The Skeptics Guide to the Universe Forum

Don't mesh around

Nailed it.

Not a train:

A train,

Connections
Puzzle #170
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Quote from: jt512 on Today at 02:36:46 AMMy experience is that the best and brightest in these fields go into academia.

The best physicists go to work for the government at places like Lawrence Livermore or Los Alamos (or even JPL). Many of those places have strong links to academia, but the work is for the government.

Not a train:

Quote from: Tassie Dave on Today at 01:10:04 AMSome may go into science for the right reasons, but not every medical student wants to save the world. Some go into with the plan to be a high end surgeon making millions.

That doesn't sound like a very efficient plan, considering the amount of training you need, and the time it takes, to be a high-end surgeon.

Gotta love it.  I didn't elaborate enough in my previous post, but the reason I cited that ALAB episode is because I thought it was emblematic of the entire "hey we have to be cold hard rationalists about this even if it offends people, and not be afraid to 'keep an eye on' potential sources of danger" attitude that emerged mostly after 9/11.  But the idea that this impulse manifests into something even marginally intelligent (let alone legal, morally respectable, or capable of making anyone safer) was disproven a thousand times by all the actual outcomes of widespread suspicions of Muslims.  If you're a person within the government or with any substantial power that goes down this road, you end up inflicting harm on others and running a steamroller over everyone's civil liberties.  If you don't have that kind of power and you're just some random guy on the internet ... well perhaps the magnitude of harm you've generated is far less, but so is your ability to accomplish anything positive from this obsession.  It is, best case scenario, a quest to become a xenophobic Encyclopedia Brown.  There is no special "3rd way" that people who identify as skeptics get to take, or did take, on this issue.

Seriously, run through your little thought experiment to completion - what you are going to DO WITH a belief that Islam is X% more "dangerous" than another religion?  For all the skeptics that became obsessed with this, and how certain they were that this belief was because they were immune to fantastical thinking, they never seem to have reckoned with just how childish the resulting narrative becomes when they take it to its inevitable conclusion.