I suppose there could be a distinction, but that is the idea of God, and that is the rational foundation for God's existence in Abrahamic religions. Funny to think that scientific development could invoke faith in some ways.
I think it's not the same. Religions are usually not mainly about more powerful beings creating other beings. There's always a whole set of prescriptive rules, "this is how you're supposed to live your life" that doesn't apply here.
This is not a nitpick, it's actually the main thing about religion. Giving meaning and purpose to life. The hypothesis of some beings creating the rest of life in the universe doesn't provide this.
I’m specifically not invoking faith. This doesn’t support Abrahamic religions more than any other. The line of reasoning here applies just as much to Hinduism, simulation theory, many creation stories, zoo theory, etc.
The idea that the universe was created by a higher being applies to every religion, but does not invoke faith? If you were to believe that theory at all it would require faith. How else could you believe it? No matter what you call it, there is a leap of faith.
Just to make sure we're on the same page, here's the definition of faith from Merriam Webster that I think applies:
a(1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God
(2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion
b(1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof
(2): complete trust
The first thing is you don't have to "believe" in the idea I outlined to use it. It's just a condition under which a probabilistic explanation doesn't account for the lack of observed intelligent life. And, it hasn't been disproven. So that's a way any probabilistic model is incomplete.
Second, we could come to seriously believe in this theory through consensus direct interactions with these higher powers. That wouldn't require a leap of faith at all. If robots showed up and were like "we were sent by your creators, they say you're doing great" and gave us a second moon as a present, that would be very strong proof of more powerful beings.
Yes, if we had direct contact with the higher being that created our universe, or any proof of their existence, humans would no longer require faith regarding the existence of God...
How would you use this theory if you didn't believe it held any truth? You certainly can't draw any corollaries from it. If it is actually a relevant condition worth considering, then you must believe it to be tenable to some degree.
There's a condition where when I kick a ball, just before I touch it, the ball actually invisibly flies to the moon and back and then moves forward. It would be a condition under which Newton's laws fail... but I would have to actually believe in that condition to some degree to use it. It is also similarly unfalsifiable. With current observations it is scientifically untenable, and believing in that condition would require faith.
Any model can be proven incomplete if you conjure up unfalsifiable conditions that exist outside its domain and believe in them.
> b(1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof
For you to use the theory of creation in any meaningful way you must believe it is tenable. For you to believe it is tenable, without being faithful, there must be proof. Proof of this existence comes in many forms, where is your proof? Morality? Reason? Those aren't entirely scientific proofs...
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to censure or disprove creationism and the metaphysical systems built upon it, they are very important and super interesting... but I don't think any of them are without a bit of faith, and they are certainly beyond science's capabilities. This is why I was saying it was interesting that science could invoke faith in some way.
I think to an extent this is essentially just redirecting the preexisting addiction (edit: remove issues) onto a drug that simply produces normative behavior, specifically behavior that conforms with modern society's idea of a highly productive and obedient individual.
For those that aren't already addicted to something, say those with adhd, I wonder to what extent their environment is causing the issues that they seek to solve with a stimulant.
Without medication, I feel much less in control of my mind. It's like I'm in a mind-fog; every long-term thought is blurry and vague so everything tends to become about the short-term. I know that eating this sugary garbage is bad for me but the immediate dopamine gratification massively outweighs that knowledge. Same with tasks I know I need to complete. I know that doing them is the correct thing to do and that procrastinating on them will not be beneficial for me overall, but I just can't "see" that future in my mind.
I don't think this is caused by my environment. Feeling like you are unable to think a clear thought is not because clear thoughts conform with modern society's ideas of a highly productive an obedient individual. For me it's simply a feeling of not being a whole human. Medication addresses this to a very significant degree, although it's by no means a complete fix.
I also use glasses, and I find similarities there. Without them my eyesight is blurry and I cannot see things beyond a very short distance. Are glasses simply producing normative behavior that conforms with modern society's idea of a highly productive and obedient individual? Is it really the environment that is causing me to think of bad eyesight as an issue to be addressed? Obviously not; being able to see clearly is something you want regardless of environment. I think that the same applies to being able to think clearly.
Well I am all for legalisation in general, but replacing illegal drugs with legal drugs other than doing something that is acceptable for the society, being the illegal drugs non-accepted, it would also mean that you aren't going to fund drug cartels, ghettos, traffickers, or in general you're not going to end up in a morgue with fentanyl, so for me, in modern context, that's still a big win
This is a pretty extreme article, but I think the argument is not that it doesn't exist but rather that it is blown out of proportion. The metric that is used to calculate obesity (specifically at the time they reference) was BMI which is a fairly flawed metric and significantly the obesity line was lowered. Idk how it is calculated now.
BMI is a pretty decent measure of fat percentage for the vast majority of people, it really only fails for people who have far more muscle mass than most people (body builders). It is highly correlated with health outcomes - people with a BMI over 30 (obese) have significantly higher risk of death from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer - this is true at a BMI of 30 and it only gets worse from there. 40% of americans are obese. It's not overblown - if anything, I think most people don't understand just how big of a health crisis it is.
On the margins it may not be useful, but for the "average" person, it is definitely useful. I'd suggest there is no one with a BMI of 30 (besides people with a ton of muscle) that is at a healthy weight. Its a gut check, which is what is helpful.
You know what they say, most of the volume of a high-dimensional orange is in the skin. The average person is very rare.
BMI is best for populations since it's so easy to calculate from easily and frequently collected data. For an individual, you can fairly easily get more accurate measures to predict whatever it is you want to predict.
If you're not a bodybuilder and not pregnant, it's one of the simplest useful calculations we have. You'd be amazed at how many medical decision-making tools[0] are very simple and are based on outcomes, not rigorous mathematical theory.
Claiming that BMI is flawed is a lazy half-argument. Finish the argument, what should be used instead of BMI? Look at the correlation plots and draw your own BMI line [0]. I think the BMI lines look pretty good for men, but for women who fall into the common BMI range of 25 to 30, the BMI formula tends to underestimate the amount of body fat.
It would be nice if everyone could get a DEXA scan regularly, but the data shows that 50% of people would find that they have even more body fat than the BMI charts predict. Again, it's worse for women, most women near the overweight threshold would find that their body fat is higher than expected.
This needs to become more widely known. BMI underestimates obesity, not the other way around. Studies that use better measures of body fat percentage consistently find even people who are "normal" weight are fatter than they think. It's why doctors are supposed to now use waist to height ratio as a secondary predictor.
I think due to its generalized nature there are exceptions where it doesn't even apply (like people who are weight training, pregnant women etc).
I also think it is becoming apparent that weight alone is not as useful of a metric as was once believed. It doesn't do a great job of identifying whether or not someone is healthy.
So maybe it is the best that institutions can do to gauge the health of a population with the data given, but I think it could be improved drastically with extra metrics (I've heard of measurements around the body being used).
There is a subset of people who are being misidentified as unhealthy or overweight. Idk how large it is but it seems significant.
Obviously there are edge cases when applying statistical tools at a population level. That's not the purpose of BMI though. If you're pregnant or weight training then OBVIOUSLY your BMI score is not comparable to others. Most people are neither pregnant nor weight training. I'd even bet that most people haven't performed a weighted squat.
>> I also think it is becoming apparent that weight alone is not as useful of a metric as was once believed.
Being fat is bad for your health. That is a fact. No amount of body positivity advertisements will change that fact. It is healthier to be thinner than obese. Look at the graph above to see BMIs impact on other health outcomes.
Also, if you think the obesity crisis is fake/blown up then simply go outside in most American cities and you'll see that many people are obese.
> There is a subset of people who are being misidentified as unhealthy or overweight. Idk how large it is but it seems significant.
Again, this is not relevant as the subset of people is so small compared with the whole population.
The "data given" is included in BMI. Your relative weight is an indicator of multiple other health outcomes.
> There is a healthy body fat % range but it is all very dependent on someone's activity and consumption.
The amount of body fat being detrimental doesn't change if you just exercise more or eat healthier. It's still bad by itself. You might have a better life expectancy than someone who is a sedentary lump at the same body fat, but that isn't saying much. Hence, again, BMI is a gut check. If you're at BMI=27, you almost certainly need to lose weight. Period.
> I do however think BMI has its flaws and that those flaws are pretty significant when it comes to assessing individual health.
While this is not untrue, I don't understand why people single out BMI as a measure to criticise. No measure is perfect, or even particularly good in many cases, and yet it's BMI that gets it.
What do you mean by "weight alone"? Even BMI is kg/m^2 rather than just weight. Do you mean total body fat percentage isn't a metric of health, or BMI doesn't closely track BF%, or literally that weight isn't a good metric?
Sorry if this is nitpicky, but responding to the claim is difficult without defining it precisely. For example, see this figure from a study comparing BMI and BF% in Greece: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/BMI-versus-body-fat-perc.... You can see that BMI incorrectly says a lot of people are healthy when they're obese in terms of body fat, but if you don't agree that body fat is a metric of health then I'd first need to convince you of that.
Edit: I'll also note that in that figure you can see the number of people who are incorrectly labelled as obese by BMI but not by BF%, and it's much smaller than the other way round. BMI tends to make your population look healthier than it really is, whereas most people who say BMI is flawed are making the opposite argument.
> I think due to its generalized nature there are exceptions where it doesn't even apply (like people who are weight training, pregnant women etc).
All models are false, some are useful. BMI is imperfect, but arguing we should ignore it because it has exceptions is like arguing we should ignore that the Earth is round because it isn't perfectly spherical. Looking at BMI alone is occasionally misleading, but it's a hell of a lot better than not looking at anything, which is the realistic alternative.
> So maybe it is the best that institutions can do to gauge the health of a population with the data given, but I think it could be improved drastically with extra metrics (I've heard of measurements around the body being used).
No-one has identified any such drastic improvements. Measuring body fat percentage gives you a small improvement over BMI alone, but it's hard to do at home and only really matters for people with very high muscle mass (who are most likely already using more advanced measurements than BMI alone).
My eyes tell me that the obesity epidemic is real. Go to any public gathering of a couple dozen people or more and count the obese people you see. Heck, pick up a middle school yearbook, we’re starting obesity young these days.
We were hoping our future was Star Trek, but it’s looking more like Wall-E.
> did anyone else think it odd how Inception enters the deepest level of a rich man’s subconscious and finds not a psychosexual Oedipal nightmare of staggering depravity, but… a ski patrol?
I don't think the author actually watched Inception lol
I take it these are percentages of all complaints? Because the number of complaints for anti-Jewish hate crimes was 116 in 2020, but 198 in 2021, so a definite increase, but hate crime overall basically doubled as well, so the relative amount to the total is lower.
These are not the same thing and especially when comparing over time you need to take into account how the definitions for the categories themselves change.
How does any of that affect his thesis that the black object in this specific video isn't the aircraft but is rather an artifact of the camera?
He doesn't make any claims about the aircraft because he is saying it isn't visible... and the scope of his analysis is this single piece video evidence.
