PacifistAg said:
Fascinating program. I think schmendeler is spot on. Their reaction to their own experiments that only debunked their views was telling. I feel bad for them.
schmendeler said:
Plus the main guy's painful friend zoning with the red head. So cringey.
As long as they don't go spreading diseases that were eradicated in the developed world decades back, it's all fun and games.schmendeler said:
The people in this movie are prisoners of their own ideology. They were all outcasts before this. Now they have a group they are part of and can feel superior about. Even when faced with conclusive evidence they can't accept it because it would mean throwing away their entire network of friends and view of self.
Ironically, this is where the theory of "flat earth" began...to mock "evolution deniers."Aggrad08 said:
They are the extreme end of conspiracy theorist but are only a more refined version of a phenomena we see on this very board with YECs and evolution deniers. It's always a bit striking to see it in action.
Yep.Aggrad08 said:
They are the extreme end of conspiracy theorist but are only a more refined version of a phenomena we see on this very board with YECs and evolution deniers. It's always a bit striking to see it in action.
in your opinion, what is the extent of what we can verify?Martin Q. Blank said:
Carbon dating requires faith beyond what we can verify.
The age of sediment layers requires faith beyond what we can verify.
The extent of evolution and common ancestry requires faith beyond what we can verify.
Some people take their assumptions and try to make them evidence. At that point, the stories in the Bible are evidence.
When it comes to dating, I'd say at least written history. If carbon dating says an object is 1500 years old, but historical texts show it have been made for King Richard, what are we to believe?schmendeler said:in your opinion, what is the extent of what we can verify?Martin Q. Blank said:
Carbon dating requires faith beyond what we can verify.
The age of sediment layers requires faith beyond what we can verify.
The extent of evolution and common ancestry requires faith beyond what we can verify.
Some people take their assumptions and try to make them evidence. At that point, the stories in the Bible are evidence.
You can only say that because we have a written history of the object. What if we don't?Quad Dog said:
That the components that the object are made out of are 1500 years old. Or someone took an older object and remade it.
I spent way too long trying to understand that question. I gave two examples (I could give a third that humans are unreliable narrators) of how written history can be unreliable and you ask me what I would do if I don't have written history. The answer would obviously be Carbon dating or other evidence. Such as: What kind of tool marks are on the object, at what point did humans use those tools? When did humans have the technology to make this thing? When was this thing popular? Was it made out of expensive items or techniques and therefore only for the rich? Was it found in an area or a layer with other object that we do know the date of?Martin Q. Blank said:You can only say that because we have a written history of the object. What if we don't?Quad Dog said:
That the components that the object are made out of are 1500 years old. Or someone took an older object and remade it.
First, yes it can error.Quad Dog said:I spent way too long trying to understand that question. I gave two examples (I could give a third that humans are unreliable narrators) of how written history can be unreliable and you ask me what I would do if I don't have written history. The answer would obviously be Carbon dating or other evidence. Such as: What kind of tool marks are on the object, at what point did humans use those tools? When did humans have the technology to make this thing? When was this thing popular? Was it made out of expensive items or techniques and therefore only for the rich? Was it found in an area or a layer with other object that we do know the date of?Martin Q. Blank said:You can only say that because we have a written history of the object. What if we don't?Quad Dog said:
That the components that the object are made out of are 1500 years old. Or someone took an older object and remade it.
An archeologist would use Carbon Dating, written history, and much more evidence to find the date of something. If Carbon Dating disagreed with all the other evidence then there may be reasonable reasons like I have listed previously. If Carbon Dating constantly disagreed with all of the other evidence, then they would stop using it and the scientific community would have a larger problem. I'm not aware of Carbon Dating constantly being different, are you?
How do you know something is 20k years old? You'd be assuming some sort of process is accurate. And it's accurate because this other assumption we made is true, so it must be. And they verify each other.Texaggie7nine said:
No one disputes that there is a window of possible error. But when one tries to use that fact to defend an idea that something that shows to be 20k years old really is less than 2k old because "the world is only 2k years old" then they are not understanding the margin of error.
And your alternative is to assume that written evidence and whatever else you consider valid to be correct.Martin Q. Blank said:How do you know something is 20k years old? You'd be assuming some sort of process is accurate. And it's accurate because this other assumption we made is true, so it must be. And they verify each other.Texaggie7nine said:
No one disputes that there is a window of possible error. But when one tries to use that fact to defend an idea that something that shows to be 20k years old really is less than 2k old because "the world is only 2k years old" then they are not understanding the margin of error.
I said that's about the extent that we could verify dating. Anything past that is pure faith in our models and in the realm of story telling.Quote:
And your alternative is to assume that written evidence and whatever else you consider valid to be correct.
I agree.k2aggie07 said:
All knowledge is the same. It differs only in usefulness. Usefulness can judged by its predictive or explanative ability. Since the whole world is experienced through our own cognitive models, everything we know underexplains and underrepresents reality. The question of "well how do you know that's true" in a technical sense is useless. We have no experiential truth criterion other than predictive utility, and we know by inspection that predictive utility can lead to models that are hopelessly flawed but still quite useful.
The model of solid objects (they're not) is not different than the model of carbon dating in kind. Only in usefulness.
