Whether it is "healthy" or "sick" is irrelevant as you state. What IS relevant, is that when somebody pays money to play a game and invests a lot of time building up whatever you do in these games, it is not a reasonable expectation that the gamemaster is just going to randomly impose arbitrary rules on you for no reason that preclude you from advancing or segregate you from the rest of the community. He might as well said you can't trade if you have green hair, it doesn't make any difference. The end result is a lot of people get screwed out of no action of their own.
It's sort of hard to investigate future events. I played the original one for a few months before I got bored but never was there anything that said: staff will randomly and arbitrarily ruin your gameplay by sponsoring events which are racist or sexist (towards your avatar?!?) which will preclude your advancement.
Now, they MIGHT have included something like that in ATITD2 but I can't find it on their web page and their Wiki is Slashdotted.
But you're a smart guy, so I'm sure you can do us a public service and find where they said that I'll stand corrected.
It's not a fucking historical textbook that purports to educate people about the past. It's a fucking GAME.
If you think that all games should be historically accurate, why aren't all these WWII video games about starving to death in a concentration camp? Huh? Are they trying to HIDE HISTORY and PRETENDING IT DIDN'T HAPPEN? OMG it's a liberal conspiracy! We need more sitting-around-and-starving-to-death in our video games because that's historically-accurate-yet-not-fun-at-all!
Have you even played ATITD? Although it is set in an Egyptian theme, it could hardly be called a reality game, and apparently this didn't happen, or didn't happen so blatently in the last version.
But since it seems like you think capitalization makes statements more believable, how about:
When I PURCHASE a game with MY MONEY I don't expect the DEVELOPERS to INSULT ME with RACIAL or SEXIST SLURS.
how is that "post-modern victim shit"? I think instead you are full of "knee jerk counter-reaction shit".
I better clarify my response lest I be accused of "spinning": I assume when you said "link between Iraq and Saddam Hussein", you really meant "link between *Al-Quaida* and Saddam Hussein" and not some sort of mental slip there.
"If there is no evidence of a link between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, why did a federal judge (appointed by Clinton) award $100,000,000 to plaintiffs payable by Saddam?"
This is the same line of thinking they highlight in the article. "Somebody who agrees with me can't be wrong!" I'm sure it is totally IMPOSSIBLE that a judge could award money to plaintiffs without it implying IRREFUTABLY that there was a connection! Are we too make policy decisions based on what judges do after the fact? Maybe instead of assuming we should actually, maybe, ask the judge why he did or what evidence he did it on? Policy should be based on facts, not non-causally related actions by others.
"why was there an IED with sarin gas in it found, along with other warheads with various chemicals? Isn't sarin a WMD?"
As far as the IED:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0521/p09s01-coop.h tm l
What makes this relevant now is the ongoing speculation about the source of the sarin chemical artillery shell that the US military found rigged as an improvised explosive device (IED) last week in Baghdad. If the 155-mm shell was a "dud" fired long ago - which is highly likely - then it would not be evidence of the secret stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that the Bush administration used as justification to invade Iraq.As a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, I know that the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the US-led unit now responsible for investigating WMD in Iraq, could quite easily determine whether this shell had been fired long ago or not. Given the trouble the administration has had in documenting its past allegations about WMD, releasing the news of last week's sarin shell without the key information about the state of the shell itself seems disingenuous.
Given what's known about sarin shells, the US could be expected to offer a careful recital of the data with news of the shell. But facts that should have accompanied the story - the type of shell, its condition, whether it had been fired previously, and the age and viability of the sarin and precursor chemicals - were absent. And that's opened the door to irresponsible speculation that the shell was part of a live WMD stockpile. The data - available to the ISG - would put this development in proper perspective - allowing responsible discussion of the event and its possible ramifications.
Consult the link on all the myriad details about how to tell whether it was a "dud" or not.
But the question remains...this is your evidence? One lousy old shell of questionable utility constitutes weapons of mass destruction (note that both the words "weapons" and "mass" imply plurality)? We went to war for one fucking shell?! Is this the evidence you think the liberals are trying to "spin" away? Again here goes your reasoning: because of my assumptions, the premises must be true! Could it be possible that the presence of this IED shell would not imply irrefutably that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? No, impossible...it's a scrap of evidence that could possibly indicate that, so therefore it MUST indicate that. What if they had, oh, a thimble full of sarin? Is that WMD? What if they had some mustard plants...that's obviously WMD right?
And I hope when she says Republicans she means Republican leadership (which is itself unfortunate) and not rank and file citizens who wish to willfully and dishonestly erode the democratic process for partisan gain. That seems hypocritical since it is the average joe-six-pack blue collar worker that the Republican party tries so desperately to befriend and emulate.
Asked for one? Like if I walk out my door into the street and shout into the sky one will just fall out of it? I agree that making voting itself easier is one way to get more people to vote, but there is still some effort involved in 1) knowing that you CAN vote through absentee ballot (consult local law) 2) knowing how to obtain said ballot (consult local law) 3) finding and taking the time and effort to get and fill out and commit that ballot
I'm not saying we have to deliver it on a silver platter, but for a country that routinely boasts about its foundation on democracy, I think a national holiday for national elections isn't too much to ask.
Do what other countries do and make it a NATIONAL HOLIDAY. How do we expect the poor and disenfranchised to vote if they have to somehow get out of work to vote? How hard is that.
(I believe there are various patchwork laws that allow certain periods of time off, but it needs to be national, at least for national elections)
Because for that to work, every OS would have to support it, and since actually none DO (except maybe Hurd, which nobody uses), ipso facto, it must be done in the libraries. You could of course argue whether it is done in libraries that are visible to programs, or built into the VM itself but that sort of academic.
Furthermore, I don't think it is necessarily true that everything-is-a-file is the best abstraction for all IO forever and ever. If you want such an abstraction simply use java.net.URL and write protocol handlers for any protocols not provided. So far, http[s]:// and file:// (and probably some others) work out of the box. Add your own.
Well, I was going to write some sarcastic comment about how this guy was right and we really need to go back to the way we did things before the internet...until I realized I couldn't imagine what it was like doing those things before the internet...
I think that's a decent case that it has some staying power... remember when TV turned to total crap, and was overpriced, and everybody got mad and threw out their TVs and that was the End Of Television As We Know It? yeah...
Well, right now we are at the other end of the extreme. I'm not saying it would be practical if we has 12-15 parties all/simultaneously/ represented in government... 3 or 4 would be a great start. Right now we have a rigged system whereby the top two parties collude together to form a psuedo-"official" debates commission to exclude other points of view... so it's not even that the other parties aren't getting support, it's that they aren't even allowed to enter the discussion AT ALL. That is a great disservice. It may be that even if the process was opened up to a few more parties, the top two would still always eventually win... that's ok because it is these alternative parties that keep the major parties "honest".
Maybe because alternative parties through the history of this country have been the ones responsible for major political and social change, not established parties:
the abolition of slavery women's suffrage the establishment of the Social Security system and workers' compensation insurance the Pure Food and Drug Act and the abolition of child labor etc.
But I agree, it's a dismal situation due to the flawed election system we have. I think all these "alternative" parties need to band together regardless of their political differences, and demand Condorcet voting, or Borda count voting or Runoff or Approval or SOMETHING other than just winner-takes-all vote and constant gerrymandering that has made a mockery of the democracy of this country.
"his point was that the line should favor scientific advancement long before religious idealism's."
Right, the question is over at what point do you draw the line on "advancement". Obviously there are many things we COULD do that we DON'T because they would be ethically wrong despite the advances they may produce (e.g. human testing), or simply because the advancement is simply not that worthwhile in relation to the human inconvenience or suffering it imposes. I think a lot of "pure" research falls into this category, including astronomy and cosmology, etc.. That's not to say that my argument is that we shouldn't be doing any pure science at all and that all pure science is a waste. I realize that they can both produce greater results down the road, and also idealistically give humans something to strive towards. Simply killing curiousity does itself have a value in this otherwise "meaningless" life.
"Oh wait I have never raped or killed a Native American."
Which is why I said you don't have to agree with the perspective, but just understand it. Discarding wholesale a people's deep-seeded feeling of domination and violation is not a way to not be an asshole. I was responding to the poster's sentiment: "fuck 'em". The history and plight of indigenous americans (or indeed I suppose any impoverished or marginalized peoples) is way too large a subject for this thread but suffice it to say that I think "fuck 'em" is an extremely ignorant and callous point of view, especially considering the rather academic nature of the telescope. I don't consider it a "danger" to humankind if we don't have some space telescope on the correct mountain. Perhaps you could make a "fuck 'em" argument over something more life and death like whether or not the Cold War necessitated nuclear radiation exposure testing on native americans.
The bottom line is that I think lots of people's believes are silly, but entirely disregarding them for something which really isn't as necessary as the poster made out, would make me an asshole. I also refute the embedded absolutist notion that the pursuit of science itself is justified regardless of whether it ever produces a net good for society. Survey academia...there are a lot of people who spend time researching utterly worthless bullshit (e.g. if there is very little scientific value to it, I have a hard to supporting things like killing dozens of animals to find out how long it takes to bleed a dog to death, just because, you know, I'm curious and it's science). Science serves humanity, not vice versa.
The facility I was citing does not use reflection. The Properties class is simply a hash table which reads a file in the format:
key=value...
However, there IS a full-fledged Preferences API which I believe is capable of storing an arbitrary hierarchy of objects, which was introduced due to the deficiencies of stashing flat settings files in user directories (I never personally had a problem with that strategy).
You can do reflection in Java, but it is a bit cumbersome, and it's too late in the lifespan of the language to go back and redo all that plumbing. For instance, C# introduced the concept of delegates precisely because it was just a PITA to write these little anonymous handler classes...it's just so much easier to say "hey guy, just call this thing I point to". Although there are some Java frameworks and language mods that allow this, it is not easily done out of the box.
For anybody NOT getting this - Dr. Mengele was the Nazi doctor who used concentration camp prisoners as convenient research subjects on eugenics. He researched twins and genetics, in efforts to be able to get German women to produce more offspring (world domination has a nasty tendency of requiring more people) and to create an Arian super-race, as well as various ghastly forms of forced sterilization. To relate it back to the topic, eugenics was popular pseudo-science before WWII, and the Germans were particularly inspired by early United States eugenics efforts (1900-1930s) to sterilize "degenerates" such as criminals, the mentally ill, and minority ethnicities, as well as the Native American holocaust. If I remember correctly, Himmler himself kept a framed picture of a native american in his office to remind him of the success of the United States.
I am a nihilist and while I agree with you that nothing is inherently "sacred", when I enforce that view of mine upon other people who are minding their business and didn't ask for it, I become... AN ASSHOLE.
"Yes, I think that scientific progress should not be held back - at any cost. I think that nothing is sacred in the light of science - so long as it's justifiable."
Huh? You have a contradiction right there. "Science should not be held back at any cost" and "as long as it's justifiable". So what is it? Science at any cost, or only science if it is justifiable? In fact, why don't you go ahead and replace "science" with some other word like, oh, "religion". You know, it makes you sort of look like the religious zealots that you would presumably oppose.
"Outright opposition is silly. If they'd helped, they could probably have even had a say in what happened."
Wow, you're right. If you rape and kill my family and then want to build something on my house, I guess it's better if I work with you not against you. Now you don't have to agree with the perception in that sentence, you just have to UNDERSTAND it.
"The only danger mankind has is that we'll never learn the secrets of the universe"
And this is where the luxury of your callous smugness is revealed. You have to be really out of touch to think that the only "danger" to mankind is not knowing "secrets of the universe". I'll tell you what dangers to mankind are: overpopulation, starvation, genocide, mass health and disease epidemics, and last but not least the pandora's box of atrocities that are opened by people who practice "my belief at any cost" and "my belief is always right". I don't know your personal history, and I would in fact be more inclined to be empathetic if in fact you were merely a disgruntled and bitter curmudgeon like myself, but I will take a wild guess that maybe you should take your fancy panties to some place (assuming you voiced your opinion on this because you are USian, for that matter, there is plenty of poverty here too) to see some real povery and disease and violence: some REAL "danger". Not "learning the secrets of the universe" is totally fucking NOT a danger. It's the luxury of a rich bored man.
You see, I was like you too. Look at me, I'm a rationalist, I'm a nihilist, I don't "believe" in anything because I have facts! I am detached from pedestrian philosophical and religious fashion. I'm like a fucking robot! I'm enlightened!
Until I realized of course that that very same strident rationalism was itself a fashion, was itself a belief (go ask Godel). Now I'm still the same person, but I'm not an ASSHOLE about it.
"field of study and advancement"
The flaw is that you drank the koolaid (who gave you that koolaid? good time for self examination here) that said science for science sake is always "advancement". Science is advancement as long as it is doing a net good not bad in service of humanity. But there are other "advancements", like justice and freedom and eradicating povery and disease, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether it is "healthy" or "sick" is irrelevant as you state. What IS relevant, is that when somebody pays money to play a game and invests a lot of time building up whatever you do in these games, it is not a reasonable expectation that the gamemaster is just going to randomly impose arbitrary rules on you for no reason that preclude you from advancing or segregate you from the rest of the community. He might as well said you can't trade if you have green hair, it doesn't make any difference. The end result is a lot of people get screwed out of no action of their own.
It's sort of hard to investigate future events. I played the original one for a few months before I got bored but never was there anything that said: staff will randomly and arbitrarily ruin your gameplay by sponsoring events which are racist or sexist (towards your avatar?!?) which will preclude your advancement.
Now, they MIGHT have included something like that in ATITD2 but I can't find it on their web page and their Wiki is Slashdotted.
But you're a smart guy, so I'm sure you can do us a public service and find where they said that I'll stand corrected.
It's not a fucking historical textbook that purports to educate people about the past. It's a fucking GAME.
If you think that all games should be historically accurate, why aren't all these WWII video games about starving to death in a concentration camp? Huh? Are they trying to HIDE HISTORY and PRETENDING IT DIDN'T HAPPEN? OMG it's a liberal conspiracy! We need more sitting-around-and-starving-to-death in our video games because that's historically-accurate-yet-not-fun-at-all!
Have you even played ATITD? Although it is set in an Egyptian theme, it could hardly be called a reality game, and apparently this didn't happen, or didn't happen so blatently in the last version.
But since it seems like you think capitalization makes statements more believable, how about:
When I PURCHASE a game with MY MONEY I don't expect the DEVELOPERS to INSULT ME with RACIAL or SEXIST SLURS.
how is that "post-modern victim shit"? I think instead you are full of "knee jerk counter-reaction shit".
I better clarify my response lest I be accused of "spinning": I assume when you said "link between Iraq and Saddam Hussein", you really meant "link between *Al-Quaida* and Saddam Hussein" and not some sort of mental slip there.
This is the same line of thinking they highlight in the article. "Somebody who agrees with me can't be wrong!" I'm sure it is totally IMPOSSIBLE that a judge could award money to plaintiffs without it implying IRREFUTABLY that there was a connection! Are we too make policy decisions based on what judges do after the fact? Maybe instead of assuming we should actually, maybe, ask the judge why he did or what evidence he did it on? Policy should be based on facts, not non-causally related actions by others.
"why was there an IED with sarin gas in it found, along with other warheads with various chemicals? Isn't sarin a WMD?"
As far as the IED:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0521/p09s01-coop.
Consult the link on all the myriad details about how to tell whether it was a "dud" or not.
But the question remains...this is your evidence? One lousy old shell of questionable utility constitutes weapons of mass destruction (note that both the words "weapons" and "mass" imply plurality)? We went to war for one fucking shell?! Is this the evidence you think the liberals are trying to "spin" away? Again here goes your reasoning: because of my assumptions, the premises must be true! Could it be possible that the presence of this IED shell would not imply irrefutably that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? No, impossible...it's a scrap of evidence that could possibly indicate that, so therefore it MUST indicate that. What if they had, oh, a thimble full of sarin? Is that WMD? What if they had some mustard plants...that's obviously WMD right?
And I hope when she says Republicans she means Republican leadership (which is itself unfortunate) and not rank and file citizens who wish to willfully and dishonestly erode the democratic process for partisan gain. That seems hypocritical since it is the average joe-six-pack blue collar worker that the Republican party tries so desperately to befriend and emulate.
I'm mostly concerned about the internets in whose dark dungeons kids are trapped...we have to reach out to them.
Asked for one? Like if I walk out my door into the street and shout into the sky one will just fall out of it? I agree that making voting itself easier is one way to get more people to vote, but there is still some effort involved in 1) knowing that you CAN vote through absentee ballot (consult local law) 2) knowing how to obtain said ballot (consult local law) 3) finding and taking the time and effort to get and fill out and commit that ballot
I'm not saying we have to deliver it on a silver platter, but for a country that routinely boasts about its foundation on democracy, I think a national holiday for national elections isn't too much to ask.
Do what other countries do and make it a NATIONAL HOLIDAY. How do we expect the poor and disenfranchised to vote if they have to somehow get out of work to vote? How hard is that.
(I believe there are various patchwork laws that allow certain periods of time off, but it needs to be national, at least for national elections)
Hmm, if you use it twice, does it turn the sound back on, like a remote?
Because for that to work, every OS would have to support it, and since actually none DO (except maybe Hurd, which nobody uses), ipso facto, it must be done in the libraries. You could of course argue whether it is done in libraries that are visible to programs, or built into the VM itself but that sort of academic.
Furthermore, I don't think it is necessarily true that everything-is-a-file is the best abstraction for all IO forever and ever. If you want such an abstraction simply use java.net.URL and write protocol handlers for any protocols not provided. So far, http[s]:// and file:// (and probably some others) work out of the box. Add your own.
Yes! War on Science Fiction! And to that end, we must immediately invade the Arts and Crafts Section, which is posing a gathering threat!
sorry, couldn't resist
Well, I was going to write some sarcastic comment about how this guy was right and we really need to go back to the way we did things before the internet...until I realized I couldn't imagine what it was like doing those things before the internet ...
I think that's a decent case that it has some staying power... remember when TV turned to total crap, and was overpriced, and everybody got mad and threw out their TVs and that was the End Of Television As We Know It? yeah...
...how long until we can get one that works on people?
But according to my commute, animals can't tell an SUV roaring 20 feet away.
...did anybody ever find out who DID kill Raymond Chan?
Well, right now we are at the other end of the extreme. I'm not saying it would be practical if we has 12-15 parties all /simultaneously/ represented in government... 3 or 4 would be a great start. Right now we have a rigged system whereby the top two parties collude together to form a psuedo-"official" debates commission to exclude other points of view... so it's not even that the other parties aren't getting support, it's that they aren't even allowed to enter the discussion AT ALL. That is a great disservice. It may be that even if the process was opened up to a few more parties, the top two would still always eventually win... that's ok because it is these alternative parties that keep the major parties "honest".
What about the 50% of eligible voters that don't vote at all.
Maybe because alternative parties through the history of this country have been the ones responsible for major political and social change, not established parties:
the abolition of slavery
women's suffrage
the establishment of the Social Security system and workers' compensation insurance
the Pure Food and Drug Act
and the abolition of child labor
etc.
But I agree, it's a dismal situation due to the flawed election system we have. I think all these "alternative" parties need to band together regardless of their political differences, and demand Condorcet voting, or Borda count voting or Runoff or Approval or SOMETHING other than just winner-takes-all vote and constant gerrymandering that has made a mockery of the democracy of this country.
'Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.'
:)
:)
- Rob Pike
Page Setup... Landscape[x]
Print...
ROFFEL!
Thanks for the cubicle ornamentation
You are in good company, sitting next to Dijkstra, Deutsch, and James Madison.
"his point was that the line should favor scientific advancement long before religious idealism's."
Right, the question is over at what point do you draw the line on "advancement". Obviously there are many things we COULD do that we DON'T because they would be ethically wrong despite the advances they may produce (e.g. human testing), or simply because the advancement is simply not that worthwhile in relation to the human inconvenience or suffering it imposes. I think a lot of "pure" research falls into this category, including astronomy and cosmology, etc.. That's not to say that my argument is that we shouldn't be doing any pure science at all and that all pure science is a waste. I realize that they can both produce greater results down the road, and also idealistically give humans something to strive towards. Simply killing curiousity does itself have a value in this otherwise "meaningless" life.
"Oh wait I have never raped or killed a Native American."
Which is why I said you don't have to agree with the perspective, but just understand it. Discarding wholesale a people's deep-seeded feeling of domination and violation is not a way to not be an asshole. I was responding to the poster's sentiment: "fuck 'em". The history and plight of indigenous americans (or indeed I suppose any impoverished or marginalized peoples) is way too large a subject for this thread but suffice it to say that I think "fuck 'em" is an extremely ignorant and callous point of view, especially considering the rather academic nature of the telescope. I don't consider it a "danger" to humankind if we don't have some space telescope on the correct mountain. Perhaps you could make a "fuck 'em" argument over something more life and death like whether or not the Cold War necessitated nuclear radiation exposure testing on native americans.
The bottom line is that I think lots of people's believes are silly, but entirely disregarding them for something which really isn't as necessary as the poster made out, would make me an asshole. I also refute the embedded absolutist notion that the pursuit of science itself is justified regardless of whether it ever produces a net good for society. Survey academia...there are a lot of people who spend time researching utterly worthless bullshit (e.g. if there is very little scientific value to it, I have a hard to supporting things like killing dozens of animals to find out how long it takes to bleed a dog to death, just because, you know, I'm curious and it's science). Science serves humanity, not vice versa.
The facility I was citing does not use reflection. The Properties class is simply a hash table which reads a file in the format:
key=value...
However, there IS a full-fledged Preferences API which I believe is capable of storing an arbitrary hierarchy of objects, which was introduced due to the deficiencies of stashing flat settings files in user directories (I never personally had a problem with that strategy).
You can do reflection in Java, but it is a bit cumbersome, and it's too late in the lifespan of the language to go back and redo all that plumbing. For instance, C# introduced the concept of delegates precisely because it was just a PITA to write these little anonymous handler classes...it's just so much easier to say "hey guy, just call this thing I point to". Although there are some Java frameworks and language mods that allow this, it is not easily done out of the box.
For anybody NOT getting this - Dr. Mengele was the Nazi doctor who used concentration camp prisoners as convenient research subjects on eugenics. He researched twins and genetics, in efforts to be able to get German women to produce more offspring (world domination has a nasty tendency of requiring more people) and to create an Arian super-race, as well as various ghastly forms of forced sterilization. To relate it back to the topic, eugenics was popular pseudo-science before WWII, and the Germans were particularly inspired by early United States eugenics efforts (1900-1930s) to sterilize "degenerates" such as criminals, the mentally ill, and minority ethnicities, as well as the Native American holocaust. If I remember correctly, Himmler himself kept a framed picture of a native american in his office to remind him of the success of the United States.
Science "at any cost" indeed.
I am a nihilist and while I agree with you that nothing is inherently "sacred", when I enforce that view of mine upon other people who are minding their business and didn't ask for it, I become... AN ASSHOLE.
"Yes, I think that scientific progress should not be held back - at any cost. I think that nothing is sacred in the light of science - so long as it's justifiable."
Huh? You have a contradiction right there. "Science should not be held back at any cost" and "as long as it's justifiable". So what is it? Science at any cost, or only science if it is justifiable? In fact, why don't you go ahead and replace "science" with some other word like, oh, "religion". You know, it makes you sort of look like the religious zealots that you would presumably oppose.
"Outright opposition is silly. If they'd helped, they could probably have even had a say in what happened."
Wow, you're right. If you rape and kill my family and then want to build something on my house, I guess it's better if I work with you not against you. Now you don't have to agree with the perception in that sentence, you just have to UNDERSTAND it.
"The only danger mankind has is that we'll never learn the secrets of the universe"
And this is where the luxury of your callous smugness is revealed. You have to be really out of touch to think that the only "danger" to mankind is not knowing "secrets of the universe". I'll tell you what dangers to mankind are: overpopulation, starvation, genocide, mass health and disease epidemics, and last but not least the pandora's box of atrocities that are opened by people who practice "my belief at any cost" and "my belief is always right". I don't know your personal history, and I would in fact be more inclined to be empathetic if in fact you were merely a disgruntled and bitter curmudgeon like myself, but I will take a wild guess that maybe you should take your fancy panties to some place (assuming you voiced your opinion on this because you are USian, for that matter, there is plenty of poverty here too) to see some real povery and disease and violence: some REAL "danger". Not "learning the secrets of the universe" is totally fucking NOT a danger. It's the luxury of a rich bored man.
You see, I was like you too. Look at me, I'm a rationalist, I'm a nihilist, I don't "believe" in anything because I have facts! I am detached from pedestrian philosophical and religious fashion. I'm like a fucking robot! I'm enlightened!
Until I realized of course that that very same strident rationalism was itself a fashion, was itself a belief (go ask Godel). Now I'm still the same person, but I'm not an ASSHOLE about it.
"field of study and advancement"
The flaw is that you drank the koolaid (who gave you that koolaid? good time for self examination here) that said science for science sake is always "advancement". Science is advancement as long as it is doing a net good not bad in service of humanity. But there are other "advancements", like justice and freedom and eradicating povery and disease, etc.