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tussock
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Post by tussock » Tue Feb 18, 2014 8:49 am

Jesus wept. Do they also make children in the US argue the virtues of rape, slavery, and genocide? By which I mean that Jesus Christ is generally for all that stuff and you should be too. Heathen. Drum it into them young, only way to be sure. :sadface:
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Koumei
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Post by Koumei » Tue Feb 18, 2014 9:52 am

The point is to teach people how to debate effectively, and hopefully "to tell when someone else is debating effectively despite actually having a really shitty point of view".
All we had was "Men are better drivers than women" (girls used actual statistics to point out that most accidents are caused by men, guys used persuasive anecdotes and "Think about the fact that all racers are men" and "The woman-driver meme has to have come from somewhere!"), and "Should we ban poker machines?" (slam-dunk victory for "Yes", because the "No" team managed the following for the entirety of their argument: places that have poker machines offer free tea and biscuits to players).

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Post by Username17 » Tue Feb 18, 2014 9:55 am

Class debates require people to be on each side and for the people on each side to make as good a showing as you can. I was once put on the group defending the notion that Columbus discovered the New World. Which is quite an uphill battle when the other teams can point out in all seriousness that there were in fact already people there when he arrived. We ended up making a dictionary argument about how "discover" required that something be "made known" and thus all the Native Americans didn't count because they never went back from the New World to tell anyone about it.
We lost hard because the Viking team had really pretty posters with Vinland artifacts on them. Also because Vinland wasn't actually a secret to people in the Old World and it is technically in the Americas so they basically just picked up our entire argument and walked away with it.
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Starmaker
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Post by Starmaker » Tue Feb 18, 2014 11:32 am

Not surprisingly, Wonkette features better coverage of the survey aaaand it turns out things are not so bad, who'd have guessed.
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Post by Maj » Tue Feb 18, 2014 3:59 pm

Considering that the teacher was my Physics teacher, and that religion of no kind was brought up during class, I'm pretty sure that the debate was his way of making us learn about antiquated thought systems more interesting.
The fact that the other team failed to do any work at all on the project shouldn't reflect on the teacher or the religiousness of the curriculum - the goal wasn't to say that Ptolemy was right. It should reflect on the lazy-ass students who got up in front of 20 other people and wasted their time.
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Post by DSMatticus » Tue Feb 18, 2014 9:43 pm

> Starmaker wrote:Not surprisingly, Wonkette features better coverage of the survey aaaand it turns out things are not so bad, who'd have guessed.

I dunno if that's what it really says. Mostly, they just point out that if you preface controversial questions with "according to people in labcoats," you get more correct answers, which means there's a number of people who are aware of the theories and explicitly reject them. Those people are still dumbasses. I would even go so far as to say they are bigger dumbasses than the people who simply haven't been taught about evolution because they live under a rock in a cave beneath a cabin in the woods in the hole at the bottom of the sea.
Well, and they point out that assuming the percent correct and percent incorrect answers add up to the whole ignores gibberish/invalid answers, but I'd have to look at the actual study to know if that was an issue or not and that takes work (especially since the NORC seems to release its data sets in proprietary formats for commercial software suites, the fuckers).
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Post by Starmaker » Tue Feb 18, 2014 11:04 pm

> DSMatticus wrote:

> > Starmaker wrote:Not surprisingly, Wonkette features better coverage of the survey aaaand it turns out things are not so bad, who'd have guessed.

> I dunno if that's what it really says. Mostly, they just point out that if you preface controversial questions with "according to people in labcoats," you get more correct answers, which means there's a number of people who are aware of the theories and explicitly reject them. Those people are still dumbasses. I would even go so far as to say they are bigger dumbasses than the people who simply haven't been taught about evolution because they live under a rock in a cave beneath a cabin in the woods in the hole at the bottom of the sea.

1. You don't know whether they reject them or just unsure because of "teaching the controversy". The latter sucks, but it's a single policy problem, not a deep systemic education problem which will take several generations to fix.
2. It might as well be that adding labcoats allows people to contextualize the question and realize it has to do with science rather than give in to question fatigue and say/mark whatever comes to mind.
3. Across countries, the numbers pretty much correlate to how socialist the country is, and the US is not an outlier. Again, this means there are no systemic problems and no secret sauce other than the obvious.
The results may be useful, but the part that is actively sensationalized is by no means unexpected. About the single actually notable result is the high acceptance of GMOs.
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Post by tussock » Wed Feb 19, 2014 2:59 am

The house science committee is way scarier than the poll. The thing were people don't know everything (even basic stuff in fields they are not employed in) doesn't really matter. The thing where they vote for people who are wilfully ignorant and actively fight against the truth ....
Is that the Dunning-Kruger thing again? Where people (in the US) tend to think of themselves as smarter than most. Does that make them pick politicians who know as little as they do, because they must also be smart?
I mean, you'd have to be stupid to believe all those experts. Except they also totally just believed the experts. Except not what they experts believe in. So climate science is bogus, and also climatologists are totally right about it, and also climate change will do nothing important or even be a good thing. That kinda stuff, it's weird.
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Post by Kaelik » Wed Feb 19, 2014 4:08 am

> tussock wrote:Is that the Dunning-Kruger thing again? Where people (in the US) tend to think of themselves as smarter than most.

That is cute.

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by Orca » Wed Feb 19, 2014 4:11 am

Tussock, neither the Dunning-Kruger effect nor class debates are limited to the US. I've met or known a bunch of people who demonstrate the former, and I took part in one of the latter in 5th Form English at Wellington High.
Now, we thankfully escape the craziness of the US House Science Committe or widespread creationism here, but be careful what you criticise - I'm not sure the Dunning-Kruger effect couldn't be appropriately applied to you.
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Post by TiaC » Wed Feb 19, 2014 7:10 am

I looked up the original study and the US doesn't come out too badly.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/c ... -7/c07.pdf (see page 23 for questions)
Notably, the only country that did better on the Earth/Sun question was South Korea. (It did lump the EU together, but the US has over twice the area, so whatever.)
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tussock
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Post by tussock » Wed Feb 19, 2014 9:04 am

I've done debates, I'm just genuinely shocked they got kids to defend torture. I suppose it is the national policy that torture is good, so that's what people are going to push. Ick.
Anyhoo, Dunning-Kruger doesn't replicate in most other countries despite your anecdote Orca. The only place it does replicate consistently is in the US, from what I've read of it. People in Japan actually underestimate their own abilities and overestimate their colleagues.
But yeh, religion makes more sense as a common thread between countries who have similarly primitive political policies. The US just gets a lot of idiots in power because it's a big country with a huge parliament, and some of them are just going to be idiots.
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Eikre
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Post by Eikre » Wed Feb 19, 2014 12:08 pm

> Maj wrote:Considering that the teacher was my Physics teacher, and that religion of no kind was brought up during class, I'm pretty sure that the debate was his way of making us learn about antiquated thought systems more interesting.
> The fact that the other team failed to do any work at all on the project shouldn't reflect on the teacher or the religiousness of the curriculum - the goal wasn't to say that Ptolemy was right.

I mean, it's not even like he wasn't. The Copernican and Ptolemaic conceptual systems will converge on mathematical congruency if you use the same figures, and can be used interchangeably. Copernicus seriously specifically did that. At that point in time, it's merely a matter of aesthetics and using whatever you think is personally easier, because Newtonian motion doesn't exist yet and both Copernicus AND Ptolemy need to use epicycles to estimate forces being created by a three body problem than neither of them have the math to solve.
So the Ptolemy v. Copernicus debate is a wash... But it it still compelling, because it is a blind for a broader Aristotle v. Newton debate, which can be conclusively argued for correctness. Aristotle supposes that a moving but otherwise undisturbed object will always settle, and Newton argues that a moving but otherwise undisturbed object will continue at the same speed literally forever. As it happens, neither Ptolemy nor Copernicus is involved in the debate, but their respective aesthetics make it seem like they do.
See, Aristotle uses density to determine where an object will come to rest, and to determine density, he fashions a rudimentary chemical system by using the three states of matter- plus heat!- as essential substances. Those are the classical elements he came up with, by the way, and the modern preponderance to co-opt them for philisopicical mysticism is fucking hackery of the highest degree (ps: the fantasy novel you're writing sucks). The thing to notice about them, though, is that Fire (heat) causes every other substance to rise, and is thus situated higher than all the rest. In the sky. In a great big fucking ball. It's the sun.
And while a lot of that shit is weird and Greek, the thing where he said that objects tend to come to rest based on their density is such a good hypothesis that you can get nine out of ten people off the street anywhere in the world to agree that it's true. But, if you expound on the system and take it to Aristotle's more tenuous conclusions, you find that you actually really need a geocentric model or the coherency of your system is threatened. So, Ptolemy, the great geocentricist, gets lumped into his camp.
Newton, on the other hand, you should already know about, because you can actually get more than half a block down the street using his theories without stapling your dick to your face. He professes a system of universal gravitation, which still happens to account for the whole thing with settled layers of density that Aristotle noticed, but doesn't suggest that it is even remotely unique to Earth. One of the things that turned Newton onto this idea was something that Kepler did: He takes the Sun as an elliptical focus for every planet, and in doing so, makes it the linchpin on which the whole solar system hangs. That's hard and fast heliocentricism, and it drafts Copernicus to team Newton.
And the thing about the framing Copernicus v. Ptolemy as a debate, as your physics teacher did, is that it takes those two historic individuals, who are in truth not actually very different in their understandings of the way things work, and it compels you to evaluate the vast, continuous scientific dialogue of mankind for a reason why you should merit either one as being more "right." It doesn't sound like it worked very well as a practical, polemical exercise, like the one that your teacher set up, but there is something poignant in the fact that the Copernican team, who spent zero effort on their arguement, still managed to intuitively surmise that their guy was "righter" because he looked like he was closer to what we think of as the truth.
In short: I dig.
Last edited by Eikre on Wed Feb 19, 2014 12:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Shiritai » Wed Feb 19, 2014 3:03 pm

> tussock wrote:Anyhoo, Dunning-Kruger doesn't replicate in most other countries despite your anecdote Orca. The only place it does replicate consistently is in the US, from what I've read of it. People in Japan actually underestimate their own abilities and overestimate their colleagues.

You mean to say that in cultures where bragging is considered a negative trait, people brag less in surveys? I am shocked.
But behold! It appears that the Japanese at least make up for less self-enhancement by viewing people outside their group even more negatively, and overestimating their friends' abilities. http://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/articles/AJSP012.pdf
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Post by name_here » Wed Feb 19, 2014 3:09 pm

> tussock wrote:I've done debates, I'm just genuinely shocked they got kids to defend torture. I suppose it is the national policy that torture is good, so that's what people are going to push. Ick.

It's possible to convincingly argue for a position you know is wrong. Well, I suppose it isn't for you, because you don't seem to be able to convincingly argue for any position, but in general it is possible.

> DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

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Post by Maxus » Wed Feb 19, 2014 4:46 pm

In my debate classes, the teacher made us defend sides we personally disagreed with.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by Prak » Wed Feb 19, 2014 5:15 pm

> tussock wrote:I've done debates, I'm just genuinely shocked they got kids to defend torture. I suppose it is the national policy that torture is good, so that's what people are going to push. Ick.

It was college, actually, and torturing terrorists is really easy to defend to a bunch of college students who can't care less. It was more difficult to defend smoking on campus.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.

> Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.

> FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
> You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.

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Maj
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Post by Maj » Wed Feb 19, 2014 5:16 pm

I would argue that debating on the side of something you don't agree with is the best way to understand it.
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Post by Maxus » Wed Feb 19, 2014 6:52 pm

I hate to link to the Daily Mail, but looks like the weather will be crappy this weekend.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... urday.html
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin » Wed Feb 19, 2014 7:29 pm

That's just incredibly terrible forced prophecy fulfillment. They don't even do anything clever like squeeze a bag full of sea-foam to blow the horn. Their gjallerhorn is just 'some prop horn.' Their Heimdall is just 'some cosplayer.' Their world-serpent is just 'two oarfish.'
It doesn't even count as trying too hard because i don't think it counts as trying at all.
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tussock
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Post by tussock » Thu Feb 20, 2014 6:03 am

> It was college, actually

Oh, well, that's entirely different. College students are better used for medical experiments, but trying to make them self-aware is almost as good.

> you don't seem to be able to convincingly argue for any position

It's not easy being right when everyone else is wrong, especially when they're good at arguing.

> I would argue that debating on the side of something you don't agree with is the best way to understand it.

Debating is crap in real life, people just use endless rhetorical tricks to convince themselves of their own correctness. What's important is figuring out who's wrong so they can start being less wrong, and what works for that is doing real science (and reading about people who do).
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Maj
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Post by Maj » Thu Feb 20, 2014 6:46 am

I don't think you actually understood what I said, so I'm going to repeat with emphasis: I would argue that debating on the side of something you don't agree with is the best way to understand it.
People fighting over shit - using those rhetorical tricks and whatever - are debating the side they believe in, not the side they don't. Their entire goal is to demonstrate the other person's perspective to be wrong. Why would they ever even think that looking at something from a different perspective would be conducive to succeeding at that goal?
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Post by Koumei » Thu Feb 20, 2014 8:25 am

> tussock wrote:It's not easy being right when everyone else is wrong,

And how would you know that? You've yet to be right about anything ever.

> Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.

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Post by Prak » Fri Feb 21, 2014 4:39 am

So Michael B. Jordan has been cast to play Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot.
For those who, like I did, initially said "who?" this is Michael B. Jordan:
I have no problem with Johnny Storm being black.* Seriously, I really don't care about Johnny Storm's skin colour. Hell, most of the time his actual skin colour will be orange.
The thing I find weird is that Kate Mara has been cast to play Sue Storm. ...this is Kate Mara:
Again, it's not really a problem, it's just... weird.
Though, honestly, I'm actually more weirded out by Miles Teller being cast as Reed Richards. He's way too young to be "Marvel's dad."
*Actually, I'm inclined to think that the casting director got Johnny Storm and Evan "Spyke" Daniels from X-Men Evolution mixed up. No, seriously. "Super family, young, hot headed male character," there are similarities.
Last edited by Prak on Fri Feb 21, 2014 4:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.

> Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.

> FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
> You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.

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Post by tussock » Fri Feb 21, 2014 6:28 am

> Maj wrote:I don't think you actually understood what I said, so I'm going to repeat with emphasis: I would argue that debating on the side of something you don't agree with is the best way to understand it.

It's not. At all. That's what Aristotle thought and he was just plain wrong. Science is how you understand things. Really. Yes. Science. For reals.

> People fighting over shit - using those rhetorical tricks and whatever - are debating the side they believe in, not the side they don't.

Meanwhile, in the real world, debaters are PR people and lawyers and politicians and they debate on whatever side pays them to do it professionally. Most of them are good enough at rhetorical bullshitting and compartmentalisation to convince themselves that whichever side they're on is the right one. That's a real thing. People using skill at argument to delude themselves, thinking they've outsmarted the evidence.
Take "creation science". You don't argue for it to understand it, imagining that argument finds anything useful is why creation science exists in the first place. You look at the science to find truth, and notice that it simply disagrees with what creation science proposes. If you want to know why people think it's useful despite being bullshit, you study sociology, not "creation science".
You want to understand something, stop arguing and do some proper science.

> Their entire goal is to demonstrate the other person's perspective to be wrong.

This is just nitpicking, but the point of a debate is to make the judge/audience think they shouldn't listen to what the other person is saying. That's also how it's used in real life.
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