In a GQ thread, there is a “discussion” between Rat avatar and myself. He seemed unwilling to acknowledge a simple point about statistics, so I concocted a trivial example involving a move away from equilibrium in a two-atom collision. He completely missed the point; in a follow-up to the post I just linked to he seemed to think absolute-zero temperatures were relevant to the point I was making. :smack: He types long posts with citations to refute claims I never made, or even hinted at. He was arguing with a strawman.
This derailed thread is not an isolated instance. In another thread about the I-E expansion he did the same thing, often making points similar to those I was making but treating them as refutations of my own posts. I’ve not done a Search but there was at least one other thread where he felt a need to misconstrue and attack my views.
What gives? He seems well-read and relatively intelligent. He’s probably a good-spirited guy with peculiar blind-spots. Have other Dopers also found that rat avatar treated them as strawmen in “debates”? Or is he just picking especially on me? If the latter, why? Did I write something that offended him? Is there something in my diction that confuses him?
I don’t really want to Pit rat avatar. He’s probably a fine guy who gets confused sometimes. I just wonder: What gives?
:eek: Touché. I should have saved that for a Pit thread!
But it was exasperating to explain something as clearly as I could, using simple words, and have him continue to rave against a strawman, blithely oblivious of my actual words.
This is pretty typical behavior from rat avatar. Happens all the time.
In the definition of a kilogram thread, there was the claim from rat avatar that a mole was “the amount of matter in an object”. This like saying a dozen (12) or a gross (144) is the “amount of matter in an object”. That’s just… no. They’re just numbers. A gross is a number. A mole is a number. When this is pointed out, the stream of irrelevant gibberish continues.
From the recent thread on prime factorization there was the claim, at minimum unproven and very likely incorrect, that finding the next prime after any given prime is in EXPTIME. I mean, testing primality is an easy problem. If you have a prime, and you want to find the next one, then even the brute force of checking every odd number until the next hit isn’t likely to take very long, given the density of primes. Yes, average distance between primes increases, but I don’t personally see why finding the next prime would be all that difficult – hell, maybe it is but it’d be nice to see a proof – and when posters point out arguments along those lines, there’s a series of red herrings that show that rat avatar simply does not comprehend the material on a sufficient basis to understand the criticisms. Not a single poster was talking about “breaking encryption”, but somehow that’s where it ends up.
Everything is garbled, misinterpreted, misunderstood. This isn’t something new, it’s the normal state of things.
Here is a (albeit ancient) thread where rat avatar accuses me of an arguing a straw man, even though anyone with a basic understanding of logical fallacies can see this wasn’t the case. And not only was he a condescending jerk about it, he had the nerve to be beat his dead horse throughout the entire thread. Even when multiple posters handed him his ass. He has impressed me with more reasonable posts since then, but his performance in that thread has always tainted my view of him.
Buck Godot probably hit this the best with ‘someone is wrong on the internet’, and I except that.
In General questions, don’t try to get me to accept claims without cites especially when they score high on the physics Crackpot Index including cases such as:
[ul]
[li]5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.[/li][li]5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.[/li][li]5 points for each mention of “Einstien”, “Hawkins” or “Feynmann”.[/li][li]10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).[/li][li]10 points for each statement along the lines of “I’m not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations”.[/li][li]10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn’t explain “why” they occur, or fails to provide a “mechanism”.[/li][li]20 points for talking about how great your theory is, but never actually explaining it.[/li][li]50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.[/li][/ul]
You could have rephrased this false statement:
You didn’t even use a closed system, ignored what “microstates” were and even ignored kinetic energy for a macroscopic description. Nothing you offered dealt with thermodynamics at all, but you wanted me to accept it as factual.
Lets look at the rules stick for GQ:
Lets see, I asked multiple times:
It isn’t my fault that you can’t read rules, but as you were setting up a “thought experiment” in a crackpot fashion that was based on false premises, yes I was not going to let it go.
The fact that you couldn’t even muster up a SINGLE cite yet resorted to personal attacks is the problem there.
You could have provide a cite and helped me learn the errors of my ways.
I won’t apologize for failing to role over and accept a bullshit theory you can’t support, I actually provided you with cites that would help you understand your question here.
Perhaps if you weren’t so fucking fragile when dealing with the concept that maybe you don’t know everything you would actually read some of my links and realize why your claim was baseless and factually incorrect.
I would have actually been happy for you to demonstrate why I was mistaken, if you can’t personally deal with people asking you to back up your claims perhaps you should stick to IMHO.
You are not alone, I have exactly the same experience. When a topic pings his radar screen, he regurgitates a lot of information and opinion, but with minimal sensitivity to relevance or context. He lectures rather than participates.
I don’t think he deliberately straw-mans in the usual sense. If he quotes one of my posts, his “reply” usually shows no indication that he has read & understood my post at all - it’s more as though some isolated word or phrase in my post was a trigger to remind him about some point he wants to argue. Sometimes I may thus find that he has targeted me as an imagined opponent that he is “refuting”; but equally often I may just be left scratching my head in puzzlement.
Nothing is properly responsive as it would be in the flow of a normal discussion - it just seems like certain stimuli trigger a memory dump from somewhere in his library of preformed lectures. I would have more patience for this kind of autism-spectrum behavior if those lectures didn’t so often tend to become supercilious and dismissive.
I am a mere peasant, ignorant of such matters, but would still submit that it is a tad misguided to suggest cites for Pasta to consult to illuminate his understanding of things quantum.
I’ll do it again, mostly because using “autism-spectrum” disorder as an insult is one of my “triggers”. People with autism have a hard enough time without people blaming all behavior they personally view as antisocial on it. Please don’t trivialize their needs and challenges by superficially resemble autism as such.
I do have Dyslexic dysgraphia, but mostly Chronos can stop false claims with “your wrong” because of his Moderator tag, despite even when he is wrong.
I was getting bored of trying to explain how CP-symmetry doesn’t allow time travel and how high school physics won’t let you disprove the 2nd law of thermodynamics or that it is generally considered the property that breaks time symmetry above the quantum level.
I should pit myself for ignoring that the language of physics is math. While this pitting doesn’t really bother me I am a bit sick of the lack of appropriate tools to show why something may not work under current best theories.
In retrospect I’ll pivot and spend more over on physics.stackexchange.com, it will be refreshing to spend time on a site where concepts like the “equipartition of energy” or “translational kinetic energy” or hell “average kinetic energy” aren’t considered as too complex and oppressive.
As it worked with for septimus apparently, no matter how mistaken my above statements are to you “there’s nothing I’m trying to say that can’t be found — were I inclined to search for it, which I’m not — in the writings of famous physicists”
Despite all efforts, you’re still asking for a cite for … for what, exactly? For nothing that I ever claimed.
My ONLY point in that sub-discussion was that the Law of Large Numbers doesn’t apply to Small Numbers. Can you even get that much through your pedantic obstinate rat’s brain?? Yes, or no: Do you think the Law of Large Numbers applies to Small Numbers, or not?
I wasted a sentence giving a trivial example of a move AWAY from thermal equilibrium, just to give a clearer face to the notion that the 2LoT was a statistical law, not a dynamical law. In the example an atom lost 99.99% of its kinetic energy — it could have lost just 95% of its energy for all the difference it would make to my example. You then seized upon the fact that the atom did NOT lose ALL of its energy as a big GOTCHA; thus showing one and all that you hadn’t a clue what anyone was talking about. Over and over, like a [del]dog that can’t let go of a bone[/del] rat that can’t let go of its own tail, you prattled about Absolute Zero temperatures and other irrelevancies.
Babble babble babble babble. I gave gentle warnings that what you were babbling about had nothing whatsoever to do with anything I was trying to say. I gave stern warnings, rude warning. It didn’t matter. Babble, babble, babble.
And here you are, so lacking in self-awareness, that you STILL haven’t gotten the point. Asking me for a cite! A cite for what exactly, dunderhead? A cite that a particle that loses 99.99% of its kinetic energy has lost 100% of its energy?? I already “apologized” for not writing “almost” to tailor my sentence to pedants.
Babble babble babble. And you had similar oblivious babble in a thread about Indo-European expansion.
Are there interesting issues associated with the Arrow of Time? I think so, but it would be impossible to discuss them with YOU.
In future if I have anything to say to you, I’ll just bump this Pit Thread. I expect you to do likewise.
Yeah, he really doubled, tripled, quadrupled-down on his idiotic argument that the Metric system was less suited for computation. The inanity starts here.
At the time, I didn’t think it was pit-worthy, but, now that we’re here…
I’m still hung up on the lack of a rat avatar for rat avatar. It appears to be some sort of spherical cow, and that just doesn’t seem acceptable, given the user name.
well, “spherical cow” is a long-time parody of approximations made in scientific estimations. (Or, as I first heard it, “Assume a spherical cow…”)
I note that in a 2016 entry of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius reference is made to Aldin Hoffman’s report on “The Secret of the Perfectly Spherical Cow” (which involves Jiminez Hoffman’s gettiing his bones removed)
A cite for what exactly, dunderhead? A cite that a particle that loses 99.99% of its kinetic energy has lost 100% of its energy?? I already “apologized” for not writing “almost” to tailor my sentence to pedants.