Flat earthers?

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by Dead_pool, Mar 26, 2017.

  1. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    There's a really interesting video online in which a man asks random people at a festival "Which is colder - a block of wood or a block of metal?" allows them to feel the block and then asks them again. Of course, the block of metal feels colder because it conducts heat away from the body faster, but no one really understood that their phenomenal experience of reality might not match up with reality itself.
     
  2. aikiMac

    aikiMac aikido + boxing = very good Moderator Supporter

    I agree that something is lost by not understanding the context, but my assertion was/is that math is the framework, the language even, that underlies all science, and because of that, I put it above science in importance when we're talking about general education -- and I would want math pushed much much more in school than it is.


    LOL, that made me laugh! :p


    The problem that (ahem, cough) non-math people ( :D ) don't think of when listening to well-spoken ID people is that you can't formulate a test for, "No amount of testing will explain this here hypothesis." :jawdrop: Boom, right there, I pulled ID out of science and put it into the sister field of philosophy.

    Ohhh, one of those. I've heard of groups like that. Okay.

    I used to work for an aerospace company that made satellites. I saw a couple of the satellites as they were being built. Working there gave me an insight into the vast, vast scope of such a conspiracy, the number of people who would have to be part of it. It is mind blowing. We're not talking just the number of workers on one day or one month or one year in one building. We're talking for the last 50 years continuously, and still ongoing, across dozens if not scores of companies scattered about the country from the west coast to the east coast, day in and day out, hiring and firing new people all the time. It's absurdly ridiculous.

    I do not approve of such conspiracies. They're insulting. :yeleyes:
     
  3. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    Actually, the philosophical discipline of logic underpins mathematics.

    You're one of THEM! :D
     
  4. aikiMac

    aikiMac aikido + boxing = very good Moderator Supporter

    That post makes me cry, man. :cry:

    "It should be possible on a ball, morons" :cry:
     
  5. Giovanni

    Giovanni Well-Known Member Supporter

    again, i just don't know how to not to get away from it. but think of how arrogant these guys are. if he really thinks the earth is flat, come up with an experiment to test that hypothesis.

    i would add to hubris, laziness. it's lazy to not put the work into understanding something.

    watching the youtube video, first of all, kron is dipping. second he's talking about how in his martial arts experience he's out there seeking "truth" and "what works", then goes from chemtrails to fluoride.

    it's depressing to listen to this.

    i'm sorry, this isn't the education system, it's these people. my kids know more about science than these fools. my kids, who go to chicago public schools.

    also, cherish the nuggets....the earth is spinning at 666 miles per hour. "that's interesting".

    fools.
     
  6. aikiMac

    aikiMac aikido + boxing = very good Moderator Supporter

    Are they different things? :p
    Is math anything more than messing around with tautologies? What is an equation, really? :p

    But, yes, historically philosophy is the parent of math.
     
  7. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    I think that's a great idea if you want to train scientists; I completely agree that every scientist should have a strong underpinning of math (mine is probably weaker than it should have been!). The purpose of general education should be somewhat broader though. Getting people to understand the scientific process and why we can be confident about things like climate change and evolution relies more on contextual information and the cultural practices of science than it does advanced mathematical concepts.

    Yeah I think this is one of those 'formulations of ID' problems. You look at Behe's work and he came up with discrete predictions.
     
  8. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    Very true!
     
  9. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    So, I have to ask again: at what age do these people take personal responsibility for being ignoramuses? Is hubris something you're born with? Is it genetic?
     
  10. Giovanni

    Giovanni Well-Known Member Supporter

    i don't know how to answer that question--at what age.

    i do know that i went into college as a mechanical engineering major so i took lots of stem classes in high school. stuff like hypotheses, experiments, observation, i was doing all that throughout.

    both of my school-age kids--aged 8 and 6--in chicago public schools have done yearly science projects, where they come up with a hypothesis, perform an experiment, then "publish" the results at their school's science fair. we're not talking massive things. lol. one hypothesis was that one side of a penny fits more drops of water than the other side. the other hypothesis involved drops of primary color food coloring into water causing color changes. but the scientific method was followed.

    sorry i'm a broken record, but i think these guys are arrogant and lazy. they're adults and should know better, but they clearly don't.
     
  11. Giovanni

    Giovanni Well-Known Member Supporter

    funny story....started as mechanical engineering, ended with an english degree. and now i work for a software engineering company as its coo.
     
  12. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    They may be lazy and arrogant adults, but it's obvious that they missed out on some very basic stuff in school. Maybe they were lazy and arrogant children, but I can't put the responsibility for a lack of education on children. The only reasonable answer is to refine the systems we use to educate children. It should be the highest priority for every nation's budget, in my opinion.

    As philo said; it's a systemic problem, so it needs a systemic solution. Just writing humans off as "bad people" doesn't do it for me. I want to find ways for us to improve as a species, not just shrug and go "meh, me and my kids are okay, screw the schmucks who believe in this stuff".
     
  13. Giovanni

    Giovanni Well-Known Member Supporter

    i'm not saying screw everyone else. but i don't necessarily agree that's it's systemic to the american education system. sure, is there room for improvement? always is. i appreciate the adoption of standards and i think we should and can do more with standards.

    i like a brian cox video i saw yesterday. i think it was an article someone shared in the global warming thread. brian said that we can't possibly compete on the same level with fools because while we have studied, and researched, fools can easily say anything to take up time. but, the option we have to expose fools as fools as quickly as possible, so at least we can move on. charts work well for that and i think he took some to a televised "debate".
     
  14. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    I think it's far, far more preferable to nip it in the bud. Get them before they're 10, when some of it might sink in and set them on a path where they can weigh evidence for themselves.

    There's no point engaging with adults who have crazy beliefs, because the effort needed, essentially to get them to change their personality, is too great.

    I won't comment on the American education system, as the media is my main reference for Americans, but there certainly are many systemic problems with education in the UK. There are vast swathes of woefully undereducated people here.

    For example, I supposedly learnt French for 5 years. I think I remember about as many words, and have no clue about French grammar or how to construct a sentence. Was I a lazy kid? Maybe, but when I consider that I don't know anyone who got to conversational level French or German purely from their secondary education, it points to a systemic failure.
     
  15. aikiMac

    aikiMac aikido + boxing = very good Moderator Supporter

    Actually, speaking as a former programmer -- an English degree is a great background for programming, because of the attentiveness to details in punctuation and and grammar and spelling. So much of programming depends upon tiny details of syntax, all of which is analogous to those details. :)
     
  16. Giovanni

    Giovanni Well-Known Member Supporter

    the best software engineer i've ever met was an english major like myself. you're absolutely right.
     
  17. philosoraptor

    philosoraptor carnivore in a top hat Supporter

    Speaking of education and programming, one of the little girls I tutor I've been tutoring in very, very, very, very basic computer programming from code.org. She is AWESOME. Sleeps with a zombie kit under her pillow, watches the walking dead, and learned how to type from typing of the dead.
     
  18. Smitfire

    Smitfire Cactus Schlong

    The irony of someone that is an expert at BJJ, an art that fundamentally is about manipulating spacial relationships of weight and mass and their interaction with what is "down" and what is "up", is delicious.
    I don't see how making the world flat solves the problem of why we stay "on it" anymore than a spherical (OK..oblate spheroid) earth?
    Surely the only evidence that we float in space is obtained by going into space, where we also observe that the world is round, so what's to say that's not also made up by NASA and actually we don't float at all!?!?!
     
  19. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    *PEDANTRY ALERT!*

    An oblate spheroid is spherical, though not a sphere.

    /pedantry

    It's even weirder than that. Gravity does not exist, only the constant acceleration of the earth disc through a medium that is nothing like the "space" we are taught about in brain washing class... erm, I mean science class :p
     
    Last edited: Mar 30, 2017
  20. Peter Maloney

    Peter Maloney New Member

    If Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing, then he would have done a better job. Camera work there was awful.
     

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