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May. 14th, 2009 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaEveryone probably already saw this via ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jonquil or james_nicoll, but I feel compelled to post about it anyway.
Conservapedia (the same Conservapedia that hosted the Lenski affair) is debating the greatest mysteries of world history. For example: did humor exist prior to Christianity?
The talk page is a thing of beauty. Conservapedia founder Andy Schlafly demonstrates that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: having learned somewhere that the classical definition of a "comedy" is not the same as the modern definition, he smugly counters everyone who brings up Aristophanes by explaining that Greek comedies were not intended to be funny. Conservapedia editors who have actually read Greek comedies argue with him in vain.
Here are some highlights of the debate:
"It's interesting how strenuously some people object to the proposition that humor did not predate Christianity. Surely your minds are not so closed as to think the proposition to be automatically impossible."
"No Andy, I don't find it automatically impossible, I find it impossible after brief consideration. That means I gave your question thought, and found its position to be ludicrous."
"One thing I think many of Mr. Schlafay's detractors are overlooking is the possibility that the works we refer to as "comedies" today might not have been intended as comedies in their own time. The word "comedy" is English (as are all the other words used to describe Aristophanes' work: joke, humor, etc.), so we are in effect relying on modern translators of Ancient Greek to tell us what the Ancient Greeks thought about their own literary works.
"The other day I was looking out my window and saw two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree trunk. Suddenly the lead squirrel stopped and turned around so suddenly that the other squirrel bumped into its head and fell off the tree! (It was only six feet or so off the ground, so the squirrel was unharmed.) I laughed at this funny occurrence — but of course the two squirrels weren't trying to put on a funny show for me; they were just doing what comes naturally to animals. Perhaps when we look into our history books and see the funny things that were done by Aristophanes, we should keep these two squirrels in mind."
"Remember that we do not actually have "contemporary reviews" of Aristophanes; what we have are modern translations of those works. I'm not even sure we would be justified in calling them "reviews", as you did, since I doubt the Ancient Greeks had anything like the modern conception of a film review or book review. "
You begin to get a better sense of their intellectual difficulties a bit lower down on the page (look for the header "reply to the above"), where they try to get a handle on the question of relative literacy levels in Ancient Greece vs. the modern United States while denying the legitimacy of either scholarly works or government-produced reports. No, really:
"It's all very well citing a book or article, but then you have to consider where the book writer or article writer got the information from - and in an unfortunately large number of cases it comes from the top of his head. How do they know what literacy levels were in Ancient Greece? As a Greek lay dying, did he say to his son "Now if you remember one thing, remember this, and pass it on to your children....the current literacy rate is 5%. Pass it on to antiquity!"? I doubt it. It is quite likely that the figures quoted in those articles are just plain lies, or taken from other sources which have lied. Just because you read it somewhere doesn't mean it's true."
From that impressive display of... would you call that agnosticism?... there's only one more place at Conservapedia to go: "Conservative principles are based on reason. So why do non-conservatives still exist?" Now with 179% more made-up statistics![1]
[1] Oh man, it didn't occur to me until now to click through to that talk page, where we get: "Any estimates would probably be just a guess so I suggest a data gathering exercise. If someone could set up a sub-page with a list of the options then we could all think of the non-conservatives that we are familiar with at school, work or in some cases even at home. Then we could just give one point for the reason that we would estimate for each person. I think the demographic diversity here should be sufficient to build a fairly accurate picture. This sort of thing wouldn't be allowed at WP with their dogmatic No Original Research mantra. So it highlights a real difference between us and WP in that we can generate new insights through a group effort as it would give almost everyone the opportunity to contribute."
...And then you find out that the actual process for generating those statistics was even less scientific. But still aggressively defended, even when a statistician comes in and asks questions. "This is more than a pure, abstract, mathematical, dare I say professorial treatment of statistics. This is the application of statistics in the real world, down and dirty, relying also upon a knowledge of human nature, and in particular the nature of the Liberal-minded human..."
It's true, it's true. I'm not a conservative because I can't compete with that kind of intellectual rigor.
jonquil or james_nicoll, but I feel compelled to post about it anyway.Conservapedia (the same Conservapedia that hosted the Lenski affair) is debating the greatest mysteries of world history. For example: did humor exist prior to Christianity?
The talk page is a thing of beauty. Conservapedia founder Andy Schlafly demonstrates that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: having learned somewhere that the classical definition of a "comedy" is not the same as the modern definition, he smugly counters everyone who brings up Aristophanes by explaining that Greek comedies were not intended to be funny. Conservapedia editors who have actually read Greek comedies argue with him in vain.
Here are some highlights of the debate:
"It's interesting how strenuously some people object to the proposition that humor did not predate Christianity. Surely your minds are not so closed as to think the proposition to be automatically impossible."
"No Andy, I don't find it automatically impossible, I find it impossible after brief consideration. That means I gave your question thought, and found its position to be ludicrous."
"One thing I think many of Mr. Schlafay's detractors are overlooking is the possibility that the works we refer to as "comedies" today might not have been intended as comedies in their own time. The word "comedy" is English (as are all the other words used to describe Aristophanes' work: joke, humor, etc.), so we are in effect relying on modern translators of Ancient Greek to tell us what the Ancient Greeks thought about their own literary works.
"The other day I was looking out my window and saw two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree trunk. Suddenly the lead squirrel stopped and turned around so suddenly that the other squirrel bumped into its head and fell off the tree! (It was only six feet or so off the ground, so the squirrel was unharmed.) I laughed at this funny occurrence — but of course the two squirrels weren't trying to put on a funny show for me; they were just doing what comes naturally to animals. Perhaps when we look into our history books and see the funny things that were done by Aristophanes, we should keep these two squirrels in mind."
"Remember that we do not actually have "contemporary reviews" of Aristophanes; what we have are modern translations of those works. I'm not even sure we would be justified in calling them "reviews", as you did, since I doubt the Ancient Greeks had anything like the modern conception of a film review or book review. "
You begin to get a better sense of their intellectual difficulties a bit lower down on the page (look for the header "reply to the above"), where they try to get a handle on the question of relative literacy levels in Ancient Greece vs. the modern United States while denying the legitimacy of either scholarly works or government-produced reports. No, really:
"It's all very well citing a book or article, but then you have to consider where the book writer or article writer got the information from - and in an unfortunately large number of cases it comes from the top of his head. How do they know what literacy levels were in Ancient Greece? As a Greek lay dying, did he say to his son "Now if you remember one thing, remember this, and pass it on to your children....the current literacy rate is 5%. Pass it on to antiquity!"? I doubt it. It is quite likely that the figures quoted in those articles are just plain lies, or taken from other sources which have lied. Just because you read it somewhere doesn't mean it's true."
From that impressive display of... would you call that agnosticism?... there's only one more place at Conservapedia to go: "Conservative principles are based on reason. So why do non-conservatives still exist?" Now with 179% more made-up statistics![1]
[1] Oh man, it didn't occur to me until now to click through to that talk page, where we get: "Any estimates would probably be just a guess so I suggest a data gathering exercise. If someone could set up a sub-page with a list of the options then we could all think of the non-conservatives that we are familiar with at school, work or in some cases even at home. Then we could just give one point for the reason that we would estimate for each person. I think the demographic diversity here should be sufficient to build a fairly accurate picture. This sort of thing wouldn't be allowed at WP with their dogmatic No Original Research mantra. So it highlights a real difference between us and WP in that we can generate new insights through a group effort as it would give almost everyone the opportunity to contribute."
...And then you find out that the actual process for generating those statistics was even less scientific. But still aggressively defended, even when a statistician comes in and asks questions. "This is more than a pure, abstract, mathematical, dare I say professorial treatment of statistics. This is the application of statistics in the real world, down and dirty, relying also upon a knowledge of human nature, and in particular the nature of the Liberal-minded human..."
It's true, it's true. I'm not a conservative because I can't compete with that kind of intellectual rigor.
