Several years ago, at the beginning of 2016, on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe forums, there was a thread about driverless cars. All the skeptics were going on about how great it was going to be, how it will be here in two years, five years at the most, how we will overcome all the “small” problems by 2017, maybe 2019 at the latest, blah, blah. And at the time, I had told them, well, you may want to hold on a while, its not quite as easy as you think. And how was that met? By a barrage of insults, of you ridiculous troll, what do you know about anything, if you wouldn’t be so ignorant and just learn, can we just block this guy moderator, on and on it went… (typical skeptic fare).
That thread was viewed 117,000 times. There was exactly ONE person who was adamant that their time frames were wrong, that we still have a long way to go. And boy, they sure didn’t like that. Looking back now at the litany of nonsense the skeptics spewed kind of makes me laugh now. Its the same nonsense you see here at TSZ every day. Now, in 2020, some of the most ardent skeptic cheerleaders have reluctantly finally started to admit, ok, yea, you was right, it was a a lot harder than we all said.
That site is propagated by a whole host of computer programmers, professors, tech experts…and not ONE of them was even close in their predictions. And me, oh I am just a dumb rice farmer, what do I know.
Well, I knew one thing, that’s for sure. And that is, that when someone calls themselves a skeptic, and then starts preaching about all they know about the world, take that with the largest grain of salt you can find. Skeptics are a cult. They don’t think for themselves, they team up with some club narrative, and go around chanting, we are skeptics, rah, rah, close your mind and believe. Its pervasive. It spreads to academia, and to the church leaders like Degrasse Tyson, Shermer, Krauss, Coyne, the Novellas, and out it goes. Rarely do we get the chance to see just how closed minded and simply wrong these preachers are, because they will never admit it. But the driverless cars in five years evangelists, its one easy example where you can see how nutty their group-think is. And how empty their cult actually is of dissenting voices that actually think.
I guess the main reason is that, if a person is actually curious and actually free thinking about the world, they would never, in a million years, label themselves a “skeptic.”
That’s obviously false. You yourself were a counterexample to “all” part of that assertion.
When you post this at TSZ, it is going to look as if you are criticizing people who frequent this site. But your example has nothing to do with this site. I would guess that several people who frequent this site have been skeptical of self-driving cars.
I’m not familiar with the site you referenced, but it seems to be an organized group of skeptics. I’m not a big fan of those groups. I have twice started following “sci.skeptic” on usenet, and each time I gave it up after a week or so. At one time, I subscribed to “Skeptical Inquirer”, but I gave that up after a while, because I saw them as not sufficiently skeptical of skepticism.
In short, you are over-generalizing.
Neil Rickert,
Interesting.
Said the moderator of…what’s the name of this site again?
But I will give Neil some credit, I don’t find him to be nearly as flaky as a lot of the flock, to be honest.
Neil Rickert,
I would be very surprised, however, if you say you have never heard of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. I won’t say I am skeptical, but…
phoodoo,
I may have heard of the site. But I have never visited it. I was already soured on organized skepticism.
Neil Rickert,
But I would take issue with the idea that I have over generalized. I think its quite the opposite. the whole “skeptical” movement is so pervasive, that you almost can’t watch any modern news media, without in some way being preached to by it. I think most people, who aren’t that familiar with their terminology, don’t realize when they are being preached to. When you hear Sean Carroll talk, or Degrasse Tyson, or Bill Nye, or Phil Plait, or Penn Jillette, just go on youtube and listen to these university professor lectures, or Ted Talks, or NPR or any science podcast, what you are actually hearing is really just skeptic movement talking points. I think a lot of people don’t notice this.
When you hear people talking about evolution, or conspiracy theories, or vaccines or global warming any of these kinds of topics, really what they are saying is things they have just heard skeptics say, so they just assume they are true. Things like oh, evolution is the most scientifically supported theory ever, or vaccines are 100% safe, or GMO foods pose no health risk whatsoever…its all bullshit. These aren’t facts. These are like cultural myths, that get repeated on youtube and become stories. I am in tune to it, so I can spot it in a second when I hear their little catch phrases and bogus references. But most people are not.
I have way under-generalized it. In the modern social universe, its so wide spread, that most people don’t have the slightest idea that this is where all this so called information actually comes from. It is more widespread than the entire scope of Russian bot media hacking (which is saying something).
In academia especially. Inescapable.
phoodoo is an anti vaxxer.
Not surprised.
FOAD phoodoo.
See. More skeptic talking points.
He got this from Huffington Post.
So ID can’t even sort out driverless cars?
Evolutionists can?
A link to the forum thread:
Self-Driving Cars
Is phooey you, phoodoo?
I refuse to have a conversation with you on a thread where you can indiscriminately decide which posts you want to allow and which posts you won’t, and where you can decide that quoting someone is against the rules.
phoodoo,
Have we ever had a conversation? /tootsie
Phoodoo made an entire thread about how he feels he was once mistreated on another forum(not that he doesn’t also feel that about this place), and that’s just so typical of skeptics?
LOL
It ain’t about me, its about you and the rest of the skeptics. Sorry mate.
One of the things I loved on that thread is how, as a group, they all thought it was presposterous to think that one challenge of fully autonomous cars is what to do about people stopping automated cars with nefarious intentions, if we took away the controls.
They said things like, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, who is going to do that…where are you driving your car….its the same problem with a manually driven car, why would it be any different…Oh, come on, just equip the cars with tear gas, flame throwers, , just have a feature that locks the cars and calls the police….
I was thinking, are these actual people, or robots who post? Can they really be that stupid?
No of course, no would ever think, a single woman, going home at night from work, would have someone stand in front of their car and not let them drive away, because the computer is not allowed to hit them. Would never happen! Beggars would never try to make you give them money to let them leave. Impossible.
Skeptics!
Fully autonomous-driving cars will always face issues: i.e. when making choices, such as between hitting a deer or an oncoming traffic, driving on icy roads, driving into deep puddles of water with just one side of the car, etc.
Self-serving cars will never feel or be able to judge no matter how many sensors are installed… Are humans better at it??? Experienced ones…probably…
There is no 100% vaccine and there never will be…
The load of adminitrated vaccines at once could, and probably was, correlated with the onset of autism, rather than vaccines themselves… but it’s hard to convince skeptics who have watched their children became mute few weeks after vaccination…
Several thousand deaths per year are associated with aspirin use, and even the natural version of aspirin can kill..
J-Mac,
Right, and if one was trying to get full, unbiased information about vaccines, it sure ain’t easy. For instance:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathogens-to-evolve-20180510/
Also, live vaccines CAN actually cause the illness they are vaccinating for. But this information is not widely advertised, because the medical community likes to promote things. It doesn’t mean all vaccines are bad, but it does mean there is a media campaign that is quite vast.
J-Mac,
I know one thing for sure, I certainly wouldn’t trust an autonomous vehicle, if it was a skeptic telling me it is OK. That includes Elon Musk.
I would rather put aside the “skeptic” label for a moment (but return to it) and think about the values, ideals, and norms embedded in this ideology — how scientism, neoliberalism, and technocracy are packaged and presented in our postmodern, post-truth culture.
Among my students I come across two deeply ingrained (and false) beliefs that make it almost impossible to teach any of the humanities, including philosophy: that what scientists do is prove things, and that whatever can’t be proven is just mere opinion.
It’s a dichotomy of scientism and relativism, and that makes it very difficult for them to appreciate that the ability to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of interpretations is a highly valuable cognitive skill.
I do think there’s an interesting question here as to how the term “skeptical” is used in the marketing of this worldview.
(And it must be emphasized that, precisely because it is a worldview, it is not skepticism at all!)
That is almost exactly my point. Its a worldview, with almost strict beliefs its adherents must follow. So, once they say they are part of this movement, they already have all lined up, all the stances they must have on climate, biology, food, UFOs, conspiracies,…. Its a bundled package. Its such a juvenile way to think in my opinion. And yet there are so many, so called respected intellectuals, who label themselves as that.
Why should what you believe in climate change, have anything whatsoever to do with whether or not you think Oswald acted alone. And yet…
Because there are too many conflicting interests involved:
-Big Pharma has to make money, otherwise they will not develop vaccines – rightly so
-Governments don’t want the panic to spread, because most people overreact and the economies plunge into recessions (have you been to a Chinese restaurant lately?), people do not pickup shipments from China because they fear viruses are dormant inside boxes and envelopes… 😉
People still get sick from inactivated vaccines… I have a colleague, medical educator, who has been on everyone’s case if they refused a flue shot – she never bothered me though 😉 –, until she had a reaction after the new flu shot…
She was sick like a dog for 2 weeks or more and told me she thought she was going to die…
Statistically, flu shots apparently help senior citizens over 60 or 65 in nursing homes…
Not in 5 years, no. Nor indeed in any time frame, unless we have self-replicating cars.
AI, including self-driving, or self-replicating cars, will not be able to judge what is right or wrong, because, for this, they would need to become self-aware/conscious…
One hint, for those who care, it has been implied in many experimental studies with MRI brain scans, that humans get their brains activated PRIOR to the stimuli, either visual, or sensory…
How does one replicate this and implements it into a robot that can function outside of time? 😉
Is natural selection able to function outside of time? This sure as hell would prove its omnipotence 😉
Today I’m teaching “Escape the Echo Chamber” by Thi Nguyen and it occurred to me that one way of understanding phoodoo’s complaint here is that “the skeptical movement” has become, quite ironically, an echo chamber of its own.
I think it’s a nice question as to what extent this is because it’s an Internet-based phenomenon, and whether there is something about the flow of information online that encourages the echo chamber effect.
Nope. In an evolutionary system, the environment provides the feedback, not organisms themselves. Bacteria, dry rot and dandelions aren’t self aware, but can evolve.
Oh ri-heally?
“But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.
Is there a third, or neutral side, perhaps???
Kantian Naturalist,
Hardly an echo chamber if we’re engaging with contrary views, though. To shout them down, often, but nonetheless we are hardly avoiding them. Many of us earned our spurs at Uncommon Descent.
Oh, reheheheally!!!??? lol
How do you prove that?
Since you don’t have a good answer, I’m not going to make you come up with a bad one… 😉
We have been over this topic (retro-causality) at TSZ more than once…
Unfortunately… “…there is just no way we can keep you on…”, again… lol
You think they are self-aware? How do you prove that?
I really don’t know why you post, if all you can do is gibber incoherently.
I don’t understand this. Is there some correct program with respect to, e.g., the deer v. the oncoming traffic? If humans are all over the place given such choices, what would you want the driverless car to do? Exactly what YOU would do?
If that is the nature of the complaints you made about driverless cars at this other site, I don’t think it’s surprising that you didn’t get a lot of credit for them. If there’s no universally accepted rule that can be applied, how can it be a good criticism to suggest that the driverless car won’t do what everybody would (or should) do?
Why do self-driving cars need to self-replicate? What the hell are you talking about, exactly?
Well, first off, on the SGU forum, as soon as they saw I wasn’t a skeptic, according to their terms, they either called me a troll, or they asked the moderator to block me.
And I don’t really have to mention what goes on here. Ahem…
It was never a complaint, it was a statement of fact that they didn’t like. Namely, that the technology is no where near good enough to do what they hoped it could do, at this stage. To me, its as if these people who were so optimistic about its quick development, that I had to wonder if these people have ever even driven before, and thought about all the calculations that go into your actions during a 20 minute commute. If you do it in a busy area, with bad or unpredictable roads, the amount of things that have to be dealt with in fractions of a second are gigantic.
Elon Musk has only recently begun backing away from his earlier proclamations, and now just says, well, its much harder than we thought, it won’t be any time soon. Other car manufacturers have expressed similar sentiments, with some simply saying it can’t be done right now.
A response to jab about evolutionists inability to sort out autonomous cars.
walto,
And I would say all of these technical problems are still only the tip of the iceberg. There are the security issues, the morality issues, the issues of who owns the car, the issue of who has permission to operate the car, the issues of slower traffic caused by these cars, the issues of fail safe buttons, the issues of complacency, the issues of breeding a generation of people who can’t drive, the issues of preventing nefarious individuals from stopping these cars whenever they feel like it, insurance, computer longevity and reliability, and the list goes on and on.
These issues have been obvious to me for a good number of years. I found it astounding that so many in the tech field thought it would be so easy. I am smarter than Elon Musk?
Elon Musk has a financial benefit from excessive optimism.
I will grant you that, but he has spent an awful lot of money on technology that is still basically worthless.
Furthermore, reading all the other comments from supposedly educated people, about how to deal with these problems (well, just put tear gas containers under the car!, Have sensors they count how many occupants in each car.) is a study in parody.
phoodoo,
Maybe someone can show me how to embed this. Unbelievable.
What?!!!
The often used by Darwinists illustration of the evolution of cars (Corvette) to prove evolution is what he must be talking about…
How else is a corvette going to evolve, from one model to the next, unless it self-replicates???
Why else would Darwinists use this illustration???
Can you come up with another, obvious inference?
You know those creationist and all… who would like to insinuate guidance in evolution, right? 😉
Only Darwin must know …lol
Even if there is, there are too many details involved to make this kind of judgment…
Those are probably the ones who don’t survive, but the ones that do, and the passengers who survive can reflect and judge; i.e. if the driver had done this, we all would have died, but he chose the better of the available options…
Nobody knows, but like phoodoo said, I’d rather be the one making the judgment than a software…
To be fair, it remains to be seen how far the technology will go and whether it will be vindicated…
Precision surgeries (robot-assisted ), often performed online help, but replacing a neurosurgeon in the future is quite doubtful to me…
You can be a skeptic without being part of the skeptical movement. TSZ is not affiliated with any skeptical movement, though some of its participants might be.
Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.
I already saw that problem in Skeptical Inquirer magazine in the 1980s. That precedes most of what is happening on the Internet.
If he can persuade enough people to buy it, then it isn’t worthless to him.
He has incorporated some of the technologies into his present day vehicles which he sells as an upgrade, Autopilot.
The posters may be educated but unless they are the actual engineers working on the proprietary technologies and then posting their progress , all of it is just speculation. And speculation is easy.
Exactly , he is an incredible self-promoter and kind of an egotistical asshole. Perfect combination
Lots of money on the table, they baby boomers are nearing the age when they no longer be able to safely drive, self driving cars would allow them to remain mobile. In the US that is a lot of people.
I am curious what would be an acceptable failure record, so far in Texas 328 traffic fatalities have occurred this year already. People accept it as the price of driving, would people accept a similar amount of carnage from driverless cars?