ribuck

Because that's how science works. In the absence of any known quantum mechanism that helps us understand free will, we say exactly that. We don't need to say "There might be an as-yet-unobserved quantum phenomenon that helps us understand free will". If such a mechanism is discovered, we will add it to our knowledge when it is discovered. Otherwise, we might equally speculate that an as-yet-unobserved orbiting teapot dispenses free will.

Lots of families have a problem about children playing with food. It probably originated in times of famine when food couldn't be wasted. But playing is the main way a small child discovers stuff and learns things. Heh, that reminds me of a farming family that had a rule "Never play with your food - until it's killed, cooked, and on your plate". Because if the children got too friendly with Sally the Lamb or Percy the Pig, it became awkward to turn Sally into lamb chops and Percy into bacon. Anyway, do let us know how it turns out.

In a piece of academic research, it would be plagiarism. When people are disseminating knowledge, it's perhaps slightly discourteous but nothing more. Dayna did not claim that she was presenting her own original research, which would have been dishonest. Whenever I write about "turning the other cheek", I generally fail to credit the Bible as the original source of my words. So I'm no better than Dayna in that regard. And Stef's own videos are full of unattributed images, yet the world keeps turning.

The reasonable interpretation of this is: "If you agree, post your agreement here" rather than "Whatever you post here, I'll pretend that you agree".

I don't get why it would have to be "beforehand". Simulating a process is always slower than doing the process directly. I can simulate a computer, using only a pen and paper, and I will be able to predict what the computer would do for any set of initial conditions. But of course the computer can do it faster. I would re-phrase the fourth question as: Q4: Can I predict my own decisions beforehand, or can someone else predict my own decisions (at any speed) when they know nothing more than the initial conditions?

Just stick with your convictions. Stay with him as long as it takes for him to feel comfortable (but stay in the background and don't interact with him). If he's not anxious about separation, he soon won't need you there anymore. That's great! If he was perfectly happy for you to go after an hour, the time will come when he is perfectly happy for you to leave straight away. For a three-year-old the world can be a scary place, and he needs to know that you would never abandon him.

Read my post above, wackjob. I obviously don't support your petition, so please take my name off your list. Don't be a dick.

If she's constipated, the first thing to do is to make sure she always has a water readily available to drink whenever she wants to. Not as in "oh, we could get a glass and fill it up if you're thirsty", but "the glass is always on the table, ready for her to drink from". Force feeding is never a good idea. It always has the opposite effect to the desired one. It associates eating with negative vibes. Young children will never voluntarily starve, so there's no need to ever apply pressure or even encouragement. That might sound surprising, but encouragement just makes eating be about you getting your way, rather than about her enjoying her food. Instead, have healthy and delicious food always available, that she can eat anytime she chooses to, without permission. I don't know her age, but assuming she's old enough to eat for herself you could leave a fruit bowl on the kitchen table with bananas, apples, strawberries etc that she can help herself to any time she likes. At lunchtime, try this technique. Put a communal plate in the middle of the table. Prepare all the food (for you and her) and put it onto that plate. Make the sizes small and convenient. For example, cut sandwiches into quarters. Make everything finger-food-size or bite-size. Then start eating, taking pieces of food for yourself one by one from the communal plate as you eat them. Make it obvious that you find the food enjoyable and satisfying, but don't make a big deal of it. Don't pressure her by saying things like "mmm, these really are delicious, you should eat some too". And don't worry if she doesn't eat anything. She won't starve if she doesn't eat any the first time, or even the second time. But by the third time, she'll happily eat some. Children are much more likely to eat things that they have helped to make. Let her help whenever you're preparing meals. Trust her to do all the dangerous stuff like using the same sharp knives to cut stuff as you do, assuming she's older than two or three. Goof around with your food. Play with it! Make face shapes with the food on your plate. Stretch the melted cheese into long strings before you dangle it into your mouth. Make waves and waterfalls with your soup, and put some bread in it to make a "beach". Let her play with her food however she wants. The first time she may not eat any, but by the second time it's likely that some will reach her mouth. Have some "crazy straws" set on the table, and use yours to suck up your soup (make sure the soup is cool enough first). She will probably do the same. For dessert, why not make jello? Ask her what color you should make. Ask her what you should put into it. Usually one would only put fruit into it, but don't worry if she suggests weird things (like tomatoes or cheese or bread). Just put in anything edible that she suggests, then when dessert time comes you can have great fun with her by excavating all the added items. Have an empty bowl in front of each of you, and a serving spoon in the bowl of jello. Serve yourself some, then leave the serving spoon in the bowl with the handle facing her, as you tuck in to your own portion with enjoyment. If there has previously been a negative connotation with food, she may at first be reluctant to "lose face" by changing her ingrained behavior. You could find an excuse to leave the meal table for a while. Say something like "I'm just going to check the letterbox. I don't mind if some of this disappears while I'm gone". This tells her that some can safely "disappear" without you saying that she ate it. So if some has disappeared when you get back, just carry on as if everything is normal. Don't say something like "congratulations, I'm glad you managed to eat some". Always remember, the object is to let her eat whatever she feels the need to eat. The object is not to "win" a battle of the wits by making the other person "lose".

It's a false dichotomy that he should either be with his online friends or with his mother. He'd probably be happier if he found some offline friends to do stuff with: shoot pool, go hiking, play music, tune engines etc.

Here's a video where Stefan discusses the hardware and software that he uses to make his videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KaCfouzemY That video is a few years old though, so it may not reflect what he is using now.

Jaw-dropping indeed if it is all as presented, but it does smell a bit like a "bitch-fest". It would be quite astonishing if Dayna actually said those words. If she really is an alcoholic, obviously she needs to sort that out before she can meaningfully do any more un-nannying. And if her personal situation is as desperate as implied by the Green family, I hope she can get whatever help she needs to sort it out. Notice, though, that this all happened months ago and things might have changed since then. I think it would be very worthwhile for Stefan to do a "listener conversation" with her.

Ray, unfortunately we seem to be talking at cross-purposes. I'm not trying to debunk the article; I'm just saying that the article doesn't say anything really profound, beyond "some people get over-excited about low-quality research". As a generalization, that's true and it will probably always be the case. Most people find positive results more interesting than negative results, so it's probably inevitable that researchers and journalists will focus on positive results. The scientific method has the statistical tools to accommodate this, so we can live with it. Peer review has always had this problem, and probably always will. Peer review is still useful though; it's just that it's a very weak process. If peer review allows through 80% of valid research and 79% of invalid research, it's still has some filtering power. You can't declare what is "sufficient" replication, because it's a cost-benefit decision. If a research finding is not very important, there's little incentive for others to try to replicate it. It it's important (such as the recent flawed experiment that seemed to show neutrinos exceeding the speed of light) then others will attempt to replicate it. It's not a dealbreaker if the methodology is not divulged. If others can replicate the results using different experiments, those are good replications and those researchers can divulge their methodology. Knowing the original methodology can sometimes provided a short-cut to identifying a flaw in the original experiment, but it's not essential to the scientific method. That would be true if you had said "much of the research" instead of "the research" (which implies "all research"). Here's how I would phrase my "bottom line": Much of the available research is insufficiently replicated and therefore unreliable. Such research may be interesting because it opens up promising directions for study, but it cannot be considered to be "new knowledge" until it has been consistently replicated.

A constant seeker of the truth doesn't do things because there's a "petition". Adam Kokesh has made a series of videos where he takes DMT on-camera and describes his experiences. Search YouTube for adam kokesh dmt

Your samples are great! I am in so much awe of people who can draw.

Heh, the president's name is Spanish for "Mr. Mature".

Unfortunately it's not very common in the UK, because it can look like a school, which makes it illegal. If education is provided for five or more children it's classified as an Independent School (Education Act 1996 Section 463): "Independent School” means any school at which full-time education is provided for five or more pupils of compulsory school age And it's illegal to operate a school without government approval (Education Act 1996 Section 466): "a person is guilty of an offence if he conducts an independent school which is not a registered school or a provisionally registered school". We can't allow people to educate their children, can we?

I hate it when I put a lot of time into reading someone's link, and they say that OK, you are correct to call me out on that. My point is that there are certain priming experiments that are well-replicated, and others that cannot be replicated. Those that are well-replicated have been incorporated into a respectable scientific understanding of priming. Those that cannot be replicated are not worthy of an article in The Economist. It's perfectly normal and proper that cutting-edge scientific experiments may or may not be replicable. These first experiments are the ones that potentially open up new areas of knowledge. Some of them will prove to be false leads, and some will prove to be goldmines. If a researcher cannot replicate an earlier experiment, they publish their results. Subsequent researchers will see this when they do bibliographic searches on the original research, and won't build their new experiments on top of the non-replicated research. Or, if they choose to do so, they won't be surprised if their own work turns out to be non-replicable. The article uses a 5% threshold for statistical significance in their examples of false positives. The weakness of this threshold is of course understood and accepted, yet it is still an acceptable threshold for initial research that needs to be replicated. Only when, after replication, is the threshold near enough to zero, does the new research become accepted as "fact". For example, a 0.001% chance that the results are due to statistical variance, which corresponds to a 99.999% certainty of correctness. I say again that the weakness isn't with the majority of new research being unreplicable. The weakness is that publications like The Economist get over-excited about the significance of new research. As for the weakness of the 5% threshold, it's no scandal. ALL scientists already understand that. Even many lay people grasp it:

I never managed to successfully "go up to women and introduce myself for the specific purpose of forming a romantic relationship" in an environment such as a bar where there was not already a common interest present, so I'm not the one to answer that question. I met my wife in a hiking club where we already enjoyed a common activity, although I certainly did make a point of introducing myself and being in her company "for the specific purpose of forming a romantic relationship". It's interesting that arranged marriages are statistically more successful than self-chosen marriages, although I suspect that's due to sub-optimal self-choosing processes, rather than being due to an inherent advantage of arranged marriages.

It's natural that new discoveries are at the edge of current knowledge, where existing understanding is fuzzy. So it's not surprising that over half of the newest findings are later discarded. It's actually a fairly efficient way to do science. It wouldn't make economic sense for new research to be bulletproof. So what happens is that new research findings emerge with uncertainty. There may be an experimental error, or the results may just be due to chance. Then, if the findings are interesting or important, others will seek to replicate the findings (or, more commonly, to strengthen and extend them which has replication as a side-effect). Only when the findings are thoroughly replicated at a high degree of certainty (e.g. "five nines" or 99.999% certainty) do they become assimilated into science as a "fact". It would be financially impossible to conduct every new experiment to a level of 99.999% certainty, since this costs hundreds of times as much as an experiment conducted to 95% certainty (a one in 20 chance of error). You can see the process of refinement by looking at research into the risks of harm due to mobile phone radiation. These experiments have been conducted over many years. Occasionally one of them points towards a physical risk, but then more extensive experiments have highlighted a weakness or shown up a statistical error. Over time, researchers learn from this process and can design tighter experiments. In the case of mobile phone radiation, the science is still not "settled". In other words, although there is currently no rigorous evidence that phone use is harmful, we still don't have complete enough knowledge to totally rule it out. This is good. This is a reasonable way for science to make progress. What is not so good is that the first tentative research results are often reported in the media as if they are settled fact, often to be retracted or debunked a year later. The problem here is in the quality of the initial media reporting. The article to which you linked seems like a fairly good overview, except that it gets off to a terrible start with its discussion of priming. Priming can affect human behavior, but it doesn't affect the underlying science of replicability. Studies of priming are well-replicated, and priming is well-understood. You could find, for example, that a reading in an experiment of drug effectiveness is about half-way between 103 and 104. A group of researchers who have been funded by a drug company might be more likely to read the result as 104 (i.e. more favorable), and another group of researchers might be more likely to read the result as 103 (because they are by nature cautious people). But this only matters in the initial exploratory experiments. By the time you get to five-nines certainty, the effects of priming have been well and truly averaged out if not eliminated.

It's discourteous to keep throwing out a stream of objections and expecting others to jump through hoops to write explanations. If you want to debunk something, you either need to fully understand what you are debunking (so that you can expose an error), or you need to post an alternative theory that better-matches the experimental evidence.

It doesn't matter why people watch her videos. She's smart because she can package herself in such a way that she is successful, despite her lack of intelligence. You pretty much nailed it in your post: "Making money requires a specific type of creativity that is not inherent in intelligence. In order to make money, one must have a product or service to sell. Many intelligent people are operationally intelligent ... this does not, however, ensure any specific knoweledge of any subject that can be turned into a product or service." She doesn't have intelligence, but she has enough creativity to turn herself into an in-demand product.

It's good to have all this information in one place, but the value of the presentation is diminished by the occasional confusion between figures for England and the United Kingdom (which comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Norther Ireland).

There's a difference between being intelligent and being smart. She's smarter than me, but she's not intelligent. I consider myself to be intelligent, but it's valid when an uneducated person says to me "If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"

She's smarter than me. She is making thousands of dollars from her YouTube videos, and I've yet to make a hundred dollars. Based on average YouTube ad revenue, she has already made over a thousand dollars from this three-minute video.

I think there's some misunderstanding somewhere. Time dilation affects every physical process. It really is time itself that passes at different rates for the accellerating and non-accellerating twin. If the space-twin comes back from the journey after five of his years, and ten years have passed for the earth-twin, then the earth-twin has definitely consumed twice the calories, and aged twice as much, and his clocks have advanced twice as much, and the radioactive carbon-14 atoms in his body have undergone twice as much exponential decay. Yes, that's one of the fascinating things about relativity. It's clear that there really is something fundamentally surreal about the photon. It behaves totally differently from regular matter. I hope that someday there will be a breakthrough insight from this, that leads us to reorganise our understanding of time and space in a way that makes it conceptually simpler (in the same sense that the discovery of the concept of "zero" made it possible to reorganise and simplify the understanding of mathematics).