phcatlantis

Logically,if mass is relative,then all the properties asoosiated with it should be relative.

You'll note that [imath]m_0 = \left((\frac{E}{c^2})^2 - (\frac{p}{c})^2\right)^\frac{1}{2}[/imath] is invariant.

I don't think it is Severian's hypothesis that students at religious schools fare worse academically.

I didn't say it was. I specifically and consistently characterized his hypothesis as 'students exposed to a religious view of the life sciences would underperform students exposed to the secular view.' I've pointed out that we should find some evidence of this in datasets breaking down student academic performance, graduation rates and college attendance by their affiliate schools. At first glance Christian schools should be more likely to instruct against evolution's consequences for life ancestry; therefore, students enrolled there underperform their public school peers. This is clearly not the case; in a country where three quarters of private school students are enrolled in some religious program. Next step would be either to break out Catholic and Jewish schools--which may or may not corrupt our sample--or focus as closely as possible on sectarian schools with known programs that instruct against evolution. I have not found that dataset. Neither has Severian, or Moleke, or silkworm. Until somebody does, all this is logic chopping mixed with a whole lot of faith.

First of all, math is a language (even though it is the most important one).

This is a non sequitur, and a woefully inaccurate one at that.

Public policy and education are poor substitutes to studying actual science...

Public policy and education science are actual sciences. That's why schools like MIT and NYU have such degree programs that culminate in Bachelors and Masters of Science

...because if you would have just studied the science you could make public policy and education stances based on the truth and nature ...

Truth is a philosophical question. The scientific merits of particular model in biology is, unsurprisingly, a question for biological sciences. The question raised by Severian, whether students exposed to religious views of the life sciences versus those exposed to secular views are at a disadvantage academically (and presumably professionally) is a question for the managerial and education sciences.

...instead of socially contrived blah blah blah that's trapped in the human fantasy of self importance.

These folks have as studied and nuanced as you. Tell me why I should take your contempt for the social sciences as theirs for biology?

18 and falling.

Really? Maybe its leveling out. Maybe its turning a corner. Maybe you have the trend line handy and would like to share it with us.

Plate tectonics explains everything about the Earth's crust, continental drift, earthquakes, volcanoes, everything. Most of Geology is this and superposition.

Is it your argument that geology is the study of geologically active systems?

Plate tectonics is the fundamental theory of Geology.

If it were fundamental, we would apply it to any geological system. We don't.

Most medical doctors have degraded into little more than customer service for drug companies.

And do you have a data set to back that up?

I'm in school with a lot of people on their way to med school and it's frightening, with the exception of a few they know nothing, and only appear to be in it for the money and the sex and not for the actual science.

I think you think too highly of yourself and probably a bit too resentfully of your peers. Beyond the your contemtptuous article of faith, what else do we have to uphold this claim that physicians are incompetent biologists?

This makes you sound incredibly dense.

Based on your comments, I'd figure you for a socially stunted and prone to focus your anger in misdirected rants about your perceived superior intelligence to those in respectable professions. I'm sure that's not the case, but since we're all apparantly in the business of measuring one another's character by their mostly anonymous comments, then that's the way you come across.

Biological evolution is not exclusive to human evolution, and evolution is not exclusive to biological evolution.

I assume you mean to say that consistency demands we apply the model to life ancestry. But who really cares if somebody asserts that supernatural events 6,000 years ago gave rise to life, rather than the story we can extrapolate from the theory and consistent evidence in the fossil record, between clades, and whatnot?

I understand you have low standards...

I understand you hold your own intelligence vis a vis that of others in extreme high regard. I'm not so sure that's a healthy way to approach this conversation.

...and it seems that to you the goal of education is to get a job...

As I see it, the education provides me with the skills and tools necessary to make my best possible shot at what I consider to be a good life. If that's different for you, then so be it. Unless you can show the motive for study has empirically testable consequences for competence and characterize the trend, you're just taking it on faith. How do you answer that?

...but a kid graduating high school who understands evolution, plate tectonics, and the laws of motion is a much stronger kid than one that didn't pay attention to them.

You can help us all out by defining "strength" and showing us the data that bears out your hypothesis. This brings us right back to Severian's very hard, testable claim; students exposed to secular life sciences are more likely to go to college than students who miss out.

You feel empowered by the fact that you actually know things that other people equivocate...

My God. You mean that for you it all boils down to a "I know something you don't know" game?

...and that tomorrow you'll understand nature a little bit better. Intellect is actually what makes the human species special, and pursuing an understanding of nature has made me more happy than anything else could.

Really? A healthy sex life? Financial security? Family? Good friends? Booze? A religious calling is a noble enterprise. But I'm a victim of a popular American mem--academic obsession to the detriment of other pursuits of happiness is just plain sad.

That's incredibly bleak and it's funny you say you're so far into education that you condone embracing ignorance.

I condone not caring what people believe insofar as concerns matters of the distant past and there is no tangible consequence in their everyday lives. The end result of your reasoning is the moral condemnation of ignorance regardless of its cause; whether due to lack of exposure, priority or the decision to believe something else. Perhaps this has something to do with your contempt for people who think its beneath them or that its inconsistent with their religious beliefs for man to have evolved from the same ancestor as a chimp. It's pretty unhealthy when a loose cannon traditionalist starts railing against the evils of evolution. I don't see the difference between that and your own disdain for religious people who've never harmed you.

And I've experienced many time where Joe Schmo and I would get into a conversation and we'd get to talking about evolution and I'd explain the process to him and he'd understand. Generally what follows is a profound interest in evolution, which has been my experience many times.

I'm quite sure you're making this up, but I'll bite. Who, when, where? And do you have the tapes? Or if we're just going to delve into personal experience, I've met plenty of Joe Schmos who wouldn't give two cents if man evolved from ape or if ape evolved from Charlton Heston; and would probably grow quickly bored with a random, unsolicited conversation on the subject.

What's unfortunate is Joe Schmo didn't know until then a concept that probably would have helped him in life. He probably should have gotten it in high school.

And how would it have helped him in life?

phcatlantis, you can debate policy and you can debate the best pop star of the 1980s but you can't debate the truth.

Sure I can. I pointed this out before, truth is an epistemological question.

I know that in debate you're supposed to hold your ground no matter what (which I've always felt made debate useless) but no matter what you say or how you say it it isn't going to change the fact of evolution.

Maybe you can point to a single post where I denied "the fact of evolution."

Agnostic: No offence meant in this, but, you seem to know more about the U.S. legal system than you do about science and hence are taking the POV of "I know the legal system like the back of my hand and science must be almost the same. so i know scientific method" well we know science like the backs of our hand and it isn't as similar as you appear to think.

Agnostic asked what is his obligation to believe that evolution is true. That has nothing to do with the scientific method; it is an epistemological question that is as validly addressed through a legal lens as it is through any other principle method of divining truth. If you care more about whether you should believe that a man and ape have a common ancestor rather than the coherence of a model predicting one way or another, then a legal approach is probably more interesting than a scientific one. For those of us not terribly interested in biology on a whole, this is definitely an appropriate outlet for entering the discussion. It's definitely in the right forum.

Why believe the theory of evolution?

Because its presently evident in all of its active features. Allele frequencies do tend to change from generation to generation. This is easily verified and its easy to search the forums for any number of references substantiating this. If you're asking why we should believe the phylogenic implications of evolution, the only thing I can say is that I don't care enough to worry that I accept it almost entirely on the basis of its sexiness. If you believe the world was created de novo 6000 years ago, more power to you.

What is it's basis?

Nearly a century and a half of experimental and observational evidence. Combined with its elegance and explanatory power when applied to the question of the ancestry of modern species, its a pretty convincing point of view. That is, of course, unless you subscribe to some different cosmology and origins perspective and care enough about what happened 6,000 or more years ago. In which case all the discoveries consistent with evolutionary, geological and cosmological models of the distant past may or may not be enough to interest you.

I think a far more interesting question attaches to education policy; is an unscientific view of the distant past incompatible with the aims of a free, technically proficient, and scientifically curious society that wishes to stay that way? In short, can you be a good scientist and believe the good Lord created the universe and everything in it in six days? That's the debate that gets me excited, and for that reason among others I definitely prefer the company of IDiots to their critics.

1. I agree that the universe looks spatially flat' date=' if you look at a large enough piece of it. Or else ALMOST flat. Astronomers have this number Omega that they measure and they get values like 1.01 +/- 0.01.

If Omega = 1 exactly then the U is spatially flat. Which contains the idea of infinite as the most likely (but not the only possible) realization.

But if, say, Omega = 1.01, then the U has to be FINITE with a slight curvature. and we dont know which it is----exactly 1 or just a bit over.[/quote']

 

Just wanted to add something to this, make sure its absolutely clear.

 

The reason why cosmologists can talk about the extent of the universe based entirely on that value, omega, is because the field assumes the cosmological principle: the universe is homogenous and isotropic on a large scale. That's to say that if we measure the large scale curvature at any place in the universe, if this principle holds we should get the same value for Omega. The best way to think about this is consider some the outer skin of some geometry that yields all positive or zero values for curvature but is not closed (say a cone with a rounded tip and a base extending out to infinity). Sure, its infinite, but omega would not be the same around the tip as it would be along the surface extending to the base. On the other hand, its pretty easy to see that a sphere or some other geometry with the necessary characteristics, has the same average intrinsic curvature everywhere.

 

2. space doesn't need some surrounding space to expand INTO

space simply expands.

 

I think in this case its useful, and slightly less misleading, to actually think about content (say a volume of dust or an area of specks) rather than space. The rubber sheet analogy captures the idea that we can see content receding in expansion, but at the cost of leaving laymen with the impression that content is just lying on some material thing that is pushing it apart. If you...

 

1) think about content growing increasingly diffuse or concentrated due to some interaction with itself, as you would with a volume of gas or dust in your everyday spatial experience.

 

2) then observe that the idea of distance between points in that content changes with the distribution of that content

 

...then I think that pretty much captures how general relativity, describing the behavior of geometry and topology due to some distribution of mass-energy, and astronomy, which characterizes that distribution empirically, knock boots to give us an extremely elegant cosmological model.

 

I think a better analogy would fall along these lines, getting away from a material notion of space and space-time and getting people to think about dust clouds. But I'm quite sure somebody else can explain it better than I can

Aw hell, its not worth it. This is your area of expertise.

I have a question. Who here (guardian' date=' ecoli, atlantic...) can get this to play? How long does it take to download. With my connection it takes a wait of 2 or 3 minutes before it starts up. This is a talk given in November by Bilson-Thompson on a way of presenting the standard particlephysics model that he is working out.

 

http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca:81/Mediasite/Viewer/Viewer.aspx?layoutPrefix=LayoutTopLeft&layoutOffset=Skins/Clean&width=800&height=631&peid=2e5425f4-3f47-4e5a-a86a-804a6d499b17&pid=e949d11b-a1a5-4365-a152-7e2014cb3867&pvid=1&playerType=WM64Lite&mode=Default&shouldResize=true

 

when it starts the first person you see is Lee Smolin--he introduces the speaker[/quote']

 

Its playing for me. What's the issue?

Actually, Sev's hypothesis has more to do with teaching ID.

Never said it did. On the other hand, the thread discussion involved a deposition transcript specifically dealing with ID. Sev observed that lawyers gum up the works in so far as science education policy because they're not knowledgable of the issue. He then went on to argue that sustained exposure "this rubbish"--presumably ID--would hurt students attempting to get into college. I pointed out that I've seen no scientific evidence to date that this is the case. Just as I've seen no scientific evidence to date regarding any of your claims about the quality and character of life science education in high school or political pressure faced by public school teachers.

Just breaking the schools down by religion is meaningless...

How so? Sev's hypothesis is plain and simple. "The schools would pretty soon learn that if they teach the kids this rubbish that the kids won't get places at college or get jobs, and the parents won't send them there." My guess is we'd look for data sets breaking down private schools by religious affiliation and take a look at their student performance as well as their matriculation and college attendance rates.

Hands up everyone with a degree in biology. Hands up those who've taught it. Right. Guess whose opinion on the worth of a biology course has more weight?

Mine. I have a stronger math, public policy and education science background than you do. Please hold your applause until the end of the post.

Without the overarcing concept behind the fact, you might as well have learned nothing.

Which is you saying that 35 percent of Protestant and 43 percent of Muslim physicians have learned nothing. [1]

Meaningless statistics; you cannot assume all or even most of those individuals are creationists/IDiots.

I can assume that 18 percent of them are.

In fact, when antibiotics first came out, there was an accompanying discussion of "Do not over-perscribe these or the bacteria *will* evolve to face this challenge"

Which is why I pointed out that the crux of the debate is over the theory of evolution's consequences in terms of the evolution of life in the distant past. Like I said, there's not much uproar against the idea that genes change.

Or how about the fact we've made great progress towards solving many gentic diseases that previously eluded our grasp due to not being in normal genes, but rather switches for the genes (which are considerably harder to find)? Guess how we did it? Good old ape-human common ancestry. they figured any truly "junk" DNA with no use would simply mutate at the usual background rate, while anything important (like switches for developmental genes) would be acted upon by selection to keep it functional, and would show a much lower rate of change. Using this method, they were able to rapidly narrow down the search to certain promising loci.

If you're done snowing the audience, why don't you explain how this has anything to do with whether or not humans came as they were 6000 years ago de novo?

I don't recall you being given the authority to dictate what everyone else is talking about.

I don't recall you being given the authority to manufacture absurd positions for people not here to defend themselves in order to belittle them.

See above. If they'e just a pill-pusher who's sole use is to make diagnoses and treat people, it problably doesn't any more than computer repair person needs to know electrical engineering in exquisite detail. But in order to actually devise the treatments? To find the genes that cause problems? To know what species are worth bioprospecting for new drugs? A lack of knowledge of evolution would severely hamper that.

You didn't answer my question. How is a physician hampered by holding the additional, unscientific belief that life began 6000 years ago as the product of some divine power?

Because they'll fail to adequately grasp biology.

You're logic chopping. Severian has a hypothesis with no empirical support. You have nothing additional to provide. So next question, what besides contempt drives you to that belief?

Even if this has no effect on other majors, it means a certain percentage who do go into biology will be at a severe disadvantage.

Then I'm sure you have the data to back that up.

False analogy except for the first part (and CS *do* have to take some level of EE courses).

You really need to read more carefully. I pointed out that CS majors do not require an extensive background in EE.

As for the court stuff, why not just cite Edwards v. Aguillard and be done with it. Even though the Lemon test was used to decide it, it's pretty clear that just plain "establishment of religion" would be enough, with no further elaboration, to evict creationism from schools, let alone the fact that it lacks any merit whatsoever as a scientific concept.

I don't recall anyone appointing you to a Court, granting you a law degree, or otherwise giving you any authority to declare as simple assertion that the establishment clause is enough to keep creationism out of schools. Surely you have a compelling and insurmountable argument to back that up.

Because evolution is the basis for all study of living things?

If you say so. Not my area. So how is plate tectonics as fundamental as the laws of motion?

Quick question. Isn't there something wrong with the stretchy string, rubber sheet, balloon analogy if the idea we're trying to convey is that its a definition of distance, with a scale factor slapped on, not some tangible thing an 8 year old can bite on, that's expanding? There's gotta be a better way to explain this stuff.

I think the goal is to enlighten the child with the truth...

There's a word for that. Prosyletization. Seriously, don't you think its more important that a student finds something genuinely exciting and personally lucrative to excel at instead of worrying about whether or not he or she believes man evolved from apes? If so, who cares if biology doesn't gets their blood flowing?

...so hopefully they'll look at education as something valuable instead of something where you spend a few years filling out forms to get a piece of paper.

Biology and chemistry were very valuable. It was a necessary 24 credits to complete to get a very valuable degree.

If you teach the kid something real and don't undermine with this attitude like you are doing something evil or creepy by learning science maybe then the child will look at science seriously.

I don't think there's much of a constituency out there for the "physics/engineering/mathematics are evil" mode of education. We're talking about a pretty narrow set of objections--particularly when it comes to the life sciences and almost entirely as it pertains to evolution's consequences for Earth's history on geological timescales.

There's a stigma enough with being a "nerd," but it's a little rougher when the attitude of the other kids (who adopt the attitude to get out of having to make an effort) is that taking science seriously makes you some sort of creep.

I think there's a lot more to nerds that make them creepy than pathological obsessions for the obscure. That said, there are many perfectly well adjusted people in engineering and the sciences who could give a crap about whether Kansas teaches intelligent design or evolution to high schoolers. They live fulfilling, productive lives, are competent in their professions, and are otherwise nice people to hang around. So what's so great about being a nerd?

High school is supposed to show you the basics and show you what is out there...

Strange, I thought the mode of most primary and secondary education in the United States only promises to provide students with some perceived minimum set of skills necessary to live and work in society.

I think that evolution certainly falls into the basics, along with plate tectonic theory, the laws of motion, and other fundamental scientific concepts.

How are evolution and plate tectonics as 'fundamental' as the laws of motion?

If we can't get kids through high school without fully understanding these concepts then we've failed as a nation.

I'd say we've failed as a nation if we can't get kids out of high school who can read at the appropriate level, handle math problems expected of high school graduates, and work with concepts of distance and time in meaningful, productive ways. I don't care if Joe Schmo the Electrician knows where the continents were hundreds of millions of years ago or that we can a phylogenetic tree detailing human and ape evolution from common ancestors. I doubt he cares either.

Well, there's also the Everson v. Ewing Supreme Court decision:

You might want to read the decision. Those words are Justice Hugo Black, who wrote a 5-4 decision determining that Ewing's reimbursement of costs for busing to religious private and parochiel schools did not rise to an "establishment of religion." Since 1947, the legal debate has been over the meaning of the word 'participation,' and the hottest venue for that is in Lemon test cases.

So yeah, seperation of church and state. If a teacher at a public school decides to start evangelizing to his students in class, it's not the responsibility of the students to find a new class, it's the responsibility of the school to fire that teacher.

Which is one view of Everson's ban against open or covert state 'participation.' And like any term that finds itself in legal space, participation--eventually endorsement--will be revisited by new lawyers before new judges appointed by new Presidents. On a side note, law is a fun and interesting area of study. Instead of just, as Moleke puts it, 'googling and vomiting,' take some time to get a basic understanding of how law comes to be, is applied and reconsidered. Everything about it is exciting, from something seemingly as mundane as subject matter jurisdiction all the way to the "sexier" constitutional sticking points.

Except I never made that point.

Which is why I said "getting back to Severian's point."

By "child" I refer to anyone up until 18. Grade school is likely too early; at that point kids are still learning stuff like what a mammal is and how to mulitply.

Sorry. I meant to say grade school, middle school *and* high school.

I'd also like to note that many private religious schools (predominantly catholic) teach evolution in their science classes, from what I've heard, with the religious aspect being the concept of god working *via* the laws of nature.

Roughly half of students enrolled in private schools are in Catholic ones. Another third affiliate with other religions and Christian denominations. [1]

You can also play with the NAEP data explorer to get the science scores for 12th graders in 2000 in public and non-public schools. Short story: Catholics, 161 -- secular public schools, 145. [2].

Either way, it doesn't answer my question. My guess is we should find some pretty hard evidence that students at religious schools fare worse academically and attend college at a lower rate than public school students. At least that's the kernel of Severian's hypothesis.

So just because it's not required, it's not worth knowing?

I don't know. Probably. I personally have little interest or use for it, so it was just another requirement for me.

I guess all that time in HS making me culturally literate by forcing me to read Hamlet and such was a waste, then?

I don't have much use for Hamlet either, and lit classes weren't required.

Then your education in biology is abysmal...

I'd say it was probably one of the best undergrad intro bio courses in the United States. I guess we have to agree to disagree.

, and not even worth calling an education. You're a cheap version of google

I don't think I've posted in the biology forums. Like I said, I'm not interested in the life sciences or chemistry. Something to do with mucas, I guess. As far as the discussion strays into matters of public policy--that's what interests and excites me.

...able to merely spit out facts without any understanding of the concepts behind them.

I said I took the requirements because I had to. I didn't say I learned nothing.

Biology without evolution is just stamp collecting; amassing a pointless series of unconnected facts for no purpose or effect.

Possibly, although that view apparantly hasn't occurred to 55 percent of Protestant and 73 percent of Muslim physicians. [3]. I imagine they believe they're employing biology to some purpose and with some effect. That is, insofar as we're narrowly discussing the theory's consequence towards explaining the course of life over geological periods of time. I'm quite sure few people are offended by the modest notion that allele frequency changes over time; I wouldn't be surprised if most people don't care.

Without evolution, one cannot actually understand genetics, physiology, behavior, morphology, development, medicine, ecology, biogeography, exercise, epidemiology, nutrition, sex, growth, parasitology, or any other aspect of biology.

No argument from me here. Although I fail to see how a physician significantly hampered by the additional, unscientific belief that evolution has not and does not give rise to new species. After all, what does it matter professionally to a doctor if life started its course to the present de novo as 6000 years ago?

Understanding is not the same as being able to vomit forth facts on command.

I guess understanding allows someone trained in one field to come onto boards like these and issue dicta to those trained in others--like education and public policy. After all, this began with a simple question: why does Severian predict that children educated in (presumably) religious institutions are less likely to meet the academic challege of college than those who attend secular schools.

Understanding *why* things are the way they are, how they got that way, and what makes certain avenues of investigation interesting and useful requires a knowledge of evolution.

Computer science is interesting enough without an extensive background in electrical engineering; enough that it has its own field. An even sharper distinction can be made between electrical engineers and astrophysicists. I even hear they let mathematicians do all sorts of crazy topology and diff geometry without studying cosmology.

The Establishment Clause is there to prevent this from happening

Which would be one point of view. There are definitely others, and there's a whole gang of lawyers, judges, senators and even a President or two who get a say in how the 'final' point of law plays out.

For the same reason they'd have trouble in college chemistry if they were taught that atoms were fake and made up' date=' and Jesus magically makes one chemical into another. Not learning the fundamental theory which underlies all biology is a rather large omission in a child's education.

 

Mokele[/quote']

 

Getting back to Severian's point, I've seen no evidence to suggest that grade school students at private religious institutions are less likely to advance to higher education than their public school peers. I think your assertion of the pedagogical risks of abandoning the life sciences in grade school would make for a great discussion; if it could survive the simple fact that most colleges and university do not have a chemistry or biology requirement and those that do have introductory courses. What's so hard about intro chem and bio anyway? I don't particularly care whether man evolved from ape or not, and I got through just fine. Just go to lecture or recitation, read the text, do the problem sets, take the tests, and you're set.

Instead of just talking about elevating the level of discussion, how about we actually go ahead and do it? We can start by actually taking up a topic that lends itself to more reasoned, substantive analysis than what you'll find in the usual "capitalism v. socialism," "IDiots in Kansas," or "Bush did/said/wants/screwed yada yada" threads.

Anyway.

It's taken three years, but the opposition is finally coalescing around withdrawal--in one form or another--as their strategic answer to this Administration's adventure in Iraq. Specifics are still hard to come by, but the most serious proposal to date came from Representative John Murtha (D-PA), echoing the outlines of a recent white paper from the Center for American Progression [1]. The strategy's core assumption is that the US presence in theater itself invigorates the insurgency beyond US and Iraqi means to roll it back and that sustained strength in excess of four combat divisions will break the fighting Army in a years time. The plan essentially calls for redeploying more than half of the American strength by the end of the year, with less than half of that number--all active duty--remaining at USCENTCOM's disposal. That, as far as I can tell, is the only strategically coherent point Korb and Katulis actually make.

To their credit, Korb and Katulis do not describe this as a plan for producing an Iraq that is free, peaceful and a partner in the global war against terror. At most, they promise their plan will "will minimize the damage to the United States in the short term, mitigate the drawbacks of our eventual withdrawal from Iraq, and secure our interests in the long term." While its not fair to ask them or anyone who feels as they do to disprove the Administration's assertion that victory in Iraq is a victory in the war on global terror, they do concede at several points that withdrawal is a dangerous proposition that will in the short term expose Americans to greater risk.

I don't know. I tend to avoid the politics section most of the time. When I do read it, it's all circular arguments.

My point is that it might be possible to attract people with social science backgrounds simply by creating an outlet for them. I can definitely bring over some law students (I don't know many OR types that are into this whole internet community thing anyway).

Many people have a very juvenile idea about what political debate is.

How is yours different? How is this disdainful view you have of people with uncompromising political points of view and a willingness to "play to win" any less of an emotional connection to your group's principles? More importantly, what's your track record of political maturation after a debate online? I sincerely doubt many here of any stripe (maybe other than that former Baptist turned atheist) can point to this forum as primary cause for their views transforming over time.

But he can agree to disagree on matters of opinion, rather than spinning them all assunder. Like ignoring the word "peaceful" and focusing on the word "stable" -- it's either a consession or it's spin, and either way it's impolite. Why not just say "hey it may not be peaceful, you have a point there, but I think it's pretty stable"? Isn't that more in the spirit of congenial debate?

Because your point was remarkably stupid. Specifically, you attributed to me, with no cause other than contempt, the position that Israel was in an age of peace. If you expect a more civil tone, try it out first.

It's not my purpose to pick on phcatlantis here, but it does serve to illustrate the point I'm trying to make in that other thread.

The quality of discussion here has little to do with civility. The really only interesting point you raised in the other thread's original post was that there is a standard of discussion in the other forums that Politics hasn't met yet. You guess this is because of congeniality. I think it's trivial to show that quality in those forums falls from the abundance of posters with expertise in those domains. There's virtually nothing like that for any of the social sciences in any online community outside of the university.

Wow, you're really dead set on spinning every possible thing your way.

I'm really deadset against silently enduring patronizing lectures from the least knowledgable on these issues.

K, I'm taking that as a consession on your part.

You can take it that way and prove that silly yet persistent memes can overcome simple arithmetic.

There's a difference between a straw man and a valid example.

Yes, there is. And your Sharon point is an out of left field strawman that has nothing whatsoever to do with what we're discussing.

It's valid, it's exemplary of the overall situation, and it fits the discussion.

Okay, I'll bite. Reflective of what overall situation?

I'm disappointed in your tone and your animosity, phc.

I'm equally disappointed, not only with the patronizing quality of your posts but the mismatch between the haughty tone and scattered shallowness of the points. I'm also extremely disappointed by the juvenile maneuvers for moral superiority in a discussion between two anonymous nobodies on an Internet forum. In a discussion like this one, I play to win; but I'll play at any level you'd like.

I was hoping for a more objective and less ideological discussion from you.

Then start. You can do so by by not confusing my point of view with the one you pulled out of thin air--specifically characterizing my argument as an attempt to convince people that peace and stability broke out in the Middle East decades ago.

I hope you're going to be happy here...

Yada, yada....I'm content to be here. Don't stress yourself over it. You want to be friendly? Cool, then let's be friendly. Either way, shall we get on with it?

Yes, it's called several centuries of treaties and trade agreements, and a mutual decision to let old business like that stop being an issue. We have that with Mexico. Israel and Palestine lack it.

The US has laid claim of Mexican territory for only 157 years. And Israel has treaties and trade agreements with Jordan and Egypt, the previous controlling sovereigns, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank. Spin the wheel again.

Yeah, this doesn't seem to be so much a "social science" type of place... not that there's anything wrong with this type of science.

Why not? Your typical social science sandbox includes calculus, probability, linear algebra, abstract algebra and topology, accounting and finance, modeling and analysis, and all sorts of -matics combining these and other tools. Seems like more than enough for everybody here to play with.

While I do agree that we don't get all that much good, intellectual debate in this particular forum--many strawmans and debates that go on for pages without accomplishing anything, though--I don't think SFN could attract those you listed. Not without radically changing the politics forums and pruning circular threads.

How do you figure? And what is the prevailing political point of view here?

Regarding the 1600 SAT/ 36 ACT valedictorian that got rejected, I seriously, seriously doubt that story is true.

Its definitely improbable. I wouldn't be surprised if he or she chose to go somewhere else. MIT definitely admits as low as 3.4 and 1340 SAT, and does reject students well within the academic mean. They've been trying to broaden their student experience base for years now--its no longer enough just to come in with a sterling transcript and recommendations from high school faculty and staff. I think its worked out pretty well for them; the undergrads are definitely more well rounded than they were seven or eight years ago.

Math and management science. I'm in it for the money.