Posts by BenWilson
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Oooo Who are they, pray tell?
Isn't there some cat called Dick Dawkins who makes a living carrying on about it? It was the only sect of non-believers at University that I can remember had their own club about it, and regularly gave Christians airtime and a pulpit in loud debates, in which the final lines of Animal Farm came to mind, something about looking from humans to pigs and back and finding it hard to tell the difference, as they struggled tooth and nail for the power over the animals.
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There is nothing inherent in atheism which requires removing belief from other people, though some atheists do behave like that.
Yes, the atheists we hear from most often. It's definitely an unfair representation. Excessive piety is also an unfair representation of Christians, the vast majority of whom in this country don't knock on doors and don't even go to Church.
I used to think Mormons were a particularly annoying sect, until I discovered recently that about 50% of my co-workers are Mormons and I never even knew. I should have guessed, since they're based in Utah, but from the way they talk they're just the same as anyone else, if perhaps a little bit more polite and professional.
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I'm very grateful to a dear friend of mine for giving me a great way of expressing this: Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Heh. I'd be more inclined to think of it as Atheism being a pathological insistence that there be no stamps in the house, and campaigning for them to be removed from the world. Just not collecting them is Agnosticism.
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Did you get caught out by Chris' edits? Chris, use carefully!
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or 7 Up (is that what it's called?)
The first one was. Collectively they're the Up Series. I lost interest at 35 up. 56 up is coming up.
It is a little bit like current reality TV, but there's no game-show element, unless you consider the game being that the people disprove the hypothesis that the child of seven can give us a good picture of the way their life will unfold. Most of them seem to be rather over the game, but they continue to participate, despite being under no real obligation. It does go a little way to showing how it is that people get stuck in these things for long periods of time, despite the negative effect that they may feel it's had on their lives. I guess it's so unique that they kind of feel compelled to keep playing.
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Because religion *qua religion* is not part of modern science.
That's not an answer. It's a "it's not considered important because it's not considered important" position. As is:
There are better ways of doing science but you're too blinkered to think of them" is not an argument.
No, it's a challenge. Since you refuse to rise to it, I could make some suggestions. 2 main things that I see in your model that might very well not occur in studies that would possibly pass as scientific are the Hypothesis, and the keeping and discarding of it.
The Hypothesis is presumably a statement of a possible law. It's quite possible this part is never done at all. Data is simply collected, methodically, categorized by regularities. No guesses are made at all as to the causes of the data. Inductive reasoning is used to make inferences from it. It would seem that a lot of traditional Chinese medicine was done in this manner. The purpose is not to establish causes, but to find effects that are likely and useful.
The keeping and discarding of hypotheses. Even if you do go for the hypothesis model, there's no reason to apply the ever popular "law of the excluded middle" to it. Hypotheses may well occupy positions that are neither true nor false. This tallies with my memory of the competing hypotheses about whether light is a wave or a particle. As my physics teacher explained it, there was no firm answer either way. Both were still viable, providing different insights into the nature of light.
Also, even if you do take a strictly two-valued deductive position regarding hypotheses, there is always the recourse to 'save the hypothesis', by searching for data error, or extra causes that tally with the hypothesis, but were not noted during the observation phase (because they were not looked for). I already talked about how this was pretty much what teachers encouraged us to do, to protect received modern scientific wisdom from refutation.
If none of these are found, the "nature" of the hypothesis can still be preserved by adding refinements to it, so that it's rejection is not total. So with errors in the Ptolemaic astronomical system, it was possible to add new circles into the data model to make it closer to observed reality. This system was what the Catholic church was backing, btw, it was based on centuries of meticulous observation and a lot of calculations. Copernicus had no new maths to work with, so his actual predictions were no more accurate than what the Church had, and he had to do the same thing with epicycles to cover the failures of his system to match reality. I don't think it was "unscientific" for them to stick to their existing system, at that point.
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That lttle guy with the perfect teeth seems like the type of shit to try and blacklist you with his mates in the real world if someone actually said what they must think but dare not utter...
He really does look like he has a big stonk-on when he gets to say "You're fired". Really works himself up, swells up, goes rigid, and then releases it with a cutting hand gesture, holds it for a few seconds, then sinks back into his chair with a palpable air of release. If he would just roll over and go to sleep afterward it would complete the metaphor. Usually there is a cut to the money-shot, the fired-on giving a facial reaction, the wincing narrowing of the eyes and slight turn, the look of disbelief, rapidly resolving through hurt and then relief that the suffering is over, and the shot wasn't as bad as it might have portended after all - for all the carry on, it's only a few drops of language, carelessly flung, inconsequential, spilled in the wrong place and time anyway.
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I do have to wonder at the sort of people who choose to be in those shows in the first place
I think it would most likely be an insidious trap. Initially, it could seem like a bit of fun. After a round or two, people who are naturally competitive would be dragged in to caring. If you've gone all the way to the end, it's basically a pride thing about not having wasted so much of your life for nothing.
As with gambling, the lucky ones are the ones who fail right at the start.
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I mean, it was *nice*, and I felt very tender towards them all for being so self-deprecating, and I would love it in real life, but it doesn't make for much televisual drama, does it?
Bizarre, isn't it?
The exact same thing has happened several times in The Apprentice NZ version. One guy actually asked to be fired. Others have presented little or no defense.
I actually think this happened several times because the contestants just had too much self-respect to continue with the show. Having some toss-pot carrying on at you in a board room for having made such a poor effort that he wants to "Fire the whole bloody lot of you", after being set up to fail in some tedious chore with a team full of people who are basically planning to back-stab each other, probably sounds exactly like the kind of workplace that the people (many of whom are genuinely talented businesspeople) would hate. I'm surprised no one has yet said that - I guess they're intimidated by their 'celebrity' rich guy's cold stares, and his humorous Matrix-esque flunkies.
Or maybe they just prefer to leave with some style and grace. "Thank you for the opportunity", instead of "Fuck you for profiting by wasting months of my time, I'm now going to get a real job that doesn't involve selling hot-dogs in a street stall, being tailed by goons, betrayed by friends, and talked down to by arrogant wankers".
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Really? They've dropped stuff like Thomson's "plum pudding" model of the atom from the syllabus? When I were a lad, we were endlessly learning stuff only to find that it hadn't held up to later scrutiny.
I was a kid too, seems like a millennium ago. Never heard of your plum pudding, nor do I recall any discussion of the history of science in any science class, other than descriptions of the experiments that "proved" the formulas that we were required to learn. And those were few on the ground. Most classes were "This is how it is. Lets call that our hypothesis. Now here's an experiment to prove it. Make sure you're very careful, because if you prove it wrong, you're wrong, and you will get marked down". When things did go wrong, and the teachers were queried, they asked us to speculate on how to save the hypothesis from this - usually by inventing reasons that would account for the data being incorrect. I don't recall ever once being invited to actually speculate on the laws of the universe. At what level does this happen?
Science exams were exclusively a set of questions devoted to testing your competency in having mastered the orthodoxy as it was taught. I seem to recall the odd practical, where the task was to follow instructions with equipment.
Which is, I suspect, why most people choose to base their understanding of science on "what the majority of scientists say". Doing the actual experiments oneself is not practical for anything but a tiny, tiny subset of the simplest science we hold as near-certain today. Our understandings are based on respect and trust rather than proof and demonstration.
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