On 5/22/2024 10:05 PM, Andrew wrote:
I'm a scientist. My words below are written very clearly around facts.
I'm saying we covered this many times where the US Census Bureau has been
publishing *ACCURATE* accident-rate statistics for all fifty (48 at the
start) states since the 1920s, and their data on accident rates for each
and every one of the fifty states show NO ADVERSE EFFECT WHATSOEVER on the
accident rate for any state and for all states in the periods before
cellphones, during cellphone ownership skyrocketing, and afterward.
The accident rate is slowly going down; but it certainly didn't go up
*That's just a fact.*
As Chris said, you need to provide links and not just rant that
you're smarter than everyone else. The US Census Bureau surveys
population every 10 years. If they also keep accident records then
you need to provide a link.
The NHTSA seems to be responsible for the gov't record-keeping
about traffic accidents. All I found from them was mixed data, mainly
about deaths. But I did find this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231211115919/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/briefing/us-traffic-deaths.html
They say that cellphones and marijuana smoking are the two
suspected causes of a 10-year increase in traffic deaths. Though
deaths is not the same as accidents. Nevertheless, pot and
cellphones makes sense to me given my own personal experience.
I'm astonished by how often I smell pot. I would be astonished at
how many people are cellphone addicts, but it's been going on so
long now that it's no longer surprising.
The trouble with scientism is that it doesn't recognize its own
limitations and the human tendency toward irrationality. To assess
data you need to be free of bias and you also need to be able
to look at your own preconceptions. And you need to be able to
question the data. In short, to be a good scientist
you need to be emotionally mature and develop self-knowledge.
Raging about what fools you think other people are is not scientific.
With science having become a kind of state religion, scientific
research is increasingly used as political propaganda. People are
increasingly prefacing their opinions with "research shows...". And
of course, any scientist who's also a cellphone addict will have a
strong bias against fuinding any negative data about cellphone use.
Very little of what passes for science is unbiased and relatively free of
gross preconceptions. We can look at virtually any topic. Dark matter,
global warming, cholesterol lowering to reduce heart disease, SRIs to
treat depression, the claim that there are not only two sexes, the
national recycling scam that's had people believing they were recycling
plastics for decades, the self-deception of viewing "renewable fuels" as
a category of "green" energy (Burning wood is not green.)... Even the
famous theory of evolution has holes in it.
All of these topics are subject to strong emotional bias by many
people. They're also subject to strong political bias. And that's not even
getting into the issue of blinding preconceptions and addiction to
certainty. A glaring example of preconceptions is the current view
of neuroscientists that "the mind is what the brain does". That's how
we got the idea of curing depression by simply changing brain chemistry
with SRIs. (One in 4 adults in the US is now hooked on some kind of
happy pill. Many of those are neurotransmitter re-uptake inhibitors,
which exist only due to the mechanistic view of biology put forth
by modern science, despite a lack of evidence for their claimed
usefulness.)
The neuroscientist/psychiatry view of "mind" is a comically irrational
point of view if you think about it. Scientists think they can accurately,
"objectively" describe the world they experience, yet they also believe
that mind as such doesn't truly exist, and that anything they think is
basically just chemical reactions. Why doesn't science accept mind as
such? Simply because mind is not subject to empirical observation and
thus can never be defined scientifically. If science can't test for it then
it can't be relevant. So mind is posited in a reductionist manner as
brain chemistry, because that can be empirically observed.
That might be worth a bit of reflection: You claim to know absolutely
the facts about traffic accidents and you claim to represent a group
of notably intelligent people who are not like "most people who are fools".
You're proud to be a scientist. By extension you also believe that you're
nothing more than a bio-robot thinking whatever the chemicals in
your brain happen to cook up -- that your apparent mind is nothing more
than Scrooge's "bit of mustard". Yet you're comically certain of your own
intelligense and lack of bias. What's wrong with this picture?
By letting your emotional bias hold sway you end up like the
horny young man who tries to convince his date that she should
come back to his house for the night, because his house is 4.3 miles
closer to her place of work than her own house is. Therefore she
could get to work the next day more easily. That "logical" young man
is presenting watertight logic, yet the foolish idiot young woman
is fully aware of the sexual motive that he can't see himself. :)
That's the achilles heal of science.