Doomroar 2015-02-25 06:40:06

Yeah that new freezing method was news some years ago, and then it was applied by some Japanese company on a new brand of commercial freezers, by now i assume all new tech uses it.

Believing on a possibility is only humble as long as all the other probabilities are also taken into account, and in the end it will remain as just that, one out of many possible outcomes, one belief in one of those possibility by itself doesn't holds much, and is actually a foolish thing if is considered anything beyond a probability, however before anything of this can even be considered, the possibility has to be that, possible, and to know if something is possible or not people run tests, like the guys at British Homeopathic Association, they actually run test to show that they belief in a possible thing, and are actually not crazy.

The difference between belief and facts? facts are things that already happened and can be evidenced, they are regardless of them being pleasant to the observer or not, belief on the other hand is just an state of mind regarding a theme, it can be justified by facts or faith, but since faith only needs conviction to be, and it can be applied to anything the user so desires regardless of it being evidenced or not, it doesn't works as an objective tool to justify something.

No need to be tactful if someone doesn't believes in facts and still is believing on something, then that something is just fantasy.

Doomroar 2015-02-25 10:36:08

Puns!

Taking the words of Dr S3C: "science is for skeptics", so they already approached things with doubts when they initiated the test, after the test were ran, they can start believing in that probability, which doesn't means that other probabilities can't be, or that the test are perfect by any means.
Not taking into account the other probabilities means that they are limiting the range of possibilities.
An opinion by itself has nothing wrong on it, but once it is shared to others with goals of acceptance, without major justification, then of course it is troublesome, because anyone could say anything about everything while having nothing to support it's opinion and it would be alright.

No the earth being flat was never a fact because they never bothered to prove it, they didn't made a research to prove that the earth was flat, since when was the church mother of the inquisition an user of empiricism!?
What do you know about Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, John Keppler, and Galileo? where are these "researches" of the flatness of the earth? and oh please do tell me which methods did they use to prove that the earth was flat? they just assumed it was that way and rolled with it out of convenience to please the church, facts don't depend on people's opinions, they depend on evidence.

Indeed i was sure you already understood how wrong it is to go around assuming things without any proof of them even existing.

Distasteful/disgraceful, unmoral, unjust, worth, and negativity are all constructs that are based on opinions based on convenience, there is no moral or justice, or taste without society and culture, and culture is an invention, it doesn't holds any reality beyond a name, those are things completely dependent on human interpretation, and if all humans die, those constructs die with them, they are agreements made by (some) humans for (some) humans and after years upon years of violent conflict they are being imposed as universal norms to all the other humans, and some privileged animals, but you wont hear any of those terms in nature or in the fields that study nature, because they don't exist there.
What is possible/impossible however, that's a whole different story, those things are, regardless of what we believe of them, for example if homeopathy is possible, then it works regardless of people believing on it or not, and that's the whole reason why a whole institute spends time making RCT test on homeopathy.

The opposite actually, belief should be trivialized to the point of irrelevance as it is the main cause of bias, and motives that lead to bad research, a clear example of biased thinking would be me over imposing my disbelief on homeopathy and by doing this ignoring the 40% positive evidence that the institute has on the effects of homeopathy beyond a placebo, the opposite of this would be disregarding the remaining 60% non-conclusive and negative evidence and just assume the thing as a reality, when it could be all just a coincidence, the only prudent thing to do in this case would be to treat it for what it is now, a possibility, is not a reality neither it is a fantasy, at the moment what it is proven is a grey field that could or not be, to go beyond that is on the realms of faith, it goes both ways, so in actuality beliefs are a harmful point to start a research, again science is for skeptics, it requires of a neutral position.

"It is thus meaningless to assert rationality without also specifying the background model assumptions describing how the problem is framed and formulated." remember this quote? it is from our discussion on reason, when we discussed about reason with philosophy being the background model, now don't think i didn't learn nothing from that circle we experienced back there, so i will get out of the future circle now, in this discussion which would be the background model of assumption at hand? at the moment we are talking about facts vs belief, and understanding the world, and as i see it you want to make reason a subjective thing that can be whatever it can be depending on who uses it, seeing that science and philosophy have a defined reasoning that is not subjective, i will ask you which other methods are there to understand the world with certainty which use reason and not faith, and most importantly actually use a subjective reason.

If belief was reason enough to justify something religion would suffice for everything in the world, and to be fair it did for the most part of human history, and in some parts of the planet, it still does, with some frightening strength.

Doomroar 2015-03-01 20:42:34

Freedom of speech is a political ideology, and as such it shouldn't interfere with the descriptions of the world, using your example it wont really matter if the food tastes good or bad (for example the person doesn't likes tomatoes), that's besides the point, but if it tastes like the ingredients that it has on it as an approximation to describe the components that form it, but as you know our senses deceive us so taste is not a reliable tool to describe things.

The knowledge of the earth being round was quite old, the Greeks already knew of it by just looking at the boats fade at the distance with the mast going out last, however this evidence went against the general idea of the earth being flat so it didn't spread on to the mainstream line of thought, when monotheist religion got involved and the answer to everything resided in one book then the flatness of the earth became cemented, not by observation but by dogma.
I recommend read some of their biographies, or search some videos about them you can see the struggle they had against the preconceptions that we had about the world, Bruno's is a particularly interesting one.

Simple a construct can stop being one when it holds its validity even when is taken out of its cultural context, for example math, even animals posses the ability to quantify things.

Horrible mistakes can come out from the best of intentions, and if we don't learn to separate ourselves from them we risk contaminating the goal of neutral knowledge, curiosity is more than enough of a force to drive someone into searching for answers.

We already have an alternative to karma, is called duty towards others and towards one self.

I don't believe in things until they are proven, and even then there's the possibility of them being refuted with even further research, thus if i believe in something is to believe that nothing will remain as truth, and this of course also applies to this very notion since we have axioms which are truths that never change due to their nature.
With homeopathy i don't believe on it, but that doesn't matters, the fact of the case is that it is a middle ground that can or not be, and it will remain that way until it is proven otherwise, and even after that it can still be put into doubt.

And since we are on this reason itself is just a compromise we roll with it because we have nothing better, which means the thing is far from perfect, if something should have stuck with you when we talked about skepticism is that reason is not really trustworthy, but that is the only thing we have, it is a compromise.
GMO has nothing wrong in itself, it is when it is used by a corporation inside an economic context in order to maximize profit that it becomes an inconvenience, this is not the first time you use the actions of an economic effect to attack a scientific result, and then justify religious ideals by putting the both of them in the "same" position, and while both make mistakes the principle behind science is to be objective and neutral.

If you are not willing to enter a context, and insist into making everything subjective then we can't advance on this discussion, the dress may as well be white and gold and if it things are to be that way we can't say anything about anything because anyone will come with their own inner truth that overrides reality based on their personal experience.

Of course in the vast world we live in not all religions are a hindrance when it comes to explore the world.
Belief can be good, but by mere coincidence, if the data that is found ins't compatible with the belief that the investigator holds then the risk for biased information appears, like when Einstein refused to accept quantum mechanics because it was incompatible with his view of a non-chaotic world.
In practice yes, indeed that is why we talk about probability and not of absolutes.

Doomroar 2015-03-08 12:58:00

Yeah censorship is all the more notorious now because people have more access to information, similarly they are able to notice more easily when something is being censored, i have mixed opinions with freedom of speech, i don't think that everyone should be able to go and say anything they want without facing any kind of consequences after all words carry power, specially if they are said by people that already have influence in society.

It fell flat but after years and years of people being burned for saying that it was round.

No, no in the sense that everyone with the capability to count, will be able to do so regardless of their cultural context.

That was the whole idea behind Karl Popper, to incur in a constant process to refute/revisit/correct the concepts that we hold as true, and as a result we just have probable outcomes instead of assured ones, and while that gives reliability to change things upon new evidence, that also opened the door to everyone disregarding everything as "just a theory" and then ignore whatever is found, because they think that it wont last or is fake, and it probably wont last, but really people we are experiencing climate change right now...

Yeah that's the whole idea, that it is not fun, indeed the idea behind moral duty is that it is based on concepts that are unrelated to feelings and in doing so they don't depend on the mood or character of a person, and thus can become universal norms, a fantasy in itself, and that's why i tell people that humanity is not worth the trouble, they wont do things because they have to, because in the end we are not obliged to anything, they will do it if they feel like doing them and when it comes to feeling everyone feels differently, that also goes for karma if they don't feel like going on karma hunting that day they will do it another day and fulfill their karma balance, it easily opens them a series of doors to justify "bad" behavior.

Yeah my belief is that it doesn't works, the fact is that we don't know if it works or not, thus my belief doesn't really matters.

When fission energy was discovered its planed uses were of that of a new source of energy, when the nuclear bomb was made, it was with all the assured intention to defeat the Nazis, Einstein was a pacifist but the pressure made him cooperate in the development of what for all purposes was a weapon capable to wipe a country, "had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing." he said this after the war, meaning that amid an arms race he made a balance and decided to help create a weapon that would stop the threat at hand, the side damage of such weapon was small compared to what the Nazis could unleash.
Would things been better if the bomb had never been created? No, the Japanese were scumbags (this doesn't even covers it) for all intents and purposes, they were the Nazis of Asia, they did horrible things to all their neighbors principally China and Korea, and their indoctrination required not one but 2 bombs and the invasion of their northern islands by the Soviets for them to stop, and even after that the troops in Manchuria refused to stop, is true the Japanese Empire was awful to their people, but the ones protesting were a minority, the Marxist students were killed, oppressed, and imprisoned, the military police was doing work, but not on the common people, the common people were waving Japanese flags, and praising the emperor convinced of their superiority, and it was nothing new, since the Sengoku period Japan has tried to subdue their neighbors, the first thing it did after achieving stability was to invade Korea, and fail in doing so.
So back to the topic at hand, the nuclear bombs have been misused, but their role in WWII was not one of those cases, and thus they fulfilled their purpose.

My stance is indeed that we should learn everything, with the constant consideration of how it may be used, when Einstein researched the bomb he was well aware of what it was going to be used.

"seeing that science and philosophy have a defined reasoning that is not subjective, i will ask you which other methods are there to understand the world with certainty which use reason and not faith, and most importantly actually use a subjective reason."
This is the context, i asked you to give me a method to understand the world with certainty which uses reason and not faith, and most importantly actually uses subjective reason.
This context surges from the fact that both science and philosophy have methods to escape subjectivity, they have established methods of reasoning, they have a background model of assumptions, guidance rules that they follow to establish premises and leave the realms of opinions, but you refuse to accept this " I believe both philosophy and science can be subjective as well", yes they can be, but the moment they are they stop being science and philosophy because they separate themselves from the basic rules that define them, if they get to say something accurate it is by luck, thus this whole discussion goes nowhere.

Doomroar 2015-03-08 17:50:01

Exactly it wont be absolute freedom, and that should hold twice for politicians, we get way too many of them negating the existence of actual problems and fabricating ones that don't exist instead, i don't like Rousseau at all, but his idea of the origin of law in society was that of a constriction of freedom in order to assure the freedom of the rest, that of course never happened.

That's an interesting notion to make when we are living in the middle of an age of green awareness, these concerns didn't existed 30 years ago, when the earth somehow had infinite resources, so i do think that we are starting to take into account those risk, mostly because such things weren't even considered before, things like food regulation, safety standardization, and environmental law, are fairly recent, so i do think that the opposite is happening, slowly of course, and only from the people that acknowledge that we can cause our own apocalypse, conveniently enough this was released today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXXZLoq2zFc however i myself don't think we are smart enough to not kill ourselves.

Hey man why don't you come live here and experience first hand what it is to life surrounded by people whose hedonistic goal in life is to feel good and have fun? i assure you it is not a fucked up country... anyway sarcasm aside, the idea of duty is that it should justify itself and apply to everyone equally regardless of who they are, Kant who is the principal exponent of this idea called the categorical imperative, bases it in principle on 2 things, that humans have a consciousness that tells them what is right and wrong, and that rational beings are deserve respect, as of now i have yet to see any proof of neither of those 2 claims, but i will tell you later this year in a blog post if he accomplishes this and is not making ass-pulls, anyway if his bases are correct then good is not about being fun or not, it is about doing the right thing, or at least having the intention (funny enough i am listening to 2 Wrongs by Onyx, feels so damn good!).

I believe in not believing, and i would love to say that i believe in science, but science is not always done scientifically, just in my own career you get people still taking about dualism between mind and brain.

I am curious now to hear how you justify the following things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimizuka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest_to_kill_100_people_using_a_sword
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women ok in this one and only this one i will give you some slack because Yoshinori Kobayashi swears on his life that it didn't happen, of course all things considered i think he is crazy most of the time, but he does says some decent things every now and then.
Actually this convenient page has most of them listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
Oh and you know Gegege no Kitaro? well the author Shigeru Mizuki wrote a manga about how it was to be a soldier for the Japanese empire, and since you are behind this whole ideology of doing fun things, well this is may be up your alley:
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Matthew-Penney/2905

And BTW those were not just "some elites" misbehaving, the whole country was on it, the ones that opposed the war were in the minority and i already commented on that in my previous comment, patriotism is not a foreign thing to Japan, specially for a country that manages their years based on the ruling emperor's cycle of life.

You may want to give that argument a revisit, because you just compared regulation and normativity, to terminology, which are 2 totally different things, a term refers to a specific thing in a field, and this by no means signifies that a term can be interchangeable for another (it can be, but cases like those are more of exceptions than norms), or in this case that a model is swappable with another, and after this it will lead to the same thing, thus becoming inconsequential.

We already talked about the philosophical method, and how and what role reason has on that field.
So here is the scientific one (in order of evolution):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_doubt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method (in here of course is also the Occam's razor, Universalizability, Falsifiability, etc)
So instead of an "i don't know but it is that way" you could use this info to give me some arguments, for example, one argument that you could use is that when scientist gather around to form a consensus on the approval of a new theory what holds weight in the acceptance of the idea is not the evidence behind the theory but the own selfish interest of the scientific group reviewing the theory, that can happen, and it has happen, however the fact remains that when that happens is because they weren't doing science, they were doing politic.

And finally a moment of opinion, i personally don't think there's a methodology out there which principles are based on subjectivity, so if you want this to go somewhere, prove me wrong.

Doomroar 2015-03-12 00:17:08

Haha no, what Rousseau says, is that humans created law in society to constrain the freedom of the individual in order to achieve greater freedom by facilitating the operation of the community, which being akin to the interests of the individual (because he is part of that community), will also benefit him. That's what he says, but that ideal doesn't happens, Hobbes has a better proposal that actually occurs.

Well in one hand that doesn't changes the fact that we live in an era in which we acknowledge that we have to care for the environment, a different thing is if we actually act upon that acknowledgement.
That's more of your problem, being unable to see the benefits of a thing just to avoid some possible risks that can be nullified if the technology is used responsible, and that is more a problem for economical models than of the researchers themselves, if someone finds how to make energy using gravitons, and also develops a way to use them with safety, but a company doesn't applies the second part, is not really the fault of the researcher, if your beef if with the companies then complain to them to the politicians, merchants and CEOs not to the scientist.

What quote? the one about learning enough in order to know how to play well? or "Thanks for continuing to play for being here and as always thanks for watching"? XD.

I agree i don't think that humans have a natural consciousness, some of us even lack the most basics of instincts.

Well Japan has historically lost most of his wars against foreign states, and the ones that they won didn't brew a long lasting control on the conquered zone, so it is more of a case of forgetting that their military might (when it comes to foreign campaigns) wasn't that great.

Is genocide justified in war, if that is the only way to stop the enemy?
I like Einstein am convinced of it, however he only applied that to the Nazis because they were a big enough threat, so for him it was a thing that had to be done and it was a painful decision, specially because he was a pacifist so to see himself cornered into developing a weapon of such magnitude must have been quite a dilemma, i on the other hand am ok with it, it is war and people will die, while i don't think that Japan had any real chances of winning WWII as a whole, they getting bombed actually saved lives (just the Nanking Massacre alone, had a death toll twice of what the 2 bombs killed, even if we remove the chinese soldiers from the count, the number is still stupidly high, and that's not the only thing they did, over all the Japanese killed 30 million people, that's 10 million more than what the Nazis killed), at the rate they were killing people the damage they generated was just getting higher and if unit 731 had succeeded on their experiments is highly probably that Japan had gotten himself a few dozens of colonies in the world, plus it would still be an imperial country.

They were supporters of a regime completely believing on the righteousness of their leaders, the ones that opposed it migrated to other countries, or fought back in their own ways, but i find it irresponsible to excuse people under the effects of obedience to authority http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment which has shown doesn't applies to these cases when people support these kinds of regime, to think that the German and Japanese population was ignorant of their ideology and acts and was just going with it is actually naive, specially on a war on the scale of WWII when the ones fighting are not just the soldiers, which in the case of Japan were mostly invading other countries, the Japanese saw themselves as the only humans on the planet.

If the problem is a lack of data, in that case you would have to search for kinds of methodologies and see if there's one that represents what you are telling me.

Yeah Descartes developed a method to make accurate research about things in general by dividing topics into their smallest and simplest parts, nowadays that method has evolved and changed into a bunch of different methodologies for different areas, but they seek the same basic principles: evaluating one's concepts, and simplifying the problem.

Well that's a problem because then how are you going to back that argument? what is the base for it? i mean sure that may not be necessary we could entertain the idea and go with it as an assumption and see if it works, or we could make a dual effort and the both of us search for a think to use as base for that argument, however if the one that is making the argument doesn't wants to search for the data, why should i who is opposing that argument do it? well in one hand that would give me an example of exception, and if i use that exception and surpass it i can then add more strength to my own argument, which is how argumentation should be done, however if we are at this point i don't really need to give my argument more strength, the opposing party already give up on the debate, "out of personal principles" you may say, but i do think you are being lazy here, you could search and see if you find something.

Cyberdevil 2020-04-15 16:00:13

@TheGameFan2020 I mean, if it's not about the post itself.