Posts by WH
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But if you're asking me to believe that the third-hand account has a woo-woo explanation
First, its a second hand account, but my coworker says she would be willing to swear an affidavit, Swift Boat styles (not that I intend to have her do that).
Second, this is a form of bias - one cannot begin a reasonable enquiry by assuming the answer or explanation to the question at issue. This is not "science" - it is prejudice. This bias makes the sceptic a poor judge of evidence - essentially such a person begins the enquiry with a closed mind and with a predilection to certain kinds of explanations before the factual foundation for those explanations has been established.
It is of course possible that my story can explained by conventional means - you will note that I did not in fact offer an explanation. However, my coworker's account of what she experienced is evidence of what she experienced.
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I think its reasonably plain that anecdotes are not "science", but anecdotes are still evidence, and frankly it is absurd to claim otherwise.
I am not attempting to satisfy a scientific definition of proof. In fact, I would prefer not to express these sorts of ideas in the language of science.
But I'm would ask that people refrain from making ignorant comments based on their personal prejudices and drawing sceptical inferences that can't possibly be justified by their knowledge of the person that actually claimed to have these experiences. You might be right - but you can't possibly know that.
That is a courtesy you owe them as a fellow human being.
<shrodinger's cat goes /reow>
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Never underestimate people's ability to make up stories or embelish them for effect.
And never doubt a sceptic's tendency to cast aspersions on people they have never met, and whose veracity they cannot know... :)
Look I'm just grumpy about the cricket.
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Could be true. But. There's no possible way to test it, therefore it's a useless hypothesis... Despite scientists since Newton exhaustively investigating the paranormal, anecdotes are still the best we can do when it comes to psychics
It is too close to holidays to get all philosophy of science on ya'all.
AUS: 185/3 (36 overs)
Okay, back to work.
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A co-worker told me the following story.
My co-worker's grandfather died a few years back. Her grandfather called her a pet name that only he used for her (which I have forgotten), but let's assume that the pet name was "carebear" for the purposes of telling the story.
Anyway, shortly after her grandfather died, my co-worker had her cellphone taken in for repairs. While the phone was being repaired, her boyfriend received a text message from my coworker's phone telling him to look after carebear. The boyfriend, assuming my coworker was playing a not-particularly-funny joke on him, asked her what was up...
A few weeks later the cellphone repair place rang to say that the physical repairs on her phone had been completed and that they needed the phone's pin number to unlock it and thus check that the repairs were succesful.
There are only a couple of explanations for this: either my coworker is lying, or someone is playing a pretty interesting trick.
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As Robyn pointed out, it's difficult to assess what is really happening without seeing the exchanges between psychic and crew.
No doubt alternative explanations can be put forward, but it is interesting when the psychics put forward explanations that depart from the police's version of events (ie, that could not have been transmitted via the police file-interviewer-psychic mechanism), or when they apparently recite facts the police say have not been revealed to the public. And names of suspects makes for such great television.
Unless it can be disproved it can't be discounted. People do tell some interesting stories about these sorts of things that I would be reluctant to chalk up to simple gullibility.
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sometimes its better to put your trust in people who aren't there [to witness the events]
Well I can't argue with that logic. Perhaps Sensing Murder could do a Clinton Impeachment edition :) It is a fascinating show.
the one hand you get a good (but increasingly common) celebrity story, on the other hand you've got to clean up some chick's puke. irl can sing though
I need to get some better work stories.
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I would accept that the book is not perfect. Whatever his shortcomings as a writer may be, Blumenthal was there, and you and I were not.
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It's just not good enough to position yourself as the only person who can stand up against the Republican smear machine, and then have your own campaign workers caught taking a leaf out of the Rove play book.
When my parents were last in the US, they were told by religious conservatives of their acquaintance that Bill Clinton had arranged for large numbers of people to be killed to cover up Whitewater, that Hillary was an evil and power mad lesbian, et cetera. When I subsequently read Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, I was surprised to learn that those rumours were being spread by people who were working with the Republican establishment and conservative media to remove Clinton from office (a very public campaign, which as you may recall, was defeated in the Senate in the face of mounting public disapproval). This was termed "the vast right-wing conspiracy".
So is it really accurate to suggest that Hillary Clinton is borrowing plays from the party of the Southern Strategy (and the people responsible for what Bush did to John McCain in 2000, SBVFT, Al Gore is insane, and Obama is a Muslim)? I would suggest that this is a false equivalence.
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I must admit that I'm confused by the "electioneering" vs "issue advertising" distinction - controls on the former strike me as utterly uncontroversial but I'm less confident about controls on the latter.
What I have read about the US suggests that regulating "electioneering" is a form of whack-a-mole, in which everyone goes about influencing elections through issue advertising and 527's.
Regulating political speech because it is effective and persuasive speech is dangerous, but neither am I thrilled by the prospect of those with the most money (or those with the most to lose and gain) dominating public discussion.