Buying lottery tickets is not an investment because it has a poor expected value (most of the time). This is why playing slot machines or black jack is also not investing. Maybe playing poker is if you are good at it. It is very possible that bitcoin currently is a poor investment from a speculative perspective, given that we don't know what it will do, it's not strictly a bad investment from a mathematical perspective.
I would not buy bitcoin now. But if I had a choice between buying bitcoin and lottery tickets, I'd take the bitcoin.
But is there any use in being an equally biased counterbalance?
Yes. Reject any idea that would make people reduce their standard of living until it's certain that it's both necessary, and the solution that causes the minimum possible reduction. Basic morality, if you ask me.
My question was not about actions that should be taken, but rather one of belief. If you think a bunch of people are wrong in their belief, does it provide any utility to believe the opposite rather than just ignoring them and coming to your own conclusion.
Beyond the scale of a few thousand years, it almost certainly is.
It is apparently one of many causes for slow rate climate change on the scale of ice ages, but I don't see that as being an adequate explanation for the dramatic change in rate we are seeing now.
Consider the following statements
I'm a libertarian so I don't think we should do solution X to global climate change
I'm a libertarian so I don't believe theory Y describing the cause of global climate change is true
I'm a libertarian so I don't believe theory Z believed by liberals and statists
The first one seems reasonable to me, but the others do not, regardless of what X, Y and Z are. One is a value proposition, the others imply that truth is dependent upon belief.
You do understand how statistics work against models, right? You have to quantify the statistical confidence that the model wasn't right by accident. If you have 10,000 models, then a 5-sigma event for any one model might only be a 2-sigma event for the universe of models (in reality it's better, because the models largely copy one another, but if they were all disjoint it would be very difficult to prove anything).
I understand you're point about having more models increases your chances that any individual one will fit the data by chance, but having more models also increases the chances of any individual one being correct or being very close to being correct. Having less models in general is not better. If you have some way of filtering out bad models beforehand (e.g. models with bad methodology), then obviously we should do that. But in general having more models is a good thing. Even if none of them are correct, the patterns of which turn out to be correct and which do not will be more dense and possibly lead us to figuring out which features of these models are good and which are not, and may lead to new insights in better ways to interpret the data.
Well, the sun is the source of effectively all the Earth's heat.
Not *all* but sure, it is the source of most of the earth's surface temperature. Maybe I should have been more specific with my question. I was not asking if you had evidence that the sun was the major source of heat, but rather if you had any evidence that the sun was the major driving force in the rate of change in temperature.
Well, the sun is the source of effectively all the Earth's heat. Are you familiar with the history of climate change beyond the past few centuries? We get a glaciation cycle every 100k years in the current ice age. The best theory is that's a solar activity cycle (it's a very regular cycle, too regular to be a feedback mechanism in the Earth's climate). We've been in an ice age since the big dinosaurs died off - that's also thought to be a longer-term solar activity cycle. The glaciers should have returned 10k years ago like clockwork, but they didn't. Why not? Probably something to do with solar activity, possibly the Quaternary Ice Age ended 10k years ago and we've been shifting to a Warm Earth.
According to most scientists, the big swings in climate in the past (e.g. on the scale of ice gaes) happened very slowly, and we are seeing a much more rapid rate of change coinciding with the industrial revolution. I don't think they are as concerned with the temperature as the rate of change, because this doesn't give as much time for ecosystems to adapt, etc.
There are also some papers claiming that more fine grained and recent temperature changes are also explained by solar activity, but those solar models have even less track record than climate models, so meh. Merely creating a model that explains historical activity doesn't count for much.
I would ask you for a citation these papers, but you don't seem to be endorsing them, so I don't think I care enough to ask.
The best thing is for solar power to become so cheap that no one wanted to use anything else. That's happening anyway. As soon as someone starts wanting to coerce my behavior to solve what they see as a problem, I'm not interested.
My question was not about advocating any particular solution. My question was about falsification.
You say that what would convince you that you are wrong is better models that have accurate predictions for decades. That would certainly convince me. But I would find evidence short of that to also be convincing. Maybe I would not be 100% convinced, but I could at least be convinced to the level of being more likely than not.
But you also seem already convinced that solar activity is the cause. I have seen a bunch of data showing the opposite, but even according to you, there is
I'm not forced to use windows at work for real work (though I am forced to use it for microsoft office and outlook). But when I use windows at home, I have cygwin, gcc, bash, python, linux VMs, etc at my disposal. There is almost nothing *nixy I can't do in windows (thanks to *nix tools, not so much windows)
Far better models than we have today. There are so many models that pretty much anything that could happen is going to be predicted by one of them, so that doesn't mean much.
That's kind of the point of creating all these models. For every model, there is a person(s) who thought it would be a good predictor, and we will find out in time if they are right. I agree we need good models to have confidence about what is going to happen in the future, but I don't think we need models (although they can help) to determine if/how much human caused global climate change has already happened.
Of course, I don't believe that's possible, because I think the sun is the major driving force in climate change. So, a good predictive model of solar activity which says "nope, not the sun" would do it too.
Why do you think the sun is the major driving force? Is that based on any evidence? Why do you need a predictive model to be convinced that the sun is not the major driving force? How about just a bunch of historical data showing no correlation between solar output and global temperature?
Sadly, that's an even harder task than Earth climate modeling.
It's pretty easy if you find no significant long term correlation and predict that global temperature is basically unaffected by the sorts of variation in solar activity we've already seen. We can decide we need a model if all of a sudden global temperature becomes very sensitive to solar activity, or if solar activity becomes more erratic, but is that really necessary at this point?
Every politician in the world wants more power. That's all they ever want. That's the only reason there's any government involvement with climate change in the first place.
That seems like a pretty convoluted way to get power. I agree that politicians want more power. I don't think that's a good reason not to try to identify and solve problems. Surely it's good to know if problems exist and what could be done to solve them, even if we don't want to grant totalitarian authority to a government to fix it.
You said a lot of things. I don't think any of the things you said answer my only question, of what evidence would convince you that you were wrong.
You said you already believe mankind affects climate. Ok. So in that case you don't need to be convinced you are wrong, or you'd need to be convinced mankind has zero effect on the climate.
You said "negatively" is subjective. Ok so what evidence would convince you that you were wrong to your own subjective measure of what counts as "negatively"?
You said we don't know how much the climate is being afftected. Ok. So what evidence would convince that we do know how much (to a reasonable level of certainty) mankind is affecting the climate?
You said we don't know the costs of doing nothing vs doing everything and we can't even approach such questions and our models are "barely predictive". Ok, so what would convince you that our models are finally predictive enough to make those kinds of assessments of cost?
You said no answer is worth granting totalitarian power to any government. Ok. I don't think anyone wants that, but whatever. This is irrelevant to my question of what it would take to convince you you were wrong even if you still think we should do nothing about it.
You said science is slow. Ok fine. So pretend science got much faster. What evidence hypothetical evidence obtained hypothetically fast would convince you that you were wrong?
Do you know what convincing (to you) evidence looks like? Would you recognize it if you saw it? Would you know why it was convincing to you? Or would it need to just feel convincing?
The way I see it, all software makes tradeoffs between complexity of use and complexity of design. Windows 10 is trying to be simpler to use by relying on an AI voice assistant, and guessing at what your intentions are, this leads to complexity of design. Some people (e.g. people who are not used to using computers) may find this orders of magnitude easier to understand than a CLI. Other uses (i.e. people who know exactly what they want to do and how) may find Cortana useless and frustrating, and prefer the lack of restrictions and handholding of a simple linux distro.
It's a spectrum. I think windows is designed very well for what it is (i.e. I dread to think what the open source version of windows 10 would be like), but I am definitely more at home piping text commands to eachother.
I think I did prefer windows 7 to windows 10, but I upgraded anyway because I knew windows 10 will be supported longer. I had a few problems that a falsely attributed to windows 10 so I had a negative first impression, but some of those problems turned out to be a result of faulty network cables. After realizing that I upgraded to windows 10 the same day I changed rooms (and in wall cables), my experience has been better. I can't speak to your specific driver problems.
Good point. If only someone could produce an anecdote about an unnamed prominent climate denier saying something stupid, it would prove global climate change was real again.
It's not just about proprietary software. The *nix environment is better at doing a lot of tasks than windows. My primary work desktop (What all our software development is done on) is linux. We also have a windows box for doing Ms office and outlook. My primary home desktop would be Linux if I could play the games I want to play on Linux.
The irony is that Open source software is so convenient, that it runs perfectly good on Windows, allowing me to do everything I want (work and games) on one machine. If open source software did not work so well on windows, I might actually have to make a hard choice between windows and linux, or just run 2 machines
The same cannot be said of the proprietary software that I use (e.g. some games, and MS Office). Those do not run well on platforms other than windows, so using windows is more convenient. But these problems are not a result license (i.e. that it is proprietary). I don't have a problem paying for software. I pay for some games on linux. I pay for plex (which runs on all major platforms).
I don't use linux because it's free. I use it because it is better at doing lots of things, and the list of things it is worse at is shrinking every day.
Or regular mining. I don't think digging precious metals out of the ground is carbon neutral. At least crypto mining is not damaging the environment directly.
Now that Intel has finally asserted and solidified it's superiority and dominance over all it's competitors in the CPU market, it only makes sense to branch out into other markets.
Intel probably doesn't have to try that hard anymore. Their lead is so big that they can probably just continue to profit indefinitely even without any real innovation on their part.
That said, I'm hearing that Intel has managed to get a 28-core chip running at 5 GHz on all cores. Their advancements in tablecloth technology has made this possible with standard watercooling solutions.
What's the point of making a new product if some group of people (will just buy them all)? That will only result in more money. What's the point of money if all it does is purchase things you want?
They aren't really smart enough to do anything but grandstand. They may as well be grilling a physicist about quantum theory. They know they don't know anything. The least they could do is try to look important during this historic occasion.
I call on all my fellow Trump supporters to show solidarity with our president to smash our computers and show Fake News Jeff Bezos what real Americans think of him.
Trump doesn't like little boys like Marco Rubio and Bob Corker. He likes big delivery men like Devin Nunes who will take important documents from the whitehouse all the way to the whitehouse.
About half the friends I had growing up liked to play violent video games. The half that didn't play violent video games retained their empathy and never became violent. The half that played violent video games all became murderous psychopaths. The violent half never actually killed anyone, but it was only because they had great difficulty finding their victims after going blind from masturbating too much.
Let me be clear: the FBI supports information security measures, including strong encryption. Actually, the FBI is on the front line fighting cyber crime and economic espionage. But information security programs need to be thoughtfully designed so they don't undermine the lawful tools we need to keep the American people safe. --Christopher Wray
Translation from FBIese: We would like you all to use very secure encryption that no one can break into except for us
1. I wouldn't characterize what I did as making an accusation, so much as bringing up a point.
2. I did not ignore the rest of your post, as evidenced by the fact that I also referenced other parts of your post.
3. I do acknowledge that you brought up both the low and high ends, but I can see how someone reading this might come to the conclusion that the low and the high ends might be equally weighted, making the average somewhere in the middle. There are in fact many more Muslims in Western countries than in Gaza, and Gaza is in a very violent environment where tempers and emotions are high. I think if you had mentioned the the 62% was from Gaza, someone reading this comment might have a better idea of the reality without having to click your link.
For polling error, unless you're proposing there's huge errors exclusively in one direction that happen across multiple polls across the last decade... it doesn't diminish the problem.
I specifically said I don't expect the polling errors to be big enough to be the entire explanation. But I do think it's very possible they are not as high as they seem. It's also possible they could be even higher. My only claim here is that these numbers really do matter, and polls like this are usually not very reliable.
And it's not that the racist label bothers me specifically, it's that it indicates societies desire to pretend the problem doesn't exist because trying to fix it wouldn't be PC.
It's certainly reflective of the will of *some* people in society to pretend the problem doesn't exist. There is also a another segment of our society that thinks all Muslims are evil. I don't think fighting back against only one of these 2 irrational sides is productive. I think we need to effectively combat all forms of irrational ideology if we are to succeed. This means calling out all sides on their bullshit, and being as intellectually honest as possible.
I never said anything about parity in extremist views between christianity and Islam. I am not a person who claims that all religions are equally dangerous, and I do think the polls you cite are indicative of a real problem.
I would like to bring up a couple points, however.
#1. Like all polls, there are probably polling errors. These can result from poor translations of questions and/or answers. They can result from the fact that people do want or feel comfortable answering questions honestly (e.g. due to living in oppressive countries, etc). These numbers are alarmingly high, to the point that I would doubt polling error could be the only problem, but I wouldn't treat these numbers as gospel.
#2. I don't think it's fair to take the country (or region) with the most extreme stat (gaza at 62%) and present that as representative. It may be representative of Gaza, but it's not representative of Muslims in general. I could say something like "Depending on the county, up to 90% of Californians believe president Obama is the antichrist." That might be technically true, but omitting the fact that the 1 country with 90% of people believing this also happens to be the least populous and most religious county is being disingenuous, and misleading people about the beliefs that are representative of Californians in general. I obviously made this example up. What I am getting at is that we should be sticking to averages of of the populations we are talking about, and not citing stats about the most extreme sub-populations unless we are referring to those sub-populations.
#3 We are all painted as evil racists by somebody. It's not the end of the world. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. You don't need to let others' opinions of you carry any weight.
Some christian fundamentalists build replicas of Noah's Ark. Some Christian fundamentalists bomb abortion clinics. Some Christian fundamentalists commit genocide. Maybe you don't want to lump the genocidal christians in with the fundamentalists. Ok fine. I don't know what to call those people either. Shall we call them Christianists? This seems like a semantic debate.
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Buying lottery tickets is not an investment because it has a poor expected value (most of the time). This is why playing slot machines or black jack is also not investing. Maybe playing poker is if you are good at it. It is very possible that bitcoin currently is a poor investment from a speculative perspective, given that we don't know what it will do, it's not strictly a bad investment from a mathematical perspective.
I would not buy bitcoin now. But if I had a choice between buying bitcoin and lottery tickets, I'd take the bitcoin.
But is there any use in being an equally biased counterbalance?
Yes. Reject any idea that would make people reduce their standard of living until it's certain that it's both necessary, and the solution that causes the minimum possible reduction. Basic morality, if you ask me.
My question was not about actions that should be taken, but rather one of belief. If you think a bunch of people are wrong in their belief, does it provide any utility to believe the opposite rather than just ignoring them and coming to your own conclusion.
Beyond the scale of a few thousand years, it almost certainly is.
It is apparently one of many causes for slow rate climate change on the scale of ice ages, but I don't see that as being an adequate explanation for the dramatic change in rate we are seeing now.
Consider the following statements
I'm a libertarian so I don't think we should do solution X to global climate change
I'm a libertarian so I don't believe theory Y describing the cause of global climate change is true
I'm a libertarian so I don't believe theory Z believed by liberals and statists
The first one seems reasonable to me, but the others do not, regardless of what X, Y and Z are. One is a value proposition, the others imply that truth is dependent upon belief.
You do understand how statistics work against models, right? You have to quantify the statistical confidence that the model wasn't right by accident. If you have 10,000 models, then a 5-sigma event for any one model might only be a 2-sigma event for the universe of models (in reality it's better, because the models largely copy one another, but if they were all disjoint it would be very difficult to prove anything).
I understand you're point about having more models increases your chances that any individual one will fit the data by chance, but having more models also increases the chances of any individual one being correct or being very close to being correct. Having less models in general is not better. If you have some way of filtering out bad models beforehand (e.g. models with bad methodology), then obviously we should do that. But in general having more models is a good thing. Even if none of them are correct, the patterns of which turn out to be correct and which do not will be more dense and possibly lead us to figuring out which features of these models are good and which are not, and may lead to new insights in better ways to interpret the data.
Well, the sun is the source of effectively all the Earth's heat.
Not *all* but sure, it is the source of most of the earth's surface temperature. Maybe I should have been more specific with my question. I was not asking if you had evidence that the sun was the major source of heat, but rather if you had any evidence that the sun was the major driving force in the rate of change in temperature.
Well, the sun is the source of effectively all the Earth's heat. Are you familiar with the history of climate change beyond the past few centuries? We get a glaciation cycle every 100k years in the current ice age. The best theory is that's a solar activity cycle (it's a very regular cycle, too regular to be a feedback mechanism in the Earth's climate). We've been in an ice age since the big dinosaurs died off - that's also thought to be a longer-term solar activity cycle. The glaciers should have returned 10k years ago like clockwork, but they didn't. Why not? Probably something to do with solar activity, possibly the Quaternary Ice Age ended 10k years ago and we've been shifting to a Warm Earth.
According to most scientists, the big swings in climate in the past (e.g. on the scale of ice gaes) happened very slowly, and we are seeing a much more rapid rate of change coinciding with the industrial revolution. I don't think they are as concerned with the temperature as the rate of change, because this doesn't give as much time for ecosystems to adapt, etc.
There are also some papers claiming that more fine grained and recent temperature changes are also explained by solar activity, but those solar models have even less track record than climate models, so meh. Merely creating a model that explains historical activity doesn't count for much.
I would ask you for a citation these papers, but you don't seem to be endorsing them, so I don't think I care enough to ask.
The best thing is for solar power to become so cheap that no one wanted to use anything else. That's happening anyway. As soon as someone starts wanting to coerce my behavior to solve what they see as a problem, I'm not interested.
My question was not about advocating any particular solution. My question was about falsification.
You say that what would convince you that you are wrong is better models that have accurate predictions for decades. That would certainly convince me. But I would find evidence short of that to also be convincing. Maybe I would not be 100% convinced, but I could at least be convinced to the level of being more likely than not.
But you also seem already convinced that solar activity is the cause. I have seen a bunch of data showing the opposite, but even according to you, there is
I'm not forced to use windows at work for real work (though I am forced to use it for microsoft office and outlook). But when I use windows at home, I have cygwin, gcc, bash, python, linux VMs, etc at my disposal. There is almost nothing *nixy I can't do in windows (thanks to *nix tools, not so much windows)
Far better models than we have today. There are so many models that pretty much anything that could happen is going to be predicted by one of them, so that doesn't mean much.
That's kind of the point of creating all these models. For every model, there is a person(s) who thought it would be a good predictor, and we will find out in time if they are right. I agree we need good models to have confidence about what is going to happen in the future, but I don't think we need models (although they can help) to determine if/how much human caused global climate change has already happened.
Of course, I don't believe that's possible, because I think the sun is the major driving force in climate change. So, a good predictive model of solar activity which says "nope, not the sun" would do it too.
Why do you think the sun is the major driving force? Is that based on any evidence? Why do you need a predictive model to be convinced that the sun is not the major driving force? How about just a bunch of historical data showing no correlation between solar output and global temperature?
Sadly, that's an even harder task than Earth climate modeling.
It's pretty easy if you find no significant long term correlation and predict that global temperature is basically unaffected by the sorts of variation in solar activity we've already seen. We can decide we need a model if all of a sudden global temperature becomes very sensitive to solar activity, or if solar activity becomes more erratic, but is that really necessary at this point?
Every politician in the world wants more power. That's all they ever want. That's the only reason there's any government involvement with climate change in the first place.
That seems like a pretty convoluted way to get power. I agree that politicians want more power. I don't think that's a good reason not to try to identify and solve problems. Surely it's good to know if problems exist and what could be done to solve them, even if we don't want to grant totalitarian authority to a government to fix it.
You said a lot of things. I don't think any of the things you said answer my only question, of what evidence would convince you that you were wrong.
You said you already believe mankind affects climate. Ok. So in that case you don't need to be convinced you are wrong, or you'd need to be convinced mankind has zero effect on the climate.
You said "negatively" is subjective. Ok so what evidence would convince you that you were wrong to your own subjective measure of what counts as "negatively"?
You said we don't know how much the climate is being afftected. Ok. So what evidence would convince that we do know how much (to a reasonable level of certainty) mankind is affecting the climate?
You said we don't know the costs of doing nothing vs doing everything and we can't even approach such questions and our models are "barely predictive". Ok, so what would convince you that our models are finally predictive enough to make those kinds of assessments of cost?
You said no answer is worth granting totalitarian power to any government. Ok. I don't think anyone wants that, but whatever. This is irrelevant to my question of what it would take to convince you you were wrong even if you still think we should do nothing about it.
You said science is slow. Ok fine. So pretend science got much faster. What evidence hypothetical evidence obtained hypothetically fast would convince you that you were wrong?
Do you know what convincing (to you) evidence looks like? Would you recognize it if you saw it? Would you know why it was convincing to you? Or would it need to just feel convincing?
The way I see it, all software makes tradeoffs between complexity of use and complexity of design. Windows 10 is trying to be simpler to use by relying on an AI voice assistant, and guessing at what your intentions are, this leads to complexity of design. Some people (e.g. people who are not used to using computers) may find this orders of magnitude easier to understand than a CLI. Other uses (i.e. people who know exactly what they want to do and how) may find Cortana useless and frustrating, and prefer the lack of restrictions and handholding of a simple linux distro. It's a spectrum. I think windows is designed very well for what it is (i.e. I dread to think what the open source version of windows 10 would be like), but I am definitely more at home piping text commands to eachother. I think I did prefer windows 7 to windows 10, but I upgraded anyway because I knew windows 10 will be supported longer. I had a few problems that a falsely attributed to windows 10 so I had a negative first impression, but some of those problems turned out to be a result of faulty network cables. After realizing that I upgraded to windows 10 the same day I changed rooms (and in wall cables), my experience has been better. I can't speak to your specific driver problems.
FYI you get extra bitcoins if you do it in an enclosed garage.
Good point. If only someone could produce an anecdote about an unnamed prominent climate denier saying something stupid, it would prove global climate change was real again.
AC beat me to it. What would it take to convince you that you are wrong? Is there any conceivable evidence that could do this?
It's not just about proprietary software. The *nix environment is better at doing a lot of tasks than windows. My primary work desktop (What all our software development is done on) is linux. We also have a windows box for doing Ms office and outlook. My primary home desktop would be Linux if I could play the games I want to play on Linux.
The irony is that Open source software is so convenient, that it runs perfectly good on Windows, allowing me to do everything I want (work and games) on one machine. If open source software did not work so well on windows, I might actually have to make a hard choice between windows and linux, or just run 2 machines
The same cannot be said of the proprietary software that I use (e.g. some games, and MS Office). Those do not run well on platforms other than windows, so using windows is more convenient. But these problems are not a result license (i.e. that it is proprietary). I don't have a problem paying for software. I pay for some games on linux. I pay for plex (which runs on all major platforms).
I don't use linux because it's free. I use it because it is better at doing lots of things, and the list of things it is worse at is shrinking every day.
Or regular mining. I don't think digging precious metals out of the ground is carbon neutral. At least crypto mining is not damaging the environment directly.
It's cool, I'm used to it.
Hurricanes are just getting way too destructive lately. It's time we started regulating how much destruction a hurricane is allowed to make.
If the private sector does not recognize 3.2 as the true value of Pi, then legislation may be the only remedy.
Now that Intel has finally asserted and solidified it's superiority and dominance over all it's competitors in the CPU market, it only makes sense to branch out into other markets.
Intel probably doesn't have to try that hard anymore. Their lead is so big that they can probably just continue to profit indefinitely even without any real innovation on their part.
That said, I'm hearing that Intel has managed to get a 28-core chip running at 5 GHz on all cores. Their advancements in tablecloth technology has made this possible with standard watercooling solutions.
What's the point of making a new product if some group of people (will just buy them all)? That will only result in more money. What's the point of money if all it does is purchase things you want?
They aren't really smart enough to do anything but grandstand. They may as well be grilling a physicist about quantum theory. They know they don't know anything. The least they could do is try to look important during this historic occasion.
I call on all my fellow Trump supporters to show solidarity with our president to smash our computers and show Fake News Jeff Bezos what real Americans think of him.
Trump doesn't like little boys like Marco Rubio and Bob Corker. He likes big delivery men like Devin Nunes who will take important documents from the whitehouse all the way to the whitehouse.
About half the friends I had growing up liked to play violent video games. The half that didn't play violent video games retained their empathy and never became violent. The half that played violent video games all became murderous psychopaths. The violent half never actually killed anyone, but it was only because they had great difficulty finding their victims after going blind from masturbating too much.
Let me be clear: the FBI supports information security measures, including strong encryption. Actually, the FBI is on the front line fighting cyber crime and economic espionage. But information security programs need to be thoughtfully designed so they don't undermine the lawful tools we need to keep the American people safe. --Christopher Wray
Translation from FBIese: We would like you all to use very secure encryption that no one can break into except for us
I have 0 doubts that they sincerely want this.
1. I wouldn't characterize what I did as making an accusation, so much as bringing up a point.
2. I did not ignore the rest of your post, as evidenced by the fact that I also referenced other parts of your post.
3. I do acknowledge that you brought up both the low and high ends, but I can see how someone reading this might come to the conclusion that the low and the high ends might be equally weighted, making the average somewhere in the middle. There are in fact many more Muslims in Western countries than in Gaza, and Gaza is in a very violent environment where tempers and emotions are high. I think if you had mentioned the the 62% was from Gaza, someone reading this comment might have a better idea of the reality without having to click your link.
For polling error, unless you're proposing there's huge errors exclusively in one direction that happen across multiple polls across the last decade... it doesn't diminish the problem.
I specifically said I don't expect the polling errors to be big enough to be the entire explanation. But I do think it's very possible they are not as high as they seem. It's also possible they could be even higher. My only claim here is that these numbers really do matter, and polls like this are usually not very reliable.
And it's not that the racist label bothers me specifically, it's that it indicates societies desire to pretend the problem doesn't exist because trying to fix it wouldn't be PC.
It's certainly reflective of the will of *some* people in society to pretend the problem doesn't exist. There is also a another segment of our society that thinks all Muslims are evil. I don't think fighting back against only one of these 2 irrational sides is productive. I think we need to effectively combat all forms of irrational ideology if we are to succeed. This means calling out all sides on their bullshit, and being as intellectually honest as possible.
I never said anything about parity in extremist views between christianity and Islam. I am not a person who claims that all religions are equally dangerous, and I do think the polls you cite are indicative of a real problem.
I would like to bring up a couple points, however.
#1. Like all polls, there are probably polling errors. These can result from poor translations of questions and/or answers. They can result from the fact that people do want or feel comfortable answering questions honestly (e.g. due to living in oppressive countries, etc). These numbers are alarmingly high, to the point that I would doubt polling error could be the only problem, but I wouldn't treat these numbers as gospel.
#2. I don't think it's fair to take the country (or region) with the most extreme stat (gaza at 62%) and present that as representative. It may be representative of Gaza, but it's not representative of Muslims in general. I could say something like "Depending on the county, up to 90% of Californians believe president Obama is the antichrist." That might be technically true, but omitting the fact that the 1 country with 90% of people believing this also happens to be the least populous and most religious county is being disingenuous, and misleading people about the beliefs that are representative of Californians in general. I obviously made this example up. What I am getting at is that we should be sticking to averages of of the populations we are talking about, and not citing stats about the most extreme sub-populations unless we are referring to those sub-populations.
#3 We are all painted as evil racists by somebody. It's not the end of the world. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. You don't need to let others' opinions of you carry any weight.
Some christian fundamentalists build replicas of Noah's Ark. Some Christian fundamentalists bomb abortion clinics. Some Christian fundamentalists commit genocide. Maybe you don't want to lump the genocidal christians in with the fundamentalists. Ok fine. I don't know what to call those people either. Shall we call them Christianists? This seems like a semantic debate.