It sounds as if something is conflicting with your worldview...reality.
Your rant, no offense intended, could be easily turned around:
"Insanity. Collective, managed, suggsted insanity. These people have the nerve to then claim they are free thinkers. Instead, they have swallowed the BS train from the profressional PR firms empoyed by [governments] in the [global warming research] industry to muddy the waters as much as possible. These tactics should be familiar by now.
Anyway, don't let logic get in the way of a little irrational paranoia and hysteria. Those evil [skeptics]!"
Honestly, what kind of data would convince you that your worldview is wrong? 15 years of dropping temperatures and rising CO2? 20 years? 100 years? If you're really trying to talk about logic and science, what is your falsifiable hypothesis?
It's pretty obvious that the leak was from a whistleblower who couldn't stand the stench of corruption and malfeasance. The various whitewash reports of folks patting themselves on the back for how poor and tormented they were notwithstanding, the tricks have been exposed, the data has been seen, and you can't go backwards and pretend it didn't happen, or it didn't mean anything.
Of particular delicious note to the much maligned skeptics was the admission by Jones during one of these "investigations" that in all the time that his papers were peer-reviewed, not a single reviewer asked for the actual data behind the papers.
Not a one.
If that isn't a challenge to credibility, I don't know what is.
Muffins and orange juice will kill you. The past thirty years of low-fat, low-calorie and exercise advice has turned what was common knowledge for hundreds of years on its head -> carbs make you fat, and being fat is unhealthy in all kinds of ways. Just remember that carbohydrates turn into sugar in your blood stream incredibly quickly, so when you look at that muffin, or that glass of OJ, or that piece of bread, just imagine instead that you're simply spooning candy into your mouth, because that's essentially what you're doing.
Go ahead and stave off your cravings by eating sugar three meals a day, everyday, for the rest of your life, and see where that gets you.
Well, on the scale of danger to one's health, I'd put a tall glass of orange juice at 9.5 on the F-up-Your-Health-O-Meter, and the nitrates and nitrites in bacon at about 0.75. The preservatives might kill me when I'm 150 years old, but those sugars and starches in bran muffins will kill you before you reach 70.
Presumably a neurological difference that prevents women from excelling in IT as a group would also be visible in other comparably intellectual fields (like law, medicine, or accounting), but we don't see that in those fields.
That's assuming that law, medicine and accounting are comparably intellectual fields, which I'd argue is probably not the case.
IT is not just about "intellectual rigor" and "critical thinking", which both could be defined to encompass both left and right brain types of processes. To me IT is, at its heart, simply much more "left-brain" -> analytical, anti-social, and thoroughly unforgiving. Even my attempt at trying to describe it is probably pathetic, but the point I'm trying to make is that you simply cannot assert that the same proclivities towards law will mean you're good at IT, or medicine, or accounting.
Here's my question, though -> would we assert that there is a problem of sexism in the field of elementary school teaching, with men being under represented? If not, why not?
I think Occam's Razor tells me that the obvious reason for women to be under-represented and underpaid in the workforce is sexism.
Occam's Razor can also tell you that the obvious reason for women to be under-represented in certain workplaces is due to natural differences between the sexes.
You're the one working from the assumption that they're different in ways that are professionally significant.
Of course. Professions require varying degrees of brain types, and differences in brain type can certainly be professionally significant. Assuming that both men and women exhibit "professional neutrality" in any profession is an assumption, not a given.
I see no reason to think that's not the case, independent of the same circumstantial problems that keep them out
Having XX chromosomes versus XY chromosomes is not a circumstantial problem, it is a factual reality. Men and women are different in the brain, period. Asserting otherwise is to ignore the scientific evidence. Ignoring what we know about male/female brain differences leaves out a major piece of information.
It's not that I deny they have an effect, it's that I find it difficult to believe that the difference persists so cleanly up the stack, as it were.
I'm not asserting that the difference is a clean one, but it is a significant one, and must factor into the differences we see between men and women in various professions. To think otherwise is to be willfully ignorant.
I'm most familiar with the example of female doctors, where women are now 30% of the doctors currently working and receive comparable pay.
I wonder how that breaks down into various specialties...or is that a statistic for just general practitioners? I would imagine it possible that doctoring, as a nurturing and also authoritarian profession, may have complexities that neutralize sex differences in a way that doesn't happen in IT. Of course, having only 30% participation may indicate that there are simply better filters, and only the rare woman is able to get into the profession, and because of the high filter, competes on par with her male counterparts, on average.
How about this for a theory - maybe women are underpaid in IT because the incompetent women aren't filtered out as effectively as they are in the case of doctors, therefore bringing down the average. Our attempts to get 50/50 representation, by including women that aren't as competent, may in fact be what causes the statistical artifact of pay differential.
No, you'd conclude that the western owners are a bunch of cheap bastards.
That conclusion would be just as unfounded as asserting that West is naturally better than East, or that people with middle names that are less than five letters are naturally better than people with middle names that are five letters or more. You've found a correlation, not causality.
Observational studies simply cannot determine causality, and any number of conclusions could be made from the observations, neither of them particularly more worthy than another.
Except pig bacon is healthy, and delicious. Contrary to USDA guidelines, saturated fat is good for you, and cereals and grains are bad for you. Bacon is, simply put, health food. You just need to avoid orange juice, muffins, or anything else that is going to raise your blood sugar levels and therefore your insulin levels.
Now, admittedly, there are some types of bacon that are dipped in chocolate, or sugar, or pancake batter, or some other evil condiment, but on its own, bacon is a perfectly healthy food.
Comparing Michael Jordan in his prime to a benchwarmer nearing retirement is, I agree, meaningless. But taking the average compensation across the NBA can tell you something worthwhile.
What could it tell us worthwhile? If we split NBA players by religion, do you think any differential would tell us something important about their religion? Or if we split NBA players by the first letter of their middle name, would any differential there tell us anything?
I guess I'm always suspect of trying to derive causality out of observational studies rather than double blind ones.
In law, medicine and accounting, three fields of similar rigor in terms of rational thinking to IT, there are lots of women, and no one seriously argues that they aren't as effective as men.
I don't think anyone seriously argues that in individual cases, women can succeed and exceed in any field of endeavor. But I don't think one can blithely assert that women and men are of equal aptitude, on average, in any given profession. Would you, for example, argue that men, on average, are equally as effective as women in say, elementary school teaching, nursing or mothering children?
Would you happen to know what the percentages of women in law, medicine and accounting are, and what the average pay differences are in those professions?
I think a rational argument can be made that most women, are, on average, less productive than men in IT. Now, whether or not this can be empirically derived is an open question, since even defining metrics for productivity is an awfully hard thing to do in a field that is more like an art than a science (imagine trying to compare productivity of the LA philharmonic 2nd bassoon to the 2nd bassoon of the New York philharmonic).
I certainly wouldn't accept that time spent on the job at the same tasks is a meaningful metric, and I wouldn't take as a null hypothesis that men and women are on average, just as productive as each other in IT. imagine taking as a null hypothesis that men and women are on average, just as tall as each other, and then asserting that there must be a universal malnutrition of women that causes them to be shorter than men.
I think neurology has shown the significant difference, on average, between men and women and the corpus callosum, and this difference can make a huge difference in aptitude and predilection to success in IT. This isn't to say that there aren't women who outshine many men, and many men who are completely pathetic and untalented, but making an assertion that it is sexism, not sex differences, that can account for average pay disparities, is simply unsupportable.
C'mon, mod parent up. We keep pretending like there is no real difference between men and women, and all this does is emasculate men and frustrate women.
Define "comparable experience". There is a vast difference in talent and ability between people who work in IT, and none of that can be reflected in any objective metrics.
That sounds great, but I think we hit a recursion problem there. We also need a mechanism to allow residents to vote for what petitions to be able to vote for later on, and so on and so on.
The petition mechanism is a shortcut, a way to break the loop of actually holding elections. Removing that shortcut re-institutes a logical loop that never ends.
I think the best way to imagine this is to contemplate the consequences of anonymous petitions. Without the signatures and names being public record, I could pretty much create a petition for anything with any number of signatures you can imagine. With ballot box voting, we've at least done some due diligence on the qualifications of those who get to drop ballots into the box, even if their choices are anonymous, their identities are not.
Hear, hear. I bought a dozen or more wireless routers in my life searching for the holy grail until I finally threw down the good money for the Airport Extreme. Solid as a rock, even if you don't get the version with the hard drive built in.
Mod parent up. TFA (2nd link) conflates two very separate beasties.
Frankly, the anti-virus and anti-trojan bits of software they seem to advocate installing on OSX are arguably trojans themselves, with the express immediate purpose of slowing down your computer, but quite possibly the next vector for infection in the future.
If they refunded my purchase price in full, I'd be quite a bit less ticked off.
Not sure how much less, if they got to be arbitrary about it and decide on their own terms to take my property and refund the purchase price. Would they let me end the license by taking their money and returning their product with no questions asked?
I guess imagining waking up one morning to find my car gone, but my bank account filled with a refund, wouldn't mollify me all that much.
Of course every hypothesis must be approached with caution (be it regarding lowering or raising speed limits or otherwise), but one day when you do have a chance to watch the hour and 40 minutes, or to read his 600+ page book "Good Calories, Bad Calories", I think you'll find his hypothesis well founded and a good fit for existing observations, both in animal models and in human populations (profoundly obese italian mothers with their pasta, portly irish folk with their potatoes, and of course, sumo wrestlers in japan). The interesting part about his hypothesis is that it is actually one based on fairly uncontested principles -> the insulin increase in response to increased blood sugar levels, the break down of the kreb's cycle of insulin resistant fat tissues, and the blood sugar raising effects of carbohydrates are fundamental, basic principles that aren't seriously debated. But even though we know very clearly the basic science here, doctors who should theoretically know better tell diabetics to eat 6-8 servings of grains and cereals a day.
Now, whether or not I can lay every chronic disease at the feet of carbohydrates, like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, alzheimer's, etc, etc, may be an open question (it seems to me a very strong possibility, hitting upwards of 90-95% confidence), but what should really disturb us is the unfounded dietary advice we started giving in 1973 based on a "dietary fat is evil" and "dietary cholesterol is evil" hypothesis. On the basis of absolutely zero controlled or repeatable studies, and in fact by willfully ignoring evidence contrary to this "fat/cholesterol is evil" hypothesis, we embarked on the largest medical experiment ever perpetrated upon mankind.
I'll tell you what, though, you could lock a fat man in a room for 3 months, expose him to all sorts of BPA or toxic 21, and feed him a low carb diet, and I'll bet you they'd improve their health and lose weight. In order for the trace effects of any toxic substance to match the evil of carbs, you'd probably have to take a lethal dose of the toxins in question.
Absolutely correct. Even for people who don't exhibit obesity, carbohydrates can still cause cholesterol problems and heart disease, because of the way they cause fat to be processed by the liver. The important thing to note here is that dietary cholesterol does not directly head to the bloodstream -> it is packaged and processed by the liver and fat cells, and this packaging is moderated by carbohydrate intake, with more carbohydrates making the blood serum cholesterol more dangerous and damaging.
So not only can carbs cause obesity, but even for those who aren't obese, carbs can cause diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other chronic diseases.
OT, but small correction - butter, cholesterol and salt are good for you, it's carbohydrates that cause heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, cancer and other chronic diseases. If they wanted to make anything illegal, it should be sugar, whole wheat bread, sweet fruits and their juices, potatoes, and all other starchy snacks and sugary drinks.
There is [sic] simply levels of "survival" [that are] unacceptable. It is not typical doomsday and unlike doomsday stuff it actually happened, we have eough examples in history to know that damaged enviroment impairs food production.
The question is humanity, not individual pockets of agriculture or cultures or civilizations. The fact of the matter is that the environment changes, and we adapt. To assert that the world is going to end, en masse, for the vast bulk of humanity is simply unjustified. You might as well claim "my great-great-great-grandpa died! my great-great-grandma died! We're all gonna die, oh noes!". As far as natural selection is concerned, easter island, greenland, henderson island, et al just don't count. They're pruned branches of the evolutionary tree (assuming they didn't migrate away before simply succumbing to starvation).
Of course, the whole question of food production brings up an interesting twist -> CO2 concentrations greatly increase food crop yields. Should we be using more natural petroleum products to increase food yields to support more humans?
My personal problem, though, is my firm belief that agriculture was the beginning of the downfall of human health, and I wonder if we could develop a system that could reliably sustain all of humanity on a primarily fat and protein diet, rather than on obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer causing carbohydrates.
Yeah, someone gave the link to CWT's Thermal Conversion Process in another comment -> very interesting stuff, but it looks like it has some complexity that might not reflect in the deposits of natural petroleum we commonly find.
That being said, this is probably more an argument about proportion than absolutes -> even the sharpest critics of abiotic oil don't deny that it could happen, they simply assert that it does not happen nearly as often as biotic oil (and vice versa).
Sounds a lot like the argument abiotic oil theorists make about "biological" markers in natural petroleum -> it's contamination, not part of the genesis of the material.
My bet is that both abiotic oil and biotic oil are possible, but abiotic oil probably has a greater natural regeneration rate, and a longer timescale upon which it has operated (maybe +1 billion years). In any case, predictions of doom generally trigger my false-apocalypse alarm -> it seems like a common human activity to predict the imminent end of the world, religion or no religion.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds as if something is conflicting with your worldview...reality.
Your rant, no offense intended, could be easily turned around:
"Insanity. Collective, managed, suggsted insanity. These people have the nerve to then claim they are free thinkers. Instead, they have swallowed the BS train from the profressional PR firms empoyed by [governments] in the [global warming research] industry to muddy the waters as much as possible. These tactics should be familiar by now.
Anyway, don't let logic get in the way of a little irrational paranoia and hysteria. Those evil [skeptics]!"
Honestly, what kind of data would convince you that your worldview is wrong? 15 years of dropping temperatures and rising CO2? 20 years? 100 years? If you're really trying to talk about logic and science, what is your falsifiable hypothesis?
It's pretty obvious that the leak was from a whistleblower who couldn't stand the stench of corruption and malfeasance. The various whitewash reports of folks patting themselves on the back for how poor and tormented they were notwithstanding, the tricks have been exposed, the data has been seen, and you can't go backwards and pretend it didn't happen, or it didn't mean anything.
Of particular delicious note to the much maligned skeptics was the admission by Jones during one of these "investigations" that in all the time that his papers were peer-reviewed, not a single reviewer asked for the actual data behind the papers.
Not a one.
If that isn't a challenge to credibility, I don't know what is.
Well AC, have yourself a clue, and check out the real science on the matter:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216
Muffins and orange juice will kill you. The past thirty years of low-fat, low-calorie and exercise advice has turned what was common knowledge for hundreds of years on its head -> carbs make you fat, and being fat is unhealthy in all kinds of ways. Just remember that carbohydrates turn into sugar in your blood stream incredibly quickly, so when you look at that muffin, or that glass of OJ, or that piece of bread, just imagine instead that you're simply spooning candy into your mouth, because that's essentially what you're doing.
Go ahead and stave off your cravings by eating sugar three meals a day, everyday, for the rest of your life, and see where that gets you.
Well, on the scale of danger to one's health, I'd put a tall glass of orange juice at 9.5 on the F-up-Your-Health-O-Meter, and the nitrates and nitrites in bacon at about 0.75. The preservatives might kill me when I'm 150 years old, but those sugars and starches in bran muffins will kill you before you reach 70.
That's assuming that law, medicine and accounting are comparably intellectual fields, which I'd argue is probably not the case.
IT is not just about "intellectual rigor" and "critical thinking", which both could be defined to encompass both left and right brain types of processes. To me IT is, at its heart, simply much more "left-brain" -> analytical, anti-social, and thoroughly unforgiving. Even my attempt at trying to describe it is probably pathetic, but the point I'm trying to make is that you simply cannot assert that the same proclivities towards law will mean you're good at IT, or medicine, or accounting.
Here's my question, though -> would we assert that there is a problem of sexism in the field of elementary school teaching, with men being under represented? If not, why not?
Occam's Razor can also tell you that the obvious reason for women to be under-represented in certain workplaces is due to natural differences between the sexes.
Of course. Professions require varying degrees of brain types, and differences in brain type can certainly be professionally significant. Assuming that both men and women exhibit "professional neutrality" in any profession is an assumption, not a given.
Having XX chromosomes versus XY chromosomes is not a circumstantial problem, it is a factual reality. Men and women are different in the brain, period. Asserting otherwise is to ignore the scientific evidence. Ignoring what we know about male/female brain differences leaves out a major piece of information.
I'm not asserting that the difference is a clean one, but it is a significant one, and must factor into the differences we see between men and women in various professions. To think otherwise is to be willfully ignorant.
I wonder how that breaks down into various specialties...or is that a statistic for just general practitioners? I would imagine it possible that doctoring, as a nurturing and also authoritarian profession, may have complexities that neutralize sex differences in a way that doesn't happen in IT. Of course, having only 30% participation may indicate that there are simply better filters, and only the rare woman is able to get into the profession, and because of the high filter, competes on par with her male counterparts, on average.
How about this for a theory - maybe women are underpaid in IT because the incompetent women aren't filtered out as effectively as they are in the case of doctors, therefore bringing down the average. Our attempts to get 50/50 representation, by including women that aren't as competent, may in fact be what causes the statistical artifact of pay differential.
That conclusion would be just as unfounded as asserting that West is naturally better than East, or that people with middle names that are less than five letters are naturally better than people with middle names that are five letters or more. You've found a correlation, not causality.
Observational studies simply cannot determine causality, and any number of conclusions could be made from the observations, neither of them particularly more worthy than another.
Except pig bacon is healthy, and delicious. Contrary to USDA guidelines, saturated fat is good for you, and cereals and grains are bad for you. Bacon is, simply put, health food. You just need to avoid orange juice, muffins, or anything else that is going to raise your blood sugar levels and therefore your insulin levels.
Now, admittedly, there are some types of bacon that are dipped in chocolate, or sugar, or pancake batter, or some other evil condiment, but on its own, bacon is a perfectly healthy food.
What could it tell us worthwhile? If we split NBA players by religion, do you think any differential would tell us something important about their religion? Or if we split NBA players by the first letter of their middle name, would any differential there tell us anything?
I guess I'm always suspect of trying to derive causality out of observational studies rather than double blind ones.
I don't think anyone seriously argues that in individual cases, women can succeed and exceed in any field of endeavor. But I don't think one can blithely assert that women and men are of equal aptitude, on average, in any given profession. Would you, for example, argue that men, on average, are equally as effective as women in say, elementary school teaching, nursing or mothering children?
Would you happen to know what the percentages of women in law, medicine and accounting are, and what the average pay differences are in those professions?
I think a rational argument can be made that most women, are, on average, less productive than men in IT. Now, whether or not this can be empirically derived is an open question, since even defining metrics for productivity is an awfully hard thing to do in a field that is more like an art than a science (imagine trying to compare productivity of the LA philharmonic 2nd bassoon to the 2nd bassoon of the New York philharmonic).
I certainly wouldn't accept that time spent on the job at the same tasks is a meaningful metric, and I wouldn't take as a null hypothesis that men and women are on average, just as productive as each other in IT. imagine taking as a null hypothesis that men and women are on average, just as tall as each other, and then asserting that there must be a universal malnutrition of women that causes them to be shorter than men.
I think neurology has shown the significant difference, on average, between men and women and the corpus callosum, and this difference can make a huge difference in aptitude and predilection to success in IT. This isn't to say that there aren't women who outshine many men, and many men who are completely pathetic and untalented, but making an assertion that it is sexism, not sex differences, that can account for average pay disparities, is simply unsupportable.
C'mon, mod parent up. We keep pretending like there is no real difference between men and women, and all this does is emasculate men and frustrate women.
Define "comparable experience". There is a vast difference in talent and ability between people who work in IT, and none of that can be reflected in any objective metrics.
That sounds great, but I think we hit a recursion problem there. We also need a mechanism to allow residents to vote for what petitions to be able to vote for later on, and so on and so on.
The petition mechanism is a shortcut, a way to break the loop of actually holding elections. Removing that shortcut re-institutes a logical loop that never ends.
I think the best way to imagine this is to contemplate the consequences of anonymous petitions. Without the signatures and names being public record, I could pretty much create a petition for anything with any number of signatures you can imagine. With ballot box voting, we've at least done some due diligence on the qualifications of those who get to drop ballots into the box, even if their choices are anonymous, their identities are not.
Hear, hear. I bought a dozen or more wireless routers in my life searching for the holy grail until I finally threw down the good money for the Airport Extreme. Solid as a rock, even if you don't get the version with the hard drive built in.
Mod parent up. TFA (2nd link) conflates two very separate beasties.
Frankly, the anti-virus and anti-trojan bits of software they seem to advocate installing on OSX are arguably trojans themselves, with the express immediate purpose of slowing down your computer, but quite possibly the next vector for infection in the future.
Who watches the watchers?
Not sure how much less, if they got to be arbitrary about it and decide on their own terms to take my property and refund the purchase price. Would they let me end the license by taking their money and returning their product with no questions asked?
I guess imagining waking up one morning to find my car gone, but my bank account filled with a refund, wouldn't mollify me all that much.
Of course every hypothesis must be approached with caution (be it regarding lowering or raising speed limits or otherwise), but one day when you do have a chance to watch the hour and 40 minutes, or to read his 600+ page book "Good Calories, Bad Calories", I think you'll find his hypothesis well founded and a good fit for existing observations, both in animal models and in human populations (profoundly obese italian mothers with their pasta, portly irish folk with their potatoes, and of course, sumo wrestlers in japan). The interesting part about his hypothesis is that it is actually one based on fairly uncontested principles -> the insulin increase in response to increased blood sugar levels, the break down of the kreb's cycle of insulin resistant fat tissues, and the blood sugar raising effects of carbohydrates are fundamental, basic principles that aren't seriously debated. But even though we know very clearly the basic science here, doctors who should theoretically know better tell diabetics to eat 6-8 servings of grains and cereals a day.
Now, whether or not I can lay every chronic disease at the feet of carbohydrates, like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, alzheimer's, etc, etc, may be an open question (it seems to me a very strong possibility, hitting upwards of 90-95% confidence), but what should really disturb us is the unfounded dietary advice we started giving in 1973 based on a "dietary fat is evil" and "dietary cholesterol is evil" hypothesis. On the basis of absolutely zero controlled or repeatable studies, and in fact by willfully ignoring evidence contrary to this "fat/cholesterol is evil" hypothesis, we embarked on the largest medical experiment ever perpetrated upon mankind.
I'll tell you what, though, you could lock a fat man in a room for 3 months, expose him to all sorts of BPA or toxic 21, and feed him a low carb diet, and I'll bet you they'd improve their health and lose weight. In order for the trace effects of any toxic substance to match the evil of carbs, you'd probably have to take a lethal dose of the toxins in question.
Absolutely correct. Even for people who don't exhibit obesity, carbohydrates can still cause cholesterol problems and heart disease, because of the way they cause fat to be processed by the liver. The important thing to note here is that dietary cholesterol does not directly head to the bloodstream -> it is packaged and processed by the liver and fat cells, and this packaging is moderated by carbohydrate intake, with more carbohydrates making the blood serum cholesterol more dangerous and damaging.
So not only can carbs cause obesity, but even for those who aren't obese, carbs can cause diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other chronic diseases.
OT, but small correction - butter, cholesterol and salt are good for you, it's carbohydrates that cause heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, cancer and other chronic diseases. If they wanted to make anything illegal, it should be sugar, whole wheat bread, sweet fruits and their juices, potatoes, and all other starchy snacks and sugary drinks.
Reference: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216
The question is humanity, not individual pockets of agriculture or cultures or civilizations. The fact of the matter is that the environment changes, and we adapt. To assert that the world is going to end, en masse, for the vast bulk of humanity is simply unjustified. You might as well claim "my great-great-great-grandpa died! my great-great-grandma died! We're all gonna die, oh noes!". As far as natural selection is concerned, easter island, greenland, henderson island, et al just don't count. They're pruned branches of the evolutionary tree (assuming they didn't migrate away before simply succumbing to starvation).
Of course, the whole question of food production brings up an interesting twist -> CO2 concentrations greatly increase food crop yields. Should we be using more natural petroleum products to increase food yields to support more humans?
My personal problem, though, is my firm belief that agriculture was the beginning of the downfall of human health, and I wonder if we could develop a system that could reliably sustain all of humanity on a primarily fat and protein diet, rather than on obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer causing carbohydrates.
Yeah, someone gave the link to CWT's Thermal Conversion Process in another comment -> very interesting stuff, but it looks like it has some complexity that might not reflect in the deposits of natural petroleum we commonly find.
That being said, this is probably more an argument about proportion than absolutes -> even the sharpest critics of abiotic oil don't deny that it could happen, they simply assert that it does not happen nearly as often as biotic oil (and vice versa).
Sounds a lot like the argument abiotic oil theorists make about "biological" markers in natural petroleum -> it's contamination, not part of the genesis of the material.
My bet is that both abiotic oil and biotic oil are possible, but abiotic oil probably has a greater natural regeneration rate, and a longer timescale upon which it has operated (maybe +1 billion years). In any case, predictions of doom generally trigger my false-apocalypse alarm -> it seems like a common human activity to predict the imminent end of the world, religion or no religion.
Name one time when our ass was in danger in the past when we didn't survive :)
Now name all the times when humans have predicted the end of the world, either by fire, brimstone, flood, hand of god, or environmental disaster.
Who's got the better batting average? :)