Bay 12 Games Forum

Thread for ex-Christians to talk in and for discussion of anything related to their experience of deconversion from Christianity, or life afterwards, or just doubts/questions, etc. Anything at all goes really that's related to ex-Christianity. Please be respectful and do not attack anyone.

Anyone is welcome of course; that's why it's "exchristians thread" and not "exchristians' thread."

I don't mean to be dismissive, but is there something about deconversion from Christianity that you feel wouldn't fit in the more general railgun thread?

Actually, the hell are they even used for out in the wild? Haven't seen even mild need in general life stuff, nor when I was doing accountancy training.

They're used in calculating combinations and permutations, among even more obscure things.

As ever, whether you need it "in real life" depends largely on your life.

Quote from: Trekkin on December 29, 2019, 01:51:33 pm

I think ridicule can be that path back.

But have you seen this actually work, in practice? From all I've been able to experience so far, it just devolves into rabid name-calling and entrenchment.

I certainly agree, btw, that crackpottery can have something to do with inherently faulty epistemological toolbox rather than just its gradual erosion over time. But then again, it's probably most likely that it's a bit of both.

Well, since we're aiming to convince third-party observers anyway, I'd argue that seeing it appear to work would be evidence it's failed; we want people watching to go home and think, not convert to fanatic scientism on the spot, and you're right that the target is a lost cause anyway. There have, however, been people who subsequently became vocal anti-crackpots who cite more acerbic rational (mostly atheist) Youtubers as the reason for their coming around, Paulogia being one of them. If you can stand to do it, trawling through Logicked's comments sections turns up a few more, and he's closer to what I'm thinking of than most.

If you know of a more direct way to measure gradual disengagement from comforting nonsense without it being self-reported (and loudly at that) I'm all ears.

Have you looked into what the service comprises, though? It's, iirc, $50 per 20 minutes of full attention, one-on-one talk, or something along those lines.
If you pay dearly for just a few minutes, you wont wax philosophical over your megalomania, or go on a persecutory complex rant, or throw around buzzwords you don't understand.
This forces the crank to re-evaluate what they have created, what they want to ask, what they really know, what is the gap in the knowledge they're trying to bridge, and whether the whole endeavour is really worth it. All before they even actually talk to the physicist.
Admittedly, my working definition of 'better outreach' in this case is 'successful in discouraging people from becoming crackpots'. So this is seldom about really teaching the science to the public, as it is about pruning the false impressions of what the science is, so that they don't macerate and spread as readily.

Yes, and the cost will help weed out some of the lazier trolls -- although, as the comments on her blog post announcing the service illustrate, some of them will just find the nearest free soapbox and whine about it.

My worry from an anti-crackpot standpoint is more one of triage, though. To be sure, some people will be spurred by the cost to rationally examine their theory and recognize it as aphysical, and maybe they need to be induced to do that in this way. But there are also people who arrive at unscientific ends by unscientific means, and I suspect their internal vetting process is to ask themselves whether they still think they are very smart and therefore everything they believe is true -- and then to also not bother actually talking to a physicist, more convinced they're right and more entrenched in their wrongness than ever. So now we have to ask whether those who are wrong for the right reasons and may be helped along will outnumber those who are wrong for the wrong reasons and will only be emboldened.

I think the latter are more common largely because modern American conspiracy theories and related follies are thick with them. At the root of Hammonism is the idea that Ken Ham thinks antediluvians fed Christians to dinosaurs before Noah built a floating wave-powered flush toilet and he's real smart so you should too. The Hovind Theory is little more than an excuse for Kent Hovind to pretend he has a real doctorate. Flat Earthers all cluster around their favored purveyor of well-gee-sure-looks-flat-to-me zetetic nonsense and rant about how everyone else is a CIA plant. Timecube was, by word count, mostly rants about how everyone but Gene Ray was educated stupid. Even the Dean Drive and the polywell fusor have little cults around them, and mewing runs mostly on the story that the Mews are persecuted orthodontic geniuses rather than dangerous crackpots. On the low end of the spectrum, conspiracy theorist Youtube is rife with these sorts of personal blogs about how persecuted they are by being asked to substantiate their nonsense, and the forum equivalent is about as rampant. I don't do social media, but what other people have shown me is along the same lines: as conspiracy theorists develop, they approach 100% conspiracy and 0% theory, because the point is to feel like they know something despite all evidence to the contrary.

This service is tantamount to an offer to put up or shut up. Some of them will try to do the former and realize they should really do the latter, sure, but we already select against crackpots willing and able to do either. The majority of loons who last long enough to spread their nonsense have already developed a defense mechanism against ever having to do either, so all this will do is motivate them to get out ahead of it.

If you want to prune false understandings of what science is, I think engaging with their purveyors is already taking the wrong tack. Detailed explanations of how bad science is bad are boring. Inviting people to come point and laugh at these stupid assholes who believe wrong things and are bad is sinking to their level, yes, but that's the level on which all of society operates now anyway, and it does have the advantage of being more engaging.

Maybe the best option would be to focus on the police brutality problem rather then the addictive substance sale problem?

In a larger sense, certainly, but we do run into an issue with scope creep here where eventually only the wholesale adoption of luxury gay space communism en bloc will do because anything less falls short of someone's policy ideal. The causes of police brutality are larger than police brutality, etc.

There are alternatives where nothing the kids do is a crime but there are still legal tools for stopping the flow of cigarettes to children, but they aren't really worth mentioning.

More specifically, the Starliner lost track of time and some piece of control software thought it was somewhere it wasn't. As a result, it had to burn more fuel than planned (not sure if that's because the bug burned fuel, more fuel had to be burned to correct the issue, or both) and couldn't get into a stable orbit to rendezvous with the ISS.

From what I understand, this is fundamentally correct: the main engine got an incorrect MET corresponding to after the needed burn, but the RCS got the correct MET and so was burning fuel keeping the nose pointed the right way during a burn that didn't happen.

Weren't folks also discussing how the barrier for entry might not actually be that low, due to the established dentist et al field vigorously shitting on people interested in trying?

That's the theory, but Mew claims he was expelled from the British Orthodontic Society because of his hundreds of Youtube videos and social media posts that have, in his version of the BOS' words, potential to mislead the public.

So he's being shat on, if you like, for presenting this to the public (and apparently coaching people in it) without proof it's effective, which is certainly not something we want doctors to be doing. Public disclosure is the last step of the process.

Besides, even if Dentists Don't Want You To Know, there are ways of getting a study like this done without needing the approval of any dentist. Mew just didn't know or care how.

In this case, it should not be too terribly hard for a research assistant to request a grant to conduct a limited trial experiment to validate the proposed processes with a randomized participant sample, and then do a post experiment followup at 6mo, 1 year, and 5 years.  That would be enough to make Trekkin happy, as long as proper protocols were followed.

Well, "happy" would involve some sense of the underlying biophysics so we could tease out a way to objectively validate patient compliance with the key elements of the technique (and, therefore, what those elements are.) It'd be much better than what we have now, though. You're correct in pointing out that the mechanism would necessarily be somewhat speculative, though, which is where we get into a chicken-and-egg problem: we can't test the device without knowing the technique does anything, but we can't test the technique without being able to verify people are doing it, for which a device would be very helpful. Having a proposed biochemical marker for compliance would probably resolve that to everyone's satisfaction.