New Testingstan

Dooey, post it there.

NUA, have you listened to anything towards the end of that thread? Or are you still working through Tith's material?

school is taking up much of my time

i will get to that thread... soon

When are you done exams? UofA finishes on the 20th but GMac finished Friday.

Phantasee wrote:When are you done exams? UofA finishes on the 20th but GMac finished Friday.

the 20th here too

also i like how the feminism thread immediately got worse after it got moved to to fantasy

it's almost too perfect

"At fractional-cee velocities"

poo

also straha i dig the way you keep getting more and more explicit with 'science is just an arbitrary subjective cultural institution' in each post

even if i don't agree

you know how to chum son

TROLL

Nietzslime wrote:also straha i dig the way you keep getting more and more explicit with 'science is just an arbitrary subjective cultural institution' in each post

even if i don't agree

you know how to chum son

I am truly flattered. :oops:

I think there's a difference between Science (the sun is powered by hydrogen fusion, g=9.81Ms^2, etc.) and science (psychology, most of biology, etc.). The first can certainly be empirical, the second much less so. Neither can really be a source of ethics, though.

well, i dunno about that

in spite of the fact that cultural biases obviously exist and inductive and categorical reasoning have large barriers to deal with when it comes to these kinds of systems

it seems like every natural science (and psychology, the borderline science) is attritively producing iteratively more useful and coherent models of phenomena as time goes by

psychology remains dicey, but i blame that more on the fact that it's a new science and we've only just begun to invent and understand tools that can explore the mind in even a crude fashion

like most of psychology's history it has been an entirely unscientific cultural institution

and freud falsified his fucking results

but galileo was a pretty shitty astronomer if you look too deeply too you dig

as far as being a basis for ethics, i would agree that it can't be. but i do think that inductive or empirical reasoning are useful tools for making practical ethical decisions on a social scale - even if you want an open ethical horizon, in concrete situations some goods will have to be privileged against others, right

i don't run a government so i can afford to be camus' rebel and never take my ressentiment at my thrownness out on other beings who are equally thrown

but if i was el presidente i suspect that i would make decisions based on sketchy empirical observations a great deal of the time

you know i think i prefer the modern endlessly bitter illuminatus prime to the old posturing macho ip

it's like a sub-havok got replaced with a sub-valdemar

fun for everyone

yeah IP nowadays is hilarious

i love it how he emerges every few months or so from whatever hidey hole he spends most of his time in just to post a polisci dissertation full of academic speak that is barely comprehensible and then slither away into some murky place

he did that last time, although now he's just pointing out how politics in america are fucked

guest skgoa thonks jesty should run the country

Ugh, I need to stop posting in that Income Inequality thread.

guys i just heard kim jong il has died

can we please have a moment of silence and respect

We may.

sorry, moment of silence is over because i want to respond to stuff

something about ip's posts reminds me of china mieville -- not the writing style, but the everything-is-fucked political attitude that stops just shy of calling for socialist revolution

i agree that he has come a long way from when he posted things like "my girlfriend is a blonde physics student with double-d's" (this actually happened)

Aaron wrote:

Metatwaddle wrote:

Nietzslime wrote:i hold many beliefs and follow none of them

this

morally i'm supposed to be vegan but in real life... not so much

I don't understand.

Why should you be?

well, full-blown vegan may be overstating it, but basically, animals suffer an unbelievable amount in factory farming, and all that we get out of it is stuff that tastes good. (if someone tells you that eating meat is necessary to be healthy, they're lying. it's harder if you're vegan than vegetarian, but it's possible. anyway, i suspect most vegans are healthier than me.) it doesn't seem like that's enough to justify our factory farming practices. food that comes from local farmer joe's happy cows and chickens would probably be okay with me, but i can't afford that stuff. i buy the mass-produced stuff that comes from the supermarket.

the cost of going vegan is not astronomically high for me, and the cost of going vegetarian is even lower. i would have to live without my favorite foods and it would definitely strain my relationship, but i wouldn't go to jail or be unable to find a job. i probably wouldn't even lose money. if i were vegan, i'd probably use a lot of onions, garlic, tomatoes, staple green vegetables, pasta, rice, and beans -- all of which are cheap.

and this isn't even getting into the possible wrongness of killing animals. i haven't worked that out for myself yet, idk what kinds of animals it's wrong to kill, but pigs are pretty bright, and if it turns out they're self-aware, i would definitely want to stay away from eating pork.

i guess where it all breaks down is that the link between these animals and my plate is pretty remote. i can't single-handedly save any animals just by not eating meat, milk or eggs, or make a dent in the sales figures of factory farms. but when i buy meat and dairy, i'm definitely making myself complicit in some awful shit. i'm giving money to the people who torture animals and saying, "please, keep doing that."

but buying beef and cheese is easy and delicious, so i usually manage to doublethink my way out of it.

Metatwaddle: Going Vegetarian is actually a lot easier than you'd think it is, and after the first two or three weeks of mild miasma you feel fantastic. Also, there a bunch of fantastic new Vegetarian restaurants all up and down the East Coast (and I can't remember if you live in Philly or NJ). If you're interested in the transition PM me. (And that is the last time I actively try to convert someone on this board, I promise.)




Re: Stas. Has he always been this fucking dense or did I miss the memo years back?

Nietzslime wrote: it seems like every natural science (and psychology, the borderline science) is attritively producing iteratively more useful and coherent models of phenomena as time goes by

psychology remains dicey, but i blame that more on the fact that it's a new science and we've only just begun to invent and understand tools that can explore the mind in even a crude fashion

like most of psychology's history it has been an entirely unscientific cultural institution

In the hard sciences, surely and I'm behind that 110%. In psyschology and a lot of biology I'm not sure that's true, and I'm even less sure about their predictive value. Moreover, most of 'that stuff' is so intertwined with cultural assumptions and baggage as to be inextricable from it (to say nothing about the lack of study groups for reliable cultural modeling.)

I can see a world in which this is no longer true, but I don't think we could get it without a lot of time passing and without a mindset shift that drive psychology away from a predictive science (what it tries to be, all the time) and instead as more of science of limited description.

But that's just me. My feelings on this are complex but flexible.

as far as being a basis for ethics, i would agree that it can't be. but i do think that inductive or empirical reasoning are useful tools for making practical ethical decisions on a social scale - even if you want an open ethical horizon, in concrete situations some goods will have to be privileged against others, right

Most definitely, and I think anyone who tries to reject science altogether (and I know a few who try) have a few screws loose in their head. It's a question of sequencing, empirical analysis comes after our ethical framework and goals.

Phantasee wrote:Dooey, post it there.

no

the thread is now doomed without me shitting it up with minutiae

and what the christ is a "profeminist" and how do you become one by watching mulan?


also lol at saervok saying "the problem with game development method X is that no one has made a hit triple-a mega game with it"
hahaha mister pacDROID i think you are disqualified from everything ever now

Straha wrote:Metatwaddle: Going Vegetarian is actually a lot easier than you'd think it is, and after the first two or three weeks of mild miasma you feel fantastic. Also, there a bunch of fantastic new Vegetarian restaurants all up and down the East Coast (and I can't remember if you live in Philly or NJ). If you're interested in the transition PM me. (And that is the last time I actively try to convert someone on this board, I promise.)

I'm actually in northern Delaware, although I sometimes get to south Jersey or Philadelphia for a night out. If/when I find a job, I may move to New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but for now I'm still in boring old Delaware.

I don't have any plans to go vegetarian in the immediate future, but I'm always open to new vegetarian/vegan recipes. I'll shoot you a PM. (And please post in Stofsk's thread!)

Ohh...I get it now. We've actually been thinking of going vegetarian but because we're sick and tired of beef and chicken. The factory farm stuff does bother me a fair bit but like you I'm kind of at a loss to do anything about it.

We're seriously looking at hunting (my son really wants to try) as a means for different meat and well, an animal that runs around in the forest and then has a quick death is better to me then mr. chicken who spent his whole life getting shit on with no beak.

xon wrote:Ugh, I need to stop posting in that Income Inequality thread.

What are you talking about, and what does this have to do with income distribution


LOLOL

Zod wrote:

adr wrote:i wonder if thanas seriously is as stupid as he looks or if he's just blinded by his desire to show off his awesome power

so much for "stuff on other boards doesn't matter"

Pretty sure that went out the window when they let the HPCA thread go. They used to disallow that sort of thing.

I mean HPCA is crazy and all, but there used to be a thing about not sniping at other boards from the safety of SDN (insert intellectual crucible and standards of debate jokes here). Which seems to have mysteriously vanished. Or is being selectively not enforced? I dunno, maybe someone should post a "lol @ Spacebattles" thread or something to see what happens.

Though the only mods I can recall seeing in the thread itself (granted I don't really follow it) are Thanas and Stas and they're new so maybe nobody told them. But I'm pretty sure plenty of other mods have been in Testing and not said a word about it.

Maybe there was some kind of unannounced policy change. Or it's okay because Stuart became an Acceptable Target. I dunno.

tl;dr - inconsistent moderation lol

RogueIce wrote:

Zod wrote:

adr wrote:i wonder if thanas seriously is as stupid as he looks or if he's just blinded by his desire to show off his awesome power

so much for "stuff on other boards doesn't matter"

Pretty sure that went out the window when they let the HPCA thread go. They used to disallow that sort of thing.

I mean HPCA is crazy and all, but there used to be a thing about not sniping at other boards from the safety of SDN (insert intellectual crucible and standards of debate jokes here). Which seems to have mysteriously vanished. Or is being selectively not enforced? I dunno, maybe someone should post a "lol @ Spacebattles" thread or something to see what happens.

Though the only mods I can recall seeing in the thread itself (granted I don't really follow it) are Thanas and Stas and they're new so maybe nobody told them. But I'm pretty sure plenty of other mods have been in Testing and not said a word about it.

Maybe there was some kind of unannounced policy change. Or it's okay because Stuart became an Acceptable Target. I dunno.

tl;dr - inconsistent moderation lol

There's two components to "the affairs of other boards" rule. The first is (was) the ban on making threads to snipe at other boards, which honestly was mostly to keep the peace between SDN and SB in the early days of the board. While I don't think it's generally good or healthy for a majority of a board's traffic to be about other boards (he says, on Testingstan, in this thread), I don't think there's any reason "don't talk about other boards" should be a general principle, either. I don't see it as being much different from a thread that made fun of, say, Darkstar's website, or a dumb conservative's blog. If the target deserves it, then have at it--and HPCA definitely deserves it.

The second is part of a broader, longstanding policy that people shouldn't be punished on SDN for things they say and do elsehwere on the Internet, unless what they do elsewhere directly impacts SDN. Now, that doesn't mean you have to pretend that whatever they said elsewhere doesn't matter. You can use what they say elsewhere as evidence of intent, for example, which is what just happened with ADR. You can take issue with how ADR's statements here were used against him on SDN in this particular case, but there isn't and has never been some kind of blanket rule that you can't take someone's statement's elsewhere as evidence he or she intends to break the rules on SDN.

You can lump these two ideas together under the same broad category, but I don't think it's being inconsistent to say "You can make fun of other boards here, but we won't punish you for things you say elsewhere on the Internet". I don't see any logical reason why you can't have both policies. And as far as the first one goes, while I've said for a while (both here, in public on SDN, and in the mod forum) that I think the administration makes unnecessary trouble for itself by not communicating clearly, if a rule hasn't been enforced in years and isn't in the official board policies anymore (the AR, ID, and DR rule list), it's really not fair to call its continued nonenforcement "inconsistent".

RedImperator wrote:And as far as the first one goes, while I've said for a while (both here, in public on SDN, and in the mod forum) that I think the administration makes unnecessary trouble for itself by not communicating clearly, if a rule hasn't been enforced in years and isn't in the official board policies anymore (the AR, ID, and DR rule list), it's really not fair to call its continued nonenforcement "inconsistent".

True enough on that point. I was pretty sure it was stated somewhere, but it isn't. Ah well.

Incidently, making fun of Darkstar? That one is against the rules at least for the SW vs ST forum itself. Mike says you can do it in the HOS but the HOS policies say you can't do it in there anymore either (or at least, Darkstar discussion is discouraged).

Not that it matters since regular users haven't been able to start topics in there since 2006.

Anyway, while you're here, I've always wondered: why do they keep thread splits to the HOS open? I mean if it's bad enough to get sent to the HOS anyway, what good is it to leave it open? Aside from the whole "giving more rope" thing which is pretty...well, pointless I guess.

Unless the hope really is that the Offender will keep going long enough for them to have an excuse to ban, but that seems rather vindictive to me.