Leaders are Readers

[moralist]

Well, to crudely paraphrase a signature line AR quote by an OL poster: you argue with people, not reality.

--Brant

that is, you don't persuade reality about anything

That's right.

Objective Reality is absolute, utterly impersonal, and is totally unaffected by our intellectual thoughts, transient irrational emotions, vacuous theories, or inane opinions. It's blessing to us is to let us know in no uncertain terms whether or not we are acting in harmony with It.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

I know you finally figured that out when you walked into a wall for the seventh time, but are you sure that didn't affect your brain function?

I fell off a bike into a wall a few days ago. Went to the ER for a cat scan to make sure I didn't have bleeding on the brain. The doc told me there was no bleeding for there wasn't a brain and I was free to go. When I got home my cats did their own scan and concurred with the hospital and told me to break out the chow.

Since your brain slightly shrinks as you get older, it is more susceptible to damage from banging around in the skull and harder for the skull casing to self-cauterize the bleeding. After he was President, Ronald Reagan fell off a horse in Mexico. He had bleeding on the brain. They bored a little hole into the skull and put in a shunt to drain off the blood preventing brain damage. Very simple operation if you know where the bleeding is. A doctor in the outback in Australia used a common house drill following radioed instructions from a neurosurgeon. My aunt fell down some stairs, hit her head and went back to bed. Spent the last six or seven years of her life in a nursing home. Serious stuff. Fuck the pathogens. Go to the ER.

--Brant

hey, I used to be a SF Aidman (check out Richard H. Carmona and John T. Walton)

I can still do amputations--in my garage--if anyone wants to get rid of an arm or leg (you'll have to supply the anesthesiologist)

[moralist]

I know you finally figured that out when you walked into a wall for the seventh time, but are you sure that didn't affect your brain function?

There is absolutely NO relationship between intelligence and morality.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

I know you finally figured that out when you walked into a wall for the seventh time, but are you sure that didn't affect your brain function?

There is absolutely NO relationship between intelligence and morality.

Greg

I'd bet to differ, but I don't beg.

--Brant

[moralist]

There are some very intelligent highly educated truly evil people.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

It's not that that's not true. It's that that's not enough for your previous generalization. You over-generalize or wrongly generalize to a fault. Here you are conflating how intelligent with how intelligence is used. Morality too isn't just about being moral but immoral. The way you're using moral turns immoral into non-moral by implication, but you don't see that. The contradiction is too much to absorb and embrace. Then there is the moral question of how one structures one's intelligence and for what purpose. A greatly intelligent brain can be turned into a gumbo through wrong development, non-development or simple passive neglect and non-use. Morality exists in every choice. Many choices involve the mind or brain per se. This kind of morality is about as personal as you can get. Existential expressions of intelligence are the consequential (moral) payoffs.

--Brant

[moralist]

Generalizations have exceptions... but there aren't enough of them to invalidate a generalization.

I take a simple view and don't overthink it so that it remains simple: As long as I do what's morally right, everything will be just fine. God makes that promise to anyone who chooses to take Him up on it... whether or not they believe in Him. Faith is not a prerequisite. Only doing what's morally right makes everything ok, because doing what's morally right is in harmony with objective reality.

I've followed this one simple idea for most all of my life, and everything has turned out just fine.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Reversion to the mean.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

Generalizations have exceptions... but there aren't enough of them to invalidate a generalization.

I take a simple view and don't overthink it so that it remains simple: As long as I do what's morally right, everything will be just fine. God makes that promise to anyone who chooses to take Him up on it... whether or not they believe in Him. Faith is not a prerequisite. Only doing what's morally right makes everything ok, because doing what's morally right is in harmony with objective reality.

I've followed this one simple idea for most all of my life, and everything has turned out just fine.

Greg

logic 101. One counter example falsifies a generalization. The exception proves the rule --- the exception proves the rule is false.

Let the generalization be all x is A. If there exists an x that is not A then the generalization is false.

The black swan proves that the generalization "all swan are white" is false.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

All generalizations can be modified propositions also.

Most Swans are white, e.g.

A...

[moralist]

Generalizations have exceptions... but there aren't enough of them to invalidate a generalization.

I take a simple view and don't overthink it so that it remains simple: As long as I do what's morally right, everything will be just fine. God makes that promise to anyone who chooses to take Him up on it... whether or not they believe in Him. Faith is not a prerequisite. Only doing what's morally right makes everything ok, because doing what's morally right is in harmony with objective reality.

I've followed this one simple idea for most all of my life, and everything has turned out just fine.

Greg

logic 101. One counter example falsifies a generalization.

You're talking about an absolute, Bob.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

While Bob is completely wrong, I wasn't talking about "exceptions." So Greg is right about Bob but wrong about me--to personalize this. Now Bob has a chance to make wrong right, but it can only be done with a deletion or correction, something he doesn't know how to do. Watch. (Greg will now come back with his opinion, my opinion, we all got opinions (and they're all subjective) and you're welcome to yours and my opinion about my opinions, all opinions, is all that counts for me. [bob leaving science is like a fish leaving water.])

--Brant

in my opinion, btw

[moralist]

Science has been wrong about cholesterol for 40 years. It was wrong about statins. It can be just as subjective as anything else, especially using the drug culture model. This is why I choose to go with my own common sense.

Why look to others to solve your problems when they can't even solve their own?

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

People taking statins today aren't getting much if any no heart attack benefit, just lowered cholesterol--cholesterol the body manufactures because the body needs it. There may be some exceptions such as extremely high cholesterol. Then there are possible overt medical complications from taking these medicines. The benefit is so statistically small, from what I read a while back, as to be non-existent because of statistical friction, but it was like under 1 -- 2 percent.

--Brant

the marketeers no longer say the drugs will stop heart attacks, only lower cholesterol, but after years of being told, one way or another, that heart attacks are caused by high cholesterol and the drugs would prevent them (and strokes, too, I suppose), that for hoi polloi to read and hear that a drug will lower cholesterol means their minds automatically make the connection for the marketeers

[moralist]

People taking statins today aren't getting much if any no heart attack benefit, just lowered cholesterol--cholesterol the body manufactures because the body needs it. There may be some exceptions such as extremely high cholesterol. Then there are possible overt medical complications from taking these medicines. The benefit is so statistically small, from what I read a while back, as to be non-existent because of statistical friction, but it was like under 1 -- 2 percent.

--Brant

the marketeers no longer say the drugs will stop heart attacks, only lower cholesterol, but after years of being told, one way or another, that heart attacks are caused by high cholesterol and the drugs would prevent them (and strokes, too, I suppose), that for hoi polloi to read and hear that a drug will lower cholesterol means their minds automatically make the connection for the marketeers

(shrug...) People who have abandoned their own common sense...

...to put their faith in a secular drug worshiping religion are only getting exactly what they deserve.

Greg

[Mikee]

Kind of like the pope talking about global warming...

[moralist]

Kind of like the pope talking about global warming...

Yup... global warming is a religion too.

Greg

[william.scherk]

I went to the Temple a couple of years ago, and was granted a supply of sacrament, Statin. I was blessed with an inquisitive mind.

I have watched my 'bad' cholesterol dip down to an artery-clogging plaque-enabling norm. I eat a plant-based diet plus the sacrament bacon. I exercise regularly. All my paternal male relatives have died from a heart attack, at various ages ranging from 39 to 79. I aim to be dead of my own final family heart attack somewhere in the latest seventies. I'd renounce my genetics, but they also gave me some of my bright intellect.

As with the religion of global warming and the anti-religion of anti-global warming, getting informed is like climbing a tower made of loose bits and strong bits of artifact and information, cheese and mortar, rocks and sand, iron-girded supports and loose, crumbly metaphor. A careful, curious, rational inquiry can serve you up a warranted opinion that you can be proud of, but don't close your reasoning to incoming data henceforward.

Understanding cholesterol, as Brant suggests, means understanding cellular, metabolic, bodily processes, optimum, diseased, subject to wear and tear and causal networks, quite human, quite complex. This is not yet a religion, which is why its products are variable, subject to refutation, overthrow, revision, and why misinterpretation by go-between media is too often the norm.

IOW, it's your body. Figure it out to your own best interest.

[Selene]

Ya just can't help yourself can you?

Sacrament - Christian, Catholic ****noun
1.
Ecclesiastical. a visible sign of an inward grace, especially one of the solemn Christian rites considered to have been instituted by Jesus Christ to symbolize or confer grace: the sacraments of the Protestant churches are baptism and the Lord's Supper; the sacraments of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches are baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, matrimony, penance, holy orders, and extreme unction.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sacrament

"As with the religion of global warming and the anti-religion of anti-global warming..."

A definitional dichotomy that I certainly find invalid.

[william.scherk]

Go after Greg, Adam. He cast aspersions in religious terms, I populated further aspersions to illustrate a point that reason, not religion, is a best mode for understanding. I countered the implication that all are fools who think that medicine is not a religion. If medicine, medical science are religion, and secular whatsit InsertSlur are religion by extension, what isn't?

I was not thinking of you and the pearls of Catholicism, so. Attempts at ridicule are aimed at shonky ideas. I added confection to Greg's karma candy. He noted that those with "faith in a secular drug worshiping religion are only getting exactly what they deserve."

As for global warming as a religion, an anti-religion religion/cult/sect is certainly possible to me within analogy, even if not plausible to you. So maybe in the end, slopping around religion as a label to anathematize is the shonky moralistic fudge at issue, not the mockery of said slop.

Edited August 1, 2015 by william.scherk

[Mikee]

As with the "anti-science of global warming" and the "anti-anti science of anti-global warming".

Right on the money, works for me. Thanks William, there's hope.

[Selene]

Go after Greg, Adam. He cast aspersions in religious terms, I populated further aspersions to illustrate a point that reason, not religion, is a best

Statements of fact about what you stated in your own words are not intended to be aspersions and are not intended as aspersions.

Therefore, you cannot play the victim with me.

A...

[moralist]

He noted that those with "faith in a secular drug worshiping religion are only getting exactly what they deserve."

You will always get closer to the truth when you use actual quotes rather than deceitful paraphrasing.

Drugs are great for treating symptoms without addressing causes. To that end, the pharmaceutical industry has been honed down to a fine art, and millions of people in the US couldn't live without them. By default your liberal healthcare bureaucracy is all you have, William, so it's perfectly natural for you to make use of what you need, because it is a product of your values.

Greg

[moralist]

Therefore, you cannot play the victim with me.

A...

He sure tries hard enough, Adam... because playing the victim is the aspiration of every liberal.

Greg

[william.scherk]

Go after Greg, Adam. He cast aspersions in religious terms, I populated further aspersions to illustrate a point that reason, not religion, is a best mode for understanding.

Statements of fact about what you stated in your own words are not intended to be aspersions and are not intended as aspersions.

I am failing to communicate, I think. I don't really know what you are driving at. "Ya just can't help yourself can you?"

It is boring to restate the issue, but I will, since I am not making any headway: stripped of inessentials, I believe that to slap the 'religion' label on some organized body of knowledge or discipline of inquiry is not entirely rational. To erase any boundary conditions between a 'science' and a 'religion' is not particularly useful, beyond identifying a tribal affiliation. If 'science-based' medicine is a religion, then why not alternative/complementary medicine, climatology, esthetics, cosmology, radiative physics, and the ARI? What isn't a religion, once you get the broad brush out?

Does that make sense?

Without some conceptual rigor, the signifier becomes merely a 'bad' tag. It carries nothing forward beyond an analogy. And since arguments by analogy can fail logically, what is left of the 'religion' concept? It seems inflated beyond its parameters, and no longer potent or illuminating.

Therefore, you cannot play the victim with me.

Sure. We are all adults with strong opinions. Sometimes a comment or part of a comment irritates, grates, engenders a reaction. So it goes.

I don't know what it is you want to happen differently. It looks like you don't appreciate any funny business with 'real' religion, and practices, and are alert to sneers directed at Christian faith and piety. Taking Greg's conceptual framework of everything-I-don't-like-is-Religion, though, you are unruffled when he suggests everyone who accepts a pharmacological agent is in effect a cult member, cowed and blinded, a hive member of no individual independent mind.

This strikes me as untenable. In the present context, it sets aside human knowledge of biological processes as a byproduct of religious dogma -- a rational failure. It fails to separate 'good' science -- objective, falsifiable, warranted, logically-sound -- from 'bad' science or pseudoscience. It leaves no tools of discernment and no heuristic to help sort out concepts.

That is not to say that the 'system' of delivery, marketing, reporting, funding, experimenting is a science as a whole. Nor that there is not a lot to criticize -- but that by inquiry in this way, we can argue about eg the actual effects of statins, and the process of winnowing out truth and fact from promotion and partial-knowledge. Using rational, conceptual tools we can edge closer to the goal of reliable, valid, tested bits of This Can Be Known.

Ultimately, you can ask yourself, Adam, when is human inquiry stymied or derailed from a logical and rational path? Does it make sense to subsume under bad/religion generalizations things that may not indeed be religious? Should we maintain in mind, as Ayn Rand did, the differences between knowledge rendered by reason, and knowledge rendered by religion?

.

And the questions I ask myself are What does Adam want? What is his beef? How could my comments change in style or tone to better convey the points I make? Is there a lingering personal animosity or suspicion that degrades all attempts at mutual comprehension?

He noted that those with "faith in a secular drug worshiping religion are only getting exactly what they deserve."

Drugs are great for treating symptoms without addressing causes. To that end, the pharmaceutical industry has been honed down to a fine art, and millions of people in the US couldn't live without them. By default your liberal healthcare bureaucracy is all you have, William, so it's perfectly natural for you to make use of what you need, because it is a product of your values.

This is such an odd mix. You presume a great deal, and you presume irrefutable knowledge. And yet, any other presumption or attestation of knowledge is faulty in your eyes, due to insertInsultHere.

Drugs aside, though, Greg -- what is your opinion on not-exactly-drug therapies that base their action in genetic terms, or that act in concert with immune systems? That is, when a disease is averted via vaccination, is the vaccination a sacrament of the leftist liberal healthcare cult/religion, or is it just a vaccine? (I might ask if you are/were vaccinated -- and if you would vaccinate your child as a matter of practicality). I am sure that you can appreciate distinctions you yourself can discover.

Similarly, advances in genomics have already begun to bear fruit. There are now genetic therapies that can redress metabolic/genetic disorders. Are these just another excrescence of liberalism's odious religion? I mean, seriously.

Serious, life-threatening disorders pop up in the population in ratios of rarity. Once childhood leukemia was a death sentence. Without advances in cancer-treatment for these kids, they would have 'got what they deserved' by natural law, I guess. But surely that is not what you think. Surely you applaud the antidote of sorts medical science can deliver, other than a death sentence.

Look at it this way, Greg. You may want to make a distinction between drugs and not-drugs and not-at-all-drugs. It may be, when you learn a bit more about this therapy or that, that the drugs agents do not merely work on alleviating symptoms while the causes tick on like a bomb ... they may cure an underlying condition, or avert a disastrous disease state.

Where you draw the line between a hellish liberal bureaucracy/religious caste that administers, mandates and manages 'health care' -- and the actual effects of this or that therapy or surgery or genetic intervention -- is where you will able to make important real-world distinctions, I believe.

Maybe everything is religious dogma to you that doesn't originate in your own experience and understanding. But what kind of perceptive critiques go unwritten and unread when you put your head in the sand of perfect knowledge? I would love, for example, to hear your opinion about advances in immunoprophylaxis by gene transfer ...

-- in this round, Splitters 2, Lumpers 1.

Edited August 1, 2015 by william.scherk