Keith Devens .com

Your skeptic emailing friends display the plumage of arrogance. I read their three categories as "Idiots," "Potential Recruits," and "Us".

There is no REAL way to catagorize people in this sense. Everyone has their own point of view and will take that point of view into concideration when they pass judgement on which catagory you belong in. It's all about how you (or your group) choses to view the world. The above comment by Alan Green is a prefect example. As is Keiths. Its all based on where your comming from as a person (or group).

Personally, if your dead set on putting people into catagories you have to take a look at the whole picture. Use the majority of society as your model. How do they, as a group, view these seperate catagories, and how would they break people up into these catagories. But, I've never been one to agree with the masses anyway.

Your skeptic emailing friends display the plumage of arrogance

Yes, they're extremely arrogant. The site for the newsletter I get is http://www.skeptic.com/. Your translation of what they said is accurate. Here's a link to their most recent newsletter, the one I was quoting.

Remember what I was talking about in that post on skepticism? Both the skeptics.com people and you fall into the same error, that is to say, thinking "if you don't agree with me, you must be wrong".

Displaying a healthy (I should start emphasising words so people don't miss that they're qualifications) skepticism isn't just about being skeptical about the opinions of others, it's about realising that you may be wrong too.

I personally put more credence in evolution because it has predictive value, whereas all the alternatives I've seen so far haven't. I don't think it's a final answer or anything, that'd be foolish. However it still does have practical value. If somebody shows me a theory with equal or greater predictive power (that can be demonstrated), I'll consider that. I needn't quote Keynes...

The problem with it is that it takes too long to practically demonstrate in the wild in real-time. But should that mean it should be disregarded? We still use Newton's laws, don't we?

I personally put more credence in evolution because it has predictive value

That's funny, because one of my strongest cricitisms of evolution is that it has no predictive value.

The problem with it is that it takes too long to practically demonstrate in the wild in real-time.

That's the reason why I don't believe evolution is scientific. It's simply not based on repeated observation (unlike Newton's laws).

(I know you brought up Newton's laws as an example of something that was previously the best we had, but is still a useful theory though it isn't quite accurate in extreme cases, but I don't see how you related that to evolution. Evolution is not now a workable theory, while Newton's laws still were and are good in their domain. Note also that this discussion is equivocating by conflating a theory with the laws that are part of a theory.)

Me: I personally put more credence in evolution because it has predictive value
...
You: That's funny, because one of my strongest cricitisms of evolution is that it has no predictive value.

That's not what you've said in the past. Remember what you've said in the past about what you've called "microevolution"? That alone gives credence to the theory's predictive value. Now do you see why I mentioned Newton's Laws? What you call "macroevolution" can be seen as an extreme case. Even if it can't be proven true for that, the theory does still have a practical predictive value.

BTW, here's another tip for your blog: how about a print stylesheet that would at least hide the navigation on the right, and possibly the tabs at the top and the forms? It's not particularly nice printing stuff off your site with them there. Cheers, bud.