers would be expected to already know hte answer to.
for example: no its not solar activity.
solar activity is on a downward trend and has been.no the kockey stick is not debunked.
no you didnt say anything factual.
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Methodology?
Sorry, but with silly results like this, I have to ask why such a small article so vapid of meaningful content was posted on Slashdot. Shouldn't paid shill articles be a different color or something?
No mention was given as to how this ranking was accomplished, and the list given at the bottom of the article doesn't even match the headline (where 2 and 3 are MySQL and MS SQL Server, and Microsoft Access beats Cassandra.
Any DB ranking that puts Access in as a top contender should definitely back up their claims - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence!
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Re:Palatio Lunaris?
It would help this position of rational wiki was rational. Sadly it's highly selective, and has a clear editorial bias.
Seriously, here's their article on the Daily Telegraph. It starts of reasonable and then goes off on a rant about "wingnuttery", and "pro-batshit" article.
Or how about David Cameron, who apparently, " has made it his life's work to surpass his idol in Margaret Thatcher and take her place as the most reviled name in modern British politics." -
Re:Palatio Lunaris?
It would help this position of rational wiki was rational. Sadly it's highly selective, and has a clear editorial bias.
Seriously, here's their article on the Daily Telegraph. It starts of reasonable and then goes off on a rant about "wingnuttery", and "pro-batshit" article.
Or how about David Cameron, who apparently, " has made it his life's work to surpass his idol in Margaret Thatcher and take her place as the most reviled name in modern British politics." -
Re:Palatio Lunaris?
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Re: Outed
Uh, that's what SJW means. There isn't any other kind. You don't get to just tell people what words mean, using the definition that benefits your side. (Unless you're English Socialism from "1984" and you long ago exterminated your opposition.) It's a descriptive term, not proscriptive. Sadly, denying free speech to others while taking full advantage of it yourself is a hallmark of the SJW movement. It's like how conservatives favor low taxes or liberals support unions.
"SJW" is just another right wing snarl word. It has no descriptive value whatsoever, other than "someone who I disagree with but don't want to explain why" or "someone I think is left wing and therefore wrong".
A "SJW" can be anyone from someone who doesn't laugh at a racist joke at work, to an animal rights activist fire bombing a fur shop. It's meaningless.
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Re:Government terrorism
( for the sarcastically challenged: the above are not a recipe for creating a sound economy, just so that we are clear)
I wish people would stop attempting sarcasm on the web. Sarcasm becomes completely invisible against the background noise, and it's impossible to tell a troll from somebody trying to be ironic (usually unsuccessfully).
Poe's law doesn't just apply to fundamentalism any more.
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Re:Did you say "fascist"? (Re:Hypocrisy)
It wasn't his definition
That's true. Because it was not a definition at all. Which is why I put the word into quotes. PopeRazo tried to "win" this argument by Equivocation — a fallacy. He got called on it, and had the grace to shut up instead of proceeding with spit-splatter like you did:
fucknut whackjob
Please, don't hate.
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Re:ah, scientists
variation on the 'science was wrong before' myth.
0/10 points. -
Re:Salmon's now on my "foods to avoid" list
Hey look, its the 'science was wrong before' argument.
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Re:Climate has never not been changing.
Ahh, the old Gish Gallop> , eh? Never gets old, that one.
I'll just leave this here. Your sea ice claims are well wrong.
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Re:nonsense
- our detection technologies, while highly advanced from where they were, are still astonishingly rudimentary, largely only by deduction (not direct observation
Direct exoplanet imaging is a thing.
Speaking of arrogance: so many bad assumptions, so many wrong numbers. Where to start...
- our universe is about 13.8 billion years old, with stellar formation around 1 billion years
...call it 2 billion, just to be conservative.Age is good, but that stellar formation number is a clear PIDOMA. (Asspull is apparently a different thing.)
WMAP estimated the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion with an uncertainty of 59 millions years. Other projects (Plank) put it at closer to 14 billion. Stellar formation started very soon - blue supergiants starlight is the best match for what caused re-ionization only 150 million to 1 billion years after the big bang.
Early stars also fit the model for relative atom abundance in the pre-galaxy age. Since the stars already had to exist to start re-ionizing it and blue giants live very short lives it is reasonable to use the early start verses later start. And their lives are really short: only 10s of millions of years to die. And their supernovas produce lots of nice heavy nuclei (dust in Astronomer terms.) These are stars are basically the diesel engines of space, popping up and off to fart polluting dust into the local gas. And early in the Universe blue super giants continue to appear in distant galaxy images. They are heavily over-represented after galaxies started to form.
- If stars were forming at 2 bn yrs, and our system is about 6bn yrs, that means there could have been planetary formation and systems like ours developing for 5 BILLION years before today.
So we know stars were forming at up to 150m years. The first deaths to provide dust to make planets as soon 10m years later with current stellar evolutionary models. So planets could start forming as little as 160m years. Regardless of the frequency of Solar-type Systems the upper bound is more like 13 billion years. Not good for being off by 500%.
- Since our system is an entirely average sun, in an entirely average stellar neighborhood, it's probable that our experience is entirely typical.
Planetary systems like our look weird now but we think that is because of selection bias as mentioned.
If you mean with life then it's going to be very hard to model that due to our current lack of data. But one fact is certain: having lots of giant blue stars in a star burst galaxy or early in the Universe is not kind to complex organic molecules making up life like ours (the only kind we know.) Just being within two light years of a supernova will kill you from the neutrino radiation let alone the wave of photons that hit later. It's also not healthy for the dust cloud around a proto-star. It is likely that frequently dying stars will dampen planetary formation in the early Universe.
To deduce then that only 8% of potential planets have formed is nonsense.
15 billion compared to 100 billion to 1,000 billion years? Unless you think 15 is a large fraction 100, we are still in the early Universe. I cannot say how robust 8% is in the calculation without running it myself. But I suspect it is a high estimate just from increased galaxy collisions spawning waves of stars and disturbing galactic gas clouds.
The Greening Galaxy Theory uses the same logic as the article from a different direction and comes to the same conclusion
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Re:More nope
Sigh...you DO understand that the word fallacy does NOT always come with the word "logical" connected, yes?
Sigh... You DO understand that the title of the page you linked to was "Logical Fallacy: Loaded Words", yes?
And excuse me for not being willing to coddle the spoiled as fuck population, I suppose you want "trigger warnings" and all that bullshit?
I really couldn't care less about your arrogance and misanthropy, but it's probably part of the reason why people assume you're a jackass instead of thinking you're being clever. You might also want to keep Poe's Law in mind.
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Electric universe
There's a less-well-known set of theories under the name Electric Universe that posit electric forces having a large effect on accretion.
It supposes that individual bodies in space can pick an electric charge through various means, and are thus attracted to bodies of the opposite charge. This explains why many bodies seem to be "double lumps" caused by the joining of two prior bodies (and not three or more).
Static is a problem for space travel, so I've heard. With no atmosphere to bleed off the charge, any friction tends to leave behind a static charge, making your helmet visor a magnet for dust, for instance.
I wonder if the solar wind has areas of net positive and net negative charge, so that bodies orbiting in various ways could pick up such an electric charge and thus be attracted to other bodies.
Any astronomers here care to comment?
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Re:Its so true.
Poe's Law strikes again.
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Re:Because we are distracted by "global warming"
It would have been nice if you had written one true thing in that entire post, you have truly written a mighty gish gallop of ridicule and ignorance.
Some short notes because you're likely libertarded:
- The predictions are more accurate than you would have us believe.
- Of course, there is "no evidence" if you dismiss every piece of evidence "because communists".
- The impact of global warming on hurricanes is an area of ongoing research, the results are not conclusive in any direction yet.
- Authoritarians will tell you that anything can be solved by more authoritarian measures. Whether or not they want to use global warming to enact those measures has no impact on the existence of the phenomenon or the results of studying it. You are using the fallacy "appeal to consequences" to argue that people shouldn't believe in global warming because it might be used to justify measures that you disagree with. It's a bit insane to claim that something isn't true because "statists" have a solution for it.
- When 97% of the experts agree on something it's an "appeal to authority", not an "appeal to popularity".
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Re:No shit ...
Nobody is claiming the ocean is not rising.
... [Lonny Eachus, 2015-08-25]Really? Are you absolutely sure about that?
... Projections like: rising sea levels. (23 years later: nope. Nothing measurable.)
... [Jane Q. Public, 2013-11-15](I won't mention to the other party that some other sources say there has been no measurable overall rise at all.) [Lonny Eachus, 2014-01-21]
Later, Lonny Eachus linked to yet another "PSI Sky Dragon Slayer" blog post which cites Mörner (2012) and claims that after excluding "distorting effects" the "sea-level trend is zero." "Mörner (2012)" seems to be (summarized by?) a blog post called "Sea Level Is Not Rising" which (SPOILER ALERT!!) concludes that "sea level is not rising" and we're facing "a very grave, unethical 'sea-level-gate'."
So as Jane/Lonny Eachus might say, it's VERY hard to believe that Jane/Lonny believes himself when he says "nobody is claiming the ocean is not rising."
"Sea level has not risen in 50 years," says Swedish sea-level expert Nils-Axel Mörner. goo.gl/UoGx3K
Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told' The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker. [JunkScience, retweeted by Lonny Eachus, 2015-08-30]Wow. Once again, it's VERY hard to believe that Jane/Lonny believes himself when he says "nobody is claiming the ocean is not rising" considering that he's also retweeting an article by creationist Christopher Booker titled "Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'".
Dr. Mörner also tilts graphs (p33) as "evidence that sea level is not rising" and gave an interview: "Claim That Sea Level Is Rising Is a Total Fraud". Check out Mörner's clumsily (and hilariously ironic!) doctored photographic "evidence" on page 35, which Anthony Watts uncritically regurgitated. What a charming conspiracy theory. Dr. Mörner also believes in that "dowsing" nonsense so strongly that he embarrassed himself on TV by trying and (unsurprisingly) failing
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Re:Lovely summary.
Good primer on the "men's rights movement": http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/M...
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Re:Lovely summary.
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Re:Lovely summary.
And yeah, I hate politically correct bullshit too. I hate it whichever side it comes from. "Oh no, the Hugo voters picked something that offends me--they must be controlled by an evil liberal cabal! We must destroy them!" That's politically correct bullshit, and I despise it.
Actually, that's a slightly different form, called "conservative correctness".
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Science is wrong but becomes less wrong over time
So take your pick, is Einstein wrong
Science proceeds toward understanding of nature that is less wrong* over time. So it's very probable that Einstein didn't have the whole story.
Aristotle was wrong about the relationship between mass and acceleration due to gravity. Galileo Galilei proved him wrong. Galileo was wrong about gravity being independent of location. Isaac Newton proved him wrong. Newton was wrong about the effect of gravity at what we now call relativistic speeds. Albert Einstein proved him wrong. Einstein was still wrong about "God doesn't play dice with the world." Each of them stood on giants' shoulders to become less wrong.
* Yes, "less wrong" is a thing. Assuming that "wrong" is an ungradable adjective like "unique", "perfect", and "parallel" is a fallacy.
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Re:America tried long prison sentences
There's an interesting, fairly even-handed look at that hypothesis at RationalWiki. As with many things in social science, it's tricky to really prove this kind of macro-scale hypothesis with airtight evidence, but there is some suggestive evidence.
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Re:How about building subways?
Ha.
- Since when do you think Germany had a budget surplus? I ask this because a trade surplus isn't really a surplus of any kind. You want to reach into the pockets of other people for your pet project?
- It's nice to know that you think you can just divine out of your head some mythical set of desired public ends and think you also know off the top of your head how to use everyone's means without their permission to best achieve those ends. Hubris much?
- The cheek of someone who knows nothing of economics criticizing a whole branch of technical workers for not knowing economics. You're like a Dunning kruger walking advertisement.
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Re:Can't be true
Everything you need to know about The Daily Liar: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/T...
Literally, they paid someone to lie so they could print it. And you want to cite them ???
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Re: Fails to grasp the core concept
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof
Burden of proof (or onus probandi in Latin) is the obligation that somebody presenting a new or remarkable idea has to provide evidence to support it. In a scientific context evidence is experimental or empirical data (although in some branches, well thought out mathematics may suffice). Once some evidence has been presented, it is up to the opposing "side" to disprove the evidence presented or explain why it may not be adequate. -
Re:Another great Scalia line
No, no, no, clearly he means Pastafarianism, Unicornism, and Last Thursdayism.
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Re:Not exactly like Superfish
This is not malicious. It is stupid and ignorant, but not malicious.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
--Clark's corollary to Hanlon's Razor after Clarke's 3rd Law
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Tower of Babel
Sorry, why do we need multiple languages again?
Originally, to punish ancient Babylonians for trying to build a dangerously tall ziggurat. Since then, to preserve access to oral tradition.
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Do Creationists not believe in the food chain?From the Answers in Genesis article:
Dinosaurs could not have died out before people appeared because dinosaurs had not previously existed; and death, bloodshed, disease, and suffering are a result of Adam’s sin (Genesis 1:29–30; Romans 5:12, 14; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22).
So, before Adam's sin, did animals not eat other animals? Did Tyrannosaurus not only coexist with Adam, but also eat kale? Mighty sharp teeth for peeling a banana, gotta say...
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Re:Good thing climate change isn't real!
Didn't you criticize me earlier for "smear attempts" and "ad hominems", saying it was a "dick move"?
Indeed, I did. But an "ad hominem" is not always a dick move, and not always falacious. It is acceptable to offer valid, topical criticism of a person's character or skills when it is material to the argument and the person has been offered as an authority. In other words, when you offer Dr. Spencer as a scientific expert, you make his credentials as a scientist fair game for criticism. So, in this case, offering evidence that Spencer may be a poor scientist is not only acceptable, it is generally expected as a rebuttal. You, on the other hand, wrote "SkS is a really, really bad site." That's not valid or topical criticism, and therefore is actually a fallacious ad hominem. So because you failed to provide valid criticism, it is in fact a "dick move". Eventually, you provided some weak criticism of a highly acclaimed paper by some of the people at SkS as justification for this evaluation, but even if I accepted that the criticism were in good faith, which I do not, it would barely be relevant.
Frankly, you seem to have a problem with understanding context and circumstances.
Additionally, I linked to three non-SkS sites that detail gross errors in the construction of that graph or the similar graph it was originally based off of, and your response is an article that mistakenly criticizes an SkS article that criticizes Spencer for errors made in a completely different forum, and claims their response to a different event contains cherry-picked data because it does not start in the same year as a graph which they make no reference to. Frankly, the article you cited appears to be written by someone who takes very little care in his writing or his reasoning. For example, it really looks like couldn't even be bothered to read the title of the article he's criticizing because the title clearly says they are debunking mistakes that Spencer made in a public appearance. One can only assume the author is grossly incompetent or grossly negligent. Of course, none that really matters, because I didn't link to that article on Skeptical Science in the first, so his invalid criticism actually has nothing to do with any of the valid criticism I provided that explains how Dr. Spencer has (intentionally or not) manipulated the data in that graph to make his position look better, and in the process produced a very misleading graph.
And according to the article you linked, if you really believe it, you should believe that the new graph that you linked contains cherry picked data (and is therefore invalid) since it also does not begin in 1979, but expecting any sort of consistency from you is clearly expecting too much.
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Re:Yeah, disappointing
Oh well, now at least we know Poe's Law applies to MRAs as well as to feminists. That's some gender equality alright.
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Re:Great. Let's sit here and wait for the next wav
It is a fallacy that addressing AGW means limiting the poor's access to energy. There will be change no matter what, and change begets winners and losers, and the losers are the current crop of plutocrats who run the GOP rage machine, and this nonsense about addressing climate change making us collectively poorer is just one of many pratts.
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Re:LIbertarian principle
Moron.
Business very much DO exist because the consumer needs their services, and specifically because in order to obtain those services they are willing to give businesses $$$$$. Businesses aren't doing anyone a favor by existing, though that's what you and your kind imply. Their existence is wholly and completely dependent on the fact that there are people willing to give them money in exchange. That's why they came into exist: they want that money.
Your view is the view that businesses are doing consumers (and employees too) a favor, that consumers exist to buy things from businesses.
You are the poster child of the stupid "libertarian". I work with some actual libertarians (as well as about a dozen stereotypical "libertarians"), who actually deserve the term without quotes. Even they think you're an idiot who has no clue what he's talking about. Hell, I'm more libertarian than you (albeit of the Left Libertarian flavor, similar to Bill Maher and a few others).
At this point I'm more inclined to think you're not just a troll, but a Deep Cover Liberal, the things you say are so idiotic.
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Most of these people are not skeptics
I find it hilarious that the one "leading climate change skeptic" they name is Christopher Monckton who is basically a climate change denial kook. The Telegraph seems to have an obsession for climate change denial and hosts columns from two other prominent denialists - James Delingpole and Christopher Booker.
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Mod parent down for citing known crackpot site
interact biologically [globalresearch.ca]
globalresearch.ca is a well-known crackpot and conspiracy theory outlet. Among various outrageous articles and radical political views, they even became a channel for pro-Russian propaganda in regards to the war in Ukraine. Anyone who cites information from the same outlet that produced works of journamlism like North Korea, a Land of Human Achievement, Love and Joy is a fucking tool.
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Re:Remember Hypatia
Yes, Christians did that 1500 years ago.
Muslims killed Sabeen Mahmud yesterday.
Pray forgive me if I see the Muslims as a significantly larger threat.
There are countless more recent examples I could have written about. However, Hypatia is in my opinion more relevant. Before 400AD or so, Roman and Greek society was based around classical foundations of rationalism and philosophy. Yes they worshipped gods, but there was tolerance for the worship of many different gods, and by extension tolerance for fundamentally different world-views. Classical civilization created great art, great philosophy, great mathematics, great architecture. We owe our systems of laws, of money, of art/drama to classical Greco-Roman civilization. And the fact that Greco-Roman civilization had flaws (e.g. slavery) does not change the greatness of what they accomplished.
In the early-mid 300AD's Constantine came to power as emperor of the Roman empire. He made Christianity the state religion of the empire. Christianity spread like wildfire, snuffing out anything that opposed it. The instance I referred to earlier, Hypatia's murder, is commonly thought of as the end of the Classical Era. In Hypatia's school, it is possible that astronomers theorized that Earth travelled around the Sun. If an astronomer had thought this, the idea would have been discussed and possibly accepted. In the new christian world, to suggest an such an idea would be blasphemy and would result in the suggester being executed in some gruesome manner.
The adoption of Christianity in as the state religion in Europe led to what is commonly known as the Dark Ages, a period of about 1000 years in which European civilization stagnated. Progress in the arts, in knowledge of the world (what we would call science), in philosophy largely came to a halt. Europeans largely forgot how to build great buildings. This era is thought to have begun to come to an end when European intellectuals began re-discovering Greco-Roman rationalism during the Renaissance, and is exemplified in Florence, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi re-discovered Roman dome building techniques in order to build il Duomo.
When I see these stone-age islamic fanatics trying to hack away at the edifice of modernity, I cannot help but thinking about what christianity did to European civilization during the Dark Ages. I also cannot help thinking of those in America who so resemble these stone-age fanatics, the christian dominionists and those who can best be described as the American taliban. If you think it is only muslims who are capable of fanaticism, you are fooling your self.
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Re:Remember Hypatia
Yes, Christians did that 1500 years ago.
Muslims killed Sabeen Mahmud yesterday.
Pray forgive me if I see the Muslims as a significantly larger threat.
There are countless more recent examples I could have written about. However, Hypatia is in my opinion more relevant. Before 400AD or so, Roman and Greek society was based around classical foundations of rationalism and philosophy. Yes they worshipped gods, but there was tolerance for the worship of many different gods, and by extension tolerance for fundamentally different world-views. Classical civilization created great art, great philosophy, great mathematics, great architecture. We owe our systems of laws, of money, of art/drama to classical Greco-Roman civilization. And the fact that Greco-Roman civilization had flaws (e.g. slavery) does not change the greatness of what they accomplished.
In the early-mid 300AD's Constantine came to power as emperor of the Roman empire. He made Christianity the state religion of the empire. Christianity spread like wildfire, snuffing out anything that opposed it. The instance I referred to earlier, Hypatia's murder, is commonly thought of as the end of the Classical Era. In Hypatia's school, it is possible that astronomers theorized that Earth travelled around the Sun. If an astronomer had thought this, the idea would have been discussed and possibly accepted. In the new christian world, to suggest an such an idea would be blasphemy and would result in the suggester being executed in some gruesome manner.
The adoption of Christianity in as the state religion in Europe led to what is commonly known as the Dark Ages, a period of about 1000 years in which European civilization stagnated. Progress in the arts, in knowledge of the world (what we would call science), in philosophy largely came to a halt. Europeans largely forgot how to build great buildings. This era is thought to have begun to come to an end when European intellectuals began re-discovering Greco-Roman rationalism during the Renaissance, and is exemplified in Florence, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi re-discovered Roman dome building techniques in order to build il Duomo.
When I see these stone-age islamic fanatics trying to hack away at the edifice of modernity, I cannot help but thinking about what christianity did to European civilization during the Dark Ages. I also cannot help thinking of those in America who so resemble these stone-age fanatics, the christian dominionists and those who can best be described as the American taliban. If you think it is only muslims who are capable of fanaticism, you are fooling your self.
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Re:It's my choice to kill my kid!
The issue is also whether you allow society to dictate what medical procedures are performed on your body.
Lets not forget the fine history of unethical human medical experimentation in the United States. And people think we should just give the government carte blanche to dictate medical procedures?
Unbelievable. Something about history, and being doomed to repeat it...
Nice false dichotomy there.
Nobody is dictating what medical procedures you can perform on your (childrens') bodies. Rather, the law prevents them from performing medical procedures (i.e. uncontrolled exposure to dangerous diseases) on unsuspecting victims (i.e. those who can't get vaccinated) in public schools. If you want to perform such experiments, you will now have to do it in the privacy of your own home on victims (i.e. children of other anti-vaxxers) who have consented in some form (i.e. by being ignorant.)
Somehow I find your willingness to subject innocents to known dangers via your private medical experimentation far more disturbing than a slippery slope argument about the government possibly doing so in the future.