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I totally agree that TV today is the place to go for quality cinema, while Hollywood seems to just pump out the same cookie-cutter crap season after season. I had the misfortune of seeing Ride Along 2 recently. Good post from the Chief. Glad to see it wasn't a waste of time trying to get...

I remember the Chief. He used to say the darndest things. Glad to see you growing up a bit Chief, but I'm still surprised you didn't mention Tesla.

Hey Tyler, been a while! Glad to see you're still around. You see the Chief around anymore?, Chief talking shithole, or something. I'm on the home stretch with Sopranos, 6x06. The first few seasons seemed to have many false starts to story lines. Like seeds for plot points that never...

I'm watching Sopranos for the first time. I give it a C+, which is probably good considering it started 17 years ago.

It would be nice if we lived in a world where every belief was arrived at through a bayesian-like probability assessment, but that's not the way the human brain works. The human brain does not need proof to form a belief, it needs justification. Justification is much easier, because proof is...

Ha, no, just a stoner with a lot of free time who happens to be interested in these subjects. I think everyone who's participated in this thread so far is pretty bright.

Nope, I am saying that personal experience is as convincing as evidence in the mind of the person having the experience. I am speaking of personal experience as opposed to a controlled experience, like a scientific experiment. Personal experience is unreliable because the person having the...

Ah but what about the bias bias? Research shows that the more you learn about biases, the more you become biased in thinking that you can avoid them. They are like the Chinese finger trap of the mind. The more you try to break free, the stronger their grip becomes. As you say, it's best to...

Personal experience is very convincing the the person having the experience, and it's very hard to counter. At the same time, personal experience has no value to anyone not having the experience, because it's subjective. So, if someone has had acupuncture and found it to be useful, no amount...

Keep in mind that patterns and coincidences are an expected feature of randomness. You've stated this very well when you say it "feels" like nothing is random. The human brain has a tendency to assign agency to the patterns it perceives. IOW, our minds aren't happy to simply notice patterns...

Beliefs are representations of what we think is accurate about the world. If I believe a statement or proposition, it's a signal that I think the statement is accurate to a high degree. So, If I believe a statement that says I will fall if I walk off a cliff, it means I think the statement...

You seem upset with my example, yet the same logic you are using was used to support belief in leprechauns, or ghosts or Bigfoot or sea monsters. Lots of people report them and many of those people have no reason to lie. If your threshold for believing in something is simply that a lot of...

Well, if the government is hiding all the info, then there is much I can say about that. It's what's known as an immunized hypothesis. It cannot be falsified. It means that, no matter what, there will never be a reason to change your mind. No argument, no circumstance, no experience can ever...

Sleep paralysis is a creepy thing to read about. I've never experienced it, thankfully. It is a common experience and one than can be willingly induced in certain people. No reason to think it's paranormal. Interestingly, the presence that people feel changes with culture. In modern times...

Investigating phenomena and coming up short, or finding more plausible explanations, is not the same as dismissing. The scientific community has taken the idea of alien visitation seriously, but without any evidence there isn't much that can be said. Doubt is the appropriate position, so long...

it's not the belief that aliens exist that is seen as kooky. Many scientists and philosophers hold that same belief. What gets someone labeled as kooky has to do with other factors. Yes, there are likely billions of planets able support life, and that's just considering life as we know it...

What I find interesting about reports of alien visitors is how the aliens change over time. For example, it seems the classic saucer shaped crafts were all the rage among aliens back in the 50s, yet no one today reports them. Then there was a shift to cigar shaped ships. For a while in the...

PH should drift. Ideally you would set it to 5.5 and then wait for it to get to 6.5 before adjusting it back down. Sometimes that takes 24 hrs, sometimes longer, depending on the buffers in the water and the activity of the plants. PH down is not really expensive if you buy it by the gallon...

My mother struggled with shingles for nearly a year, which is much longer than the average person has to deal with it. Even worse, rather than getting the typical rash on one side of her trunk, the virus attacked the nerves in her knee joint causing near constant pain. So, I've personally seen...