subject: Re: Shredding Theory of NS, Phase III

text:
H,R.Gruemm on 25 Dec 2003:

[snip]

A reply appears in the thread "Naive ?s on the
Blindwatchmaker Thesis," specifically at
http://tinyurl.com/28hra

Warning:  dangerous comments below.  Read at your own risk.

More, Louis Trenchard.  1925.  _The Dogma of Evolution_
(Princeton: Princeton University Press), 387pp.  This book is
based on lectures delivered at Princeton University in
January 1925.  More was Professor of Physics at the
University of Cincinnati, and also wrote _The Limitations of
Science_.  These extracts appear in the chapter "Introduction:
Evolution as Science and Faith."  Paragraphs on 30-32:
     As I am by training a physicist, it may be asked why I
     undertake a discussion of biology and of evolution in
     particular.  My reasons are that there is a more urgent
     need for a critique of biology as it is the science which
     is furthest out of its field, and also its influence on life
     and thought is more direct and readily seen than is that
     of the physical sciences and, consequently, may be more
     pernicious.  While the physical sciences have
     endeavoured to dominate thought, they do recognize
     that the field of life lies outside their boundaries and
     they continue to exclude its problems from their
     discussions.

     At least, the biologists cannot reproach me with being a
     "paper philosopher," since I have had a pretty severe and
     long training as a laboratory experimenter.  I am quite
     prepared to accept the conclusions of biological
     experimentation and I shall depend on the statements of
     biologists to show that they have not bridged the gap
     between the organic and inorganic worlds; that they are
     not prepared to explain living processes as physical
     force and energy; that biological evolution as a guide to
     human society is a delusion.  Anyone trained adequately
     in physics, which the biologists acknowledge to be the
     foundation of their science, ought surely to be able to
     follow and to understand their deductions.  If this be not
     true, how can biologists use the facts and laws of
     physics with such freedom and assurance?  And when
     we remember that the data of biology must be
     interpreted by historians, sociologists, philosophers, and
     the clergy, before the doctrine of evolution can be used
     as a guide to human affairs the argument becomes a
     two-edged sword and cuts both ways.  There are even
     good grounds for believing that physics, with its
     dependence on the technical use of mathematics, is the
     most difficult and avoided of the sciences.  Biologists
     and social evolutionists preach its essential value as a
     necessary foundation for their authority, but they
     successfully avoid its practice and their interpretations
     of its laws seem, at times, rather weird.

A paragraph on 12-13:
     Again, the marvellous inventions of science and its
     conquest of external conditions affect the imagination.
     Criticism is abashed and overawed by the array of facts
     which men of science have predicted and which have
     been verified.  And so we become convinced that the
     facts of science are adequate as a basis for the most
     elaborate and far-reaching hypotheses on all questions,
     however contrary to experience and common sense they
     may seem to be.  Our doubts are dulled to a quiescence
     which would, otherwise, be active if we kept clearly in
     mind that science is based on the same sort of evidence
     as are all other methods of human knowledge and that
     men of science are, as Newton pictured them, wanderers
     on the shore of a vast sea of unknown phenomena,
     picking up here and there a bright coloured pebble or
     shell.

Paragraphs on 21-24:
     With what is now known to have been a pitifully meagre
     supply of facts, observations, and experiments, the
     Darwinians preached the gospel of evolution as an
     established scientific law and crushed all opposition to
     natural selection by hurling the anathema that, if you did
     not believe, you were not fit to survive.  Every trick of
     habit and every reminiscent thought was traced back to
     some mammalian or reptilian monster; even such
     insignificant facts as that the hair on a man's wrist lay in
     a certain direction were sufficient to link him with
     simian ancestry; and daily search was made for the
     "missing link."

     All this restlessness and discussion resulted in one real
     service.  Interest was directed to the biological sciences
     and they were cultivated as never before.  Laboratories
     multiplied, and the phenomena of life were studied
     systematically.  The results of this investigation have
     been that, today, the evidence available supports our
     faith in a general law of evolution.  We accept it as we
     accept the law of conservation of matter, not because it
     can be proved to be true from experience, but because
     without it natural law is not intelligible.  The only
     alternative is the doctrine of special creation which may
     be true but is irrational.  The origins of the human races
     certainly go far back in time.  But, on the other hand, the
     causes and method of evolution have become a matter of
     such doubt that the better biologists, themselves, admit
     they are not on the track of any satisfactory proofs.  In
     addition to what may be called the scientific confusion

     amongst biologists, they have been shocked, and even
     dazed, by recent sudden attacks from the outside on
     them and on their work.  They are driven to the
     defensive and agree with Professor Conklin who
     introduces the subject of human evolution with the
     outburst that: "During the past few years, and especially
     within the past twelvemonth, there has been a
     remarkable recrudescence of the old theological
     opposition to the theory of evolution, especially as
     applied to man."^9 [9: _The Direction of Human
     Evolution_, Scribner's, 1922, 2d ed., p. v.] And he
     characterizes this outbreak as the most ignorant,
     frenzied, and intolerant that has ever been uttered
     against this theory.

     We now learn that after sixty years of persistent
     research, the causes of evolution are unknown; natural
     selection, with its catchwords of struggle for existence
     and survival of the fittest, is losing ground; the despised
     Lamarckism with its metaphysical background is
     gaining in favour.  Is it, then, surprising that laymen
     should confuse mere faith in evolution of some sort with
     the controversies as to its cause, and condemn the whole
     doctrine?  They remember, only too well, the haughty
     assurance of the Darwinians that evolution was a
     demonstrated fact and not a faith, and that natural
     selection was an adequate cause.  And with popular
     acceptance of these assertions as truths, society was
     reorganized according to the philosophy of naturalism
     with the universe a machine.  If now, the biologists
     cannot tell us how evolution will proceed in the future
     and what causes variations, how can we predict what we
     should do or how apply evolution to guide us socially
     and ethically?  As a laboratory science evolution does
     not especially interest us.

     While this note of uncertainty and confusion is clearly
     apparent in the minds of the biologists, they seem to
     miss the point that evolution is a far broader subject than
     a laboratory problem in biology; that it is one affecting
     the entire physical and spiritual outlook of man.  Instead
     of aiding society to re-orientate itself, they still try to
     soothe us into quiescence by saying our knowledge
     merely is lacking but the mechanistic method still
     remains the only true "open sesame."  Let us, therefore,
     withdraw for a time from discussing evolution and its
     applications and gather more facts until we have

     sufficient data wherewith to give the solution to the
     world.  They cannot understand that it is not more facts
     which are needed but some little indication to show that
     the laws of physics are adequate to include life and its
     attributes.  They are blind to the evidence that the world
     is fast losing faith in the ability of science to solve the
     riddle of man, to coordinate his physical and mental
     worlds by scientific experiments and logical formulae,
     and is turning again to the precepts of those who are
     wise from human experience.  Two or three examples
     will be sufficient to show how biologists, who recognize
     the revolt against scientific naturalism, propose to meet
     the situation.

     Professor Conklin, who by his scientific achievements
     and by his position as biologist in Princeton University
     exerts a great influence, sketches the probable direction
     of human evolution with the avowed purpose of
     combating these frenzied attacks on the study of
     evolution.  I may say at once, that I am quite in
     sympathy with his purpose in so far as he opposes the
     futile and foolish attempts to prohibit by law the
     teaching of the science of biology and of evolution, or to
     limit the full inquiry of biological phenomena.  But, his
     irritation under fire seems to have confused the clarity of
     his scientific reasoning to such an extent that he fails to
     distinguish between evolution as a scientific theory to be
     investigated in the biological laboratory, which will
     stand or fall on the evidence of scientific investigation,
     and the metaphysical hypothesis of evolution as a guide
     to social and religious affairs, which is not a problem of
     biology.

On 28-29:
     [after quoting 1922 Bateson:  most all of what is quoted
     is in http://tinyurl.com/2aq8z and
     http://tinyurl.com/y2gg ]  Again, we see that men of
     science are still under the delusion that they are hounded
     by a host of enemies.  Can they contemplate the course
     of history for the last half century and not see that
     implicit belief in Darwinian evolution, accepted because
     we naively believed in the facts and theories given us by
     biologists, has dominated society?  Is it astonishing that
     a revolt occurs when the prop to our faith is thus
     knocked out?  It cannot reassure us to have Professor
     Bateson tell us, at the close of his address, to be of good
     cheer because the mystery may be solved tomorrow; we
     cannot forget that, after sixty years of diligent search to
     clear this mystery of the origin of species and of the
     method of their variations, he confesses that not even a
     beginning has been made.  The tomorrow of the
     biologist may be as long as the million years or so
     necessary for the horse to eliminate his four toes.

The last paragraph of the chapter, on 33-34:
     A final word should be given in justification of the fact
     that I have based my criticism, and have placed most of
     my emphasis, on the work and ideas of the founders of
     the evolution theory, Lamarck, Spencer, Darwin,
     Huxley, Fiske, and Haeckel.  Objection will almost
     certainly be made that, as their work has been
     superseded or at least revised by modern scientific work,
     I should criticise the facts and hypotheses of living
     biologists.  But the objection will not be just, if it is kept
     in mind that the purpose of the book is not to discuss the
     validity of evolution as a scientific biological theory but
     rather to trace the effects of its application to the broader
     fields of social life and religion.  The doctrine of the
     founders of evolution was clear and it was pronounced

     with authority; today it is confused and broken with so
     many crosscurrents that it is very doubtful if many of
     those who confidently subscribe to the dogma of
     evolution as the explanation of life, of society, and of
     religion, know what it really requires us to believe.  In
     spite of the fact that much of the earlier specific work
     has been discredited, it is equally true that modern
     biologists are still using the ideas and methods of their
     predecessors.  If these ideas and methods are
     fundamentally wrong, then the monistic and naturalistic
     philosophy, which has followed from the doctrine of
     evolution and which is still dominant, will fall also.


author: Howard Hershey

subject: Re: Shredding Theory of NS, Phase III

text:
Dana Tweedy wrote:

If David Ford were capable of independent thought rather than merely
stringing together excerpted quotes from other authors (which he
mistakenly thinks is a substitute for erudition), he might be able to
tell us how he thinks that the evidence for natural selection as a
mechanism which changes population genome frequency in the direction
that optimizes those phenotypes that are best adapted to local
conditions *could* be demonstrated *in* the fossil record rather than
merely being consistent with the fossil record.

To me, the evidence that natural selection, as an observation of the
mechanism which causes changes in population genome frequency in the
direction that optimizes those phenotypes that are best adapted to local
conditions is evidence from living organisms in current environments
(where all aspects of that definition can be experimentally demonstrated
and rates of change can be quantitated).  As the above defined
mechanism, of course, natural selection only works on *existing* genetic
variance and not *hypothetical* genetic variance.  So, the independent
fact that the ultimate source of all genetic variance is *mutation*
which is random wrt need does come into play.  These *current*
experimental observations of how organisms work is the evidence that Mr.
Ford needs to counter if he wants to shred the Theory of NS.

The reason why the fossil record is not evidence for natural selection
is that we cannot, given the nature of the fossil record, know, with
certainty, what the selective forces were and what the genetic
composition of populations were.  We can only infer what natural
selection could do in the past on the basis of inference of the nature
of selective forces observed in the present and the response (and rate
of response) via natural selection that can be observed in the present.

OTOH, what I *really* think Mr. Ford is objecting to is not the idea of
natural selection, per se, but the idea that natural selection (and
probably, although he doesn't say so, any other naturalistic mechanism)
can be inferred to be, in part, responsible for producing the observed
fossil record.  That is, he thinks *some unspecified aspects* of the
fossil record are *inconsistent* with the observed ability and rate at
which NS can be *observed in the present* to change *morphology* (since
the fossil record is a record of morphologic change and not genetic
change, which is examined independently by sequence differences in
living organisms -- and which is also *consistent with* the idea that NS
plays a role in change over time or common descent, but is more
consistent with the idea that most *observed* genetic change in
organisms is selectively neutral drift).  Given that the rate of both NS
and artificial selection can be measured in the present, given that the
rate and extent of morphological change which *can* be obtained by
artificial or natural selection in the present *with existing variance*
can be as quantitatively as large as many of the changes seen in, say,
human brain capacity over the much longer time of 5 million years (this
was a change which was actually quite rapid), given that the rate of
random mutation is observable, he has a tough job in justifying his
quantitative claim that NS *could not* produce the observed amount of
morphological change seen in fossil record in the time available for
that change.  He doesn't make clear which *observed* feature of the
mechanism of NS working on random variation does not hold in the past.
Does he think that random variation did not occur in the past?  That NS
did not bias organisms toward those features that were locally
beneficial in the past?  That NS did not occur at all in the past?  That
the rate of morphological change in the past was too fast to be
accounted for by NS by using extrapolation from current rates?  I am
quite sure that Mr. Ford doesn't even know that those are the questions
he needs to be asking.

That is because David seems to not be capable of independent thought and
is only capable of quasi-mindlessly stringing together the secular
equivalent of Bible verses that have been taken either in (typically
from old or crank sources) or out (typically the ones from more recent
sources) of context to justify a previously decided upon position (such
a methodology of extracting Biblical quotes is used variously to justify
killing witches or not, hating homosexuals or not, keeping the
institution of slavery or not, beating one's children or not, handling
snakes or not, and drinking poison or not).  That is a style of
'scholarship' which is quite common to fundamentalist preachers
(Christian, Muslim, and Hindu) and medieval scholastics (What did
Aristotle think about this?).

It is not, however, one that is used by modern scholars and certainly
not one used by modern (meaning since the Rennaisance) scientists.  What
they do is try to examine and explore evidence that supports and that
which tests their ideas.  For example, take the "assertion" that there
is no evidence supporting NS.  That would mean that environments have no
effect in determining the genetic nature of the organisms exposed to
that environment.  This is an eminantly testable hypothesis.  And it has
been tested.  Do you know what the results were?  Or are you using a
definition of NS that is non-standard, such as a definition that
requires NS to invent new traits rather than distinguish among existing
phenotypic traits on the basis of their effects on reproductive success?
  I suspect that Mr. Ford has a non-standard definition of NS, since he
thinks it doesn't happen in current environments.


author: AC

subject: Re: Shredding Theory of NS, Phase III

text:
On Tue, 30 Dec 2003 05:54:06 +0000 (UTC),
david ford <[email]> wrote:

<snip>

NOt that old books are necessarily incorrect or invalid, but perhaps you
could explain why a book published nearly eighty years ago should be
considered as a refutation?


author: Beerlet Dhiblang

subject:
Re: Assorted woo, acupuncture and mind power (was Re: Raiding the
	Pantyry)

text:
On Feb 21, 8:02 am, Tang Huyen <tanghuyen{[email][remove]>
wrote:

Thank you Tang.

/l


author: DharmaTroll

text:
On Mar 4, 2:05 am, halfawake <[email]> wrote:

Yeah, with wonderful conversations about magic woo-woo energy
radiating from your palm into someone's soul. As if any of this
resembles anything connected or philosophy or spirituality. More like
checking into a virtual asylum.

Did you see this site?

http://www.farbeyondthestars.com/?p=1189

--DharmaTroll


subject: Re: Ass Burgers, cont. Discernment vs. discrimination

text:
On Mar 2, 10:13 pm, Déjà Fu <[email]> wrote:

Yeah, using Google, I found criticisms that echoed yours.
Here is a well-written one.

--DharmaTroll

http://skepticalob.blogspot.com/2010/02/acupuncture-treats-depression-in.html

<<Thursday, February 25, 2010

Acupuncture treats depression in pregnancy? I don't think so.

One of the big problems with science is that you do the experiment and
it doesn't support your thesis. What to do? Slice and dice the data to
make it look better, of course.

That's just what happened in a study that purports to show that
acupuncture alleviates depression in pregnancy. This would be an
important finding if it were true, since some pregnant women suffer
from depression and are wary of the risks of taking antidepressants in
pregnancy.

In Acupuncture for Depression During Pregnancy, the authors set out to
investigate whether acupuncture could alleviate symptoms of
depression:

    "Qualified participants were randomized to acupuncture specific
for depression, acupuncture not specific for depression, or prenatal
massage...

    Acupuncture specific for depression was tailored individually to
address each participant's depression-related patterns of disharmony
according to the principles of traditional Chinese medicine and
following a published standardized treatment manual.26 Acupuncture not
specific for depression was also standardized and needles were
inserted in real acupuncture points that did not address depression-
relevant patterns of disharmony according to traditional Chinese
medicine...

     Swedish massage was provided in a standardized fashion and
included effleurage and pétrissage strokes..."

There were 141 participants in the study, randomized as follows: 46
received acupuncture specific for depression, 48 received acupuncture
not specific for depression and 40 received massage. Response to
treatment was defined as a more than 50% reduction on the Hamilton
Rating Scale for Depression, as well as a HRDS score between 7-14. In
other words, the patients were still depressed, but their symptoms had
decreased markedly. Remission was defined as achieving an HRDS score
of less than 7.

Did acupuncture specific for depression result in remission of
depression. The authors acknowledge that it did not.

   "Remission rates were not significantly different between the group
receiving acupuncture specific for depression (16 of 46, 34.8%) and
the combined control groups (26 of 88, 29.5%; number needed to treat
19.1); the remission rates for the groups receiving acupuncture not
specific for depression and prenatal massage did not differ (11 of 40,
27.5%; and 15 of 48, 31.2%, respectively; number needed to treat
26.7). Acupuncture specific for depression remission rates did not
differ from either the group receiving acupuncture not specific for
depression (P=.47; number needed to treat 13.7) or prenatal massage
(P=.72; number needed to treat 28.3)."

But did acupuncture for depression produce an improvement in symptoms
(a response)? The authors claim that it did, stating:

    "Response rates were significantly higher for the group receiving
acupuncture specific for depression (29 of 46, 63.0%) than for the
combined control groups (39 of 88, 44.3%; P<.04)... The control
interventions did not differ from each other, 15 of 40 (37.5%) for the
group receiving acupuncture not specific for depression and 24 of 48
(50%) for the group receiving prenatal massage; P=.24)..."

But on closer inspection, the data does not support the authors
claims. Yes, the data show that acupuncture specific for depression
produced a statistically significant higher rate of response than non-
specific acupuncture (63% vs. 37%). And the data also show that
acupuncture for depression produced a statistically significant higher
rate of response than found in a group created by combining non-
specific acupuncture + massage (63% vs, 44%). But, the difference
between the response rate for acupuncture specific for depression and
massage was not statistically significant (63% vs. 50%; P=0.20).

In other words, acupuncture specific for depression produced an effect
that was not different from that of one of the controls. But by
creating a group that combined non-specific acupuncture (ineffective)
with massage (effective), they were able to create a composite that
was ineffective, and then they compared the experimental group with
the composite. But that doesn't change the fact that acupuncture for
depression was no better than massage.

Have the authors shown that acupuncture specific for depression is
effective for treating depression in pregnant women? I don't think so.
If it offers no advantage over massage, we can forget about
acupuncture and simply offer depressed pregnant women a day at the
spa. It is no less effective and probably far more enjoyable.>>


subject:
Re: Ass Burgers, cont. Discernment vs. discrimination (was: Re:
	Assorted woo, acupuncture and mind power (was Re: Raiding the Pantyry)

text:
On Mar 2, 3:24 pm, DharmaTroll <[email]> wrote:

[snipping lots of verbal dross...]

Surgical use of acupuncture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB51uRdY8cc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ThmAqf--t8

My suspicion is that b/c surgical acupuncture is not allowed in the
USA these studies overlook the efficacy of acupuncture in that
context.

In the case of phantom limb or phantom pain syndromes, the Mayo
Clinic's official position is that some acupuncture (AKA "dry needle")
therapies are proven to work reliably enough to try it as a less
invasive and lower risk procedure:

"...The National Institutes of Health has found that acupuncture can
be an effective treatment for some types of chronic pain. In
acupuncture, the practitioner inserts extremely fine, sterilized
stainless steel needles into the skin at specific points on the body.
It's thought that acupuncture stimulates your central nervous system
to release the body's natural pain-relieving endorphins."

Works for me. A world-class group of MD's beats a statistical PhD meta-
study any day in my book.

Pain mgm't is a nettlesome issue. My suspicion is that there's a broad
spectrum of pain mgm't issues where acupuncture understandably sees
marginal efficacy compared to placebo or analgesics. Acupuncture is
both an endorphin-agonist and inhibitor/antagonist therapy. It's
ability to trigger analgesia may likely taper off with time.

Likewise for post-surgical acupuncture, I'd be interested in under
what exact circumstances acupuncture works and for how long. I can't
see that issue being solved in some "either-or" black-and-white
study.

There're better empirical means than just that....

/l


text:
On Mar 1, 8:06 am, Beerlet Dhiblang <[email]> wrote:

Leebert piles onto the insults from Bill Pfft Nobody:

Blah blah blah.

I've read a lot about the meta-analysis, how it was done, how careful
it was, and I previously read about two of the thirteen studies in
painstaking detail.

Now, I'm up against Robert and Evelyn (with reiki, which is a whole
level more far-fetched than acupunture), who say, "just look at this
one coincidental hit, and please ignore all the hundred misses and
only look at this case" and then they focus on me and why something is
wrong with me for not believing. So I've looked and analyzed the
methodology, the studies, 1000% more than the believers, who only want
to use "astrology rules" where you just look at testimonials and
ignore the ratio of hits to misses. So what do you do, you come over
the top and actually accuse me of not researching well enough.

This is exactly what goes on in the climate change debate. No matter
how much evidence scientists pile up, they are constantly accused of
not doing it right, or making errors and so forth, so the opponents
turn their ton of evidence into a weakness.

The Leebert strategy: accept woo-woo talk "I had a witchdoctor chant
and shake rattles and wave her crystals, etc., and now my foot is
better, so it obviously WORKED!"  Then when I present studies, and
carefully present a meta-analysis of tons of studies, attack me and
say, "Get yourself on the actual research pubs & tell me how much of
that shit you even understand" and then dismiss anything I say if I
don't present myself as a Ph.D. in the field and so forth. Nice try
Leebert. Oh, and I am not alone: I have minions, many with Ph.D.s who
do understand this stuff: when nutters like Keynes babble about the
speed of light not being constant or the universe being positively
curved, I write them with what I've got and they enrich and correct my
stuff, and then I post it. I like being right. In any case, to accept
astrology methodology (testimonials of single anomalous cases while
ignoring a vast background of misses, then attributing the single case
to the woo-woo, and finally attacking the character of anyone who
questions the reasoning to that conclusion) and then to try to attack
my understanding -- that's laughable. I've already proved over and
over that I'm the Alpha-male, that I'm more informed than the nutters
and superstitionists around here. But I guess a superheroes work is
never done!

Anyway, your dismissal, Leebert, is a lot like the folks who attack
global warming scientists. I read an essay with an insightful
connection between the tactics of the global warming denialists (which
your tactics remind me of) and O.J. Simpson's defense in his trial.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175211/tomgram:_bill_mckibben,_climate_change%27s_o.j._simpson_moment/

Key point:

<<The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and
enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done
it.  The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event
that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were
conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make
it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a
problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s
blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning.  So
Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey,
Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that
it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they
needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how
Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los
Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a
screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If
a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be
a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made
the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared
Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a
perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.”
His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to
dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to
instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as
well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on
the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of
global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great
boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that
the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If
you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s
unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of
the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)?
That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious
date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t
happen by 2035, as the report indicated -- a fact that has now been
spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less
obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every
glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.

Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s
account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or
at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate”
scandal from an English research center last fall. The English
scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university
decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not
complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough
and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence
about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in
fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of
fuss Johnnie Cochran made -- that’s what Congressman James
Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific
fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his
opponents “Hitler youth.”>>

"Scientific fascism" is the same as Bill Pfft Nobody's "Church of
Scientism", and used in the same way here that he does. And you,
Leebert, want to just have me waste my time presenting lots of
evidence, so that you can have more and more targets to nitpick, while
accepting superstitious anecdotes that "she cast her spells and waved
her crystals and shook her rattles, and it doesn't matter how, but IT
WORKED". Nice try, Leebert

--DharmaTroll


text:
On Mar 2, 1:20 am, halfawake <[email]> wrote:

Who the hell ever said that? You're soundin' like Bill Pfft Nobody!

I never (nor as anyone else I know of) ever claimed that it "must be"
a coincidence. I simply pointed out that the reasoning that "it is
certain (or very likely) that it is not a coincidence and that the
reiki caused Evelyn's foot to feel better" is wrong, and based on
fallacious reasoning.

Of course it's possible that the reiki caused her foot to heal. I
pointed out that my neighbor's foot had the exact same problem, and it
healed spontaneously, without either doctors or woo-woo. That alone
also means nothing.

But what does mean something is to look at large numbers. Let's say, 1
in 100 turn out to heal on their own. And then we look at reiki cases.
Evelyn is healed, and the other 99 cases we find aren't healed. Evelyn
and Robert say "ignore those 99 cases: what's important is that the
woo-woo-ish waved her crystals and shook her rattle, and she's a nice,
caring loving person, too, with huge breasts, so that is proof that
she healed Evelyn!" No, it's not proof or even suggestive of anything,
since we would expect one in a hundred cases to naturally heal anyway,
you see. E

velyn and Robert could then cherry-pick and find 9 more folks who were
healed after using reiki. And ignore the 900 more who aren't. But they
would only present 10 stories, all remarkably coincidental, and say,
"Look Dharmatroll, here are 10 different folks, not just Evelyn, who
had reiki, and then healed completely right afterward. Only a closed-
minded science-geek could not admit that the reiki works."

And again, those 10 testimonials would mean nothing, given the 990 who
didn't heal. Since I would expect 10 in a thousand folks to
spontaneously heal anyway, picking out those 10 folks and then
presenting their testimonials is no evidence for anything! It's a math
trick! You're just playing with numbers.

I have no problem with wonder and enjoyment. I'm just saying that
there is no reason to attribute the healing to the woo-woo snake-oil
peddler. You've played a math trick, and now distract from it with
talk about my wanting to poo-poo wonder and enjoyment.

Rather, I'm all for wonder and enjoyment, but express it about how
Evelyn's body has the power to heal -- I'm just saying, no reason to
play a math trick and give a snake-oil peddler, no matter how many
crystals she has or how big her breasts are or how nice she is --
express wonder about Evelyn's healing ability, not about a
superstitionist's sleight of hand tricks, dammit.

Bullshit. There is always the possibility. But there's a destruction
of intelligence and sanity, when one out of 100 cases are hits, and 99
out of 100 are misses, and you ignore the misses, focus on a lone hit,
claim that the snake-oil must be genuine, and then distract with all
this emotional bullshit about "destruction of possibility" and "awe
and wonder". My, God, Robert, you have the huckster's lines all down.
Being a massage therapist for New Agers for years, you've really
learned the smooth talk, and how to spin bullshit with emotional pumps
like that. I mean this as a compliment, if you can believe that:
you're really impressive; too bad you're married -- you could probably
get almost any New Age or hippie chick to sleep with you easily if
you're as smooth a talker in real life. Geez.

--DharmaTroll


text:
On Mar 2, 10:36 am, Hollywood Lee <[email]> wrote:

Well of course, Lee. I sometimes write serious and boring posts. And
then after schmokin' a bit I'll come back to them, and exaggerate,
make a caricature of myself, and add gratuitous insults (nothing too
crude, though). That's what makes this fun.

Well, if folks get confused about at that, I have another reason to
make fun of them. I mean, shit, Lee, you have a brilliant scholar
Tang, who knows, what, 12 languages, and he spends his time making up
phony bios of Fu, accusing me of being Jigme for years and now of
being the Pope's right-hand man, and I'm supposed to be serious, as if
I were talking to serious sane rational people??? With you, it's like
I was back in college philosophy classes and cool discussions over
beer after class at happy hour; it's nostalgic. With Keynes, it's like
with my nutter neighbors, except I can say to him what I'd like to say
to them but am too polite to ever say in real life. And so on.

Well, if by arguing first, I can demonstrate how pointless grasping at
such views are, that might lead to letting go of all the bullshit and
going back to real, practical, daily life and what's real. And in the
meantime it's a lot of fun!

--DharmaTroll


text:
On Mar 2, 10:46 am, DharmaTroll <[email]> wrote:

Cite facts.

If you can't cite facts, or cite the variables involved in the sub-
studies, or cite the types of pain mgm't being treated, or explain the
shortcomings and pitfalls therein, then you are simply citing
authority, vicarious knowledge and have NO authority of your own to
make the claims you do about either the science NOR the wisdom of
anybody else's opinions or experiences.

There are those reasonable opponents (not the rejectionists) who want
better validation, not just some effed up predictions that haven't
borne out.

The problem is water vapor, but it also includes soot, ground-level
ozone, deforestation and so on.

More appeals to authority. It's not working.

Explain the obvious and undeniable efficacy of surgical acupuncture.

I've read a great many studies from PhD's based on seemingly immutable
data. Their conclusions turned out to be dead wrong.

Yes. And the greatest damage to every glacier, glacial field and major
stade so far has been from 4 factors: Deforestation, tropospheric
soot, sootfall (soot deposition), ground-level ozone and sublimation.
It *NEVER* goes above freezing on Kilimanjaro and yet the glacier has
receded. The reason? Mostly deforestation & sublimation.

The Himalayan fields OTOH have been depleted by soot-driven
accelerated melt rates & deforestation/sublimation.

The Arctic has been progressively decimated by sootfall, to the extent
that 90% of the ice loss in the past 150 years has been from soot. The
most aggressive depletion of boreal ice currently stems from soot
deposition, atmospheric brown clouds and ground-level ozone.

IOW, don't fall for politics from either side. Think about the current
global warming scare: It't been heavily influenced by the man that
declared an ozone state of emergency in 1988, claiming that there was
an ozone hole over NYC, none other than Al Gore. A major architect of
the IPCC is Maurice Strong, a man heavily into globalization projects.
The IPCC has in turn predicted a climate apocalypse with a parabolic
warming curve that has so far fallen rather flat (during a decade of
increasing solar quiescence). Meanwhile Gore is heavily leveraged in a
carbon credit arbitrage scheme.

Fleets of PhD's went along with actively declaring a climate
apocalypse. Were they right to do so? Fleets of PhD's went along with
actively denying the sun's current trend of increasing somnolence.
Were they right to do so?
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Evolution

Surely CO2 causes warming, but how much extra feedback will it see
from water vapor? That's the $60T question. But science shouldn't be
driven by panic, political agenda or press release b/c of the risk of
harming the reputation of science itself. That goes for those claiming
precautionary principles as well as those who ridiculously deny the
simple science of greenhouse gases.

Neither you nor I are scientists, so my suggestion is this: Take a
break.

/l


text:
On Mar 2, 2:35 pm, Beerlet Dhiblang <[email]> wrote:

I did cite facts, and references with tons of facts. I'm posting to a
nutter religious list with folks who believe in "chi" and life after
death and think the world is a figment of their imagination. It's not
like I'm posting to a journal read by rational educated folks, Darth.

They are all there in the articles. People on these lists don't want
stats and facts and pitfalls. They want to take one case in isolation,
babble magical claims about "the flow of chi", and then dismiss any
rational discussion or clinical tests. You know that very well,
Leebert. You can read all the facts here:

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/338/jan27_2/a3115

But as the article I post below explains, "you can't do that just by
publishing more scientific data".

As for climate change:

Not obvious or undeniable at all. There isn't evidence for any magical
'chi', only for placebo effects, as every sham acupuncture study has
shown that sham acupuncture works as well as real acupuncture
performed by so-called professionals who use all the woo-woo stuff
about "meridians".

I agree there are interesting arguments on all sides, and of course I
avoid all the extremists. But just because there are nutters who cry
wolf, or doomsday in this case, doesn't mean that we don't have good
reason to believe that we're causing most of the warming, rather than
it not being at all man-produced.

How about a break of your thick scull, Leebert? Heh. No, Leebert, why
don't you take a break. You are no match for the great and powerful
DharmaTroll, defender of sanity, rationality, and good beer!

That's a cop out. I've studied enough science and I can read about the
issues enough to know that the climate change deniers who yell
"scientism" and ignore the facts are full of deva-dung, and that the
woo-woo-ists like Robert and Evelyn who use astrology tactics to look
at single instances and ignore the background misses, and then attack
my character when I point out that it's no more than what you'd expect
by random, that they are similarly full of deva-dung. I could have 3
Ph.D.'s and a Nobel Prize, Leebert, and the woo-woo-ists would still
believe whatever they'd want to believe. This wonderful piece from NPR
makes the point:

--DharmaTroll

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124008307

<<
All Things Considered

February 23, 2010

Belief In Climate Change Hinges On Worldview
by Christopher Joyce

Does Climate Change Exist? It's A Matter Of Perspective

When it comes to climate change, some look at the facts presented and
see a coming catastrophe, others see a hoax. This difference in
interpretation, social scientists say, has more to do with each
individual's existing outlook than the facts.

Over the past few months, polls show that fewer Americans say they
believe humans are making the planet dangerously warmer, despite a
raft of scientific reports that say otherwise.

This puzzles many climate scientists — but not some social scientists,
whose research suggests that facts may not be as important as one's
beliefs.

Take, for example, a recent debate about climate change on West
Virginia public radio.
Coal company CEO Don Blankenship and environmentalist Robert Kennedy,
Jr. debate
West Virginia Public Broadcasting

VIDEO: Coal company CEO Don Blankenship and environmentalist Robert
Kennedy, Jr. debate about coal, climate change and the nation’s energy
future in the coal-mining state of West Virginia.

"It's a hoax," said coal company CEO Don Blankenship, "because clearly
anyone that says that they know what the temperature of the Earth is
going to be in 2020 or 2030 needs to be put in an asylum because they
don't."

On the other side of the debate was environmentalist Robert Kennedy,
Jr.

"Ninety-eight percent of the research climatologists in the world say
that global warming is real, that its impacts are going to be
catastrophic," he argued. "There are 2 percent who disagree with that.
I have a choice of believing the 98 percent or the 2 percent."

Individualists And Communitarians

To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it's not surprising that
two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the
faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural
Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values
shape public perceptions and policy beliefs.

"People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are
consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view," Braman
says.

The Cultural Cognition Project has conducted several experiments to
back that up.

Participants in these experiments are asked to describe their cultural
beliefs. Some embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise.
They are labeled the "individualistic" group. Others are suspicious of
authority or of commerce and industry. Braman calls them
"communitarians."

In one experiment, Braman queried these subjects about something
unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-
sized objects that could lead to novel products.

"These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe
some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says.

The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians
generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions
based on the same information.

"It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive
information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they
would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information,"
Braman says.

Rejecting Information That Threatens Beliefs

So, what's going on here?

"Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to
information is that the implications of it threaten their values,"
says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The
Cultural Cognition Project.

Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view
of how the world should work.

"If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think
about it in a much more open-minded way," he says.

And if the information doesn't, you tend to reject it.

In another experiment, people read a United Nations study about the
dangers of global warming. Then the researchers told the participants
that the solution to global warming is to regulate industrial
pollution. Many in the individualistic group then rejected the climate
science. But when more nuclear power was offered as the solution, says
Braman, "they said, you know, it turns out global warming is a serious
problem."

And for the communitarians, climate danger seemed less serious if the
only solution was more nuclear power.

The 'Messenger' Effect

Then there's the "messenger" effect. In an experiment dealing with the
dangers versus benefits of a vaccine, the scientific information came
from several people. They ranged from a rumpled and bearded expert to
a crisply business-like one. The participants tended to believe the
message that came from the person they considered to be more like
them.

In relation to the climate change debate, this suggests that some
people may not listen to those whom they view as hard-core
environmentalists.

"If you have people who are skeptical of the data on climate change,"
Braman says, "you can bet that Al Gore is not going to convince them
at this point."

So, should climate scientists hire, say, Newt Gingrich as their
spokesman? Kahan says no.

"The goal can't be to create a kind of psychological house of mirrors
so that people end up seeing exactly what you want," he argues. "The
goal has to be to create an environment that allows them to be open-
minded."

And Kahan says you can't do that just by publishing more scientific
data. >>


text:
On Mar 2, 5:01 pm, Déjà Fu <[email]> wrote:

So, Fu, what do you think of the study that Nutter-d00d Keynes posted?
It's from Stanford and was a randomized, blind trial. The study can be
found here:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/2010/03000/Acupuncture_for_Depression_During_Pregnancy__A.7.aspx

--DharmaTroll


text:
On Mar 2, 9:33 pm, Déjà Fu <[email]> wrote:

Ok, so then it wasn't really a truly blind test. Those that had the
"special acupuncture" besides having pins stuck in them like the
"traditional" group, talked to the acupuncturists and were counseled,
unlike the traditional group. In that case, there is the very strong
possibility that talking to the acupuncturist is what made the
difference in the study.  D'oh!

--DharmaTroll


text:
On Feb 28, 9:44 pm, Nobody in Particular <[email]> wrote:
Back to Bill Pfft Nobody's endless accusations...

No, but that's 99% false instead of 100% false. Since you seem to
really want to attack what ever position I hold, the most interesting
case would be to find out what position I hold, have me say "yes,
that's my position," and then attack it. In fact I find that
interesting. Having your refute the crazy views that you project onto
me, however, is a waste of time.

I don't really care about the science of today. I care only about the
question, "how do you know". So even though I don't like woo-woo, you
could, though not easily at first, convince me of non-physical woo-woo
souls, for example. You might produce a soul-switcher, the latest tech
given to you from a deva realm, or from Zeta Reticuli, or whatever.
You use this and it's like those films "All of me" or "Freaky Friday".
A nuclear physicist 'switches' with his 6 year old son, and the son
starts solving physics problems and the dad plays with toys. Or you
switch Robert and Tang, and suddenly Robert (his body) is talking in
10 languages and acting obsessively, whereas Tang (his body) starts
explaining how closed-minded people are who don't believe in crystal
healing.

Well, actually I wouldn't believe you at first. I'd want brain scans.
I would suspect that your device 'uploaded' all of Tang's and Robert's
memories and dispositions by copying their brain states, then
'reformatted' or did a 'brain wipe' on Robert and then structured all
the neural pathways to have been just like Tang's, and vice versa.
Thus a physicalist explanation, analagous to reformatting and copying
the contents of a hard-drive, I explain, is the simpler explanation to
your woo-woo soul story.

So you do extensive brain scans and demonstrate that their brains
haven't changed a bit, and the synapses haven't been rewired, and I
have this double-checked to make sure. Well, at this point, I have to
say, yeah, it seems I was way wrong about consciousness,
personalities, and brains. Your story that the person is a soul, and
that your soul-switcher switches the connections between particular
bodies and ineffable souls now sounds to me like the best explanation,
and I say, ok, ineffable souls seem to exist. I don't take this as a
belief, any more than I do dark matter, but I infer to the best
explanation and say "I'll go with the soul theory unless or until new
data come along that then suggest an explanation which is better, and
then I'll tentatively accept that one."

Hence, I'm not bound by whatever the present theories are, and I'd
even buy souls if you showed me evidence, and I would say, "I guess I
was totally wrong about brains, and that nut-job clown Keynes was
closer to the truth than I was. Go figure!"  But not until I
stubbornly held out for evidence, and was given it.

This differentiates me from others on the list, such as Robert and
Evelyn today, who, no matter what evidence, just stick to their guns
and change the subject to me; whereas I'm stubborn and skeptical of
anything without evidence, but if you give me real evidence (as
opposed to appealing to fallacies, or cherry-picking by focusing on
single or anomalous hits and ignoring the much larger background of
misses).

Skipping to:

Well, you seem to lasso as "science" everything that is not magic. So
I infer than this means you must appeal to magic in some form or
another. Maybe you don't, and you simply are stuck making up claims
that I'm a high priest in a religion you've invented.

And you again repeat:

There is no such religion. I pointed out by quoting the links you
provided, that the term is an insult, and refers to the most extreme
version of logical positivism. It's what's called a "straw man". There
is no such religion. And even those who are much more skeptical than
I, such as Fu, aren't positivists. I don't think there are any such
folks around anymore. So you're accusing me of a philosophical
position from a hundred years ago that's obsolete, which I don't hold.
Then you repeat this over and over, like saying "you're a nigger",
"you're a nigger" over and over, or Charles saying "you're a cunt"
over and over to folks. If you want to converse with me, better to ask
my position and deal with it, rather than just insult and make up
claims that I'm in some religion. I understand that you're being as
much of an asshole as you can to as Tang says "flip" me, but by now
you should have figured out that that's not going to work, and that
you're wasting you're time.

Why? You've just articulated my position. I'm not going to attack you
for repeating what I say.

Skipping down to your accusation:

Now I can attack you because you falsely claim that I hold exactly the
opposite of the position I hold here.

I claim (in probably over 100 different posts over the years) that
anything is possible. What I then say is that being possible isn't the
issue; rather, the issue is how likely and probable something is, and
what evidence we have for it. I often have pointed out that what can
be posited without evidence can be just as easily dismissed without
evidence. But I've never claimed anything to be impossible. As I just
explained above, if you provided evidence, I would even accept souls
as not only possible (which I already always have claimed) but likely
and the best explanation, if the evidence pointed to them as the best
explanation.

Finally you are honest. You want me to allow Keynes to say the most
insulting rude things over and over for years, and to turn the other
cheek. Well, that's great for Jesus, Gandhi, and the Amish, but I'm a
superhero, and kick the butts of evildoers. You don't like that I'm
having fun. I am polite and say "I don't know" and discuss all the
interesting possibilities and various far-out tries by philosophers,
and I've done that for years in lots and lots of philosophy classes
and so forth. With the kind of kooks like Keynes, and people who just
swallow fallacies and go through endless avoidance routines like
Robert and Evelyn (two of my favorite posters, btw), I wouldn't be
here a whole week, and would simply talk to folks who think and reason
at a higher caliper -- a Buddhist friend of mine is getting several of
us together for such discussions on one Saturday night a month. Here I
have nutters and quacks, mixed in with cool ideas, so I mirror folks,
and return whatever attitude they present to me. Problem in your case
is that if you're an asshole towards me, no matter what your excuses,
I'm going to put that right back in your face. So if you want to
defend insulting assholes, ignore their throwing rocks at me, and then
attack me when I strike back, which is the dishonest tactic you've
used, I'll be the villian you pretend I am, and I'll be your shadow
side that you hide from. It's fun for me, and you seem to want to play
the game.

Again, that means little more than "I believe in magic". If I say, I
don't think divine intervention is going on, for example, then I'm a
believer in the church of 'scientism'. No. Rather, I don't swallow the
belief that divine intervention is going on. That doesn't mean I
believe it is impossible. I don't. I don't have beliefs about it.
Rather, without evidence, I don't find any reason to see it as more
than a possibility, which isn't likely, along with an unbounded number
of other unlikely possibilities. You can say "you're not believing in
divine intervention makes you a fundamentalist in the church of
scientism." That's what you have said every time I say "X doesn't have
any evidence supporting it, so I don't blindly accept X as true or
likely to be happening". Well, it doesn't make me a fundamentalist. It
only makes you an asshole.

Right. And again, your choosing to picture me as you do doesn't make
me what you picture me as. Again, it only makes you an asshole.

--DharmaTroll


text:
On Feb 27, 8:12 pm, DharmaTroll <[email]> wrote:

Oh, really? Then why defend & promote a so-called acupuncture "meta-
study" when you haven't yourself reviewed the depth of the study or
whether a proper hierarchical linear regression was employed on not
only the efficacy, but the skill of the practitioner? It's nothing but
a quick press release & I'm not buying it.

One obvious problem with acupuncture and chiropractic massage is the
skill of the practitioner. Did your study check for the age,
ethnicity, school, teacher lineage or relative experience of
acupuncturists?

Before you go lambasting other people for belief in woo, you might
benefit from some critical thinking.

Think about how many meta-studies on cancer links to EM were done
coming up with ... OMG! ... positive correlations between high-tension
power lines and cancer! Of course there were no HLR models on actual
spatial relations on the locus of power lines sections to residences,
the actual voltage, amperage or current type (AC vs DC in Europe) and
the sites of step-down poles & full substations stations that would've
indicated a higher level of exposure to PCBs. As a result nearly every
cancer study on EM were SHODDY and YET they validated each other.

The same thing went for the medical orthodoxy on stomach ulcers with
years and years of studies that reinforced each other. So when the
news came that halobacter pylori was the actual culprit the medical
establishment excoriated the novel research demonstrating an
antibiotic cure for ulcers.

You argue like one and always have. When you wax polemic it becomes
ridiculous.

WTF? Where's your so-called math? You're just doing cut&paste crap,
there's no math, you're no scientist (and neither am I).

News clippings? Bullshit. Get yourself on the actual research pubs &
tell me how much of that shit you even understand and how to properly
structure an empirical study. There's a lot of shoddy work being done
that survives peer review.

Good one.

But yer still talking out yer ass.

/l


text:
On Feb 28, 3:07 am, halfawake <[email]> wrote:

Well, you've made the New-Age tun-the-tables move there, Robert.
You've reversed the the whole context into a prejudice: "because it
couldn't have been the Reiki".  But that's not what's going on at all.

Of course it could have been the Reiki, or something she ate, or some
new meditation practice, or she could have just healed. I ate lunch
yesterday with my neighbor who had the same condition and I wanted to
make sure I got the story right. He said he didn't do anything in
particular, but it recently just stopped hurting. He hasn't gone back
to running, as he did years ago, and he does other kinds of exercise
these days.

The "there are plenty of geeks" part is a way to dismiss "non-
believers" who don't buy the amazing cure story peddled here. You've
labeled people who aren't believers, and then dismissed them, probably
in a way you're used to and have done for years, as it's a common way
to strengthen folks' superstitions and make fun of those who question
the superstition.

Again, Evelyn could have picked anything that happened to her and
attributed the miracle cure to that. My neighbor says, "I don't know
why it went away -- maybe it healed, maybe I did something unwittingly
that helped heal it -- I have no idea." And that was that. If he had
gone to a reiki woo-woo-ist or an acupuncturist, he would probably
say, "well, I had pain for a long time, and then I did this bizarre
woo-woo practice, and I must admit, the pain is all gone!" I'm sure he
would have said this, and thought, "well, maybe there is something to
this reiki". We all would consider that, Robert.

That's the point of controlled studies, as you just can't tell if
there is a false positive or not from testimonial's like Evelyn's.
When there is no evidence from lots of studies that a pseudo-science
practice has an effect better than placebo, then I say, "Evelyn's case
is probably just like my neighbor's case, except that she made an
attribution that makes sense, given her experiences, but is probably
wrong, and is a false positive.

If controlled studies of reiki came out to be clearly effective, and
way outdid any placebo, or any other treatment, then I would say that
Evelyn's use of this was probably effective and that it was
responsible for healing her foot, and that my friend was probably one
of the lucky cases where people spontaneously heal.

Note that in both cases, I would say "probably", as I'm not claiming
to know anything with certainty -- there are no deductive proofs here,
like fingerprints and DNA left at the crime scene. Rather, I'm
pointing out that from the evidence we have, I don't see any reason
for Evelyn and you cheering her on to conclude that this particular
brand of snake oil or fairy dust  really has genuine medicinal value.

You bother because you buy into the anecdotal evidence and you believe
it, Robert. You believe it so much that to lower cognitive dissonance
you will label those who suggest you have committed a logical fallacy
in your reasoning as "geeks" and you shift the belief to them, as if
it is others who have a rigid belief and can't see the light as you
and Evelyn do. This is really just a more sophisticated version of
Bill's trick, to say that by not accepting magic, supernatural claims,
and so forth as evidence, I am really a fundementalist in some church
he calls "scientism". Except you do it better and in a more clever and
subtle way, because you've had years of practice using such
disclaimers, having been a massage therapist to the New Age woo-woo
crowd before you went on to be a filmmaker!

Evelyn:

Well, you see, knowing what the mechanism is, Evelyn, is important,
because if I claim to perform a magic trick and your pain goes away, I
might ask you for thousands of dollars to remove the next pain you
get. If there is a mechanism that removes your pain, you might want to
consider paying me, if the pain is serious. If I was taking advantage
of a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, then I am really committing
fraud and swindling you when you are vulnerable and desperate. And I
claim that lots of New Age woo-woo, as well as mainstream preachers
swindle people this way, and get rich feeding off of folks like
Evelyn. Others honestly belief their superstitions, and are often
harmless, but can be harmful if they turn people away from real
doctors, or helpful if they provide comfort and a caring context for
the person in distress.

Evelyn:
Robert:

Robert, the "placebo effect" is not a catch phrase for healing.
Placebos don't heal: rather, the subjective experience of pain is
lessened. I lot of our experience has to do with the thoughts we have
about it -- you know this from meditation -- and the placebo effect
has to do with this, for if we think something is effective, or if we
merely pay a lot more for a medicine, then we actually feel less pain.
It isn't about healing, however.

And which people don't care, Robert? Is it not the superstitious
gullible ones, who don't care what the mechanism is (actually what
they don't care about is questioning their beliefs, because they are
convinced there is a mechanism). And those who don't care about what
"somebody else thinks" sounds again so nice, that you are talking
about ignoring closed-minded people with silly opinions who don't know
the truth that the 'we' (the New-Agers or woo-woo-ists or believers)
know. When really this is just a way of saying that people with
beliefs don't like to examine them. And yes, that is the case.

Again here, you've changed the subject, from examining an ill-formed
inference, a claim of almost magic based on a post hoc ergo propter
hoc fallacy, to your rejecting "science" as being "omnicient", which
means all-knowing as in a God.

This is yet another New-Age move, to make a magic claim, and then I
say "there is no evidence that casting the spell, shaking the rattle,
sticking pins in the doll (or in you), or performing reiki or crystals
or magnets, etc. caused the illness to be cured". And then you reply,
"I don't believe science is omnicient", as if I'd made a claim to have
omniscient or to have some science that's omniscient, when all I said
was that you don't have good reason to make the causal claim you're
making. Usually, what comes next, after more sweeping generalizations
about science, is talk of "White European Men" followed by an appeal
to a mythical ancient time of illiterate natives who had wisdom that
was lost.

When the issue is that you don't have good reason to make the causal
claim. Again, if Evelyn gets suddenly ill, then you may have good
reason to deduce that it was something she ate, but even then you'd
want to check on how others are feeling who ate the same food, and
that's like the clinical study, because it's evaluating both hits and
misses. But when pain goes away, you can attribute this to almost
anything you choose, even a sign from God (and I've heard that
interpretation not infrequently).

Bottom line: you can label those who question your belief in the
causal efficacy of some woo-woo practice as "geeks", you can make up
claims that they are appealing to "omniscience" and then push off of
that, and pretend that they are the ones positing a claim rather than
you, and you can appeal to the intuitions of the person noticing the
correlation, and say that "Evelyn just 'knows' that the reiki healed
her" and a whole lot of other tricks. But they are still just tricks,
which have emotional appeal, but don't provide evidence for anything,
Robert.

Another distraction. My saying "I don't believe your claim that the
magic ritual/spell/energy-work/mantra caused the healing" gets twisted
in to my having an "agenda" which is "hard" (and hard means bad,
irrational, closed-minded, maybe even mean and uncaring, you see), and
that the problem is with me for being an ignorant dolt with blinders
on who can only see the world in one way and so is lost in delusion.
With this comment, which is a stronger version of the 'geek' label
above, you can now dismiss anything I say as being the ramblings of a
laughing stock. This is the invocation of the fallacy of  argumentum
ad hominem in its finest form!

Wow. Now it's all about a psychiatric analysis of me for questioning
your belief. You now posit not only the ability to know about the
cause of the illness, but you now have the ability to read my mind, to
reach through the screen into my brain and know what my feelings are
and know that my not believing your claim is due to these remarkable
psychological flaws in my personality and that I am on a "Crusade" and
therefore I am again deluded and so you can discount everything I say.
So now you have avoided justifying your believe in the magical cure,
and now can focus on mind-reading claims about my psyche, and
hopefully I'll spend so much effort trying defend myself against such
charges, that the original magical cure claim that you made will be
forgotten. Have you ever thought of going into politics, Robert?

Robert weaves the story deeper. You claim now that l am deluded
because now I'm avoiding experience and that since experience is not
all in studies, that this means if you say that a miracle occurred or
magic woo-woo caused Evelyn's foot to heal, it's because she is using
"experience" which ignorant dolts who pay attention ignore. Yet
experience is misleading, especially when one makes the inferrence you
make. If you rely on experience, the experience is just that A
happened and then B happened. The belief and claim that A caused B
through some magical unknown means is not part of experience at all.
It's an interpretation added to the experience.

Then you dismiss talk of "a study". Yet when I presented a meta-
analysis of lots of studies, in the case of acupuncture 13 of them,
where in every single of them acupuncture didn't do better than sham
fake placebo acupuncture, you dismiss all of them and all 3000 plus
people in favor of your unsupported belief that because Evelyn went to
a particular woo-woo-ist (and not knowing all the other things she did
in her life that she doesn't remember), that this is probably the
cause of her illness disappearing. No, that doesn't make sense, and
the appeal to experience doesn't work, because it's an inference to
causation beyond experience that you're claiming, without good reason
to make that inference.

Finally, Evelyn writes:

On Feb 28, 6:42 am, "Evelyn" <[email]> wrote:

This indeed is how we find things out. And notice that it's better to
be superstitious to be on the safe side if it's something that might
kill you!  We were evolved to be a bit paranoid and superstitious to
be on the safe side. This isn't evidence that reiki was the cause of
your illness going away, Evelyn, but it sure is evidence of why we are
inclined to jump to conclusions and have beliefs and superstitions,
because when we are right, it often would save our lives (and we'd go
on to reproduce) and when we were wrong, it was simply a harmless
belief.

For example, read the article that yesterday you posted on Facebook:

"Religion is a byproduct of humans' tendency to perceive agency and
intention as causes of events, to see "the hands of God" at work
behind otherwise natural phenomena.  "Humans are evolutionarily
designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are
paranoid," says Kanazawa.  This innate bias toward paranoia served
humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families
and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers.
"So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go
against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and
they become atheists."

According to the article you posted, I've got the advantage over you
and Robert in that I am going more against our natural evolutionary
tendency to believe, and you guys are still in primitive self-
preservation mode.

Unfortunately, in a moment of utter irony, however, I note that my
rocket-scientist neighbor just wrote on Facebook about the same study,
"Hmm, looks like samples are taken from a population of ~1500. I
wonder what the error bars are. If they are around +/i 3 or 4%, these
data don't mean much."  Oh drat. The higher IQ of skeptics may not be
statistically significant and may all be do to error from not having a
large enough sample. So I'll postpone drawing conclusions and wait for
the study to be replicated before I gloat about my superior
intelligence.

No, that's not what I claim. I am entirely ready to debunk claims and
beliefs that have no good evidence to support them, or which are based
upon faulty reasoning or logical fallacies. In your case, you
committed the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, claiming
that because A happened before B, A necessarily must have caused B.
And this doesn't follow. What that means is that I would want to look
for more evidence that "when A happens, B is more likely to occur". If
that evidence is lacking, then I say that you don't have good reason
to have that belief and jump to that conclusion.

I find it interesting Evelyn that you make a false accusation about me
which you read a flamer, Bill, make, and repeat it when I question
your belief. As I pointed out to Bill, never have I claimed that the
present science is an authority or an absolute or ultimate truth. All
I'm doing is pointing out that you've used faulty logic and biased
emotional subjectivity to draw a conclusion that is unsupported and
for which there isn't evidence. Like Robert, you wish instead to claim
that I am so deluded and mentally ill that my words are just about my
illness so can be dismissed, rather than dealing with the issue that
you have a belief that is unsupported by evidence. Again, a fine case
of the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem, and you've simply supported
fallacious reasoning by supporting more fallacious reasoning. Do
enough iterations of that, and you'll have yourself a new religion!

Yeah, that'll be the day. I'm the one that's pushing the "don't know
mind" here, claiming that we don't know and that you don't have enough
evidence to claim to know (or even think probable) that the woo-woo
cured you.

But we don't know that it helped. That's the whole issue. You're
claiming to know that it helped, which is the total opposite of the
"don't know mind" you are claiming to have, Evelyn. All you know is
that someone performed woo-woo and your pain got better. Again, my
neighbor had the same condition for a long time, and his planters'
just went away. Yours might have as well, but you claim to "know "
that "it actually helped", and this whole thread is about me saying
that you don't know that!

Sure, that's different, and you have a physical connection, just as
when you touch a hot stove you get burned. It's when there isn't a
physical connection (or claims are made about objects like crystals
and magnets) or when someone talks about invisible "energies" and so
forth, that's when your bullshit detector should go off, not when
someone massages your neck and your muscles are more relaxed.

Indeed, folks are hurt by taking herbs: they attack medicine and big
pharma which sometimes peddles useless drugs, but then they swallow
untested drugs from nice cuddly people like your reiki friend, and
they can get awfully sick. And you can lose a lot of money, as sham
New Age cures rake in billions of dollars from the gullible. But yes,
like the article you posted says, we evolved with a bias to be
believers, because usually it can't hurt to err on the side of
superstition. I think it's time we use our awareness to override our
instincts, however.

In this case, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do New-Age woo-woo,
Evelyn. I'm not making suggestions about your actions. What I'm
suggesting is only that your belief that "the reiki worked" and caused
your illness to go away is unsupported and that you don't know what
caused your plantars' to go away, and that you don't have good reason
to causally attribute it to the reiki, no matter how much you believe
it or how kind and nice your woo-woo friend is who practices it.
That's all I'm saying.

--DharmaTroll


text:
On Feb 26, 8:38 pm, DharmaTroll <[email]> wrote:

Ev wrote some salient anecdote, one that many can share:

[ Tommy Trollpa's rejoinder devolves from counter anecdote to bizarre,
long, pointless and doubtlessly time consuming logorrhea of no
return ]

[ yet more fucked up polemics and phillipics ]

[ enter the slow-moving taret ]

Totally different phenomenon ...

[ More social autism ... ]

[ snipping yet more verbal diarrhea ... DON'T YOU HAVE A LIFE? ]

Jesus X Trollpa, what a bunch of autistic horseshit. It's not even
funny or interesting other than an opportunity to tell you to get some
help.

Next thing I know you're going to tell us that Ben Gay is a placebo &
authentic chiropractic manipulation and massage do not remedy simple
skeletal, muscular and spinal misalignment.

WRT to acupuncture, you are so talking out of your statistical study
asshole. This debate has tossed back & forth for 40 years now on the
efficacy of acupuncture, etc. Of course it will not work in all cases,
so its efficacy is statistically spotty.

SHIT! There are pharmacological drugs approved by the FDA that suffer
spotty efficacy as well, and those are backed by pharma-science.

Get off your stud stallion & become a real person, not a dhamma dork
trying to scientise Buddhism or whateverthefuck you think your
miserable mission is.  Better look twice at the validity of the
studies you cite & compare them with battlefield accupuncture that
works.

Look dhumbba, until the discovery of the GI halobacterium, for 50
years the western medical orthodoxy on ulcers stood with its own
really shitty efficacy (including radical surgery).

And you're vigorously hopping up & down in defense of modern science?

Never mind I've seen it work FIRST HAND, both with chronic back pain &
OPEN SURGERY, no placebo effect.

Have you considered there are now thousands of so-called researchers
who are happily discovering & publishing bullshit with SAS b/c they
are required to. IOW SCIENCE FOR MONEY!?

You need to question whether they're just playing follow the leader,
whether it's politics you're reading, NOT real science. Do they have
their HLR stat models fully laid out to find possible variables that
would invalidate their statistical model? A great many researchers are
unfortunately either lazy or have an agenda, seen that time & again,
like with the whole link of power lines to cancer. Millions of dollars
went into that one. Um, did someone forget about PCBs in transformers?
I caught that one years ago, it was like watching people believing in
crop circles except led by scientists.

Do you know how Aspie this makes you, your endless narrowcast
diatribes that go nowhere, on the same fucking mind-numbing didactic
polemic patronizing asocial same bullshit (and Jesus.H.X., you & the
Tang-banger are so fucking aspie!!). Like, is becoming a Usenet WOMBAT
yer big goal in life?

/l


text:
On Feb 27, 10:58 am, Beerlet Dhiblang <[email]> wrote:

Well if it isn't Darth Leebert, no doubt up to no good, and out to
spread disinformation and slander the good name of the Trollpa.

Not true. I pointed out that someone I know well had the same problem
and it just went away, but without woo-woo, and thus Evelyn's
attributing the cause of her getting well to the woo-woo-ist was not
warranted.

Not at all, Darth. I was spelling out the methodology of confirmation
bias made famous by astrology, and employed by all pseudo-science such
as reiki, where one pays attention to hits (in the form of anecdotal
testimonials) and then ignores the overwhelming number of misses in
the background, leading Evelyn and countless others to take such
testimonials as evidence, when they are not.

As usual, my reasoning was valid and sound, and well-written.

No, it's the exact same methodology, and I carefully made a case for
it in detail. You ignore the careful details in my well-argued essay
which support my thesis, and then you insult me for providing so many
details; and finally you dismiss my thesis without any counter-
evidence, punctuated by insults. Truly you are a Seth Lord, Darth
Leebert!

Autism? Surely you have me confused with your own dark master, Emperor
Tang, the list autism poster-boy.

Again, rather than responding to the DharmaTroll's excellent, well-
argued points punctuated by satire and irony, rendering the Trollpa's
writing a joy to read, you simply respond with more baseless put-downs
and judgements, Leebert.

No, it's well-argued, humorous, and very informative. And I really
nailed the pattern with excellent illustrations. I'd say my post was
spot-on, Darth.

No, you're dead wrong on that, Darth. Only recently was acupuncture
compared with sham acupuncture in carefully controlled studies. And
while you accuse me of the same bias that the acupuncturists use with
your "of course it won't work in all cases" attempt to discredit me,
note that I'm talking about a meta-study of every single carefully
controlled study that compared acupuncture to sham acupuncture. We are
talking over 3000 people total, and 13 independent studies, where all
the hits and all the misses were carefully documented. Acupuncture
didn't do well in a single one of the studies, Leebert. Not one.
Acupuncture went 0 for 13 in all thirteen studies, with over 3000
participants. Fake, placebo, sham acupuncture did as well as
acupuncture in every one of them, Leebert -- every single one of them.

This particular meta-analysis examined studies of acupuncture for
pain. What's good about the search strategy used is that it not only
discarded various types of acupuncture that aren't really acupuncture,
such as electroacupuncture, but it also only included only trials that
used some sort of placebo acupuncture, be it sticking needles into
non-
meridian points or using the special "placebo needles" that retract
and give the illusion of penetrating the skin but do not actually do
so. In other words, it used only trials that included an acupuncture
group, a placebo acupuncture group, and a no acupuncture group.
Another strength of the analysis is that it also included only studies
in which both the acupuncture groups and the no-acupuncture groups
were given the same medical interventions. If the no treatment group
received a treatment substantially different from the acupuncture
groups, the study was not included. And no studies that met all of
these rigorous conditions were excluded, either.

The results were thirteen trials, with a total of 3,025 patients
between them.  The studies included covered a rather wide
range of conditions, including knee osteoarthritis, w7-w9 tension type
headache, migraine, low back pain, fibromyalgia, abdominal scar pain,
postoperative pain, and procedural pain during colonoscopy. Moreover,
the duration of treatment varied from one day to 12 weeks.
What were the findings? Sham, placebo, fake acupunctures scored better
than real acupuncture in all 13 out of 13 studies, Leebert. It was a
rout, a shut-out. Spin all you wish, but that was the last -nail in
the coffin for acupuncture.

Sure there are, and eventually they get weeded out. I'm not arguing
that modern medicine is perfect, or that it is entirely driven by
altruism and profit doesn't play a big role. But at least it is done
with controlled studies which are replicated by independent
scientists; whereas with psuedo-science like acupuncture, reiki, and
every other kind of vibrationology, there are no controlled studies,
and rather than some bullshit falling through the cracks sometimes,
the pseudo-science "alternative medicine" industry is propped up by
100% bullshit, based on testimonials alone, and thus uses exactly the
same methodology as do both astrologers and tele-evangelists. And I
carefully made that point and you simply ignored it and merely mocked
me and hurled your usual insults.

Shame on you, Darth Leebert, and your evil master Emperor Tang, for
trying to slander the awesome wisdom of the DharmaTroll and spew
disinformation and ignorance upon the good people of absfg. Your dark
plans to unleash the superstitious New Age upon the world are sure to
be foiled, for you are no match for...

--My Divine Grace Yabba Dabba Dukkha Dharmakaya Trollpa


subject:
Ass Burgers, cont. Discernment vs. discrimination (was: Re: Assorted
	woo, acupuncture and mind power (was Re: Raiding the Pantyry)

text:
On Feb 27, 1:32 pm, DharmaTroll <[email]> wrote:

Jeeeezus H. X-man Tommy, this is just more autistic spewage.

Obviously I don't go for the whole boatload of any sensitive bullshit,
and certainly not yers. I *do* wish you would get the fuck off Ev's
back sometimes, it's annoying as fuck to read something sensible from
her & then see your dorkage hanging out of yer inseam.

IOW, your social awareness is busted & your social needs go wanting.

Is this all that you really want from usenet is to just fuck with
people w/ your repetitive screeds?

Where you're smart, great, fine, keep doing that. But where you start
this triumphalist scientism crap about acupuncture, you're going to
find yourself in the same dept. as the bunch that lambasted the
evidence for halobacters in stomach ulcers.

In Iraq they've got boys running around with battlefield acupuncture.
As I've said before I've seen acupuncture work firsthand, with my
wife's back problems & with a full lobectomy (film).

If acupuncture suffers from a major shortcoming in efficacy & that is
its dependence on the skill of the practitioner. As with chiropractic
massage & correction (which saved me from a life of increasingly bad
scoliosis) the practitioners need to really know their shit.

Regardless of what science thinks it can prove or disprove, all your
pissed effort in bandwidth will be forgotten.

At first it was nice to have you back but yer fucking killing us with
your shit. Why keep fucking it up?

The denizenry of Buddhist usenet come to  play in a shrinking pond.
These are now becoming small, could-be happier fora on what's left of
uselessnet. arbt is dead, arb is functionally dead, apz could do w/out
us, leaving us really with az & absfg which hasn't seen fresh meat
that'd stick around in a long, very long time.

You're problem buster is that yer too fucking full of ego to know the
difference between discernment and discrimination. You *have*
discriminating tastes and intellect, but you are utterly lacking in
the discernment on when to limit it and to employ third thoughts
against the other two.

The way you obsess is the pay-off to anyone who is discerning (as I
can tell are Robert, Ev, Lee the Hollywooder, Lee the otherer in the
way they back off): You demo classic high-function Aspergers, just
like Tang, just like me. No shit.

OK, in your case I'll call it Ass-burgers. Same thing, only
different... asocial, obsessive, brilliant, driven, can't get enough
stimulus surfing the dialectic. Classic Aspberger's.

Oh, yeh sure.... we've learnt a thick skin & humor as a shield,
groovy, we're old enough. But like Tang, me & Chuck, you come back
here for a reason ... to hide out with the other kindred souls. You
dumbass, yer as addicted as any of us.

Face it: There's something that attracts us to this bullshit. It's
beating our heads against the same wall day after day after day  after
day  after day  after day  after day  after day  after day  after day
after day  after day  after day  after day  after day  after day
after day  after day  after day  after day  after day  after day
after day  after day  after day  after day  after day  after day
after day  after day  after day  after day  after day  after day
after day  after day  after day  after day  after day  after day
after day  after day  after day  after day  after day  after day
after day  after day  after day  after day  after day.

Why? WTF? Are you so mind-blind you won't admit it that you get
didactic all over people with mounds of bullshit nobody's gonna bother
reading?

Hello?

Discernment?

/l


text:
On Feb 27, 6:04 pm, Nobody in Particular <[email]> wrote:

Nope. No belief here. The best Bill Pffft Nobody and Darth Leebert can
do is to try to call me names and and call me a 'believer' when I
don't offer any blind faith or beliefs, just reasonable arguments and
I actually do the math. You have no defense to actual science and
reason and so you simply call it another religion and label me as a
fundamentalist so you can put your fingers in your ears, close your
eyes, and shout "lalalalala", or "day after day after day" or whatever
your ignoramus mantra happens to be.

I can bring'em to water -- too bad I can't waterboard'em.

--DharmaTroll


text:
On Feb 27, 9:32 pm, Nobody in Particular <[email]> wrote:

No, Bill, you just accuse me of having beliefs when I don't accept
magic or bad reasoning as evidence for anything. That's not a belief:
that's not accepting your beliefs. There's a difference between my not
accepting your superstition or invalid reasoning, and my asserting an
unfalsifiable assertion or claim of magic myself. Once again, you've
conflated the two and gotten muddled in your attempt to discredit me.

No. Here's the sequence of events:

DT:  I claim that appeal to magic and gut feelings is not evidence.

Bill: Science is all methods which aren't magical or irrational;
therefore, you only allow science, and therefore you are a
fundamentalist believer just like me, and so my beliefs are as likely
to be true as yours.

DT: No, you appeal to magic and I don't.

Bill: See, there you go, appealing to scientism, you closed-minded
fundamentalist.

And we go round and round. And my lack of swallowing magical
explanations, or testimonials without looking at the misses is not a
belief at all, Bill: rather, it is the skeptical rejection of bullshit
and invalid arguments.

So now you're attacking psychological qualities that you read into the
posts of someone you've never met, yet claim to know as well as your
wife somehow with your amazing mind-reading abilities, and hate with a
deep passion so much that not only do you have to attack every post I
make, follow me to other threads and insult me, then claim you've
killfiled me, then attack me again when I say good riddance and ignore
you, and now my not accepting your magical explanations or reasoning
convinces you that I am a believer and fundamentalist in a religion
that you've made up called 'scientism'. You're attacking your own
shadow, Bill, and are only seeing all the things you hate about
yourself in my words, the way liberals do with Dubya and conservatives
do with Obama. It's your own certitude and arrogance that you're
reading into me, if only about claiming to mind-read and know all
about me.

Um, I'm the one *rejecting* your unsupported belief, not the one
positing a belief; and I'm the recipient of numerous insults by you,
rather than the insulter. Projection again. I'd be happy to repost
your barrage of insults, my questioning you about all the insulting,
and you're calling me a crybaby and sissy in response to pointing out
that you merely hit me with insults when you had no evidence or
reasoning for my refutation of your argument.

Well, I've never once mentioned "the scientific method" and I don't
use the term, and I have no idea what you mean by it, except that you
seem to lasso "everything that isn't magical or irrational or fallacy-
based reasoning" together and call that the "scientific method". My
claim is that appeals to magic, holy books, guidance from spirits in
dreams, looking at testimonials and anecdotes without the background
of misses, appealing to logical fallacies, going with the majority
vote, and claiming that one simply has a pipeline or direct experience
to the truth all are not good evidence for anything. That's what I
keep saying. I've never appealed to any "scientific method" in any of
my posts. I've merely rejected woo-woo.

Yes you have. You label science, or at least the rejection of the woo-
woo I mention above, as 'scientism', and then you appoint me as high
priest or grand wizard of this made up religion, and then you
conveniently avoid discussing evidence for magical claims by simply
labeling me as a religious believer. That's your shtick, Bill, and
it's getting old.

I haven't once lied to anyone here. (My claiming that I'm superhero
dressed in tights and a cape is not a lie as much as hyperbole and
satire, btw, if you accuse me of that, and my claiming that a
earthquake of 8 was twice the size of one of 7 wasn't a lie, just a
boneheaded mistake, which I admitted.) The only one who knowingly has
made false statements in our conversations is you, Bill.

Again, I don't assert any beliefs. I simply fail to accept magic and
other woo-woo as reasonable explanations for anything.

I'd be happy to quote over 50 times (better yet, you look them up)
where I explain that what we know is always changing, that I don't
know anything for sure, that I infer to the best explanation given the
current data as a working hypothesis, and that this fluid hypothesis
I'm constantly updating every time new data comes on the scene. Now
I've stated this in dozens of posts for 15 years on this usenet group,
and my posts all back me up. Furthermore, never in those 15 years have
I ever once claimed that the present state of science was the ultimate
truth or an authority that can't be questioned. Rather, I've each time
used terms like "inference to the best explanation" and taking that
explanation as a "fluid working hypothesis" to be constantly updated.
You over and over accuse me of exactly the opposite of everything I've
consistently said, and then you call me a liar.

Now if I post a dozen instances where I said exactly what I claim and
not the opposite which you claim, I strongly suspect you will say "but
you only accept the Google record of posts and that's scientism, while
you reject my intuitions and opinions about you". And I'll say "that's
exactly right: and Google agrees with me," and you'll say, "see, you
only accept scientific evidence, so you're a fundamentalist believer
after all." That's a Keynes' trick. Except he does it on purpose to be
funny, whereas you are insane for real.

No, Bill, that was irony.
I was making fun of your inquisition of me. D'oh!

--My Divine Grace Yabba Dabba Dukkha Dharmakaya Trollpa


text:
On Feb 27, 10:16 pm, Déjà Fu <[email]> wrote:

Good question, Fu. As I pointed out in my reply:

<<Well, I've never once mentioned "the scientific method" and I don't
use the term, and I have no idea what you mean by it, except that you
seem to lasso "everything that isn't magical or irrational or fallacy-
based reasoning" together and call that the "scientific method". My
claim is that appeals to magic, holy books, guidance from spirits in
dreams, looking at testimonials and anecdotes without the background
of misses, appealing to logical fallacies, going with the majority
vote, and claiming that one simply has a pipeline or direct experience
to the truth all are not good evidence for anything. That's what I
keep saying. I've never appealed to any "scientific method" in any of
my posts. I've merely rejected woo-woo.>>

Bundling together rejection of various forms of woo-woo and calling
that a positive blind-faith belief is merely a sleight of hand trick.
I'd also like to here how Bill claims to have knowledge without
empirical evidence.

--DharmaTroll