Phi for All

I think it's a bad coping mechanism. It's not easy dealing with people, but it's usually vastly more rewarding than not. It's well worth the effort and I think it's a big mistake not to make the investment by claiming they're ALWAYS interested in triviality, or that their life's goal is to win a video game. That's not honest, and relationships need quite a bit of that.

Where did I say you're "supposed to be as happy"? And the part about beating level 100 being "their life goal" is also new information. Are you making strawmen? The sheer number of significant things below "curing cancer" is fairly staggering, and may not include video games at all. The point is, the accomplishment may not be something you care about, but the person who accomplished it is. Or should be.

You're disconnecting the details from the person, imo. Beating level 100 on Dragon Master may not be something you care about, but your best friend beating level 100 is a big deal because it's a big deal for him. You don't have to get excited for the game, but can you be excited for your friend? Work or school, the idea is to get the job done while interacting with a whole bunch of peers. Cooperation is one of the hallmarks of our species, and it's one of the things that allow us to form societies.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And not even wrong.

Complete Red Herring. I'd prefer to discuss why you contest the consensus. Do you work for an oil company, or some other industry that doesn't want to conform to tougher standards on carbon emissions?

I think you have this ass-backwards. The gun is 95% loaded. You're the one banking on getting that single empty chamber.

Seriously, you haven't caught on to what a logical fallacy is and isn't yet? They don't usually happen in questions, they happen when someone puts forth an unsteady argument, sort of like what you've done here. Nobody should have to TELL you when you're doing it, you should be able to see that you're using a Hasty Generalization to argue that asking any question always results in calls of logical fallacies, because it's happened to you in some instances and now you're generalizing that to be all instances. This is like saying, "Never try to have any fun at all, or you will be told you're not allowed to climb the power line towers!" Does that make sense to you? It doesn't make you a skeptic, it weakens your arguments.

It certainly is easier. I don't think hygiene was in question. It's the ingredients like azodicarbonamide, used to make processing the bread dough easier for large scale manufacturing, that poses health risks you wouldn't face if you made your own bread. Again, false dilemma. There's a middle ground between hunting live animals and eating tinned meat that your argument is ignoring.

False dilemma. There's a middle ground option, where you buy flour and yeast from the supermarket, then use your own water, work, oven, time, and knife to make a sliced loaf. There are even flours that aren't as heavily processed as the ones used in Walmart white bread.

! Moderator Note Or... OR... It's like you were told via PM, opening a second account is against the rules, so we banned the second one, and because Moderators can't change member's usernames, we requested one of the Administrators change your original username to Marios Kyriazis. It's not an instantaneous process.

That's a strawman argument. And possibly a post hoc fallacy as well. Your rep doesn't go down because you aren't agreeing with people. That's easy enough to chart and analyze. Rep goes down when you stop listening, or present the same poor arguments, or keep claiming you have evidence but never show it, or because you continue to misconstrue the efforts of the membership to help give ideas a sounder footing by adherence to a proven methodology.

This is my take as well. Sure, if you chop up an onion you've just "processed" it, but the mainstream concerns are for what happens when a little of that onion is mixed with onion powder and other ingredients, then cooked in a way that allows the mixture to be squirted into a pre-made crust, frozen, and sold as a pot pie (or other convenient meal). Nutritional benefits are clearly marked on most processed foods, so that must not matter as much to most consumers as the other main concerns, cost, convenience, and taste. Processed foods cost more in the long run than preparing meals from scratch, but save some time and a lot of effort. Anecdotally, I hear good and bad things about the taste of processed foods, ranging from delicious to disgusting. It would seem to me that the processing would be more likely to develop a great tasting meal, but the concerns over cost, distribution, shelf-life and other supply-side economics may play a bigger part. I wonder if taste can be used at all as a metric for processed foods. With many of them, people either love them or hate them. Hot Pockets come to mind. To me, the real objection to convenience foods is how many concessions am I making to my health by accepting this easy answer? Is this manufacturer meeting the bare minimum federal standards required to call what they're selling me "food", and placing more importance on logistics than my longevity?

It's a word with a specific definition, you're right. I suppose it's wrong to usurp it's intended meaning to conflate it with "awe-inspiring phenomenon". I'm going to strike the word from my science vocabulary. I'd gladly trade "miracle" back to religion, if we can have the definitions for "theory" and "logic" back.

This is a common misconception. It's why sound bytes work so well on the general public, because they've been led to believe there is a simple explanation for everything. I've said it before, but science is like a jigsaw puzzle stamped from the layers of an onion. Knowing how one piece fits often requires you to know how several earlier pieces fit on a different layer. Crackpots don't like the depth of understanding, or rather the steps needed to get there, mainly because they believe this little aphorism about explaining things simply, with just words. Then they end up trying to look at a single layer of the jigsaw puzzle, and conclude that it must be wrong, that elitist scientists are just trying to make fortune and fame, and that there must be a simpler explanation than trying to unravel the whole onion.

! Moderator Note As everyone can plainly see, comments like this detract from the conversation. They're unnecessary, insulting, and uncivil. Reading subsequent posts, we see how misunderstanding your words wasn't anyone's fault but yours. Can you PLEASE keep that in mind, and try to edit yourself before you press ENTER next time?

And you didn't have to learn anything.

I hope eventually people will stop thinking miraculous things are only achievable through religion.

Or... OR... We could focus on what we actually know about here on the planet, seeing as how there are SO many differing beliefs about gods, all claiming to be Truth. We can't really know about them, can we? Isn't it just a hunch, a guess, depending more about where on Earth you were born? This solves the problem with the innocents; they're victims of chance, not God. We could be one species on a planet with a broad diversity of species that evolved over hundreds of millions of years from a few proto-ancestors, and a species that is spectacularly well evolved to actually leave the planet. We have high intelligence, imagination, curiosity, cooperation, communication, opposable thumbs, tool use, and more recently, the understanding of the physical universe that will let us move outward from where we were born, to learn and continue to grow. We could be the only chance our planet has of producing something that will continue after our sun expands.

! Moderator Note We don't judge suitability. We enforce the rules, and we don't have one for boorishness. That's what the reputation system is for. It helps determine value in posts like the one you mention.

Perhaps God just likes to see you cringe.

It depends on the cheese you use. SFN Cheese Nips are made with Tetilla:

I think it's important here, especially here, to use terminology correctly. Too often, pop-sci references take over legitimate definitions, and we end up with the misuse of such words as "theory" and "logic" and "dimension". I'm not just being pedantic here (I think). The scientific definition of dimension is interesting in its own right. What if there are more dimensions than our senses are designed to detect? I'm reminded of Douglas Adam's pan-dimensional beings, who look like rats in the first three spatial dimensions, with the rest of their bodies only accessible from higher dimensions. I don't think there are enormously important things we don't know about, because we'd probably detect something we couldn't explain any other way. I think it's important to work with accepted definitions so conversations like this can be productive.

Time is the temporal dimension, and we already sense it.

As ajb mentions, it doesn't help to look at it as "our dimension/their dimension". We live in three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension.

As ajb points out, a dimension gives perspective, it's not a place you can go visit. Have you ever visited Flatland? It has only length and width as spatial dimensions, plus time. You can draw it on a piece of paper, as long as you agree that your pen adds no height to Flatland. All the beings in Flatland have no height, can't even conceive of what it is because nothing has height in Flatland, they have no senses that can detect height because they don't need them. When YOU visit Flatland, you still have height, but everyone from Flatland only sees the parts of you that have length and width, that come into contact with their flat world. You appear just like they do. You'd have some superpowers, like being able to change size as you move through a dimension the Flatlanders don't have access to. You could make yourself disappear briefly by jumping, something no Flatlander can do. So there's an example of how you could visit another planet (making you an alien), and have access to a dimension the inhabitants can't sense. You could exist there and parts of you could be in another dimension.