Is this place really about fighting ignorance?

All of the above, with a heavy pinch of center-left politics. Cecil has pointed it out in the column itself, when accused of liberal bias, saying basically “I appear in alternative/underground weekly newspapers; were you expecting fair and balanced?”

That certainly shines through on the boards. A few valiant outliers aside, we’re pretty liberal by USA standards.

True, but racism and sexism are the forms of ignorance that don’t have the good grace to meekly surrender to imparted knowledge.

If you’re committed to fighting ignorance, sometimes you have to admit that it takes longer if the ignorance wants to fight back. Hence, the longer and more contentious threads (and the accompanying incredulous ATMB threads about why we even entertain those discussions).

(But, of course, after a point, you realize it’s like wrestling a pig. You both get filthy, but the pig enjoys it.)

Well, you’re right, but when those -isms come up, we do tend to take up arms against it. I don’t think we ONLY fight those two, though. We fight ignorance about celebrity drug habits, and ignorance about guitars, and ignorance about all sorts of other things.

–G!

I took to the Straight Dope in 1999 (joining 2000) because before Google and Wikipedia, it actually answered questions (as dracoi mentioned). Now, search on Google about a topic that has been discussed here, and Google points back here, which to me says something significant.

Yes there are some people whose posts deserve to be ignored, especially in Elections and BBQ Pit, but eventually you learn who is who.

I’m an agnostic-y atheist, and I sort of agree with this. I do think there are some Deists probably hanging around, but they are afraid to speak up. Of course there are a few true believers as well, but they are a small minority.

I’ll say this about the SDMB–it, like Wikipedia, is a good source of knowledge that is “officially approved”, i.e., agreed-upon by the great majority of the best-known leading experts in a particular field.

However, even within living memory, plate tectonics was up for debate. If the Internet and the SDMB existed 70 years ago, people pushing plate tectonics would have been laughed at and/or ignored on that hypothetical SDMB. The same can be said of many previously-laughed-at discoveries or inventions. This is NEVER a place that you’ll hear about in-progress paradigm-shift level research from the people doing the research. You’ll see it argued about briefly, at most.

There may be some world-changers hanging out here, but they know better than to talk about that stuff here. Unless you’ve got 700 peer-reviewed studies backing you, you better not claim it here.

Until the snow flies and you are sidelined for the winter, probably not? :wink:

(Although we still probably should cross paths sometime or other even if you do take some time off from here)

This conversation sounds like The Whales of August, which I found on YouTube after it came up in another thread. A few minutes ago I stopped watching it half-way through because it’s too depressing. Now September Song’s an earwig (it’s not in the movie).

Hey! Where’d you get the pie? Also, why aren’t you sharing? :dubious:

For every paradigm-shifting idea like tectonic plates or H. Pylori gastritis that turns out to be true, there’s over 100,000 ideas put forth that do not pan out. Given that, I’d say we’ve got the right attitude here, asking for good evidence to back up the claims.

In those former cases that proved out, the fact that they had more and more credible evidence supporting them over time eventually won people over. And that’s how science works.

And yeah, what draws me to the SDMB and keeps me here is that as a whole, we are rather more skeptical, and ask for evidence more often than other online sites.

I must not be asking enough questions about racism and sexism because this has not been my experience.

Exactly. Unorthodox opinions get laughed at and ignored not for being unorthodox, but for having no evidence. Anyone can sit around, get stoned, and figure out a whole new paradigm for the universe. Internet nutcases by the bucketload do this constantly. None of those ideas are worth the electrons it takes to communicate them unless and until they’re backed up by evidence. It’s astonishing what a difficult concept this is for so many people. Everyone seems to think that “my unsupported notion I just thought up should be given just as much respect and consideration as any scientific theory that has undergone rigorous testing for hundreds of years.”

Reminds me of the guy that came in preaching that cannabis oil cures everything from late-stage cancer to acne, and that we’re all criminal murderers because we’re not giving it to literally every person in hospitals and nursing homes. When pressed - HARD - he finally admitted that he had no evidence at all to back his theory up, but that he just knows that it’s true. And we’re supposed to overturn all medicine based on his gut feeling. Now, unusually for someone like this, cannabis oil DOES appear to be effective at treating some things here and there. But even if he’s completely correct on every point, it would be wildly irresponsible to do anything without first PROVING it.

Given the nature of your post, I would like to see the evidence for that. Several peer reviewed actual papers, or lacking that, at least some credible source for why you would claim something like that.

But here’s the rub, you just cliamed something, then used it as “a given” to then make another claim. It doesn’t work like that.

No, in both of those examples that isn’t what happened at all. Please provide some evidence for your statement as fact.

Given your views just expressed, it should be easy for you to give the evidence to support your claims. I usually have several sources before I claim anything here, since if somebody disagrees, it’s helpful.

I don’t have a stance of any kind, skeptical or otherwise. I don’t need that kind of armor. I’m just open, or I try to be. Skeptics are believers too, and waste a similar amount of my time. LOL

Which are then shown to be wrong.

Nope. In fact, if I was wrong about anything, and that was shown by scientific real evidence, I would change my views. What else is there to do?

Really?

That’s a lot of verbiage just to call into question my assertion that apparent incorrect hypotheses vastly outnumber correct, paradigm changing ones. You ask for cites for that. I’ll just point out the situation in the pharmaceutical world, which goes through a million or so new molecular entities on average to bring one new drug to market. https://peerj.com/preprints/813v1.pdf

And I’ll add an observation by Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

So, one in a million vs. one in ten thousand for the ratio of true vs apparently untrue hypotheses. I split the difference and called the ratio above one in one hundred thousand.

If you wish to argue that the ratio should be less than 1 in ten thousand, have at. I did train as a medical scientist, have a few papers under my belt, and can differentiate legitimate criticism from pedantry.

What I asked about was your claim that was quite specific.

I want to know the source of that. You are talking about “paradigm-shifting ideas”, and you claim for every true one, that are “over” 100,000 ones that are not true.

It’s an impossible figure, which is why I asked for your source. If you just made it up, which does seem to be the case, that’s another matter. It was that you were using your own claim as the foundation for your next statement, and it was about demanding sources, evidence for a wild sounding claim, that led me to ask you for your source. or sources.

Certainly there may be a million things or more that people try to invent each year, and most don’t work out. But that isn’t what you claimed at all. You clearly stated it was the big “paradigm-shifting ideas”, and that for every one that turns out to be true, there are over a 100,000 that are not.

It’s illogical. There isn’t anywhere close to that many major ideas in science, much less 300,000 or 400,000 new “paradigm-shifting ideas” put forth about them.

You have equated a million different molecular substances with “apparently untrue hypotheses”, and then used “failed inventions” as well to support your claim. Neither supports your statement that for every new and valid theory or discovery if you will, there are over a 100,000 false ones.

Remember you used this reasoning to conclude your attitude towards anything new here is rational. If your premise is false, you have put forth an invalid hypothesis, or theory, to explain your own behavior towards invalid ideas.

I see it as ironic that when asked for cites, something you reasoned is quite an acceptable response to a claim, you didn’t produce anything to support your claim.

(this doesn’t mean it isn’t true btw, but it’s actually something you can’t prove, which just makes it even more ironic. You could be completely right about the numbers, but there is no cite, no way to show it, making your claim one of the sort of things people would dismiss, because you have no evidence for it. Now that is ironic.)