[Non-political] News that makes you Laugh/Cry/Both...

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Feb 21, 2014 7:18 am

tussock wrote:
Maj wrote:I don't think you actually understood what I said, so I'm going to repeat with emphasis: I would argue that debating on the side of something you don't agree with is the best way to understand it.
It's not. At all. That's what Aristotle thought and he was just plain wrong. Science is how you understand things. Really. Yes. Science. For reals.

Does it hurt to be that clueless?

-Username17

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Feb 22, 2014 8:27 am

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/538400 ... -audiobook
"Motherfuckers talk like Yoda."

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun Feb 23, 2014 5:04 am

Does it hurt to be that clueless?

I honestly never know unless someone spells it out for me, preferably with evidence. For instance, I'm familiar with that particular XKCD, understand the humour, not sure how it applies here.

Which, you know, is less fun for you to look down on and all, but I'm sure it's not just me you'd be educating.

Sashi · Post by **Sashi** » Sun Feb 23, 2014 5:18 am

The way you show things are true is by making and falsifying every counterargument. The ones that don't falsify are new science.

Presenting counterarguments, especially ones you don't agree with, is literally the most important part of science.

The null hypothesis is the ur-"thing you don't agree with" and statistical analysis is dependent on "arguing in favor" of it.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Sun Feb 23, 2014 1:12 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:So Michael B. Jordan has been cast to play Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot.

[...]

The thing I find weird is that Kate Mara has been cast to play Sue Storm.

(underlining mine)

Fortunately I had my younger brother on hand to point out that they're siblings, because I didn't catch the underlined part.

Essence · Post by **Essence** » Sun Feb 23, 2014 10:53 pm

tussock wrote:It's not. At all. That's what Aristotle thought and he was just plain wrong. Science is how you understand things. Really. Yes. Science. For reals.

So, then, you believe it's impossible to understand anything that capital-S Science isn't able to lead you to a definitive conclusion on?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:28 am

I would love to see Tussock list anything science has ever proved, ever.

Science allows for results consistent with a theory, and for disproving competing theories. List of science's interactions with theories ends.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:37 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ma ... cal_proofs

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 4:15 am

That's math, not science. They're different.

Also, technically, mathematics only proves internal consistency.

Redshirt · Post by **Redshirt** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 4:15 am

It's not. At all. That's what Aristotle thought and he was just plain wrong. Science is how you understand things. Really. Yes. Science. For reals.

Tussock, please demonstrate, using science, that torture is wrong. You're clearly convinced that it's wrong, and since science is the only way to understand things that you accept, you must have seen a pretty compelling study that established, empirically, what right and wrong are.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 5:34 am

#Essence. Whut? Are you going to trick me with the word "definitive"? Because a lot of what science does is disabuse people of nonsense by showing that you can't prove some things scientifically, no matter how easy they are to argue.

#fectin. Whut? Quantum mechanics predicted the existence of semi-conductors. Your computer? Yeah, they turned out to be useful. Do you really want a fucking list, because the fucking Green Revolution happened when people first applied scientific principles to farming and animal husbandry. Boom, more food. The steam engine was the application of new theories of gasses and the fucking PV=nkT equation, which turned out to be useful for all sorts of things, like the internal combustion engine, and the jet engine (proven in theory long before it was practical). Batteries, electricity, metallurgy, meteorology, ....

Do you have any concept of how blind people were before they understood that taking and sharing regular notes on standard measures of mysterious things for building a bank of evidence was even important? That you could just do it to anything and understanding would just happen? That we had to have common literacy before that could really take off.

Like Edmund Halley digging through ancient astrological data and finding that one big comet was the same thing over and over again, regular as clockwork. Not actually a sign from the gods or anything. It was just a different brightness each time. Science.

#Redshirt. Whut? You're confused that words mean things or something? You've got to tortuously redefine words before "torture" stops being a subset of "wrong".

If you mean, "is doing cruel and unusual harm to chosen people a significant cost to us"? You'll find that PTSD and similar psychological effects are real things with real problems for real people, many of whom are inevitable innocent and returned to society. If you mean, "fuck the externalities, and some people don't count anyway," there's ample studies that show that everyone benefits from fair and just treatment of identifiable minority groups.

None of that's fuzzy or uncertain. Morality has been studied, and has been confirmed to work in similar but importantly different ways to how pre-scientific people understood it. Studies were done on things as large as universal benefit systems (and they work, outcomes are pretty brilliant for everyone). Prisons have been studied, sentence lengths, all sorts. Economics, man.

Lots of people ignore those studies because private prisons or whatever are profitable, politicians are corrupt, and throwing away the lives of poor black people seems harmless to rich whites, but they're wrong and that's been proven too. It really does materially hurt everyone when some of us are abused. Walmart makes everyone poorer, even the people with shares in it.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 6:45 am

Tussock, stop being a stupid twat. People are not making fun of you because "science doesn't lead to anything ever!" People are making fun of you because you are shouting "science!" and have no fucking clue how actual research and investigation is done.

Proof by contradiction (of the null hypothesis) is the standard model for sciencing at problems. Do you know what a proof by contradiction is? It's arguing from the position of something until you discover a reason that position cannot be correct. It is playing devil's advocate until you figure out why the devil is an asshole and why you shouldn't listen to him. It's exactly the thing Maj described and you rejected. That is why you are a buttface stupidhead, and that is why people are calling you a buttface stupidhead. You rejected the methodology that all modern scientific research is based off in favor of... SCIENCE! What next? Will you reject communicating with words in favor of language?

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 9:53 am

fectin wrote:I would love to see Tussock list anything science has ever proved, ever.

Science allows for results consistent with a theory, and for disproving competing theories. List of science's interactions with theories ends.

"You make the hypothesis, the experiment is consistent with the hypothesis. Have you be proven right? No! You just have not yet been proven wrong."

I wish I could find that clip.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 11:15 am

Yeah, you're supposed to attempt to prove yourself wrong until you fail utterly and run out of ways to do so - at which point you provisionally accept that you might be right until further notice, but are less wrong than people who haven't looked at it.

Redshirt · Post by **Redshirt** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:30 pm

#Redshirt. Whut? You're confused that words mean things or something? You've got to tortuously redefine words before "torture" stops being a subset of "wrong".

No, actually, you don't, because what is "wrong" has at no point been defined by you. You're assuming that there is some universal, objective, agreed upon definition of "wrong" and then neglecting to provide that definition.

If you mean, "is doing cruel and unusual harm to chosen people a significant cost to us"?

No, I do not mean that. I mean precisely nothing by the word "wrong" because defining it is your job. If it is your position that something is wrong if it bears costs for everyone involved, you can say so and then subject that position to scrutiny.

Edit: For comparison's sake, in Prak's debate, his definition of "acceptable" hinged on international law--something was ok if it didn't violate the Geneva Conventions. "Yabbut torture is wrong" is not a useful or convincing answer to that position, because it doesn't provide an alternative definition of "acceptable."

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 11:01 pm

Yeah, that's always the thing with these supposedly purely logical ethical systems. Sure, I can believe that you can logically demonstrate that universal benefits make everyone happier and live longer, but why do you want to do that? What basis does the system have for preferring one outcome over another, and where does that come from?

Also, funnily enough I'm in a "philosophy of science" course. The big influences on modern thought about what constitutes science don't think it can prove things true if they even believe in objective truth as a concept.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 5:46 am

name_here wrote:Yeah, that's always the thing with these supposedly purely logical ethical systems. Sure, I can believe that you can logically demonstrate that universal benefits make everyone happier and live longer, but why do you want to do that? What basis does the system have for preferring one outcome over another, and where does that come from?

What does this have to do with anything? Things make people happy. Your goal is to increase the overall happiness of people. To that effect, you either spend resources on people's current interests or spend resources on getting people to exchange their current scoring system to something more constructive and then score points based on that. And every step of the way you have a chance to just fail and waste the resources.

You don't need a degree in neuropsychology to realize having people obtain happiness from watching movies is better than having people obtain happiness from getting their limbs cut off, and if you actually have someone who'd be happy to be mutilated, it's better to get them interested in movies.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 6:19 am

Starmaker wrote:Your goal is to increase the overall happiness of people.

That is not clearly the goal. It isn't even clear that people can be happy all the time. It certainly wouldn't be the case if you asked someone in the 1400s what the goal of their social system was that they would say "to maximize happiness."

It wasn't that they wanted to maximize happiness but just couldn't think of a better system, it was that nobody thought that was the goal.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 1:11 pm

DSMatticus wrote:Tussock, stop being a stupid twat. People are not making fun of you because "science doesn't lead to anything ever!" People are making fun of you because you are shouting "science!" and have no fucking clue how actual research and investigation is done.

Evidence. Really. Data, and lots of it. Not with debates at all. When you defend your Thesis, or publish in a journal, you don't stand there arguing against it while someone else argues for it. Someone's going to check your evidence, make sure that it means what you think it means, but you really do just make your own point and show you have the evidence to back it.

Proof by contradiction (of the null hypothesis) is the standard model for sciencing at problems.

Proposing a mechanism for action is pretty fucking important too, otherwise you're going to prove a lot of absolute nonsense entirely at random. So it's not as simple as that. It also depends on your field having such a thing, and it being consistent and well understood previously, and so on.

Do you know what a proof by contradiction is? It's arguing from the position of something until you discover a reason that position cannot be correct.

With evidence. Because science is not debates. The "argument" isn't anything. You seek evidence that the thing you suspect is statistically likely to be different from from it not being true.

Which requires evidence not of some other dude's theory of God or whatever, but of the real world and how it is by default, gathered in the same way as your own, at the same time, in a nice double-blind control study. With statistical evidence that your control is valid.

Or you just assume it is and fire up the LHC and count Higgs Bosons until it's "certain" that they exist, and just use math to show that there'd be nothing at that particular spot on the spectrum if they didn't. Which again, is not an argument about looking at things from someone else's perspective, it's about gathering overwhelming evidence.

It is playing devil's advocate until you figure out why the devil is an asshole and why you shouldn't listen to him. It's exactly the thing Maj described and you rejected. That is why you are a buttface stupidhead, and that is why people are calling you a buttface stupidhead. You rejected the methodology that all modern scientific research is based off in favor of... SCIENCE! What next? Will you reject communicating with words in favor of language?

None of that has anything to do with debates. At all. Thank you for explaining the joke though.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 1:25 pm

Redshirt wrote:
#Redshirt. Whut? You're confused that words mean things or something? You've got to tortuously redefine words before "torture" stops being a subset of "wrong".
No, actually, you don't, because what is "wrong" has at no point been defined by you. You're assuming that there is some universal, objective, agreed upon definition of "wrong" and then neglecting to provide that definition.

There's rather a lot of them. But to quote one of the greats.

Chomsky wrote:In fact, one of the, maybe the most, elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something's right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow.

So you believe your children should be allowed to be tortured by their peers for information? Parents and teachers should torture children to get them to conform? It's totally OK and normal and acceptable and right if the Taliban tortures US soldiers in Afghanistan for information? That's your position? That torture is not "wrong"? Or do you just abandon almost every moral code ever and say it's OK for your side to use on their side because you're special? Because that's essentially the definition of "WRONG".

But hey, be a Nazi fuck. See if I care.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 1:44 pm

tussock wrote:So you believe your children should be allowed to be tortured by their peers for information? Parents and teachers should torture children to get them to conform? It's totally OK and normal and acceptable and right if the Taliban tortures US soldiers in Afghanistan for information? That's your position? That torture is not "wrong"? Or do you just abandon almost every moral code ever and say it's OK for your side to use on their side because you're special? Because that's essentially the definition of "WRONG".

Or you know, we accept that their is a fundamentally subjective preference not proven by science that makes our children being tortured something we don't like and we extrapolate that subjective preference to a universal standard for additional reasons that are not proven by science.

I mean seriously for a second. Chomsky isn't actually a scientist. Where do you think the Science is behind the statement that morality has to be universal or it is badwrong morality?

Redshirt · Post by **Redshirt** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 2:58 pm

tussock wrote:
Redshirt wrote:
#Redshirt. Whut? You're confused that words mean things or something? You've got to tortuously redefine words before "torture" stops being a subset of "wrong".
No, actually, you don't, because what is "wrong" has at no point been defined by you. You're assuming that there is some universal, objective, agreed upon definition of "wrong" and then neglecting to provide that definition.
There's rather a lot of them. But to quote one of the greats.

Chomsky wrote:In fact, one of the, maybe the most, elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something's right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow.
So you believe your children should be allowed to be tortured by their peers for information? Parents and teachers should torture children to get them to conform? It's totally OK and normal and acceptable and right if the Taliban tortures US soldiers in Afghanistan for information? That's your position? That torture is not "wrong"? Or do you just abandon almost every moral code ever and say it's OK for your side to use on their side because you're special? Because that's essentially the definition of "WRONG".

But hey, be a Nazi fuck. See if I care.

Failure. The point of the exercise was to prove torture is wrong scientifically. Chomsky's definition is great, but he hasn't used any process of hypothesis testing to arrive at it. Or, if he has, you didn't post it. All you're doing right now is working logically from premises which are not meaningfully empirical. That's something one of those filthy debaters would do, and very (gag) Aristotelian.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 3:22 pm

tussock wrote: So you believe your children should be allowed to be tortured by their peers for information? Parents and teachers should torture children to get them to conform? It's totally OK and normal and acceptable and right if the Taliban tortures US soldiers in Afghanistan for information? That's your position? That torture is not "wrong"? Or do you just abandon almost every moral code ever and say it's OK for your side to use on their side because you're special? Because that's essentially the definition of "WRONG".

You have missed the point of the question completely. We do not dispute that torture is wrong. We dispute that you can prove that through pure logic. Start from these or theorems someone else has proved from them or admit you can't logically prove torture is wrong.

Or you just assume it is and fire up the LHC and count Higgs Bosons until it's "certain" that they exist, and just use math to show that there'd be nothing at that particular spot on the spectrum if they didn't. Which again, is not an argument about looking at things from someone else's perspective, it's about gathering overwhelming evidence.

That proves nothing. It merely fails to disprove the theory.

Redshirt · Post by **Redshirt** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 3:34 pm

You have missed the point of the question completely. We do not dispute that torture is wrong. We dispute that you can prove that through pure logic. Start from these or theorems someone else has proved from them or admit you can't logically prove torture is wrong.

Well, actually my question wasn't about logic--Tussock already shit all over using logic to arrive at truth on the way to his swipe at Aristotle. I want to see an empirical demonstration of what counts as good and what counts as evil. This is of course a fool's project, but shhhhhh, don't tell him the answer to the puzzle, it'll ruin it for him.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 4:55 pm

Redshirt wrote:Well, actually my question wasn't about logic--Tussock already shit all over using logic to arrive at truth on the way to his swipe at Aristotle. I want to see an empirical demonstration of what counts as good and what counts as evil. This is of course a fool's project, but shhhhhh, don't tell him the answer to the puzzle, it'll ruin it for him.

Science != logic. And logic doesn't work the way you think it works (while we're at that: Aristotle knew dick about logic). And you don't know what "empirical demonstration" means.