No. I don't want to "replace" religion with them. I merely note that they also provide a structure and framework in life, which is what you claimed religion had a monopoly on.

Whether you create structure and framework in life around your religious in-group or around your local chess club is none of my business, as long as you don't attempt to enforce the rules of that club on the rest of society.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Or like I already said before, there is but a small part of the religious phenomenon that I can safely call "subjective". The rest of it, be that the creation (not that idiocy called intelligent design, mind you), the spiritual, or the mystical side, I hold my judgement and I don't exclude at all that sometime in the future they will be subject to rational, skeptical, analythical approach.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)

ValentinD:

Why? Because explaining such fundamental topic by means of probabilities is -- weird. In this particular case, it's not just that we wouldn't hold the ultimate secret of the universe; the problem is that we don't quite know what photons, or quanta are, even at a functional level. And the practical applications in work today are only using the tip of the theoretical iceberg.

At a functional level, you get particles when you decompose the hilbert space of spaces of a complex system in terms of irreducible representations of the appropriate group of spatio-temporal symmetries.

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler

Did you just say weird?

European Tribune - The world is weirder than you ever thought

In other words: it is an experimentally verifiable fact that, if God doesn't play dice, 1) the world out there has spooky action at a distance; 2) you are not allowed to ask about the values of quantities you don't measure; 3) if you considered "what if" you had actually measured an additional quantity, the values of the ones you did measure would change.

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler

ValentinD:

Way up this thread I chose as an example the dual nature of light precisely for its implications.

Which are? Hopefully something more substantial than

this is an example which can hardly be explained rationally.

If you cannot explain an experiment rationally, you'll have to revise the logic of your attempt at rational explanation and, if that is not faulty, examine the (often unstated) philosophical assumptions and maybe drop some of them.

I showed that brilliant scientists doubted for years, even as both theoretical and experimental base was already there.
Why?

Because they had to give up a lot of metaphysical baggage. Some of the creators of QM were never able to do it. Einstein and Schrödinger among them.

the philosophical issues resulted from this are absolutely fascinating and show, not the limits of rational thinking

Wait, I thought

that this is an example which can hardly be explained rationally.

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler

Lily:

Migeru,

• Are you trying to make the case for science that will one day have the means to answer any question that may arise?

No, because some questions have no meaning or no answer.

For instance, under Newtonian physics there was a concept of "absolute velocity". When Maxwell's equations were found to predict the speed of light, it was assumed this could be used to answer the question "what is the absolute velocity of the Earth in space?". The Michelson-Morley experiment failed to show any absolute speed. Under Einsteinian physics the question "what is the absolute velocity of something?" is a meaningless question. It's not that science cannot provide an experimental answer to the question, it is that the question is meaningless. Quantum mechanics also provides a number of examples of meaningless questions

• This is not yet the case. The picture isn't complete, and you cannot prove that it will ever be.

I am, in fact, quite confident that it will never be. On the other hand, I am also quite confident that we know enough about physics to explain every ordinary phenomenon, in principle.

• Valentin believes there's more there which he cannot prove, either, though there's some evidence - for more, not the complete picture.

He's not very explicit as to what, exactly, there is "more". Thus I am not quite sure how it would be possible to prove or disprove thar this "more" actually is there. If he's referring to "hidden variable theories", there is no known experiment that is inconsistent with the "standard interpretation" of quantum mechanics. So, "hidden variables" are either incorrect or experimentally indistringuishable from "standard quantum mechanics". Moreover, although "hidden variables" have their origins in a philosophical "naïve realism" (naïve here being a technical term and not one of abuse), hidden variable theories compatible with experiment must be nonlocal, contextual and not counterfactually definite. This means they are nothing that any reasonable layperson would call "intuitive", and since hidden variable theories are mathematically more contrived than standard quantum mechanics and are not any more "intuitive", I choose to stand by standard quantum mechanics. Well, I am partial to the Everett "relative state" interpretation (I consider "many worlds" a misnomer) but that is still only an interpretation of the standard mathematical apparatus.

• Science explores the odds and ends of our existence. So does philosophy. So does Buddhist contemplative science, to cite but one prominent example. The findings of Buddhist scholars cannot be proved with the same methods that you apply to prove your point. Does this make these findings irrelevant?

Did I say they are irrelevant?

• Maybe 'materialistic science' will make discoveries that have been found long ago in other disciplines. Maybe not. If they do, are these discoveries only given scientific relevance once they'll be proved through the methods you solely acknowledge?

Clearly they can only be given "scientific relevance" by scientific methods.

• You will not be able to find a consensus because, again, one is talking apples, the other oranges.

I'm talking quantum physics because quantum physics was being talked about.

So, maybe it is better that each tries to explore the other's view, if interested, and come back in a few diaries' time.

I admit that this is not exactly a balanced approach since Valentin doesn't appear to be a contemplative scientist but knows your side.
This would be different if you were debating each from his own and differing discipline alone.

I don't know what you mean by this last part.

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler

Western science is not "contemplative". It is experimental.

On the value of "contemplation"... Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I, Chapter 16 [PDF]

There is another school of philosophers who feel very uncomfortable about the theory of relativity, which asserts that we cannot determine our absolute velocity without looking at something outside, and who would say, "It is obvious that one cannot measure his velocity without looking outside. It is self-evident that it is meaningless to talk about the velocity of a thing without looking outside; the physicists are rather stupid for having thought otherwise, but it has just dawned on them that this is the case. If only we philosophers had realized what the problems were that the physicists had, we could have decided immediately by brainwork that it is impossible to tell how fast one is moving without looking outside, and we could have made an enormous contribution to physics." These philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.

Our inability to detect absolute motion is a result of experiment and not a result of plain thought, as we can easily illustrate. In the first place, Newton believed that it was true that one could not tell how fast he is going if he is moving with uniform velocity in a straight line. In fact, Newton first stated the principle of relativity, and one quotation made in the last chapter was a statement of Newton's. Why then did the philosophers not make all this fuss about "all is relative," or whatever, in Newton's time? Because it was not until Maxwell's theory of electrodynamics was developed that there were physical laws that suggested that one could measure his velocity without looking outside; soon it was found experimentally that one could not.

Now, is it absolutely, definitely, philosophically necessary that one should not be able to tell how fast he is moving without looking outside? One of the consequences of relativity was the development of a philosophy which said, "You can only define what you can measure! Since it is self-evident that one can not measure a velocity without seeing what he is measuring it relative to, therefore it is clear that there is no meaning to absolute velocity. The physicists should have realized that they can talk only about what they can measure." But that is the whole problem: whether or not one can define absolute velocity is the same as the problem of whether or not one can detect in an experiment, without looking outside, whether he is moving. In other words, whether or not a thing is measurable is not something to be decided a priori by thought alone, but something that can be decided only by experiment. Given the fact that the velocity of light is 186,000 mi/sec, one will find few philosophers who will calmly state that it is self-evident that if light goes 186,000 mi/sec inside a car, and the car is going 100,000 mi/sec, that the light also goes 186,000 mi/sec past an observer on the ground. That is a shocking fact to them; the very ones who claim it is obvious find, when you give them a specific fact, that it is not obvious.

Finally, there is even a philosophy which says that one cannot detect any motion except by looking outside. It is simply not true in physics. True, one cannot perceive a uniform motion in a straight line, but if the whole room were rotating we would certainly know it, for everybody would be thrown to the wall--there would be all kinds of "centrifugal" effects. That the earth is turning on its axis can be determined without looking at the stars, by means of the so-called Foucault pendulum, for example. Therefore it is not true that "all is relative"; it is only uniform velocity that cannot be detected without looking outside. Uniform rotation about a fixed axis can be. When this is told to a philosopher, he is very upset that he did not really understand it, because to him it seems impossible that one should be able to determine rotation about an axis without looking outside. If the philosopher is good enough, after some time he may come back and say, "I understand. We really do not have such a thing as absolute rotation; we are really rotating relative to the stars, you see. And so some influence exerted by the stars on the object must cause the centrifugal force."

Now, for all we know, that is true; we have no way, at the present time, of telling whether there would have been centrifugal force if there were no stars and nebulae around. We have not been able to do the experiment of removing all the nebulae and then measuring our rotation, so we simply do not know. We must admit that the philosopher may be right. He comes back, therefore, in delight and says, "It is absolutely necessary that the world ultimately turn out to be this way: absolute rotation means nothing; it is only relative to the nebulae." Then we say to him, "Now, my friend, is it or is it not obvious that uniform velocity in a straight line, relative to the nebulae should produce no effects inside a car?" Now that the motion is no longer absolute, but is a motion relative to the nebulae, it becomes a mysterious question, and a question that can be answered only by experiment.

I realise I paraphrased part of this argument in a parallel comment, but that's because I had recently re-read it. And I decided to hunt or a quote in response to the claim that "Western science" is "contemplative".

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler

For certain values of "comprehensive."

Science describes the world as it appears to everyone who bothers looking. That is its great virtue, and what makes it such a powerful tool.

Of necessity, however, it means that science cannot answer - and will indeed never be able to answer - questions that have different answers depending on your subjective taste, your unique life experience or your particular cultural baggage. If you move into that, you are leaving the realm of science and entering into the realm of metaphysics, taste, ideology, theology, ethics, political economy or any of a host of other diciplines.

(Most of) these disciplines are both interesting and relevant. But they are not science.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

My point is that there were many scientifically sound theories considered wrong for decades before being accepted by the community, despite "rational" theoretical proof and hard-fact experimental proof.

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan

No doubt bearing a grudge against religion, some here treat the religious phenomenons exactly the same way the Vatican treated Giordano Bruno and Galilei.

I call Galileo Gambit.

"I can't touch it, hence it doesn't exist." Well a lot of stuff was considered impossible even in modern time science, and is now accepted.

Doggerel.

So if we pretend ourselves evolved and rational, we should at least learn from the past,
namely to be more careful in our sentences (or else, why not, to tag them "Ideological"), more precise in our argumentation (rather than reducing christianism or buddhism to the winged dragons), open minded enough to accept that "impossible" today may be "scientifical fact" 200 years from now.

Markups added for clarity.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

For that matter, it's also interesting that you'd claim that the American communists were "discredited," when in point of fact they were purged.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

I understand that the American pro-life movement is quite complex. I have met "pro-lifers" in the US in the 90s, and they were very charming and peaceful people.

I assume that these people are still around. Nonetheless violent extremism is apparently growing.

I hadn't heard of "Christian Reconstructionism". Now, where's that even "Christian" since they aim at an Old Testament theocracy, including capital punishment, no gun control? I'd classify them as sectarian at best. That goes of course also for the "If you think abortion is murder, act like it." - I would only interpret it as another way to say, "Don't have one," but you think of other consequences.

These groups, unfortunately, have gone astray from Christian faith. Quite dramatic.

But then, there's this other question, should all Christians take the blame when there are some who cause trouble?
And also this: Do you believe the violence of one or that of a group justifies an equally violent or even more violent response?

Jerome's quote suggests it does... when the Christian religion as a whole is held accountable. - It's simple to blame the Christian religion but not justified.

"the vindictive morality of the old testament"

The morality of the Old Testament is a fact ever since the colonisation of North America.

"which is repetaedly told that abortion is murder"

I suppose you mean to deny that there actually is a living creature in there, whose life is stopped during the procedure.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)

Sections are a different issue, and I still think manual tag filtering rather than fixed categorisation is the way to go there. You could add a few simple buttons and the mechanism would be intuitive and obvious. (I'm not sure about the Scoop side, obviously.)

Otherwise, the rec process seems to work. It reflects community sentiment about the value and readability of diaries. In practice most diaries at the moment end up rec'd, even if it's only for a while, so it's not obviously restrictive.

Author assigned tags are a good way for a prolific author to categorize their work so diaries in the archive may be more easily found. And they would certainly make it easier to index diaries. So they are useful.

They don't work very well for generating common sections, though, without the overhead of a committee of worker bees that go through the tags and clean them up.

The sectional reclists is a version of sectioning that leverages what already works.

This doesn't guarantee that outsiders will like a diary. But how would it possible to make diaries more appealing to outsiders, without knowing who those outsiders are?

I hadn't been aware that was the goal, so I hadn't thought about how to achieve it.

The system even works on dKos, more or less, in that diaries on the rec list do usually seem to be worth reading - although they've taken to propping it up with their rescue ranger system to give more exposure to worthwhile diaries that fall off the list.

There's a lot of aggressive behavior on dKos involved with the fight for the position on the reclist that ensures hundreds of comments and hundreds of recs and comments and lots of "mojo".

Power law distributions being what they are, its not likely that the European Tribune will expand to that size, but if it did, that would turn sectional reclists from a nice feature into an essential one.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

But how would it possible to make diaries more appealing to outsiders, without knowing who those outsiders are?

Quite.

The premise of this 2-part foray into "user-friendly" design "improvement" of ET is the unknown quantity of "occasional reader" (Lily). Let's not forget: Acquiring ("attracting") and converting an unknown quantity of "occasional readers" into ET um insiders --presumably persons distinguished by frequency of visible activity-- is a problem, she identified more or less, for ET administrators to solve.

• Size: universe of ICT subscribers excluding cumulative registered users, visits per month, unique visitors per month (for comparative  value perhaps).
• Usage: e.g. views per story, time per story, comments per story, services (rating by type, search, wiki, published stories etc. per diem and by device (whot, no ET Mobile proposals? RSS?). Analysis of such data informs reader segmentation
• Preferences: i.e. how "occasional readers" specifically prioritize value of website services. (That's a data collection challenge no diary-with-poll can service!)

Why is this piece of interface design proposal writing a big fat void thus far? Could it beeeee (1) unknown by definition (2) no model demographic of "occasional reader" (3) no target demographic of desirable "insider"? heh.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

I don't want to interrupt the technical debate here, just quickly jump in. Even if the occasional reader is happy about speed and accuracy, I don't believe that occasional ET readers come here - and stay! - when they want to feel lucky and be entertained.

Maybe this aspect (provided I assess it correctly) would take one worry away?

Especially if he or she cannot relocate a favorite article in the section last visited, because some number of other "occasional readers" migrated it elsewhere and the title is long gone from RECENT DIARIES list.

There is still the learning process ... learning to click "+" if you are going to want to revisit an article is one of the things to learn.

But for the weekly reader, speaking as an oft-times weekly reader, it would without a doubt be appealing to have sections that you could page back through to look at what had happened in the week.

The "occasional reader", presuably prioritizing speed and accuracy in locating a particular class of article, could likely conclude over a period of time (say, months) the DIARIES menu fails to satisfy this expectation and is an unreliable method.

I don't see the likelihood. Given a small enough class of categories that are defined in terms of the types of diaries that are commonly posted, the regular users of ET that recommend diaries for the reclist will be far more reliable in forming coherent groups than a sectioning that relies on each individual author's interpretation of the meaning of each section.

And whereas in the author-selected sections, in a blog with the level of traffic of ET, there's a very strong incentive to pick the section that gets the most traffic, and we're back to the "all diaries in politics" scenario.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.