sparticus-was-wrong
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User ID: 533
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
There's nothing anywhere that appears to break the laws of physics. You need to look at the effect filming with a gimbal has. I saw one video taken from a helicopter using a heat sensor or something (black and white video). The thing seemed to be really moving fast but someone got out google maps and mapped out the course the "object" was travelling and it was actually going very slow. Obviously a bird.
Another trick to watch out for is perspective. If you think something is very far away but is actually closer it will appear to be going impossibly fast. And in the sky you don't have good frames of reference to easily detect this.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
So GRRM just ragequit and said the whole thing works differently, that in Westeros your paternal family "type" will always predominate over another or something like that, because magic or whatever.
I wouldn't call that rage quitting. I'd say this is the correct response. Why would a world that has dragons, walking dead people, tree people and so on follow earthen genetics? Do people in that world even have DNA? The way the story is presented it very much "feels" like Ned's discovery (actually Jon Arryn's) is correct and for the reasons he stated.
It would also be plausible that families have some kind of "magic". How else is one line able to manage to hold a position of power for thousands of years? Do we have an analog to that in our world?
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
It needs to be clear that the existence of the "Slippery Slope" fallacy does not mean all Slippery Slope arguments are fallacies. Slippery Slopes do happen and it's a very common tactic, in fact. The fallacy is along the lines of your example but suggesting that censorship, once successful will expand is not a fallacy it's the most likely outcome. It's also an outcome we've literally watched in history on multiple occasions. Once you've been able to stop people saying something small you don't like hearing, why would you stop?
sparticus-was-wrong
10mo ago
Does cancer have a cure?
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
I believe you but do you have any sources that demonstrate this? I have contacts who make this asinine claim and I know they won't take any of the sources I would be able to quickly find (e.g. Fox) so do you have better ones?
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
As for those who do accept that medical technology currently cannot make Jane "actually a woman", but it might be able to do so in the future – and I am assuming you belong to this group – I have to ask: what is a woman? What medical procedure would Jane need to "actually" become a woman?
This line of reasoning always gets me. Person claims to be of different gender. People point out that this person isn't actually behaving like the target gender. Person claims have wrong views about what that gender is like.... well then what makes you think you are of that gender? Maybe the gender you currently have is also misunderstood and your biology actually got it right but societies views of it is not right?
You say "what is a woman and what would be required to be one" and I say if someone cannot answer definitively what a woman is then how can they possibly claim to be one.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
Gimbal lock doesn't explain anything but making slow things appearing fast. Radar is most likely a bug or some kind of tests designed to trick radar (which the US has conducted in the past). Could you expand on what you mean by infra red signature? If you're talking about my example, nothing was fooled there. The pilots knew they were watching a bird but they saw the infra red video it looked like a UFO so they uploaded it.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
But what happened to all the people who were pro-Bernie and hated Clinton literally hours before? They should have still been there.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
I think the issue is that IQ is measuring how intelligent one has managed to become. But racists like to use it to determine what one is capable of becoming. There was a very interesting case of the Dan Everett and the Piraha amazonian tribe (I can't find the article now, I believe it was in the Times or similar but it was more than a decade ago). He claimed that the tribe had no numbers in their language (only "many", "few") etc. and were completely incapable of learning to count.... if they learned after about 16 years of age. If they learned before then they could count just fine.
Of course there is much more evidence than this about forming connections before a certain age, etc. My point is that even if Africa truly has "naturally" low IQs, this is almost certainly do to with education and if that were fixed the IQs would rise. So again, the issue is that certain people try to look at IQ and point at something genetic but that's not remotely implied by IQ unless you could ensure the study group had the exact same education as the higher groups.
sparticus-was-wrong
10mo ago
I don't clearly see the option that seems most likely to me: the deep desire to be seen as "cool" or "intelligent". These people will switch to whatever reddit/the paper/hollywood tells them is the new truth, no matter what it is.
And the one that kills me the most is:
t: "I'm a woman born in a man's body!"
t: :does something very masculine:
p: "Uh, that didn't seem very lady like"...
t: "You just have a wrong stereotype about what women are really like!"
... At which point I'm asking myself how anyone can "feel like a woman" if a woman can be literally anything. Maybe this holds for men as well and they actually just feel like a non-stereotypical man?
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
Well, you can't convince someone against something they really want to believe. The fact is we have no conclusive evidence of anything breaking physics at all. The physics says it's impossible, or if it could somehow happen we should also have time travel. Why has no one ever come back if time travel will one day exist?
As Charles Stross said on his blog: people who believe we're being visited by aliens don't understand just how vast space is.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
If you look at official statements, though, the government only says that these are really their videos. They don't even say they don't know what it is.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
But that argument equally undermines the original complaint that it doesn't make sense for Valyrians to all have platinum blonde hair but different skin colors. Maybe the definitely blood-magic evil sacrifice thing that makes valyrians what they are doesn't impact skin color, who knows?
We shouldn't use the show to make assumptions about the book. The show could be using an entirely different rule set (or, more likely, not caring about the story or any underlying consistency at all).
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
You may not need it, but it seems highly unlikely to me that various actors wouldn't be out there trying to insure their voice wins out. Look at Twitter: the bot count seems to be higher than previously thought.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
These days, we prefer the name "linguistic relativity hypothesis". Sapir-Whorf has some ugly ties to the Nazi's: they incorrectly used the theory as evidence for Aryan superiority (which is silly if you know German and some other language). Their usage was ridiculous but, like pedophiles, just the mention of their name taints the subject, hence the name change (and, of course, it more accurately states what the theory is about).
I should do a better job of keeping various articles that discuss the theory as it's kind of a pet favourite of mine. In my own life I've noticed Swiss-german native speakers tend to have a problem distinguishing smell and taste. They use the same word for both.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
I'm personally strongly against "woke"-ism, but did Tolkien exclude black elves? Did he mention their colour at all?
sparticus-was-wrong
10mo ago
I was reacting to the statement that a medical condition implies a cure. It may imply that there could be one but it doesn't imply that there is.
sparticus-was-wrong
10mo ago
How much more would they need to do before the principle of charity finally runs out on them?
sparticus-was-wrong
10mo ago
I think the solution is pretty simple here: if you're white and the suspect is black, simply do not go. Announce you see some other crime in progress (e.g. littering, jay walking, etc.) and are unable to respond. There is no upside for the cop and only potential downside. I'd quit before I'd go to confront someone I'm not legally able to arrest.
sparticus-was-wrong
10mo ago
Even in the current environment the studies are so bad that the meta analysis is worthless. Junk in, junk out.
sparticus-was-wrong
10mo ago
The experts may not be malicious as such but it's interesting to note that medical professionals always seem to determine, after much sincere consideration, that the most expensive possible procedure is always required. If you go in with back pain they will find a disk out of alignment if you're over 35 or so and that will be the motivation they give for recommending back surgery despite no correlation between surgery and reduction of pain and no correlation between unaligned disks and pain.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
That probably works, thanks.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
MS CEO is not white, does that count?
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
Yes, so much of the world feels like living in "The emperor's new clothes" right now.
Personally I don't believe it's all that needed on Reddit.
Years ago I noticed something interesting related to GMO products. You could be in the most obscure sub you could think of and if you just mentioned GMO is a negative light at all, suddenly you'd get a 3 page post citing 100's of "scientific papers" proving how safe, or even healing GMO meat was, how anti-science you were, how evil, how much of a Nazi, etc. Pretty much the exact same post no matter where you were, but different accounts (as far as I cared to look anyway). Then if you brought something up (e.g. "yea but literally all of those papers you cite are from GMO companies?") then you might get silence for a bit, then seemingly instantaneously all over the site there would be a package response to that. It was such a bizarre phenomena but it was really like Beetlejuice: say "GMO sucks!" and they would appear.
Then came the 2016 election. All of the mainstream news subs were pro Bernie and hostile to Hillary (and to Trump of course, though he had that crazy meme sub at that point). Then Hillary won the primary and I saw the exact same thing happen with Hillary. The same Beetlejuice affect. You could be in /r/rollerskatesforpeoplewith3legs and say "those are cool skates but they remind me of Hillary Clinton and she's just not likable" and out comes the canned posts with all the exact same message stated the exact same way (e.g. "Most qualified person to ever run for president"... uh, what about a president running for a second term, wouldn't they be more qualified?). Highly aggressive. But this time it wasn't one or two it could be dozens of people or more. What made it stand out to me was how fast and how radical this changed. The die hard "Bernie or nobody" people seemed to literally disappear. Of course they were there but suddenly they were downvoted to oblivion.
I personally think reddit these days is 80% bots and "call centres" making comments. So there's no need to censor the site directly, just put backroom restrictions on what the call centres and bots are allowed to push.
NOTE: The above is purely from memory and I'm a human so some of it won't have actually happened how I remember it now but I think it gets the point across of what I was seeing and why I have come to this conclusion.
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