End of a Scientific Legend?

pacopico writes to mention the sorry state of the well-known Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sixty years ago, it was at the forefront of the race for the Atomic bomb. Nowadays, "smugness can breed complacency, and complacency carelessness. In recent years the laboratory has been in the news not for its successes but its failures.The result is a change of management, which the story goes on to discuss in great detail. It begs the question - can Los Alamos hang on as a prestigious place or is it too late for the supercomputing powerhouse and weapons lab?"

Comments

Beg your pardon?

[rumblin'rabbit]

It begs the question - can Los Alamos hang on as a prestigious place or is it too late for the supercomputing powerhouse and weapons lab?"

The traditional, and in my view the proper, meaning of "to beg the question" is "to assume the very thing that's in contention" - that is to say, to use circular logic. It does (or at least did) not mean "to compel one to ask".

I hear even top level news anchors misuse the term. Drives me nuts.

Pet peeve: "Beg the question"

[Gregoyle]

This is slightly OT, but one of my major pet peeves is when people say something "begs the question..." when they mean that it implies a follow-on question.

"Begging the question" is a very simple fallacy made in a debate or discussion. It is when you assume your initial proposition to be true in order to "prove" that proposition. For example, you could say "Only idiots would go to Wal-Mart," and "prove" it by saying "Everyone in Wal-Mart is an idiot". If you expand the concept of this fallacy you can come to the "corellation does not equal causation" problem in modern statistics.

If anyone has better examples I'd love to hear them.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beg_the_question