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[Loud Whispers]

Hitler didn't make those ideas, he adopted them

You know what that's begging for, LW.

Hitler didn't make the trousers, he wore them

[Baffler]

-snip-

Potential is a common argument, but it doesn't really make sense if you don't have a theistic worldview, at least not by itself. I think it's interesting to consider it from a point of action vs. inaction. An egg can never be fertilized (at least in humans) without sex. A blastocyst however will eventually develop into a baby on its own, provided it isn't interrupted by sickness, miscarriage, or physical trauma. At conception, then, the situation goes from avoiding an action, to taking an action - interrupting the development of a baby that will be taken to completion provided nothing stops it. You see similar ideas in the medical field, like in the USA where both legal and ethical distinctions exist between withholding treatment necessary to preserve the patient's life and euthanasia using a lethal dose of some drug.

[ChairmanPoo]

I fail to see the point, tbh. I've always found such distinctions more illusory than real.  The way I see things not taking an action is a choice (ergo an action) in itself, and often comes up in difficult dillemas as a way to wash your hands off a problem. In the question at hand, a zygote will unavoidably become a person... unless it doesn't, for a thousand different reasons, external or internal.  It hardly serves as an argument about the zygote's personhood, or the rightfulness or wrongfulness of contraception. By the way, I don't consider the argu,ent from potentiality (which closely mimics this) as inherently religious, but just like in this one, you have to accept the premises, which I really don't.


There're also further consequences from these kind of reasonings when carries to their logical conclusion. For instance, I heard a bioethicist (my uni bioethics teacher, as a matter of fact) argue that in the clinical dillema of separating a couple of cojoined twins sharing vital organs to save one of them, the moral thing is to abstain and let them both die. With which I strpngly disagree.

A more recent  and real, not hypothetical, example: I've been present in argument arguments about curettage in pregnant women with leukemia, with some people arguing that treatment should not be administered because it would be deadly for the foetus. Nevermind that there is not a chance in hell for the pregnacy to come to term.

(For the record, in those cases I was present we did carry out the treatment in the end.)

[Helgoland]

History actually does progress dialectically, to a degree. Thus what's right and what's wrong politically depends not only on the policy in question but also on its relation to the zeitgeist. In particular there are situations in which terrorists are on the right side of history, or at least they are driving history forward, even though their methods are not suited to reaching their professed goals.

[Reelya]

I suspect hypnotism is a load of male bovine manure and every time I see a show on TV I am firmly convinced the players are faking it.

Depends what you refers to by hypnosis, but at least the medical kind is fairly established now.

I kind of wonder. There was the whole 1980s repressed memories thing in which it turned out almost always the memories had been suggested by the researchers. It was linked with the "satanic daycare" moral panic. I wonder how much hypnosis was actually discredited when all of that broke.

I'm pretty sure hypnotism is real. They used to hire a guy to do school functions in my home town, so i've seen it first hand. Groups of about 10 high school students at a time. High School students, who would love nothing more that to mess up the guys performance and be "That kid" but none of them ever did.

Look into the history of those shows. They predate the hypnosis technique and early practitioners claimed to either use telepathy or supernatural powers. The shows had the same effect regardless of completely lacking anything resembling hypnosis techniques. Later, when hypnosis became a fashionable medical idea, the same shows adopted the label hypnosis as the justification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_hypnosis

Basically it's in the same vein as psychic stage shows and other charlatans, but they co-opted a pseudoscientific idea of "hypnosis" to validate what's going on as "not magic" once magic started to make people skeptical. Many of the shows don't even use hypnotic induction, and it makes no difference at all. That's a red flag for pseudoscience: when doing or not doing the main thing doesn't change your results:

Mesmeric and other stage performances changed their names to "stage hypnotist" in the 19th century. They had originally claimed to produce the same effects by means of telepathy and animal magnetism, and only later began to explain their shows in terms of hypnotic trance and suggestion. Hence, many of the precursors of stage hypnosis did not employ hypnotic induction techniques. Moreover, several modern stage performers have themselves published criticisms which suggest that stage hypnosis is largely the result of sleight of hand, ordinary suggestion, and social compliance, etc., rather than hypnotic trance. Most notably, the well-known American magician and performer, Kreskin, has frequently carried out typical stage hypnosis demonstrations without using any hypnotic induction. After working as a stage hypnotist and magician for nearly two decades, Kreskin became a skeptic and a whistleblower from within the stage hypnosis field.

An outspoken skeptic regarding stage hypnosis, Kreskin not only actively debunked stage hypnotists' claims, but went so far as to offer a substantial monetary reward, $25,000, to anyone who could prove the existence of hypnotic trance. The reward has been unsuccessfully challenged three times.

[penguinofhonor]

You're really stretching that connection to fit your preconceptions. It could also mean that stage performers were evoking this mental state before modern hypnosis techniques, and the shows adopted an official label for the phenomenon once one existed.

[ChairmanPoo]

Yeah, all of us here have seen the shows. Has anyone here actually experienced this supposed state?

[itisnotlogical]

I've seen an entertainer-hypnotist, not a supposed therapeutic hypnotist. I was extremely tired, it was part of a post-graduation celebration so I honestly have no idea how much of it was "real hypnosis" and how much of it was just me subconsciously wanting to be part of the show.

[penguinofhonor]

You might have that uncertainty after therapeutic hypnotism too.

Anyway, reading into the history of modern hypnotism has me more convinced that at least some stage hypnotists have actually been able to cause trances. James Braid, the guy who invented the word "hypnosis" and is often considered the first modern hypnotist, didn't invent the idea of a suggestive trance whole cloth. He was trying to come up with a scientific explanation for a phenomenon that the stage hypnotists of his day credited to magic. He based his techniques on theirs - if they couldn't actually achieve hypnosis then we wouldn't have modern hypnotism.

[Reelya]

The problem with "maybe they were already hypnotizing people" is that modern practioners have discovered that the effects are the same whether or not they skip the whole "putting you in a trance" stage. So it's just normal suggestion and social phenomena, and the "hypnotizing" segment is just theatrics.

Which is what I wrote is a "red flag" for pseudoscience. When you can just skip huge chunks of the supposed process and the outcome is completely the same, then occam's razor suggests you should abandon that part of the theory.

[helmacon]

I've seen an entertainer-hypnotist, not a supposed therapeutic hypnotist. I was extremely tired, it was part of a post-graduation celebration so I honestly have no idea how much of it was "real hypnosis" and how much of it was just me subconsciously wanting to be part of the show.

Hold on, we had post graduation hypnotist shows at my highschool too. I didn't realize that it was a common thing.

[ChairmanPoo]

I've seen an entertainer-hypnotist, not a supposed therapeutic hypnotist. I was extremely tired, it was part of a post-graduation celebration so I honestly have no idea how much of it was "real hypnosis" and how much of it was just me subconsciously wanting to be part of the show.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

q

[penguinofhonor]

spoiler

Maybe my earlier post was an oversimplification then. I apologize for rushing to judgment.

[Reelya]

It's a natural reaction, our culture is just infused with tons of pseudoscientific beliefs like you wouldn't believe. We laugh at the "quaint" beliefs of previous generations and think we're just oh-so-rational now. But the fact is, we're swimming in almost as many bullshit beliefs now as ever.

Sometimes we replace the "quaint" ideas we laughed at with worse ones, then science debunks the new version, and we get headlines "who would have thought X is true" which implies it's a new idea and not original "folk wisdom" handed down for generations.

One example was in the 1990s I saw on TV a nutrition segment and one reporter mentioned some old Slavic saying or something that if you boy is always going for an extra potato at dinner, you need to watch that or he'll get fat. The food reporters both laughed: "potatoes don't even have any fat!" Uhh, that was pre-Atkins, and they were laughing at the idea that carbs could make you fat. Look who's laughing now.

Another interesting one is to do with cold viruses and the "cold makes you cold" myths. For a long time smug educated people have scoffed at this as simple folk superstition. Except now, scientists have discovered that the exact temperature in your nose can make a huge difference in how fast rhioviruses replicate. Which actually validates your mom.
http://scienceline.org/2015/01/cold-viruses-thrive-in-cold-noses/
So people went from believe being cold causes you to get a cold, and veered all the way to "how cold you are makes no difference whatsoever". Both extremes are wrong.

[redwallzyl]

Meanwhile, our overzealous use of multivitamins is doing absolutely jack shit to help us health-wise.

Hell, here's a good one: milk making your bones strong is a myth. It is fortified with vitamin D, which prevents rickets (at least in the US). Great if you live in Alaska. Otherwise, doesn't really help that much at all. Though I will admit, the commercial motivation to keep that myth around is probably part of the reason why it is still around.

regardless milk is delicious and i will never stop drinking it.