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Messages - TLEILAXU

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286
General Misc. / Re: eSports vs Sports
« on: March 01, 2018, 07:57:24 pm »
Tleilaxu, lol, you only follow the part of the conversation you want to. There was a Russian Curler that just got caught doping. Any gamers out there using PED's? Nah, didn't think so.  Darts is a questionable thing. But, by the definition of sports, eSports is I no way co.parable to that definition. Curling is. I've went over this already. Look, if it makes you think your an athlete to play BattleStar Galtica 3000, then good for you. But, you and very other gamer in the world is not an Athlete. You know it, i know it. You just can't admit that, because its one of your hobbies.
He got caught doping and the rest of the doping community was dumbfounded because, as they admitted, curling is not a physically taxing sport, it relies on fine motor skills, just like e-sports, which are indeed sports.

287
The Forum of Interesting Things / Re: The Intellectual War on Science
« on: March 01, 2018, 07:55:57 pm »
Just reading through the thread, don't have much to offer. Besides, whoever said they would kill children because what they see as a defective human being, should be strung up on a tree in front of your local courthouse. Sorry, if that's too blunt. But, I'm pissed. I see the words regard and such being thrown around, how old are you? And, if you could kill a human being because you think its defective, you should be in a mental institution. Your a soulless sack of shit. Ban me. Do whatever you want. That's downright the worst thing I've ever seen on this board and shame on the moderators who allow it to take place.

I agree that abortion is an option women should have the right to. Bit, some fucking egotistical basted saying who should live and who shouldn't....no. No one has that right. We are not gods. And, because you learned a little science at your UNI doesn't make you one. I ask, how could that be allowed to be said on this forum without any repercussions? Huh? What a fucking joke you are whoever said that. As if you're the perfect human being, you should be put down like a dog for suggesting such a thing. Fucking scientists you all got it all figured out do you?

Controlled mating sonwe can evolve better? Nah, ill stick with love. That's what makes a family and a person into something great, love. Not your white coats and labs. Blows my mind that that would even come out of one of your mouths.
Oh the irony. I also like how you obviously barely read the thread or the arguments presented, yet feel entitled pass on judgement and lynching  8). Also, what's with the bashing on scientists? Showing some deep prejudices there.

288
General Misc. / Re: BFK's Music Corner
« on: March 01, 2018, 07:29:27 pm »
This miight be one for you BFK. There are many versions of the Cherubic Hymn/Cherubikon/Kheruvimskaya Pesn etc., but thisi is easiily the best one I've found, and II had to spend liike 2 hours searchiing for it to put ini my new classiical playlisit since youtube deleted my old account https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdaI4ksLl1Y
That is the nicest gift, Tleilaxu....that is extremely cool of you to share that with me. Russian Orthodox (?), a vocal group from Belarus. Wow, that is beautiful!

In return, here's a motet from the Roman Catholic tradition: "Sicut Cervus", by Palestrina, sung by the Cambridge Singers. Our church choir* sings it regularly.

https://youtu.be/0yd5EE0hAB8

*btw, I just rejoined the choir!
Thanks. I envy people with the abiility to sinig.

289
The Forum of Interesting Things / Re: The Intellectual War on Science
« on: March 01, 2018, 07:27:47 pm »
No, this is all very wrong. Even if we could somehow measure "all causes" everything breaks down at the quantum level where things are fundamentally probabilistic. The universe is not deterministic. You can look it up on wikipedia.

Is there something to definitively prove that quantum particles actually behave randomly or that our understanding can only, at best, approximate their behavior by evoking randomness?

Also, is there a way to show that quantum mechanical processes apply to macro-events?  So, is Schrödinger's cat alive or dead?


Quote
To quote Spinoza "Nothing in Nature is random. … A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge."
17th century philosophers (or philosophers in general) aren't exactly authorities when it comes to matters relating to the natural world...

Sure, but that statement is as much about knowledge as it is about the natural world.

No, this is all very wrong. Even if we could somehow measure "all causes" everything breaks down at the quantum level where things are fundamentally probabilistic. The universe is not deterministic. You can look it up on wikipedia.

Is there something to definitively prove that quantum particles actually behave randomly or that our understanding can only, at best, approximate their behavior by evoking randomness?

Also, is there a way to show that quantum mechanical processes apply to macro-events?  So, is Schrödinger's cat alive or dead?
I'm not an expert on this, but from googling around it seems consensus is relatively clear: quantum mechanics are probabilistic.

290
General Misc. / Re: eSports vs Sports
« on: March 01, 2018, 05:49:52 pm »
I agree Wilshire, wholeheartedly with that post. Tthats what inwas getting at. Look, this has run its course and I have no need to battle over it. Positives and negatives to both. The fact remains as parents we have to see whether video games and sports are affecting our children negatively or positively. That's the crutch.

ETA: e Sports ARE STILL NOT FUCKING SPORTS!!!!!! AND I WILL NEVER WAIVER!  ;)
It's funny how you keep ignoring our comparisons with curling, dart etc.
I think you just need to face the fact that e-sports ARE sports. This is 100% objective.

291
The Forum of Interesting Things / Re: The Intellectual War on Science
« on: March 01, 2018, 05:46:15 pm »
I don't think I'm following that line of reasoning.
Take mutations: gene transcription happens millions and millions of times, sometimes a gene gets transcribed improperly and you make something different. If the gene leads to increased survival, then it gets passed on.
Mate selection is a further extension of this. While it might have a whole host of factors that don't seem random, they're based on the person's genes and partner suitability, which was ultimetly determined randomly.

If we could actually see the tools we're using to select partners - hormone smells, face symmetry, etc. - I'd maybe consider it was random, but the fact that we're blind to almost all of it seems to suggest otherwise. On top of that, if it wasn't random, we'd have a whole lot fewer bad genes wandering around making life miserable. But since we can't see, and we let disease rule us, I'd say there's little that shows its not completely random.

Random: lack of pattern or predictability in events.

We do know why mutations happen though.  It isn't as if there is just some cosmic random number generator that determines if a gene will replicate properly or not.  If it fails, it fails for a reason.  Lets call it, for simplicity's sake, fatigue, or even effect of some radiation (i.e. cosmic rays), or compositional weakness.  In any case, there is predictability, if we could enumerate every possible cause.  To quote Spinoza "Nothing in Nature is random. … A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge."

The question of, say, mate selection sure appears random, because there is a huge range of possible outcomes if we select two people "randomly" out of the entire population of the earth (so, lets say 3 billion males combined with 3 billion females, just for an examples sake yields something like 4.4999999985E+18 possible combinations).  Yet, of course, there is only a far, far smaller actual set of real combinations that could even really happen, because events don't just happen, they are caused by something.  So, someone in, say, having never left rural Africa has almost essentially zero (or functionally zero) chance to mate with someone in, say, the dense jungle of South America because they will never, ever, even possibly interact, unless they specially left the area, which would then change the entire scope of the calculation and in doing so, prove that there is some element of determinism based on causes having effects.

You could only possibly mate with someone you actually encounter.  The people you encounter are not random, they are wherever they are for some reason or other.  And you interact with them for some reason or other.  You decide to mate with them for some reason or other.  I really don't understand how this is random, even if it is vastly complicated and incredibly hard to predict.  We simulate it with something that approaches randomness, because that is the best we can do, but that doesn't make it actually random.

Same with a computer generating "random numbers."  Even something like "GetTickCount" yields something that appears random, but really isn't.  So, there are very expensive "random number tables" one could buy, that use vastly complicated data sets (like captured cosmic radiation) but even those are determined by something, and are not truly "random."
No, this is all very wrong. Even if we could somehow measure "all causes" everything breaks down at the quantum level where things are fundamentally probabilistic. The universe is not deterministic. You can look it up on wikipedia.
Quote
To quote Spinoza "Nothing in Nature is random. … A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge."
17th century philosophers (or philosophers in general) aren't exactly authorities when it comes to matters relating to the natural world...

292
General Misc. / Re: BFK's Music Corner
« on: March 01, 2018, 12:04:06 am »
This miight be one for you BFK. There are many versions of the Cherubic Hymn/Cherubikon/Kheruvimskaya Pesn etc., but thisi is easiily the best one I've found, and II had to spend liike 2 hours searchiing for it to put ini my new classiical playlisit since youtube deleted my old account https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdaI4ksLl1Y

293
The Forum of Interesting Things / Re: The Intellectual War on Science
« on: February 28, 2018, 10:17:15 pm »
Hurray!
Evolution is a a wholly random process without direction...
As Above, So Below

I don't buy that at all.  Evolution cannot be random, everything has a cause and effect.
Depends on what you mean. We wouldn't say that breeding horses is random, because we select the horses containing the traits we want to breed, but overall evolution is very random, i.e. mutations arise randomly, individuals mate randomly, chromosomes segregate randomly, the number of offspring can be random etc. At the molecular/atomic level, things are stochastic, so ultimately evolution is intrinsically stochastic as well, it's just on a different scale.

294
The Forum of Interesting Things / Re: The Intellectual War on Science
« on: February 28, 2018, 09:57:16 pm »
Hurray!
Evolution is a a wholly random process without direction...
As Above, So Below

295
General Misc. / Re: eSports vs Sports
« on: February 28, 2018, 09:48:10 pm »
You're making some of the rudest, judgmental statements I've ever seen. Athletes who cant count their toes?...

...But, the reason for the post, for one of you gamer gods to explain to me how you could consider setting on your ads, twiddling your thumbs a sport. Not, one of you have or even tried.
m8


Also, if curling is a sport, so is e-sports. That's just objective fact.

297
The Forum of Interesting Things / Re: The Intellectual War on Science
« on: February 28, 2018, 08:05:11 pm »
A collection of tightly bound quarks and gluons popping in and out of existence?
I'm not sure rhetorical questions are going to help me out here, but if you can't articulate what you're getting at,  I won't lose sleep :) .
How do those quarks and gluons interact?

298
The Forum of Interesting Things / Re: The Intellectual War on Science
« on: February 28, 2018, 07:59:36 pm »
Quote
I just don't believe in high-holy-evolutionary-dice-rolling. IMO, better to take a more direct approach, even if it takes a few centuries of botched jobs to get the hang of it.

If you think about it, these are actually not separate things ontologically speaking.

I'm not sure I follow. Which thing's aren't separate?

Evolution vs. Eugenics? I guess yy strict definition they are pretty much same, but by common understanding and implication they really aren't. Evolution is a a wholly random process without direction, eugenics is evolution with a goal. So yeah, while the scientific term evolution (change of allele frequency over time) necessarily covers eugenics, its misguided (mislead) to suggest that they are the same thing.
Think: "What am I?" and then reflect over this again.

299
The Forum of Interesting Things / Re: The Intellectual War on Science
« on: February 28, 2018, 05:49:42 pm »
I'm sure I'm going to be further unimpressed moving forward in this thread by the way you write but could you please tone it down?
How am I supposed to know that retard and wheelchair are no longer acceptable words? I'll use "handicapped" if you inst.

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We already do this to some extent (given parental income) with genomic sequencing (if I have that right).
Exactly.

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I honestly don't have a stance on this conversation but a thought about these questions: many people find it visually disturbing and some find it socially abhorrent. A pregnant woman often is showing in that period and then has to explain to her peers (who, let's just say, can have a very wide range of responses to this topic) what happened to the baby.
Hence why I mentioned the thing about shaming earlier.

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I think a problem for you in advocating your position here, here or anywhere, is that the actual starting conditions aren't this conversation - you'd spend your whole life consolidating this position (which is what H and Wilshire are asking of you) and then facilitating the social conditions to enact it in the world as it is (fighting the same fight that the "pro-choice" camp has already been fighting for years) but also people would vehemently oppose you with much less grace than is shown here.
Sure, I don't actually believe this will ever be implemented in the West, for the same reason people are morally opposed to genetic modification. Countries with less restrictive views on human nature like China will march ahead, and in North Korea they already kill all disabled babies AFAIK, although North Korea is definitely not a good role-model.

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I just don't believe in high-holy-evolutionary-dice-rolling. IMO, better to take a more direct approach, even if it takes a few centuries of botched jobs to get the hang of it.
If you think about it, these are actually not separate things ontologically speaking.

300
The Forum of Interesting Things / Re: The Intellectual War on Science
« on: February 28, 2018, 01:22:41 am »
For additional discussion: I don't think all life is sacred. I just don't think humans are good at deciding how to draw that line, nor do I think that doing so would be helpful, as shown above. Not to be confused with the idea that humans are sacred either - in fact I think we should do a far better job controlling our population and managing our waste so as to stop the genocide of every other lifeform on the planet (as it'll lead to our own downfall, but whatever, that's perhaps another issue).

What I wanted to get to was, rather than killing off people who don't look the way we want them too, I'm much more for the manipulation of genetics to create humans that are 'better'. Rather than letting sloppy evolution drive us into the idiot corner, I think we need to take control of it. Stop letting people decide how many babies they make, and who they make them with.

Much better, though the outcome risks being similar to the above, to let let people augment their offspring as they choose. Better still to limit the number of new humans each human gets to make at the same time.

I just don't believe in high-holy-evolutionary-dice-rolling. IMO, better to take a more direct approach, even if it takes a few centuries of botched jobs to get the hang of it.
Laughed a little bit at how your posts started out (what I presume to be) exaggerating my posts into eugenics territory, and then turned into actually advocating for eugenics themselves  8)

Wilshire follows my point in illustrating that if we declare that we should only offer the opportunity for life based off certain objective criteria, how do we decide which?  And to what degrees?

Also, how to we unsure we don't slip into subjective criteria?

And who gets to decide?
We decide based on prior knowledge about life quality, life potential, potential for suffering etc.
All criteria are ultimately subjective.
Parents in dialogue with doctors should decide, or vice versa, e.g. a doctor might recommend euthanasia if a child e.g. is found to have mutations leading to severe disease and early death.

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