The most annoying beliefs

I agree.

 

No war but the class war.

The immigrants are the working classes of another country. We share more in common with them then we do with those who rule us. Or course they will push wages down, the thing that pisses me of the most is that it's in school level textbooks. Perfect market anyone?

So whilst those fat cats who print the newspaper practice divide and rule yet again, let us remember that it is very much in their interests that it continues. Cheap labour to fuel the hungry gears of capitalism.

 

Odon? Is that...you?

 

Two further commonly expressed opinions tinged with the stupidity stick:

1. There will come a time (usually soon) when human nature will change and everyone will suddenly become either very barbaric or very enlightened.

No, there won't. Human nature hasn't fundamentally changed in the last 150 thousand years or so. What makes you think it will change in 2012 / during the End Times / when the oil runs out / etc?

2. Science is a religion.

No, it isn't. Sure, you can stretch the definition of religion to include things like nationalism or a political belief, but what unites these things is a common core set of values or assumptions that does not or cannot change. Science is not a set of core values beyond the meta-value that everything is open to question and nothing can be accepted as conditionally true without ample supporting evidence. It's a method for knowing things, not a set of things that are known. Show me a religion that would fundamentally alter its content and methods when better ones come along, and I will show you a science.

 

"If I have not personally experienced or seen it, it cannot be true/exist."

A patient argued with me there was no such thing as a hernia belt. Do I really seem like I have nothing better to do than make up crazy medical devices that don't exist?

 

Unfounded conviction and idle speculation aside, there is very good reason to think that human nature will change if we want it to. It has always been changing regardless of what we consider to be its fundamentals. In human nature is a drive to the all conclusive, an ultimatum, a conceptual and physical finality -- a will to an end. That is more annoying to me than any belief about the matter. Bring on the imagination! Do we really need to validate 'the truth' after all?! : D

 

yes?

 

Yes. Yes we do.
Furthermore, doing so will not impede human imagination.

 

That is a slight annoyance, but far more common and more irksome to me is when people believe that if they have personally seen or "experienced" something, it is definitely true/exists, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary or countless other more probable explanations.

By a lot of people's reasoning, I have had an "out of body experience" or seen a ghost. I know, thanks to a balanced evaluation of the evidence, that it was probably a hallucination. The vision was far more likely to have come from my brain rather than actually being a "spirit" or anything else we have no evidence to support. People struggle with being objective and stepping outside of their own "experience", which I suppose is the same reason they sometimes fail to believe that things do exist if they weren't aware of them before.

 

In the absence of evidence, I'd go as far as to say we do at least desire to. It is interesting though how our truths have the capacity to impede us. 'The truth' really is only an idea if we concede infinity. The truth of anything is that very thing and only that. Isn't it?! : D

Knowledge itself really is the ongoing act of knowing, and nothing besides.

Let's never stop our questions upon mere probabilities! ;D

 

This is something that irks me nowadays. People are not informed as to what is human nature and what is human behaviour.

 

"Shakespeare is the best writer in the world." To the next person who says that I will replie say "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as William Shakespeare even said, as a way of saying telling us to read whatever thy likes and not what critics say thy shouldst."

 

^This

 

You're both irking up the wrong tree there : D

I am the best beholder in the world didn't you know? ;D

If you honestly believe there to be a fundamental difference between human nature and human behaviour, it won't exactly irk me, but it shall certainly be treated to some of my humblest incredulity.

 

Human behaviour encompasses cultural acquired traits which vary within certain bounds over time and across cultures. Human nature encompasses those universal aspects of human cognition shared across all cultures and over time, and represents that which bounds the range of possible variation of human behaviour. These phenotypic features of human nature change only very slowly over evolutionary time, i.e. many tens or hundreds of thousands of years. This is why we have the brains of paleolithic hunter-gatherers while driving fast cars and using the internet...

 

Ah yes, the "you don't know what it's like because you weren't there" syndrome. Actually being there exposes you to all sorts of biases and prejudices which can be overcome with some objectivity, distance and pains-taking research. Eyewitness testimony is one of the most unreliable forms of evidence.

 

please tell me you two don't text each other while in the same room

 

We do.

 

Lithium:

This most unscientific distinction you mean to draw here, of nature encompassing behaviour and not vice versa, isn't drawn. I must be more scientific than I imagine to see this?! If humanity isn't its behaviour, I'll be a monkeys uncle!

And also why we have the brains of racers and hackers whilst catching and killing a boar with a bowie knife. Human nature is not the common denominator for the nomenclature of its behaviours, just as genius is not explained by the genetic course that leads up to it.

 

Too much generalization and categorization that is not applicable in the real world.