Spectrum wrote:
Me: Let us start there. Suppose I dispute that figure; suppose I claim that '30% are born with an active evil tendency'
If you have some basis and rationality to your 30% claim, then I will readily accept your figures.
I'm asking you how we would decide which of us is right and which of us is wrong. In order to do that we would have to know what we are counting; what objective empirical fact that number relates to.
Me: What is the objective empirical observation we could make of each newborn baby, so that we count count its occurrence, and (by inductive reasoning) show that your statistic about its frequency is correct and mine is wrong?
No empirical observation? Then your figure is arbitrary. So you are not doing science.
As I had indicated my hypothesis is proven by the empirical resultant evils, terrors and evil from Muslims around the World.
Again, what are you counting? What empirical fact corresponds to one unit of 'evil'?
As for the potential in newborn babies, we don't have the technology to study the precise neural conditions yet. At present we already have fMRI scanning and imaging that can detect activities in the brain for certain mental problems. When the Connectome Project advances in the future we will be able to determine which baby will have an active potential evil with higher accuracy.
'Active' or 'potential'? The scan can only detect what is 'active' i.e. already present. It cannot detect 'what might be there in the future' which is what 'potential' means. 'Active potential' is an oxymoron.
You say above 'we don't have the technology to study the precise neural conditions yet. And yet you claim to already know a percentage figure for the number of humans who have this feature! So you must have decided that some neural feature equates to 'evil potential'. What is it?
At What Age Can We Identify Psychopathy in a Child?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fu ... y-in-child
They can identify it because there is something there to identify. The child exhibits behaviour X, behaviour X is what we mean by 'psychopathy', therefore the child has it.
But you are claiming to be able to identify that a newborn child is psychopathic, before there is any psychopathic behaviour to observe. So you cannot be looking at what the child does, but at something else. What? You produce statistics, but never say what you are counting.
More about stats:
Yes, even if 1% of the skin cell has black pigment, technically we can identify the person as a 1%-black-person. It would not appear visually to be right, but technically there is nothing wrong to label the person as 1%-black-person if we deliberate on a continuum of blackness.
However if we deliberate on the continuum of whiteness, then that person is a 99% white person.
You tie yourself into knots with words. If that is the system you are using, then a '99% white person' and a '1%-black-person' would mean exactly the same thing. But to continue:
Thus in the case of the evil continuum.
I rate genocide as 99% on the continuum while say petty crimes at 10%.
Technically a petty crime is an evil along the continuum, albeit with an evilness of 10%.
But with the cells, there was a physical fact; this 'black pigment'. (It's not how it actually works, but let that go). We look at the cells of an individual human and see 17% (or whatever) have that pigment. If we say 'they are 17% black/83% white' then that is what we would mean. It is something anyone can confirm. That if I (or anyone else) looked at that person's cells, that is what they would find.
Now tell me the equivalent for 'evilness'. How do I (or anyone else) look at 'genocide' and count the 'evilness'? What are we counting?
Once again, you need an answer, or you are not doing science.
About DNA:
Here is another example.
Recently the DNA Ancestry Profile Testing is very common.
Let say a person DNA profile has the following results;
- 1. African 80%
2. Ethnic XYZ 10%
3. Jewish 9%
4. European 1%
Although the above person is likely to be 'black' it is not technically wrong to identify him as European, albeit a 1%-European-Person.
The DNA profile will not have those results. The DNA profile will simply describe the DNA. What will make somebody 'African' would be your (rather odd) decision to label certain bits of DNA 'African'. Then, 'African' would simply be a label for some portions of DNA.
Where you depart from science would be if you then allowed other connotations for the word 'African' to become mixed up in that label, so that 'African' did not only label those portions of DNA, but also carried implications of geography, skin colour, culture and so on, which are arbitrary human constructs. At that point you would be using 'DNA' as a general symbol, it would no longer simply refer to an empirical fact about the cell.
What has confused you is that we can use certain features of DNA to trace kinship. So, we can say that X has DNA that is common in people who live in location Y, and guess that they are related to them. But to class the people in location Y as 'Jews' or 'Europeans' is arbitrary, and how we do it is culturally determined. So, for example, you could look at everyone's DNA and say they are '100% African', in that we are all related to Africans. And nobody is 'European' because the difference between Europeans are greater than their similarities. Or we could look at the similarity between me and my parents and say my group identity is 'Londoner's family'. And so on. In other words, where we draw the lines between groups is arbitrary.
(And just to be clear, all humans have almost identical DNA. Humans and chimps are 98.8% identical. Humans and bananas are 50% identical. So any difference between individual humans is way less than 1%, not the 10% etc. in your list.)
But in case this diversion means you have missed the main theme, I am asking what you are counting when you produce stats to do with quantities of evil, or quantities of 'evil potential'. If you cannot name an objective empirical fact, then your statistics are not facts.