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On fire for Christ
SFN Regular

Norway
1273 Posts

Posted - 05/23/2017 :  09:10:56   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send On fire for Christ a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by Dave W.

Originally posted by On fire for Christ

it's sad when people like old people Dave try to fit in with the edgy crowd by being liberal to a fault and not seeing any kind of grey area.
There's a gray area between treating people fairly and being an asshole? Do tell.


Unless 1 side of this is 100% perfect then that is a straw man.

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 05/23/2017 :  09:56:15   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by On fire for Christ

Dave I had a nasty response for you, but I deleted it because Jesus would have deleted it.
Matthew 5:30.

Anyway, I really think that having a proportional and measured reactions to comments by public figures would find a lot more support across the spectrum, than overreactions. Usually, yes, they are insensitive, tone deaf,maybe ignorant etc, and we want to highlight that they should not be encouraging such things.
So lets respond in a proportional way, then that person might not double down, his supporters might agree.
If you turn the dial to 11, call out the lynch mobs and excommunicate someone for 1 ill-conceived twitter post, then that person will more than likely put his guard up, double, triple down, his defenders will rally, now that person is your enemy, all his followers are your enemy and then you have the same thing again, more tribalism more black and white politics. Why? because people can't take a deep breath and talk about things in an adult way.
Tell that to the asshats, dude.

Rebecca Watson made one small criticism of one guy's behaviour, and the MRA contingent within organized atheism went absolutely bonkers with outrage.

Ophelia Benson parenthetically pointed out that a comment of Shermer's was sexist, and he immediately declared himself to be the target of a witch hunt, and compared Benson to the Nazis.

Other examples abound.

Your attempt to tone police and talk about a proportional response needs to be directed at the followers of the likes of Dawkins, Harris, etc. The liberals aren't the ones who photoshop pictures of the opposition into gang-rape scenes complete with drawn-on bukkake, or doxx and SWAT their critics. The violent rhetoric - talk of being beset by lynch mobs, for example - comes entirely from the right. The tribalism you speak of is exemplified by the asshats.

Again: this is not a case of both-sides-do-itism.

And it's not a single Tweet, either. What you see is the result of a years-long pattern of behavior. It is no surprise at all that Dawkins, Shermer, Harris, Coyne and the others would be praising the B&L paper. Their response to the paper is more evidence (not the only evidence) that they are unfit to be "thought leaders" for skepticism.

If you want to have adult discussions about these topics, you'll need to get informed, first.

Unless 1 side of this is 100% perfect then that is a straw man.
You'd be right if one side were claiming to be perfect. Perfection is unattainable. Striving for perfection, on the other hand, is easy. For example, had Shermer responded to Benson with "Oh, shoot, I didn't think about that and I'll try to do better in the future," it would have been a non-issue, blown over in thirty seconds. Instead, he chose to whine and double-down.

One side attempts to attain equality, the other strives to maintain the status quo. That's why there's no gray area between them. There is no "moderate" position from which to play holier-than-both-of-thee.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 05/23/2017 :  10:10:23   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
PZ Myers gets some details wrong regarding the "hoax" paper, but points out something important.

If the logic of Boghossian and Lindsay (and Shermer as accomplice) were correct, then this 2012 paper's publication spelled doom for the entire field of evolutionary biology. It wasn't even a hoax, but 105 pages of garbage intended to be profound.

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 05/23/2017 :  18:07:00   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Prickly Questions ends with this:
Second, my own pretend-social-science prediction (which may of course be disconfirmed) is that Steven Pinker and other prominent ‘skeptics’ are not going to rush to acknowledge that the hoax has gone horribly wrong, even though it obviously has. On the one hand, the skeptics’ own theory of themselves is that they are cool headed, rational assessors of evidence, who hew to scientific standards of proof in developing and testing their personal beliefs while their enemies are prepared to believe in all sorts of gobbledygook. If this theory were to hold true, then one would have expected either (a) that skeptics would have rejected the hoax immediately (perhaps treating it with particular suspicion given that it fit so closely with their political priors about postmodernism and academic feminism) or (b) that if they couldn’t quite get there on their own, they would acknowledge the flaws in the spoof and recalibrate their own beliefs and public arguments as soon as the problems had been pointed out to them.

My prediction starts from the alternative assumption that skeptics, like their opponents, are less a conclave of ice-minded Bayesian ratiocinators than a sports team or political faction looking to win. This means that (like all of us) they are (a) inclined to clutch at anything that has a superficial resemblance to evidence supporting their beliefs, and (b) not to want to let go of it, even when it becomes clear that it isn’t evidence at all, both because of various forms of anchoring bias, and because they don’t want to hand an advantage to their opponents by admitting they were wrong. This leads me to predict that either there will be no acknowledgement of fault by Pinker et Cie, or that if there is some grudging acknowledgment it will be framed so as to assert or imply that the skeptics are right, even if they are wrong.

[Of course, if this is disconfirmed, I could start touting my own ancillary hypothesis to save the phenomenon – that Pinker and people, having read this post or similar arguments, have decided to ‘fess up so as better to prevail in the meta-struggle behind the struggle. That, however, would be cheating on my part.]
Some of the comments are interesting. A commenter named Jerry Vinokurov writes:
The comments on the BHL page are priceless. In response to the obvious bad faith displayed by Boghossian, Jerry Coyne (among others) basically replies “well, we already knew gender studies was garbage so it doesn’t matter that this experiment is worthless.” Tells you all you need to know, basically.
"The BHL page" refers to this blog post, at which Jerry Coyne did, indeed, comment:
This hoax is just one more brick in the wall of vacuity that surrounds much of culture studies.
Confirmation bias writ large. If it weren't from people who so freely allow their politics to guide their skepticism, I'd be astounded.

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On fire for Christ
SFN Regular

Norway
1273 Posts

Posted - 05/23/2017 :  22:51:52   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send On fire for Christ a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by Dave W.



Your attempt to tone police and talk about a proportional response needs to be directed at the followers of the likes of Dawkins, Harris, etc. The liberals aren't the ones who photoshop pictures of the opposition into gang-rape scenes complete with drawn-on bukkake, or doxx and SWAT their critics. The violent rhetoric - talk of being beset by lynch mobs, for example - comes entirely from the right. The tribalism you speak of is exemplified by the asshats.



Lets not pretend it's all one way traffic, there were memes spread by prominent figures quoting sam harris saying "all muslims should be nuked" (paraphrasing) citing his words a conference he never even attended. Putting words in people's mouths for the sole purpose of inciting a rabble is about as damning a behaviour as you can get. Obviously this is branching out into "islamaphobia" now but I think there's overlap, (and it's more interesting to me because it's one of the few instances where I agree with certain atheists and will defend them to a point), please lets not pretend that the 100% of the demands from the social justice movement are reasonable and fair e.g. blanket labeling people as "shameful" for not learning "all 31 genders". What about ridiculous fines on the books in new york and Canada for "mis-gendering" offenses?

Quite frankly I don't see any major difference in tactics or integrity between the two sides. Maybe you're in an echo chamber. Try living on the other side for a while and get some perspective. (Why do you think I hang around here?)


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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 05/24/2017 :  05:50:53   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by On fire for Christ

Lets not pretend it's all one way traffic, there were memes spread by prominent figures quoting sam harris saying "all muslims should be nuked" (paraphrasing) citing his words a conference he never even attended.
Prominent figures where? Sam Harris himself claims it was some guy named Chris Hedges who began making the claim, at least as early as 2011. Chris Hedges is a journalist and minister, not a skeptic or atheist. Harris later claimed the nuke story had been repeated by the likes of Glenn Grenwald, Reza Aslan and Cenk Uygur, who are all journalists, and not prominent at all among the atheist or skeptic movements.

...please lets not pretend that the 100% of the demands from the social justice movement are reasonable and fair e.g. blanket labeling people as "shameful" for not learning "all 31 genders". What about ridiculous fines on the books in new york and Canada for "mis-gendering" offenses?
Seriously? I thought we were talking about the schism within the skepticism and/or atheism movements. If I can grab any ol' fundamentalist's nonsense and hold it up as a failure of the right, I think this discussion will go much easier. Pretty sure any right-wing shooter is all the trump card I need to shut you down, if you really want to go this route.

By the way, Canada and NYC did nothing more than add transgender protections to their already-existing anti-harassment laws. If you, OFfC, were being intentionally, maliciously referred to as a woman by an employer or landlord before those new rules went into effect, you would have had grounds for a lawsuit. The new rules in both NYC and Canada simply recognized that intentionally, maliciously harassing transgender people is equally as bad as intentionally, maliciously harassing cisgender people. The same laws protect you (with the same fines) as they do transgender people. You need to stop getting your news from Breitbart.

Quite frankly I don't see any major difference in tactics or integrity between the two sides. Maybe you're in an echo chamber.
Maybe you have a different idea about what the "sides" comprise than I do (see above).

Try living on the other side for a while and get some perspective.
I can't avoid it. I'm an old, white, heterosexual man. I just recognize that being what I am comes with perks that others have to fight for. If you don't grok that (like Dawkins, Shermer, Harris and others don't), then it's you who need perspective.

(Why do you think I hang around here?)
I honestly thought that when you occasionally get drunk you like to troll us. Fits the available evidence. You sling some shit around, then while you're hungover, you make lame attempts to defend it. A couple days later, when you finally feel better, you remember the rest of your life and vanish from our pages for another few months. And then you go on another bender and fling the same crap around some more ('cause you can't remember doing the same trolling things before).

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ThorGoLucky
Snuggle Wolf

USA
1486 Posts

Posted - 05/24/2017 :  14:24:12   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit ThorGoLucky's Homepage Send ThorGoLucky a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by Dave W.

PZ Myers gets some details wrong regarding the "hoax" paper, but points out something important.

If the logic of Boghossian and Lindsay (and Shermer as accomplice) were correct, then this 2012 paper's publication spelled doom for the entire field of evolutionary biology. It wasn't even a hoax, but 105 pages of garbage intended to be profound.

Serious Inquiries Only podcast #44 has a thorough takedown of the claims made by Boghossian and Lindsay. The journal that published the hoax has no impact score. And as Sokal said in his hoax, it's a repudiation of editors' dereliction of duty, not the field of study.

And Thomas Smith said that he will interview Lindsay about it. That should be interesting!
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 05/24/2017 :  18:21:10   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Big write-up in Salon is direct:
Lindsay comes oh-so-close to the epiphany needed to see the fatal flaw in his and his colleague’s project: These two “prongs” aren’t merely in tension; they are inversely correlated. Publishing in Cogent doesn’t merely muddy the waters on their point against gender studies; it completely vitiates it. Cogent isn’t even about gender studies. Not a single “senior editor” of the journal has an academic background in the field. Rather, the various editors’ expertise lies in (I kid you not) tourism, criminology, development planning, geography, sport management and communication sciences.

The most crucial point, therefore, is this: Submitting an article on gender studies to that particular journal and then claiming that its publication proves that gender studies is idiotic is tantamount to a creationist writing a fake article about evolutionary biology, publishing it in an unknown pay-to-publish non-biology journal (whose editorial board includes no one with expertise in evolutionary biology), and then exclaiming, “See! The
entire field of evolutionary biology is complete nonsense.” This is puerile gotcha-ism that completely misses the target while simultaneously making, in the case of Boghossian and Lindsay, the skeptic community look like gullible, anti-intellectual fools.
Thank you, thought leaders!
...[A]s a general rule, if one wants to criticize a topic X, one should at the very least know enough about X to convince true experts in the relevant field that one is competent about X. This gets at what Brian Caplan calls the “ideological Turing test.” If you can’t pass this test, there’s a good chance you don’t know enough about the topic to offer a serious, one might even say cogent, critique.

Boghossian and Lindsay pretty clearly don’t pass that test. Their main claim to relevant knowledge in gender studies seems to be citations from Wikipedia and mockingly retweeting abstracts that they, as non-experts, find funny — which is rather like Sarah Palin’s mocking of scientists for studying fruit flies or claiming that Obamacare would entail “death panels.” This kind of unscholarly engagement has rather predictably led to a sizable backlash from serious scholars on social media who have noted that the skeptic community can sometimes be anything but skeptical about its own ignorance and ideological commitments.
Peter Boghossian is the Sarah Palin of skepticism. That's gonna leave a mark.



Amanda Marcotte:
If you're out to disprove maleness is the source of all evil, acting like a couple of dicks isn't the way to do it.

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ThorGoLucky
Snuggle Wolf

USA
1486 Posts

Posted - 05/25/2017 :  13:06:32   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit ThorGoLucky's Homepage Send ThorGoLucky a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Geniuses Nicola Tesla, Linus Pauling, and the like became wackos, and it looks like Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay have fallen too. What an embarrassment to Skeptic Magazine too.
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 05/25/2017 :  17:19:15   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by ThorGoLucky

Geniuses Nicola Tesla, Linus Pauling, and the like became wackos, and it looks like Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay have fallen too.
I remember someone like Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman discussing how intelligence makes it easier for people to fool themselves, because smart people are more able to invent justifications for believing in nonsense. But I can't find the quote despite Googling for a long time.

What an embarrassment to Skeptic Magazine too.
Michael Shermer has been an embarrassment to his own magazine for a while, now.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 05/25/2017 :  18:09:09   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Massimo Pigliucci:
The Boghossian and Lindsay hoax falls far short of the goal of demonstrating that gender studies is full of nonsense. But it does expose for all the world to see the problematic condition of the skeptic movement. Someone should try to wrestle it away from the ideologues currently running it, returning it to its core mission of critical analysis, including, and indeed beginning with, self-criticism. Call it Socratic Skepticism(TM).
He also notes:
Update: Steven Pinker has admitted on Twitter that the hoax was a bad idea: “‘Gender studies’ is an academic field that deserves criticism, but The ‘Conceptual Penis’ hoax missed the mark.”
Good for Pinker! The tweet, for reference. But then, just hours later, he tweeted a link to this nonsense defending the "hoax." Oh, Pinker!

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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend

Sweden
9687 Posts

Posted - 05/26/2017 :  00:38:21   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Send Dr. Mabuse an ICQ Message Send Dr. Mabuse a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by On fire for Christ

Dave I had a nasty response for you, but I deleted it because Jesus would have deleted it.

Weird that I see you writing at all...

Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3

"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse

Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder.
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 05/26/2017 :  09:20:13   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
PZ Myers writes about the illogical argument that social sciences aren't very popular, therefore their journals can't be any good.

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Kil
Evil Skeptic

USA
13476 Posts

Posted - 05/26/2017 :  12:08:17   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Kil's Homepage  Send Kil an AOL message  Send Kil a Yahoo! Message Send Kil a Private Message  Reply with Quote
You know... All of this stuff is why, aside from SFN both here and on facebook, I've sort of gone independent. If there is a coherent skeptical movement at the moment, I have no idea where it is. I see some good papers and I post them. I think Science Based Medicine and other blogs are very good. I like SGU. But after years of bickering and disagreement, I guess my feeling is to let it self destruct and maybe start over. In a way I'm with Massimo Pigliucci on that, only he has more faith than I do that there might be someone to lead the way. I think it's why I tend to follow people like Jim Lippard and others who just do their thing.

I'm sure that's partly the reason why, for the first time in many years, I have no interest in going to the major skeptical event in Vegas.

Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.

Why not question something for a change?

Genetic Literacy Project
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On fire for Christ
SFN Regular

Norway
1273 Posts

Posted - 05/26/2017 :  19:58:21   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send On fire for Christ a Private Message  Reply with Quote
no I'm talking about the general social and political divide rather than just the skeptical community, which has always been a septic tank.

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