I find this one of the most interesting questions when it comes to religion: The the leaders (or "profiteers") of a religion actually believe their own words?
It seems that in some cases, they clearly do. I'm pretty sure the Pope actually believes. But there are some cases where I truly doubt this is the case. Many of America's Televangelists very obviously use religion only for their own gain, for sex, money and power. If they believed their own words, they would have to assume that they would end up in hell.
Likewise, while Scientology's current leaders may (or may not) believe the Xenu story, I'm pretty sure Hubbard himself never believed a single word of it.
Actually, I belong to a splinter group of the cult of the gnome believers. Our dogma clearly states that gnomes steal socks. Those who believe that they steal underpants are heretics. Since I can't come over there and burn you, I hereby respectfully request that you burn yourself. It's for your own sake, as it will save your soul, as well as your socks.
"To say that these religious systems don't make useful predictions is false."
Tell me one experiment whose outcome can be predicted using the "theory" of ID.
"These systems must be useful, or they would have driven their adherents to extinction many generations ago."
I did not say that religion wasn't "useful" (at least for some values of "useful"). Anthropologists and psychologists can probably give you a huge list of reasons why religion may have had beneficial effects on the survival of certain societies, not least of which the fact that it often makes people willing to die for said societies (of course, science is making the requirement to die for one's society more and more moot as we can now easily kill people without being personally involved - today, the society with the better science usually wins, not the one with the people more willing to die).
As for the rest of your post, I'm honestly not entirely sure what your point is, and how it contradicts (or has anything to do with) what I wrote. You seem to imply that society might always require religion to survive. I honestly doubt it, but even so, your point seems to be entirely orthogonal to my point. I merely said that religion "doesn't make any kinds of useful predictions".
""The only thing this kind of sociopathic requirement causes is hit-and-run troll posts." Not so. This isn't about spreading the message. If you've ever seen the comment threads on some of the sites they call "hostile", you'll notice that commenters who try to push a creationist message don't just get ignored, they get hit back hard with a combination of mockery, direct insults, and point by point refutations in extreme detail. This is reliable.
I'm not sure how this contradicts what I said? I didn't say it was about spreading the message, I merely pointed out the effects this has on message boards.
It's hard to speculate about the intention of these people. I would agree that setting up a "us vs. them" attitude plays a role here. Another reason might be that they want to cause the impression that there are more people believing in this kind of stuff than there actually are.
"Well, an open mind within the bounds of reason is the best you can accomplish."
What are the bounds of reason? There is medicine available today of which we are not sure how it works. But we do know that it works. Theoretically, the same could apply to homeopathy. This is not about reason, it's about evidence. It's true that homeopathy makes no sense when you reason about it, but that alone does not mean that it can't work. The evidence shows that it can't work.
"This is also not the same thing as a lack of an opinion"
Right. Scientists, of course, do often start trials or studies because they do have an opinion and want to test it. You don't have to believe in homeopathy to accept that there is - in theory - a small chance that it might work due to some weird reason that we haven't figured out yet, and that it's thus worth being investigated.
Being open-minded is not the same as not having an opinion. Being open-minded merely means that you can accept the idea that you might be wrong, and that you're willing to accept the evidence even if it goes against your opinion.
"You see, they posit that scientists, being hateful curmudgeons, despise homeopathic medicine as not made from enough harmful chemicals, and their negative thoughts cancel out the natural psychic abilities that all water has."
And that is an example of somebody with a predetermined opinion, who isn't open-minded to accept the evidence that goes against this opinion.
If you read the article, you'll see that they don't require "discussion" of any kind:
"provide at least 10 posts defending ID that youâ(TM)ve made on âoehostileâ websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade)."
The only thing this kind of sociopathic requirement causes is hit-and-run troll posts.
Also:
"What ID brings to the table is a new reexamination of facts."
This is wrong. Scientists already reexamine facts constantly. ID does not add anything useful to the discussion, because it postulates a "theory" that can neither be proven nor disproven, and doesn't make any kinds of useful predictions. That's like saying "postulating sock gnomes requires you to reexamine the facts of where you left your socks yesterday." It doesn't.
And finally:
"The other problem with ID is also prevalent in fields such as homeopathy and supernatural research. The attempt to address the issues at hand with a completely open mind leads to bad conclusions."
That, again, is wrong. Scientists are required to have a completely open mind when it comes to everything, even homeopathy. This is precisely why we have useful studies in which scientists tested the claims made by homeopathy and other "alternative" medicine. It's also why we know which of these things work, and which don't.
The ones who don't have an open mind are the people who still believe homeopathy works. Their closed-mindedness makes them unable to accept the evidence.
Interesting, thanks for the information. I guess the experiments indeed do not negate free will, but to me, they are at least evidence that the freedom we experience may be only an illusion.
Yes. Clearly, GP wasn't there when the spiders were actually alive. For all we know, they were kilometers in length and just shrunk due to being really old. I think that is the most likely explanation.
And all iPods use simple databases maintained by a desktop application (usually iTunes), so you can't simply copy mp3 files to them.
A lot of people would call it a defect if the device cannot maintain its own database, unlike comparable MP3 players.
And a lot of people would call it a defect if your MP3 player did not recognize your playlists from your desktop player, if the MP3 player took half a minute to scan the new MP3s every time you copy a bunch of them to it, if the MP3 player would not synchronize track position between devices for audiobooks, and so on. It's a trade-off, not a defect, and most people seem to prefer the iPod way.
iPods are not open devices.
Which comparable open device would you recommend that U.S. residents buy instead of an iPod Touch?
Probably an Archos device, or perhaps the Samsung P2. I haven't looked into it too much. I think iRiver makes a music player running Android, that might also be an interesting option.
"They literally can't perceive other individuals as feeling entities, which is why it is so easy for them to inflict harm on animals and people. Only the threat of legal sanction stops them"
This is probably not true in most cases. Sociopathic people behave like normal people most of the time not because they are afraid of punishment, but because it is a successful strategy for getting jobs and money and becoming successful. Even without laws, behaving in sociopathic ways would harm sociopaths in most situations, such as alienating people who are of help to them.
You don't hire sociopaths who behave like sociopaths regardless of whether they acted against the law. So they don't behave in obviously sociopathic ways regardless of what the laws say.
"The thinking side of the human mind considers the action, weighs the consequences, and then decides whether to follow through."
This is probably but an illusion, a trick our brain plays on us. It is very likely that we make a decision first, and then rationalize that decision, cheating ourselves into thinking that we actually consciously weighted the consequences before making the decision. There are experiments which show that humans come to a decision long before their brain actually thinks they do.
It is true that most scientific evidence points towards humans not really having any kind of choice at all. However, our own experience is so different from the evidence and subjectively seems to contradict it that it is hard to accept the evidence even for people who would normally consider themselves rational.
Another thought is that even if we have no choice, the current legal system may make sense because it may act as a deterrent. In reality, I'm pretty sure the effect is the opposite (send people to jail, imprint even more violent behaviour on them, release them again, repeat).
Besides, the people who do believe they have a choice are forced to not accept the evidence because they don't have the choice of accepting it:-)
You can replace the battery, it's just not simple. No need to throw it out. And all iPods use simple databases maintained by a desktop application (usually iTunes), so you can't simply copy mp3 files to them.
iPods are not open devices. They're usually not the best choice for hackers.
Presumably, one explanation would be that the profit from the smaller stores that it is smaller than the administrative cost of sending them CDs. They could ask for more money, I guess, but perhaps they just don't want the administrative overhead.
Normal: Things we have observed for a long time. Not normal: Things we have observed only recently.
Since global warming is the main change currently happening to our climate, attributing other changes to global warming is often an acceptable first hypothesis, at least if there's a known mechanism that could potentially link the two.
"Typically, you don't need to. Anyone can read any study and get a basic idea of how believable the conclusions are. How big is the sample? Is there a control group? Does the data show causation, or only correlation? Is the data self-reported? There are a bunch of simple questions you can ask to gauge how much stock you should put in a study."
That's a valuable skill that you either were taught or stumbled apon, not all people think that way.
Yes, I was unclear. When I said "Anyone can read any study and get a basic idea of how believable the conclusions are", I didn't mean to say that anyone automatically has all the knowledge required to do this. I meant to say that it doesn't require much mental capacity. Anyone can learn to do it.
You are right that most people are unfortunately never taught how to read a study and what to look for in a study. In fact, I recently discussed this with a friend of mine who went to school for about 20 years and had what anyone would consider to be a great education, and yet did not know what exactly the placebo effect is.
"Idealy that is correct but you* cannot have expertise (let alone time) to investigate every issue personally"
Typically, you don't need to. Anyone can read any study and get a basic idea of how believable the conclusions are. How big is the sample? Is there a control group? Does the data show causation, or only correlation? Is the data self-reported? There are a bunch of simple questions you can ask to gauge how much stock you should put in a study.
If you don't want to do that, you can, of course, figure out whether to trust the people who wrote the study. Some things to look out for is their qualifications, and who paid for the study.
And if you don't want to do that, I agree with you that trying to figure out what the consensus is is a good idea. Unfortunately, the media is typically a poor way of figuring this out, since they always feel to need to be fair and balanced, while reality is hardly ever fair and balanced. In this particular case, there is no question that the globe is warming, as you say. It is also clear from the data that CO2 is at least partly to blame for the increase in temperature, and there is further no question that mankind is responsible for a sizeable part of all CO2 emissions.
Unfortunately, if you go with many media reports, you don't really get that impression; hence my original point that you should be sceptical.
Based on what data? I don't really feel like trusting the future of the planet on somebody's hunch, and the data I've seen seems to show that global warming happens, that it is caused by CO2 emissions, and that it is highly likely that mankind at least contributes substantially to the trend.
"that humans have a minor impact on the globe's warming trend."
Small changes can cause huge changes if the system was in balance before the small change was made.
"There are plenty of other things putting out CO2: cows,"
Okay, that I don't understand at all, perhaps somebody can explain this to me, because I think I'm honestly missing something here. As far as I can tell, this whole "cow emission" thing is total bullshit. Cows' farts don't release new CO2 into the atmosphere. They release CO2 that was previously bound by the plants the cows ate, don't they? So it's all just part of the cycle of life. The real problem isn't the CO2 that was bound by plants during the last few decades and is now released again. The real problem is the CO2 that was bound millions of years ago and is now being released again, destabilizing the climate mankind has enjoyed recently.
If you're simply "Questioning the Mainstream", you're missing the point somewhat. The point is not to question something specific; the point is to question everything. Not only should you be sceptic of people who believe that global warming is real and man-made, but also of those who deny this. In fact, what you should do in all cases is not trust anyone, but look at the studies and data yourself, and judge it on sound scientific reasons.
It's not a question of cherry-picking. Lightning does not ignite dirigibles because they're filled with hydrogen, which does not ignite unless mixed with oxygen. Most dirigibles of the time passed through thunderstorms and were hit by lightning repeatedly, without harm. The problem is that these ships vent hydrogen when landing. If struck then, the ships could ignite. Fortunately, modern blimps don't use hydrogen at all, so there's no chance of them being ignited by lightning.
Dirigibles are usually not harmed by lightning. In fact, even the Hindenburg passed through thunderstorms and was struck by lightning several time without harm.
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I find this one of the most interesting questions when it comes to religion: The the leaders (or "profiteers") of a religion actually believe their own words?
It seems that in some cases, they clearly do. I'm pretty sure the Pope actually believes. But there are some cases where I truly doubt this is the case. Many of America's Televangelists very obviously use religion only for their own gain, for sex, money and power. If they believed their own words, they would have to assume that they would end up in hell.
Likewise, while Scientology's current leaders may (or may not) believe the Xenu story, I'm pretty sure Hubbard himself never believed a single word of it.
Being exposed to opinions you don't like is not the same as being persecuted.
That is pretty convincing. Where do I send my tithe?
Actually, I belong to a splinter group of the cult of the gnome believers. Our dogma clearly states that gnomes steal socks. Those who believe that they steal underpants are heretics. Since I can't come over there and burn you, I hereby respectfully request that you burn yourself. It's for your own sake, as it will save your soul, as well as your socks.
"To say that these religious systems don't make useful predictions is false."
Tell me one experiment whose outcome can be predicted using the "theory" of ID.
"These systems must be useful, or they would have driven their adherents to extinction many generations ago."
I did not say that religion wasn't "useful" (at least for some values of "useful"). Anthropologists and psychologists can probably give you a huge list of reasons why religion may have had beneficial effects on the survival of certain societies, not least of which the fact that it often makes people willing to die for said societies (of course, science is making the requirement to die for one's society more and more moot as we can now easily kill people without being personally involved - today, the society with the better science usually wins, not the one with the people more willing to die).
As for the rest of your post, I'm honestly not entirely sure what your point is, and how it contradicts (or has anything to do with) what I wrote. You seem to imply that society might always require religion to survive. I honestly doubt it, but even so, your point seems to be entirely orthogonal to my point. I merely said that religion "doesn't make any kinds of useful predictions".
""The only thing this kind of sociopathic requirement causes is hit-and-run troll posts." Not so. This isn't about spreading the message. If you've ever seen the comment threads on some of the sites they call "hostile", you'll notice that commenters who try to push a creationist message don't just get ignored, they get hit back hard with a combination of mockery, direct insults, and point by point refutations in extreme detail. This is reliable.
I'm not sure how this contradicts what I said? I didn't say it was about spreading the message, I merely pointed out the effects this has on message boards.
It's hard to speculate about the intention of these people. I would agree that setting up a "us vs. them" attitude plays a role here. Another reason might be that they want to cause the impression that there are more people believing in this kind of stuff than there actually are.
"Well, an open mind within the bounds of reason is the best you can accomplish."
What are the bounds of reason? There is medicine available today of which we are not sure how it works. But we do know that it works. Theoretically, the same could apply to homeopathy. This is not about reason, it's about evidence. It's true that homeopathy makes no sense when you reason about it, but that alone does not mean that it can't work. The evidence shows that it can't work.
"This is also not the same thing as a lack of an opinion"
Right. Scientists, of course, do often start trials or studies because they do have an opinion and want to test it. You don't have to believe in homeopathy to accept that there is - in theory - a small chance that it might work due to some weird reason that we haven't figured out yet, and that it's thus worth being investigated.
Being open-minded is not the same as not having an opinion. Being open-minded merely means that you can accept the idea that you might be wrong, and that you're willing to accept the evidence even if it goes against your opinion.
"You see, they posit that scientists, being hateful curmudgeons, despise homeopathic medicine as not made from enough harmful chemicals, and their negative thoughts cancel out the natural psychic abilities that all water has."
And that is an example of somebody with a predetermined opinion, who isn't open-minded to accept the evidence that goes against this opinion.
Admittedly, I'm sock-gnome-agnostic. Show me the evidence!
If you read the article, you'll see that they don't require "discussion" of any kind:
"provide at least 10 posts defending ID that youâ(TM)ve made on âoehostileâ websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade)."
The only thing this kind of sociopathic requirement causes is hit-and-run troll posts.
Also:
"What ID brings to the table is a new reexamination of facts."
This is wrong. Scientists already reexamine facts constantly. ID does not add anything useful to the discussion, because it postulates a "theory" that can neither be proven nor disproven, and doesn't make any kinds of useful predictions. That's like saying "postulating sock gnomes requires you to reexamine the facts of where you left your socks yesterday." It doesn't.
And finally:
"The other problem with ID is also prevalent in fields such as homeopathy and supernatural research. The attempt to address the issues at hand with a completely open mind leads to bad conclusions."
That, again, is wrong. Scientists are required to have a completely open mind when it comes to everything, even homeopathy. This is precisely why we have useful studies in which scientists tested the claims made by homeopathy and other "alternative" medicine. It's also why we know which of these things work, and which don't.
The ones who don't have an open mind are the people who still believe homeopathy works. Their closed-mindedness makes them unable to accept the evidence.
Interesting, thanks for the information. I guess the experiments indeed do not negate free will, but to me, they are at least evidence that the freedom we experience may be only an illusion.
Yes. Clearly, GP wasn't there when the spiders were actually alive. For all we know, they were kilometers in length and just shrunk due to being really old. I think that is the most likely explanation.
And all iPods use simple databases maintained by a desktop application (usually iTunes), so you can't simply copy mp3 files to them.
A lot of people would call it a defect if the device cannot maintain its own database, unlike comparable MP3 players.
And a lot of people would call it a defect if your MP3 player did not recognize your playlists from your desktop player, if the MP3 player took half a minute to scan the new MP3s every time you copy a bunch of them to it, if the MP3 player would not synchronize track position between devices for audiobooks, and so on. It's a trade-off, not a defect, and most people seem to prefer the iPod way.
iPods are not open devices.
Which comparable open device would you recommend that U.S. residents buy instead of an iPod Touch?
Probably an Archos device, or perhaps the Samsung P2. I haven't looked into it too much. I think iRiver makes a music player running Android, that might also be an interesting option.
"They literally can't perceive other individuals as feeling entities, which is why it is so easy for them to inflict harm on animals and people. Only the threat of legal sanction stops them"
This is probably not true in most cases. Sociopathic people behave like normal people most of the time not because they are afraid of punishment, but because it is a successful strategy for getting jobs and money and becoming successful. Even without laws, behaving in sociopathic ways would harm sociopaths in most situations, such as alienating people who are of help to them.
You don't hire sociopaths who behave like sociopaths regardless of whether they acted against the law. So they don't behave in obviously sociopathic ways regardless of what the laws say.
"The thinking side of the human mind considers the action, weighs the consequences, and then decides whether to follow through."
This is probably but an illusion, a trick our brain plays on us. It is very likely that we make a decision first, and then rationalize that decision, cheating ourselves into thinking that we actually consciously weighted the consequences before making the decision. There are experiments which show that humans come to a decision long before their brain actually thinks they do.
It is true that most scientific evidence points towards humans not really having any kind of choice at all. However, our own experience is so different from the evidence and subjectively seems to contradict it that it is hard to accept the evidence even for people who would normally consider themselves rational.
Another thought is that even if we have no choice, the current legal system may make sense because it may act as a deterrent. In reality, I'm pretty sure the effect is the opposite (send people to jail, imprint even more violent behaviour on them, release them again, repeat).
Besides, the people who do believe they have a choice are forced to not accept the evidence because they don't have the choice of accepting it :-)
You can replace the battery, it's just not simple. No need to throw it out. And all iPods use simple databases maintained by a desktop application (usually iTunes), so you can't simply copy mp3 files to them.
iPods are not open devices. They're usually not the best choice for hackers.
Presumably, one explanation would be that the profit from the smaller stores that it is smaller than the administrative cost of sending them CDs. They could ask for more money, I guess, but perhaps they just don't want the administrative overhead.
Normal: Things we have observed for a long time. Not normal: Things we have observed only recently.
Since global warming is the main change currently happening to our climate, attributing other changes to global warming is often an acceptable first hypothesis, at least if there's a known mechanism that could potentially link the two.
"Typically, you don't need to. Anyone can read any study and get a basic idea of how believable the conclusions are. How big is the sample? Is there a control group? Does the data show causation, or only correlation? Is the data self-reported? There are a bunch of simple questions you can ask to gauge how much stock you should put in a study."
That's a valuable skill that you either were taught or stumbled apon, not all people think that way.
Yes, I was unclear. When I said "Anyone can read any study and get a basic idea of how believable the conclusions are", I didn't mean to say that anyone automatically has all the knowledge required to do this. I meant to say that it doesn't require much mental capacity. Anyone can learn to do it.
You are right that most people are unfortunately never taught how to read a study and what to look for in a study. In fact, I recently discussed this with a friend of mine who went to school for about 20 years and had what anyone would consider to be a great education, and yet did not know what exactly the placebo effect is.
The whole discussion refers back to this original quote:
"The heavy lifters all seem to have been struck by lightning or otherwise done in by weather."
"Idealy that is correct but you* cannot have expertise (let alone time) to investigate every issue personally"
Typically, you don't need to. Anyone can read any study and get a basic idea of how believable the conclusions are. How big is the sample? Is there a control group? Does the data show causation, or only correlation? Is the data self-reported? There are a bunch of simple questions you can ask to gauge how much stock you should put in a study.
If you don't want to do that, you can, of course, figure out whether to trust the people who wrote the study. Some things to look out for is their qualifications, and who paid for the study.
And if you don't want to do that, I agree with you that trying to figure out what the consensus is is a good idea. Unfortunately, the media is typically a poor way of figuring this out, since they always feel to need to be fair and balanced, while reality is hardly ever fair and balanced. In this particular case, there is no question that the globe is warming, as you say. It is also clear from the data that CO2 is at least partly to blame for the increase in temperature, and there is further no question that mankind is responsible for a sizeable part of all CO2 emissions.
Unfortunately, if you go with many media reports, you don't really get that impression; hence my original point that you should be sceptical.
"I would contend"
Based on what data? I don't really feel like trusting the future of the planet on somebody's hunch, and the data I've seen seems to show that global warming happens, that it is caused by CO2 emissions, and that it is highly likely that mankind at least contributes substantially to the trend.
"that humans have a minor impact on the globe's warming trend."
Small changes can cause huge changes if the system was in balance before the small change was made.
"There are plenty of other things putting out CO2: cows,"
Okay, that I don't understand at all, perhaps somebody can explain this to me, because I think I'm honestly missing something here. As far as I can tell, this whole "cow emission" thing is total bullshit. Cows' farts don't release new CO2 into the atmosphere. They release CO2 that was previously bound by the plants the cows ate, don't they? So it's all just part of the cycle of life. The real problem isn't the CO2 that was bound by plants during the last few decades and is now released again. The real problem is the CO2 that was bound millions of years ago and is now being released again, destabilizing the climate mankind has enjoyed recently.
If you're simply "Questioning the Mainstream", you're missing the point somewhat. The point is not to question something specific; the point is to question everything. Not only should you be sceptic of people who believe that global warming is real and man-made, but also of those who deny this. In fact, what you should do in all cases is not trust anyone, but look at the studies and data yourself, and judge it on sound scientific reasons.
It's not a question of cherry-picking. Lightning does not ignite dirigibles because they're filled with hydrogen, which does not ignite unless mixed with oxygen. Most dirigibles of the time passed through thunderstorms and were hit by lightning repeatedly, without harm. The problem is that these ships vent hydrogen when landing. If struck then, the ships could ignite. Fortunately, modern blimps don't use hydrogen at all, so there's no chance of them being ignited by lightning.
Dirigibles are usually not harmed by lightning. In fact, even the Hindenburg passed through thunderstorms and was struck by lightning several time without harm.