Banno is getting off on being a dick-tator. — counterpunch

Oh, the wit of the forums! Such elegant humour!

off topic!

You exceed yourself! Wonderful!

Thanks, I do try.

Just saying your deceptively simple question is in fact a huge and complex subject area that plays out right across society and the world, past and future, left and right, religious and secular - you've opened a can o' worms, and then go 'ewww, worms!'

One thing that can be noted is the way the politics often trumps the science, especially in respect of the COVID epidemic. The arguments about vaccination, the origins of the virus, and about the means of amelioration, are often heavily impacted by political considerations even if the science is supposed to be leading. — Wayfarer

Yes. It's such simplistic dogma, people are being infantilized. Science deals in numbers. But politicians and some scientists who speak in favor of vaccination, and then one's actual doctor use a higly idealized, dogmatic, simplistic narrative. As in, "Repeat after me: The vaccine is safe and effective! The vaccine is safe and effective! Anyone who doesn't fall in line with our hysteria is a science denier and antivaxxer and should be punished in every imaginable way!"

There's no room for detail, no room for nuance, it's supposed to be just black and white, hysterically so: if you're not hysterically with us, you're hysterically against us!

Praising science is founded on philosophy, a philosophy that is new to humanity. Billions of years can erase so much that we think what appears to have happened did. You have a deficient philosophical world view. Why even praise science when it can only make us comfortable

You wrote this:

Would you guys please get back on topic? There's plenty of places to discuss race and god; this is a thread about science. At least make some attempt to relate the discussion to the OP, perhaps? — Banno

I responded this:

I don't understand. My posts have been all about science including the response to the pandemic in particular. I don't see how that is off topic at all. I went back and checked all my posts in this thread for the last 3 days and couldn't find anything about race or god. Did I miss one? — T Clark

I haven't seen a reply from you yet.

@Banno is wonderful. [irony]I don't care what everybody anybody says.[/irony]

As to fact-checking; who fact-checks the fact-checkers? — Janus

It's liars all the way down.

You're going to have to engage with the science, though, if you wish to have an opinion on anything from climate change through to viruses. Deliberately ignoring any science with political import would be absurd. — Banno

When we're trying to use science to develop policy, especially in an urgent situation like the pandemic, there comes a time when you have to make a decision. When that happens, the right choice is generally to follow the scientific consensus, even if it is imperfect.

Exemplifying science-denial ...

'Injecting doubt': How hard-core COVID vaccine deniers could impact the 'moveable middle' (Sharon Kirkey, Edmonton Examiner, May 2021)

In a way, the doubling down, entrenchment, aggression seems to be a form of backfire effect.

However, when you look more closely, it turns out that black people commit a lot more crime - and so make up a larger proportion of arrests than their numbers in the population would suggest. I was on twitter at the time - and shared these statistics, and was banned from twitter for doing so. — counterpunch

I don't think you were banned for pointing out that black people commit a lot more crime. I think you were banned because so many people who raise that point refuse to have a credible discussion about why black people commit a lot more crime. There are two generally understood reasons posited: 1. Black people commit a lot more crime because they are victims of the left, liberal policies, Democrats, and Obama; 2. Blacks are inferior. No reasonable person would go down either road and thus, it's easier, smarter, and wiser to just ban the offender.

As I have argued before, if one is truly interested in a scientific analysis of a socially-touchy situation, and if they feel oppressed, or cancelled by ostracization, or consequences, in their pursuit of truth, they can proceed through a process of elimination. In the instant case, rather than pointing fingers and blaming the left for not treating people the way in which the right would treat them, and which treatment would make people good, honorable, upstanding, righteous citizens like those on the right; or, rather than arguing blacks are inferior, the logical choice would be to engage the oppositional left on their case; i.e. Disprove the reasons which the left posits for why black people commit a lot more crime.

There are many ways in which this could be done. For instance, the seeker of truth could subject him/herself to what black people have gone through and then see if they can bootstrap themselves out of it using white, non-criminal ways. That, of course, would be difficult due to the compounding growth for whites one way, and compounding loss for blacks the other way, but it could give some insight.

On the other hand, if the scientist was afraid to go down, subjecting himself to similar treatment, or could not find volunteers to do so, he/she could go the other direction by bringing black people up and see how that faired. The difficulty, of course, would be the compounding down (lack of equal treatment can compound down with lack of education, interest in education, no father, believing what you are told about yourself, crime as a way out, etc.). The scientist would have to overcome all that.

The other think the scientist would have to look out for is the anecdotal outlier. You know, some white criminal who grew up with it all, or the black success story who thrived despite the odds. After all, we are talking the social sciences here, and the norm. As scientists, we know how fundamentally stupid it is to run to a Chicago Welfare Queen as a stand in for black people, or even a Ben Carson for that matter. We wouldn't go to Dillon Klebold or Donald Trump for science on the matter of whites.

But if it turned out that the process of elimination did not work, then maybe the hypothesis that black people are inferior, or that the left is keeping them down, would shift the burden back to the left.

Imagine if, after the Civil War, this happened: All former slave-owning real and personal properties were given to former slaves; All children of former slave-owners were taken from their families and removed to a school in Carlisle, PA for re-education; All wives and old men of former slave-owners were shipped off to distant Reservations to become dependent wards of the government; All former slave-owning men were forced into indentured servitude under their former slaves for a period of years; All proven sympathizers of slavery and/or former slave-owners were subject to the same treatment; All those who resisted were hung.

Is the fact such did not occur, evidence of white privilege? I suspect we would not have people flying the Stars and Bars in the shadow of the First Amendment, nor would we still have statues glorifying Traitors? Racists would still be under the fridge and no one would be left to take pride in their treasonous, racist ancestors? Then blacks would have owned land (not forty acres and a stupid mule that were subsequently taken by Jim Crow). They would have plantations that became subdivisions and cities, lesser flight to the northern factories and poverty towns where they commit more crime than white people. They'd be more integrated and educated, etc.

So maybe the right has a point. Maybe the left did create all these contemporary problems by not killing all the racists when we had the chance. Stupid left, with their magnanimity in victory, and their exhaustion from war, taking a gentle stab at carpet bagging and then going home, just to let the enemy back in.

Hmm. I'll have to rethink that.

, is conservation of momentum causation? Maybe, maybe not? Maybe if you stretch your notion of causation enough.
Add gravity into it all, and we're getting more into causation.
And with those two, you've taken a small step towards modeling the Solar system.
Given such (overwhelmingly) established characterizations of (celestial) mechanics, you'd have to get into some heavy-duty skepticism to deny the scientific consensus (heck, you might be converging on solipsism).
As an aside, I've noticed a few people out there going down this sort of denial, only to turn around and declare that a Jewish carpenter supernaturally walked on water a couple thousand years ago in the Middle East. Weird.

I haven't seen a reply from you yet. — T Clark

That'll be because I haven't replied.

When we're trying to use science to develop policy, especially in an urgent situation like the pandemic, there comes a time when you have to make a decision. When that happens, the right choice is generally to follow the scientific consensus, even if it is imperfect. — T Clark

Of course this is generally true. Most people don't want to think for themselves; and they should and inevitably will, follow the official line, which ideally ought to be based on the best science. In an emergency coordinated action is needed, and the tendency of the majority to follow is necessary to achieve that. But it does not follow that everyone ought to believe the official narrative. People who want to think for themselves can make up their own minds, and it won't be a problem for coordinated action, because they are a tiny minority.

It's liars all the way down. — frank

Of course it's not; the mere facts of probability and human diversity suggest there will be varied degrees of truth and accuracy across reports: in other words there will be mistakes, there will be lies and there will be honest reports; the difficulty lies in deciding which is which when you have no direct experience of what is being reported. Then you have to rely on your intuition about what is likely to be true and what is probably not. And of course your intuitions could be wrong.You can therefore afford to suspend judgement until and unless the situation forces you to make a choice as to which way to go.

Why even praise science when it can only make us comfortable — Gregory

...because it can make us comfortable?

I like my reverse-cycle heater.

How does dragon-theory explain how it works, let alone how to make one? It doesn't. What you are suggesting is rubbish.

Then that list of liars includes Frank.

ANd yet, here you are typing on your device to the waiting world, thanks to science.

Science deals in numbers — baker

And when you look a the numbers, it turns out that vaccines afe safe.

Just saying your deceptively simple question is in fact a huge and complex subject area that plays out right across society and the world, past and future, left and right, religious and secular - you've opened a can o' worms, and then go 'ewww, worms!' — counterpunch

Sure it is. It's an important and curious question. I just want you to focus on the contents of the can and stop playing with the can opener.

ANd yet, here you are typing on your device to the waiting world, thanks to science. — Banno

More engineering than science, but yes, cell phones are great.

cell phones are great. — frank

Then in amongst your liars are people doing great stuff.

Then in amongst your liars are people doing great stuff. — Banno

That was a sarcastoid directed at Janus, who asked me who fact checks fact checkers.

Repeat after me: The vaccine is safe and effective! — baker

For the record, I've been partially vaccinated, and I fully accept that the vaccine is safe and effective.

As it said, we can't know for sure what's in the sun nor what happened billions of years ago. Theories fit their predictions and predictions fit their theories. It goes both ways. But we don't know when time started and what flux of matter happened in order to produce the patterns that we see in the CMB ect. It could have been anything

That'll be because I haven't replied — Banno

Are you going to?

Scientific thinking is very prominent, but any number of actions can produce a pattern that seems to indicate one specific series. We are all solipsists in that we know the world from our perspective. The world could have started at my birth as Bertrand Russell did or may have said. Science makes people give up personal thinking for "group think". I remember back to my first experiences of consciousness and free will and see his I've seen science make things. They know about Banno's heaters. But they don't know billions of years ago for the same reason we can't trust ancient history as being as reliable as modern history

More confused stuff.

any number of actions can produce a pattern, but one can infer the cause of a pattern and test for recurrences - quite formally, using Bayesian statistics, if needed. SO we can rationally choose between causes for a given pattern.

We are social creatures, relying on both information and conventions in all our deliberations; past the age of a few years we are able to understand that the world appears different to others. Absurdly, Solipsism has to be learned.

Group think relies on seeking agreement despite the facts. Science is explicitly configured so that this is as far as possible avoided. One can achieve prominence in science by finding things that are wrong.

I remember back to my first experiences of consciousness and free will and see his I've seen science make things. — Gregory

What?

If you find a document from ancient times that says Jesus rose from the dead, we can infer that there were many factors from back then that could taint the authority of the witness. Modern history we can test better. The further we go in history the less we know and this applies to all the sciences that deals with the past

What an odd reply. It's a false analogy, of course, since looking at fossil crinoids or the microwave background, we are looking at rocks and radiation; other folk can reproduce our observations.

That is, the analogy with historical documents does not aply to scientific hypotheses from past events.

It does apply. All kinds of dark matters and many worlds and all that stuff could have hidden the true origin of the universe