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Author Topic: Life on Planet Mars has been found.... [Disproven never trust a youtuber lol]  (Read 2911 times)

Trekkin

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"Most likely to be" != "Totally this"

Just to be sure we are on the same page here. I am not ruling out fungus as an option, just saying it is less likely to be the case. (what is the fungus eating in there? I needs a source of metabolic energy. Unless this is some very strange chemotrophic fungus or something, how do you explain having a fungal growth of that density, in the absence of organic substrate? Etc.)

Zapping it for science is the most direct way to find out. Sadly we may never know. :(

vis-a-vis "Lamplight"

It is also a theatrical term for purposefully drawing attention to something in a narrative. This is the use I invoked.

An example in television, is a close pan-in to a McGuffin in the scene, even when the actor's characters are unaware of it.

You might be thinking of "to highlight", but I can't find any examples of someone using "lamplight" as a verb.

In any event, I'm not saying your conclusions are necessarily wrong. I'm saying that you and the author have collectively managed to demonstrate why you don't bring up Occam's Razor in a scientific context to discriminate between candidate hypotheses: because ultimately it's a judgement call working sideways to the actual process. "Most likely to be" is indeed not "definitely this", but it's also not scientifically meaningful outside of very specific statistical contexts.

I'm not doing this to pick on you, by the way. I'm doing it because adversarial reasoning like this is probably the single most pervasive and tenacious error people make in trying to think scientifically, and it's a weirdly subtle error for something so core to empiricism; the same processes that are vital to organizing and prioritizing research are fatal to actually performing it. You've helped to provide an unusually tutelary example of why that is, and I felt it was important, in light of how we're all looking at the pseudoscience now, to highlight that.
« Last Edit: April 19, 2019, 02:30:16 am by Trekkin »
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wierd

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No, I mean lamplight.

It is related to the phrase "Hang a lantern"
http://bekindrewrite.com/2011/02/04/what-does-hang-a-lantern-mean-and-how-do-i-use-it-in-my-book/

It's an obscure usage, but not incorrect.
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Trekkin

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Well, now, if I were inclined to misuse abductive heuristics, I'd say that the simplest explanation for your failure to find an actual example to support your assertion thus far (rather than further assertions that whatever you have found is relevant) is that there's nothing to find, so per Occam's Razor you're probably wrong.

How fortunate we are to live in a more epistemologically precise age.
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wierd

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Well, you COULD, but then you would run foul of the past 3 posts you just made about drawing conclusions without evidence (specifically data)... :P

Be it as it may, I really don't have a good explanation for why google seems so damn insistent the term doesn't exist.  Does not make the term wrong, it just makes me wonder what's going on over there.

The term's most frequent use is in the form of the phrase "lamplit term", where a specific word is chosen explicitly.  Google returns a few nonsense word-salad pages with that use, but wtf.  (shrug)
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Bumber

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Could you mean spotlighting / lampshading?
« Last Edit: April 20, 2019, 10:15:34 am by Bumber »
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Reading his name would trigger it. Thinking of him would trigger it. No other circumstances would trigger it- it was strictly related to the concept of Bill Clinton entering the conscious mind.

THE xTROLL FUR SOCKx RUSE WAS A........... DISTACTION        the carp HAVE the wagon

A wizard has turned you into a wagon. This was inevitable (Y/y)?

Max™

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Yeah, I've seen spotlight used, and I would have personally used highlight though it isn't a theatrical term, but I bet if someone said it was originally used to describe lamps placed up high to illuminate portions of the stage from a different angle it would seem plausible enough to fly most places.
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