Metacritic (a review aggregator) gives Michael Moore’s latest movie Sicko a 74 out of 100, while the new Expelled gets only a 20. Expelled, however, is a better movie. In Sicko, Moore shows US folks facing high prices for docs, drugs, and surgery. Sad anxious people find that if they can’t pay, they may not be treated. But then we see happy glad folks in England, France, and Canada getting all the medicine they want for free. Free good, expensive bad — that is the depth of Moore’s celebrated case for universal care.
Ok there may be good arguments possible about Universal Healthcare but would you be long or short in a market on it? Your disclaimer failed to state your personal position on it.
The point is not to say that ID is true, or that evolution is false, all they want is for it to be debatable. Not have evolution taught in schools as 100% FACT when it is still nothing more than a THEORY.And there's not a lot of legitimate evidence for evolution either. Everything they decide is "proof" gets proven as something else later. Anyone remember Lucy? Or how about great grandpa Coelacanth?The bottom line is evolutionist will believe in absolutely anything so long as they don't have to believe in "god".Fine, believe what you want, but stop teaching our kids that the world is billions of years old and their relatives consist of monkeys and fish.
By the arguments made for both sides (U.S. needs universal health care, I.D. supporters are basically shunned and there's still room to debate I.D.), Expelled is marginally better than SiCKO once you factor in how misleading SiCKO. (Cuba? Decent health care? No preferential treatment? Really?!) And that's especially disappointing considering how many more valid arguments he could have used. However, Moore is an amusing and admittedly talented documentary maker. Expelled is just poorly made and isn't nearly as entertaining. But I didn't personally pay to see Expelled, so that only cost me time.
Uh, didn't see 'Expelled' but love how Robin can't let go of 'Sicko'. Pretty funny stuff. I gotta say I'm impressed with the quality of the comments though. Last I visited these parts people were afraid to take Robin on (possibly on account of his Overcoming Bias through censorship of critical comments) and most of what we heard in response to his "the rich are always right!" cries was the "whoosh!" of his bowing lemming fans. It's nice to see that the quality of commentors has improved... or is it just a temporary malfunction in Overcoming Bias's CensorBot 3000?
"And they get opponent Richard Dawkins to admit a 1% chance of God"
Actually walked into this after a double feature today. Probably missed the first half hour, but stayed for the remainder. The film is pretty transparent, as was Sicko. Evidence consists of such things as having two seperate ID experts say that when evolutionary biologists are drinking they admit to problems with evolution.
And while Dawkins does not come off well, Hanson isn't being fully forthcoming in the sentence quoted above. Stein asks Dawkins to rate the percentage chance that there is no god. Dawkins says he cannot put a number on it. Stein presses again and Dawkins (very hesitantly) offers 99, but also asserts two more times that it is not something he can really put a number on. Stein then says why not 97 and then it devolves into a question of whether it is a long way from 50/50.
It was an interesting experience. I'm an Okie and the theater was over 1/3 full. The audience was very receptive (similar to that for Sicko), but I really did enjoy Redbelt much more.
If intelligent design wants to make a case for itself, the movement needs to start producing scientific data and testable hypotheses, not B-movies and popular books that pander to credulous creationists.
Hallq, nice to finally see a comment from someone who saw at least one of the movies compared. Sure interviewee clips could have been longer, but if you'd seen Sicko, you'd admit Excelled was far fairer. I saw nothing wrong with insisting on a number - we do that to lunch guests all the time. On freedom, sure there are official policies, but they are symbolic and largely unenforced.
>In Expelled, experts on many sides speak at length in their own words.
When did this happen? I was put off by how quickly they shifted between interviewees, the only substantial argument for intelligent design I could see was based on the misrepresentation that everyone agrees life would have had to begin with a single cell, when most scientists are thinking simple self-replicators.
>And they get opponent Richard Dawkins to admit a 1% chance of God, and a higher chance Earth life may have been designed by distant ancient higher powers.
Maybe this doesn't look good if you really think about it, but for people who aren't probability & statistics nerds "%1 chance" just means "really small chance." Dawkins himself said it was hard to put a number on, and Stein made himself look like a fool insisting on getting a number after Dawkins said that.
>For my taste, the movie overdid threats to a mythical "academic freedom" that supposedly made the US great, but probably never existed.
What do you mean by "mythical academic freedom"? It's undeniably true that U.S. universities have policies that give academics considerable autonomy in some ways, emphasis on some. Their star case for the supposed assault on academic freedom was a guy who's publishing record dried up when he got into pseudoscience. It looked bad if you don't know anything about the issue, but you could stand to be a little more skeptical here.
>It also overdid how understanding Darwin leads people to reject God, and emboldened Nazis to brutality. These claims are not relevant to the truth of intelligent design, but they are admittedly true and relevant to most viewers' desire to avoid beliefs with such consequences.
Am I the only one here who's read Plato? He was talking totalitarianism and eugenics two millennia before Darwin. Darwin was, at best, occasionally referenced in Nazi propaganda as in the modern world science is always worth shoehorning into propaganda if you can, but it doesn't mean anything.
I think the scientific issues raised by ID are legitimate if focused in the following way. Take a mechanism like the bacteria flagellum, or the immune system, which Behe argues is improbable based on only evolution. The ID argument is basically that evolutionists are basically saying that a hurricane went through a junkyard and created a fully functional 747. The evolutionists counterargument is like saying that given many years, and an editor (natural selection), a bunch of monkeys will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The legitimate question is, given the path dependent mechanism of evolution, what is the ex ante probability that the bacteria flagellum would arise? If the number is like 1 in a google, it is likely it was designed. If the number is more like 1 in a hundred trillion, then given the number of planets and years, this is possible. These are both big numbers, but the ID people are basically saying the odds are too great, the evolutionists saying they are large but given the anthropic principle evolution is highly likely to be sufficient.
I think the argument should be focused on examining the true probabilities given the mutations that had to occur, in what order, acknowledging that various sub-steps had intermediate functionality that is no longer present. The basic evolutionary argument of Ken Miller is to point out that various components of the bacteria flagellum have sets of proteins that are homologous to proteins that have other uses. A good reference for this is http://www.talkdesign.org/f... But I think the probabilities are not summed very well, the evolutionists merely say there's a way, and so, given the anthropic principle, it must have happened.
Thank you all for such insightful and cool headed comments on this blood boiling narrow minded blog. Overcoming Bias LOLIt is really frustrating we still to have to debate childish superstition, evolution vs. biblical creationism/ID in the 21st century
H/A: It's interesting that he's behind Expelled, because he seems to be too smart and too knowledgeable to not have a grasp either of the strengths of the evidence for evolution, or for the weaknesses of creationism/intelligent design as a theory.
I can't access youtube from here, but user:UbuntuMacDupe on that site has a video expanding on this point.
Matthew C., you may wish to watch Ken Miller's presentation on Intelligent Design as well. In the general parlance, ID is distinct from theistic evolution in important ways, said ways including the thesis that certain biological components could not have evolved. Dr. Miller provides good evidence that this thesis is simply false.
Robin Hanson publicly (on Facebook) lists himself as agnostic.
Yes, but he also claims that people should go along with the masses, and pretend to hold whatever position would be held without using the masses as evidence.
He claims to be agnostic. What are the chances that, in accordance with his claimed principles, he's actually some kind of theist like the majority of people, and in accordance with his claimed principles, he misrepresents his belief?
Ok there may be good arguments possible about Universal Healthcare but would you be long or short in a market on it? Your disclaimer failed to state your personal position on it.
The point is not to say that ID is true, or that evolution is false, all they want is for it to be debatable. Not have evolution taught in schools as 100% FACT when it is still nothing more than a THEORY.And there's not a lot of legitimate evidence for evolution either. Everything they decide is "proof" gets proven as something else later. Anyone remember Lucy? Or how about great grandpa Coelacanth?The bottom line is evolutionist will believe in absolutely anything so long as they don't have to believe in "god".Fine, believe what you want, but stop teaching our kids that the world is billions of years old and their relatives consist of monkeys and fish.
Quality Health Care for Peanuts: How Singapore Does It
If Michael Moore really wanted to challenge our preconceptions about health care, Sicko would have been a documentary about health...
By the arguments made for both sides (U.S. needs universal health care, I.D. supporters are basically shunned and there's still room to debate I.D.), Expelled is marginally better than SiCKO once you factor in how misleading SiCKO. (Cuba? Decent health care? No preferential treatment? Really?!) And that's especially disappointing considering how many more valid arguments he could have used. However, Moore is an amusing and admittedly talented documentary maker. Expelled is just poorly made and isn't nearly as entertaining. But I didn't personally pay to see Expelled, so that only cost me time.
Is Hanson biased?
Uh, didn't see 'Expelled' but love how Robin can't let go of 'Sicko'. Pretty funny stuff. I gotta say I'm impressed with the quality of the comments though. Last I visited these parts people were afraid to take Robin on (possibly on account of his Overcoming Bias through censorship of critical comments) and most of what we heard in response to his "the rich are always right!" cries was the "whoosh!" of his bowing lemming fans. It's nice to see that the quality of commentors has improved... or is it just a temporary malfunction in Overcoming Bias's CensorBot 3000?
mnuez
"And they get opponent Richard Dawkins to admit a 1% chance of God"
Actually walked into this after a double feature today. Probably missed the first half hour, but stayed for the remainder. The film is pretty transparent, as was Sicko. Evidence consists of such things as having two seperate ID experts say that when evolutionary biologists are drinking they admit to problems with evolution.
And while Dawkins does not come off well, Hanson isn't being fully forthcoming in the sentence quoted above. Stein asks Dawkins to rate the percentage chance that there is no god. Dawkins says he cannot put a number on it. Stein presses again and Dawkins (very hesitantly) offers 99, but also asserts two more times that it is not something he can really put a number on. Stein then says why not 97 and then it devolves into a question of whether it is a long way from 50/50.
It was an interesting experience. I'm an Okie and the theater was over 1/3 full. The audience was very receptive (similar to that for Sicko), but I really did enjoy Redbelt much more.
IMO, about the best thing to come out of the "Expelled" fiasco was:
"Richard Dawkins - Beware the Believers"
http://www.youtube.com/watc...
If intelligent design wants to make a case for itself, the movement needs to start producing scientific data and testable hypotheses, not B-movies and popular books that pander to credulous creationists.
Hallq, nice to finally see a comment from someone who saw at least one of the movies compared. Sure interviewee clips could have been longer, but if you'd seen Sicko, you'd admit Excelled was far fairer. I saw nothing wrong with insisting on a number - we do that to lunch guests all the time. On freedom, sure there are official policies, but they are symbolic and largely unenforced.
>In Expelled, experts on many sides speak at length in their own words.
When did this happen? I was put off by how quickly they shifted between interviewees, the only substantial argument for intelligent design I could see was based on the misrepresentation that everyone agrees life would have had to begin with a single cell, when most scientists are thinking simple self-replicators.
>And they get opponent Richard Dawkins to admit a 1% chance of God, and a higher chance Earth life may have been designed by distant ancient higher powers.
Maybe this doesn't look good if you really think about it, but for people who aren't probability & statistics nerds "%1 chance" just means "really small chance." Dawkins himself said it was hard to put a number on, and Stein made himself look like a fool insisting on getting a number after Dawkins said that.
>For my taste, the movie overdid threats to a mythical "academic freedom" that supposedly made the US great, but probably never existed.
What do you mean by "mythical academic freedom"? It's undeniably true that U.S. universities have policies that give academics considerable autonomy in some ways, emphasis on some. Their star case for the supposed assault on academic freedom was a guy who's publishing record dried up when he got into pseudoscience. It looked bad if you don't know anything about the issue, but you could stand to be a little more skeptical here.
>It also overdid how understanding Darwin leads people to reject God, and emboldened Nazis to brutality. These claims are not relevant to the truth of intelligent design, but they are admittedly true and relevant to most viewers' desire to avoid beliefs with such consequences.
Am I the only one here who's read Plato? He was talking totalitarianism and eugenics two millennia before Darwin. Darwin was, at best, occasionally referenced in Nazi propaganda as in the modern world science is always worth shoehorning into propaganda if you can, but it doesn't mean anything.
I think the scientific issues raised by ID are legitimate if focused in the following way. Take a mechanism like the bacteria flagellum, or the immune system, which Behe argues is improbable based on only evolution. The ID argument is basically that evolutionists are basically saying that a hurricane went through a junkyard and created a fully functional 747. The evolutionists counterargument is like saying that given many years, and an editor (natural selection), a bunch of monkeys will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The legitimate question is, given the path dependent mechanism of evolution, what is the ex ante probability that the bacteria flagellum would arise? If the number is like 1 in a google, it is likely it was designed. If the number is more like 1 in a hundred trillion, then given the number of planets and years, this is possible. These are both big numbers, but the ID people are basically saying the odds are too great, the evolutionists saying they are large but given the anthropic principle evolution is highly likely to be sufficient.
I think the argument should be focused on examining the true probabilities given the mutations that had to occur, in what order, acknowledging that various sub-steps had intermediate functionality that is no longer present. The basic evolutionary argument of Ken Miller is to point out that various components of the bacteria flagellum have sets of proteins that are homologous to proteins that have other uses. A good reference for this is http://www.talkdesign.org/f... But I think the probabilities are not summed very well, the evolutionists merely say there's a way, and so, given the anthropic principle, it must have happened.
Thank you all for such insightful and cool headed comments on this blood boiling narrow minded blog. Overcoming Bias LOLIt is really frustrating we still to have to debate childish superstition, evolution vs. biblical creationism/ID in the 21st century
A better movie to compare for Expelled would be Triumph of the Will, the wonderfully made Nazi propaganda film.
Expelled is not a documentary. It's a propaganda film intended to promote hatred of scientists and atheists.
H/A: It's interesting that he's behind Expelled, because he seems to be too smart and too knowledgeable to not have a grasp either of the strengths of the evidence for evolution, or for the weaknesses of creationism/intelligent design as a theory.
I can't access youtube from here, but user:UbuntuMacDupe on that site has a video expanding on this point.
Matthew C., you may wish to watch Ken Miller's presentation on Intelligent Design as well. In the general parlance, ID is distinct from theistic evolution in important ways, said ways including the thesis that certain biological components could not have evolved. Dr. Miller provides good evidence that this thesis is simply false.
Robin Hanson publicly (on Facebook) lists himself as agnostic.
Yes, but he also claims that people should go along with the masses, and pretend to hold whatever position would be held without using the masses as evidence.
He claims to be agnostic. What are the chances that, in accordance with his claimed principles, he's actually some kind of theist like the majority of people, and in accordance with his claimed principles, he misrepresents his belief?