Debates that are just stupid.

[Digital Watches]

I don't know if this is uncouth here, so if CK or EE wants to delete it, they're welcome to.

Some debates, either through redundancy or sheer lack of logic, are just getting stupid. This thread is for the purpose of putting out debates that you're entirely tired of and wish would just end. I suppose there's no reason people couldn't argue that a debate mentioned here has merit as well. To be clear, I don't mean debates here necessarily, but in the whole world of politics, ethics, philosophy, wherever debates are to be had.

One that I personally am entirely tired of is the "does life begin at birth or conception?" debate. The premise is entirely flawed, in that one side is arguing completely on the basis of potential. If life begins at conception, and therefore abortion is murder, we'd have to count miscarriage as involuntary manslaughter. In fact, through the same logic, I could argue that life begins at the birth of the female parent, as all eggs are existant in the ovaries at birth. Therefore post-pubescent refusal of unprotected sex for either gender is murder. Unless one party involved is sterile, of course. Birth control is the same. Likewise, murdering someone should count as a mass-murder or killing spree. After all, who's to say how many kids they would have had? Of course, this also doesn't apply to sterile people. That still counts as one murder. See how stupid this is?

 

[Me14k]

Your second paragraph is amazing..Mind if I plagerize it somewhere?

Anyhow..

You are right. You cant argue things like abortion because no one can proof exactly where life starts and the issue is mainly religious.

A thread like this may be interesting.. but im sure it will die in no time due to lack of activity within it.

Personally I think that anti-smoking laws are stupid. It's against people's free will..you need to be regularly exposed to 2nd hand smoke for it to affect you and cigarettes greatly help the economy. (about 50% of hospital business is from smoking patience (great money for already failing hospitals)) and there are millions of people in which work depending on the sucess of the smoking industry.

(I just made a thread)

 

[Xsyven]

Personally I think that anti-smoking laws are stupid. It's against people's free will..you need to be regularly exposed to 2nd hand smoke for it to affect you and cigarettes greatly help the economy. (about 50% of hospital business is from smoking patience (great money for already failing hospitals)) and there are millions of people in which work depending on the sucess of the smoking industry.

(I should make a thread)

Please. Anti-smoking is a bad example of a stupid debate.


It's the debates without fact aren't worth debating, in my book. The "Does God Really Exist?" debate is absolutely ridiculous, seeing that there's no possible way to prove that he does or doesn't, since both are based on theories. I don't even try.

 

[Mediocre]

One of the debates that really gets me aggravated is about whether or not America is a Christian nation. The people who are arguing that it is make some of the dumbest points. No, the Declaration of Independence is not a legal document; it is a piece of propaganda. No, the founding fathers were not Christians (not all of them, anyway), and even if they were, the Constitution they wrote clearly intends for the country to be secular. Yes, the majority of people in the US are Christian, but that doesn't make the nation itself Christian, just as the fact that the majority of people in this nation don't vote doesn't change the fact that the nation itself is a republic.

People make these points over and over, not seeming to realize that they're totally irrelevant.

The "Does God Really Exist?" debate is absolutely ridiculous, seeing that there's no possible way to prove that he does or doesn't, since both are based on theories.

I'm pretty sure you don't understand the meaning of the word "theory." Theories are based on evidence, not entirely speculation.

Neither the argument for or the argument against the existence of God has any sort of evidence behind it, so neither is a theory.

 

[Me14k]

Please. Anti-smoking is a bad example of a stupid debate.


It's the debates without fact aren't worth debating, in my book. The "Does God Really Exist?" debate is absolutely ridiculous, seeing that there's no possible way to prove that he does or doesn't, since both are based on theories. I don't even try.

I guess you are right on smoking..ill make a thread.

And I HATE that thread about god existing..

 

[Xsyven]

I'm pretty sure you don't understand the meaning of the word "theory." Theories are based on evidence, not entirely speculation.

Neither the argument for or the argument against the existence of God has any sort of evidence behind it, so neither is a theory.

Well, I was thinking of the big bang theory, and then the word theory popped into my head, and I didn't want to get too wordy.

Way to pick that out.

 

[AltF4]

Mediocre: While we're in the process of splitting hairs, are you sure you know what a theory is? When you say that theories must be based on evidence, it makes it wound like you're saying there must be evidence in favor of the theory. This isn't necessarily true. A theory is an attempt to explain why observations (evidence) occur. So in this way a theory must have some sort of observation that it is trying to make sense of.

Try avoiding the word "evidence". Instead use "observation". Evidence has a connotation that it is "in favor" of one theory or another, when this is not the case. An observation is merely something that has been seen, heard, smelt, etc... It does not "increase the probability" of one theory or another. Observations can ONLY be used to contradict theories. You cannot ever confirm a theory.

But on topic:

I find almost any debate that ultimately depends on religion to be pointless. This unfortunately encompasses a great number of topics. The debate goes back and forth until inevitably one side declares that they are correct on the basis of a belief that they do not share with the other person. Disagreeing is the only option from that point. Might as well just skip the whole thing. (Which most people do)

 

[Mediocre]

Well, I was thinking of the big bang theory, and then the word theory popped into my head, and I didn't want to get too wordy.

Way to pick that out.

Sorry, I phrased that more confrontationally than I should have. It was stupid of me. If I had put a little more thought into that post, I would have realized that you're someone that would probably be aware of the scientific definition of "theory."

I still would have made basically the same post, because the misunderstanding is annoyingly common, but I really ought to have phrased it better.

Mediocre: While we're in the process of splitting hairs, are you sure you know what a theory is?

Yeah, I'm fairly sure.

My definition definitely left out some aspects of a theory, but I don't think that anything in my limited definition was incorrect.

When you say that theories must be based on evidence, it makes it wound like you're saying there must be evidence in favor of the theory. This isn't necessarily true.

It's not? Please give me an example, because Wikipedia says:

[A theory] originates from or is supported by experimental evidence (see scientific method). In this sense, a theory is a systematic and formalized expression of all previous observations that is predictive, logical and testable.

Unless you cite a more reliable source to refute this (and there are many sources more reliable than Wikipedia), my definition stands.

A theory is an attempt to explain why observations (evidence) occur. So in this way a theory must have some sort of observation that it is trying to make sense of.

That's a hypothesis.

A theory, like a hypothesis, is an attempt to make sense of something. Unlike a hypothesis, it must be backed by evidence.

Try avoiding the word "evidence". Instead use "observation". Evidence has a connotation that it is "in favor" of one theory or another, when this is not the case. An observation is merely something that has been seen, heard, smelt, etc... It does not "increase the probability" of one theory or another. Observations can ONLY be used to contradict theories.

Yes, I understand the difference between observations and evidence.

However, you seem not to understand the difference between theories and hypotheses.

At least when I was "splitting hairs" I knew what I was talking about.

You cannot ever confirm a theory.

You can't absolutely prove a theory, no.

However, you can test it repeatedly, until the accuracy of the theory approaches certainty.

 

[AltF4]

We really are just splitting hairs here like I said. Normally this isn't worth even bothering about, but this IS the debate hall isn't it?

Observations don't have preferences for one theory over another. Observations serve only to contradict theories. That is their ONLY purpose. You can't define a theory as having "evidence in favor of it" because that expression is meaningless. You can't say that the difference between a hypothesis and a theory is that a theory has evidence to back it because there's no such thing as having "evidence for" a theory. A theory can either be consistent with observation, or inconsistent with observation. There is no in between.

The colloquial definition of these terms like theory and hypothesis are the ones you're going to find in dictionaries. I'm not saying that those definitions are wrong, a great number of people use them. But in within the scientific community they each have a very specific meaning. That is what I am referring to.

 

[Digital Watches]

Blargh. Double-post somehow got through. Ignore this.

 

[Digital Watches]

Your second paragraph is amazing..Mind if I plagerize it somewhere?

No problem, but out of curiosity, do you mean the actual second paragraph (about some debates being stupid) or the second REAL paragraph (About the particular debate I'm tired of)?

Also:

Allowing smoking in public places could EASILY cause the degree of exposure one would need to be affected.

I have NO idea why the "Does God Exist" debate is still going on: It's completely pointless and stupid, as is almost any religious debate (Which is not to say that all of them are inherently flawed, it's just that on both sides, there are too many who are too emotional about the issue for the reasonable voices to even be heard, not to mention that almost no one arguing a religious topic is ever convinced. When they run out of things to say, they just repeat themselves ad nauseum.)

 

[Xsyven]

Sorry, I phrased that more confrontationally than I should have. It was stupid of me. If I had put a little more thought into that post, I would have realized that you're someone that would probably be aware of the scientific definition of "theory."

I meant to add a little at the end of my post, to let you know that I really didn't care. I was at work when I posted that, so my mind was in other places.

As for the definition of theory/evidence/observation thing-- I think we're getting a bit too picky about what words really mean.


Let's make a fun example, shall we? I may have simplified this up a bit, but it gets the point across.

Let's say I baked two cookies. One was eaten by either Mediocre, or AltF4Warrior.

Say I confront both of you, and for example, Mediocre has a bit of chocolate chip smeared on his lips. My theory would be that Mediocre ate the cookie because there's chocolate on his lips. We have physical evidence.

If Mediocre didn't have that chocolate smear, I couldn't do anything but hypothesise that he'd eaten the cookie, because he's known for his freakish obsession for cookies. No real evidence, but educated assumptions.

I hate being too serious in here.

 

[AltF4]

A better way to sum it up is this:

Scientific theories are exactly analogous to finding patterns in nunbers. Each number is an observation, and each pattern is a theory.

Say I give you two numbers, 1 and 2. Well, one might come up with the theory that the numebrs are following a linear pattern of adding one to the last number in the sequence. But there are other patterns that could also fit these observations. A pattern that also works is n*2, doubling the last number.

Each of these theories could potentially be correct given the current information. But if we were to get more observations, we could eliminate some.

Say the next number is a 4. Ah ha! You say! That confirms the second theory! No, it does not. It only contradicts the first. We now know that the theory n+1 could not be true. There are still more theories that could match this new set of data. In fact, (this is important) for any finite set of data, there are an infinite number of consistent theories. This is why you can never confiirm a theory, because it's impossible to eliminate them down to one.

A "good" theory is one that makes predictions that could potentially be proven false. An example of a "bad" theory is one that cannot be proven untrue. In our number example, the theory "all the numbers are randomly generated" is a bad theory. No matter how many data points you get, you can never prove it wrong. You can always say "the numbers are random" no matter how many you get. These kinds of theories (ones that cannot be disproven) are referred to as philosophical theories, as opposed to scientific ones.

So you see that you can't say "I have evidence for my theory" because it's not just evidence for that ONE theory, it also applies to an INFINITE number of other theories too. Observations do not prefer one theory or another.

Strictly speaking, there is no difference between a theory and a hypothesis. However, if you would like to say that a hypothesis involves more guesswork when being formed: sure. But what I'm trying to say is that it is impossible to distinguish in principle a theory that has been well thought out and one that has not.

 

[Sargent_Peach]

I don't think the "does life begin at conception or birth" debate is stupid. I agree that it is quite worn out. That debate entails abortion and stem cell research, which is not a stupid debate. It is flawed because pro-choice debaters let pro-life debaters use potential.

I thought I did a pretty good job on it in DWYP. (The link if your interested)
http://smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=96816

I think I proved when life starts, but of course some people will disagree.

Basically, I said that what differentiates humans from animals is a complex cerebral cortex, so once that is developed in a fetus, it is human. This happens during the 5th month of gestation.

No major central nervous system activity and no complex cerebral cortex, that doesn't sound like "alive" to me. This is a condition regarded universally as a state of "death" in adults. You cannot really "kill" an adult in this stage, you can only "unplug" them. Such an act would not be disrespectful of their human existence because that existence has already ceased, and only a body remains.

 

[Kalypso]

Didn't I respond to this thread?

edit- Wow, I got an infraction for 'spam'... wtf...

I vaguely remember saying something along the lines of fake science to affirm faith (Like Intelligent Design) is stupid and worthless to debate for obvious reasons like them just plain not being science and anyone who will argue with you about it probably has a flawed understanding of what science is. Also something about people arguing which side of the political spectrum is better when the debate is at its core flawed and pointless.

How the **** is that 'major spam?' If you want me to post an essay every time I post, fine, but I'll be posting much less lol. A few lines is perfectly fine when they make a point... I'm tired of the debates and they're ****ing dumb, I've had each at least 10 times and they never go anywhere. I really fail to see how that is spam, at all.

 

[Blackadder]

Please. Anti-smoking is a bad example of a stupid debate.


It's the debates without fact aren't worth debating, in my book. The "Does God Really Exist?" debate is absolutely ridiculous, seeing that there's no possible way to prove that he does or doesn't, since both are based on theories. I don't even try.

I like quoting you, for some reason.
I thought that about the "Does god really exist" thing.
Debates that are stupid are ones that are backed up with zero proof
of anything. As you said the god debate is rather silly, there isn't any solid way to say he does or doesn't! You can't say "he does cause the bible says so". Books can lie, and it's not like that was written on fact. You also can't say he DOESN'T exist "Cause it's a silly belief". How does that stand up?
So, in my opinion, a silly debate is a debate with no fact behind it.
Or, of course, a debate on something like "Chips look kewl don't they"