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good article but a heck of a lot of typo-corrections/editing needed.
He’s like a detective who deepens his insistence that a person was killed by lightning with every bit of forensic evidence you present showing conclusively that the victim was murdered with a shot to the head.
who were shown in controlled surveys to deepen their partisan beliefs on weapons of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” (that Iraq had them before George W. Bush ordered invasion),
and revise their political beliefs tan people
citizens became more much more likely
that it accounts for a large percentage o the federal budget
Part of the explanation lay
– it can easily the belief-holder to try to “restore consonance” by
you don’t have actually believe hat idea to rationalize
the billionaire arch-polluters Koch brothers
Such ideas have now have resurfaced and
Joe McCarthy’ short-lived televised
Last but not least. late 20th and early 21st century America is
right wing
propaganda of Glenn Beck at al.
And this is relevant even if it is not the case that the far right is winning over all that much of the working class and its populist anger.
generally lost it working class
I thought the three questions were outlined scientifically in this article:
The Best Questions For A First Date
February 8th, 2011 by Christian Rudder
First dates are awkward. There is so much you want to know about the person across the table from you, and yet so little you can directly ask.
This post is our attempt to end the mystery. We took OkCupid's database of 275,294 match questions—probably the biggest collection of relationship concerns on earth—and the 776 million answers people have given us, and we asked:
What questions are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about?
Love, sex, a soulmate, an argument, whatever you're looking for, we'll show you the polite questions to find it. We hope they'll be useful to you in the real world.
First—define "easy to bring up"
Before we could go looking for correlations to deeper stuff, our first task was to decide which questions were even first-date appropriate. I know each person has his own opinion on what's okay to talk about with a stranger. I also know that if I had to wade through hundreds of thousands of user-submitted questions like these verbatim examples:
If you were to be eaten by cannibal, how would you like to be prepaired?
do u own 3 or more dildos in your room?
Do you hsve a desent job?
I would go fucking insane. The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position!
So, instead of judging each question's first-date appropriateness subjectively, I turned to statistics. I decided our candidates were the ones that (a) most people were comfortable discussing publicly, and (b) were mathematically likely to tell you something you couldn't just guess. I sliced OkCupid's question pool like this:
That blue rectangle is our highest-quality, least-invasive questions, and we next examined each of them for interesting correlations. (If you're interested in knowing more about the above graph, you can drop-down an explanation here, complete with an interactive scatter plot that took me forever to make.)
More details on how we pared down our candidate pool of first-date questions [hide this]
Whenever a user answers a match question on OkCupid, he has the option of keeping his answer private by clicking this box:
The less often people check that box for a given question, the more confident we can be that the question is okay to talk about. I sorted our huge mass of questions accordingly. Here's a simulation of the process—I can only picture a small subset of the data we crunched, but it should illustrate the principle involved. To explore the questions in the plot, you can mouse-over one to bring it forward and click it to send it back.
interactive step #1: sort by privacy | undo
At first, this seemed to work pretty well. It at least separated the questions about race and politics and sexual history from, say:
Are clams alive?
But as we got deeper into this post, this ordering felt inadequate. A question like Which describes you better, normal or weird? might be fine to ask, but doing so is of little value because almost everyone has the same answer. 79% of people think they are weird. Ironists "rejoice".
We wanted to recommend useful questions, not just ones that weren't awkward. So I added another dimension to the plot: how much each question splits public opinion. I've called this second property "answer diversity." Now let's sort by it, too:
add a sort by answer diversity |undo
Doing this, we can think of our space of questions as four zones, roughly described like so:
Clearly, the lower right-hand corner contains the kind of questions we want, and that's where we found the correlations we report below. Just wanted you guys to know we didn't get them out of thin air, or, worse, off some blog.
Now let's get right to the results.
Do my date and I have long-term potential?
Ask your date (and yourself!)...
* Do you like horror movies?
* Have you ever traveled around another country alone?
* Wouldn't it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?
Of all questions appropriate to a first date, the three listed above were the ones couples most often agreed on.
This is the shallow stuff to ask when you want to know something deep:
Okay, if you want to know...
Will my date have sex on the first date?
Ask...
* Do you like the taste of beer?
Because...
Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date.
No matter their gender or orientation, beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they've just met. Sadly, this is the only question with a meaningful correlation for women.
full article here:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-first-dates/
When Facts Don’t Matter
wallflower wrote:I like this piece and was a bit puzzled by justdrew's response to it:good article but a heck of a lot of typo-corrections/editing needed.
OkCupid researchers recently came out with an interesting article "The Best Questions For A First Date." http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-first-dates/ The question if you want to know "Is my date religious?" is to ask: "Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?" It turns out that as a group rationalist hate spelling and grammar mistakes. I'm not religious, but prone to making spelling and grammar mistakes, so I'm not very sensitive to them.
I was curious that I hadn't caught any mistakes in the article, so I copied and pasted the article into a word processing document. Even with the aid of red squiggly lines inserted with the software, I still don't see mistakes.
The issues of editorial judgement is trivial, except that it reflects a rhetorical style that Paul Street is critiquing. The centrality of self-esteem is key towards understanding both the effectiveness and pitfalls of ad hominem.
Left and left-leaning discourse online suffers from a lack of generosity. I think we often don't even notice that there's a problem because left and left-leaning folks hold vigorous rational debate in such high esteem. I fear that we often don't recognize how the psychology Street points to: "The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are." affects people on the left as well as the right.
Singing to and singing with the choir aren't a waste of time because self esteem is central to our beliefs and acts. Attention to our rhetoric is important regardless of who we're talking too. Especially online, phatic speech acts, words serving a social function, are important. That's not to say rigor isn't important, of course it is; rather that for rhetoric to be effective, we must consider the importance of self esteem as we speak.
Right-wing ideology so obviously and proudly attacks and corrodes and spits on reason and fact, and specifically tramples on so many threatened groups and classes, that those who would come together in movements for social justice feel forced to fight it, as a matter of self-defense. Generally that means they cannot complicate that fight with some unrealistically elevated critique of the status quo. So they forget about fighting the status quo. In fact, "fighting the status quo" is what the right wingers are supposedly doing; they have successfully stolen the language of opposition.
Facts are not a shield against stupidity, and that is a difficult concept for scientists to grasp.
Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/134967/#ixzz1EHu4HyQS
Part of what fuels the charge of accommodationism is the view that religious believers should be treated with contempt. The view has it that those who are contemptible are not worthy of respect. This seems true as far as it goes. But notice that to hold a person in contempt is to ascribe to him a capacity for responsibility. Accordingly, we do not hold the mentally deranged in contempt for their delusional beliefs; rather, we see their beliefs as symptoms of their illness. To see religious believers as proper objects of contempt, then, is to see them as people who should know better than to believe as they do. It is hence to see them as wrong but, importantly, not stupid. Thus it is a confusion to regard religious believers as both contemptible and cognitively beyond-the-pale. Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.
When it is aimed at rational persuasion, argumentation has two closely related objectives. The first is the obvious aim of demonstrating that the view that one favors is true. We engage in argument in order to make explicit the grounds upon which we base our beliefs; in making them believe explicit, we simultaneously provide support for our beliefs. The second aim of argumentation is easily overlooked. When we argue, we also engage in a diagnostic project. We aim not only to demonstrate the truth of our own view; we additionally endeavor to understand how our opponent arrived at her view, how she conceives of the relation between her view and her evidence. Put another way, in argumentation, we aim to discover where our opponent has gone wrong. Being able to identify others’ errors is often a crucial part of persuading them to change their views. Furthermore, being able to diagnose our opponents’ mistakes is intimately related to fully grasping our own views. Knowing an issue means not only knowing the right answers, but also where the wrong turns are. As Mill observed, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
wallflower wrote:The article I was looking for is "Accommodationism and Atheism" http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/accommodationism-and-atheism.html#more which has an interesting argument:... Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.
Canadian_watcher wrote:wallflower wrote:The article I was looking for is "Accommodationism and Atheism" http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/accommodationism-and-atheism.html#more which has an interesting argument:... Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.
this is hilarious. Academic strategy for plying people away from their belief in God.
Good luck. It'd never work on me. Logic cannot trump the experience of miracles.
I get so tired out from 'smart people' saying that a belief in God is a sign that I'm mentally inferior to those who 'just know that there can't be a God.' Einstein believed in God. Whatshisname rocket guy... Von Braun believe in God. I could go on of course. Have times really changed that much that possibly those scientists were socially pressured into saying publicly that they believed in God whereas maybe if they were alive today they would state otherwise? I doubt it. Or maybe times have changed to the point where we've now proven there isn't a God/Gods? If so I totally missed the press release on that one.
It's okay with me that there are atheists - if they want to believe that they themselves are this universe's greatest manifestation then so be it, but why isn't it okay with atheists that there are those of us who can feel that there is a force greater than ourselves? What's their beef? Religion as a Cause of War? I admit it's been a handy tool, but to stop that little ruse they have to look at the money behind the war, not the believers in a God of any name. That's probably too scary & real for them since they themselves have no faith in anything greater than themselves.
anyway.. sorry for the tangent.
JackRiddler wrote:...
Surely among the valid questions we get to ask: what are we expected to believe on the basis of faith? By faith I mean not a personal miraculous experience but the word of a scripture, a church authority, a charismatic leader or a person who claims to have had miraculous experience.
... Behind it all, another question: Can we acknowledge how much of what's out there in the [guise of science] in fact is hucksterism, lazy repetition, or a product of social pressure (sometimes backed by horrific physical sanctions)? ...
"So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They're theology, so they're whatever you think of theology; I don't think much of it. In fact, in my view that's exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion." -- Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power
wallflower wrote:...
The article I was looking for is "Accommodationism and Atheism" http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/accommodationism-and-atheism.html#more which has an interesting argument:Part of what fuels the charge of accommodationism is the view that religious believers should be treated with contempt. The view has it that those who are contemptible are not worthy of respect. This seems true as far as it goes. But notice that to hold a person in contempt is to ascribe to him a capacity for responsibility. Accordingly, we do not hold the mentally deranged in contempt for their delusional beliefs; rather, we see their beliefs as symptoms of their illness. To see religious believers as proper objects of contempt, then, is to see them as people who should know better than to believe as they do. It is hence to see them as wrong but, importantly, not stupid. Thus it is a confusion to regard religious believers as both contemptible and cognitively beyond-the-pale. Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.
...
In the period of preparation for loving God, the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no such thing as bread. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. – Simone Weil.
JackRiddler wrote:Canadian_watcher wrote:wallflower wrote:The article I was looking for is "Accommodationism and Atheism" http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/accommodationism-and-atheism.html#more which has an interesting argument:... Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.
this is hilarious. Academic strategy for plying people away from their belief in God.
Good luck. It'd never work on me. Logic cannot trump the experience of miracles.
I get so tired out from 'smart people' saying that a belief in God is a sign that I'm mentally inferior to those who 'just know that there can't be a God.' Einstein believed in God. Whatshisname rocket guy... Von Braun believe in God. I could go on of course. Have times really changed that much that possibly those scientists were socially pressured into saying publicly that they believed in God whereas maybe if they were alive today they would state otherwise? I doubt it. Or maybe times have changed to the point where we've now proven there isn't a God/Gods? If so I totally missed the press release on that one.
It's okay with me that there are atheists - if they want to believe that they themselves are this universe's greatest manifestation then so be it, but why isn't it okay with atheists that there are those of us who can feel that there is a force greater than ourselves? What's their beef? Religion as a Cause of War? I admit it's been a handy tool, but to stop that little ruse they have to look at the money behind the war, not the believers in a God of any name. That's probably too scary & real for them since they themselves have no faith in anything greater than themselves.
anyway.. sorry for the tangent.
Tangent? I think these issues arise unavoidably in any discussion of what constitutes fact.
JackRiddler wrote:I urge you to start, whether here or in another topic, by defining this God, regardless of who might have endorsed it/him/her. We should be able to agree that there is no one concept of it, that concepts of it conflict.
JackRiddler wrote:Surely among the valid questions we get to ask: what are we expected to believe on the basis of faith? By faith I mean not a personal miraculous experience but the word of a scripture, a church authority, a charismatic leader or a person who claims to have had miraculous experience.
My answer is that I won't believe any such thing, especially if it is attached to a cultural and religious program of authorities and commandments, without evidentiary confirmation or a rationale in keeping with my own experiences (witness statements won't necessarily be rejected, but won't be accepted when involving things that initially seem to be violations of the universally observable natural laws, like spontaneous manifestations, angel levitations, hidden spaces used for heaven or hell, etc.).
JackRiddler wrote:Are there scams and lies and delusions and sales campaigns out there in the form of religions or faith claims? Are you willing to make distinctions between these and sincere beliefs, and if so, how?
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