User:Woozle

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Revision as of 01:43, 22 September 2008 by Woozle (talk | contribs) (→‎2008-09-21: tabs from Kontact)
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This is Woozle's "internal" page, for making notes on things; you are welcome to poke around in this area all you like, but most of it probably won't mean much to you.

Woozle's "external" page for general public consumption is here.

Practical Stuff

Somewhat Esoteric Stuff

Somewhat Outdated Stuff

Other places to find me

Essays

See also Issuepedia, where I've written a lot of stuff, and the Woozle category.

Bookmarks

Most of my bookmarks get filed in HTYP or Issuepedia, but sometimes I just don't have time to file everything and I dump them here so I can close tabs in Firefox.

Media

2008-09-21

2008-09-15

2008-09-11

The problem is this.

(Just grabbing part of the quoted essay; I'll get to Hanson's concluding sentence in a bit.)

If we try to formulate a scientific hypothesis which allows for the possibility of "divine intervention", then you have to define divine intervention.

I think it's probably reasonable to define it as "any occurrence where the laws of science are clearly violated".

(If that isn't at least a superset of "divine intervention", then my subsequent argument will collapse... but I'll need another definition to work with.)

(In other words: no fair saying you need to include something in a hypothesis but then refusing to define it. But onward...)

If the laws of science are violated, that means that not only do we not *currently* understand how it could happen, we can *never* understand how it happened -- can *never* arrive at a set of rules which, if followed, would inevitably cause the same occurrence.

Well, first off, science is based on the idea that (1) the universe operates according to laws, (2) those laws are *never* broken, (3) we can discover those laws through hypothesis and experiment, and (4) we revise our interpretations of those laws as our understanding gets more and more perfect (5) we do not need to have a perfect understanding in order to have an accurate understanding.

So right away you've broken rule #2 by allowing for divine intervention; you *cannot* have a scientific hypothesis which allows laws which aren't always followed.

The only way you could have divine intervention as part of a scientific hypothesis is by redefining "divine" as something subject to scientific analysis.

E.g. if God plays a part in "the divine miracle of life", we should be able to see the laws of chemistry being violated during egg fertilization.

And secondly (and more to the point), science seeks to explain phenomena in ways that are reproducible.

So, yeah, okay, we can't make a sun or a planet in the laboratory. But we can look at all the things we think are at work in the making of a sun or a planet, and we can do experiments to see if they work the way we think they do.

"If you subject hydrogen to enough pressure at a high enough temperature, do you really get stupendous amounts of energy?" And yes, you do. (To vastly oversimplify the process of atomic fusion.)

Saying "God did it" is not just irreproducible, it's fucking *undefined*.

And totally not science.

But anyway, on to Hanson's final sentence...

He's conflating two things: (1) are these things too silly for a well-educated person (especially a professional scientist) to consider? Hell yes. (2) Are these things too silly to be worth bringing up in the context of teaching critical thinking to children? Hell no.

So yeah, I'd be all in favor of using these things as examples in a science-based course on critical thinking.

The problem is, US public schools don't teach critical thinking.

They're still geared towards turning out assembly-line labor for the mills. They teach kids facts, and both kids and teachers (and school systems) are rewarded *only* for how well the kids regurgitate those facts.

Our school system is, at present, far too blunt an instrument for conveying anything as subtle as "here are some hypotheses; can you work out what's right and wrong about them?"

Not only that, but ID proponents aren't even asking for this level of subtlety; they *want* ID taught as "equally valid" with evolution.

So there are two reasons not to teach it: (1) inadequate schools, and (2) the proposal is to teach something that is false as truth.

And finally, Hanson shows his lack of research on the ID issue when he conflates it with UFOs and ghosts. Nobody is *trying* to get those taught in the schools. It's not an issue.

ID is dangerous -- not because it threatens to expose children to "competing ideas" which might undermine their "faith in science" or some such rot, but because it is being weaselled in inaccurately and dishonestly in an effort to (further) corrupt our educational system.

2008-09-05

2008-08-24

2008-08-23

  • http://ptable.com - insanely interactive periodic table
  • http://www.rawa.org/events/apr28-07_e.htm "The American forces act so reckless and hasty in killing innocent civilians everyday, that they seem to have come here for taking revenge of the 3,000 victims of the 9/11 from the people rather than to targeting the terrorist of their own creation, the Taliban. The death toll of these innocents throughout Afghanistan is now much higher than that of 9/11. This has indeed provoked and enraged the wrath of the people, encouraging the Taliban terrorists, who definitely receive the maximum benefits." (emphasis mine)

2008-08-22

2008-08-20

or Add links to articles on other sites"

working on custom RSS feeds

other MW stuff

vbz.net

I don't remember why I had these pages open, but they should probably be checked if everything seems to be "working":

2008-08-19

2008-07-16

2008-07-01

Once again, my ability to find links I Absolutely Must Save outstrips the time in which I have to file them, and extant tabs in Firefox and Konqueror threaten to take over my system RAM...

from RSS feeds

2008-06-06

2008-06-04

2008-05-29

  • ncwarn.org - anti-Shearon-Harris
  • ncethicalsociety.org

2008-05-24

2008-05-23

2008-05-22

2008-05-12

2008-05-11

2008-05-01

  • Judge Deals Blow to RIAA in Music Piracy Case: putting files in a "shared" folder is not illegal. (What about putting them on the web, or in an anonymous ftp folder?) (for Issuepedia)
  • U.S. Marines Invade Manhattan, New York!: "Iraq Veterans Against the War" demonstrate US military brutality (for Issuepedia)
  • Iraq: U.S. has no claim to oil boom '"America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq," Baghdad official says. "This is an immoral request because we didn't ask them to come to Iraq, and before they came in 2003 we didn't have all these needs."' Iraq does not want the US to stay. (Has anybody except neocons claimed otherwise? This is not a rhetorical question.) (for Issuepedia)
  • Wolfowitz: Iraq occupation ended in 2004: we're no longer occupying Iraq, we're just kind of there. (Our mission to spread American sovereigntydemocracy is so just and holy that God (from his office in the White House) has granted us special dispensiation to be militarily present without "occupying", perhaps.)
  • White House admits fault on 'Mission Accomplished' banner: well, not really: ""President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said `mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."" Do they really?
  • Mark Anderson speaks on the current economic crisis (for Issuepedia)

2008-04-30

2008-04-29

Customization

Notes

Homeopathy

from when Tene asked for the theory behind homeopathy; there isn't really anything scientific, which may mean it's all bunk (and indeed that's the prevailing sentiment), but...

(02:33:22 PM) Woozle: Ok, theory...
(02:35:21 PM) Woozle: (And I'm not claiming this is scientific, just maybe a place to look.) Reality is generally more complicated than the models account for. We think of molecular movements in a gas or liquid as being "random", but there are probably patterns at some level.
(02:37:34 PM) Woozle: Things vibrate. Things have resonances. It seems maybe a little unlikely, but couldn't it be that the particular shapes of the molecules present would influence those patterns in some way? The deadly problem with that idea is that once the influence is removed, you'd think that the patterns would deteriorate back to the default pretty quickly.
(02:37:44 PM) Woozle: So maybe that doesn't work.
(02:38:49 PM) Woozle: The other area to look is in quantum theory, which new-agey people love to use as an explanation for everything -- so I'm hesitant to bring it up -- but it seems possible to me that there may be some kind of pattern-retaining effect there.
(02:41:25 PM) Woozle: The main thrust of my personal advocacy for homeopathics, though, is on two fronts... (1) it is kind of a "chew toy" (placebo, if you prefer -- though I *swear* I came across an article throwing serious doubt on the "placebo effect"... maybe I dreamed it, because I haven't been able to find it again) which prevents people from using our poorly-run healthcare system;
(02:41:40 PM) Woozle: (Well, not *prevents... I guess I mean "pre-empts")
(02:42:05 PM) Woozle: (except in emergencies, when it's really needed... thus applying the adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it")
(02:43:41 PM) Woozle: (2) homeopathic doctors tend to be much more in it because they want to help people, rather than in it for the paycheck -- so even if 90% of the time they're giving you treatment which actually has no effect, it at least isn't the latest sample from Glaxo which might actually be harmful... and they're more likely to pay attention to what's going on, and direct you to conventional treatment *if needed*.
(02:46:14 PM) Woozle: (3) people should have the right to make their own mistakes. It seems to me that we do far too much protecting people from their own mistakes by "controlling" substances or outlawing them completely, when what we should be doing is educating and tracking. The big (mainstream) drug companies seem to want to make the situation worse; the homeopathy movement is fighting that tendency, even if it's actually making money off snake oil.
wiki file: https://hypertwins.org/mw/index.php?title=User:Woozle&oldid=11203