I chose Dr Spicer’s hypothesis carefully. He is an indisputable physicist, and his hypothesis is therefore physically viable...
No. It is physically viable only when demonstrated so to be by the principles of scientific methodology, which Spicer should have known to do yet did not do. You presented his credentials only and demanded that we accept his work therefore as something that merited an affirmative effort at refutation. You further insinuated that rejection of his claims as unproven was not ripe until such an effort had been made.
That is the epitome of a fallacious appeal to authority. It's bad enough that you fell for it. It's worse when you encourage other skeptics against their will to fall for it.
The above constitutes a skeptical examination, and refutation of, Spicer’s hypothesis.
Yes, we get it. Your stated goal here is to raise the level of discourse. Unfortunately you do that far too little by example and far too often by pretentious admonition and ambiguously worded twaddle. Your methods and arguments aren't as exemplary as you perhaps believe them to be.
I have been a skeptic writer for decades. I've been quite successful at it, having appeared in peer-reviewed print, the mainstream press, and on television. I'll keep my own counsel on what it means to be a skeptic. Your goal is laudable, but you've let your ego get in the way. You aren't objectively as good a skeptic as you profess to be. So when you take your colleagues to task in a condescending manner, you're only hurting your own credibility.
Further, it is important that skeptics are not too arrogant. Just because an opponent holds a different belief does not mean he is an idiot.
Straw man. What one believes is not so important to skepticism as why one believes it, and how forthrightly one is able to articulate those reasons amid criticism. What we have here, in the form of most fringe claimants who drop by -- and certainly in the persona of Jabba, are people who believe things for reasons other than what they say. They're not looking for reasoned debate. They're looking for something that superficially resembles it. They want to validate the pseudo-intellectual veneer they've pasted onto conclusions drawn for other reasons, and they need an audience's help to do it.
It's a rhetorical game, not a debate. When asked to account for their belief, they embark on the shenanigans of evasion and deceit that we have seen. Mockery for that attempt is not altogether inappropriate, because what it merits is strong disapproval, not coddling.
With that in mind, I contend rather that skeptics should not be too acquiescent. It is important that a skeptic realize the methods used by fringe theorists to forestall a meaningful test of their claims.
You do not do this, and in fact in this thread you have actively aided Jabba's efforts to prevent his claims from meeting the scrutiny they deserve.
You describe at length the means you used to examine and refute Spicer. What you did, however, was let Spicer reverse his burden of proof and place it on you, so that all he had to do was speculate in the language of science without providing any proof for it. That's bad skepticism. Your acquiescence of Spicer's blatant pseudoscience even spilled over into your haughty admonition that your colleagues here needed to delve more deeply into his work before dismissing him. But you played right into Spicer's game and validated his non-effort.
In fact, to a man, your colleagues here got the answer right. The right answer is that it doesn't become science until Spicer undertakes the well-prescribed effort to make it so, and obligates no rigorous counter explanation until then.
You have been so acquiescent to Jabba that he can't seem to see that you're criticizing him. He's even asking you to argue on his behalf. It's bad enough when one's approach is so toothless that spectators can't determine which side of the debate you're on. It's abysmal when you're arguments are so wishy-washy your opponents mistake you for an ally.
Given Jabba’s Bayesian equation, of which I knew very little...
What you did was arrogantly to suppose that a few minutes' Googling would provide you with enough information not only to address Jabba's proposal but to attempt to correct people who already understand and use the science. That's eminently poor skepticism. It's no better than fringe argumentation.
You
still don't understand the difference between Bayesian statistics and classical statistics, and that handicap has pervaded all your misguided attempts to set us all right. I'm not interested in a recitation of the various ways you misunderstood my rebuttals to Jabba. What matters is that I had the right approach to his nonsense from the start, but your self-aggrandizing efforts to referee your fellow skeptics played right into Jabba's rhetorical game.
Fringe theorists have frequently turned to Bayes. They pretend that his methods convert beliefs and assumptions into fact, and in your ignorance you expressly validated that ploy in Jabba's case. In a more general sense, fringe theorists often quibble over some minute or tangential aspect of their claims, in order to distract from their inability to prevail on the weightier matters such as evidence. This is why Jabba went off on his Bayesian tangent, and you played right into his hands by spending three pages or so fumbling about with your own misunderstandings, all the while validating the errant presumption that if only Jabba could get his formula and multiplication right, he'd have made a valid point.
Yet your colleagues, again nearly to a man, had the right answer from the start: Bayes is not appropriate to the question he was trying to solve, and that simply pulling numbers from thin air doesn't create fact no matter how "rigorously" the math is done.
I remember your most recent arrival, when you disputed the claims that the image's arms were too long. You said you yourself had been unable to accurately derive arm measurements, hence no claims of lengthy arms could have a factual basis. I asked what your training and experience was in anthropometrics, such that you could make this claim for everyone. You bristled at the question, and now I see why. If you want to be a good skeptic, do not arrogantly profess expertise you do not have and cannot demonstrate. That's your ego getting in the way of either a sound argument or a good education.
In short, your overly acquiescent approach clearly isn't working.
What you mistake for arrogance among your colleagues is simply the no-nonsense approach that must be taken in the face of the intransigence Jabba and his ilk display. It is not the least arrogant to place reality squarely in the face of arguments intended from the start to be duplicitous and evasive. Nor is it arrogant to speak knowledgeably and confidently from expertise one legitimately has.
Anyway, It's been fun but I think I'll give it a rest for a while. I thank particularly slowvehicle, JayUtah and RC Hans, among others, for often appreciating what I was up to, and for those who never understood, no hard feelings.
Your thanks are welcome, but no, I never knew what you were up to. Even when I thought you were legitimately trying to improve the argument, I never agreed that it was actually working. When and if you return from your flounce, let it be on not quite so tall a horse.
