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I think Dave is really egotistical and he will get butthurt and defensive by your last paragraph. You don't even need to have domain knowledge about paranormal stuff or near death experience stuff in order to showcase Dave's unprincipled thinking. You could just continouasly ask him for an argument why all those things are stupid and if he cant provide a clear argument against them, then that alone will clearly showcase that he is emotionally and ideologically driven against those things and he is ruling out things in an unprincipled way and he is not serious in his thinking. You can push him on this: why does he act smug, when his confidence can't match the quality of argument he can provide against such cases. The objection of "I cant prove a negative" or the "onus is on you to provide a positive argument" - won't fly here, because he is taking a negative position against such cases and as long as he doesn't take an agnostic position on something (where you withold judgement, and you don't take any positive or negative stance against something), the onus is on him as well to justify his position. - Its the same with God debates. If you take an atheist position where you say that God doesn't exist - you will have to provide justification for that claim. Its very easy, whatever claim make or stance you take you will have to provide justification for it unless you are taking an agnostic route. The problem for Dave with taking an agnostic route though is that he won't be able to justify his confidence and smugness.

He is trying to point out the fallacious nature and the ridiculousness of that logic.

His question is pretty good though and brings a lot of productivity and clarity to this discussion. Whats the purpose of your thread? For you to prove something or to just invite people to inquire or to invite people to debate or to invite people to help you with something or just for entertainment or what exact reason for this thread? edit: I see you already answered it nevermind.

Yep, this is more than likely whats gonna happen .

Destiny - really good at clartiy and breaking complex topics down to layman language and good at meeting you where you at without needing to constantly use a speech script. I don't think he is a good communicator. He always speaks in generalities and almost never points to any specifics and when he tries to give an answer to a pointed question he rambles a lot and he always goes on tangents.

I peeked in how Dave responded to the video - I am only 3 minutes in and it is really bad quality. 1) Dave tries to imply that its unreasonable to criticize science, because it produces so many tangible and beneficial things to us. - starting with this is already weak, because just because it produces things doesn't mean it cant be done better and also there are things other than the scientific method that one can criticize regarding science (dogmatism, corruption etc). 2) The video just started and Dave is already making a lot of assumptions about the formscape's intentions why he made the video and why he said the things he said. - this is just pure rhetoric and doesn't have much substance to it. In fact doing moves like this is distracting the audience from focusing on the critique to solely focus on the flaws of the character who made the critique. People often times do this rhetoric move, when they can't directly engage with the criticism that was made.

You act like a second Leo, but this case you are not being completely biased about psychedelic awakenings, but being biased towards sober awakenings. The level of arrogance you display is the same as what Leo displayed and both cases are just sad , because none of you can justify the claim of why you are the only one who attained the highest level - its a vague assertion anyway, because none of you use any consistent way or metric how to measure who has what level of conciousness. All of these 100% confident assertions are based on speculation and guessing games or very weak inductive reasoning at best. Besides all that , you seem to be implying that Christ consciousness/awakening is attainable for other people, so it doesn't really makes sense for yourself to claim to be the 2nd Jesus and use that identification to separate yourself and claim to be special . If a 100 people have the same awakening will we suddenly have a 100 Jesus on Earth? - honestly, even being extremely charitable and assuming you are not delusional about this, it just seems like you had an experience or an awakening and now you are completely identifying with whatever you became in that awakening/experience. My completely honest take though, is that you seem to be very ungrounded right now, and you should ground yourself before you hurt anyone or yourself.

You are already hitting and miss - @undeather already made his own criticism of science so your idea that he is incapable to engage with any criticism or that he is completely closed-off from percieving the limitations of science or the scientific method is already demonstrably wrong. Next time read the thread and just after that go deliver your criticism, because this one didn't land. Aside from the "criticism" that you delivered, do we need to respond chatgpt-s criticism or should we use hardcore motivated reasoning like yourself and use chatgpt to write a response to chatgpt's criticism?

How is he a paranoid science defender? All his position was, that for science rigor is important and you guys are yet to make a specific argument against rigor, without pivoting to enlightenment or any other topic. Saying that rigor is a bias - is a completely meaningless and useless criticism alone - because lack of rigor is also bias. Bias alone is not necessarily bad and I have already made arguments in favour of that. Being charitable is important. So if we are reading his statement charitably - all else equal, science will generally make the world a better place. Btw, nothing was said nor implied from our part about love, consciousness or awakening not being important in general. If anyone has a substantive argument against rigor - go ahead construct one, but don't pretend that saying "thats an assumption" or "thats a bias" is anything nearly substantive or constructive.

Yep, couldn't agree more. A lot of users here have picked up a very clear bias against logic and against relative domain stuff from Leo. They haven't integrated logic, they have a logic shadow. We can discuss the limits of logic and the limits of relative domain things, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that most people here (im confident including Leo) don't understand properly how basic formal logic works, let alone trying to question the laws of logic and trying to understand what that entails and what possible implications that can bring. After some awakening experiences and or enlightenment most of them thinks they can have an authority to speak on any subject, without studying or deeply contemplating that specific subject beforehand. The inferences that one can make from the knowledge of one subject can only go so far and has very clear limits when it comes to using that knowledge and making inferences about another subject. So far, based on all the guys I know who claimed to be awakened and or enlightened none of them managed to infer or come to all the scientific knowledge that we know - using enlightenment or awakening alone. So it seems that cross domain induction and inference making is very limited and we should have much much more epistemic humility when it comes to using the knowledge of one domain to make knowledge claims about another domain. The other thing is that this community loves to ramble a lot, rather than trying to engage with points or try to directly answer questions.

I don't know why you guys always need to pivot to enlightenment and awakening as if that would respond to the problem that is being presented. None of those long paragraphs about awakening , the Absolute or enlightenment directly engages with any of the point that being presented and none of them contradicts the idea of rigor either.

Lack of rigor is itself a bias and will lead you to getting stuck. - its very easy to throw around sentences like that. Leo you are not engaging seriously or addressing any of the problems being presented to you and always try to zoom out and run to the absolute to delegitimize everything that being thrown at you. If you are honest, you will acknowledge that you have to choose an epistemic method to acquire truth (including relative truths and absolute truth). Now accepting that premise, you can either pretend that you are completely agnostic towards all possible epistemic processes (which you are demonstrably not) or you make an evalutaion between said epistemic processes.

The idea of string theory being full of bullshit is another example of lack of rigor 😂. Show me an example where lack of rigor is more reliable for increasing a premise probability to be true than more rigor. Yes, but your criticism is incredibly weak, because you are failing to engage with the fact of what happens if you try to reject rigor. I already established this - saying to someone who values rigor that the bias of rigor is bad - the opposite is the case, rigor is good and everyone including yourself know this and live according to this. You have certain set of virtues that you value over others when it comes to evidence gathering and thats the exact reason why you value evidence is a hierarchical manner and you use certain methods over others to collect evidence. A very grounded example you can engage with is a medical example. Would you say that you value anecdotes regarding the effectiveness and safetiness of a vaccine the exact same way as you would value going through multiple meta analysis with full of randomized controlled trials? If you would have tried to make an argument that every kind of methodology has their own value (meaning that everyone should be open to every kind of methodology), thats fine, but again, that still does not mean all of them have the same reliability with respect to them increasing a premise probability of being true. But here you are pivoting to the Absolute domain rather than staying in the relative domain. But it seems to be the case, that even when it comes to awakening and enlightenment stuff (and again you agree with this) certain methods will have more effectiveness in general than other methods. There is a reason why you constantly advocate for taking a dose of 5meo DMT and you are not advocating for us doing [I could insert whatever activity in the world here]. Like would you defend something silly like "guys you know, that I have said that there is no real method for truth so I would advocate for you trying out every possible thing in the world to try to awaken" (including blinking 10 thousand times a day). I think you failed to demonsrate that so far. Demonstrate with what possible truth rigor is incompatible with. Yeah I agree that they are lazy and that most of them are too philosophically illiiterate in a way , that they fail to see the set of assumptions that they build their worldview from. Most of them also fail to see that negative statements like "that doesn't exist" or "that can't be true" also requires arguments for them that they would fail to construct in the vast majority of the cases. All I tried to say there (in the thing that you responded to) is that to accept new things (even if you are very open minded) you will still probably have some kind of standard in mind for evidence - to accept the existence of certain things.

Even if that is true, you said "all science" - physics is as rigorous as it gets. You throw around the word 'bias' a lot, but being biased can lead you to better quality of evidence depeding on how you define it. If you are open to any kind of methodology being used and you want to have completely lack of bias - that case you, you shouldn't differentiate in any way between what methdology is used when gathering evidence to anything (because the time you use any kind of differentiation, well you are biased towards something). But I think such a stance will be ridicolous, especially once we take a look at the evidence hierarchy and why it is conducted the way it is. The whole idea of rigor is that you want to increase the probability of a premise being true. The better quality your methodology is (the more rigorous it is) - the better you can increase that probability , the better quality evidence you can gather. If you want to fight with the scientific community - how should better quality methodology be defined - feel free to do so. But again the whole idea is to increase the probability of a premise being true. If you have better ways to evidence gathering, then I think the scientific community will welcome you with open arms - but I suspect you don't have any such thing. Well, how high the bar is set regarding quality of evidence for any specific subject is different for everyone. Maybe if you would run a consistency check on Dave, maybe you would find him being incosistent or maybe he has a higher standard before he concludes things about paranormal phenomena. But yeah you can always disagree with anyone, that maybe their standard is way too high and because of that they rule out too many things too fast. Rigor has a specific definition and I don't think it is circular or question begging. Regarding the 'whatever aligns with its dogmas' - well you can try to argue why rigor is bad or why rigor is unnecessary, but I don't think you want to take such a stance.

I find it refreshing though, that he is not bought into every position (mostly conspiracy theories), that most new age people blindlessly bought into. Even though if he is a grifter, it would be convenient for him to just go balls to the wall with all those conspiracy theories (cause most of his audience is aligned with them). For example, he rejected the vaccine conspiracy stuff and if I remember correctly, he has reasonable takes on institutions as well. I saw him losing some portion of his audience after they realised he is pro covid vaxx. Basically, - based on what I have seen about his stuff- it seems to me, that he usually has nuanced takes and not ideologically driven takes.

Yeah I understand that and I can agree that it can be really effective and valid when it comes to talking about certain things that cannot be conveyed in normal logic (like talking about the absolute or infinity) - but when it comes to relative domain stuff, I think we should strive to be as strict and clear as we possibly can, without being loose with our words. I sort of agree with this as well (and I mostly tream him as an entertainer), however the problem is that Bashar doesn't act like an entertainer, he acts and conveys himself as an actual guru/teacher (someone who delivers actual knowledge/teachings) and that could be problematic. He makes a ton of descriptive claims about reality and about spirituality as well. For example the 5 laws:

Most of his teachings seems to be too vague to me and I think thats a problem, because it opens up the interpreter to misinterpret the core of the message. For instance the 'follow your passion without any insistance or expectation on the outcome' - sounds good, but really vague. How can you tangibly differentiate between following true passion vs being compulsive towards something (that hiding itself as a passion)? The other example is the idea of synchronicity - that if you follow your true passion everything in your life will come together without you needing to worry about the specifics or money or anything. To me, this seems to be a potentially very dangerous advice , but besides that, this idea is an attempt to try to use it as kind of a law to explain stange or special events (that may or may not happen in your life) , but the problem is that no grounding or justification is given for this "law" - it just put forth as an idea and you have to go with it. The other problem is that most of his teachings seem to be unfalsifiable. Beside all that, I find it interesting that some of his stuff seem to be very similar to Leo's stuff: Nothing in reality has built in meaning Reality is infinitely complex, but it is not complicated. Permission slips The third one is especially interesting:

This is not true and very easy to refute. For example, one criticism of pseudoscience is the lack of rigor and bad/loose inference making. That obviously doesn't apply to all sciences.

I think in the video (what I linked) there he explains it pretty well, but if you have further specific questions or any confusion about the data or anything related to the project you can directly ask him - he will explain it in detail. You can reach him on twitter or at his discord server (if that is necessary I can give you the link in pm). Almost every day he goes live on twitter and he answers questions regarding the project.

Yep assuming the numbers he used to calculate are correct, it is a pretty strong empirical case against the claim of indiscriminate killing of everyone. Whatever argument someone wants to make against this have to explain this: Why would Israel spend a whole bunch of time, effort, resources, and mission objective compromises just to discriminate away from civilians killings? Now, as I have already said, of course this is not an absolute way of assessing whether Israel has genocidal intent or not, however it has to be appreciated how much weight it holds and whatever arguments somone wants to make against this ,has to hold a lot of weight to counter this stat and calculation.

@Danioover9000 I see you going on a rant and got triggered for some reason, you should cool down before you give a response. Im not falling in any trap, I shared how RR is calculated and what it supposed to represent and what specific argument it supposed to counter and thats it. Now you are connecting this to a whole narrative and other stuff that wasn't mentioned or said at all. I don't know why you are making strawman arguments. You are not even trying to be good faith. I never said there is no connection between destroying buildings to genocide intent, all I said was that alone destroying buildings has a loose correlation to genocide intent. Regarding the Nazi argument. Nazis did kill millions of Jews and if we were to take a look at RR(relative risk) regarding them, then the calculation would show an obvious genocide, without looking at how many buildings were or werent destroyed.

Btw if anyone wants to ask some questions to the guy who created the chart, you can do it on twitter right now (he is live):

Yes it does, the whole point of that chart is to give a quantitative analysis for indiscriminate genocidal intent and it is a counter to the argument of 'But look at the civilian death numbers' . Meaning, that if someone wants to make a counter argument using a quantitative analysis (rather than a qualitative one), then you have to use an even better metric than relative risk (which is used on the chart that I shared). Or you can give a qualitative analysis and counter it that way. I don't see how this is relevant. If more buildings gets destroyed that establishes somehow that there is an intent of genocide? I think there is a loose correlation between genocidal intent and the amount of buildings getting destroyed. I think Relative risk (RR) is a better metric to use, but if you can give an argument why destroying buildings and genocide is closely related, then i am open to hear about it. These arguments are fine in terms, that you try to give a qualitative analysis/argument there, which the chart I shared does not want to counter. Again the chart is just a counter argument to the other quantitative analysis of 'but look at the civilian death number'.

Regarding the claim 'careless targeting/killing of civilians' here is a tweet, that has a graph that calculates the relative risk rather than just stateing how many civilians were killed. It has multiple wars on it , so you can compare and see all the different relative risk values from different wars. https://twitter.com/AviBittMD/status/1751718541621928033/photo/1 The idea that the only variable (how many civillians were killed) is adequate enough to establish that Israel indiscriminately killing everyone is an incredibly bad logic and doesn't make much sense at all. The whole idea of discrimination is to measure how much you differentiate killings between militants and civilians - You need to compare militant death to civilian death (per capita). As you can see on the tweet's graph, relative risk(RR) is calculated this way: (Militants killed/Militant population) / (Civilians killed/Civilian population). Here is his explanation (timestamped) how relative risk is applied in real scenarios: