I don't find the evidence convincing. To quote Skepchick (because I have very little to add to her critique):
Even though the phones wereâ"literallyâ"on top of the hive, it wasnâ(TM)t until they had been transmitting for over 30 minutes before an effect was recorded. The effect was that the bees began piping (a really cool rhythmic buzzy sound). It is true that piping bees are related to swarms; however, bees pipe for a lot of other reasons too. If you bump into a hive, bees will pipe. Itâ(TM)s something they do when they are disturbed.
Itâ(TM)s important to note that no alteration of behavior (swarming or otherwise) other than piping was actually observed, even after 20 hours of exposure to active mobile phone headsets. The swarming and dying part was completely made up.
The immediate critique that occurs to me is that a cell phone transmitting for over an hour will heat up. If a hot, noisy object is on top of a bee hive, I think it is reasonable to expect the bees to react. That effect may have no relationship with cell phone transmission or magnetic fields at all.
It is, frankly, difficult for me to say much about this paper besides negative things, because it is entirely made up of un-replicated experiments. It was a âoepilot studyâ. As a reviewer, I would not have approved this paper in itâ(TM)s present form, simply because it is so difficult to figure out just what the methodology was!!
I canâ(TM)t even say how often the piping occurred because no statistics are presented. At the very least, I would want to see how long, on average, the phones were on and transmitting before piping began! The acoustic characteristics of the piping are described, but that doesnâ(TM)t tell me anything about the relationship to phones.
In terms of sample size, we have 8 negative control trials (phones off); 10 inactive trials (phones on, but not transmitting); and 12 active trials (phones on and transmitting for unspecified times. Each of these conditions (off/on/transmitting) was tested on different days, and at two different locations, but there are no details on which and when.
The âoe83 experimentsâ number used in so many of these news stories appears to be a complete misunderstanding of what an experiment actually is. The paper did say that 80 sound recordings were madeâ"but clearly some of those were repeated measures on the same setup. The actual sample size was at best 12.
If it takes half an hour for the bees to respond to stimulus, it's rather difficult to ascertain whether it's the EM radiation of the phone's signal, or the heat and noise generated by the phone being called. To properly test the signal alone, the phone should have its speaker disabled and some steps should be taken to prevent it from radiating a temperature above ambient. This remains an incomplete, improperly controlled study. (This is all without mentioning that the inverse square law makes testing phones on top of bees rather unrealistic.)
Sorry, the source of analysis does not invalidate it, neither does 'fervency' (which is subjective anyway). Until you can assail my analysis itself as opposed to just tossing ad hominem nonsense at me, you are engaging in fallacy.
Also it doesn't give you any high ground that you are using a second account to mod up your own posts. I was suspicious the first few times that you were modded up virtually the same minute you posted, but when it became every time I checked your comments record. Every one of your posts is modded up exactly one point. That doesn't happen, it's not a coincidence. You're a tool who abuses open systems, and anybody with eyes should question your motives and honesty to the very core of your character.
Come on. Do I really have to explain physics to you? Skin + water with impurities conducts electricity better than just skin. You don't need more voltage when there is less resistance, more contact area, more exposure time, etc. etc.
Exposure to residential voltage in such a way as the current necessarily travels directly through the heart falls in the category of 'seriously fucking with it'. You practically have to engineer that to happen.
Further, just because some things kill some people does not speak to their lethality as a class. Strawberries can kill those persons allergic to them, that doesn't mean we say strawberries are lethal. Oxygen can kill people in high enough concentrations, that doesn't mean we think first of its lethality. Residential voltage in most cases is not lethal, so much so think of it as normally lethal is at best a distortion. Nice try at a lecture though.
Argument from authority, nice fallacy. They're right because they are scientists! Why couldn't I see it before! Oh, that's right, because I actually think about things, and you just buy whatever is spoonfed to you and attack the moral character of anybody who asks questions.
What people want to pretend is not your business, nor anybody's, unless we want a society where thought police hunt down thought criminals, something we're inching ever closer to doing as discussions like this indicate.
Excellent example! And then they humiliate the woman by publishing the photos without her consent.
False. I know videos like this were on America's Funniest Home Videos (and analogous shows) all the time, all with express legal consent.
Re:How about "when software is named by assholes"
on
When Software Offends
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· Score: 1
I am a perv, and I'm not repressed about it. How about finding something of substance to say instead of ad hominem?
I'll give you that you finally turned up your claims of additional tests. Now here's what's wrong with them. The Punjab University study (the full, original, published study, not some digested article from the mainstream news) mentions but gives no statistics for its blank group. This is highly suspicious, because it was subjected to all of the physical stress save the EM radiation of the phones. If the EM radiation were so significantly responsible, they would be shouting from the rooftops that even in the colony where they ripped shit up and dumped dead phones in, nothing significant happened. Instead, that they did a blank study is barely mentioned, and all the statistics are compared between the aggregates of the active tests with the absolute control group that had nothing done to it whatsoever. That is bad, bad science. What's the point of having a blank group if you're not going to report your findings? Because that would have undermined their bullshit, as apiologists already know that just sticking things in hives damages them.
The link I provided earlier already debunks the Favre study, so I see no need in rehashing it. The full, original, and published study is here, for those who want to assess it for the lacking elements discussed by Skepchick.
I forget who said it, some professor of a graduate program somewhere I roughly recall, but there is a fitting insight for this contrast. To paraphrase, undergraduate students tend not to question. They do research and when they find information in papers they take it as some kind of divine inspiration handed down from on high. When a person with a PhD does research and finds information in a study, they immediately pick up a hammer and start whacking to see what breaks.
If you want a true scientific perspective, you need to ask questions about what you're being told. If somebody came in here and started saying that bees are absolutely not impacted in any way by EM radiation, I would say that current studies are not conclusive, that there are flaws in their methodology that should be fixed and the studies run again before any verdict can *usefully* be reached. You want to believe that bees are detrimentally impacted because you have a green agenda. I am not arguing for or against an agenda, I am simply pointing at the flaws of these studies. When one is done that is completely transparent, properly controlled and documented included all times and statistics for all groups, then I will be satisfied.
Just because it is on Wikipedia does not make it true or complete. I can assure you that upskirt refers to the composition of a photo or video, not its consensuality. Dare I ask, what do you think a consensually-taken upskirt photo would be called if not also 'upskirt'?
Further, if in the course of some other activity a woman accidentally shows her underwear on camera, that too is called a 'pantyshot' even though the camera was not there for the explicit purpose of capturing the event.
That either of these terms requires lack of consent or the explicit and demonstrable intent to malice is wholly false.
Re:How about "when software is named by assholes"
on
When Software Offends
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· Score: 0
Your definition is false in its qualifications. Photos taken up skirts with consent are still called upskirt and/or pantyshots. At which point one is just quibbling over paraphilias, both those of the men and those of the women, assuming that the latter aren't acting 100% for financial gain, at which point it becomes a criticism of the ethics/morality of those arrangements.
Re:In My Opinion, More So a Lack of Understanding
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Technology and Moral Panic
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Almost all legislators were men during the enaction of both laws, and the electorate itself was still more men than women at the time due to the momentum of social norms. Your misogynist opinion is also completely discredited by the fact that there were more women in both Congress and the electorate when Prohibition was repealed than when it was enacted.
You claim that additional studies have borne out the conclusion, I said I didn't see them in your search, and you still haven't provided them. Further, if you read the article I linked, you'll see that the original study was very poorly and unscientifically reported. Proper statistics and times were not kept, proper controls were not in place. I am providing actual evidence and reasons for why this is bunk. All you are doing is referencing vague things that you cannot produce and calling me names like 'zealot'. I think that the spectators to this exchange can see who the real 'zealot' is here.
I put my finger in a charged light socket when I was toddler. Still alive, and that wasn't the only time either, though it's less spectacular to survive shocks as adult working on electronics. Residential voltage is not lethal unless you're really fucking with it, such as dropping an appliance in an occupied bathtub.
Re:In My Opinion, More So a Lack of Understanding
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Technology and Moral Panic
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· Score: 4, Informative
You might want to learn some history before you try to make arguments with it. A majority of both parties supported both the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. More or less as many Republicans as Democrats opposed the measures.
If I think somebody has said something wrong or inaccurate, I check it myself. If somebody refers to something I don't know or understand, I research it myself. This is part of being self actualized, and people who rely on others for these things are lazy and contemptible. If society were overburdened with such people, no advancement would be possible, because everybody would be waiting for somebody else to learn things and do things for them.
Did you pay attention to your own search results? Half of them discredit the study, and I don't even see additional studies in them. I did however find a very nice debunking article in a chain of links off your weak Google-fu: http://skepchick.org/2011/05/bees-ccd-and-cellphones-still-no-link/
That study was bullshit pseudoscience that wasn't even done with proper controls. If you look at the original Daily Mail article that your link links to, you'll see that an expert on bees notes that you can do the same damage simply opening a hive and stuffing things in it, cell phone or otherwise. You can't get a meaningful conclusion from that.
There was a war between earlier electricity providers between AC and DC as the basis for the grid. DC was a terrible choice but Edison was backing it, and he started a misinformation campaign claiming AC was lethally dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. Even though AC won the war, the disinformation memes persisted for a few generations.
This was all summarized from memory. You should really try learning things yourself instead of waiting for somebody else to do shit for you. That behavior makes you a dependent sheep.
Single parents are quite different from adoptive parents. When you're emotionally invested in a person like that it makes sense to care about whomever they cared enough about that they would have that person's child. That creates a much stronger impetus than simply wondering 'where did I come from?' in some detached, abstract way.
Also, speaking both from personal experience and my interaction with other adopted persons, people who get really obsessive about their biological parents usually have personal problems, such as irrationally excessive need for attention or deficiencies (real or imagined) in the relationship with their adoptive parents.
Let me spell it out for you: I am deriding the method(s) by which many persons arrive at beliefs which they use to make crucial decisions not only about their lives but the lives of all others they can impact socially or politically. Derision toward the thing believed is secondary, not necessary for the first derision, and occurs only when I have evidence to demonstrate that belief is wrong and/or harmful.
As Aristotle said, "I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law." When two people arrive at the same conclusion by different means, it is necessary to judge the means to judge the people. Which is more useful, reliable, accurate beyond the immediate context? Hell, from Plato to Locke and beyond, this differentiation has been one of the most important stratifications of society.
Somebody who borrows their morality wholly from another authority demonstrates a high likelihood that they either lack the character (lazy), intellect, or sanity (sociopath) to form a cohesive morality for themselves. Conversely, those persons who are able to build their own morality from a wide comparison of sources/experiences/ideas and can adapt that morality to new information (something that users of static sources cannot readily do beyond a certain degree without resorting to denial or distortion), demonstrate a superiority over the first group, and, in fact, ultimately end up being the source of morality for them. Those who do not understand natural law are ultimately dependent on those that do.
Yes, I'm familiar with the work of Dawkins and others about the potential behavioral explanations for altruism and/or fairness in a gene-centered model of natural selection. I don't think this has fully accounted for sexual dimorphic elements that are visible in many different species. Aside from the obvious human historical and prehistorical anthropological and sociological evidence of unequal social structures on gender lines, there are species withing the arachnids and mantids among many where females prey on males. Even in more advanced species there are unique gender roles which may be detrimental to one or the other. This also doesn't account for emerging research in sexually antagonistic selection, where genes develop to benefit a gender in species to the detriment of the opposite gender. Etc. etc. my lunch is over, so I must cut off.
Biology is nothing more than an impulse to be considered by conscious people. It is not inherently moral, otherwise we'd still have a patriarchal society where women are treated like talking cattle. If people acted on every biological impulse, the world would be awash with chaos and death.
Go watch some nature documentaries and see biology in action. Biology has no problem with cannibalism or infanticide or rape. Hell, from a biological perspective, rape is an imperative. Biology is useful to understand, but if you think it's the basis for a civilized society you're insane.
Actually modesty is one of two negative things: ignorance or lies. Either you're too stupid too realize you're good at something, or you're prone to lie to hide your ability for some unknown ulterior motive.
I do not need to be empathetic to somebody's inferiority complex. I only need to be aware of the validity of my own reasons for what I do. If I am buying things simply to show off, that would be a personal failing that I should solve for my own reasons. Frugality, unlike modesty, is a real virtue, because persons hemorrhaging money tend not to have it very long, let alone grow it. A lifestyle, however good it is at any given time, that rapidly ends itself is inferior to one which is both good and sustainable. People could learn a lot from the ancient Epicureans, in more ways than one, but you don't want to get me started on philosophy.
The child you raise is your child. When you're primary role model, disciplinarian and source of love and guidance for years, it tends to have a lot more impact on the consciousness of a person than who squirted into whom. I am adopted myself, and I don't know who my biological parents are, much less care about them any more than I would any stranger. I love the parents that raised me, and know it is reciprocated.
Never did I say that people should all draw the same conclusion as me, or any abstract single conclusion. However my experience with society at large is that most people do use a simplistic morality that they inherit from some other source. This is obviously a generalization, so when people say 'but I'm an exception!' That doesn't demonstrate it false, especially in a community which is does not, by and large, represent a typical cross section of "normal" society.
There is a huge portion of society where if you ask them straight up, 'where does your morality come from?' They will answer without hesitation: 'God/Allah/Bible/Quran'. Further there are many in that number that fundamentally believe that morality outside of a divine source is impossible or false. In Asia the same attitude exists but the source becomes 'society/parents/family/culture'. As disappointing as it may be, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that this is the attitude of the majority of humans living today.
Slashdot Mirror
China makes CFLs too, I should know, all of mine are made there, so much for your boon.
Even though the phones wereâ"literallyâ"on top of the hive, it wasnâ(TM)t until they had been transmitting for over 30 minutes before an effect was recorded. The effect was that the bees began piping (a really cool rhythmic buzzy sound). It is true that piping bees are related to swarms; however, bees pipe for a lot of other reasons too. If you bump into a hive, bees will pipe. Itâ(TM)s something they do when they are disturbed. Itâ(TM)s important to note that no alteration of behavior (swarming or otherwise) other than piping was actually observed, even after 20 hours of exposure to active mobile phone headsets. The swarming and dying part was completely made up. The immediate critique that occurs to me is that a cell phone transmitting for over an hour will heat up. If a hot, noisy object is on top of a bee hive, I think it is reasonable to expect the bees to react. That effect may have no relationship with cell phone transmission or magnetic fields at all. It is, frankly, difficult for me to say much about this paper besides negative things, because it is entirely made up of un-replicated experiments. It was a âoepilot studyâ. As a reviewer, I would not have approved this paper in itâ(TM)s present form, simply because it is so difficult to figure out just what the methodology was!! I canâ(TM)t even say how often the piping occurred because no statistics are presented. At the very least, I would want to see how long, on average, the phones were on and transmitting before piping began! The acoustic characteristics of the piping are described, but that doesnâ(TM)t tell me anything about the relationship to phones. In terms of sample size, we have 8 negative control trials (phones off); 10 inactive trials (phones on, but not transmitting); and 12 active trials (phones on and transmitting for unspecified times. Each of these conditions (off/on/transmitting) was tested on different days, and at two different locations, but there are no details on which and when. The âoe83 experimentsâ number used in so many of these news stories appears to be a complete misunderstanding of what an experiment actually is. The paper did say that 80 sound recordings were madeâ"but clearly some of those were repeated measures on the same setup. The actual sample size was at best 12.
If it takes half an hour for the bees to respond to stimulus, it's rather difficult to ascertain whether it's the EM radiation of the phone's signal, or the heat and noise generated by the phone being called. To properly test the signal alone, the phone should have its speaker disabled and some steps should be taken to prevent it from radiating a temperature above ambient. This remains an incomplete, improperly controlled study. (This is all without mentioning that the inverse square law makes testing phones on top of bees rather unrealistic.)
Sorry, the source of analysis does not invalidate it, neither does 'fervency' (which is subjective anyway). Until you can assail my analysis itself as opposed to just tossing ad hominem nonsense at me, you are engaging in fallacy.
Also it doesn't give you any high ground that you are using a second account to mod up your own posts. I was suspicious the first few times that you were modded up virtually the same minute you posted, but when it became every time I checked your comments record. Every one of your posts is modded up exactly one point. That doesn't happen, it's not a coincidence. You're a tool who abuses open systems, and anybody with eyes should question your motives and honesty to the very core of your character.
Come on. Do I really have to explain physics to you? Skin + water with impurities conducts electricity better than just skin. You don't need more voltage when there is less resistance, more contact area, more exposure time, etc. etc.
Exposure to residential voltage in such a way as the current necessarily travels directly through the heart falls in the category of 'seriously fucking with it'. You practically have to engineer that to happen.
Further, just because some things kill some people does not speak to their lethality as a class. Strawberries can kill those persons allergic to them, that doesn't mean we say strawberries are lethal. Oxygen can kill people in high enough concentrations, that doesn't mean we think first of its lethality. Residential voltage in most cases is not lethal, so much so think of it as normally lethal is at best a distortion. Nice try at a lecture though.
Argument from authority, nice fallacy. They're right because they are scientists! Why couldn't I see it before! Oh, that's right, because I actually think about things, and you just buy whatever is spoonfed to you and attack the moral character of anybody who asks questions.
Excellent example! And then they humiliate the woman by publishing the photos without her consent.
False. I know videos like this were on America's Funniest Home Videos (and analogous shows) all the time, all with express legal consent.
I am a perv, and I'm not repressed about it. How about finding something of substance to say instead of ad hominem?
I'll give you that you finally turned up your claims of additional tests. Now here's what's wrong with them. The Punjab University study (the full, original, published study, not some digested article from the mainstream news) mentions but gives no statistics for its blank group. This is highly suspicious, because it was subjected to all of the physical stress save the EM radiation of the phones. If the EM radiation were so significantly responsible, they would be shouting from the rooftops that even in the colony where they ripped shit up and dumped dead phones in, nothing significant happened. Instead, that they did a blank study is barely mentioned, and all the statistics are compared between the aggregates of the active tests with the absolute control group that had nothing done to it whatsoever. That is bad, bad science. What's the point of having a blank group if you're not going to report your findings? Because that would have undermined their bullshit, as apiologists already know that just sticking things in hives damages them.
The link I provided earlier already debunks the Favre study, so I see no need in rehashing it. The full, original, and published study is here, for those who want to assess it for the lacking elements discussed by Skepchick.
I forget who said it, some professor of a graduate program somewhere I roughly recall, but there is a fitting insight for this contrast. To paraphrase, undergraduate students tend not to question. They do research and when they find information in papers they take it as some kind of divine inspiration handed down from on high. When a person with a PhD does research and finds information in a study, they immediately pick up a hammer and start whacking to see what breaks.
If you want a true scientific perspective, you need to ask questions about what you're being told. If somebody came in here and started saying that bees are absolutely not impacted in any way by EM radiation, I would say that current studies are not conclusive, that there are flaws in their methodology that should be fixed and the studies run again before any verdict can *usefully* be reached. You want to believe that bees are detrimentally impacted because you have a green agenda. I am not arguing for or against an agenda, I am simply pointing at the flaws of these studies. When one is done that is completely transparent, properly controlled and documented included all times and statistics for all groups, then I will be satisfied.
Just because it is on Wikipedia does not make it true or complete. I can assure you that upskirt refers to the composition of a photo or video, not its consensuality. Dare I ask, what do you think a consensually-taken upskirt photo would be called if not also 'upskirt'?
Further, if in the course of some other activity a woman accidentally shows her underwear on camera, that too is called a 'pantyshot' even though the camera was not there for the explicit purpose of capturing the event.
That either of these terms requires lack of consent or the explicit and demonstrable intent to malice is wholly false.
Your definition is false in its qualifications. Photos taken up skirts with consent are still called upskirt and/or pantyshots. At which point one is just quibbling over paraphilias, both those of the men and those of the women, assuming that the latter aren't acting 100% for financial gain, at which point it becomes a criticism of the ethics/morality of those arrangements.
Almost all legislators were men during the enaction of both laws, and the electorate itself was still more men than women at the time due to the momentum of social norms. Your misogynist opinion is also completely discredited by the fact that there were more women in both Congress and the electorate when Prohibition was repealed than when it was enacted.
You claim that additional studies have borne out the conclusion, I said I didn't see them in your search, and you still haven't provided them. Further, if you read the article I linked, you'll see that the original study was very poorly and unscientifically reported. Proper statistics and times were not kept, proper controls were not in place. I am providing actual evidence and reasons for why this is bunk. All you are doing is referencing vague things that you cannot produce and calling me names like 'zealot'. I think that the spectators to this exchange can see who the real 'zealot' is here.
I put my finger in a charged light socket when I was toddler. Still alive, and that wasn't the only time either, though it's less spectacular to survive shocks as adult working on electronics. Residential voltage is not lethal unless you're really fucking with it, such as dropping an appliance in an occupied bathtub.
You might want to learn some history before you try to make arguments with it. A majority of both parties supported both the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. More or less as many Republicans as Democrats opposed the measures.
If I think somebody has said something wrong or inaccurate, I check it myself. If somebody refers to something I don't know or understand, I research it myself. This is part of being self actualized, and people who rely on others for these things are lazy and contemptible. If society were overburdened with such people, no advancement would be possible, because everybody would be waiting for somebody else to learn things and do things for them.
Did you pay attention to your own search results? Half of them discredit the study, and I don't even see additional studies in them. I did however find a very nice debunking article in a chain of links off your weak Google-fu: http://skepchick.org/2011/05/bees-ccd-and-cellphones-still-no-link/
That study was bullshit pseudoscience that wasn't even done with proper controls. If you look at the original Daily Mail article that your link links to, you'll see that an expert on bees notes that you can do the same damage simply opening a hive and stuffing things in it, cell phone or otherwise. You can't get a meaningful conclusion from that.
There was a war between earlier electricity providers between AC and DC as the basis for the grid. DC was a terrible choice but Edison was backing it, and he started a misinformation campaign claiming AC was lethally dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. Even though AC won the war, the disinformation memes persisted for a few generations.
This was all summarized from memory. You should really try learning things yourself instead of waiting for somebody else to do shit for you. That behavior makes you a dependent sheep.
Single parents are quite different from adoptive parents. When you're emotionally invested in a person like that it makes sense to care about whomever they cared enough about that they would have that person's child. That creates a much stronger impetus than simply wondering 'where did I come from?' in some detached, abstract way.
Also, speaking both from personal experience and my interaction with other adopted persons, people who get really obsessive about their biological parents usually have personal problems, such as irrationally excessive need for attention or deficiencies (real or imagined) in the relationship with their adoptive parents.
Let me spell it out for you: I am deriding the method(s) by which many persons arrive at beliefs which they use to make crucial decisions not only about their lives but the lives of all others they can impact socially or politically. Derision toward the thing believed is secondary, not necessary for the first derision, and occurs only when I have evidence to demonstrate that belief is wrong and/or harmful.
As Aristotle said, "I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law." When two people arrive at the same conclusion by different means, it is necessary to judge the means to judge the people. Which is more useful, reliable, accurate beyond the immediate context? Hell, from Plato to Locke and beyond, this differentiation has been one of the most important stratifications of society.
Somebody who borrows their morality wholly from another authority demonstrates a high likelihood that they either lack the character (lazy), intellect, or sanity (sociopath) to form a cohesive morality for themselves. Conversely, those persons who are able to build their own morality from a wide comparison of sources/experiences/ideas and can adapt that morality to new information (something that users of static sources cannot readily do beyond a certain degree without resorting to denial or distortion), demonstrate a superiority over the first group, and, in fact, ultimately end up being the source of morality for them. Those who do not understand natural law are ultimately dependent on those that do.
Yes, I'm familiar with the work of Dawkins and others about the potential behavioral explanations for altruism and/or fairness in a gene-centered model of natural selection. I don't think this has fully accounted for sexual dimorphic elements that are visible in many different species. Aside from the obvious human historical and prehistorical anthropological and sociological evidence of unequal social structures on gender lines, there are species withing the arachnids and mantids among many where females prey on males. Even in more advanced species there are unique gender roles which may be detrimental to one or the other. This also doesn't account for emerging research in sexually antagonistic selection, where genes develop to benefit a gender in species to the detriment of the opposite gender. Etc. etc. my lunch is over, so I must cut off.
Biology is nothing more than an impulse to be considered by conscious people. It is not inherently moral, otherwise we'd still have a patriarchal society where women are treated like talking cattle. If people acted on every biological impulse, the world would be awash with chaos and death.
Go watch some nature documentaries and see biology in action. Biology has no problem with cannibalism or infanticide or rape. Hell, from a biological perspective, rape is an imperative. Biology is useful to understand, but if you think it's the basis for a civilized society you're insane.
Actually modesty is one of two negative things: ignorance or lies. Either you're too stupid too realize you're good at something, or you're prone to lie to hide your ability for some unknown ulterior motive.
I do not need to be empathetic to somebody's inferiority complex. I only need to be aware of the validity of my own reasons for what I do. If I am buying things simply to show off, that would be a personal failing that I should solve for my own reasons. Frugality, unlike modesty, is a real virtue, because persons hemorrhaging money tend not to have it very long, let alone grow it. A lifestyle, however good it is at any given time, that rapidly ends itself is inferior to one which is both good and sustainable. People could learn a lot from the ancient Epicureans, in more ways than one, but you don't want to get me started on philosophy.
The child you raise is your child. When you're primary role model, disciplinarian and source of love and guidance for years, it tends to have a lot more impact on the consciousness of a person than who squirted into whom. I am adopted myself, and I don't know who my biological parents are, much less care about them any more than I would any stranger. I love the parents that raised me, and know it is reciprocated.
Never did I say that people should all draw the same conclusion as me, or any abstract single conclusion. However my experience with society at large is that most people do use a simplistic morality that they inherit from some other source. This is obviously a generalization, so when people say 'but I'm an exception!' That doesn't demonstrate it false, especially in a community which is does not, by and large, represent a typical cross section of "normal" society.
There is a huge portion of society where if you ask them straight up, 'where does your morality come from?' They will answer without hesitation: 'God/Allah/Bible/Quran'. Further there are many in that number that fundamentally believe that morality outside of a divine source is impossible or false. In Asia the same attitude exists but the source becomes 'society/parents/family/culture'. As disappointing as it may be, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that this is the attitude of the majority of humans living today.