Fail Quotes

[BlameThe1st]

http://valleywag.gawker.com/larry-page-says-when-machines-take-our-jobs-itll-feel-1601133907

Good grief! This article and the comments reek of the trite "machines create unemployement" fallacy. Don't these idiots realize that this arguement has already been debunked more than 50 years ago?

[yt]gjC-S6pobE0[/yt]

[Travis Retriever]

http://valleywag.gawker.com/larry-page-says-when-machines-take-our-jobs-itll-feel-1601133907

Good grief! This article and the comments reek of the trite "machines create unemployement" fallacy. Don't these idiots realize that this arguement has already been debunked more than 50 years ago?

[yt]gjC-S6pobE0[/yt]

More than 100 years ago IIRC.  Bastiat ftw. :3

[Dallas Wildman]

And yet again, everyone forgets the prior and just focuses on the LR.

Unrelated note: why are the posts in reverse-chronological order? Makes it very distracting to read.

That's probably how it was designed, I've been chatting there since 2010, I'm used to it.

[Dallas Wildman]

... And, get this: they actually went on record to criticize the methods suggested by idiots like him and that cunt Same Harris, who clearly took a page out of Julius Streicher's handbook.

EDIT: not that I favor warrant less searches, but at least with the Israelis, one could ague there's probable cause. Which, again, says something about the logic of these people.

Where is this video/article?

[Ibrahim90]

Where is this video/article?

as mentioned, they were critisizing methods, not the person himself (just being clear here, in case I wasn't. That part afterwards was my opinion of his proposals and reasoning for such). Sources? here:

http://skift.com/2013/11/15/tsas-behavioral-detection-techniques-are-worthless-says-former-el-al-security-director/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/23/airport-security_n_4494308.html

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/25/it-was-posted-on-a-humor-site-but-this-serious-takedown-of-the-tsa-is-blistering/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/25/it-was-posted-on-a-humor-site-but-this-serious-takedown-of-the-tsa-is-blistering/

and for a lighthearted version (by the same guy):

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-reasons-tsa-sucks-a-security-experts-perspective/

it isn't direct, but they make it clear: they don't care what you look like, your religion, or what you carry, but what you do. I think Mr. Sela's quote in the third link is the most telling:

"Security needs to be done due to risk — and risk means that in Israel we don't check luggage, we check people. And I'm not talking about racial profiling here; that's a product of poor training. Regardless of race or creed, people with bombs strapped to their body behave in similar ways," Sela said.

[Travis Retriever]

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5915509/
On one hand, glad to see another furry who at least seems to lean towards anarcho capitalism.  Ditto for Maximus-Ursus (a friend of his).  *happy dance!*

But still, fail for seriously using Stef's analysis of Frozen as a justification for that.  It probably just means poor writing on part of the authors of the movie.  Also, what he's criticizing is a SEXUAL fantasy.  Since when does a sexual fantasy need tons of story/being based the rules of reality, etc?  Gimme a freakin' break, bro.

Also a bit ironic considering his fursona has a physique that would, in real life, require ideal bodybuilding genetics and injects of various steroids, growth hormone, insulin & IGF-1, thyroid hormone, and various muscle volumizers like Esiclene & Synthol and not to mention implants, as well as amazing anthropometry (such as a very high muscle to tendon length ratio and very high shoulder to hip bone ratio and a symmetrical figure with biceps that have a very large peak), etc to even be feasible in real life.  All this in addition to a good decade or two of training.  I guess hitting the genetic and drug lottery are 'feminizing' too...*shrugs*

He and others can bitch and moan about "HARD WORK!" but the fact of the matter is, most genetically typical trainees, even a decade of trying will NEVER be able to legitimately bench 300 pounds, as Casey Butt put it here:  http://www.weightrainer.net/training/rules.html (near the end of rule 17)

As did Menno here:  http://bayesianbodybuilding.com/re-predicting-your-muscular-potential/
and here:  http://bayesianbodybuilding.com/bodybuilding-vs-aesthetics/

[R.E.H.W.R.]

Joe Rogan's fans are morons. The comments are so stupid.
[vimeo]84185040[/vimeo]

[Travis Retriever]

There was a guy on one of Shane's videos saying, "All economic theories rest on oil." I'd LOVE to see him actually support this.

[Travis Retriever]

Not a major fail.  It's probably not even a fail.  But I asked Jason Fennec about his thoughts on Stef's psychology stuff, noting that I don't like when the latter goes into Social Conservative mode. (full link to the conversation here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihkp3itmpd8 it's the top thread with Jason Fennec).

This was the response I got:

"1) Your understanding of psychology is about 90 years out of date.  Psychoanalysis is an obsolete pseudoscience with about as much merit as Marxism.  The current state of psychology is cognitive behavioralism and neuropsychology.  For somebody who values empiricism so much, you seem quite fond of unfalsifiable abstractions like the "ego" or the pseudosciecne of dream interpretation.

2) Your logical positivist philosophy is also about 90 years out of date.  The Verification Principle, upon which your epistemology is obviously based, comes from the Vienna Circle.  The Verification Principle states that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable or else tautological (i.e., such that its truth arises entirely from the meanings of its terms).

When one realizes that the Verification Principle is itself neither empirically nor tautological verifiable, it utterly self destructs, completely eviscerating both your UPB argument and most of the arguments in this video.  This is also why modern scientists DO NOT use verification as part of their scientific method but, instead, use falsification and corroboration to determine contingent truth.  You may wish to read Carl Popper's /The Logic of Scientific Discovery/ and his critiques of both Marxism and Psychoanalysis.  The fallacies of both Marx and Freud are remarkably similar.

3) You continually conflate the current philosophy of science with the lunacy of postmodernism (a strictly aesthetic philosophy), mostly because you do not understand the influence Carl Popper had on modern scientific reasoning.  In science, a theory must be able to make falsifiable predictions that can be tested.  Because theories are abstractions, we never test them for absolute truth, but for absolute falsity.  If a theory, such as "a god made everything", cannot make testable predictions, then it is not scientific and cannot be discussed in scientific terms, but must be relegated into the philosophy of metaphysics, where knowledge is speculated, not contingently determined as truthful. 

Thus, when an agnostic says, "you cannot say that their is no god", he or she is being accurate, because the statement "a god exists" cannot be used to derive testable predictions.  Unless you falsify a statement, you cannot say it is false.  To do otherwise would be an absurdity.

4) The observable universe is entirety deterministic and has never been observed to be otherwise.  In fact, if you make the positive statement "God or gods do not exist", then you have no choice but to accept a deterministic universe, based entirely on causality and universal laws. 

Since humans came from a deterministic universe they must also be deterministic in nature.  To say otherwise, without strong evidence, is special pleading (Free Will is called "The Little Gods Hypothesis" for a reason).  Even worse for your position is the fact that Free Will has been falsified via fMRI studies that show people deciding what they are going to do before they become conscious of the choices they have made!  If decision making is a subconscious activity, not a conscious one, then our conscious mind is merely an observer that has the mistaken belief that it is somehow in charge of all the choices we ever make.  In fact, that is exactly what modern psychology tells us. 

5) You continually conflate epistemic questions with ethical questions.  The different branches of philosophy are each conducted differently in their own way and their respective methods not necessarily compatible.  Ethics is the calculus of behavior, with the goal of a moral outcome.  Ethical questions are not solved empirically, but rationally, similar to math.  You keep making this error largely because your do not understand the evolutionary origins of human morality, and how this relates to our being a social species. 

6) Calling people who disagree with your out-of-date scientific understanding and self-destructing philosophy "cowards" is so childishly arrogant that it could only be described as sophomoric.  Your vain indulgence in false expertise makes subscribing to you an embarrassment for your more learned listeners.  Please get over yourself."
And here be my response to that:

""When one realizes that the Verification Principle is itself neither empirically nor tautological verifiable, it utterly self destructs, completely eviscerating both your UPB argument and most of the arguments in this video." How does the VP relate to his UPB?  I found Hawkeye's explanation of UPB to be pretty solid.

"Thus, when an agnostic says, "you cannot say that their is no god", he or she is being accurate, because the statement "a god exists" cannot be used to derive testable predictions.  Unless you falsify a statement, you cannot say it is false.  To do otherwise would be an absurdity."
Sounds like an attempt to shift the burden of proof/forgetting the null hypothesis.

"4) The observable universe is entirety deterministic and has never been observed to be otherwise."
Actually no.  Quantum Mechanics, e.g. the Double Slit experiment and the Casimir effect being being empirical/observed examples of non-deterministic, probabilistic nature.
As for free will, I like Hawkeye and Stef's thoughts on that.  If I don't have free will, I can't be said to be responsible for my actions because I didn't "decide" or "will" them.  So holding a person responsible for them is--through actions--saying/agreeing that they have free will.  Even if it's not 100% true, it's close enough. As Hawkeye says, If it's true, then you can come reasonable close to predicting human behavior like, say, in a market, with near 100% accuracy like we can the motion of planets and stars or other physical systems.  Hasn't happened.  Then there's the issue of quantum mechanics and our brains being biochemcial computers operating at that probabilistic level.

As for what I think Stef does right...I found his proof of property rights to be bulletproof.  Same for his thoughts showing that, morality kinda has to be objective.  i.e. stealing both affirms and dis-affirms property rights, murder the right to life and slavery right to liberty, etc. "But I disagree because..." while using your free will to say so and your computer/own body/life/etc.  And you do seem to agree with the idea of self detonating statements, if only a little, based on the comments about "self destructing philosophy".  Though it could be something else.  Maybe.  Self detonating statements ftw.  How could it get more solid than that?"

Or at least it *would* have been my response, but to avoid yet another pointless flame war like the one in the thread linked below, I'd just change it to:
"Interesting.  Though I was going more for specific subjects of psychology that he got wrong (e.g. his thoughts on Frozen or other media, his thoughts on child abuse as it relates to society, his thoughts on how promiscuity can be/is bad, etc), rather than methodology, but sure, that works too. "
Bah, I've only been up for an hour.  So too early for me. X_X

So is there any truth to this "falsifying free will" stuff? And much of the stuff he talks about regarding verification/falsification, as before when he and Shane had that huge debate still strikes me as jargony gobbledygook that he doesn't know well enough to explain in a way that makes sense.  I consider myself fairly smart, so if I can't get it, chances are, it's a problem with the person explaining it.  As Shane and him might as well have been speaking in Chinese in that old thread here: https://www.bogosity.tv/forum/index.php?topic=579.0 (back when he was going by Ex_Nihil0) regarding falsification/philosophy/postmodernism/[insert either never or poorly defined bollocks here] and I would have understood just as much.  I've always thought it my fault if I didn't understand something growing up, but after 26 years on this rock, I've realized that if I honestly can't understand it, smart as I am, especially after asking/inquiring, then the person explaining it likely doesn't know it well enough to be able to explain it good or worse, knows that they're full of crap and is trying to mount a bluff.  It is what it is.  Ditto for the wiki/link Shane PMed me during that time on the subject.  It's like, guys.  If you can't explain the stuff in a way that makes sense, especially to someone who is not a pillock to begin with, then you most likely don't understand it well enough to be able to make the judgements that you are.  Simple.

And yeah, when I saw he talk about that stuff I was thinking. "Seriously dude? You're STILL banging on about this crap?"  Yeah, I'm usually pretty good with abstract/hard to understand subjects, so when I call something gobbledygook, you can take that to the bank.

[MrBogosity]

[Quoting Fennec, not Travis]

In science, a theory must be able to make falsifiable predictions that can be tested.  Because theories are abstractions, we never test them for absolute truth, but for absolute falsity.

As a Bayesian, I reject this. While I'm absolutely with Popper on the importance of falsification, it's impossible to test a theory for absolute falsity. Even if the test results falsify the hypothesis, if nothing else, you can never be absolutely 100% sure that you did the test right.

The observable universe is entirety deterministic and has never been observed to be otherwise.

This just isn't true. Quantum mechanics shows determinism to be an illusion. The universe is probabilistic, not deterministic, as determined by observing the behavior of elementary particles. But as larger structures of atoms and molecules are made, the probabilities converge on either 0 or 100%, and the universe APPEARS deterministic.

Even worse for your position is the fact that Free Will has been falsified via fMRI studies that show people deciding what they are going to do before they become conscious of the choices they have made!

People who make this statement don't understand Free Will; they're arguing against a strawman. Free Will is NOT contingent on me making the decision consciously; my subconscious mind is as much me as my conscious mind is. Which is ironic, since I strongly suspect this person would reject dualism, yet here he is making an argument that seemingly depends on it!

[Now quoting Travis]

I found Hawkeye's explanation of UPB to be pretty solid.

And if his isn't, Harry Browne's certainly is!

Sounds like an attempt to shift the burden of proof/forgetting the null hypothesis.

It's also an Argument from Incredulity: just because he can't think of a test to determine whether or not god exists doesn't mean that no one ever will! And yes, the burden of coming up with such a test is absolutely on the believer.

If I don't have free will, I can't be said to be responsible for my actions because I didn't "decide" or "will" them.  So holding a person responsible for them is--through actions--saying/agreeing that they have free will.  Even if it's not 100% true, it's close enough. As Hawkeye says, If it's true, then you can come reasonable close to predicting human behavior like, say, in a market, with near 100% accuracy like we can the motion of planets and stars or other physical systems.  Hasn't happened.  Then there's the issue of quantum mechanics and our brains being biochemcial computers operating at that probabilistic level.

My belief (and, if I understand it correctly, yours and Hawkeye's) would more closely be considered compatabilist (an option he seems to be ignoring). The whole idea of coming up with a scientific model is so we can overlay it on a part of the universe and use it to explain what's going on and make predictions about it. Free will absolutely works as such a model, even if what's going on is technically something else.

This reminds me of the people who get all uppity about there being no such thing as centrifugal force. Yes, the "force" behind it is just inertia, but when you're trying to resolve physical equations in a rotating reference frame you HAVE to come up with a centrifugal component!

I think the whole determinism argument is self-defeating anyway. Should we punish someone for a crime when he doesn't have free will? Well, if we do punish him, that wasn't OUR choice, because WE don't have free will! The whole concept, as far as I can see, is completely useless.

[Travis Retriever]

I think the whole determinism argument is self-defeating anyway. Should we punish someone for a crime when he doesn't have free will? Well, if we do punish him, that wasn't OUR choice, because WE don't have free will! The whole concept, as far as I can see, is completely useless.

For starters, thank you for your input.   Also, the quoted bit was more or less my thoughts on it too.  Thanks.
And yeah, it seems Bayesian thinking eludes yet another skeptic.  As absolute certainty would be a probability of 1 and absolute falsity would be a probably of 0.  Which is not allowed.  But yeah, as you yourself have said, the human brain just doesn't seem to be wired to easily understand things like probability and statistics (granted, the public schools aren't helping much in that regard, but I digress).  And yeah,  you've got me curious, what did Harry Browne have to say on this matter of morality?

[MrBogosity]

And yeah, it seems Bayesian thinking eludes yet another skeptic.

Skimming through that old thread, I'm not really sure he's a skeptic.

And yeah,  you've got me curious, what did Harry Browne have to say on this matter of morality?

He over and over again made the case for (for example) how it's objectively better to be an honest person, even if everyone around you is dishonest. He did it so often it's hard to find any one primary source for it, other than How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.

[Travis Retriever]

Skimming through that old thread, I'm not really sure he's a skeptic.

Wouldn't surprise me.

He over and over again made the case for (for example) how it's objectively better to be an honest person, even if everyone around you is dishonest. He did it so often it's hard to find any one primary source for it, other than How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.

I really need to read that book. I haven't because, at least for the first several pages, it strikes me as very redundant/constantly repeating himself and old-man-esque speak.  Like he took a speech or two and tried making it into a book.

[evensgrey]

There was a guy on one of Shane's videos saying, "All economic theories rest on oil." I'd LOVE to see him actually support this.

Particularly since economics as a discipline goes back to well before oil was anything other than a damn nuisance.

[Travis Retriever]

Skimming through that old thread, I'm not really sure he's a skeptic.

He over and over again made the case for (for example) how it's objectively better to be an honest person, even if everyone around you is dishonest. He did it so often it's hard to find any one primary source for it, other than How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.

Weee, more fail-ish stuff from that thread:

"It is an inductive statement. We have always seen the universe to be deterministic. If you claim free will, you have the burden of proof because of previous observations. Intuition is not proof."  Um, hello? Quantum Mechanics? AKA, the most proven scientific theory second only to Evolution by Natural Selection?

"+Boromir Smith Imagination is where hunches come from.

But science doesn't work on hunches.  Every hunch has to be tested in order to be demonstrated.  That's how science works.  Once something has been demonstrated, the burden of proof shifts to those who deny or reject the claim. 

This isn't dogmatic.  You are confusing dogmatism with a mental algorithm.  In order for something to be dogmatic, you need unsubstantiated facts that cannot be questioned.  "
You mean like yours and ignoring quantum mechanics? Sheesh.