Posted on 01/01/2012 5:02:18 PM PST by grey_whiskers
One of the things that is fun about forums such as Free Republic is the sheer volume and scale of topics discussed. Everything from discussions of GOP primary races (come BACK, Sarah!) to speculations on the Middle East, from Kim Jong-un to fitness resolutions for the New Year, from Naughty Teacher threads to black helicopter speculations. If the Internet is a microcosm of the real world, then Free Republic is a microcosm of the internet. And all helpfully sorted by keyword, date, and author in order to make drinking from the fire hose easier.
But of course, not is all fun and games. Free Republic bills itself as “the world’s premier conservative internet forum.” And as such, it is a welcome place to hang out and talk with like-minded people, away from the “rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, sh*t-kickers and Methodists”
found on the rest of the internet. Unfortunately, that means that all kinds of people, from Paultards to Mitt-bots, from DU infiltrators to atheist crusaders (a little ironic, that), *all* consider it their dishonor-bound duty to try to worm into FR unnoticed or at least post here, to “set the record straight”. Free Republic has developed its own defense against such, the famed Viking Kitties and their famous ZOT!
And why is there the necessity for the ZOT? Are we not broad-minded enough, intelligent enough, magnanimous enough, tolerant enough to allow the existence of contrary or dissenting viewpoints? Sure. But that’s what the rest of the Internet is for. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, the purpose of an open mind, like that of an open mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Or, as Rush Limbaugh likes to say, “I am balance.” Conservatives need a place to go to recharge without constantly being ridiculed, calumnied, mocked, and shouted down by main force.
So what happens? The voices of “tolerance” are so offended by the existence of an oasis for conservatives (and, what’s worse, most of them are Christianists as well -- of all the nerve!) that they seek to plant a flag for reason (as they proclaim it) right here on FR. Which leads to noteworthy fireworks when they try to do so, as many of the ideas which they hold to be axiomatic, are marked as heresies here on this site. As Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) wrote, “everybody is someone else’s weirdo.”
But how is that that people identify someone else as a weirdo? After all, with so many different subjects around, and different opinions available on each subject, conservatism is not nearly as monolithic as liberals and atheists assume (indeed, there are some conservative atheist, some of them even have remained unzotted on FR for years). May I suggest, for the purposes of insight, that we borrow a page from statistics, and in particular, from analytical chemistry? This is not meant to be a rigorous discussion, only a semi-humorous one to get the creative juices flowing. Say hello to my little friend, Student’s t-test.
Despite the name, and its use in classes, “Student’s T-test” was originally developed by W.S. Gosset, who went by the fictitious name “Student” and worked for the Guinness brewery. Come to think of it, maybe that had something to do with the name he chose :-) Student’s t-test is used when comparing two small sets of data, to decide whether differences in the data sets are due to chance, or are “significant” (that is, whether or not, the data sets “really are” different -- meaning, that is, 95% of the time, or 99% of the time, or whatever -- the differences in the data sets cannot have come about due to random differences). The idea is conceptually simple. Everyone has heard of a “bell curve” to describe data. The t-test is used to compare, not theoretical bell curves, but sets of experimental data, which have ranges of values instead of infinitely long tails. By looking at the mean of each data set, as well as the range of values of each data set, one can determine whether the two data sets are ‘most likely’ measurements of the same thing or not.
That’s fine, you ask, and how exactly does this relate to websites or social interactions therein? Consider someone’s political views as a set of data points, with the extent of “liberalness” or “conservativeness” for each topic being spread along the X-axis, and the *count* of topics of which a person is liberal or conservative to that extent as the height above the axis. If you plot out a person’s political views in this fashion, you will trace out a curve. It might be a symmetric bell curve, it might be somewhat asymmetric, it might even exhibit kurtosis. But in general, you will be able to get a feel for how a person “stacks up,” left or right, by talking to them.
And so it is on discussion groups, or in forums such as FR. Typically most of the posters in a self-identified, semi-autonomous site such as FR would, if their “political bell curves” were plotted, would be somewhat similar: a significant difference between two people could come about if either the overall shape of their bell curve were different, or if they had a particular outlier on a important topic, on which they differed *greatly* from someone otherwise similar. In either case, other people talking to the person would begin to feel that “something is amiss here”: something which bears an analogy to statistical sampling and comparison. And if the difference is significant enough, the person is outed as a TROLL.
“Everybody is someone else’s weirdo.”
Cheers!
Consider this:
"...let's turn to a passage in Heller's Creative Tension. He points out that recent developments in deterministic chaos theory have demonstrated that "there are strong reasons to believe that a certain amount of randomness is indispensable for the emergence and evolution of organized structures.... Randomness is no longer perceived as a competitor of God, but rather as a powerful tool in God's strategy of creating the world."
"He quotes the physicist Paul Davies, who wrote that,
"God is responsible for ordering the world, not through direct action, but by providing various potentialities which the physical universe is then free to actualize. In this way, God does not compromise the essential openness and indeterminism of the universe, but is nevertheless in a position to encourage a trend toward good. Traces of this subtle and indirect influence may be discerned in the progressive nature of biological evolution, for example, and the tendency for the universe to self-organize into a richer variety of ever more complex forms."
"In a similar vein, he quotes A. R. Peacocke: "On this view God acts to create the world through what we call 'chance' operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next."
"So the bottom line is that if your life were totally planned, it couldn't be. In other words, the more you attempt to tamp down randomness and chance, the more you are likely to create disorder. To put it another way, there is a higher principle at work, which uses randomness and chaos to break up evolutionary impasses and "lure" the system toward its own destiny, so to speak. We must surrender to this destiny, as each of us, to paraphrase Sri Aurobindo, is a "unique problem of God."
"Or you could say that "the answer is the disease that kills curiosity," or that twoness resolves the problem of oneness through the discovery and synthesis of eternal threeness, in which Love abides. ....."
You’re just like a liberal. It’s never what I said, it’s how I said it.
That's some conviction you have there. :)
"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" ~ Charles Darwin
It appears the mathematicians and physicists were invited to the table and once they began making observations from their own, much more rigorous, disciplines were often ignored or eschewed by many biologists, e.g. Pattee, Rocha, Rosen, Yockey.
Most notably in my view is the question "what is life v non-life/death in nature" which is rather fundamental to mathematicians and physicists looking at biological systems whereas to biologists, whose mission is to study life, there is almost no interest in anything beyond descriptions. Or to put it another way, the biologists seem to be content to know what life looks like and have no interest in what life "is."
Thank you so very much for your engaging essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!
LOLOL!
She’s fond of the fallacy of the undistributed middle, also.
"Unpredictable" is the accurate term for what science currently deems as "random."
And truly, I'd rather believe that scientists misappropriate words from mathematics because they do not understand the discipline than to think they are intentionally misrepresenting their observations.
Heller, I think, makes a good point, if in the process, he isn’t conflating “random” and “chance.”
”Planned chaos,” it’s sometimes called. I’m not sure that’s a useful idea. Heller’s idea, I think, is.
Quite so. True, I think, of Materialists generally.
True, I think. Not so true, perhaps, of others, Materialists generally, with an agenda to push.
You're welcome. I agree.
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