Restoring the American Dream

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Finaly! Somebody tries to counterargue with atempts at logical arguments. Paragraph by paragraph, then.

1- It wasn't obvious when you argued before, so why is it obvious now?

2- That's a somewhat fair criticism only in the sense that the population is at around the same age. People at campuses are easily recruited because of their interest in science. In terms of economic background I doubt that there is bias towards the poor, afaik. It's not even very relevant. People were put in a situation of economic advantage vs disadvantage, due to luck. And the random advantageous adversary, even though knew s/he was benefited by luck, justified his "success" with merit, instead of the original random advantage. Even if your theory, about it all being role playing, was true, that afirms the thesis you are trying to deny: rich people are, in average, more selfish than the poor, due to the very fact of being rich.

3- See 2.

4- He explicitly said that the images he was showing was one example of the experiment, ie, the experiment was done on many locations. Besides, if these are published, don't you think the referees would spot this paifuly obvious flaw you try to attribute to this study?

5- Ad hominem fallacy towards the speaker. And it was because of: a) lack of arguments against the other (explicit and mentioned) experiments' methodology; b) blinding bias towards an ideology. Ad hominem fallacy against me due to lack of real arguments, trying to shut me up and discredit me in further exchanges.

One more round?

Ok. The other line of atack: that the conclusions don't follow from the data. Paragraph by paragraph, then.

1- Ok. That could be a possible criticism. If people don't share what they're not entitled to, a fortiori they do not share what they already have. That's a far more reasonable line of reasoning than thinking these behaviours are completely distinct.

2- We're all selfish, including me, you and Fnord. We're humans. It's a matter of degree. What these many studies suggest is that selfishness (or self-entitled behaviour) arises because of increased wealth, relative to others' wealth. And that it has negative consequences for the society as a whole.

3- It's possible that that is the case, although it's unlikely. How to effectively simulate societies with wealth redistribution many times? That's a study on collective behaviour, not on individual behaviour. It's much more difficult to replicate, I think, because of the exponential growth of the complexity of collective behaviour, and of the length of time that that behaviour takes to manifest.

4- Ok. I don't mind being "shot" by people without arguments.

5- On the footnote: see my previous post.

According to the left there are no intellectual right wingers. In the video they pretty much tell you in the beginning what the results will be. It's UC Berkeley, a notoriously liberal school, so I don't think they're going to conduct then publish a study that is contrary to their beliefs.
Yours truly,
The Zealot

It was obvious on first reading. If I think something is obvious, that means I really shouldn't have to point it out.



It affirms nothing of the kind. 'A twenty-year-old's impression of a rich person' does not equate to 'a rich person'. The impression may or may not be accurate. In sum: you claim that the undergraduates at UCB are a fair representation of Americans of all ages and backgrounds, or perhaps of all humans; and that a student's behavior when he "feels rich" in a contrived situation closely corresponds to the behavior of genuinely wealthy people of all ages and backgrounds. I disagree with both claims.





So you think that Bob's behavior really does tell us something about the historical Henry Ford?



Not in the transcript he didn't. If the transcript is inaccurate, we may as well stop, because we're talking about different things.

"Hundreds of cars" is not really very many. I could stand at the intersection a block from here and watch hundreds of cars go by in an hour. Extrapolating from what I see there to draw conclusions about 300 million people would be absurd.



Appeal to authority. No, after seeing many examples over the decades, I think scientific standards in the social sciences are actually quite low. And even in the hard sciences some dreck gets through. I am close to several academic research scientists, and they routinely show me journal articles which should never have seen the light of day. Sadly, 'published in a peer-reviewed journal' does not automatically mean 'valid and true'.



That's not what an ad hominem is. I do not say that the speaker is slow-witted, or insane, or funny-looking; I say that some of what he describes is demonstrably bad science.



We're not given as much information about the other experiments. However, two examples are enough to destroy his credibility. Either he follows sound scientific principles or he doesn't.



"Blinding bias" is an ad hominem. You know little of my ideology and nothing of the reasons I believe it to be true.



Again, I have said nothing about you personally.



If I had no arguments I wouldn't bother contributing.



I lack this power, and in any case don't really care what you say. If you imagine yourself to be a major thorn in my side, you're mistaken.



Insofar as you align yourself with junk science, you discredit yourself.

I'll ask again: what ideology or belief do you think is challenged by that TED lecture? I'm not on this board every day, but I really haven't noticed anybody arguing that most rich people are scrupulously honest and enjoy giving their money away.

Captialism.

Left-Wing people seem to really hate that people can work hard, earn a lot of money, and get to keep it all to themselves (after first giving the goverment a giaganitic share of their money).

We should be thankful to successful capitalists, instead, they are called greedy, or selfish, or evil.

When the paltry 4.3% of the world's population called Americans (313 mill / 7.2 billion) equalize with the rest of the world, and all Americans are impoverised like most of the rest of humantiy, then does the left-wing claim success? What an awful ideology to actually want people to be poorer.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58-7qtpa80Y[/youtube]

Denial. Facts are relative though. The American Dream of the far right extremists (they are the loudest), is the scorched earth ideology. Just rip it all apart and start over again. They don't believe in problem solving. They are defeatists. They give up. They want to thugify (I know it isn't a real word) their way through life. But I guess that is not exactly what the thread is about.

Look at the picture he uses to define himself on this site. It says everything about his "mentality"

What these people want to sell is that the "American Dream" is constant, unchanging, and the same for every American or person who comes to America. It is not my dream to be wealthy. own a bunch of crap and have people worship my ego. The people who have that dream are obvious. Obvious "me-ists and my-ists" Everything is about THEM.

There were actually two people that critizised the lenght of the video before AP put his two censt worth in and both have avatars your kind might find offensive.
But since I remember this little gem \/ I'll assume your talking about me.
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt252605.html

Rise and walk, oh dead thread!

I was not particularly referring to you on this post, but yeah, I find your exploitation of the American flag offensive. I find you offensive. I don't even know why you are on this site other than to troll. But every person, in every forum and message board I have come across on the internet who exploits the flag in the way you do behaves in the same arrogant, jingoist way. This is supposed to be a support site, not an abuse site. You have no empathy for the problems people here deal with. You are self diagnosed. One of the people who self diagnose AS for status. You do not care about anyone but YOU. Most flag exploiters are apathetic.

I'm not in lockstep with your liberal views so therefor I'm a troll.
Seen it before.


Openly doubting someones diagnosis/self-diagnosis because they don't agree with you is what you're doing.
Seen that before, too.
If you think I'm naughty now you should have been here in 2011-2012.
It's only fair that I inform you that your style of vitriolic posting is nothing new here and your kind provides only mild annoyance to some and entertainment to others.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-4FFxfIbec[/youtube]