ericmurphy
Posts: 2460
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Generally I don't get into psychoanalyzing guys like Bill Paley, or Dave (although I was okay with psychoanalyzing Thordaddy since his homosexual panic was so overt), but I will say I've run into people like Dave before. They simply will not admit that they're wrong about anything. Generally people outgrow this particular pathology sometime between high school and the end of college, but then look at our president. At any rate, Dave is certainly not alone in his congenital inability to admit error. Dave is a particularly pathological example of this behavior, but I think he's just at the far end of the curve.
At any rate, if we're keeping track of the number of times Dave has simply ignored and/or failed to acknowledge devastating rebuttals to his claims: Well, the Portuguese thing is the most obvious example. His continued refusal to engage Mr. Aftershave in dealing with the six independent lines of evidence that all corroborate radiocarbon dating curves would be another glaring example. Dave seems to think Occam's question is some sort of digression from the topic. Sheesh! Could he be any more cement-headed?
Another example would be his statement that three billion (or even three billion billion) years is not enough time to get from bacteria to cnidaria. When challenged to provide evidence as to this impossibility, we got…crickets chirping. Well, he did make some statement about information never increasing, but when confronted with the research by Claude Shannon (from the 1940s, for crying out loud), we got…crickets chirping.
His failure to come to terms with the explanation for excess C14 (or, indeed, any C14 at all) in coal seams and diamonds is another egregious example. He simply will not admit that I've ever given him an explanation. He doesn't disagree with it, or attempt to refute it; he simply refuses to admit I ever even said it.
I know Dave hates it when people call him a liar, but man, how else can you characterize statements like that? It's not like he could have forgotten; I gave him exactly the same answer three times in the last two days.
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2006 MVD award for most dogged defense of scientific sanity
"Atheism is a religion the same way NOT collecting stamps is a hobby." —Scott Adams
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