group discussion
topic:
what do you believe in that you're not supposed to?
yes, there are many pro-religious people on this group and we've all seen that many on this group are against religious dogma or whatever...
but what do those ATHEISTS believe in?
stuff you shouldn't really, as an atheist, believe in?
UFOs?
Ghosts?
Auras?
Life After Death?
Atoms?
Evolution?
Number theory?
That sorta stuff? Where is your boundary of belief?
I believe that chocolate and french fries make you slim and beautiful.
Other than that, not much, but the feeling of deja vu does trip me out every now and then. I'm sure there's a logical explanation, I'm just too lazy to find out what it is.
I wouldn't say it's something I "believe" in, but I get caught up in all the superstitions associated with baseball. I really get annoyed when an announcer talks about a pitcher being in the middle of a perfect game. I'll sit in a lucky chair or do things like that even though I'm certainly smart enough that I'm not really impacting the game.
Your list is a rather odd one, from my perspective. I believe there are scientific reasons for things that sometimes seem magical. That has always been the case with science. I guess I already "believe" in some of the things your list says I shouldn't.
Tom said:"Auras are real. They often herald migraines."
Those are not the kind of auras usually referred to in the context of Mike's list. There are no external auras visible to others given off by living creatures.
@ 8: I know. I was by way of making a funny. Trying, anyway.
Regarding a couple of the others... UFOs are real. Doesn't mean they're little green men, just that there are things in the sky that we can't identify (such as large helium balloons with glo-sticks in them to stimulate UFO sightings). There's life after death, too. Just not for whoever died.
I'm kind of superstitious. I throw salt over my shoulder when I spill it, and, believe it or not, I say "god forbid" when I give a hypothetical about something bad happening to someone. I know there's nothing rational about these things, and I don't believe the notions underlying them, but it's sort of like I have a little OCD or something where these things are concerned.Go figure.
Actually, now that I think about it, I do the salt thing too. I also get really ticked off when I get a chain e-mail or something like that. I never forward them on, but it's almost like the people who sent it to me are wishing me ill if I don't. Puts me in a bad mood every time.
Chantel, you're probably not old enough to remember this, but back in the 1970s, it became really popular, for some reason, to send snail mail (um, well, what we would now call snail mail, anyhow -- you know what I mean) chain mails that would say stuff like, "If you send this letter to 25 people you will gain riches. If you ignore it and don't send it, you'll die!" And then it would give supposed examples of people who had sent it and then won the lottery or whatever, and people who ignored it and were killed in car accidents and so forth.
I got a couple of those when I was perhaps 10 or 11, and they scared the living shit out of me. I didn't have enough people to send it to once, and I spent days terrified, really, seriously thinking I was going to die soon.
It makes me really mad to think about it now, that someone would send a letter like that, and to a child.
I HATE chain emails. They really piss me off!
You know that if you don't pass the e-mail along something bad will happen to you.
Hi Laura. They had chain mail when I was a kid too, but it was mostly passed around at school. The only chain mail I actually received through regular mail was recently. A friend of mine sent me a letter asking me to send her one pair of underwear (new) and another pair each to six friends. Somehow if I did this I would eventually receive like 40-something pairs for myself. It was some sort of weird panty pyramid scheme.
That is way too bizarre Chantel. Where are you finding these friends? "The Panty Pyramid Scheme", now I want to make some random pyramid scheme.
Logic and scientific reason is my boundary. Anything someone claims to exist because it cannot be disproved falls outside science.
stuff you shouldn't really, as an atheist, believe in?
"UFOs?
Ghosts?
Auras?
Life After Death?
Atoms?
Evolution?
Number theory"
I'm confused, atheists don't believe in evolution. They understand it as the best explanation for life. You don't have to believe something on faith when you have evidence.
Lesli wrote: "Higgs particles are just waiting for the ILC..."Right, and monopoles could be easily found in the center of the earth, after they've been slowed by diffusive non-binding interaction with ordinary charged matter and gradually attracted to the gravitational equilibrium. In fact, they'd be preferentially distorted in their distribution along the magnetic polar axis down there, forming and actual dipole unless of course it was charge balanced so there was "magnetic hydrogen" or whatever instead.
But so far, we haven't yet seen them, and a proper skeptic has to think it no more likely that they do without evidence than that they don't, don't you think?
If it comes to that, I "believe" in monopoles more than I believe in Higgs particles. I'm not convinced that the standard model isn't itself a collective model of something deeper, and dynamically broken symmetry has a certain appeal to it as well.
rgb
I'm a bit of a believer in the whole concept of a collective unconscious. That we're all linked in some way. Karma - that if we keep on doing good things for others it comes back round eventually.This next isn't the same thing, but it certainly has kept my mind open to 'other' things (within limits!).
When I was about 16, my brother had a major heart issue. I hadn't talked to him in many months and for some reason I picked up the phone and called him at the same time that his wife was doing an emergency breakthrough to reach me. Weird, huh?
Nathan wrote: "Strange, but not miraculous. Simply pure coincidence."Neither miraculous nor coincidence, I'd say, Nathan. I'd put it on a continuum somewhere in between. A connection of some sort that doesn't have to have a religious component - just a connection.
A coincidence. What evidence is there that it is anything other than a coincidence? I would say none.
I know the usual religious response is, what evidence that you have that it wasn't? But Princeton had a research group called PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (?)) not quite sure I got that right. But in any case they actually did prove statistically significant (although minute) abilities for people to affect the outcome of randomized number generators. They called it consciousness related physical phenomena, I believe. And thought it had implications in areas where the margin of error was small - like jet fighters. It's interesting. I believe they also learned that the effect was more pronounced in areas considered sacred and with more people.
Paltry evidence I know. It was Princeton and it was shutdown, but I think their research is still out there.
That's all I've got, Nathan! Not trying to change your mind, just answering the question of thread.
Michael wrote: "Nathan wrote: "Strange, but not miraculous. Simply pure coincidence."Neither miraculous nor coincidence, I'd say, Nathan. I'd put it on a continuum somewhere in between. A connection of some sor..."
It's definitely coincidence. "Continuum somewhere in between" a miracle and coincidence is nonsensical. There is no such "continuum." The call is explainable as a coincidence. Sometimes when you call someone, they are trying to call you too.
Michael wrote: "I know the usual religious response is, what evidence that you have that it wasn't? But Princeton had a research group called PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (?)) not quite sure I go..."What kind of RNGs? If they influenced the outcome of software pseudorandom number generators, well, as Bond would say "That's a neat trick..." ;-)
I keep an open -- but skeptical -- mind about that sort of thing. Bear in mind, though, that marginal results are the bane of research science, because "statistically significant marginal result" is an oxymoron, and the contradiction is in the statistically significant part.
As a person who has written one of the better and more widely used RNG testers out there (see "dieharder" on my website) I know a bit more about randomness than most people, and one thing you learn about random number generators is that they literally produce extremely unlikely patterns all the time. To detect anomalies in the global distribution of unlikely patterns is possible, but it is an enormous amount of work and requires billions of random numbers. I don't think most people appreciate just how many random numbers you have to pull from the generator to be able to be able to fairly reliably not reject the null hypothesis.
Sorry about the double negative, but rng testing involves the null hypothesis -- this is a perfect rng -- and using rands from the generator to evaluate some known statistic. One can (often) use the inverse distribution to create a p-value, the probability of getting the simulated result you got, given the null hypothesis. Typically this number has to be very low to justify rejecting the null hypothesis and concluding that the generator is not random, because even if you reject on p = 0.01 well heck, that happens one in 100 trials! In other words, all the time. I generally don't reject until p is a) less than 0.0001; and b) I get p's that low one in three or four trials, fairly consistently (in which case I can crank up test parameters and consistently get p as small as I like every time, a good signal of rng failure).
There problem is further compounded by the fact that "random number generator" is itself an oxymoron. How can you generate something that is "truly random" with an algorithm? Not even dice rolls and mechanical rngs are truly random, because physics is not truly random, it is at best unpredictable. So nearly any rng they might have used to perform the test has its own point of failure even without psychic help. They would have to detect second order deviation relative to this failure point (after finding it!) which is quadratically difficult in number of samples drawn, basically a susceptibility.
All of which sums up to saying -- marginal results here are pretty ignorable. Either they got a consistent, reproducible signal, nothing "small" about it, or they are (quite possibly accidentally) introducing testing bias and cherrypicking runs with low p instead of analyzing the distribution of p itself and the p of getting that distribution. Failures at the p = 0.01 level are interesting only if they happen, on average, a lot more or less than 1% of the time, and testing to see if that is true will fail at the 1% level 1% of the time. It's a bitch, actually, and one of the reasons RNG testing is fun and even profitable, because some of the patterns of failure can be very subtle indeed.
I'd be a lot happier if they could demonstrate e.g. actual psychokinetic force on very sensitive piezoelectric crystals or something like that. Physics can measure very, very, very small forces nowadays -- I think that one can even detect things as weak as tidal forces directly with piezoelectric whiskers, if one there is enough signal to noise.
Duke had the Rhine institute back in the 60's (it had just gotten kicked off campus when I arrived in the early 70's). It got kicked off because it was determined that a lot of its "evidence" for positive psi turned out to be cherrypicked or the result of poorly designed tests. Run 100 tests, 1 comes back with a very unlikely result, hold up that result and say "look, it proves psi" but fail to tell people about the 99 tests that were null results or to disclose the overall distribution of results and show that it wasn't normal or expected.
rgb
I'm much less prone to this stuff than I used to. I never "believed in" UFOs. My opinion on them is that it is possible that there is life on other worlds, because there is life on our world. How rare life-bearing worlds are is still an open question. However, whether there is life elsewhere is only part of the equation - to have been visited, we need beings who are capable of interstellar travel. There is no evidence of that at all. All UFO sightings are anecdotal and there is no hard evidence (grainy photos and questionable videos aside). So, my guess is we have not yet been visited.There is no evidence of ghosts or "auras" or life after death.
I agree that the theory of evolution is a phenomenal and a well-supported theory. And, the existence of atoms has been well proved too.
Where I've been had before was on nutritional claims. I used to drink "wheat grass juice" thinking it had some great health benefit, only to learn I had wasted gobs of money.
I have a simple baloney detection method - if someone claims a miracle occurred, I don't believe it. If someone says they saw an angel, and all that's described or photographed is a bright light, I don't believe it. If someone uses fluffy, meaningless terms like "consciousness" and "good energy", I am immediately skeptical. Words like "karma" and "crystal energy" and "the universal consciousness" are all buzzwords for "something I don't know anything about."
When it comes to food claims - I am very careful to look at exactly what is being said - words like "helps build" or "supports the immune system" or "helps give you energy" or "helps whatever." They're probably lying. I want to see the double blind study.
The fact that scientists are not required to show statistically insignificant results is something that really bothers me. Why can't we just keep a log of all the tests from now on so that we know what has been done? And what didn't work. Also, it would be nice if there was an easier way to search for research. Like a grand list of some sort. Am I dreaming?
Nicole wrote: "The fact that scientists are not required to show statistically insignificant results is something that really bothers me. Why can't we just keep a log of all the tests from now on so that we know ..."The internet actually enables this, but you need to be hooked in through a University library to get at the search engines that can download the actual journal articles.
Outside of the journals (where all of this IS done, with more or less fidelity, since you'll get a comment fired back at you and ruin your chances at funding if you publish complete crap:-) nobody takes the time to summarize all of the published work because there is an enormous amount of it and a lot of it is far from cut and dried. Look at the controversy surrounding Anthropogenic Global Warming, for example (and yes, there is one even though many people don't want you to think that there is). The conclusion is incredibly sensitive to the proxies used to extrapolate temperature backwards, complicated by the fact that accurate recordings of global temperature have only been accumulated for roughly 30 years, increasingly inaccurate (as one goes back in time) recordings of local temperature have been kept since roughly 1724 when the thermometer was invented, and beyond that we have to rely entirely on proxies that are normalized to this terrible data. Worse, many of the proxies (such as tree ring thickness) depend only approximately or nonlinearly on temperature in the first place and are equally sensitive to things like annual rainfall or environmental stress that are not directly related to temperature.
Add to that the fact that we can easily explain the past data with several models that do not support pointing the finger at CO_2, the fact that Mr. Sun is an almost completely unknown dynamical system whose output (solar "constant") is obviously tightly coupled to global temperature and whose solar constant varies significantly on the scale of centuries. Add further the data from ice caps that show that it has gotten remarkably warm repeatedly in the past (during the Holocene) and gotten damn cold a few (during the Holocene) and that the Holocene is already one of the longer interglacial periods out of the last five or six -- most of the last 500,000 years the earth has been a big ball of ice from the latitude of maybe Pennsylvania north, with nasty winters reaching quite close to the equator -- all without the help of CO_2.
Think about it a bit, and you'll realize that where scientists do try to summarize and push a single result onto the lay crowd, they're often trying to "sell" something or get funding or save the world from a perceived danger that longer term or more careful research may well prove to be the opposite of a danger. How many times have foods been touted as great, then excoriated as terrible, then touted once again? Is butter better or worse than margarine?
I love the internet and wish that the cost barrier to journals was erased so EVERYBODY could read the original research and decide what to believe, but even when you can get to them, the decision isn't easy. There's an enormous, truly enormous amount of information to sift through.
rgb
I guess I just wish that there were better ways to track research. I heard about umbilical cord stem cell research that could revolutionize the way we think about stem cell research, but I have yet to hear about this from popular science magazines. Every mother could be donating their umbilical cord for research. The doctors just throw it away anyway. And it's a perfect solution to the controversial embryonic stem cells.
About global warming, I have heard that there is controversy and I really don't know what to believe anymore. Extrapolation without a very large sample of data, chances are that the degree of certainty decreases to the point of not gaining useful information. But that is as far as I understand statistics. (I got a 2.6, The lowest grade I've ever earned :(
The cost barrier on journals is annoying.
Is it not close to 70% of people don't understand the basic science that backs a research article even in a popular science magazine. I wonder what the % of people who could understand a meta-analysis would be?
"There's an enormous, truly enormous amount of information to sift through." Exciting isn't it? It is so cool to think that no matter how long I read, I will never run out of things to learn! (Or have perfect knowledge, that would be so boring for me)
There are journals that I should just go ahead and subscribe to. Anything that has Psych and Religion in the title is interesting to me!
I believe in UFOs. There's nothing really religious about that, I don't think. I mean, we'd have to be pretty arrogant to assume we're the only living creatures in the universe.It's fun to say you believe in ghosts and supernatural creatures but, obviously, i don't really believe in those things.
I mean, we'd have to be pretty arrogant to assume we're the only living creatures in the universe.It's one thing to believe there are living creatures somewhere in the universe and another to believe that they periodically come to our planet and anally probe people. I believe the first is likely true. However, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest aliens have ever visited our planet.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I guess I should have phrased it right. I don't believe anyone who says they've been 'abuducted' because there's no evidence. There's also no evidence to prove that UFOs are real. I should have said, I believe in aliens ... or other lifeforms in the universe. Not necessarily that they keep visiting our planet.
Why does the scientific community go through such great lengths to keep normal people from accessing the information they produce? It being searchable only from some university is about as useless as useless gets. I can't run down to Georgetown and hop onto a library computer - I'm not a student there. But that doesn't mean I don't have the interest to learn - I just can't quit my job to do it.
Nathan wrote: "However, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest aliens have ever visited our planet."You obviously don't shop where I shop. A number of magazines reknowned for their reliability alternate stories about Jesus appearing on a burned piece of toast, Nostradamus's prophetic vision of the coming Apocalypse, and stories of anally probing aliens the their corpses discovered at crash sites.
Surely these are all reliable witnesses and describe actual data and occurrences. Don't they?
rgb
Rob wrote: "Why does the scientific community go through such great lengths to keep normal people from accessing the information they produce? It being searchable only from some university is about as useless ..."Because Your Congressmen have passed things like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to protect you from the Evils of open access to information. Because the Federal Government refuses to mandate the open public access to all publications or inventions derived from Federally Funded Research. Because people like to own things, and confuse information with a thing. Because there are a few GOOD things about the current system -- for example, the govt would have to fund the journals if they can no longer make money selling access and getting grant money and tuition money that way, and there are reasons to think federally funded journals would be less than ideally objective platforms -- and one would have to work a bit to develop a new system that was cheaper, universal, and still bias-free or bias-minimal.
Hey, you asked...;-)
rgb
Surely these are all reliable witnesses and describe actual data and occurrences. Don't they?True enough. My mistake.
There are sources, such as Google Scholar or PLoS or PubMed where anyone can access the primary literature. In addition, NCBI or GenBank are open to everyone and you can go there and get gene sequences, or compare transcripts from different organisms or see the phylogeny of the sequences. There is a significant difference between people not making information available and people not having the skill set or wherewithal to seek out the information.
Nicole wrote: "The fact that scientists are not required to show statistically insignificant results is something that really bothers me. Why can't we just keep a log of all the tests from now on so that we know ..."Well, yeah, you are dreaming because we still live in a free country and most scientific research is private and the property of the researchers. So, we can't rightfully compel them to share their work in a way they don't want to.
Perhaps anyone receiving government money could be required to post their end product or release their end product for a research database. But that wouldn't be even close to most research.
Ceri wrote: "I believe in UFOs. There's nothing really religious about that, I don't think. I mean, we'd have to be pretty arrogant to assume we're the only living creatures in the universe.It's fun to say yo..."
It's not religious, but it's not evidence based. There isn't any evidence that we've been visited by aliens.
If you believe in "unidentified flying objects," well, then of course, everyone does. But, that just means that you believe that there are objects we haven't identified. That does not imply that the objects are alien spacecraft.
I disagree that we would have to be "arrogant" to say we are the only ones in the universe. First, to say that there is no evidence of alien visitations on Earth is not the same thing as saying that we are the only life in the universe. There may be millions of high-tech civilizations out there, and they may have no knowledge of our existence.
Second, we simply do not know how common intelligent life is. We have 300 or 400 million stars in the galaxy Milky Way, and somthing like 400 million galaxies estimated to be in the universe. That's a lot of chances for life to arise, assuming the laws of nature are the same all over the universe.
However, what are the odds? How often does life arise. We have 8 planets and some dwarf planets around this star, the Sun, and only one planet has any life on it as far was we can tell so far. So, are the odds generally 1 planet in a life-conducive zone per star? That would be a TON of planets with potential life.
But, most stars are binary stars, which tend to cause huge temperature and weather shifts. Most planets are not in our habitable zone around their stars, and most planets don't have nice stable orbits like the Earth has, conducive to very low, relatively speaking, climate changes.
At this point, we can only say that there is at least one planet with life on it in the universe. Does it take a whole universe to get one life bearing planet? Maybe. Maybe we get one per galaxy? If so, the odds of us having been visited are incredibly small. What if it's 2 or 3 or 100 per galaxy? Even then - the distances are so incredibly far that to have been picked out of all the hundreds of billions of stars for visitation is hard to believe.
I think there is a desire to have been visited. Maybe it's an offshoot of the religious feeling that here we are, so we must be the focal point of the universe, or part of the universe's purpose. I.e. - aliens come here because we are important.
However, look up in the sky on a clear night and check out the milky way and its BILLIONS of stars....which one should we visit to find life? Even if thousands of them have life, the odds of us finding it are slim to none.
And, then of course, let's not be temporally myopic. I mean - this universe has been moving along for 13-14 billion years before we ever got hear and did just nicely without us. Maybe Earth was visited, but it was 4 billion years ago, on a study of planetary formation, and the aliens that visited our system have long since gone extinct.
Modern humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years, and we have had the ability to get into space for 50 years. Alien civilizations by the millions could have risen and fallen and gone extinct before we dropped out of the trees. To think that just as we are getting advanced enough to get into space, that at just that time, some aliens are going to stumble upon our obscure star, in a random backwater of an outer spiral arm, of a nondescript spiral galaxy, now that -- that would be some kind of coincidence.
I'm with Eric. The problem with determining the probability of life elsewhere in the universe is that we're trying to extrapolate from a sample size of one. We can make some decent assumptions about the percentage of stars within our limited field of vision that seem to have planets, the percentage of planets that seem to meet the basic requirements of our style of life, but that's it. The things we don't know drastically dwarf the few things we do. And, of course, all this is limited to the few centuries that we've been observing the cosmos, approximately 500/14,000,000,000 years.That said, I hope there's life elsewhere in the universe, and my gut feeling (probably born of this hope) is that there probably is. And I think it would be cool if aliens visited our planet, but it seems outrageously unlikely, within the bounds of our current understanding of physics.
Also, the probability of our being visited seems to work against the probability of life existing elsewhere. We've been transmitting stuff into space for several decades now, increasing the probability of our being detected. But for us to be worth visiting, we have to be somehow special. The fewer civilizations there are in the universe, the more worth visiting we are but, of course, the fewer civilizations there are who might want to.
unread topics | mark unread
Books mentioned in this topic
Sundiver (other topics)Starquake (other topics)
Dragon's Egg (other topics)
