From wannabe poster “Jane,” who, needless to say, will not be commenting here again. She’s referring to my remark about Ricky Gervais not taking the free-will issue seriously enough:
anyboby notice how jerry gets upset when free will is mentioned and that ricky and richard dont buy into this lack of responsibility. Jerry has to deny praise and blame because he did nothing in his life and let his parents down. Watch him sqirm when free will is mentioned and he goes on the defence of his postion straight away. ” I cant be blamed, its not my fault mom and dad!”. Be an adult Jerry like Ricky said!!! Lol your pathetic
I suspect “Jane” is a 14-year-old boy with sexual issues who hangs out in front of a computer in his parents’ basement. And speaking of “Jane’s” parents, they’d be prouder of him/her if he/she would learn to write and spell!
“defence” suggests British. “mom” suggests US. My guess is Brit, so unlikely to have a 2basement”, Jerry.
There are basements in the UK. Honest.
Absolutely, but less common.
My guess is Canadian, perhaps poisoned by the same well water that drove DM mad
A little research suggests “defence” + “mom” may have been uttered by a Canadian.
Stephen Harper?
Nah, ‘defence’ because he is American but can’t spell, ‘mom’ because even he can spell that.
If your parents were disappointed in you they must have had ridiculously high expectations. You’ve got a science doctorate, a job as a professor at a university, and you are a published author.
“I suspect “Jane” is a 14-year-old boy with sexual issues who hangs out in front of a computer in his parents’ basement. And speaking of “Jane’s” parents, they’d be prouder of him/her if he/she would learn to write and spell!”
That’s pretty harsh. I hope that the commenter isn’t actually a 14 year old male with sexual issues.
You find that harsh? I think it’s a pretty safe assumption, and I hope it’s right. I usually picture these people as demented loser teenagers too, but I suspect a lot of these prelimbic mutoids are masquerading as normal adults. For me, that’s the truly scary possibility.
That is one odd website to which you’ve linked your nym. Good odd. But definitely odd.
As in all things, what is truly understood does not seem the least bit odd.
That which is truly understood seems normal and is not surprising. In other words, it is less interesting to look at. There is much pleasure in understanding new things.
Oh, I can appreciate non-standard humor. I particularly enjoyed the article on vaginal storage. But I still think “odd” is an apt description.
I take quite a but of pride in my own “odditude.”
It could be a misspelling, but the writer could also be British, e.g., defence instead of defense.
I think he was referring to the words like “anyboby” and “your pathetic”. I didn’t even notice the spelling of “defence” but that may be because I’m in the UK. 🙂
Defence is really the proper spelling, since it came first!
your for you’re is one of the most common internet misspellings these days. Is it it lack of education, or just saving two finger taps? If texting, I could understand it.
Others are advise in place of advice, choose/chose, and of course, definately.
But one that does a U-turn on meaning is to use ‘accept’ in place of ‘except’, which I saw once in a scientific paper. Could that confuse a determination? Definitely.
He misspelled “it’s” too, writing “its” when he meant “it is”.
And “cant” and “dont”.
And “postion”!
Another one is the confusion between effect and affect (also seen in scientific papers!)
My personal favorite: “would of” in place of “would have” (as in “I would of done it”).
And I’m not even a native English speaker :-).
And I’m not even a native English speaker
Paradoxically I think that not being an native speaker helps with this particular kind of misspellings, especially if you’ve learned English in a class or by reading books. I never confuse “there” and “their” for example, for a long time I even thought that they sound differently.
When I was in elementary school, anyone making these kind of mistakes would have been laughed out of class. I went to school when everyone knew the language mattered.
My favorite¹ case of “effect”/”affect” confusion was in a comment in a blog. The blogger had used “effect” in the “effect a change” sense, and some well-meaning but totally unqualified commenter “corrected” her by writing something like, “The word ‘effect’ can’t be used as a verb; it’s always a noun. Just a friendly piece of advice from one blogger to another :)” Oh, how I laughed! Good to know that the very fact of having a blog, the barrier to entry of which is approximately zero, qualifies one to polices others’ grammar.
¹ I use American spellings in general now, having lived here for 19.5/50.75 years of my life.
So much for my cool use of ¹ to get a superscript 1!
You mention “effect”. But that word is rarely seen or heard currently, being incorrectly replaced by “impact”. A sentence showing the different usage of the two words: “The impact of your fist on my pedantic mouth could have a long-term effect.”
At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, “Defence” is hardly first, since it derives from the Old French “Defens,” which in turn comes from the Latin, “Defensus.” And here in the U.S. should be marked as misspelled by any competent teacher.
Granted, that the US is closer to the root form. But how about the -yze vs. -yse conundrum? From a Wiki page:
So who in our history as Americans can we hold accountable for words like analyze, catalyze, hydrolyze and paralyze? Can’t win ’em all … 😉
Now you may have put too fine a point on it.
Webster.
I’m not so sure about that. In French and Latin, the languages of origin, it’s spelled with an ‘s’.
There is a certain logic to putting a “fence” in defense though.
“And speaking of “Jane’s” parents, they’d be prouder of him/her if he/she would learn to write and spell!”
Unless of course (1) Jane’s parents are creationists or (2) Jane’s father is a fat balding 60-year old from Belarus named Boris who calls himself Natasha and spams me with email about how much he loves me and would want to visit … and I only have to send him money …
Hey! Leave my “Natasha” out of this!
We *have* to believe in free will. We have no choice.
Or, we could disagree with it for the same reason.
I apologize for the harshness of my moderated comment. As a former 14 year old boy with sexual issues, that was very painful to read. I still love your site!
RW: Argumentum ad cellarium
This is why I think it’s a mistake to argue “free will”.
Because the religious see “free will” as what it is — a religious concept.
“Free will” was invented as the dodge the religious use to explain why people commit acts that their god finds offensive. Like eating IQ-raising sin-fruit or mowing the grass on Sunday.
“Jane” (and it probably is a woman, because 14-year-old boys don’t normally project to girl names) is a religibot. I’ll bet she thinks atheists really do believe in god, but declare atheism so they can “behave any way they want.”
Now, that’s the dumbest, least-informed argument against atheism ever. It essentially takes this form:
* I know god exists
* I also know god doesn’t want me to sin
* But I like to sin
* I deny god exists, I can sin all I want.
Forgetting, of course, that a god who punishes sin won’t forego punishment just because you don’t believe in it.
Or would it? Hmm…maybe we’re onto something. Hmm….
Nope. On second thought, it’s still the dumbest, least-informed argument against atheism ever.
My favorite argument for god is Torquemada’s Argument:
1) See that bonfire?
2) Therefore God exists!
Sure I believe in Free Will, but I don’t really have nay choice in the matter.
Not only learn to spell; one must also learn to use an apostrophe.
Surely an adult who hasn’t given up childish things? “Is mentioned” and “buy into..”, “lack of responsibility”; passive voice and business-world metaphor doesn’t sound adolescent to me.
Jerry, Why do you assume that Jane has “sexual issues?” Do you have some information about Jane beyond her comment? I think that Jane’s comment is pathetic and ignorant, but based on the comment alone it seems to be a pretty low blow to imply that a hypothetical case of teenage gender confusion would be a character flaw deserving of mockery.
Spoken like a true 14-year-old boy with sexual issues, Dan. 🙂
But seriously, I agree with you. It also seems like a violation of the “no personal attack” standard Jerry has appropriately set for this site.
But surely a simple speculation about sexual issues doesn’t constitute a personal attack.
What if Jane is one of those lonely cat ladies? Hmmm… you’re cornered!
Speaking of Cat Ladies:
href=”http://www.amazon.com/Accoutrements-Crazy-Lady-Action-Figure/dp/B0006GKJ7CCrazy Cat Lady Action Figure No kidding. Saw one for sale in a shop last weekend.
html fail:
Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure
Oh my. That link opened a can of worms:
Cat Butt Gum
Canned Unicorn Meat
Maybe You Touched Your Genitals Hand Sanitizer
Gifts for the bored and jaded friend with everything.
“All that means is that we have no evidence for fairies, and of course scientists never professes absolute certainty.”
I’m sort of a grammar and spelling and punctuation nazi, but I think making a big deal out of mistakes is often irrelevant; anyone can slip up, even intelligent atheists. There is plenty to take issue with in the content of the comment.
I love good snark, but I had some pretty immediate second thoughts on this one. It is an Ad Hominem and nothing more. So I really can’t take much satisfaction in it and I think I’d prefer some snark that is based more on the merits rather than imagining unsavory personal characteristics of the poster.
“Unsavory personal characteristics?” I didn’t see any mention of same. And I would also point out that every 14-year-old boy has sexual issues.
Isn’t “a 14-year-old boy with sexual issues” redundant? As I recall, that’s all being a teen is.
It’s an economic problem when being a teen: usually a supply and demand thing.:)
It all depends on how you define free will. If you say that free will is the power to make choices, then we do have free will as our brains (“we”, so to speak) can make choices, although such choices are limited by several factors depending on which conditions we find ourselves in. I don’t think rapists, for example,choose to be what they are, what kind of desire they feel, but they obviously choose their victims. That’s why I’m pro-death penalty, because rapists don’t choose to have the desire to rape, and eventually that desire will force them to rape someone. So the only way to deal with rapists is to kill them. They can’t become “non-rapists” and we can’t remove the desire from them without a risk of reincidence or seriously hindering their ability to function within our society.
“. . .the only way to deal with rapists is to kill them.”
Oh my. Your reasoning is unapproachable.
Too harsh on therapists.
The “your” and “you’re” issue is getting worser and worser. Almost as bad as the there and their and they’re (they never get that there last they’re right). There there own worst enemies over their. I am attacked by the illiterate for comments I make all over the internet. In a post on youtube, a nitwit said that the singer of the particular video he just watched had a gravelly voice from smoking. I replied to him that the artist in question quit smoking and I received this reply: “aye mayn
he dun smoke
but he do smoke i mean he dun smoke now k”.
I believe I was being told that the singer used to smoke but he quit which would make his original point valid. I asked this kid if English was one of the languages spoken in his neighborhood and then received this: “.aye mayn
he dun smoke
but he do smoke i mean he dun smoke now k
no evidenc
cept vry itervew snce th 90s
but he nvr smokd k?”
I finally realized I was communicating with an e.e.cummings who had been anaesthetized against his will during some crazy drinking contest. But for all I know, e.e.cummings dun drink k. cept vry satday.
What makes me sad is that lack of basic language skills are in evidence all over the place all the time and most people don’t seem to care. Most people don’t react anyway. I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, we live in a society in which rap lyrics are often referred to as poetry.
That looks like text Gaelic to me. Or maybe Welsh. Next time, ask him if he’d like to buy a vowel.
I’m an American and never use the expression “straight away.” I don’t recall other Americans using it either.
Yes, correct spelling is a thing of the past. A couple of years ago I noticed a new metal sign had gone up in a local park. It read “GOLF PRACTISE STRICTLY PROHIBITED.” Possibly because the lettering on the sign had still to be painted, the previous wooden sign which was probably some 30+ years old and somewhat dilapidated was still in situ approximately 20 yards away. It read “GOLF PRACTICE STRICTLY PROHIBITED.”
A neat example of declining standards even at the level of local authority bureaucracy.
Most of the messaes of this type are simply not worth wading through. I used to try to find the hidden nugget of meaning, but there isn’t one. The tragedy is that these are the people who believe they have something worth saying. The great unwashed are alive and well, and thanks to the internet they are always playing at a theater near you.
Butter and I were discussing how much self-righteous indignation would be appropriate to feign, when our Freedom from Religiots Foundation newsletter arrived!
YAY! It’s absolutely slathered in Coynage! Dan Barker tipped his cap to Jerry’s recent drive, which apparently made quite a noticeable bump. There’s also a picture of Ceiling Cat in the Zócalo. Really sweet.
Check it out, folks! And hats off to youse folks for making it happen.
For those of you, sitting on you’re stockpiles of extra cash… well, theirs not much nice things I can say about you. Your a bunch of loosers.
“Your a bunch of loosers.”
Well played, Sir!
I got mine today too, and was delighted to read of the victories that Ffrf and others are having against those who would encroach on our 1st amendment rights. Shame about the flaunt/ flout confusion on the front page, though!
+1 for the last paragraph of your comment 🙂
As the proud parent of a dyslexic child, get over the spelling. The ability to spell is no indication of intelligence, nor is the lack thereof an indication of a lack of brain power.
Agreed…not even a correlation, especially on the internet. And before you mock someone in public ask “Are you not entertained?”
No indication? That’s completely incorrect. P(dyslexia|bad spelling) is quite different to P(bad spelling|dyslexia). If someone’s spelling is as described, dyslexia is not the first assumption to make, or even close to 50% the assumption to make – the writer being stupid, careless or careless to the point of stupidity is overwhelmingly more likely.
The person showed other signs of idiocy along with arrogance, an always endearing combination. How are we to know somebody is dyslexic? We all have limitations and many of us have handicaps. We are still expected to cope with and compete in this world. There is no chance I will ever give all of these terrible grammaticians and spellers a pass simply because one of them might be dyslexic.
I was not defending the writer. I think it should be beneath Prof. coyne to attack the letter writer for his poor spelling. I could argue it is even more egregious to attack a weak specious argument based on its poor spelling.
Regarding spelling and intelligence: as a child I was a terrific speller and won all sorts of contests. I loved reading and spelling came naturally to me. My fourth grade teacher, after I had won a contest, made a point of telling me there was no correlation between spelling ability and intelligence. She did this in class, so I was eager to find her wrong. In the olden days we did our research in the library and the only study on the issue supported my teacher. I still have yet to find a convincing study that disputes her claim. It is not only dyslexics that spell poorly.
Finally, attacking or even snarking about spelling errors shuts out people who may actually have something to say who aren’t willing to be mocked.
It’s (generally) a sign of intellectual laziness.
or a sign of being in a hurry or typing on a touchscreen or any far more charitable and reasonable interpretations. Intellectual laziness or some other moral condemnation is an absurd charge to level at a few misspelled words.
/Tounge in cheek mode on
Aw, come on, don’t be so hard on them! I cant spel or do propa grammer and I have too degrezz! But at leazt, unlike the Yanks here, I no how to spell “mum”.
My Swedish cousin, who deals with companies in both the UK and the USA, has a British-American / American British translation dictionary. No kidding. It’s funny reading.
I’ve always wondered if the US State Department has an Aussie-Yank dictionary. The usual word for the American “flip flop” is “thong” here, and “trunk” of a car (US) is “boot” here. “Gas” is “petrol” here, and so on.
One of the nicest things about being human is our ability to be cooperative and tolerant (there are plenty of negatives). This thread (and the original post) disappoint me. The issues raised are important to understanding humans but I doubt we can collectively rise to the challenge.
Generally, people can spell but don’t bother to edit for typos. This example does seem egregious, though.
I try not to worry about typos unless they strike me as amusing: a nice little nudge from the universe down a new path of thought.
I agree that the tone of this particular post is disappointingly mean spirited, but I guess we all have off days.
I think I’ve been listening to Brian Cox too much. Philosophical issues like “free will” just seem silly.
But yeah. I agree that your response to Jane was disappointing.
Your pathetic signator makes a very large, very common, and very dubious assumption, which is the assumption that responsibility can only be predicated on “free will”.
In accepting responsibility there are two major aspects:
1. Accepting obligations to care for others who depend on us, or for property in our care, or to fulfill various requirements such as making payments or following rules or delivering expected goods or services.
2. Accepting the consequences of our actions.
Neither of these require free will. They require the kind of flexible intelligence that the human brain has.
The second of these two is the one people usually assume requires free will. No, it requires that we are able to know what the alternative actions are, to predict the likely outcomes of those various alternatives, and to assess which outcomes are in our best interest or best meet our goals. This effectively outlines a kind of algorithm for choosing, and once that deterministic algorithm arrives at its conclusion we carry out the action so conceived.
Whatever the consequences are, which would vary from place to place or era to era, a person must live with them. This is easy to know and understand, and also requires no “free will”.
If we had “free will” there would be no friction, no resistance,no struggle in deciding to quit smoking, deciding to end a depression, deciding not to pull the trigger when boiling with rage and with loaded gun in hand we encounter the most vile evil hateful harmful monstrous enemy we can possibly imagine. A truly free will would effortlessly switch unconstrained between alternatives without doubt, hesitation, fear, uncertainty, temptation, or other forms of internal struggle or resistance that usually arise unconsciously and beyond our control in our thought processes.
We simply don’t have that freedom. We certainly do have intelligence, memory, learning, reasoning, and the other mental capacities needed to make estimations and predictions, and thus choices, and we certainly can and do take responsibility regularly without any need of the mythological “free will” generally assumed necessary to do so.
Jeff,
I think the point most people are trying to make is that the choice is set by the algorithm, which the person cannot change (though another algorithm could). In these circumstances, retribution seems unfair. Deterrence, containment and rehabilitation remain valid objectives. Removing one of the four accepted objectives would be quite a significant change.
I agree with this. If you read anything that conflicts with this in any way then it’s a misunderstanding. My main point is that we don’t lose responsibility just because we don’t have free will, which is a very common and very naive critique.
Thanks, Jeff.
I agree that we retain some responsibility. Though I can’t help thinking that there is a qualitative difference between freely generating good or evil and simply transmitting good or evil which is already implicit in your environment.
For all practical purposes, though, the calculations are just too hard. It’s easier (and safer?) to continue to act as though we had free will, even though Occam’s razor whittles it out of existence when we think about it. This feels like a good example of a case where it makes perfect sense to believe in something you know to be untrue.
Heresy!
Well, I disagree with this. We have evolved moral intuitions that express themselves emotionally in the form of anger, vengeance, and the desire for moral retribution. This is why for many people it is not good enough to lock up a heinous murderer for life, a move that will prevent him from ever killing again. They must be crushed, tortured, hurt, destroyed. This is the logic of our evolved internal justice system at work. Violence and aggression toward transgressors is our unthinking instinct. But our reason and better understanding of the brain tells us that “evil” as an independent thing doesnot exist. Instead we have brains that suffer from disease, genetic malformation, or poor nourishment and exposure to harmful experiences and educations. The better we understand these things as time goes by, the more confidently we can dispose of primitive emotional moral retribution and focus on containment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. The goal is to protect society and if possible heal or reform the offender, not to punish for the sake of punishment itself or for venting our savage rage.
You are basically advocating that we should continue to be ruled by these primitive instinctual passions rather than using reason to rise above them, simply because they are more natural and intuitive, and don’t require stretching the brain. To me it seems analogous to arguing that our instinctual fear of flying should guide our decisions about how we travel, rather than our statistics based probability calculations and our knowledge of aeronautic technology.
If I read you correctly you are advocating going with the gut, which is more natural to people, rather than using our best science and philosophy to rethink our penal systems and our laws. I can’t agree tht this is the best approach. It is the easiest approach.
However, I believe progress is possible and that the impulse for progress eventually conquers the inertia of passivity if it has truth on it’s side. If this were not true,we might never have even made stone tools or started playing with that terribly frightening and dangerous specter of evil more commonly known as fire.
Jeff,
You are inferring that I take the extreme position opposite to your own. This is not the case. I am not saying that I always go with the gut. What I am saying is that I find it easier to believe that I have real choices, even though a moment’s reflection shows that this is unlikely.
So I believe that I choose to respond to your post, that I choose to advocate a humane response to wrong doing and that I choose to take an interest in scientific progress.
In fact, maintaining the fiction of free will makes it easier for me to act rationally. Without this fiction there would be less pressure on me to make choices, so the algorithm might well come up with lazier decisions.
I think that what drives the true scientist is the lure of actively discovering the truth. This is rather different from passively being present when the truth is inevitably or accidentally revealed. Again, belief in their own agency seems essential. Even if they know this is not actually true.
I suspect that the connection between belief and thought is less straightforward that it often appears. It seems to me that belief is essentially the trained, subconscious, diffuse pattern matching which guides snap recognition and instant response, whereas thought is the learned, conscious, focused chain of logic which guides complex, planned projects. It is quite proper for belief to operate differently from thought. (I am aware that this is a simplification and “belief” and “thought” are in practise not used quite so neatly. Nevertheless, I do think that the conscious and subconscious components of cognition operate pretty much separately, and this helps us to understand what religion is for. But I digress.)
Do you have any evidence to support your belief that scientific progress is stable and will not lead to an extinction event within the next few million years? Or do you have some other criterion of “goodness”? It seems to me that this is essentially a mathematical question, but I haven’t seen it seriously discussed anywhere.