I often notice that amongst the so-called educated they quote science that leans in their favor, and then outright dismiss science that challenges their beliefs. I'm not talking about creationists or global warming deniers. I mean something less obvious and more insidious that can be found across political spectrums. A friend of mine who teaches history is oft to mention his belief that we are leaving an era of reason behind in favor of an era where 'gut' feelings and authenticity rules supreme. These people espouse a brand of empiricism that would set us back pre-Descartes, actually make that the medieval period. And their numbers are growing.
This isn't merely scientific ignorance. These people have been raised around science, but just like creationists, they've built up a straw-man caricature of science in their heads and that's what they go by, based on their feelings. They don't actually test out their assertions in a structured way beyond surfing websites that agree with them. You'll find examples of that brand of opportunism, even occasionally while browsing up through this thread. You'll find it on biased environmentalist activist websites that espouse long-term damaging solutions to complex problems, or on alternative medicine websites that attack 'science' for 'being fundamentalist' while engaging in fundamentalist behavior, people who think Autism is not an illness, or a technology that has the potential to feed billions (GM) is evil, etc etc. You'll find such bias anywhere there is an identity to protect, an ego to feed or a website to promote. Since it cherry picks, and goes by what 'feels' good, it is ultimately self-serving, hence it's 'epistemological opportunism'.
What do you think can be done to counteract these populist attitudes on science that seem to be taking over? When people collapse complex problems (like medicine, cancer, mental health, GM crops etc) into black and white issues without stopping to look at all the issues, what do you do? Is there ways of raising awareness re critical thinking and proper scientific methodology? It's so easy to demonize scientists with coy phrases or genetic fallacies. Do some approaches work better than others in explaining basic scientific concepts to the public?
An obvious historical example is the Moors, Al-Andalus.
I'm more worried about Christian theocracy at this point. I'd be worried about the dismantling of science. At least Muslim schools teach evolutionary biology...
Actually there's a lot of other things I'm far more worried about. I'm more worried about dogmatic political ideologies taking over as they do every bit as much harm as theocracy. Muslims are barely a minority, and like I said, l do live integrated with them and for the most part I don't see what the big deal is aside from lots of what if's and bogeymen.
Last I checked there's been a fair amount of protests throughout Muslim nations in the media over the past while.. they're hardly all brain dead dangerous followers... but go ahead, believe they are all the same, believe in your invented bogeyman. You do realize that not too long ago Muslims were actually romanticized, not feared?
Montreal is not the fourth Century in the East, it is the 21st century in the West. That's a terrible analogy--by that logic I could prove anything I wanted, just draw a specious analogy with vastly alien historical situations to prove anything evil. After all, history is violent and nobody is innocent if you go back far enough and make ridiculous comparisons. What you are doing is akin to religious people who try to claim Atheism is evil by citing the massive amount of deaths in China. It's irrelevant.
You have to look at the reality that exists in the now. We've far, far more pressing social issues here than oh so scary Muslim families who are going to their mosques and working their day jobs.
Look, there are real problems and challenges with immigration but when you oversimplify things into grandiose claims like these, you make the real problems worse. I live in the heart of multiculturalist Canada (in the same town this article took place in). We do occasionally have issues with small pockets of Muslim immigrants who want to enforce their religion, but this is a rarity. The vast majority of Muslims you meet in this town are polite and mind their own business. I sit next to them everyday on the metro and I assure you, they are the opposite of scary. Media hype and the availability heuristic..we should be old enough to see past these things by now.
For NaNoWriMo I started writing a story about 'The Great Migration' and realized that rather than describing early human evolution, it was perfectly suited to describe the coming decades.
It is in short supply these days, in all camps. Actually, to be fair, I frequently run into proponents of Climate Change who've as much understanding of scientific methodology as the Creationist posing for a photo next to the exhibit of the saddled triceratops. Maybe they 'believe' it because they saw it in a picture with text on facebook. Who knows. It doesn't help, either way.
'In the 1970s scientists were predicting an ice age, now it's global warming.'
There's plenty of deniers who claim warming isn't happening, who claim its a conspiracy to raise taxes, who cite a Time magazine article from the early 1970s (when global warming actually still was more or less a consensus) as evidence of some discrepancy in the sciences, because apparently 40 years of scientific advances can be refuted by misquoting what scientists 'believed' in the past.
Deniers won't be able to find 'safe places' to camp out, it's not like one can just find a bunker and ride it out for a couple of years. Even if some now accept that warming is taking place, the science is still being denied. The net effect, doing nothing, is the same. The difference amounts to splitting hairs.
Although it's true there are parts of the world that won't be hit as hard as others, and those of us who live there won't have to worry about camping out.
This article is not claiming to know anything about consonance, if anything it's opening up the field to more questions.
It's comparing musical and amusical listeners to debunk the notion that constructive/destructive interference patterns (beats) are how we neurologically perceive consonance and dissonance. Nothing more. It's making no value judgements as to what consonance or dissonance is. If anything it goes out of its way to demonstrate how complex it is to make judgements regarding that. As others have pointed out here, 'consonance' varies substantially from culture to culture and between time periods.
I'd mod this up if I could. It's not what you're doing, it's how you're doing it. Schoenberg is easy to pick on but something like Anton Webern is remarkably expressive and has wider appeal. I just saw some footage of a concert collaboration between Aphex Twin and Penderecki, it was remarkably high budget, very, very atonal, and it looks like the audience knew what they were going to see.
Anyone going to a zombie horror flick will hear dissonant music piped at them for an hour and a half at a time.
Also, true story. Go check out raves and you'll find it is not unusual to hear a lot of wildly dissonant synth pads and glissandos while people are jumping up and down and having a good time.
Modern chords+chromaticism that we take for granted did not exist before we had the mathematics and engineering to develop temperament, which, if you've ever tuned a piano before, you know introduces specific patterns of beats between intervals and offsets the pure ratios to allow for key changes, etc etc.
Off topic, likewise foreign scales and tuning sound very bizarre to western ears. (I remember the first time I heard zazen flute music, deliberately detuning two flutes to produce complex patterns of beats, that clearly environment and culture has a role in what sounds good and what sounds bad)
Study is interesting but inconclusive, too easy to confuse correlation/causation, or draw conclusions that make the fallacy of ecology.
A three year old being able to figure out basic GUI operations conversely does not equate to an OS being overly simplified. GUI use is user end stuff. I take it there isn't a lot of sysadmins on slashdot today.. Under the hood, Windows 8 is anything but simplified. I take it there isn't a lot of tech support staff, either.. the kind who has to help users navigate unintuitive interfaces..
I've read the Bible so I remember those things, and I agree with the quote "I like your Christ, I don't like your Christians." Problem is, it's hard for others to tell what a Christian is or isn't, when many who've loudly professed Christianity didn't put up again their swords back into their places.
Hitler: “Along with the fight for a purer morality we have taken upon ourselves the struggle against the decomposition of our religion. We have therefore taken up the struggle against the Godless movement, and not just with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out. And above all we have dragged the priests out of the lowlands of the political party struggle and have brought them back into the church.” Documente Zer Kirchenpolitik
Also The Taiping rebellion alone killed as many as World War I, and that was a long time ago. You're not factoring in the countless destruction of cultures around the world deemed Satanic by the puritanical invading Christian armies either. Lastly Hitler was also not a Communist, the communists were his enemies, he attacked the communists, and where do you think the concept of the Third Reich came from? The First Reich was the Holy Roman empire.
Yes, and the common ground here isn't religion. Religion is a symptom of the real problem.
It desn't matter whether you are a Taliban shooting a little girl, or a member of the Red Army killing doctors and teachers--you know, those dangerous edjoomacated people--or a brainwashed 19th-early 20th century expansionist nationalist.
Humans tend to.. not question their beliefs. We become emotionally attached to them. We place way too much value on them. Our beliefs are tribal--We tend to believe what we believe to fit in with our peer groups (when's the last time you were at an outing and someone spewed crap and the rest of the group went along?). We discourage critical thinking, and encourage anti-intellectualism, and encourage far, far too much Authenticity (thinking from the gut) at the expense of reason. It's easy for us to kill. All it takes is a sociopath or narcissist in a position of power to motivate us to do it. Sometimes, not even that much. Our beliefs trump the lives of others. Our beliefs trump the rights of others to live their lives in peace. The problem is humans are arrogant. Religion has nothing to do with it.
I wish I could find the study off the top of my head. It linked a specific gene with a dramatically increased risk for psychosis, and adults without this gene were conversely, at very low risk.. I saw the study a few years ago so it's one of those things where I can't recall any more detail than that. Maybe google..
This seems to be what a lot of research into drugs reveals--that one substance can affect two different people drastically, and sometimes it is genetic. I've read studies linking caffeine with protective cardiovascular effects in one group of people, and damaging cardiovascular effects in others. And there's also been studies linking increased caffeine consumption with reduced chance of cognitive decline and related illnesses later in life.
While we are at it: studies linking marijuana with protective effects in MS patients, compared to studies showing people with certain types of genes (a small percentage of the population) have an increased risk of psychosis after use. Or studies showing potential harm or positives from drinking alcohol.
My hypothesis: it's all a crapshoot, in the end, really.
^Bumped for truth. Sensible post should be modded up.
(I call myself lazy but in reality I've worked 10-16 hours a day for much of my life and after a while simply burnt out. So it depends on how you define lazy.)
"you only respect individuals. that is the only moral baseline possible
to respect some artificial agglomeration: a religion or a country say, is just a means to introduce respect for a value system and command and control structure that is imperfect and arbitrary"
Oh so anything not purely individual is artificial? An interesting assumption, open to debate. Once again, so much of this ground has been covered in what I sent to you above before and the reason I don't want to get into it is that it is lengthy, because these issues are multifaceted and complex, just like humanity.
If you want to label your subjective moral judgements universal, feel free. After all, if there's one thing nearly universal about humans, it's that nearly everybody does just that.
No, it's not acceptable to me. Nowhere would my questioning the existence of universal morals even begin to justify killing homosexuals, or throwing battery acid on women's faces. This hardly leads me to conclude a universal set of morals exists though. To do so would be a non-sequitur. There's still far too many steps in between A and B.
If 'universal' morals exist, they will only exist in that they are agreed on by humans who work together across cultures to establish them, and how to define them in a way that respects individuals, as well as cultures and localities. After all, the imposition of 'universal' morals is a very damaging act in itself. And yes, we can use logic and reason to get there, with the goal of building a better world to live in, which is rational. I suspect we'll find truly 'universal' morals around the same time we fully understand the universe we live in, including ourselves. And then perhaps we'll discover another intelligent species who came to very different conclusions.
Once again, the link I posted above delves into these issues and links to better written articles on the subject.
How interestingly Descartian-esque a dichotomy. The absence of a 'perfect' circle in nature while the 'perfect' circle exists in geometry. The problem isn't that I don't agree with your intent. The problem is that I don't agree with what it is that is being presupposed. The issue has far more complexities and facets to it than 'perfect morals exist because imperfect morals exist'. A does not lead to B. I suspect if you read some of the above links in depth you may come to understand why.
Slashdot Mirror
I often notice that amongst the so-called educated they quote science that leans in their favor, and then outright dismiss science that challenges their beliefs. I'm not talking about creationists or global warming deniers. I mean something less obvious and more insidious that can be found across political spectrums. A friend of mine who teaches history is oft to mention his belief that we are leaving an era of reason behind in favor of an era where 'gut' feelings and authenticity rules supreme. These people espouse a brand of empiricism that would set us back pre-Descartes, actually make that the medieval period. And their numbers are growing.
This isn't merely scientific ignorance. These people have been raised around science, but just like creationists, they've built up a straw-man caricature of science in their heads and that's what they go by, based on their feelings. They don't actually test out their assertions in a structured way beyond surfing websites that agree with them. You'll find examples of that brand of opportunism, even occasionally while browsing up through this thread. You'll find it on biased environmentalist activist websites that espouse long-term damaging solutions to complex problems, or on alternative medicine websites that attack 'science' for 'being fundamentalist' while engaging in fundamentalist behavior, people who think Autism is not an illness, or a technology that has the potential to feed billions (GM) is evil, etc etc. You'll find such bias anywhere there is an identity to protect, an ego to feed or a website to promote. Since it cherry picks, and goes by what 'feels' good, it is ultimately self-serving, hence it's 'epistemological opportunism'.
What do you think can be done to counteract these populist attitudes on science that seem to be taking over? When people collapse complex problems (like medicine, cancer, mental health, GM crops etc) into black and white issues without stopping to look at all the issues, what do you do? Is there ways of raising awareness re critical thinking and proper scientific methodology? It's so easy to demonize scientists with coy phrases or genetic fallacies. Do some approaches work better than others in explaining basic scientific concepts to the public?
An obvious historical example is the Moors, Al-Andalus.
I'm more worried about Christian theocracy at this point. I'd be worried about the dismantling of science. At least Muslim schools teach evolutionary biology...
Actually there's a lot of other things I'm far more worried about. I'm more worried about dogmatic political ideologies taking over as they do every bit as much harm as theocracy. Muslims are barely a minority, and like I said, l do live integrated with them and for the most part I don't see what the big deal is aside from lots of what if's and bogeymen.
Last I checked there's been a fair amount of protests throughout Muslim nations in the media over the past while.. they're hardly all brain dead dangerous followers... but go ahead, believe they are all the same, believe in your invented bogeyman. You do realize that not too long ago Muslims were actually romanticized, not feared?
Montreal is not the fourth Century in the East, it is the 21st century in the West. That's a terrible analogy--by that logic I could prove anything I wanted, just draw a specious analogy with vastly alien historical situations to prove anything evil. After all, history is violent and nobody is innocent if you go back far enough and make ridiculous comparisons. What you are doing is akin to religious people who try to claim Atheism is evil by citing the massive amount of deaths in China. It's irrelevant.
You have to look at the reality that exists in the now. We've far, far more pressing social issues here than oh so scary Muslim families who are going to their mosques and working their day jobs.
Look, there are real problems and challenges with immigration but when you oversimplify things into grandiose claims like these, you make the real problems worse. I live in the heart of multiculturalist Canada (in the same town this article took place in). We do occasionally have issues with small pockets of Muslim immigrants who want to enforce their religion, but this is a rarity. The vast majority of Muslims you meet in this town are polite and mind their own business. I sit next to them everyday on the metro and I assure you, they are the opposite of scary. Media hype and the availability heuristic..we should be old enough to see past these things by now.
For NaNoWriMo I started writing a story about 'The Great Migration' and realized that rather than describing early human evolution, it was perfectly suited to describe the coming decades.
Also, I suppose camping out makes for a great action film.
It is in short supply these days, in all camps. Actually, to be fair, I frequently run into proponents of Climate Change who've as much understanding of scientific methodology as the Creationist posing for a photo next to the exhibit of the saddled triceratops. Maybe they 'believe' it because they saw it in a picture with text on facebook. Who knows. It doesn't help, either way.
'In the 1970s scientists were predicting an ice age, now it's global warming.'
There's plenty of deniers who claim warming isn't happening, who claim its a conspiracy to raise taxes, who cite a Time magazine article from the early 1970s (when global warming actually still was more or less a consensus) as evidence of some discrepancy in the sciences, because apparently 40 years of scientific advances can be refuted by misquoting what scientists 'believed' in the past.
Deniers won't be able to find 'safe places' to camp out, it's not like one can just find a bunker and ride it out for a couple of years. Even if some now accept that warming is taking place, the science is still being denied. The net effect, doing nothing, is the same. The difference amounts to splitting hairs.
Although it's true there are parts of the world that won't be hit as hard as others, and those of us who live there won't have to worry about camping out.
Some of the more abstract tracks remind me a lot of music from the post WWII era! (Think forbidden planet, etc)
This article is not claiming to know anything about consonance, if anything it's opening up the field to more questions.
It's comparing musical and amusical listeners to debunk the notion that constructive/destructive interference patterns (beats) are how we neurologically perceive consonance and dissonance. Nothing more. It's making no value judgements as to what consonance or dissonance is. If anything it goes out of its way to demonstrate how complex it is to make judgements regarding that. As others have pointed out here, 'consonance' varies substantially from culture to culture and between time periods.
I'd mod this up if I could. It's not what you're doing, it's how you're doing it. Schoenberg is easy to pick on but something like Anton Webern is remarkably expressive and has wider appeal. I just saw some footage of a concert collaboration between Aphex Twin and Penderecki, it was remarkably high budget, very, very atonal, and it looks like the audience knew what they were going to see.
Anyone going to a zombie horror flick will hear dissonant music piped at them for an hour and a half at a time.
Also, true story. Go check out raves and you'll find it is not unusual to hear a lot of wildly dissonant synth pads and glissandos while people are jumping up and down and having a good time.
Actually we had to abandon Pythagoras hundreds of years ago, because 'pure' consonance sounds bizarre to our modern ears:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament
Modern chords+chromaticism that we take for granted did not exist before we had the mathematics and engineering to develop temperament, which, if you've ever tuned a piano before, you know introduces specific patterns of beats between intervals and offsets the pure ratios to allow for key changes, etc etc.
Off topic, likewise foreign scales and tuning sound very bizarre to western ears. (I remember the first time I heard zazen flute music, deliberately detuning two flutes to produce complex patterns of beats, that clearly environment and culture has a role in what sounds good and what sounds bad)
Study is interesting but inconclusive, too easy to confuse correlation/causation, or draw conclusions that make the fallacy of ecology.
A three year old being able to figure out basic GUI operations conversely does not equate to an OS being overly simplified. GUI use is user end stuff. I take it there isn't a lot of sysadmins on slashdot today.. Under the hood, Windows 8 is anything but simplified. I take it there isn't a lot of tech support staff, either.. the kind who has to help users navigate unintuitive interfaces..
Don't we want intuitively-designed GUIs? If anyone can use it, it's a sign of success, not failure.
I've read the Bible so I remember those things, and I agree with the quote "I like your Christ, I don't like your Christians." Problem is, it's hard for others to tell what a Christian is or isn't, when many who've loudly professed Christianity didn't put up again their swords back into their places.
Hitler: “Along with the fight for a purer morality we have taken upon ourselves the struggle against the decomposition of our religion. We have therefore taken up the struggle against the Godless movement, and not just with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out. And above all we have dragged the priests out of the lowlands of the political party struggle and have brought them back into the church.” Documente Zer Kirchenpolitik
Also The Taiping rebellion alone killed as many as World War I, and that was a long time ago. You're not factoring in the countless destruction of cultures around the world deemed Satanic by the puritanical invading Christian armies either. Lastly Hitler was also not a Communist, the communists were his enemies, he attacked the communists, and where do you think the concept of the Third Reich came from? The First Reich was the Holy Roman empire.
Yes, and the common ground here isn't religion. Religion is a symptom of the real problem.
It desn't matter whether you are a Taliban shooting a little girl, or a member of the Red Army killing doctors and teachers--you know, those dangerous edjoomacated people--or a brainwashed 19th-early 20th century expansionist nationalist.
Humans tend to.. not question their beliefs. We become emotionally attached to them. We place way too much value on them. Our beliefs are tribal--We tend to believe what we believe to fit in with our peer groups (when's the last time you were at an outing and someone spewed crap and the rest of the group went along?). We discourage critical thinking, and encourage anti-intellectualism, and encourage far, far too much Authenticity (thinking from the gut) at the expense of reason. It's easy for us to kill. All it takes is a sociopath or narcissist in a position of power to motivate us to do it. Sometimes, not even that much. Our beliefs trump the lives of others. Our beliefs trump the rights of others to live their lives in peace. The problem is humans are arrogant. Religion has nothing to do with it.
I wish I could find the study off the top of my head. It linked a specific gene with a dramatically increased risk for psychosis, and adults without this gene were conversely, at very low risk.. I saw the study a few years ago so it's one of those things where I can't recall any more detail than that. Maybe google..
This seems to be what a lot of research into drugs reveals--that one substance can affect two different people drastically, and sometimes it is genetic. I've read studies linking caffeine with protective cardiovascular effects in one group of people, and damaging cardiovascular effects in others. And there's also been studies linking increased caffeine consumption with reduced chance of cognitive decline and related illnesses later in life.
While we are at it: studies linking marijuana with protective effects in MS patients, compared to studies showing people with certain types of genes (a small percentage of the population) have an increased risk of psychosis after use. Or studies showing potential harm or positives from drinking alcohol.
My hypothesis: it's all a crapshoot, in the end, really.
^Bumped for truth. Sensible post should be modded up.
(I call myself lazy but in reality I've worked 10-16 hours a day for much of my life and after a while simply burnt out. So it depends on how you define lazy.)
I do all of the above because I'm a cheap bastard and only have a few pairs of clothes.. and am too lazy to go down to the local Target. Simplify.
"you only respect individuals. that is the only moral baseline possible
to respect some artificial agglomeration: a religion or a country say, is just a means to introduce respect for a value system and command and control structure that is imperfect and arbitrary"
Oh so anything not purely individual is artificial? An interesting assumption, open to debate. Once again, so much of this ground has been covered in what I sent to you above before and the reason I don't want to get into it is that it is lengthy, because these issues are multifaceted and complex, just like humanity.
If you want to label your subjective moral judgements universal, feel free. After all, if there's one thing nearly universal about humans, it's that nearly everybody does just that.
No, it's not acceptable to me. Nowhere would my questioning the existence of universal morals even begin to justify killing homosexuals, or throwing battery acid on women's faces. This hardly leads me to conclude a universal set of morals exists though. To do so would be a non-sequitur. There's still far too many steps in between A and B.
If 'universal' morals exist, they will only exist in that they are agreed on by humans who work together across cultures to establish them, and how to define them in a way that respects individuals, as well as cultures and localities. After all, the imposition of 'universal' morals is a very damaging act in itself. And yes, we can use logic and reason to get there, with the goal of building a better world to live in, which is rational. I suspect we'll find truly 'universal' morals around the same time we fully understand the universe we live in, including ourselves. And then perhaps we'll discover another intelligent species who came to very different conclusions.
Once again, the link I posted above delves into these issues and links to better written articles on the subject.
'Unyielding, unmoving, perfect'
How interestingly Descartian-esque a dichotomy. The absence of a 'perfect' circle in nature while the 'perfect' circle exists in geometry. The problem isn't that I don't agree with your intent. The problem is that I don't agree with what it is that is being presupposed. The issue has far more complexities and facets to it than 'perfect morals exist because imperfect morals exist'. A does not lead to B. I suspect if you read some of the above links in depth you may come to understand why.