Oh dear.

[Baruch]

I could tell from the OP that you were going to be obnoxious, and every post since then has only confirmed my expectations.

So "agree with me or I call you names"?

[trdsf]

I could tell from the OP that you were going to be obnoxious, and every post since then has only confirmed my expectations.

Nah, not obnoxious.  Just overawed by semiphilosophical doubletalk.

[Hakurei Reimu]

That's not really the usual explanation, though. The usual explanation is that you hear what you expect was said, rather than what actually was.

So what if that's the usual explanation? It's not right. The McGurk effect happens because the brain is trying to reconstruct the words that are being said, not hear the sounds coming out of the person's mouth per se. It's supplementing the audio data with the visual data of mouth movement and trying to reconcile the two. Usually, it works, which is why lip-reading is a thing, because back before video editing and overdubbing, mouth movements were a good supplementation to the heard phonemes, so you can better reconstruct the words even if some of the phonemes are a little off. The McGurk effect happens when this usually robust form of phoneme recognition is deliberately played with.

Actually, we can find similar effects in various disciplines. Multiple people with different experiences can see, hear--or think they saw, think they heard--different things. And worse, you can manipulate what they think they see or hear by dropping a single sentence to prime them.

It even works on memories, too.

The reason why that is that people don't sense in a vacuum. Our senses are noisy (and I never claimed they weren't; "consistency" is not synonymous with "100% accurate and precise"), so our brains do a shitload of filtering to try to extract useful information from the mess. Part of that is consistency checking. You're more likely to reject or alter a perception if it is too out of line with what is already known. Dismissing outliers is a fine way of reducing noise in a signal. The system is good enough under real-world conditions to derive accurate answers, because each of the ways of manipulating perceptions and memories require deliberate trickery that are quite difficult to pull off in the moment. You can make a plane's engine disappear in an image quite easily and have no one notice it; it's much more difficult to make that engine disappear in real life.

Consistent? Sure, maybe, for the same person, in the same position, at the same time, you'll always get the same result... and if that same result is always wrong? If human observation is always, consistently incapable of getting reliable data?

Creatures whose senses are "always, consistently incapable of getting reliable data" in a real environment will find it quite difficult to surivive in it, as they would be prone to have counteradaptive responses to dangers. Ergo, your characterization of human senses as "always, consistently incapable of getting reliable data" is wrong â€" our senses are actually quite good at picking out that reliable data, as it takes deliberate manipulation to reliably create these effects you speak about.

How do you bypass that to magically arrive at a correct answer, exactly?

It's not magic. Our senses work well enough when they're not being deliberately played with, and as such any errors that occur are more or less random and can be picked out from the useful signal.

Magic would be thinking that there would be a consistent systematic error in all our perceptions to blind us to a particular aspect of it, with no side-effects at all, or otherwise severely impacting our survival prospects, and thinking that would not be weeded out by evolution.

I never said there was reason to believe a god exists. I'm an atheist. An agnostic one, who recognises limitations and flaws in human perception, and in human reasoning, which make it impossible to be sure.

You know, I never bought the "B-But you can't be suuuuure!" argument when creationists made them, and I'm not going to start now. Ultimately, you are quibbling over only the tiniest, most infinitesimal sliver of doubt about salient facts like we are made of atoms. We are 99.99...9% sure of that fact, where the '...' represents an ungodly number of 9's. By any practical measure, we're absolutely sure of that fact. That fact is not going away, no matter how much you wave that nihilism card of yours.

I think this is a case of the is-ought problem. You think that information ought to be useful. I contend that such a thing as usefulness doesn't exist, because the universe is inherently without purpose.

Your assertions are invited take a long walk off a short pier. It's not that I think that knowledge ought to be useful, rather it's that my definition of knowledge is useful, whereas your "100% surity" definition is not. Furthermore, your usage is not even conventional â€" the only people who use your form are the dishonest twats that come here to make trouble.

You also might want to brush up on what the "is-ought" problem actually constitutes.

And no, just because you say using some spurious logic that there is no such thing as usefulness doesn't make it true. The universe doesn't need to have an inherent purpose for humans to find particular definitions of words useful. Words are, after all, invented â€" one and all.

In fact, to the contrary, I find my scepticism very useful, because it means I am open to more possibilities, and I enjoy that very much. Oh, and evidence also suggests that believing in God is useful, but somehow that doesn't seem to matter to you--perhaps because you're part of the Atheist Tribe and are judging "usefulness" from whether something agrees with said tribe? But that's hardly objective.

I like it how you're trying to draw this false equivalence between atheism and theism, like a good little creationist. Sorry, chum, it doesn't wash when creationists do it, and it's not going to start working now. By any conventional definition of "knowledge," we mean a belief with evidentiary and logical support. It has never meant 100% surity to anyone with an honest agenda.

Your definition of "knowledge" leads to a category empty of content: according to you, no belief can qualify as knowledge. You are trying to equivocate your own flawed and empty definition of knowledge with what is conventionally meant by the word, and in any flavor of skepticism, equivocation is a fallacy.

Science delivers the goods... according to science and its proponents.

Funny. I could say the same about the Bible.

Oh, the irony! You have the gall to say that, even though you are using a product of science to communicate how science is the same as the bible. By "the goods," I mean the quite tangible products of technology that you can see and touch, that you use every day to separate yourself from your caveman ancestors. It's quite disingenuous to use the very goods of science to accuse science of only producing empty promises.

Again, because you have not dismissed it in the slightest:

Science delivers the goods.

[omokuroi]

Whole lotta stuff there, all of which you're trying to boil down to 'because I can't experience it directly personally, I can't discount it'.

Well, yes I can.

First of all, the extension of my senses by technology doesn't mean those observations don't count because I had to resort to artificial means to make them.

The number of things you can make technology to perceive is limited by the number of things you can imagine could be perceivable; the extent to which you are capable of using the information provided you by technology is limited by the extent to which the senses which you use to view that data are trustworthy; and last, but certainly not least, the extent to which you can reasonably expect to observe any proposed spiritual or higher realm is about the extent to which you can reasonably expect the characters in a video game to observe you.

Second, the fact that I don't make a particular observation myself doesn't make the observation invalid.  What makes an observation invalid is when someone makes a contrary observation and that observation is verified.

Really? I was under the impression science--or more generally, physicalism--holds that truth exists entirely independently of whether you can verify it.

Now you seem to be arguing that truth is subjective, which is, um, not compatible with any version of science I know.

What you're preaching here is a message of scientific despair

I just want to show you the truth.

The whole point of the scientific method is: repeatability of observations, and the testable predictions and potential falsifiability of theories.

The word "potential" here is unnecessary, and the order is wrong. Falsifiability is the very first requirement--if it's not falsifiable, science has nothing to say on the matter and will not, should not try. By the word of any good scientist.

It has everything to do with the fact that every researcher knows that if they can demonstrate an important observation is incomplete or even wrong in a verifiable and repeatable way, that's the fast track to a Nobel.

Yeah, I'm sure that giving people incentives to fudge their work in return for potential reward isn't actually anathema to science and the source of a great deal of bias at all.

You, however, want perfect knowledge and absolute certainty.

You're projecting. I'm an epistemological solipsist, and I said it in my first post. I am much, much more comfortable with uncertainty than you are. That's why I'm capable of admitting my limits at all, while still freely citing research even on the knowledge it could be wrong.

And it can be wrong. Everything you think you know can be wrong. That is one of the foundational principles of science.

You would thus blame Galileo for not taking Relativity into account when he measured the rates at which different masses fell, or Democritus for not putting forth the idea of protons, electrons and neutrons when he first put forth an atomic theory.

What kind of emotional reasoning is this? I don't blame people for being wrong with the best data available. If there's something wrong with the message you don't shoot the messenger... unless you're just a dick.

The second is that if there is a god for whom data exists, it's a pretty weak-ass god that can't do something to at least drop a clue in front of people.

In the first place, why would a god have any interest in some hubristic apes on a rock in the middle of nowhere?

Lastly, if you want to reject the scientific method -- and it seems to me you do, at least in part

You're the ones rejecting the scientific method. "There's no way we're wrong"... "If we are wrong the chance is so minute we're not even going to look at it"... "We're not going to double-check our work, ever"...

What kind of science is that?

Ioannidis

Why does it seem like you're attacking literally everything but my actual points? Science isn't perfect. Scientists make mistakes. Scientists have limited understanding.

Few actual scientists are going to contradict any of this, but you vehemently deny any flaws in, well, anything. Maybe that's just what it means to be an adherent to atheism?

So what if that's the usual explanation? It's not right. The McGurk effect happens because the brain is trying to reconstruct the words that are being said, not hear the sounds coming out of the person's mouth per se.

And I'm sure the fact that native Japanese speakers can tell the difference between isolated English R and L sounds, but cannot differentiate them in the context of speech, also has nothing to do with perception being altered according to expectation--in this case, the expectation from experience specific to that language that the general range of the R and L phonemes are functionally equivalent.

You're more likely to reject or alter a perception if it is too out of line with what is already known.

What is already known... such as, maybe, "there is no god"?

Dismissing outliers is a fine way of reducing noise in a signal.

And the conscious choice of which outliers to dismiss is commonly known as one of the messier sources of bias in science, yes.

the ways of manipulating perceptions and memories require deliberate trickery that are quite difficult to pull off in the moment. You can make a plane's engine disappear in an image quite easily and have no one notice it; it's much more difficult to make that engine disappear in real life.

Yeah, so difficult.

Creatures whose senses are "always, consistently incapable of getting reliable data" in a real environment will find it quite difficult to surivive in it, as they would be prone to have counteradaptive responses to dangers.

The opposite. Creatures who need to take the time to gather and analyse accurate data on their environment would die while stuck in a state of reconnaissance and indecision the vast majority of times, instead of making a "good enough" decision enough times to get laid before getting eaten (or whatever else kills them). This is why police officers murder innocent people all the time: because if they weren't reckless idiots, then they'd very often get shot and killed while carefully determining whether they're at risk of, uh, getting shot and killed.

Selection chooses survival. It doesn't choose objectivity or accuracy. If being biased and irrational is 1) easy and 2) keeps you alive for long enough to reproduce, objectivity and rationality are simply unnecessary, if not outright detrimental.

It's not magic. Our senses work well enough when they're not being deliberately played with, and as such any errors that occur are more or less random and can be picked out from the useful signal.

"It's all predictable and replicable, therefore it doesn't matter."

"It's all random, therefore it doesn't matter."

Somehow I'm not getting the impression you actually have an argument anymore.

That fact is not going away, no matter how much you wave that nihilism card of yours.

Yeah, the same way no other widely-supported scientific knowledge has ever gone away or been replaced.

Ever.

In history.

That's the point of science, after all. To present a divine revelation of the Absolute Truth and never, ever be falsified.

...rather it's that my definition of knowledge is useful...

"Because I fucking say so! You fucking troll! Jump, faggot! Do it!"

Uh. Exactly... why aren't you banned yet? This has crossed the line into flaming and feels scary close to going straight for death threats.

You also might want to brush up on what the "is-ought" problem actually constitutes.

Trying to derive what "ought" to be from what actually is, and the impossibility therein. ...I'm saying that what actually is gives you no leg to stand on. You're just spitting emotional assertions at me and asserting that, because you're frustrated, I'm a troll and something something about jumping off a pier.

And no, just because you say using some spurious logic that there is no such thing as usefulness doesn't make it true.

"God doesn't exist because there's no evidence,

but also objective usefulness absolutely 100% exists and whether there's any rational basis for it is irrelevant."

I like it how you're trying to draw this false equivalence

False equivalence is also a favourite phrase of leftists. "The righties are the biased ones," they say, "how dare you equate us to them, call us irrational," they say.

How dare. That's absolutely preposterous.

I'm absolutely sure atheists are immune to that bias, though. Because you're an atheist, right? And you couldn't possibly be biased.

Oh, the irony! You have the gall to say that, even though you are using a product of science to communicate how science is the same as the bible.

And how is it different?

You realise that the Bible is considered a legitimate historical document, right? I mean, sometimes it's wrong, but then most of the science from thousands of years ago has been proven wrong too.

It's quite disingenuous to use the very goods of science to accuse science of only producing empty promises.

Strawman. I'm accusing you of worshiping science; at no point did I say science is always wrong.

I could tell from the OP that you were going to be obnoxious, and every post since then has only confirmed my expectations.

"You disagree with me, and your points are logically too hard to attack.

Therefore, die heathen."

How properly scientific of you.

[Unbeliever]

And the Internet again shows we are demigods.  Rocks can't do this.  At least compared to rocks, we are demigods.  Compared to infinity, we are rocks.  Some prefer to think of themselves as rocks.

[omokuroi]

Being a rockman is better than being a human anyway.

[Baruch]

Nah, not obnoxious.  Just overawed by semiphilosophical doubletalk.

Better double talk than being mute?

The alternative is a monologue from the usual sources -8

[Baruch]

omokuroi - "And I'm sure the fact that native Japanese speakers can tell the difference between isolated English R and L sounds, but cannot differentiate them in the context of speech, also has nothing to do with perception being altered according to expectation--in this case, the expectation from experience specific to that language that the general range of the R and L phonemes are functionally equivalent."

Studies have shown, that new born infants, can distinguish, and potentially speak, all phonemes ever used in human language (over 150).  But by age of one year, due to exposure to parent's speaking to it, they have drastically reduced the phonemes that they can distinguish or speak (to around 30).  By age 6, their linguistic neural matter has matured, and they now know one or more language fluently, if exposed for six years to fluency.  After that point, true fluency is impossible.  This is verified by sectioning the neural process mass ... for a mono- or poly-lingual native speaker, the neural matter is uniform.  For any neural matter exposed to subsequent foreign language learning, a series of striped areas is observed, corresponding to each foreign language learned, superimposed on the original uniform mass.  Children raised in completely bilingual families, are often unaware until later, than they are speaking two different languages ... it is simply ... how we speak at home.

For a Japanese person, they can intellectually understand that R and L are different, but this is like a man understanding pregnancy vs a woman who has been pregnant.  When learning a foreign language, that stretches my available phonemes, I have to mimic the correct sounds, I cannot produce what I cannot distinguish by ear.

PS - there are over 50 different kinds of synesthesia.  I am not.  And I am too generous to call such variance, an abnormality.  One has to be suspicious that a person like Mozart, might have been able to "see" his music in addition to hearing it.  The visual cortex is a very powerful processing system.

[omokuroi]

Better double talk than being mute?

Keh, even my dubious supporters think it's all doubletalk?

No wonder Diogenes needed that torch.

By age 6, their linguistic neural matter has matured, and they now know one or more language fluently, if exposed for six years to fluency.  After that point, true fluency is impossible.

ちっã€,ç...©ã,,な、人é–"ã€,ã,たしのã"とがそã,"なルールã,'å¾"うつã,,ã,Šã®ãªã,,ã€,

そã,,そã,,「ルールだかã,‰ã€ã¨ã,,ってã,,証が弱ã,,じã,ƒã,"

PS - there are over 50 different kinds of synesthesia.  I am not.  And I am too generous to call such variance, an abnormality.  One has to be suspicious that a person like Mozart, might have been able to "see" his music in addition to hearing it.  The visual cortex is a very powerful processing system.

I have to put up with mirror-touch. For whatever reason, the intensity varies over time. When it's really intense it's just annoying.

[Baruch]

See, you are special.  But I can Google Translate with the best of them.  That isn't fluency ... claiming what you don't have, is the broader category of which virtue signaling is all about.  Aka egomania.

[Hakurei Reimu]

And I'm sure the fact that native Japanese speakers can tell the difference between isolated English R and L sounds, but cannot differentiate them in the context of speech, also has nothing to do with perception being altered according to expectation--in this case, the expectation from experience specific to that language that the general range of the R and L phonemes are functionally equivalent.

Well, when you're listening for understanding rather than for the exact phonemes, you're ignoring the difference between R and L because they're irrelevant to speaking Japanese. Part of the job of that filter I was talking about is ditching irrelevant information, because otherwise there would be too much to deal with. But this filter is context dependent, as you've demonstrated above.

What is already known... such as, maybe, "there is no god"?

You do realize that many of us went from "there is a god" to "there is no god," right? How does that happen if our perceptions always change to make it seem like our knowledge is always right? You seem to think that these perception filters as perfect, that if I think that there is no god, then there will be no possible evidence that will filter through my perception filters to even give me the suspicion that there is a god. Nope. No human system is that perfect, as demonstrated by the fact that people's minds can be changed by evidence (your milage may vary, of course).

You make contradictory demands on human perception to make your idea work: that human perception is flawed, and that they're all flawed in precisely the same way as to make reality appear a certain way. Genetic variation alone will assure that this is not the case, to say nothing of the variation of upbringing and experience that will bring many different perspectives into play. There's only one way to be right, but when you're wrong, you're wrong in your own unique way.

And the conscious choice of which outliers to dismiss is commonly known as one of the messier sources of bias in science, yes.

When an outlier occurs many many times, you tend to suspect that it's not an outlier after all.

Yeah, so difficult.

So, you think that such gross changes to reality such as making a plane engine disappear is on the same level as changes in visual preferences? Yeah, that's not a dishonest comparison. /sarcasm

The opposite. Creatures who need to take the time to gather and analyse accurate data on their environment would die while stuck in a state of reconnaissance and indecision the vast majority of times, instead of making a "good enough" decision enough times to get laid before getting eaten (or whatever else kills them).

"Good enough" choices made in a timely manner have to at least be somewhat good by some measure. A terrible choice is a terrible choice, even if made quickly.

This is why police officers murder innocent people all the time: because if they weren't reckless idiots, then they'd very often get shot and killed while carefully determining whether they're at risk of, uh, getting shot and killed.

Wrong. Most of those incidents occur because the police don't use space and time to their advantage, and don't communicate well with the suspects or their fellow officers. They put themselves in positions where being reckless is the only survival option.

Selection chooses survival. It doesn't choose objectivity or accuracy. If being biased and irrational is 1) easy and 2) keeps you alive for long enough to reproduce, objectivity and rationality are simply unnecessary, if not outright detrimental.

I'd like to see a predator who manages to capture its prey without beng able to objectively or accurately tell where its prey is. Or a herbavore be able to eat plants not poisonous to it without being able to objectively or accurately distinguish between its food and stuff it can't eat. Like it or not, survival and objectivity and accuracy are linked. This thing we call "reality" has rules, and anything running afowl of them doesn't last long.

"It's all predictable and replicable, therefore it doesn't matter."

"It's all random, therefore it doesn't matter."

Somehow I'm not getting the impression you actually have an argument anymore.

Well, those two statements only seem at odds because you don't understand statistics. Nowhere have I said that being predictable and repeatable is 100% â€" there is always some noise to that. However, the majority of results will hang around the true one. It seems like you're implying that a radio station is worthless because I can't perfectly tune a radio so that there's no static. No matter how many semantics games you play, that's just false.

Yeah, the same way no other widely-supported scientific knowledge has ever gone away or been replaced.

Ever.

In history.

Name one. But before you get too far, quantum mechanics, general and special relativity, heliocentrism, and the usual examples people like to cite do not qualify. I know how those came about, and they do not reveal about science what you want them to reveal.

That's the point of science, after all. To present a divine revelation of the Absolute Truth and never, ever be falsified.

Sure, sport. Raise that strawman with that grandstanding attitude.

"Because I fucking say so! You fucking troll! Jump, faggot! Do it!"

Uh. Exactly... why aren't you banned yet? This has crossed the line into flaming and feels scary close to going straight for death threats.

Oh, please spare me the drama, child. Nothing I have said on this board, let alone to you specifically, constitutes anything approaching a death threat. At worst, I've cussed at you and called you names for your dumb ideas, and I've outlined why I think your ideas are dumb.

Believe it or not, that is allowed on this board. If I think you're being dishonest and disingenuous, then I'm not going to hold myself back and keep it to myself â€" I'm going to call you what I see in you. If you can't take that, then maybe this place isn't for you. Seriously, being scared because I've called you names? That's really childish.

Trying to derive what "ought" to be from what actually is, and the impossibility therein. ...I'm saying that what actually is gives you no leg to stand on.

No, you're just defining a form of knowledge I do not recognize as legitimate, close to what I (or indeed ANYONE) mean when I say it, or useful in any way. Your form of knowledge is an empty category, and empty catagories are useful only in very restricted circumstances. This is not one of them.

When I say that I'm using knowledge in a particular way, you are NOT allowed to say, "You're wrong because I define knowledge blah-blah-blah." No, fuck you. Nobody uses knowledge the way you use it. When I say that I know there are knives in my kitchen, I do not mean that I am absolutely sure that no knife-burglar had snuck in and stole them all and left no traces of his existence, or that I am absolutely sure that my kitchen knives have not spontaneously ceased existing or other such rot. I mean that I have good reason to expect that if I walk into my kitchen and look for a knife there, I'll easily find it. Nobody means knowledge the way you want me to use it, so I'm not going to be using it that way.

You're just spitting emotional assertions at me and asserting that, because you're frustrated, I'm a troll and something something about jumping off a pier.

You have a rich fantasy life.

"God doesn't exist because there's no evidence,

but also objective usefulness absolutely 100% exists and whether there's any rational basis for it is irrelevant."

Again, false equivalence. I am a thinking agent. I make plans. Some things, conditions and procedures are condusive to carrying out these plans, and some are not. The things, conditions and procedures that are condusive to carrying out these plans are "useful." Ergo, "usefulness" is a condition that processes and objects can satisfy; by any sane definition of the word, it exists, regardless of whether the universe has a purpose in and of itself. QED.

You are the only one adding this "objective" qualifier to "usefulness." Dishonest debate tactic: No True Scottsman fallacy.

False equivalence is also a favourite phrase of leftists. "The righties are the biased ones," they say, "how dare you equate us to them, call us irrational," they say.

How dare. That's absolutely preposterous.

I'm absolutely sure atheists are immune to that bias, though. Because you're an atheist, right? And you couldn't possibly be biased.

I don't give a shit whether you think I'm biased or not. I'm only interested in what you can substantiate. You have, so far, not substantiated that I am one of this Atheist Tribe who judges only based on emotional appeal, or announces things by divine revelation, whereas I have substantiated the use of my definition of knowledge by the fact that it is what we seem to mean when we use the word.

And how is it different?

You realise that the Bible is considered a legitimate historical document, right?

By everyone but historians, yeah. I mean the Exodus left no archeological traces, but it totally happened. Nazareth wasn't inhabited in the first century, but it was totally the birthplace of a magical man who performed miracles.

I mean, sometimes it's wrong, but then most of the science from thousands of years ago has been proven wrong too.

Yes, because geocentrism was totally not a pre-scientific idea that was grandfathered into science without being verified. And Eratosthenes was completely discredited when he got the circumference of the earth to under 1% of its true value. Oh, wait...

Strawman. I'm accusing you of worshiping science; at no point did I say science is always wrong.

You have not substantiated that I "worship" science. What sacrifices do I make to the alter of science? What litany do I recite before I go to bed honoring science? What prayers do I offer science to directly intervene with my life?

Do I admire scientists? Yes, there's much to admire about them. Do I admire the process of science? Yes, it seems a reasonable way to approach the world. Do I admire the fact that the knowledge gleaned by science helped us rise up from mere apes to creatures on the cusp of escaping our planet, lengthened our lives, and made those lives more comfortable and fulfilling? Abso-fucking-lutely. Do I notice that every time that creationtards and theists try to argue for their god, that science gives them a metaphorical bitchslap? Oh, hell yes!

I don't know how you call this "worship," however.

[PickelledEggs]

BTW, what is a 'gnostic atheist'??

Gnostic atheist is different from the usual agnostic atheist. Most atheists are agnostic atheists. So, when people say "im atheist, the default is agnostic, but there are some that are gnostic. It's under the samed scale as gnostic theists and agnostic theists

[trdsf]

The number of things you can make technology to perceive is limited by the number of things you can imagine could be perceivable; the extent to which you are capable of using the information provided you by technology is limited by the extent to which the senses which you use to view that data are trustworthy; and last, but certainly not least, the extent to which you can reasonably expect to observe any proposed spiritual or higher realm is about the extent to which you can reasonably expect the characters in a video game to observe you.

You really have no understanding at all of the history of research, do you?  The record is positively rife with discoveries made while looking for something else entirely.  Herschel didn't even have the barest inkling of an idea that such a thing as infrared radiation existed when he discovered it.  Perlmutter et al. were sure that they were going to verify the decelerating expansion of the universe when they instead demonstrated the exact opposite.  Dirac had no idea he was predicting the existence of antimatter when he formulated his equation to explain particle behavior.

In short, unlike what you're alleging here, just because we ain't looking for it doesn't mean we can't or won't find it.

Second, the fact that I don't make a particular observation myself doesn't make the observation invalid.  What makes an observation invalid is when someone makes a contrary observation and that observation is verified.

Really? I was under the impression science--or more generally, physicalism--holds that truth exists entirely independently of whether you can verify it.

I needed to specifically include what I said here because what you said was a complete non sequitur.  An unverified truth may well be true, but we don't know it is, and what does that have to do with the verification of observations.  Again, you expect us to take into account that which we do not know, and that's patently unreasonable.

Now you seem to be arguing that truth is subjective, which is, um, not compatible with any version of science I know.
I just want to show you the truth.

I don't know where you pulled that from.  I have repeatedly said knowledge is based on evidence.

The word "potential" here is unnecessary, and the order is wrong. Falsifiability is the very first requirement--if it's not falsifiable, science has nothing to say on the matter and will not, should not try. By the word of any good scientist.
Yeah, I'm sure that giving people incentives to fudge their work in return for potential reward isn't actually anathema to science and the source of a great deal of bias at all.

The word potential here is important.  String theory -- or M theory, as it is coming to be known -- cannot currently be tested, and it's as yet unclear how it ever will be.  Some physicists regard M theory as more of a viewpoint, but a useful one, but not a theory until some aspect of it can be put to the test.  This does not stop physicists from using M theory to do useful work, albeit always with an eye over their shoulder, awaiting confirmation.

Similar thing in mathematics: for some 40 years, mathematicians built a vast structure on papers that began "Assuming Taniyama-Shimura...".  They knew they didn't have all the foundations in place, but there was work to be done.  Fortunately, Andrew Wiles proved the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture, which is now known as the modularity theorem.  You, it seems, would have had them lose 40 years of work waiting for Wiles' proof first.

There's nothing wrong with going out on a limb as long as you're aware of it, and prepared for the fall if it gets sawn off.  There were quite a few papers ready proposing Higgs-less models of the Standard Model, in case the search at CERN failed.  Wrong limb, but a prudent approach, because

And your use of 'fudge' here is, quite frankly, very nearly libelous.  Exactly how do you think a deliberately faked observation would pass 'verifiable and repeatable'?

You're projecting. I'm an epistemological solipsist, and I said it in my first post. I am much, much more comfortable with uncertainty than you are. That's why I'm capable of admitting my limits at all, while still freely citing research even on the knowledge it could be wrong.

I call bullshit.  You're the one who's said a claim of knowledge cannot ever be made in the absence of certainty, and then disclaimed the scientific method on the spurious grounds of human fallibility -- you want certainty, but you refuse the best known route to it.

I'll quote you yourself here:

We have plenty of evidence that humans make countless errors, distort everything they see to fit their biases, and on and on. Yet you accept on faith that the conclusions and hypotheses of certain humans are valid, while summarily dismissing the conclusions and hypotheses of others.

I know as well as you do that one of these groups of humans is rather more trustworthy, if not by their nature then at least by the methods they use to subdue that nature. That does not change that they are humans.

As such, you are making nothing more than an educated guess. The probability that either they or you are correct may be more than a coin toss. It may be more than 80%. It may be more than 95%. It is not 100%.

Claiming knowledge is counting your chickens before they hatch. Nothing more, nothing less.

You are presupposing that all human endeavor must be assumed faulty because humans are fallible.  I accept that humans are fallible, but that doesn't mean we're not capable of figuring things out.

And I don't need to know Russell and Whitehead's full derivation of the logical underpinnings of addition to know that 1+1=2.

And it can be wrong. Everything you think you know can be wrong. That is one of the foundational principles of science.

No one, least of all me, ever denied that.  That's the self-correcting nature of the scientific method.  Twenty-five years ago, we knew the universe was expanding, and the question was: in what manner is the rate of expansion decelerating?  Now we know that was the wrong question -- but it was a perfectly valid one, and a perfectly valid viewpoint, based on the data available at that time.

Also, there's a vast difference between being wrong, and being incomplete, and you appear determined to conflate the two.  Far more often than not, science is the process of expanding rather than merely correcting: Newtonian gravity is merely a low-energy approximation, but it's enough to get you to the moon and back.  Hardly wrong there.  Einsteinian gravity will give you the necessary math for an accurate GPS system... but Newtonian math is all it takes to put the satellite in orbit.  And we know Einsteinian gravity is incomplete because it isn't quantized.

That's lightyears away from being wrong.

What kind of emotional reasoning is this? I don't blame people for being wrong with the best data available. If there's something wrong with the message you don't shoot the messenger... unless you're just a dick.

You're the one who says that since we can't tell what future observations might be, we can't discount them today.

Pray, how exactly is one supposed to take into account observations that have not been made and of which one is necessarily unaware?

You're holding knowledge to an obscenely high level of scrutiny.  You want absolute and unassailable knowledge now, whether or not we actually have access to it, and then denying the validity of the scientific method because "humans are fallible".

Sounds awfully religious to me.

In the first place, why would a god have any interest in some hubristic apes on a rock in the middle of nowhere?

You tell me, you're the one keeping the door open for him.

You're the ones rejecting the scientific method. "There's no way we're wrong"... "If we are wrong the chance is so minute we're not even going to look at it"... "We're not going to double-check our work, ever"...

This is a deliberate mis-statement of my position.  Verifiable and repeatable.  How is that not checking, re-checking, and double-checking?

What kind of science is that?
Why does it seem like you're attacking literally everything but my actual points? Science isn't perfect. Scientists make mistakes. Scientists have limited understanding.

Because you clearly haven't bothered reading exactly what I have written, that's why it seems that way.  Also, judging by your responses, you don't seem to know yourself what your points are.

No one ever said science was perfect.  What it is, is the only reliably self-correcting path we know of to knowledge.

Few actual scientists are going to contradict any of this, but you vehemently deny any flaws in, well, anything. Maybe that's just what it means to be an adherent to atheism?

I have never denied flaws.  You're setting up an agonizingly obvious strawman here.  Evidently, the only kind of debate you can handle is one in which you make up your opposing position yourself.

I think I'm going to stand by my assessment of "overawed by semiphilosophical doubletalk".

[omokuroi]

See, you are special.  But I can Google Translate with the best of them.  That isn't fluency ... claiming what you don't have, is the broader category of which virtue signaling is all about.  Aka egomania.

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I hardly need to keep my ego in check when we have a semi-troll running around presumably named after this (formerly) divine bastard though.

strawman strawman assertion assertion "actually you're right but the fact you're right doesn't matter because i said so" strawman strawman HOLY PROJECTION BATMAN

We agree that there are unknowns, and that God could be one of them. You and the shrine maiden have admitted this. You don't get to just reframe my argument endlessly and pretend I wasn't right.

[Unbeliever]

3. Not a dogmatist. Gnostic atheists are little better than gnostic theists, to me--pretending you know more than you really do is always arrogant, even if the side you stick to is more likely to be right. Actually... even if you turned out to be 100% right, and it were absolutely proven, a poor argument that arrives at the correct conclusion is still a poor argument.

In referring to the God as depicted in the Bible, I'm absolutely certain that it does not exist. If that makes me arrogant or some sort of ego-maniac, then so be it. A theistic type of God cannot logically exist, because too many of its characteristics are contradictory. If a thing cannot logically exist, then it does not exist. Negatives can be proven in this fashion. So I'm a gnostic atheist, I guess.

In referring to gods of some other sort, perhaps some vague "something out there" I'd have to be maybe a bit less certain, as long as it isn't logically contradictory, but still pretty sure there's no such thing.