I agree, and this cannot be overstated. I worry that the use of this phrase is almost more dangerous than the mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation.

To be precise, in most of the examples people love to trot out, correlation does imply causation, just not direct causation. A and B might be correlated because they are both caused by the same thing. While a correlation between obesity and TV watching doesn't imply that TV watching causes obesity, the correlation is good evidence that one causes the other or that there is a third thing, laziness perhaps, that causes both.

Of course there are counter examples to this assumption, called Reichenbach's principle, but they are even more rare.

You think it's a bad idea to seed the oceans with iron, because our interfering with the natural ecosystem might have unintended consequences. So instead, you're suggesting that we should do nothing to stop our interfering with the natural ecosystem by pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the air.

Seems consistent.

When talking about Universities, people often tend to have this reaction that seems at home in the private world. If Starbucks doesn't want me to connect to Change.org and are providing me with free internet service, they should have the right to block that site. After all, they have no obligation to provide me with internet service in the first place, so they are free to limit the access.

As pointed out by others, the first major difference here is that ASU is partially funded by Arizona tax payers and therefore operates by different rules. But, more importantly, ASU is a *university* and universities should operate by different rules. Good universities are either government entities or non-profits with a mission to educate students with the interest of developing them into well-educated citizens. Unfettered access to different ideas is absolutely critical to that process. A university that restricts access to free speech is simply failing at its primary mission: preparing students to be active participants in a democratic society. It's not a matter of whether ASU gets government money or not, it's that ASU has a mission that they are actively thwarting.

One woman had a miscarriage as a direct result of being kicked in the stomach repeatedly by police. (And, yes, she told be police she was pregnant, and that she was trying to escape to protect her unborn child.)

http://open.salon.com/blog/fingerlakeswanderer/2011/11/22/pregnant_protester_who_was_beaten_miscarries

Is that enough violence for you? Or would you like more before you regard this as despicable?

This is the often-overlooked benefit of top schools. The most talented students tend to learn a lot from one another, and so you want to surround yourself with the smartest peers you can. If all the smart people were going to North-South Nowhere State University at Tinyville, that's where you should go. But they're not. They're all going to the "top" programs. So, if your smart, you should go there too.

Maybe your Amazon purchases are delivered by teleportation, but mine come via UPS or USPS. They use trucks, the kind that travel on roads. They often come to my city via planes that fly in airspace regulated by the FAA.

Yeah, thank god the government invented the internet so they don't ever have to invent anything ever again. We can stop paying taxes now because we've reached the end-of-days. Nope, no new ideas the government could fund with our tax dollars today.

What about other forms of fraud like credit-card fraud? Large scale fraud that involve transactions that go across state lines are investigated by the FBI. Should someone pay for that?

You're simply wrong about this. True the NIH requires submission to open access journals, and I trust you know what your talking about with the NSF. But these are not the only tax-based sources of research funding. First, there are non-U.S. sources. Even in the U.S. there are the departments of defense, education, and energy which fund huge amounts of research. Defense and energy do a lot in science and technology. On top of that you have state universities that are funded (less and less) by tax dollars from their states. They often support the research of their faculty with that money.

Take a look at the top journals in many fields. We are very, very far from free access to scientific research.

College might be a waste of time if you view the only benefit of college as increasing your earning potential. But, this view of college is anti-intellectual. There are other benefits to college other than monetary, and some people are willing to pay for them.

Most of what you do for money is bad for your bottom line. Buying that TV? That won't make you money. Going to the movies? Waste of money. But I'll bet you do some of those things. Why? Because the item or service you receive in return is valuable to you -- more valuable than the money you exchange for it. The same could be said in college. While the money you invest will not increase your earning potential proportionally, it still might be worth it if you value the intellectual rewards you get while there.

This is preposterous. If it was really the case that tuition exceeded the cost of operating the university, state funding and private endowments wouldn't be necessary. What crazy statistics did you use to determine this claim? Or did you just make it up because it sounded good?

The most impressive counter protests I've seen have involved soliciting donations. The Topeka symphony (I think) put out a person who was asking people to pledge $1/hour that WBC spent protesting to the Human Rights Campaign. That way every hour they spent protesting gave money to anti-homophobia organizations.

What makes you say that?

There are plenty of contemporary philosophers who are active participants in science and who would be appropriately called natural philosophers. Now- a-days they're more often called "naturalists" (named by W.v.O. Quine). Contemporary philosophers, and citations to them, regularly show up in scientific journals.

Which "common day" philosophers are you referring to? How much common day philosophy have you read? I think it's fair to say that this problem is near death and has been for a long time. The problem was made famous by Descartes of course, but he's hardly "common day."

I'm happy to hear that you think people listen to philosophers. How many people do you know that spend their time worry about the problem of existence instead of something else?

Your attitude about philosophers is common, people take an intro to philosophy course that focuses on rationalist thought of the 15th century and assume they now know the state-of-the-art of philosophy. Somehow people don't realize how stupid this is, even though they wouldn't dare assume they understood contemporary physics after taking physics 101. Philosophy has a very long history of contributing to major scientific breakthroughs. Here are a few:

1. Einstein, throughout his life, credited many philosophers including Hume and Kant with inspiring him to come up with special and general relativity.

2. Neils Bohr invented his preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics because we was inspired by Kant.

3. Adam Smith was a "moral philosopher." Before him economics didn't exist.

4. Psychology wasn't it's own discipline until very recently. Before that it was philosophy.

The irony of your comment is that it reproduces exactly the line of thinking that you criticize. You realize that janitors, by having physical access to almost all parts of a business, are capable of more havoc than IT folks. They often have physical access to all the same systems that IT people do and much more. If potential to cause damage should correlate with compensation, I'd argue that the janitors should get paid the most in any organization.

I hate these sorts of claims because they are absolute nonsense. How can you know if my university degree was a waste of money for me? Do you know how much I value the things I learned (both in and out of the classroom) at the university? No, of course not, because you don't know me. It's like looking at someone you've never met and saying that they were stupid to go eat at some particular restaurant.

Usually, these sort of studies assume that the only reason anyone would go to college is to improve their lifetime earning potential and then compare the average change in earning to the cost of the university. While this is an important consideration, it shouldn't be the prevailing one, and more importantly it shouldn't be translated into the only potential thing of value that might come out of a university education. We are all not mindless money generating machines that simply wish to take the quickest route to a buck. Some of us want to enjoy the journey too.

I am a far better person for my university education. Even if it cost me money in the long run, I'm happy I went.