I Had A Random Thought...

[Frenetic Pony]

holy crap... I'm glad I denounced religion 22 years ago. This shit is crazy. How do people even know what to believe? Can they browse a commit log or something?

 

The same way all religion works, people believe what they want to believe. It's also why they don't want to hear anything bad about religion. That's tantamount to ruining their belief and taking away something they get happiness from.

 

I'd love to do a study with the hypothesis to the effect of: A. as better sources of entertainment become available people (on average) are less interested in religion B. as medical technology advances people (on average) are less interested in religion.

 

After all, you don't need to pray for a cure for leprosy when (in the fantastically unlikely chance you get it from your pet armadillo farm) you can just go to a doctor.

[elmuerte]

I could go on a rant for that for a long while. But cutting the whole story short... it doesn't happen. They'll find new reasons.

[osmosisch]

It's pretty impressive to live in the Netherlands which owes its existence largely to christian schismatics and know nothing about it.

 

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Gereformeerd.svg

 

Anyway

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oUc02BcpKw

[elmuerte]

Somebody from Groningen posting about a guy from Twente... religion is fucked up

[TychoCelchuuu]

holy crap... I'm glad I denounced religion 22 years ago. This shit is crazy. How do people even know what to believe? Can they browse a commit log or something?

Mostly they believe what they learn as kids, which, if you think about it, is the way it works for 99% of everything we believe, not just our religious beliefs or lack thereof. If you think Christians are the only ones who have ever disagreed about anything, wait until I introduce you to theoretical physicists...

[Zeusthecat]

At least theoretical physicists don't have the audacity to proclaim that what they believe is fact. Religious people, however, have a fundamental problem distinguishing between belief and fact.

[Ucantalas]

How much can a person change before that person is no longer the same person? For that matter, how much can a person change at all? Is it possible to change the way you do things and how your life is going to such a degree that other people you know wouldn't consider you "you" anymore? 

People are constantly telling me that I need to change, that I need to change basically everything about my life. But I'm terrified of losing myself in the process. But I also don't know who I am or what makes me... me. Can I ever really lose myself? Or am I forever tethered to who I am deep down in some way? What if 'new' me is worse? (Objection! But what if he's better? Moot questions your honour. Sustained.) What if I try to change and find that I just can't do it? Does that make me a failure? Or did I succeed at surviving? 

 

In the grand scheme of things I guess it doesn't matter because in a few decades I'll be dead anyways and a little while after that no one will even know who I was. So then why should I bother changing at all? The only reason I even want to change is so people will stop telling me to, but there's no guarantee they'll stop when I've changed. Is it really a good idea for me? 

Looking at my life right now, I'm not doing much of anything. My life has not been going in a direction that I expected or wanted it to, So maybe change really would be for the best? But thats kind of a terrible motivation, isn't it? To change because that change might possibly lead to something better in the future? Its very similar to the moot points I made above about whether or not new me would be better or worse. I guess in some ways its the same statement? I don't know. 

I just got back from watching "The World's End" (and I'll try to avoid any spoilers, but in case I don't succeed, if you haven't seen it you might want to skip this paragraph. I don't know if there's a spoiler tag... I'll try just in case.)

So the main character, Gary King... I was watching the movie, and I saw a lot of him in me. A man obsessed with his past, always looking back, seeing nothing good in the present or future. He holds on to what happened with his friends in his high school, to the point of never getting a new car. He still has the map of the Golden Mile they used back when they tried it as young adults! He, too, does not want to change. And its ruining his life.

 

So thats the kind of random thoughts in my head today.

[Sententia]

As a physicalist I have to reject the concept of a 'person' that you have.  You are your consciousness, and you have been ever since the physical basis for your consciousness, your brain, developed enough in the womb.  You've been a consistent being through your entire life and you will continue to be the same being until your brain stops functioning, regardless of how much it changes in its capacities or biases, as it has since you were a baby and as it will continue to do.

 

It's really impossible to lay a blanket answer on 'is change bad?', it's going to depend wholly on circumstance.  My advice is this: the two most important aspects to consider are what you enjoy most in life, and what you want to accomplish.  Give those the highest weight even if you're feeling depressed about your prospects in the now; finding meaning is very uplifting.

[Roderick]

What is man but a collection of wildly fluctuating precepts and modes of behavior? I have come to believe that it's only because of a strong belief in our own 'unity' that we can tie the absurd changes in who we are together into the concept of a single identity. If you compare objectively how you were in your adolescence, teen years and childhood, it would be like looking at three different people. But we are storytellers and so we can weave these disparate entities together. We also recognize the actions and thoughts that may have changed us, and consider that normal and healthy.

And it is normal and healthy. Change is what defines people, which is why it is absurd that in our society we seem so stuck on 'not being hypocrites', i.e. never ever changing our minds or doing something contrary to what we did or said before. But people are perfectly capable of rising in the morning and completely reversing their mode of thought. It is only when you see people as immovable and unchanging that you can continue the windmill-duelling quest of holding them to things they thought in the past or even yesterday - frustrating though that occasionally truly is. Tangentially, this is also why everyone should be afraid of becoming a politician: a person who is by his own political association not allowed to ever change his mind. What a tragic existence! As soon as you'd engage in the natural behavior of adjusting your views according to changing circumstances, within or without, you'd be labelled untrustworthy and a flip-flopper.

More insights on change: did you know the body replaces itself largely every few years? There's hardly a cell in you that's the same as the ones you had ten years ago. All of this raises the question of Theseus's Ship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_theseus if all parts of an object are faithfully replaced, is it still the same object? Or in the words of today's most relevant philosophical force:

[osmosisch]

What is man but a collection of wildly fluctuating precepts and modes of behavior? 

A miserable little pile of secrets.

[Nappi]

More insights on change: did you know the body replaces itself every few months? There isn't a cell in you that's the same as the ones you had last year.

 

What about neurons?

[Roderick]

You're right, they aren't all of them replaced, and neither are some other cells in the body. You got me. My cute side note has diminished in argumentative value.

[Nappi]

Also, the Theseus's Ship link points to this thread instead of the Wikipedia article. 

 

I'm giving you a C+ for the sidenote. And I'm being generous here.

 

 

 

[Roderick]

Thanks for pointing that out, I have no idea why it switched the links.

[Gormongous]

A miserable little pile of secrets.

 

You are me, osmosisch.

[Roderick]

And some other dudes on Twitter who said the same!

[Frenetic Pony]

So remember that guy, I described who "Knew so much about oppression in China!" Yeah, I've nicknamed him "Bro". He works at the same coffee shop as the girl I'm interested in, this is his continued adventure in pseudo intellectualism.

 

A while ago another employee here asked me about milk, saying her "Friend" was telling her about how people weren't supposed to drink milk. Because we aren't adapted to it and so its bad for us. I've heard this little scientifically derived factoid "telephoned" into bullshit before. It seems to originate from the fact that thousands of years ago all human adults were lactose intolerant, and so couldn't drink milk. At some point(s) a lactose digesting sequence that's dominant was mutated and has now spread throughout virtually all of humanity.

 

But the little factoid that we used to not be able to drink milk beyond being a toddler has mutated into the urban myth that "milk is bad" because "cavemen didn't drink it". Today I saw "Bro" refuse the rest of a latte, "I'm trying to avoid drinking milk." Bingo. Considering milk is the major source of vitamin A in most human diets I suppose I can wait till "Bro" crashes his car at night and dies due to night blindness. I'd love to correct him, but people get weirded out when I connect things they've said without them ever speaking to me. Maybe I can just hope he gets Vitamin A and D some other way.

[Zeusthecat]

There is actually mounting evidence that milk is not good for you and depletes calcium from your bones. Even if the reasoning behind it is wrong your friend is better off without it. And there are lots of other sources of Vitamins A and D. Otherwise I would have crashed my car at night and died due to night blindness.

[Twig]

I've gained lactose intolerance since becoming an adult, and I know a surprisingly large number of people who share my newfound symptoms. Why did no one ever tell me this as I was growing up? I drink it anyway because it's delicious, and although I've tried almond milk I hate it. It doesn't taste right.

 

I make poor life decisions.

 

If I ever have kids, they won't drink milk, so they can avoid my suffering.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I don't remember what you said about China guy when you last brought him up, but if he "knows" so much about China because he's Chinese and/or because he's been to China, he's pretty right about the milk thing - most Chinese people are much more lactose intolerant than Westerners, so if you're in China, unless you're drinking special milk or you're a foreigner, you're probably in for a tummy ache.

[Frenetic Pony]

There is actually mounting evidence that milk is not good for you and depletes calcium from your bones. Even if the reasoning behind it is wrong your friend is better off without it. And there are lots of other sources of Vitamins A and D. Otherwise I would have crashed my car at night and died due to night blindness.

 

Factually incorrect, but that's ok. Most "studies" on the "benefits" or "harm" that a specific food causes are immensely flawed. Any proper statician cringes at survey studies based around foods, there's so much selection bias and such a high ratio of signal to noise that they mostly end up being useless. They're often retracted or another study finds something the exact opposite years later. After all it's utterly impractical for long term controlled experiments concerning diets. The studies I've found around milk almost all match this pattern "we've found a small discrepancy in some of our statistics in a study we didn't do right and now we print!" The reason being you're more likely to get tenure and more respect for going to print than if you never print anything.

 

What evidence we do have is that we don't need that much calcium, it's barely needed from the point of milk. Vitamin A and D (assuming you don't have other sources, like I said I hope this guy does, it's probable) and protein are the major benefits, while it's hard to know what milk does and doesn't do, we do know that there really isn't any strong indication of it being "bad for you" in any way. At least from any study as of yet. And yes, I know the "drink all the milk!" FDA advice comes from the dairy industry, I mainly drink it for the protein as I'm a vegetarian.

 

As for lactose intolerance when adult, yeah not everyone has the correct gene sequence, there are enough adults that don't have it (spontaneous mutation? just lack of it from heredity?). Either way drinking it as a kid is fine, and has no bearing on whether you become lactose intolerant later (almost certainly anyway, it would be interesting to see if there's some DNA methylation activation/deactivation of the sequences going on).

 

As for China, no, Bro is about as American as it gets. For reference he's the guy that thought Falun Gong (a quasi spiritualist movement) was getting holocausted in China. Which they aren't, I mean there's repression, but there's no special concentration death camps just for a movement that's not even that religious.

[dibs]

If I ever have kids, they won't drink milk, so they can avoid my suffering.

Milk is an excellent source of many good things for kids (and children, calves and other mammal younglings too!). Please don't deprive them based on non scientific conjecture.

[Zeusthecat]

Factually incorrect, but that's ok. Most "studies" on the "benefits" or "harm" that a specific food causes are immensely flawed. Any proper statician cringes at survey studies based around foods, there's so much selection bias and such a high ratio of signal to noise that they mostly end up being useless. They're often retracted or another study finds something the exact opposite years later. After all it's utterly impractical for long term controlled experiments concerning diets. The studies I've found around milk almost all match this pattern "we've found a small discrepancy in some of our statistics in a study we didn't do right and now we print!" The reason being you're more likely to get tenure and more respect for going to print than if you never print anything.

 

What evidence we do have is that we don't need that much calcium, it's barely needed from the point of milk. Vitamin A and D (assuming you don't have other sources, like I said I hope this guy does, it's probable) and protein are the major benefits, while it's hard to know what milk does and doesn't do, we do know that there really isn't any strong indication of it being "bad for you" in any way. At least from any study as of yet. And yes, I know the "drink all the milk!" FDA advice comes from the dairy industry, I mainly drink it for the protein as I'm a vegetarian.

 

So under that logic wouldn't the studies you choose not to ignore be equally as fallible? You can't say I am factually incorrect when your opinion is simply based on what you want to believe. 

[TychoCelchuuu]

There are fine non-health reasons to avoid drinking animal milk, like the way animals are treated by the sorts of places that sell a lot of milk we drink or the cost of milk (shit's expensive!), so there's no need to resort to pseudoscience to come up with an excuse not to buy and drink it.

[Twig]

Milk is an excellent source of many good things for kids (and children, calves and other mammal younglings too!). Please don't deprive them based on non scientific conjecture.

Like I get what you're saying but I don't think you understood the context of what I was saying. ):