How dare you say our site's insecure!
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@ben_lubar said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@djls45 said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@ben_lubar said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@accalia said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@Planar said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
IMO,
religionBlindly following an ancient belief system without thinking about what the beliefs are and what their implications are is a mental disorder.Fixed that for me.
This way Politics AND nationality/culture can apply too!
no sense leaving them out!
:-)
What if I think about the implications and then do it anyway?
Or if I think about the implications and then decide that they're right (and so do it)?
(The way you worded it implies that you concluded it was wrong, and then went against your conscience.)Someone doing something malicious intentionally is less bad than someone doing that same malicious thing by accident because in the latter case one additional person was wronged.
That assumes that the "ancient belief system" is malicious (or at least the part under consideration for action).
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@groo said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
delete it again
You sound like some sort of expert...
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@Khudzlin said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@Steve_The_Cynic I think @dkf was saying that it's not a good move to do vexatious stuff as a litigant.
I'm quite sure he was.
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@dkf said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@ben_lubar said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
I am not sure what they think autism is, but it's not what I think it is.
That's a sentence with some interesting possible interpretations. For example, it leaves open the possibility that you think autism is a kind of chocolate syrup, despite the definitions given in dictionaries and the DSM.
Minced chocolate syrup, no doubt.
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@groo said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
religion should be punished as a crime.
@Rhywden said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@groo I think you just upset a Bible thumper :)
How's about we don't make particular thoughts illegal, and instead we only punish people if they do bad stuff.
Even stupid religions, like Scientology, or "Christian Science" (which is neither), or Pastafarianism...
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@anotherusername How about we don't get our knickers in a twist whenever someone states an opinion?
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@Rhywden An opinion that thoughtcrime should be illegal is a stupid opinion and deserves a downvote. So I gave it one.
You interpreted that as me getting my pants twisted. That's also a stupid opinion, but hey, go ahead and think whatever you want. It's a free country (at least, mine is).
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@anotherusername said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
How's about we don't make particular thoughts illegal,
Conning people you represent supernatural entities and manipulating them into giving you money isn't a thought.
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@groo convincing someone to give you money with no promise of anything tangible in return is not illegal, much as anyone would like it to be. It's only illegal if you promised something tangible in return and fail to deliver on it; then it's fraud.
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@anotherusername I know what the law currently is. I'd like if those loopholes were closed.
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@groo By those standards, selling someone a movie ticket would be dicy. You're promising entertainment--if they're not happy that's fraud (instead of just a bad purchase).
Fraud requires deception that is
- material to the matter (ie you wouldn't have purchased it without the deception)
- relied upon (as in it actually cost you money)
- knowing (the deceiver must KNOW that it is deception, no honest mistakes)
- injurious (must cause actual damages, so can't have unforeseen good sides)
Fraud is REALLY REALLY hard to prove, and for a good reason. It keeps lots of crap out of the legal system. If the government tried to tighten that up, freedom of speech/press/thought/religion would all have to go. Completely not worth it.
Caveat emptor and all that. Due your own due diligence, and you'll be mostly safe.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
material to the matter (ie you wouldn't have purchased it without the deception)
relied upon (as in it actually cost you money)
knowing (the deceiver must KNOW that it is deception, no honest mistakes)
injurious (must cause actual damages, so can't have unforeseen good sides)Many religions match it:
Material: afterlife, next life status, proximity to supernatural beings
Knowing: I know many "evangelic" variations of "christianism" have "priests" that know it's bullshit taking a cut of donations.
Injurious: people go from small donations to selling all their stuff and giving to these scams
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@groo Good luck proving it though. You'd need to be able to read minds to do it efficiently and even have a hope of justice. It would also involve weighing in on matters of religious doctrine (a BIG no-no in the US).
By those same standards, most of politics (and government in general) is fraudulent. Even worse, in fact, as the fraud is measureable here on earth. "That high-speed choo-choo is going to only cost $X billion and take 5 years and be perfect!" when everyone (the politicians included) knows it will take at least $5X billion and 3-4 times as long. And run half full most of the time.
What would be the upside? Not much.
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@groo said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
Material: afterlife, next life status, proximity to supernatural beings
None of which have any tangible way of testing or proving.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
By those standards, selling someone a movie ticket would be dicy. You're promising entertainment--if they're not happy that's fraud (instead of just a bad purchase).
I don't think so. You're selling admission to the theater. So long as you don't bar a ticket holder from going in I think you'd be OK.
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@boomzilla yes, but the implied meaning of selling tickets is that the people you're selling tickets to ought to want the tickets.
They want the tickets because of their expectations about the movie; if those expectations aren't met, did you defraud them by selling the tickets? No, of course not.
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@anotherusername said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
yes, but the implied meaning of selling tickets is that the people you're selling tickets to ought to want the tickets.
Yes, but admission to the theater and being able to watch the movie is all they've been promised.
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@boomzilla yes, but being able to enter the church building and attend their service is all @groo's "conned" churchgoers have been promised. Everything else that he thinks they're being conned out of is stuff that's merely implied, like the entertainment you expect from a movie.
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@boomzilla True, but under a stricter standard that would cover religions, you'd be on shaky ground and open to a lot of nuisance lawsuits.
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@Benjamin-Hall Look, I'm just here to be a pendantic dickweed about analogies.
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@anotherusername said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
being able to enter the church building and attend their service is all @groo's "conned" churchgoers have been promised.
Not true for all churches.
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@groo promises that can't be tangibly measured or verified aren't real promises.
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@groo, here's an analogy to make you think about this.
I'm a teacher. I teach physics, chemistry, and web design at a college prep private school. I know for a fact the following:
- The students' families are paying large sums of money to attend the school.
- A certain percentage of what I teach is absolutely false (in the "lies we tell children" sort of way)
- There is an implied promise that those who do well in school will have a leg up in life.
- I know that this implied promise is sketchy at best, and false for many students. Education is correlated with good life outcomes, but not causally so.
By the standards you've put out, I'm committing fraud of the same type as religions are. So are the vast majority of advertisers (ok, this one's not so far fetched). So are 99.99999999% of all people who are trying to find romantic partners. Your definition of fraud is so all-inclusive that it's dystopian (in the 1984 sort of way). But you're only willing (based on the thread) to apply it to religions. I'll refrain from saying more due to not wanting this thread to move to the .
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
I know that this implied promise is sketchy at best, and false for many students. Education is correlated with good life outcomes, but not causally so.
We have good reasons to believe education makes for better outcomes. Anyway you're paying for something with tangible benefits.
It's different from a priest that shame followers that don't pay the tithing, while receiving a cut from it and poor people giving 10% of their starving wages for him. (And people that sell everything to give said church)
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@groo said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
I know many "evangelic" variations of "christianism" have "priests" that know it's bullshit
[citation needed]
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...
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@groo I thought you were implying that Christianity in general was fraudulent, as opposed to fake preachers making up their own sects.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@groo By those standards, selling someone a movie ticket would be dicy. You're promising entertainment--if they're not happy that's fraud (instead of just a bad purchase).
One year in high school, a bunch of us (half a dozen or so IIRC) got together on Halloween to hang out. We were a bit old for the whole trick-or-treat thing, so we drove to the next town over to visit a "haunted forest." We paid admission and headed in.
The place sucked, largely because the people who were running it were just not paying attention. Like, among other things, at one point we managed to sneak up on the guy with the hockey mask and chainsaw and startle him. Not exaggerating!
When we reached the end, we found the guy in charge, explained what our experience had been like, and asked for our money back because the experience hadn't even come close to matching what was promised... and he actually refunded it, for our whole group. So occasionally this does work.
(Please note that this anecdote has no bearing whatsoever on my views about religion.)
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
I'm a teacher. I teach physics, chemistry, and web design at a college prep private school.
...
A certain percentage of what I teach is absolutely false (in the "lies we tell children" sort of way)
...
By the standards you've put out, I'm committing fraudThen why do you continue to teach something false, even if you know it?
Because you are forced to conform with standarized tests?
Curious in which topics in high school physics / chemistry / web design that happens.
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@Adynathos said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
web design
He's probably teaching them NodeJS and telling them they have a future
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@Adynathos he said he's a physics teacher... a lot of physics theories are "false", but still produce good enough predictions so as to be useful as simplified models. Perhaps that's what he's talking about?
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@TimeBandit said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
@Adynathos said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
web design
He's probably teaching them NodeJS and telling them they have a future
... and then you realize that COBOL programmers are some of the most highly-paid software professionals working today, and extrapolate that to 50 years from now when all the old Javascript that people hardly understand today is still in use.
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@Adynathos At the level of high-school physics (not the advanced or AP versions, the basic ones), we teach basic principles in a "physics utopia" where all the strings are massless, pulleys are frictionless, etc. Also, since we only talk about Newtonian mechanics (as far as mechanics goes), we're teaching things that aren't True. They're good enough, and they work, but they're not the truth. One of the major themes of a scientific education is relearning the same things over and over, but each time hearing "ya know that thing we told you in <insert last class>? Well, it's not really that way. It's more like...."
Another issue is that we (as a profession) tend to give a false impression of the amount of knowledge we really have. We act as if the things we teach are unimpeachable fact. They're not. I really want to add caveats such as "well, except for...." or "unless we consider that...." but those aren't pedagogically helpful. This often leads students to believe that scientists actually know more than they do. This leads to a kind of blind, quasi-religious faith in SCIENCE. This is poisonous to real science.
But enough ranting.
@TimeBandit Thankfully I don't have to teach any javascript. I just do basic HTML5 and CSS3. Much more on the front-end design. Other teachers cover Swift, Python, and C++.
@anotherusername Exactly.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
Another issue is that we (as a profession) tend to give a false impression of the amount of knowledge we really have. We act as if the things we teach are unimpeachable fact. They're not. I really want to add caveats such as "well, except for...." or "unless we consider that...." but those aren't pedagogically helpful. This often leads students to believe that scientists actually know more than they do. This leads to a kind of blind, quasi-religious faith in SCIENCE. This is poisonous to real science.
+∞
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@groo said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
Anyway you're paying for something with tangible benefits.
so if I can't get a job with a high school diploma, I should sue the state for fraud?
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@Yamikuronue said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
so if I can't get a job with a high school diploma, I should sue the state for fraud?
If they promised it, it's fraud. Most marketing and sales people should be in jail.
And HR, and managers, all fucking professional liers.
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@antiquarian Well, I don't know how fraudulent they are now, but Protestantism started as a protest against corruption in the Catholic Church (selling indulgences among other things).
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@groo and downvoters, fuck downvoters
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@Benjamin-Hall said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
Also, since we only talk about Newtonian mechanics (as far as mechanics goes), we're teaching things that aren't True.
We should say that Newtonian mechanics are an approximation, which is often accurate and practical to use - that is True.
And this approach is used throughout physics (ubiquitous Taylor-series-expansions with ignoring high-level terms).
I have seen many situations where the full-detail equation is impossible to solve, and you must make some approximation to proceed.I just do basic HTML5 and CSS3
In my uni course about web technology, they showed us how to use Bootstrap and Django. It allows you to get the job done quickly.
I don't claim that this is a good or bad approach to teaching web-tech, just give an example how others teach.
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@Benjamin-Hall That's why using False in that context is dicey. It's technically not true to the best of modern scientific knowledge, but saying things like False or Lie has some of the extra meaning as Fraud, like that it's done for a purpose not aligned with what the student actually wants to do or what the teacher is supposed to be doing. Simplifying assumptions to make problems solvable isn't in the same ballpark.
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@UndergroundCode said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
That's why using False in that context is dicey.
The term you are looking for is “An Approximation”. It's great for when you're working with something that is not exactly right, but which is a usefully simpler version of something that is right.
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@UndergroundCode Sir Pterry and/or his cowriters of the Science of Discworld series coined the phrase Lies to Children, which aren't lies in the usual sense of the word, to describe this. I like the term, but the problem with using it is that people who haven't read the book assume I'm branding such simplifications as lies.
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@Adynathos said in How dare you say our site's insecure!:
I have seen many situations where the full-detail equation is impossible to solve, and you must make some approximation to proceed.
I believe that this is a very general fact of life: In my personal (and thus entirely anecdotal) experience, there are very, very few statements which are both objectively, incontestably true and also actually useful.
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@ixvedeusi and that was the point I was trying to make. Life (and science, and knowledge in general) are hard problems. People who claim otherwise are being misleading.
That's why claims of "fraud" are less than useful. In this context, they're just weapons to be wielded against people who start from different assumptions and/or make different trade-offs in their approximations.