Guano (2)

Comments that seem to me to be in violation of the game rules will be moved here, and closed to further comment.  Do not regard having your post moved here as a reprimand, merely as a referee’s whistle. 🙂

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[New page 30485 created as an antidote to the page bug – AF]

396 thoughts on “Guano (2)

  1. keiths: walto,

    Why is dishonesty your tactic of first resort?Couldn’t you at least try to act like a genuine philosopher, for once?

    I understand that you regret your earlier position, which you now regard as weird and ridiculous.That’s fine; you’re free to change it.Don’t pretend that you didn’t hold it, however.

    You know perfectly well what I said:

    Again, why immediately resort to dishonesty?Don’t you see how it backfires on you?

    My questions stand:

    What now?

  2. Erik,

    Do you even understand that definition?

    It defines the intersection of A and B as a set. If A and B have no elements in common, then the intersection is the empty set.

    Your goofy definition outlaws the empty set, so you can’t use the elegant formulation.

    As for what makes you a crackpot, it’s simple: you actually think you’ve found a fundamental problem at the heart of mathematics, one that evaded everyone until you came along. In reality, the problem is simply that you’re incompetent. You’ve mistaken your own sloppiness and ignorance for skill and rigor.

    That’s crackpottery.

  3. Gregory,

    Why does Dennett still push ‘memetics,’ keiths and KN? They WILL NOT answer.

    Read the book, doofus.

    Dennett devotes an entire chapter to that topic:

    11.​What’s Wrong with Memes? Objections and Replies

    – Memes don’t exist!

    – Memes are described as “discrete” and “faithfully transmitted,” but much in cultural change is neither

    – Memes, unlike genes, don’t have competing alleles at a locus

    – Memes add nothing to what we already know about culture

    – The would-be science of memetics is not predictive

    – Memes can’t explain cultural features, while traditional social sciences can

    – Cultural evolution is Lamarckian

    Gregory:

    They cannot. It would ultimately (require them to) destroy their idol worship of Dennett.

    I don’t worship Dennett, but I do respect him.

    It must chap your ass to see him succeeding, again and again, while you fail.

  4. The sad thing is that Dennett has provided a wealth of material to argue against, if Gregory actually wanted (and was brave enough) to present an actual argument against memetics.

    I pointed this out to Gregory earlier:

    Gregory,

    Why does Dennett still push ‘memetics,’ keiths and KN? They WILL NOT answer.

    Read the book, doofus.

    Dennett devotes an entire chapter to that topic:

    11.​ What’s Wrong with Memes? Objections and Replies

    – Memes don’t exist!

    – Memes are described as “discrete” and “faithfully transmitted,” but much in cultural change is neither

    – Memes, unlike genes, don’t have competing alleles at a locus

    – Memes add nothing to what we already know about culture

    – The would-be science of memetics is not predictive

    – Memes can’t explain cultural features, while traditional social sciences can

    – Cultural evolution is Lamarckian

    Gregory:

    They cannot. It would ultimately (require them to) destroy their idol worship of Dennett.

    I don’t worship Dennett, but I do respect him.

    It must chap your ass to see him succeeding, again and again, while you fail.

  5. Thanks Joe, the one who actually tried to make an argument. The rest of the stuff I don’t read.

    “What are the boundaries of memes? They are a lot more fuzzy than, say, ‘gene’.”

    Yes, we are agreed; ‘memetics’ is fuzzier than ‘genetics’ in part because the so-called ‘unit of replication’ (concocted to rhyme with ‘gene’!) is not ‘purely material.’

    Check the record, folks. I’ve done Dennett’s ‘memetics’ already & will waste no more time on it. Memetics *IS* dead. The question is if YOU ‘skeptic’ folks have any clue WHY. Joe offered one reason, among many.

    It doesn’t seem most ‘skeptics’ here have much idea what memetics is or why it was stillborn. Another recent thread on Dennett made it appear that KN’s position had changed, that he’s finally realised the emptiness of ‘memetics.’ KN now seems to KNOW that “’memes!’ is a dumb explanation.” Ok, so let’s see if KN actually KNOWS or just BELIEVES that about memes because he’s got ‘fuzzy’ syndrome about other things already.

    None of the armchair cynics here offers much of value compared with KN, who is actually trained in some inspirational philosophy and should be without excuse for his damaged, ancestor-denying philosophistry, the kind of thing that Dennett would likely stand up and applaud exactly for it’s pretentious nonsense.

    “And we get no guidance on how to do that.” – Joe

    Well, to be fair, we have seen attempts. If you want to ‘trust’ Susan Blackmore’s wacko bizzaro world of ‘meme machines’, that’s a strange sort of priority (“Memetics is founded on the principle of Universal Darwinism.” – Blackmore). These ‘memetics’ people are kooky hyper-exaggerators from day #1.

    Dennett’s drumming for memetics & the kooks he gathered with him indeed shows how ‘dumb’ a philosopher it is that atheists have embraced as their own. Universal Darwinism uber alles!! Until it breaks and dies too, just like ‘memetics’.

  6. Holy shit there are so many completely unsupported assertions made, and it’s really just technobabble made with the pretention of legitemacy. You’re pretending you’re showing evolution to be impossible, using fancy technical jargon. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

    You people disgust me. Yes, you, Jonathan Bartlett. I don’t buy for one fucking second that you’re not aware that you’re lying with this gibberish. And I don’t buy that you’re not aware, that you can only get away with it, because the people you’re preaching to are already the most intensely cognitively biased dolts in existence, impressed by fancy technical jargon they don’t have the qualifications to understand.
    So you knowingly, actively, deliberately rely on the fact that to these people, it’s going to be a matter of “expert A whom I disagree with says one thing, expert B whom I agree with says another thing, but I don’t understand any of it but it sounds fancy, so I’m going to go with expert B”.

    Lying. Sack. Of. Shit.

  7. I should file this here before I forget.

    fifth plopped out another good one:

    No revelation is based on God.
    He is Gödel’s axiom that is necessarily true and yet unprovable.

    It’s so moist and shiny. Irresistible to a coprophile like fifth.

  8. Imagine how discouraging it must be to be fifthmonarchyman.

    He goes up against atheists here at TSZ and gets his ass handed to him time after time. It goes so badly that he’s ashamed to give a URL to his pastor and fellow church members.

    He squirms to avoid even the simplest of questions about “Jacob the father of Joseph” vs “Joseph, the son of Heli”.

    (Hey, fifth — maybe Jacob and Heli were a gay couple, and so Joseph had two fathers.)

    He defends dogma by fighting tooth and nail against the truth.

    TSZ should be a scene of great triumph for fifth, in which God hands victory to the Christians who are preaching the Word and humiliates the “rebels” who reject it. That never happens.

    You got suckered. fifth. Fell hook, line, and sinker for the fundagelical “Biblical Christianity” sales pitch.

    Time to wake up and start thinking again, instead of just blindly believing.

  9. keiths: Imagine how discouraging it must be to be fifthmonarchyman.

    He goes up against atheists here at TSZ and gets his ass handed to him time after time. It goes so badly that he’s ashamed to give a URL to his pastor and fellow church members.

    He squirms to avoid even the simplest of questions about “Jacob the father of Joseph” vs “Joseph, the son of Heli”.

    (Hey, fifth — maybe Jacob and Heli were a gay couple, and so Joseph had two fathers.)

    He defends dogma by fighting tooth and nail against the truth.

    TSZ should be a scene of great triumph for fifth, in which God hands victory to the Christians who are preaching the Word and humiliates the “rebels” who reject it. That never happens.

    You got suckered. fifth. Fell hook, line, and sinker for the fundagelical “Biblical Christianity” sales pitch.

    Time to wake up and start thinking again, instead of just blindly believing.

    The best part is that even the other theists here think he’s pretty much a nutcase. I could think of few better advocates against the position he attempts to advocate for, than himself. By simply allowing him to post, and us occasionally engaging the lunacy, it thereby becomes exposed as the lunacy that it is.

    I think many people (including myself), have in exhasperation tried to reason with presuppositionalists. But it’s become clear to me we don’t really have to get concessions, so to speak, from presuppers. We don’t have to convert them to reason andthen reason with them, we just have to reason “next to” them, so that any individual with doubts, who is a fence-sitter exploring the issues, who sees the two side by side, can see how obviouosly presuppositional apologetics fails to live up to it’s grandiose claims, and how they completely rig the rules in their own favor in a way that makes it impossible for them to reason out of it.

    In several very direct ways, FMM have stated that reason and arguments aren’t even allowed to bring into doubt his religious faith. For example, literally insane nonsense like this:

    FMM: Christianity is not a claim to be defended it’s a worldview that allows you to make sense of claims.

    If you were to be convinced of the truth of Christianity by a clever argument you could be dissuaded from Christianity when a crafty rebel came up with a cleverer argument that you had not thought of.

    This is enough. Generally reasonable and rational people can see through it. We don’t have to get the presuppositionalist to agree, we just need to get him to state his many absurd and unprovable claims, and then contrast it to our own. That’s it, no more is required.

    I would never, never ever in my entire life, state that I could not be persuaded out of something I believe by a good argument.

  10. Mung:
    I just don’t understand why atheists/materialists get all incensed when someone suggests that their “explanations” are indistinguishable from magic.

    I see Mung the bullshit artist is too lazy to even think of his own arguments.

    Science provides details. Mung’s ID Magic provides none. ID loses.

  11. Pedant: Remember that old saw: “Don’t feed the troll?”

    This is awesome, TSZ has finally gotten rid of moderation, now we can say whatever trash talking nonsense we want! Yippee!

    Hey Pedant, get off Dazz’s mother already will ya? She also needs to be fed, and she has five more customers waiting outside who also have five bucks, so make it quick already!

  12. colewd:
    Flint,

    Until you establish through testing a mechanism that can generate genetic complexity there is no explanation for how how life becomes more complex.Without lots of serendipity random change will degrade information.

    Sorry but you’re a fucking idiot. You’ve had the feedback from selection explained to you well over a dozen times on multiple boards and you’re still a fucking moron who wants to know how random changes alone did it.

    You deserve every bit of scorn you get.

  13. phoodoo:

    (snip childish attempt at “gotcha”)

    LOL! You’re probably the only guy here who can out-asshole Mung. Well done!

    Oh, and you’re just as big a fucking moron for thinking evolution is “just chance” too.

  14. Neil Rickert:
    phoodoo,

    Please watch those insults.

    Yes, I know you didn’t start this round.But please try to stop.Otherwise, I will have to get heavy handed with guanoing.

    Then why the hell are you telling me, you partisan hack? You can’t even see the post right above your head?

    Perhaps you are the recalcitrant shit for brains he was referring to?

  15. Alan,

    Posting insults in regular threads is against the rules – and so is posting quotations of those comments.

    No, it is not against the rules to quote those comments, guanoed or not. And it shouldn’t be, either.

  16. phoodoo:
    Adapa, you have raised so really interesting points in this thread, that I think deserve further discussion.

    LOL! What a whiny baby. Poor phoodoo is just so butthurt he can’t stand it!

    I bet your nose bleeds every 28 days.

  17. Mung: Unguided process is an oxymoron. If it were unguided it wouldn’t be describable as a process in the first place. Teleological thinking remains with us because that’s the way things are.

    So erosion and weathering in geology aren’t natural processes caused by wind and rain. Erosion and weathering are actually caused by intelligent invisible pixies who ferry the stone and soil away.

    Oh, it’s just Mung trolling with his usual stupidity again. Never mind.

  18. walto,

    Mung, is there any chance you could provide a citation to the excerpt you’re quoting from…and a link?

    When Mung first posted the OP, I was annoyed that he had failed to cite his source. “Why on earth would he leave that out?”, I wondered.

    One plausible hypothesis: When you’re a habitual quote miner like Mung, you don’t want to get in the habit of citing your sources. If you do, then people can easily look up the context and nail you for quote mining.

  19. phoodoo,

    Actually I can’t find it at all.

    That may be related to the fact that you have the reading comprehension skills of a turnip.

  20. Alan Fox:
    phoodoo,
    Take the hint (or don’t).

    Go fuck yourself Alan. You have already overstepped your moderators position on multiple occasions. Do you think you threatening that you are going to do that again matters to me?

    Its not your job to decide whose posts are substantive and whose aren’t. You are a biased hack, I don’t listen to you. Your guerilla skepticism doesn’t intimidate me.

  21. Heh, look at Mung another buttfrustrated IDiot. Do whatever you want kiddo.

  22. Alan Fox:
    phoodoo,
    Take the hint (or don’t).

    Go spawn. You have already overstepped your moderators position on multiple occasions. Do you think you threatening that you are going to do that again matters to me?

    Its not your job to decide whose posts are substantive and whose aren’t. You are a biased hack, I don’t listen to you. Your guerilla skepticism doesn’t intimidate me.

  23. Mung: You wrote:

    So in tossing your coin, do you think that the event HEADS make it increasingly likely that HEADS will appear when your coin is tossed again?

    FAIL again by Mung the trolling asshat.

    There is no selection pressure for a coin to come up heads or tails. A fair coin will have a 0.5 probability of a heads outcome with each toss.

    On a planet bathed in electromagnetic radiation in 380 to 700 nm wavelength range the there is considerable selectable advantage in developing an organ to detect and process those wavelengths.

    So fuck off Mung.

  24. I heard that it was Adapa’s own mother who convinced him that drinking his own urine would make him smarter. You can stop now Adapa, you’re as smart as you’re ever going to get.

  25. phoodoo:

    Because you see DNA, what you have actually done, by taking out 90 objects, is to sample .000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000
    0000000000000000000 0000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000001 (I left out 10*486 zeros to save space) % of the entire contents of the bag.

    So how unlikely is it that it is 99% green? Maybe its only “Like, oh yea right!” unlikely? Or is it “Ahh, maybe”?

    See kids, these are the math experts who are going to teach you to be smart-excited kids? Sorry, its the best we got.

    phoodoo,

    You keep forgetting to take your own incompetence into account.. You’re not a bright guy, and you don’t understand statistics. As a result, and unsurprisingly, your intuitions are way off.

    You are focused on the ratio of the sample size to the population size. But when the population size is much larger than the sample size, the variability in a statistic depends far more on the absolute size of the sample than it does on the ratio of sample size to population size.

    If you were brighter, I would pose a relevant problem and invite you to do the calculations. Given your (in)abilities, however, I’m afraid it’s not worth the effort.

  26. phoodoo:

    Plus we still have to one day figure out the point of DNA’s question. That’s really going to be hard.

    I hate to break it to you, but the brighter folks have already figured that out.

    Good luck, phoodoo.

  27. Mung,

    LoL! No, it’s quite clear that you think you and DNA_Jock are talking about “epistemic probabilities.” It’s not at all clear that is what Rumraket was talking about.

    To you, it’s not. After all, you’re the doofus who’s baffled by “epistemic probability” and thinks it’s “made up”.

    To those of us who understand the concept, it’s obviously what Rumraket was talking about.

    I hope you’ll take Jock up on his bet so you can learn about epistemic probability the hard way.

  28. It is truly sad a good 50% of the comments at TSZ these days are trolling shitposts by phoodoo, J-Mac, and the all-time shitpost leader Mung.

    I suppose that’s what happens when attention whores are given attention.

  29. dazz: So all is left to do in this thread is confirm that Mung has honored his bet

    You’re full of shit dazz. You don’t even know what the bet was. Joe F doesn’t know what the bet was. And the link in his OP isn’t to the bet.

    Joe tried to make a different bet, one which I never took him up on. One which I never agreed to.

  30. J-Mac:
    HarleyDavidson and King Agrippa,

    Thank you so much for reading my OP! However, I can’t see your comments, which I’m sure they are very lovely…I just hope that by reading my upcoming OPs about 15-18 of the for now, you will come to your senses…
    Best wishes! J-Mac

    Peace and love!

    Stay stupid, J-Mac.

    Like you have a choice.

    Glen Davidson

  31. John Harshman:
    Shouldn’t there be some kind of rule that an OP has to be at least coherent? I’m not sure how it could be enforced, but when it’s violated I definitely get annoyed.

    In my experience, endosymbiosis is generally advanced as an explanation for mitochondria and plastids, not other features of eukaryotes. So what’s the point of all the other crap?

    Shouldn’t the same rule apply to the comments like this? Your experience is not worth much here I can assure you of that…
    I guess in your imaginary world the problem of origins of eukaryotes has been resolved? Well not in real world… Until then, you can get lost!

  32. Alan Fox:
    Moved a couple of comments to guano. Please attack ideas (or lack of them) to your heart’s content but try and remain civil to fellow members.

    You know, the ones lying about everything.

    Actually, discussion is only possible if there are penalties for trolling and disingenuousness. Which is why genuine discussion is so scarce here.

    Also why courts don’t allow themselves to be yanked around by self-serving idiots. This forum is designed to be sand-bagged by exactly those same self-serving idiots. Dover worked because of rules invoked by Judge Jones, rules aimed at arriving at truth, not for the protection of the incompetent and mendacious.

    Glen Davidson

  33. fifth:

    relevant to this thread and the whole God can’t exist because he is mean idea.

    That isn’t the argument at all. As you know.

    Your dishonesty does not glorify Jesus, fifth.

    Please, please, share this URL with your pastor, so he can see how much of a liability you are to the Christian faith.

  34. John, to Erik:

    Now what you want to see, apparently, is a movie of a cow changing into a whale, but that’s your problem, not biology’s.

    Mung:

    So there’s no evidence for evolution. But that’s not biology’s problem. Got it.

    If there’s no movie, there’s no evidence for evolution. Publish, Mung!

    Idiot.

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