Phi for All

! Moderator Note The hijack about photons having curved trajectories has been split off to Speculations. If pcalton wishes to expound on his idea further, please join him there. Please stay on the topic of this thread.

Tim the plumber has been banned for repeated soapboxing and trolling. A blog was suggested.

I have to assume that you don't mean citations from other discussion participants, since you've obviously been inundated with links to peer-reviewed articles supporting the claims other participants are making in those Climate Science threads. Are you instead saying that the consensus view itself isn't held to a rigorous enough standard? The evidence for a scientific consensus has passed enough tests to be the best explanation we have, accepted by the most professionals in that field, and they're published so anyone can check the techniques used to gather it. Are you claiming they all dropped their normally rigorous methodology on a highly publicized issue like climate change?

There were just a handful of Islamic terrorists before Bush II. Isn't war supposed to reduce the enemy? Maybe that war was is about something else.

We demand it of the consensus, so we're just trying to be consistent. Is there a problem?

! Moderator Note Can we please have one Earth Science thread where nobody posts arguments from incredulity? Discussion fails when faced with fallacies.

! Moderator Note Agreed. Moved to the Lounge.

It depends on the definition of virginity.

Believe me, when I see a positive change in someone's discussion style, an attitude adjustment that suddenly makes them more productive to respond to, I think that's a great time for a reinforcing rep point. It's all about interesting and informative scientific discussion. Angst and drama and personal outrage should be edited at the source. You have the power!

The Lounge here is like Non-science Help. We're going to help you work this out for yourself, but we're not going to do the work for you. You aren't being distracted, you're letting yourself become distracted. Understand the difference and you're on the road to recovery. You shouldn't restrict your future choices of what you find interesting and compelling. As zapatos said, some really awesome discussions happen in non-science fora. Set a time limit for SFN if you need to. If your phone has a timer, set your limit and let it count down when you're here, pause it when you're not. When the timer goes off, you're done for the day.

! Moderator Note Non-mainstream hypotheses can't stay in our mainstream sections, where students might mistake your speculations for proper test answers. I'm moving this to our Speculations section. Please read the special rules for this section. You're going to be asked for supportive evidence any time you make an assertion. The idea is to get input from experts and enthusiasts who can help you make sure each step you take is sound foundationally. You also have to be patient while other members decipher your non-standard terminology. They're going to be asking what you mean a lot. Any criticism is about your idea, and shouldn't be taken personally. Enjoy. What was it about the current theories that caused you to devise a completely new set of explanations?

Was that really necessary? Did you really need to say that?

I must think that? Is that a prerequisite for thinking that our cultures have more of an effect on women's career choice than any kind of biological preference? Where did my right/wrong judgment happen, in your opinion? You put forth the argument that I'm insulting the agency of women by claiming they're affected by attempts to dissuade them from certain career choices. If I were to make similar claims of unjust manipulation about people being affected by internet harassment, would you assume I'm trying to insult them? I don't see where the insult is, and I can't help but feel this part of your argument is trying to say, "They're big girls, they can take care of themselves, you're insulting them to think they could be swayed in their career choice by their society." No, the advertising part was analogy, trying to equate the subtle, constant aspects of both advertising and societal pressures. Sorry I wasn't clear on that. Again, I've been unclear. This was not personal. It's your argument I was talking about, that it seems to need women to be biologically disposed to certain professions, or at least much more so than they're affected by their societies. It seemed to help minorities when we agreed not to treat them differently with respect to employment and housing. Many people now have a broader range of freedom to make life decisions because they can factor a mandatory lack of prejudice into the equation. I offer this as evidence that it might work with women in STEM. But are you also saying that men should be compensated more on average because more men die on average while working? Is this the risk you're talking about, besides the obvious stuff like "skyscraper construction worker"? Please forgive me, you've been participating so much I'd forgotten that Unity+ opened and titled the thread.

Personal opinion warning: I think you're reaction to criticism is way overblown. I can appreciate that you've spent months trying to overthrow theories that have been around for decades, but you started this rant with a total rep of -1. Now you're at -14, and you should certainly be able to plot which of your posts are being downvoted. But whatever, we have members who made the same choice. They got a few negative votes for behavior early on, then decided to sulk and keep it up, try to have the worst reputation possible. Most end up breaking enough rules to be banned, but some are still here.

Suddenly, I have an assumed lack of respect for women's agency, because I think many societies don't treat women equally in the workplace? This argument reminds me of the "if you don't support the war, you must hate our soldiers" fallacy. You attempt to put down any kind of brainwashing as absurd. Personally, I consider the daily barrage of advertising many people get to be a form of brainwashing. In that context, women are very definitely being subjected to daily abuse. But you seem to be saying that because we're adults and can make our own decisions, that type of manipulation is perfectly OK, that's it's insulting to even suggest that it's an influence on women's career choices. I think many people ignore small, daily, accumulated brainwashings like this, in much the same way the frog doesn't jump out of the pot if the heat is increased slowly over time. You need to stop looking at this as an all or nothing problem. It's not just culture that creates this gap, NOBODY has been saying that! It's much more likely that there are many factors to be considered. You seem to need women to be hard-wired against science biologically, with no influence from the culture they're born into. Does it absolve men from trying to help if it's just a nature thing? As an aside, this seems like a defense for why men should get better pay than women, because they take more risks and die at work more often. Off the top of my head, I'd say just replace "female crowd" with "women". If you were trying to discuss men in STEM, would you really call them "males"? And I know it's just an argument from incredulity, and fairly worthless because of that, but I can hardly believe you would ever refer to men in STEM as "the male crowd". The only thing I'm finding annoying is that I can't figure out why you're trying to validate your stance with so many bad arguments. You seem to want everyone to argue from the extremes so you can more easily make your points.

Happy Birthday, Moon! Enjoy yourself today, have a great time. I would suggest a series of prank calls to the Creation Museum. "Hello, can I speak to Lucy, please? I have a bone to pick with her."

How is it a blanket declaration? I basically said I think the problem as presented here is more nurture than nature. And you can stop crying, because your misleading vividness isn't really helping this discussion. You're resorting to some uncharacteristic fallacious logic, when you're normally very careful about that. Seriously? You don't think referring to the "female crowd", as opposed to the men in STEM, isn't setting up sides? And really, when did you start resorting to strawmen so often? My stance is clearly "more nurture than nature", not "biology absolutely does not under any circumstances have any sort of..." Yeah. It's like a parody of strawmanning. Why?

The cultural references seem to show it is a nurture problem. How women are treated, how they're thought of, seem to play a much bigger role than any kind of interest preferences by gender. I can't help but think that if this thread were about men in science, the title would have been something about men in science. Instead, it's a female "crowd", implying one "side" vs the other. I know, I should stop reading things into it that weren't intended. But it's probably more of an overall attitude like that that keeps women out of STEM in some countries, a way of looking at any woman as different or wrong for the position. And a lot of male geeks are socially awkward as well, and don't relate well to women. This can translate to putting them down in all kinds of subtle ways.

Critical thinking isn't a subject. It's a process for analyzing and synthesizing information rationally. You learn it when you learn the scientific method, but it can be applied virtually anywhere.

Example?

Life is the ticket to get in. You don't get to participate if someone takes your ticket away. It's the prerequisite for anything meaningful. It should be important not to end it if it can be helped. I think any comparisons to war are misplaced. Soldiers make a choice to enlist and put themselves in harm's way, and what we're talking about is punishment, pure and simple. Punishment from the People, administered through the State. I think the DP is like the People sweeping their problems under the rug, it's going to keep them from finding a better solution because, hey, the place looks nicer without all those criminals. If we're to have any hope of changing our messed up penal system, I think respect for life should be promoted, so no killing people for killing people. Top-down approach, see if you can convert all murders to assaults. Sure, we all die, but I don't know anyone who wants to die at another person's hands. I could start another thread asking people how they'd like to die, and see how many people would like to be murdered. So that's where I stand. Degrading a life is a bad thing, but you have to have life for anything else to matter.

Your misunderstandings about science run deep. You call it "the current paradigm", when it's the best explanation we have to date. That's what theory is, the best we've got for now. You gripe that people can't see past the best theory, but offer nothing else. I try to avoid arguments from incredulity, but I can't believe you could seriously say, "New ideas are always rejected and always have been". What a unique way to be completely wrong!

Copy it, don't cut it. Highlight the relevant parts of your document, copy, then paste it in a post. Or better, give us a short synopsis of what your idea is about.

The problem is self-perpetuating. The science community is plenty vocal, it's just that the people who should be listening to them don't have the science education to understand them. Explanations from scientists tend to be much more nuanced and deep, so the average person tunes out science in favor of some easy-to-understand but ultimately wrong sound byte ("If we evolved from monkeys, why do we still have monkeys?"). And frankly, if they only taught the scientific method, and critical thinking skills, I think that's all it might take. If everyone understood how to think rationally for themselves, I think it would foster a desire to learn more.

Ah, it's the adjective then. Substitute "valuable" or "irreplaceable" for "precious". I can't replace a human life taken. From what I've observed, this is all we get. Death happens normally, but I think we should do everything in our power to keep from causing it prematurely.