If the Argumentum ad Popularum is popular, does that make it right?
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Perhaps the biggest bête noire for me is the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers; so whenever I see particularly egregious examples, it gets my fingers twitching over the keyboard, ready to lay down some not-so-Respectful Insolence. So it was last Friday when I…
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The argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam ("appeal to ignorance"), argument by lack of imagination, or negative evidence, is a logical fallacy in which…
As fellow Minnesotan Greg Laden warns, we're getting a visit from another dishonest hack of the Discovery Institute, John West. On Friday, 30 November, at 7:00 in Room 155, Nicholson Hall on the UM campus. I may just have to stop by. He's going to be babbling about an extended argumentum ad…
Martin Cothran, defender of Holocaust deniers and sometime friend to the eugenicists at the Disco. 'Tute, unleashes his inner Freudian psychoanalyst to determine that I have "logic envy." He seems to think his perverted logic is so big and beautiful that everyone else must want the same thing.
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Only if we all agree on it.
How about this one: 98% of U.S. atheists feel discriminated against.
I love how DaveScot makes a post implying the IDists are persecuted and the first comment (a relatively tame one) warrants a site ban. I'm amazed at how many people DaveScot bans. I think I've seen one, maybe two, bans from this and related science sites over the past year. Science isn't this scary institution out to silence everyone that disagrees, and as much as the religious cry "I'm persecuted," I can't believe they don't see what they themselves do.
Here are some more statistics I found:
64% of Americans think religion is "under attack"
49% of Bush voters want evolution out of public schools
12% of Protestants favor legalization of gay marriage
46% of SUV owners say that Jesus would drive an SUV
89% of Americans believe in miracles
Percent of Americans who would NOT vote for a/an:
Woman: 33%
Homosexual: 37%
African American: 37%
Catholic: 40%
Jew: 46%
Atheist: 48%
I always preferred the maxim as General Sherman put it:
"Vox populi? Vox Humbug."
The one statistic that made me pause was when I read that 97% of Americans use toilet paper.
.0000000008% of the u.s. population favors mandatory, county-wide pillow fights, with severe penalties (intense tickling until the point of urination) for any "below the belt" shenanigans.
.0000000004% of the u.s. population favors making grape popsicles the "offical iced food stuff" for the 21st century...and beyond!
97% use toilet paper?
Maybe the other three percent do what I do. I use a hard stream of cool water from one of those hoses that you usually see at kitchen sinks.
Once you use it, you'll never go back.
I hope not. Then I'm going to have to start conducting polls of my students to see which theorems are true and which ones aren't. I don't see that ending well. Just this Friday I used a theorem which I proved the preceding Friday, and one of the students kept trying to argue with me over whether or not it actually worked (and not just as a matter of a hasty assumption of hypotheses).
The argument is self-compelling: if enough people use it, it will become legitimate.
The one statistic that made me pause was when I read that 97% of Americans use toilet paper.
That's kind of odd, because much of the world doesn't, and further more thinks it's gross, and uses water instead.
Argumentum ad populum or Consensus gentium...
I recall Heinlein writing somewhere that "Vox populi, vox dei" actually translates as How the hell did we get into this mess?
Isn't it true that 95% of statistics are made up on the spot?
An Iranian slur for westerners translates as 'paper wipers'. The there is the Asian concept that blowing your nose into a hanky and then _sticking the used hanky back in you pocket_ as the most gross thing ever.
I've said it before .....
Science is not decided by a popular vote of the ignorant and uninformed.
So, vox populi if and only if the "populi" are properly educated.
Back to Plato, chaps?
Select some Guardians, and let them run the show, oh ... hang on ... quis custodes ipses custodes?
HELP!
Yesterday there was a poll from CNN. it said that 99% of the world's population are scientists. yay i have falsified all of you. yay.
Interesting to note that, in many cases (for example, questions of morality) conservative Christians would be among the first to say that just because everyone does something/believes something, that does not necessarily make it right.
The most disturbing case of a conservative Christian claiming discrimination I have seen was from a co-worker who filed a complaint with the HR department stating that the company's policy of extending full (ie equivalent to spousal) benefits to employees' same-sex partners was discriminatory against his religion, since he believed that such behaviour was immoral.
On the other hand, I suspect the the-person-on-the-street would consider "strong religious beliefs" to include not just conventional strong Judeo-Christian faith (which is obviously the subtext in DaveScot's post), but any strong beliefs *about* religion (which would include people who are public about their commitment to their lack of religion). I think it is probably accurate to say that people with *obviously* strong religious beliefs of whatever stripe are discriminated against. .
Here's one that may be more worth looking into, and an altogether new angle :)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060406.shtml
Quick survey - what % of us think that Stove - beyond a certain genuine & valid linguistic point about language being tricky and ill-suited for certain purposes that could have been expanded into a Gould-like useful critique of evolutionary bio - really could have used some more toilet paper?
I wonder what % of folks would refuse to vote for a black lesbian atheist? Is it simply additive, or . . .?
What's really disturbing is how many people don't bother to wash their hands in public restrooms. Ick.
Stove needs to read Dawkins more carefully. He clearly explains what his "teleological" terminology does and does not mean. And why altruism isn't really altruism.
It's difficult for people to understand things in non-teleological terms, but that says more about the student than the subject being studied. Assuming that the universe shares your personal mental biases (or your species') is cosmic arrogance.
Altruism and heroism are easily explainable in selfish-gene terms.
Celibacy mostly doesn't exist. People sworn to celibacy cheat. A lot. Do you know where the word "nepotism" came from? Do you think the Catholic Church's sex scandals are new? Their inability to cover it up and silence their critics is fairly new, but the problem itself is older than Jesus.
Abortion, contraception and alcoholism might be too new for the human genotype to have adapted to resist them yet. Although this may not be true of alcoholism - the high susceptibility of certain ethnic groups, *especially* ones that historically had no access to concentrated alcohol, suggests that the other groups *do* have at least partial (adapted?) resistance.
Pretty soon we'll start seeing people who aren't satisfied with having sex, they want to get rid of the contraception and have children... oh, wait. Those people are already here. Maybe abortion and contraception aren't so anti-fitness as they look on the surface? Plenty of other species have birthrate-regulating mechanisms already; maybe we just have indirect ones.
A genuine desire not to have children probably will be selected out, if its basis is genetic (which it probably isn't, but for the sake of argument...) Check back in a few thousand years - surely you didn't expect overnight results? Reliable contraception is only a century or two old! Even for something with as short a generation time as, say, moths, it's asking a lot for evolution to move *that* fast.
Evolution doesn't predict that no species should ever have problems. It specifically expects some degree of imperfection; really, these are much bigger problems for intelligent design, which *should* produce perfection or a lot closer approximation than what we have. (And why would an intelligent designer allow so many unnecessary males, or meiotic distortion genes, or other gene selfishness that hurts the species?)
I think that David Stove has a LOT to learn about the evolution of cooperation, which has been an active subject of research; he seems confined to the common stereotype of Darwinism as dog-eat-dog competition.
The most common mechanism, it seems, is kin selection, selection to help other possessors of one's genes. This explains not only insect sociality but also multicellularity. Only an extremely tiny fraction of the cells of a blue whale or a giant redwood tree will be represented in their offspring, yet they keep on going.
As to Joseph Sobran himself, he is reputedly a creationist.
That's because it is the grossest thing ever.
Considering some of the things Asian cultures have historically considered edible...
Anyway, I'm interested to hear what, if anything, Mr. Stove offered as a replacement explanation for evolution...