ID/Evolution Discuss

Impenitent, You say “appears” a lot, but I think that’s unnecessarily precise. If I actually do my best to be unbiased, it stands to reason that I should appear unbiased. Actually, by specifying, you make it sound like the appearance is the aim, and any actually impartiality is just a happy accident. But, you’d just come right out and say that if that’s what you thought, whouldn’t you? :wink:

Nah, the ads keep the site alive. Right now, proceeds match upkeep costs almost exactly (actually, they’re a little short!).

RealUnoriginal, I think you’re assuming that I would remove ads for Nazims or terrorism. I don’t necessarily have to make that statement. But, ultimately, the ad software that’s in place here filters what shows up, so I don’t think it will ever be an issue. If I am to claim any bias in my choice of what ads run, it is my bias in favor of techonology, which I think can make better decisions in this case than a human could.

-Imp

You’re correct.

Mad Man P then needed a better knowledge of how the ads are placed and how exactly they are chosen to have beaten you in the challenge. His point was the best one though, “you” are biased–it’s undeniable. However, when you default your bias to an algorithm (technology), then you are alleviating your responsibility on a different issue. Perhaps you should find a different way to fund ILP than to apparently allow the spread of misinformation… Though, that would require work. It would then be reasonable to pass on this work if you are not able to undertake it. Then, Mad Man P becomes part of his own argument–would he be willing to spend his time and money to help you find an ulterior method? His values would be expressed and if he were a hypocrite, then you would be the winner…

Anyway, enough with the if-then scenarios…

Your winning doesn’t change the observation that the spread of misinformation is occurring and that we have responsibilities as “intellectual superiors” (if any of us indeed are) to help people garner “better” information that can be accessed. Then again, where do you draw the line as a mentor vs. a babysitter for strangers?

Why make a distinction between seeing and reading minds?

Where’s the poll?

This is a response to Mad Man from the actual debate forum. I put it up here so Faust could close the debate.

I was talking about the rhetorical tactic, not his decision to use a computer to do the dirty work, just so there’s no confusion. The rhetorical tactic is something like, “I’m not wrong, but even if I was wrong I’d still be right.” That tactic can be picked apart.

If we were to agree with you on our own, you would have won the debate before it even started! :slight_smile: Be thorough…not excessive, but throrough.

That’s true, but I think the more important part of that sentence was “explicitly say why either or both was bad.” Carleas thinks it’s false and still puts it up, so you needed to focus on why it was bad to put up intentional or unintentional lies. I still think defering to Nazis or bigoted people is a bad case. I think most black men have a far greater emotional reaction to the ‘N’ word than most theists do when you attack their religion, and that most Jews give the Holocaust a little more weight than a misguided online advertisement. No one is getting persecuted for believing in evolution by this ad; it implies evolutionists are stupid or wrong, but that’s expected in any debate on religion. The evolution/ID debate has been mostly blood-less, and to suggest that it can escalate into something meaner is tricky; you may fall victim to a slippery slope fallacy youself if you’re not careful.

Essentially, I think the ‘badness’ of the ad needed to be dealt with on a lower level. You were on the right track with the obvious but appropriate comments about this being a philosophy forurm. I think you could have appealed to common sense and maybe some type of peer review; why help propagate a clearly falsifiable theory (evolution is wrong) that has nothing more interesting to say than its ID counterparts that don’t try to attack evolution? Criticism is important, but only as far as it takes to accept or reject the assertions of an opponent. Evolutionists have answers to the criticisms in the ad; these responses don’t prove evolution, but it shows that the ad has been acknowledged and is no longer necessary. To talk about it further is a waste of time, and letting it lie around for the uninformed to grab hold of is just going to start the cycle over again.

I suppose I could have gone for the “quality” appeal… you know the “If we advertise anti-evolution we might lower the overall quality of the site and thus attract the wrong sort of people” line of argument.

or perhaps have delved into the tesk of showing the harm of believing evolution to be impossible.

The truble is. I figured I had everything pinned down. The ad was false information, which was granted. It follows that the ad served no other purpose than to misinform people about the status of evolution. Now what possible reason could anyone have for agreeing to advertising false information?

Money.

And that’s what it came down to… Carleas was basically saying that the page needed to make money to survive. From there he went on to say, that since the forum ought to remain philosophically neutral, the best thing to do would be to relegate the responsibility of choosing the ads to an algorithm, so that he would be left out of the process and thus maintain neutrality.

I pointed out that this algorithm was his choice, and that whatever followed from that choice was on him. I denied him the possibility of neutrality, and asked him, in light of that, to justify advertising what he knew to be false information.

I even offered to give him a list of ads, which were not mistaken, that could replace the anti-evolution one and make the page the needed amount of money. Denying him the excuse that the forum needed the ad to support itself.

In my mind it was game over.

But I played a good hand poorly… took too much for granted and didn’t explain myself fully and in enough detail. Nor did I spend much time attacking Carleas’ defense.

It’s a fair judgement… but a poor conclusion.

I made a deal with Carleas before the debate that if I won, the ad would be removed and if he won I’d tolorate it… So now I have to tolorate that garbage… #-o

At any rate…

I would like to thank the judges for their fairness and time.

so… thank you. :smiley:

Hey Mad Man, you were great. Thanks for the debate. I was biting my nails waiting for the decision.

I thought the strongest part of your argument was when you brought it back to money. I thought that was a good tactic, and it had me worried. I don’t know that I responded particularly well to it, either, because my argument was, as Anthem pointed out, slippery slope, i.e. a fallacy.
I think what you should have done more of is to highlight why this ad is significantly different from other ads that might have come in its place. Maybe there’s a difference between saying “evolution can’t be proven” and “jesus didn’t exist”. I don’t see it, but I think you could have made it seem more plausible.
I do also think you got a little over-confident. At some point, I was regretting the judges we chose, but it may have helped me in the end, because you knew you didn’t have to make as strong an argument, and you let it get away from you.

But all in all you were great, and, contrary to Anthem, I liked when you were “over-the-top”, it added a lot of life. :stuck_out_tongue:
Thanks again for debating me; we should do it again once some others get a chance to duke it out.

I’m happy you knew you were doing that :slight_smile:

Well then it’s good for you that you weren’t judging, eh? :wink:

I suppose he did warn us that he was going to be entertaining, but I just didn’t like the smarminess. You know, it’s so hard to convey tone on the internet…maybe I would have liked it more if Mad Man did this in person. If I knew him better I may have had a better feel for his internet tone, but that would also take away from my objectiveness. This is difficult!

I think the lesson is it’s a major consideration for future debates. Having a free-fom judgement is fine, but keep in mind that it allows subjectivity to creep in. It’ll happen anyway, but some type of scorecard may be appropriate for more contentious debates.

Anyway,I think just based on the points made by either side Carleas got this one, so I didn’t feel terrible about voicing my opinion on the style.

Definatly… I don’t know why I didn’t. Really, I this was my biggest mistake. I should have explained more clearly why claiming that “scientists say evolution is impossible” is a lie and “jesus didn’t exist” isn’t, or “God exists!” isn’t.

Again i merely asserted that there was a difference between factualy false claims and expressing an opinion, like a philosophy, belief, or point of view.

I do believe I made the same mistake here as I did in my “high school” (the equivolent) oral math exam. I took too much for granted in my presentation, assuming the examiners knew the proofs, and instead presented what I thought was an impressive demonstration of higher functions and implications, along with their proofs ect.

They rightly pointed out that, off course the examiners knew the proofs… the point was to show that I knew them too. :stuck_out_tongue:

I did the same thing here… I forgot to prove the basics before moving on to the more impressive… I built the roof before the walls were in place… and the house came down… [-(

You bet!
And thank you as well. I had allot of fun with this.

I was actually thinking about PMing you after each one of my posts and apologizing. I was never sure if I had gone too far with the “contempt” thing. Just wanted to put on a show. Give the impression of a passionate and personal dispute.

Next time we butt heads here, I’ll be more explicit with my arguments and rebuttals, leaving no wiggle room for you to “respond fallaciously” to my points. :wink:

P.S. wasn’t there supposed to be a poll as well?

I just added a poll. Sorry it took so long. I was doing some work I was keeping secret from the government.

This is a success for “philosophy”.

While the slippery slope is a fallacy, I do think a distinction needs to be made to counter it. Mad Man P was relying on a heavily moralized point (ID is bad and worthy of censorship) while taking it as a given that this moral point was specific to ID and not other objectionable points. In absence of any reasonable metric of distinction, the slippery slope argument holds fairly well.

Sure, everyone involved in the debate (including the judges) agree that ID is bad, but what distinguishes that from Star Court justice? Under such conditions, how is “Free Speech”, as it is normally understood, maintained?

I knew that would bite me in the ass…

I thought i was sufficiently clear about NOT being against ID in general, so much as the “anti-evolution” part of it.

The “false information” angle was not based on the premis that ID was immoral… ID could be true, for all I know…

My premis was that spreading false information was immoral. The ad in question was making claims about the scientific status of evolution that were demonstrably false. The fact that the ad was false information was a given in the debate.

That is the equivolent of a group of people trying to make the case that you are a bad person by spreading the rumor that you cheated on your wife, when you didn’t. It’s called lying. Sure they might be honestly mistaken about it (maybe they thought the person they saw was you), but for someone who knows for a fact that you didn’t cheat on your wife to start spreading this rumor, is immoral. Even if he agrees that you are a bad person…

Which I understand – but in a society that embraces “free speech” does libel/slander apply to concepts or just people? I tend to favor the latter.

We all know that truth in advertising is pretty much dead. Under your metric we could ban ads for hair product that ask, “If you want full hair like this, buy our product!” while showing someone with perfect hair. Clearly the truth is being bent in that ad. Is it sufficient to warrant a ban? I think your argument left that sort of thing fairly murky, which from a funding standpoint is problematic.

But it’s speaking on behalf of the scientific community… which consists of people.

If I were to campaign by claiming that the catholic church, for example, had renounced Jesus christ as the massiah, and have that ad placed all over the place… do you think I should get sued? do you think they should win?

What if I dug up a few members of the church who actually confirmed what I was saying? Does that mean I was honestly mistaken when I thought these guys spoke for the greater community?

Also, I dealt with free speach and the relationship that it has to advertisement. Free speach gives you the option to decline speaking on someone elses behalf… no matter how much they pay you.

So the question is… should we decline?

The line really is drawn quite clearly… we can all see it being crossed… the one notion that seems to stop us from acting on it is “on which universally appliable principle, do we act?”

The answer is morality… it’s universaly appliable, you do not do or say that which you perceive to be wrong or harmful, on pain of being guilty of having done so.

Carleas’ defense was an attempt at avoiding this guilt by way of relegating the responsibility to an algorithm and pretending that there was no choice, along with a justification for why there OUGHT to be no choice, for the sake of philosophical neutrality.

I should have given chase when Carleas retreated into the advantages of philosophical neutrality for a forum such as this as a grounds for maintaining his moral neutrality… it would have been rather simple to show how the welfare of this forum didn’t magically render immoral behavior, moral nor does the fact that the forum needs money render advertising that crap the “lesser of two evils”… because there ARE alternatives… of even lesser evil…

but oh well… at least I’m holding my own in the poll (he said grasping at straws…) :smiley:

When I logged in last night, I was confronted by an ad for “The God who Wasn’t There”, the subtext of which explained it was an attempt to show that Jesus never existed. I have to say, the fact that we’re showing that ad should have figured prominently in the debate about the ID ads (which I didn’t read), yes?

I’ve got you covered. It was definitely worth noting.

I really think that the accusation of a lie is too subjective to apply here. Are the people who run these ads lying, or are they just saying things we disagree with?

Given that there are radical protestants out there that do essentially claim that the Catholics no longer worship Jesus and have renounced Christianity and many of them have a fairly wide base, I don’t think such an ad would be censored. Indeed, McCain got in a little bit of trouble when a preacher whose endorsement he had sought made claims along those lines about Catholics, but the water wasn’t too got. He didn’t denounce the preacher until the preacher said something about the Holocaust being God’s tool for founding Israel so the End of Times can come about. It isn’t an outlandish claim at all, nor is it one that warrants a proper lawsuit. Maybe a civil suit, but even then I am not sure how well it would fair.

As for the ideas being a representation of a group of people, I couldn’t agree more. However, when discussing the notion of free speech it is customary to separate the categories (the Enlightenment ideal of ideas existing as such is at play here). From a functional sense, I think that such an approach is not merely pragmatic but actually a necessary conclusion if free speech is to be authorized while libel is constrained. You could strike either/or and have a more parsimonious system, but I’m unconvinced that the cure in that case would be better than the disease.

This is a misrepresentation of the situation… It wasn’t a case of group A claiming group B’s ideas are so and so… It was the pretense that group B had said that group B’s ideas are so and so…

They dress themselves up as scientists and speak on behalf of the scientific community…

That’s like me claiming christian theologians have discovered that there is undisputable biblical evidence that Jesus did not exist… it’s not quite what the atheist ads are doing… and we all know it…

And I don’t know about the laws where you live, but if someone here tries to sell something by claiming their product can do something it can’t… then they will get sued… false advertisement is a crime here.

The court case against evolution being scientifically disporven or even challanged by ID, already settled the dispute… yet they keep advertising it… and I’m basically asking… why the hell is this page contributing to this stupidity?

I don’t disagree… that works very well.