Phi for All

Know yourself. The rest can be learned. Your perspective and reasoning are valuable here, so I hope you can find some bandwidth and keep us up to date on yourself. Thanks very much for all the learning!

Argument from Incredulity is extremely weak, and always a good sign that you need to dig deeper for supportive evidence. It sounds like you equate the hardness of the pills with their ability to strengthen your bones, which is an unreasonable bias on your part. Calcium performs its role wrt bone support without requiring specific delivery methods. Tums, for instance, are chewable, so they're supposed to be broken down before being swallowed. IIRC, calcium is absorbed by stomach acids anyway. Vitamin D helps with absorption as well, which you're probably getting from your smoothie.

! Moderator Note This isn't what Speculations is for. It's not for guesswork. When you have more than guesses and can support your assertions with science, you can open this again in a more rigorous approach.

! Moderator Note We have a section for non-mainstream speculations. What you've done here is hijack someone else's thread with your own pet concept, and that's against the rules. If you're willing to support your hypothesis with evidence, I can split this off into it's own thread. You'd also have to defend this concept of design as well, which seems unsupportable without some kind of magic or religion or other supernatural means.

Singling out professors seems like you're labeling a whole group of people based on the behavior of some of them. IOW, discrimination. Also, you base your appraisal of their intentions and motivations on a LOT of assumptions. Are you reading minds to get all that info about why they do the things they do?

! Moderator Note Once again, you've set up a discussion with bizarre parameters that assumes some kind of homogeneity among high schools you've failed to establish. The scenario you set forth is going to meet with such varied responses that it's meaningless trying to discuss them all. A large spectrum of responses should be expected. Please establish a better opening post next time, something that might lend reason and value to the conversation so you don't have to ask others for it.

! Moderator Note Moved from The Lounge.

They really aren't a homogenous group you can stereotype that way. Do you know what a spectrum is? We're all on many of them, about many things. This particular spectrum you're poking at goes from unemployable at one end to founding Facebook at the other. So your question is fairly meaningless, sorry to say, since the answers to it don't support the correlation you thought existed.

The Standard Model allows for this. Order a Crispy Fish sandwich uncooked, then use the buns and Horsey sauce to barter with the guy at the liquor store.

I don't think "reality" is a viable term for what you're talking about. Science is interested in the natural world, but there's too much subjectivity wrt "reality". I don't think the natural world is mathematical, and nothing you've ever written about it is very persuasive to me, especially when I have more trustworthy science I can rely on. I think we've been able to describe the natural world mathematically to an astonishing degree, and I think your concept puts the cart before the horse. We made up the maths to describe what we saw. The physical universe does what it does, and we measure it using concepts that give us accurate enough explanations that we can make predictions that teach us even more. And I agree with zapatos, trying to push that load about not needing evidence because it's self-evident is a slap in the face to our rules and scientific methodology. Take that argument somewhere else, pal. You're welcome here as long as you obey the rules the owners of the site want the staff to enforce. Why don't all you folks who love to make shit up and assume it's interesting start your own discussion forum? You could have no rules at all, and follow no methodology, and you can search for meaning all you want without being held to any standards. You could discover fascinating new horizons and be much happier, while we plod along with our dumb old rules and limit ourselves to best current scientific explanations. How about that? The spirit of SFN is discussing how amazing mainstream scientific knowledge connects us all as a species and a civilization. It tears me apart when folks who obviously quit studying science far too early criticize it rather than overcome their ignorance about it.

And yet your own "subliminal prejudices" lead you to conclude we shouldn't read what they write, but rather intuit what they really mean? Or let the misinformation they're basing their idea on slide so we can hear the whole idea first before commenting? Or encourage people to use their imagination when they don't understand something, rather than ask a question of a science community? Tell me about it....

I read them EXACTLY the way they're written. I don't CARE why they wrote it, because science isn't really the place for why, so I'm NOT assuming anything. The friction is all in your mind, because it's not personal, and it's actually quite easy to see when someone is guessing and when they're supporting their concepts. Now you have it. I don't know the people behind the ideas. The ideas are assessible without them. Any prejudices we might have here are for rigorous support, and against breaking the rules, so they aren't subliminal at all.

All of them, or just the really awesome ones? Humans rely on patterns a LOT, and our memories are geared to take advantage of that. All of them, or just the memorable things? I remember sitting in kindergarten on the floor and the boy next to me showed me he had a pile of pennies under his hands, and he said, "Don't tell my teacher". I can see why that might stick with a four-year old (and why didn't he say "our" teacher?). I think the key is your interests. We all have a much better memory for the topics that grab our attention. I recall lots of girlfriends who had stuffed animals, but I only remember the stuffed dragon this one girl had. I don't remember what color hair she had (I do remember her name), but I remember that cool dragon.

No, because it's not. We have threads on EU if you check back. IIRC, studying comets shows EU to be false. All your ideas seem based on NOT using a model that's been extremely helpful in favor of just another non-mathematical aether fable.

No. That's NOT what happened in that thread. Your approach was compared to other past ideas that were debunked, and then some of the misconceptions around your weird need to invent a unit of measurement were brought up. Not criticized, but pointed out as wrong. So many people come here with ideas based on misconceptions that it's normal to correct those first. If you wanted to build a house, we'd tell you your idea about using wood for the foundation is a poor one, and will likely make all the rest of your work on the house useless. It doesn't matter what the rest of your ideas for the house are if they're based on that bad foundation. Nobody wants your house to fall, so our experience is passed along in hopes that you'll understand why you need to start with the best foundation you can, in carpentry as well as science.

! Moderator Note You don't get to say that here unless you can support it, which you've proven you can't. Try to force this assertion again and you can take some time off on suspension.

You offered waving hands, or pushed long debunked theories like EU without showing new support. Your skepticism is worth nothing. Evidence is the key here.

I will recommend to staff you get your wish, but not here. We won't EVER be a site for wild guesswork. I don't understand why you don't post at a site that welcomes such conclusion-jumping. There are plenty of them, yet you complain that we need to be like them. We don't want that, so why do you insist on posting here?

Our rules don't require you to stay if you don't get anything meaningful from the experience. The rules are there so the rest of us don't have to waste time on ideas that show no merit.

This is why I say you don't understand skepticism. It's not a fence you sit on forever. If you question a part of science, you need to support your counter-claims with the same rigor, dig deep, find the evidence that supports your stance. If you find it, you present it, and you're no longer a skeptic. If you can't find it, you admit it and accept the mainstream explanation as the best current one, and you're no longer a skeptic. Either way, the preponderance of evidence is what should be influencing any assessment of your ideas. Nobody here has simply dismissed you, they've instead given detailed reasoning which you ignore because you think it's dogma. Too bad for you, really.

! Moderator Note Are you done trying to present your idea within the rules? I see a great deal of whinging and very little on-topic discussion. Is it time to close this?

Read the rules again, slowly, and you'll see why your ideas don't pass any of the standards the site owners have set. If you don't think you can support your wild guesswork in this way, there are plenty of other sites that will let you dream all you like. This is a science discussion forum with strict standards (and not even the strictest). It's clear you don't understand what a theory is, how truth is treated, or even how true skepticism works. What you have is an idea you made up that makes perfect sense to you, but only you, and you can't support it scientifically, so now you're claiming we're too hidebound to mainstream ideas and not giving you a chance. You're wrong, read the rules. And this was a poor place for this rant. You should have opened up a thread in Suggestions, Comments, and Support.

Don't just make the claim! Dig back through some of your threads and show where people are judging YOU and not your idea. This is what we mean by supportive evidence, and likely why your ideas don't merit discussion per our rules. People are taking their time to assess the science in your posts, so you need to do more than wave your hands. More rigor, please!

I left SO much of that evolutionary path out for brevity's sake, but I think it was good information. I'm counting on you to keep me accurate. I think requirer is probably wicked smart and had limited resources for asking questions about things they didn't understand. Smart folks who don't get good explanations start piecing together what they think they know, and that approach is seductive since it makes perfect sense, but only to you.

Purism is well-defined as an art movement, but poorly defined as a philosophy. I'm leery these days of broad, subjectively-defined labels that don't serve us as well as we assume they do. I make conservative and liberal choices every day, but resist painting myself as one way or the other. Most purists don't realize how fragile and restrictive their worldview is, and see only the beauty of simplicity. A purist might claim that eating the plant a medicine came from is a better approach than taking the medicine, because the plant is the "pure" source. But in actuality, modern medicine removes the impurities and things you don't need from the plant to produce a more effective medicine (taking ephedrine as an antihistamine is far more effective than chewing on a bunch of ma huang stems). You have a misconception about science, that it's trying to control or take over the natural world. What science does is make sure the conclusions we reach are carefully and reasonably considered, and they ABSOLUTELY MUST agree with observations made in the natural world. In this case, "natural" means no magic, no deities breaking physical laws, only what we observe happening. IOW, science is a bunch of descriptions of nature that we've refined to such a degree that we're able to predict the future based on the present and past. Theory gives us this predictive power. As far as human "nature" is concerned, we're still figuring that out. Cooking our food led to bipedal locomotion, and gave us smaller jaws so we had more room in our heads for brains, and more time to dig around with tools. It led us to armed warfare, but it also put us on a par with better-armed predators and gave us a fighting chance. We didn't have fur to keep us warm and we figured out how to use the fur from animals we ate instead. In fact, we took the disadvantage and turned it around: we could run down an animal with fur because they'd get TOO hot, and eventually drop from heat prostration. Because of the amazing things we can do that other animals can't, humans are often perceived as anti-natural, or outside of nature, but I assure you, we're very much a part of it. In fact, I would go so far as to say viewing humans as "unnatural" is dangerous, and could give some permission to consider us as above the rest of life on the planet.