Your EvC Debate Dream Team - Fantasy Debating

Randman
Ray Martinez (aka Cold Foreign Object)
Buzsaw
DesdamonaEdited by Taz, : No reason given.

Why do you think this is? While I don't talk much anymore, I do occasionally find the time to read a lot of things on a lot of evc forums.I must admit that I have encountered "evolutionists" that didn't know jack poop about certain things, myself included. If you want to get me to discuss about geology, good luck on that. But for some reason, "evolutionists" who are ignorant about certain topics tend to stay away from those topics while creationists tend to have no problem making up bullshit as they go along.Again, this is a perfect demonstration of what I have been pointing out for years. It just seems to me that a lot of what we observe are the exact opposite of what we'd expect.-Conservatives favoring tax cuts for the rich to put more burden on the middle class even though this is the opposite of what their bible says.-Religionists making up bullshit in the evc debates even though they claim to have the moral high ground.-Christian divorce rates are through the roof compared to secular ones even though christians want to preserve the sanctity of marriage.-Conservatives want to be able to trash this planet even though they want to "conserve".-Christians being intolerant of gheys even though they claim to love.And so on and so forth.Iunno. If I didn't know any better, I'd have thought it was suppose to be the other way around in all these things. The evilutionists were the ones that were suppose to make up bullshit while the moral christians were suppose to be the morally superior crowd and go with facts.Anyway, just my random thoughts for the day.

Hi sleve.The point is deeper than that. We have observed for years, not just here, that creationists don't support each other's arguments and tend not to criticize each other the way us evolutionists do. On our side, whenever one of us say something wacky, there'd be 100 or 1000 other evolutionists lined up ready to tell that person to go away.But take Kent Hovind, for example. There was a lecture I saw where he described the human reproductive process to the audience. Specifically, he was describing how the dna of mommy and daddy combined. According to him, the dna is like a ladder. When mommy and daddy love each other, the ladder seperates and one of mommy's strand combines with one of daddy's strand to create junior.This is, of course, complete bullshit. I have the videos lying around somewhere. I will try to find it and post it.Nevermind, I found the videos. Sad to say, but I actually have his entire creationism lecture series. I will try to find the lecture portion I mentioned above and post it on youtube. Heck, I will start posting every one of them on youtube.The point is Hovind has said many nonsensical things over the years, and not once have I seen other creationists criticizing him for it. Over the years, he's said that the sun's main source of power comes from combustion. He's said that there was a water canopy above the atmosphere before the flood. This would have crushed every living thing on Earth! If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to go back to school and learn about fluid mechanics.As a rule of thumb, it seems that creationists don't criticize each other the way us evolutionists criticize our own. This is a frustrating thing, especially when we sometimes get the most wacked up creationist. There was a creationist I encountered that said he found the absolute proof that evolution was impossible and that it proves god exists. According to him, evolution requires an external source of power. Everything, according to him, requires an external source of power. Since we haven't found this external source of power, there must be a god fueling us with Energy. Amazingly enough, none of the other creationists said a thing. Nada. Zip. After having an eye surgery because my eyes rolled back so hard that they got stuck, I had to inform him that we have this big-ass bright object in the sky called THE SUN.If anything, Buz's debate in that thread is a perfect demonstration of how creationists aren't team players and that they don't criticize their own. Not ever.Added by edit.Actually, I'm going to perform an experiment on here to demonstrate my point. Stay tuned!Edited by Taz, : No reason given.Edited by Taz, : No reason given.

Speaking as someone who TAed for college physics once upon a time in the past, trust me when I say it's amazing how far people can go in life while still living in a delusional state. Just studying something in college doesn't necessarily qualify you as not stupid or not ignorant. I'm not saying you are, but just be aware that you wouldn't want the standards to be so low.Others have pointed out, even in this thread, that you seem to have some ill-informed preconceived notions of science is and how scientific theories work. Percy did a wonderful job at explaining your misconceptions just a few posts ago.Now, the test for us to see is whether you will absorb what he said and try to better understand the nature and differences between theory and specific examples within the framwork of the theory or will you behave like so many creationists we have had in the past. Your choice.

*Blink*You did not just say that did you?I've been corrected so many times that I'm beginning to doubt my own knowledge database in my head.We evolutionists correct each other all the time. And when a high profile evolutionist says something wrong, you can be assured that he's going to get hundreds, if not thousands, of criticisms from his fellow evolutionists. This is why science is a self-correcting process.In my lab we've been working on and testing a possible steel replacement material that weighs 1/4 that of steel, doesn't corrode, will last for about 100 years, much much stronger than steel, etc. We just got more fundings to continue our work. Basically, it's a dream material come true for structural engineers. It's also cheaper to make than steel. The point is in this line of work we have to be very precise and we're always prepared for criticisms from our peers. Talk to any researcher and they will tell you getting a paper to go through peer review and actually get published is pretty damn hard nowadays. I speak from experience.I'm sorry, but I simply don't see the same kind of discipline coming from the ID/creo side. Every prominent creo/IDist I have heard (and believe me, I've heard plenty... I also collect their videos) has spout more bullshit than I care for. And I'm not even a biologist. My knowledge of biology is limited to what I took in college and my readings of current events in biological sciences. Even the nonsensical myth of irreducible complexity won't go away.

Isn't this true of this side of the fence also? I know I can't stand to read things on those creationist forums anymore. Paul, can you honestly say that you can read a forum full of people like buz and not get high blood pressure?Edit.My own son even dared to defy me! From FSTDT

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Quote# 79554

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All who believe in the natural order must stand in opposition to the perverse homosexual agenda. At no time in human history has any society ever permitted marriage between same sex couples.

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Homosexual activists are hell bent in destroying the natural order because of their birth defect that makes them attracted to their own sex. Instead of trying to find a cure for this aberration, they want it legitimized.

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Stop them whenever they try. They must not be allowed to corrupt and denigrate the sanctity of marriage. The line is drawn here.

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Son of Taz, Moonbattery 63 Comments [2/19/2011 4:21:13 AM]
Fundie Index: 70
Submitted By: Honky McCracker
WTF?! || meh

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Edited by Taz, : No reason given.

DrA, I'm just curious about something. Did they offer Sarcasm 101 or something at the school you went to?

But how do you know that it's effective? There have been studies that show ignorant people can't understand why they are wrong and continue to believe in the nonsense that they believe in.Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss

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"I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at and I didn't know it," Dr. Dunning said.

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One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

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The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

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"Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it," wrote Dr. Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dr. Dunning.

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This deficiency in "self-monitoring skills," the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

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Some college students, Dr. Dunning said, evince a similar blindness: after doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining why the answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong.

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In a series of studies, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to "grossly overestimate" how well they had performed.

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In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates. Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.

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Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to "identify grammatically correct standard English," and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.

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On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against those of an "expert" panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were less conclusive.

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Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their own competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the "false consensus effect."

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When high scoring subjects were asked to "grade" the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

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"Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others," the researchers concluded.

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In a final experiment, Dr. Dunning and Dr. Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found.

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The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that "he who knows best knows how little he knows."

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And the research meshes neatly with other work indicating that overconfidence is a common; studies have found, for example, that the vast majority of people rate themselves as "above average" on a wide array of abilities -- though such an abundance of talent would be impossible in statistical terms. And this overestimation, studies indicate, is more likely for tasks that are difficult than for those that are easy.

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Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside, for example, said he suspected that most lay people had only a vague idea of the meaning of "average" in statistical terms.

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"I'm not sure the average person thinks of 'average' or 'percentile' in quite that literal a sense," Dr. Funder said, "so 'above average' might mean to them 'pretty good,' or 'O.K.,' or 'doing all right.' And if, in fact, people mean something subjective when they use the word, then it's really hard to evaluate whether they're right or wrong using the statistical criterion."

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But Dr. Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated that there were many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their competency, and not be aware of it.

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In some cases, Dr. Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one's own inability is inevitable: "In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the woods, you know you're incompetent," he said.

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But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people from blurting out "You stink!" -- truthful though this assessment may be.

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All of which inspired in Dr. Dunning and his co-author, in presenting their research to the public, a certain degree of nervousness.

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"This article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors or poor communication," they cautioned in their journal report. "Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly."

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We've all observed what this study confirmed. People who can't understand the evidence tend to be the surest people about their ill-informed preconceptions.Again, how do you know they even understand your snarks?Case in point. Buzsaw might not like this, but he is demonstrating the conclusion of the mentioned experiments.Edited by Taz, : No reason given.