This sarcasm is NOT failing because the listeners are stupid. It's failing because the group being ridiculed is stupid and therefore you can't exxagerate their position enough to make it clear you are trying to make a joke. Trying to satirize global-warming deniers is like trying to satirize a Jack Chick tract.
Where did this meme begin that if sarcasm fails, it is always the listener's fault? It's not true. For one thing, sarcasm can be poorly written by the author and it's failure be the author's fault. For another, the failure could be neither the author nor the listener's fault if the group being ridiculed by the satire has such a low credibility that it is plausible that someone from that group could say something really stupid and actually mean it.
Any such pockets that survive would still outnumber the puny amount of people we could support in an off-earth colony any time in the near future. It would take hundreds of years at the minimum before we could make a colony be self-sustaining without resupply from earth, to the point where its population could grow organically at the normal exponential rate. Until then, this doesn't make a good plan for species survival. (Don't get me wrong - there are still good reasons to do it, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.)
Of course it could just be that the percentage of gay people hasn't changed, it's just that there are more now since the overall population is growing.
A more likely explanation is that the percentage hasn't changed but the social acceptability of admitting to homosexuality has, hence it is being more accurately reported now.
in 100 years time, we can't really have a self-sustaining colony that needs no help from earth to survive. The free-for-the-asking resources that come on earth are what made colonization of the New World possible in the 1500s and 1600s. When you need to manufacture everything including air and water, it's not going to happen that fast. Does this mean I'm opposed to starting an off-planet colony? No. Go, get started on it - the sooner the better. Does this mean I'm opposed to making the false propaganda claim that it would be a way to survive an earth-ruining disaster in 100 years? Yes.
During the early stages of coloniztion, if the Earth becomes uninhabitable, then the colonies will die off soon after.
You don't assume things and then try to disprove them.
Well, actually you do. That's what the scientific method is all about. It's just that you have to pick a theory that it is obviously possible to disprove as a starting point. That is where Creationism fails to be science - it's not a falsifiable theory. Tests can never prove a theory right. They can only fail to prove it wrong. There is no 100% certainty.
The basic premise of science is that you are able (through a controled environment) to reliable and consistantly reproduce a series of events, receiving the same results each time.
Not quite. The premise is that consistent series of events produce consistent results, true, but it is NOT a requirement that you be the one causing those events. Taking a survey of events you did not cause, but that happen to fit certain criteria, is another acceptable way to do science. Newton observed planets in motion and drew theories from then even though he didn't cause them to start moving that way. And what the Evolutionists do by looking at the available record is very much the same thing.
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
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when it's proven wrong the proponents quickly change the theory to fit the facts
Correct. That's why science is superior to religion.
one theory is not better than another if both cannot be tested. true.
Yours is just as untestable as the creationists. false.
Re:TROLL: how about "creationism" crap?
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You know what's more annoying than trolling? People who insist that online topics should never be allowed to drift naturally in the same manner they would in a normal face-to-face conversation. If your philosophy was adhered to, then people could get away with lying so long as they do it in an off-topic way (because then nobody would be allowed to respond about the lie).
Show me a fossil record of a single-celled organism?
I grew up in a town where many of the older buildings were made from the stuff because it was easy to quarry in nice convenient sheet layers right out of the ground. It's called limestone.
The Psalms part of the volume is nowhere near Genesis part of the volume. If it was really devinely inspired and that was the intention, then why make it so ambiguious what kind of "day" was meant, and why base it on having to look up another reference hundreds of pages later in the volume and backtracking it to the first chapter? (This is made even sillier by the fact that they weren't even coillected together into the same bible until long after they were first written and that decision to collect them together was made by humans.)
Besides, it is blatantly false to say that that is always how "day" is interpreted in the bible. Was the bible trying to claim that Jesus came back from the dead thousands of years later, or three actual earthly 24-hour days?
Ahhh. The good ole IPU. It's been a long time since I hung out in that newsgroup. Is it still so overflowing with traffic as to be utterly useless, or has it fallen off a bit with the advent of web forums??
Re:Deity does not help analyze things
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The hypothesis that God exists is defined in a way that even if it was incorrect it would still be impossible to prove it is incorrect. Any non-faslifiable hypothesis (one you cannot devise a test to disprove) is not a candidate for scientific study. You quoted Einstien's phrasing of the scientific method, but I don't thinkg you understand what it means. It says basically, that since you can never prove a theory correct with 100% certainty, what you should do instead is to propose theories that could be proven wrong (which is possible), and then keep testing them to try to find the holes in them that could prove them wrong. The iterative process of doing this over the ages should get slowly closer to the truth. BUT, in order for this to work it is vital that you ONLY use it on hypotheses that are in fact possible to be proven wrong if they are wrong. In science these are called "falsifiable hypotheses". If your starting hypothesis is not falsifiable (as is the case with positing God), then the scientific process has the "bug" in it that it would make your theory look rock-solid and believable even though in reality it was just ill-defined in the first place and didn't fit into the scientific method.
(This is the second way to shoot down a scientific theory wrong, is to show how it was never even falsifialbe in the first place.)
It's a copout; science is only useful because it's true according to some model of reality.
Yeah, but that "some model" just so happens to be the one that is mandatory for all human intelligence to operate correctly - the model that phenomena are repeatable according to rules. Take that model away and you can't have pattern recognition, which is the basis of all intelligence.
So's winning the lottery. And yet you keep hearing on the news about people who've had it happen to them. Basic probability says that if you run enough trials, you have a good chance of finding a success SOMEWHERE even if the chance on each individual trial is infinitesimal.
Consider how many 'trials' there are being run if the question is "can life exist somewhere in the universe"?
(It basically narrows down to the mathematical case of taking one phenomenon that approaches zero as N approaches infinity, and multiplying it by another one that approaches 1 as N approaches infinity, and then asking what the result is when N is large but still finite - depending on which phenomenon approaches faster, the result could still be nearly 1 or nearly 0. It's just that in this case we don't know enough data to tell which phenemenon is approaching its asymptote faster, so it's still unknown.)
I too prefer science to religion, but I take exception to your definition. If your definition was what science was, then we could fire all the scientists and shut down all the research facilities because science would be done. We'd be finished with it now. What you describe is the *goal* of science to work toward (that will probably never be fully achieved), but isn't science itself. Science is merely the only reliable means of moving closer to the goal of being true. But if you accept that there is still more science to learn, then you have to accept that things we think are scientifically true today could be proven wrong tomorrow.
True, but it's merely the sort of faith that is necessary for any sort of logical thinking of any kind, and nothing more. It doesn't stick its neck out any further than that which is necessary to build human intelligence upon. (We as a species could never be intelligent without first basing it on the notion of repeatable patterns.)
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
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Yet science is only valid within the realm of science
True. But then what exactly is "the realm of science"? It's just simply "stuff we can test and try to prove ourselves wrong." Anything not in that realm is something that has no credibility because you can't differentiate the made-up from the rigiously tested. And that the line separating that realm from other things is not stagnant. What isn't science today could become science tomorrow. It all depends on what kinds of tests can be devised.
Note that I do not take Scientology on faith. In it I've seen many repeated examples of corporate abuse of people.
Were these last two lines supposed to be related in some way to the rest of your message? If so, how? They just seemed to be completely unconnected and random. (And don't say "Scientology" if you mean "Science". Science has nothing to do with those e-meter weirdos.)
It is true that we don't know how reality came to be, but this does NOT imply, as you state, that any guess is as good as any other. Some guesses are still equally plausable (big bang versus deism, for example), while some are already known not to be right (Earth created in 4004 BC, for example).
We don't know which of the infinitely remaining theories is the right answer, but we do know several that we can safely remove from contention, and thus it is not true that any guess is as good as any other.
Sure, take out the greek letters. After you turn English into a language with 50-60 letters, that is. The reason for the greek symbols is that 26 symbols is not actually enough to cover all the needs, especially with conventions in effect like "a,b,c,d" are typically constants, and "x,y,z" are typically free variables, and "f,g,h" are typically functions, and....
Taking pride in something assumes you have a legitimate reason to take some of the credit for making it happen. So, what did you do to become an American? (not your family, not your ancestors, but YOU) If you were just born here (like me) then you really shouldn't be taking pride in it because it happened automatically without any effort on your part.
The only people with the right to take pride in being Americans are immigrants. For the majority of the rest of us Americans, the ones who are citizens by birth, the most we can lay claim to is that we are glad to be (not proud to be) Americans.
If you're gliding it in you shouldn't be risking a stall
Yeah, I know - my point was that you couldn't do that if you were following the ILS's reccomended glideslope in the simulator program. It tells you to follow a glideslope angle that could not be achived without engine power. If, for example, your plane's best powerless glide achieves a slope of 8:1, the ILS is telling you to come in at 12:1 (not the actual numbers - made up example).
No, I'm not a pilot, but it did seem odd to me that the instrument approach was asking me to do something the manual said was unsafe and I shouldn't do (it said I should try to come in with only a trace amount of throttle so that I can make a gliding landing if I have to.)
Perhaps the ILS is configured in a way that is appropriate for other planes, but not the little plane I was using. Or perhaps passenger comfort (smoother landing) took precedence over safety.
Or, perhaps it was just a mistake in the simulator (but it did seem to consistently happen at every airport that had ILS).
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This sarcasm is NOT failing because the listeners are stupid. It's failing because the group being ridiculed is stupid and therefore you can't exxagerate their position enough to make it clear you are trying to make a joke. Trying to satirize global-warming deniers is like trying to satirize a Jack Chick tract.
Where did this meme begin that if sarcasm fails, it is always the listener's fault? It's not true. For one thing, sarcasm can be poorly written by the author and it's failure be the author's fault. For another, the failure could be neither the author nor the listener's fault if the group being ridiculed by the satire has such a low credibility that it is plausible that someone from that group could say something really stupid and actually mean it.
Your analogy is too oversimplified. You are shown two pedals and you don't know which is the brake and which is the gas. Now, which one do you hit?
Any such pockets that survive would still outnumber the puny amount of people we could support in an off-earth colony any time in the near future. It would take hundreds of years at the minimum before we could make a colony be self-sustaining without resupply from earth, to the point where its population could grow organically at the normal exponential rate. Until then, this doesn't make a good plan for species survival. (Don't get me wrong - there are still good reasons to do it, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.)
Of course it could just be that the percentage of gay people hasn't changed, it's just that there are more now since the overall population is growing.
A more likely explanation is that the percentage hasn't changed but the social acceptability of admitting to homosexuality has, hence it is being more accurately reported now.
in 100 years time, we can't really have a self-sustaining colony that needs no help from earth to survive. The free-for-the-asking resources that come on earth are what made colonization of the New World possible in the 1500s and 1600s. When you need to manufacture everything including air and water, it's not going to happen that fast. Does this mean I'm opposed to starting an off-planet colony? No. Go, get started on it - the sooner the better. Does this mean I'm opposed to making the false propaganda claim that it would be a way to survive an earth-ruining disaster in 100 years? Yes.
During the early stages of coloniztion, if the Earth becomes uninhabitable, then the colonies will die off soon after.
You don't assume things and then try to disprove them.
Well, actually you do. That's what the scientific method is all about. It's just that you have to pick a theory that it is obviously possible to disprove as a starting point. That is where Creationism fails to be science - it's not a falsifiable theory. Tests can never prove a theory right. They can only fail to prove it wrong. There is no 100% certainty.
The basic premise of science is that you are able (through a controled environment) to reliable and consistantly reproduce a series of events, receiving the same results each time.
Not quite. The premise is that consistent series of events produce consistent results, true, but it is NOT a requirement that you be the one causing those events. Taking a survey of events you did not cause, but that happen to fit certain criteria, is another acceptable way to do science. Newton observed planets in motion and drew theories from then even though he didn't cause them to start moving that way. And what the Evolutionists do by looking at the available record is very much the same thing.
when it's proven wrong the proponents quickly change the theory to fit the facts
Correct. That's why science is superior to religion.
one theory is not better than another if both cannot be tested.
true.
Yours is just as untestable as the creationists.
false.
You know what's more annoying than trolling? People who insist that online topics should never be allowed to drift naturally in the same manner they would in a normal face-to-face conversation. If your philosophy was adhered to, then people could get away with lying so long as they do it in an off-topic way (because then nobody would be allowed to respond about the lie).
Show me a fossil record of a single-celled organism?
I grew up in a town where many of the older buildings were made from the stuff because it was easy to quarry in nice convenient sheet layers right out of the ground. It's called limestone.
The Psalms part of the volume is nowhere near Genesis part of the volume. If it was really devinely inspired and that was the intention, then why make it so ambiguious what kind of "day" was meant, and why base it on having to look up another reference hundreds of pages later in the volume and backtracking it to the first chapter? (This is made even sillier by the fact that they weren't even coillected together into the same bible until long after they were first written and that decision to collect them together was made by humans.)
Besides, it is blatantly false to say that that is always how "day" is interpreted in the bible. Was the bible trying to claim that Jesus came back from the dead thousands of years later, or three actual earthly 24-hour days?
Ahhh. The good ole IPU.
It's been a long time since I hung out in that newsgroup. Is it still so overflowing with traffic as to be utterly useless, or has it fallen off a bit with the advent of web forums??
The hypothesis that God exists is defined in a way that even if it was incorrect it would still be impossible to prove it is incorrect. Any non-faslifiable hypothesis (one you cannot devise a test to disprove) is not a candidate for scientific study. You quoted Einstien's phrasing of the scientific method, but I don't thinkg you understand what it means. It says basically, that since you can never prove a theory correct with 100% certainty, what you should do instead is to propose theories that could be proven wrong (which is possible), and then keep testing them to try to find the holes in them that could prove them wrong. The iterative process of doing this over the ages should get slowly closer to the truth. BUT, in order for this to work it is vital that you ONLY use it on hypotheses that are in fact possible to be proven wrong if they are wrong. In science these are called "falsifiable hypotheses". If your starting hypothesis is not falsifiable (as is the case with positing God), then the scientific process has the "bug" in it that it would make your theory look rock-solid and believable even though in reality it was just ill-defined in the first place and didn't fit into the scientific method.
(This is the second way to shoot down a scientific theory wrong, is to show how it was never even falsifialbe in the first place.)
It's a copout; science is only useful because it's true according to some model of reality.
Yeah, but that "some model" just so happens to be the one that is mandatory for all human intelligence to operate correctly - the model that phenomena are repeatable according to rules. Take that model away and you can't have pattern recognition, which is the basis of all intelligence.
granted, it's possible, just not that likely,
So's winning the lottery. And yet you keep hearing on the news about people who've had it happen to them. Basic probability says that if you run enough trials, you have a good chance of finding a success SOMEWHERE even if the chance on each individual trial is infinitesimal.
Consider how many 'trials' there are being run if the question is "can life exist somewhere in the universe"?
(It basically narrows down to the mathematical case of taking one phenomenon that approaches zero as N approaches infinity, and multiplying it by another one that approaches 1 as N approaches infinity, and then asking what the result is when N is large but still finite - depending on which phenomenon approaches faster, the result could still be nearly 1 or nearly 0. It's just that in this case we don't know enough data to tell which phenemenon is approaching its asymptote faster, so it's still unknown.)
I too prefer science to religion, but I take exception to your definition. If your definition was what science was, then we could fire all the scientists and shut down all the research facilities because science would be done. We'd be finished with it now. What you describe is the *goal* of science to work toward (that will probably never be fully achieved), but isn't science itself. Science is merely the only reliable means of moving closer to the goal of being true. But if you accept that there is still more science to learn, then you have to accept that things we think are scientifically true today could be proven wrong tomorrow.
True, but it's merely the sort of faith that is necessary for any sort of logical thinking of any kind, and nothing more. It doesn't stick its neck out any further than that which is necessary to build human intelligence upon. (We as a species could never be intelligent without first basing it on the notion of repeatable patterns.)
Yet science is only valid within the realm of science
True. But then what exactly is "the realm of science"? It's just simply "stuff we can test and try to prove ourselves wrong." Anything not in that realm is something that has no credibility because you can't differentiate the made-up from the rigiously tested. And that the line separating that realm from other things is not stagnant. What isn't science today could become science tomorrow. It all depends on what kinds of tests can be devised.
Note that I do not take Scientology on faith. In it I've seen many repeated examples of corporate abuse of people.
Were these last two lines supposed to be related in some way to the rest of your message? If so, how? They just seemed to be completely unconnected and random. (And don't say "Scientology" if you mean "Science". Science has nothing to do with those e-meter weirdos.)
It is true that we don't know how reality came to be, but this does NOT imply, as you state, that any guess is as good as any other. Some guesses are still equally plausable (big bang versus deism, for example), while some are already known not to be right (Earth created in 4004 BC, for example).
We don't know which of the infinitely remaining theories is the right answer, but we do know several that we can safely remove from contention, and thus it is not true that any guess is as good as any other.
Sure, take out the greek letters. After you turn English into a language with 50-60 letters, that is. The reason for the greek symbols is that 26 symbols is not actually enough to cover all the needs, especially with conventions in effect like "a,b,c,d" are typically constants, and "x,y,z" are typically free variables, and "f,g,h" are typically functions, and ....
If you want to get more technical, we all migrated here from the oceans, and before that, from the proto-sol nebulous mass that hadn't solidified yet.
Taking pride in something assumes you have a legitimate reason to take some of the credit for making it happen. So, what did you do to become an American? (not your family, not your ancestors, but YOU) If you were just born here (like me) then you really shouldn't be taking pride in it because it happened automatically without any effort on your part.
The only people with the right to take pride in being Americans are immigrants. For the majority of the rest of us Americans, the ones who are citizens by birth, the most we can lay claim to is that we are glad to be (not proud to be) Americans.
If you're gliding it in you shouldn't be risking a stall
Yeah, I know - my point was that you couldn't do that if you were following the ILS's reccomended glideslope in the simulator program. It tells you to follow a glideslope angle that could not be achived without engine power. If, for example, your plane's best powerless glide achieves a slope of 8:1, the ILS is telling you to come in at 12:1 (not the actual numbers - made up example).
No, I'm not a pilot, but it did seem odd to me that the instrument approach was asking me to do something the manual said was unsafe and I shouldn't do (it said I should try to come in with only a trace amount of throttle so that I can make a gliding landing if I have to.)
Perhaps the ILS is configured in a way that is appropriate for other planes, but not the little plane I was using. Or perhaps passenger comfort (smoother landing) took precedence over safety.
Or, perhaps it was just a mistake in the simulator (but it did seem to consistently happen at every airport that had ILS).