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As someone who used to be a cop, this is absolute peak cops justifying the evidence not supporting their intuition by just making bullshit up. If it actually w

As someone who used to be a cop, this is absolute peak cops justifying the evidence not supporting their intuition by just making bullshit up. If it actually worked, they'd have data and results. But, spoilers, they don't.

jajko 2y ago
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- explaininjs 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    What's "evolutionism"?
    - explaininjs 2y ago
      The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors. There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists, but this is a rarely embraced territory: you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future.
      - gjm11 2y ago
        People sometimes complain about "motte-and-bailey" rhetoric, where what you argue for explicitly is much more unassuming than what you really believe. I have rarely seen so spectacular an example. Motte: "there might be non-differentiable phenomena in physics". (Note that e.g. anyone who believes that "wavefunction collapse" in quantum physics is an actual real thing believes in non-differentiable phenomena; so does anyone who thinks that inside black holes there are actual singularities rather than merely places where general relativity breaks down and something more complicated happens; so does anyone who thinks that the smooth-looking stuff we seem to observe arises from some combinatorial underlying structure like a cellular automaton or some kind of constantly-evolving network of vertices and edges and whatnot.) Bailey: literal freakin' creationism. (Complete with "a God who specially designed you". Something in the world might not be differentiable, therefore there is a God who specially designed you. Gosh!) As I said elsewhere in this thread: evolutionism means belief in evolution, or belief that evolution happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. And creationism means belief in creation, or belief that creation happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. These are not, even slightly, the same thing as whether or not some functions describing the universe might be non-differentiable. Also, "non-differentiable" is not, even slightly, the same as "not time invariant". E.g., the function y = cos(exp(-x)) + exp(-x) cos(x^2) is not-time-invariant on both large and small scales, but it's differentiable, analytic even. And "x is a continuous function of t, and (dx/dt)^2 = 1 at all but a discrete set of points" is as time-invariant a law as you might care to mention, but almost all its solutions have places where they aren't differentiable."
        explaininjs 2y ago
        You clearly missed the paragraph where I very explicitly talked about the time variant differentiable middle ground? That’s surprising, it’s the majority of the content. Regardless, I’m not talking about functions describing the universal state, I’m talking one layer up from that, those that describe how that state changes, including any instantaneous events. Does the cat instantaneously die at any given second with the same probability, or does something intervene in the one second it does that did not exist in any of the others?
        gjm11 2y ago
        I didn't miss the paragraph, but it seemed (and still seems) fundamentally confused to me. [EDITED to add:] I do agree that when I said "X and Y are clearly not the same thing" I should have added something along the lines of "I see that after treating them as the same thing you say that technically they're different but hardly anyone embraces just one of them, but I don't think the paragraph where you talk about that makes much sense". Sorry about that. In any case, it's rather a side issue; "nondifferentiable things obviously don't imply a god who specially designed you" was the more important point, and one your response doesn't address at all. Why would there be a "time variant differentiable middle ground" but not a "time invariant nondifferentiable middle ground"? Why would differentiability imply no God? (You think a god could intervene in the universe but not in a differentiable way??) For that matter, why would nondifferentiability imply a God? (Maybe nondifferentiable things happen that are just random noise.) Why would having "time-variant" phenomena stop you using science to extrapolate to the past or future? A time-varying law can be expressed as a time-invariant law about time-varying functions. So I suppose when you say "time-variant" you mean something like "varying with time in a way that cannot be described scientifically. But the real-work here is in the "cannot be described scientifically" bit, not the "varying with time" bit. If you had time-invariant behaviour that was beyond scientific description, that would block grandiose scientific ambitions too. I think that when you say "non-differentiability" you mean "divine intervention", and when you say "time-variant" you mean "fundamentally inaccessible to science", but you know that if you say what you actually mean then people will be all "science demonstrably works really well" and "claims of divine intervention keep not checking out when investigated carefully" and "evidence for gods is really weak" and so on, so you've picked these more modest-sounding mathematics-looking terms to use instead. Top tip: if you're going to do that, it gives the game away a bit if in the very next paragraph you start saying ridiculous things like "if you take things to be differentiable then you don't get the warm fuzzies of a God who specially designed you", and people will notice.
      - kergonath 2y ago
        > The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors. LOL. You’re just cargo culting philosophy now, with a thin veneer of sciencey-sounding jargon. 1) An axiom is not an article of faith, it’s something on which we build a theory. Euclid’s axioms are invalid in quite a few situations and nobody loses any sleep about it. 2) The opposite of “the laws of physics never change” is “the laws of Physics can change”, not “god did it”. People would be very interested if you proved that Physics is not invariant with respect to time, because it would mean that energy is not conserved and it would open massive possibilities from a theoretical point of view. That would be much more impactful than most Nobel prizes in the last 60-odd years. 3) There is plenty of “non-differentiable physical behaviour” with invariant laws of Physics. No need for any creator. > There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists You fail to even allude to what this middle ground would be. Science itself would be fine with the time invariant being violated. A lot of laws we now know would be wrong, but science itself would not have any more problem than when we realised that the Galilean transformation of velocities was not actually true. Also, “differentiable but non-constant mechanisms” is just meaningless babble. > but this is a rarely embraced territory For a simple reason: it is a straw man and nobody actually believes what you are attacking (mostly because it is meaningless). > you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future. You seem to be assuming that everyone shares your philosophical system, just swapping “science” for “god”. It is not the case. We do not need warm fuzzies or cool satisfaction. And we do not get any particular pleasure from the fact that any god that is not simply a hands-off creator is exceedingly implausible. You believe in whatever you tant to, and it’s fine. Do not assume that we are like you are.
        explaininjs 2y ago
        1. I mean axioms we take as fact when establishing a world view. 2. It can’t be proven that they are time invariant, that’s what you take on belief. 3. That’s not what I’m referring to. I’m referring to the laws themselves suddenly changing, not the state of a given particle suddenly changing. If you don’t understand point 3 there’s not much more to say. If you did you’d understand a lot of the other things you don’t at the moment, for instance what it might mean for a function to be differentiable but not constant. Contrast G changing over spacetime as can be described by a differentiable function vs a constant vs stepwise at the will of the creator.
    - callalex 2y ago
      A strawman made up by religious fundamentalists so that they can feel superior to others.
      - explaininjs 2y ago
        No… it’s simply the worldview opposite creationism. Any assertions of feelings of superiority are very certainly projections. It’s interesting that my entire argument in this thread has been equivalence, but people want to interpret it as some sort of superiority thing.
        callalex 2y ago
        Following imperical studies is not a world view though, you’re making that part up which is why I dismissed it as a strawman.
        explaininjs 2y ago
        To the extent there are empirical studies demonstrating evolution, I and many creationists besides me believe them too. Where the faith of evolutionists lies is in taking those studies showing the most minuscule changes then saying “look, small changes have occurred by random mutation. we know of no other mechanism by which anything might occur, therefore this is how everything was created! what, you don’t trust the science?? heresy!”
  - gjm11 2y ago
    I think the term you're looking for is "scientism". In so far as "evolutionism" means anything, it means "believing in something like Darwinian evolution", which (1) is more specific than what I think you're going for and (2) is not the kind of meta-level position you're talking about. (I also think that most complaints of this science-is-just-another-religion kind are rubbish, but that's a more controversial matter and I will not further derail this thread onto it.)
    - explaininjs 2y ago
      No, “evolutionism” is actually the most correct characterization. The quip about scientology was meant to caricaturise the belief more than anything. Your claims 1 and 2 are both incorrect. Creationists and Evolutionists can both agree that scientific process creates good results and is a generally well-reasoned approach to learning about the current state of the universe and making predictions for the future. Where they disagree is the extent to which this is true, especially as it relates to the ability of those predictions to track reality going forward and backward in time, but that’s more covered in a sibling comment.
      - gjm11 2y ago
        What creationists and evolutionists (as such) disagree about is not some broad question about the philosophy of knowledge, though doubtless most creationists and most evolutionists disagree about those too. What they disagree about is the specific question of how human life on earth came to be the way it is. "Evolutionism" doesn't mean "believing that science is always right" or "believing that science is capable of answering questions about things other than repeatable experiments" or anything of the sort. Nor does it mean, as you put it elsewhere in this thread, "an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws". (Believing in those things might make someone more likely to be an evolutionist[1], but if that's enough reason for you to call them "evolutionism" then you'd better also be prepared to call being white "wealth" and being tall "playing basketball" and so forth.) [1] But one doesn't have to believe those things in order to be an evolutionist, and I fear you're engaging in the widespread but unjustifiable practice of seeing that someone disagrees with you, thinking "what cognitive flaw might lead them to be wrong in that way?", picking an answer, and assuming it's right. "Evolutionism" means "believing in evolution" or sometimes "believing that evolution is responsible for such-and-such particular things". (And sometimes some other related things, like "believing that evolution isn't just a consequence of physical laws but that Progress is somehow built into the fabric of the universe" or "applying the ideas of evolution to particular fields", but those aren't the meaning we're discussing here.) (This isn't some idiosyncratic usage of the word "evolutionism"; every dictionary I've looked in agrees that this is how it's used.)
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - Slyfox33 2y ago
    Sorry buddy, evolution is a fact.
    - explaininjs 2y ago
      Parts are, parts aren’t. If you aren’t able to specify exactly what you believe with regard to it, there’s not much more to say.
      - danparsonson 2y ago
        > Parts are, parts aren’t >...specify exactly... Go ahead then! You still haven't said anything of any substance.
        explaininjs 2y ago
        See the rest of the thread for people who understand the basic concept of debate. It’s not my job to make that persons argument for them.
- mistermann 2y ago
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BeFlatXIII 2y ago
What's your opinion of the copy machine polygraph scene from the opening of The Wire's final season?
- krferriter 2y ago
  That was a pretty accurate presentation of how polygraph machine testing works. The machine isn't doing anything useful in terms of determining if what is being said is true or not.
ghostpepper 2y ago
Doesn't the polygraph machine just play a role similar to "the manager" in a used car negotiation? Just like the salesman can leave the room, get a coffee, never actually talk to anyone, and come back in and say "Sorry the manager says I can't go that low" and lots of people will buy it - the polygraph interviewer is "saying" to the interviewee (in not so many words) "sorry pal, I'd love to believe you, but the machine says you're lying - my hands are tied" Seems like it's a useful prop for manipulating people, and in that role it really is effective.
- cainxinth 2y ago
  > Seems like it's a useful prop for manipulating people, and in that role it really is effective. Similar to e-meters in Scientology.

jajko 2y ago

[flagged]

explaininjs 2y ago
[flagged]
- danparsonson 2y ago
  What's "evolutionism"?
  - explaininjs 2y ago
    The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors. There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists, but this is a rarely embraced territory: you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future.
    - gjm11 2y ago
      People sometimes complain about "motte-and-bailey" rhetoric, where what you argue for explicitly is much more unassuming than what you really believe. I have rarely seen so spectacular an example. Motte: "there might be non-differentiable phenomena in physics". (Note that e.g. anyone who believes that "wavefunction collapse" in quantum physics is an actual real thing believes in non-differentiable phenomena; so does anyone who thinks that inside black holes there are actual singularities rather than merely places where general relativity breaks down and something more complicated happens; so does anyone who thinks that the smooth-looking stuff we seem to observe arises from some combinatorial underlying structure like a cellular automaton or some kind of constantly-evolving network of vertices and edges and whatnot.) Bailey: literal freakin' creationism. (Complete with "a God who specially designed you". Something in the world might not be differentiable, therefore there is a God who specially designed you. Gosh!) As I said elsewhere in this thread: evolutionism means belief in evolution, or belief that evolution happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. And creationism means belief in creation, or belief that creation happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. These are not, even slightly, the same thing as whether or not some functions describing the universe might be non-differentiable. Also, "non-differentiable" is not, even slightly, the same as "not time invariant". E.g., the function y = cos(exp(-x)) + exp(-x) cos(x^2) is not-time-invariant on both large and small scales, but it's differentiable, analytic even. And "x is a continuous function of t, and (dx/dt)^2 = 1 at all but a discrete set of points" is as time-invariant a law as you might care to mention, but almost all its solutions have places where they aren't differentiable."
      - explaininjs 2y ago
        You clearly missed the paragraph where I very explicitly talked about the time variant differentiable middle ground? That’s surprising, it’s the majority of the content. Regardless, I’m not talking about functions describing the universal state, I’m talking one layer up from that, those that describe how that state changes, including any instantaneous events. Does the cat instantaneously die at any given second with the same probability, or does something intervene in the one second it does that did not exist in any of the others?
        gjm11 2y ago
        I didn't miss the paragraph, but it seemed (and still seems) fundamentally confused to me. [EDITED to add:] I do agree that when I said "X and Y are clearly not the same thing" I should have added something along the lines of "I see that after treating them as the same thing you say that technically they're different but hardly anyone embraces just one of them, but I don't think the paragraph where you talk about that makes much sense". Sorry about that. In any case, it's rather a side issue; "nondifferentiable things obviously don't imply a god who specially designed you" was the more important point, and one your response doesn't address at all. Why would there be a "time variant differentiable middle ground" but not a "time invariant nondifferentiable middle ground"? Why would differentiability imply no God? (You think a god could intervene in the universe but not in a differentiable way??) For that matter, why would nondifferentiability imply a God? (Maybe nondifferentiable things happen that are just random noise.) Why would having "time-variant" phenomena stop you using science to extrapolate to the past or future? A time-varying law can be expressed as a time-invariant law about time-varying functions. So I suppose when you say "time-variant" you mean something like "varying with time in a way that cannot be described scientifically. But the real-work here is in the "cannot be described scientifically" bit, not the "varying with time" bit. If you had time-invariant behaviour that was beyond scientific description, that would block grandiose scientific ambitions too. I think that when you say "non-differentiability" you mean "divine intervention", and when you say "time-variant" you mean "fundamentally inaccessible to science", but you know that if you say what you actually mean then people will be all "science demonstrably works really well" and "claims of divine intervention keep not checking out when investigated carefully" and "evidence for gods is really weak" and so on, so you've picked these more modest-sounding mathematics-looking terms to use instead. Top tip: if you're going to do that, it gives the game away a bit if in the very next paragraph you start saying ridiculous things like "if you take things to be differentiable then you don't get the warm fuzzies of a God who specially designed you", and people will notice.
    - kergonath 2y ago
      > The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors. LOL. You’re just cargo culting philosophy now, with a thin veneer of sciencey-sounding jargon. 1) An axiom is not an article of faith, it’s something on which we build a theory. Euclid’s axioms are invalid in quite a few situations and nobody loses any sleep about it. 2) The opposite of “the laws of physics never change” is “the laws of Physics can change”, not “god did it”. People would be very interested if you proved that Physics is not invariant with respect to time, because it would mean that energy is not conserved and it would open massive possibilities from a theoretical point of view. That would be much more impactful than most Nobel prizes in the last 60-odd years. 3) There is plenty of “non-differentiable physical behaviour” with invariant laws of Physics. No need for any creator. > There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists You fail to even allude to what this middle ground would be. Science itself would be fine with the time invariant being violated. A lot of laws we now know would be wrong, but science itself would not have any more problem than when we realised that the Galilean transformation of velocities was not actually true. Also, “differentiable but non-constant mechanisms” is just meaningless babble. > but this is a rarely embraced territory For a simple reason: it is a straw man and nobody actually believes what you are attacking (mostly because it is meaningless). > you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future. You seem to be assuming that everyone shares your philosophical system, just swapping “science” for “god”. It is not the case. We do not need warm fuzzies or cool satisfaction. And we do not get any particular pleasure from the fact that any god that is not simply a hands-off creator is exceedingly implausible. You believe in whatever you tant to, and it’s fine. Do not assume that we are like you are.
      - explaininjs 2y ago
        1. I mean axioms we take as fact when establishing a world view. 2. It can’t be proven that they are time invariant, that’s what you take on belief. 3. That’s not what I’m referring to. I’m referring to the laws themselves suddenly changing, not the state of a given particle suddenly changing. If you don’t understand point 3 there’s not much more to say. If you did you’d understand a lot of the other things you don’t at the moment, for instance what it might mean for a function to be differentiable but not constant. Contrast G changing over spacetime as can be described by a differentiable function vs a constant vs stepwise at the will of the creator.
  - callalex 2y ago
    A strawman made up by religious fundamentalists so that they can feel superior to others.
    - explaininjs 2y ago
      No… it’s simply the worldview opposite creationism. Any assertions of feelings of superiority are very certainly projections. It’s interesting that my entire argument in this thread has been equivalence, but people want to interpret it as some sort of superiority thing.
      - callalex 2y ago
        Following imperical studies is not a world view though, you’re making that part up which is why I dismissed it as a strawman.
        explaininjs 2y ago
        To the extent there are empirical studies demonstrating evolution, I and many creationists besides me believe them too. Where the faith of evolutionists lies is in taking those studies showing the most minuscule changes then saying “look, small changes have occurred by random mutation. we know of no other mechanism by which anything might occur, therefore this is how everything was created! what, you don’t trust the science?? heresy!”
- gjm11 2y ago
  I think the term you're looking for is "scientism". In so far as "evolutionism" means anything, it means "believing in something like Darwinian evolution", which (1) is more specific than what I think you're going for and (2) is not the kind of meta-level position you're talking about. (I also think that most complaints of this science-is-just-another-religion kind are rubbish, but that's a more controversial matter and I will not further derail this thread onto it.)
  - explaininjs 2y ago
    No, “evolutionism” is actually the most correct characterization. The quip about scientology was meant to caricaturise the belief more than anything. Your claims 1 and 2 are both incorrect. Creationists and Evolutionists can both agree that scientific process creates good results and is a generally well-reasoned approach to learning about the current state of the universe and making predictions for the future. Where they disagree is the extent to which this is true, especially as it relates to the ability of those predictions to track reality going forward and backward in time, but that’s more covered in a sibling comment.
    - gjm11 2y ago
      What creationists and evolutionists (as such) disagree about is not some broad question about the philosophy of knowledge, though doubtless most creationists and most evolutionists disagree about those too. What they disagree about is the specific question of how human life on earth came to be the way it is. "Evolutionism" doesn't mean "believing that science is always right" or "believing that science is capable of answering questions about things other than repeatable experiments" or anything of the sort. Nor does it mean, as you put it elsewhere in this thread, "an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws". (Believing in those things might make someone more likely to be an evolutionist[1], but if that's enough reason for you to call them "evolutionism" then you'd better also be prepared to call being white "wealth" and being tall "playing basketball" and so forth.) [1] But one doesn't have to believe those things in order to be an evolutionist, and I fear you're engaging in the widespread but unjustifiable practice of seeing that someone disagrees with you, thinking "what cognitive flaw might lead them to be wrong in that way?", picking an answer, and assuming it's right. "Evolutionism" means "believing in evolution" or sometimes "believing that evolution is responsible for such-and-such particular things". (And sometimes some other related things, like "believing that evolution isn't just a consequence of physical laws but that Progress is somehow built into the fabric of the universe" or "applying the ideas of evolution to particular fields", but those aren't the meaning we're discussing here.) (This isn't some idiosyncratic usage of the word "evolutionism"; every dictionary I've looked in agrees that this is how it's used.)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Slyfox33 2y ago
  Sorry buddy, evolution is a fact.
  - explaininjs 2y ago
    Parts are, parts aren’t. If you aren’t able to specify exactly what you believe with regard to it, there’s not much more to say.
    - danparsonson 2y ago
      > Parts are, parts aren’t >...specify exactly... Go ahead then! You still haven't said anything of any substance.
      - explaininjs 2y ago
        See the rest of the thread for people who understand the basic concept of debate. It’s not my job to make that persons argument for them.
mistermann 2y ago
[flagged]

BeFlatXIII 2y ago

What's your opinion of the copy machine polygraph scene from the opening of The Wire's final season?

krferriter 2y ago
That was a pretty accurate presentation of how polygraph machine testing works. The machine isn't doing anything useful in terms of determining if what is being said is true or not.

ghostpepper 2y ago

Doesn't the polygraph machine just play a role similar to "the manager" in a used car negotiation? Just like the salesman can leave the room, get a coffee, never actually talk to anyone, and come back in and say "Sorry the manager says I can't go that low" and lots of people will buy it - the polygraph interviewer is "saying" to the interviewee (in not so many words) "sorry pal, I'd love to believe you, but the machine says you're lying - my hands are tied" Seems like it's a useful prop for manipulating people, and in that role it really is effective.

cainxinth 2y ago
> Seems like it's a useful prop for manipulating people, and in that role it really is effective. Similar to e-meters in Scientology.