And I have no intentions of stopping. Frog Blast the Vent Core!
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
So, curiosity doesn't prompt you to at least try a drink? I mean, I've never been drunk in my life and I don't plan to ever get drunk, but I've tried beers and a couple types of liquors just to see.
Also, I guess this means it's your birthday. Happy birthday!
Twenty-three plus years for me.
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May the best of your todays be the worst of your tomorrows.
Days Left: 514
HeyDude: When I was quite young, seven maybe, I tasted a drop of some kind of booze, probably wine, at my dad's prompting. (Fun fact: in New York State, this is actually legal.) I don't remember what it tasted like except that I didn't really like it.
Today is indeed my birthday. I always forget that my birthday is so close to Solo's.
Power of 3: Not too shabby!
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
Sorry for neglecting to wish you a happy birthday in my initial post. May the best of your todays be the worst of your tomorrows!
Oh, and a note concerning my teetotaler ways: No drop has touched my lips, though at the age of three my grandparents tried to get me to drink beer. I've gone so far along with this that I won't partake of communion in a church that serves wine instead of grape juice.
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May the best of your todays be the worst of your tomorrows.
Days Left: 514
To both Kodi and Jakob... why?
When I was very young, it started out as rigid religious fundamentalism. As I got older, I realized that it wasn't necessarily sinful to drink. That said, by that point I had matured enough to have better reasons than "YOU GO TO HELLZ 4 TEH BEERZ LOLZ." Here are my greatest reasons (in no particular order).
1. Genetic History of Alcohol Abuse
When my dad was younger (long before I was born) he had struggles with alcoholism to the point that it almost cost him his life. Two of my great-grandfathers lost a combined three legs due to symptoms stemming from chronic alcoholism. One of them lost both his legs, his sight, and most of his hearing before his death. There have been other problems with some of my younger relatives that I do not feel prudent to share on a message board. Suffice to say, I really don't feel like taking any risks that way.
2. Personal Affinity for Beverages
While this may on the surface appear as a flimsy excuse, let me elaborate. I am notorious for having the ability as well as the bladder to drink a lot of liquid in a short amount of time, especially if something tastes good to me. I have put down more Cherry Vanilla Dr. Peppers in my time than I choose to count. At dinner at a restaurant it is commonplace for me to have at least two refills on my soft drink. Given my affinity for beverages, I know that if I found an alcoholic beverage I particularly enjoyed, I would likely overindulge myself in it.
3. My desire for control
I don't know if many of you on this board outside of Gary and ZB know me particularly well, but I am not exactly the type of person who likes to do things because I am told to do so. The phrases you have to, you need to, and you should grate at me to the point that I literally tone out the rest of what the speaker is saying. I desire control in my life over all aspects and absolutely detest ceding control to others. In turn, I like to be in control over all the decisions I make so that I can take responsibility for everything I have done. While it would have been my choice to partake in alcoholic consumption, any actions resulting from that choice are not fully mine. As it is, my sober judgment can be spotty at times. I shudder to think what it would be like under the influence of any amount of alcohol.
Reasons one and two I guess would explain why I am extreme in my actions (and those who know me well know that I often take extremes in my life for better or worse), and reason three would explain why I am against overindulgence to begin with.
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May the best of your todays be the worst of your tomorrows.
Days Left: 514
Happy birthday!
I have a drink now and then, but nothing to bring myself to the point of inebriation. Nothing wrong with a glass of wine for the heart, eh? Anything you have too much is bad for you-- even water, and especially chocolate. Drink responsibly, they say.
If you choose not to though, hey, cool by me.
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SIGNATURE
Well, Alex, you know how I see understanding the human mind as my Goal in Life. The more of my wits I have, the more progress I'll be able to make towards this goal. That is, the wiser I am, the better. So it would be counterproductive to do anything that would impair my judgment, like take recreational drugs. Obviously, ethanol is a recreational drug. (The idea here is similar to Jakob's third reason.)
You could argue that drinking in moderation wouldn't substantially affect my work, and indeed, I have no special reason to believe that it would. But every little wit counts. What I save by not drinking might be just what I need to make the right choice in a difficult dilemma. And while the chance of my becoming an alcoholic is small, the potential damage is so great that even a slight chance of addiction is a big risk. By contrast, abstinence can never be my undoing.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
Gotcha. And Jakob, you are wise, what that personality of control, not to drink.
Couldn't one argue, though, that partaking in alcohol, at least once, might help you bring yourself to a greater understanding of the human mind, as you can examine the effects that it has on said mind?
Happy Birthday (a little late)!
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Yeah, there's a long tradition in pre-Christian religions associating alcohol with poetry, or even saying that one is directly responsible for the other (not so much Snorri's "Mead of Poetry" story, which we can thank Roberta Frank for debunking; more the associations of Dionysus with drama, all that soma in Hindu mythology, and hallucinogenics in every shamanistic religion ever).
Oh, yeah, happy late birthday.
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Set signature in options page.
Jace: Experience doesn't necessarily educate. In the domain of psychology, experience is particularly unlikely to educate. Here's a simple demonstration: ordinary people experience behavior (their own behavior and that of others) every day of their lives, and yet they don't know any psychology.
Wil: Maybe drugs can give you artistic ideas. Certainly, anybody who's already physically dependent on a drug may have trouble being creative while sober, especially if they've conditioned themselves to expect drugs while working. But science is more a matter of rigorous analysis than free association, so muddled thinking won't help.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
Your demonstration is flawed, though, by a simple logical fallacy. The question is not whether ordinary people can learn psychology through experiencing behavior, but whether psychologists can truly understand behavior without experiencing it. Can a robot psychologist or an alien psychologist ever be as good as dealing with humans as a human psychologist?
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
But the fact that ordinary people don't learn psychology by experiencing behavior isn't merely due to lack of expertise. I don't know of any kind or degree of expertise that allows one to, as it were, learn psychology by doing. My point is that experience doesn't help here. The only way to meaningfully learn about how people behave is to study behavior, which a robot or an alien, given sufficient access to human subjects, can do just as well as I can. Of course, there are other variables at play (for example, would aliens be all that motivated to understand human behavior, given that its applications to their own problems are limited?), but in general, behaving doesn't teach you much about behavior, and thus experience can't be necessary for investigation.
If you're looking for evidence specifically for the latter claim, think of this: how many of the psychologists who've studied recreational drugs intensively have actually tried the drugs they've studied? The literature on the effects of drugs is deep, wouldn't you agree? Not to mention all the research on mental illnesses conducted by people who don't have the illness they're researching. So psychologists and neuroscientists get along just fine without experience.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
I suppose it's a difference between studying/investigation and understanding. Yes, there is plenty of research on mental illnesses by psychologists, but there are plenty of people with those illnesses who would claim that the psychologists don't really understand the illness.
Let's take it to a field I'm more familiar with: education. Education research is very prevalent, there's lots of materials, and lots of researchers. But much of this research isn't very useful for those who need it: teachers. And the reason for this is that most of those education researchers don't teach. So while they can watch teaching, and watch learning, and make studies and investigations, they miss some key critical point by not experiencing the teaching themselves, which is why some of the most relevant research comes from either active teachers or researchers who are not very long out of the classroom.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
If there are things the mentally ill know about mental illness and teachers know about teaching that the researchers don't, what's keeping them from telling the researchers? If you mean to say that people who experience something have some kind of special knowledge of that thing which can't be expressed in words, I can only reply that the kind of understanding that matters to me is measurable and expressible. To seek any other kind of understanding is to hunt ghosts.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
But the thing is you are again conflating "knowing" with "understanding," when they aren't the same thing. Understanding comes from being able to internalize concepts to such a point that they become obvious. What I'm saying is that experience doesn't provide new concepts, per say, but rather allows the internalization process.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Okay, that distinction between "knowledge" and "understanding" makes sense, but I don't buy the idea that there are cases where in order to understand something you know, you have to experience it. I realize that learning a skill takes practice, but the kind of understanding that is the goal (as opposed to the means!) of research (basic research, anyway) concerns phenomena on their own, not how the researcher themself can affect the phenomena.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
My twenty-first birthday is in less than three weeks! I have no intention of drinking either.
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CSBE FTW!
DarthMarth - Better than a bowl of Cheerios.
I thank you, DarthMarth, not only for joining the club (let's call it PMSians on the Wagon) but also for giving me an excuse to make the twenty-first post.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
Never had a drink huh? Have you seen Rocky?
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"...you should try reading my posts being getting all emo." --FoxMetal
Can you really be on the wagon if you haven't ever been anywhere but on the wagon?
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Set signature in options page.
Travis: No, but I enjoyed "The Rye or the Kaiser".
Willis: Good question. It reminds me of Wittgenstein's discussion of how it's logically possible for some people to sometimes play chess incorrectly, but not for everyone to play chess incorrectly for the entire history of the game.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
Man, I almost don't drink and I feel like I should egging Kodi on to try. Is this what it feels like to be other people?
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Shake your windows and rattle your walls.
don't do it if you don't wanna; i got mad respect for people who stand by their opinions and do things at their own pace.
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mmm beer
You should watch Rocky. It's a beautiful movie.
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"...you should try reading my posts being getting all emo." --FoxMetal
Ironically, I will be going to a bar tomorrow, for a happy hour with the other people working in my lab. When I told them I didn't drink, they were unperturbed. One of them said "We'll get you a virgin… something."
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."
You could go for a classic Arnold Palmer.
They could just get you a virgin. But at an after work happy hour it'll probably be a dude :-(
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Set signature in options page.
I showed up, but nobody was there yet, and I didn't have the guts to wait, so I chickened out.
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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."