People are living the American way of life? Who, other than Fortune 500 executives?

I thought it was the white picket fence cliche, or was that the "American Dream"?

It's a jingoistic nationalist popular culture fabrication with connections to the American Dream and Manifest Destiny. It purports to an allowance for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," but in reality people only get to pick two of those things. If you look at the phrase to mean literally the "American lifestyle" what I said is probably incomprehensible, but in that case you probably aren't the kind of person I'm talking to.

Edit: This is all irrelevant, anyway. My point is that if you want to imply a strong association between obesity and genetics, you are forced to admit that upward mobility is effectively not possible. This also carries the implication that expressing your general disgust with obesity has strong classist overtones.

i don't think you can successfully argue that obesity is in any real way caused by genetics. yeah, it may make certain eating habits more appealing to certain individuals, but i don't believe that your genetics make it impossible for you to make healthy eating choices.

Um, can I change my answer to calling troll on this thread?

You are probably right!

Actually what I was thinking of as the 'American Lifestyle' was eating burgers off the grill in the back yard while drinking a beer and watching football.

There's nothing wrong with eating burgers off the grill in the back yard while drinking a beer and watching football, except for one major issue.

There's no TV outside in most places.

Now, a TV could be brought outside, but the easiest thing to do would be:

1. Grill the burgers outside, bring the food inside, drink a beer and watch football.

2. Grill the burgers inside, eat inside, drink a beer and watch football.

Anyways, I believe in God.

So im going to hell right? Because that Jesus guy thought some neat stuff about how to treat your fellow man, but wasn't a god?

No, I do not believe in such things. Both spooks and fairy tales. There's little to no evidence for either, and more than enough against the arguments for the existence of a god. Or, at least, not a 'good' god. We truely can not know one way or the other.

The "American Way of Life" doesn't really exist anymore, since Americans now live divided by various things, such as social economic classes, political idealism, religion idealism, ethnic division, racial division. I'm not saying these things were not present before, but there were better times for the U.S. than there are today.

Which times are those?

American Dream is alive in well in California with record unemployment and foreclosure and a fiscal system about ready to collapse in on itself.

Y'know what. Let the feds reclaim California. We've failed at a state.


...or we can secede from the rest of the state.

1787: 35 year old, male, white, land owner.
1877: Grandfather clause.

1776: Federalists vs. anti-federalists
1861: Union vs. Confederacy
1913: Isolationists vs. Internationalists

1692: Witch trials.
1960s: Redscare. Christianity versus Atheism; introduction of "In God We Trust."

1830s-1900s: Irish had lower social standing than blacks.

Segregation of whites and blacks exists in some form to this day.

Wait... what are you trying to say again?

I had a longer reply but the internet ate it and I'm too lazy to retype it all. Here is the abridged version.

Again I agree, but there's a third option where both 1. and 2. are true. Obesity is a spectrum, so whilst the majority of cases are the result of environmental factors coupled with a natural predisposition to weight gain there are some genetic disorders (ones with leptin come to mind) where obesity is all but inevitable.

I believe in Harvey Dent

Good job Steven, taking an eight year old FARK meme and posting it here for not the first time.

Good job Emon, that's a 16 year old X-files "meme." I've never even been to Fark, but I've seen every episode of the X-files (except the last few season with Agent Jhon "T-1000" Doggett, I didn't like those).

Oh right, I forgot that show existed. Must have pushed it out of my mind after, what season 6 or so?

You know, it's really too bad SF_GoldG_01 craps his pants and hides under his bed any time someone challenges him, because I'm actually curious about this.

All SF_Gold wanted to do was tend rabbits. He said to me, "I remember about the rabbits, George." I'm sorry Jon'C, he isn't coming back.

Now with polling goodness so we can see where Massassians really stand on this contentious issue!

I guess I'd have to say I'm with Steven on this (at least how he originally put it). There's been too many times in my Calculus/Engineering/Biochemistry/Biology/Forestry classes where natural processes have worked out a little too well and perfectly to keep you from wondering...

As for the idea of a christian god, or any god presented by the majority of religions, however... it's a little bit too much for me to buy into.

What do you mean by "worked out too well"?

The human mind is wired to search for patterns--it makes us intelligent and it lets us survive. We're designed to feel satisfaction at having found a pattern in something.

So you're taking your aesthetic response to a scientific explanation to be evidence for some greater mystical truth out there? That's like saying "Mmm... this chocolate tastes too good for there not to be a God."

(I don't mean to pick on you specifically; this is an argument that I hear an awful lot, and it doesn't make sense to me.)

Kurt Vonnegut said that music was the only proof he needed for the existence of god.

With calculus... the way you had have some super complicated equation, but when you went through and solved it, it equaled something like 0 or 1.

With biochemistry... the way that all of the seemingly random and simple properties of atoms and molecules come together to form a functioning organism.

I'm not saying that things like this are proof of the existence of god... just that if the universe were planned by a self-aware being, then he/she/it sure was smart. Godlike in his intelligence, if you will.

Well, this gets into questions about the metaphysics of math and suchlike, and my views there are pretty unpopular. But as I see it, mathematics is a human construction (not a revelation of some fundamental Truth), so praising the intelligence of its creator as godlike just sounds like hubris to me.

And I think that your Vonnegut quote is even closer to my 'chocolate' paraphrase (which I think would be a ridiculous statement) than what you say about science.

Guess I should answer the question seriously.

No. I simply do not see a place in my life for a god. I don't reject entirely the concept of a higher power, but I do reject the idea that this power is any sort of conscious entity. I mainly see morality as something that comes from humans. I don't do much philosophizing, though, so my ideas in this area are not well-defined.

I was raised in a religious home, but a low-key, open-minded one, so I was not under any pressure to rebel. I got into science at an early age, and even at my most religious I believed in evolution. I paid attention in Sunday School (I still enjoy a good Bible story, or Greek myth, or Tolkien novel). I even took things pretty seriously for a time. Eventually, though, I began to think more about the world around me. The more I thought, the less sense god made. Eventually I just decided that there was no point.

I went to a Church of England primary school, and I guess with that and the total lack of involvement between religion and my parents, I grew up thinking the whole shebang was a bit twee.

If there is, it is beyond us in ways we cannot imagine.

Answer me.

Metaphysics of math?

First off, the most important thing to understand about modern mathematics is that everything can be reduced to a very small set of fundamental axioms over a set. If you live in a universe where you can group objects together, you live in a universe where mathematics is a fundamental reality.

Secondly, every mathematical concept we've developed - no matter how bizarre or esoteric - has some real-world example.

Example: quantum mechanics is linear algebra in a complex vector space. Complex numbers exist in real life, and they're vectors.

Another example: your comic book collection is a vector in GF(2). Holy cow, right? If you figure out a way to fairly combine and split up comic book collections with the other members of your comic book club, it's starting to look a lot like algebra.

Finally, surprisingly trivial equations can be used to model the behaviors of complex natural systems. Those same trivial equations can be used to predict the behaviors of other similar systems: i.e. Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, magnetic field strength, light intensity, sound intensity -- they're all inverse squares.
More importantly, the animal brain has evolved with some neat mathematical tricks built-in. If someone throws you a ball, can you catch it? Your brain is running through huge amounts of enormously complex calculus and linear algebra. You aren't even conscious of it, but it's happening. Obviously math works, otherwise we'd have never evolved with a powerful vector computer in our heads.
This tends to indicate to me that something just as good as mathematics is happening here.

Søren Kierkegaard is often interpreted as stating that man has three stages in life. The first is the aesthetic stage, a life primarily concerned with aesthetic enjoyment, a preference towards the possible over the actual and a lack of deep reflection.

This gives way towards the ethical stage where an individual begins to develop a sense of direction and respects social norms with utmost importance. Ethics deal with correct action in a social setting.

The third stage is the religious. (I've heard it referred to as the moral stage, especially by those who want to downplay Kierkegaard's Christianity) The religious life necessitates above all a relation with God, since the religious life is not dictated by society or church, but God. The religious self is the only true self. The most important aspect of the religious life is the understanding of oneself as sinful but that faith derived from reason can bring man past his despair and towards eternity.

What does this have to do with the discussion at hand? Nothing. But Kierkegaard don't need no reason.

Hey... did I ever accuse math of not working? Of course not. I use group theory in the work I do, so I'm pretty confident about the usefulness of math, even things (like quaternions) that seem pretty esoteric at first glance.

Most people have an essentially Platonic conception of the implications of mathematics: they think that a statement like "2+2=4" tells us something fundamental about the nature of the universe; whether or not they admit it, they tend to believe in Plato's notion of the Forms, and that mathematics is an expression of unadulterated Truth.

On the contrary, 2+2=4 is a statement that works within a particular system of manipulating symbols; whenever that system is invoked, that statement is true. It can't tell me very much about the universe, then, because I can't imagine any universe in which "2+2=4" is untrue.

(This is what Wittgenstein means by statements like "Here "I can't imagine the opposite" doesn't mean: my powers of imagination are unequal to the task. These words are a defense against something whose form makes it look like an empirical proposition, but which is really a grammatical one." Wittgenstein gets misused by pomo cranks all the time to claim things like "truth is relative; reality is whatever you want it to be," but actually what he was doing was arguing for a formalist, rather than Platonic, conception of semiotic systems--of which math is an important example.)


It is, of course, interesting to see the ways in which our abstract symbolic systems can be lined up with phenomena in the universe--that's why we do math. But to think that "2+2=4" is a fundamental truth about the universe--and then to believe in some mystical power because of your aesthetic awe at that statement--is misguided: it's a grammatical statement, nothing more.

Yes. No particular reason.

But 2+2=4 does tell us something fundamental about the nature of the universe: You have two apples. Bill has two apples. Bill gives you his apples. How many apples do you have? The fact that you can derive a predictive mathematical model of quantum physics from this exact reasoning suggests that math is "real" in any sense you can apply that word to an abstract concept.

Near as I can tell, you agree with me this much - but I don't think you're getting past the notion of "mathematics" as its modern symbolic representation. The symbolic representation didn't even exist before Euler, but we were still doing mathematics (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica for example.)

I have a lump of dirt and Bill has a lump of dirt. He adds his lump on top of mine. Now do I have two lumps of dirt?

Add a .2 L block of salt to a .2 L cup of water. Does your total volume of salt&water thus equal .4 L? I'm going at .2c and I throw a ball forward at .2c: is it going at .4c?

In every case, of course not.

But you'll object "Normal addition doesn't apply in these cases!" Of course it doesn't: but we didn't know that a priori. Math is like a yardstick: we lay it next to the universe, and we can measure the universe by how it lines up to our symbolism. We learn something about the universe when .2c "+" .2c doesn't behave the way you'd expect.

2 + 2 = 4 by the definitions of 2, 4, +, and =. That only tells me something about how we've defined those symbols. We learn something about the universe when we discover an isomorphism between the four symbols of our statement and things/relations we find out there in the world.

Humans are creative at coming up with symbolic statements and relating them to the world. But I don't see any reason to conclude that "This statement lines up well with many phenomena" is evidence for anything grander than the fact that people come up with clever (and therefore useful) statements.

For example, I could take the statement "X is X". I bet you I could find an infinite number of isomorphisms between that statement and the universe. But does that tell me something about the universe, or something about the grammar of the statement "____ is ____"?




I'm sorry that we're not communicating well; an internet forum is not exactly the place where I express my thoughts most clearly. But I'm not really sure at all what you mean by this.

We do, actually. Addition is defined for apples, not piles of dirt.

There are some cultures on earth that do not have the concept of numbers. There are either apples, or there aren't. To them, I suppose, mathematics would appear to be an unnecessary and artificial phenomenon. If you were a member of this culture and Bill gave you his apples, you wouldn't have the language to describe such a change in quantity. Does that change the outcome?

This is what I mean when I say you aren't going past the symbolic definition. We rigorously define addition for our purposes, but an addition is indeed happening in the universe independently from our definition.

For once a religious thread is actually fascinating.

Explain without being mean more often please.

(I'm working on a paper tonight, so I don't have a lot of time to respond. I think I understand where we disagree, but it deserves a real reply. For now just this: )

Let's continue with my yardstick analogy. A yardstick is a yard long, and I can't imagine a universe where that wasn't the case--not because I can't imagine measuring-sticks of various lengths, but because of the way that 'yard' and 'yardstick' are defined. So to say "my yardstick is one yard long" tells me nothing about the universe (just like "2+2=4" tells me nothing), but saying "hey, this object over here is the same length as my yardstick" does tell me something about things out there in the world.

If I end up finding out that lots of things can have a yardstick lined up with them in a useful way, that tells me that the yardstick is a really useful tool to have devised. But it still seems goofy to me to say, "Hey, this yardstick is really useful: there must be a God/Profound Truth!" The multitude of yardstick-uses doesn't imply a connection between their applications.

Of course, the usefulness of the yardstick does lead me to ask certain questions. "Is there a reason things tend to be yardstick-sized?" or perhaps "Am I finding lots of yardstick-sized things because that's the size of thing I'm looking for?" And answering those questions will lead me to develop newer tools.


But never does the fact that I can make a tool to do the next job strike me as unusual, or mystically profound. As I go through these steps repeatedly, I'm also not surprised that I'm developing better and better (i.e. more widely applicable/more general) tools.


I suppose you could be surprised that we can make any tools at all--that is, you can be surprised that order exists in the universe at all. But I'm not sure that I can imagine a completely chaotic universe; simply saying "universe exists" means "things exist" which already contrasts "things" from "nothing" which already introduces a degree of order. So you're left with a claim like "God (née Mystical Truth) is the opposite of complete chaos"--which as far as I can tell means "God is the opposite of a meaningless phrase".

(To get back to my original point of contention: being surprised at existence itself is a far cry from being awed by the beauty of a scientific explanation. Wonderment at the simple existence of tools vs. wonderment at the fact that we made a really good one.)