Bay 12 Games Forum

... have y'asked the teacher for suggestions on how to deal with it? Might be time to do that.

With what's written in the margins? In a heartbeat

And seriously, I am/was a philosophy major. It's like half my academic mandate to crap all over scientific methodology, especially in softer fields like psychology. Part of the job these days is helping make sure those twits don't start doing stupid(er than normal) stuff. E: 'Course, better than half the time they don't listen, and then you get stuff like the worser parts of evo psych, but damnit, we're supposed to be trying.

Also, pure-blood depends on how "pureblood" actually works. Is it like the Nazis where you need wizards back to your grandparents? Is it just "two wizards for parents"? *shrug*

*waves vaguely at half-blood prince* Probably at least grandparents, yeah.

This psych course has led me to such interesting places, did you know that according to the margin of my textbook, Harry Potter is a good illustration of the nature-nurture interaction, being that he was born to pureblooded parents, but raised by muggles, he had natural magical ability, but it didn't flourish until he went to Hogwarts...

... he wasn't born to pureblooded parents (Only his father was, Lily was muggleborn), and it's kinda' arguable he flourished at all, from what I recall. Only had one particularly innate magical ability, too (parseltongue, and it's arguable that that was actually natural), if I'm not misremembering -- the rest of it largely required training to be more than random discharges. Critter's a pretty strong case for the majority of nature being bollocks, from what I've seen (great deal of HP's actions can be fairly easily slotted in to the predictable behavioral patterns of someone that's gone through what he has). Plenty of fanfiction makes good (and bad, and mediocre, and ungodly terrible) investigations into the subject.

... exhibit A, why lunar rovers should not attempt to jump into a mosh pit?

But average joe-shmo on the street doesn't think in those terms, and all they hear is "Monsanto is evil! GMO is tampering with nature! We're all going to die!" and they think GMO is all evil with no good reason to use it at all. Think it's fucking poison or something, like we're fucking sticking cyanide-producing genes into wheat for the lulz or something.

And still eat it. Would still eat it, if the price was sufficiently lower than non-GMO alternatives (and it is ) and it was easier to identify the stuff. Oh, some stick to the guns and there's folks that avoid it for jonesing purposes, but most? Heh.

Seriously, there's a lot more bark than bite in that arena, and even when there is bite it's usually not much of one, 'least so far as I'm aware. There's just not enough bad news directly on the subject (i.e. catastrophic failures in regards to the actual crops, never mind peripheral stuff like devilsanto's business practices and bee genocide.) to really turn public action away from it (and opinion's closer to split than strongly against). Not when it feeds so many for so cheap.

Nah, I can pretty much guarantee you that once the field gets just a little more developed in regards to practical applications a lot of the bullshitting is going to pipe down. Sorts of folks railing against it are borderline notorious for how quickly they change their tune once they're actually able to benefit from whatever they're railing against.

Mind you, they're also borderline notorious for still railing against whatever they've targeted after they benefit from it, but eh. Actions speak louder, etc.