What makes a spanko?

The old saying, "Lies, Lies and Statistics."

It is generally agreed that, if you wanted, you could slant statistical analysis numerous ways to get the outcome you want in almost any subject. That's assuming the questions you ask are properly worded and not slanted to the answers you want to get.

I did statistical analysis whilst in the army and quickly came to the conclusion that, to get the real low-down on results published, I wanted to see the raw data and make up my own mind!

It's easy to take the word of 'experts' if we don't want to do the work to get the 'real' answers ourselves and if those who did the study refuse to release the raw data of their research you can pretty much assume there is a lot more 'real' answers they're hiding.

I think the usual version is "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". It's generally attributed to Mark Twain.

"Ad verecundiam" is the Latin language name for the fallacy of taking an authority figure on faith. It is a very dangerous thing to do. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was the man who first identified the fallacy of ad verecundiam. Aristotle was a smart fellow. Unfortunately a lot of people during the centuries after him committed the fallacy of ad verecundiam in regard to the teachings of Aristotle himself. With the result that many innocent errors of knowledge which he made were perpetuated for centuries. Ironic!

Well we are quite solidly in agreement on that

Dead wrong? So where do you think decisions come from, precisely? If determinism is wrong, I'd love to know what the right explanation is. While it is essentially a philosophical concept, it has a lot of roots in biology and biochemistry. And to your last point, logically it makes sense.

(Oh and your last post on Aristotle was wonderful!)

This was an excellent post. People will always have their motives for misrepresenting things. But for me the fault does not lie with the wolf for being a wolf. I have more disdain for the sheep, who knows the wolf is out there, and placidly munches grass obliviously.

George Carlin once said: "Don't just teach your children to read, teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything."

kdpierre

Yes, kdpierre, I insist that determinism is dead wrong. And the alternative to determinism is not only indeterminism (the idea that there is no cause and effect in the universe), which is also dead wrong. The alternative to both determinism and indeterminism is volition - i.e. free will. Free will is not a contradiction of the law of cause and effect. It is a species of cause and effect. All (non-psychotic) human beings have free will - i.e. they have the power of choice. And the cause of their choices is their choosing.

Deterministic causation does however apply to cause and effect in other entities than human beings.

I cannot explain this philosophical point in more detail here since this is not a discussion forum on philosophy.

Wow. Pretty heavy discussion from a spanko site. If those who judge us poorly based on our sexuality were to read this, they might reconsider.

So animals don't have free will and can't make choices?

I fear that this thread has derailed somewhat. My intention was to discuss what makes us spankos and if we have anything driving in common that caused that.

Having said that, I'm not entirely on the boat regarding the discussion on experts. I find that mostly they give pretty sound advise, as well as they can, and in any case our entire society is based on the recommendations of experts. I mean, most of us leave electrical installations to an electrician. An astronaut would rather have a rocket scientist designing the craft than having a go at it himself. No one can at best master more than a handful of scientific fields well enough to give advise, so we all have to rely on the words of the experts and it has secceeded in bringing us quite far from the caves.