Correlation =/= Causation
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Agreed. 2500 years since Socrates, and we really haven’t made a whole lot of progress on that kind of project.
And @anon89609066: I actually agree with @popobawa4u’s choice to demand clarification in this case.
“Supernatural” as a category has always been difficult for me. It isn’t as though there’s a place you can go and read the complete laws of nature, and then somewhere else you can go and see things that don’t fit the schema. If you confronted the scientific community with data that broke all known laws of nature, they would say, “Well, this thing exists, and behaves differently than we’d expect, so we’ll have to study how it behaves and come up with a better, more complete set of laws.” They would increase the scope of what they know nature includes, just like they did with stars, galaxies, microorganisms, atoms, quarks, and all sorts of other things.
For something to be supernatural, such an approach would need to be somehow fundamentally impossible. I’m honestly not sure how that could be even in principle. And dictionary definitions like “(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature” don’t help much.
“Free will” has a similar problem. Whatever parts a system is made of, whether normal matter or something more exotic, its behavior is either determined by initial conditions (deterministic, even if not all the initial conditions are known or measurable) or not (random in some way). I see lots of people try to invoke a third category, but I’ve never understood what they think that category does.
@popobawa4u: The closest I’ve ever seen to a good definition was the idea that supernatural entities involve “ontologically basic mental things.” I am also confident that most people don’t think of it that way, have never heard any such definition, and wouldn’t understand the point if they did.
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I was thinking on the last one the answer could be 1 day or 47 days. Depending on which half of the pond you were talking about. The second half or the first half.
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True, the math can be grasped, but the answer isn’t always obvious. Intuitively, #1 sounds the best. But all three actually have the same reduction rate.
Yes, and people use this all the time to manipulate things.
Hey, ever play the game Mindtrap? I freaking love it. Its full of riddles, usually for something like a crime scene. Once you get your brain in “Mindtrap mode”, looking for the details between the obvious, you make everyone else look foolish.
You just ODed and now they moved it up to Schedule IV to combat abuse and now people who need it aren’t being prescribed it for fear of abuse
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Sorry, no, not at all. I know some very smart, very educated, very analytical people who also have strong religious beliefs. The difference between them and the college students interviewed for this study is that they’ve come to their beliefs the hard way, by thinking deeply and long about what they choose to believe in and why.
90% or more of teenagers have the religious beliefs they were handed by the church they grew up in. This study is not actually a study of what correlates to religiosity vs non-religiosity, it’s a study in how analytical thinking skills correlate to questioning authority vs not questioning authority.
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I’d take all three and be worry free!
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I thought I had finally figured out that widget one. (I’ve seen questions like that before.) I got it wrong, so I guess I kind of believe in god now?
(I thought it was 1 minute.)
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The 3 question math quiz can predict if you are good at math!
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You’ve messed that up.
bat+bat = 210, so bat = 105
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To answer that, don’t you need to know the rate of heart attacks in the general population?
If I assume it’s 3% (because I’ve seen questions like this before), that makes all three drugs equally effective, and I would take the one I’ve seen advertised on TV.
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Are you washed in the blood of the Lambda?
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I would also like an odds-ratio or some other measure of effect size.
But - if the meanings are arbitrary - how is forceblink ever wrong?
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Um, isn’t that what I said?
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I’m just wondering what the “intuitive answers” are. Surely there’s no other way to answer these than to analytically puzzle them out? I guess “intuitive answers” are just what superficially seems to fit in, if you just look at a couple of the numbers and ignore the actual question, i.e. without actually answering the questions? E.g. $1, 100 minutes, 24 days?
It’s not really about math, though - it’s about puzzling out the correct answer (that may seeem counter-intuitive) versus looking for an answer that looks good superficially but doesn’t actually work.
They tend to be more likely to be religious extremists, too, e.g. suicide bombers. Because engineering is about solvable, problems with black and white, right and wrong answers. I imagine the trend is the opposite with biologists, for example.
More than one. Do I believe in “God” or not? (Or, hell, One - which god do I believe in?)
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I think that anyone who adopts atheism because of a lack of good grounds to posit a deity, but who doesn’t then go on to adopt nihilism, either hasn’t thought things through sufficiently or has some very interesting arguments that I’d love to hear.
(Doesn’t apply to religious atheists, such as some Hindus, possibly some Buddhists, and the more ideologically pure Marxist-Leninists.)
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Math puzzle inventor Martin Gardner was a theist and would have been able to answer these questions in an instant.
Actually, Gardner described himself as a “fideist”. He acknowledged that all reason and evidence were on the side of atheism but nevertheless had a personal belief in a god based solely on faith. Therefore, I think he was a fairly atypical believer and am not at all surprised that he’d be an exception to a quiz like this.
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Well not #1, because that would only reduce your risk from 3% to 2.01%, and would only prevent the heart attacks of 99 out of 10,000 people.
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I can’t find any example of the word being used this way.
You could say that about half the language if you look at the etymological origins.
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