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Zeusthecat

I Had A Random Thought...

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Sorry, I wasn't trying to shut you up or anything. I was more just trying to say that your despair and anxiety is something well known and understood.

 

No reason to be sorry, I wasn't insulted or anything.  On the contrary, I hadn't really considered that I was in fact repeating a question that's been asked for perhaps thousands of years.  I'm glad you pointed it out.

 

 

 

I don't know what y'all's Facebook feed looks like, but let's just say I post Snopes.com links in the comment-box more than I would like to. I don't know why I care. I guess I just hope other people would do the same for me.

 

 

I love Snopes for exactly the same reason. I would have to unfriend several superstitious relatives if Snopes didn't give me a ready response to their bull.

 

I periodically check the List of Common Misconceptions on Wikipedia and am saddened that it exists and continues to grow (and am occasionally ashamed that I believed a few).

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I just want to clearly state that I am stupid too and that I don't want to value people based off of their intelligence. I prefer to be around people who demonstrate compassion habitually, regardless of how fast they can grasp Quaternions. My frustration is when stupidity is enforced. Now that I think of it, intelligence being enforced can suck too (and it's kind of scarier). I guess I don't have a problem with stupidity at all then. I'm glad we had this conversation!

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None of us is as dumb as all of us

 

I wonder, and let me know if you all can't follow me, but since there's only one way a piece of knowledge can be true and (near) infinite ways it can be false, and since decision-making in groups tends to fall along lines of common and/or shared knowledge, does that mean that groups are dumber than individuals because false knowledge is more easily reinforced than true knowledge?

 

I think I had a Phenomenon moment there...

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'The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.' — Terry Pratchett

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Now that I have looked up "Hoisted by my own petard" I wonder why it that's not the message you get in Call of Duty when you kill yourself with your own grenade. I get that message a lot.

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"Hoisted by my own petard" should be the title of a Thumbs podcast at some point.

 

Also, the etymology of petard means that it could be very loosely interpreted as meaning, "Lifted by my own fart."  In an alternate universe, a similar phrase could have meant that you achieved success through your own incompetence.

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Apparently Shakespeare wrote it "petar" which makes it likely he was simultaneously sticking in a fart joke for the cheap seats.

 

Also, to be picky, it should probably be "hoist with my own petard" to stay closer to the original line.

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I feel like people in general are getting dumber, yet technology, science, and the sum of human knowledge seem to be advancing at an almost alarming rate.  I know the internet is not a good indicator of...well...anything, but it feels like the average person is becoming a stupider over time while humanity as a whole is getting smarter.  One of these perceptions must be wrong, but I honestly don't know which one.

I strongly recommend this book for a pretty interesting and thorough look at this question, for once not from the doomsayer's perspective:

http://smarterthanyouthink.net/

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I was hoping someone would post the, "I'm not saying it's aliens" guy. For shame. Way to not cheer me up.

 

The who now?

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I know what he's talking about but I'm not going to post image macros on the Idle Thumbs board without a very good reason. There isn't even any context.

 

Anyway, I found this a worthy read and I suspect any thread I start for link dumping will just end up being about the thing I linked.

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.html

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I know what he's talking about but I'm not going to post image macros on the Idle Thumbs board without a very good reason. There isn't even any context.

 

Anyway, I found this a worthy read and I suspect any thread I start for link dumping will just end up being about the thing I linked.

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.html

 

Personally, I think the comparison between Whole Foods and a creationist museum is a pretty lousy one. And what point is he trying to make by just cherry picking a few products and dismissing them offhand as ridiculous because of how 'pseduoscientific' the name sounds? Sure there is some homeopathic stuff there that isn't based on hard science but just dismissing the whole place as some liberal pseudoscientific temple without providing any evidence beyond his biologist friend who said some of their probiotics were "bullshit" makes for a very weak article.

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I actually think his ultimate point is a great one. 
 

For some reason, there’s a special stream of American rage directed at ideological attacks on science that seems to evaporate when the offender is a for-profit corporation.

 

He's picking on Whole Foods, but that's a relatively true statement. We don't spend near the energy attacking corporations for their fraudulent, bad science claims as we do religiously associated organizations.  And there is a metric shitton of bad science in terms of health, food and exercise.  You can't even really trust the good science, since our knowledge of how the body works and various substances affect it are still in their infancy.  It's something that scientists understand, but the general public doesn't.  I think a reasonable argument could be made that Whole Foods and others like it prey on the ignorance and prejudices of their target demographic.  The same way the Creation Museum does. 

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Is that premise really true though? I feel like corporations get a ton of flack for claims they make that go counter to scientific stances, especially from us 'liberals' who tend to be very skeptical of corporate motivations.

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Whole Foods is super fucking expensive, so I don't even need to worry about their snake oils, I think it originates in Austin though.

 

Here's the aliens meme:im-not-saying-its-aliens-but-its-aliens.

 

It mostly cracks me up because I was watching this stupid show on close captioning at a Vietnamese restaurant with my girlfriend sometime in 2009. We were just kind of making fun of how stupid the History channel had become that they are just wasting a bunch of time entertaining tons of thoughts about alien ancestors creating our civilization. But shortly in to the meal it just turned in to a weird fixation on this guy and why he spoke so strangely and why he wore a suit but didn't feel that having noncrazyperson hair was important.

 

Didn't realize he was a (or became) a phenomenon that everyone was already laughing at. I had a very similar experience with that red headed weirdo on CSI Miami.

 

Also I find it funny that Giorgio seems to have gradually evolved to this level of craze.

Gmqna.jpg

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Is that premise really true though? I feel like corporations get a ton of flack for claims they make that go counter to scientific stances, especially from us 'liberals' who tend to be very skeptical of corporate motivations.

 

Meh, this is a case where I just have my personal experience.  I see plenty of liberals that have their own giant blind spots, same as everyone else.  It does seem like businesses like Whole Foods and the pseudoscience pharmacy departments tend to fall in those blind spots. 

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 But shortly in to the meal it just turned in to a weird fixation on this guy and why he spoke so strangely and why he wore a suit but didn't feel that having noncrazyperson hair was important.

 

cHj17xJ.jpg

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