What's more important is that almost all the times, the assholes' assholey behavior towards women is not challenged by the non-assholes present. They tend to just watch.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with women or misogyny. It's just that if you would challenge every asshole on everything that's wrong, you'd have an unpaid full-time job.
This is a conversation that's long overdue, and it needs to happen.
Uh, not. It's one of the most pointless and unnecessary conversations ever. No, I mean it. Hear me out.
It's not because the problem doesn't exist. It's because everyone who you actually can have an actual conversation with is already on your side. None of the people who are willing to engage in a dialog have a substantially different opinion. It's the assholes that don't do discussions, rational considerations and conversations with people outside their peer group that are your problem.
You're preaching to the choir, and in doing so, turning it against you. People dislike being held responsible for things they themselves hate, you know?
The utter lack of compassion for men, and the complete lack of awareness of how the social construction of masculinity affects them, is one of the most depressing things about the current discourse on these issues.
It's because here in western culture we just love binary systems. To death.
So you have men and women, but little space for anything inbetween. But you also have many other binaries, everywhere you look. We think in opposites (good/evil, etc.)
So it's only natural that we also think in victim/perpetrator. And it lines up so nicely: All women are victims, all men are criminals. Sadly, some parts of the feminist movement actually think like that. But it's just another typical psychology trap, and the real world is a lot more interesting and complicated.
I'm sorry for you if you live in such an environment. I don't.
Yes, if a girl dresses slutty, most men think that she had sex on her mind - in one way or the other. That can include many things, from just enjoying feeling sexy, to wanting to be looked at, to impressing her friends or her boyfriend, to looking for a fuck. That doesn't mean that men will consider it a personal invitation. If they do, then those men are assholes, but not men in general. If you think that such stupidity is a culture, get the heck out of your horrible environment.
Yes, women are actually playing hard to get, and are constantly testing potential partners by putting up soft obstacles for him to overcome. It's one of the games played so constantly that books have been written about it, and I don't mean pick-up literature, but scientific ones. It's actually quite an interesting topic from a psychological point of view. Experienced men can clearly seperate between playful hard-to-get and actual leave-me-alone, just as experienced women can clearly signal such. However, teens and inexperienced people of both genders often don't. As long as it doesn't involve physical pressure, it's a fucking misunderstanding, not "rape culture". Now if you are physically forcing someone into intercourse who is keeping saying or signalling "no", then you're either a rapist or in a BDSM relationship. However, we do, sadly, live in a "rape culture" in a different sense of the word - namely 50 million things that are not rape being labeled as such. Trying to pick up a girl in a crowded bar even after she's said "fuck off" may be all kinds of things, but it's not rape.
If she's passed out - you put a blanket over her and let her sleep it off. Absolutely no discussion on that one. This has happened to several of my friends, both female and male, and in absolutely every single case it resulted in a blanket and breakfast and nothing else.
So sorry if your social circles suck so badly at basic human values that they either consider forced sexual relations ok, or define rape so broadly that normal human interactions and misunderstandings fall into the category. If your friends fall into either category, don't whine about a non-existing problem of society, get new friends.
Other faiths do not, they evolve their understanding so that it no longer conflicts with established fact.
I disagree on that. It is merely a retreat battle where they withdraw from the battlefield once solidly defeated, but for centuries the christian churches, for example, killed people who confronted them with uncomfortable facts.
Like science must yield to religion where it cannot answer,
No, it must not. Nobody should yield to a bunch of people whose "knowledge" is entirely made up.
There's the philosophical argument about whether or not religion in theory could have a place somewhere. And then there's the real religions of the real world, and they're all completely full of shit, and we know it because their track record on truth so far is absolutely abysmal.
As I said before, when every claim that was tested turned out to be bollocks, the time for respect towards the lalaland of some old-man fantasy world is neither deserved nor appropriate.
For anything that requires a formula more complicated then =SUM(A1:A10)/AVG(B1:B10) you should use something that was actually designed to handle data.
also know that for decades people with uncers got a lot of bad advice and no investigation was done in spite of the repeated failures of that advice.
I totally agree on that. The process has many faults, and especially whenever humans do science, you get all of the psychological problems like not wanting to admit the past 5 years of your life were wasted, or personal interests, business interests, good old corruption, self-esteem and pride, change-blindness, the whole nine yards.
unlikely but hardly impossible to make the observation by chance.
That works for a small sample set, but not for large ones. I totally agree that in reality it would take a long time and many failures to get a result in cases like these. And early on if someone were so daft to propose the ultimately correct solution he would probably be laughed at.
But here's where I see the important difference: Despite all the fails and taking the long way around the block, science will eventually get there. Religion and mysticism, on the other hand, disregards the evidence so its pre-defined worldview can be preserved.
I prefer making many mistakes but eventually arriving at the right answer over having one absolute, ultimate truth and maintaining that belief even after it turned out that its bollocks.
The only people I know who do serious business stuff with spreadsheets are the kind of middle management airbags who drag the company down in many other ways as well. You all know them, the types where work goes better in their department when they're on holiday or ill.
I mean, seriously? Anyone with an above room temperature IQ here who thinks spreadsheets are more than hacks for getting a quick, rough estimate of your data?
Here's where I see these: As the new city car-sharing service.
In my city, there are several car-sharing agencies where you pick up a car anywhere you find it (Apps exist so you can look on your smartphone for the nearest one), drive to where you want to be, and drop it there for the next one. The system is great.
But even better would be if you could order a car to your location when you're getting ready, get an answer with an arrival time so you can put on your shoes and cloak and go downstairs, hop in and tell it where to go. And when it needs fuel, it drives itself to the nearest fueling station.
You threw out at least half of my scenario. You have no idea what the manager's agenda is, nor even that the manager exist
Sorry for not being more explicit on that.
My argument is that if the manager has an agenda, then it can be spotted. If there is some favorite behaviour, looks, gender or whatever, then with enough data we can see that people who fall into category X have more luck than average.
But even if he does favor people with red hair, no matter how high he stacks the odds, you will refuse to believe he exists.
Let's not jump to conclusions, but go step-by-step.
Let's assume that red hairs are his favorite, and that he prefers them so much they win statistically significant more games.
A scientifically minded person will first notice the pattern and then work on a) confirming it (is it really the red hair, or something else that just happens to coincide with red hair?) and b) finding out how the causal link works. Red haired people will be monitored and compared, and many theories will be produced about just what is it that makes them win more games. Maybe their opponents like them and let them win? No, can't explain them winning at roulette.
Scientists work from the simple to the complex, from the self-evident to the obscure. So after 500 theories that make sense have all been excluded, they will begin taking the crazy stuff seriously.
Since his stacked odds are not actually impossible, you will declare it just a fluke
Sorry, but this is the point where I have to say you have no clue how science works. Do you even realize the precision of modern science? I think it was Richard Dawkins who said it well: Yes, our science is only "close" and "not exact". But what a scientist and a layman understand there are two totally different things. Most of our physics, for example, is "just approximations" - on the scale of measuring the distance between New York City and San Francisco down to the millimeter. OMG, we might be off by up to 0.5mm ! Science has no clue, it's all just guesswork!:-)
No, any statistically significant deviation from the mean on any statistically significant sample will not be declared a fluke. Especially not if the measurement can be reliably repeated. Claiming so is utter bullshit. Planets have been predicted and subsequently discovered because of such small deviations (in other planets orbits).
If you test again
Again, you have no clue how science works. Sure, for practical reasons sample sized are limited, but for even tiny things, there are dozens of studies with hundreds or thousands of measurements, not two or three.
But I can move back from the purely philosophical to a more practical argument: Any and all gods of actual, active religions have been solidly debunked, because their faithful do not claim small odds on random events, but massive, easily visible and measurable effects on the real world. Effects that could not possibly slip through the net.
Withdrawing to "maybe he's just deciding who wins the 50/50 chances" is just the latest step in a century-long retreat battle of religions. Every area that was once claimed to be the domain of the higher powers and impossible to understand by mere humans that we have successfully cracked has - I repeat myself - turned out to be... not magic.
There is a point in an argument where the burden of proof shifts. If one side makes claim A and is disproven, and then claim B and is disproven, and likewise for claim C, D, E... X and Y then somewhere down the line, we can dismiss their claim Z without even looking at it and require that it is now their turn to prove their claims and not our responsibility to disprove them.
For religion, that point has long been passed. Not one claim of religion that has been scrutinized has held up. Not one. Tha
Faith is the belief in something in absence of evidence. I think I've made it quite clear that evidence is quite the important qualifier.
Note that there are enough 50/50 events happening that even a statistically insignificant number influenced can have quite a pronounced effect but could never be proven.
Ok, let's bring this into an area that is less abstract. What you are claiming is that this world is a casino and the casino manager decides who wins and who loses by influencing the dice so that statistically speaking, everything is fine (for every winner he creates, he also makes someone who would've won randomly a loser instead, so the probability distribution is preserved), yes?
You are correct that this could never be proven.
However, as soon as you claim a pattern in the winners, I can measure it. For the casino manager to be substantially different from pure chance, there has to be a pattern, otherwise not only is there no measurable difference between the manager and pure chance, there is also no actual difference.
If the casino manager has a preference for men, or white people, or people with red hair, or christians, or people who say "bless the manager" when entering the casino - we can spot this preference in the probability distribution.
If he has no preferences, he's nothing but a fancy name for randomness. For all we know, the universe does not have meaningless intermediaries, so unless you also claim that the universe is in reality totally different from everything we've discovered so far, the casino manager has just been found with a slit throad and the murder weapon is Ockhams Razor.
You are actually at the point where you are dismissing things that you cannot actually say don't exist.
I've never been anywhere else. It's been my argument from the beginning on this point. If something has no effect on the world, then it doesn't exist.
I think it's a solid argument. If there is no difference between the thing existing, and the thing not existing, then it doesn't exist.
Yet you would leave no evidence behind at all.
I think you underestimate statistics, but I know what you are going for. Yes, there are individual chance events with great consequences that could or could not have happened. But these are individual events. You cannot guide a game by manipulating one die roll, you would have to do it constantly, and at that point it becomes detectable.
There are two ways in which $deity could "load the dice". One is to give things a nudge, like making life start on Earth when that first living organism fell from the sky or whatever, and it had a 50/50 chance of making it. You are right that we cannot disprove this possibility.
The other is the "constant guidance" that things like intelligent design require, where $deity uploads patches and hotfixes pretty much all the time. This kind of interference can be measured, because if you influence 50/50 events into one direction many times, you are disturbing the probability distribution.
Prayer affects it. To deny it's existence is to look silly since each and every person can confirm for themselves that it exists.
You misunderstood. I do not doubt prayer as a psychological phenomenon. Like the placebo effect in medicine, it certainly does have some kind of effect. However, like homeopathy, it does not have a) the effect it claims to have and b) not via the causal chain it claims.
But can it calm your mind and make you feel better? Sure. Just like meditation or a nice cup of tea. None of these require the reason why you pray (aka $deity listening) to be true.
I just know it has limits and like to use the right tool for the right job.
Yes, but the argument is whether those limits are practical, temporary, or principal and permanent.
I agree immediately that sciecne has practical, temporary limits. I'm much less sure about the principal limits, because so far, much more "science will never..." barriers have been broken through than have survived.
Ah, you are assuming that the signal was intentionally created and hidden, it's not just some mysterious natural force that exists.
Of course, once you enter the "can god create a stone so heavy he himself can't lift it?" territory, pretty much anything goes.
But it doesn't change my argument. At all. It still boils down to this:
Imagine that there's a signal hidden in a kind of cosmic steganography. That's ok, I can assume that.
Now we imagine that some humans, with no technological or other aid can detect this signal, and manipulate it to create some kind of effect on the real world. But no technology - not now and not in the future - can. This claim falls into the "if you make extraordinary claims, you need to provide extraordinary evidence" territory.
Or maybe the claim is just that the signal somehow affects the real world in some kind of "god masterplan" way. Once again, even if we cannot detect the signal itself, we could detect the effects it has. If the effects are undetectable, then by definition they do not actually change anything in the world.
Sure, you can do FMRIs and perhaps even deep brain electrodes when someone reports that they are happy or sad, but you still are just looking at a set of responses and completely missing the sensation of actually being happy. You take on faith that what they feel is what you feel. You still won't be able to say if anyone but you actually feels emotion.
This is such an old philosophical topic that I thought it doesn't justify discussion. Of course, there is a difference between the subjective and the objective, but that doesn't mean anything is mysterious. Take pain, for example, a topic that is fairly well researched. If I hit your hand with a big hammer, we know quite well and in much detail what will happen, physically, biologically, bio-chemistry, sensational. We can predict in advance which brain areas will light up. For you, however, none of that will matter and what you experience is not physical impact and bio-chemistry signals travelling nerves and activating synapsis, it's "wtf you asshole that hurts!".
But there's nothing mysterious or unknown about that at all. It's just the difference between representation systems and levels of abstraction, much in the same way that hearing music and having someone tell you how great the concert was are completely different things.
You describe the placebo effect, but science has little idea how it actually works, only that it exists. [...] Science can still be surprised.
Science being a method for discovery, it would be very surprising if it couldn't be surprised anymore. My argument is not that science knows everything (it doesn't), but that we have solved many of the big mysteries of life, and every time it turned out to be... not magic.:-)
And of course, in many areas science can measure and predict but has no complete causal model, only some ideas (and there are many theories on the placebo effect, it's not like scientists throw up their army and say "it's a mystery!"). But again that's a normal part of the process, and not a counterargument. Picking that as an argument against science is like saying soccer is a shitty sport because you've been watching for 20 minutes and they haven't yet announced the winner.
Basically: - Yes, science still has many questions, and for every answer found two more pop up. - However, everywhere we looked, we found... not magic (sorry, I just love the quote) - And in any area where we can reliably check, with any scientific, magical, mystical, religious or just common-sense method you want to use, science works and all the other bullshit doesn't.
If you doubt the third point, show me the mystic who comes to his huge-audience money scam events on his flying carpet and doesn't need speakers and amplifiers because he communicates telepathically.
A difficulty here is that you are attempting to apply science to something that is not within the realm of science.
I'm applying one small part of the scientific method.
But I'm fairly sure I can agree with most sane people on this basic without using the word science. It's simply a matter of "does it work or not".
If it can be measured and tested, it is science. If it cannot, it is religion. That doesn't necessarily mean there is nothing in religion, it just means science (at least within our current understanding) can't touch it.
Nonsense. There are two ways to interpret "it cannot be measured". One is "...with current technology and/or knowledge", which simply means that in the future it probably can. The other is "...in principle", which means it doesn't exist. Because if it exists, it affects the world in some way (if it doesn't affect the world in any way whatsoever, then you cannot prove its existence). If it affects the world, that effect can be measured. Thus, the thing can be measured, indirectly. In fact, there are many things in science that are measured just this way, by their effect on other things.
But because they are a subjective experience by nature, science can neither confirm nor deny them. It can at most quantify a statistical effect on behavior that may or may not be felt in the subject as an emotion.
Nonsense. We can measure brain activity (crudly, yes, but technology improves). Even if we don't know what the fuck is going on, we can take our measurements and compare them to the emotions the subjects reported, and we can make correlations. It's a very early science, but we have made some very interesting progress. For example, Helen Fisher has done brain scans on people in love and her speeches and books about her research are incredibly fascinating. Here's one of her talks.
I have seen the idea that religion and magic live inside those impenetrable probabilities much like a signal may lie in the noise floor. It's there, but you can't prove it. It may have effect in a manner similar to the way insiders used to embezzle from banks by pocketing the rounding errors.
There's a difference between Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle - which puts limits on the precision of measurements - and the esoteric bullshit excuse "you can't see or measure it and if you look, it will hide away (but I can feel it and use it to do things)".
If the signal is indistinguishable from noise in principle (and not just because your instruments aren't good enough), then it is not a signal at all. It is the very definition of signal that it is discernible from noise and contains information.
The insiders are a totally different thing, they are just a low signal that stayed undetected because nobody was looking for it. Of course there are signals we don't know about, much like people just a few hundred years ago didn't know much about the Universe because they only looked at it in the visible wavelength, and if you've seen pictures of galaxies showing them in far UV or IR light, you know there's more to it all then we see in the visible spectrum.
So yes, we cannot be sure that there isn't other forces that we don't detect, yet. However, we can exclude that they are strong and important or any kind of explanation for magical effects of any kind, because within the world that matters to our life, there aren't that many phenomena that we are puzzled about. We're busy working out some details, but there's simply no space for some big undiscovered force.
We still have dark energy and dark matter and such, which are basically the scientific terms for "we have no clue what the fuck it is, but we know it's out there", but they're not important to what matters to you and me today
I don't remember who said it, but it's brilliant: "You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts."
If A's or B's rituals work is not a matter of belief. We can test their claims. Unless, of course, they've already withdrawn so much from the real world that all their claims are untestable (e.g. they only make claims about the afterlife). In that case, I quote Nietzsche in saying that by definition, since the attributes of a thing can be defined as its effect on other things, if a thing does not affect anything else, then it does not exist for any practical purposes.
I agree on the flu, and most western doctors would as well. Assume my argument allows for choosing an adequate response. I think I wrote "serious illness".
As for the metereologist, of course he knows that his field is so complex that all his predictions have a probability attached. But if he knows anything about his field, then he knows that "number of prayers within the local area" is not one of the parameters that have a measurable effect on the weather.
In the end, we can only go by results, ethics and comparison. If belief A and belief B are identical in all results (i.e. what we gain from them), but belief B includes daily ritual sacrifice of an infant while belief A does not, then belief A is superior because it gets the same results for less cost.
Unfortunately, in the real world it is rarely so simple.
However, for many of the more fanatical ideologies, there is a really simple real-world test: Do they practice what they preach? A religious fanatic who preaches that all science is evil, but flies to his events in an airplane and uses speakers and amplifiers shouldn't be trusted, because he himself makes use of the very things he rages against. A homeopath who, when he himself is seriously ill, goes to the hospital and gets real medicine, is a fraud and he knows it. But likewise, a meteorologist who prays for good weather tomorrow is a hypocrite.
Websites should diversify their traffic generators instead of just relying on good ole google to generate traffic for them.
For many sites, they don't intentionally create or seek out traffic generators, it just happens that Google is the 900lb gorilla and most of your traffic comes through them.
There's some wisdom to your words, and some foolishness.
I think the wisdom is evident, so I'll focus on the foolish parts, after saying that I also see the wise parts, so don't mistake this for being one-sided.
The problem with letting everyone believe whatever they want is that some of those beliefs are misguided, demonstrably false and/or dangerous. There are two major problems there:
a) belief leads to action b) belief propagates
The immediate problem is a). There are now several cases on record where parents refused or didn't seek medical aid for a child, and as a result the child died of a cause that is trivial to cure. In all of the cases, religious belief was the reason the parents acted or refused to act. But, of course, not to single out religion, WW2 and the Holocaust were also results of belief.
The typical counterargument is that everyone should be allowed to belief what they think, but not be allowed to act upon it. That is a good practical solution (since we can't control thoughts) that works exactly until such a belief becomes the majority opinion - through problem b). Once it does, you have witch burnings or a Third Reich or a law that makes being gay illegal with a penalty of death.
If you consider beliefs to be a form of memes, it stands to reason that one strategy is the elimination of competing beliefs. Or, in other words: Some of the people you graciously grant this freedom to belief whatever they want will use it to take away your freedom to belief what you want.
So if you seriously belief in freedom, you should be ready to eliminate beliefs that don't, because memes are competitive and it's eat or be eaten.
Sure, but the only effect it has is that it makes them feel better. We have double-blind studies on the effect of prayer on illness and it's zero. There's a placebo effect (people who know that someone prays for them get better, regardless of whether that really happens or not), but since she's very likely not reading/. posting it here won't do a thing.
Yes, I'm an atheist, but more importantly, I hate it when people "do good" that's just a fake job and its real psychological purpose is to make yourself feel better. Same with giving to beggars, 70% of them will have a zero increase in life quality due to your gift, but this is not the place for details on that.
After everything that the U.S. has been willing to do in the past decade or so, you still think that members of congress are off limits to the NSA and CIA?
No, I don't.
Unfortunately, I do also believe most of them are spineless, corrupt cowards. A true legislative would go public at the first sign of such attempts and disband the agency in question, with any and all funding withdrawn, effective immediately.
I believe there is a natural tendency of governments towards higher concentrations of power, because of a) human desires and b) higher efficiency (at the low cost of democracy, human rights and such things). So to keep working, the different branches of government need to ascertain their independence from each other regularily.
Unfortunately, no western democracy really has its branches seperated. Judges are appointed by politicians, the executive is elected from among the members of the legislative in many parliamentary democracies, or is a member of the same party as the legislative in republical systems.
You completely missed the point. If a branch of the executive can control the legislative, then parties don't matter at all. You could have 20 parties and it wouldn't make a difference.
You mean if you were in Congress, you wouldn't be afraid of the NSA? I'm afraid of them, and I'm just a regular guy with no power.
If you are afraid of the NSA, you have no job being in congress, and/or your primary goal should be to shut it the fuck down, because if an arm of the executive has the legislative so afraid that it can control them, then you're not living in a democracy anymore. For a free country. You're living in a military dictatorship.
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What's more important is that almost all the times, the assholes' assholey behavior towards women is not challenged by the non-assholes present. They tend to just watch.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with women or misogyny. It's just that if you would challenge every asshole on everything that's wrong, you'd have an unpaid full-time job.
This is a conversation that's long overdue, and it needs to happen.
Uh, not. It's one of the most pointless and unnecessary conversations ever. No, I mean it. Hear me out.
It's not because the problem doesn't exist. It's because everyone who you actually can have an actual conversation with is already on your side. None of the people who are willing to engage in a dialog have a substantially different opinion. It's the assholes that don't do discussions, rational considerations and conversations with people outside their peer group that are your problem.
You're preaching to the choir, and in doing so, turning it against you. People dislike being held responsible for things they themselves hate, you know?
The utter lack of compassion for men, and the complete lack of awareness of how the social construction of masculinity affects them, is one of the most depressing things about the current discourse on these issues.
It's because here in western culture we just love binary systems. To death.
So you have men and women, but little space for anything inbetween. But you also have many other binaries, everywhere you look. We think in opposites (good/evil, etc.)
So it's only natural that we also think in victim/perpetrator. And it lines up so nicely: All women are victims, all men are criminals. Sadly, some parts of the feminist movement actually think like that. But it's just another typical psychology trap, and the real world is a lot more interesting and complicated.
I'm sorry for you if you live in such an environment. I don't.
Yes, if a girl dresses slutty, most men think that she had sex on her mind - in one way or the other. That can include many things, from just enjoying feeling sexy, to wanting to be looked at, to impressing her friends or her boyfriend, to looking for a fuck. That doesn't mean that men will consider it a personal invitation. If they do, then those men are assholes, but not men in general. If you think that such stupidity is a culture, get the heck out of your horrible environment.
Yes, women are actually playing hard to get, and are constantly testing potential partners by putting up soft obstacles for him to overcome. It's one of the games played so constantly that books have been written about it, and I don't mean pick-up literature, but scientific ones. It's actually quite an interesting topic from a psychological point of view.
Experienced men can clearly seperate between playful hard-to-get and actual leave-me-alone, just as experienced women can clearly signal such. However, teens and inexperienced people of both genders often don't. As long as it doesn't involve physical pressure, it's a fucking misunderstanding, not "rape culture".
Now if you are physically forcing someone into intercourse who is keeping saying or signalling "no", then you're either a rapist or in a BDSM relationship. However, we do, sadly, live in a "rape culture" in a different sense of the word - namely 50 million things that are not rape being labeled as such. Trying to pick up a girl in a crowded bar even after she's said "fuck off" may be all kinds of things, but it's not rape.
If she's passed out - you put a blanket over her and let her sleep it off. Absolutely no discussion on that one. This has happened to several of my friends, both female and male, and in absolutely every single case it resulted in a blanket and breakfast and nothing else.
So sorry if your social circles suck so badly at basic human values that they either consider forced sexual relations ok, or define rape so broadly that normal human interactions and misunderstandings fall into the category. If your friends fall into either category, don't whine about a non-existing problem of society, get new friends.
Thanks!
Other faiths do not, they evolve their understanding so that it no longer conflicts with established fact.
I disagree on that. It is merely a retreat battle where they withdraw from the battlefield once solidly defeated, but for centuries the christian churches, for example, killed people who confronted them with uncomfortable facts.
Like science must yield to religion where it cannot answer,
No, it must not. Nobody should yield to a bunch of people whose "knowledge" is entirely made up.
There's the philosophical argument about whether or not religion in theory could have a place somewhere. And then there's the real religions of the real world, and they're all completely full of shit, and we know it because their track record on truth so far is absolutely abysmal.
As I said before, when every claim that was tested turned out to be bollocks, the time for respect towards the lalaland of some old-man fantasy world is neither deserved nor appropriate.
You don't by chance remember the name of the survey or have a link?
I'd be extremely interested in this particular piece.
So what's the alternative?
Databases.
For anything that requires a formula more complicated then =SUM(A1:A10)/AVG(B1:B10) you should use something that was actually designed to handle data.
Is that the industry that cratered a couple years ago, taking much of our economy with them?
I don't think they need telling. They need mercy killing.
also know that for decades people with uncers got a lot of bad advice and no investigation was done in spite of the repeated failures of that advice.
I totally agree on that. The process has many faults, and especially whenever humans do science, you get all of the psychological problems like not wanting to admit the past 5 years of your life were wasted, or personal interests, business interests, good old corruption, self-esteem and pride, change-blindness, the whole nine yards.
unlikely but hardly impossible to make the observation by chance.
That works for a small sample set, but not for large ones. I totally agree that in reality it would take a long time and many failures to get a result in cases like these. And early on if someone were so daft to propose the ultimately correct solution he would probably be laughed at.
But here's where I see the important difference: Despite all the fails and taking the long way around the block, science will eventually get there. Religion and mysticism, on the other hand, disregards the evidence so its pre-defined worldview can be preserved.
I prefer making many mistakes but eventually arriving at the right answer over having one absolute, ultimate truth and maintaining that belief even after it turned out that its bollocks.
That needs explanation?
The only people I know who do serious business stuff with spreadsheets are the kind of middle management airbags who drag the company down in many other ways as well. You all know them, the types where work goes better in their department when they're on holiday or ill.
I mean, seriously? Anyone with an above room temperature IQ here who thinks spreadsheets are more than hacks for getting a quick, rough estimate of your data?
Here's where I see these: As the new city car-sharing service.
In my city, there are several car-sharing agencies where you pick up a car anywhere you find it (Apps exist so you can look on your smartphone for the nearest one), drive to where you want to be, and drop it there for the next one. The system is great.
But even better would be if you could order a car to your location when you're getting ready, get an answer with an arrival time so you can put on your shoes and cloak and go downstairs, hop in and tell it where to go. And when it needs fuel, it drives itself to the nearest fueling station.
These things could easily replace taxis.
You threw out at least half of my scenario. You have no idea what the manager's agenda is, nor even that the manager exist
Sorry for not being more explicit on that.
My argument is that if the manager has an agenda, then it can be spotted. If there is some favorite behaviour, looks, gender or whatever, then with enough data we can see that people who fall into category X have more luck than average.
But even if he does favor people with red hair, no matter how high he stacks the odds, you will refuse to believe he exists.
Let's not jump to conclusions, but go step-by-step.
Let's assume that red hairs are his favorite, and that he prefers them so much they win statistically significant more games.
A scientifically minded person will first notice the pattern and then work on a) confirming it (is it really the red hair, or something else that just happens to coincide with red hair?) and b) finding out how the causal link works.
Red haired people will be monitored and compared, and many theories will be produced about just what is it that makes them win more games. Maybe their opponents like them and let them win? No, can't explain them winning at roulette.
Scientists work from the simple to the complex, from the self-evident to the obscure. So after 500 theories that make sense have all been excluded, they will begin taking the crazy stuff seriously.
Since his stacked odds are not actually impossible, you will declare it just a fluke
Sorry, but this is the point where I have to say you have no clue how science works. Do you even realize the precision of modern science? I think it was Richard Dawkins who said it well: Yes, our science is only "close" and "not exact". But what a scientist and a layman understand there are two totally different things. Most of our physics, for example, is "just approximations" - on the scale of measuring the distance between New York City and San Francisco down to the millimeter. OMG, we might be off by up to 0.5mm ! Science has no clue, it's all just guesswork! :-)
No, any statistically significant deviation from the mean on any statistically significant sample will not be declared a fluke. Especially not if the measurement can be reliably repeated. Claiming so is utter bullshit. Planets have been predicted and subsequently discovered because of such small deviations (in other planets orbits).
If you test again
Again, you have no clue how science works. Sure, for practical reasons sample sized are limited, but for even tiny things, there are dozens of studies with hundreds or thousands of measurements, not two or three.
But I can move back from the purely philosophical to a more practical argument: Any and all gods of actual, active religions have been solidly debunked, because their faithful do not claim small odds on random events, but massive, easily visible and measurable effects on the real world. Effects that could not possibly slip through the net.
Withdrawing to "maybe he's just deciding who wins the 50/50 chances" is just the latest step in a century-long retreat battle of religions. Every area that was once claimed to be the domain of the higher powers and impossible to understand by mere humans that we have successfully cracked has - I repeat myself - turned out to be ... not magic.
There is a point in an argument where the burden of proof shifts. If one side makes claim A and is disproven, and then claim B and is disproven, and likewise for claim C, D, E ... X and Y then somewhere down the line, we can dismiss their claim Z without even looking at it and require that it is now their turn to prove their claims and not our responsibility to disprove them.
For religion, that point has long been passed. Not one claim of religion that has been scrutinized has held up. Not one. Tha
Surely you're not claiming faith in science? :-)
Faith is the belief in something in absence of evidence. I think I've made it quite clear that evidence is quite the important qualifier.
Note that there are enough 50/50 events happening that even a statistically insignificant number influenced can have quite a pronounced effect but could never be proven.
Ok, let's bring this into an area that is less abstract. What you are claiming is that this world is a casino and the casino manager decides who wins and who loses by influencing the dice so that statistically speaking, everything is fine (for every winner he creates, he also makes someone who would've won randomly a loser instead, so the probability distribution is preserved), yes?
You are correct that this could never be proven.
However, as soon as you claim a pattern in the winners, I can measure it. For the casino manager to be substantially different from pure chance, there has to be a pattern, otherwise not only is there no measurable difference between the manager and pure chance, there is also no actual difference.
If the casino manager has a preference for men, or white people, or people with red hair, or christians, or people who say "bless the manager" when entering the casino - we can spot this preference in the probability distribution.
If he has no preferences, he's nothing but a fancy name for randomness. For all we know, the universe does not have meaningless intermediaries, so unless you also claim that the universe is in reality totally different from everything we've discovered so far, the casino manager has just been found with a slit throad and the murder weapon is Ockhams Razor.
You are actually at the point where you are dismissing things that you cannot actually say don't exist.
I've never been anywhere else. It's been my argument from the beginning on this point. If something has no effect on the world, then it doesn't exist.
I think it's a solid argument. If there is no difference between the thing existing, and the thing not existing, then it doesn't exist.
Yet you would leave no evidence behind at all.
I think you underestimate statistics, but I know what you are going for. Yes, there are individual chance events with great consequences that could or could not have happened. But these are individual events. You cannot guide a game by manipulating one die roll, you would have to do it constantly, and at that point it becomes detectable.
There are two ways in which $deity could "load the dice". One is to give things a nudge, like making life start on Earth when that first living organism fell from the sky or whatever, and it had a 50/50 chance of making it. You are right that we cannot disprove this possibility.
The other is the "constant guidance" that things like intelligent design require, where $deity uploads patches and hotfixes pretty much all the time. This kind of interference can be measured, because if you influence 50/50 events into one direction many times, you are disturbing the probability distribution.
Prayer affects it. To deny it's existence is to look silly since each and every person can confirm for themselves that it exists.
You misunderstood. I do not doubt prayer as a psychological phenomenon. Like the placebo effect in medicine, it certainly does have some kind of effect. However, like homeopathy, it does not have a) the effect it claims to have and b) not via the causal chain it claims.
But can it calm your mind and make you feel better? Sure. Just like meditation or a nice cup of tea. None of these require the reason why you pray (aka $deity listening) to be true.
I just know it has limits and like to use the right tool for the right job.
Yes, but the argument is whether those limits are practical, temporary, or principal and permanent.
I agree immediately that sciecne has practical, temporary limits. I'm much less sure about the principal limits, because so far, much more "science will never..." barriers have been broken through than have survived.
Consider steganography.
Ah, you are assuming that the signal was intentionally created and hidden, it's not just some mysterious natural force that exists.
Of course, once you enter the "can god create a stone so heavy he himself can't lift it?" territory, pretty much anything goes.
But it doesn't change my argument. At all. It still boils down to this:
Imagine that there's a signal hidden in a kind of cosmic steganography. That's ok, I can assume that.
Now we imagine that some humans, with no technological or other aid can detect this signal, and manipulate it to create some kind of effect on the real world. But no technology - not now and not in the future - can. This claim falls into the "if you make extraordinary claims, you need to provide extraordinary evidence" territory.
Or maybe the claim is just that the signal somehow affects the real world in some kind of "god masterplan" way. Once again, even if we cannot detect the signal itself, we could detect the effects it has. If the effects are undetectable, then by definition they do not actually change anything in the world.
Sure, you can do FMRIs and perhaps even deep brain electrodes when someone reports that they are happy or sad, but you still are just looking at a set of responses and completely missing the sensation of actually being happy. You take on faith that what they feel is what you feel. You still won't be able to say if anyone but you actually feels emotion.
This is such an old philosophical topic that I thought it doesn't justify discussion. Of course, there is a difference between the subjective and the objective, but that doesn't mean anything is mysterious. Take pain, for example, a topic that is fairly well researched. If I hit your hand with a big hammer, we know quite well and in much detail what will happen, physically, biologically, bio-chemistry, sensational. We can predict in advance which brain areas will light up. For you, however, none of that will matter and what you experience is not physical impact and bio-chemistry signals travelling nerves and activating synapsis, it's "wtf you asshole that hurts!".
But there's nothing mysterious or unknown about that at all. It's just the difference between representation systems and levels of abstraction, much in the same way that hearing music and having someone tell you how great the concert was are completely different things.
You describe the placebo effect, but science has little idea how it actually works, only that it exists. [...] Science can still be surprised.
Science being a method for discovery, it would be very surprising if it couldn't be surprised anymore. My argument is not that science knows everything (it doesn't), but that we have solved many of the big mysteries of life, and every time it turned out to be ... not magic. :-)
And of course, in many areas science can measure and predict but has no complete causal model, only some ideas (and there are many theories on the placebo effect, it's not like scientists throw up their army and say "it's a mystery!"). But again that's a normal part of the process, and not a counterargument. Picking that as an argument against science is like saying soccer is a shitty sport because you've been watching for 20 minutes and they haven't yet announced the winner.
Basically: ... not magic (sorry, I just love the quote)
- Yes, science still has many questions, and for every answer found two more pop up.
- However, everywhere we looked, we found
- And in any area where we can reliably check, with any scientific, magical, mystical, religious or just common-sense method you want to use, science works and all the other bullshit doesn't.
If you doubt the third point, show me the mystic who comes to his huge-audience money scam events on his flying carpet and doesn't need speakers and amplifiers because he communicates telepathically.
A difficulty here is that you are attempting to apply science to something that is not within the realm of science.
I'm applying one small part of the scientific method.
But I'm fairly sure I can agree with most sane people on this basic without using the word science. It's simply a matter of "does it work or not".
If it can be measured and tested, it is science. If it cannot, it is religion. That doesn't necessarily mean there is nothing in religion, it just means science (at least within our current understanding) can't touch it.
Nonsense. There are two ways to interpret "it cannot be measured". One is "...with current technology and/or knowledge", which simply means that in the future it probably can. The other is "...in principle", which means it doesn't exist. Because if it exists, it affects the world in some way (if it doesn't affect the world in any way whatsoever, then you cannot prove its existence). If it affects the world, that effect can be measured. Thus, the thing can be measured, indirectly. In fact, there are many things in science that are measured just this way, by their effect on other things.
But because they are a subjective experience by nature, science can neither confirm nor deny them. It can at most quantify a statistical effect on behavior that may or may not be felt in the subject as an emotion.
Nonsense. We can measure brain activity (crudly, yes, but technology improves). Even if we don't know what the fuck is going on, we can take our measurements and compare them to the emotions the subjects reported, and we can make correlations. It's a very early science, but we have made some very interesting progress. For example, Helen Fisher has done brain scans on people in love and her speeches and books about her research are incredibly fascinating. Here's one of her talks.
I have seen the idea that religion and magic live inside those impenetrable probabilities much like a signal may lie in the noise floor. It's there, but you can't prove it. It may have effect in a manner similar to the way insiders used to embezzle from banks by pocketing the rounding errors.
There's a difference between Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle - which puts limits on the precision of measurements - and the esoteric bullshit excuse "you can't see or measure it and if you look, it will hide away (but I can feel it and use it to do things)".
If the signal is indistinguishable from noise in principle (and not just because your instruments aren't good enough), then it is not a signal at all. It is the very definition of signal that it is discernible from noise and contains information.
The insiders are a totally different thing, they are just a low signal that stayed undetected because nobody was looking for it. Of course there are signals we don't know about, much like people just a few hundred years ago didn't know much about the Universe because they only looked at it in the visible wavelength, and if you've seen pictures of galaxies showing them in far UV or IR light, you know there's more to it all then we see in the visible spectrum.
So yes, we cannot be sure that there isn't other forces that we don't detect, yet. However, we can exclude that they are strong and important or any kind of explanation for magical effects of any kind, because within the world that matters to our life, there aren't that many phenomena that we are puzzled about. We're busy working out some details, but there's simply no space for some big undiscovered force.
We still have dark energy and dark matter and such, which are basically the scientific terms for "we have no clue what the fuck it is, but we know it's out there", but they're not important to what matters to you and me today
I don't remember who said it, but it's brilliant: "You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts."
If A's or B's rituals work is not a matter of belief. We can test their claims. Unless, of course, they've already withdrawn so much from the real world that all their claims are untestable (e.g. they only make claims about the afterlife). In that case, I quote Nietzsche in saying that by definition, since the attributes of a thing can be defined as its effect on other things, if a thing does not affect anything else, then it does not exist for any practical purposes.
I agree on the flu, and most western doctors would as well. Assume my argument allows for choosing an adequate response. I think I wrote "serious illness".
As for the metereologist, of course he knows that his field is so complex that all his predictions have a probability attached. But if he knows anything about his field, then he knows that "number of prayers within the local area" is not one of the parameters that have a measurable effect on the weather.
That is the problem, I admit.
In the end, we can only go by results, ethics and comparison. If belief A and belief B are identical in all results (i.e. what we gain from them), but belief B includes daily ritual sacrifice of an infant while belief A does not, then belief A is superior because it gets the same results for less cost.
Unfortunately, in the real world it is rarely so simple.
However, for many of the more fanatical ideologies, there is a really simple real-world test: Do they practice what they preach? A religious fanatic who preaches that all science is evil, but flies to his events in an airplane and uses speakers and amplifiers shouldn't be trusted, because he himself makes use of the very things he rages against. A homeopath who, when he himself is seriously ill, goes to the hospital and gets real medicine, is a fraud and he knows it. But likewise, a meteorologist who prays for good weather tomorrow is a hypocrite.
Websites should diversify their traffic generators instead of just relying on good ole google to generate traffic for them.
For many sites, they don't intentionally create or seek out traffic generators, it just happens that Google is the 900lb gorilla and most of your traffic comes through them.
There's some wisdom to your words, and some foolishness.
I think the wisdom is evident, so I'll focus on the foolish parts, after saying that I also see the wise parts, so don't mistake this for being one-sided.
The problem with letting everyone believe whatever they want is that some of those beliefs are misguided, demonstrably false and/or dangerous. There are two major problems there:
a) belief leads to action
b) belief propagates
The immediate problem is a). There are now several cases on record where parents refused or didn't seek medical aid for a child, and as a result the child died of a cause that is trivial to cure. In all of the cases, religious belief was the reason the parents acted or refused to act. But, of course, not to single out religion, WW2 and the Holocaust were also results of belief.
The typical counterargument is that everyone should be allowed to belief what they think, but not be allowed to act upon it. That is a good practical solution (since we can't control thoughts) that works exactly until such a belief becomes the majority opinion - through problem b). Once it does, you have witch burnings or a Third Reich or a law that makes being gay illegal with a penalty of death.
If you consider beliefs to be a form of memes, it stands to reason that one strategy is the elimination of competing beliefs. Or, in other words: Some of the people you graciously grant this freedom to belief whatever they want will use it to take away your freedom to belief what you want.
So if you seriously belief in freedom, you should be ready to eliminate beliefs that don't, because memes are competitive and it's eat or be eaten.
Sure, but the only effect it has is that it makes them feel better. We have double-blind studies on the effect of prayer on illness and it's zero. There's a placebo effect (people who know that someone prays for them get better, regardless of whether that really happens or not), but since she's very likely not reading /. posting it here won't do a thing.
Yes, I'm an atheist, but more importantly, I hate it when people "do good" that's just a fake job and its real psychological purpose is to make yourself feel better. Same with giving to beggars, 70% of them will have a zero increase in life quality due to your gift, but this is not the place for details on that.
After everything that the U.S. has been willing to do in the past decade or so, you still think that members of congress are off limits to the NSA and CIA?
No, I don't.
Unfortunately, I do also believe most of them are spineless, corrupt cowards. A true legislative would go public at the first sign of such attempts and disband the agency in question, with any and all funding withdrawn, effective immediately.
I believe there is a natural tendency of governments towards higher concentrations of power, because of a) human desires and b) higher efficiency (at the low cost of democracy, human rights and such things). So to keep working, the different branches of government need to ascertain their independence from each other regularily.
Unfortunately, no western democracy really has its branches seperated. Judges are appointed by politicians, the executive is elected from among the members of the legislative in many parliamentary democracies, or is a member of the same party as the legislative in republical systems.
but with only 2 political parties
You completely missed the point. If a branch of the executive can control the legislative, then parties don't matter at all. You could have 20 parties and it wouldn't make a difference.
You mean if you were in Congress, you wouldn't be afraid of the NSA? I'm afraid of them, and I'm just a regular guy with no power.
If you are afraid of the NSA, you have no job being in congress, and/or your primary goal should be to shut it the fuck down, because if an arm of the executive has the legislative so afraid that it can control them, then you're not living in a democracy anymore. For a free country. You're living in a military dictatorship.