Pepin

The measurement being made is not valid. What I mean by this is that the hypothesis that rape is a male problem relies only on the measurement of gender, which does not include other differentiating factors within that class. Even if it were true that 99% of rapes were committed by men, it would not be at all valid to extrapolate this behavior to the majority of men, as 99% of men have nothing to do with rape. It is the same reasoning used by racists when claiming that a particular race commits more crime. They use data to support that there is a higher percentage of this race committing a crime, then they extrapolate the measurement to the majority of people of that race, when the statistic only applies to a small minority of that race. The language is very similar with the same rhetorical strategies being employed. This reasoning would be valid if the majority of that group behaved in such a way. If 99% of rapes were committed by men, and 50% of men had committed rape at some point in their life, then this could be considered a men's issue. Being accused of being a rapist or supporting rape because of sex really puts me off. Thunderfoot has some good videos on this topic.

I'm so sorry about your situation. I can't imagine what that is like.

A skill that I have been developing is understanding continual improvement and planning long term. When you become a bit more serious about fitness and health, you manage the day to day while keeping your longer term goals in mind. There is also something about strength training where it becomes far more obvious that you need to put in the work to progress. It is true of everything, but first hand experience is nice. Most of my life, I've never really had to try to get results, so running into barriers is pretty difficult. Like in school, I never had an issue understanding the material, and would always get good grades. It wasn't until college that I started actually having the issue of not understanding a topic, and having to really work to gain fluency. This is very confusing and it isn't something at all that I've figured out in the last 4 years since I dropped out. With trying to gain strength and the mentality that is needed for it, I'm having an easier time facing struggles in other areas of my life. Might sound a little strange, but I think Elliot Hulse is onto something.

Magic has many basises. There is the self-deceptive sort, which is generally known as superstitious behavior. There is the more harmful kind where there is the magician, and the the audience. The premise tends to be that the audience does not has access to such powers, while the magician gained such powers early on in life, or through years and years of training. The magic that "works" is far more dangerous than the magic that doesn't. Psychic readings for instance do not work as the psychic tends to give general and vague advice which the audience fills in. The magic that works is of the kind where the magician has knowledge of how to do something, but misdirects the audience into believing that the fix has something to do with the performance. If a computer technician gets you to believe that you need to execute a complex ancient dance that takes years to master, you will then never be able to attempt to fix your computer. If you spend years learning the dance, you have just wasted your time. In context to the state, laws are spells. Only politicians have the means of casting them. The political process is to give people the illusion of control.

I think it is a possible explanation for the behavior, but like you said in your post, we ought to be careful in applying evolutionary theory to humans. I attempt to mostly talk about the subject mostly in terms of non-human animals or ancient humans. It is very difficult to not apply the concepts to modern humans. In regard to your response, what I find interesting is that the mother wants to take care of the child when there are orphanages around. If having a child while single is a behavior caused by the urge to reproduce, then the perceived risk of having an orphanage take care of their child seems to be too high. To me at least, it kind of says that there are other factors at work, likely being social. I actually have not read those books. I might check them out at some point. I have quite the reading list.

To expand upon this, both sexes have this preference, but the male is usually more capable of achieving this result. Evolutionarily, if the offspring is capable of surviving with a single parent and they know that the other will take care of the offspring, both the mother and the father have an incentive to take off and produce more offspring. It is common for mothers to trick males into helping offspring which are not his. Females will often take advantage of this when partnership is common, as it is likely the male will commit. Similarly, there are certain birds which will lay their eggs in another bird's nest, and that bird will then be tricked into taking care of the offspring. The commitment is in raising the offspring, which no organism prefers to do, but it tends to be the female that has to for various reasons. In humans, these reasons are multiplied.

When partnership is on the rise, it becomes more advantageous for females to sleep around and this behavior increases. When sleeping around begins to take over, partnership then becomes advantageous, and this becomes the norm. There isn't a single state reached in this model, rather it is like a pendulum that goes back and forth between opposing ends. Though the study doesn't really address this, it is important in understanding that sexual behavior at any given time will be between to extremes. This reply on the page voices my confusion about this article better than I can. The reasons people come up with are not exactly relevant to the theory. Even if they were, there are large issues in identifying sexual motivations through questionnaire granted four billion years of evolution. There are many studies which demonstrate that people just make up reasons for their answers, and with sexual attraction being a highly evolved and rather unconscious activity, the propensity to make up answers is far higher. With that said, I am not doubting the results of the study, but I am doubting the supposed refutation it is supposed to have made.

So much confusion in this topic comes from the history of philosophy, where philosophers attempted to address everything. Many philosophical roles are now specialized disciplines, such as: physics, biology, psychology, mathematics, and so on. As Stefan argues, morality is the only specialization philosophy has anymore. I believe the basis of epistemology and non-empirical reasoning can still be considered philosophical topics, as they are not really scientific.

I am on Juggernaut FitnessTV's novice program, and I've found that lifting heavy comes with a lot more benefits in terms of stress, proprioception, sleep, and energy. Becoming stronger is also quite nice.

Looking at academic philosophy within the last 100 to 200 years, it is certainly true. Too many unimportant focuses and questions that scientists don't care about.

The conscious mind tends to refer to your own awareness and self generated action, while the unconscious refers to everything else. Consciously, you play a very small role into your everyday process, and there tends to be a great intermixing between conscious and unconscious. The distinction between the two is arbitrary in many circumstances, but is needed in instances where there thoughts and actions fit such a dichotomy. I have argued in other posts on the board that a large part of self knowledge is identifying who you are in context to your psychology through identifying unconscious elements.

To clarify, when you speak of variance, do you mean probability of mutations? As far as genetic shuffling goes, the amount of sperm or eggs produced does not matter. But in terms of mutation, it may be valid to say that sperm contribute more to mutation according to some studies. Provided this is true to some extent, it wouldn't imply that sperm are more valuable, as the mutation is likely to have no effect or a negative effect. Positive mutations do occur, but they would have to occur at a far higher rate in order to increase the value of sperm. I suppose the argument could be made that the increase mutation rate in sperm could play a role in certain circumstances of species survival. If sperm mutation was dominate in an insect species and pesticide was being used on them, it would be more likely for the sperm to contribute to resistance to the pesticide as opposed to the egg. Again, this would not imply that sperm is more valuable, as value is a different concept the above posters explain.

This theory is not inline with the evolutionary theory. A great book to look at is The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, as it contains an explanation of gender and sex cell in regards to evolution.

It has been a while since working on this paper, and something I'm struggling with is a balance between density and fluff. It is like if you over explain an idea: people get the impression you think they are an idiot, and if you under explain: people have a hard time understanding what you are saying. I hope that part of the confusion is in the loss of context, as I am quoting a passage from about 50 pages which I intended to build on itself. Anyway, I am attempting to avoid another wall of text, so I apologize if this response isn't sufficient. To address your question, I use this terminology to avoid complications with making claims about if reality is one thing or not, and to provide a precursor to the role of independence in relation to sensation, perception, and consciousness. A question in terms of perception is how it is capable of differentiating between existents, when a purely sensory based experience is incapable of any distinction. With perception: we can look at a painting and perceive all of the entities it contains, but with pure sensation: we receive all the same data but have no ability to see it as anything but one thing. Though I tried to avoid this, to quote myself "Perception is the means by which an organism identifies aspects of reality through an analysis of sense data,‭ ‬and identifies existents which operate in a manner that is independent enough to be isolated from the rest of reality.‭ ‬The objects which perception identifies are entities. ‭ ‬A perceiving organism identifies part of reality as separate from all other entities,‭ ‬observes its nature as if it were a separate from all else,‭ ‬and ascribes the perceived nature to the entity. ‭ ‬Imagine a pixelated frame,‭ ‬in which all is green.‭ ‬A‭ ‬5x1‭ ‬block of the color red appears from the right,‭ ‬crosses the screen,‭ ‬and exits on the lower left.‭ ‬A purely sensational experience of this would only be capable of describing the colors or the entire whole, the notion of a red block and a green background would not exist.‭ ‬A perceptual experience would identify the red block as something that acts separately from the green background‭ ‬according to measured independence, that is that the green pixels do not move in relation to the block, and each bit of the 5x1 block moves in relation to every other bit of the block. ‭ Perception breaks up the sense data into segments,‭ ‬and does so according to causality and measured independence.‭ ‬Independence is measured in a manner that is similar to that of physics,‭ ‬which is to say that different segments of reality are compared to see if they are correlated or not.‭ ‬Segments whose correlation is minimal,‭ ‬which is to say not causal enough to be significant,‭ ‬can be seen as acting independent from the rest of all other segments. ‭ ‬Though this description sounds sufficiently complex,‭ ‬it is a basic task your brain performs every day.‭ ‬Imagine watching a somewhat minimalist animated movie.‭ ‬In identifying sense data that you can’t make sense of,‭ ‬you observe any relation the data has to everything else.‭ ‬If it has some relation,‭ ‬such as a fuzzy ball that stays in position above a person’s head,‭ ‬it is then possible to identify the data as hair.‭ ‬If it has no relation,‭ ‬further inspection is taken in seeing what affect the data has on other data.‭ ‬It may be seen that the character puts his hand on the object,‭ ‬and then runs his hand through his hair after,‭ ‬which might indicate that the object is a can of gel." It is also a rebuttal/clarification to the idea that an existent's properties and behaviors are dependent on the rest of reality, with the existent having no role in its own behavior. This has large ties to free will which I discuss later in the book. A common argument against free will is to talk about your behavior in terms of everything else in reality, as if your own internal mechanisms are irrelevant, but this I won't get into as it is against board rules. Not quite in relation to my intention, and I take responsibility to this. Hopefully the above clarifies some stuff. I've found this subject material to be extremely difficult to think about and even worse to convey. If you'd be interested in a draft of this, I could tidy some stuff up and PM it to you. If not, that is fine. The vacuum is a thing, strangely enough. Here is a podcast that goes into it, and it is an interesting listen even if you are an avid amatuer physics geek like me. Also there is nothing outside the bounds of the universe as current data suggests that there are no boundaries in our universe, that there is no edge. This sounds confusing, just as when we hear that the universe is expanding we first ask "what is it expanding into", to which the answer is that it isn't expanding into anything, rather parts are just getting further and further from each other. I would say you are making sense, but that it is difficult to make sense of the answers as they are not intuitive. I am not at all an expert, just spent a lot of time listening to lectures and reading books, so what I am saying in this regard is somewhat regurgitation with a moderate amount of understanding.

Not a problem. There is an instinctual bias as to how we think things are, as opposed to how they are. It is difficult for people to disconnect from this, which leads them to dismissing ideas that seem to contradict how they believe things are. The best example of this is special relativity where time dilation and length contraction occurs. There have been many posts on this board that talk about how it is an idiotic theory and has no basis in reality, despite it being confirmed over and over and it being incorporated into modern electronics. I believe it is best to assume that reality is beyond strange, and physics confirms this over and over again. You are correct that reality is a high level concept, at least how we view it now, though a distinction that becomes confusing is if the parts we see are actually not segmented and rather part of a large whole. This technical point really does not matter as far as organizing our knowledge of the universe, as that will most certainly be in parts, but reality might not have any parts and just be one thing. To put it this way, is the universe the result of separate fundamental particles each interacting to create to larger whole; or does the larger whole appear to be broken up due to its concentrations of certain properties and certain areas, when rather it is all connected? Below is some writing I did on the subject for a book I was writing. I included the first bit on reality just for some context. There may be some typos and such as it is a WIP.

It isn't something I really understand as of yet, but it is a mathematical implication of the curvature of our universe. Unfortunately, it isn't one of those things that can be understood without being able to understand the math. To some this may sound like a cop out, but it is completely true, as there are few analogies that will get across the mathematical implications of 4 dimensional space. There is a similar issue with quantum mechanics, but it is worse. I found quantum mechanics far less confusing with the math as it explained a lot. I am a bit weak in this area at the moment. I used to read a lot about this topic and understood it on a somewhat amateur level, but it has been a while. Below are some resources I found. At least according to wiki, an infinite flat unbounded universe seems to be best indicated by the data. This essentially means that there is no edge to the universe and that you can travel in one direction forever without reaching the same point again. It could be the case that one direction has a bound, while others do not. This all likely sounds rather perplexing as how can something be infinite? I have lesser issue with that question and a more difficult time with the question of why anything exists at all. Not sure why, but it feels like non-existence would be more likely. To be clear, I have no qualm philosophically with existence existing, it is just the strange stupor the topic puts my mind in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/finite-yet-unbounded/

Samuel, there are contradictory physical theories as to space being infinite. I consume a lot of physics lectures and most of what I have heard is that it is unknown if space is infinite or not. There are some models that suggest it is, while others that do not. There are some on both sides who state each case as if it is fact. I know this is an appeal to authority and perhaps you have some expertise I do not have, but I feel uncomfortable with your claim. I have heard that the universe is finite yet unbounded, does that fit into the theory in your post? I have heard that claim challenged as well, but I know it is pretty well accepted.

Oh, I can certainly agree it is an amazing theory to think about. What I find fascinating is that not only will Hamlet be written is such a circumstance, but Hamot will be as well. If that isn't clear, the entire book of Hamlet will be written, but with the name and title all being replaced with Hamlot. The same is true for the name Bob, and Megan, and so on. Really, there will be any and every combination of spelling mistake possible with various instances of the book. The question I have to consider is that if we actually ran this experiment, and ended up with the entire book of Hamlet, except the word "the" misspelled "thr" on page 45, would we consider that a success?

I have a difficult time understanding the mentality some of the commenters on that article have in regard to the rape in the show. It seems like they believe they put it in because men like it? There are certainly a small minority of people who might, but the rape scenes are meant to make people feel very uncomfortable. It is in some way a cheap method of making someone a villain with no redeeming qualities, and also a method to be edgy, but it isn't a method to turn people on. Reminds me of a Thunderfoot video where he talks about a part in a game where you save a bunch of girls from a prostitution ring, and how the feminist perspective was that this was diminishing female sexuality and promoting females as objects. Quite the opposite as the message is "this shit is wrong hence why you are using force to stop it".

I still have painful thoughts about a cat of mine dying. Loved that cat. It is really just so sad when they get into the upper age range, worse when it is something like cancer. Really sorry for your loss, it must difficult to deal with. Hope you feel better.

The idea is true mathematically, there is no controversy there. With enough time, a random text generator will come up with Shakespeare. Where the question hits a bit of a wall is the uncertainty in the applicability of time. For instance, the concept of time breaks down at the big bang, and describing anything in terms of time may not even make sense. To put it this way, time may not have existed until after the big bang. To go further with this, time may cease to be if the universe ends. Nobody really knows how it will end or what will happen exactly, but it is possible that the concept of time will break down. To go further, if the universe continues to expand, it may inhibit any possibilities of random text generators of working. If there are multi-universes, what if the universe with these particular laws is only created once, as is every other universe with its own laws? There still could be an infinity of universes, but only one universe with these particular laws. The topic becomes a bit confusing when thinking about it practically because there is a lot we don't know. The idea works if we assume all remains constant, but that may not end up being true. Worse, there is no real understanding of time, which disallows any real prediction as to the real world viability of these ideas as predictions are based on time. I find the idea to be rather cool and perhaps applicable, but I have no idea if it is. I listed some reasons why it may not be applicable, but it isn't really something we can say (as of now) is true or not practically. Assuming everything is the same, we can certainly say it is true.

Ah, the part about pesticides makes a lot of sense as B12 is produced almost exclusively from bacteria, and pesticides would decrease that. B12 isn't really a big deal anyway as it is one of the few supplements that works.

This question is impossible to address without defining the measurements through which the concept can be identified in reality. As the song asks, what is love? To theorize on the fly, I would argue that love pertains to conscious action and conscious motive. To same you love someone is not a comment about their body, about positive natural traits which they had no choice in developing, yet rather the aspects of a person which are consciously generated. Love is a connection from one ego to another, as opposed to the more untethered ends of unconscious attraction. Love is connected to happiness, at least how I define happiness, which is the correlation of the psychological self and the person's actions. Someone who wishes to act a particular way, but is unable to attain such a state in reality, is likely to not be happy as they have no ability to manifest into the real world. The self in such a context is like someone in a committee who makes suggestions, but has no influence over the body. To quote a post I made in the past: To connect this idea more fully to the initial claim in regard to love, since love pertains to the relation of a person's self to their actions, love essentially is the admirement of a person's happiness, ie: the ability for a person to choose their actions. To put another way, you cannot love the self that has no relation to reality. To continue on with this, those who consciously have little to no control over their life can be dangerous or wastes of time as there is little to suggest that their word and their desire will hold and precedent over the momentum of the past. You cannot trust someone if they cannot trust themselves. To measure if two people love each other, you would essentially measure each person's virtue in conjunction with their relationship. What this means in real terms is measuring the relation of their reason and values in a general context, and in a context specific to the relationship. I can go on or expand if anyone desires it. Not sure if I am over explaining or under explaining certain ideas. If anyone is confused about the whole part about "self" or "ego", I wrote up a post about it here.

I think people ought to tip 15-20% if the service was good. Less or none at all if it was terrible. The percentage does depend on the laws, as in Canada servers are paid a higher wage, which causes the tip range to be 5-10%. Something to consider is that the server's wage is always paid for by the consumer, either directly through tipping, or indirectly through the purchase of food. People tend to focus on the fact that the restaurant pays their servers so little, but this isn't actually true as whether the compensation is coming directly from the customer or indirectly from the restaurant does not matter. If tips were banned and a server were to make the same amount of money in wages as tips, the price of food would increase, meaning the same amount of money would continue to come from the consumer. One reason for tipping is that it allows restaurants to advertise 10-20% lower prices, while expecting customers to pay the actual price for food an service. A restaurant that banned tipping and continued to pay their servers the same would simply increase their food prices by 10-20%, the customer would still be paying the tip, but indirectly. There are some minor nuisances to this, such as the fluctuations in tip percentage per meal being different than the static price increase per meal, but whatever. This explanation is a bit repetitive because it isn't something people understand very well, if everyone stopped tipping and wanted servers wages to remain constant, what you would have paid for voluntarily through tip is now mandatory through price. Realistically, you'd likely pay a little less. Servers tend to focus a little much on the instances where they were tipped little or not at all than all the instances they were tipped the average or more. This thought pattern is normal psychologically, but is not exactly rational.

There is more complexity to the industry than this generalization. Like I argued in a previous post, the porn industry in the past was pretty wretched, but has improved greatly since the popularity of amateur productions and particular companies that arose to address the issues. It is not to say that there are still not issues with certain distributors, but the consumer now has a choice as to whether they will support companies which employ incredibly shady business practices who only hire emotional wrecks, or those who have a strong interest in the well-being on their employees. If we are to discuss porn as a concept, that is the filming or photography of a person or people in sexual contexts (excluding written material for obvious reasons), then in order to determine the aesthetic ethics of the concept, it is vital to examine the instances which contain the least amount of baggage. This is to say that speaking about the worst practices and experiences within a subset of the industry ought not to be the focus, as what is then being measured is not the concept of porn, but the concept of aesthetically unethical and completely unethical business practices. To make an analogy, in the discussion of the free market, it is not helpful to focus on the unethical business practices that occur in China in assessing the free market, yet rather it is best to look at instances of semi to completely voluntary trade. Some instances to consider are those who masturbate at home and upload it to the internet for free. Many couples will film themselves having sex and upload it to the internet. Some actually start their own business from this. Some will do webcam shows and receive tips, which can amount to a decent amount of money. There is no industry involved and it is difficult to imply necessary psychological issues. It is obviously not the same as wanting to have sex in public or wanting to have strangers watch you masturbate in person. A step beyond this are companies where a couple wants to have sex in front of a production crew in exchange for money. Typically they want to do something interesting and out of their comfort zone and the money is an added benefit. Another example of this are single people who will masturbate in exchange for money at a production studio. I have no intention to attribute motives or reasons for why people do this, but I would claim that for most that this behavior is not unhealthy, which is to say that this is not a broken past throwing someone into abusive situations, as there is no abuse in these contexts. Certainly I can contrive scenarios where it would be someone repeating their history in these instances, but that is likely a minority, and such an issue if found in every industry. The question I would pose is, is there anything wrong with the above instances? If a girl or guy uploads a videos of themselves masturbating to fill the vain need of physical affirmation, would you not be empathizing with them by masturbating to it?