@SDGundamX

We can criticise religion generally - for it's falsehood, for it's stultifying effect on the mind, for the shadow the faithful cast over an enlightened world.

We can criticise religions individually - for the divine exhortations to genocide in each of the abrahamic canons, for the promise of infinite torture by a benevolent god in both christianity and islam, for their arbitrary or bigoted taboos, and particularly of the newer creeds - islam, mormonism, scientology - for what we know to be the bad character of their founders.

And, as you say, we can criticise the behaviours of individual believers, communities or sects - catholicism on condoms and the spread of aids, genital mutilation in africa (which you're quite right to point out has cultural roots that pre-date islam, though it would be disingenuous to claim religion has no reinforcing or propagating effect on that practice).

I wholly disagree that this last is the only or most meaningful critique to offer of religion. There are fundamental tenets of these ideologies on which all their denominations, however fractured, can be said to agree.

Allow these people their diversity, their specificity and their subtle variation of interpretation and you're in danger of chasing a thousand little fish at once, in a thousand different directions, while the religious school as a whole shifts, shimmers, dazzles and slips away. I prefer to play the dolphin pack: surrounding, corralling, squeezing and finally devouring the enemy entire.

To play devil's advocate, there's a reasonable argument to be made that polygamists really aren't worthy of marriage equality.

His point is absolutely valid. People are born homosexual, people choose to be polygamous. It might be that as a society we make an arbitrary decision that polygamy is not ok. Maybe future generations will decide that it is ok.

Personally, I don't give a damn what consenting adults get up to, but I think it's pretty important not to let the issue of SSM equality get sidetracked by the orthogonal issue of polygamous marriage.

If you want to campaign for polygamous marriage, go for it, but I think it's reasonable to pick your battles and in the USA, change happens slowly. It was over a century from the emancipation proclamation to the Civil Rights Act.

I'll quite happily say that SSM is a more important (but unrelated) issue than polygamous marriage.

@robdot

You're either trollin' or just real thick.

Yes, the simulation could in start an arbitrary place.
Yes, the devs could pre-programmed our knowledge of historical events.

That's besides the point, you're missing the point.

One philosophical tool we humans use to analyze the world is called - Occam's Razor.

Meaning, hypotheses that are overly complex should be simplified to their bare minimum in order to draw the best conclusions.

You COULD make a simulation with pre-programmed historical events.. and procedurally generated galaxies..

but that's even complex than simply setting up a few simple rules and variables.. and letting that simulation play out.

THE EVEN MORE GLARINGLY POINT THAT YOU KEEP GLOSSING OVER is..

It's much more likely that any civilization advance enough to create such simulations...

Would probably be extinct or too busy living in utopia to do so.

AGAIN, a point the author of the video concede MANY times.

Thanks for your "very scientific" definition (just like GenjiKilpatrick's "evidence" for global warming, saying "OMG, Global Warming is real because it was 70 degrees in Georgia!")

No, unlike you, I don't confuse partisanship with data... Nor do I look for arbitrary reasons to discount a person's entire argument because the rules of epistemology suddenly no longer apply. On the contrary, I choose to instead examine what the data actually shows before arriving at my own changing thoughts on the matter.

But I guess, for you, the data isn't as important as the source, so long as your pre-cooked distortions of reality aren't disrupted by something as pesky and difficult to conform to one's beliefs as the FACTS... (remember those?)

But, yes, you are absolutely right about fucking yourselves. Perhaps you should spend less time online and save some electricity. (Or maybe it's too much for you to actually Walk The Talk instead of just bloviating online.)

I went to a gas station recently. Lots of people were pumping gas... And none of them seemed to care very much about your ideas of oil company fellatio. They also didn't seem concerned at all about crackpot climate change "theories"... (Go figure.) You should get out there and yell at them for ruining the planet, ChaosEngine. I was also at an airport recently, too. There were lots of planes burning fuel. You're not making a single dent on oil consumption with your tirades... Perhaps you should try another strategy and see if anyone cares.

(Haha.. Of all the fictional "crises" you could choose to be an alarmist about, you've chosen one on which you have zero impact! But, hey, for all I know, you're just addicted to the adrenaline rush of faux outrage. Lucky for you, I'm here to feed it...

See, this is why it needs to be shown the rise in joules, and a total energy rise in the entire planetary system, not just some arbitrary surface temperature rise....because people like you (no insult intended here) genuinely see the small relative figure and think...eh its no big deal.

Its a huge deal.

We are losing gigantic chunks of the otherwise permanent ice shelf in south and north arctic areas.

With those gone, we have otherwise what would have been massive mirrors, which reflect light...now acting as big old heating blankets (the water is effectively a black body to sunlight, absorbs it like no other..).

That right there is called a positive feedback loop. You start with something small, and within no time (geologically speaking), its in runaway growth.

The frozen tundra in greenland is home to enormous pockets of trapped methane....not for much longer. (source: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n1/abs/ngeo2305.html)

Methane's impact on global warming (i.e. energy RETENTION within our planetary weather system) is 25 times greater than an equivalent amount of C02. (source: http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html).

Further to this video, when you heat up the ocean systems beyond a certain threshold, the natrual pumping systems which circulate warm surface water to the deeper parts of the ocean for cooling, just flat out stop working. (source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19895974), leading to the slow heat-death of a vast swath of temperatue sensitive biomes....which, when they are active and growing healthily, actually contribute to c02 depletion (carbon based lifeforms 'use up' carbon to be 'made').

...I could go on, but you see....even just a cursory glance at some of the 'smaller' impacts is pretty compelling enough to consider the phrase 'no big deal' a bit of a misnomer.

Do your research....it is catastrophic, and it is likely to happen in your lifetime (if you are under 30 atm).

Your grandchildren and great grandchildren will be living in a drastically different global environment.

No biggie though, cause we got electric cars coming online in the next 30 years or so

Yeah, John Oliver is wrong on this one. Biosecurity in Australia is not some arbitrary bureaucracy, there are genuine reasons behind it.

But what's worse is he (and everyone else) missed the real story.

Johnny Depp's dogs entered the country illegally. They were given a few days to leave and then flown out on a private jet.

Meanwhile, actual human refugees seeking asylum in Australia are held for years at a time in an island detainment camp where they are subjected to sexual assault and living conditions that even non-celebrity dogs would be horrified by.

But yeah, what really matters here is some idiot minister talking to an idiot talk radio host about some fucking puppies. Sometimes I despair for humanity....

Very cool and very clever, but if the goal is speed and simplicity what makes it better than cutting a v-groove with a router and folding that together? Is it that much stronger? Seems like something worth patenting, but unless the shape isn't as relatively arbitrary as it seems, surely there is some variation on it that's better in some way, and could you patent that? Seems like it might be jumping the gun to announce it before iterating the design and perhaps applying some computer analysis.

I was in one of the areas that does ACT instead of SAT. I took the test when I was a freshman and got a 29 (out of 36, quite a high score), and never took it again -- I think due to a mixture of apathy and fear that my score would go down, although that wouldn't matter because you always submit your highest score.

I went to a local state university even though a 29 on the ACT is high enough to get some attention from prestigious universities. Personally, I was NOT impressed with the state of post-secondary education in the US. I'm "glad" that I went and got my degree, but only because it is expected and pretty much a requirement for getting most jobs.

I did learn some stuff, about 25% of which I feel was actually relevant to my field of study (Computer Science). If I was interested in paying the university for actual knowledge obtained as opposed to paying them for a piece of paper that opens doors to jobs, I could have packed all the relevant classes into 1-1.5 years and gotten the same amount of knowledge out at a small fraction of the cost (less than 1/4). University education felt extremely inefficient and arbitrary to me.

I don't think I'd have been any more impressed with an ivy league university education. Pay a LOT more, deal with the same inefficiencies, and end up with roughly the same amount of actual knowledge gained -- but an admittedly more (arbitrarily) valuable piece of paper to wave at job recruiters.


The situation is only getting worse for the Gen Y's and Millenials behind me. Higher expectations / requirements for college degrees in jobs that have no business requiring them, much higher tuition even at state universities, etc. I don't have any solution or advice other than suggesting that people take as many credits as possible from cheapo junior / community colleges and then transfer those to the cheapest in-state university they can.

So basically, I guess that I think that the SAT (or ACT) is actually less broken than the entire post-secondary education system at large in the US. A mere symptom of a much more severe underlying problem.

if you come from the perspective that arguments are a zero sum dynamic,"winning" being the desired outcome,then i can see where this video makes some salient points.

then yes...internet arguing then becomes an exercise in futility.

if you make assumptions about peoples intentions based on arbitrary and cosmetic indicators such as avatars and a few comments,then of course the argument will be biased on those parameters.

but if you view an argument as a vehicle to understand the person you are engaging with,then the dynamic changes to a much more beneficial interaction between both parties.

it takes patience and a desire to understand,along with a healthy dose of respect.

i argue with newt all the time.
sometimes we find out we actually agree but were using different analogies or language to express our position.other times we disagreed but respected each other enough to hear the other person out to better understand WHY they felt/thought the way they did,and yet still disagreed in the end,but now had a much fuller picture to better compliment that disagreement.

"winning" should not be the first thing on the agenda.understanding should always be the first order of business,and having someone lay out the logical connections based on their understanding and interpretations is truly the best way to accomplish that goal.

and if y'all could be nice to each other?
yeah..that would be great.

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

As someone living in the land 'o piracy, I can recommend these ... uh ... "competitors":
www.yts.re
www.eztv.ch

But to be fair, well over half of the first set of "sins" (before adding in sins for movies not available on Netflix) were really nitpicky or even just plain arbitrary. Like the very first one:

"Netflix was established in 1997 as a subscription based DVD-by-mail service, who, within it's lifetime, helped transform and revolutionize the consumption of online video streaming." = SIN ???

Coming at this from the perspective of academic philosophy I think the truth of the matter is ultimately very simple (however the details can be almost infinitely complex and diverse in how we apply them).

Simply put it appears impossible to demonstrate any kind of ultimate ethical authority or perfect ethical principles objectively.

One can certainly assert them, but they would always be subject to the problem of underdetermination (no facts, only interpretations) and as such subjective.

Even strictly humanist systems of ethics like concequentialism and deontology are at their core based on some arbitrary assumption or rule e.g. minimising harm, maximising pleasure, setting a universal principle, putting the concequences before the intention etc. etc.

As such I think the only honest and objective absolute moral principle is "Nothing is true and everything is permitted" (the law of the strong). All else can only truly be supported by preference and necessity. We do not "Know" moral truth, we only appear to interpret and create it.

This being the case it is the opinion of myself and a great many post modern philosophers that ethics is essentially a specialised branch of aesthetics. An important one still, but none the less it is still a study of preference and beauty rather than one of epistemological truth.

By this logic one could certainly argue that the organic "Humanist" approach to ethics and morality as outlined in this video seems infinitely preferable to any sort of static absolute moral authority.

If morality is at its core just a measure of the degree of thought and extrapolation one applies to maximising preferable outcomes then the "humanist" seems like they would have an inherent advantage in their potential capacity to discover and refine ever more preferable principles and outcomes. A static system by its very nature seems less able to maximise it's own moral preferences when presented by ever changing circumstances.


However I'm about to kind of undermine that very point by suggesting that ultimately what we are calling "humanism" here is universal. i.e. that even the most static and dictatorial ethical system (e.g. Wahhabism or Christian fundamentalism) is still ultimately an expression of aesthetic preference and choice.

It is aesthetically preferable to a fundamentalist to assert the absolute moral authority and command of God and while arguably less developed and adaptable (and thus less preferable by most Humanist standards), it is still at it's core the exercise of a preference and as such covered by humanism in general.

i.e. if you want to be a "humanist" then you should probably be wary of placing ultimate blame for atrocities on specific doctrines, as the core of your own position is that morality is a human condition not a divine one. i.e. religion did not make people condone slavery or start wars, human behaviour did.

We can certainly argue for the empirical superiority of "humanism" vs natural authority by looking at history and the different behaviours of various groups & societies. But really what we are arguing there is simply that a more considered and tolerant approach appears to make most people seem happier and results in less unpleasant things happing.

i.e. a preference supported by consensus & unfortunately that doesn't give us any more moral authority than a fanatic or predator beyond our ability to enforce it and persuade others to conform.

"Nothing is true and everything is permitted", "right" and "wrong" can only be derived from subjective principles ergo "right" and "wrong" should probably instead be replaced with "desirable" and "undesirable" as this seems closer to what one is actually expressing with a moral preference.

I completely agree with the sentiment in the video, more freedom of thought seems to mean more capacity to extrapolate and empathise. The wider your understanding and experience of people and the world the more one appears to recognise and appreciate the shared condition of being human.

But I must never forget that this apparent superiority is ultimately based on an interpretation and preference of my own and not some absolute principle. The only absolute principle I can observe in nature seems to be that chaos & conflict tend towards increasing order and complexity, but by this standard it is only really the conflict itself which is moral or "good/right" and not the various beliefs of the combatants specifically.

And that in itself is why a lot of people DO NOT do Guiness (or think they are the "all-knowing God" of records). Because in a lot of situations you have Guiness (and THEIR sponsors) make up arbitrary rules to support their "name to fame"; sometimes to draw an audience no less. Then they let their guy have at it, and then tell everyone to come challenge this "feat". Meanwhile, everyone else is doing all sorts of different things.

So not being with Guiness doesn't mean it is a hoax, but it may mean as @direpickle said, they have very specific "rules" if you want to break a record...

I hate censorship, and I do everything I can to put it down, but if I were to be fair, calling it "arbitrary" is a little biased. It certainly follows a logic of escalating offensiveness, but beyond that it's an example of how mislead the ideal of "free speech" is in the "land of freedom".

EDIT: Also, this isn't in support of "boobs", neither the female kind or the kind in front of the camera (though often the latter deserves it so much more). Phrasing your anti-censorship arguments in this way just prove the censors point, and belittle the conversation from the get-go.

Exactly. He got all the girls. Watch him and learn.

If this arbitrary value comes out more than 2 Einstein was wrong. And the answer is.... 2.5 woohoooo! Anything practical on the horizon?

Also strings + entanglement = Flying Spaghetti Monster confirmed.