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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 25, 2018 - 08:10am PT
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"aren't you a passive-aggressive little troll!!"
"You can be ridiculously dense..."
No worries, Mark.
There's room for the both of us on this thread, I think.
But ad ideam, remember? Not ad hominem.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Mar 25, 2018 - 08:26am PT
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You directly insulted my profession and my intellectual integrity worded with just enough deniability.
This is classic pasive-agressive behavior and trolling. So that statement is an observation of your behavior. This behavior by you is a common theme. There is good natured and spirited debate, there is sh#t talking repartee, and there sometimes is straight up calling a spade a spade. Then there is passive-aggressive behavior. It’s different.
And, "you can be incredibly dense." That's my observation. That is a different claim than "your are incredibly dense."
Are you a parent? Again, introspection is good. The practice of the science mindset is an exercise in clarity of consciousness.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 25, 2018 - 08:33am PT
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hfcs wrote last week...
chiropractic: a system of therapy which holds that disease results from a lack of normal nerve function and which employs manipulation and specific adjustment of body structures (as the spinal column):
Useful along with some distinct limitations.
...in response to you using the very same qualifier as a footnote to a definition of "reductionism" you posted - to which I responded that the qualifier wasn't necessary.
Now you, Mark F, just wrote...
You directly insulted my profession and my intellectual integrity worded with just enough deniability -Mark F
That's nonsense.
Let's agree we don't see things the same way.
Please stop responding to my posts and I'll do likewise. Thank you.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Mar 25, 2018 - 08:37am PT
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Yes, and, while the content is technically true, the context was classic passive-aggressive behavior. You knew what you were doing. You like to do this here with me and others. Stop it. It’s unbecoming.
The exercise of reductive thinking and modeling in research is bread and butter in science and is the application of reductionism - the model that this method allows consistent and useful data. What exactly is the problem with that? Research requires the choice of what to observe and what to measure and too many variables muddy the water.
As for not responding to your posts? You expect to post here and pick and choose who you debate? Is that your idea of intellectual rigor?
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 25, 2018 - 09:02am PT
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Loop fruit just studies abiology (dead matter) because he has no real clue what life actually is.
That's what happens when they only use the reductionist method they miss life itself completely.
The guy is a mess and an anonymous coward to boot .....
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 25, 2018 - 06:38pm PT
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Let's see, is that when you make some bogus generalization against religion and use it as a point of certainty in an argument?
That statement was a reference to what you had just said in a previous post. It was sarcasm. You know what that is I bet. It wasn't a definition of S.M.
In my thirty plus years in the academic world I've watched the progressive degradation of the humanities from both sides of the political spectrum. The triumph of STEM means the continued defunding of the humanities and their resulting turn to the safe harbor of social science as a means of self justification. And it's a tragedy for education. Science cannot tell us how a good life should be lived, cannot give us reasons for living that life and cannot reconcile us to the tragedies inevitable in all lives. And yet so many in science continue to see it as the only valid path to truth without realizing that that truth is empty and worthless without human mediation.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 26, 2018 - 09:24pm PT
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Hexagons!
How does a bee "know" how to make hexagons?
...
In my thirty plus years in the academic world I've watched the progressive degradation of the humanities...
If there's been a degradation of the humanities it's come from within - in large part by their choice to take an anti-science posture that's underappreciative (or overly critical) of sciences's role in the human condition.
The triumph of STEM means the continued defunding of the humanities
Everywhere we look are entities having to compete. Again, there's no reason the sciences and the humanities can't work together. The humanities could raise their game - they could be less hypercritical of science, more pro-science - starting with the great Scientific Story aka The Universal Story aka The Evolutionary Epic (E.O. Wilson) - and this would likely attract more funding.
http://www.supertopo.com/forumsearch.php?ftr=scientific+story
The humanities generally speaking long ago got off on the wrong foot with science - in an effort to protect their customs, norms and traditions - and ever since have made little effort to correct their course. When in a hole stop digging.
Languages and psychology and history - all parts of the humanities as well - by my lights have not been "degraded" by science. They are thriving, it seems to me.
Science cannot tell us how a good life should be lived, cannot give us reasons for living that life and cannot reconcile us to the tragedies inevitable in all lives.
To me this seems somewhat incomplete or out of balance. 1. It can certainly give us clues or pointers depending on case and circumstance how to better our lives ("how a good life should be lived"). 2. If it can't help us reconcile us to the tragedies - your claim - then how is it that's it's helped ME over a lifetime - as a component in the overall process - reconcile MY life to these tragedies?
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Mar 26, 2018 - 09:26pm PT
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HFCS, that' picture and the question, of course, is the shit!!
Thanks for the share.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 26, 2018 - 10:18pm PT
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Mark,
Sometimes you seem to argue the contemporary point of view that if something isn't intellectually rigorous, it can't be worthy or good.
I'd say a good many things might be worthy or good could fall far outside that way of seeing things.
You?
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Mar 26, 2018 - 11:38pm PT
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Argumentation, debate, research, teaching, academic writing are places where intellectual rigor are good things.
Making love, dancing, drinking, sh#t talking around a campfire, dropping into a steep, lining up for the rapid ahead, being with someone dying, appreciating the ending spring cycle of flowering trees, drinking fresh mountai stream water, writing poetry, playing with children or playing anyway, aiming for that sweet spot in the ice with just the right flick, pulling jams, chopping wood...
...then let that go.
"O incomparable Giver of life, cut reason loose at last!
Let it wander grey-eyed from vanity to vanity.
Shatter open my skull, pour in it the wine of madness!
Let me be mad, as You; mad with You, with us.
Beyond the sanity of fools is a burning desert
Where Your sun is whirling in every atom:
Beloved, drag me there, let me roast in Perfection!"
~ Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 27, 2018 - 12:24am PT
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HFCS: why are all your arguments ad hominem?
you went after MikeL in December, it seemed rather strange, all foaming at the mouth about anti-science humanities, etc, etc... we're not fighting the culture wars here, we're discussing ideas, which is what I thought you wanted to do.
Try posting ideas without mentioning anyone's name. You do have ideas, don't you?
and since you brought it up, yes, I thought you were being uncivil:
"That anonymity allows you to behave in a most uncivil manner, and doing that, you invite others to treat you the same way."
and you revert back to that same behavior cyclically it seems.
You also seem to think of yourself as the one and only defender of science, your conviction of your righteousness is indomitable, and you let us all know it. I'm just a simple scientist and you delight in calling me out, I guess I have it coming.
But maybe just stick with the ideas, huh? and I did suggest in that post linked above that you might try hugging someone, you know, just to be nice. That is giving you the benefit of the doubt...
have you ever met Mark in "real life"? He's quite an interesting fellow, and he climbs.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 27, 2018 - 12:47am PT
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"The challenge the bees face is not, however, quite that simple. A honeycomb consists of two arrays of hexagonal cells married back to back, and the question then arises of how best to join the two layers. This is a three-dimensional problem, and the most economical solution is not obvious. Honey-bees adopt a rather sophisticated structure in which each cell ends in a cap made from three lozenge-shaped faces (Fig. 2.30a). These are components of a rhombic dodecahedron, and cells married with such end caps have a zigzag cross-section (Fig. 2.30b). Is that, then, the way to be most frugal with wax?
Réaumur considered this question in the eighteenth century. Observing that bees make end caps of rhombuses with edges of equal length, he wanted to know the angles of these polygons that minimized the surface area. The maths was beyond him, so he asked the Swiss mathematician Samuel Koenig to solve the puzzle. Koenig showed that the ideal angles are about 109.5° and 70.5°, which are those seen in a regular rhombic dodecahedron and are also those observed in real honeycombs. To find this answer, Koenig needed to use the methods of calculus devised in the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. How on earth could the bees 'know' about that piece of new mathematics? The secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, Bernard de Fontenelle, could not believe that bees were capable of calculus—for that, he said, would surely mean that 'in the end these Bees would know too much, and their exceeding glory would be their own ruin.' Thus, he said, it must be that these mathematical principles were exercised by the insects according to 'divine guidance and command.' Darwin removed the need for such heavenly intervention by supposing that selective pressure would drive the bees to find the optimal solution by trial and error."
page 78-79, Shapes: Nature's Patterns: a Tapestry in Three Parts
By Philip Ball
I learned of this as a bit of British slander for the French Academy decades ago...
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 27, 2018 - 06:42am PT
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A benefit of late night posting is you sometimes get a response by next morning that's every bit as much a morning stimulus as a cup of coffee!
lol
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 27, 2018 - 06:47am PT
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Ed,
Seriously, do we read the same posts? the same thread? I’d respond to your latest but I wouldn’t even know where to start. From my pov, surreal. THE ENTIRE BOLUS. Surreal.
Tags: climbing, hugging, internet dogs, righteousness, uncivil manner, culture wars, simple scientist, having it coming, anonymity, ad hominem, MikeL (post-modernist), ideas, defender of science, one and only, foaming at the mouth
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 27, 2018 - 07:05am PT
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For any NON-regulars here who happen across this page and these posts...
I’d like to invite you to explore this approx 10,000 post thread, to sample a few dozen posts of the regulars here across its sweep (perhaps as a project of sorts, lol, in some moment when you find you have nothing better to do?) and give attention in particular to the posters largo, wb, mikel, sycorax, brennan and of course to me and my posts as well; moreover give attention to the name-calling, the ad hominems, the sarcasms and caricatures, the jr high rhetoric, last but not least, the "incivility" as it arises... then second, return here, read Hartouni’s post again (also his other post alluded to, and linked, afore, as surreal imo in its own way) to see for yourself how much of it holds water/runs true.
Useful markers (for starters): bong water, beaker boys, scientism, sausages, frootloops, coward, bigot, troll (little troll, lol), pointy hat...
...
"have you ever met Mark in "real life"? He's quite an interesting fellow, and he climbs." -hartouni
Good to hear. Good for Mark.
PS
Perhaps this needs repeating? "post-modernist" to a post-modernist is not a bad word, lol.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Mar 27, 2018 - 07:31am PT
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Ed, I’m so flattered that quite an interesting fellow called me quite an interesting fellow!
HFCS - it would be really great to have a first name so we all didn’t have to use a silly acronym all the time - Ed is a great example of a man dedicated to pure science who is rich with many interests.
He represents that archetype for the classic multi-faceted scientist comfortable with the humanities and interested in pretty much anything and everything.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 27, 2018 - 07:56am PT
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Fruitloops is just a classic case of an extremely narrow minded academic.
He's soo smart he's lost his intelligence .....
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 27, 2018 - 08:24am PT
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If there's been a degradation of the humanities it's come from within - in large part by their choice to take an anti-science posture that's underappreciative (or overly critical) of sciences's role in the human condition.
Everywhere we look are entities having to compete. Again, there's no reason the sciences and the humanities can't work together. The humanities could raise their game - they could be less hypercritical of science, more pro-science - starting with the great Scientific Story aka The Universal Story aka The Evolutionary Epic (E.O. Wilson) - and this would likely attract more funding.
The diminishment of the humanities goes back to the 19th century and Josiah Mason’s notion of a College of Science in which “the Classics shall not be taught.” The opening speech at that school was given by T. H. Huxley the primary Darwin apologist. Huxley commented unequivocally on the worthless nature of a classical education in the face of scientific advancement. And since then and throughout the 20th century the humanities, in their delusional sense of inferiority in relation to the “rigorous methodology of the scientific method,” have increasingly justified themselves as social sciences as well as through a perceived political relevance. This being the source of so much of the post-modern theory you see as negative. What remains are the limitations of science and the scientific method in informing us as to how we should live. The battle here isn’t between science and the dunderheads of the religious right, it’s over how we understand ourselves: whether through a material analysis that cannot give us insight into even the most trivial thought or emotion or through an understanding of the human condition that is the function of religion, mythology, philosophy and the arts.
I can’t think of anyone in the humanities that would propose a school in which “science shall not be taught.”
Both science and the humanities are necessary to understanding and both have their limitations.
I like Matthew Arnold’s reference to Darwin and in response to Huxley:
“That our ancestor must have been a quadruped with pointed ears and a tail arboreal in nature.
Assume it to be so,” says Arnold: “there was yet something that inclined him to Greek for Greek is what he became. Look at what we achieve when we look inside ourselves and know we are not complete, when we are driven to perfect ourselves in works of art and the words of Aeschylus and Sophocles.”
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Mar 27, 2018 - 09:36am PT
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Both science and the humanities are necessary to understanding and both have their limitations.
Yup.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 28, 2018 - 07:13am PT
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Thus this proves that knowledge ultimately must come from the unlimited (God) because the limited is always incomplete.
The theory there is no need for God and/or there is no God is 100% proven false ......
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