Slow clap, you two. Excellent stuff.
I can't decide if the pair of you are yin and yang or Romeo and Juliet. Perfect character foils, or star-crossed lovers? Either way, ya gotta love it.
In the red corner, there's Skil. Holds the consensus viewpoint when it comes to the shape of Earth, but such a vociferous attacker and so desperately trapped in the paradox of proving how little he cares that he may very well drive people to the other side with his vitriol.
In the blue corner, it's Jack. Though consensus holds his perspective as bunk, he's perhaps the only one here who can maintain his composure. But his hyper-intellectualization and unswerving dedication to terminology leave him adrift within his own community and at odds with both sides of the wider discussion, battling intentional or unwitting psy-operatives on two fronts!
Fire and ice, and neither can quit the other.
Never change, you two. <3
Thanks for listening!
It doesn’t even apply / isn’t directed at or about the views of the “opponent”
That may be true of that statement in isolation, but it's a wider pattern in some of the things you say. For example, when the conversation recipient said this:
Also, the North pole would be the tropics as the sun would pass directly over it every day and there would be no such thing as "midnight Sun".
You responded first with:
Your reasoning is silly. The sun does what it does, and our observations of it don’t change when our perceptions of the shape of the world do. That would be crazy.
I'm sure you're not trying to misrepresent the other person's point, but responses like that strike the reader (at least me) as either a strawman, deliberate obtuseness, or a severe misunderstanding. As you said, it would be silly to claim the observations change the actual path of the sun, which is why it seems obvious to me that that's not what they're suggesting. I'm pretty certain they're trying to point out what they see as an inconsistency between what we observe ("midnight Sun") and the predictions of a flat earth model ("the sun would pass over it every day").
I think a more appropriate response is to address their perceived inconsistency. Since it sounds like you accept observations of midnight sun, I think that means explaining how a midnight sun could be consistent with a flat earth.
Edit: I see you do offer such an explanation a couple paragraphs after the above quote, so I don't think you're misunderstanding their point. But I maintain that the intervening paragraphs about what a silly reasoning it would be if... are only hurting your clarity and liable to put your conversation partner on the defensive, which I believe is (usually) the opposite of what you're actually wanting to do.
Just more food for thought, and thanks again for being open about it.
IF the world is flat, then all observations we make occur on a flat earth.
Jack, I've had a number of discussions with you, and I've read through even more of your threads with folks on this forum. I'm pretty convinced that your discussions with people would be more productive if you reduced your use of this tautology.
I think your intent in deploying it is to challenge someone's line of reasoning when they stray too close to conflating consistency with evidence, of blurring observation with experiment. I think your intent is to make clear that the ball model's consistency with astronomical observations isn't evidence per se for the ball model.
But, as is the case in this thread, using the tautology almost always distracts from your point rather than clarifies it. Readers often assume (and you make it easy for them to assume) that you're setting up a straw man that says our observations literally, causally shape the world, which nobody you've talked to here actually thinks. It just sidetracks the conversation while you have to explain to the reader that:
You misunderstand.
I think your discussions would be better served if you found another way of raising this point. Maybe a way of explaining that of course any model of the world's shape needs to be consistent with our astronomical observations, but that consistency alone is only circumstantial evidence at best and is made weaker by the existence of any alternative models that are equally consistent with observation.
Just a thought from a reader.
Hi there, audience here. :-D I don't normally chime in but I felt compelled by the... unique rathole y'all have taken this discussion into.
Never have I seen two participants agree so vociferously that they're wasting breath, but also so unwilling to budge even an inch to resolve that situation! It's honestly fascinating: you're like two turtles duking it out by bopping each other gently on the shell, venturing nothing, yielding nothing, dedicated entirely to stubbornness-presented-as-patience.
Y'all are usually fairly interesting to read; but now you're being dull.
If it helps you reset the conversation and "get back on a topic of productive conversation", here are my takes on the recent points:
Modeler: Jack is right, defending this "Turing tests can only be used on bots" position is irrelevant at best. You're wasting words defending a semantic point of no value to the conversation. You've seemingly dug in only to avoid "losing a point," so to speak, not because it's important to the central debate. You're not gonna out-semantic Jack---that's like his whole schtick.
Jack: It's obviously rude to insinuate someone might be a bot, and hiding behind the distinction between "declaring" someone a bot or "using verbiage like 'likely'" is even ruder. This is kindergarten-level interpersonal stuff; there's no way you don't see why Modeler would feel disrespected or heck, even offended, by your statements. That rhetorical habit of yours is counter to the "productive conversation" you claim to love and belies the image you try to project of a calm rational interlocutor---knock it off. Leave that shit for the ragers and trolls, not one of the few people obviously actually trying to have a discussion with you.
And for the record, Jack: to an outside observer, Modeler doesn't seem to be behaving like a bot any more than you are; to my eyes, he's only demonstrating the same conversational stubbornness (e.g., refusal to yield trivial points, refusal to specifically cite to prior comments, insistence on semantic distinctions) that you yourself are guilty of.
Anyway, I'm hugely impressed and thankful for the stamina you both display in sticking to this conversation. And if you find gratification in lines of discussion like these, then by all means, continue. But it sounds like you don't, so instead can y'all please drop these irrelevant back-and-forths and get back to the interesting stuff, like satellites and accelerometers or whatever?