The slippery slope

Start here:

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Tl/dr: don’t trust science.

That’s fine, though it doesn’t say much about the topic. :2cents:

The point is you can’t use science to support your argument when science itself is in the doghouse.

One of many reasons we need to fix what’s wrong with science.

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It boils down to you can’t use science, period, which is not how humans got to where they are.

There are plenty of doghouses to go around. :dog: :slight_smile:

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It’s bad, but not quite that bad. Some fields of study are in worse shape than others.

Physics is still doing reasonably well.

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He he F.

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Australia today :roll_eyes:


Seems like, “Moral Equivalency”, is a policy now.
Prophetic words from almost a decade ago , courtesy Victor Hanson. Listen carefully.

Great, so now we have

  • all religions other than Christianity and atheism,
  • all political movements other than Trumpism and whatever its holier-than-thou supporters will accept as “conservatism”,
  • postmodernist philosophy,
  • any criticism of the “they’re poor because they’re lazy” dogma, and
  • science in general (except for physics)

all working together in a conspiracy to add “P” to the alphabet soup of gender rights and thus (of course) destroy civilization.

Did we miss anything? :roll:

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Sum up this thread… Blowhardism.

Global warming didn’t get a look in , a few years ago these nutters would have thrown that on the pile too but they are busy getting new air cons installed.

About those atheists…

(We’ve a got a thread about those Catholics somewhere else.)

The ancient Greeks gleefully buggered little boys and it didn’t bring down their civilization, although I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up in it. Maybe there are some civilizations humanity is better off without? Although, at the time. the competition was none too, y’know, stiff.

Oh, and here’s a correlation-causation fallacy for you all:

Is atheism pro-pedophilia, or is pedophilia pro-atheism? If your natural inclinations are socially unacceptable, it can be very self serving to embrace a philosophy that rejects all overarching standards.

Oh no, did you just---- :runaway:

abandon_thread_by_dannehmac-d4kdzfm

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don’t worry, we now have Rotherham, Newcastle etc etc, plenty of options to chose from!

Um no. It was apparently too long, so you didn’t read it. “You can’t trust science” is the entire basis of science. Not trusting anything underpins the power of science. It is, as Feynman said, the art of not fooling ourselves.

The “replication crisis” isn’t really something new. Science, especially the social sciences, has always been plagued by dubious experiments. I know this because I studied a social science at one of the UKs most respected institutions for the subject, and they spent a great deal of time teaching us how to understand (and use) statistical tests, and how to spot bullshit.

Sometimes there’s deliberate fraud, but 95% of the time no malice is intended: experimental design is really hard, and it’s rare that scientists actually measure what they think they’re measuring. Getting things wrong, and proving people wrong, is how science proceeds. I’d say 98% of the general public don’t understand this (they think it’s some sort of Judge Judy show with experts slugging it out) and 60-70% of scientists are a bit hazy on the details.

The reason physics is less plagued by bullshit is threefold: 1) only smart people do physics 2) physics is a bit more black-and-white than most sciences and 3) physics as a subject has long held a monopoly on some of history’s greatest scientists, who have added not just to the body of scientific knowledge but also to the philosophy of science.

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Your response doesn’t reference sexual dimorphism at all.

In any case, your argument is invalid. The issue is only behaviour with the potential to cause harms. Whether the behaviour is “innate” or not is irrelevant. Psychopaths are (more or less) born that way. We still put them in prison at the earliest opportunity.

That’s not true. By far most psychopaths don’t commit crimes. Being a psychopath isn’t a crime in itself.

The smart ones don’t get caught.

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Sorry, I should have clarified that that was a summary of Rowland’s post-quoting-wikiwisdom, not a summary of the wikiwisdom itself. I’ve read similar articles and am well aware of the concept.

The post doesn’t elaborate on the issue, but we’ve elaborated plenty in other threads. I see no need to reinvent the wheel here. :cactus:

The ones you admire, I take it. :roll_eyes:

Let’s just say I have a higher opinion of them than of the ones who get caught.