A group of scientists have declared that lobsters, shrimp, and cuttlefish are sentient and conscious. The specialties of the scientists?
A review of the signatories on this declaration indicates most of the expertise is in philosophy, psychology, and environmental studies.
They are no more qualified to comment on this than I am on any number of random subjects. By using the term “scientists,” they attempt to claim an expertise that they do not possess. It’s like that time a bunch of Doctors expounded on gun control.
Just because you have expertise in one field doesn’t mean that you have been granted any special wisdom in any other.
13 Comments
tfourier · April 25, 2024 at 8:46 am
Look the list of those who signed. At a rough estimate about 80% have zero science background. “Philosophers”, etc. None.
Another10% have “eco-science” backgrounds. Little better than sociology. No actual science involved. And of the few that have a possibly relevant science background they are either grad students or glorified grad students, associate profs. Plus one or two or the usual total cranks you will find in all faculties. All retired.
So of the many tens of thousands of actual scientists from the relevant fields we have maybe half a dozen who signed.
Never believe the headlines. Always read the primary sources for these stories.,
49%mfer · April 25, 2024 at 9:44 am
“A group of scientists have declared that lobsters, shrimp, and cuttlefish are sentient and conscious.”
They are also delicious.
Dan D. · April 25, 2024 at 9:52 am
This is a great example of the rise of “scientism” around the world, where The Science is a new god to worship without question. I’d like to say its a direct outcome of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters (“Back off man, I’m a scientist”) but its really another spoke in the hub of this long game of breaking down the institutions that made Western Civilization advance so quickly. We have that useless skinjob Jill Biden claiming she’s a “doctor” to start with and the list goes on. The goal is to confuse the average person who doesn’t have time or schooling to know the difference so they throw up their hands and say “Well, scientists said…”
Its a huge personal peeve of mine and one of the reasons I got booted from LinkedIn (I told a lawyer she needed to learn about the meanings of words and that airline waitresses were not “first responders” during the Covid scamdemic. F LinkedIn, btw.)
Aesop · April 25, 2024 at 1:31 pm
Michael Crichton correctly placed it way back when SETI was organized, based on the 1960 Drake Equation, which in scientific shorthand equals utter nonsense:
https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
This lecture, and a 100-question test on its contents with a minimum grade of 80%, should be required to receive a high school diploma in this country.
Being a journalist should require a score of 95% or better.
Any score under 100% should be a positive bar for receiving any STEM degree.
Aesop · April 25, 2024 at 1:25 pm
This is easily settled.
The manager of the local Red Lobster should hire a test administrator to give all their lobsters a standard IQ test, and publicize the lobsters’ grades.
Discussion over.
Fuck me?? No, fuck you, animal rights retards.
IcyReaper · April 25, 2024 at 3:59 pm
Remember, we MUST follow ( bow down to the eco commies) the science. This is very a prelude next step to not being allowed to eat any animal meat protein just bugs then they will become sentient then we go to soylent green…
Stealth Spaniel · April 25, 2024 at 4:17 pm
Well, I just had a big ol’ boil up of shrimp. Now waiting for them to cool to chow down with some yummy cocktail sauce. I don’t care about the shrimp’s feelings. I am just hungry!
Paul B · April 25, 2024 at 7:44 pm
FFS.
I was an actual lobster biologist for 2 1/2 years. Published 8 original monographs on mostly behavior, neural anatomy and chemical physiology of H. americanus, the tasty one. Among the weird things I did was blindfolding lobsters and temporarily knocking out their sense of smell on one side and seeing how they navigate to food (not very well), removing their brain and seeing how they got by (just fine for about 2 weeks, since 80% of the brain is visual processing and lobsters don’t see very well, but they lost the ability to feed themselves after a few days without a brain and tended to get infections from the surgery).
Lobsters are not conscious. They rely on ganglia and a pre-programmed set of semi-flexible behavioral algorithms for decision-making. Something I did another paper on. We had lobster races and lobster fights. The best science involves beer drinking and gambling. There was butter, mayo and hotdog rolls involved.
Anyhow, the people involved in this stupidity are all retards and state-school frauds.
Anonymous · April 26, 2024 at 3:17 am
Democrats are not conscious. They rely on ganglia and a pre-programmed set of semi-flexible behavioral algorithms for decision-making. Some aspects of the programming can be mass-updated by the central scrutinizer, mostly data for targeting like “Russia”, “Ukraine”, and “China”. The core engine implementing values like “domination” and “envy” and the goal-seeking heuristics are fixed.
Aesop · April 27, 2024 at 8:21 pm
IMHO, Anonymous just won the internets for the day.
DrBob · April 26, 2024 at 8:57 am
Having been a working scientist in academia and industry for many years, there is a phenomenon which underlies this “expertise” outside of one’s field of study. It’s called hubris. I spent way too many hours in faculty meetings listening to professors expound on fields for which they had no background. But they were the “smartest” people in the room, and if they came up with an idea, it must be a good and valid idea, because they knew they were the smartest.
The best story along this line is that of the Wright brothers. Their competition to first flight was a group of academicians in the Ivy League and National Academy of Sciences. History faithfully records the winner of that competition. The bicycle mechanics who built, tested, failed and rebuilt their way into the air, while their ‘learned’ competition was still pulling their academic puds.
Anonymous · April 27, 2024 at 5:49 pm
Soooo… completely agree that just because a person says X’ and has some parchment does not necessarily mean a) they know what they’re talking about or b) they don’t have some sort of agenda that they are fueling with ‘the science’s.
But I’d like to point out that the corollary ‘I have no degree in this, so I must not be clever enough or smart enough to cipher this out’ is also not true. Too many times, people are shut out of convos because they ‘aren’t qualified’.
Divemedic · April 27, 2024 at 7:56 pm
But trying to use a credential that you don’t have, so that you can establish yourself as being some sort of authority on the subject is dishonest.
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