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Author | Topic: Just a question... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Are you suggesting that I MUST be hallucinating? I'm suggesting that the easiest person to fool is always yourself. Look, we know that's a fact from psychology. Look at these sets of lines: Now, if you were asked to compare the length of the first one to the other three, and decide which of the three were most equal to the first, can you imagine any situation under which you might honestly answer "A" instead of "C"? I mean, A is visibly shorter, is it not? Yet, in the Asch conformity experiment, fully 36% of the subjects did exactly that - answered that A was the closer match - when they were surrounded by confederates (research assistants whose collaboration with the researchers is unknown to the subject) who all answered A. Not a single one of the subjects who so misanswered was aware that they had done so to conform to the rest of the group; they had genuinely perceived that A was the closer match, because of the effect of conformity. These were completely healthy, normal individuals. Do you understand the relevance? There are all manner of factors that make you see things that simply aren't there before we even get into mental illness. Of course, nearly one in 16 Americans have a serious mental illness that could cause hallucinations or mental artifacts, so it's not unreasonable to suggest some mental defect on your part, either. But my point is that even a normal, healthy brain can be made to see things that simply aren't there at all. That's a known fact from psychology. What makes you think you're any different than a normal person?
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Why are you talking about a painting? What does that have to do with anything, unless it is the very thing that happened to you? You claimed that you had no way of predicting what was coming next, but a half-finished portrait provides some pretty good clues about what will appear next. If the nose is there, for example, you have a pretty good chance of predicting where the eyes and mouth are going to be.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Just so you know... What you walk into a room of science-minded people and say "I've got emprirical evidence for the existence of God" (with no quotes around that word), don't be surprised that they challenge you. Furthermore, when you tell them, "Well, I don't mean "empirical" the way scientists mean it, but in my own personal way.", you should also expect some discussion of that.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Science is biased in favor of the evidence as observed. quote: Well that was a completely meaningless, worthless statment unless you take the trouble to explain why you think it was the most ridiculous thing I've ever written.
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itrownot Member (Idle past 5998 days) Posts: 71 Joined: |
quote: "I'm suggesting that the easiest person to fool is always yourself."
crashfrog, I don't think you meant to say "always"---this is hyperbole, right?
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5908 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
itrownot
crashfrog, I don't think you meant to say "always"---this is hyperbole, right? Not at all I reckon, given that we are far less critical of ourselves than we are of others. Edited by sidelined, : No reason given.
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itrownot Member (Idle past 5998 days) Posts: 71 Joined: |
ALWAYS easier?
perhaps you're missing my point, sidelined... but actually, I'd be more interested to hear from crashfrog as to what he meant.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
I think crash was paraphrasing one of my favorite Feynman quotes:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” The most difficult bias to detect is bias we ourselves have. This makes sense, since if we could spot our own biases, they wouldn't be biases anymore. Individual bias is one of the things the scientific method corrects for.
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riVeRraT Member (Idle past 416 days) Posts: 5788 From: NY USA Joined: |
If science is biased on unbiased objective evidence, then that makes science unbiased, not biased. Negative plus positive, equals negative.
bias: A bias is a prejudice in a general or specific sense, usually in the sense for having a preference to one particular point of view or ideological perspective. However, one is generally only said to be biased if one's powers of judgment are influenced by the biases one holds, to the extent that one's views could not be taken as being neutral or objective, but instead as subjective. This description does not fit the definition of science. Science is not subjective. There is a difference between the word "based" and "bias". Edited by riVeRraT, : :
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
riVeRraT writes: If science is biased on unbiased objective evidence, then that makes science unbiased, not biased. Negative plus positive, equals negative. This seems to be based upon a misunderstanding of what Nator wrote in Message 61:
Nator in Message 61 writes: Science is biased in favor of the evidence as observed. I can't make sense of how you're misinterpreting this, but it definitely does not mean "science is biased on unbiased objective evidence," which reads nonsensically to me. All Nator was saying is that science places great emphasis on observational evidence. --Percy
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Negative plus positive, equals negative. Uh, no, not necessarily. Sometimes negative and sometimes positive, depending on which term has the greater magnitude.
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
He might have meant "negative times positive equals negative."
--Percy
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
crashfrog, I don't think you meant to say "always"---this is hyperbole, right?
I know that it's surprising the first time you find out what it really means to have a genuinely skeptical mindset, but no, it's not hyperbole. It's always easiest to fool yourself.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Yes. Science is biased in favor of empirical evidence. That's obvious, isn't it? I think you are getting caught up in the common misconception that bias is always a bad thing, which is isn't, of course. I am, for example, biased in favor of ethical business practices as opposed to unethical practices.
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itrownot Member (Idle past 5998 days) Posts: 71 Joined: |
quote:
"I'm suggesting that the easiest person to fool is always yourself. Look, we know that's a fact from psychology." crashfrog...seriously, I get your point, it's just that your above statement is more "punny" than factual. Afterall, the word "fact" is a scientific term around here, just as, say, the word "empirical" is, so I'm just hoping you'll try to be more precise when using such terms. Otherwise, we're not going to understand what you're trying to say, know what I mean?
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