I haven't even read it yet but this grates on me. Science is the method we use to figure out if something is true or false. It must do nothing else.
“Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
781–790 of 883 posts
Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know the people behind statments like these are coming to it with extremly unintelligent and bad faith definitions and intentions, but the actual words are actually correct. If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath, you would probably do it. If you had the atomic bomb, you p…
The only bad faith actor reaching unintelligent definitions here is the one projecting them unto others. Hiding this knowledge from the world doesn’t make it not exist. It just makes people less prepared for when malicious actors use it against them. You promote ignorance as a solution to technical problems. I don’t.
Read what I wrote again, slowly this time, spelling each word.
Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wouldn't target a particular religion, it would be a general policy protecting all children's right to education. LDS people being impacted would be an unfortunate side effect, not the promoted intention of the policy. I genuinely can't tell if you're being disingenuous here. I'm not personally stressed about the rights of LDS people, but the procedural scenario I'm describing isn't even remotely far-fetched.
> It wouldn't target a particular religion This makes it sound like it is indeed targeting a particular religion: > An anti-LDS government official in control of education in some state (say, California) could take those findings and use them to justify a new policy that all LDS children are required to attend sex-ed classes in school If what you meant was "all children, including LDS children" I think it could've be…
> the hijab ban in France that's nominally a religious symbol ban
A hijab is an extreme religious symbol, so it makes sense that it would be overrepresented in a ban of religious symbols.
That's like an American calling a law racist because its impact is coincidentally not racially balanced.
Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
#784Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right. People forget things like: Jesus' disciples witnessed his miracles and wrote about them, other nonbiblical scholars wrote about Jesus and his miracles, there was recorded evidence to his death, there were witnesses to his ascension, 11 of the 12 apostles died for believing that Jesus was God (the 12th was Peter, marooned on Patmos, also for believing Jesus was God)
Sure, but can any of those things be replicated in a controlled experiment?
I'm not a Christian, but it is a fallacy to assume that the only way to arrive at truth is through controlled repeatable experiments. Watch this lecture to get a more nuanced view on the subject: https://youtu.be/If3cNUixEBM
Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess my point is that industrialization doesn't/didn't occur uniformly across entire industries; some aspects of industries were mechanized before others, temporarily increasing demand for manual labor in the per-industrialized segments to keep up with the machines. Textile factories create demand for field workers, steel mills and steam engines create demand for coal miners, railways create demand for workers tha…
I seriously doubt slaves would have been profitable for the western railway. Blasting tunnels was very skilled work, and very dangerous. Would you want slaves, who hated your guts, handling nitroglycerin? You'd need as many armed guards as slaves.
Presumably the blasting itself could have been done by specialist free men. But the blasting itself is only a small part of the process. First you need to drill the holes by hand, that means beating a rock drill with a hammer for hours, just for a single hole, and you need dozens of holes for one blast, countless thousands if you're trying to go through a mountain.
There were steam powered machines for drilling rock at this time, but they were cumbersome and temperamental, most of the drilling was still done by hand. Hence the folklore of John Henry racing a power drill to see who could work faster. I believe most of the drilling in the west was done by hand, by Chinese immigrants.
Then there is the matter of the rubble. Explosives only break the rock, who hauls that broken rock? That's more manual labor.
Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The earliest known manuscripts of any biblical text post-dates Jesus by 300 years. It's easy to make bold statements, but that definitely doesn't match what most historians, Christian and secular, claim. (And I believe several of your other claims have been largely discredited, even by secular historians.) Bart Ehrman, a New Testament historian who is well known for his critical eye on this stuff (he was a Christia…
>Bart Ehrman, a New Testament historian who is well known for his critical eye on this stuff He is not known for any such thing. Ehrman's claims are all on the historical chain of evidence for the books, not whether the books are true accounts. I'm very familiar with his work. In fact, in his book "How Jesus Became God", he suggests that there's no evidence at all, historically speaking, that Jesus ever even claimed…
> Quoting a book as evidence that the book is true is tautological.
I wasn't arguing that the books were true. I do believe that, but you'll note my reply above simply tries to show that your bold claim that "the earliest known manuscripts of any biblical text post-dates Jesus by 300 years" is widely discredited.
I didn't "admit there were no eyewitnesses" at all -- my response wasn't related to that. Overall it seems like your reply had very little to do with my response above?
Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it is bad science then just reject it for being bad science. Don't reject it for not catering to your special interests group.
The study of racial differences is famous for being bad science.
Unless it can help improve treatments: https://nyulangone.org/news/popular-hypertension-drugs-linke...
Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That there is a genetically distinct haplotype group that corresponds to many folk that share these traits with me, is sufficient This is what race means. You are taking the same referent and giving it a different designator.
If that's the case I'm sure you can provide a link to a dictionary stating as much. In reality, such haplotype groups, when they even exist, do not correlate with what people call "race".
You mean one of the politically activist dictionaries like Webster, which have lately frequently changed the definition of words like "racism"? I'm sure if it becomes an issue they'll change their definition of "race" too, if they haven't already.
And sure, not all races correspond directly to a specific HG, but all races have clear genetic differences which can be identified and classified purely mechanically. Multi-locus fixation clustering is an example of one such mechanical procedure. Unsupervised, something like k-means will generate racial groups equivalent to the ones humans come up with intuitively.
In your case, the HG in question obviously corresponds to one such cluster.
Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idealism is great, as an ideal. It starts to become a little delusional when you think your idealism lines up with reality.
I'm not sure I espoused any utopian view. Reading back, I'm actually genuinely interested to know why you want a third-party 'gatekeeper' to protect you personally from certain kinds of (uncomfortable) scientific facts. I don't judge, you can make that decisions for yourself, but why do you personally want to write that blank-check to a third-party, so that they decide what scientific facts you should or shouldn't be…
Because I’ve come to the realization that there maybe some people that have the time, drive and intelligence to look at all the facts and come to the “right” decision but in the overwhelming number of cases people don’t want to do this exercise and will rely on frameworks provided. If one isn’t provided they’ll come up with their own and there’s no guarantees any of it will work out for the good of society.
This coupled with the fact that there is currently a firehose of “information” that I doubt even people with the best of abilities and intentions can adequately grok if they’re not specifically paid for the time to think about them.
Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grant you that "Ashkenazi Jew" is not a race by any conventional definition. But no, there's no "genetically distinct haplotype" that defines it. It's "Jews from central and eastern Europe", vs. those from Africa, the Middle East and Spain. [1] It's a broad, vague category, that is nonetheless sometimes still useful. Just like race. We don't pretend that Ashkenazi Jews don't exist, or are verboten from polite discu…
So you agree that humans do not have biological races, but you disagree with guidelines that promote a more accurate terminology?
"Humans do not have biological race" is correct if and only if you change the definition of "race" to whatever definition these academics have made up expressly to make the statement true.
If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.