It's experiments that need to be repeatable, not events. This is the crucial distinction. You can devise experiments that give logical inferences about past events. Provided the logic is sound, and the experiment is repeatable so that it can be verified and withstand scientific rigour, you can generate valid scientific knowledge about past events without physically recreating them.
You might find this podcast interesting. Seems the intent of the 2nd amendment was to discourage america from having a large standing army that sapped resources and wagged the dog. If everyone has guns and there is an effective nationwide draft in the form of a militia, then the population of the US would be far more resistant to going to war. The founding fathers apparently recognised the downfall of every large civilisation was imperialism and wanted to build in a resistance to it. The world wars seem to have destroyed that mechanism though.
It depends what you mean by "no chance". Nothing we've learnt scientifically to date suggests this would cause cancer. Of course that doesn't mean there is "no chance" since we may learn something new that does suggest it would cause cancer.
And if you retreat to the position that something must create absolutely zero risk to be worth doing, then absolutely nothing is safe enough for you. Going out in the sun and breathing carry a risk of causing cancer.
From our current understanding, there is absolutely no rational reason to believe that microwaves from cellphones/wifi give you cancer, in the same way that there's no reason to believe that touching wood fends off bad luck. People still swear blind that it does, but there's no scientific reason to think so.
The point he was making is that you said specifically that the headline was US bashing, but all the headline says is the some research is being conducted in Europe. You'd have to work very hard at being insecure and over-sensitive to read that as some kind of slight against America. From a purely pedantic standpoint, it's the article/summary that you should have denounced, the headline was entirely innocuous.
firstly evidence!=proof, and secondly all the mountains of evidence we have that the violation of conservation of energy is impossible renders that interpretation of the data very dubious, especially when an alternative interpretation that falls naturally out of a well supported model easily accommodates (and probably predicts) this data.
It seems obvious to me that this has been a long-term plan enacted by people who did not care whether their goal would ever occur during their own lifetimes
That's an asinine example. You're ignoring the context. Slashdot has very little content to do with sword wielding maniacs, whereas the "The Pirate Bay" that is closely affiliated with "The Piratbyrån" whose manifesto is copyright reform, indexes content of which the vast majority is "pirated" copyrighted material. But silly me, obviously the name is just a coincidence, and reading anything into their choice of name is just as strained and tenuous and thinking the slash in slashdot must be to do with swords.
That's lobstertainment is one of my favourites. Best calculon episode ever. The problem with beast was that NOTHING happened very slowly, and there were almost no jokes. And the plot was inane. Nine thumbs down. I can't think of any futurama eps that were that empty of ideas.
That same argument could be applied to every single piece of information in an xbox live profile. None of it is necessary for playing the game. But that isn't what they're for. They're for creating a sense of community by allowing you to find people that you can identify with and socialise with to enhance your enjoyment of the game. And for that purpose, ANY aspect of yourself that is unusual or important enough to you to note so that you can identify potential friends is completely necessary. If I was gay, I wouldn't want to invest time befriending someone who was ultimately going to have turn on me once they found out. Being in a minority, I would also want to maximise my potential of finding other people in that minority in order to find people I can identify with.
Put it this way - if 10% of the population were heterosexual I would want to locate other heterosexuals to socialise with. And note that "socialise" doesn't mean have some kind of orgy.
Can you honestly think of any reason why this is being singled out other than homophobia? Putting information in your xbox live profile that some might deem irrelevant does not get you banned, and does not get you hounded by other users.
Your post amounts to one very long winded series of straw men and non-sequiters.
Before the earth was round, it was flat, it's been shaped like a disk. It's been hollow, filled with magma, it's had a liquid core, a solid core, and now it might have two cores orbiting each other.
what you've very neatly laid out there is the progression of scientific knowledge gradually refining the consensus towards something more and more accurate. Notice how that sequence didn't go "first it flat then it was round then it was flat then it was a pyramid then it flat again, then a giant donut then flat now there's a 50-50 chance of it being flat or round and we haven't got a clue which it is"? That would be what you would expect from your weird caricature of the scientific process whereby everybody just seems to be bumbling around making things up as they go along, but as you freely illustrate, it isn't what actually happens.
and then you got a cure for all bacteria and soon viruses and cancer then woops we're nowhere on cancer and viruses and bacteria are going to win after all.
so could you cite exactly when the scientific concensus was that "you got a cure for all bacteria and soon viruses and cancer" and when this position was abandoned in a spectacular about-face to "woops we're nowhere on cancer and viruses and bacteria are going to win after all" because correct me if i'm wrong, but that's just something absurd that you pulled out of your ass.
before you go on about how science progresses and is never wrong
Well it's lovely of you to put words in people's mouths, but it's one of the basic tenets of science that all positions are provisional in the face of further evidence. EXACTLY the opposite of your straw man. This of course renders your following "analogy" completely irrelevant and specious
different kinds of fire, food, water... the air... and we keep drilling down and also learn about things that don't matter as much... [...]is that going to make my dick bigger?
I think perhaps the reference to the size your dick is supposed to be the "tell" that you are just trolling but the sad truth is some people actually think this way. So your attitude is that science is pointless because it just gets more wrong with time and even if it was right the things it teaches us are increasingly unimportant.
I think you've failed to show that science gets more wrong with time, indeed your earlier shape of the earth example illustrates exactly the opposite, and i think the correlation between how difficult to understand science becomes as time goes on, and you lack of interest in it as time goes on, might be a good indicator of some kind of causation, but of course, further independent evidence is required before i could make a firm assertion.
the ignorant are everywhere, so obviously, they must be better than you... that's what Darwin says.
I think you mean better adapted to reproduce in their environment. That's what Darwin says. And being better adapted to reproduce in your environment like everything else is a temporary status, especially if you are drastically altering you environment.
Your idea of what science is and what science "says" is grossly ignorant and absurd. I'm hoping you're just a troll and you got modded +5 interesting become someone though it would be funny.
I don't accept any theistic beliefs, and I do accept the validity of evolutionary theory. I don't recognise any universal, absolute and arbitrary morality. I (like most people I imagine) voluntarily subscribe to a personal ethical framework that I refine and revise the more I experience. Why do I bother? It turns out that I'm not some kind of rapist murdering thief because it's glaringly self evident that that kind of behaviour wouldn't do me any favours. Looking at it from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, it seems it's just a fact of nature that short term "self sacrifice" very often pays off disproportionately in the long term. Going out of your way to help people results in the vast majority of those people wanting to help you at a later date.
But it isn't purely about cold calculated return on investment. There's a reason people that you help want to help you in return. Human beings have emotional triggers that provoke altruistic and cooperative behaviour, feelings of gratitude, friendship, trust, love, compassion, etc. Perhaps a theist would say these come from god. An evolutionary psychologist would say these traits have evolved since, as I pointed out earlier, altruism and short term self sacrifice pay off more in the long term than short sighted coercion and greed and are therefore selectable traits.
So as far as I can see, the reason people act for the good of others / their environment is just a mixture of pragmatism and natural human emotions.
As you rightly point out, the mechanism of evolution implies no moral obligation in any way. It has no intent or conciousness with which to desire any outcome or behaviour.
I always find it interesting the way some religious people bring this subject up in terms of "obligation". It implies the only reason they see to behave ethically is because an authority tells them to. That kind of attitude is something I would reject as potentially extremely detrimental to the well being of myself and the people I care about, so by my "morality" unquestioning deference to some kind of ethical proxy is "immoral".
To put it simply - do you love your family only because your preacher tells you that the bible says that there is an omnipotent being that will torture you for eternity if you don't, or do you love them because it is an innate part of what you are to love them?
Now you can say obviously it's the latter and that innate part of you comes from god. Fair enough, and I can say it's the latter and that innate part of me comes from the evolutionary processes that are part of the natural functioning of the universe.
Now apply that same line of thinking to all the people you like, trust, or feel compassion for, and hopefully at that point you can appreciate why someone with no belief in an arbitrary "morality" can behave ethically and with compassion without the need for divine proscription.
Not only does it seem obvious to me that "goodness" is simply an innate part of being a human, it makes me wonder about the people to whom it isn't obvious. Are they like some kind of barely contained sociopath that would kill everyone they dislike if only god would tell them it was OK? I imagine not, but it seems as shame that they don't give themselves enough credit for the "goodness" that is simply who they are, rather than who they're told to be.
I don't want the world to become an uninhabitable wasteland because as a human, my emotional makeup causes me to care about the welfare of the human race, and my acknowledgement of myself as a member of the common descent of all life on the earth, and my emotional appreciation of the natural beauty of the system causes me to care about the fate the ecosystem of the earth
As a counter example, simply an example - not a generalisation, there are some who use the religious belief of an imminent rapture to justify not caring about the environmental consequences of our behaviour at all. So theism is not always a guarantee of responsibility.
i think you missed the point - that's opposite of what they'd want to do - if they did that they would no longer be able to sell overpriced hardware since you could just build your own PC and install OSX.
So you don't think it's valid to have both personal responsibility and social responsibility? If you saw a hit and run and no one else was around would you just walk past and leave them to die, thinking "Some people draw the short straw in the lottery of life. That's all there is to it"?
Do you think that attitude on the whole would make for a better society? Do you even want to be part of a society?
And do you also genuinely believe that everyone with a medical ailment is capable of finding the money to treat their ailments if they really tried?
And do you genuinely believe that taxation is theft?
While it's valid to argue where the line should be drawn between social and personal responsibility, the childishly histrionic language in which you couch your argument and the silly straw man you knock down in the last paragraph suggests that don't really have a very balanced pragmatic attitude toward living in a society, and perhaps would be better moving to the mountains to fend for yourself.
yeah, along with all those people born with or stricken down with ailments over which they have no control are just parasitic scum that should be left to die in a ditch lest they put too much of a strain on the taxpayer.
Slashdot Mirror
Find a human skeleton in some precambrian rock strata. Congratulations, you've just falsified common descent.
Welcome to the fascinating world of creationists.
I heard an interesting alternative take on what the intent behind the 2nd amendment was the other day - i commented about it here.
It's experiments that need to be repeatable, not events. This is the crucial distinction. You can devise experiments that give logical inferences about past events. Provided the logic is sound, and the experiment is repeatable so that it can be verified and withstand scientific rigour, you can generate valid scientific knowledge about past events without physically recreating them.
are you kidding? she looks like Q ;)
You might find this podcast interesting. Seems the intent of the 2nd amendment was to discourage america from having a large standing army that sapped resources and wagged the dog. If everyone has guns and there is an effective nationwide draft in the form of a militia, then the population of the US would be far more resistant to going to war. The founding fathers apparently recognised the downfall of every large civilisation was imperialism and wanted to build in a resistance to it. The world wars seem to have destroyed that mechanism though.
It depends what you mean by "no chance". Nothing we've learnt scientifically to date suggests this would cause cancer. Of course that doesn't mean there is "no chance" since we may learn something new that does suggest it would cause cancer.
And if you retreat to the position that something must create absolutely zero risk to be worth doing, then absolutely nothing is safe enough for you. Going out in the sun and breathing carry a risk of causing cancer.
From our current understanding, there is absolutely no rational reason to believe that microwaves from cellphones/wifi give you cancer, in the same way that there's no reason to believe that touching wood fends off bad luck. People still swear blind that it does, but there's no scientific reason to think so.
The point he was making is that you said specifically that the headline was US bashing, but all the headline says is the some research is being conducted in Europe. You'd have to work very hard at being insecure and over-sensitive to read that as some kind of slight against America. From a purely pedantic standpoint, it's the article/summary that you should have denounced, the headline was entirely innocuous.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=awesome+bar
firstly evidence!=proof, and secondly all the mountains of evidence we have that the violation of conservation of energy is impossible renders that interpretation of the data very dubious, especially when an alternative interpretation that falls naturally out of a well supported model easily accommodates (and probably predicts) this data.
It seems obvious to me that this has been a long-term plan enacted by people who did not care whether their goal would ever occur during their own lifetimes
why?
pirated gay porn
That's some spectacular grammar.
whoosh
That's an asinine example. You're ignoring the context. Slashdot has very little content to do with sword wielding maniacs, whereas the "The Pirate Bay" that is closely affiliated with "The Piratbyrån" whose manifesto is copyright reform, indexes content of which the vast majority is "pirated" copyrighted material. But silly me, obviously the name is just a coincidence, and reading anything into their choice of name is just as strained and tenuous and thinking the slash in slashdot must be to do with swords.
That's lobstertainment is one of my favourites. Best calculon episode ever. The problem with beast was that NOTHING happened very slowly, and there were almost no jokes. And the plot was inane. Nine thumbs down. I can't think of any futurama eps that were that empty of ideas.
That same argument could be applied to every single piece of information in an xbox live profile. None of it is necessary for playing the game. But that isn't what they're for. They're for creating a sense of community by allowing you to find people that you can identify with and socialise with to enhance your enjoyment of the game. And for that purpose, ANY aspect of yourself that is unusual or important enough to you to note so that you can identify potential friends is completely necessary. If I was gay, I wouldn't want to invest time befriending someone who was ultimately going to have turn on me once they found out. Being in a minority, I would also want to maximise my potential of finding other people in that minority in order to find people I can identify with.
Put it this way - if 10% of the population were heterosexual I would want to locate other heterosexuals to socialise with. And note that "socialise" doesn't mean have some kind of orgy.
Can you honestly think of any reason why this is being singled out other than homophobia? Putting information in your xbox live profile that some might deem irrelevant does not get you banned, and does not get you hounded by other users.
Your post amounts to one very long winded series of straw men and non-sequiters.
Before the earth was round, it was flat, it's been shaped like a disk. It's been hollow, filled with magma, it's had a liquid core, a solid core, and now it might have two cores orbiting each other.
what you've very neatly laid out there is the progression of scientific knowledge gradually refining the consensus towards something more and more accurate. Notice how that sequence didn't go "first it flat then it was round then it was flat then it was a pyramid then it flat again, then a giant donut then flat now there's a 50-50 chance of it being flat or round and we haven't got a clue which it is"? That would be what you would expect from your weird caricature of the scientific process whereby everybody just seems to be bumbling around making things up as they go along, but as you freely illustrate, it isn't what actually happens.
and then you got a cure for all bacteria and soon viruses and cancer then woops we're nowhere on cancer and viruses and bacteria are going to win after all.
so could you cite exactly when the scientific concensus was that "you got a cure for all bacteria and soon viruses and cancer" and when this position was abandoned in a spectacular about-face to "woops we're nowhere on cancer and viruses and bacteria are going to win after all" because correct me if i'm wrong, but that's just something absurd that you pulled out of your ass.
before you go on about how science progresses and is never wrong
Well it's lovely of you to put words in people's mouths, but it's one of the basic tenets of science that all positions are provisional in the face of further evidence. EXACTLY the opposite of your straw man. This of course renders your following "analogy" completely irrelevant and specious
different kinds of fire, food, water... the air... and we keep drilling down and also learn about things that don't matter as much... [...]is that going to make my dick bigger?
I think perhaps the reference to the size your dick is supposed to be the "tell" that you are just trolling but the sad truth is some people actually think this way. So your attitude is that science is pointless because it just gets more wrong with time and even if it was right the things it teaches us are increasingly unimportant.
I think you've failed to show that science gets more wrong with time, indeed your earlier shape of the earth example illustrates exactly the opposite, and i think the correlation between how difficult to understand science becomes as time goes on, and you lack of interest in it as time goes on, might be a good indicator of some kind of causation, but of course, further independent evidence is required before i could make a firm assertion.
the ignorant are everywhere, so obviously, they must be better than you... that's what Darwin says.
I think you mean better adapted to reproduce in their environment. That's what Darwin says. And being better adapted to reproduce in your environment like everything else is a temporary status, especially if you are drastically altering you environment.
Your idea of what science is and what science "says" is grossly ignorant and absurd. I'm hoping you're just a troll and you got modded +5 interesting become someone though it would be funny.
I don't accept any theistic beliefs, and I do accept the validity of evolutionary theory. I don't recognise any universal, absolute and arbitrary morality. I (like most people I imagine) voluntarily subscribe to a personal ethical framework that I refine and revise the more I experience. Why do I bother? It turns out that I'm not some kind of rapist murdering thief because it's glaringly self evident that that kind of behaviour wouldn't do me any favours. Looking at it from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, it seems it's just a fact of nature that short term "self sacrifice" very often pays off disproportionately in the long term. Going out of your way to help people results in the vast majority of those people wanting to help you at a later date.
But it isn't purely about cold calculated return on investment. There's a reason people that you help want to help you in return. Human beings have emotional triggers that provoke altruistic and cooperative behaviour, feelings of gratitude, friendship, trust, love, compassion, etc. Perhaps a theist would say these come from god. An evolutionary psychologist would say these traits have evolved since, as I pointed out earlier, altruism and short term self sacrifice pay off more in the long term than short sighted coercion and greed and are therefore selectable traits.
So as far as I can see, the reason people act for the good of others / their environment is just a mixture of pragmatism and natural human emotions.
As you rightly point out, the mechanism of evolution implies no moral obligation in any way. It has no intent or conciousness with which to desire any outcome or behaviour.
I always find it interesting the way some religious people bring this subject up in terms of "obligation". It implies the only reason they see to behave ethically is because an authority tells them to. That kind of attitude is something I would reject as potentially extremely detrimental to the well being of myself and the people I care about, so by my "morality" unquestioning deference to some kind of ethical proxy is "immoral".
To put it simply - do you love your family only because your preacher tells you that the bible says that there is an omnipotent being that will torture you for eternity if you don't, or do you love them because it is an innate part of what you are to love them?
Now you can say obviously it's the latter and that innate part of you comes from god. Fair enough, and I can say it's the latter and that innate part of me comes from the evolutionary processes that are part of the natural functioning of the universe.
Now apply that same line of thinking to all the people you like, trust, or feel compassion for, and hopefully at that point you can appreciate why someone with no belief in an arbitrary "morality" can behave ethically and with compassion without the need for divine proscription.
Not only does it seem obvious to me that "goodness" is simply an innate part of being a human, it makes me wonder about the people to whom it isn't obvious. Are they like some kind of barely contained sociopath that would kill everyone they dislike if only god would tell them it was OK? I imagine not, but it seems as shame that they don't give themselves enough credit for the "goodness" that is simply who they are, rather than who they're told to be.
I don't want the world to become an uninhabitable wasteland because as a human, my emotional makeup causes me to care about the welfare of the human race, and my acknowledgement of myself as a member of the common descent of all life on the earth, and my emotional appreciation of the natural beauty of the system causes me to care about the fate the ecosystem of the earth
As a counter example, simply an example - not a generalisation, there are some who use the religious belief of an imminent rapture to justify not caring about the environmental consequences of our behaviour at all. So theism is not always a guarantee of responsibility.
which isp is that?
i think you missed the point - that's opposite of what they'd want to do - if they did that they would no longer be able to sell overpriced hardware since you could just build your own PC and install OSX.
Transalations? How well did your third grade go? :p
So you don't think it's valid to have both personal responsibility and social responsibility? If you saw a hit and run and no one else was around would you just walk past and leave them to die, thinking "Some people draw the short straw in the lottery of life. That's all there is to it"?
Do you think that attitude on the whole would make for a better society? Do you even want to be part of a society?
And do you also genuinely believe that everyone with a medical ailment is capable of finding the money to treat their ailments if they really tried?
And do you genuinely believe that taxation is theft?
While it's valid to argue where the line should be drawn between social and personal responsibility, the childishly histrionic language in which you couch your argument and the silly straw man you knock down in the last paragraph suggests that don't really have a very balanced pragmatic attitude toward living in a society, and perhaps would be better moving to the mountains to fend for yourself.
that just screams tubgirl
yeah, along with all those people born with or stricken down with ailments over which they have no control are just parasitic scum that should be left to die in a ditch lest they put too much of a strain on the taxpayer.