Re: Shall We All Leave At Once?

On 19 May, 04:00, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On 16 May, 19:30, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On 16 May, 17:35, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On 16 May, 13:57, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:2c2e5563-0fa6-47b5-be30-5397ac0455f0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On 16 May, 11:57, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<stevesi...@xxxxxxx> wrote in message

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It's a bit ***, this Usenet Group. Time has passed. The
Doctor
is
the
winner of some prize that matters to him alone. Aggy is always
right,
in a fly's eye. TopPoster is... well, whatever.

TOSH!

JAPBIRD!

Yads has always been here and I've been here for over a decade
so
the
problems with this group are nothing to do with us. TopPoster is
an
obsessive compulsive spamming troll.

Hey, Aggy's got a point (about TopPoster anyway)...

At least Yads tries to comment on the
actual series. The facts are that 95% of the time I am right and
its
those
opposing me who are wrong.

...and then he ruins it. Still, it's funny.

The should stop posting on subjects then know
nothing about such as ancient history, religion and production
matters
otherwise I will continue to make fools of them.

See what I mean? Oh, I do so love irony.

Now lets get down to the real problem. People who try to defend
RTD
no
matter what, and what's worse its exactly the same people who
want
to
lick
RTDs arse

But at least they try to comment on the actual series...

No. All they do is slag of other posters who disagree with them or
think
the
new series is not as good as the original or that RTD is crap.

No, no, can't say I've read anything from anyone like that. Care to
give any examples? There are people who defend Davies against
irrelevant personal criticism about his sexuality and the like, but
I

And way do they waste their time doing that? It's an issue that
doesn't
concern them in any way but these PC LOONIES take it upon themselves
to
intervene when no one else is bothered.

Read the above again - "defend Davies against irrelevant personal
criticism". In other words, whoever's criticising him is plainly
bothered, and frequently homophobic.

No. I was talking about the people defending RTD. The reference to PC
LOONIES should have given you a clue who I was referring to.

Um ... everyone other than you? That seems to be the way you usually
use the term.

No. The PC LOONIES. That is perfectly clear to anyone but a comprehensionaly
challenged fool.

Ah, so these are the people who, like Steve Wilson, don't mention RTD
at all and you slam them for defending him, right?

appeals to Plato and Aristotle spring to mind). And more often than
not you just try to pass opinion off as fact, such as your strange
ideas about religion.

No, that's you who tries to do that. I only cite original texts.

You miss the point - citing original texts doesn't make the argument
you're using them to support correct or factual, even presuming the
texts themselves are correct representations of events.

For example:

Citing original text: There is a stone Linear A inscription in Crete
with an undeciphered name on it.

Speculative argument (NOT fact): That name must be Zeus-Pater, and the
individual referred to must be the deity generally regarded as
fictitious.

What you post are opinions,
mostly unsubstantiated.

Depends on the topic - I note when I've giving a personal opinion and
generally provide citations when discussing facts.

Your so called citations are nothing more than personal opinions of other
peoples personal opinions of other peoples opinions who have never actually
read the source texts

Hmm, you mean such as translations of Aristotle or the text of the
Travels of Noah?

or who deliberately ignored the source texts and made
something else up based on somebody else's lack of understanding of the
source texts which they never considered checking against the facts.

Remember the punctuation we just taught you about?

As I've told you before, sophistry won't let you get away with sloppy
thinking. If you manifestly (and repeatedly) get things wrong, and

Except I haven't got things wrong. You just think I'm wrong because you
don't understand and have never studied the subject

You've tried mouthing off about philosophy and science before now,
both subjects I have indeed studied and demonstrably understand better

Yove not studied real science or philosophy.

Hmm, what was that you were saying about taking the experts at their
word?

You've never read a primary
text in your life as I demonstrated when I showed you didn't know Plato

You've really got to get a handle on what "demonstrated" means (SP, is
it in the list?) You provided an example of one Platonic text I
happened not to have read (fair enough, he wrote quite a lot and in
any case for much of my course I focused on more relevant philosophers
such as Kant). This does not in any way "demonstrate" that "I've never
read a primary text in my life". How does it demonstrate, for example,
that I've never read Leviathan, the Groundwork on the Metaphysics of
Morals, A Treatise of Human Nature, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, or for that matter On Friendship or The Republic. All
primary philosophy texts.

but
were mouthing off rubbish contrary to the texts themselves based on someone
else's personal opinions who never read or understood the source texts
properly. And as for science. Biology isn't a real science. It's observation
of behaviour and therefore personal opinion.

SP, add "biology" to the list, please. The term you're looking for is
"ethology", a discipline which was for a long time scorned by
biologists themselves (in much the same way physicists - and many
other scientists - sneer at cosmology these days). Such developments
in biology as evolutionary theory and ecological modelling have little
if anything to do with behavioural studies.

Having said all that, it is of course absurd to equate "observation of
behaviour" with "personal opinion". Observations are just that -
records of what's actually happening. "Cuttlefish change colour" isn't
a personal opinion, it's an observation. *Why* they change colour may
be a matter to hypothesise about, and in the true scientific
tradition, to test - indeed behavioural studies are heavily based on
experiment to develop explanations for behaviours. Now, what's the
word for making observations and conducting experiments in order to
find explanations for those observations?

Real sciences are based on
mathematics

Mathematics doesn't predict anything. Nor do statistics. Scientists
use them to make predictions, but in order to do so they need
observations or hypotheses to feed in. Mathematics is just the
computer processing - feed in your data, get your output. Science is
"based on mathematics" in the same way journalism is based on word
processors - it's a tool that makes the process a lot quicker and
simpler, but isn't in any way fundamental to the process. Stats are
just a way of organising data and summarising results and trends;
anything the maths can tell you you can work out by staring at the raw
data set long enough if you have the time or inclination.

And biology uses an awful lot of stats in any case - in my field alone
there are at least two journals devoted entirely to particular aspects
of statistical analysis, and a number of others that routinely carry
papers on stats and modelling as the larger part of their content.

Um. Buzz - wrong again. With the possible exception of cosmologists,
who are arguably only regarded as scientists because they're lumped in
with 'physicists' and have scientific training, rather than because

HOGWASH!

Cosmology was the first ever science and Cosmologists were the first ever
scientists since before the time of Anaxagoras.

You're thinking of astronomers (and way back then they didn't use
mathematics, just observed the behaviour of stars and planets, so
can't have been real scientists...) Cosmoslogy is a very recent
science, hence the fact that it's still stuck without the tools to do
anything other than theoretical work.

what they actually do is science. A sizeable number of cosmologists
are among those who complain about the lack of scientific rigour in
that field. It's *fundamental* in science that no claim is accepted
until it's been subjected to and passed tests, even if this ideal
isn't always followed to the letter in practice. Your struggle to
understand even this core concept demonstrates just how weak your
grasp of scientific principles is.

You have no idea what scientific principles are. All theories are considered
valid unless proven otherwise. That is why they are called THEORIES not
laws!

Two more, SP - theory (scientific) and law (scientific).

A theory is called a theory because it is accepted in science that our
ways of modelling the world are approximations to make things simple
for people to understand, rather than a true description of the world,
and in the knowledge that all theories are replaced in time. And it
takes a lot of work before anything in science is accepted as a theory
- nothing is accepted as a theory until it has passed rigorous tests
of all its assumptions repeatedly (again, except in cosmology, where
you can say "oh, I know, let's invent extra dimensions to make the
maths work. We'll call it 'string theory'").

Secondly, the term "law" has a very specific meaning in science, so
isn't available to describe theories, hypotheses, or wild speculation
anyway. A scientific law is something which is necessarily true if the
conditions are met - for example the laws of physics describe the
critical values forces of nature must take in order for them to have
their observed effects. What's been described as the law of natural
selection describes the set of circumstances in which natural
selection will inevitably occur; in fact in that case it's a logical
impossibility for those conditions to be met and for there to be no
natural selection.

It has always been that way throughout the history of science. If you
didn't think your theory was valid then you would have never devised it to
start with.

Most of the time, the same observations can be explained by multiple
possible hypotheses - a scientist's job is to identify the
possibilities and develop tests to discriminate between them. For
example, widespread frog declines due to a novel infectious disease
might be due to a new disease suddenly emerging, climate change
increasing the virulence of the pathogen, or some combination of the
two factors. Different workers subscribe to different options and try
to test them. Individual scientists and research teams frequently
stick to a particular position long after it's become untenable (such
as the fellow blaming the frog disease on climate change, or another
who still tries to insist that birds aren't descended from dinosaurs),
because they devised (or subscribed to it) believing it to be correct,
but the fact that they believe it doesn't make it right. And no one
accepted the hypotheses that turned out to be most accurate
unchallenged - neither of the positions on the frog disease is
currently accepted as a theory, for instance, because although the
case seems settled in terms of novel agent vs. climate change, there's
still circumstantial evidence suggesting the latter may have a role
and the former leaves some questions unanswered (which the climate
change scenario doesn't actually answer, but that's another debate).

For example if you observed a ball falling and saw that it's
speed increased as a function of time you would devise a theory which
accounted for that and that theory would be considered perfectly valid
unless proven otherwise,

Not until it had been pretty firmly established that not only is this
a common feature of balls, but that the same principle can be applied
to other objects. And you have to go back a few centuries, before the
modern discipline of science had gained a foothold, to find a time
when even this simple observation would gain anything resembling
uncritical acceptance. The questions science deals in these days are
invariably more complex - all the basic observations have been made.

such as someone noticing that the balls velocity
was also affected by wind resistance and that unless it was dropped inside a
vacuum, it would reach a terminal velocity which could be observed if it
were dropped from a sufficient height. Claims are subjected to tests in
order to test the theory and if the claim passes the test the theory holds,
if not the theory is modified to give the same result as the experiment.

I wish you'd stop phrasing it like this. It makes it sound as though
scientists are in the business of fiddling the figures to make the
world fit.

If
a claim always gives the same results within the confines of the theory and
the experiment then it is called a law. But you wouldn't understand that
because there are no laws of Biology

See the above example. The truth is, biology is a lot more complex
than chemistry, maths - probably even than advanced physics, since
although it contains systems that are difficult to conceptualise, they
tend to be governed by a fairly small set of simple laws. "Laws of
biology" are often difficult to isolate, the mechanisms aren't
intuitive, and they are often hard to test - why does species richness
increase towards the tropics, for instance? It's been about three
hundred years since this question was first asked, and we still don't
know. But it does qualify as a law, or very nearly so.

Has anyone ever managed to categorically prove classical physics? It can't
be done.

This is why science isn't about categorical proof. Who ever said it
was? As I've said before, proof is the preserve of mathematicians and
philosophers, not scientists.

Classical physics is chaotic and you can never construct an
isolated system to test it out on. So what scientists do is state that
within such and such limits and margins of error Newton's laws are valid and
within such and such limits and margins of error Einstein's laws are valid
and so on. If you claim they are not, then you must prove otherwise.

Once again you miss the point - you're talking about theories that
have been subjected to and passed numerous tests. Yet your claim was
that any claim a scientist makes is treated as a valid theory until
disproven, which is simply false.

One does
not have to substantiate anything unless you are claiming that something
someone else has said is wrong,

Yes one does, but even if we were to grant this, your entire set of
arguments of nearly any topic is predicated on the premise that the
rest of the world is wrong about the subject, hence your need to
substantiate it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,
and all that - yet you struggle with evidence of the ordinary kind.

FOOL!

Ah, I was waiting for one of your trademark witty comebacks.

Aggy, when you learned words as a kid, where did you get the meanings
from?

Context and breakdown of the component parts.

Where does the context come from? Breakdown of the component parts has
nothing to do with it, as I explained. You can't describe the concept
of a car by reference to the concepts "wheel", "axle", "engine" etc.

Where do you suppose other people get the meanings from? The

Context and breakdown of the component parts.

whole point of a dictionary is that it reflects standard usage of

The whole point of a dictionary is that it's a glorified spellchecker.

As is often said, you can't use a dictionary in the first place if you
don't know how the word you're looking for is spelled. It's true that
the most common way people use dictionaries probably is to check minor
details of spelling when they already have a broad idea of how the
word they're looking for is spelled, but that is not the whole point
of a dictionary, or even any part of its point.

You
don't go to a dictionary to find out a scientific definition. You consult a
science book.

A scientific dictionary, no less... Have you ever wondered why they
have legal dictionaries, biology dictionaries etc. full of the jargon
in those fields? Why do we call books with English/foreign language
translations "dictionaries"? Do we want to use them to find out what a
word like "mahasiswa" means in our language, or do we just want to
find out how "mahasiswa" is spelled?

words, and in a world which has had dictionaries for about three
centuries, ultimately people learn how to use the words from the
dictionary in the first place. Now, *every* dictionary in the English

The *** they do. They didn't need dictionaries 2,000 years ago or even when
Shakespeare was alive.

You really never have got the hang of the idea that society changes,
have you? Journalists didn't need computers three hundred years ago
either, but you try finding any today who don't rely on computers to
do their job.

language defines "homosexual" as "sexual attraction towards one's own
sex". This is what the word *means* - i.e. the concept this particular

That's what you have been deceived into thinking it means.

It's what it means in the English language.

explaining in detail to you that the logic you were using to define
the word - that it was defined as the meanings of each of the
individual words it was derived from - is flawed. Someone even gave an

And you never managed to convincingly do that. All that you did was to
express a personal opinion.

Not so; it was substantiated through reference to the way the word is

No it was not. You can't substantiate anything through ignorant usage.

The usage was entirely gnorant. See? I can make up words too!

That's like believing that the world is flat because everyone else who is
ignorant of science says it looks flat.

Ah, but the difference is that here the people saying what homosexual
means are not ignorant of the English language - to the contrary
they're experts, so by your own logic shouldn't their word be taken as
gospel truth?

Phil
.