Corona GM conspiracy thread

@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

1. He comes up with an idea. He decides that this idea is the "Truth".

Lol. Truth is a direction you work toward, an orientation. Your orientation should be true from the outset of any journey, but that doesn't mean you've already reached Truth.

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2. He searches for "facts" and quotes that support his new "Truth". His belief in his idea gets stronger.

This is true of any process of inductive theorizing. Just because inductive theorizing builds support doesn't make it immune from deductive testing. Induction and deduction are separate processes that are each valuable in their own way. Neither should be shirked or excluded in order to focus on the other entirely; but deduction can only happen after induction has built up a theory to test.

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3. He ignores any facts that contradict his new "Truth".

Facts don't contradict anything. Facts can provide evidence as to why a theory should be questioned, but facts don't do anything by themselves, i.e. without interpretation.

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4. When the facts are persistent, he invents new conspiracy theories to explain them away. This leads to new "Truths".

You have trouble distinguishing between facts and their interpretation. It is because you hide your weak reasoning behind the camouflage of dishonest math, misunderstood theoretical premises, and what feels 'realistic' to you subjectively.

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Science, like most fields of study, is a team effort. It is a painstaking process of building expertise that has gone one through generations. Each generation of scientist learns the knowledge of past scientists and then builds upon it. The scientific community works in concert with a shared set of knowledge backed by fact and experiment.

Your BS is so anti-science, it's disheartening.

You use the words, 'science' and 'painstaking' to describe a perversion of science that amounts to making it into tradition-based authoritarianism.

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Making Conspiracy Theories is a solitary process. LivingLava has built up his "Truth" by himself. He won't let anyone correct him. He won't change his ideas. He judges the work of real scientists and mathemeticians and geneticists by whether they confirm to his own personal "Truth". He doesn't need math. He doesn't need education. He doesn't need to listen to people who know more than him. All he needs is his own opinion on what sounds right to him.

Now you're using the fascist logic of gang-v-individual to ridicule me? I've never said that conspiracy theorizing is or should be a substitute for other forms of theory-building and analysis.

You're just so insecure that you have to attack anything and everything you can instead of appreciating conspiracy theory for what it is, a way of applying critical thinking and intelligence.

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This is why LivingLava can't accept experts. The experts have done things backwards... they spent time studying and and working to learn their field. Experts listen to each other, and are accountable to the facts.

You don't have to 'accept' or 'reject' experts and expertise. It just provides information to take into account in your analysis. Science requires acceptance is always tentative. You can't accept or reject anything except with absolute positive proof.

When you jump the gun to assume you have positive proof of something without thinking critically enough to know your evidence isn't as strong as it seems, you're doing the exact same thing you accuse conspiracy theorists of doing, and you mistake me for someone who assumes that my conspiracy theories have positive proof, which I never do.

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Education is a process of finding how your current misunderstanding contradict with the facts, and then developing new understanding by changing your ideas. Without going through the process of education, you can't be an expert.

You have deemed yourself an expert in expertise, but you lack the critical thinking ability to check your own assumptions.

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As Lava points out, not all education happens in school (although it is nearly impossible become an expert in an advanced field without school since there is too much material to cover). But education does mean being able to listen to people who know more than you, and dropping your ideas when they are shown to not match the facts.

Stop preaching authoritarian submission. If someone isn't an expert, they can't drop anything based on what they presume to be expertise in someone else.

You can't rightly submit to something you don't understand. You can go along with it, i.e. go with the flow, but that in itself is a misinformed and hasty decision.

When you have access to expertise from a person or source, the best you can do is use the source to become better informed in your process of critically evaluating whatever knowledge you are trying to establish.

Ultimately, you have to take responsibility for deferring to someone else's expertise, although we all get misled because we can't catch everyone else's mistakes all the time.

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@maxdancona,

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Can someone explain to me why eating a bat is any more dangerous than eating a squirrel or a goose or even a deer

Didnt see this till Wilso replied.

"Bush meat" is usually made from stuff that we from the west would get weirded out over. I too think bats are kind creepy. BUT we do know that bats (Especially support zoonotic diseases in a sub-clinical fashion (That means they can have a disease (like rabies or encephalitis), or prion diseases {like mad cow or CWD) and NOT show any symptoms. They just go off and die somewhere)

. We can usually tell when a game animal is diseased, they are usually hunched , somewhat lethargic and often have that 100 mile gaze.
Buh meat they would eat in Nigeria included monkeys, turtles, lizards, large trash fish, cats, and lotsa insect species ( some Of which I developed a taste for , when they were crisped up)

I dont eat deer also, I think they taste awful, same thing with pike fish. More people choke to death on pike fish bones than are annually executed in all the states of the US combined .

I once shot a snow goose during spring goose hunting. We tried cookin that thing up and it was totally inedible in our tastes. It tasted "Muddy".
As Wilso said the aboriginal people eat bats all over the world and grubs and even spiders. I call a halt when Im creeped out a bit.
No real medical or scientific reason (except bats )

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@livinglava,

A. You didn't answer, but I was pretty sure you would not.
Having a medical degree would be a prerequisite for me to allow someone to perform surgery on me. I would still want to hear reviews by past clients, but if you lack a medical degree, I don't give a **** how smart you think you are, you're not coming near me.

B. Actually, you deny the existence of expertise. It has nothing to do with authority whatever. Someone who is completely ignorant about a subject may ask questions or ask how apparent contradictions are to be resolved, but someone who knows nothing about a subject and still debates it with someone with deep knowledge has a character disorder.

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@Brandon9000,

Brandon9000 wrote:

A. You didn't answer, but I was pretty sure you would not.
Having a medical degree would be a prerequisite for me to allow someone to perform surgery on me. I would still want to hear reviews by past clients, but if you lack a medical degree, I don't give a **** how smart you think you are, you're not coming near me.

My point was that a medical degree isn't (nor should it be) sufficient criteria for you to let someone perform surgery on you. You should put a lot more research and critical thinking into your decision than just checking their degree/license.

Would you hire anyone with a driver's license to drive your children to school? No, you would apply more critical thinking than that.

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B. Actually, you deny the existence of expertise. It has nothing to do with authority whatever. Someone who is completely ignorant about a subject may ask questions or ask how apparent contradictions are to be resolved, but someone who knows nothing about a subject and still debates it with someone with deep knowledge has a character disorder.

I don't 'deny the existence of expertise.' I just point out that people are too quick to trust and suspend critical thinking when they fall under the spell of 'expertise.'

Expertise is important and you should employ it to inform your critical thinking process, whether the information is coming from human or non-human sources like books/internet/media/etc.

What you shouldn't do is accept and trust information blindly because it comes from an 'expert,' or because it appears to be 'an expert source.'

You can and should accept information tentatively, but tentative means you don't just abandon yourself to trust.

Is it possible you personally just can't handle the idea of not blindly accepting information from sources you trust? I.e. are you just not capable of moving forward tentatively without wholly accepting/rejecting something?

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@livinglava,

I like how you "modify" your crap as someone corners you. Had you merely just stated the above, no one would have disagreed with you, but that wasnt your original point.
Perhaps your real problem is an inability to write a clear declarative sentence.

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

I like how you "modify" your crap as someone corners you. Had you merely just stated the above, no one would have disagreed with you, but that wasnt your original point.
Perhaps your real problem is an inability to write a clear declarative sentence.

Why can't you just acknowledge what I'm saying and see that people misinterpret things I say based on negative assumptions?

Also you should admit that implicit authoritarian is rampant in people's minds.

Submitting to reason is different than submitting to expertise or other authority because with reasoning, you have to actively reason with authority in order to accept it tentatively instead of blindly/unquestioningly accepting and thus deferring to it.

People don't like being questioned and having to reason with others, so it is their impatience and intolerance that causes them to gravitate toward authoritarianism and reject critical/reasoning-based deference/submission.

Authoritarianism with you, on the other hand, comes in the form of always fight-provocations. You can't engage in non-hostile discussion with you before you start insulting and generally pushing people into a defensive stance. War induces authoritarian regimes, and democracy requires peace. By pushing for war in discussions, you kill the democracy of interactive reason and push people into authoritarian assertion/defense mode instead.

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@farmerman,

I think LivingLava cares most about being right. The facts don't matter. Discussion doesn't really matter, I have not yet seen him learn anything new or even admit he is wrong.

LivingLava has his own "Truth" that he will not change. Facts, evidence, data or expertise are all negotiable to him.

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@maxdancona,

But you have to admit he is kinda funny. The stuff he worries about and the way he worries makes me chuckle.

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@livinglava,

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Why can't you just acknowledge what I'm saying and see that people misinterpret things I say based on negative assumptions

when a number of people "misinterpet" what you say, perhaps you should re visit your own communication skills.
Learn to be PRECISE and CONCISE. You go on your own "Canterbury Tales" and assume that you're making sense.
Most of the time, you are not

EG-from your last post

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Also you should admit that implicit authoritarian is rampant in people's minds.

This isnt even a complete sentence

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Submitting to reason is different than submitting to expertise or other authority because with reasoning, you have to actively reason with authority in order to accept it tentatively instead of blindly/unquestioningly accepting and thus deferring to it

This is total bot salad. Try losing three quarter of your words maybe itll make sense then.
The rest is equally funny but I gotta eat dinner

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@farmerman,

When LivingLava says "reason" he just means "stuff I made up by myself". That might make his word salad a little easier to understand.

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

But you have to admit he is kinda funny. The stuff he worries about and the way he worries makes me chuckle.

You make it sound like you are a detached person by saying this, but if that was the case, why would you exhibit so much hostility toward POVs you disagree with?

If you were really as detached as you think you are, you would just calmly reason with others instead of ridiculing and using hostile, fight-picking rhetoric so often.

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

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Also you should admit that implicit authoritarian is rampant in people's minds.

This isnt even a complete sentence

That was meant to say, 'authoritarianism,' but you should understand that from context.

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Submitting to reason is different than submitting to expertise or other authority because with reasoning, you have to actively reason with authority in order to accept it tentatively instead of blindly/unquestioningly accepting and thus deferring to it

This is total bot salad. Try losing three quarter of your words maybe itll make sense then.
The rest is equally funny but I gotta eat dinner

You just don't understand it, so I'll spell it out for you with examples:

Submitting to expertise:
A:"811 + 19 = 80 because I am an expert in addition"
B: "Ok, I accept your answer and submit to your authority because you are an expert in addition and I don't understand it, yet I trust you because expertise."

Submitting to reason:
A: "811 + 19 = 830" because 9+1=10 and so the one carries to the 10s place and "1+1+1=3" in the 10s place. Since there is only an eight in the hundreds place, the eight doesn't change, so the sum is 830.
B: Ok, I understand your reasons for merging the two numbers in this way, therefore I can accept your claim based on my own understanding of the reasons it is true.

See the difference? It's the difference between mindless acceptance of authority and understanding the reasons why something is true, how facts were established, etc.

Another example could be something like the fact that a fossil is a million years old. Some people just accept it without even giving a thought to how someone might estimate the age of a fossil. Critically questioning how the age estimate was made, however, might reveal that it is based on layering, depth, radioactive dating, comparison with other fossils, or some combination of methods. Questioning assumptions built into facts and seeking to know how empirical observations are interpreted to produce facts that contain analytical conclusions results in deeper knowledge that just memorizing facts.

You can memorize books full of facts and be an expert, but you can still lack critical understanding of your own expertise.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

When LivingLava says "reason" he just means "stuff I made up by myself". That might make his word salad a little easier to understand.

Reasoning is dialectical, like Socratic method. You ask critical questions and seek answers to them in whatever way you can find them.

Sometimes you can figure something out on your own without researching it; sometimes you research it and tentatively accept some received knowledge to help build your own conclusions.

The process of reasoning just involved asking critical questions, answering them, and then further questioning what you've built so far to go further with it.

That is how you build up a more robust body of knowledge/understanding on anything.

If you just research something and accept what you read without questioning it, you are just memorizing dogma. You have to think deeply about something to really understand it, and that involves reasoning.

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@livinglava,

You have never seriously studied anything, have you Lava?

Gaining expertise in a subject is not "memorizing dogma". If that is your idea about what getting an education means, then no wonder you never bothered to get an education.

No one memorizes dogma. That isn't what anyone does.

I learned to do science by doing science. Fifty percent of the work I did was solving problem sets... and the answers to these problems could be checked to see if they were true. I was learning by doing. Another thirty percent was doing lab work... actually testing the theories I was either learning or developing on my own against how Nature works. The rest of the time was learning to work with peers and professors.

I learned to do engineering by doing engineering. Right now a big part of my job is making big data go faster. When I have a new design, I run it and gets measured. I can't just declare that my idea is better, I have to test it and publish the numbers. If it runs slower then it gets reject and I learn something.

Of course as an engineer I get to read papers, and collaborate with peers. If they have an idea, I don't just accept it. I test it. But generally speaking my peers are experts and their ideas are great (and I have much more expertise now then I did 20 years ago which helps me figure out a great idea sooner).

These ideas you make up on your own are ridiculous. And you never really have to put them to the test because they are your own personal "Truth", so you will never discover they are wrong.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

You have never seriously studied anything, have you Lava?

Gaining expertise in a subject is not "memorizing dogma". If that is your idea about what getting an education means, then no wonder you never bothered to get an education.

I have no interest in submitting to your evaluation of me by discussing my personal background with you. Everyone has gotten some level of education or we couldn't be online typing as we type, so stick to discussing topics and avoid delving into people's personal information. Doing so only demonstrates your own weakness to keep things at a general level.

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No one memorizes dogma. That isn't what anyone does.

At some level, that is what we all do, usually subconsciously.

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I learned to do science by doing science. Fifty percent of the work I did was solving problem sets... and the answers to these problems could be checked to see if they were true. I was learning by doing. Another thirty percent was doing lab work... actually testing the theories I was either learning or developing on my own against how Nature works. The rest of the time was learning to work with peers and professors.

You love to narrate and romanticize your view of your own life as an academic scientist. It is just self-indulgent narcissism that makes you look like you're still trying to convince yourself that you are a worthy outcome of your education.

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I learned to do engineering by doing engineering. Right now a big part of my job is making big data go faster. When I have a new design, I run it and gets measured. I can't just declare that my idea is better, I have to test it and publish the numbers. If it runs slower then it gets reject and I learn something.

Looking at selfies of yourself in a lab with a labcoat on is irrelevant, yet that is what your self-narratives are like.

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Of course as an engineer I get to read papers, and collaborate with peers. If they have an idea, I don't just accept it. I test it. But generally speaking my peers are experts and their ideas are great (and I have much more expertise now then I did 20 years ago which helps me figure out a great idea sooner).

More labcoat-selfie idolatry.

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These ideas you make up on your own are ridiculous. And you never really have to put them to the test because they are your own personal "Truth", so you will never discover they are wrong.

To declare something absolutely right or wrong, you need positive proof, which you aren't going to get at the level of most conspiracy theories, whose scope typically goes beyond what is empirically researchable. All you can do is reason about them, and that is what makes them interesting material for discussion, at least for mature people who aren't obsessed with winning arguments instead of just fleshing out reasons that provide evidence to be weighed.

I never get to the point of evaluating anything because people like you and Farmerman are always jumping the gun to argue about not even the reasoning regarding a given hypothesis but just the stupid assumptions you make about poster's backgrounds based on whatever you think you have figured out about them at a personal level from their posts.

I keep telling you you are anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-discussion when you basically just fight against open discussion of critical thinking regarding tentative information and whatever facts and/or other information you can bring to bear on the reasoning process.

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@livinglava,

- You hate professional scientists and engineers
- You hate education (at least the kind that happens in University).
- You hate experiments done in labs.
- You hate mathematics.

And you are calling me anti-science. You are ridiculous

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@maxdancona,

In Ll's professional life, hes in sol charge of deciding how much whip cram goes on top of your hot chocolate. Like Frank Lloyd WRight, he does it all by sight and feel. Thats why most of Wrights buildings were in danger of collapse(he too didnt "believe" in math)

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@livinglava,

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I have no interest in submitting to your evaluation of me by discussing my personal background with you.

I think thats a clear "NO I havent studied anything"

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

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I have no interest in submitting to your evaluation of me by discussing my personal background with you.
I think thats a clear "NO I havent studied anything"

There are two important parts to studying (other than just developing skills).

1) Everyone starts an education with a bunch of intuitions. A good part of these intuitions are wrong. You need to have you need to have your intuitions challenged so that you can weed out your ideas that don't work.

2) You need to be challenged other people. The ideas in your head are all created the same brain. You can get misconceptions that you don't even know to question. Professors and peer will do that for you.

Lava already thinks his ideas are "Truth", he doesn't want them challenged.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

- You hate professional scientists and engineers
- You hate education (at least the kind that happens in University).
- You hate experiments done in labs.
- You hate mathematics.

And you are calling me anti-science. You are ridiculous

You are anti-science. You can't acknowledge that science, education, and even mathematics are all things that exist beyond the narrow institutional manifestations of them that you worship.

You are a materialist with no view of reality beyond the most superficial aspects of material manifestations.

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Corona GM conspiracy thread

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