Nope, you're wrong. Alcohol is a depressant. Just because you may "feel stimulated" because of the effect it is having on your brain does not mean that your body is actually treating it like a stimulant, it is just targeting your inhibitions so you "feel more stimulated". Anything that depresses areas of the brain is a depressant.

Which woud bolster the decision to remove Aspergers from the Autism Spectrum in the new DSV

Because we're the leading research country in the world and we like to keep it that way?

Yes because NASA never invented anything we use every single day.

We get HUGE bang for our buck in NASA. If you want to cut wasteful spending, you could cut NASA's budget several dozen times over from the military and they'd barely feel it. NASA is probably the best example we have of a government organization gone right, and all people seem to want to do is cut it because they don't understand how science works. Things like NASA exist because all of their inventions came out of necessity of the incredibly complex things they were doing. Those inventions make billions of dollars for many companies. We probably wouldn't have invented half the stuff NASA has come out with because the current stuff we had was "good enough" for life down here on Earth.

To be fair to the AI researchers, they had no idea how the brain worked because neuropsychologists had no tools to figure it out back then. Now the psychologists have a slightly better understanding of how the brain works (though they are still in the dark about most things), and some of that has been put back into AI.

AI also wouldn't have seemed to fail so hard if not for Minsky and Papert publishing that there was no way a perceptron could solve the XOR problem, killing the field for ~25-30 years. Thankfully, it was solved by adding more perceptrons and reignited the field.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is valid. If you tell me there is an invisible dragon in your garage, you better have some damn good evidence to back that claim up. In a slightly more realistic assertion, if you tell me that vaccines cause autism, then you also better have some damn good evidence to back that claim up. Extraordinary claims cannot be treated on equal footing as an ordinary claim because taking extraordinary claims at face value can be far more dangerous.

Thank you for this post, this is why I read /.

You got hurt, it just hurt you less than the thing it was killing did.

I haven't read the books, but that article is crap. The entire thing just says "evolution is clearly happening, so we should reinterpret the bible to say that God just got he ball rolling." It is an exercise in altering religious views to conform to modern science, not an exercise in scientific thought. It is just arguing that we should modify religion to become a "God of the gaps", which is a silly argument indeed.

That is true. It isn't religion that causes wars/genocides, it is religious institutions and the brainwashing that they enforce upon their members (governments who have committed such atrocities also are guilty of the exact same thing). Though I'd argue that power is more the goal than money.

My experience in the community is just that no one cares unless it starts effecting your science or hypotheses. Theist or atheist, if you're good at what you do no one cares. If you go around preaching to other scientists, yeah, you're opening yourself up for ridicule. But I think that is true in any field outside of the more religious areas of the US.

Free thinking expands science. Indoctrinating people (children) into ways of thinking stifles science. It is hard to break free of 18+ years of having a belief system drilled into your head.

That being said people should be able to believe what they want, but indoctrinating children or others by force is somewhat more iffy.

Science can tell you "why" also, such as why the Earth is round. I don't see why can can't just leave questions unanswered and we have to make up an answer for them. Perhaps in thousands of years science will progress to the point where it is possible to answer some questions previously thought impossible. A "God of the gaps" is a silly god.

How often is religion relevant to a field of science where it needs to be discussed? Really, religion is inappropriate to discuss in scientific terms, as the entire point of religion is blind faith. Science has no place in religion, just as religion has no place in science (as in, "God did it" as a valid hypothesis, not as in the scientist's personal belief structures, which they are more than entitled to and I know many scientists who are also theists).

Yeah! All of that machine learning theory and heuristic problem solving really turned me into a Marxist! Man, thanks for pointing that out. It couldn't possibly be that, when taught critical thinking skills, someone realizes that a belief in the Earth being ~6000 years old is a particularly silly one?

Nope, vast Left wing conspiracy to indoctrinate the population. Totally much more likely.

In all of my schooling through undergraduate and (currently) graduate, in both political science and computer science, I have never heard a leftist viewpoint espoused that I need not meet after class specifically to talk about. I've had both left and right wing profs, but I only found out by talking to them about current issues after class. I'd always try to guess, but I was probably within error of chance. If anything, studying in a university has made me more conservative than when I started, as now I have the critical thinking skills and background knowledge to know how naieve and foolish my old views were.

This Marxist myth is silly and makes those on the Right who espouse it look like tin foil hat nutjobs. Maybe it was true in the 60s, I don't know. But it certainly isn't now.