Continued: (Ed) Atheism Plus/Free Thought Blogs (FTB)

Imagine if atheists still held up Robert Ingersoll in the way some skeptics talk about Sagan. Kill your heroes.
 
qwints said:
Imagine if atheists still held up Robert Ingersoll in the way some skeptics talk about Sagan. Kill your heroes.
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Sagan was a lot more recent than Ingersoll though.

But yes, some Sagan stuff, especially his political stuff, is rather dated. and sometimes he let his politics slip into his science in an unhealthy way, for example claiming that the Quwait war would lead to the end of the world, give or take.

Still overall great guy though. Much greater than anything that has come from the cesspit known as atheism plus.
 
colander said:
If you're interested in going wilderness camping, then you have to be prepared for bear encounters, too.

Does that mean that it's not acceptable to bear-proof your encampments?

I note that you've chosen to post your argument on the JREF Forum, the moderation policy of which expressly forbids the use of insults and seeks to remove them whenever and wherever they appear. Does your choice to post on a forum where rules against incivility are aggressively enforced mean that you are not interested in honest and open discourse?

I don't think that actively seeking to circumvent the possibility of being subjected to personal insults is an action that is in any way inconsistent with "being prepared" for them.
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Just out of curiosity, are you of the belief that this very civil discussion would be permitted to take place on the A+ board or in an FTB comment section?
 
Navigator said:
1391780_572732616126235_1224428607_n.jpg


Elevatorgator
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hehehe.

Also I love how this video probably has nothing to do with Elevator Gate, but it makes be laugh every time.
I always find it funny how racism is typically seen as unacceptable but as soon as we change paranoia about race to just "men", suddenly people have a hard time noticing the sexism.

 
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Humes fork said:
Do you know what a problem with Carl Sagan was? C'mon, it's atheism plus and/or Pharyngula, what could it be?

That he was such a white male!

I should probably stop reading that blog. PZ Myers went crazy, and will probably remain so.
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I wish that people would take that advice and stop listening to boring old white guys.
Well, one boring old white guy, at least.

So racist. So sexist. So bigoted. So predictable.
 
Humes fork said:
Do you know what a problem with Carl Sagan was? C'mon, it's atheism plus and/or Pharyngula, what could it be?

That he was such a white male!

I should probably stop reading that blog. PZ Myers went crazy, and will probably remain so.
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I don't see the issue here.

Myers doesn't see Sagan as a personal inspiration, and thinks that we shouldn't idolize people. Well, he's right. And it has nothing to do with anything Sagan did. If you find other people more inspiring, then...well, that's that.

The fact that Sagan was a white guy seems to be your problem, not Myers'.
 
Mumbles said:
I don't see the issue here.

Myers doesn't see Sagan as a personal inspiration, and thinks that we shouldn't idolize people. Well, he's right. And it has nothing to do with anything Sagan did. If you find other people more inspiring, then...well, that's that.

The fact that Sagan was a white guy seems to be your problem, not Myers'.
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I'm not referring to what Myers wrote, but to the comment I linked to.
 
Humes fork said:
Do you know what a problem with Carl Sagan was? C'mon, it's atheism plus and/or Pharyngula, what could it be?

That he was such a white male!

I should probably stop reading that blog. PZ Myers went crazy, and will probably remain so.
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Brilliant!

"I don’t particularly think we should ever stop talking about him, or many of the other great old white guy popularizers of science, but I’d say that we need to have people doing that stuff who are not old, white, or male and we need to be spreading the word about them at least as much as we talk about the old white guys, as [old white guy] PZ does in this post."

Square parentheses mine.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
No comment on the research you cited being fatally flawed?
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Nope, I was giving you the last word as I found your criticism persuasive. The lack of defined inclusion and exclusion criteria means a meta-analysis is simply cherry-picking. I can't find a comparable valid meta-analysis to cite, and I don't have the qualification, time or resources to conduct one myself. I think it's fair to say that there are numerous experimental and observational studies showing violent video games increase aggression while others show no result. My guess is that these studies are detecting a real effect, but I can understand how you might disagree.
 
squealpiggy said:
Brilliant!

"I don’t particularly think we should ever stop talking about him, or many of the other great old white guy popularizers of science, but I’d say that we need to have people doing that stuff who are not old, white, or male and we need to be spreading the word about them at least as much as we talk about the old white guys, as [old white guy] PZ does in this post."

Square parentheses mine.
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What's so funny? Don't you know that you can't be sexist or racist towards men or white people? Its like literally by definition impossible because of oppression institutional power dynamics privilege etc. Don't you even feminism 101?
 
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qwints said:
Nope, I was giving you the last word as I found your criticism persuasive.
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Fair enough.

I think it's fair to say that there are numerous experimental and observational studies showing violent video games increase aggression while others show no result.
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Increasing aggression short-term is trivial. What needs to be demonstrated is long-term causal effects. As yet there are no valid studies I know of which demonstrate this.
 
qwints said:
My guess is that these studies are detecting a real effect, but I can understand how you might disagree.
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I differ because in my view, short-term responses to a stimulus are extremely poor markers for long-term social outcomes.

Studies of pornography show that men who have just watched porn are more likely to give responses to paper questionnaire's consistent with views sympathetic to rape, then men who have not just watched porn. Yet if anything, the free availability of porn decreases the sexual assault rate. What you need to do in order to get at the truth is look at the long-term, society-wide level and see what association there is between porn access and sexual assault victimisation.

In the same way we don't know what effect violent video games have on the actual rate of interpersonal violence until someone does a large-scale, long-term, apples-to-apples comparison of places that differ in access to violent video games to see what the association is between violent video game availability and assault victimisation.

However we do know that access to violent video games is trending up fast, and the video games are getting more and more realistic, while actual interpersonal violence rates keep falling. So if there's a positive link, it has to be a very weak one.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
However we do know that access to violent video games is trending up fast, and the video games are getting more and more realistic, while actual interpersonal violence rates keep falling. So if there's a positive link, it has to be a very weak one.
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Even the two meta-analyses, which were biased towards finding in favour of a causal link, only found an extremely weak correlation.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Even the two meta-analyses, which were biased towards finding in favour of a causal link, only found an extremely weak correlation.
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No kidding...I could never get away with such poor correlations in molecular work. Heck I have to hit about 98.5% identity just to say a 16s ribosomal RNA gene fragment gives a positive genus/species identification.
 
FWIW, I don't think the studies are evidence of increases in societal or personal levels of violence, I do think there are studies that show evidence of increases in aggression.
 
If you mean long-term, then could you link to some of these studies? Because I've never seen one which supported such a claim.
 
Edx said:
What's so funny? Don't you know that you can't be sexist or racist towards men or white people? Its like literally by definition impossible because of oppression institutional power dynamics privilege etc. Don't you even feminism 101?
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Hey I only feminism 69 if you know what I'm saying ;)

You're a chick, right? :p
 
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