Sandbox (2)

For general discussion that would be off-topic in other threads!

757 thoughts on “Sandbox (2)”

  1. soc1e: I remember reading Schneibster’s posts back in the IIDB days.Seemed like quite a bright fellow.Has he gone off the deep end?

    After googling:yikes.

    Yes, he is a bright fellow, and yes, yikes.

  2. For the record, I am not aware of being racist against Japanese people, or even having said anything that could be construed that way!

  3. Lizzie: For the record, I am not aware of being racist against Japanese people, or even having said anything that could be construed that way!

    I took it that Schneibster was trying to needle you.

  4. FYI, the polar bear fur is transparent. It just looks white due to the way the light bounces off the space between the fur/ hair

    Joe at UD. Great to see he is learning new facts. I wonder where he got this snippet?

  6. keiths,

    Uncharitable?

    William’s problem has always been in articulating his points. It must be incredibly frustrating that, as far as I can tell judging by the number of times WJM has said something along the lines of “no, that is not my argument”, nobody here is buying it. That is why I asked him if he had ever had any positive feedback when discussing his ideas with others. His inability to clarify on some of his more baffling statements is also a bit frustrating. But WJM claims that he is satisfied and that’s fine. This has been yet another demonstration that true communication is hard to achieve. There has to be at least some common understanding of the terms employed and this is often not the case.

    On the other hand, I’m still puzzled as to what WJM was trying to accomplish. If his internal logic and view satisfy him, why did he want to expose it here? Seems a lot of effort for not much reward. Ah well.

    ETA

    Moved to sandbox (cont’d) meta comment and off-topic.

  7. Patrick: This will probably sound as flakey to you as it did to me four or five years ago, but have you tried meditation or breath work?

    My wife pulled me into a practice that includes a lot of both.I’ve gotten a lot of benefits from it, including a bit more insight into what people mean when they talk about “spiritual” experiences.I still think it’s just cool stuff you can do to your own mind rather than getting in touch with anything external, but it can be fun.

    One breath work heavy meditation I do frequently is called Quantum Light Breath (available here).It is guided, so even if you have no experience with meditation you can get the experience.I’ve also done Stan Grof’s Holotropic Breath a couple of times.It can get quite intense.

    I’ll move this to the sandbox, since it’s grossly off topic.

    Now stop looking at me like that and sliding your chair away.I ain’t crazy, I tell ya!

    Sorry, Patrick. I just came across your comment while trying to work out why the comment links on the main page don’t take you straight to the comment for Sandbox and Guano.

    My daughter teaches Yoga and has often got me to try yoga exercises and meditation. I find holding Yoga poses distinctly uncomfortable. I guess that is a consequence of arthritis, lack of flexibility and general fitness. She’s more or less given up trying to persuade me but next time she’s visiting I’ll ask her about meditation and breath control (which figured strongly as I recall) without the uncomfortable poses.

    I characterize myself as having a butterfly brain. Easily distracted into new subjects but lacking the concentration to develop deeper understanding. Switching the brain off when relaxing or going to sleep is also a problem. If you think your methods will be beneficial, I’ll certainly try them.

    ETA

    I’m now using Thunderbird linked to the comment RSS feed now so hopefully I’ll pick up comments directed at me more reliably.

  8. Alan Fox: Sorry, Patrick. I just came across your comment while trying to work out why the comment links on the main page don’t take you straight to the comment for Sandbox and Guano.

    Perhaps the browser cache.

    I clicked the link for Patrick’s post (to which you were replying), and was taken there. Then I clicked the link to take my to your post (to which I am replying), and still got a page with Patrick’s post, though positioning at the top. I think my browser found that in its cache, and saw no reason to reload, but could not find the tag where it should position.

    I’m just guessing here.

    I’m now using Thunderbird linked to the comment RSS feed now so hopefully I’ll pick up comments directed at me more reliably.

    Different software. I have been following comments with RSS for some time now, and it does make it easier to follow.

  9. Neil Rickert,

    Hi Neil,

    I did notice the new plugin (Total Cache) recently so it makes sense. If the plugin does what it claims it’s probably a small price to pay.

  11. Alan Fox: Sorry, Patrick. I just came across your comment while trying to work out why the comment links on the main page don’t take you straight to the comment for Sandbox and Guano.

    My daughter teaches Yoga and has often got me to try yoga exercises and meditation.I find holding Yoga poses distinctly uncomfortable. I guess that is a consequence of arthritis, lack of flexibility and general fitness. She’s more or less given up trying to persuade me but next time she’s visiting I’ll ask her about meditation and breath control (which figured strongly as I recall) without the uncomfortable poses.

    My wife and several of the people in our meditation / breathwork practice are also into yoga. I lack the natural flexibility and, frankly, the inclination to improve. I’m sure it would benefit me, but I have much more fun lifting weights and running.

    I characterize myself as having a butterfly brain. Easily distracted into new subjects but lacking the concentration to develop deeper understanding. Switching the brain off when relaxing or going to sleep is also a problem. If you think your methods will be beneficial, I’ll certainly try them.

    I can only share my own experience, which could be skewed since I went most of my adult life without trying anything like this before. The first time I did the Quantum Light Breath meditation was at a workshop that my wife dragged me to kicking and screaming. The facilitators had us do a few simple exercises to get relaxed, then went into the breathing.

    I was expecting relaxation at best. What I got was my brain dredging up memories that I hadn’t thought about in years. The more I let go of the distracting thoughts and focused on the breathing, the more experiences I revisited and the more vivid they got.

    If you’re looking for something to help you sleep, that’s probably not the right one. There are others that are quieter and more about letting go your sense of self that might help there.

    I’ve been doing this for a little over four years now. I’m calmer, a bit quieter, more aware of my own motivations and those of the people around me, less prone to respond immediately with anger, and just generally happier. Even my kids have noticed the changes.

    It’s good for me. I recommend it to everyone. I’ll stop proselytizing now.

  12. Patrick,

    Thanks for all the encouragement, Patrick. I’m going to try it out over the weekend. I need something to calm me after the stress of moderation. It’ll be easier on the brain cells than merlot.

  13. I managed to fumble the posting and make my previous comment uneditable by me. In it, the paragraph that starts “Why that particularly?” is a quote from Alan Miller’s comment to which I replied.

  15. Alan Fox:
    OK now, Joe?

    Yes, thanks. I think the problem may have been that I pushed the submit button twice, and although it didn’t submit the second time, it also didn’t then count my first one as editable. Or something like that.

  16. Joe Felsenstein: Yes, thanks.I think the problem may have been that I pushed the submit button twice, and although it didn’t submit the second time, it also didn’t then count my first one as editable.Or something like that.

    You’d added your comment in before the final “close blockquote”. For some reason when you use the “quote in reply” option it appears a few lines down. I’ve done it myself a few times.

    The latency due to the caching plugin sometimes is a problem too.

    PS as your comment is now OK I’ll move these meta-comments to the sandbox.

  18. OMagain,

    Yikes – it’s just a broken record! WJM Fails To Get It part zzzzzzzz. As Lincoln Phipps says (immediately to be wafted aside for sophistry):

    We see these monologues quite often […] It is never made very clear what the point of all of this is but the subtext seems to be some kind of moral fashion parade whereby the Christian dresses in their finest Emperor’s clothing and rides upon their ‘bête noire’.

    Their question tells us more about them then they would probably want to reveal. It tells us about the thoughts that populate their head and the mental gymnastics they go through to not do these things.

    What we’re left with is the feeling that they do not accept that they could have an intrinsic will to not do these things but they rely on extrinsically applied rules to not be a monster. To these people we plead that they never lose their faith if that is all that is between whatever is broken inside and society.

  19. WJM@UD

    So, that is 2 moral subjectivists who agree that morality boils down to might makes right (because I feel like it, because I can). When you add Robin from TSZ, that’s 3.

    My argument is set up to either gain this admission, or reveal that those who will not admit it are either deceiving themselves or are hypocrites.

    And there you have it. The false trichotomy.

  20. Touch keyboard tricks:

    ÈÉÊËĒÝÙÚÛÜŪÌÍÎÏĪèéêëēýÿùúûüūìíîïīòóôõöōœø –/¢£€¥¥₣₣₤₱‰†‡★¿“”«»˝±≠≈∞ +=÷×~≈√ΠΠ♪♥♠♦♣∞™©®↑↓←→≤«≥»

    Kindle Fire (Android)

    Press and hold various keys. Some are obvious. Others, not so much.

    ETA: ½⅓¼⅛⅔¾⅜⅝⅞ⁿ∅

  21. https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/
    http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/3/7803054/2013jcpsrep.pdf

    From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

  22. OMagain,

    He introduces one of his yawn-inducing tics, ‘ideological bias’, preventing people from seeing the Truth. My personal ideological bias relates to the practical difficulties of traversing distances upwards of 25 million million miles – 50 million trips to the moon and back. That’s just the nearest star (a binary). One can invent all manner of possibilities circumventing that to keep the belief alive, but a shred of unequivocally alien technology or tissue would be better yet.

    And no … if they are ‘greys’, they probably aren’t “brothers”, heh heh 😉

  23. Odd then how electronic recording devices, that otherwise could provide clear evidence for “aliens”, also seem to suffer from this ‘ideological bias’ insofar as yet no such device has provided any such evidence. Despite a large % of the world now carrying round such devices.

    Likewise Ghosts (Hi Clive) etc. You’d expect evidence for such things to increase at a rate proportional to the increase in the availability of devices capable of capturing such evidence.

    And lastly, if William has such experience then is this not the logical explanation for the identify of the designer? Why is William not shouting such from the treetops?

    I suppose it’s down to the fact that when this came up at UD in 2011 William had plenty to say about it but did not mention his experiences with greys then where he had this to say:

    I don’t care if extraterrestrials exist or not – it has no impact whatsoever on my belief system. I don’t care if Greer is a crackpot or not.

    Extraterrestrial life: UFO fans assail White House, demand disclosure

    I guess his experience with ‘greys’ came about sometime between 2011 and now, but of course there are alternative interpretations. But due to the rules of this site I am unable to detail them, even in the Sandbox 😛

  24. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that William’s personal experience with greys is his brother’s working for Greer.

    Just a shot in the dark.

  25. OMagain:
    Odd then how electronic recording devices, that otherwise could provide clear evidence for “aliens”, also seem to suffer from this ‘ideological bias’ insofar as yet no such device has provided any such evidence. Despite a large % of the world now carrying round such devices.

    The XKCD webcomic concurs: http://xkcd.com/1235/

  26. varphi T should read latex varphi T (hmm ok I give up on latex)

    [I think I fixed the latex problem, so I’m moving this to sandbox contd — Neil Rickert]

  27. I don’t have time to compose a proper post, but if we’re looking for a change of topic, PaV’s question: “Does Evolutionary Theory Really Help Scientists”? can be answered with a resounding Yes!.

    In the paper, the scientists find a new, quite short protein that they believe “might be the first in a series of uncharacterized developmental signals.” Cool.

    PaV thinks the “junk DNA” hypothesis set biology back, and that if this region hadn’t previously been thought to be non-coding, that this advance would have come sooner.

    He ignores that in the search for these short open reading frames, that phylogenetic analysis was a crucial step in their identification. “Conservation” and “Phylogeny” appear throughout the paper.

    Evolution is right there in the methods, explaining how they decided which sequences to focus. It is figure 1.It is Throughout the discussion: “phylogenetic comparisons of synonymous versus non-synonymous codon changes reveal strong amino acid preservation in the toddler ORF.”

    So for the ID hypotheses that PaV claims would set us free:
    Does he think there is no “junk”-apparently functionless ncDNA? I think this is empirically untrue, and not at all an ID hypothesis that designs are perfect.

    A ID advocate might say conservation could be due to so called “common design”, but only evolution would predict conservation is due to functionality (or else lost or altered due to mutations). A designer can put identical non-functional bits on unrelated designs (tailfins on cars and bicycles come to mind), and keep updating that design.

    PaV’s Hypothesis: “Meanwhile, ID would say this: the genes are the cells tools; how to use these tools and building materials MUST BE encoded in the “non coding” (nc) portions of DNA. IOW, from an ID perspective, one of the first moves one would make in studying why “cells suddenly start to move” would be look at the nc-DNA.” is already falsified, as:

    1) Again, this paper demonstrates this function in a protein coding region.
    2) Many, many cellular regulators are proteins. Regulatory RNAs are certainly important.
    3) Lastly, this is not an ID prediction. It is a postdiction in an era when regulatory RNAs have long been known, and quite close to treading on the RNA world hypothesis. There is also no rationale for–it is arbitrary.

  29. Gregory,

    You seem to fall down willingly at the ‘philosophy is dead’ trope. Stand up, KN. Get inspired. For Y-WH’s sake! Learn more than the Sophists did. Find truths and adventures in the neo-post-modern age. You need not be as weak or eclectically destructible as you appear. Why not awake, arise?

    Well that was an interesting meltdown.

    Perhaps Gregory has forgotten that Amerika is not entirely lacking in culture. We still have street preachers.

  30. Is this another suicide by cop attempt?

    I know it’s against the rules to question people’s motives here, but gregory appears to be instigating his own martyrdom.

    I think it would be a shame to grant it.

  31. A peculiar comment [to an even more peculiar BA OP] by the evanescent WJM over at UD:

    […] it’s like the difference between expecting a lot of junk DNA, and expecting little to no junk. One might expect to find, under the design paradigm, stored up and potentially useful DNA sequences along with a mechanism for finding and activating them under certain conditions. There are all sorts of ways that the ID perspective can provide scientific throughput that is just not available under the Darwinian mindset.

    All sorts of ways, eh? So discover something, already.

    Stored-up-and-useful sequences are not forbidden by evolutionary processes, but there is a mechanistic difficulty in maintaining them without ongoing interference, due to mutation of neutral sequence. WJM should talk to Eric B about the degradation of unused sequence. No-one is rejecting Design explanations out of hand, but nor is there anything other than handwaving from ID to support their actuality. Given perfectly valid mechanistic explanations for junk, the possibility that design was not involved has yet to be ruled out. Still, if science is being held back by that caution, advance it by applied means. That’ll make ‘them’ sit up and take note.

    I’d also like to point out that many Darwinists – if not most – already employ design principles (such as reverse-engineering and decoding techniques) even though they refuse to admit they are doing so.

    ‘Darwinists’ don’t realise when they are designing and when they aren’t?

  33. petrushka: I think it would be a shame to grant it.

    I don’t think Gregory warrants a UD-style ejection. I’d be extremely unhappy if that were to happen. A move to guano of comments that do not comply with the not-very-onerous rules seems adequate for all but one ex commenter.

  34. Alan Fox: I don’t think Gregory warrants a UD-style ejection. I’d be extremely unhappy if that were to happen. A move to guano of comments that do not comply with the not-very-onerous rules seems adequate for all but one ex commenter.

    Agreed. Actually, I very much enjoy interacting with Gregory. He has an interesting approach to many of the problems I’m also interested in. I just wish he didn’t come across as so irascible. I try to be calm, persuasive, and reasonable, and he seems to respond with invective and insult more often than not. Still, I value his contributions to our discussions.

  36. Discovery News suggests that ‘artificially’ selected random mutations are a valid inference of ID. I don’t think they realize the can of worms they’ve opened up…

    Not sure what to make of this unintentionally amusing paragraph:

    Here is an interesting test for the Design Filter. The mutation could have been caused by chance. By all appearances in a genetics lab, it is a nonsense mutation [say again?] — an accident of little or no consequence. No natural law would have caused the mutation. [huh?]

    I got a kick out of this:

    This is not so different from any intelligent design case. Designers do not always exhaustively know the particulars. [exactly, designers do not but God does]

    While true, there is no way in hell the ID movement could be sustained if this admission were to become a key idea in ID metaphysics.

  39. Aardvark,

    Is the blog mistress doing well?

    We haven’t seen her lately, but she does tend to disappear for long periods when she gets busy.

  40. keiths:
    Aardvark,

    We haven’t seen her lately, but she does tend to disappear for long periods when she gets busy.

    I sometimes wonder whether these absences are experiments to see what happens. How will the ant colony grow?

    A reminder that any commenter who wishes to raise a subject that s/he thinks would be of interest to the TSZ community is very welcome to author a post. If you need author status, just ask.

  41. Hi,

    I don’t have author status, but there’s a topic I’d like to raise. I’m working on a book that includes a chapter on Dr. Dembski, and I’m curious about a couple of assumptions I’m making.

    First, has Dembski worked through a specified complexity/CSI calculation for anything other than the 4 subjects Dr. Elsberry identified in this post? That’s the Caputo incident, the flagellum, the WEASEL program and the SETI data. I haven’t seen any other cases of him actually working through a case, but I want to make sure I’m not missing anything.

    Second, is anyone aware of any incident in which the intelligent design community, particularly the credentialed experts but including any prominent member, has scrutinized and rejected an ID idea? Dembski’s temporary rejection of the explanatory filter would be an example, had he not walked it back a week or so later. Again, I can’t think of any good examples, but want to make sure I’m not missing anything.

  42. Learned Hand: I don’t have author status, but …

    Actually, you do have author status.

    I don’t know if somebody just gave it to you, or if you have had it for some time. But you have it.

    Hold your mouse over the “New” at the top of the page, and select “Post” to start a new topic.

  44. Anyone else been following the exchanges between Vincent Torley at Uncommon Descent and Larry Moran at Sandwalk? Starting from here or thereabouts. with contributions from Sal Cordova and a Croatian biochemist called Branko Kozulic.

  46. The Sandwalk chronicles has been mentioned in the current Learned Hand thread, but not discussed. It really is one of the great internet exchanges.

  47. William J Murray at Uncommon Descent

    Darwinist definition of quote-mine:: whenever an ID proponent uses a quote by a Darwinist to advance the ID position.

    Not quite, William. A quote-mine is taken from a secondary source as is usually demonstrated by the selective nature of the quote, the errors contained in the quote and/or in the attribution and the inability of the quoter to provide the context of the quote, not having access to the original.

  48. Not quite, William. A quote-mine is taken from a secondary source as is usually demonstrated by the selective nature of the quote, the errors contained in the quote and/or in the attribution and the inability of the quoter to provide the context of the quote, not having accss to the original.

    Please direct me to a source that agrees with your definition, Alan, because RationalWiki – a noted anti-ID, anti-Creationist source, says:

    Quote mining is the deceitful tactic of taking quotes out of context in order to make them seemingly agree with the quote miner’s viewpoint or to make the comments of an opponent seem more extreme or hold positions they don’t in order to make their positions easier to refute or demonize.

    It says nothing about getting the quotes from a “secondary source”; it says nothing about not having access to the original source or the inability of the person using the quote to provide the original source. Quote mining is a deceitful act of deliberately using a selective quote to misrepresent the views of the person you are quoting.

    IOW, Alan, you are once again completely wrong. I suggest you don’t run around accusing people of quote mining until you understand what quote-mining actually means.

    What’s really ironic here is if you had read the O.P. I made that comment in, vjtorley spells out what “quote-mining” means, with a link to that very page on RationalWiki. You could have avoided making this gross error simply by reading the context.

    You might have also realized I was making a sarcastic joke.

  49. Two points. Rationalwiki are wrong, in my view, to insist on mens rea. A quote-miner can just be sloppy or incompetent.

    More importantly, citing a quote from the original source when you have actually taken it from a secondary source is dishonest, at least if one maintains the pretense after having been called on it.

  50. Alan said:

    Two points. Rationalwiki are wrong, in my view, to insist on mens rea. A quote-miner can just be sloppy or incompetent.

    So, without providing ANY third-party source support for your idiosyncratic definition of “quote-mining”, you’re going to insist that RationalWiki is “wrong”? Wrong by what standard – your idiosyncratic definition?

    Under what conditions, Alan, will you just admit that you’re wrong about something?

    More importantly, citing a quote from the original source when you have actually taken it from a secondary source is dishonest, at least if one maintains the pretense after having been called on it.

    Well, of course lying about where you got the quote is dishonest, but it’s not quote-mining under any definition I can find other than your personal, idiosyncratic, face-saving one.

    Attributing a quote to the original source even if you get it from a secondary source is only a problem if it turns out to be a misquote. If it is, people should then have the integrity to acknowledge the error. One should always apply due diligence in making sure that such quotes actually exist in the source material and actually mean what they think it means. Getting quotes from sources that align with one’s own views and relying on that source to faithfully transcript and represent them is a recipe for egg-on-the-face retractions and apologies.

    There is no excuse, however, for insisting that a third party source like RationalWiki is “wrong” and not providing a single third-party source to support one’s own assertion about what a phrase like “quote-mining” means.

    Or, Alan, do you think it means whatever anyone happens to claim it means? If I have no 3rd party support, can I accuse you of “quote-mining” if you quote anyone at all about anything I happen to disagree with? If not, why not?

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