Tannhauser

Ditto.

£450 in total. Holy crap.

You should see my 'magic wand'.

Two more press releases from the Ministry of Disinformation. All you had to do was read past the first paragraph on the link: [my emboldening] So, it's an optional module on an Educational Studies BA. How long's a module? Six weeks? Two weeks? Is using this as a way in to study the issues cited legitimate? Who knows? The point is that it isn't a 'Harry Potter degree'. They aren't spending three years studying Harry Potter. This post forms part of an Internet Studies degree. It's a compulsory module called 'How to avoid spreading bullshit via car forums'.

Ah, that makes sense.

If you believe the D**ly M**l (and who doesn't?), his pay was even less than that. Their guesstimate was an annual salary of about £70,000. I don't think the other three really count as boffins.

That was the question I asked myself at 16, concluded that there was no reason, and stopped. I don't buy the 'it was taken over by Christians' business. It's inconveniently christian through and through. Good post. Agreed. It's not that difficult to find a pleasant compromise. I enjoy the time off. If someone wants to buy me a present, that's their business. If I want to buy someone a present, I will - no matter the time of year. Why wait for Jesus' nominal birthday? I can't imagine why anyone would go to a wedding or party from a sense of obligation. To what end? What sort of person would invite you -and expect you to go to - something that you weren't interested in? In life, you have to participate in what you want to, then be a big boy and say no to the rest.

I had that last year. A pipe that removes condensation along the outside of the house had a plug of ice in it, which shut the boiler down.

Agreed that all scientists bring their own prejudices. But any phenomenon that is real just won’t be denied. Observations create cracks in the theory, and eventually the theory becomes unsustainable. That’s happened countless times in the history of science. But that’s not happening with the paranormal. Odd experimental results do not, in isolation, build a serious case. So , you’re postulating that there is some sort of sense that is beyond that of the senses. Furthermore, this isn’t a disguised version of our own biases, it’s actually a real phenomenon. If so, we should be able to establish it with a simple test, one that eliminates the possibility that we are using the existing senses. OK, how about Ganzfeld techniques to investigate ESP? There’s a case of science trying to establish that something unobservable can be real. Once again, thousands of experiments have failed to show any such effect. Sadly, the rest of your post descends into world trade centre stuff. You couldn’t have picked a worse example of ‘scientific bias’ to further your argument. Actually, that’s not true, you could always go back to David Icke. But it’s certainly amongst the worst. After every major event, outlandish ideas flourish briefly, then die a death. I would make a list, but such an argument would be doomed, since undoubtedly you would believe in every single one of those as well.

See above. I am imagining you assaulting your brother’s ears with an unrelenting stream of this sort of thing. No wonder he gives you short shrift. Your appeal to common sense is ironic in the extreme given some of your beliefs. That aside, common sense is no guide in these matters, is it? Three hundred years ago, it was common sense that disease was caused by bad smells, or that witches made the cattle fail to deliver milk. I’ve no idea wat your teacup example is meant to prove. I think you do have a point here, but as pointed out above, one makes these sorts of judgements based on the totality of one’s experiences. For myself, I would certainly dismiss the testimony of seeing a spirit, for example, as a delusion, lie, or mistake. This is based on the following: 1) We know all sorts of mechanisms that can account for such visions that don’t involve the existence of spirits. We have evidence that these can produce similar experiences. 2) Spirits do not materialise under carefully controlled conditions. The only conditions under which they do appear are ones that cannot be checked and reproduced. Therefore, there is a lack of high quality evidence. 3) We know that many attempts to fool researchers have been uncovered. 4) A lot of witnesses to such events are not very credible – this is my subjective judgement, but it’s not based not on what they are saying. It’s based on my perception of their personality, intelligence, ability to analyse and interpret, and so on. 5) The deep need people have to believe in a world that science cannot explain, and for the world to be generally less mundane than it actually is. 6) My lack of direct experience of anything remotely paranormal 7) My observations of people that believe they are experiencing something paranormal. 8) The lack of any credible theory to explain the existence of spirits 9) Evidence that consciousness is a physical process that is tied to one three pound lump of material in the skull 10) Philosophical and logical objections to the notion of a spirit. So, the next time I see someone claim that they have seen a spirit, to be honest, personally I do dismiss it as rubbish. I don’t need to go through all that reasoning process for each new example. Having said this, if Princeton University started reporting spirits in a well-designed experimental protocol (read: can’t be easily faked), and then those results were replicated elsewhere, by different researchers, then I would begin to reconsider. But guess what? It’s not going to happen. It’s taken 100 years and –and as Jagman pointed out – a lot of time and money – but the paranormal is at the end of the road. The one exception is PK, in which there is a glimmering of a smidgeon of a shadow of a difficult-to-explain event. That’s it.

Right, this is a bit of a monster reply. You’ve raised two issues with science, or the people who practise it: corruption, and inability to think open-mindedly. Starting with corruption. Some scientists are undoubtedly corrupt and – for example- falsify data. That’s part of any human enterprise. However, as a mechanism for finding out reliable information, it has several advantages. For a start off, its built on the principle of replicability. Results have to be repeated in order to be taken seriously. Secondly, in most cases, there is some transparency about raw data. Thirdly, there is peer review, which for all its faults can alert researchers to when data looks dodgy. Compare this to the long history of fakery in many subjects that want to challenge conventional silence. There is absolutely no comparison between the two, The history of pseudoscience and paranormal experience is littered with charlatans, fakers, cheats, criminals. Secondly, blinkeredness. It’s all to do with balance of evidence. Let’s say someone reports that they dropped a ball, and the ball just hovered where it was. Or a video appears on Youtube appearing to show this. Does this mean that the scientist should start questioning theories of gravitation? No, because its likely that there is some other explanation that accounts for the observation. We have so many experimental observations, and it predicts so many things successfully on a day t day basis, that its going to take something extraordinary to disprove it. A hovering ball is much more likely to be due to fakery, or someone being mistaken about what they have seen. Is this blinkeredness? It certainly would be if it’s taken too far. If a scientist was to ignore real evidence that is reproducible and cannot be accounted for by other mechanisms, then yes. Unfortunately, the challenges from paranormal investigators are usually incredibly weak. Understandably, scientists don’t have the time and energy to respond to every ill-conceived crackpot idea, especially when they are talking to people who just cant understand why their revelatory new idea doesn’t work.

Just posted a long explanatory reply to that and lost it. Hey ho.

Good post. Karl Popper would be proud of you.

Fantastic. That's the phone for me.

Happy to oblige

It's newsworthy for all sorts of reasons, including (a) the fact that one of the big three parties broke their election promise, which (b) alters the political landscape and puts strain on the fledgling coalition and © it's a significant change to the educational system, which means that (d) tens of thousands of potential students are afected, and by extension their families. A hundred years ago, there was probably the same debate about secondary education. "Educate them up to 11, that's fine, but why should I pay for them to go and learn all that stuff they don't need at secondary school? Who needs to know what a molecule is or what the Holocaust was?" The point being that the distinction between a basic, adequate and further education is a bit of an arbitrary one, and changes with the times. Many who DESERVE and [are] CAPABLE of going to university now will not go. It's not a simple matter of 'pay for it later', as has already been discussed. Although there will be 'slush funds and scholarships', this will by no means redress what is a fundamental shift in policy. For a start off, not everyone gets As at GCSE. The cachet of having a degree does diminish as more people have one - but only if you look at it as something to give you a competitive edge. I'm guessing that you have maths GCSE - is that less useful to you because most people have got the same? You still have the mathematical skills that you acquired as a result of taking the course to a certain standard. . Massive over-generalisation. I didn't pay a dime for my degree, and I did take it seriously. I'm also surprised that you of all people are so willing to accept the ill-informed stereotype of university being three years 'dossing around'. Of course, everyone knows a bunch of lazy students - just like most people have encountered a policeman drunk on power, a left-wing teacher, a boring accountant and so on. I can understand you not wanting to pay for it, but as pointed out elsewhere in ths thread, that's one of the things about living in a society comprised of people with different priorities to yourself. You end up paying for things that are of no interest to you. The solution is to live in a hut in the forest on your own. That equates education with utility, but education adds to society in a way that is independent of economic success. I dare say you've educated yourself on lots of topics, and you show it on here by contributing different political and cultural perspectives. In doing so, you benefit from reading stuff written by people who have formally studied history, politics, international relations and so on. There's a good reason why repressive regimes (and I'm not making reference to the UK here) always target academics and universities - because they are the ones who challenge the staus quo, cut throught the rhetoric and bring a more informed perspective to the table.

One tries . This thread's right up my street, because it goes from philosophy of religion right through to science and pseudoscience.

I had a look at Michael Roll's stuff. I hadn't come across him before. Man, he's a classic. The medium he seems to be referring to is Helen Duncan. That will be the Helen Duncan who had previously been caught red-handed faking her 'manifestations'. More Establishment manipulation of THE TRUTH, I expect.

This is often referred to as the 'jealous phenomena' defence. I think there's a huge problem with effectively providing a get-out clause for every time a phenomenon fails to appear. Any failure can be explained away as 'there was too much negative energy (or whatever)'. The problem with demanding a particular mind set such as an 'open mind' (read 'believer') is that those sympathetic to psychic phenomena tend to make the worst investigators. They are inherently trusting of the individuals taking part, they don't want to look for fraud in their participants or their research assistants, so they don't. I always think studying sexual behaviour is a good analogy for the jealous phenomena defence. Someone might be able to do it perfectly well at home, but not 'perform' under intense scrutiny in the lab. Well ,that's true initially for many, and yet sexual behaviour can be and is studied successfully under controled conditions. Any real phenomenon will eventually prove itself under carefully mnitored conditions.

Sorry, missed that. That would be 9K per year (only for some unis,of course), so 27K for a three year course. That's without living costs over the course of the degree, let's say 3 X 7k= 21K. Of course, you'd have to pay the latter out anyway, but whilst studying, you're restricted to low paid jobs that won't stop debt accumulating. 21K to pay off regardless of your earnings, and if you get up to the average UK wage (?), another 27K on top. 48K to pay off starts to sound like a substantial amount. I agree, as loans go, it could certainly be worse.

I certainly wouldn't begrudge the pensioners their heating, and I wouldn't put tuition fees at the top of the list of priorities. But I think there's a danger of just picking the things that we can relate to as being 'worthy'. If you hadn't had to make use of unemployment benefit, I wonder if you would have added that to your list of things you shouldn't be expected to pay for? I know that there are loads of things I pay taxes for which as far as I'm concerned are a total waste of money. But that's part of being part of society, isn't it? You pay for my subsidised ballet, I pay for your community arts project, he pays for her childcare allowance, she pays for his adult literacy class. I also don't mind shelling out more now that I earn more. Just seems fair do s to me.

Absolutely. Though, along with these myths, the same mechanism is going to propagate true connections (some mushrooms do make you sick). That's why we need science, to separate out the two. Agreed. But it's difficult to extrapolate that to western societies, where there are plenty of people who also have intense personal experiences they cannot explain. Much as you want to write them off as either doolally or plain ignorant, there are plenty who don't fit into either category. Again, personally, I think those experience can largely be explained by various psychological processes. My point is that it's not irrational to reject the evidence from your own senses.

My Dad worked from 14-65 paying into the pot. His contributions to the state put me through uni. Now I'm a taxpayer, and my contributions will put someone else through the system. They're not my kids, but that doesn't bother me. I pay my taxes towards lots of things I don't see any return on: other people's child care, paying for smokers who got lung cancer despite knowing the risks, unemployment benefit, pensioners' heating allowance, and so on.

Agreed, but that will still amount to the same consequence. The richer kids will go because parents can afford it, the less well off won't want to face thousands in debt.

There is an evolutionary theory that the tendency to believe in the supernatural and superstition is wired into us by evolution. The argument goes like this: When two events happen together, we could see tham as connected or unconnected. So for example, if I eat some mushrooms and then I am sick, this could be because the mushrooms caused the sickness (connection) or put it down to chance (no connection). If I miss the connection, then next time I eat something poisonous it might kill me. If I incorrectly put my sickness down to the mushrooms, and then avoid mushrooms in the future, the worse that's going to happen is that I miss out on one food source. The same logic could work with avoiding places where there might be predators etc. In evolutionary terms, it might be better to make a few incorrect associations than miss something really big. We therefore have an innate tendency to try to link together events, even if there is no real connection between them. So for example, if I wear a green jumper and then pass an exam, the two events become associated, and green (or the jumper) become 'lucky'. In the same way, if someone has a dream and then the dream apparently comes true, the dreamer may make a connection where none exists: their dream predicted the future. Maybe we're all genetically wired to see connections when there aren't any.