| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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did you catch the comedy central telethon to help autism? kind of ironic. |
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i think i caught autism watching the amazing race. |
i had a friend in high school who had an autistic brother. he was high-functioning, i guess you would say: he didn't sit on the floor spinning plates and stuff like that. in fact, he seemed endlessly thrilled with life. i didn't even know he was autistic until one day when i was sitting in my car in front of my friend's house - to pick him up go somewhere - and his brother came outside. he knelt down like he was in a race and than ran of down the street to the stop sign and back. when he crossed his "finish line" he gave a little victory dance and walked back into the house. when my friend came out, i started describing what his brother just did (thinking it was just quirky) and my friend got angry. and he told me his brother was autistic. my friend went on to be a drug casualty. i don't where the brother is now. i'm sure other websites have this story, it's just that i have slate bookmarked and there it was when i powered up this morning. |
Except once, he and his mother came to visit us at our house. At one point, we looked around and realized he was no longer with us. I found him in my room, standing motionless on my bed, staring at the print of John Waterhouse's "Lady of Shalott" on my wall. That's the only other thing I've seen hold his attention. I am currently experiencing an obsession with the program, "Supernatural," at a level of intensity I don't think I've ever felt for a TV show before. It's overwhelming. 95% of that is due to the character portraits drawn and the family relationships between the brothers and their father, and the fluidity and growth the characters experience across the season(s). It's actually pretty unusual in this regard among the TV landscape -- pretty complex psychosocial dynamics progressing in real time. So interesting. I literally can write pages and pages on these characters and my love for them, so I'm going to stop myself here. |
They shouldn't release these kinds of open-ended studies to the media. This shit is going to go right up with "gum stays in your stomache for 7 years" and "television makes children violent". |
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Not that isn't some shoddy-ass science out there that is in fact mistaking correlation for causation. Generally, you don't find that in the "hard" sciences, but in the more open-ended sciences that try and study human behavior. However, it's also a mistake to think that correlation never points to causation. |
down to the hard sciences, where math has been shown to model the real world some Z times. |
Causation is an illusion. There is only correlation and observation. |
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Science is not a myth. Any particular theory is a myth. Science is the process of debunking theories, of deconstructing myths and creating ones that are more reflective of reality. This is it's fundamental difference from religion. Science is not the myth, it is the process. I suppose you could call science a meta-myth. If you did, I'd say, "Fuck you through every available orifice, you donkey sperm burping bitch." |
Human/Fallibility. Science? |
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the scientific process is the myth, the corpus of theory is the implementation. this is all semantics. but scientific process depends on believing in a rational, mathmatical world. |
The scientific process only depends on the belief that assertions about the world can be tested. Math has nothing to do with it. It's simply the foundation and language of many of the testable models. Science depends on empiricism, which is not math. It's not even logic. It's "you can test X, and that test can be repeated." And everything depends on belief unless you're omniscient, so don't even go there. And this isn't all semantics. You misunderstand science. And there is no third point. |
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what are you guys talking about? |
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when the testable models are built on math, math is the foundation of science. math is logic. science as a process is one thing, but science as the body of scientific knowledge is a religion. it is faith in statistical probability. |
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in a cubic tumbler, please, on the rocks. |