Sayonara

Clearly not. You asked me to provide my "credentials" and I did so. I have already made the distinction between judgement and observation, and I cannot help it if you have no rational response. Ad hom me again, and I will ban you from this site for a month. "Suggest" is not the same as "recommend". Stop moving the goalposts and deal with the issues that have been raised. Quite clearly I have "decided" no such thing. Incidentally, that "for them" in there is symptomatic of the reason you are not reading me correctly. I am all in favour of a consistent approach in medical treatment, but since I am not the one proposing the public delivery of a new medical treatment my arguments are not required to accommodate that as an issue. For all this yelling, the current problem remains the same: other than labelling homosexuality a "medical condition", how do we justify the perceived necessity (if you like) of any given hypothetical cure? I would appreciate it if we could move this thread on towards answering that question in a positive fashion.

I agree mooeypoo.

There is another element to this that we have yet to touch upon in this thread (even between the lot of us we have not managed it yet!) The request "please provide clear examples of extinctions due to loss of habitat" is more appropriately provided as "please provide clear examples of extinctions due to loss of habitat that we know about". I perceive the loss of habitat (in the physical sense you mentioned earlier) to be problematic here, because without a complete catalogue of everything that existed within a habitat before it was destroyed, we cannot very well be sure of knowing which species - if any - have been entirely lost during that destruction. This is not so much of a problem for extensively studied ecosystems, but in relatively untouched and largely unknown systems such as deep Amazonian jungle, we have no idea what was there beforehand.

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who took the time to nominate, vote, and make this community what it is!

I am making no such judgement. I am making the observation that it is only a real problem for anyone because society occasionally says this is so. Allegations of judgements notwithstanding, my "credentials" for this discussion come from personal experience, observation, getting involved with the community, and a great deal of research. Perhaps you would care to share your own "credentials", seeing as we now apparently can't discuss this in a civil manner without them. As I said, I made no such decisiom. Stop chucking red herrings about the place. Noted, but the issue still exists that the recommendation to "fix" something which might not be perceived as problematic by the patient (or, indeed by anyone else) requires justification. On the other hand, as has been mentioned by pretty much everyone else in the thread, it might simply suggest a lack of incentive. Again, if homosexuality is shown to be a medical condition, why does it need curing?

Google lost their cool kid image when they floated.

You are having a laugh, right? It doesn't come at all when some bright spark says "hey kids, don't worry about going through these tough times to come out stronger on the other side and confident in yourself. Take a pill instead!" The difference between "abnormal" and "wrong" has been covered extensively already, so I will leave this one. Granted, but that can be done as a casual query without any investment in the result, whereas a recommendation implies that one believes one is "improving" the patient in some way, or bringing them closer to one's own ideal. Doesn't that strike you as being a quick fix to a problem that is not even a problem with your hypothetical "patient", but a problem with society at large? Consider that examples of what you are proposing already exist. Take, for example, the minors who somehow convince their (presumably mad) parents that they will just DIE if they don't get surgically enhanced boobies. I don't see any objective reason for "curing" gay people, so I am not sure that is really a good argument. Also I find it offensive that you would even say that, quite frankly. Talk about broad sweeps of the brush. I mean, I can see where you are going with it, but you really are swinging back towards the Victorian "mental disorder" way of delivering the message I would favour this approach provided that: 1) It came with no expectations whatsoever, and 2) No value judgements were made or even implied in the circulation of this information.

I don't deny this in the least. The difference lies in the fact that whereas being ugly is not desirable to anyone who is ugly, not everyone who is gay perceives it to be a problem. There is a spectrum of responses. Clearly you have never attended a Pride event. Of course I think that there will be many who want to use a treatment. My issue is with the fact that everyone should be expected or recommended to use a treatment regardless of their own wishes, despite the fact that medically speaking there are no known ill effects associated with being gay that are not also associated with being straight. When I said "you" I really meant anyone. I should have said "one". I am simply stating why I think your prediction is perhaps premature. Why does it even need to be "recommended"? Why can it not simply be THERE, on a subscriber basis? It's not like society has any need to rid itself of homosexuality. Aren't there quite a few states that we consider to be abnormal, and could treat, but don't?

Right, so nobody ever self-harmed after years of being bullied about their looks, and cosmetic surgery is just an urban myth. You clearly omit the counter examples that show ugliness is not generally considered desirable. The harmfulness issue aside, people want to be good looking because they perceive it to bring them benefits which they find desirable. The fact that you cannot imagine a gay person having similar wishes is an argument from incredulity. Well, no. Not if the affected person does not perceive their condition to be undesirable, the condition does not have inherently harmful effects, and the condition is not transmissible. Apples and oranges. If you expect people to take a cure that will fundamentally change who and what they are, you are making the statement that you do not value their right to be. Societies like ours reject this approach.

A "symptom" that can be treated implies some sort of harmful condition.

One of the reasons I don't like "here is my example, now show me yours" discussions, is that it is an unconstrained battle which usually encourages a shift in the burden of proof. How many examples should we provide? Should we counter with one for each of Lomborg's? Maybe we should have twice as many? How many examples will be acceptable or convincing? Alas, that has not been stated. Although having said that, Go Lucaspa Go!

I said lack of use, not absence of use. As you will be well aware if you have ever glanced at the "Why is there no forum for...?" thread in the Suggestions and Comments forum, we strictly avoid maintaining or creating sub-forums for which there is only a trickle demand, and we are happy to accommodate a handful of such discussions in other, perhaps less appropriate, sub-forums. If enough demand arises, requested forums will (re)appear. Believe me, the Philosophy of Science sub-forum has been discussed extensively amongst the SFN Staff. It was not closed on a whim. Touché. I have to say I don't think it is particularly intuitive for a user to discuss a scientific theory in one sub-forum, but have to go seeking out another thread in another sub-forum (a thread which may not exist) in order to discuss the implications, applications, etc. We are quite happy for such on-topic discussion to occur in the "hard science" areas. To justify the depth decisions that we make when we add sub-forums, we need actual demand. Not the presence of a few dozen dead threads and a handful of live discussions which might be relevant, but demand. And that is why we have the "Why is there no forum for...?" thread. It is where those demands should be directed.

This discussion reminds me of a case that we investigated last year. An elderly lady was knocked to the floor during a robbery and suffered minor injuries. In hospital she developed secondary problems as a result of those injuries, and died. At court, the prosecution argued that the robbery was aggravated by manslaughter because the actions of the offender led to the death of the woman. The defence argued that she was old, infirm, and on the way out anyway, and that she could have died from the same problems without having been injured. One detective summed it up quite succinctly by asking the prosecution "had she been old, infirm, and on the way out anyway, and was hit by a bus, what would you say the cause of death was?" Now I hate explaining things with analogies, as a general rule, but I think we have a similar situation here. Loss of habitat (which bear in mind does not necessarily mean complete loss, or even removal of biomass) is frequently the factor that weakens populations and systems, allowing other negative factors to drive them under. So an obvious question is, do we consider that to be the root cause (or the indirect aggravating factor), as in "we would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that darned habitat loss", or do we consider it to have no more (or even less) importance than any factors which follow it?

I don't mean alone in the literal sense, obviously. But it seems to be a minority view. If you think I am being closed-minded about this, then clearly you have not paid close enough attention to my posts. I do not state that Lomborg is wrong, or that I believe him to be wrong. I consistently state that in this thread the discussions of his interpretations lack crucial information about his use of particular terms.

You could also infer from that simply that he does not consider himself to be a murderous human.

Nobody has provided conflicting data because the data is the same. It is the interpretations that differ, and there are many reasons (some discussed here at length) why Lomborg is the one standing alone.

This thread can go on and on forever, but we have already established the essential ingredient that Lomburg's interpretations vary from everyone else's because his criteria for "habitat loss" also vary.

I will capitalise on your error before you notice it by registering encyclopediagalacticaportal.com.

Vegetarians seem to be largely aware of this. I believe their stance is somewhere in the region of "instead of causing further suffering to meet our meat requirements, we should reduce those requirements".

The maximum number of possibilities is quite massive' date=' but the number of [i']actual comparisons[/i] needed to check each possibility should generally be very low (because the variable assignments in each round of checking are likely to be wrong and therefore fail the test condition). A recursive function could probably chew through this problem quite quickly if you feed it the right arrays.

In what way has it put the US "behind" other countries, and why should some subjective ranking against other countries take priority over the welfare of your own citizens?

I know, let's dig up a thread from three years ago and start repeating bad arguments.

I just tried to install the latest Ubuntu release on my PC... I have two SATA drives forming a striped RAID array which is what Windows boots from... those use the onboard SATA connectors on the motherboard. I also have an IDE drive for documents and my DVD burner; those are connected to the onboard IDE channels. Despite the DVD drive having the highest priority in the boot priority list, it is being completely ignored on startup. Is this invasion and occupation of my boot priority list territories normal RAID behaviour?

I predict many more Cs.

It was SkepticLance who detailed how the Japanese use the whales, not me.