I'm out - closing my account

I agree with you. It's quite frightening what some folk say & believe. I can't get my head around it either.

I only stay for the odd tech tip.

On Friday, September 29, 2017 at 10:09:32 PM UTC-4, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote :

I said I wasn't coming back unless it was to discuss only electronics, but I lied. I got drawn back in and it was probably a mistake.

nded people can be. There are some SED users I agree with and who I thought were rational and analytical.

w) but interested in analyzing people, I was in for a shock. I tried coming to terms with why some SED users refused to believe anything they didn't l ike, regardless of the facts presented.

PBS, even Fox at times) cannot be trusted. This assertion in itself seems i llogical to me, but I digress....

nment agency (e.g. NASA), or any other well-established research institutio n is also accused of being biased and cannot be trusted, sometimes only bec ause of what state it resides in!!! So, what does this leave? Internet-only news sources that are relatively new and often highly targeted to their au dience, often venturing into tabloid territory, or worse, foreign adversary propaganda.

oint of reference. Everyone is their own expert. No facts or research can b e trusted, primarily if it disagrees with one's opinion. A research paper i s discounted because said person has did "their own analysis and concluded it's all false".

w and grappled with. Again, how can otherwise intelligent people have such utter disregard for what should be common points of reference?

Oh thank you (for going away.) As a liberal weenie snowflake, I'm happy to see you go.

I didn't see any of your electronics posts, but I skipped most of your stuff.

(There's all kinds of people in the world, there are going to be differences of opinion, some opinions/ideas from the right are good. Our job (as a people) is to find the good ideas/ opinions.)

Mostly we should talk about electronics, then food, family, books, beer... religion and politics last... well that's my perfect SED.

George H.

ken on request of JT, hence the handwritten text covering my real name.

[snip] [snip]

A quick check of my filters shows hondgm as killfiled ;-)

Good riddance. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142    Skype: skypeanalog |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 

           To those of us in my age bracket... 

           GREEN means inexperienced and/or incompetent.

Sounds like a mistaken endeavor - OT posts should come with a disclaimer "For entertainment purposes only." If you want to learn about psychology read a book on the topic or take a class - there's not much to learn about it here but there are plenty of books written by people with multiple Ivy League degrees on topics like "The Psychology of Belief" and so on.

It's usually best to read what people way more knowledgeable than you or anyone here have to say on a topic like that before trying to do "independent research."

I say that because you wrote all that stuff in the fashion of someone who thinks most other strangers on the Internet, whether liberal or conservative, are deeply interested in your opinions about them (at least enough to read all that) which is odd.

Also I think you should find more productive things to do with your time, life is kinda short in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah, unfortunately I can't say I feel OP really added much productive to the political side of things; mostly kind of whiny and "but WHHYYYYY?"-type posts. And 95% off-topic as far as I could tell.

On Saturday, September 30, 2017 at 12:09:32 PM UTC+10, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wr ote:

I said I wasn't coming back unless it was to discuss only electronics, but I lied. I got drawn back in and it was probably a mistake.

nded people can be. There are some SED users I agree with and who I thought were rational and analytical.

w) but interested in analyzing people, I was in for a shock. I tried coming to terms with why some SED users refused to believe anything they didn't l ike, regardless of the facts presented.

PBS, even Fox at times) cannot be trusted. This assertion in itself seems i llogical to me, but I digress....

nment agency (e.g. NASA), or any other well-established research institutio n is also accused of being biased and cannot be trusted, sometimes only bec ause of what state it resides in!!! So, what does this leave? Internet-only news sources that are relatively new and often highly targeted to their au dience, often venturing into tabloid territory, or worse, foreign adversary propaganda.

oint of reference. Everyone is their own expert. No facts or research can b e trusted, primarily if it disagrees with one's opinion. A research paper i s discounted because said person has did "their own analysis and concluded it's all false".

w and grappled with. Again, how can otherwise intelligent people have such utter disregard for what should be common points of reference?

Neither do I. I'll miss your inputs.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Also given how OP talks about "closing my account" seems like OP is a little younger than most people here on average; it's usenet dude you don't "close your account."

He should just take a chill pill and come back when he's more relaxed IMO

Likely because political affiliation/homophility/heterophiliy is primarily influenced by genetics/early childhood experiences and absent some radical life crisis, trauma, or transformation experience it's pretty locked-in from about the age of ten.

Most of the significant personality-shaping stuff happened long before anyone learned a stitch about logic, critical thinking, engineering or much of anything else

That is to say long-time-resident Americans have a self-focused, ego-driven culture because on average we're descended from and raised by a long line of ego-driven narcissist-type ancestors who were such PITAs even the British couldn't stand them and pretty much kicked them out of the country. That or were the type of person who was so obsessed with riches that they'd cross 4,000 miles of uncharted ocean because they heard there was some gold there

ce?

That's pseudo-evolutionary pop-psychology of the most trivial kind.

They were the over-imaginative nut-cases of their generation. Sadly for nat ional profiling, reversion to the mean implies that their descendants look pretty much like everybody else.

Australia collected a lot of gold-seekers around the 1850's, and that's whe n the first of my ancestors got here. But they were builders and joiners, a nd made their money out of building houses (and at least one church). There weren't that many actual prospectors, and lots of people who correctly exp ected to make money out of the prospectors (or at least out of those prospe ctors who were lucky enough to find gold).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

There may be reversion to the mean for certain strictly biological predispositions, but I don't see how that works in terms of how culture is passed from generation to generation.

In fact what might have been originally primarily biological predisposition _became_ the culture and one ends up getting a big dose of it whether one was born that way or not.

Jared Diamond's meh book "Guns, Germs & Steel" argues strongly against biological determinism, that white Europeans conquered much of the world not because they were smarter than any other type of human (probably true), but because white Europeans mainly had the good fortune to live in a specific environment that was conducive to rapid agricultural development and trade, and along with it the guns, germs, and steel.

It glosses over/doesn't fully explain why that rapid development should materially imply that once you learn how to make guns and steel you use them to conquer the world. Because that might again imply a sort of biological determinism, in that not only were white Europeans geographically fortunate, they were also psychologically more ruthless. Or at least that ruthlessness is the dominant human trait that technological culture greatly facilitates in a fait accompli, to the point that it would be foolish to adapt any other strategy.

It might have been a primary biological predisposition in a small and well-publicised segment of the population. but most of them had though better of the approach before they got around to child-rearing.

Admirable book, and in complete in contradiction to your pop-enthology.

The Chinese has guns and steel first, and didn't - which was a quite deliberate cultural choice.

China was unified. Europe wasn't. European were motivated to dominate new resources in order to prevent other European from exploiting them and getting the domestic advantage that the new resources offered.

China - incorrectly as it turned out, though it took quite a while for the error to become obvious - didn't feel they needed to get ahead of any competitor.

That's games theory, not biological determinism.

If you are dealing with other people, some of whom are ruthless, a certain amount of "do it to them before they can do it to you" does make sense.

The European Economic Community is - in part - a recognition that collaboration does pay off better.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

+1

Then you must really LOVE flat-earthers.

Yeah, the OP couldn't even disappear without grandstanding.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Says the proprietor of one of the longer signature lines to post here.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney (which is tolerably short)

Well, it was my best stab as to why "otherwise intelligent" people could believe certain things. Put another way I'm saying it could be that (Americans at least) were raised in a culture that's riddled with abuse from top to bottom, to the point it's like air and you don't even realize what you're doing. I know it feels a little like "that's the way it is because that's the way it is" but not sure how much more specific one can get.

I had a fairly large peer group of other American kids growing up in the

1980s and 1990s, a fairly diverse set by the standards of the day I think also. I had white friends, black friends, asian friends, and Jewish friends. On average my family was poorer than most in a wealthy area, so there was a certain amount of jealousy that they had lifestyles we couldn't afford and I wasn't mature enough to think too much more deeply about the dynamics of those families. To a 12-year-old these families had the physical trappings of success and "normality" and so that's what I assumed they were.

It was only much later when I had the opportunity to think back on some of the things I saw that I realized the unifying characteristic across demographics was that many of those families were also highly abusive situations, either ambiently or through outright abuse and manipulation tactics. It also became more noticeable as I got older and started to notice that even given the material advantages many of them had, they often had enormous problems becoming successful adults and maintaining healthy relationships.

i.e. abuse and ruthlessness is like a contagion/germ that propagates generationally and from person to person, and for whatever reason western European culture is an ideal environment.

I thought it odd phraseology, too, though perhaps he dropped off Usenet completely (closed his NNTP server account)?

Please, no.