Little things that annoy the hell out of you

[Ed Oscuro]

I fucking HATE people who, when they start losing the argument, begin prefacing their posts with a paragraph (or three) explaining that people have these things that are called "opinions" and then proceed to explain social rules revolving around them (did you know everyone has a right to their opinions???) and blah, blah, blah...

What I like to remind people is that any opinion, especially on a matter of some import, is completely worthless unless you are able to explain, in an objective, fact-based manner, why you have come to hold that particular opinion instead of another one. "Opinions" as they apply to arguments of this type are not inscrutable, mysterious feelings that nobody else could possibly understand; they are conclusions reached after a considerable amount of observation, contemplation, and research. If you are unwilling or unable to justify your "opinion" beyond the point of "it's my opinion", then you haven't put anywhere near enough thought into your position (which is a word I'd like to see replace "opinion" in a lot of these situations) on that particular subject.

Often that's true, but not always. I'll have to restate my earlier post: Sometimes a bald opinion is as far as you can go, because it's not clear where it comes from or whether it's right to hold, and contrary opinions don't have any clear way of contradicting it, but instead they coexist. This problem does apply to facts too, because at some point the explanations run out. Some call this the Munchausen Trilemma - because some serious people think that resorting to an opinion in an argument is as nonsensical as the fictional story of the Baron getting his horse out of the mud by pulling upwards on his hair. (I also think these problems have a connection to Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem.)

One example of the problem, though many people hate to admit it, is the deist vs. atheist debate. There are lots of opinions and even some evidence that there isn't a being behind creation, but ultimately there is no conclusive proof either way; you can't take the evidence far enough. Note the difference here between inductive and deductive reasoning; you can't deduce that there isn't a god from the available evidence, though you can induce it.

[Mischief Maker]

One example of the problem, though many people hate to admit it, is the deist vs. atheist debate. There are lots of opinions and even some evidence that there isn't a being behind creation, but ultimately there is no conclusive proof either way; you can't take the evidence far enough. Note the difference here between inductive and deductive reasoning; you can't deduce that there isn't a god from the available evidence, though you can induce it.

The only reason you can't disprove the existence of God is because religious people move the goalposts every time they're about to lose. God lives upon his mountain throne. Hey, I climbed that mountain and I didn't find God. Fool! God doesn't live on the mountain, he lives in the clouds. Hey, I flew a balloon into the clouds and I didn't find God. How silly! God does not live in mere clouds, he lives in the vastness of the cosmos. Hey, we've sent astronauts into space and peered to the edge of creation with our telescopes and we can't find God. Pshaw! God does not live in the cosmos, he lives in another dimension! Etc, etc, etc...

[Ed Oscuro]

The good news is there's no moving the goalposts past the limits of observational reasoning - personally I'm quite comfortable to have religious types spinning their wheels out there. Keeping in mind these limits, though, is a useful way of staying honest when dealing with the nonsense. I've sat in on a class led by a leading atheist cosmologist, and it's clear that a lot of the deist cosmologists (Plantinga obviously, some others whose names I forget because the book was too expensive) pack in a lot of beliefs that you can and probably should try to knock down.

Borrowing from Professor Smith*, a lot of people don't realize one of the most important things: The rationale behind the many-worlds hypothesis may well have its origins in religious wishful thinking. It just might so happen that we live in a universe which by chance is hospitable to life, without there being any other worlds. Yet the many-worlds hypothesis has its tentacles into so many aspects of the modern psuedo-scientific mythology of our world (from fiction all the way back to pop sci) that many people take it for granted, including many "hard science" types.

The point is less this
and more this.

The downsides to this, of course, is that if you have a fairy godmother telling you that your opinion is the correct one, many people mistakenly take that as a privileged opinion over others held by people who are honest enough to say "why don't we eat people anymore? I dunno."

*it's really esoteric stuff at this point. See section 2.5 here.

[Lord Satori]

Personally, I've put together all sorts of things to form my own theories, but ultimately, there's no real way for anyone to know for sure.

Is there really a God? Well, you'll find find out when you're dead.

[Xyga]

The biggest threat to stupid faith is a nerd in a lab coat.

[Mischief Maker]

Personally, I've put together all sorts of things to form my own theories, but ultimately, there's no real way for anyone to know for sure.

You know, you're right. I mean there's scientific evidence that a lightning bolt is an electric discharge caused by high potential difference between thunderclouds and the ground. Lightning rods seem to be effective in preventing damage to buildings from lightning by providing a safe means of discharging that electric potential. What's more, there are experiments that anyone can replicate with the right equipment in which they can produce artificial lightning using these very principles of physics.

But ultimately, there's no real way for anyone to know for sure that it isn't really caused by Thor, God of Lightning, swinging his magical hammer Mjolnir because he's quarreling with his trickster brother Loki!

[Xyga]

Yeah agreed ! Seriously: MAGNETS !!!!

[Ed Oscuro]

Personally, I've put together all sorts of things to form my own theories, but ultimately, there's no real way for anyone to know for sure.

Haha. I guess the problem comes from people not understanding that I'm talking about the limits of knowledge, not whether you should keep walking into a walls because ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN! In everyday life - and in science - you should follow best practices. Sometimes you can use deductive reasoning (which might just be a form of inductive reasoning), sometimes you must use inductive reasoning (something is likely to be true) - the problem with wishful thinking / religious thought isn't that we can prove it's wrong, it's that we know parts of it are counter to common sense.

But if somebody wants to say "we can't really know with certainty if there's a god," that's just...well, that's obvious, but they can't use that to support other statements. There's lots of things we can't know for sure. Nobody can be sure that they aren't the only thinking thing, but little children learn pretty quickly that it's not helpful to think like that.

Take Russell's Teapot. It's out there, invisibly floating in space without affecting anything - those properties make it harmless. If the Order of the Teapot uses their belief in the teapot to mislead people, then I'd resist. But somebody just believing in the teapot makes little difference in my life.

[Xyga]

Speaking of which, I've just realized the Many-Faces God in GOT is.... the internet.

On the internet you're nobody, just 'a man' or 'a girl', you go there and kill random people you don't know (or they kill you) and 'a man' (usually admin or mod) rules over everything.

[Lord Satori]

Personally, I've put together all sorts of things to form my own theories, but ultimately, there's no real way for anyone to know for sure.

You know, you're right. I mean there's scientific evidence that a lightning bolt is an electric discharge caused by high potential difference between thunderclouds and the ground. Lightning rods seem to be effective in preventing damage to buildings from lightning by providing a safe means of discharging that electric potential. What's more, there are experiments that anyone can replicate with the right equipment in which they can produce artificial lightning using these very principles of physics.

But ultimately, there's no real way for anyone to know for sure that it isn't really caused by Thor, God of Lightning, swinging his magical hammer Mjolnir because he's quarreling with his trickster brother Loki!

[Skykid]

I fucking HATE people who, when they start losing the argument, begin prefacing their posts with a paragraph (or three) explaining that people have these things that are called "opinions" and then proceed to explain social rules revolving around them (did you know everyone has a right to their opinions???) and blah, blah, blah...

What I like to remind people is that any opinion, especially on a matter of some import, is completely worthless unless you are able to explain, in an objective, fact-based manner, why you have come to hold that particular opinion instead of another one. "Opinions" as they apply to arguments of this type are not inscrutable, mysterious feelings that nobody else could possibly understand; they are conclusions reached after a considerable amount of observation, contemplation, and research. If you are unwilling or unable to justify your "opinion" beyond the point of "it's my opinion", then you haven't put anywhere near enough thought into your position (which is a word I'd like to see replace "opinion" in a lot of these situations) on that particular subject.

I agree with both of these positions ( )

It's the bane of my debating life when I'm putting forward an argument, and when the other guy simply hasn't got the wherewithal to construct a counter argument I know the whole "but that's just your opinion, everyone has the right to their opinion, just because you don't agree with my opinion doesn't make me wrong" etc, is just around the corner.

It's as though there actually is no right or wrong and everything is down to arbitrary realms of unquantifiable possibility - or basically as Mischief Maker explained with his scientific evidence post.

There are a few caveats here however:

1: Someone might genuinely enjoy something even though it's total shit, and this I certainly don't doubt. It's commonplace enough to make the capitalist world go round. Whenever I suggest the lack of ability to see the crap for the trees is down to a lack of education (in the most simple sense) I usually get my shit kicked in or suspended or something.

2: If people didn't have opinions, either erroneous or simply within a differing spectrum, we wouldn't have much to talk about, so it's a double-edged sword.

3: There are completely different ways of appreciating anything, from music to art to films to books - and that really is a matter of taste. And I don't mean when people use 'taste' as a stand-in for 'opinion', but when for example you can appreciate something like Return of the Living Dead for what it is, still understand that at its core it's trashy and meant to be, but excels at what it does. If I showed it to my mum I wouldn't expect her to like it because the subject matter simply isn't her thing - but I'm quite sure she wouldn't call it poorly made or without value.

No idea why I'm talking about my mum.

[Blinge]

Large tree getting cut down outside my place. it was nice to see from my window.
gone gone gone
=/

[Immryr]

Just as I get my x360 set up on a permanently tate monitor my arcade stick starts crapping out on me.

[the_last_shmupper]

The way my hard drive is secretly doing something even when my computer is doing nothing. Checking in the task manager reveals nothing. Its messing with my game recordings.

[Ed Oscuro]

this very disappointing op-ed at The Guardian. Users "AlanTyndall," "Zepp," and "o_lobo_sabitario" have got it right. Actually a lot of people understand the problem - "race" and "culture" aren't different. The poor woman in the middle of the story obviously didn't get this right if she misrepresented her race, but culture? That's whatever she wants it to be.

This one hits home for me because of the work I did with my own ethnic ancestry some years back. I'm mostly comfortable thinking of myself as just another white guy with a few different genes along with all the crazy European ones, but I often remind myself that my own ancestors don't get put on a pedestal just because they're "mine" in some way. I don't believe that if people were meant to fly that they'd have wings, and I don't believe that you can't build your ethnic identity. Clearly some people are comfortable with ethnic groups they weren't raised in. It seems to be an interesting psychological question how it happened, but I don't see how you can say it's bad.

What gives this random columnist the right to say her manufactured identity is "wrong" because it's "not intelligible?" All of life is about trying to make the madness intelligible, and blood quantum and randomly enforced ethnic attitudes don't do the job. It was wrong during slavery, during segregation, and it's still wrong today.

The real story is between the black community's right to police its own narrative and history, and the right of individuals to be who they are in a world of poorly-thought-out and archaic boundaries. Any problems in this case will be related to fraud, not with trying to be black. The story about what her parents want her to be vs. what she is - certainly it's an old one, interesting even, but not really worth getting upset over.

Besides, being white is pretty boring.

But tell me, do my constant Anglophile affectations really upset anybody?

[ratikal]

Five Guys makes some good burgers. But 80% of the time, they slip out of the bun when you eat them.

[the_last_shmupper]

Five Guys makes some good burgers. But 80% of the time, they slip out of the bun when you eat them.

Its been a while since I've had their burgers, but I remember them tasting like Wendy's square burgers. I also remember their wallpaper having a news article about how its the best $4 burger... yeah that I paid $5 and then tax for.

[null1024]

Samsung's "Whistle" notification sound. That shit's hella annoying.

oh god

Such an awful sound. Turned that shit off first thing when I got my Galaxy.
just hearing it again is making me feel disgusted

[the_last_shmupper]

The way Steam has adopted idle gaming and put it into its new sale to get cards and other useless things.

[drauch]

Samsung's "Whistle" notification sound. That shit's hella annoying.

oh god

Such an awful sound. Turned that shit off first thing when I got my Galaxy.
just hearing it again is making me feel disgusted

Yes. Anyone who uses this is one sick fuck.

[soprano1]

Having many fruit trees and not being able to give the excess produce as donations to poor people associations due to stupid national and EU laws. Even charity nowadays is controlled...

[Ed Oscuro]

The way Steam has adopted idle gaming and put it into its new sale to get cards and other useless things.

I'm guilty of being swept up in this. "Oh look, some stupid new game thing...WHAT CAN I GET FRUM IT?"

It always amuses me to see how much some of my "rare" trading cards are "worth" in looney tunes dollars.

@ soprano1: With the Greek Euro exit maybe on the way (again? Or just more posturing) maybe it comes to an end soon? Ah.

[soprano1]

@ soprano1: With the Greek Euro exit maybe on the way (again? Or just more posturing) maybe it comes to an end soon? Ah.

I hope not, since if they go, we go too, and that's not something that amuses me.

[Ed Oscuro]

Yeah, I know. EU's got some structural problems though, and that's a big one.

[soprano1]

Yeah, I know. EU's got some structural problems though, and that's a big one.

That's true for sure.
edit:50 more posts for the big 500, yay

[Ed Oscuro]

Maybe the local animals will be grateful for the free food

I'm actually not too worried about the Euro - I just sold something to a person in Euroland and I mentioned I accepted Euros. I don't normally get a chance to play with currencies (I wouldn't really want to do it on a big scale, but it's nice to have some flexibility.)

I know it's not what you're talking about, but the whole regional labeling thing for food has intrigued and mystified me for a while. I understand people in Provolone, or Parma (Parmesan), or Champagne, etc. would get upset when people use a regional name to represent other goods, but what then does the naming ban mean for the marketing of traditional European recipes that are made in other regions? In the US things can still be named whatever, and I think mainly growers in other regions that can't use the name get shafted. And any "generic" label again has the same problem because Europe doesn't really have a lingua franca.

[soprano1]

Maybe the local animals will be grateful for the free food

I'm actually not too worried about the Euro - I just sold something to a person in Euroland and I mentioned I accepted Euros. I don't normally get a chance to play with currencies (I wouldn't really want to do it on a big scale, but it's nice to have some flexibility.)

I know it's not what you're talking about, but the whole regional labeling thing for food has intrigued and mystified me for a while. I understand people in Provolone, or Parma (Parmesan), or Champagne, etc. would get upset when people use a regional name to represent other goods, but what then does the naming ban mean for the marketing of traditional European recipes that are made in other regions? In the US things can still be named whatever, and I think mainly growers in other regions that can't use the name get shafted. And any "generic" label again has the same problem because Europe doesn't really have a lingua franca.

I can't really feed kiwi or peaches to the chickens, and it's too hot to raise pigs (since they eat pretty much anything), but worry not, almost nothing gets rotten.

I really am not much in the know about the regional labeling issue, to be honest. What i know is that making common economic laws to countries with vastly different economic, and sometimes cultural situations, isn't a very good idea.

[Ed Oscuro]

Many aspects of the EU strike me as good (the universal passport obviously) but yes - when your currency is pegged to how well the best industry in the EU is performing, it's probably bad news unless you're Germany.

[soprano1]

Many aspects of the EU strike me as good (the universal passport obviously) but yes - when your currency is pegged to how well the best industry in the EU is performing, it's probably bad news unless you're Germany.

Yeah, being able to travel at will between countries is great, and so is being able to use a single currency, but only if you can afford it
What you say is true, though: If by some bizzarre event Germany says they are out, the whole project goes down the drain, and another war could happen.

[Xyga]

Don't worry, once TTIP is passed all of our EU trade rules will vanish and we will be required to pay our US creditors with our bodies (I'd prefer fruits, but I don't have any).

Anyway many of the good things about the EU are being put into question, maybe because we were too innocent/confident about ourselves and the world and we let the 'dream' die, idk, but in about a couple of years many things will have changed, drastically I believe.

PS: EU partners make for over half of Germany's trade business, so if any of the 'big' ones jumps, Germany jumps too. The thing is our own Gov let something out once: we may be going towards an official two-tiers EU (rich north, semi-poor south, different rules) but I'm having a hard time imagining the South will swallow something like that without going full rage.

@Ed; at the current exchange rate paying in USD doesn't cost me much really, for small-average amounts when the rates are okay I like to pay people in their home currency, just like that. ^^
At least I'm doing it while it's possible, the Euro still being a thing.