Darwin Defeats the Jedi Order?

So what brought the Jedi down to the point where their "foggy" sensibilities could get them wiped out by a couple of Sith?

Consider:

1. Force talent seems to run in families.
   
2. In fact, every child of a Jedi that we've seen - in the movies, and in at least most of the EU, for that matter - is force sensitive to a degree.
3. Jedi aren't allowed to marry. They are a celibate order. (See #2 for why we don't have more evidence from the movies on whether or not force sensitivity runs in families.)
4. For the past thousand years prior to the prequels, the Jedi order has been dying out slowly.

Anyone else get the feeling that the Jedi Knights drained their order by imposing celibacy on its members? Whether it's midichlorion transmission through bodily fluids, like a disease, or genetic, or what-have-you... the celibacy rule selects against force sensitivity.

Darwin 1, Jedi Order 0.

Moderation and Extremism

Opponents from StarDestroyer.Net generally try to color ST-v-SW.net as the location for extremist "OMG Evil Tr3kkieZ!!!!1" arguments. While I freely admit that I stand against the attempts of a small group of fanboys to inflate Star Wars tech with the stated goal of "mak[ing] it a better comparison to Trek" tech, the fact remains that ST-v-SW.Net is a moderate site.

Let's take a moment to ponder how ST-v-SW.Net would be if it were called, say, "GalaxyClassStarship.Net" and featured the same sort of shameless slant as ST-v-SW.Net's wannabe-competitor:

- Star Trek V's journey to the center of the galaxy? Oh, that'd be standard starship top speed in case of emergencies. Sure, we've seen ships seem to top out at lower speeds, but they were just having trouble or dialling down the velocity or whatever. It doesn't matter . . . any analysis of instances of lower speeds would be evil and wrong.
Warp Drive = 20,000,000c in Kirk's era
(SD.Net and its board denizens calc SW velocities by mixing up various non-canon sources to reach millions of c speeds. GCS.Net would at least use a single self-consistent example.)

- "Parallax"[VOY1]'s trip inside a black hole? Baseline hull resiliency calculation, here we come! And it wasn't just Voyager that should've been squished in there . . . a shuttle was inside it too. Sure, we've seen shuttles break when smacking into the ground, but that's different due to some flimsy excuse we'll come up with and all repeat like a mantra. God, don't you know anything?
Starship and Shuttle hulls = roxorz
Starship and Shuttle Acceleration = millions upon millions of g
(SD.Net and its board denizens calc SW ship hull resilience based on an example of the Falcon passing close to a neutron star in one of the books. Speaking of which, if GCS.Net used Trek books then we'd have multiple examples of starships entering black holes.)

- Star Trek III and Sulu's scanning of the planet's core with the tricorder? Baseline tricorder range.
Tricorder = "Sir, my tricorder detects Imperials!" "On which planet?"
(SD.Net and its board denizens calculate Imperial sensor tech off of various outlier EU data, ignoring things like TESB's "Is that a Millennium Falcon on your hull or are you just happy to see me?")

- "Obsession"[TOS] antimatter calcs? Standard for antimatter reactors. After all, the talk of a dilithium matrix actually may serve as the explanation for the extra juice the core puts out over and above what it probably should per real antimatter, not to mention the weird radiation the Malon dealt with in VOY.
Antimatter = about 28.6 million gigatons / gram, give or take
(SD.Net and its board denizens calculate SW reactor tech by way of making false assumptions about the Death Star and then scaling down. IIRC someone once pointed out that this should result in something like 1 gigaton hand weapons, but they drop it down a bit in practice. Isn't that nice of them?)

- "The Die is Cast"[DSN3] planetary attack calcs? Standard weapons yields. Sure we've seen 'em fire with less effect, but these are precision weapons.
Torpedoes = millions of megatons per shot, or better
(SD.Net and its board denizens calculate vessel firepower via the aforementioned false assumptions regarding the Death Star, and again scale downward. They've also taken some EU data and diddled with it until they could inflate it beyond the original EU statements. And, they explicitly ignore the movie yields in favor of comic book versions of weapons shots. I'm sure GCS.Net can jack up the Trek yields even further with effort.)

. . . and so on. Oh, yeah, and while we'd give the appearance of using evidence, we'd really just be trying to persuade readers by any means necessary that Trek could beat Wars, and wouldn't be afraid to say so every once in awhile.

Only then would GCS.Net be equal and opposite.

As it stands, I'm happy to keep ST-v-SW.Net straddling the proverbial fence.

Probe Droid Objections

Just a little quickie . . . here is a work-in-progress version of the Probe Droid objections page. Unfortunately that's all the time the weekend has allowed. More to come.

Star Wars Mythbusting

In a StarWars.com write-up on a show called "Mythbusters" here in the U.S., the folks from the show made a couple of comments on some events that occur in SW. One was:

Can electricity make your skeleton visible from the outside?

"Only if you have a sufficient midi-chlorian concentration," Imahara smiles. "I'm convinced they're bioluminescent."

That one amused me, since certain opponents claim Force Lightning to be both (a) normal electrical lightning and (b) capable of resulting in perfect X-ray-like representations of target skeletons. I've argued against both notions for the many obvious reasons. Now that others are telling them the same sorts of things, perhaps one day they'll start to believe them.

(The latter idea even led to their absurd claim of naturally-occurring metal implants in the neck of Star Wars humans.)

Anatomy of an Argument

BHMM here. Those of you who followed the [temporarily closed] Strek-v-Swars.net forums may recall seeing me complain there about a particular methodology I refer to as "naïve SOD." Those of you who didn't are about to get a crash course.

To outline this argument, I'll use the simplest example that can point out the problems in this methodology - Death Star acceleration. As one of the simpler examples, it's also one of the less dramatic, because the naïve arguments in question diverge most dramatically from a truly empirical approach in the more complex examples.

We have one particular commonly iterated argument that boils down to a claim of 100g acceleration based on the series of positions of the Death Star on a Rebel diagram. Solely, in other words, on a particular interpretation of a single small detail of the VFX.

As usual, there are minor problems of scaling, and the Death Star at one of these positions happens to be a faded icon sitting on the edge of a dark line across the diagram, i.e., an apparent blind zone. The figure also seems predicated on Yavin being noticably larger than Jupiter, when we consider the distances claimed (100,000 km from 15 minutes to 5 minutes, and 200,000 km from 5 to firing position).

But it's reasonable enough on first inspection, errors aside.

So what happens when we plug this 100g back into the original scenario, looking at the Rebel diagram? We get a very strange starting position for the Death Star, particularly when we consider an Imperial diagram that also shows the approach.

It becomes clear that something is wrong with the claim that the Death Star has 100g. The more evidence we examine - dialogue speaking of orbiting at maximum velocity, and when we dig into the mathematics of the Death Star's attack on Yavin, we can formalize an explicit mathematical proof demonstrating that the Death Star cannot have 100g of acceleration*. Place the Death Star anywhere that fits with the diagrams and dialogue, and 100g results in Yavin being destroyed before Luke reaches it.

Can we fit a lower acceleration into the Rebel diagram? Sure. Remember first that the 5 minutes position is a "last known" position and you're fine.

So let's summarize the technique that was used here to arrive at the faulty figure.

1. Find a small detail of VFX.
2. Interpret this detail in a fashion that maximizes or minimizes whatever you're looking to maximize or minimize.
3. Make sure #2 seems to be the simplest possible explanation. After all, simple explanations sell well.
4. Don't even bother looking at the rest of the explicit visual evidence. After all, since the VFX are completely and utterly accurate (per the suspension-of-disbelief philosophy of analysis) and the simplest possible explanation is the best one (per a misinterpretation of Occam's Razor**), your argument lays forth the best possible estimation, and is necessarily correct in its details.
5. Likewise, ignore qualitative evidence - the only thing that matters is numbers, dialogue can be freely ignored.
6. Above all, do not try to fit your conclusion back into the movie or TV series.
   

These six steps to success are the foundation of naïve suspension of disbelief; as such, they are the foundation for a significant fraction of the arguments made in the Star Trek vs Star Wars debate. It's not rigorously logical (see #6) and it's not empirical (see #4 and #5). It's fast, easy, and rhetorically potent. Everybody does it, too.

Point #6 bears particular emphasis. One of the most easily used counterarguments in the VS debate is reductio ad absurdum. In its most useful form, this means taking the conclusions arrived at, and seeing what would have happened onscreen were the figures in question true.

*The messy details are an exercise left to the reader, who surely can manage it from all the figures being thrown around on the various articles. I could write it out here, but this post is long enough already.
**Occam's Razor, properly cited, states that the simplest explanation that fits all of the evidence is usually the best one.

New Faces

Just wanted to leave a quick note . . . you'll be seeing some new faces around here, figuratively speaking. Much as the main site features guest articles, the Weblog will be featuring special guest bloggers as part of the team. I'll leave it to them to introduce themselves or just jump on in as they see fit.

I hope you enjoy their posts as much as you've enjoyed mine.

Confessions and Fundamental Differences

The below was said by a StarDestroyer.Net poster in regards to my review of Wayne's blog post:

Has he not noticed that writing persuasive documents is one of the cornerstones of versus debating? (Discussions of canon policy don't exactly fit well into the other cornerstones: the scientific method and application of physics and other sciences.)

Bingo, we have a winner: there's the problem confessed right there.

It's just like I said before when quoting another guy's confession:

Part of the problem might revolve around a term commonly used to describe discussions about which fictional universe would win in a war. You see, it is often called "the versus debate", the "Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate", et cetera. It would, perhaps, be better if it were called the "Star Trek vs. Star Wars rational discussion and careful analysis by a group of open-minded individuals interested in determining the Truth of the situation" . . . but that, as you can see, would be quite a mouthful.

. . . and, sadly, would be an entirely incorrect description of many of the folks involved . . .

Those who treat this as a formal debate will invariably end up approaching the following position, espoused by pro-Wars debater Ian "Kynes" Samuels:

1. Debate is not a search for truth. It is an exercise in rhetoric.
2. As it is not a search for truth, positions which I do not personally agree with may be adopted to win.
3. The objective of debate is to emerge the "victor," having used superior rhetorical tecniques [sic] to gain victory.
4. Any tactic empirically effective at advancing a position should be used.

(source)

Obviously, the above concepts, while theoretically valid for crooked lawyers and other debate practitioners, are invalid in any honest inquiry. An idea is not right or wrong based on the rhetorical techniques used to defend it . . . the idea either conforms to reality, or it doesn't. Add to that the fact that, inevitably, some have concluded that incessant flaming and character assassination are empirically effective means of advancing one's position (which is true, provided that one's audience is composed of idiots), and the Star Trek vs. Star Wars discussion can take some ugly and peculiar turns.

If you're a slick salesman who can persuade someone that 2+2=5, then I'm sure that's great for you. However, that doesn't make the belief correct, not even if you believe it yourself.

Again I point to the fundamental disconnect between their worldview and my own.