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"Pretending to be smart is not the same thing as being educated."

ToddNotTodd

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It's also easier to complain about other people's lack of ability/education than to make a real contribution. The irony that the OP calls himself "uber genius" and complains about people pretending to be smart should be lost on no one.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is both fascinating and infuriating...
 
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DogmaHunter

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The title above is a Halle Berry line off a movie called, "The Program."

One of my continuing frustrations on most forums these days is running into individuals who pretend to have done their homework but haven't.


You mean, people like you, who have been caught red-handed copy pasting sciency sounding propaganda from creationist websites, without citing the source to make it look as if they were your own words?

On the Cambrian Explosion and phony expertise
 
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Nihilist Virus

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Lol, I'm going to walk into a black neighborhood and tell them that slavery was not wrong.
 
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2PhiloVoid

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Lol, I'm going to walk into a black neighborhood and tell them that slavery was not wrong.

Or, you could hold a conversation with them about why they think their ancestors ended up as slaves in Europe and the Americas in the first place, maybe even as slaves of Native Americans. Or, you might ask them if they know whose tribe sold out the other tribes to the white slavers in the first place. Wouldn't this be a bit more productive conversation if you dared to do something akin to what you've just humored about?
 
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Nihilist Virus

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I'm not suffering from white guilt, but that doesn't mean I want to go down the delusional path of excusing whites from what they did or shifting the blame. Whites committed atrocities on basically everyone.
 
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2PhiloVoid

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I'm not suffering from white guilt, but that doesn't mean I want to go down the delusional path of excusing whites from what they did or shifting the blame. Whites committed atrocities on basically everyone.

Well sure. Whites have been the great enablers of all kinds of atrocious social systems, such as slavery, ever since the time of Greece and Rome and on up through ... well, today.
 
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Uber Genius

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Right. So read the peer-reviewed literature, not a journalist's often woefully inaccurate interpretation of the research.

If you think reading a magazine about science adequately informs you about research you are mistaken.
Straw man!

You extended my statement (an introductory method to approaching knowledge) to the ridiculous (that I am suggesting reading a peer-reviewed journal adequately informs one of all research in that area).

Silly rabbit, Rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies are for kids.
 
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Uber Genius

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This "false trichotomy," is accepted by just about every physcisict writing about fine-tuning since Brandon Carter in the early 1970s.

Now most don't hold to design but they do hold to the three options.

So instead of demonstrating your ignorance of the body of knowledge why not give us an alternative to the three (which is how all false dichotomies are rectified). Please show at least someone from the field that holds to your fourth or fifth or sixth inference.
 
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sfs

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Straw man!

You extended my statement (an introductory method to approaching knowledge) to the ridiculous (that I am suggesting reading a peer-reviewed journal adequately informs one of all research in that area).
You made a suggestion, that people do research using respected sources. That was a good suggestion. Then you wrote, "Peer-reviewed literature in journals specializing in a particular body of knowledge. "Science News" as opposed to "Scientific American". That is a bad suggestion. "Science News" is not a more respected source than "Scientific American." and neither is a substitute for consulting peer-reviewed research. Pointing out that you made a bad suggestion is not a straw man.

Your parenthetical comment then completely mischaracterizes what I actually wrote.

I see no evidence that you are in a position to be lecturing others on how to argue effectively.
 
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Uber Genius

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Quoted you exactly.

Stop pretending.

Your lack of clarity is due to lack of training and integrity.

Your rhetorical tricks are disingenuous.

Your misrepresentations are obvious.

Please engage the material and stop leading us down rabbit trails.

"Ignored"
 
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sfs

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Quoted you exactly.
You wrote: "You extended my statement (an introductory method to approaching knowledge) to the ridiculous (that I am suggesting reading a peer-reviewed journal adequately informs one of all research in that area)."
Your second parenthetical comment is not a quotation (exact or otherwise) of me, and does not accurately represent what I wrote.
Stop pretending.

Your lack of clarity is due to lack of training and integrity.
I guess I'd better turn in all my degrees then, and retract the 150 or so scientific papers I'm an author of. (Well, I would if I had any integrity. . .)

Your rhetorical tricks are disingenuous.

Your misrepresentations are obvious.
Your inability to handle correction is understandable -- but not laudable.
 
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variant

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You misunderstand. The falseness is the idea that the answer must fit neatly into any of those categories. Even if we accept such categories as exhaustive, the answer is free to be a mixture of any of them.

Your arguments reliance on "experts" is also funny, there simply aren't any.

The fine tuning argument is a question about how universes come into being and there aren't any experts in how that occurs, or what the possibilities or limitations are. The immediate skepticism of physicists trying to tell you what would happen if the fundamental forces were different should be quite overwhelming.

Physicists (the experts you speak of) once summed the entirety of what they "knew" about the universe to try to calculate the cosmological constant and were off by hundreds of orders of magnitude.

So it seems being "educated" hasn't given you the capability to actually work though a simple argument.

Further I don't think being "educated" looks like copying William Layne Craig into an internet forum, but rather, it should look like having the actual ability to process the argument and understand it's meaning and limitations.
 
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Silmarien

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There appears to be a misunderstanding somewhere here. Go back and reread the whole exchange--if Science News is not a better source than Scientific American, your initial suggestion was a bit off. I don't think @sfs is jumping down the rabbit hole by providing a simple correction, especially in a thread about how to carry out research.
 
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Ana the Ist

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You forgot attacking the credibility of the person making the argument instead of the argument itself.
 
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Uber Genius

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Opinions are knowledge claims. They are based on knowledge.
No. They are beliefs.

Knowledge claims, although controversial, usually are defined as having two additional properties, justification, and truth.

Justified True Beliefs are knowledge.

This has been the philosophical standard for the last 100 years of so.

"I belief that the lake is approximately 30 feet deep off the dock," is an opinion.

"I believe that the lake is approximately 30 feet deep off the dock, because

I measured it,
and I have a land survey from before the lake was formed showing the land proceeded 30 below the current water level,
and fishermen in my lake talk about their fish finders finding fish at 28 feet by my dock and suggest that they are two feet off the bottom.

Do you sense the difference between belief alone (opinion) and knowledge?

Here is a resource:

The Analysis of Knowledge (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
 
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