[Kryptid]

What is your cut of the action? If not, why aren't you maximizing your profitable activities?

You think we're getting paid for this?

[larens (OP)]

What is your cut of the action? If not, why aren't you maximizing your profitable activities?

You think we're getting paid for this?

No, more likely you are Manchurian Candidates brainwashed by cognitively dissonant academic propaganda.

[Kryptid]

No, more likely you are Manchurian Candidates brainwashed by cognitively dissonant academic propaganda.

Ah yes, brain-washing. I guess I should have gotten into the habit of wearing tinfoil hats.

[larens (OP)]

No, more likely you are Manchurian Candidates brainwashed by cognitively dissonant academic propaganda.

Ah yes, brain-washing. I guess I should have gotten into the habit of wearing tinfoil hats.

Maybe you should get more into the habit of being a moderator and enhancing the discussion. When I replied to your question of "what was my profession?", you ignored my replies and just allowed BoredChemist to continue trashing the discussion.

[Kryptid]

Maybe you should get more into the habit of being a moderator and enhancing the discussion. When I replied to your question of "what was my profession?", you ignored my replies and just allowed BoredChemist to continue trashing the discussion.

I got tired of what appeared to be a fruitless effort. If you want to count that as besting me in the debate, feel free to. The research I needed to do in order to be a part of it was illuminating, however. So you have my thanks for that.

As far as Bored Chemist goes, I don't see how he has broken any of the rules.

[larens (OP)]

Maybe you should get more into the habit of being a moderator and enhancing the discussion. When I replied to your question of "what was my profession?", you ignored my replies and just allowed BoredChemist to continue trashing the discussion.

I got tired of what appeared to be a fruitless effort. If you want to count that as besting me in the debate, feel free to. The research I needed to do in order to be a part of it was illuminating, however. So you have my thanks for that.

As far as Bored Chemist goes, I don't see how he has broken any of the rules.

I must say that the debate was also illuminating, especially when I followed the links you did supply. It showed me how deeply the dogma that Life on Earth started on Earth is protected by cognitive dissonance. This showed me that I must focus on general simplicity and let the origin of life be a secondary topic. It was, of course, fruitless for you to try to change my basic philosophy of science since it arises from practicing fundamental science with good results for decades. That Bored Chemist was not breaking the rules of the forum is a problem of the forum. So thanks for the insight.

[Kryptid]

It showed me how deeply the dogma that Life on Earth started on Earth is protected by cognitive dissonance.

To be fair, I am open to the possibility that life could have started elsewhere. I just have not seen sufficient evidence to convince me that it must have or must have not.

That Bored Chemist was not breaking the rules of the forum is a problem of the forum.

So which of his actions do you think should have a rule or rules barring it?

[larens (OP)]

It showed me how deeply the dogma that Life on Earth started on Earth is protected by cognitive dissonance.

To be fair, I am open to the possibility that life could have started elsewhere. I just have not seen sufficient evidence to convince me that it must have or must have not.

In the spirit of the Lighter Side people need to be allowed to present there evidence without being presented with unreasonably high standards for evidence. Though there is going to be a struggle over epistemology, it should not degenerate into a fight. I welcome people explaining what they would consider convincing evidence, though they do not generally know.

That Bored Chemist was not breaking the rules of the forum is a problem of the forum.

So which of his actions do you think should have a rule or rules barring it?

Repeatedly asserting a position without presenting new evidence each time should be barred. Enforcing this rule would require finesse because people nearly always modify their position a little each time. People mainly need to be reminded how they are violating the rule. This could move to barring offending replies. Only in extreme cases should people be barred. Since you were also violating the rule, you would need practice in applying it. It would need to be discussed among the moderators to reach some type of consensus. Earlier on there were repeated changes in the format of the forum that tended to hide my posts followed by their revocation, so I am not sure of how much of a consensus there is now. I thought that you were one of the people protecting me.

[Kryptid]

In the spirit of the Lighter Side people need to be allowed to present there evidence without being presented with unreasonably high standards for evidence.

This forum has no official position when it comes to a standard for evidence (at least not in this section). Each individual member will have their own standard. It just so happens that the two main contributors to this thread (other than yourself) found your presented evidence unconvincing and thus disagree with you. It isn't our duty to protect anyone's ideas from criticism, only from unreasonable behavior like insults or threats.

Though there is going to be a struggle over epistemology, it should not degenerate into a fight.

I don't believe this thread has degenerated into a fight.

Repeatedly asserting a position without presenting new evidence each time should be barred.

I don't think I can agree with that. If an argument is a well-supported by the presented evidence, there is no need to bring new evidence to the table.

Enforcing this rule would require finesse because people nearly always modify their position a little each time. People mainly need to be reminded how they are violating the rule. This could move to barring offending replies. Only in extreme cases should people be barred.

I have seen other science forums that operate in this manner. The threads about new theories tend to get locked if their moderators deem there to be no good source of evidence presented. Sometimes the members are banned if they continue on this line. The Naked Scientists have generally been very lenient because we have allowed all kinds of crazy things to be posted here with questionable to zero evidence. Even here, however, I have seen cases where arguments run around in circles with nothing being accomplished until the thread was eventually closed by a moderator.

If you want to propose a change to our rules, feel free to send a message to an administrator.

Earlier on there were repeated changes in the format of the forum that tended to hide my posts followed by their revocation, so I am not sure of how much of a consensus there is now.

I was unaware of that. It could be potentially caused by a forum glitch. Feel free to report it to an administrator.

I thought that you were one of the people protecting me.

It wasn't any of my doing. I haven't altered any of your posts. The only time I do take action like that is to remove obvious spam (like companies or individuals setting up accounts solely to advertise) or to remove threads that are started by people who have been deduced to be ban-evaders.

[larens (OP)]

It isn't our duty to protect anyone's ideas from criticism, only from unreasonable behavior like insults or threats.

Insults or threats are too high a standard a limit when dealing with harassment. It's generally repeated small events of incivility that ruin people's lives. I have gotten accustomed to this because I have had unorthodox beliefs since I was a child. It has taken quite a toll on my social life, however.

Repeatedly asserting a position without presenting new evidence each time should be barred.

I don't think I can agree with that. If an argument is a well-supported by the presented evidence, there is no need to bring new evidence to the table.

Think about that again. If a good counterargument is presented, the first evidence may not really be well-supported. It is incumbent on the first presenter to try to improve their body of evidence rather than just reasserting their first position.

The Naked Scientists have generally been very lenient because we have allowed all kinds of crazy things to be posted here with questionable to zero evidence.

So have I noticed. That is why I started posting here. I needed some type of online feedback, because Covid-19 had shut the UCB campus. On the first science forums I tried, my posts were immediately censored because they were too unorthodox. After a while here I stopped posting because people were not open enough to advanced fundamental science. After the abstract I had presented showed up in a general Internet search I returned to correct it, since it had an embarrassing error in it. I was surprised at the deluge of replies this triggered. I suppose I should not have been surprised. I have gotten thrown off at least one science forum for amateurs because I was too knowledgeable. I would restrict myself to professional forums, but they are generally closed to people who are not specialists.

[Kryptid]

Insults or threats are too high a standard a limit when dealing with harassment.

What else did you have in mind?

If a good counterargument is presented, the first evidence may not really be well-supported.

Hence why I said "if it is well-supported".

[Bored chemist]

Repeatedly asserting a position without presenting new evidence each time should be barred.

OK, stop repeatedly telling us that an entirely hypothetical satellite is the origin of life.

[larens (OP)]

Repeatedly asserting a position without presenting new evidence each time should be barred.

OK, stop repeatedly telling us that an entirely hypothetical satellite is the origin of life.

You are the ones repeatedly bringing up the subject without consideration of evidence. I put the subject into the topic title so the discussion of the origin of life would be grounded with a specific location with specific solar radiation and specific solar nebula inputs. I then proceeded to present evidence, most of it only weakly dependent on that specific location. I lot of it was in rebuttal to the generally assumed location, the Earth. After I had shown that an asteroidal site was strongly preferable to a site on earth I could then show that a former satellite of Vesta  was the only asteroidal site strongly favored by the evidence. Since evidence is strongly interconnected, one has to choose some such structure to make the presentation coherent and efficient. Remember that the origin of life was specifically in the title.

Instead of allowing me to proceed laying out the evidence in the manner I thought best for putting together the entire model you demanded that I prove my specific location before tying down the evidence that supported it - a logical impossibility. Logical counterarguments need to attack points within the scientific model, not the presenters model of presentation. While the latter tactic may score points within a debating club, it does not within a scientific forum.

[larens (OP)]

Insults or threats are too high a standard a limit when dealing with harassment.

What else did you have in mind?

People trying to force the order of discussion so as to make a logical and coherent presentation impossible. My last post to Bored Scientist addressed this specific  point. I also have made other points to you that you have not taken to heart.

If a good counterargument is presented, the first evidence may not really be well-supported.

Hence why I said "if it is well-supported".
[/quote]

That is a giant "if". With cognitive dissonance working most supposed evidence is not well-supported.

[Kryptid]

People trying to force the order of discussion so as to make a logical and coherent presentation impossible.

I don't see how that counts as harassment. Being illogical or frustrating is not necessarily being harassing. If you find it to be too much to deal with, there is supposedly some way to put a selected user on "ignore". I've never done it myself, so I'm not sure how to do it. If you want, I can research it.

That is a giant "if". With cognitive dissonance working most supposed evidence is not well-supported.

Then the veracity of the evidence itself can become the subject of debate.

I'm not looking to continue the debate, but I'm just throwing this out there for curiosity's sake: why not consider Ceres as a possible abode for the origin of life? It has plenty of organic material, water ice, and iron minerals. Why couldn't your water circulation system and natural nuclear reactor be present there? Or what about Hygeia, which also has ice and organic material?

[larens (OP)]

I don't see how that counts as harassment. Being illogical or frustrating is not necessarily being harassing. If you find it to be too much to deal with, there is supposedly some way to put a selected user on "ignore".

Since most people were being too illogical or frustrating, I stopped posting for a while so that I could ignore everybody. Their motivations were unclear.

That is a giant "if". With cognitive dissonance working most supposed evidence is not well-supported.

Then the veracity of the evidence itself can become the subject of debate.

I was debating the veracity of the evidence.

I do not think that people are understanding my comments about cognitive dissonance so I will give a little on the philosophy of science. Every model is a simplification of reality so has a domain of applicability, beyond which it gives bad results. To work with a model and make the effort of detailing it one needs to make a commitment to it. This means ignoring information coming from beyond the domain of applicability. This information sets up cognitive dissonance. One has to set a threshold of tolerance to it, such that the threshold being exceeded is a warning that one is at or near the boundary. One may then adopt a new paradigm and enlarge the boundary within which one is working. It requires much effort, however, to learn or create a new paradigm, including the principles of correspondence with the paradigm of the old domain. As a scientific paradigm matures there are more and more people in the domain and they must spread out to near the boundary to have a niche of their own. For most people adopting a new paradigm is too hard so they are likely to cross the boundary and get bad results. This, however, tends to corrupt the entire community of followers of the old paradigm as they raise their thresholds and lower their standards so as to not lose members.

Creative people have much greater thresholds of tolerance for contradiction so they are able to work near the boundary, understand the nature of the contradictions, and create a new paradigm. Their telling people that there is a new paradigm is a new form of cognitive dissonance.  Since the community has raised its threshold in the meantime, the new paradigm is generally ignored or explained away with internally contradictory arguments. This protects people from having to make the effort to adopt the new paradigm, but sets up positive feedback in raising the cognitive dissonance threshold higher. Eventually something will break, but not before a core group of creative people figure out how to explain the new paradigm, including its principles of correspondence, simply enough to be able to recruit a critical mass of new recruits and resources.

Because it has been 75 years since the post-World War II influx of greater scientific resources, most basic scientific disciplines have reached a high state of maturity in their current paradigms. For 50 years physics has mainly seen refinements on what was developed in the previous 25 years. It is now in a highly metastable state. To break through this quandary I need to reach a critical mass by concentrating on simple arguments to recruit a few creative people well skilled in conventional mathematics and physics and with the necessary resources. They can then do enough of the more difficult principles of correspondence to lower the barrier to acceptance by the larger community. This may require a few unusual people who can help communicate the simple arguments widely enough to reach the necessary number of creative people willing to detail the necessary number of principles of correspondence. The numbers for what is necessary is an open question.

I'm not looking to continue the debate, but I'm just throwing this out there for curiosity's sake: why not consider Ceres as a possible abode for the origin of life? It has plenty of organic material, water ice, and iron minerals. Why couldn't your water circulation system and natural nuclear reactor be present there? Or what about Hygeia, which also has ice and organic material?

We can finish the debate right away. They are all too cold.

[Colin2B]

Earlier on there were repeated changes in the format of the forum that tended to hide my posts followed by their revocation, so I am not sure of how much of a consensus there is now.

Could you be specific about what happened? I am not aware of any format changes since you registered here, nor any revocation of your posts.
Have you posted here before using a different identity?

In the spirit of the Lighter Side people need to be allowed to present there evidence without being presented with unreasonably high standards for evidence.

If you look at the posts in this section you will find that it is rare for an OP to present any credible evidence for their assertions. This does not prevent any member questioning the validity of the assumptions and asking for evidence, and if that evidence is not forthcoming to repeat the request until it is provided.
As you will appreciate we do get some very outlandish claims without any supporting evidence eg last year a claim that a planet exists on the same orbit as earth, but on the opposite side of the sun, so never seen. I suspect that the title of this topic may be placing you into this category if the asteroid, or evidence for its previous existence, is not available.
I wonder if a general discussion on the likelihood of life originating on a nearby asteroid, and the conditions necessary for that to happen, might be be more productive.

[Bored chemist]

Repeatedly asserting a position without presenting new evidence each time should be barred.

OK, stop repeatedly telling us that an entirely hypothetical satellite is the origin of life.

You are the ones repeatedly bringing up the subject without consideration of evidence. I put the subject into the topic title so the discussion of the origin of life would be grounded with a specific location with specific solar radiation and specific solar nebula inputs. I then proceeded to present evidence, most of it only weakly dependent on that specific location. I lot of it was in rebuttal to the generally assumed location, the Earth. After I had shown that an asteroidal site was strongly preferable to a site on earth I could then show that a former satellite of Vesta  was the only asteroidal site strongly favored by the evidence. Since evidence is strongly interconnected, one has to choose some such structure to make the presentation coherent and efficient. Remember that the origin of life was specifically in the title.

Instead of allowing me to proceed laying out the evidence in the manner I thought best for putting together the entire model you demanded that I prove my specific location before tying down the evidence that supported it - a logical impossibility. Logical counterarguments need to attack points within the scientific model, not the presenters model of presentation. While the latter tactic may score points within a debating club, it does not within a scientific forum.

I saw what you did, and it's a sensible approach.
However, it is building a rather tall house of cards.

Your job, if you want us to believe your idea, is that you need to disprove the "null hypothese "
(1) You have to show that life didn't start on Earth
(2) You have to show that it didn't start somewhere else in the Solar system  (I think we can agree that much further afield that that is impossible because radiation would destroy the DNA/RNA)

Until you have proved those, I'm going to continue to state the null hypothesis. And I recognise that there's no way I can do that without  saying "you are wrong".

[larens (OP)]

Your job, if you want us to believe your idea, is that you need to disprove the "null hypothese "
(1) You have to show that life didn't start on Earth
(2) You have to show that it didn't start somewhere else in the Solar system  (I think we can agree that much further afield that that is impossible because radiation would destroy the DNA/RNA)

I repeatedly pointed out that the concentrations of chemical precursors on Earth would be too low because of dilution and catalytic destruction.

I said that other asteroids would be too cold, which I take to be obvious, since one has to arrive at a biology with liquid water as the main solvent.

As for interstellar panspermia, dehydration is more destructive to RNA than is radiation alone. At ambient temperature in typical cells the RNA half-life in a vacuum is only a few years.

Until you have proved those, I'm going to continue to state the null hypothesis. And I recognise that there's no way I can do that without  saying "you are wrong".

My more concise proof is by general simplicity, which includes equal treatment in pairs of variables. The physical/social sciences pairing puts the origin of life at a neutral point in the middle. The periodic/chaotic pairing, not having someplace else to be, gets paired with the origin of life. Vesta and Ceres are the main bodies in clearly chaotic orbits because of their mutual gravitational interaction during close encounters. Larger bodies are in longer term periodic orbits. Life starting on a former satellite of Vesta breaks the Vesta/Ceres symmetry. This is the viewpoint from which I arrived at the topic.

To accept this viewpoint, however, requires understanding how general simplicity generates the mathematical description of reality starting from changing just one axiom of arithmetic, namely, associativity of multiplication. (Associative means the order in operating on 3 things does not matter; commutative means the order of operation on 2 things does not matter.) This allows past and future events to mutually cause each other, i.e., block time, while making the past and the future at the level of particles distinguishable.

Think about operations that generate steps in time.  Commutivity means taking one step forward in time, then one step backwards is the same as taking one step backwards, then one step forward - both leave you in the present. The past and the future are both involved, however, so mutual causality is allowed. It together with having a finite number of states and the principle of plentitude, i. e., you have to traverse all the states, allows the number of states to be mapped unto time intervals and allows constants in time, e.g., the Hubble constant for the expansion of the universe.

Adding one more step by nonassociativity adds another property. Taking one step forward in time, one step back, and finally one step forward leaves you one step in the future, which is the normal progression of time. This order, however, is different from one step back, then two steps forward, because the canceling pairs of steps are going in opposite directions. If this asymmetry were not present, we would not be here because the amount of matter and antimatter would be the same and they would annihilate each other.

While this approach is relatively concise, it can not be extremely concise because I would have to go on and explain a lot more, e. g., string theory and the Standard Model of particle physics for you to be thoroughly convinced of the validity of general simplicity. For the moment just remember that it is a paradigm shift reversing the order of priority between empiricism and rationalism in fundamental science. It is Platonic rather than Aristotelian.

Since you are a chemist, I will say that it changes chemistry by introducing quasicrystalline components in 3-D space projected down from 12-D hypercubic lattices. These come from data words of the 24-D extended binary Golay code so there is the illusion of separateness of matter and space-time-mass.

[Bored chemist]

I repeatedly pointed out that the concentrations of chemical precursors on Earth would be too low because of dilution and catalytic destruction.

The problem with that is that you don't seem to have any idea what the concentrations might be.
And it's also  unfortunate that you are saying that hard radiation will generate HCN  and HCHO when, in fact, it will destroy them.