Gemli explains...

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Rivendale
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Re: Gemli explains...

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Gemli might be an asshole. DCP might be an asshole. However as most professional debators point out their goal isn't to convince their interlocutor. The audience is the target. Furthermore if redundancy is the metric that we measure performance then most courses should be abolished. Most exercise programs should be abolished and most religious meetings should be abolished. These interchanges will far outlive anyone here and I think important in the upcoming generations that view them. Also, there is an asshole in every room and if you can't find one you're the one. And on a positive note. The sheer volume of this 13000+ interaction assures it won't be delegated to some obscure article in The Friend magazine.
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Re: Gemli explains...

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Dans arguments get really tiresome. They follow a couple trite patterns:

“You haven’t read enough of my friends books”

“I don’t have the burden of proof”

“You aren’t serious”

“I’ve grown tired and bored of this”

It’s kind of sad watching a former BYU professor with a PHD spend his time like this.
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Res Ipsa
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Re: Gemli explains...

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Physics Guy wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 11:37 am

Gemli keeps repeating that stories aren't evidence. I like the sound of that, I really do; but only for about three panels. Then it occurs to me that I've never personally seen any hard evidence for Higgs bosons. I've never even worked through the calculations to show that the Higgs mechanism keeps the Standard Model renormalizable. Renormalization is nasty, mind-bending stuff and few physicists ever work through it in detail themselves. We mostly just accept what we're told. We hear stories.

I don't believe it's the same. I think I'm being more reasonable when I accept my physics stories than Mormons are when they believe their witness accounts. I'm just not happy with how well I can articulate how my stories are better than theirs.
This argument of Gemli’s is not the knock out punch he seems to think it is. It’s a shallow application of post-modern deconstruction.

His claim is simply wrong. Stories are evidence. We accept that they are so commonly in our everyday lives that we don’t think about it. Your comment about accepting the story of the Higgs Boson is one example of something we all do thousands of times a day. We deprive people of their liberty and forcibly move money from one person to another based on stories. The murder weapon in a trial, just sitting there in front of the jury, isn’t evidence of anything. It becomes evidence through the stories told by witnesses and experts.

What Gemli is functionally doing with this argument is special pleading that religious stories should be treated differently than other stories. But I’m not seeing an attempt to justify the special pleading.
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Physics Guy
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Re: Gemli explains...

Post by Physics Guy »

Yeah, that’s the succinct point for which I was groping: special pleading. Anyone can ride a high horse about not accepting inadequate evidence, but if they can’t explain why that kind of evidence is inadequate for their opponents when they accept it themselves in other cases, then that’s the fallacy that we call special pleading.
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Re: Gemli explains...

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Res Ipsa wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 5:51 pm
Physics Guy wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 11:37 am
Gemli keeps repeating that stories aren't evidence. I like the sound of that, I really do; but only for about three panels. Then it occurs to me that I've never personally seen any hard evidence for Higgs bosons. I've never even worked through the calculations to show that the Higgs mechanism keeps the Standard Model renormalizable. Renormalization is nasty, mind-bending stuff and few physicists ever work through it in detail themselves. We mostly just accept what we're told. We hear stories.

I don't believe it's the same. I think I'm being more reasonable when I accept my physics stories than Mormons are when they believe their witness accounts. I'm just not happy with how well I can articulate how my stories are better than theirs.
This argument of Gemli’s is not the knock out punch he seems to think it is. It’s a shallow application of post-modern deconstruction.

His claim is simply wrong. Stories are evidence. We accept that they are so commonly in our everyday lives that we don’t think about it. Your comment about accepting the story of the Higgs Boson is one example of something we all do thousands of times a day. We deprive people of their liberty and forcibly move money from one person to another based on stories. The murder weapon in a trial, just sitting there in front of the jury, isn’t evidence of anything. It becomes evidence through the stories told by witnesses and experts.

What Gemli is functionally doing with this argument is special pleading that religious stories should be treated differently than other stories. But I’m not seeing an attempt to justify the special pleading.
Out of curiosity, when you’re in court do stories, well, evidentiary stories, require any evidence to establish truth probability? Are alibis enough a la, “My friend can attest I was at his house at the time of the murders.” And then George attests to that ‘evidence’, so we now have two ‘evidences’. Does the court normally accept those stories as factual until priven otherwise?

- Doc
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Re: Gemli explains...

Post by Everybody Wang Chung »

drumdude wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 4:46 pm
Dans arguments get really tiresome. They follow a couple trite patterns:

“You haven’t read enough of my friends books”
Isn't it great to belong to a religion whose scriptures aren't enough to determine whether it is true? According to DCP, you have to read numerous non-official books by his friends in order to make a determination. Let's hope that these books by DCP's friends are available in Latin America and Africa, or the Church will be in big trouble.
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Re: Gemli explains...

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Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 7:19 pm
Res Ipsa wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 5:51 pm
This argument of Gemli’s is not the knock out punch he seems to think it is. It’s a shallow application of post-modern deconstruction.

His claim is simply wrong. Stories are evidence. We accept that they are so commonly in our everyday lives that we don’t think about it. Your comment about accepting the story of the Higgs Boson is one example of something we all do thousands of times a day. We deprive people of their liberty and forcibly move money from one person to another based on stories. The murder weapon in a trial, just sitting there in front of the jury, isn’t evidence of anything. It becomes evidence through the stories told by witnesses and experts.

What Gemli is functionally doing with this argument is special pleading that religious stories should be treated differently than other stories. But I’m not seeing an attempt to justify the special pleading.
Out of curiosity, when you’re in court do stories, well, evidentiary stories, require any evidence to establish truth probability? Are alibis enough a la, “My friend can attest I was at his house at the time of the murders.” And then George attests to that ‘evidence’, so we now have two ‘evidences’. Does the court normally accept those stories as factual until proven otherwise?

- Doc
Doc, according to my limited expertise, I served as a juror once, the following happens. Attorneys invite stories from witnesses and find folks with other information relative to the stories. Then a group on nonexperts, jurors, argue about it all until the jurors that don't agree reach the desperation point of crying so a decision is finally made and every body finally, thank God, gets to go home.

It's not a perfect device but it is a lot better than the ancient tradition of just torturing people till they confessed.
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Re: Gemli explains...

Post by Rivendale »

huckelberry wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 8:27 pm
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 7:19 pm
Out of curiosity, when you’re in court do stories, well, evidentiary stories, require any evidence to establish truth probability? Are alibis enough a la, “My friend can attest I was at his house at the time of the murders.” And then George attests to that ‘evidence’, so we now have two ‘evidences’. Does the court normally accept those stories as factual until priven otherwise?

- Doc
Doc, according to my limited expertise, I served as a juror once, the following happens. Attorneys invite stories from witnesses and find folks with other information relative to the stories. Then a group on nonexperts, jurors, argue about it all until the jurors that don't agree reach the desperation point of crying so a decision is finally made and every body finally, thank God, gets to go home.

It's not a perfect device but it is a lot better than the ancient tradition of just torturing people till they confessed.
I have been a juror also. The testimonies (stories) were not the evidence that eventually led us our verdicts. They simply were a springboard to communicate information from each prospective witness. We then considered the testimonies credibility, physical evidence, prior documented behaviors, likelihood of proposed events, and other court evidence to arrive at a verdict.
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Re: Gemli explains...

Post by drumdude »

Rivendale wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 8:37 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 8:27 pm
Doc, according to my limited expertise, I served as a juror once, the following happens. Attorneys invite stories from witnesses and find folks with other information relative to the stories. Then a group on nonexperts, jurors, argue about it all until the jurors that don't agree reach the desperation point of crying so a decision is finally made and every body finally, thank God, gets to go home.

It's not a perfect device but it is a lot better than the ancient tradition of just torturing people till they confessed.
I have been a juror also. The testimonies (stories) were not the evidence that eventually led us our verdicts. They simply were a springboard to communicate information from each prospective witness. We then considered the testimonies credibility, physical evidence, prior documented behaviors, likelihood of proposed events, and other court evidence to arrive at a verdict.
You wouldn’t have voted that the testimony of the witnesses was sufficient to persuade you that the plates were an ancient record of Jews who traveled to the Americas 600 years before Christ???
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Re: Gemli explains...

Post by Res Ipsa »

Rivendale wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 8:37 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Sun Mar 10, 2024 8:27 pm
Doc, according to my limited expertise, I served as a juror once, the following happens. Attorneys invite stories from witnesses and find folks with other information relative to the stories. Then a group on nonexperts, jurors, argue about it all until the jurors that don't agree reach the desperation point of crying so a decision is finally made and every body finally, thank God, gets to go home.

It's not a perfect device but it is a lot better than the ancient tradition of just torturing people till they confessed.
I have been a juror also. The testimonies (stories) were not the evidence that eventually led us our verdicts. They simply were a springboard to communicate information from each prospective witness. We then considered the testimonies credibility, physical evidence, prior documented behaviors, likelihood of proposed events, and other court evidence to arrive at a verdict.
I also have been a juror. The physical evidence means nothing without a story to put it in context. Stick the raw data from a DNA test in front of a jury. It means nothing without the story that explains what it means.

ETA: I’d suggest that what juries do is listen to all the stories and then construct a story they can agree upon.
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we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.


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