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Comment Re:If you make this a proof of God... (Score 1) 612

If we can be living in a simulation then there's no reason a supposed god can't be in a simulation either, with no basis for knowing where 'reality' begins. It's still turtles all the way down with the simulation argument.

Actually this seems somewhat reminiscent of the ontological argument but with a 20th century vibe.

Comment Re:Level of public funding ? (Score 1) 292

I wrote a short science fiction story once. In the Renaissance, you could be a polymath by age 30, because there wasn't nearly as much information to learn as there is now. Discovering paradigm-shifting physical laws of friction or gravity or planetary motion is far more obvious than say, specializing your career in the behavior of certain genes, which nowadays can take up until your mid-thirties to acquire competency in.

Story premise: in order to contribute to a scientific field, you have to know the relevant research. In the far future, humans have amassed so much information that for a newcomer to even catch up to all the latest relevant information in a field starts taking upwards of forty to fifty years, by which time the scientist is well, past her prime. In other words, we discover there's not only say energy/computing limitations but hard neurological and biological roadblocks to our scientific progress (and we have to find ways to work around it).

I haven't come up with an ending.

Comment Re:Sex discrimination. (Score 1) 673

Ok, so we've moved the goalpost from *women can't perform as well as men at math* at least to *women can, but only men have that wider range that leads to true exceptional genius*.. that's a start...

Which is an interesting proposition with a very short historical sample size to draw from, given that up until the mid 20th century it was difficult for women to enter the sciences. And even in time periods when women were discouraged from doing so we still find women who are exceptional such as Emmy Noether. Computer science is also interesting given that women were quite active in the early days, and we've Grace Hopper responsible for developing the first compiler.

I think it ironic to mention 'not admitting sex-based difference' when at best sex-based difference in studies gives us -overlapping distributions- not -separate tidy boxes- and really only for certain kinds of thinking that are difficult to disentangle from nurture/environment. Neuroscientists have only begun to map the human brain, and both men and women are affected by hormones with conflicting studies saying what hormone does what. There is little clear evidence as to what sex-based biological capabilities/differences actually are and they don't affect math skills in tests accounting for cultural bias. Second, perhaps that one in a few thousand men had the qualities of 'future leaders' speaks volumes about traditional thinking, presupposing that only certain men with certain fetishized qualities are chosen as leaders based on old paradigms. There is certainly no historical basis for such a claim given that even despite the limits placed on women throughout history you still find women breaking the rules taking leadership positions, sneaking into battles, writing novels under pseudonyms, being renowned as philosophers and mathematicians, being fully capable of insanity, capable of a lot of things, really, rather. Oh, and being ignored from history due to plenty of men who think women belong in the home (see balzac).

It all comes down once again to turning descriptive statements into prescriptive roles. For example, confusing descriptions of cultural habits with biological differences, and then making prescriptive statements about gender based on that combo.

We are capable of dealing with suicide, homeless men, autism (whatever autism turns out to be) AND sexism. We are also capable of dealing with viral epidemics, PTSD in soldiers, so forth, AND sexism. Humans are capable of separating different problems into different boxes and tackling them. There's no need to conflate separate problems.

Comment Re:Sex discrimination. (Score 3, Interesting) 673

I found a related study linked below, and it goes hand in hand with the other common sexist/racist position you see floating around this thread: confusing descriptive statements with prescriptive statements. It's an age-old pattern that goes like this:

1. discourage minority from participating in an activity.
2. look around and point out descriptively: "Gee, minority x isn't good at this activity!"
3. make prescriptive statement: "Therefore, minority x isn't good at this activity!" which in fact, discourages minority x from the activity, thereby repeating step 1. It's sort of like how if your parent or teacher told you you sucked at something, you'd be less likely to perform well at it because you'd be convinced you were a failure. Except in this case, it's applied against an entire group.

This certainly worked with racism, but it applies equally to sexism.

This is why women perform equally with men in mathematics in parts of the world where gender discrimination doesn't exist like it does here (http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2014/03/both-genders-think-women-are-bad-basic-math?utm_content=buffer6bc17&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer). But in this thread, looking around, some guys are claiming that women aren't good at math. As proof of this, they reinforce the old tropes that women aren't as good at math. They thereby discourage women from math/comp sci, then take the lack of women in the field as 'evidence' of what it is that 'women' really want, when women as a whole never had a fair shot to begin with.

They may say that 'leveling the playing field' is hurting the cause, but really, I see no evidence of this at all. The cause is moving forward because society as a whole has seen through the little ruse, and that's why change is happening. Tackling workplace problems facing men is not contradictory (and is often complimentary) to the cause of eliminating sexism, it's too bad they conflate the two issues.

Comment Extinction. (Score 3, Insightful) 878

China won't be able to pick up the pieces because a large-scale nuclear war means a decade of nuclear winter, the end of the ozone layer, and the possible annihilation of our entire species.

With our last breath, we 'won!' because it was better to go extinct than to look 'weak.'

I'll vote for cooler heads.

Comment What's really new here? (Score 2) 347

Infiltration, astroturfing and reputation destruction are as old as the hills. Such as this not really amusing story of a Muslim organization turning in a member who was hyping terrorism, only to discover he was an FBI infiltrant:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/2946...

I think such things are to be expected. It sucks, but if you've a security vulnerability in any system, you can expect it to be exploited. The question we should be asking is, can online groups adapt to account for such possibilities, and how?

Comment Re:It doesn't matter. (Score 3, Insightful) 180

Ah, the old -science will all be wrong in 20 years...

Which is wrong of course, we still make use of Newtonian physics hundreds of years later, and were you to count mathematics, some aspects of mathematics date back thousands of years. It's fair to say that 20 years from now we will still accept phylogenetic trees and we will use physics that allows us to build computers. Science is a process of refinement, a spectrum of probabilities

The strength of science is that it can in fact discard ideas quickly. If a model is no longer useful, out it goes, or it is altered. I find it odd that the parent assumes that because science has procedures built in to allow it to change when it is wrong, that this somehow equates to astrology therefore being right. Eg science will be wrong in 20 years which it wont)==astrology is right. This does not follow.

Science has predictive power. Anyone can replicate its results if they replicate the conditions of the experiment. With astrology on the other hand, lots of us have tried it, and it doesn't work. It doesn't stand up to testing. If it worked for everyone, it wouldn't be an issue, but it doesn't. Sure, there's a percentage of people out there who claim it work, but that's to be expected in a large enough population as a statistical probability. You'll find people claiming garlic cloves ward off the flu too. What it comes down to in the end isn't just that such beliefs are wrong--they simply aren't useful for the most of us.

Of course when the phrase 'be open minded' comes out, this translates as 'crowds who believe in anything for thousands of years can't possibly be wrong, blindly follow them''. When the bandwagon fallacy comes out, you know the ego is at work. Let's talk Tim Leary. Science is the real, ultimate ego death. There's no room for ego in determining objective reality, because objective reality doesn't work the way one wants it to.

Comment That's because.. (Score 3, Insightful) 625

The Right tends to be more of a certain Christian belief that has a deep seated fear of 'new agey', 'spiritistic', 'occult' etc practices, whereas the left has the Christians who don't care about that kind of stuff, and the secularists who are every bit as irrational.

I've noticed this trend too, having grown up amongst fundies then moving to the big city as I got older. You find pseudoscience everywhere.

My experience on the religious Right: Yoga, Meditation and Astrology open your mind to Satan. Pray to God, son.
My experience on the Left: Lengthy discussions of star signs, after laughing at those damn fool fundamentalists.

Comment Re:The numbers (Score 1) 545

It's the paraphilia I'm talking about, not what normal adults may or may not be attracted to. The latter is typically exclusive (think, as child hits mid to late teens, child discovers an inability to be attracted to his peers. However, child is unable to seek counselling for obvious reasons of social stigma). It is at least from what I have read manageable with therapy and coaching, even if, similar to other and far less harmful paraphilia, it is not -curable-.

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