What Extremist Views Do You Admit To Having?

[epepke]

Vegetarians want something to cook on the grill other than plain veggies. So they slopped some ground-up veggies together with a coagulating agent and formed it into a burger. I suspect there are also hot dog-shaped coagulated veggie blobs.

Yes, I held some in my hand just the other day. They look just like ground fat with some coagulated blood, which is approximately what hot dogs are.

 

[Melendwyr]

And I think you weren't reading between the lines very well.

I read between the lines just fine. I don't think you're titling your threads very well.

If I am mad and showing it, it no longer matters if I am right.

Incorrect. Being angry is not an inherently undesirable state. Anger has its functions and uses, just as all the emotions do.

 

[mumblethrax]

Functional analysis is the heart of behaviorism.

Cognitive scientists have a different understand of what functional analysis is.

Merely inferring causation after the fact is what is circular. Tell me how one has ever either manipulated or measured the mind without manipulating environment and measuring behavior, and you will have made your point.

This is where I think radical behaviorism is at its most absurd. To erect so impermeable a barrier against inference renders the greatest theoretical advances in the history of science invalid. Dalton was wrong to propose his atomic theory without observation of the atom, Darwin could not actually describe traits as passed from parent to offspring without understanding of genetics, and it was a mistake for Einstein to propose relativity without direct evidence. As Chomsky quipped, behaviorism would render physics the science of reading meters. It is impossible to directly measure the mind, because mind is an emergent property of brain. It is nevertheless useful to speak of cognition, and of cognitive function as information processing. It is quite possible, given this, to generate and test falsifiable hypotheses which support the foundational assumptions of cognition. Miller's experiments about the effects of representation on short-term memory leap to mind. Observation of the panicked behavior of captive chimpanzees exposed to snakes for the first time also implies innate cognitive structures. Both of these can be seen as reactions to environment, but only in the most trivial sense; something else is clearly going on.

And please, don't think behaviorism is stuck at Watson's year--modern behaviorists recognise private behavior such as thinking and remembering; they just think of them as behaviors, not as "mind".

I don't, I think it's stuck on Skinner. His consignment of thought, feeling, belief, memory and so on to behavior, external to his black box of physiology, is an arbitrary and specious assumption driven an invalid induction, not science. Nothing about this assumption is obvious or intuitive, and there is no way to show that thought is strictly behavioral, and never itself directly causative.

Both are quite obviously still there, and quite influential. Eschewing inner causes in favor of environmental causes, for instance, is at the heart of virtually any application of social or cognitive psychology.

Herein lies the difference between theory and application. I'm not hostile to application; it's vital to create a body of evidence from which theory can be inferred. But radical behaviorists do seem quite hostile to theory, for reasons unknown.

Honestly, I had thought behaviorism had reconciled itself with cognition to some degree, which is why I see your comments as something of a throwback.

 

[Luke T.]

Another extremist view of mine: Any patient who comes into a doctor's office or hospital, for whatever reason, should be tested for STD's. I believe (heard) this was actually common practice several decades ago, and helped to knock back syphilis. Nowadays, civil liberty advocates oppose it.

And there is still a dark part of me that is in favor of people with sexually transmittable fatal diseases (AIDS) should be tattooed on a discreet location of their body.

 

[Belz...]

...An extremist view ?

I'm allergic to stupidity. Everytime I'm subjected to a person or idea I find idiotic, I feel obligated to point it out to that person. It's gotten me into all kinds of trouble in the past.

Belz...

 

[Dorian Gray]

My extreme view is.... I don't think large breasts are always attractive. There, I said it.

 

[Babe from Missouri]

My extreme view is.... I don't think large breasts are always attractive. There, I said it.

And that's something that a woman built like a 14-yr-old girl can't hear enough.

I'm for extreme welfare reform. I may start a thread later and go into that, I'm interested in everyone's view.

 

[Beerina]

7. I too felt exhillaration when watching 9/11 on TV, and exasperation at the reporters wondering where this "explosion" (the first one) had come from when you clearly saw a plane fly into the building. I get excited at most natural disasters, especially when you can't actually see the human suffering. Doesn't mean I feel good about it, though.

This is a natural product of evolution. Animals that didn't get all excited when something dangerous was happening tended to not survive to the next generation too well.

Also keep in mind that laughing and smiling are a biological response to nervousness.

Nothing to see here, move along, move along...

 

[Beerina]

Originally Posted by Mercutio

3) There is no free will.

4) "Mind" as a causal entity is an illusion

Strangely, I don't consider those extremist, but I guess most people would.

Ditto on no free will and consciousness is an illusion.

Actually, I have yet to even see a definition of free will that doesn't ultimately boil down to determinism, or determinism with some random quantum influences.

Of course, I have no problem defining free will as "the freedom to do what you want", which neatly sidesteps the issue when you think about it. Now how "what you want" comes about, that's another story.

A mind is something that evaluates inputs and produces outputs. This is deterministic. I don't see where the age-old philosophical conflict is. I press for a definition of "free will", but never get it. Some spiritual entity that...what? Just what does it do, if not process inputs and create outputs deterministically (or, worse, deterministically with random influences.) What else could it possibly be? It's a law of excluded middle thing.

 

[Beerina]

Those two anecdotes aside, it can be difficult for vegetarians eating out with friends or family. Many restaurants don't have very good vegetarian options (though that has changed in recent years) and many meat-eaters don't want to go to pure veg restaurants.

My 16 year old daughter is an ovo-lacto-processed meat vegetarian. She'll eat vegetables and meat, but only if it's ground up like hot dogs, sausage, hamburgers, Mc Nuggets, etc. She will eat chicken tenders, which are real, macroscopically unified slabs of meat, but are thickly breaded and flavored, and very occasionally, about 20% of a chicken breast from the barbeque or a thoroughly grey steak.

So she's not a pure ovo-lacto-processed meat vegetarian, but pretty close!

 

[Adrian]

I have many many extreme views. There are way too many to pick just one, so here are my top three:

1.) I refuse to include most southern states as part of the US. I group those states together as a unit that I refer to as "Christopia".

2.) I think private prayer should be allowed in school, but it should be taxed and monitored by the FCC for decency standards. It must only happen in special designated areas to protect others from the dangers of second-hand faith.

3.) I believe that a government should only be able to enact the option of war if every senior official's own children are immediately drafted to the front lines with no flak jacket.

 

[pgwenthold]

I haven't read over all the pages of this thread, but I am going to suggest this hasn't been brought up:

I believe that Major League Baseball ticket prices are significantly too low. In fact, I think that most tickets to popular events are seriously underpriced. I can't stand events where the tickets are sold out in 8 minutes.

 

[pgwenthold]

Oh, and my other one: Sometimes, $hit happens for no reason at all.

 

[Dorian Gray]

And that's something that a woman built like a 14-yr-old girl can't hear enough.

Small-breasted women don't have to wear bras - that's all I'm saying. It's sexy.

 

[shecky]

I believe nearly everyone on this thread should be executed for revealing themselves to be closeted (and not so closeted) fascists.

 

[Tez]

Extreme views I hold:

1. The laws of physics are ultimately arbitrary and not "deeply beautiful".

(Not sure I really hold this one all the way to my blackened soul, but I have some quantitative arguments showing the Hamiltonian of the universe could be pretty much anything but would still admit a "beautiful uniform and highly symmetric" description over a large range of energy scales. Part of this program is to understand why we have evolved in a way that we do see amazing beauty in nature and in our mathematical understanding of it.)

2. Randomness (and hence the need for probabilistic descriptions) is only ever a human construct and thus a function of limited human knowledge/information

(So I dont really believe in "free will" - I believe all the disconcerting feelings people have about abandoning such a notion can be dispensed with by realising that issues of computational complexity can rescue us from the notion that some uber-powerful being is able to predict our actions.)

3. The math we have now is not really that profound and is primarily a function of how a society of (male dominated) primates needed to quantify their outlook on the world.

(If a race of beings not formed from localised globs of electromagnetic fields do exist, then I'm quite sure their whole system of mathematics would be orthogonal(!) to ours.. Heck, if female mathematicians such as my PhD supervisor or my sister were controlling the directions of mathematical research I think modern math would be significantly different. And not just becoz it'd involve more questions about chocolate, though of course that too...)

4. Patriotism is only exhibited by puerile thinkers.

5. Respect for the musings of historical persons purely because they lived a long time ago is only exhibited by puerile thinkers.

6. People who believe in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are puerile thinkers.

7. All holders of extreme views are puerile thinkers.

 

[New Ager]

(Leon)

10. What part of "shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion" is difficult to understand? Keep religion out of government.

(Todd)

No argument with the sentiment, but if you insist on a strict reading of the amendment, it says "Congress shall make no law repsecting the establishment of religion." If you want to be a literalist, it says nothing about the president, other executive departments, or state governments.

(New Ager)

Todd, you are so right.

And it doesn't say the President shouldn't have a religion and use it in his decision making. It also doesn't say that everything gov't funds is gov't. A school isn't the gov't and should not stop school prayer.

(Adrian)

I think private prayer should be allowed in school, but it should be taxed and monitored by the FCC for decency standards. It must only happen in special designated areas to protect others from the dangers of second-hand faith.

(New Ager)

I think private liberalism should be allowed in school, but it should be taxed and monitored by the FCC for decency standards. It must only happen in special designated areas to protect others from the dangers of second-hand looniness.