Atheism isn't a worldview, but

[The Grand Nudger]

It isn't dedication that I criticize Fred, it's the object of that dedication, and the effects thereof (on oneself, and the rest of us). So go back to the drawing board.

[Fred]

It isn't dedication that I criticize Fred, it's the object of that dedication, and the effects thereof (on oneself, and the rest of us). So go back to the drawing board.

Heh. You seem to be able to criticize it in every way but actually addressing any of it. Still haven't heard what the problem was with the universal bit you got stuck on.

Do you really believe that the relativists didn't freak out all over that? You ever heard the story about the IQ cap that could determine someone's IQ with just a quick brain scan of some sort? Wholly objective, no question bias, none of the usual stuff that gets hurled at testing. Just an objective measurement and viola.

How would you react to such a device? How do you think they would react?

[The Grand Nudger]

If the proposed mechanism is sound, if they can back up their findings, and if others can use the same methods to reach the same conclusions, then what problem would I have with it Fred?

Link it.

(and don't even try to pull some sensational headlines bullshit like you did before, this shit better be rock solid, because you know I'm going to check it out)

[Fred]

If the proposed mechanism is sound, if they can back up their findings, and if others can use the same methods to reach the same conclusions, then what problem would I have with it Fred?

That's just it. You wouldn't have a problem, because it makes eminent sense from a rational pov, and I would agree with you. But not everybody sees it the way you and I do, because I agree with you all the way. (Twice in one day, R. That's gotta suck, huh?)

Link it.

http://orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe...t-Died.php

You would probably find another article in this Wolfe collection interesting if you were to actually read it, lots of stuff on EO Wilson and his ants, and the raft of shit he took when Sociobiology came out. The relativist wing did as much as they could to turn his name to shit.

Here's the pertinent part re the IQ Cap:

Even more radio–active is the matter of intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. Privately—not many care to speak out—the vast majority of neuroscientists believe the genetic component of an individual's intelligence is remarkably high. Your intelligence can be improved upon, by skilled and devoted mentors, or it can be held back by a poor upbringing—i.e., the negative can be well developed or poorly developed—but your genes are what really make the difference. The recent ruckus over Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve is probably just the beginning of the bitterness the subject is going to create.

Not long ago, according to two neuroscientists I interviewed, a firm called Neurometrics sought out investors and tried to market an amazing but simple invention known as the IQ Cap. The idea was to provide a way of testing intelligence that would be free of "cultural bias," one that would not force anyone to deal with words or concepts that might be familiar to people from one culture but not to people from another. The IQ Cap recorded only brain waves; and a computer, not a potentially biased human test–giver, analyzed the results. It was based on the work of neuroscientists such as E. Roy John 1, who is now one of the major pioneers of electroencephalographic brain imaging; Duilio Giannitrapani, author of The Electrophysiology of Intellectual Functions; and David Robinson, author of The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Personality Assessment: Toward a Biologically Based Theory of Intelligence and Cognition and many other monographs famous among neuroscientists. I spoke to one researcher who had devised an IQ Cap himself by replicating an experiment described by Giannitrapani in The Electrophysiology of Intellectual Functions. It was not a complicated process. You attached sixteen electrodes to the scalp of the person you wanted to test. You had to muss up his hair a little, but you didn't have to cut it, much less shave it. Then you had him stare at a marker on a blank wall. This particular researcher used a raspberry–red thumbtack. Then you pushed a toggle switch. In sixteen seconds the Cap's computer box gave you an accurate prediction (within one–half of a standard deviation) of what the subject would score on all eleven subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or, in the case of children, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—all from sixteen seconds' worth of brain waves. There was nothing culturally biased about the test whatsoever. What could be cultural about staring at a thumbtack on a wall? The savings in time and money were breathtaking. The conventional IQ test took two hours to complete; and the overhead, in terms of paying test–givers, test–scorers, test–preparers, and the rent, was $100 an hour at the very least. The IQ Cap required about fifteen minutes and sixteen seconds—it took about fifteen minutes to put the electrodes on the scalp—and about a tenth of a penny's worth of electricity. Neurometrics's investors were rubbing their hands and licking their chops. They were about to make a killing.

In fact—nobody wanted their damnable IQ Cap!

It wasn't simply that no one believed you could derive IQ scores from brainwaves—it was that nobody wanted to believe it could be done. Nobody wanted to believe that human brainpower is...that hardwired. Nobody wanted to learn in a flash that...the genetic fix is in. Nobody wanted to learn that he was...a hardwired genetic mediocrity...and that the best he could hope for in this Trough of Mortal Error was to live out his mediocre life as a stress–free dim bulb. Barry Sterman of UCLA, chief scientist for a firm called Cognitive Neurometrics, who has devised his own brain–wave technology for market research and focus groups, regards brain–wave IQ testing as possible—but in the current atmosphere you "wouldn't have a Chinaman's chance of getting a grant" to develop it.

[The Grand Nudger]

So, an article in Othodoxy Today (articles examining contemporary social and cultural issues primarily from an Orthodox Christian viewpoint) instead of a peer reviewed paper. NP, I'll look passed that. The strange thing is that in attempting to google this device, Mr. Wolfe's article seems to be the only hit at all, bar a few forum posts lumping it in with 100 mile carburetors and e-meters. The only links I can find to this return a 404. The term "Nuerometrics" does not give a hit on a wiki page either. The ambiguity of "I spoke to one researcher who had devised an IQ Cap himself" isn't helping. I'm very willing at this point to decide that your IQ cap doesn't exist, since the only reference found to it is from a journalist in a book of mixed fiction/non-fiction. Surely you have something of substance? Right now it looks like Mr. Wolfe got hoaxed (and yourself as well).

http://www.brainmachines.com/body_wolf.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wolfe
http://www.neurometrics.com/
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=ch...00&bih=795

[Fred]

The strange thing is that in attempting to google this device, Mr. Wolfe's article seems to be the only hit at all, bar a few forum posts lumping it in with 100 mile carburetors and e-meters. The only links I can find to this return a 404. The term "Nuerometrics" does not give a hit on a wiki page either. The ambiguity of "I spoke to one researcher who had devised an IQ Cap himself" isn't helping. I'm very willing at this point to decide that your IQ cap doesn't exist, since the only reference found to it is from a journalist in a book of mixed fiction/non-fiction. Surely you have something of substance? Right now it looks like Mr. Wolfe got hoaxed (and yourself as well).

Fine. Let's say he made the whole thing up, a charge I've never heard leveled against him on any score, but we'll posit it anyway. Did he make this up, too?

"But that turned out to be mild stuff in the current political panic over neuroscience. In February of 1992, Frederick K. Goodwin, a renowned psychiatrist, head of the federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, and a certified yokel in the field of public relations, made the mistake of describing, at a public meeting in Washington, the National Institute of Mental Health's ten–year–old Violence Initiative. This was an experimental program whose hypothesis was that, as among monkeys in the jungle—Goodwin was noted for his monkey studies—much of the criminal mayhem in the United States was caused by a relatively few young males who were genetically predisposed to it; who were hardwired for violent crime, in short. Out in the jungle, among mankind's closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees, it seemed that a handful of genetically twisted young males were the ones who committed practically all of the wanton murders of other males and the physical abuse of females. What if the same were true among human beings? What if, in any given community, it turned out to be a handful of young males with toxic DNA who were pushing statistics for violent crime up to such high levels? The Violence Initiative envisioned identifying these individuals in childhood, somehow, some way, someday, and treating them therapeutically with drugs. The notion that crime–ridden urban America was a "jungle," said Goodwin, was perhaps more than just a tired old metaphor.

That did it. That may have been the stupidest single word uttered by an American public official in the year 1992. The outcry was immediate. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative John Dingell of Michigan (who, it became obvious later, suffered from hydrophobia when it came to science projects) not only condemned Goodwin's remarks as racist but also delivered their scientific verdict: Research among primates "is a preposterous basis" for analyzing anything as complex as "the crime and violence that plagues our country today." (This came as surprising news to NASA scientists who had first trained and sent a chimpanzee called Ham up on top of a Redstone rocket into suborbital space flight and then trained and sent another one, called Enos, which is Greek for "man," up on an Atlas rocket and around the earth in orbital space flight and had thereby accurately and completely predicted the physical, psychological, and task–motor responses of the human astronauts, Alan Shepard and John Glenn, who repeated the chimpanzees' flights and tasks months later.) The Violence Initiative was compared to Nazi eugenic proposals for the extermination of undesirables. Dingell's Michigan colleague, Representative John Conyers, then chairman of the Government Operations Committee and senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, demanded Goodwin's resignation—and got it two days later, whereupon the government, with the Department of Health and Human Services now doing the talking, denied that the Violence Initiative had ever existed. It disappeared down the memory hole, to use Orwell's term.

A conference of criminologists and other academics interested in the neuroscientific studies done so far for the Violence Initiative—a conference underwritten in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health—had been scheduled for May of 1993 at the University of Maryland. Down went the conference, too; the NIH drowned it like a kitten. Last year, a University of Maryland legal scholar named David Wasserman tried to reassemble the troops on the QT, as it were, in a hall all but hidden from human purview in a hamlet called Queenstown in the foggy, boggy boondocks of Queen Annes County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The NIH, proving it was a hard learner, quietly provided $133,000 for the event but only after Wasserman promised to fireproof the proceedings by also inviting scholars who rejected the notion of a possible genetic genesis of crime and scheduling a cold–shower session dwelling on the evils of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. No use, boys! An army of protesters found the poor cringing devils anyway and stormed into the auditorium chanting, "Maryland conference, you can't hide—we know you're pushing genocide!" It took two hours for them to get bored enough to leave, and the conference ended in a complete muddle with the specially recruited fireproofing PC faction issuing a statement that said: "Scientists as well as historians and sociologists must not allow themselves to provide academic respectability for racist pseudoscience." Today, at the NIH, the term Violence Initiative is a synonym for taboo. The present moment resembles that moment in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church forbade the dissection of human bodies, for fear that what was discovered inside might cast doubt on the Christian doctrine that God created man in his own image.

[The Grand Nudger]

I said he got hoaxed. I told you I'd check up on that (which you should have done before you offered it up as part of your overall sage wisdom). So, on to the next bit. I read it, I'm not surprised at the reaction. What is it you think this elucidates? We don't punish people for a "propensity to commit violence" Fred. We wait until they actually do. The ways in which such an initiative might be subverted for "less than ok" purposes are near endless. If the correlation is there, it's there, but that's not how our legal system is set up currently is it? Ever read any Philip K. Dick?

[Fred]

I said he got hoaxed. I told you I'd check up on that (which you should have done before you offered it up as part of your overall sage wisdom).

So you did, and so you are now seemingly convinced. But based on what? A wiki link to him, a google search where you didn't even spell his name right, a company webpage, and another google search? Uh, I know we have different standards, but that's supposed to show this he has been hoaxed? Odd, one of the most famous journalists of our time gets hoaxed on a hot button issue, I'm guessing it would not be hard to find a reference to such an event, but looks like you haven't. So, yeah, I guess that's good ground to safely assume it's all made up.

So, on to the next bit. I read it, I'm not surprised at the reaction. What is it you think this elucidates?

The resistance that sprung up against the rationalist pov. You know, part of the topic of the thread. Crazy, huh?

So far, it seems like you disagree as a default, but I'm still confused as to what specific part you find out of spec. I've asked you twice what you disagree with re the universal bit, but you haven't said. As to the rest, I don't know what the problem is with that, either, as it seems like you are arguing against the existence or validity of developmental psych or something, but again, I don't know what the sticking point is.

[The Grand Nudger]

Dont get pissy just because your little helmet turned out to be made of thin air. You should have checked it out yourself. One would expect the internet to contain mention of this device, somewhere, anywhere, that doesn't lead back to his article. It does not. Deal with it. (you know you can find technical specs for the Millennium Falcon online right? So, a fictional starship, but not your little gadget. Spare me.)

Moving forward, the reaction to this sort of proposal has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not one believes in fairy tales or science. As I have already pointed out, it has to do with our societies reactions to being presumed guilty before you have committed a crime. Pick up Minority Report by Philip K. Dick and take a look at this issue again. People are divided, but not along your arbitrary lines. I'm not arguing against science, I'm arguing against the conclusions you draw from it without being able to offer up much more than "because that's the way I say it is". Exemplified in the case of the magic helmet above. Let me illustrate how this looks from the outside.

Step 1: Swallow the Kool-Aid
Step 2: Find some dubious source that you think people will accept at face value
Step 3: Make conclusions based upon the Kool-Aid and your "source"
Step 4: Complain that no one else will swallow the Kool-Aid
Step 5: Make a new thread.

[Epimethean]

So we should accept a bunch of cockamamie garbage dreamed up by inventors BEFORE such things can be vetted through proper channels, and this has what benefit on science? Science fiction is great stuff-and some of it does affect the directions science takes, but let's call a duck a duck here, and I see quackery in boldface.