If you think what you're doing is "implying that today's mainstream climate science is not the Gospel from Above", then you're kidding yourself. What you're doing is implying that today's mainstream climate science is wrong and that the 90%+ of scientists working on the topic have got their science wrong. So you're implying that they are professionally incompetent for accepting something as settled science too early or frauds who've promulgated the idea that it's settled science when they know it's not. That tends to rile people up. If you were to do the analogous challenge to, say, a bunch of chemists on something equally big and fundamental in their field, you would get the same kind of reaction. This is all obvious, surely?
Please don't use words like embroiled unless you actually know what they mean. Using simpler words that you can actually understand will make you sound like a tiny bit less of a twat. But only a tiny bit, if you get basic facts wrong as you have done here.
You really aren't seeing the circularity of it all, are you? You ask: why should individuals use fewer resources. You then make a non-credible claim ("there are plenty of resources on this planet"; yeah, like water and energy resources are not increasingly difficult to access...). We'll get the scaled-back population one way or another. I'd prefer a gentler route, but at this point it seems unlikely. Grim days ahead, even for folks in 4000 sq ft houses.
My world is the same as your world. It's the one we've got and wishful thinking about off-planet resources and halving the population will not change the reality, except to damage our preparedeness.
Repeating a claim that you earn lots more than me doesn't make it any more or less likely than the first time you said it. Well, I guess it says something about your ability to listen carefully, and poor listeners are less likely to earn lots of money on average, but of course you could be an outlier. Does earning lots make you feel very proud of yourself and conversely very sneery about those who earn less? Does it make their opinions less valid in your eyes? If so, you might like to reflect on whether that logic really holds up.
In case you weren't clear, when I say "some people", I include myself among those people. Not sure why you find this difficult to grasp.
And finally, I'm very clear that you aren't going to do anything differently. Congratulations! I know you're very proud of that. A tremendous achievement, I must say.
Who's judging? I'm simply observing that 4000 sq ft of house for one or two adults only is a shitload of resource. You're right about kids. I'm certainly culpable, as is everyone in the developed world. And they, the poor sods, are the ones who are going to inherit this mess. But I don't see how you've invalidated the quantity argument, which is: we should all try to tone down our impact on the environment to some extent, from whatever point at which we start. To take your car analogy further: if we see a solid wall in front of us, we may not be able to avoid hitting it, but it'll hurt a lot less if we can slow down a bit.
Separately, I wouldn't assume things about your income relative to mine. You may be right; you may be wrong. You don't know. I'm sure you're fabulously successful in whatever it is you do, but you have no knowledge of how successful I am, whatever you choose to infer from what I write here. You've also taken a very narrowly reductionist view of what a positive net impact on the world looks like, viz tax and charitable funding. What about the day job itself? Does yours have no social worth? Surely not! Mine certainly does
Overall, you're acting awful pissy and defensive, and there's really no need. You published on a public forum about building a large house and some people have pointed out that doing this uses lots of resources. Why not just respond calmly and politely instead of casting aspersions on my money-making ability etc etc? Or keep your postings to boards where you will find only supportive sentiments?
What is it with people that they don't get that an analogy needn't be the same intensity to be valid?
If it makes you feel better, you're welcome to think of it as a less serious crime instead, eg theft. Should you not intervene when you see a theft happening, because you have once committed a crime?
I am indeed arguing over quantity. I'm saying that quantity matters. Bit by bit for all of us. If we could only take into account what paragons of virtue had to say, we'd be the poorer for it. It's a ridiculously high bar to set, and there's no justification for it. Why should it matter whether I could do better as to whether you choose to do better? How about we both try, along with everyone else in the rich world?
Your permanent structure may be durable, but it's also resource-intensive. Resource wars do happen, and they are ugly. There are worse ways for you to spend your money than building a huge house, but there are also better ways. You could choose to do it differently.
Anyhow, it's clear from your super-aggressive and defensive tone that you won't. And you're not alone in that. And as a consequence of your decisions, my decisions, and the decisions of the rest of the rich world, we are likely to end up in a super-shitty future. Hey ho.
Are you not bright enough to understand the concept of second-order effects? Timber, glass and slate all cost water and energy, and both of those are pretty large resource issues. Plus, there's a significant amount of metal and concrete in most homes, which are even more water and energy intensive. What's the point of trying to kid yourself that it's treading lightly when it's not?
Second, why should we all not hold each other to account? Why do we need to be perfect in our own lives before we can comment on someone else's? If you saw a man raping a woman, would you say you couldn't intervene because you sometimes act misogynistically (eg your joke just now)? As it goes, my kids share a room, and I've never owned a car. There's more I can do, for sure, and I do a reasonable amount already. Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien and all that.
Have you noticed how I've not had to resort to insulting you to make my point? You might try it some time.
How is that wrong? It uses all sorts of resources which we are going to run out of. It's analogous to being on a desert island and eating all your food supplies in the first week. It's stupid. It's what humans have done repeatedly through history, and the consequences have been horrid repeatedly too. See, for example, Collapse by Jared Diamond.
So in addition to moaning that the material that the sainted Schroeder has written is 1. unclear 2. out of context you're now moaning it's: 3. outdated! Despite there be no material difference in the passages I quoted and the passages in the article you linked to! I do hope you discount all material you read that's more than 5 years old in this kind of blanket fashion. It's such a great policy for keeping yourself fresh and relevant, particularly for a man struggling with the great questions of biblical archaeology, as you undoubtedly are, given your -- what was the phrase you used -- "massive expertise".
And just imagine, you somehow know I'm atheist! I wonder if your knowledge takes precedence over the facts in this case, as it seems to in so many others (the relevant fact here being: no, I'm not atheist. That's just your preconceptions at play)
Do you happen to know the antonym for skilful? Because your consistent lack of engagement with the content (ie questions such as how you read Schroeder's rehashing of Paley's watchmaker analogy as anything other than the conflation of natural selection and random chance) while actively answering the questions you *do* have answers to (what kind of job do you have? I don't have one, I market my output -- which incidentally sounds a tiny bit euphemistic), is a "technique" that is begging to receive that label. I suppose "dimwittedly blustery" might be a good way of describing it.
Incidentally, any time you want to actually discuss the content, I'd be delighted to. I shan't hold my breath.
You were an extremely, erm, *unusual* Harvard student, it seems. I've met quite a few, as you'd expect, given where I work, and you'd be the first one I've ever heard of who: - doesn't spell properly - uses such risible syntax and grammar - has such poor reasoning skills - is only able to respond to challenge with abuse - is publicly and proudly racist and sexist - struggles so badly with their reading comprehension (Cambridge, NJ!! instead of the University of Cambridge. Spectacular!) So I'm ever-so-slightly sceptical.
I was at Emma from 92 to 95. I was a NatSci and did HPS in my 3rd year. That's not proof you'll be able to understand, but anyone who's been to Cambridge will recognise the terms.
I could well believe that you don't work for others. I wonder how you make a living? As I said, I hope for their sake, it doesn't bring you into contact with women, if this is how you behave in real life.
Anyway, this is all terribly entertaining, but it now is starting to feel a bit circular. I wonder if you're ever going to address the content, or whether you'll just continue to display your quirks for everyone's amusement. I think quirks is probably le mot juste by this stage, don't you?
I see. So when I post directly from his text, you: 1. complain that the text isn't clear, despite it being what he wrote, being perfectly understandable, and being pretty much identical with the text you linked to 2. complain it's out of context, as though it's some kind of distortion of what he's saying, despite my providing a link so everyone can read the passages in context, and despite it being a quote that accurately reflects the essence of his belief, viz that natural selection relies on chance and cannot explain life (as instantiated here by proteins) 3. tell me I don't have authority to comment 4. fail to respond to the content That is a pretty phenomenal all-round fail, and you managed to do it with a really quite whiney tone as well. Well done!
It would have been pretty straightforward for you to say "you have taken him out of context as follows..." and then provide an example. You could have done so while maintaining your trademark arsey tone and snide asides. But that would have required you to engage with the content and actually back up what you're saying..... oh wait a minute. You couldn't possibly be engaging in bluster because you're scared of making an argument on the content, could you? We'll see. It's been content-free and abuse-rich thus far from you, and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
You have a future as a gifted parodist, or at least as the inspiration for a character in a new Carl Hiaasen novel.
I mean, accusing me of not reading and then failing to notice, despite my saying so perfectly clearly, that I went to the University of Cambridge, which is in England, and instead thinking that I was at Harvard and grew up in Jersey!
Let's recap your public, self-inflicted wounds to date. This isn't comprehensive, of course; who among us could manage that, with such rich source material? However it's both fun and instructive: - you've misunderstood the term hearsay - you've read posts from me talking about the University of Cambridge, grants, and Oxford, and *still* manage to misplace me on the wrong side of the Atlantic - you've confused something (Rambam? the codes?) with midrash. I don't know what term you meant to use, but like your use of the term hearsay, you chose wrongly. Or at least you started talking about something neither you nor I had previously referred to, which is just as wrong and just as likely - you've confused me with someone who would be upset or insulted by being called a girl, in the process demonstrating your hatred of women, which you've now exposed further by clarifying that the only thing to do with a woman is to fuck her ("I was likely banging women of scientific background from bars around Harvard Square") - you've demonstrated racism as well, implying "Eskimos" (your unpleasant racist term, not mine) are stupid - you've failed to respond directly, despite repeated invitations, to my criticism of Schroeder's conflation of random chance and natural selection. You've accused me of not reading his material, yet this is the central thesis of one of the links you provide! - you've outdone yourself in this latest post, by contradicting yourself three times in six sentences: "I do not agree with every single thing the man says... I dont believe in any secret codes... Yes, I agree with what he says..." - you think bible codes are me taking "all to cartoon extremes", whereas of course Schroeder has written repeatedly about the codes and they were one of his main reasons for deciding to work at Aish, which is something that is obvious to anyone with more than passing familiarity with his work - you complained about getting uninvited comments on Slashdot! Talk about pissing in the wind... - you claimed, with a straight face, that " Shroeder reconciles Science and God in a reasonable and logical manner." Your spelling mistake, not mine, by the way, along with many others. You are the gift that keeps on giving, you really are
I wonder what kind of a job you have? Assuming you have one, of course. If you act like this in real life, I hope your job doesn't bring you into contact with many women -- for their sake. My guess is that you're a lot more restrained, but that the underlying personality still shows itself in unfortunate ways.
Perhaps you would like to say what you found convincing? I could do with a laugh. As I have now said repeatedly with no engagement from you on the content, we are talking about a man who conflates random chance and natural selection: is that something you concur with? I've mentioned several other of his fallacies too. Are you able to say which you think is not a fallacy? The idea of taking Rambam as scientifically accurate? The bible codes? Or do you swallow the whole lot, hook line and sinker?
By the way, the phrase "men of scientific backgrounds" is very curious. Do you not speak to women? Are their soft, feminine minds too weak for you to bother with? You seem to have some ishoos with women, and you continue to have this bizarre idea that telling someone they're a girl or woman is insulting.
Hearsay does not mean what you think it means. Why use a word that you don't understand? It's quite risky for you.
Anyways, I'd love to hear you tell what you find so convincing about Schroeder's arguments in between the spittle-flecked invective and insults about women, Cambridge undergraduates, Eskimos (you know that's as acceptable as calling Schroeder a yid, right?) and hillbillies. Let's hear the specifics. Is it this kind of inelegant restatement of Paley's watchmaker's argument? I've quoted it at length, so that everyone can read a little bit of Schroeder for themselves and decide whether my statement that he doesn't understand the difference between random chance and natural selection is accurate.
"The organic structures referred to as proteins are the basic building blocks of life. They are long molecules consist- ing of twenty different amino acids. The amino acids are joined into varying combinations to form chains, each of which coils into a highly specified shape. A mutation that inserts a wrong amino acid into the chain alters the protein has some 200 or more of these twenty amino acids joined together to form its chain, the number of possible combinations of amino acids in the chain is twenty to the exponent power of 200, or in the more usual ten-based system, ten to the power of 260. That number is a one with 260 zeros after it, or it’s a billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion. If purely random processes were responsible for the million viable proteins, nature would have had to discover by chance the fewer than one million combinations that allow for life from among this vast non-viable biological wasteland. The Laplacian probability of that happening is one chance out of a thousand billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion. In other words, there is no way that nature could have happened upon the viable combinations by chance."
Market pressures. If it were labelled, a consumer segment would actively avoid it, the same way other segments avoid high-fat or high-salt foods.
And as I said, there are other reasons for wishing to label than just medical. Palm oil is causing significant climate change, for example. I would personally argue that long term, environmental impacts are much more important than immediate human health risks.
Whether you think you're superior to me or not, the idiocy of your assertion that Schroeder has reconciled science and religion is publicly there for all to see. It will stand as a public and self-inflicted humiliation. At least you can be grateful for pseudonymous posting, which limits the damage to your reputation. But if you repeat this sort of stuff in real life in the company of scientists...
The delightful irony of someone who thinks they're manly using phrases that my seven year old would find too childish... I mean, really: "you're a girl"; "lesbian". It's not only the language of the playground, it's the language of a particularly immature playground too.
I really don't see why you've gone off on one just because I had the temerity to insult your precious Gerald. I doubt you do, either. I think you're caught up in the moment, delighting in your rhetoric. Ah well, it's your prerogative to waste your time dreaming up childish insults for me, rather than engage with the content.
Schroeder isn't a man of fame! He's not remotely famous as a scientist. It's hardly a bloody tossup between him and Peter Higgs, is it?
If your greatest intellectual achievement is failing to get into Mensa, you're not going to impress anyone round here. I mean, lots of us have read the Mismeasure of Man and don't hold much stock by IQ as a valid measure of intelligence, but surely you can do better than that? A job at somewhere that requires brains, such as Google? An Ivy League degree or equivalent? An impressive GPA? Good GMAT score? A string of publications in a good journal? Give us something to work with here
Slashdot Mirror
If you think what you're doing is "implying that today's mainstream climate science is not the Gospel from Above", then you're kidding yourself. What you're doing is implying that today's mainstream climate science is wrong and that the 90%+ of scientists working on the topic have got their science wrong. So you're implying that they are professionally incompetent for accepting something as settled science too early or frauds who've promulgated the idea that it's settled science when they know it's not. That tends to rile people up. If you were to do the analogous challenge to, say, a bunch of chemists on something equally big and fundamental in their field, you would get the same kind of reaction. This is all obvious, surely?
"insist on"
And you've written a non sequitur.
Exactly! Mod this up!
Please don't use words like embroiled unless you actually know what they mean. Using simpler words that you can actually understand will make you sound like a tiny bit less of a twat. But only a tiny bit, if you get basic facts wrong as you have done here.
Given your grasp of grammar is as shaky as your grasp of logic, I think the answer is pretty clear: for you, stupidity just comes naturally.
He was distinguishing between official looking and actually official. I'm sorry that was too subtle for you
And one of his earliest stories, too! Heinlein almost always has an apposite quote. Mod parent up
Sounds like he needs to read "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok, where he'd find another analogy. Then he could try the chevruta model.
You really aren't seeing the circularity of it all, are you? You ask: why should individuals use fewer resources. You then make a non-credible claim ("there are plenty of resources on this planet"; yeah, like water and energy resources are not increasingly difficult to access...). We'll get the scaled-back population one way or another. I'd prefer a gentler route, but at this point it seems unlikely. Grim days ahead, even for folks in 4000 sq ft houses.
My world is the same as your world. It's the one we've got and wishful thinking about off-planet resources and halving the population will not change the reality, except to damage our preparedeness.
Repeating a claim that you earn lots more than me doesn't make it any more or less likely than the first time you said it. Well, I guess it says something about your ability to listen carefully, and poor listeners are less likely to earn lots of money on average, but of course you could be an outlier. Does earning lots make you feel very proud of yourself and conversely very sneery about those who earn less? Does it make their opinions less valid in your eyes? If so, you might like to reflect on whether that logic really holds up.
In case you weren't clear, when I say "some people", I include myself among those people. Not sure why you find this difficult to grasp.
And finally, I'm very clear that you aren't going to do anything differently. Congratulations! I know you're very proud of that. A tremendous achievement, I must say.
Who's judging? I'm simply observing that 4000 sq ft of house for one or two adults only is a shitload of resource. You're right about kids. I'm certainly culpable, as is everyone in the developed world. And they, the poor sods, are the ones who are going to inherit this mess. But I don't see how you've invalidated the quantity argument, which is: we should all try to tone down our impact on the environment to some extent, from whatever point at which we start. To take your car analogy further: if we see a solid wall in front of us, we may not be able to avoid hitting it, but it'll hurt a lot less if we can slow down a bit.
Separately, I wouldn't assume things about your income relative to mine. You may be right; you may be wrong. You don't know. I'm sure you're fabulously successful in whatever it is you do, but you have no knowledge of how successful I am, whatever you choose to infer from what I write here. You've also taken a very narrowly reductionist view of what a positive net impact on the world looks like, viz tax and charitable funding. What about the day job itself? Does yours have no social worth? Surely not! Mine certainly does
Overall, you're acting awful pissy and defensive, and there's really no need. You published on a public forum about building a large house and some people have pointed out that doing this uses lots of resources. Why not just respond calmly and politely instead of casting aspersions on my money-making ability etc etc? Or keep your postings to boards where you will find only supportive sentiments?
What is it with people that they don't get that an analogy needn't be the same intensity to be valid?
If it makes you feel better, you're welcome to think of it as a less serious crime instead, eg theft. Should you not intervene when you see a theft happening, because you have once committed a crime?
I am indeed arguing over quantity. I'm saying that quantity matters. Bit by bit for all of us. If we could only take into account what paragons of virtue had to say, we'd be the poorer for it. It's a ridiculously high bar to set, and there's no justification for it. Why should it matter whether I could do better as to whether you choose to do better? How about we both try, along with everyone else in the rich world?
Your permanent structure may be durable, but it's also resource-intensive. Resource wars do happen, and they are ugly. There are worse ways for you to spend your money than building a huge house, but there are also better ways. You could choose to do it differently.
Anyhow, it's clear from your super-aggressive and defensive tone that you won't. And you're not alone in that. And as a consequence of your decisions, my decisions, and the decisions of the rest of the rich world, we are likely to end up in a super-shitty future. Hey ho.
Are you not bright enough to understand the concept of second-order effects? Timber, glass and slate all cost water and energy, and both of those are pretty large resource issues. Plus, there's a significant amount of metal and concrete in most homes, which are even more water and energy intensive. What's the point of trying to kid yourself that it's treading lightly when it's not?
Second, why should we all not hold each other to account? Why do we need to be perfect in our own lives before we can comment on someone else's? If you saw a man raping a woman, would you say you couldn't intervene because you sometimes act misogynistically (eg your joke just now)? As it goes, my kids share a room, and I've never owned a car. There's more I can do, for sure, and I do a reasonable amount already. Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien and all that.
Have you noticed how I've not had to resort to insulting you to make my point? You might try it some time.
How is that wrong? It uses all sorts of resources which we are going to run out of. It's analogous to being on a desert island and eating all your food supplies in the first week. It's stupid. It's what humans have done repeatedly through history, and the consequences have been horrid repeatedly too. See, for example, Collapse by Jared Diamond.
Oh excellent. Priceless.
So in addition to moaning that the material that the sainted Schroeder has written is
1. unclear
2. out of context
you're now moaning it's:
3. outdated!
Despite there be no material difference in the passages I quoted and the passages in the article you linked to! I do hope you discount all material you read that's more than 5 years old in this kind of blanket fashion. It's such a great policy for keeping yourself fresh and relevant, particularly for a man struggling with the great questions of biblical archaeology, as you undoubtedly are, given your -- what was the phrase you used -- "massive expertise".
And just imagine, you somehow know I'm atheist! I wonder if your knowledge takes precedence over the facts in this case, as it seems to in so many others (the relevant fact here being: no, I'm not atheist. That's just your preconceptions at play)
Do you happen to know the antonym for skilful? Because your consistent lack of engagement with the content (ie questions such as how you read Schroeder's rehashing of Paley's watchmaker analogy as anything other than the conflation of natural selection and random chance) while actively answering the questions you *do* have answers to (what kind of job do you have? I don't have one, I market my output -- which incidentally sounds a tiny bit euphemistic), is a "technique" that is begging to receive that label. I suppose "dimwittedly blustery" might be a good way of describing it.
Incidentally, any time you want to actually discuss the content, I'd be delighted to. I shan't hold my breath.
You were an extremely, erm, *unusual* Harvard student, it seems. I've met quite a few, as you'd expect, given where I work, and you'd be the first one I've ever heard of who:
- doesn't spell properly
- uses such risible syntax and grammar
- has such poor reasoning skills
- is only able to respond to challenge with abuse
- is publicly and proudly racist and sexist
- struggles so badly with their reading comprehension (Cambridge, NJ!! instead of the University of Cambridge. Spectacular!)
So I'm ever-so-slightly sceptical.
I was at Emma from 92 to 95. I was a NatSci and did HPS in my 3rd year. That's not proof you'll be able to understand, but anyone who's been to Cambridge will recognise the terms.
I could well believe that you don't work for others. I wonder how you make a living? As I said, I hope for their sake, it doesn't bring you into contact with women, if this is how you behave in real life.
Anyway, this is all terribly entertaining, but it now is starting to feel a bit circular. I wonder if you're ever going to address the content, or whether you'll just continue to display your quirks for everyone's amusement. I think quirks is probably le mot juste by this stage, don't you?
I see. So when I post directly from his text, you:
1. complain that the text isn't clear, despite it being what he wrote, being perfectly understandable, and being pretty much identical with the text you linked to
2. complain it's out of context, as though it's some kind of distortion of what he's saying, despite my providing a link so everyone can read the passages in context, and despite it being a quote that accurately reflects the essence of his belief, viz that natural selection relies on chance and cannot explain life (as instantiated here by proteins)
3. tell me I don't have authority to comment
4. fail to respond to the content
That is a pretty phenomenal all-round fail, and you managed to do it with a really quite whiney tone as well. Well done!
It would have been pretty straightforward for you to say "you have taken him out of context as follows..." and then provide an example. You could have done so while maintaining your trademark arsey tone and snide asides. But that would have required you to engage with the content and actually back up what you're saying..... oh wait a minute. You couldn't possibly be engaging in bluster because you're scared of making an argument on the content, could you? We'll see. It's been content-free and abuse-rich thus far from you, and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
You have a future as a gifted parodist, or at least as the inspiration for a character in a new Carl Hiaasen novel.
I mean, accusing me of not reading and then failing to notice, despite my saying so perfectly clearly, that I went to the University of Cambridge, which is in England, and instead thinking that I was at Harvard and grew up in Jersey!
Let's recap your public, self-inflicted wounds to date. This isn't comprehensive, of course; who among us could manage that, with such rich source material? However it's both fun and instructive: ... Yes, I agree with what he says..."
- you've misunderstood the term hearsay
- you've read posts from me talking about the University of Cambridge, grants, and Oxford, and *still* manage to misplace me on the wrong side of the Atlantic
- you've confused something (Rambam? the codes?) with midrash. I don't know what term you meant to use, but like your use of the term hearsay, you chose wrongly. Or at least you started talking about something neither you nor I had previously referred to, which is just as wrong and just as likely
- you've confused me with someone who would be upset or insulted by being called a girl, in the process demonstrating your hatred of women, which you've now exposed further by clarifying that the only thing to do with a woman is to fuck her ("I was likely banging women of scientific background from bars around Harvard Square")
- you've demonstrated racism as well, implying "Eskimos" (your unpleasant racist term, not mine) are stupid
- you've failed to respond directly, despite repeated invitations, to my criticism of Schroeder's conflation of random chance and natural selection. You've accused me of not reading his material, yet this is the central thesis of one of the links you provide!
- you've outdone yourself in this latest post, by contradicting yourself three times in six sentences: "I do not agree with every single thing the man says... I dont believe in any secret codes
- you think bible codes are me taking "all to cartoon extremes", whereas of course Schroeder has written repeatedly about the codes and they were one of his main reasons for deciding to work at Aish, which is something that is obvious to anyone with more than passing familiarity with his work
- you complained about getting uninvited comments on Slashdot! Talk about pissing in the wind...
- you claimed, with a straight face, that " Shroeder reconciles Science and God in a reasonable and logical manner." Your spelling mistake, not mine, by the way, along with many others.
You are the gift that keeps on giving, you really are
I wonder what kind of a job you have? Assuming you have one, of course. If you act like this in real life, I hope your job doesn't bring you into contact with many women -- for their sake. My guess is that you're a lot more restrained, but that the underlying personality still shows itself in unfortunate ways.
I've read the material and understood it.
Perhaps you would like to say what you found convincing? I could do with a laugh. As I have now said repeatedly with no engagement from you on the content, we are talking about a man who conflates random chance and natural selection: is that something you concur with? I've mentioned several other of his fallacies too. Are you able to say which you think is not a fallacy? The idea of taking Rambam as scientifically accurate? The bible codes? Or do you swallow the whole lot, hook line and sinker?
By the way, the phrase "men of scientific backgrounds" is very curious. Do you not speak to women? Are their soft, feminine minds too weak for you to bother with? You seem to have some ishoos with women, and you continue to have this bizarre idea that telling someone they're a girl or woman is insulting.
Hearsay does not mean what you think it means. Why use a word that you don't understand? It's quite risky for you.
Anyways, I'd love to hear you tell what you find so convincing about Schroeder's arguments in between the spittle-flecked invective and insults about women, Cambridge undergraduates, Eskimos (you know that's as acceptable as calling Schroeder a yid, right?) and hillbillies. Let's hear the specifics. Is it this kind of inelegant restatement of Paley's watchmaker's argument? I've quoted it at length, so that everyone can read a little bit of Schroeder for themselves and decide whether my statement that he doesn't understand the difference between random chance and natural selection is accurate.
"The organic structures referred to as proteins are the basic building blocks of life. They are long molecules consist- ing of twenty different amino acids. The amino acids are joined into varying combinations to form chains, each of which coils into a highly specified shape. A mutation that inserts a wrong amino acid into the chain alters the protein has some 200 or more of these twenty amino acids joined together to form its chain, the number of possible combinations of amino acids in the chain is twenty to the exponent power of 200, or in the more usual ten-based system, ten to the power of 260. That number is a one with 260 zeros after it, or it’s a billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion. If purely random processes were responsible for the million viable proteins, nature would have had to discover by chance the fewer than one million combinations that allow for life from among this vast non-viable biological wasteland. The Laplacian probability of that happening is one chance out of a thousand billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion bil- lion. In other words, there is no way that nature could have happened upon the viable combinations by chance."
From: "Finding the Intelligence Within the Design", JEWISH ACTION Fall 5767/2006
http://www.ou.org/pdf/ja/5767/fall67/17-22.pdf
As I said, he's a kook, rehashing old arguments that have zero standing among biologists for new, naive, audiences.
Market pressures. If it were labelled, a consumer segment would actively avoid it, the same way other segments avoid high-fat or high-salt foods.
And as I said, there are other reasons for wishing to label than just medical. Palm oil is causing significant climate change, for example. I would personally argue that long term, environmental impacts are much more important than immediate human health risks.
Whether you think you're superior to me or not, the idiocy of your assertion that Schroeder has reconciled science and religion is publicly there for all to see. It will stand as a public and self-inflicted humiliation. At least you can be grateful for pseudonymous posting, which limits the damage to your reputation. But if you repeat this sort of stuff in real life in the company of scientists...
The delightful irony of someone who thinks they're manly using phrases that my seven year old would find too childish... I mean, really: "you're a girl"; "lesbian". It's not only the language of the playground, it's the language of a particularly immature playground too.
I really don't see why you've gone off on one just because I had the temerity to insult your precious Gerald. I doubt you do, either. I think you're caught up in the moment, delighting in your rhetoric. Ah well, it's your prerogative to waste your time dreaming up childish insults for me, rather than engage with the content.
You don't like comments from all and sundry, post on a private forum. Otherwise, expect people to call you out for idiocy.
Schroeder isn't a man of fame! He's not remotely famous as a scientist. It's hardly a bloody tossup between him and Peter Higgs, is it?
If your greatest intellectual achievement is failing to get into Mensa, you're not going to impress anyone round here. I mean, lots of us have read the Mismeasure of Man and don't hold much stock by IQ as a valid measure of intelligence, but surely you can do better than that? A job at somewhere that requires brains, such as Google? An Ivy League degree or equivalent? An impressive GPA? Good GMAT score? A string of publications in a good journal? Give us something to work with here
No he doesn't. *Rambam* reconciles the two. *Einstein* had a go. Of scientists working today, *Robert Winston* is pretty good. Schroeder is a kook.