Slashdot Mirror
Experts Rate Wikipedia Higher Than Non-Experts
Grooves writes "A new Wikipedia study suggests that when experts and non-experts look to assess Wikipedia for accuracy, the non-experts are harder on the free encyclopedia than the experts. The researcher had 55 graduate students and research assistants examine one Wikipedia article apiece for accuracy, some in fields they were familiar with and some not. Those in the expert group ranked their articles as generally credible, higher than those evaluated by the non-experts. One researcher said 'It may be the case that non-experts are more cynical about information outside of their field and the difference comes from a natural reaction to rate unfamiliar articles as being less credible.'" That's the problem people face when 'everyone who disagrees with you is a moron'.
Historian A: "The Nazis were horrible awful people who killed and murdered millions of people during World War II. They created nothing but pain and suffering while seeking out total fascist control of the entire world."
Historian B: "Nazism is not a precise, theoretically grounded ideology. It consists of a loose collection of ideas and positions: extreme nationalism, racism, eugenics, totalitarianism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and limits to freedom of religion."
Now the reason I put those two up there is because your average person (I'm American so I may be biased on 'average') would probably favor historian A's perspective as opposed to historian B. Historian B is actually an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry. It's more encyclopedic as it's not opinion oriented. I'm not saying Wikipedia is free of opinions but what I'm proposing is that non-experts have an opinion and often when they read something that doesn't align with that opinion, they consider it to be incorrect.
The (on average high) neutrality of Wikipedia is most likely what causes non-experts to rate it as more erroneous than experts. Since the sample set was so low (as the report notes) then it is perhaps more likely that this happened.
I think that this is what the "Everyone who disagrees with you is a moron" article is getting at. I'm guessing experts are training not to suffer from that disease.
My work here is dung.
As everyone else but they know a little bit more about the process through which their own expertise derives. One need only read professional historians to understand that they have as much an agenda as anyone else for example.
Wikipedia is used all the time in the IP lawfirm where I work. If we need a definition or a quick rundown on a field before filing a patent, it's a good, well linked source.
science is a religion
that just by being a grad-student or a research assistant you become labeled an expert!
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
Um, I don't think being a Biology Ph.D. candidate makes one an expert at astronomy. If you try to pull that stunt in court as an expert witness, the judge won't like it.
A better description would be "smart, educated people" easier on Wikipedia than less smart, less educated people.
Even then I'd say "further study is needed."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert
That's because there's an article about experts, but none for non-experts. If I weren't an expert about everything, I'd be pissed too!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
These articles could have been written by anybody. It only seems appropriate that I would be skeptical about a topic written by a less than credible source about a t0pic I know little about.
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
Could this just be a case of someone saying, "That can't be right!" only because they don't know if it really is?
Why is it when Microsoft/oil company/tobacco company is torched whenever they release a study saying Windows/gasoline/smoking is good because they are paid off blow-hards serving their masters but a Wikipedia study saying their articles are accurate (and make no mistake, that is what they are saying) doesn't raise an eyebrow?
I don't understand the people who attack Wikipedia....
It is free, a lot of people have put a lot of effort into it, and it is incomparable to any other repository of knowledge known to man.
Why the fuck would anyone want to piss on it? Don't like it? Shut up and go to a library.
I just hope that those non-experts didn't feel the urge to "fix" anything.
Because corporate-sponsored studies aren't editable by the public. People do raise an eyebrow with regards to Wikipedia, but any person with true knowledge can have a say in the content of an article. Plus there is clear public debate. No one can publicly debate or dispute a corporate study before it's published. Anyone can criticize it afterwards, but those disagreements never become an addendum to the study.
Developers: We can use your help.
... that when it comes to academic articles (e.g. physics) the only people who know enough math/jargon to get it close to right are the academics. So, the acuracy is of course going to be fairly high.
BUT, when it comes to policitically charged articles (or other non-academic articles), b/c of people's "MY true is reality no matter what the facts say" mentality nowadays, the acuracy plumits.
Basically, this study is nothing but a false positive in favor of wikipedia.
Isn't this the same criteria used for "well-respected, peer-reviewed journals"? You can abuse any such journal, just as wikipedia sometimes is.
However, wikipedia is different from such journals because it is a commons which is shared by people with differing viewpoints. It doesn't get the same bias that some journals may get where submitters and readers gravitate towards one of several different publications with slightly different biases (e.g. some journals favor publishing articles related to global warming as a concequence of human activities while others favor articles about it being a more natural phenomonon).
Debate is healthy, as long as it is reasoned. Wikipedia's nature enforces reason on debates about its contents. If a wikipedia entry gets edited by a person with a bias, a person with an opposing bias deals with it directly by editing the _same_ article, instead of proposing an alternate view somewhere else where it may not be seen by readers of the article. This beats the status quo , where oposing sides tend to just keep shouting their message without having any true debate.
science is a religion
Let me just say that I am so tired of the the rampant bias against wikipedia in education. I have had teachers go on 10 minute rants on how horrible of a site it is. I also am frustrated with the fact that during these rants generally there are no facts, studies or examples given to why they believe wp is untrustworthy only that anyone can change it so that means it is bad. Are there bad articles in wikipedia? Yes I dont think anyone would disagree with that. Are the bad articles the ones you will be looking at? I think thats the more important question. The more popular a topic is the edits it receives and the more trustworthy the information is. That is ofcourse ignoring the fact that now many big wikipedia articles cite sources. Another baseless concern is that at the time you are looking at the article some random false fact will have been inserted. Wp has this little feature called "history" I always check the last couple changes to a article before citing it in a paper. If something seems fishy I will cite a earlier version of the same article.
Anyways I guess in summary people are way too afraid of the wiki model.
Dooom
Reference books and articles (in my industry at least) are peer-reviewed, if you are getting them from the major outlets. You know they are credible, or at least validated by several other PhD's in the field.
Experts by definition know a lot more about a topic. Especially where articles omit sources, experts aren't stymied, because the stuff that's missing is trivial to them.
They can judge corectness of topics they already know a lot about more easily than a non-expert could. Which might explain why most students underestimate their ability to score well on tests, where their professors don't worry so much about 2/3rds of the class not passing.
Also, people in general seem to be pretty dense. Evolution, climate change, 9/11 as a reason for invading Iraq, gay marriage - even if you don't agree with the accepted (biological/ climatological/ politicological/ sociological) viewpoint on such issues, popular "debate" about these matters can hardly be called rational. People these days seem to distrust the scientific method itself, let alone experts, for coming up with answers they don't like (yes/partly our bad/red herring/no harm).
Perhaps non-expert's opinion of wikipedia articles would improve if each page was headed "and thus spoke nostradamus:"
I tend to take most things I read on Wikipedia that I'm not an expert on with a grain of salt, simply because I keep finding errors in articles that I am.
The expert says "there are some good ideas behind this really shitty writing", and the non-expert says "wow, this is some really shitty writing." So the expert comes away with a higher opinion.
From the wikipedia article on experts: "The opposite of an expert is generally known as a layperson." And defines layperson as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layperson (until someone corrects it). Which seems to imply that only clergy are experts.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
One of the things that one learns while doing his/her PhD is that he/she is NOT an expert in ANY field. It is only a matter of time for some big-headed know-it-all grad student to get crushed in a conference by a more experienced, better informed researcher. Being a grad-student and having research as your job makes you more open to new ideas and other people's opinions.
When you daily come accross many different approaches that try to solve the same problem, you are bound to learn that you must examine them all first before you decide. Otherwise you might miss a good idea that may eventually cost you your PhD. Sure you will have a favourite in the end, but that will be only after giving way to every possible option.
So a grad-student reading a Wikipedia article with an "alternative" (i.e. mistaken) point, would say "Hmm.. why not?", while a non-grad-student could say "WTF is this?" Of course, this would be the case only when the point is more close to being debatable and not obviously wrong.
I got into this discussion with some people on another forum the other day. There's a lot of people who regard it as little more than a repository of useless information, but it seems to me that that's more a factor of what sort of information they're looking for. There's a lot of things one there that I personally find pretty trivial, but who cares? It's not like having an exhaustive list of all the Pokemon characters is bothering anyone.
Personally, I find it to be a very useful resource for information on technical topics outside of my field of specialization. I do lots of modeling and conceptualization for games, so it's reeeeally nice to have an easy resource to explain the basics of say 19th century steel production or aircraft engines from the 30s. It's also really cool just to be able to read about a historical event and click a related topic to trace a thread through time. It's not a complete resource, but what is?
Not enough coffee.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Um, I don't think being a Biology Ph.D. candidate makes one an expert at astronomy. If you try to pull that stunt in court as an expert witness, the judge won't like it.
They're not saying that, and that's not the "stunt" they "[tried] to pull". They're saying that the biology Ph.D candidate is an expert in biology, and he, as an expert in biology, rated biology articles rather high as far as accuracy goes. He then rated astronomy articles (a field in which he isn't an expert) lower. Now, move on to the guy who is a Ph.D candidate in astronomy, and you end up with opposite results (biology articles rated lower than astronomy articles). They weren't testing grad students against non-grad students, they were testing grad-students of different disciplines against each other.
my pet machine
If you're not an expert, you should be skeptical about your sources. In the case of Wikipedia, you should find an actual expert you can trust, have them read the entry, and tell you their expert opinion of its reliability.
Also, note that these experts aren't necessarily saying that Wikipedia is 100% accurate or reliable. The real issue might be that where a non-expert might mistakenly disregard a large amount accurate information from Wikipedia, an expert might understand that while the majority of the information was accurate, a few important inaccuracies were also present.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
"Caution--and further research--needs to be used before citing anything learned from Wikipedia as a fact."
Yes, well, caution--and further research--needs to be used before citing anything learned from the Encyclopaedia Britannica... or the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics... or the World Almanac as a fact.
All of these are secondary sources. All of them are highly useful and are used as actionable sources of information every day, but none of them would be an acceptable citation in a research paper.
Furthermore, Wikipedia has always had policies that all information in Wikipedia must be derived from a published "reliable source" and that the source should be cited. Although these policies have mostly been honored in the breach, in the past year or so there has been an increasing tendency to cite sources explicitly. This is virtually a requirement for an article to become a home-page "featured article," for example. In some cases it is easier to trace the source of a fact in a Wikipedia article than in a traditional encyclopedia.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
For the endocrinology classes I teach at the med school here, the most popular reference for both the students taking the class and the guest lecturers seems to be Wikipedia...I've even regularly seen physicians use the Wikipedia article as a refresher on a subject.
1. You have a small inkling of the subject, and you are using the Wikipedia article to enhance your understanding.
2. You verify all statements in the Wikipedia article by reading all the primary source references. If the article has no references, discard it as a claptrap of lies.
#1 will enable you to spot the obvious (possibly deliberate) inaccuracies. #2 is to ensure the validity of the information. The article should be considered a secondary source, but its references (which every article should have) should be considered the primary source.
Increasingly people don't trust things that they aren't very familiar with because of the sort of political, under-handed, deceptive crap that has crept into so many areas of knowledge from the political world. Most people I know don't trust the mainstream media anymore and that ranges from people who are nearly communist in their left leanings to people who are practically John Birchers. Dispassioned, reasoned discussions are rare these days.
Think it's not the problem with even science? Why do so many people attack Bjorn Lomborg with a fanatical ferocity for daring to raise scientific questions about how, why and if global warming is happening? Why can't people who claim to operate on civilized values like reason sit down and have a friendly chat. "Interesting, Bjorn, let's look at your facts; Hmmm, interesting, but I don't think you considered the following (X, Y, Z); Touche, but I would like to present this, this and that to prove that global warming is not human-caused." Instead it's more like, "YOU MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLE WHO ARE YOU TO QUESTION ANY ASPECT OF GLOBAL WARMING?!"
The truth is that there are so many people who are significantly maleducated today that it's no wonder why people are screwed up. I mean, it was a real eye opener for me, when I started reading up on my own time, about some of the cultural practices of the ancient world. Most of the people who look horrified at religion today have never even heard of such practices as Pater Familias nor know that their celtic ancestors (if that applies to them) often practiced human sacrifice. I honestly think that based on some of the conversations I have had since I started doing these things on my own, that the maleducation of the American public today is worse than the lack of education that existed 200 years ago. There is nothing worse than having a horrendously bad education--it'd be better to simply be a void that can be filled by actual knowledge.
Now, the reason that I brought up the global warming issue was not to beat a popular pinata, but to illustrate the fact that to many "laymen," the "experts" often come off as narrow-minded fanatics. That doesn't inspire confidence in the average person. What does inspire confidence is a calm ability to articulate on his or her level with facts that back it up. Problem is, too many people have an agenda and too many people are too caught up in it to be convincing to the majority who won't immediately accept what they say at face value as though it were penned by the hand of God.
Many people complain about the lack of authority and accuracy in Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is a community project, that a community puts together. If Wikipedia is at fault it is because the community in general has allowed it to be that way.
People can only know about faults in Wikipedia if they saw them for themselves (otherwise it's hearsay, and the complaints are therefore without merit). By looking up Wikipedia, people are acting as a part of the community, most likely with the intent of deriving benefit. By finding problems and not addressing them, they tried to take from the community and not give anything back.
If the people complaining know of specific inaccuracies, then why have they not fixed them? Are they not a part of society or something?
IME, Wikipedia is often better on technical subjects than on subjects of general interest, because the people who are motivated to actual read/edit the articles tend to have some knowledge of the field, know how to do research, and not be particularly interested in goofing around with it.
My experience with tradition media is that almost always when there is an article on something that I actually know a great deal about, they get many facts/details wrong and those stick out to me. Even if the overall story is basically OK, it is always troubling when there are significant numbers of obviously wrong things. In general, of course, this erodes my confidence in coverage of things outside my areas of expertise because there is no reason to think that reporters make mistakes only when they are writing about something I know well. So this study could be coming from noticing the same effect- even if the gist of the article is OK, experts notice problems and then become suspect overall.
There are regular stories on Wikipedia on Slashdot, and occasional stories on other wikis. Shouldn't there be either a Wikipedia icon or a Wiki icon to distinguish these stories? The Wikipedia "multilingual globe being built" is copyright (one of the very few things in Wikipedia which is) so you can't use that, but the Wikipedia "W" is fairly well known. Looking through Wikimedia Commons, this puzzle piece looked good to me. I don't know if the GFDL licence would be a problem for Slashdot.
The MediaWiki sunflower would only be suitable as an icon for Wikis powered by that piece of software. I don't have an idea for an icon to represent all wikis.
55 articles is not a statistically significant sample size. One article, even two articles, each is not enough to develop a valid opinion.
A better way would be to have the 55 people read 5 articles on subjects they are familiar with and 5 articles on subjects they are unfamiliar with, then have the people rate the subjective veracity of the articles, then have them look up the same 10 subjects in 2 different conventional sources, and finaly have them re-rate the wikipedia articles for veracity.
This article is effectively useless as it mearly give the opinions of 55 people and nothing more.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
It appears that Goodwin's law is not invoked for the first comment in a discussion. This come logically from the requirement that Goodwin's law apply to a discussion that involves the Nazi/Hitler example as a means to refute another comment.
Being the first comment, an off-by-one exception occurs, resulting in an aborted termination of the thread.
science is a religion
There's no guarantee that an article, at any moment in time, even approaches accuracy. If an expert in a field has reviewed some piece of information within it, perhaps a mechanism allowing him to digitally sign that piece of information would allow the article to gain some credibility.
In theory, citations should achieve the same goal, but it's clear that people don't want to research Wikipedia articles that have already been written. They want to use them as research. Do we want to work to try to change people's habits and perceptions, or change the system to work with people's habits and perceptions?
True scientists are "experts" because they use logic to rate one's findings and conclusions. The "problem" with Wikipedia isn't a lack of often very good, "expert" knowledge. Rather, it's the lack of editorial value that limits its credibility. Experts familiar with a given area already have credible sources to conjur whenever they evaluate Wikipedia entries. I "believe" the entry on the MPEG standard because I'm very familiar with that topic. But were Wikipedia to be my first exposure to the topic, I'd be skeptical simply because I cannot vouch for its "truthiness" (the same goes for elephants). This is the same old "what's wrong with Wikipedia" thing.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I've heard complaints about Wikipedia from many people who are eminently unqualified to make such assertions.
Conversely, the experts in the area seem to like Wikipedia, much as the above story suggests. Along these lines, I was interested to hear a podcast from Australia's Science Show talking about this very issue (the podcast is no longer up, but there is a transcript).
Indeed, circumspect assessments of such one-track religious issues to so many Slashdotters as Global Warming is baiting flamage.
Experts understand the subtle nuances of a subject and therefore qualify their position with lots of 'if' or 'buts'. An informed observer appreciates these nuances. An uninformed observer does not, it appears less precise and less clear.
The less competent see fewer nuances and therefore make more straight forward assertions, they qualify their position less, therefore it looks clearer to an uninformed observer.
May I be so bold as to suggest that the term "expert" is rather subjective?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr. _Wikipedia_biography_controversy
back when the wiki wasn't as well known, blatantly false and defamatory information stayed on the 'neutral' site for months.
of course, these days, evin minor gramatical edits are scrutinized for Neutral Point of View....
We all have a bias regarding Wikipedia, one way or the other. The submitter is obviously pro-Wikipedia.
- "Generally credible" is certainly better than "not credible", but note that "Very credible" was an option and Wikipedia didn't hit that mark. So people that say "Use Wikipedia as a starting point, but not as an authoritative source" are probably the ones who should draw the most self-validation from this study IMHO.
- 13% of the articles contain errors - and that was excluding contested content and stubs! This is NOT good.
- Don't underestimate the significance of the study's narrow scope. With a project like Wikipedia, one or two dedicated individuals can raise (or lower!) the quality of coverage in a particular field.
#DeleteChrome
Although Wikipedia has always had a hard core empiricist/scientistic bias of the kind that would make Richard Dawkins proud, its' insistence on practically enforcing said bias is only a relatively recent occurrence.
The site's operators have however always suffered from a persistent, gnawing insecurity about credibility...but the question that has never been definitively answered is which particular group they so desperately need credibility with. I suspect said group is, as I said, pseudoscientific atheistic fundamentalists like Dawkins.
My specialty is evolutionary biology and molecular systematics. I have been amazed at the breadth of coverage in Wikipedia on obscure and general topics in my field. There isn't necessarily enough detail there to do more than get oriented, but what there is, is generally good enough to use it as a first-order reference. Sure, there are minor mistakes. When I looked up Ilex vomitoria, they didn't have the authority on the name exactly right. (So I fixed it.)
Don't forget that Wikipedia has been around for all of a few years, and already has entries for every topic under the sun, and most of those entries are informative. That is an absolutely mindboggling achievement. Nothing like it has ever been accomplished in encyclopedic work before. Sure, there are problems, especially in the growing problem of opinionated vandalism. But the good aspects of Wikipedia are an unleashing of human knowledge and energy on the order of the voyages of exploration or the invention of computers. We'll be the biggest fools in human history if we can't figure out how to foster that while suppressing the jerks.
That said, the weakest link in Wikipedia are entries on popular topics rather than specialist ones. The study may have been skewed, because by asking experts, the articles involved are likely to be more specialized. As an example of a popular morass, the entry on Jerusalem suffers from more heat than light. People can't even agree on the name, and there's no right answer. We're going to have to come up with methods of dealing with information that really is just a matter of opinion. Is the solution to have a perfectly objective panel of experts write the entry? That gets into deep philosophical issues of what, exactly, is objectivity. Is the solution to post entries from the three or four major branches of opinion and leave it up to the reader to get through them all? Both? Neither? Something else entirely?
And now, great, I get modded flamebait myself.
It's flamebait, because it's an intentional digression of the discussion off topic. GW has nothing to do with wikipedia, and there is no reason to pick that specific example in this widely divergent case except to excite controversy. The addition of a personal opinion in the statement as an absolute fact without explanation is just asking for a flame war.
There's nothing in GGP that clears it from being a deliberate attempt at disruption, and every indication that it is one.
Graduate students are hardly experts. If they had 55 actual researchers, professors, and authors evaluate those articles then I would say that they actually got some results worth discussing.
His point was most people are spoonfed what to believe by the media.
His thread was not flamy or an attack in any particular way I could tell. It was a statement followed by a supporting example. And someone who is "global warming's number one fan" probably modded him down to suppress his supporting example- not his comment.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"Some information in this article or section has not been verified and may not be reliable.
Please check for any inaccuracies, and modify and cite sources as needed."
Apparently there's no experts on experts, so no one could properly verify the expert opinions of experts.
....in wikipedia?
Oh wait did I say that??
If an article become controversal then it become alot less accurate.
If and article isn't hearsay then it become deletable (a matter of wikipedia policy).
If an article is generic and more or less common knowledge, then it is likely to be more accurate.
But there is one remaining fact:
Wikipedia holds no liability. so it really is like any profession, there are idiots in the bunch.
USE WIKIPEDIA AT YOUR OWN RISK, as there is no life guard.
How I know this from personal experience where an article was posted about myself (by another whom I was unaware of)in error and existed for over a year before I noticed and tried to correct it. The correction resulted in the article being removed as well as an article correcting and validating an entry existance in wikipedia on myself.
The sum result is libel. But do I have any recourse? No, because wikipedia is not an "official resource"
http://www.google.com/search?q=fuck+off&start=0&ie =utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:e n-US:official
Notice wikipedia entry.
I guess the guy marking this didn't realize we're laughing at him, not with him.
Expert A: The world is FLAT!
Expert B: The world is spherical, but more distorted due to the gravitational forces of surrounding objects, which I can explain right here...
Expert A: No, dude, the world is FLAT!!
Experts huddle: Let's form a consensus.
Wikipedia Consensus Emerges: "OK, let's agree the world is flatt-ish, and round-ish, and all shapes in between!"
Dude, I feel sorry for you if you can't figure out what shape your planet is... Get a clue
Read the literature (dynamic decision-making, experts versus novices, the role of experience in expertise): graduate students are often not expert in their fields. That's part of the reason they're apprenticing - to gain experience and become expert!
No, I didn't bother reading the article; title didn't pass the sniff test.
expert->master->genius
So yeah, grad student is at the expert level. Article knows what it's talking about. You do not.
I have a problem with the methodology of using graduate students and research assistants as "experts". A graduate student is someone who is in the process of becoming an expert, but speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time around graduate students in the humanities and behavioral sciences, i would not classify the vast majority of them as experts in their chosen field of study. They're usually chock full of opinions, but woefully short on actual expertise.
My dog could get into grad schoo, but that doesn't make him an expert...except on the internet.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Think about medicine for a second. Would you rather have 500 enthusiastic amatuers doing surgery, each correcting something that the other thought was wrong, or would you rather go to a brain surgeon, who has studied medicine for years? The doctor has a much better chance of getting it right than amatuers.
Secondly, with experts, I can usually manage to figure out who they are and where they came from. Even using Wpedia's History, most users are 1337ster_275, or worse yet, an IP address. Well, that's not reassuring at all. Knowing that the author or contibuter was Thomas Gadfly, pH.D. from the University of Montana would mean something. Not the least of which is that he actually makes a living working in that field. He's studied the subject, not skimmed a "Physics of Star Trek" book and declared himself an expert. Who is 1337ster_275? Did he finish high school?
And with all due respect, how do you know enough to know if the Wpedia article is "fishy"? All that the History says is "it changed", so was it corrected, or was it reverted back to a wrong but popular version? It will always come down to trust, and since there's no way to check back on the various writers, it comes down to blind faith in the power of the consensus.
I could see Wpedia as a way to look for search terms on the way to getting the facts and legitamate sources. I could see using Wpedia in an internet debate where nothing was really at stake. Just not in research papers and the like where it's imperative that your facts are accurate.
Everyone who disagrees with me IS a moron.
/, so many times it's beyond dispute.
Proven it here on
Expect to prove it again within minutes.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I believe you are referring to the scientific method. However, if I walk into any science class, whether it is grade school science or a college course, I guarantee that you will find more than just the method being taught. They include other things such as commonly found results, observations, and theories that may or may not have been proven.
"science is a methodology based on the faith that the real world exists"
Interesting statement-why use the word faith? From dictionary.com:
faith, n.
1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. See Synonyms at belief. See Synonyms at trust.
3. Loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one's supporters.
4. often Faith Christianity. The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will.
5. The body of dogma of a religion: the Muslim faith.
6. A set of principles or beliefs.
Now, definition for religion (also from dictionary.com):
religion -noun
1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.
3. the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.
4. the life or state of a monk, nun, etc.: to enter religion.
5. the practice of religious beliefs; ritual observance of faith.
6. something one believes in and follows devotedly; a point or matter of ethics or conscience: to make a religion of fighting prejudice.
7. religions, Archaic. religious rites.
8. Archaic. strict faithfulness; devotion: a religion to one's vow.
What "proof" do you have that the world actually exists as you perceive it? How do you know everything you've been told in science is actually true? History is full of many hoaxes that have hoodwinked a great number of people (peltdown man, anyone?) and theories that are held true for long periods of time before being discarded. Some are even discarded by their authors, then picked up again by others (Einstein's theories).
"Science is a religion" refers to an unshakable belief some people often show that only things which can be proven actually exist. It is this attitude that "proved" human flight was impossible and that rockets couldn't fly in a vacuum. What they forget is that once something has been done, it has actually been done, even if it seems to be unreproducible.
Faith that the real world exists is still faith. You may counter that you can actually experience the real world. However, many people with a faith in God say they have had experiences that are just as real.
The "hard" sciences are notorious for their lack of hard, reproducible theories about the human mind or even life. Understanding which portions of the brain are involved with various activities is not the same thing as being able to understand exactly what makes it work. A thorough understanding of a process or mechanism would allow one to reproduce it, given proper materials. But how to explain things like premonitions, which has demonstrably altered people's behavior in a manner that shows the premonition was tied to a real event?
Mainstream science seems to pick and choose subjects that are safe to explore and things that are not. If you ask around, I'm sure you can find examples of people reacting to "a feeling" or a dream that ended up being tied to a real-world phenonmenon (e.g. my wife lifted up t
science is a religion