Teo, put your conspiracy beliefs to the test or expect to be banned.

[brimstoneSalad]

Yes, I am. Do you think it's wise to tell the guards I doubt prisons exist? Do you think it's legal?

Yes, you should tell them that and listen to what they have to say. If it's illegal, you have nothing to fear if prisons don't exist.

To test your theory, why not commit some "serious" victimless crime for which there is supposedly a prison sentence in front of the police and see if you get arrested and put in prison or not? If you have faith that they don't exist then that should be zero risk evidence of your theory. Of course not everybody who commits such crimes is charged so it wouldn't be conclusive proof (and you could not tell them about the experiment, or else they might just refer you to a psychiatrist instead of putting you in prison), but if you repeated the experiment a few times with different crimes and with different police it will start to become pretty strong evidence.

By the way, @brimstoneSalad, what do you think about my idea that Vladimir Putin isn't his real name?

The universe doesn't have a "real name" variable. If somebody uses a name, that is that person's "real" name. It's also possible for people to make assumed names their legal names.

In terms of whether it was the name his mother gave him at birth or he changed it, it wouldn't be strange either way. Vladimir is a fairly common name, but many celebrities also change their names. It's not that unheard of for politicians.

Keep in mind also the Pygmalion effect. A mother who has such high expectations to name a child that may end up raising a child more likely to attain such things. Names can in a sense *cause* things, so it's not necessarily even a big coincidence.

James Mallory suggested in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, that Teuta(na), the name of a famous Illyrian queen, as it is written in historical sources, wasn't actually her real name, but a title meaning something like "mistress of the people" (from the root *tewt). Well, by that logic, "Vladimir" probably isn't Vladimir Putin's real name either, right?

No, that's completely different. In historic contexts titles have often been confused with names (that confusion is easy in those time spans, it's not what's happening with Putin).

[teo123]

I've visited local jail today at 12:25. There was nobody there.

[NonZeroSum]

I've visited local jail today at 12:25. There was nobody there.

Oh that's dissapointing, can you call or email to know what time they're open? Perhaps they aren't allowing visitors because of coronavirus:

Tel.: 031 201 199
E-mail: Zatvor.U.Osijeku@uzs.pravosudje.hr

What did you think of the prison architechture anyways? Why do you think they have such big metal bars on the entrance? And why the big walls surrounding one big building in the middle with lots of small uniform windows like a place built for lots of small uniform rooms?

Did you see if the courthouse nextdoor was open? Did you talk to anyone?

[teo123]

Perhaps they aren't allowing visitors because of coronavirus

So, how is it scientific to make such post-hoc explanations for why experiment didn't succeed? Your hypothesis made a very specific prediction, and I've bothered to test it, and it has been proven wrong. And I still, according to you, bear the burden of proof?

can you call or email to know what time they're open

And isn't it more scientific to reject the theory that made the specific but false prediction that there will be many people today there?

Why do you think they have such big metal bars on the entrance?

Why is that relevant? Maybe they have some sensitive electronic equipment at the entrance that needs to be protected from radiation by a Faraday Cage. Maybe they do that because people simply expect a jail to have those things, so that more people would believe it's really a jail.

And why the big walls surrounding one big building in the middle with lots of small uniform windows like a place built for lots of small uniform rooms?

Why is that relevant? Some monasteries are built that way (as one on the Bing homepage today: https://www.bing.com/th?id=OHR.GeghardM ... 0x1200.jpg), maybe that building used to be a monastery. Why is there a big wall called Vodena Vrata between the Drava River and the K Topu restaurant?

Did you see if the courthouse nextdoor was open?

No, I forgot to check that. Will you ban me because of that?

[NonZeroSum]

Perhaps they aren't allowing visitors because of coronavirus

So, how is it scientific to make such post-hoc explanations for why experiment didn't succeed? Your hypothesis made a very specific prediction, and I've bothered to test it, and it has been proven wrong. And I still, according to you, bear the burden of proof?

Yes, that's you misunderstanding the scientific method again, check the diagram below, all that happened is we planned out an experiment with numerous evidence gathering methods to undertake, like talking to people, and even though you weren't able to conduct all the experiments, you decided the procedure was working fine and you'd proved a negative.

If we were going to try and run an experiment without you talking to people, we'd need you to wait there gathering video footage for days or something.

Why do you think they have such big metal bars on the entrance?

Why is that relevant? Maybe they have some sensitive electronic equipment at the entrance that needs to be protected from radiation by a Faraday Cage. Maybe they do that because people simply expect a jail to have those things, so that more people would believe it's really a jail.

And why the big walls surrounding one big building in the middle with lots of small uniform windows like a place built for lots of small uniform rooms?

Why is that relevant? Some monasteries are built that way (as one on the Bing homepage today: https://www.bing.com/th?id=OHR.GeghardM ... 0x1200.jpg), maybe that building used to be a monastery. Why is there a big wall called Vodena Vrata between the Drava River and the K Topu restaurant?

Yeah, those are predictions which run counter to Occam's razor.

Did you see if the courthouse nextdoor was open?

No, I forgot to check that. Will you ban me because of that?

No, but quoting myself:

We're simply looking for evidence that you can collect witness testimony, compare it to other research you can do online of millions of hours of footage inside prisons, millions of news stories about people who went to prison, etc. And can come to some conclusions which show your critical thinking skills are improving. It can be anything, like "wow this disheveled woman who got the bus to visit her family in prison really doesn't seem to be someone well payed by the illuminati, I wonder how they suckered her into belieiving her family is in there against their will, like I believed, I wonder what lead to her family member deciding to be a payed actor?."

Looks like all prisons in Croatia are closed to visitors due to covid, so apologies for not checking that, but it was also in your brief to do background research:

PrisonObservitory.org - Covid-19: What is happening in European prisons?

CROATIA
Update: 6/04/20

Prisoners in Split's Bilice prison started a hunger strike [1], refusing to eat prison food out of fear that COVID-19 could enter the prison, but on March 26 Bošnjaković called on them to end the strike. On March 28 one police officer [2] was found positive to the COVID-19, while several others are in self-isolation. There were no cases COVID-19 inside prisons until the date of this update. Measures have been taken on time and the system works well, said Justice Minister Dražen Bošnjaković. [3]

The Croatian Penitentiary Administration adopted all recommendations and measures [4] of the Croatian National Civil Protection and Public Health Institute to protect the health of inmates, judicial police officers and other staff in prisons with a purpose of timely detection and treatment of persons with COVID-19 disease and prevention of its further spreading.The measures are the following:

Family visits, daily prison leaves and permits to work outside the prison:

✦limitation of visits to prisoners; family members need to arrange video conferencing / video visits or use other technologies for long-distance visits, enable more frequent and longer phone calls to mitigate consequences of visit restrictions

[References:

1. https://www.total-croatia-news.com/poli ... -prisoners
2. https://pravosudje.gov.hr/vijesti/u-sub ... litu/21730
3. https://pravosudje.gov.hr/vijesti/minis ... nika/21804
4. https://pravosudje.gov.hr/UserDocsImage ... sustav.pdf]

Covid-19 in Europe's prisons - and the response

One of the first steps taken by many Member States in response to Covid-19 was to prohibit prison visits (e.g. Belgium, Croatia, Sweden, Bulgaria, Slovenia) and place new prisoners in isolation (e.g. Belgium, Ireland, Austria).

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[teo123]

Yes, that's you misunderstanding the scientific method again, check the diagram below, all that happened is we planned out an experiment with numerous evidence gathering methods to undertake, like talking to people, and even though you weren't able to conduct all the experiments, you decided the procedure was working fine and you'd proved a negative.

What does "gather" mean? What does "undertake" mean? English is not my native language.

If it means what I think it means... Well, maybe. After all, the first version of my computer science experiment with my sorting algorithm can be said to have failed to give us any useful results, so I refined the way I did measurements. But if I failed to get useful results again and again, even after refining the experimental method, that would have seriously undermined my hypothesis. And what would even be considered a negative result in the experiment to test whether prisons exist?

Besides, one of the basic principles of science is that incoherent hypotheses aren't being tested. Testing supernatural claims with experiments, rather than immediately rejecting them, is unscientific. Testing with an experiment a hypothesis that the energy given by wind turbins is exactly proportional to the cube of the speed of the wind is also unscientific, following the scientific method is to reject such a hypothesis a-priori, because in no possible world is the energy of the wind exactly proportional to the cube of its speed (the measurement units don't add up, energy is by definition mass times speed squared). Such a hypothesis contradicts the basic principles of physics (not to say it can't be a useful approximation in some measurement units in some interval). Similarly, the scientific way to deal with the hypothesis that jails exist is to reject it a-priori, because it contradicts the basic principles of social sciences.

Yeah, those are predictions which run counter to Occam's razor.

How? There being expensive electronic equipment in the entrance which is protected from electromagnetic radiation by those bars is not really an extraordinary claim: expensive electronic equipment protected from electromagnetic radiation by bars exists in many places: trains, airplanes, chemical factories...

Besides, something that contradicts the basic principle of some science can't be said to obey the Occam's razor.

Looks like all prisons in Croatia are closed to visitors due to covid, so apologies for not checking that, but it was also in your brief to do background research

What does "in your brief" mean? Do you mean it was a part of my burden of proof? Why would it be a part of my burden of proof, you are one making a positive claim that prisons exist?

[NonZeroSum]

Looks like all prisons in Croatia are closed to visitors due to covid, so apologies for not checking that, but it was also in your brief to do background research

What does "in your brief" mean?

Part of the scientific method we asked you to carry out:



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I'm going to lock this thread until prisons in Croatia re-open to visitors, don't talk about prisons or any other conspiracy theory topics until then. This is a vegan, philosophy and fun topics discussion forum where we expect only rational discourse or fun things like music sharing.

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