(May 16, 2025 at 6:32 am)Alan V Wrote: If someone repeatedly uses strawmen in their arguments, they are dishonest. 

Exactly, spot on. 

Quote:Belacqua
Not long ago I was insisting that the Democrats share some of the blame for the outcome of the last election, and for this I was accused of wanting to legitimize political lies. And of course you have been called a liar on this thread, due to your stubborn refusal to agree to certain details about how children learn. You are sinning against Truth!

Quote:Your pattern of insisting on false equivalencies is what several of us objected to.  I believe liberal forum members have always said Democrats aren't perfect, or are only adequate.  However, when the house is on fire you set other priorities.  Compare Democrats to someone who lied 30,000 times and is undermining our democratic institutions, and to those who support such a person, and you will understand why we think you are trying to pull a fast one.

Which again looks suspiciously like a straw man, misrepresenting those objections. 

Quote:It is very alarming for us to hear someone say that there is no such thing as effective propaganda, when two-thirds of Republicans were convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Especially when you eventually find out that person has yet another arbitrary definition of the word, that differs from common usage. Constantly contradicting or denying the dictionary is hardly what I would describe as honest behaviour. The old "atheism is a belief" claim is a prime example of exactly such mendacity.

Quote:So you've probably heard of the criticism that Sesame Street, while intended to help children learn to read, actually damaged their ability. The producer's plan was to make it fun to learn reading by making the letters dance and sing and tell jokes. But of course actual reading requires a kind of sustained attention to letters that DON'T dance or sing, so kids raised on Sesame Street found it too boring to read a page of text. 

The evidence of that is scant at best and contracted  directly at worst by evidence 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...7313000026

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8771937/se...es-smarter

Quote:Then there are the criticisms that superhero movies have a fascist message hidden behind the charm of the hero's personalities. (Only the ubermensch can save us.) Or of course the constant message in US media that the hero is the person who makes the most effective use of violence. This teaches us something

That's not remotely the message of superhero movies at all you just don't get the genre 

Nowhere does the movie remotely teach us that only the powerful can save us. In fact, it teaches the opposite throughout the whole MCU and DC and most definitely the comics we that superheroes are flawed and foilable beings who have many of the weaknesses we have. What makes them heroes is not them having powers or just being better than us. What makes them heroes is what makes them like us. Steve Rogers was a good person before the super-solider serum. Tony Stark was an amoral womanizing  prick till he got a taste of  humility and sought to redeem himself. As for your nonesense about violence, no heroes are heroes because restrain on using violence. There are countless instances where they could have just killed the villain and made things easier or committed, regardless of cost. They didn't though, and they often give the villain more than enough chances to give up, so this statement is simply false.

(May 16, 2025 at 8:04 am)Belacqua Wrote: The finding that adolescents actually suppress (if that's the right word) memory in order to explore the world more widely makes a lot of sense to me. Certainly I became more exploratory at that age (my parents would use a different adjective). And it fits nicely with what we've been saying about the dynamic nature of people's beliefs. It appears to be natural -- almost biologically demonstrable -- for people of that age to move away from the ideas they had taken for granted in childhood. Which works against the theory that children brainwashed as toddlers will be unable to deviate from their indoctrination later on. 

Yes, exactly. So, think of a schema as your general knowledge about scenes and events. And then distinguish this from your specific memories of having been in those scenes and events. You can both describe what houses look like as a category and also remember what your particular house looks like. And so, these two things are always in tension, but that tension is different depending on your age. Children are just trying to get their foot in the door, beginning to form schemas and memories. But in adolescence, your brain starts to suppress those schemas. In other words, it's allowing the brain to explore more freely and gather as much unfiltered information as possible. And then once we reach adulthood, we begin re-developing the connection between our schemas and our memories, optimizing the two.

This is also interesting in light of this conversation because we wouldn't survey 12-year-olds on the nature of the universe and take their answers as meaningful—but internally, that's what we do. Adolescence, not childhood, is when we first start forming and testing our own beliefs. And by early adulthood, we solidify our teenage beliefs. You are more likely to hear that someone questioned their religion as a 12 year old than a 40 year old, for example.

As to the Sesame Street kerfuffle. My oldest two watched it all the time. The youngest wasn't so interested. I also read nightly to all three kids. Sesame Street really can't be blamed for kids not learning to read without bouncing letters.

The most important thing to boost reading comprehension and interest is to read to your damn kids.

I had started reading to my oldest when she was quite small. When baby number two came along four years later I would have child one hold the book while I fed the baby. I would read and tell her when to turn the page till she knew well enough on her own. So both were, in essence, being read to. I read to my son every night till he was about ten years old. He happened to like more advanced books and we read the Hobbit, the uncensored Tom Sawyer, and the Chronicles of Narnia...after reading the Little Critter books about a bazillion times.

If you plop your child in front of SS and figure they will learn to read and do nothing else it's probably not going to work. You use all the tools you have and adapt to the abilities and interests of each child.

It's humorous to watch two idjits who haven't raised kids discuss how it should be done.

(May 16, 2025 at 8:08 am)Sheldon Wrote:

(May 16, 2025 at 5:38 am)h4ym4n Wrote: Good people?

If you are in a gang and your gang leader tortures people for not believing it exists and the good people ignore what it’s doing still makes the good people culpable.

Think of all those good xian Germans who just let their gang leader slaughter millions 


Good people my ass

Whilst this doesn't directly relate the the thread question, it is a valid point, if anyone was able to objectively demonstrate that the deity in the bible was real, I'd have to accept it, but I'd be horrified, and want nothing to do with it. How can people who would otherwise revile acts like genocide, infanticide, endorsing slavery and ethnics cleansing, and sex trafficking prisoners, worship a deity, and revere a book where that deity is depicted doing all those things, and more.

Easy: cherry-picking. My mom an sister aren't evil, but they're selective about which books they read.

(May 16, 2025 at 8:11 am)Belacqua Wrote: This is not exactly subliminal or subconscious, because once it's pointed out it's obvious. But I do think that a lot of people absorb the subtext in an uncritical way.

These are interesting examples. I think the first thing I would point out is that both of your examples are occurring within conscious experience. The child is consciously attending to the dancing letters; the issue is that they are learning something different than what the producers intended. The second is similar in that people are consciously processing the superhero stories. But in this case, you are highlighting something interesting about stories themselves, which is that they serve as analogies and metaphors, which helps guide behavior and persuade people, but it has to happen consciously. So, a person isn't going to read Animal Farm and come to any conclusions about totalitarian regimes, unless they know about and live in a totalitarian regime and makes a conscious connection between the two, otherwise animal fam is just about farm animals.

An example of unconscious processing in psychology is something like blindsight where the person is fully blind, or at least consciously blind, but can still navigate a space somewhat effectively. But you can still physically trace the movement of information from the retina to connections in areas of the brain that are outside direct conscious experience.

One of the benefits of this thread is to see Johnny be so wrong all the time, lying, doing, running scared from the scrolls that undo his entire life ethos.

The gift that keeps on giving.

@John:

This is rather off-topic, but I'm curious what your views on free will are?

(May 16, 2025 at 9:15 am)The Architect Of Fate Wrote: That's not remotely the message of superhero movies at all you just don't get the genre 

Nowhere does the movie remotely teach us that only the powerful can save us.

To me superhero movies seem a lot like professional wrestling: superheroes fighting super-villains, but with special effects.

I enjoy them anyway. Taking them too seriously misses the point altogether.

Come to think of it, superhero movies are very similar to religions too: superheroes fighting super-villains.