Cap'n Refsmmat

I think ydoaPs's point is that Jesus agrees with Peter. See post #57.

To be fair, this is the Religion forum, and a thread about what God is to boot. I think one can safely say what attributes their particular conception of God has.

Ooh, that brings up an even more interesting question. Suppose they developed a "cure" for naturally being worse at (insert field here). Some sort of medication that "fixes" the brain difference and makes you equal to the other gender. Would you take that medication?

Awesome. I'm envious of any job that involves making man-portable potato cannons and trailer-mobile potato artillery. Also, I'm surprised that golf ball appeared to emerge unscathed. At that velocity I'd have thought it'd break when it hit the ground. I guess the shallow angle let it survive.

You can't divide by a-b. a=b, so a-b=0. Division by 0.

Hmm. I'll bet there's an assortment of medical problems that might be related to this, even; an assortment of web sites (not necessarily reputable, I haven't done too much research) tells me that potassium deficiency can produce poor memory, among other symptoms. That's not to say the only explanation is medical -- this could just be the way you are. But it's worth looking into, even for the sake of just having a thorough checkup. Have you been like this your entire life, or is it more recent? Another thing you should consider is using an external brain. I'm reminded here of the software The Hit List, with its motto "Forget what you need to do with confidence", but there's plenty of other similar stuff. There are also paper planners, of course; my brother carries around a pocket notebook and pen so he can write down memorable quotes, ideas, and random stuff, for example. Now, I'm a bit of the opposite of you. I tend to remember random facts for years, storing them until I turn them into a bad pun while talking about something completely unrelated. But I still don't trust myself to remember everything I have to do, so I keep a to-do list and calendar electronically. It's very handy.

Okay. But if you're reading applications for the next member of your arm-wrestling team, are you wrong to favor males over females?

I see. So even if there's a demonstrable difference between genders, your gender only indicates a likelihood of you being better suited, whereas experience at a university or a previous job indicates that you definitely were to their standards.

Right, but just like graduation from a good university is a qualification, couldn't the correct gender be a qualification?

This is quite a famous debate in the early church. I think the best answer, as you and ydoaPs have demonstrated, is that the Bible contradicts itself on this point.

"If the moon is made of cheese, then I am a superman" is valid. But the rest of the argument you construct is not, because denying the antecedent is a logical fallacy. There could be other things that cause you to be Superman besides the Moon's cheesiness.

I'm trying to be hypothetical here. Suppose we discover that the differences are significant. What then? (I'm going to edit my first post to make this more clear)

But isn't picking someone because their gender is typically better at the job just like picking them because their school had a good reputation? In other words, I don't see the difference between "Oh, this guy should be good, their physics program is really good" versus "Oh, she should be good at this, she's female." Both of them talk about averages. On average, the people from a particular college might be better prepared, just like on average, one gender might have better skills. It's another factor that indicates whether a candidate is more likely to be suited for the job.

So, there's a perpetual debate on whether there really are mental differences between the genders, or whether those differences are merely psychological or a result of cultural restrictions. That's not at all what I want to debate here. We can talk about what the case really is in another thread. Instead, I'd like to pose a question. What if it was demonstrated that women and men have significant fundamental mental differences, with men being better at certain tasks and women better at others? Suppose, for example, it turns out that men really do have a biological predisposition towards science and mathematics, while women have a predisposition towards verbal skills. (It does not matter, for the purposes of this thread, if this is actually true.) What is the appropriate reaction? Should we try to educate people to suit their biological predispositions, or should we try to overcome them? Should "affirmative action" (hiring talented women preferentially over men in male-dominated fields, for example) in gender relations be encouraged, to boost a gender in fields it's not "good" at? And again, this thread is not about what is actually the case, so let's please not debate what the differences actually are -- this is an ethical question, not a neuroscientific one.

First betas of IPB 3.1 should be out in a week or so. I'll be done with school in two weeks, so real work can start then. So, this summer. I'm not sure about animated logos. I already don't like animated avatars too much. You can see our test site online, though: http://area51.scienceforums.net/ Feel free to register and tinker (and tell me if there's something wrong), but please don't use your regular SFN username in case I try to run a conversion run on it -- it chokes when two people have the same username on import.

What about this? http://www.data.gov/open Federal agencies are putting more and more of their data online.

You'll be able to get the formulas, they'll just be jumbled up. The code will work, it will just be difficult to understand. Is this something like what you want? http://www.backerstreet.com/rec/rec.htm You might search for "decompiler" rather than "disassembler."

Generally, even if you can disassemble, the result will be pretty illegible. Most of the structure of your code is lost when you compile it, so the resulting disassembled code won't have the structure you originally gave it.

Which book, and can you quote what it says?

How about we just adopt the convention of sourcing news from two sources of different bias? That way we can compare the articles to see what's reported differently. No need for a ban on specific news sources, just a requirement that there's more than one source used. It doesn't need to be a particular rule, just a convention agreed upon by people who post in Politics. If someone doesn't cite any other sources, it's easy enough for someone to search it on Google News and provide a link for those interested. In fact, this is a good idea even if news sources were totally unbiased -- sometimes one article leaves out details that another includes, just for reasons of space or because the reporter thought them unnecessary. Citing multiple sources gives us a more complete picture.

If you'd like to share what your logic book says, that'd be great. Mine's 200 miles away at the moment, and in any case my philosophy professor's definition of "valid" and "invalid" agrees with what has been demonstrated above. (See Philosophical Writing by Martinich, my professor.)

I think what you will find is that you cannot use the axioms and theorems of logic to prove any argument of the form If P, then Q. Q. Therefore, P. You cannot prove #3 with the theorems of formal logic. That is why affirming the consequent is a fallacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent should answer that. I don't have my logic textbook handy.

I believe the Brainiac people faked it. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/jul/15/badscience.uknews

When the conclusions do not logically follow from the premises. The conclusions in the arguments the tree talked about do not follow logically, because they deny the antecedent or affirm the consequent. Neither is a valid logical operation.