Phi for All

I don't really have a recipe for you. It would be optimum if you could find the amazement, the sheer awe and wonder the rest of us do for science topics, and join in the conversations about those topics, and leave the more common social chatter for Facebook or Twitter. We tend to talk about religion from a reasoned perspective as well, so if you're a person of faith, I'd recommend anywhere else to discuss your god(s). We have no interest in being a one-stop shop for everyone's social media yearnings. We're a science discussion forum with a focus on mainstream science.

We would first suspend you. If you didn't get the message and continued in this vein, we'd suspend you for a longer period. If that didn't work but you weren't breaking any other rules, we'd probably put you in the moderation queue, where a staff member has to approve your posts before they show up for everyone. We'd rather you stop making this all about you, and just join some science discussions. Talk with people about the science, and stop trying to yank us all over onto your tracks. If you're serious about improving your life by improving your knowledge, it's not going to happen if you keep making your time here about everything else.

It means science deals with observable, testable phenomena. Souls, gods, angels, heaven, all these things are scientifically ambiguous because they can't be discussed meaningfully. Falsifiability is lacking in most religious concepts, for example.

The way you talk about it makes us fear that what we say might be taken the wrong way. You aren't clinical in your discussions, you're very, very personal. It would be unethical for us to discuss suicide with you in that light. As we've stated here and elsewhere, we can talk about anything until it becomes part of an online diagnosis, then our policy is to do what the site's owners demand, adn refer you to a professional. I'd hoped you could see the reason behind that.

My copy of the New Testament has numerous references to slaves and slavery, and usually admonishes them to obey their masters with fear and trembling. Ephesians 6:5-8 and Colossians 3:22-24 are the first two that come up.

And that's a good thing, since we tend to stop looking when we think we've found something. It took me a while to see that theory is better than proof, and current best explanations are better than answers.

But the basis of true trust is accurate information. The anti-vaxxer movement is ignorant, misinformed, and relies on emotional arguments over intellectual ones. How do you gain the trust of someone who believes emotional lies over scientific facts? What's wrong with pointing out that you don't know about things you don't know about? Medicine in general is a poor candidate for business models. But even in a business, don't customers come to you for expertise? And when it comes to life and death situations, don't the benefits outweigh the fears? Medical professionals shouldn't have to persuade their clients that immunization is trustworthy. If the complications from measles and whooping cough were as visible to the masses as the complications from polio, I doubt we'd have this problem. Even the idiots stood in line three times to get Salk's vaccine on a sugar cube so they wouldn't end up crippled.

The OP should have avoided the obvious strawman logic in his title. I'm sure that's what prompted the bad rep. That said, I'm not a fan of negative reputation on an opening post in general. Sometimes though, when someone is opening a ton of similar threads, or they're obviously trying to thwart some staff action, or they use blatantly poor reasoning or fallacies in their opening argument, I can see why people do it. "There are no bad questions" is a fantasy, unfortunately. Intent seems to be key.

Discussing suicide isn't out of bounds, and we've done it in a clinical manner before. Discussion that seems to promote suicide ("When's the Best Time?") isn't allowed. If you want to discuss your own tendencies, we're going to refer you to a professional, since nobody online is capable of diagnoses about complex health issues. Beyond the liability for the site owner, it's a disservice to discuss anyone's ongoing medical problems in a forum like this. We don't want to enable anyone who is trying to avoid professional help for any reason, we don't want to make the situation worse through our own ignorance of the situation, and we don't want anyone here responsible for a well-intended remark to be taken the wrong way by someone who is temporarily emotionally unstable. This is NOT something internet forums will ever be good at. The detachment prevalent in online posting doesn't seem to dovetail well with coping mechanisms for depression. We're afraid of making the situation worse, so we defer to those in a professional setting designed to offer the best, most meaningful help.

One of the things we're really strict about here is not trying to doctor anyone. We refer questions like these to professionals, because we care and we trust in their expertise. It's not only an ethical policy, but a legal one as well. Liability is an issue here. Currently, we're having a staff discussion about how you're forcing our hand wrt your status on the site. It looks like we have to choose between you and the owner's policies. You seem to be sort of flipping out here, and pushing hard against some kind of perceived obstacles. I think you need to take a break, how about you?

Guesswork with evidence is a speculation. Without it, it's a closed thread here.

And you should absolutely go somewhere else to discuss that. This will never be that place. Never.

Real trolls don't last here for years. What you don't realize is that science-types are usually pretty exacting, so if you said something factually wrong about science, nobody here could leave that alone. They'd be forced by pedantry to either correct you or vote your comment down. You're more of a fish who left the school too early, and you're getting beat up trying to go it alone. I've been there. Come on back and learn.

A speculation HERE is scientific in nature. You can't introduce the supernatural into a discussion that needs to stick to science. In other words, you'd have to confirm there is a heaven before discussing if it exists in black holes or not. Then you'd have to show how you might test such a thing, which is impossible because of the natures of both heaven and black holes. Then there's also the fact that you joined a science discussion site and have spent much of your time creating non-science threads. Why should anyone think there's anything meaningful to talk about in your thread about unobservable places and stellar phenomena? Look, we may be a bit too rigorous for you. There are other science discussion sites out there, and some don't care about sticking with mainstream science. They love the kind of wild west guess-fests you're talking about, where facts don't matter as much, and you can leap from one unsupported claim to another. If you find the adherence to principles and methodology too strict, I suggest you go check some other discussion sites.

Public interest should refer to knowledge needed by citizens in a representative democracy to help them make informed decisions. It shouldn't be confused with "the public's best interests", which is usually misused by those who want to avoid a negative public reaction. Anyone claiming Mueller's report will be too divisive to be shared with the public is trying to define what's in everyone's "best interest". It seems similar to officials keeping a possible epidemic secret. We shouldn't give up intelligence secrets, but we shouldn't try to shield a sitting POTUS from evidence either. Public interest says we need to be informed; public's best interest might say we can't embarrass the POTUS on the national stage like that.

Certainly busier than you need to be, since you're eschewing orthodoxy and accumulated mainstream knowledge. You'll have to start from the ground up while the rest of us stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us.

George Carlin's advice? Eat a whole box of Oreos in the waiting room, and make them work for it. Seriously, though, there are many health problems that can arise from tooth problems. Even if you wear dentures, you need to see a dentist on a regular basis. We want to keep you around, and you don't want infection in the bloodstream near your brain.

You may be able to fool people who haven't studied science at all, but what if the girls actually know quantum mechanics? You should talk about things you know well.

I stopped for a lot of reason.

I think I was trying to say, if nobody takes criticism of an idea personally, feelings don't have to enter into a discussion of the idea. In fact, emotions can cloud our reasoning, so removing them as much as possible is good methodology. I'm also over-sensitive about ideas that people claim to have spent years developing that are full of mistakes in the science. If someone had been mercilessly critical years ago, think what the person with the idea could have been working on.

Part of this is a general unwillingness to differentiate between an idea and the person who had it. Great ideas and bad ideas don't make people great or bad. They're just ideas. Here, at least, we try to only attack ideas. And we do that mercilessly, because we care.

Gods are about gaps in understanding and knowledge. Some people aren't comfortable not knowing, but instead of learning and exploring, they make things up that make sense to them. The ambiguity is preferable to an answer they don't understand. People in general don't tend towards supernatural beliefs, but I think ignorant ones do. It's just easier to believe in god(s) when you don't have the proper knowledge.

Hannibal Lecter used to meat people. I would NOT recommend his methods for finding friends. Is there a crucial time element involved in your question?

Happy birthday!

Sarcasm is tricky in print. I thought you were seriously using the most sickening of the apologist phrases.