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Just Thinking About Science Triggers Moral Behavior
ananyo writes "The association between science and morality is so ingrained that merely thinking about it can trigger more moral behavior, according to a study by researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara. The researchers hypothesized that there is a deep-seated perception of science as a moral pursuit — its emphasis on truth-seeking, impartiality and rationality privileges collective well-being above all else. The researchers conducted four separate studies to test this. In the first, participants read a vignette of a date-rape and were asked to rate the 'wrongness' of the offense before answering a questionnaire measuring their belief in science. Those reporting greater belief in science condemned the act more harshly. In the other three, participants primed with science-related words were more altruistic."
that these researchers falsified this study to detract attention from all their previously falsified studies.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
It seems like the study's results would be consistent with either hypothesis...
John Nash, and his Game Theory.
All rites reversed 2010
I think it'd be more fair to say that the IDEA of science (impartiality, seeking truth, etc) being a moral pursuit would make people act morally.
Anybody who has read any science news published in the past decade or so knows exactly how easily it can be to twist science to support a political or economic agenda. Case in point, science says that smoking causes cancer. How many studies were published, funded by tobacco companies, saying that it was harmless? The same can be said about the Wage Disparity, effects of HFCS and climate change to name a few.
The ideal of scientific study is great and might stimulate people to behave morally. But I'm curious if that would hold for people that believe in the lofty ideals of anything.
Oh, but it does
Moral behavior? Nah, "science" is only a justification used to confirm what people already know to be "true". If the conclusion leads the wrong way, then there is automatically something wrong. The scientist is then attacked and discredited. Read The Return of the Ugly, Racist Pseudoscientist with a Small Penis to discover how one man got smacked in the face for saying, "Hmm...that's odd." The link goes to archive.org because naturally, the post was deleted due to the response - "SHUT UP!" And then of course the flaming about his small penis.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Note: Psychological studies performed on US undergraduates generally don't apply to humans in general.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/17x/beware_of_weird_psychological_samples/
Remembering the people who were Psych majors in school, I'd say that they probably were the least representative sample of humanity possible.
Usually when I think of science I think of blowing stuff up...
A likely correlative effect: those who "believe" more in science are, on average, people less influenced by the hyper-misogynistic and "fuck you I've got mine" narratives of the US right-wing (proclaimed alongside the anti-intellectual, anti-scientific propaganda of the same groups). The less time you spend watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh, the more likely you are to be both more "scientifically-minded" and less a fan of rape. Scientific rationality and "humanist" motivations have become indelibly tied together in the general public's mind thanks to the right wing propaganda machine's persistent war against both.
In what way specifically does a "belief in science" influence morality at all? Futhermore, what the hell is "belief in science"? Science was invented to strip away the need for belief by extrapolating facts. This entire study is full of bakas.
This confirms my view that feminist (misandric) people think that their male hate bigotry is based on science and not on emotions, similar to the nazy germany where racism was "science".
Simply using scientific language isn't exactly science. It could rather be going after specificity. If you prime me with a bunch of IF/THEN TRUE/FALSE terms and then ask if something is wrong I'm going to be more inclined to give a more literal and less nuanced opinion.
For example, is it wrong to feed the bears? Of course it is... its against the rules, encourages the bears to see humans as a food source, and makes them less inclined to gather food from the wild. So... its wrong. But at the same time its not especially immoral.
If you prime me with true false information I'll just say its wrong. But if you expand the point there might be more going on there.
I don't think science has anything especially to do with morality. It does have a great deal to do with truth seeking but its truth seeking for its own sake and not some higher calling. That is not to say scientist are not moral people or that they're not helping humanity. Merely that there is no causal link between morality and science.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Where the crap did you dig up that definition of "moral?"
The pursuit about understanding can only go one way.
Science is about truth.
Faith can be about anything. Its make believe after all.
The fuck is "wrongness", and how does one rate it?
And why does "condemning an act more harshly" make you more moral? Does this mean scientists are more likely to support Sharia law? you know, that legal system based entirely on science and reason.
The relationship between religiosity and intelligence is also intriguing and not too dissimilar in its foundations.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence
No low IQ people are atheists. :D
I guess that phenomenon is related to the current study on morals and beliefs in science.
scientists have above average morals.
In other news, 90% of all people say they are above average drivers.
my thoughts certainly aren't moral ;-)
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
The human cultures that are most exposed to modern scientific education are also those with birth rates below replacement levels. So, for whatever reason, scientific education is co-related with the decline of human civilization.
Not true. Humans have increased their numbers until the entire planet is full of us and vast areas of its surface have been taken over to provide us the food that we need. In an environment with massive, untapped natural resources which can be developed and exploited to serve an every increasing population you may have a point that to sustain civilization you need to grow and expand. This is arguably no longer the case.
If we want to sustain our civilization we have to find a way to switch from growth through increasing our numbers to a stable population. This is concerning because it is extremely hard to do since nature generally seems to take the "grow or die" approach...but when to grow is to die (either from fighting for limited resources or from a lack of resources) then we have to find another way and it is hard to imagine that science will not the route to finding it.
The human cultures that are most exposed to modern scientific education are also those with birth rates below replacement levels. So, for whatever reason, scientific education is co-related with the decline of human civilization. If it leads to the decline of human cultures, it is not moral.
They're also those with effective/available birth control, female equality, and education.
Don't worry, though - as soon as we build our AI's and fusion reactors, humans will have more time to boink, pursue art, and raise families. It takes science, though, if you want to do it without famine and pestilence.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
We are over populating the planet as is.
A decline in breeding is a welcome balance.
(1) Since when is harshness condemnation the definition of moral?
(2) Since when was a psychological priming study science?
Rising standards of living generally lead to a decline in birth rates. People can afford to engage in other fun activities besides sex, and they need time to do those things, which raising a huge family of kids does not permit. It's an economic question, not a scientific one.
With eugenics.
To respond in a shiny sciency-sounding way, correlation does not prove causality. In other words, perhaps there is some besides or in combination with science exposure that depresses birth rates.
i don't understand woman sometimes.
they do their hair, add makeup and dress up for hours.
they do this so they STAND out, saying "notice me!"?
then you talk to them and they're all "go away. don't look at me."
my take is that they're really dressing up for the off chance
of crossing path with MR. PURFECT.
everybody else is just collateral emotional wreak after the encounter.
-
or maybe "bi-polar" and "being a girl" is the same? having two competing "X" chromosomes and all : P
Scientists want to believe they are more moral, liberals want to believe they are more intelligent, etc etc etc and people exist to tell them what they want to hear. This is not news.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seems right. After all, I know that thinking about religion makes me want to do evil and go out and kill people.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Where the crap did you dig up that definition of "moral?"
I went back to basics and made choices.
I am a person. Do I have value? Yes, I've decided that I do.
Does humanity have value? Yes, I've decided that it does.
So, the most fundamental basis of moral behavior has to be, "Does it cause us to destroy ourselves."
If behavior causes us to destroy ourselves, it is immoral. Full stop.
After that, I begin to consider the quality of the human experience. It is always better to exist than to not exist, but it is better to avoid suffering and afford humans dignity after the fundamental goal of survival is met.
For example, it is better if birth control makes it possible for people to have families that are more likely to survive and thrive, and afford women more dignity.
But, if every woman on Earth decided that they were going to just skip having children and focus on their careers, it would then become moral to rape them into pregnancy and force them to bear their children to term, and immoral to stand by and watch humanity become extinct because we don't have the stomach to do what needs to be done.
That's a ridiculously extreme example that will never actually come to pass, of course, but it illustrates the way in which behaviors become moral or immoral depending on the situation.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
And what exactly is moral conduct in your book?
Not really. Earth can easily sustain 10 to 14 billion humans with a good use of technology. That could go into the hundreds of billions if we could accept getting our protein from algae vats.
The association between religion and the belief that âoe I am pure and you are going to hellâ is so ingrained that merely thinking about it can trigger more immoral behavior, according to a study by researchers at the University of Kansas. The researchers hypothesized that there is a deep-seated perception that my religion makes me better then you â" its emphasis on myth-seeking, self-importance and irrationality privileges above all else. The researchers conducted four separate studies to test this. In the first, participants read a bible passage of a date-rape and were asked to rate the 'wrongness' of the offense. Those reporting greater belief in religion condemned the victim more harshly stating âoeshe probably deserved itâ. This was also followed up with the strong believe that if it was a âoerealâ rape then her body would just reject any possibility of pregnancy.
love the taste, hate the texture
Reeeeeeealy? Weapons research? (physical, chemical, biological, your choice) Profitizing common herbs into expensive medicines? Researching social engineering? Moral? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Having fewer people does not imply an automatic decline of human civilization. Without that poor assumption, the rest of your argument falls flat.
And where would the rest of the biosphere live if we rock into the hundreds of billion.
What is our goal ? To fuck until we can't move ?
Our basic nature is to breed. We can follow that or grow up.
"Greater belief in science?"
"Emphasis on truth-seeking?"
"Science as a moral pursuit?"
Science is an academic discipline. It is not concerned with truth, morals or beliefs. It is concerned with fact. Science is the process of deriving fact from hypothesis through observation and experimentation.
Facts are data. Truth is meaning. No matter what experiment is being conducted, science cannot ever provide meaning. It can only provide facts.
Science has absolutely no connection whatsoever to morals. They are two utterly disconnected fields of human endeavor.
When people start advocating a greater "belief" in science, it leads one to conclude that either science is becoming a religion or these people are trying to fill a void in their lives.
What is our goal ? To fuck until we can't move ?
Word.
The study was published in March and was discussed here in March, with 315 comments: http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/03/30/1857216/does-scientific-literacy-make-people-more-ethical
An ideology / process by definition does not morals, aka amoral. Only scientists are moral.
Science doesn't ask "Can we build nukes?" nor "Should we build nukes?" only _scientists_.
There is a correlation between atheism and intelligence. But there are still plenty of idiotic atheists out there.
This all seems to assume that a birth rate below replacement ends inevitably with extinction, which is stupid, nonsensical gibbledypoop. The fact that we aren't currently keeping up doesn't mean we wouldn't pick up the pace if the planet started to get a little sparse. There are seven billion people, and I see nothing wrong with having a few less, as long as we're doing everything we can to keep the current batch alive. Letting people die is unethical, but not cranking out new ones isn't even on the scale.
This is you: http://www.xkcd.com/605/
You just demonstrated another flawed definition of morality.
How does it stand up to the question of capital punishment for murderers? Murderers destroy other humans, which would be translated as "Humans destroying themselves." Can executing murderers be moral? If so, how is it different from the murderers' actions? You're still killing a human which is "destroying ourselves" using the same translation as before.
Enjoy continually creating circular logic to try to plug this hole.
But I have no delusion that I'm the centre of the universe, and therefore see no reason to have children. It seems that most other intelligent people have already come to this conclusion.
The researchers performed four studies, and only one was looking for mere correlation. Unfortunately that is the only one the summary mentions. One of the other studies primed the subjects with scientific words in a crossword puzzle, and just thinking about those words caused people to behave more morally. Now I am not sure how good the controls in their experiment were but it looks like they tried to remove correlation from the other three studies.
You can attack their methodology, but based on their research there really was a causal relationship between scientific thinking and moral behavior.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Slashdotters: please don't reproduce anything from PLoS ONE. The journal is a notorious joke.
Papers I have reviewed for PLoS ONE (in my field of biology) have been poorly written garbage.
PLoS ONE is where shitty datasets and negative results go to die after being written up in the most lazy way possible.
I think this may be in response to at least one other study showing a similar effect when subjects were primed with religious concepts: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/18/9/803.abstract
Tell that to the poor employees @ Aperture Laboratories, who gave their lives installing the morality core, to stop GLADOS from flooding the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin. And she was in it for the SCIENCE after all.
Same thing with regards to a certain Mr.Cave Johnson. "Safe science? why not marry safe science if you love it so much". Not very moral, especially that using hobos for testing volunteers. Who wants to make $60?
Let alone using his own employees as test subjects.
I am not suggesting we should. But we can build up and down. We don't really need to spread out that much until we are well on our way into the 10s of billions. The point I am making is that we are a long long way from being genuinely overpopulated if we actually used our technology.
Our basic nature is to breed. We can follow that or grow up.
The fundamental duty of all living things is to recreate themselves. After you do, something changes inside you that causes you to realize that you're not the center of the universe. That's called "Growing Up".
If you haven't bred yet, you're still a child. You shouldn't be allowed to vote, any more than any other mewling babe.
That is the biggest BS I have read in a while. There are plenty of people that have bred multiple times and yet to grow up or actual act like adults or they let their kids run wild (being non-responsible towards their kids because they are selfish as parents.)
We need to step up and stop.
Breeding is over. We can kill anything we can grasp...extinct anything larger than a medium dog.
We can farm anything anywhere we want.
What is our goal. We won. We can breed all we want now. Challenge over.
All that is left to beat is insects, virus's and bacteria. The more we fuck the more they grow....so we need a new angle.
Breeding is for animals. The people who make a difference are focused on changing Minds not reproducing Bodies. I mean, it's great that you made some more humans and you're really proud of that, even though you could have done it with no higher brain function at all. But your vote, as a breeder, counts for very little next to all the votes of your offspring, who have been learning from me and will vote for me.
Humans are just a substrate, a temporary phenomenon. People go on. Humans are pitiful, weak bags of mostly water that can't go anywhere too hot or too cold, can't handle high pressures or low pressures, fall apart for the slightest reason. But People can be so much more than that. And they will be, long after the breeders die out. We don't hate you, we just don't care very much about your primitive biological urges.
Asimov's Trantor had, if I remember correctly, 40 billion at its peak and that was basically one planet-wide city. Or you could go up an order of magnitude or two and use Coruscant at a trillion people. Of course if you do that, you run into a problem or two or three. If you're wondering if a webcomic author is a good authority on the physics of a fictional city, he's not just a webcomic author.
Of course, we COULD use that science to send some of those billions of people to planets or celestial bodies other than Earth. Keep a few billion folks on Earth, send a couple million to orbiting habitats, and put the rest on Mars and its moons as well as Earth's moon.
I've been putting together a system that I think would be effective in pulling us out of this nosedive. I started in on an essay to explain it at one point, though I haven't worked on it recently... been designing the software needed to support it.
http://slashdot.org/journal/492191
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The human cultures that are most exposed to modern scientific education are also those with birth rates below replacement levels
Which is good, because the Earth is beyond carrying capacity. Increasing the population when we're about to run out of petroleum based fertilizers and become unable to feed billions of people is immoral.
So, for whatever reason, scientific education is co-related with the decline of human civilization.
Population is not the same as civilization. Civilization is not even proportional to population.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
its emphasis on truth-seeking, impartiality and rationality
Proof that most people don't know anything about science.
The problem today is that scientists can't do anything without acceptance from the moral masses. Want to cure cancer, you can, just don't you dare have a cage full of diseased mice in your lab because that is wrong. Want to cure genetic diseases, you can, just don't you dare try to use stem cells because some people consider that abortion. Want to solve world hunger, you can, just don't you dare splice a tomato gene with an eggplant. Want to prove the world is round, you can, just be respectful of those that believe in 2000 years of lies and intolerance to truth.
I agree there are obvious scientific research that is immoral and unacceptable, but the problem now is that if this study is a truthful indication of the state of scientific research today, then science will fail, and with it, our civilization will collapse.
It is a common theory that the Roman Empire fell is because in essence stupid people out grew the ability for the intellects to solve their problems or improve social conditions. I'm afraid the trend is repeating. FUD is the new God.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Not really. Earth can easily sustain 10 to 14 billion humans with a good use of technology. That could go into the hundreds of billions if we could accept getting our protein from algae vats.
Or other sources...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Our basic nature is to breed. We can follow that or grow up.
The fundamental duty of all living things is to recreate themselves. After you do, something changes inside you that causes you to realize that you're not the center of the universe. That's called "Growing Up".
If you haven't bred yet, you're still a child. You shouldn't be allowed to vote, any more than any other mewling babe.
That is the biggest BS I have read in a while. There are plenty of people that have bred multiple times and yet to grow up or actual act like adults or they let their kids run wild (being non-responsible towards their kids because they are selfish as parents.)
If you don't have kids of your own, then who the fuck are you to judge? If they let their kids run wild, their kids won't let you tame them, and they'll reproduce, and they'll carry on their family line, despite social pressure to abstain from reproducing and work. It's an effective defense mechanism against efforts to "civilize" them and use them.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
No, breeding is for living things. As opposed to dead things. If you're not a breeder, you're a dead man walking, and you better make yourself useful.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
This is about as far from science as you can get.
Please name one fact that proves God does not exist.......you won't be able to.
Please name one fact that proves God does exist.......you won't be able to.
I am a person. Do I have value? Yes, I've decided that I do.
Does humanity have value? Yes, I've decided that it does.
The trick with morality is not in making statements - it's about understanding why something is so? Why does any of us have value, and why does humanity have value? I agree that humanity has value, because in the universe we know humanity is the only sentient species. The lowest of the low has value because of the consequences of not assigning value to them. Even then, we get in to the personhood debate which is not an easy one to resolve, but can reach certain standards through reason. For example, I'd consider the right to own property to be fundamental, because few people want their shit to be arbitrarily taken away. Would a person in a coma who medically has irrevocably lost higher brain functions have the same rights? No.
So, the most fundamental basis of moral behavior has to be, "Does it cause us to destroy ourselves."
If behavior causes us to destroy ourselves, it is immoral. Full stop.
It depends on what how you define destruction.
After that, I begin to consider the quality of the human experience. It is always better to exist than to not exist, but it is better to avoid suffering and afford humans dignity after the fundamental goal of survival is met.
Existence is not always better than non-existence. Dignity sometimes comes through non-existence.
For example, it is better if birth control makes it possible for people to have families that are more likely to survive and thrive, and afford women more dignity.
But, if every woman on Earth decided that they were going to just skip having children and focus on their careers, it would then become moral to rape them into pregnancy and force them to bear their children to term, and immoral to stand by and watch humanity become extinct because we don't have the stomach to do what needs to be done.
That's a ridiculously extreme example that will never actually come to pass, of course, but it illustrates the way in which behaviors become moral or immoral depending on the situation.
I agree it is situational. Morality is not simple. On the rape example, it's a difficult choice where I feel morality may give way to pragmatism. To return to the example of property; what if you were to collapse in the street, and the only way to save you was to quickly drive you to hospital? I have a car, but I refuse to offer a lift because I'm late for dinner. It's my car, but with this information the moral choice to me is to take my car and save this man's life. What then if the reason you collapsed was because you tried to mug a well armed victim? You're right - it's situational, and also can be influenced by factors.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Science has certainly been used for bad ends and bad people have certainly done science. Maybe science is taking on the trappings of a new faith. Faith in a good future for all or some such thing. It may be that scientists are coming to be viewed as a new priestly caste whose tireless pursuit of truth places them on a higher moral plane. Peer review would suggest a higher moral standard. Faith needs to be prescriptive and in some cases predictive and it needs to tell a story the tribal members can subscribe to. The posted study may be an inkling of science as a religion, as faith. I post this tongue firmly in cheek but with a little concern given my species seemingly timeless need for a faith. Past faiths have relied on moral laws handed down to the faithful and in impoverished environments those laws have been used to pass moral judgement and to accord entitlement to resources. To the scientifically illiterate science today represents the new laws of the universe and the applied sciences give us most of what we have. Our old minds in a new age may just be dressing up science in priestly robes. Or it may be complete nonsense or both.
What you describe is a distorted view of a small part of the system I'm designing, I call it LIFE. What language/protocol are you thinking of using?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Dead people make good fertilizer. Come up with a better analogy.
I'm curious now if we eliminated religion if people would actually be smarter, they would test smarter, or if all the stupid people would just be aethists.
Decline in population levels is not the same as "decline of civilization" - that's a pretty obvious fallacy
I find this fascinating, but as a Christian (I know... prepare your fireballs), I don't find this surprising.
Firstly, I'm more than happy to acknowledge that there are an enormous number of desperately uninformed religious folk in the world and many say things (mostly regarding creationism) in total ignorance of honest, scientific findings. I personally appreciate the genius of the study of evolutionary biology and I continue to pray that the Christian community be educated about science, rather than approaching it with uncalled-for skepticism.
However, the reason I don't this relationship surprising is that at the heart of faith in any religion is humility. A vast amount of knowledge tends to puff men up and probably makes them unwilling to look outside their own intelligence for answers. Pursuing faith forces us to acknowledge that we have a need for a greater being, intelligence, power or spirit. It humbles us because we trust it something other than our own effort or intelligence.
In response to your post, I hear the voices of thousands saying, "Yes, we may be stupid and uninformed and ultimately too weak to save ourselves, but we realize it, and that's why we have faith."
How many of us would be enough for you ?
I mean we can clearly breed un-opposed.
What is the goal.....More is better...Biology is broken. We won.
Most likely? All the stupid people who accept religion just because would accept atheism just because.
Science proponents: replace all your reasoning with our fact-based logic model of the universe designed by creatures evolved to process a handful of fuzzy things with heuristics.
So, the most fundamental basis of moral behavior has to be, "Does it cause us to destroy ourselves."
That's a ridiculously extreme example that will never actually come to pass, of course, but it illustrates the way in which behaviors become moral or immoral depending on the situation.
Oh ok, then your argument that "science education is immoral" is only valid in a ridiculously extreme example that will never actually come to pass.
Do you think it's maybe a little bit more likely that science will be the only thing that gets our species to other planets, and is thus critical to the long-term survival of humanity? Even if you're a pure "scoreboard utilitarian", you should be trying to optimize the score at the end of the game instead of at the end of the first quarter.
That is the wrong question.
There is no amount of people I consider "enough".
Overpopulation does not occur when you have more than "enough", it occurs when you have to many.
And the 7 odd billion people we have now are not to many. Every one of us could live a western lifestyle if we used our existing technology reasonably. That means building a metric crap ton of solar energy plants in the desert. That means removing sequestered fossil fuels as our transportation energy source. That means building an effective global power and communications grid. None of these things are beyond our reach. We have more than enough wealth, material and labor available. What we really need is power and we can get that from simple sunlight.
Then you look at the socio-economic trends of the western civilization, and your overpopulation problem naturally evaporates as birthrates decline. The population will plateau, it already is in most of the developed world.
The beauty of science is that you don't have to believe in it, in the sense of 'to believe' meaning 'to accept on someone else's authority.' I point this out because I have a feeling I would be ranked extremely highly on this 'belief in science' scale while I consider myself to not believe in science at all; the authority of science derives from empirical testing and reason, not belief.
It was discovered that thinking about Richard Dawkins causes more moral behavior. "Science bless you!" was the official response from his publisher when asked about an opinion about the discovery.
Our basic nature is to breed. We can follow that or grow up.
The fundamental duty of all living things is to recreate themselves. After you do, something changes inside you that causes you to realize that you're not the center of the universe. That's called "Growing Up".
If you haven't bred yet, you're still a child. You shouldn't be allowed to vote, any more than any other mewling babe.
That is the biggest BS I have read in a while. There are plenty of people that have bred multiple times and yet to grow up or actual act like adults or they let their kids run wild (being non-responsible towards their kids because they are selfish as parents.)
If you don't have kids of your own, then who the fuck are you to judge? If they let their kids run wild, their kids won't let you tame them, and they'll reproduce, and they'll carry on their family line, despite social pressure to abstain from reproducing and work. It's an effective defense mechanism against efforts to "civilize" them and use them.
Because it doesn't take the element of having kids to know how to be a grown up, which is why one (with out without having had kids) can judge others that have children and very easily see they don't act like grown ups. So they should be "judged" for being idiots and for helping to ruining a stable society, especially if they take the same level of effort to their professional jobs, teachers especially, coz I have seen such examples that made me fear for their own kids and the kids they educate. So again, yes, people should be judged.
Dead people make good fertilizer. Come up with a better analogy.
Ever heard of Prions?
Dead people do NOT make good fertilizer.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
So what they are saying is that society has so emphasized science that its pursuit has taken on the trappings of an ideology.
So its we are focused on profit !
We could all live well for now on the resources we have.... For a while. Ok the clock would still be ticking.
True. But we are ruled by greedy apes that will not let go until their cold dead hands are pried loose. When will we get over that ?
In the Third Reich, the scientists made massive advances in the sciences, knowing all along that their inventions (especiall in medicine) would be used for immoral purposes. Many of the psychotropic drugs that we still use to treat mental disorders came from research done by the Nazis on living subjects, against their will, and usually to their death. Morality can be linked to science, perhaps, but only because they're correlated to some third cause.
The problem today is that scientists can't do anything without acceptance from the moral masses. Want to cure cancer, you can, just don't you dare have a cage full of diseased mice in your lab because that is wrong. Want to cure genetic diseases, you can, just don't you dare try to use stem cells because some people consider that abortion. Want to solve world hunger, you can, just don't you dare splice a tomato gene with an eggplant. Want to prove the world is round, you can, just be respectful of those that believe in 2000 years of lies and intolerance to truth.
I agree there are obvious scientific research that is immoral and unacceptable, but the problem now is that if this study is a truthful indication of the state of scientific research today, then science will fail, and with it, our civilization will collapse.
It is a common theory that the Roman Empire fell is because in essence stupid people out grew the ability for the intellects to solve their problems or improve social conditions. I'm afraid the trend is repeating. FUD is the new God.
There has been a push during the last 50 years to de-emphasize the study of philosophy when pursuing degrees in college and universities. Many have put forth that the lack of basic understanding that comes from studying the great philosophers is what leads to the issues you point out for both scientists and the public. In short, what you are really asking is at what point is too much too much? Where does the line get drawn between moral and immoral? Science cannot answer that question, but philosophy can.
Alas, we don't require philosophy to be studied in most of our degree programs any more, so people make invalid philosophical arguments with potentially devastating results. Even primitive man understood that when throwing a spear a small error in initial trajectory led to a large error at the target. With modern societies lack of sound philosophical underpinnings, the possibility for those small errors is great and the likelihood of large errors or unintended consequences therefore even greater.
It's not FUD being the new god, it's ignorance.
I am only one person.
Everyone else adds up to 7 billion people.
If society starts thinking only about themselves, then that's 7billion people whose only thoughts are how to fuck me over.
And that's why altruism.
NOTE: Also exists in Bats, Chimps, Lions and many other social group animals.
Altruism works, bitch.
So to quote "And the 7 odd billion people we have now are not to many"
What are we needing. cause breeding wont fix it ?
We could live well forever, the clock would not be ticking as you put it. I am talking about a permanent population. We have no need to use non-renewable materials. We could power all of North America with a solar thermal power system covering a square less than 100 miles on side. Make it a little bigger and we can turn sea water into fresh water and refill the Ogallala aquifer. Put a similar one on each continent and completely end the worlds reliance on fossil fuels. This requires no new technology.
We get rid of the greedy apes as soon as people stop buying into the idea that we are overpopulated. The markets work to their advantage based on the idea of artificial scarcity, because it is exactly that... artificial. Once people realize that, then you can smash their little monkey skulls and start building the future.
Lol and breeding would stop this ?
Your on my side. Fool.
Where the pest that needs to stop.
The first gaping hole I see in the study is that the scientist did not also have a group of participants who fill out questionnaires and do word scrambles and whatnot using non-scientific words and concepts, and see if that also makes a difference in how the groups respond to the date-rape case.
So they've only found evidence for half of their claim. They present no evidence that thinking about science, specifically, affects the subjects' morality more or less than does thinking about anything else.
The more scientific papers I read, or read about, the more I despair that a great many scientists don't understand scientific rigor.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
There is nothing scientific about morality - it is purely subjective.
Science just deals with facts - how one acts upon the knowledge of those facts is either moral or rational.
It doesn't say science depends on morality or that science is inherently moral, immoral or amoral. It says that when people think 'scientifically' they tend to consider moral issues more often or in greater depth. That may because those understanding the scientific principles are also aware of the lack of inherent 'morality' in them. So they are motivated to think beyond the pure science.
Have gnu, will travel.
Here's the first 2 lines of the conclusion synopsis: These studies demonstrated the morally normative effects of lay notions of science. Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms and exhibit more morally normative behavior.
"lay notions of science" = shit people think might be scientific - for some people this includes homeopathy. For nearly everyone it includes some totally bogus nonsense.
"exhibit more morally normative behavior" = behave more in accordance with mainstream dogmas and shibboleths - in the Southern USA in the 1950s, this would definitely include being OK with brutal beatings of gays and "uppity" black people.
This ISN'T a stable society. It's a society that has been below replacement levels of reproduction for several generations. We're in the middle of a crisis of too many elderly and not enough young. You're living in a bubble untarnished by reality. If you search for key words such as "Demographic Winter" or "Ageing Population" there are plenty of numbers to substantiate the simple truth that we are REALLY FUCKED.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your ideals and preconceptions...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Sure they do, don't knock it till you've tried it!
Real science is testing your ideas about how they could be wrong.
Reproducibility isn't needed.
When MMe Curie did her experiments on Radium, NOBODY ELSE could use the same radium atoms after they decayed.
I fail to see a problem here. Doesn't this just mean fewer kids on my lawn?
Is this starting to sound like "Science as religion" to anyone else?
I mean, science as a METHOD is brilliant and irrefutable; hypothesis, test, prove/disprove, repeat.
But there seems to have a been a cascade of quackery articles talking more about "science" as a CREED than science.
And that is a huge mistake. ANYTHING can become dogma. Anything.
-Styopa
So we make grandiose conclusions about human behavior based on the responses of bored or hungry college students to silly questionnaires.I know humanities departments are envious of the methods used by real sciences but give me a break. Madison avenue knows a hell of a lot more about peoples psyches than the profs at UCSB.
Intelligent people are programmatic bugs, that actually care in spite of the "intelligent creators" design.
The "intelligent creators" only care if you procreate, because you are food, and they will show up some day.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
In epistemically less rigorous contexts, like our everyday lives, testimony is perfectly fine. I am willing to accept that there is water in a bottle I buy from a store simply because it's labelled as being water. What's special about science is that we can crank up the epistemic rigour all the way and (in principle) find out for ourselves whether a claim that is being made is true or false. There are plenty of domains where this is not the case. Religion (which you mentioned) is one, and so are certain social situations (unless you're willing to involve, say, Jerry Springer). In practice we often do end up relying on testimony, but, again, the beauty of science is that I (you (we, as a species)) don't have to.
So, it's kind of like the concept of Free-as-in-Speech in Open Source.
There is far too much code out there for any one of us to examine by themselves. Many of us haven't read through any, yet alone tried compiling any of it. But, even those of us with no programming skill like the idea that it is at least possible for us to do these things, as the limits are set by our own technical skills and available time.
So even though an End User like myself may have no personal understanding of the Source Code I'm using, I still place greater confidence in the trustworthiness of the software I'm using, when I know it is possible for others to do that examination, even if nobody I personally trust has actually has checked that particular piece of code.
It doesn't illustrate anything except that you're a crazy sexist. Not having offspring is not the same as "destroying ourselves". We are we, we aren't our children. Hypothetical individuals that might be born in the future don't have any rights or interests until they are actually born.
Vegans and Vegetarians are obviously Immoral and irrational because they sure as heck are unscientific.
Omnivores are scientific so eating meat and vegetables is obviously rational and moral.
I don't know any true Carnivores so I'll have to leave that one alone.
This ISN'T a stable society. It's a society that has been below replacement levels of reproduction for several generations. We're in the middle of a crisis of too many elderly and not enough young. You're living in a bubble untarnished by reality. If you search for key words such as "Demographic Winter" or "Ageing Population" there are plenty of numbers to substantiate the simple truth that we are REALLY FUCKED.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your ideals and preconceptions...
Birth rates globally are still above replacement levels (2.36 per woman of child-bearing age), albeit just by a hair (2.33 globally is break even), but are falling. You are assuming that trend will continue indefinately, probably falsely.
Also note the "break even" fertility rate falls as infant/child mortality rates fall. In developed countries, 2.1 is break even; in developing countries it ranges from 2.5 - 3.3 due to higher mortality rates. As medical science improves (and existing advances become available
in poorer nations), replacement level should fall closer to the ideal 2.0.
Source Total fertility rate
On the off chance that you're not trolling, FYI the world is greatly overpopulated. We are NOT going to lower the birth rate to our extinction, but our overpopulation itself may well do so. We are undergoing a mass extinction right now that is entirely due to habitat loss.
Fewer kids need to be born. I stopped at two.
Free Martian Whores!
No low IQ people are atheists. :D
So since the link didn't say that, can I assume you're not an atheist? Because that was, if you'll pardon me, a really stupid thing to say. I know for a personally observed fact that that statement was incorrect. There's a fellow I drink with who's an atheist. He is completely illiterate and spent ten years in prison for murder when he was young, neither of which are indicators of superior intelligence. He's in his early seventies, has never paid into Social Security and has no pension and works construction for little more than minimum wage. Now tell me that guy has a high IQ.
What your link said was that there's a correlation between atheism and analytical minds, which makes perfect sense.
Free Martian Whores!
The key point that is mentioned here is the bit about "deep-seated perception of science as a moral pursuit." It's been known for a long time that people behave more morally when given reminders about moral beliefs. The average person doesn't actually understand what science is or how it works; rather, she regards it as some thing which she ought to believe in and respect, an attitude that she acquired socially. This is almost exactly how religion functions, and if you regard this as a tragedy that flies in the face of everything science stands for, welcome to what happened to religion. The religion of today was the intellectual, scholarly, and scientific pursuits of generations of old, watered down for the masses and then petrified into a code of unchangeable ideas that everyone must memorize. What most people consider to be religion today is laughable, and likewise much of what's now being passed for science nowadays is also a joke. Those people who against vaccines? They claim science is backing their claims. That's basically like saying God is on your side.
yes and no. Religion offers some mental calisthenics beyond eating grass and watching paint dry. The trick with religion isn't a lack of food for thought, the problem rests with dogma, delusion and worst of all persecution.
I know you're just being a douchebag, but in all seriousness, right now I'm trying to design an effective way for mesh networks to scale. My system presupposes their existence, and the tech isn't quite there yet. I believe that by making all the nodes aware of their location on the earth, and by making the nodes intelligent enough to discriminate between peers based on the broadcast power of the peer, I can solve the problem. But it takes time. The rest of the necessary technology has already been invented, this is the remaining key to the puzzle. Depolying it will be a whole different matter... ideally, something can be put together that can run on existing devices, so people can, if they wish, install the software and begin the process of administering their affairs using the new system.
If billions of people can be presented with the choice "From now on, we will ignore existing systems of authority and govern our affairs using this system. Anyone who attempts to use force to compel you to honour the rules of the old system is a violent criminal, and we will all co-operate to stop them. Do you agree?", and they say "Yes", and they KNOW that 9 out of 10 people they see on the street ALSO said yes, then the existing systems will fall. What will they do with their newfound power? I don't know. Evolve as a society? Kill themselves? Beats me. As long as vicious self-serving bastards are no longer able to wield them, I'll be content.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Wrong. Belief in supernatural powers is a natural component of our cognition. It takes considerable effort to not believe in magic, requiring intelligence and fortitude to fill in the gaps created in our image of the world, and to prevent oneself from pursuing flights of fancy.
Many self-avowed atheists and agnostics believe in the supernatural or in magic; their expression of atheism is merely a rejection of the dominate, contemporary religious concepts. For example, many geeks harbor beliefs in aliens or superluminal travel. They would argue that those beliefs are anchored in science, but science and religion have always been deeply intertwined.
"There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking." -- Alfred Korzybsky's variation of Henri Poincare. Those who will believe anything, will believe the justifications for evil, and those who doubt everything, will doubt the justifications for good, generally to suit themselves.
It's not about morality it is that scientists can't get laid.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I have an IQ of 148 (I forget which test, but I was tested by two psychologists two separate times at the age of 11). The higher the IQ, the more likely people are to be just plain weird. Your image of intelligence merely reflects those in the 100-130 range who grew up in a stable family.
As a child I could always tell who the smart grownups were. They would ask questions which other people would think odd or non-sensical, but which had deep substance. One man I remember (I grew up very poor and my mom had a lot of "guy friends") was a retired chemical engineer; extremely bright and more than a little eccentric. He basically chose to become an itinerant alcoholic; he said to himself something like, "I like drinking... I like traveling... so fsck it!"
Half of the kids in my gifted program (all IQs over 138) never finished university. What truly distinguished us (~10 students) from the rest of the school (1000+ students), aside from our IQ, was our extreme variability--from where we came form, and to where we migrated in society.
Your markers for IQ have more to do with class and economic well being. An alcoholic murderer? That tells me absolutely nothing about the guy's IQ. Extremely high IQ people can smell their own, and we're definitely a weird bunch. Being weird doesn't make you smart, but being smart doesn't make you not weird--or not violent, or not self-destructive. Being smart simply makes you more aware of your pathologies; it doesn't make you a better person.
Does humanity have value? Yes, I've decided that it does.
Well that's a silly assumption...
wat
Thinking requires atheism.
What did Aldous Huxley say about "life not having meaning" in Ends and Means?
BTW, you do know you're a bit crazy right? I won't hold it against you.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Of course most low IQ people are believers. Most religions protect them from being aborted in the first place.
How many farm worlds did it take to support Trantor?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Paragraph 5:
"Participants first completed a word scramble task during which they either had to unscramble some of these science-related words or words that had nothing to do with science."
Dupe: Does Scientific Literacy Make People More Ethical?
Science is explicitly NOT a moral pursuit. Science is objective, morality is subjective. There would be no need for morality if things could be scientifically proven good or bad in the way that things can be proven true or false, or arguments valid or invalid.
Science does seek truth, morality does not. The best it can seek is consensus.Science is indeed impartial, morality is about picking a side. "Collective well being" may be one end goal of scientific thinking, but never at the expense of truth, and as soon as one engages in science specifically for such a goal one is no longer impartial.
Also date-rate is a poor topic for such an experiment as it is easy for most people to conclude that it is wrong based on universally shared principles (note: nothing to do with science). In fact it sounds like the researchers didn't even think twice about forming such a moral position in advance and merely compared to which degree the participants chose a moral position that agreed with theirs. Far better would be the trickier issues like political positions, abortion, polygamy, homosexuality, vegetarianism etc.
Even if the experiment was sound, the interpretation is ridiculous. The observed correlation could still be interesting, but we would need to conduct more, better, experiments and interpret the results better.
My hypothesis would be : Assuming science enthusiasts go on less dates as young singles than the general population they have less exposure to situations where tricky situations arrive, i.e. getting drunk and having sex. Many of the less-scientifically minded have probably had situations where a mistake was made, or judgement was poorly executed, and are less likely to make blanket judgements condemning certain behaviours outright. A science enthusiast that hasn't been in that situation is likely to consider himself, should he find himself in that situation, as being capable of exemplary behaviour, he may not consider himself as likely to make mistakes, have less tolerance for mistake making in general, and more prepared to take a harder moral position against the very human behaviour of making mistakes.
And what the hell is "belief in science"?
I have seen more intellectual rigour on /r/Atheism
It is simply easier for a person to just believe the same things as most of his neighbors, family and friends. No arguing needed, no or only little amounts of justification for own world view are needed. If a person, however, has a world view that does not match the world view of most people around him, this person will always have to justify this world view to them. This needs more intelligence than just going with the mainstream. Low IQ people will therefor always go with the mainstream as this is the only thing that is possible for them.
As all these studies that compare individuals intelligence vs. atheism have been done in states such as the US where the mainstream is theism, they show no low IQ people who are atheists. These studies should be repeated in states where the mainstream is atheistic and anti-religious, e.g.: China or eastern Germany. They might show exactly the opposite trend: No low IQ people are religious.
Jan
No the apes look at money. That fake number that they need to get bigger.
So its we are focused on profit !
Try stop it.
Im sorry but step up.
We can breed as much as we want. Nothing eats us.
We can farm the whole planet with tech and extinct everything above alge if we like.
Why ?
Ummm.. you don't "accept atheism" there is nothing to accept. If children would be raised up in a totally non-religious community they wouldn't suddenly start questioning the absense of religion. The same way as you don't constantly question the absense of grimmalatabalation. You have no idea such idea or thing even exists, and as a mater of fact for the said children religion doesn't. Most people around here are pretty close to religion free already. What religion mean to them is something other people do, and a collection of fairytales. They may even belong to some church, but only because they were joined to it as a kid, and haven't thought about it since. You could argue they are even more atheists than the self proclaimed ones that try to "convert" everyone to atheism. They simply don't give a crap about gods or religion or the existance of it. If you ask them about it it would be the same as me asking you about your relationship with grimmalatabalation. With the difference that thay have heard about god and religion, and those words aren't made up by some anonymous coward on slashdot, but by some cowards that lived many thousands of years ago.
Now that we are poised to be able to control another human body through a mind-link (http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/08/27/1827256/uw-researchers-demonstrate-first-direct-communication-between-human-brains), you better hope the controller has morals.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Hear hear! Clearly this is cause-and-effect, not correlation! Death to modern scientific educations! They clearly cause the decline of human civilization! We cannot advance unless we overpopulated our planet!
Waitaminute.... something doesn't feel right about this statement.
trying so hard to fight that invisible man in the sky that doesn't exist, but they can't simply ignore him... Does that make atheists crazy?
Science is just the study of observable phenomena using a using a specific set of techniques. As such, it is amoral. Human beings introduce any sort of moral structure (or lack thereof) into the interpretation of the results of such observations.
Science must be the one true religion for these modern times.