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Your Political Facebook Posts Aren't Changing How Your Friends Think (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes:It may be hard to resist airing political grievances or appealing to voters on social media during a U.S. presidential race as heated as this one. But no one wants to hear about your politics, least of all on Facebook. Those long rants about how Trump is a bully and a buffoon, Hillary is a crook, and conspiring against Bernie Sanders has doomed America forever aren't changing voters' minds, a new study found. A staggering 94% of Republicans, 92% of Democrats, and 85% of independents on Facebook say they have never been swayed by a political post, according to Rantic, a firm that sells social media followers. The firm surveyed 10,000 Facebook users who self-identified as Republicans, Democrats, or independents. The only thing those opinionated election posts are doing is damaging your friendships. Nearly one-third of Facebook users surveyed said social media is not an appropriate forum for political discussions. And respondents from each political affiliation admitted they've un-friended people on Facebook because of their political posts.
Science 101 should have taught you that with any chaotic system, it is not possible to make predictions about the future state of said system.
That is a misunderstanding of deterministic chaos based on oversimplified popular science.
Some things can be predicted in a deterministic system, some cannot. But, in general, you very often predict the average properties of the system, even if you cannot predict the exact path through the phase space. In a chaotically dripping faucet, you can predict the average number of gallons per hour, even if you cannot predict the exact pattern of the drops. In a weather system, you can predict that July in Bismarck North Dakota will be warmer than January, even though you can't predict whether July 12 2019 will be rainy or dry. In a climate system, you can predict that radiative input equals radiative output, even if you cannot predict the exact temperature in Bismarck on July 12.
Chaos is well defined. It does not mean "anything at all can happen."
That's the truth.
Anecdote time: I've got a friend who, for just the past year or two, suddenly, has bashed on his friends (or their family members) everyday on FB, and says how stupid he realizes they are now (without naming names, however), how racist or homophobic they are, how Trump is Hitler, Sanders is great, and religion is for mindless idiots, etc.. never thinking about the fact that some of his friends' wives are actually fairly religious and he's insulting them on a daily basis as well, and some are also conservative. He gets downright nasty.
Worse, he copies and pastes quotes he gets from his newsfeed to sound worldly and intelligent, but I've known the guy for 30 years; he's never voluntarily cracked open a fucking book in his life. He's barely computer literate and was probably lucky to graduate High School. He doesn't know about half the famous people whose quotes he uses, so it's even more irritating that he's a total pseudo-intellectual who now believes he's the intelligentsia, all due to his political stances; and then he gets baffled why anyone should get "offended" at the toxic crap he spews everyday! Freakin' Trump has got more tact than him.
He's changed dramatically in just the past year or two, to the point where his wife just left him a few weeks ago (his second divorce). He's gone completely off the SJW rails, all except for one aspect: feminism; women are still great when they're sitting on a Harley, wearing leather and showing their tits, and making him a sammich.
He's ruining all his relationships via Facebook,and it's not changing one damn opinion, except ours of him.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Science is not a belief.
It takes faith to believe that 2 + 2 is 4. The word "because" isn't a good answer.
No. There are plenty of examples of the requirement of "belief" in science, this isn't one of them.
You cannot be an expert in every field of study, and perform all your own experiments verifying the entirety of accumulated human knowledge. That means, to some extent, you must trust (i.e. have faith in) the processes that produced all that knowledge. It's the kind of faith that can be replaced with a degree of certainty, if you care to prove these things to yourself and replicate the experiments, but it's a kind of faith nonetheless.
Two plus two equals four not because you believe the results of an experiment you did not yourself verify, but because you were taught a mathematical system in which the result of performing the arithmetic operation of addition on the numbers 2 and 2 results in 4. No faith necessary.
If you're using math to describe real world objects, then you can grab two oranges and two plums and put them together and count them. You don't have to call the result "four," you can call it "quattro" or "loS" or "harfshump." Whatever you decide to call that collection of four objects is your description of a group of things that has a cardinality of 4. You need only have faith in your ability to put a descriptor on a fact that is independently true. If you just got hit over the head, and you see four pieces of fruit but there's really only two, 2 + 2 still equals 4. You were just wrong about starting with 2 and 2.
If you'd prefer that two plus two equals something other than four, you are free to use a different system (e.g. one where 2 + 2 = 0 and 2 * 2 = 3) or cook up your own. Go nuts, toss the integers out the window, devise a system where [nothing] plus <purple> equals {%%%}. However, 2 plus 2 will still equal 4, axiomatically, in the system everybody else uses.
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2+2=4 is a matter of stipulation. It isn't a matter of observation, nor of faith, but of agreement to the convention.
The scientific method is firmly founded upon a set of metaphysical assumptions which have proven to have high practical value, but cannot themselves be demonstrated (such as: the outer world actually exists, and is not an elaborately-crafted illusion). So, there is belief involved. But it is much less belief than what is involved in religious doctrines.
Sorry, but 2 rocks plus 2 rocks still equals 4 rocks.
Birds have been shown to have a sense of numbers, without any metaphysical assumptions.
>No one wants Trump or Hilary,
This is demonstrably wrong.
... plus even if it was true, most people would still vote for one of those two candidates, because the anti-Trump people really don't want to see Trump in office, and the anti-Hillary people really don't want to see Hillary in office. In those circumstances, very few of them will be willing to effectively annul their influence on the election by throwing their vote away on a third-party candidate who isn't going to win anyway.
Now if we had a third-party candidate who was polling competitively with the two first-party candidates, or if we had a voting system that didn't suffer significantly from the spoiler effect, things might be different. But we don't, so they aren't.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.