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On August 03 2014 05:56 MoonfireSpam wrote:
Yeah a bit back seat moderation, but how about not being total douchebags. Looking at you IgnE and Zulu. There's some interesting reading in here, I hate having you read you guys shit it up with condesending comments that literally serve no purpose beyond showing you are cunts.
You actually seem like the biggest douchebag here.
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On August 03 2014 07:57 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2014 05:56 MoonfireSpam wrote:
Yeah a bit back seat moderation, but how about not being total douchebags. Looking at you IgnE and Zulu. There's some interesting reading in here, I hate having you read you guys shit it up with condesending comments that literally serve no purpose beyond showing you are cunts. You actually seem like the biggest douchebag here.
I admit i haven't read this whole threat. but opening the conversation with a one-liner and a wikipedia link is really hard to best.
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On August 03 2014 06:39 bookwyrm wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2014 06:31 2Pacalypse- wrote:Also as a side-note to your previous post where you interpret Dawkins' point as calling people stupid and not explaining them is very unjust, seeing as he spent half of his life as a science educator trying to explain evolution to people. precisely BECAUSE dawkins is a pop cultural figure with a proselytizing mission about "explaining" evolution to people who have somehow, mysteriously (on his view), not yet entered the 20th century, he has an interest in glossing over the finer points and making the whole thing seem like a more imposing edifice than it really is. He's not interested in asking difficult questions about the very thing which he is trying so hard to promote. Just as TV preachers are not interested in talking about theological problems or points of difficulty in the doctrines which they expound - they want to present them as seamless wholes. Dawkins DOES think people are stupid - he says it explicitly. Since his entire thesis is that there is no rational reason to believe anything other than what he thinks, and that the people to which his polemic is addressed are hapless fools trapped in some "pre-rational" ideology... You're going to have to give up on your attachment to Dawkins as a credible figure. Let's agree to all go read the Selfish Gene and the Extended Phenotype and pretend like he died in a plane crash after that.
That is complete nonsense.
Richard Dawkins fights against a lot of diffirent kinds of opponents from a lot of different angles.
He recognises that many people form their views as a result of a higher authority, or teacher. Often these are religious leaders who accuse science of being limited because it doesn't have all the answers, and anyway everything is just a "theory" scientists don't KNOW anything. Where as they, and their religion, DO have all the answers and they DO know everything for certain. He fights against these kinds of people by saying that scientists DO know things (as much as anyone can know anything). Human beings have a desire for certainty and authority figures in their lives. Dawkins is providing an equal amount of certainty about evolution, as his opponents are.
Other opponents of his are those that claim that all kinds of ideas are equally valid. For these people he argues the finer points of why he believes what he does, and tries to get he opponents to justify their beliefs to a similar degree (which of course they cannot, to to which most people claim they have a RIGHT to believe anything they want). Do people have a right to believe whatever they want? What about law makers, and police-officers and teachers, people have a direct influence on our lives? Humanists believe that what these people who have a direct influence on our lives believe is important for all of humanity, and this is why it is not OK for everyone to believe whatever they want.
There has arguably been no other theory which has been put under more scrutiny than Evolution. It is easily the greatest and most important theory in history. It explains where we came from, and why life exists as it does all around us. The evidence for evolution exists at all levels, from fossils to biochemistry. There is NO credible alternative theory. It must be (and is) taken as axiomatic that Evolution exists, and thus it is called "fact" by Dawkins.
Don't even try to undermine Dawkins as a scholar. He is widely accepted to be a brilliant scientist.
So what if Dawkins says you are stupid, does that hurt your feelings? Is this really why you hate him?
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Croatia9530 Posts
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tl;dr I didn't make a point about whether violent rape was worse than date rape, even though my text directly implies I did. Why should I have to excuse myself for implying something if I in my mind didn't imply it. I only did it to break horrible taboos.
I stand by my choice to educate you unreasonable and emotional people doing this. How can you not understand if I don't do these kinds of comparisons we'll never break the taboo.
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Croatia9530 Posts
tl;dr of your tl;dr - I don't like you so no matter what you say I will ever consider reasonable and instead I'll just paraphrase everything you say sarcastically so it fits in the one tweet-length.
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On August 03 2014 18:53 son1dow wrote:
tl;dr I didn't make a point about whether violent rape was worse than date rape, even though my text directly implies I did. Why should I have to excuse myself for implying something if I in my mind didn't imply it. I only did it to break horrible taboos.
I stand by my choice to educate you unreasonable and emotional people doing this. How can you not understand if I don't do these kinds of comparisons we'll never break the taboo.
There is nothing wrong with what he wrote. His argument is to take the emotional out of emotionally charged debates so that the issues can be discussed logically rather than emotionally.
Often people see what they are looking for and hear what they want to hear. If you want to see Dawkins as a self-satisfied purveyor of half-truths then that is what you will see. If you do see this though you're not really doing so through being objective and rational, but by reacting emotionally. Which is kind of the point.
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You blamed me for not linking his defense, but you didn't read the accusations, what kind of useless sophistry is that. The first post on the reddit link describes well how he messed up.
Both of you are showing how you're doing the same thing as him - missing the point of the accusations and piling on how only irrationality leads us to not understand his great point.
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On August 03 2014 22:55 son1dow wrote:
You blamed me for not linking his defense, but you didn't read the accusations, what kind of useless sophistry is that. The first post on the reddit link describes well how he messed up.
Both of you are showing how you're doing the same thing as him - missing the point of the accusations and piling on how only irrationality leads us to not understand his great point.
Can you just tell us the main accusations because i really don't want to respond to all of the 64 posts in the reddit thread here.
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Croatia9530 Posts
On August 03 2014 22:55 son1dow wrote:
You blamed me for not linking his defense, but you didn't read the accusations, what kind of useless sophistry is that. The first post on the reddit link describes well how he messed up.
Both of you are showing how you're doing the same thing as him - missing the point of the accusations and piling on how only irrationality leads us to not understand his great point.
I'm pretty sure most of the posts in that reddit link are based on his tweets alone, without reading his explanation. Which is something that is often done with his tweets; he's pretty eloquent, but not enough to convey all of his thoughts in 140 characters. That's why I blamed you for not linking his defense; it provides a pretty important explanation that he couldn't fit in 140 characters on which he was judged.
That first post on reddit exactly proves the point of his explanation... If he had used this example: “Slapping someone’s face is bad, breaking their nose is worse”, would he get the same amount of emotionally charged replies as he did with the rape example? And then read the title of his post "Are there emotional no-go areas where logic dare not show its face?". He's not giving a definitive answer to that question, but he's arguing that there shouldn't be.
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Re: First response in reddit thread.
The first paragraph says that Dawkins isn't qualified to have an opinion. Anybody is free to have an opinion and tell it to anyone who will listen.
The second says he is wrong in his opinion, and that no assessment can be had about the severity of rapes. This is missing the point. His point being that all matters, no matter how sensitive, should be able to be discussed by anyone in a hypothetical manner without emotion or fear of intimidation (which he has experienced first hand).
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Dawkins', though wrong in that bad comparison and ignorance in defending it, was indeed trying to say that we should have the ability to discuss things rationally, but he implied that we should do so with the purpose of learning something in discourse.
You just said that basically some public representative, or any person no matter how influential should be able to, for example, argue against any kind of existence of mental illness and say that they should just do vitamins and eat fruits without any relevant experience and don't receive backlash for it.
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On August 03 2014 23:35 deathly rat wrote:
Re: First response in reddit thread.
The first paragraph says that Dawkins isn't qualified to have an opinion. Anybody is free to have an opinion and tell it to anyone who will listen.
The second says he is wrong in his opinion, and that no assessment can be had about the severity of rapes. This is missing the point. His point being that all matters, no matter how sensitive, should be able to be discussed by anyone in a hypothetical manner without emotion or fear of intimidation (which he has experienced first hand).
I think the point is that while it is not impossible to evaluate the moral harm or approbation of one rape in comparison to another, every rape is highly fact-specific (context dependent, consequences, intentions). Dawkins tweets are offensive because they imply some false category analysis. At best he's tweeting intentionally provocative inanities that illustrate his childish application of "reason" to yet another field in which he lacks expertise.
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a) they are both worse
b) why would you want to "take emotion out of" something which can't be understood without thinking about emotions? it's just dumb. anyone who thinks "for all x, if we want to think about x, it would be best for us to forget about emotions and use the Power of Logic" is a robot (and an idiot).
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Ah philosophy:
I think, thus I am unemployable
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On August 04 2014 06:56 8882 wrote:
Ah philosophy:
I think, thus I am unemployable
Hrm, don't a lot of philosophy majors end up in highly reputable law schools?
Better off than chemists, that's for damn sure.
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I think he certainly is being intentionally provocative, in order to raise awareness of the issues he campaigns for and stimulate discussions such as this one.
As for him "lacking expertise", is it not a classic fault in reasoning to attack the person rather than the ideas he is presenting? You could definitely argue the case for his philosophical expertise, but it's hardly the point is it.
It is obviously correct to take the emotion out of ethical debates. Does the victim of a crime have the right to sentence the perpetrator? Why not?
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On August 04 2014 03:40 bookwyrm wrote:
b) why would you want to "take emotion out of" something which can't be understood without thinking about emotions? it's just dumb. anyone who thinks "for all x, if we want to think about x, it would be best for us to forget about emotions and use the Power of Logic" is a robot (and an idiot).
There's evidence from neuroscience that emotion plays a huge role in moral reasoning (as well as many other complex decisions). I don't understand how an evolutionary biologist can ignore this kind of empirical evidence in his philosophical position.
Over-reliance on logic is actually my main beef with philosophy, Logic does one thing: it creates true statements from other true statements. It makes no promise about assumptions that are likely to be true, but might not be in some cases. You can absolutely start with an assumption that is true 99.999% of the time, assume it's "true" then through a series of logical steps to prove something that is never true. Unfortunately, absolutely true statements about anything interesting, be it physical reality or moral principles are hard to come by (some claim impossible).
It's worth remembering that if you assume P and not P to be true then you can prove absolutely any statement, true or false. By the same token if you assume P and Q, such that Q implies not P through some argument, then again you can prove anything you want. This makes purely logical arguments about reality incredibly fragile. There's a reason why metaphysics has so little interesting to say and why scientists rely on experiments so heavily. There's always a nagging suspicion that the assumptions were untrue (or only true in some circumstances and not in others).
Maybe moral outrage over hypothetical moral dilemmas are analogues to the people's reaction to Zeno's paradox. But at least "proving" something about reality that is clearly untrue is funny. "Proving" something about morality which is revolting isn't.
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EPT
