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The "Scientific Impotence" Excuse
chichilalescu writes "I've had the feeling for a long time that people refuse to listen to scientists. The following is from an article on Ars Technica: 'It's hardly a secret that large segments of the population choose not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their predefined beliefs: economic, political, religious, or otherwise. But many studies have indicated that these same people aren't happy with viewing themselves as anti-science, which can create a state of cognitive dissonance. That has left psychologists pondering the methods that these people use to rationalize the conflict. A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology [abstract here] takes a look at one of these methods, which the authors term "scientific impotence" — the decision that science can't actually address the issue at hand properly.' The study found that 'regardless of whether the information presented confirmed or contradicted [the subjects'] existing beliefs, all of them came away from the reading with their beliefs strengthened."
... aren't intelligent enough to assess the quality of their own thinking. In fact most people aren't even able to think straight most of the time. The human mind is not built for the kind of obtuse rationality that scientists often communicate in.
Scientists really have to do a better job at communicating clearly with less jargon, I think part of the problem is not being able to demonstrate the effects in a tangible way that is undenibale. I think the use of metaphors and communicating complex things in terms of everyday things that people can understand would go a long ways to help people understanding the contradictions.
You really have to catch people in contradictions in a public venue with an argument that is simple to understand and you'd look like an idiot for not accepting.
Half of the population are dumber than the other half!
However I am not sure for which half the original article was intended for.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That the study was done entirely on slashdot posts.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
Most of the people I know who fall under this description dislike psychologists the most of all scientists and/or academics. I doubt that this will help change anything; it'll probably just make it worse.
This article is clearly wrong, and my beliefs have been strengthened.
I think it's more basic than that. Any ideology followed closely and long enough leads to unthinking behavior and beliefs. Ideology requires a lack of thought almost by definition. Whether that is unthinkingly following a religion, an economic system, a political party, or nationalistic rhetoric doesn't really matter, what matters is the fact that people turn off their brains and allow someone or something else make decisions for them. Once turned off a brain is a very difficult thing to get turned back on again.
This supports my larger theory of "People are idiots". Look, lemme explain this one in great detail for you: We live in a culture that has become so self-absorbed, we are unable to consider the idea that we may actually be wrong. We are unwilling to consider that our own belief may be mistaken. And at the current rate we're going, that's not going to change any time soon.
Activists on both sides of an issue do the same thing. Each side chooses the evidence that supports their predetermined belief.
The other side of "scientific impotence" is "appeal to authority".
Once issues become politicalized it becomes very difficult to make a scientific judgement one way or another because of all the competing agendas and misinformation on both sides.
Part of the problem is that science is a moving target. Look at dietary and nutritional science. If you're a baby boomer, you've heard scientists say umpteen different things over the last 40 years. People don't mind some change, but they don't like their belief systems upturned regularly by a system that is founded on constant change, but says it speaks "the truth". The truth is very slippery. Look at Fred Hoyle. The guy just couldn't come to grips with the Big Bang. And yet, if you want to get technical about it, what we currently think is "the truth" about the origin of the universe is a collection of models that agree with the data to some extent. Some of these models are guaranteed to be overturned.
Is it any wonder that people are resistant to the pressure to change?
-l
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...that challenging someone who has cognitive dissonance strengthens their will. We're stubborn people, our heads are full of tangled webs of experiences from childhood to the present that forges what we want to believe and what we'll accept and how we'll view it. Most people have their minds made up on a subject well before they see any actual data. It all explains why so many really stupid things happen.
I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: non-thinking. Non-thinking makes a virtue out of not thinking [tautological/reflexive]. And if you accept rational science then you're doing something morally wrong.
There, fixed that for you. People don't need religion to make them stupid. They're perfectly capable of being stupid all by themselves. Blaming religion is just taking the easy way out.
Even people who don't describe themselves as being religious, or who are very conspicuously not part of any organized religion are like this. I think this is a general human trait that religion hijacks for its own purposes.
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Don't paint all religions with the same brush. I consider myself to be quite religious, but I am not a slave to blind faith. My religion says that the universe was created when a giant cow licked a huge block of salt... while that may be what my religion says, I have zero doubt in my mind that it did not happen that way.
People who fail to examine their religion in the context of which it was written are doomed to falling into the traps of blind faith. Those who can look at their religion for what it is, can rectify it with modern knowledge, and can take into account the effects of history (revisions, political influences, lost texts etc) are able to differentiate religion and faith and have no trouble at all accepting scientific knowledge.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
I think you'll find that most of the mistrust people harbour about scientists, and science in general, comes from the fact that the media tends to 'definitively' interpret the results of non-definitive studies. Or over-report studies that, when peer-reviewed, fall apart like a... well, like a poorly-built motorcycle.
But never underestimate the power of hucksters operating under the guise of 'chiropractor', 'naturopath', or 'one who speaks for the man/men in the sky'. They tell you with a straight face that these people who have nothing to gain by lying, and who have dedicated their lives to understanding how things work through empirical research, and who aren't trying to take your money, are not to be trusted. The last few decades have given rise to a real resurgence of anecdotal 'fact' over the scientific method, and it's kind of scary.
I'm not sure which is more entertaining, the fact that you're confusing cause and effect, or the fact that your statement directly supports the hypothesis presented by this study.
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Amen brother!
But seriously. You're absolutely right. I won't even make any arguments here I will simply refer everyone to Richard Dawkins wonderful book on the subject "The God Delusion". I especially like his Darwinian explanation of why religion is so successful within our species. The next step in human evolution is realizing that there is no god and being OK with that. Really, we don't need him/her.
Yeah, "most people" are too dumb to heed scientific finding unlike you obviously. Look at how science is reported, particularly medicine/health stories, and you're probably better of ignoring them.
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I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: religion.
A psychology degree may have helped you realize that non-religious people ignore science as well.
I completely understand why many people aren't as quick to believe everything scientists say. Simply because scientific -fact- seems to change every few years. A few years ago scientists said there were 9 planets. Now there's 8. First there was no water on the moon, now there is. As far as science is concerned, theres no problem with updating facts and theories as new information is obtained. But most people don't work like that. As far as they're concerned, you're the same as the guy who keeps changing his story every time you ask a question.
The problem is that scientists will call you ignorant or stupid if you stop believing every word they say just because you know there's a good chance of them saying something different in a short while.
Religion on the other hand, rarely changes its story.
D
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Even a murderer sees himself as a good person. Everyone is the hero of his own story (in his own mind). So why would it surprise you when a bigot doesn't see himself as a bigot, or when an anti-intellectual doesn't see himself as an anti-intellectual, or when a sexist doesn't see himself as a sexist for using "himself" and "his" exclusively in his writing?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Jesus christ what a great new! :P
I would narrow your statement a little to the problem being *faith*; that is, religion(s) based on belief in some core concept, often illogical, without proof. The general concept of "Religion" includes philosophical attitudes and historical groupings, some of which are perfectly happy to focus on logical (or at least rational) discussion of their core texts and history.
I wish I had said that instead of what I did say. *laugh*
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You're wrong. God told me so.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...choose not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their predefined beliefs...
In other words, people are prejudiced, whether one's bias is a matter of religion or a firm belief in the aether doesn't really matter. Certainly there are those that oppose anything a person in a lab coat (or a tweed jacket) might say but this is well known behaviour. If the purpose of the paper was just to give a name to this phenomena then personally I'd rather they came up with something more descriptive rather than pandering to the need for a snappy headline.
I don't see what this has to do with science specifically: I'd have just as much luck convincing a creationist that Buddha put the bones there as I would getting them to accept evolution through natural selection. If someone is set in their ways you'll be hard pressed to convince them no matter how you came to whatever it is you're arguing.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
... more like an entitlement mindset.
Religion, and the idea of God in general, springs from the basic notion that the universe owes you something. Eternal life, accountability, a reason to live, the "answers."
Science, on the other hand, starts from the premise that whatever secrets Mother Nature holds will have to be earned through hard work. There are no promises of results and no guarantees that understanding will ever be reached.
So is it any wonder that so many people take the easy way out and choose faith instead?
Exzachary. Science is the pursuit of knowledge, not its permanent acquisition. Belief presents itself as acquisition with no need to go any further.
-l
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The idea that science can answer questions about reality is itself a religion. For example, you cannot see atoms and you cannot see the big bang, evolution or even global warming and yet billions of people mindlessly believe these ythings without question simply on the authority of the left wing "science" touting powerful and wealthy elite.
...and boy, am I glad the bottom 99% is making the important decisions.
This is actually not new (although the name is new to me at least). Back in the 90s they did studies on various hot button political issues like the death penalty. They gave the same sheet of facts to death penalty supporters and opponents and told them to read them. When they came out, both sides claimed their views had been strengthened.
There was a study done some years ago where different groups were given tests to determine bias towards a given or accepted premise. Scientists where shown to be just as and in some cases more likely to fail a given puzzle due to reluctance to let go of a given premise and try another one. So we should be careful to equate "scientist" with "right." Facts are facts as we know them. That isn't to say they should be ignored either but skepticism is just as healthy where science is concerned as it is where religion, philosophy, politics, or anything else is. In fact, it's probably more important as science is the pursuit of the knowledge of what we see, hear, and smell.
How many times have we heared that "clinical trials have proved that doing ... will increase cancer risk" only to have an oposite study published next week. Contrary to popular belief science doesn't always agrea with itself, so why fault people for not believing it at face value.
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I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: religion.
I think religion is a factor, but there's something else going on because while most *Americans* identify with Christianity, actual Bible Thumpers and indeed regular church goers are a minority.
First, distrust of science is primarily in the softer sciences like psychology, environmental sciences, and such; no one really questions the atom smashers, the "high-tech" scientists. I think that many people believe that these "soft scientists" are not actually objective, and let "wishy-washy" environmentalism and other perceived leftyism influence their findings; that they set out with an subjective objective and mold their science to fit their personal views.
Clearly, in many cases, this is true, and it has tainted all "soft science".
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
No offense: but this is complete bullshit.
In order for one to appreciate the full beauty and realize the power of the Scientific Method, and its applications: one has to have *faith* in his/her own observations. I know people who will adamantly argue that everything we see isn't *actually* real, and is merely illusion and thus the tools of Science breaks down completely for these folks. Rationality is predicated on one's ability to make assumptions (which, when you think about it, are actually "leaps of faith" in disguise).
Some people choose to make these assumptions based on Religions others go by "gut feel", and others use some combination of the two. Either way, as far as *Science* is concerned: there is no difference.
For me, without being able to replicate experimental results personally, perform higher math easily, or penetrate the often obtuse language of scientific publications means that while I can consider a hypothesis or theory, I'm basically doing what those who follow the teachings of a religion are doing...interpreting someone else's work by using my common experience.
The fact that I believe science is largely accurate and a better way to describe our surroundings than religion is as much faith as someone who believes in their religion. Scientific Impotence is another way of saying "I'd like to recognize that alternate faith, but I still think mine is more valid."
It's tribalism. Fundamentalist Islam? Tribalism. Fundamentalist Christianity? Tribalism. Hassidic Judaism? Tribalism. Tribalism tells you that you mustn't rock the boat but defer to the authority of the elders. Tribalism tells you the other side is bad because they are from the other side of the valley/from the other side of the lake/Communists/Socialists/Fascists/Catholics/Protestants/Different from us. Religion, like nationalism, or political party is usually just a big tribe.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The problem is with everybody, including "scientists" themselves, as Richard Feynman pointed out,
... I never pay any attention to anything by "experts." I calculate everything myself... I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions.
And he elaborates more in his lecture (and an adapted chapter in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman):
What if that ideology is rationalism?
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Call me a heretic if you want, but...
Given two groups - one which changes its beliefs when confronted with contradictory evidence, and another which simply ignores the evidence - I'll put my faith in the first group.
Scientists are people as well - "choose not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their predefined beliefs". They can have the same problem, and I would bet it happens a lot once careers, huge grants and academic prestige and huge egos get into play. A white lab coat does not make you a super-people, a god, infallible, incapable of being wrong, or corrupt, or bribe-able, or blackmail-able, or otherwise influenced adversely.
The "scientific community" has been seriously wrong down through the ages on any number of subjects, the "consensus", the predetermined "beliefs" lead to rote conformity, a herd mentality, and the inability to admit facts and data that where staring them in the face.
why people don't believe demonstrable facts, and instead concentrate on how we can exploit that. The churches figured this all out centuries ago, surely the scientific community can too.
Nullius in verba
Then you'll rationalize irrational behavior, including your own, and leave it at that.
Isn't it a Tad ironic that a non-science which engages in that sort of confirmation bias "research" is responsible for an article telling us why people do that?
OTOH science isn't perfect due to the lack of granularity in studies not everything can be accounted for and as such it isn't always the best answer. The gambler's fallacy springs to my mind. Or really the unfounded assumption that factors outside the game have negligible impact and each possibility is equally likely. Neither of which are ever justified outside of theoretical scenarios.
Which is why every so called 'fact' should be accompanied with a degree of probability, even if it's very rough. In my view, probabilities are underused massively in just about every area, just because publishers don't think the 'stupid public' could understand them. It's really sad.
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“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” - Buddha
... seems to me religion isn't the real cause.
To me this piece is rather interesting (and the commentary) because it offers a glimpse into two very distinct mindsets: the view that we are all programmable machines and if only we get the "right" information in and all the "wrong" information out then everything will be fine, and the view that somehow, someway we come preprogrammed and thus have a tendency to self-select data that supports our personal beliefs.
Why do we persist in continuing to believe that somehow we'll cure the problem of religious fundamentalism if only we pound enough data through everyone's skull? Because there is the pervasive belief that we're just programmable machines. Well if that's so, then why in this day and age do we STILL have people who believe in Creationism? Or ID? Or climate change being false? Wouldn't an overload of correct information purge those beliefs away?
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: stupid people
Don't blame religion for the negative impacts that stupid people have upon society.
Even then, of course.
Er, I'm pretty sure religion is an effect rather than a cause here. If you manage to drive someone away from a religion without doing anything about the not-thinking, they'll just end up at some other religion or pseudo-religion.
An important detail is missing here: Scientists don't say those things! The media does. Scientists say "Based on our recent observations/experiments, there may be a correlation with this reading and proof of x." The media follows with "Science proves x beyond a doubt! Panic!"
It is any ideology that one refuses to be critical of, regardless of existing information that might prove their view to be false; Avowed Communists, Die Hard Free-Market Anarcho-Capitalists, Partisan Democrats and Republicans, the Apple fanboi, fans of the television show Lost, and you!
Seriously, everyone thinks they are a person of reason and logic without seeing their own personal bias.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
You seem to assume that "science" gives mankind an escape from presuppositions. But that's easily demonstrated not to be true. There are no such thing as "brute facts", whose Truth somehow transcends interpretation. There are only interpreted facts.
Everyone has faith. Even a non-religious person presupposes certain things. For instance:
etc. Such things are necessary in order to even begin thinking. Like the religious person who grounds their beliefs on the scientifically-unprovable faith in a deity, the non-religious scientist grounds his beliefs on his own scientifically-unprovable presuppositions.
Everyone does it. Your argument can't be "I have science while you have only faith." It has to be "My unprovable presuppositions are more valid than your unprovable presuppositions for the following reasons..."
Religion will always offer an answer that science must admit it does not know. Science, by not knowing, is beautiful to me. It is the search. The problem is when people don't have the simplistic car analogy or capacity/education to understand something, they'd rather compartmentalize their unknown to a rational, safe place. This is SOP for people because it is at the center of their coping mechanisms. At one time, it was a man-god with a flaming chariot crossing the sky of a flat earth. As Pumba reckoned, it's a nuclear fusion fireball... but he was an odd duck. Most people don't want to care because they have no control over it. If the Sun goes off with a harsh explosion, we all have 8 minutes. Do we sit and worry about the huge fusion nuke bomb going off all the time, or do we go get a tan? A tan is more rational. But once you decide the Sun is a good thing, you don't think about it all the time. 2000 years ago, it was better to let Apollo do his daily deal, and not worry about it. Not much has changed; just the rationalizations made by the people spewing the garbage to maintain ever more social control. The more things get complex, the more this phenomenon will permeate. We're peaking as a species with what we understand as individuals. We are too specialized. So instead of explaining the basics of new things, we do car analogies and football fields, and failing that, we say to the rest that it's God's Will, and Allah's Might. And 7,000,000,000 idiots all get along to a lesser degree.
"[T]ake the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged." - Terry Pratchett, Death, The Hogfather
There is nothing stupid about believing in something larger than yourself. As Pratchett says, ideals like justice and mercy can not be detected scientifically, but even the staunchest atheist may believe in such things. It is not religion per se that is the problem. The problem is holding on to anachronistic ideologies because they are more comfortable than the truth. But even the non-religious have been known to do that from time to time.
Proverbs 21:19
Well, that is in part due to the fact that descriptive, phenomenological science is not differentiated from explanatory, theory-building science. Whether we categorize planets one way or the other has no impact on the theory how they move.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
As for myself, it's not that I believe that science cannot address the issue (though sometimes I do believe that is the case), but that I don't trust the experimentation method or the impetus behind the experiment. Far too often the "science" in question has an agenda behind it - political, business, social or whatever.
For example, one can find scientific studies which indicate that high fructose corn syrup is unhealthy. There are also studies which will indicate that there is nothing at all wrong with high fructose corn syrup. Both studies (supposedly) use scientific methods to arrive at their conclusions. Therefore, ultimately, a person is left to his own beliefs to decide which study (if any) is correct.
Your examples are applications of science, not science itself. Any application of science should be seen in context. "Real" science has no political agenda. At least peer review is there to shoot it down.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Seriously, who cares? What is with this obsession with current attitudes towards science? If your science is sound then who cares? I have read at least 3 articles in the past month in the same spirit and I'm finding it hard to agree. Science shouldn't care what the world thinks IMHO. Let people worry about how to treat the message, just be the messenger.
If you think I'm going to argue with someone over their beliefs and refute them with science, then you must think I'm a damn fool. That whole you can lead a horse to water thing. Idiocy isn't a new phenomenon and there is no danger to science in general.
The overwhelming majority of people are inclined to make stuff up and pretend its true. And there's no way to demonstrate to most people that scientists as a group are not like this also. Some people trust scientists as a matter of faith. A very few become subject matter experts and verify for themselves that the science is accurate. Many people fall somewhere in between. For the rest, skepticism is a fairly rational outlook, given the information they have.
For people to rationally trust scientists, they themselves would have to be honest. And that would be a fairly radical change.
The planets thing is nomenclature. The rest of it is not down to science, it's down to the reporting of science. If journalists didn't dumb it down so much, and reported with less hyperbole, people would leap to fewer erroneous conclusions.
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You seem to misunderstand science.
First off, lets talk about pluto. There are no new "facts" here, just a standardization of definitions. There was a time when "planet" meant "anything big orbiting the sun". When it turned out there were millions of big things orbiting the sun, scientists needed to decide just how big a thing had to be. The only two serious options were one that would increase the number of planets immediately to 12 and probably upwards of 40 eventually, and one that would reduce the number of planets to 8 and probably leave it there.
Next, water on the moon. We looked for water on the moon once, and didn't find it. Scientists announce "we can't find any water on the moon". Journalists announce "there is no water on the moon". Later, scientists crash a lump of metal into the moon with the energy of a small nuclear bomb, and find that there *is* some water, just deeper then they were able to look before. It's no more "scientific fact" changing then it would be if you looked everywhere for your keys and couldn't find them, announced that you probably left them in your car... then found them under the couch in a more through search.
The other scientific development often brought up in this regard is the whole "we once thought the earth was flat" thing. Guess what? We're never going to find out that we were wrong all along, and the earth really is flat. Never. We're never going to find out that the sun rotates around the earth. The reason is because scientific *facts* never change. Scientific hypotheses change every day, and theories change once in a while, but *facts* never change.
And in any case, which is better... being absolutely firm and unchanging (but wrong), or admitting your errors switching to the truth?
"Therefore, ultimately, a person is left to his own beliefs to decide which study (if any) is correct."
And you just made the science is impotent argument. Fascinating. You never, ever just cancel out studies. This isn't math.
When faced with contradictory studies you don't ignore the science but rank the studies based on quality. Ignore the poor studies and weight the rest best on quality and derive your conclusion. And one of those conclusions may be that no conclusion can be made with the existing data.
Majority of people are dumb. Mod me up. Not only is my belief valid, but its supported by scientific backings.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
"The problem" is people who think there should be a "the" before the word "problem." Especially the ones who then follow that up with a single noun.
The body of science has already exceeded the capability of the human brain to absorb in its entirety. Some people cannot even comprehend the scope, let alone the contents, of what we know as a conglomerate.
At some level, everyone has to take some of the details of areas outside of their scope on credit these days, and it is only going to get worse. It's going go far from believing in the credibility of authority figures or certain groups of scientists. Some form of spirituality is going to become more and more essential to keep the human psyche from freaking out in an endless series of myopic anxiety attacks. Either that or artificial brain enhancement.
None of the above is an excuse to slack off and ignore the world -- everyone should try to be good at something. Nor is it an endorsement of the backward, psychologically abusive religions that are still popular and widely exploited.
But people that walk around thinking killing off "religion" is a panacea scare me as much as the evangelicals.
Someone had to do it.
Er, I'm pretty sure religion is an effect rather than a cause here
And where did I say otherwise?
If you manage to drive someone away from a religion without doing anything about the not-thinking, they'll just end up at some other religion or pseudo-religion.
Like GP, you're correct, but still misleading. For example, someone going from Scientology to, say, Catholicism would be a good thing. Now, no "problem" has been solved, but the batshit ideas this person believes in will be slightly less batshit.
One more time: Not all delusions are equal. Geeks treating the real world like some sort of math problem is a reductive and mostly pointless exercise.
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It's quite easy to find two papers saying completely opposite things in bleeding edge studies, yes. But I wouldn't say the judgement between the two papers would be totally "your own beliefs".. you can still examine the methodology and see which one makes more sense (or has flaws in it), for example. And then you can ask your friends or even Google if the paper is popular enough. Science doesn't really give you the truth immediately, but at least the method to arrive to the conclusion is open, so you can still take part in refining it.
I disagree.
I think the open and obvious manipulation of scientific data to market and sell products is what has empowered the modern evangelical idiocy in the United States. If you want to see the credibility of science rendered impotent, read some patent drug marketing materials. Another great example is baby rearing advice. Compare the scientifically derived advice given by doctors for infant care today. Then talk to someone with a 10 year old. Then talk to your mom.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
However Scientist when talking to the public often fail to explain the areas of doubt in their theory. So to the public it sounds like a guy who is saying something different all the time, but each time explains it in a way that want you to take it as the solid truth... Religion does the same thing however they have a more consistent message...
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Evolutionary Biology doesn't explain society or the relations between men and women. Ev Psych does.
Do scientists believe their own theories? Scientists disagree about everything, down to the basic principles of their specialty. I'm in graduate school getting my PhD. I've attended seminars, been in luncheons with "world-class scientists". I've witnessed them making up whatever theories they want, which fits in with their political/religious/ethnic beliefs. I was in a seminar the other day by a geneticist with a world-class reputation, who exposed a lot of seaminess in DNA sequencing technology, held to be the gospel truth in our society today. In reality, samples are easily contaminated by handling; a "sample" of caveman DNA was shown to be contaminated just by the presence of people in the same room, using standard laboratory procedures. Then she went right on to claim that modern polar bears are descended from Irish bears, and it was pretty clear she was just cheerleading her ethnic background.
How do supporters of this preposterous, so called, "scientific impotence theory" account for the fact that Science produces the world's entire supply of Viagra?
Scientia potestas est, and sometimes it is willing to share...
I understand that the goal of real science is an objective search for the truth about nature. You are right that, ideally, it should have no agenda. Unfortunately, in practice, it doesn't work that way. Ditto for peer review.
Proverbs 21:19
I agree with this fully. Being a religious man myself, it disappoints me how closed minded religious thinking CAN be. I like to take a more open approach, I believe God created the universe, me, and everything involved in it, including the laws and theory's we've discovered on how we came to be, and how the universe works/is made. I will not limit MY God to a very narrow understanding. If God can create the universe, than I am sure he would understand the best way for life to exist, and one of those ways could very well be (and most likely is) evolution. I mean, if any god were to create the universe, he/she/it/third gender would be the greatest scientist to ever live!
Indoctrinate : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments Educate : to develop mentally, morally, or aestheti
Getting someone to change their mind is extremely difficult, which is why Texas is trying to teach lies. But the honest truth is that truth (and by implication, science) is better at convincing the undecided then lies (and by implication any religious beliefs claiming to be science).
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Nah, faith is not enough for science. You should also test your findings, retest, Peer-Review, and be prepared to be wrong, to do better.
But I think it's all quite suspiciously convenient.
I know, it's almost like the facts support the hypothesis.
What if that ideology is rationalism?
Surely you know people - or even yourself - who this applies to. I know it applies to me sometimes, and if you read enough comments on /. you can certainly find a number of others. Unblinking rationalism will cause you to lose the ability to appear reasonable to other people. This is, in a sense, "turning off your brain," as the GP stated. And if you're very deep in that rut, it will indeed be very hard to get out of it. You won't want to compromise, because you think your belief is the only right belief. It's important to temper pragmatism with a bit of frivolity or whimsy every now and then, just to balance things out a bit. Being able to consider viewpoints other than your own is always a strength, not a weakness.
Please stop pluralizing words with an apostrophe. That is not what it is there for.
Heh, sounds to me like it's the publishers of the study that are ignoring a logical conclusion.
If I firmly believe the environment is changing, and someone shows me a study saying the opposite, I'm not going to put my time into deconstructing the nonsense study. I'll reject it, without any problems of cognitive dissonance - I'll assume the researchers didn't do their job correctly (nobody's perfect!) or it's biased research by people who've studied science but are under the influence of politics or funders.
Enigma solved, dudes.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
My lack of 100% confidence in science has nothing to do with religion (as I don't believe in ANY religion at all.) It's just realism. There are certain things that have too many variables for us to be 100% sure of. Climate change and some pharmacological studies are two prime examples. Decisions have changed over the years when new studies, new evidence, new methodologies, or new variables are determined. You can't blindly follow science either, though the great majority of it is correct.
I think it's more basic than that. Any ideology followed closely and long enough leads to unthinking behavior and beliefs.
Including... science.
Except science isn't an ideology.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
and yes, I am an atheist, I just don't feel the need to ram it down people's throats, that would make me part of the problem
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
regardless of whether the information presented confirmed or contradicted [the subjects’] existing beliefs, all of them came away from the reading with their beliefs strengthened.
You can’t win... If you contradict me, my faith shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
You are correct that this can apply to any ideology, but religion goes out of its way to cherish "faith," which is the polar opposite of scientific reasoning. With religion conditioning so many from birth to believe that "having faith" is a proper basis for the most important of convictions, it almost certainly strengthens acceptance of all manner of unreasoning thought.
Science seeks truth through the systematic application of logic to empirical evidence.
Faith accepts ideas as truth despite lack of empirical evidence, and in spite of contradictory empirical evidence.
Religion promotes faith. Faith is the enemy of scientific reasoning, whether applied to religion or politics or history or...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It's both. Ignorance and irrationality create religion, which encourages continued ignorance and irrationality. It's a feedback loop.
"...choose not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their predefined beliefs: economic, political, religious, or otherwise."
I find it interesting that most of the comments are centered around religion. It seems that economic, political, or other reasons are overlooked. The main point of the article is that people want to filter whatever fact or theory being placed before them though their own belief system. It is my opinion that is to maintain one's ego. "I believe this and nothing can disprove that ... your science is junk ... etc." What you may think is a science may be what you have turned into your own religion.
Which is why every so called 'fact' should be accompanied with a degree of probability, even if it's very rough.
Exactly - just look at how well that worked on Wall Street. Hey, that derivative has a 99.999999% chance of going up but 384%, and only a measly 0.000001% chance of losing 75%, so there is no chance that if we have 80 bazillion shares of 40,000 derivatives like this that we'll actually lose anything, right?
Or we could use the example of the space shuttle, which had a well-engineered set of parts that together only had a 1 in 10,000 chance of serious failure.
Numbers are only as good as the underlying model. Testing a model seems NP hard to me. The only way to know the shuttle failure rate is to launch it 100 times and see how many astronauts die. The only way to REALLY know the probability of the big bang being right is to create 10,000 model universes from the same (unknown) starting conditions as ours and see what conclusions the scientists who evolve in every one of them independently come up with.
I agree that changing science is part of the "problem". In fact, I would go further to say that science is sometimes wrong and even manipulated. Scientists who participate in big projects with lots of funding are often critical of challenges to their research because challenges put their grants at stake. This is why "cold fusion" was so violently rejected by the established scientific community during the 80s: it challenged the billions of dollars of research funds involved in building Tokamaks.
But I have to disagree that religion rarely changes. Take the Bible for example. The bible is a compilation of texts. Someone chose which texts to include and which to leave out. Further, many biblical stories are rewritten legends that date back to Sumeria. Finally, mainstream religious leaders change their dogma from one generation to the next: e.g., the Catholic Church now accepts many scientific theories that it rejected not too long ago.
The original goal of religion must have been to explain the unknown. That is the goal of science. Unfortunately people hang onto established beliefs even when they are found to be untrue: thus, today's religions are out of harmony with science. The two should be in harmony.
What I personally have little patience for is when people accept religion without questioning: they "believe". That is not only irrational, but dangerous, because it leads to dogma, and a willingness to accept what someone else tells you without question. That is the foundation of religious extremism, and is the currency of terrorism.
That's a great example actually, because the # of planets in the solar system isn't really science, it is semantics. Astronomers didn't lose a planet, or realize that Pluto was actually a peanut someone dropped onto the lens of their telescope (doh!). They revised the definition of planet to clarify the meaning. The word was ambiguous from the start. No facts actually changed.
But to the lay person, the scientists were wrong. That's really unfortunate, and I'm not sure what can be done about it.
Faith makes a virtue out of not thinking.
That would be a surprising deduction to monks, theologians, and apologists of many faiths throughout the ages. Reason and rational thought are not the sole province of science. In fact, before the Enlightenment (in Europe), reason and rational thought were believed to be the province of priests and lawyers. Logic deals only with deduction based upon accepted assumptions. Assumptions about metaphysics are unprovable/unfalsifiable, so science can say nothing about it (the very topic of this article). Some people with faith will determine scientific results differently than some people without faith because certain assumptions (about which science has no say) necessarily creep into the logic. In short, there _is_ thinking on the part of the faithful, and to disparage them by claiming they are unreasoning fools, fit only for padded cells is short-sighted at best.
I wish I could mod you up, because you make some very good points.
Proverbs 21:19
Blaming religion is just taking the easy way out.
Quite the opposite: NOT blaming religion is taking the easy way out. Sure, there are other ways of "non-thinking", to borrow your expression, but none of them are legally imposed on children since they begin understanding language, supported by institutions with huge amounts of tax-free capital.
If science is an ideology, then two column accounting and engineering are ideologies.
But you are exhibiting another element of cognitive dissonance, in that you attempt to reduce an empirical discipline like science down to the same level as an ideology. This is a standard tactic of anti-intellectuals, post-modernists, Creationists and pseudo-skeptics. Rather than critique a theory or a discipline entire they simply redefine the terminology to make it more expansive.
Science is a tool, a methodology. It has no ideology, any more than a hammer or a matchstick has an ideology. That's not to say that proponents or practitioners can't have ideologies, but part of the design of science is to eliminate the biases by forcing methodological strictures on research. Science is all about the evidence, ideologies are all, so far as I can tell, about ego stroking.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think it's more basic than that. Any ideology followed closely and long enough leads to unthinking behavior and beliefs
...Once turned off a brain is a very difficult thing to get turned back on again.
In my own observation, Science is following in these exact same footsteps. "Junk science" should not exist, yet due to unthinking behavior and beliefs, it does and it seems to only be getting worse.
This seems to me rather like Moses, the Israelites, and the Golden Calf. God had just led them through a gap in the fricking Red Sea, but because Moses was gone for like fifteen minutes, they created a new idol to worship.
So while pure scientific reasoning could be the path to truth, it never will be, due to the fact that it is practiced exclusively by humans who are not rational beings by their nature. Once 'Science' officially replaces the major religions of the world with its own brand of dogma, something 'new' will cause it to be reborn again as 'reason'. Until that gets adulterated by humanity... and so on, and so on.
And lest you disagree, pause and see if you can think of any science that is (or should be) in debate, yet any doubt triggers 'blasphemy' reflexes from within the faithful. If we're talking about a path to truth, rather than dogma, then this would not occur. People would be instead encouraged to do their own research and come to their own conclusions.
When a scientist 'proves' something to true (especially if it's something the pro-science people want to be true) it is accepted and opposing views discarded. That is the new, best truth. But if a year later the 'fact' is show to have actually been manufactured (for grant money, for fame, etc), then the believers often have a hard time letting go of said 'fact'.
Unless one personally reproduces the experiment behind whatever scientific fact they believe in, then it just that - a belief. Faith in some kind of god (invisible, physical, human, scientific, or whatever) is hard-wired in us.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
The difference between science and belief is that science observes phenomena and comes up with the most logical conclusion for why it happens. Belief answers why a pheonmena happens and rejects observations that contradict that answer.
Then I don't believe it.
ipv6 is my vpn
>For example, one can find scientific studies which indicate that high fructose corn syrup is unhealthy. There are also studies which will indicate that there is nothing at all wrong with high fructose corn syrup.
Your problem is that you (and perhaps the original authors) are oversimplifying. No scientific study would ever claim that HFCS is 'healthy' or 'unhealthy'. They would claim that eating X amount of HFCS causes an increase in Y. The other paper would claim that eating Z amount of HFCS does NOT cause an increase in Y(or A). Y may be related to health, and so might A, but 'healthy' is a value judgment which we do not make.
Read the surgeon general warning: "quitting smoking now may reduce serious risks to you health". These are the kinds of statements science is legitimately able to make. Not 'you will die young if you smoke' or ' cancer sticks are unhealthy'.
Sometimes people will become so emotionally-invested in a scientific "fact" that they will refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary.
Even if the evidence is gathered by the most rigorous scientific methodologies and the global scientific community as a whole accepts the new fact as an update to the old.
These are some of the most people to talk to, because they think they have science on their side, even though they don't.
Define "healthy."
It is difficult to make scientific statements using only the ambiguous language we use every day. So much of science is semantics. Both sets of scientists might be correct: their research right, their methods correct, their data and conclusions spot on. But when the reporter asks "So is high fructose corn syrup healthy?" the scientist has to say "yes" or "no" not "An increase of 15% in intake of HFCS results in a a 99.5% correlation to an increased lipid growth in the lining of the..." One scientist says "yes" and the other says "no." Then they both go chug a Mountain Dew. :-)
Don't blame religion for the negative impacts that stupid people have upon society.
I blame religion for exploiting the stupidity of people to gain influence and sometimes control over governments and me. I have no problem with others believing in myths as long as they don't try and force me to believe or subject me to the rules of their myths.
We already had a word for this, many in fact. All of the following apply;
Willfully Ignorant
Idiot
Nutcase
May the alrighty power of Logic damn these unbelievers!!! How dare they refute the answer to the Great Question!
Science like many other things has it's own internal politics. Unfortunately this can mean that whilst the ideal of science is great, real world science is as vulnerable to the same level of establishment dogma as politics and religion. For example if your beliefs (e.g. not agreeing with string theory) doesn't match up with those who are leading your department the chances of you getting tenure are slim to none. Similarly with funding and access to resources, if you have a hypothesis that the majority of your peers disagree with, you're going to have a hard time getting the funding or access to the equipment you need.
We should always aspire to the ideals of science but remember why the Royal Academy has a motto of "Nullius in Verba". Otherwise, we become as dogmatic as those we sneer at.
Er, I'm pretty sure religion is an effect rather than a cause here. If you manage to drive someone away from a religion without doing anything about the not-thinking, they'll just end up at some other religion or pseudo-religion.
You can't ever fix the 'not-thinking' part. It is an intrinsic trait of being a human being. We're still quite primitive, and have yet to develop fully cybernetic brains that are immune to things like 'instinct', 'intuition', and 'emotion'. These are basic survival mechanisms that allow us to put handles on complex and primal thoughts. I hope we get to keep them for a very long time.
That's more or less Deism - God as the Cosmic Engineer whose creation is in essence defining the boundary conditions of the universe. In my opinion, this is somewhat at odds with the "Personal God" idea of Christianity. I accept that, it actually has some beauty, but as an atheist, I don't see much that differentiates it from a pantheism in the sense that the universe as a whole is God, or, in the other direction of thought, from a rationalist perspective that states that there is nothing but the universe, but that is enough to admire it in all its perceivable glory.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Pot meet Kettle.
I mean seriously, the scientific community is in no position to proclaim bias in accepting new ideas.
It is a human condition, and the sheer arrogance to suggest that science holds some sort of logical, ethical or even better position on the subject is ludicrous.
History is replete with the scientific community eating its own young.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Rationalism is not an ideology. It cannot be. To be idealistic means forgoing being rational when a particular subject related to that ideology becomes the topic of discussion.
Rationalism and being able to consider viewpoints of others are not incompatible. The problem arises when you are facing what you know is either an irrational or unproven viewpoint espoused as truth by someone else.
A minority of the people mentioned in the study the article talks about are members of this group of thinkers. Scientists *ought* to be. Preconceived notions and science do not do justice to research.
There's a lot of crappy discussion of various scientific topics going on right now simply because the loudest talkers are not the most rational ones...at least until rational people get upset at flagrant opining in the guise of fact-giving.
Rational people are quick to compromise, if given evidence with solid foundations. Irrational people see rational people dismissing unfounded or weakly-supported opinion and think that rational people are unwilling to compromise because *they* cannot step back and examine things in the same way. Being able to resist making up your mind makes you a bad candidate for being, say, a troop commander, but it is the only *defense* to ideology.
Maybe you have a different definition of rational?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Post an article on Slashdot showing a relationship between violent video games and violence, and watch the Slashdot crowd foam at the mouth. And I doubt it is the fundies who are doing the posting...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
" 'It's hardly a secret that large segments of the population choose not to accept scientific data"
The problem of the current society is not the ignorance or non-acceptance of science by population.
Lay people do not have to "accept" or "reject" science. Science becomes relevant to people only in the form of technology. For example, what was the origin of species has absolutely no relevance to practical life of people, for example, so people do not have to "accept" or "reject" the origin of species. In the contrary, "inheritance" and "mutability" as well as "selection" ("natural selection" proved by the way useless - too slow) are very relevant to people and have been used (without much pomposity) generations and generations before Darwin.
On the other hand, people do not have to "accept" or "reject" the "ideology" of theoretical mechanics on the ideological level, because people CAN use it, and if they are using it without knowledge (sic! knowledge, not "acceptance") they are in very practical trouble, and if they are using it right, then they get immediate very unequivocal practical results, and those results exclude any ideological "acceptance" or "rejection".
Face it. There is useful science, and there is useless "science". One of them IS actually science, and the other is not.
Another point: if you have to forcefeed science to people, then there is no such "science". True science does not need ideology. True science is obvious (that's what my late scientific Teacher taught me, by the way, to work on a paper until the results become obvious).
Que to "troll" moderation.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Unblinking rationalism will cause you to lose the ability to appear reasonable to other people.
*appear* reasonable is the key phrase there. The rational always appear unreasonable to the irrational. Is it the rationalist's fault that others don't think enough?
You won't want to compromise, because you think your belief is the only right belief.
Unless presented with evidence otherwise. That's the core of rationalism.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1668404&cid=32380300
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The other side of "scientific impotence" is "appeal to authority".
There was once a guy on my favorite forum that argued politics a lot, and his favorite trick was to link to an encyclopedia entry on logical fallacies every time someone made an argument against him, pointing out which fallacy they had made. I once asked openly if there was a logical fallacy for people who replied to every question with an accusation of a logical fallacy rather than just arguing the merits of the question. His reply was that there was - but he wouldn't tell me which one it is.
The problem I have with your statement is that there are limits to the Appeal to Authority Fallacy. The A2AF would almost certainly come into play if, say, something was wrong with your company's business and you asked why it wasn't fixed, and you were told it wasn't being fixed because your boss said it was fine. The other stupid extreme there is that if your doctor says that you need a surgery but you argue that it's unnecessary, when your friends try to tell you that you should listen to your doctor, are you going to claim that they're just appealing to the doctor's authority?
There's got to be a hair to split around the difference between appealing to an arbitrary / managerial authority and appealing to a knowledgable / professional authority. There's a point at which appealing to the authority of a person who is highly trained in a specific background with relevant application to a "hard" science, one that is testable and falsifiable, should be relevant against an opposition that does not have that same depth of experience.
Once issues become politicalized it becomes very difficult to make a scientific judgement one way or another because of all the competing agendas and misinformation on both sides.
Many of the truly controversial scientific actions that occur lately have been cases in which one side has a majority of scientists in agreement with them, while the other appeals to a very small subset of scientists who gain notoriety by positing contradictory theories, without even bringing up the issue of who may be funding either group or if they have the relevant scientific backgrounds. We're supposed to believe that the opinions of a few are supposed to be given equal weight and consideration as the greater opinion against them, even without published methods or peer examination. I've got a different logical fallacy for that - the false equivalency.
And what you've just said is a well-known political tactic. If there's a scientific issue that comes out that certain people are nto comfortable with or stand to lose profits as a result, make it a political issue. Introduce contradictory evidence without fully sourcing it. When anyone says that your claims are biased and untrustworthy, claim the same thing right back at them. Claim that those scientists have just as much of an agenda as yours do. In this way, you can invalidate a scientific opinion in the public trust.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Religion doesn't Talk. so yes. The priests are quite a other matter .
This just in... stupid people aren't happy when they realize they're stupid. Full story at 11.
Were you going for ironic with that post? They do a study into how people ignore scientific evidence in favour of reinforcing their own beliefs. You then ignore the result and choose to continue with your own predefined belief that the fault lies with religion.
This argument that you present is exactly why the Smoking industry flooded the semi-scientific world with studies suggesting no correlation between smoking and cancer.
This is simply the ability of people to pollute an argument by making false claims while appearing as another.
Essentially, some people were committing fraud in the smoking and cancer correlation case.
We should not blame science for people abusing a process for their own political gain.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
The problem, of course, is that some people don't recognize their religious beliefs, be it about vaccinations causing autism, saturated fat causing heart disease, or CO2 emissions causing global warming. These people firmly see themselves as rational, when in fact they're being religious.
Science, strictly speaking, is the relentless application of skepticism. Once you close the door on your own mind, regardless if your position is in fact correct, you've started behaving in a religious manner. A person who believes that Lamarck can never be reconciled with Darwin, or that the "scientific consensus" on global warming can never be challenged is just as religious as any fundamentalist christian. Rational thought must begin with the understanding that you could be wrong about things you might think are very obvious.
+1, thanks.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Buddhists are just as bat shit crazy as other religions. I live in a 90% + buddhist country and the crazies here are no different then the bible thumpers.
Try telling someone here that Buddha was wrong and you won't last long. Buddhists also have a long history of suing anyone that uses Budhas images out of place.
They're no different then muslims or christians and the only reason the west doesn't portray them as such is because they have no majority buddhist country close by.
Yeah. It's like, "I don't need no fancy-schmancy science to explain this to me. I already know what the problem is: religion. Now there's no need to enquire further or try to test this, because we all know the answer."
People's understanding of issues is heavily determined by how they are framed. The frame sets the questions, which in turn point to the answers. Answering "Which side of the issue are you on?" means choosing one of exactly two sides.
Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity. You may ask, "Do you believe in evolution?" But that is not the question many people will answer. What they really hear is, "Do you believe in evolution, or are a God-fearing person like us?" Then their answer is not so much a negative rejection of evolution as a positive affirmation of who they are and their membership in a community.
How did evolution become incompatible with being part of a community? This happened not by explicit argument, but by subtle framing of politics. You say that there are two sides to an issue. But that division into two is exactly the moment of politicization. Which side are you on? Are you with us or against us? Do you believe in evolution or do you believe in God?
Would you sacrifice your friends and your community and your sense of who you are in order to believe in an abstract theory that has no bearing on your day-to-day life? I think it is perfectly rational to say no regardless of the evidence. We need community to give life meaning. It's in our blood as human beings. But community life is impoverished in our lonely society. We cling to it when we find it.
Nor does this apply only to religious folk. Say you had a revelatory experience of God that showed evolution to be false. Imagine the social and personal implications of denying evolution. Would you believe, or would you imagine it was a hallucination? As an atheist, I can imagine the former would require a wrenching reconstruction of my identity and relationships to other people.
What you say is true in general: people tend to choose the evidence that suits them (though this is not symmetrical: some people, groups and arguments are more honest than others). My point, however, is that the logic you are criticizing is embedded in the very language of your post. Your acceptance that there are two sides - not one, not three - is where the slippery slope begins.
Religion on the other hand, rarely changes its story.
I agree with most of what you said up until this point. One need only look at the number of existing Christian denominations to see how much a religion can change. That is to say nothing of more differential Christian "offshoots" like Mormonism, Christian Science, and Jehova's Witnesses.
God himself changed from the vengeful Old Testament version to the warm and fuzzy New Testament version.
Jesus wasn't considered a deity until after 300 CE, which is also when the concept of the Holy Trinity came about.
The demonizing of alcohol by Christian organizations didn't happen until the 19th century (Jesus had wine at the last supper).
Galileo was pardoned by the Church in 1992.
Today the story of Adam and Eve is "not meant to be taken literally", but at the time the Old Testament was written, I don't see how else it would have been interpreted.
So, to say that religion never changes its story is foolish. Yes, both scientific conclusions and religious beliefs will change. This is largely because people change, societies change, and cultures change. The thing with religion is that it easy to shop around until you find one that "fits" with an existing view. Science does not work that way.
Have you ever tried to explain an idea that matters to someone else? If they have a stake in what you're talking about, and you go around qualifying your statements with doubts and hedges, they freak. If they want you to be right, you're a waffling doubletalker and a muddler of their agenda. If they want you to be wrong, you're a threatening goon who's just shown them a weakness.
Pitchforks and torches ensue either way. Those who propose to speak to the public at all are duly warned.
Your best bet is to speak with authority, as far as you can substantiate, and spent the rest of your time correcting the misapprehensions caused by poor listening, third-hand accounts of your message, and the media agenda of fitting everything into an entertaining narrative.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Evolutionary biology does? Really? I think what you've done is exhibit another aspect of psuedo-skepticism, the reading of headlines and assuming you've gained some understanding of underlying concepts. There are aspects of the theory, such as sexual selection, which can explain certain facets of behavior in generalistic terms, but you'd have to go to neurology and evolutionary psychology to find attempts to move beyond a very "big picture" notion of any species' behavior to specific claims, and indeed, plenty of biologists have some problems with the way that evolutionary concepts are extrapolated to explain specific behaviors. Indeed, one of the chief criticisms of Dawkins' memes is that it takes phenomena that are at best analogous to the genetic aspects of evolution and taking the analogy too far (something Dawkins himself consistently warns against throughout his publications for the layman).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Your comment seems to be based on a misunderstanding of what ideology means.
Ideology isn't fundamentally about what is, but what should be. That makes it a fundamentally subjective matter, and no living person can really refrain from having an ideology.
The problems you're pointing to are the result of dogmatic beliefs in how to make things be what a particular ideology says they should be.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
but I still maintain that it is the best way for pursuing knowledge. In fact, science is all about renewing itself, reviewing itself and progress. Yes, I know that there are a lot of horseshit out there masquerading as science. There are authoritative pricks, there are oppressive fuckers, braindead platonicists, opportunistic paper-pumpers. Still. It. Is. The. Way.
No, I haven't RTFA, but there's plenty of evidence from the field (as it were) that those who are trained to think scientifically do not do so when their prestige (or even their chance of obtaining tenure) is on the line.
I think that's exactly the problem - taking the same dictionary definition of "rational", two different people, often two very intelligent people, can assign a position or topic into a different bucket. For some very intelligent people, AGW is "rational". For some other very intelligent people, AGW is "religious".
In the end, it seems to me that hypocrisy is an unfortunate feature of humanity, and for all the people who believe they are espousing a rational viewpoint, there are probably only a tiny minority who really are willing to change their mind.
I know, since I'm one of the few :)
Good god, then it's even WORSE!
For an example, check out these numnuts.
There is no "rationalism," there are only imaginations of rationalism -- and those imaginations are generally pretty poor stuff for the soul.
The idea is that if you look and act like a smug selfish conniving snivling jerk that spends his (and it's generally his) time coming up with mathematical theologies of social networks and bayesian systems, that you're somehow more "rational." Dios, it's gross.
Seriously here, though:
The problem is the ends. Rationality can never be for just itself; Rationality is always towards some purpose. And what purpose would one orient their rationality to? Well, a lot of people think that money and power are the ultimate purposes, so they judge themselves and others by how far they get in this "rational" persuit. Then there are other people who say, "Well, actually, the goal is some equitable distribution of power and influence (and what have you,)" and so there you end up with liberal philosophies or efforts to make the middle class swell or what have you.
Would-be "Rationalists" need to identify what they live for, which will not in-itself be a "rational" thing. It won't defy reason or logic or what have you, but it won't be derivable or even based in reason or logic. It'll be an imaginary thing, or an imaginary society, or an imaginary world, or an imaginary person, most likely -- but an imaginary thing worth loving.
The athiests I know all have comic books in their back pockets. They should just fess up where their hearts are, rather than hiding behind the facad of "rationality."
Except, of course, when your ideology *IS* one of thinking critically and rationally, which is what people call - Science!
Science is often its own religion. Don't let people tell you otherwise. People have an unbelievable faith that science can solve almost any problem, perfectly.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Except no one has ever got physically violent over which operating system is better where as people are dying every day because of their different religious beliefs.
People have their faviourite programming language but I doubt a father has ever cast out their son or daughter after finding out they prefer something else.
Perhaps accounting isn't the best example for your point -> ever hear of GAAP? Accounting, deciding what is and isn't an asset or liability, or how to depreciate specific things, or what buckets to put certain expenses, is very very much an ideology.
I'd also make the assertion that engineering, in specific cases, often ends up being ideology, particularly in the realm of computer engineering, and all the various flavors of metrics and measurements and process that your freshly minted MBA will want to try out on his next programming team.
In the end, you're right, science is a tool, but many people who claim to be "following the science" are only doing so out of convenience, not because they've applied any of the methodology. Science is about falsifiability, and unless someone can tell you what kinds of observations they would accept as refutations of their theories, they're not doing science.
Thank You! I was worried it was only me that noticed that. What's funny is that the op is such a PERFECT example of the idea the article is pushing.
What's so fun about this is that to be such a good example requires that he not know just how good an example he is! Amazing, really. And yet, it's just happened right here.
//TODO: signature
I think it's more basic than that. Any ideology followed closely and long enough leads to unthinking behavior and beliefs.
Including... science.
Except science isn't an ideology.
But the idea that the scientific method is the best methodology for determining anything, and that everything can be understood through the scientific method, is an ideology.
I'm not arguing that this is incorrect, just stating that it is most definitely an ideology.
But scientists *do* say these things for a number of reasons, economical (grants, tenure), personal, or whatever. Further up in this thread someone gave the great example of the wildly changing child-rearing advice that has been given, by scientists, over the last 100 years, each time presented as "the truth".
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
1) Children not being taught critical thinking and have no training to deal with alternative aarguements to their own viewpoint
2) Learning that contrary to what the GOP wants you to thinks, changing you mind when new data comes in is NOT a bad thing.
3) Religion. It's very nature teaches people not to question things they believe.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
While I generally agree, there still is a problem. Often people calling themselves "rational" are philosophical quite weak on basic epistemology. If you don't keep on questioning whether your observations are actually facts, you run into the danger of becoming ideological yourself. You mentioned a very important qualifier yourself - "solid foundations". Those are not always present in discussions with some people who deem themselves "rational". If you stop questioning yourself, you run into the danger of becoming an ideologist. That might not be "true rationalism", but I have seen it often enough advertising itself as such.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
But the idea that the scientific method is the best methodology for determining anything, and that everything can be understood through the scientific method, is an ideology.
The "scientific method", when boiled down to its essence, is nothing more than a belief that evidence is the best indicator of reality.
When you troubleshoot your car or computer, you follow the scientific method. Is it "ideology" that keeps you from taking it to an exorcist instead of probing and prodding to find out what the problem is?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Science doesn't speak with one voice on pretty much anything. Ask a group of paleontologists what happened to the Neanderthals or the Dinosaurs. Then run out, lock the door and come back two days later to let the survivor out.
Even when science does speak with one voice, it takes years for consensus to filter down because people who are not exposed to the debate (non-scientists) will continue to support things which have been proven wrong. Why? Well, because that's what they heard, and your new theory probably doesn't have a laundry list of "Here's how all previous theories were proven wrong" attached to it. You're telling people that the Celtics won the championship when they never found out that the Lakers had been eliminated in the second round. I can still pull up scientific articles that contain conjectures that are known to be wrong - yet they don't have that information about their legacy attached to them, so maybe I just assume that that's the "best" science.
"Science" is also known to be highly influenced by money. Scientists, like artists, need financial backing. The works they produce are sometimes tainted by that. Instead of doing pure, unbiased research, they are simply out with a mission from a master with an axe to grind on some issue.
Long story short: Science is done by people. And you can't trust people.
You ignore the fact that I have limited time and other stuff to do in my life than researching corn-syrup studies. So for many, many things, it will have to be a gut decision.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
You seem to assume that "science" gives mankind an escape from presuppositions.
And you seem to assume that all presuppositions are equally valid.
The whole point of science is that anyone can question the assumptions. Refining and even radically changing basic assumptions happen from time to time; it's an important part of how science evolves.
Every religion, on the other hand, has a set of core assumptions that are true. If you want to change them, you have to found a new religion.
I completely understand why many people aren't as quick to believe everything scientists say. Simply because scientific -fact- seems to change every few years. A few years ago scientists said there were 9 planets. Now there's 8. First there was no water on the moon, now there is. As far as science is concerned, theres no problem with updating facts and theories as new information is obtained. But most people don't work like that. As far as they're concerned, you're the same as the guy who keeps changing his story every time you ask a question.
The problem is that scientists will call you ignorant or stupid if you stop believing every word they say just because you know there's a good chance of them saying something different in a short while.
Religion on the other hand, rarely changes its story.
Here's the thing I love about science -- you can test it. I'll be the first to admit that I don't instinctively believe quantum mechanics, relativity, and some of the weirder shit coming out of the theoretical community. It's all counterintuitive to me. So I say "prove it" and goddamn, they can do it in spades. The GPS system would be non-functional if it didn't take relativity into account. If Einstein hadn't thought it up when he did, we'd have ended up discovering it when we started finding errors we couldn't account for in the timing of the signals from the satellites, the same way the background radiation from the Big Bang was first discovered as noise screwing up an unrelated experiment. Accidental discoveries are some of the sweetest.
QM stuff doesn't make a lick of sense to me. It sounds like bullshit. But the physicists can put together experiments that can't be explained by anything but their theories. And if a better theory comes along, they'll replace it. I'm still gobsmacked by spooky action at a distance.
What we don't have on religion's side is experimental theology. There's no way to actually put the Lord thy God to the test. Could you imagine how awesome life would be if that actually were the case?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Theories change. There is a big difference between a theory and a fact.
HAND.
Similarly, arithmetic is the ideology of two-column accounting, and mechanics is the ideology of, say, mechanical engineering.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
NO. Scientific *facts* (that is to say, data and observations) do not change. What changes is terminology (which is why there are now eight planets when there were nine) or they get more and better data (which is why there is now water on the moon when once there was "none"). With the facts you build hypotheses, which are tested to the point that they become theories, which is the real currency of science. There is always a hedge, because science doesn't deal *in* facts, it deals *with* facts.
But, when asked, a scientist tells you the current understanding in plain language, which to the laymen sounds like, but isn't, a "fact". Because teaching or other interaction with the public shows scientists that most laymen are (at best) ignorant or (at worst) idiots.
This is why scientists drink a lot.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Whilst this entire story is being inundated with the usual 'attack religion' comments that slashdot spews out like my arse after a curry, I do want to raise a few points in this debate.
That is that quite simple, all sides of the climate change camp (as that is what this thread is about, even if the summary avoided mentioning it directly) are equally as guilty of blind faith.
The Business side will refuse any concept which jeopardises their profit margins
The Religious side will refuse any concept which does not match their religious texts
The Politic side will refuse any concept which is unlikely to get them elected
The Environmentalist side will refuse any concept which doesn't show that climate change is indisputably real and mankind is to blame
And
The Scientist side will refuse any concept which question their science, which is confusing as science has to be questioned for it to be science, else it is merely ideology or at worst, religion.
As for myself. I'm a geek, and think you can all kiss my ass. I hope you all die from your bickering before the planet cooks you alive.
Your bs arguing is interfering with my late night gaming sessions, now shut up so I can go play warcraft.
I still have yet to meet a scientist who is not biased by politics, morals, religion, money or things of this nature.
Scientists do what they need to do to make sure their data supports their predetermined conclusion.
Now, get our your calculator. Every idiot on Slashdot will post something about religion in this article. Use your calculator to add it up and you will know how many idiots we have here.
Only idiots (like Einstein and Newton) believe in God right? Common sense tells us that the physical universe just created itself out of thin air. There was not a single atom in existence anywhere, there wasn't even such a thing as an atom. Then in one split second the physical universe just popped into existence from nothing! Wow, that makes such good scientific sense. Thanks for enlightening us with your stupidity.
Gary Coleman's dead you insensitive clod!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/28/gary-coleman-dies-child-star
Disproof by counter-example: me.
I'm religious. I go to church every Sunday. I also believe, 100%, in things like evolution, a fourteen-billion-year-old universe, and the possibility of alien life. I consider the Bible true, but realize it speaks mainly in metaphor and parable. Very few passages can be taken literally.
Do I believe in God? Yes. Do I believe in science? Yes. Do I find them in conflict? No.
Heck, I've got an essay in the works on solving the Trinity mystery by use of calculus. Whoever thinks religion causes bad thinking is guilty of the same bad thinking as the subjects of the study.
Most people make bad decisions. This is generally accepted. Most people are religious. This is fact, supported by many, many statistical studies. Simple probability, then, indicates that many of the people who make bad decisions are religious. Don't blame religion for people being stupid.
Blame people for people being stupid.
Science is rationally looking and collecting data. It's a process for removing variable and bias to get data. It's testing thing in a manner that could disprove them.
It's not a thing, it's a process.
You can't have usefull science and useless science. It's a complete flast dichotomy. There is only science.
"True science is obvious " Nonsense. The fact that two objects fall at the same rate was not obvious. The Science to determine it, observation, and testing showed that this non obvious thing is true. You cam do many tests to try and falsify it. That would be science.
Science is not something that can be rejected. Its a look at data and facts. To 'reject' science is to reject rational thought.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
> Blind Faith makes a virtue out of not thinking.
There, fixed that for you.
e.g. You have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow, since you have no proof (about future events) that it will, only a premise.
I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: religion. Faith makes a virtue out of not thinking.
Do you have any research to back up this claim?
...or that the "scientific consensus" on global warming can never be challenged...
I like how you read an article about yourself and never once realized it was about you.
I liked parts of the book a lot, but it was painfully obvious that Dawkins didn't know much about religion and religious people. I compare what he said, and my friend who's studying to be an Episcopal priest, and there isn't a whole lot of similarity.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Man, do I have an ideology for you!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Peer review (as formalized by scientific journals gatekeeping their publishing) is not a necessary part of the process. The idea that somehow having an elite few "review" a paper makes it immune to the critique that it is an appeal to authority is false on its face.
Science is about creating falsifiable hypotheses to explain observations, engaging in more observations, and either modifying or discarding hypotheses.
When Phil Jones mentions that none of the peer reviewers of his papers ever asked for his raw data, it shines a bright light on exactly what peer review is, and what it isn't. It is *not* science. It *is* a way of restricting publishing. Let's not confuse the two.
Hogwash. Faith (true faith) requires a great deal of contemplation. The fact that some (perhaps even most) people YOU might know are blindly faithful, is besides the point.
How many "rational" people have blindly accepted the premise of AGW?
When finally, someone with a critical eye took a look, and found all the research tainted by manipulation without explanation and no historical records to verify the changes, what happened? There are those that are "rational" that are still running around crying "the sky is falling" like chicken little.
But hey, if it makes you feel better thinking you think more than someone of faith then, good for you!
Suffice it to say, "Not thinking" is a human condition, and falls equally across religious and non-religious alike.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
> Rationalism is not an ideology. It cannot be.
It mostly certainly can be.
See: Pseudo-skepticism.
http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/talk/talk.html
_Anything_ can be turned into a religion.
Science didn't spring forth out of the sea foam fully formed, it is a methodology that developed over time and has had changing assumptions about what should and should not entail and use as valid ways of "knowing." Empiricism wasn't always the model, falsification was not all of the model. Seriously, you need to read about the history of science and the philosophy of science. It is one of many ways of looking at the world. It just happens to be one with some very good and practical uses. No built-in ideology? What about the supremacy of skepticism and empiricism? You take it as an a priori assumption that that is the only correct manner. That comes from a value system.
Science is all about the evidence, ideologies are all, so far as I can tell, about ego stroking.
This is unbelievably hypocritical. You have no right to make the kind of broad sweeping statements you made in your second paragraph about anyone else.
By the way, people can and do fight over which accounting methods are superior. Plenty of people find double ledger a waste of time. Accounting also does not exist in the world of perfect Platonic forms.
A belief is just an assertion that may or may not be backed up by good facts. There's nothing about a belief itself that would inhibit someone from discarding it, or force someone to reject all contradictory conclusions.
Positioning "Science" and "Belief" as opposites is interesting. Science requires you to believe things. For instance, science requires that you believe in the usefulness of science. I think you're just trying to drag "Belief" through the mud by assigning it some sort of evil meaning.
+1 Interwesting
"Are they made from real Girl Scouts?" ~Wednesday Addams
When faced with contradictory studies you don't ignore the science but rank the studies based on quality. Ignore the poor studies and weight the rest best on quality and derive your conclusion. And one of those conclusions may be that no conclusion can be made with the existing data.
Which leads to the same result as that of the poster you replied to: the person is left to his own beliefs to decide what is the best action to take relative to the problem the study addresses (in this case whether or not to consume food products with high fructose corn syrup).
Additionally there is another problem with your suggestion, what do I do when there are two or more contradictory studies that are on a subject that I do not have enough knowledge of to be able to rank the studies?
I just went back and looked at the article, it tells us nothing about what people do about science because they did a study on a subject that is not a real science. They studied students' reactions to papers on whether or not homosexuality is a mental illness. Since there is no objective definition of what "mental illness" is, how can you do a sientific paper on whether a particular behavior is evidnece of mental illness?
This is actually part of the problem, people working in many scientific disciplines attempt to reach scientific conclusions on things that are not subject to objective analysis.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
In my own observation, Science is following in these exact same footsteps.
As per TFA?
And lest you disagree, pause and see if you can think of any science that is (or should be) in debate, yet any doubt triggers 'blasphemy' reflexes from within the faithful. If we're talking about a path to truth, rather than dogma, then this would not occur. People would be instead encouraged to do their own research and come to their own conclusions.
Wrong. The problem here is that, for many scientific topics, any and all research is flooded by questions from ignorant people, which scientists aren't responding to and aren't expected to.
If you, as a mathematician, are discussing your work on the Riemann Hypothesis, you can't be expected to give a serious reply if somebody on the audience asks "why is i the square root of -1?", as obviously anybody incapable of answering that lacks the ability to judge your work fairly and accurately. Yet that's exactly what happens in many scientific fields, and so when the requisite (and appropiate) RTFM response comes, it's dismissed by the ignorant as a "'blasphemy' reflex" from a "faithful" rather than a heartfelt plea for the audience to RTFM before asking dumb questions.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Is Viagra Popper related to Karl Popper?
Ironically, you're doing exactly what the article supposes do: you're demonstrating this 'scientific impotence'.
Did it occur to you that even scientists demonstrate this pre-cognitive bias? No, it doesn't make for good science, but it happens: creationists ignore or overlook evidence of evolution; evolutionists overlook the possibility of a creationary hand (or something which goes against theory 'established' to the point of dogma); egyptologists overlook what would be obvious to an engineer or geologist due to the pre-established timelines.
What it basically comes down to is: what is a person's first beliefs? Everyone comes into a situation with assumptions. Whether those assumptions are scientifically correct or not doesn't really matter, because they will inhibit the holder in one way or another: prevent creative problem solving, inhibit a technically correct result (though many people do arrive at correct answers through incorrect and/or emotional means with regularity), and so on.
Very, very few people actually analyze themselves to the degree necessary to get down to first belief determination, and even then it's utterly impossible to completely 'debug' yourself.
(Interestingly enough, did we not read recently that a study found that people's instinctive intellect (vs. reasoned intellect) often proved to be more accurate at a type of problem solving? Such instinctual intellect is, seemingly, exactly what is happening here: it just isn't as effective for 'complex' problems).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You're totally missing the point. How does science tell you how you should behave in society, for instance? It doesn't. That's a question for ethics, which is a part of the field called philosophy. The scientific method isn't going to help you very much when you're trying to determine if some action is ethical or not. And it certainly isn't going to help if you're trying to decide if it's moral or not.
Likewise, science isn't the be-all-end-all in determining what kind of government you should set up in your country. Should you pursue communism, some variety of socialism, a republic, or what? How does the scientific method help you here? You could look at history to see what works and what doesn't, but since individual situations are so different and there's so many variables involved, and there really haven't been that many different nations, that's not going to help a lot. What worked in one place might not work in another place where the situation is different, and what was a disaster in one place might work someplace else if it were done a little differently.
For things like determining how electromagnetic fields work, why the sky is blue, how old the Earth is, etc., the scientific method is obviously the best. But there's a little more to life than figuring out how the physical universe works.
Mod parent up. People are people, whether they wear lab coats or priestly robes. One cannot critique faith in the church without being critical of their own faith in secular institutions.
“The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods. and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.” -niel postman
sig loading.......
All religions change all the time. There is a difference between religion and faith, the first is absolutely terrible and the cause of the majority of the wars throughout mankind's history, the second is needed by the brain to understand certain things. religion was created to have people with the same beliefs come together and worship based on their beliefs, but over time it has been taken over by power hungry people (most not all religions) Almost all Judaism based religions are about control now. Because of this as peoples beliefs change so does the religion. The Catholic church now accepts ideas that it outlawed, the new testament replaced the old testiment because people could not reconcile a god who mass murders anymore. I can go on and on.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Ah, the "I know you are but what am I" response :)
Everybody should realize the article is about them. Even you :)
Your suggestion has some validity, but it is impractical. Basically, you're asking me to do my own in-depth research on any given scientific endeavor. But of course I lack the materials, time, and knowledge to do that effectively. So again, I'm left to going with my intuition.
Proverbs 21:19
I look on it more as clinging to incomplete and unproven theory in order to relieve the discomfort that can be caused by the feeling that one's knowledge is sparse. I suspect a number of those who hold some tenets most fiercely also haven't studied them in depth, and are trying to avoid the work/distraction of doing so.
I've encountered a few who still go around claiming all the great physics discoveries were made in the 1900's and there is nothing else to be found.
Someone had to do it.
But you are exhibiting another element of cognitive dissonance, in that you attempt to reduce an empirical discipline like science down to the same level as an ideology.
Surely I am not the only one here who has read so-called scientific studies and abstracts which demonstrate an ideological assumption or three in an attempt to reach an (often) foregone conclusion? That may be analysis of a topic in a scientific fashion, but it's still an exertion of assumption to get there.
Sure, they don't call it ideology: they call it 'established theory' or some such thing. But what, if not an "established theory" is (say) protestantism or catholicism or islam? ("the logic of man" vs. "the texts of our ancestors" or whatever). The fact that someone prefers one foundational basis over the other is simply bias: scientific 'fact' gets disproven much more frequently than religious 'fact', after all - and the scientific communities of the world seem almost as reticsient in admitting a significant conceptual change as religious organizations.
We all look at the world through colored lenses.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Rationalism can be a school of philosophical thought opposed to empiricism.
Perhaps more illustratively, in Jerry Pournelle's chart, rationalism "refers to the extent which a political philosophy is compatible with the idea that social problems can be solved by use of reason."
It's not 'not accepting scientific data' it's not accepting conclusions. Why? For many reasons:
- the scientific method as commonly understood is frequently not applied by scientists.
- scientific methods are commonly misapplied to problems.
- ignorant usage of statistics by non-mathematicians is rampant.
- political motivation and problems associated with peer review for publication and grants.
The list could go on and on. Nullius in verba - if you don't apply that to 'scientific conclusions' you're just probably just as ignorant as the people you're criticizing.
Maybe to the sheep who went from one ideology to another, and have been taught to be helpless about using their own minds. But to suggest that science is inherently becoming an ideology for everyone is absurd. The very fundamental scientific method teaches an opposition to ideology. If you find science as an ideology, either you've been working in a field so long you've become biased and lost, or you've been trained to find ideologies and then not question them, and then you just traded one for another.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
No, it can't become one. If it's become such than what's being practiced isn't science anymore. Science is an active methodology for gathering and analyzing data. Once that's no longer the case it's not science anymore. There's a word for it, pseudoscience.
Everything will be taken away from you.
The people who complain loudest about politicization of science usually are in reality complaining that science isn't politicized in the way they'd like it to be.
I think it's not only uncontroversial, but hardly could be otherwise. You couldn't live in an unpredictable world. We predict things all the time. Like that when we walk forward we'll actually move in the intended direction, and that when a bear is running straight at you it'll probably catch you soon enough, if you don't find a way of getting away.
The only reason we dare take a step forward is because we have a reasonable certainty that a wall won't suddenly materialize out of nowhere right in front of our nose. If reality isn't predictable, then taking any kind of decision becomes impossible, and having a brain is pointless.
A partly predictable reality works just fine though. You can decide whether to step out of your house when you have information like "When raining, people who go outside sometimes get struck by lightning". Even if the reasons are obscure, and the underlying mechanisms unknown, there's still something useful you can do with information like that.
I don't think reality needs to be objective though. We get by just fine by working from out subjective perception. For instance you can describe a flower as being yellow. An insect will see something different. And in fact any possible perception of color is equally valid because color is something that only exists in our mind. But so long there's consistency to that subjective interpretation we can make use of it.
Not really. The greatest scientists are characterized by intellectual honesty. The difference between dogma/ideology and science is that when confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary of what they believed to be true, any true scientists will change their opinions on the matter at hand.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: religion. Faith makes a virtue out of not thinking. And if you accept rational science then you're doing something morally wrong.
I don't think that's it, exactly.
I think it's more a sort of inferiority complex. Basically, people don't want to feel that other people are fundamentally better than they are - particularly due to a little distinction like the level of education they've achieved. It's not as though more education does make a person fundamentally better - not necessarily - but they still feel that as a kind of threat. For a person to accept that scientist's argument at face value means acknowledging that, in some particular domain, at least, the scientist is the better person. The scientist has, presumably, studied his field in enough depth to be able to speak with authority and confidence on certain issues - but a non-scientist must simply take it as a matter of faith that the scientist really knows what they're talking about. This can be hard to accept: when you've studied something in depth, you can feel justified in dismissing lines of thought that you know, from experience, to be fruitless. But the non-scientist hasn't made this exploration, and so the dismissal of certain lines of reasoning just feels like a rejection. It can be difficult to accept the idea of other people in the world greater than oneself - whether in terms of strength, knowledge, or authority...
But the alternative places an uncomfortable burden on the scientist to pander to ignorance. Entertaining, rather than flatly rejecting, ignorant challenges to scientific ideas means engaging the discussion at the most basic levels - arguing points long-since resolved, to the extent anyone can be sure of anything, simply because the challenger hasn't taken the time to learn these concepts, or the reasons for their widespread acceptance.
I believe it's a problem not of religion, but of culture: we embrace the fantasy that no one is fundamentally better than anyone else, reject authority, and make our own decisions about where to place our trust... To some extent that's not a bad thing - it's good to question the status quo, and to have ambition beyond your current grasp - but there is a difference between challenging standard wisdom in ignorance of it and challenging it after gaining a thorough understanding of it. The latter is productive, the former is not. The fact that rejecting the superior knowledge of others is comforting is the problem - that's the reason why, when a religious sect advocates a perspective that's at odds with the established scientific knowledge of the world, this perspective has appeal.
Bow-ties are cool.
You conflate ideology with idealism.
Rationalism is the philosophy that underpines the scientific method.
Ideology:
1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.
2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.
Rationalism:
The theory that the exercise of reason, rather than experience, authority, or spiritual revelation, provides the primary basis for knowledge.
"unproven viewpoint espoused as truth by someone else."
Here is an excersise: Prove rationalism as a means for the scientific method without circularity or by example. Get back to me when you have a solution and can stop they hypocriticality.
I'm in complete agreement with this...
For example, one common ideology holds that non-empirical truths (such as moral standards) do not exist; they are subjective and/or fictional. That is not a scientific conclusion; it is a philosophical assumption. And note carefully that it's impossible to be neutral on this question -- non-empirical truths either exist or they don't.
I find it clearer to use the term "axiom" rather than "ideology." A given practitioner's axioms are an input to the scientific methodology, and this is unavoidable. Yes, this means ideology is inescapable in science, and yes, this occasionally changes the resulting conclusions. But unless one has a well-grounded argument against some axiom, then this is fair game.
Now, this ain't postmodernism, which advocates that all ideologies are valid. No, axioms are objectively true or false, and false axioms will get you false conclusions. But one does not prove an axiom; indeed, some (like AC) are provably unprovable, at least in certain interesting contexts. As far as we know, we humans simply have to admit that all thinking, including scientific thinking, begins with a set of unprovable truths -- and that there will be some legitimate disagreements about what those are.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
I have to be misreading this, because I can't believe that anyone would seriously imply that all atheists somehow use comic books to define their reason for being.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Would-be "Rationalists" need to identify what they live for, which will not in-itself be a "rational" thing. It won't defy reason or logic or what have you, but it won't be derivable or even based in reason or logic. It'll be an imaginary thing, or an imaginary society, or an imaginary world, or an imaginary person, most likely -- but an imaginary thing worth loving.
The athiests I know all have comic books in their back pockets. They should just fess up where their hearts are, rather than hiding behind the facad of "rationality."
What do you even mean by that? It's not rational to desire a world in which more people could be happy and live in peace? It's not rational to enjoy fictional stories?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I don't recall Catholicism putting out a kill order on anyone in the past 50 years or so, nor breaking in to government buildings to destroy records. And we're talking the main branch of the religion for that, not fringe groups.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
It didn't begin that way, but it is becoming one.
Please explain your position. I am not rejecting your idea, but I am not inclined to fill in the blanks in your argument, either.
Bow-ties are cool.
Point out evidence to a communist that people are selfish. Or to a libertarian that the FDIC stopped runs on banks and lead to the stabilization of the economy. Point out to a racist that minorities are people too. Point out to feminist that, well, there's too many examples.
After you do all that, come back and tell me religion is the only problem.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Agreed but we need a term for when non-scientist and irrational people use scientific lingo to push their ideology, i propose: scientology.
per dolorem ad astra
...it's people. There are too many middle men out there with their own agendas for me to know what's true or not. And I've seen too many theories come and go to give any group the benefit of the doubt. Ironically enough, much of the skepticism we see nowadays is a vindication of the scientific method itself.
At least, not without evidence, eh? =)
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
Science makes some very big assumptions about causality. "Similar causes lead to similar effects." Thus far, these assumptions have held up, but if we, for example, unequivocally break the light-speed barrier, science would be turned on its ear.
I believe there are more assumptions made by science, (science being defined as following the scientific method.)
No actually, its not "becomming one". The people who have become disenchanted with their existing religion have taken their initial, inadequate, and over-blown imagining of something and decided to erect a new false idol to replace their old false idol.
The fact that these idolators have chosen to stamp the word Science on their alter, and have taken up the trappings of what they beleive to be science, and then fool other people who presume there exists congruence where "strong evidence" and "confidence" and "idology" into thinking that they "practice Science" is no real surprise. The average religious person could be sold a cheese sandwich as a religion if you knew exactly how to dress it up for their individual needs.
So there _are_ people who have made a religion out of "Science" and for that matter "Atheism" or "Rationality" but in neither case are these people actually engaged in these pursuits per se. The first hint is the capitalization. None of these terms are big-letter nouns. They are, when truthfully applied, little-letter labels for procedures.
Saying big-letter Science for reference to the scientific method, is like saying you "practice Dishes" because have washed your dishes out in the sink.
The scientific method produces scientific results. The method is (1) make your best guess; (2) figure out how many ways your guess could be wrong; (3) figure out if you can produce a procedure that can demonstrate any one of those ways; (4) execute that procedure; (5) if the procedure does prove your guess wrong go back to step one; (6) if your procedure fails to prove your guess wrong tell everybody to see if they can kill your guess by starting at step 2. (7) if nobody can come up with working disproof, presume your guess is right until someone _can_ come up with a disproof, then go to step 1.
See thats a process, not a state of being. And nothing ever gets "off the table" in science. The best theories are those that spend the longest time in step 7.
Thats it. The only "faith" involved is the sure and certain knowledge that if your guess has been at step seven long enough, there is some young turk out there who can totally make a name for himself by knocking it down. That is, there is a faith in human nature there, that someone will want to one-up you. That's right, just faith that someone eventually _will_ find a way to piss in your Cheerios. Its the ultimate game of king-of-the-mountain. And that's the best way we have found to-date to make sure that nothing is ever enshrined as "true".
The people who are full of religion just assume that everybody else has _something_ that feels the same to them. When they see someone who isn't filled with religion they are compelled to believe that person has some pursuit "in that mental slot". There is no real fault to this since many people "find science" as a new religion instead of actually engaging in any scientific pursuit whatsoever. There are so many of these souls that it becomes almost reasonable to believe that mistake is universal. But this is the result of confirmation bias. The faithful seek to confirm that everyone is adherent to some faith.
Here is the first clue: True Science(tm) never _proves_ anything. Really. NEVER PROVES ANYTHING. There is no such thing as "scientific proof". There is strong scientific evidence (e.g. a large body of exercises that end in step six) and so on.
That is also why it is so obvious and exasperating for any person of rational thought to deal with a religious person when that religious person conflates their religion with science. All those books and pundits which attempt to prove some religious point "scientifically". It literally cannot be done. Any attempt to prove anything is outside the scientific method, that is it is inherently unscientific.
This frustrates the scientist because its like having somebody come to a curling match with a book on american rules football and trying to prove the a sweeper was offsides. It just doesn't apply no matter how hard the outsider t
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
how do you think scientists got past the mind blowing inconsistencies quantum mechanics requires us to grasp. ...
By believing what they measure and observe and correlate it with theory?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
capsplendid@gmail.com
Bless you, dearie, but you might have wanted to read this before you wasted your time.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Although the study is an interesting one, I dislike calling what people are presented with "scientific data". What people see are scientific theories. The most data they typically get is statistics, which are a minor subset of the data that's chosen to support the theory. Much of scientific research is flawed, as is often seen when research contradicts other research. It's incomplete becuase it's indeed very complicated, and must use approximations and models. That's not to say science is impotent, because these tools have self controls (which are sometimes even used), and science can use predictions to test theories. Still, people must make the distinction between data and theory, and realise that theory can be flawed.
Properties of nature exist independently of what science may know about them. Laws of nature which are required to build weapons are always there, it can't be invented. Dogma, on the other hand, is purely artifical.
To further the point made by Draek: often times, you can't even *engage* the uninformed in any sort of meaningful debate, because they simply lack enough knowledge to know what they are arguing against.
For example: debating a creationist that keeps asking for "intermediate forms" or "why hasn't a cow given birth to a dog?" It shows that they simply do not understand the most fundamental aspects of evolution. So instead of debating whether or not all forms of life were created by the process of evolution, the creationist first has to be educated about what evolution is; and they then spend the entire time arguing about unrelated points about simply the *definition* of evolution.
Similarly, it is extremely difficult to have a discussion about whether or not nationalized health care is a good thing or not. Statistics can show that the US has bad health care. They can show that the US spends more money on health care for a lesser result than every other industrialized nation. But you get into a discussion with a health care opponent, and they generally immediately respond with, "it's socialism" or "I don't want lazy people to get a hand-out". So you can't even begin having the discussion about nationalized health care until you can figure out what, exactly, they mean by "socialism" or "lazy person."
So if it comes off as dismissive or dogmatic when someone asks you to RTFM and educate yourself about the basics of the topic at hand before they will engage you in a discussion, there is a good chance that they are just tired of answering the same basic questions asked by every ignorant, opinionated idiot. You may be genuinely interested in learning and having a debate; unfortunately, your questions about "if AGW is real, then why did we get so much snow on the east coast this year?" sounds a lot like someone who has chosen to not take the time to educate themselves *at all*.
If you want your opinion to be taken seriously, show that you have taken the time to analyze the facts and come up with real reasons for why you hold the beliefs that you do. If you can't do that, expect your bush league statements to be dismissed out of hand.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Science is a tool, a methodology. It has no ideology, any more than a hammer or a matchstick has an ideology. That's not to say that proponents or practitioners can't have ideologies, but part of the design of science is to eliminate the biases by forcing methodological strictures on research. Science is all about the evidence, ideologies are all, so far as I can tell, about ego stroking.
Well, I think we're all misusing the word "ideology" here. Dictionary definition seems to say that it's just a systematic body of ideas that characterizes an individual or group... From that definition one could certainly say "science" is the ideology of "scientists"...
I think the argument was that some people accept science too blindly - and that surely is possible. The very nature of science is to explore ideas, and embrace the possibility that some of the ideas we embrace may be disproven. It is a rigorous process of building knowledge over generations, because the knowledge we generate as a race is too far-reaching to be fully explored by one person in one lifetime. But the fact that we're building this knowledge collaboratively, and over long periods of time, means we must accept, often as a matter of faith, that many of the investigations carried out by others or in the past were done so properly, and that the ideas are, as a result, at least somewhat reliable.
Of course, it's the same kind of trust we must place in any knowledge that comes from outside ourselves. I have heard that there exists a country called Turkey - I have seen in on maps and in history books - but I have no personal experience that confirms this. If you question everything you can't personally verify, it severely hinders your working relationship with the world. :) I think that placing one's trust in science is about the best one can do. It's the best information we have about how the world works, subject to the best discipline of verification. It's not infallible, but we're only human after all...
Bow-ties are cool.
You need to look at the study. Show me one good study that says corn fructose is worse for you then sugar?
Having a 'study' isn't good enough. You need good p values, you need proper conclusion and it needs to be repeatable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Still, each story about a scientist gone astray increases the visibility of scientific fraud. Each story reinforces a negative view held by the public and destroys their trust in the scientific system. The potential implications are dire if the public--and therefore those who fund research--regard every scientist as a potential charlatan. Every scientist should therefore reinforce his or her commitment to avoid ignoring any data that do not fit the hypothesis. Honesty is the only weapon against fraud and against public mistrust, and it is available to everyone from technician to professor. We all need to make sure that it remains the dominant ethos in our laboratories.
In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91-19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices.
As quoted from How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005738
The athiests I know all have comic books in their back pockets. They should just fess up where their hearts are, rather than hiding behind the facad of "rationality."
Er, what ?
Scientists dont tell you to believe everything they say. They tell you to check the facts. Read through papers, ect. ect. Your are committing a fallacy. I.e. Something that changes equals un-truth whereas something static equals truth. Perhaps both are untrue. I am quite confident in saying Science approximates the truth, whereas religion totally fabricates it.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Are you this up in arms when it comes to attempting to use religion as a hammer to force another ideology upon a skeptical populace that will result in worsened economic conditions and reduced freedoms for that populace?
Not trolling; I'm genuinely curious.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
I think it's more basic than that. Any ideology followed closely and long enough leads to unthinking behavior and beliefs.
Including... science.
Except science isn't an ideology.
Except that many DO make "science" an ideology, particularly when attempting to use science as a hammer to force another ideology upon a skeptical populace that will result in worsened economic conditions and reduced freedoms for that populace.
Strat
Why is this modded "Troll"?? I'm genuinely curious.
It's not like this hasn't happened many times in the past, and will most likely continue in the future.
Is it now heresy to suggest that politicians politicize science and so do ideologically-driven scientists?
Strat
Because it's a transparent shot at climate change science, implying that it's all a conspiracy. Apparently practically everyone who is qualified to interpret the data have conspired to deceive the entire world about the subject. I can't think of a single scientific organization in the world that has researched the subject that doesn't agree with the IPCC findings. Yet some folks with no background in the relevant subjects, who haven't done any actual research, feel that they can dispute the findings and allege all sorts of malfeasance. THAT is not science. That's just people with vested interests or ideological loyalties defending their turf and trying to spread FUD in order to prevent any action being taken.
They don't have scientific evidence to back up their claims, they just want to sow doubt. Do they really care if they're wrong? No. They'll simply blame the government for not acting to prevent whatever problems arise, just as the "drill baby drill" folks are now blaming the government for not doing more to prevent the gulf spill and for not fixing it faster now. This, despite the fact that they would vehemently oppose regulations on industry that might affect their bottom line, and that they always claim that government is generally incompetent and industry knows best how to do their jobs. It's all quite self-serving.
Yup, this is true. But do you hold that only empirical truth counts as truth? If so, can you explain how that that position is an empirical truth?
Nope, this is not true. Your definition of "faith," though popular, is not taught by most religions, and certainly not Christianity.
But more to the point of TFA, do you hold that only empirical evidence counts as evidence? If so, can you provide empirical evidence for that position?
Yup, could be true. But only if the terms are defined correctly. That's a little like saying "Stuff is nice."
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
Most of so-called "Chinese Medicine" is complete bollocks. To paraphrase a line from "Storm" by Tim Minchin: "Do you know what they call Chinese medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine."
HAND.
You realize your brain is a complex calculating machine, and usually your gut feelings are associated with learned data or quick approximations. E.g. if you are threatened with death by falling off a cliff, you will instantly enter "automatic mode" and your arms and legs with scramble for a foot or hand hold without even having to engage your frontal lobe. You COULD plan out what you will do before the fall if you knew it was going to happen, but in practice these things are somewhat random. For you it seems like a gut reaction but in reality its just your brain entering a more computationally efficient survival mode which is still rooted in rational behavior. The problem is we are wired to do this only within the constraints of our natural environment which is not a trading floor or driving in a vehicle, hence the reason we see so much irrational behavior in our modern world.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Geeks treating the real world like some sort of math problem is a reductive and mostly pointless exercise.
Logic is futile?
How does science tell you how you should behave in society, for instance?
Well, just as a for-instance, games theory shows that a simple tit-for-tat algorithm is one of the most effective strategies in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Study of social insects, as well as herd and pack animals, reveals that cooperation among members of a species is a powerful evolutionary strategy. Not the only one, of course, but further study quickly reveals that we are social animals. Studies of the human brain reveal powerful empathic circuitry that may well form the basis for the Golden Rule. It's not as strong as the sex drive (and even that can be suppressed), but there does seem to be a biological basis for some foundational ethics. In fact, it's silly to assume that ethics can or should exist in a vacuum, with no scientific basis.
Of course, science is unlikely to tell us which fork to use at a formal dinner, or why, but it can definitely reveal a lot about basic ethics. I might go so far as to say that if it can't be explained by science, it's not ethics, but manners.
Likewise, science isn't the be-all-end-all in determining what kind of government you should set up
Not at this point. There's a definite paucity of data, as you point out. We've only tried a handful of kinds, and this is something where the negative consequences of random experimentation are too great to risk on live populations. Nevertheless, models and simulations can reveal a great deal, although our current tools limit the scope, and therefore the effectiveness of such modeling. I agree that science is not yet the "be-all-end-all" here, but to suggest that it can't ever be is naive and foolish. Heck, it may well turn out that there is no "best" kind of government--that you always have tradeoffs. Nevertheless, that can only be proven with...wait for it...science. And if science can help us understand those tradeoffs (which, at least in theory, it certainly can), then it can help us make a more informed decision.
Science does have limits, no question, but your view of those limits seems hopelessly naive.
Logic is futile?
No, trying to shoehorn human beings, far from logical creatures, into simple boolean constructs is self-defeating. Otherwise, politics would be much simpler and much more boring.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Somebody needs to learn about the philosophy of science. You're a fish that doesn't see the water.
So what is science? At its heart it is an approach to observe, measure, and record, then correlate the records with theories to allow us to better understand the nature of the subject observed.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Sure, they don't call it ideology: they call it 'established theory' or some such thing. But what, if not an "established theory" is (say) protestantism or catholicism or islam? ("the logic of man" vs. "the texts of our ancestors" or whatever).
Erm, that an established theory is a) based on extensive evidence and experimentation and b) is actually disprovable ?
The fact that someone prefers one foundational basis over the other is simply bias: scientific 'fact' gets disproven much more frequently than religious 'fact', after all - and the scientific communities of the world seem almost as reticsient in admitting a significant conceptual change as religious organizations.
What religious "facts" are you referring to that could actually be disproven in the first place ?
We all look at the world through colored lenses.
Obviously. Yours are clearly pretty coloured against your misconception of what Science actualy is.
Asking for evidence that evidence exists is a silly exercise in mental masturbation. Thanks for the laugh.
Also amusing is your claim that the popular definition of "faith" is "certainly" not the definition used in Christianity, though you can't be bothered to mention the "real" definition.
Your post is amusing all around. Doesn't add to the discussion, though.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Unfortunately people hang onto established beliefs even when they are found to be untrue: thus, today's religions are out of harmony with science.
You are incorrect in your assertion.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Scientific evidence is produced by probing the thing/system science wants to describe.
The irony here is that you are forgetting that human beings produced theological ideas based on exactly the same kind of thoughtful contemplation that you ascribe to scientific theory (Jesus in the desert, Buddha meditating for years, Muhammad in the cave, and that's just the "famous" ones) - which is exactly the same oversight that leads biblical literalists to believe that it was written by the divine hand of god. There are of course differences - primarily the lack of immediately testable evidence. But for every successful belief system (there are perhaps a few dozen still around), there have been countless failures. Why did they fail? Because they didn't deliver in one important way: they didn't make enough people's lives better. What more proof does a belief system need? Most do not attempt to explain why a rock and a feather fall at the same rate in a vacuum (the catholic church tried to hold on to some old beliefs to avoid challenges to its power, but Jesus had nothing to say about fluid dynamics). They simply try to alleviate the suffering of existence. No more proof is needed for the average believer.
Even so, in spite of how easily dismissed theological texts are these days, people put an enormous amount to thought into them. Just about every modern moral system is the result of thousands of years of theological evolution that has resulted in an incredibly sophisticated understanding of the human condition. Have you ever actually read a serious work of theological scholarship? Start with Joseph Campbell. He does a great job of explaining theological thinking in modern psychological terms. It will change the way you think about religious texts without requiring you to submit to any particular institutional view of them.
Science and Faith are the opposites, not Belief. "Belief", alone, is too vague.
Science is about what we believe, based on our best available evidence. Faith is about what we believe, despite our best available evidence. New knowledge and ideas can cause upheavals in either, but with Science, the end goal is to find truth, not preserve it.
After reading the Discworld series and any other Pratchett books I could get my hands on, I find that quote the most obviously nonsensical part of all his writings. To see why, simply replace "justice" and/or "mercy" with any compound phenomenon such as "ocean" or "wind". I believe we have firmly established scientific evidence for both, and yet they do not appear from looking at their individual components. Gert Nygårdshaug put it very well in "Fortellernes marked" ("The Storytellers' Market"), saying essentially that the original meaning of "belief" requires evidence to back it up, and everything else is superstition.
IIRC, most of the criticisms follow two types. The first is that it's not a causative relationship, which the popular media implies the article proves. The second are criticisms of the study methodology by people familiar with the subject. I don't think Slashdotters are claiming that science isn't capable of elucidating the truth of this matter.
Accepting second-hand information about the "truth" without skepticism isn't scientific thinking. OTOH, the summary is talking about denying large amounts of scientific data with the rationale that science can't answer the question. Slashdot's consensus might not always agree with science, but it tends not to suffer too greatly from this particular issue AFAICT.
I already commented, so I can't mod you up, but you're right.
Scientists overstate their claims all the time. I am a peer reviewer for an international journal and this is one of the most common revisions I request of manuscript authors.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Dawkins is a response to the problem. Meaning people gleefully ignore facts because they are counter to some allegory the believe.
Quite frankly, he serves as a good counter to religions stupid loud people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What scientists mean to convey when they present a discovery :
We performed experiment A. Result B was obtained. We propose mechanism C to explain the findings.
What the media reports:
Scientists prove C!
What appears in the abstract:
In the last decade, there has been much interest in D. We have done something that relates only tangentially, but will pretend that it's relevant. To investigate D, we performed A with the result B. We propose that the findings can be explained by C, which is a critical step towards understanding D, building a quantum computers and curing cancer.
What the researchers say to each other:
Fuck yeah, we got B to agree with C (sort of)! Beers are on me! Now I can defend my thesis and I'll never have to see A again! We can probably put in something about D to try to get into a better journal.
The particular language used by each group is tailored to the audience. The immutable facts are that A was done and B was obtained; that's the science.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
religion is a great crutch for self inflicted ignorance.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
By believing what they measure and observe and correlate it with theory?
Are you kidding? Measurements are not fact. Measurements are what we use to get our heads around a physical phenomena. Measuring gravity tells us nothing about what it actually is. We don't even know whether space "pushes" against things or mass pulls on them. There are theories that point in both directions, but ultimately you must have faith that science has something - anything - to say about the true nature of the phenomena. And sometimes measurements are completely useless on their own. The very phenomenon that lead to the discovery of quantum mechanics (the double slit experiment), was completely counter-intuitive and offered the "revelation" that measurements were inherently imperfect and limited. It was as close to an existential dilemma as science has ever had, and lead to real debates about whether the moon was really there when you weren't looking at it and whether the universe was really anything like what it looks like.
Do you know for a fact that we will ever know what causes the effect we call gravity? No. You only have faith in your belief that science is not only real, but has something to say about what things are really all about. That is exactly the same thing as believing that a particular theological point of view has and/or will have something to say about the human condition.
Science itself tells us that there are things it cannot tell us - e.g., Russell's paradox. It is simply another imperfect tool we use to make life more tolerable. Just like religious belief. (Not the institution, the system itself).
Yes, you're right that science might possible be able to provide some insights into these things, at some point in the remote future.
However, we can't wait around until that time to choose a form of government or decide on ethical behavior, or to decide on various political issues. Science is frequently too slow to provide answers for some things.
For instance, should abortion be legal or not? Should the mother have a right to do what she wants with her body (esp. if the fetus threatens her life medically), or do the fetus's rights override this? How is science going to help decide this? Not 1000 years from now, but right now? It's an ethical question, not one that science is prepared to answer.
Should a homeowner be allowed to shoot an intruder dead if he's physically threatened? How does science answer this question? Some people think a person should be allowed to kill anyone that enters his home without permission, especially if they're threatening their life, or worse armed. Other people think that it's wrong to kill, even if someone is threatening to kill you, and that self-defense is not justifiable in any circumstance. There's a whole range of opinion in between. How does science help decide this? I don't see how it does. You might be able to make up some models and use game theory or whatever and decide what the best ethical constraints are for personal survival, or for species survival, or for the best society (with a certain definition of "best"), but these are all probably different.
What if I'm facing a group of 10 thugs who mean to kill me, and I can either let myself be killed, or kill all of them? Some people would argue that my life is no more valuable than anyone else's, and it's wrong to kill 10 to save 1. Others would argue that as a non-aggressor, my life is more valuable than aggressors', and self-defense is warranted. Others would argue that thugs only harm society, and should be eliminated whenever convenient not just for my sake (as the one immediately threatened), but for the sake of all future victims, plus all the expenses that society must pay in dealing with thugs (police, courts, prison, etc.).
How does science determine which of these viewpoints is "correct"? It doesn't. That's a personal valuation. If I believe that my life is more valuable than 10 thugs' lives, that's my viewpoint, and hopefully society (in the form of a jury) agrees with me. But I don't see how science can prove this.
That's the way it works in theory... Let me know when you get you own LHC fired up so you can personally replicate those findings.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Respectfully, I do not think so.
The link that you provided states that the Baha'i faith asserts the existence of a God who is the creator of all things. I certainly accept that science does not fully explain our existence, but I feel that it is not proven that an entity "created" the universe. Asserting that this is so puts a religion at odds with science, because science should only assert to be true what can be proven to be true, and allow for everything else to be unknown.
"Assumptions about metaphysics are unprovable/unfalsifiable, so science can say nothing about it (the very topic of this article)"
Sorry, no. As explained elsewhere, if there is no evidence for something (e.g., an afterlife), it is as nonsensical to believe in it as believing in absolutely anything else for which there is no evidence (e.g., a teapot floating between Earth and the moon, Thor, Yahweh, fairies or little green men). Without evidence, all of those are equally unlikely, i.e. somewhere between zero and very low (at least if people have been looking for evidence for a long time).
Science makes some very big assumptions about causality. "Similar causes lead to similar effects." Thus far, these assumptions have held up, but if we, for example, unequivocally break the light-speed barrier, science would be turned on its ear.
I believe there are more assumptions made by science, (science being defined as following the scientific method.)
What? That makes no sense. Disproving a scientific hypothesis or theory does not "turn science on its ear". It happens, and the theories are adjusted accordingly. We develop a new theory or revise the existing one to account for the new evidence and continue experimentation and the search for more evidence.
Seems like you're arguing that because it disregards solipsism, it's making some enormous assumption that could be wrong. If it's wrong about that, then it really doesn't matter anyway.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
This isn't exactly new, isn't it the reason for the development of the scientific method?
Much of what TFA talks about sounds like confirmation bias (mixed with a little doublethink). This is a natural human trait to place more weight on something that confirms what we already thought, and we use it all the time is a useful rule of thumb that enables us to avoid wasting time - most of the time we were right all along, or at least conveniently wrong. An unfortunate by-product is that we rely too much on a small amount of assurance (considering something proven fact rather than merely an assumption that we've found some dubious support for). Secondly, we are both lazy and do not like to be wrong so are prone to not only biasing our little test sample but also of warping potentially conflicting results into something that either can be discounted or even confirms our fallacy (e.g. ad hominem - "that jerk denied it so it must be true").
People do this so extensively that if you pay attention to your communications you'll probably discover yourself manipulating what you say because you predict the behaviour and seek to counter or exploit it. Probably more subtly than can be seen on the average Slashdot submission though.
This is also a major issue with the internet where we can very easy find information to suit our predispositions, while the volume and general unreliability of information reinforces our willingness to discount anything that conflicts. That is why some people bemoan the death of newspapers where articles were long, informed and reliable enough to have a chance of convincing you of something using facts, logic and reason. Contrast to Digg.
If you have insuffucient data to make a conclusion, you don't make one. Why would you presume to know what you already determined to be unknowable for you?
There's no utility in arbitrarily deciding based on intuition. Intuition is nothing but guessing when outside your domain of experience.
You're not some military commander who has to make a call. It's not a dichotomy where "none" isn't an option. If you can't decide on reason then admit it and leave it for another day. Science goes on and patience is a virtue. Good things come to those who wait, including answers.
Gotta love strawman arguments! I never said anything along the lines of that. The qualifiers "usually" and "loudest" are very important here and the meaning significantly changes if you ignore them, as you seem to have done. Anyway, like you didn't complain about politicization of science but merely noted it exists, I didn't say you're too deeply set in your ideology to accept scientific theories with mountains of evidence and extremely broad support among the scientific community, I merely noted that such people exist and correlate well with loudly complaining in a manner which you most certainly were not doing.
But let's cut the crap, shall we? You indeed were, and I indeed was. And your original post was complaining about the evil cabal of climate scientists and their bogus theory of anthropogenic global warming. Anyone could see that. Sure, you tried to be vague about it, but the stuff about scientists "forcing their ideology on a skeptical populace" and harming the economy and restricting freedoms (because the freedom to screw over other people is the most essential freedom of all, of course) is a classic AGW denialist stance. Nobody else makes that specific set of claims, particularly the "oh they're going to destroy the economy" line.
And now we come to the central point of the matter, and why your original post was was modded down as a troll. You are claiming that a scientific theory with decades of research, enormous amounts of evidence, broad consensus amongst the relevant experts, and no denial by any international or national scientific body is a fraud, mere ideology-pushing. You are accusing the scientific community (not just climatology, it'd have to be far larger than just that to work) of conspiracy and deception on a massive, unprecedented scale, which somehow over all these years has not had a single insider coming out with the truth. And you are making these accusations without the slightest shred of evidence to show that said theory is wrong, and certainly not enough to prove that it is the product of some immense conspiracy.
You're talking about "research and facts", so let's see what you've got to support your position. Otherwise, your troll moderation was wholly deserved.
But scientists *do* say these things for a number of reasons
And the corrolary here is that not everything scientists say is science. I heard one sneeze the other day, and I was--amazingly--able to not interpret it as a statement of science.
Unlike priests, scientists (the individuals) make no claims of infallibility. This, I think, is what gives people who don't understand science the most difficulty.
Wow. That post made so little sense, it's difficult to even know where to start. Your example has a single assumption, which isn't actually an assumption. We've seen tons of evidence of canyons and valleys being created by water (rivers and glaciers) on earth. It's not an assumption, it's a verifiable fact. So, I'm not really sure what you think you're proving there, or how it helps your argument. Going to take a closer look at Mars seems like a good thing to do. The fact that they actually found water there is that much more interesting. We can learn a lot from this kind of exploration.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
We have now figured out everything. Unlike 100 years ago, when some things science thought were true but turned out not to be.
In fact the further you go back, the more wrong scientists have turned out to be. The world's not flat. The universe is expanding.
Future generations will look back on us as the generation that finally figured everything out so they wouldn't have to.
Actually I think you miss the point. Science doesn't attempt to answer the questions of morality or ethics as you've mentioned there are other fields of study which explore that very topic. Most people classify science as the act of applying the scientific method. If a question has no distinct answer then the scientific method will not be able to answer it. Science in that respect can give us more data to weigh our decisions such as the whole abortion debate and when to classify life. It's not a question science can answer because the question is subjective. As soon as an egg is fertilized it meets all the scientific classifications for life but many don't see it as distinct life or don't think it should be protected. Science cannot answer that question but it can shed let such as when the fetus can feel pain or verify the process of fertilization to begin wtih.
That is the root of "Scientific Impotence." Many people assume that "scientists" think they can answer all of life's questions with the scientific method and that's simply not true. Science has been perverted by money and politics and so the base questions become flawed because the scientist is trying to reach a conclusion that will support his or her funding organization. This is not true science and also adds to the reason science isn't trusted. Science is not a way of life, it's a process for answering questions that requires constant testing and validation and in other words, more questions.
There are those that take everything too far, don't let the outliers ruin the concept. Science has given a lot to our world and because of that most people won't outright bash the scientific method as a flawed approach unlike a few centuries ago.
I don't understand that field, and it's all hogwash anyway. Don't RTFA, it's just political propaganda!!
If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it.
If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.
The origin of myths is explained in this way.
Rationalism is not an ideology. It cannot be. To be idealistic means forgoing being rational when a particular subject related to that ideology becomes the topic of discussion.
Sure it can. It's greatest flaw is that many rationalists believe that rational inquiry can eventually produce the complete truth about the nature of the universe, despite rigorous proof to the contrary (cf Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, etc etc).
I am officially gone from
In fact, before the Enlightenment (in Europe), reason and rational thought were believed to be the province of priests and lawyers.
That's why they call it the Enlightenment. (too easy)
I appreciate what you say, but the cumulative effect is disastrous (also see the sibling reply to yours).
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Thanks for taking the time, much appreciated and much more interesting than a mod point.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
The fact is thought that populations don't understand statistics or probability at ALL. You tell somebody that second-hand smoke caused an extra 20 child deaths this year, and they go freaking out, banning smoking from all public locations. Then you try to explain how that isn't statistically significant and they look at you like you're insane. I guess having the exact numbers right there to tell people might help, but most are going to ignore the numbers.
All of this is just a more fundamental problem with our society. We need to teach children to question their lives, to think freely, and to be ready for things to change. Instead, we kill the desire to learn and peer pressure forces them to establish foundational beliefs that set them up to be wrong again and again, and whats worse, to defend the wrong answers rather than realizing errors and correcting.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
In other words, you think most people are stupid. You, of course, are smart.
The reality is that nobody is capable of objective self-examination of their own thought processes. That's why we have the scientific method, formalized education, peer review, psychotherapists, 12-step groups, clergypeople, etc.
In fact, smart people are better then others in maintaining beliefs contradicted by evidence. Example: William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner and co-inventor of solid-state logic (WTF would we be without that?), who made bad decisions about his personal life, who started businesses that had no hope of succeeding, and who spent the last part of his life propounding racial theories worthy of the most ignorant Nazi or Klansman. His brilliance facilitated his idiocies; anybody who tried to argue with him got cut off at the knees.
Example: Christopher McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp. Graduated from Emory with honors, refused an offer of membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Shared Shockley's ability to out-argue anybody in sight. Developed weird theories from reading too much mysticism, gave away his money and embarked on a hand-to-mouth existence that ended when he tried to hike from Anchorage to the Bering Strait without so much as a compass.
Example: Our own Pudge. People who tangle with him tend to dismiss him as a braindamaged wingnut, but I find his arguments to be cleverly constructed, if somewhat factually challenged.
What these folks lack is not intellectual skill but emotional maturity.
Martin Luther said...
"But since the devil's bride, Reason, that pretty whore, comes in and thinks she's wise, and what she says, what she thinks, is from the Holy Spirit, who can help us, then? Not judges, not doctors, no king or emperor, because [reason] is the Devil's greatest whore."
Science didn't give us nukes or bioweapons, people did based on the knowledge they gained through the application of the scientific method. Science requires no faith. You can't argue that faith is the same as observation because observation in order to be accepted needs to be reproducible again and again. I haven't seen anything in any religion that is as reproducible as say the interaction of oxygen and hydrogen.
Arguing that Galileo and Copernicus, or Newton are "exactly" like prophets or priests communicating a revelation is laughable as humans inherently question what is around them. No one discovered science or the scientific method, they merely reported their findings and methodologies which others built upon by repeating the tests. It's like saying that humans discovered sex, it is in our nature and quite testable. The great scientists of the past embraced the process that is science but for instance, Einstein still believed in god. He understood their were questions that didn't have a specific answer such as should black people be considered equal to whites or when is abortion okay? Those are not questions which have a scientific answer because they are value judgements. In some cases the plurality rule and all people are deemed equal unless they're Mexican (this irritates me to no end) and in other cases there is no consensus such as with abortion.
This is really a caricature. Have you read any Thomas Aquinas?
I always discount scientific data/results not because of my own beliefs, but because I believe the scientists (or employers/funders) belief/goal is being pushed and it wasn't properly scientifically tested.
Many times we read stories here where one scientific study contradicts another scientific study.
Another thought, after reading more about the Baha'i faith.
This religion appears to make a very noble attempt at seeking truth over dogma. I hope that my prior comment was not seen as disparaging. Please understand that I know little about Baha'i.
Actually I think you miss the point. Science doesn't attempt to answer the questions of morality or ethics as you've mentioned there are other fields of study which explore that very topic. Most people classify science as the act of applying the scientific method. If a question has no distinct answer then the scientific method will not be able to answer it. Science in that respect can give us more data to weigh our decisions such as the whole abortion debate and when to classify life. It's not a question science can answer because the question is subjective.
I don't think I'm missing the point at all; I think you're exactly right, and this was the point I was trying (perhaps not so well) to make.
You need to go tell this to "Xtifr", who seems to think that science can answer all these questions, in his reply to my post.
Are you kidding? Measurements are not fact. ... but ultimately you must have faith that science has something - anything - to say about the true nature of the phenomena.
why must I have "faith"? Why can I not merely posit that, by gosh, I don't know? Or perhaps that this is an approximation that appears to give the right answer of behavior 99.999% of the time?
Why do you insist on having absolute answers and act like without them we'll perish? Bacteria seem to get along fine without this knowledge. So do higher lifeforms.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Worsened economic conditions and reduced freedoms have nothing to do with science, at least not the science you're talking about, and the scientists practicing that science have no such motivation except in the minds of conspiracy theorists.
I want to blow your mind.
I grew up in a Christian environment, and the only way that I have found to avoid cognitive dissonance is to adopt the view that the universe is understandable. So I examine religious experience as a series of related phenomena.
A common form of religious experience involves groups of people gathering together to sing, and to listen to some appointed person that performs motivational-type monologues, often intertwined with narration. Extra-curricular study of religious texts is strongly encouraged, so the central memes are reinforced.
The human brain is divided into semi-symmetrical hemispheres, with the left usually being dominate with speech. Imagine the individual moving through environments that are either unsafe or safe, the organism defending itself or opening itself up for influence. The religious context is one of safety (or at least where the participants defenses are lowered), and I believe from a meme standpoint, also one of suggestibility (to use a computer metaphor, programmability). Split-brain observations (see Michael Gazzaniga or Roger Sperry) have given rise to Dual Brain Theory, so under this paradigm we might suppose that each hemisphere has a semi-separate emotional experience, and consequently different memories of those experiences. Interestingly, dolphins in the wild appear to alternate which hemisphere is sleeping/functioning, with conditions varying from safe (captivity- both hemispheres can sleep), to dangerous (swift current- rapid cycling of hemispheres). Now try and imagine Dissociative Identity Disorder and Schizophrenia within this model.
So, "god" exists, but is actually just the non-dominant hemisphere programmed in a religious environment. The great psychologist Julian Jaynes put together a fascinating theory in his influential The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and it remains a classic in psychology more than three decades after its original publication. Religion would be an evolutionary adaptation to larger tribes, made possible by agriculture. And Jaynes' ideas would not seem so radical if the field of psychology kept within the same vein of understanding pioneered by William James and Dr. Bois Sidis (it was however sidetracked by followers of Freud, and later Skinner). One of his most important works was The Psychology of Suggestion (1898).
So, science is definitely not religion. And we need to figure this communication problem out very soon, because a "perfect storm" of crises is upon us and our old tricks of technologically accommodating a mentality that believes that useful energy is infinite or that growth is inherently good has come to an end. To grasp the historical significance of not coping adequately with this mentality, all one has to do is look at the great disasters of the 20th century, beginning with WWII.
I think a part of it is that we're so used to hearing about all these "scientific breakthroughs" and "important discoveries" all the time. Every scientific article talks about the potentially life-changing applications of each little project, and by the time those developments take place, they're less spectacular (or less unusual, given today's society) than originally believed. I think another part of it is that so many scientists think their chosen fields are the most important. It does make sense that they would think so, given that they've devoted their careers (or entire lives) to the cause, but it sometimes seems to give their claims a sense of embellishment. After all, in how many ways have scientists predicted the end of the world? And of all those urgent warnings, how many have actually ended the world? Not counting the killer asteroids and alien invasions, of course.
Luke chapter 3 states that Jesus is the 75th generation after Adam. So if one even assume an average of 20 years per generation that would mean only 1500 years between Adam and Jesus. But the bible states that Adam lived to be over 800 years old and Noah lived close to 400 years old. But even giving a thousand years for each generation would only give 75,000 years between the first human and Jesus. Even that amount of time is not enough to explain how people got to all the far reaches of this planet and how there are different races. So one has to pick and choose what one believes from the bible since it is irrational to believe there were only 75 generations and that the flood covered the whole earth. To be rational and reasonable one would have to throw out a huge per cent of the bible which the early priest did not do.
Actually, the sun does go around the earth as much as the earth goes around the sun. All motion is relative.
The ideology of science is that the methodology is a good one. There isn't much ideology, but it is non-zero. In order to conclude that the scientific method is a correct method for ascertaining truth, you first have to postulate that there is a persistent, objective reality, and that our senses bear some consistent relationship to it. That is moderately uncontroversial (at least today), but it is still a precondition to the conclusion that the scientific method is useful.
The scientific method is useful because it produces testable predictions. Science doesn't presuppose anything on "faith". The "assumptions" of causality and reality being objective are theories that are tested every day, and so far, are holding to be true. If this wasn't the case, our current theories would not hold up to scrutiny and new ones would have to be created.
Knowledge Brings Fear
Well, someone convinced the Pope that evolution was Gods plan, so you should just keep pushing your luck and you might just change someones mind.
Actually, it is not about "everybody". It is about people who deny scientific results. Personally, I am not doing any of that.
I just don't think we're "designed" for changing our worldview, or zeitgeist, or whatever you want to call it.
Sure - the human brain is a learning machine. Evolution has absolutely selected it for its capability to learn, and rationalize, which we have extended to include the Scientific Method. But we should not forget that hundreds of millions of years before that, Evolution also selected the more primitive parts of the brain, for their survival qualities. Those parts are responsible for emotion and feeling, and fight/flight responses.
And when we're challenged, I think it naturally will evoke a defensive response. ESPECIALLY when it comes to cultural survival. We are also social animals, and we bond most closely to our families, and those who are most like us. I think it's simply a natural, and strong response, for the irrational part of the brain to kick in, and defend that "social territory", familiarity, family, tradition, and culture.
The trick is, to set aside the defensive response, and let the rational brain work. Even if it turns the whole-brain's image of the world upside-down. (example: "what? there's boys and girls, that's it. No in-between, no weird stuff! That scares me, and threatens my ability to procreate." . . . indirectly, because maybe their offspring could be gay, and then there would be no way for the parent to inflict social 'control' on the offspring to force them to produce grandchildren, and secure the legacy. - this can affect us on a very primitive level, no matter how backwards and uncivilized you think it is, we also all share this cognitive architecture.)
I am in complete agreement that it would be GREAT if everyone could just sit down, have a beer, and talk about Evolution or how the Earth is round not flat, or whatever, without being called an evil baby-eating communist. But I just don't think it's in human-nature to do that. And while some of us have the ability to look at challenging ideas without feeling threatened, and turning to irrational thoughts and behavior - we share this world with 6 billion others. And we're not all the same. We don't all have the same abilities, environment, background, upbringing, etc. There will NEVER be an ideal utopian paradise where everyone is going to be able to do this. We've done a great job; in Liberal Democracies, of cramming written-language literacy down everyone's throat. I think the illiteracy rate in such nations is down below 1%. We accomplished this in probably less than three generations of public education. But - I'm talking about personal mastery of emotion and logic. These very basic drives. We don't have the technology or the tools, and even attempting this, would be attacked by the very problem its meant to address. Such measures would be branded as "totalitarian brainwashing". And I'm not sure that all (6 billion) of us would even have the facilities with which to develop the necessary skills. Fixing THAT problem? I think you're talking about something like eugenics at the very least, or genocide of certain cultures.
Not very pretty at all. Once we start trying to think on behalf of other people. Economics and Sociology is bad enough. Best stick to Physics and the like. You can push particles around, and they don't hit back.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The American problem is that an educated clergy is seen to be the enemy of the pentacostal religeons.
The Jesuits have no arguments with evolution, it's the faith healer travelling shows that rant against it.
Oops. *grin* Yes, evolutionary psychology.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I'm wondering if the Dunning–Kruger effect may have anything to do with this. This mainly has to do with the fact that people's incompetence blinds them to the fact of their incompletence.
However, I've encountered people across all ranges of IQs who (myself included from time to time), at least for certain things, insist on being dogmatic in the face of reasonable counterevidence.
Of course, we don't want to take science as dogma either. Scientists are basically human beings, who make mistakes. We shouldn't just unquestioningly accept everything that comes out of the mouth of a scientist. On the other hand, if something has been peer-reviewed and withstood a far amount of scrutiny, it definitely worth taking seriously.
I think part of the problem is that many people have a hard time "believing" two contradictory ideas or at least seriously contemplating them at the same time. Unfortunately, this is frequently necessary in the face of incomplete information. Two ideas that seem mutually exclusive are each supported by some body of reasonable evidence.
As Nietzsche put it, "a strong individual ... creates himself by fashioning his own values." This is from the same quote where Nietzsche implies that the universe has no inherent meaning. Many people find this depressing or claim it will make people immoral; I take away from it that I can choose what meaning for my life to have. But I always realize it's *my* meaning, which just like the models in science, I can further change and refine as more evidence becomes available to me.
I'm an atheist (in the classical sense), and I'm no fan of comic books (I don't have a single one). Of course, by your above criterion, if someone is carrying USA legal tender, they are a theist ("In God we Trust"). As an atheist, though, it appears to me that the only meaning that exists is what we give it. The safest bet is to wait until all the evidence is in, but it appears that may never happen. Therefore, I choose to treat others as I would want to be treated, as this seems a rational thing to do, and would make the world a better place. The evidence I have seen so far supports this hypothesis. I keep in mind that the initial choice of what to value was mine, and I can change it, but from there I can extrapolate via evidence how best to make the world a better place.
Nathan's blog
That would indicate that the problem does not reside with the people who tend to disbelieve scientists. The problem is with the media and the relationship scientists have with it. And rather than wasting time studying and critiquing the behavior of people who disagree with scientists, the article should be studying and critiquing the media and how scientists interact with it.
When the media consistently distorts what you're saying to the point where it's detrimental to your credibility, you have a PR problem. Rather than getting upset at the symptom (the people who get their info from the media), scientists should be working on the problem (their dysfunctional relationship with the media). As I've gotten older, one thing I've come to realize is that the world won't automatically stop and take notice and shower you with praise just because you're right. You have to work to get your message out there, and fight to make sure the message is portrayed accurately. You can't expect the messenger (the media in this case) to do it for you. They're gonna do whatever is easiest for themselves, like everyone else does.
Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity.
I'd suggest that in an environment of social change where all things are hyper-political, personal identity is at the core, but it's much more convoluted than that:
Put crudely, the libertarian mob cries out "I know what I know and I don't need some scientist telling me anything different". If you listen carefully enough, you'll hear other groups (provocateurs, stake-holders, religeous fundamentalists, etc.) chanting along in harmony.
Oh please, 90% of the posts arguing against the studies haven't even read the article. The reality is people, regardless of ideological bent, choose to believe what they choose to believe.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I am inclined to agree that the GP is complete bullshit, but how can you seriously propose that a hardline skeptical position (reality doesn't exist) should be the default?
Positing that reality doesn't exist requires rejecting absolutely all the evidence that is available. It is also utterly impractical: even religions generally do not take that position. I think it requires more faith to reject all experience than to accept the existence of physical reality in the absence of a plausible alternative. If physical reality doesn't exist (all experience is an illusion), then we have hardly lost anything by using the scientific method, which only purports to make predictions about physical reality anyway.
I won't disagree that you can't convince someone of the efficacy of the scientific method, who believes experience does not reflect reality, but I do take issue with your characterization of the acceptance of experience as a "leap of faith." It's an assumption, to be sure, but one that is useful as hell. If true reality is unknowable (or knowable only by revelation), then what is the point of taking actions which affect the false reality revealed by the senses?
People who make assumptions based on things other than the experience of (presumed) reality are nevertheless generally still accepting large parts of experience as fact. You may know actual radical skeptics (why are they bothering to talk to you if you don't exist?), but imputing that position to even a substantial minority of theists would be inaccurate.
The lady doth protest too much.
It is a part of the human condition to believe that someone else's denial is categorically different than your denial. Learn a bit of humility, a bit of introspection, and perhaps you'll gain some wisdom by realizing that yes, it is about everybody, and you don't have any particular claim to being above the fray. Automatically assuming that the critique of the argument doesn't apply to you is in fact the proof that it does.
why must I have "faith"? Why can I not merely posit..
To "posit" is to create a hypothesis. To do so is to use the scientific method. Therefore it is prima facia absurd to put your belief in its validity aside while testing its effectiveness against some standard of proof.
Faith is, by definition, "[t]he confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, concept or thing." You must have some degree of faith in the simple idea of testability, or you must abandon it and get your information about the world in some other way.
And as for your claims about bacteria, It is true that they have faith in anything. They simply react. But they have no faith in anything because they do not have a choice. It is the fact that we do have a choice that makes us human. We decide what we believe in (when we're paying attention). You decide to put your faith in the tool under consideration every time you put it to use.
As Pratchett says, ideals like justice and mercy can not be detected scientifically
Actually, they can. Do an fMRI. Love, mercy, empathy, all those things are explained by neurons firing. Why do they fire that way? Evolution. They're *useful*.
The entire idea that justice, mercy, and so forth can't be explained with basic science is utterly fucking absurd. It's the biggest lie the religious like to tell. But it's complete bunk. Those things exist because the human species evolved to have them. Why? Simple: they increased the odds that we, as a species, would perpetuate ourselves. After all, which is more likely to thrive: A community where individuals help each other, or one in which they murder each other to get what they want? Hell, it isn't even unique to humans. Plenty of other communal species exhibit behaviour that we would consider "moral" (helping others, defending the group, etc).
Society, culture, morality, all those things are beneficial to survival. It's just that simple. Don't fall for the religious bullshit. You don't need a magical sky fairy to explain away morality for you.
"Can't be bothered" seems like quite a presumption. Perhaps I was waiting for your responses first? Perhaps because they might be relevant? Perhaps as follows?
It is laughable. My rhetorical question was meant to be obviously absurd (your significant misquote notwithstanding). But the absurdity lies not in the question but in the position.
The notion that "only empirical truths count as truth" enjoyed remarkable popularity for a remarkably short while in the early 20th century. Formally known as logical positivism, adherents advocated that "a statement must be empirically verifiable, at least in principle, to be objective" (that is, to be either true or false). This view demotes all nonempirical statements, such as "humans deserve equality" to mere subjective utterances like "bananas are yummy."
So, my other, non-rhetorical question still stands: is this an accurate understanding of your position, or did I misunderstand you?
I hope it is not your position because it is absurd, as demonstrated by my absurd question. Positivism collapsed immediately upon the realization that positivism is not empirically verifiable. Positivism sets up a standard for truth that positivism itself cannot meet, and is therefore self-defeating. It is not materially different from saying "only ten-word sentences count as truth."
But even if one ignores the logical impossibility of positivism (a self-defeating statement is the opposite of a tautology, after all), it turns out to be utterly unworkable in practice as well. It turns out, upon simple reflection, that everyone in fact believes a great number of nonempirical claims.
Here's a simple example: "The universe exists." Does that sound silly? Let me rephrase: "The universe, rather than The Matrix, exists." Now here we have a claim that is, by definition, impossible to empirically verify. But that does not disqualify it from being true, and one is rarely considered irrational or unscientific for believing in a real universe.
Numerous examples abound, including the laws of logic, moral standards, human rights, and -- of course -- the principles of science itself. These are all nonempirical truths that we hold a priori, and we all know what those are called: axioms.
So, with those preliminaries accomplished, I can answer your objection:
Faith is the choice between rationally plausible axioms.
This is a succinct summary of the Greek word pistis, which is translated as faith in English versions of the Bible. The Greek word is as specific in its meaning as the English word is vague, and thus I am incessantly met with objections that impute onto Christianity one of the seventeen other definitions of faith that have nothing to do with pistis. To be fair, this vagueness has confused a good fraction of all English-speaking Christians (judging from my own students) and I conjecture that this problem is less prevalent among speakers of other languages.
There is absolutely nothing irrational or anti-scientific about this view of faith. Indeed, our notion of a "rational," "intelligent," "educated" person is of one who accepts -- as nonempirical truths -- the axioms of Reason, the axiom that the universe exists, but not the axiom that God exists. This is an arbitrary cultural distinction, and has nothing to do with being rational, intelligent, or educated.
Of course it didn't. It was an attempt to get clarification, so that the discussion can benefit.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
How about: Science is a continuous process of discovering facts and approximating models to fit facts.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Science didn't give us nukes or bioweapons, people did
Exactly. And theological concepts did not "give" us wars or oppression. People did. My point was simply that religion is a science with different rules about testability. One can have faith in the observation that gravity pulls things together and the observation that it's best not to judge other people unless you're willing to be judged. The problems arise when people say that you must believe this or that. That is not the wisdom, that's people's use of it.
No one discovered science or the scientific method, they merely reported their findings and methodologies which others built upon by repeating the tests.
Reported? Findings? Methodologies? They used the scientific method to develop the scientific method? Absurd on the face of it. Perhaps what you mean to say is that individuals discovered that they were more successful at what they were doing (mainly just surviving), if they kept track of and shared their successes and failures. People did indeed do science naturally and refined the technique into what we now call the scientific method. But such an understanding also applies to the notion of theology. People talked about the problems of existence in the same way they talked about the problems of finding food - by discussing experiences and trying to make use of what they learn. They debated, they re-assessed, they re-combined. All hallmarks of scientific thought. (And, BTW, claiming that dogma forces people into believing begs the point that in the same way science didn't make nukes, religion did not make oppression.)
This is my point about the obvious similarity (perhaps exact was the wrong word) between what we now think of as a scientist and a so-called "prophet". Forget the instant revelation stereotype. If you look at what little we know of them, (and i'm talking about the big ones who actually had a significant impact on things), they are all very thoughtful, articulate, respectful of history, aware of the tension they create and ready to defend their beliefs with self-evident logic. That sounds a lot like a scientific thinker. While the "evidence" is not something outside of ourselves that we can all turn and look at as confirmation that something is true, the reality of our individual experience makes or breaks a prophetic claim in the same way the reality of an individual test in a lab that makes or breaks a scientific claim. Do you really think anyone would even know Siddhartha's name if what he said didn't work out better for people than what they were doing before?
Luke chapter 3 states that Jesus is the 75th generation after Adam. So if one even assume an average of 20 years per generation that would mean only 1500 years between Adam and Jesus. But the bible states that Adam lived to be over 800 years old and Noah lived close to 400 years old. But even giving a thousand years for each generation would only give 75,000 years between the first human and Jesus. Even that amount of time is not enough to explain how people got to all the far reaches of this planet and how there are different races. So one has to pick and choose what one believes from the bible since it is irrational to believe there were only 75 generations and that the flood covered the whole earth. To be rational and reasonable one would have to throw out a huge per cent of the bible which the early priest did not do.
So, you want to devolve a discussion of generic faith and rationality into a discussion of the internal consistency of the Abrahamic religious tradition? Okay. Genesis 11:9. It didn't take 1500 years to spread people across the world, nor 75,000. According to Genesis 11:9, God did it in an instant. The priests never threw out any percent of the Torah; they would have known the story of the Tower of Babel. Now can we get back on topic and discuss reason and faith, and how one does not negate the other?
Science is not identical to logical positivism, but it does have axioms. Who said it does not? You can reject these axioms and blab all day to your philosophy class about the matrix. Meanwhile, scientists send people to the moon. But please, don't let me interrupt the blabbing.
As for your claim that you know the one and only "christian" definition of "faith," you are simply lying. Having spent most of my life in a Christian church... having family members who are clergy... I can tell you as a fact that faith is "absolutely" not taught as the Greek "pistis" in all (any?) popular churches. It is more-or-less taught as the value of knowing truth emotionally rather than and in spite of science. Result: churches undermine scientific reasoning in the public mind.
I personally have an axiom: people who knowingly reject the axioms of science are insane. Of course, many who claim to do so actually reason with evidence and logic most of the time, falling back on cognitive dissonance only when they need to in order to justify whatever cherished insane belief they were psychologically molested with as children.
If you ask me to prove an axiom I will laugh at you. If you ask me to reason without axioms I will laugh at you. What are we left with? A choice between the axioms of scientific reasoning and insanity.
Bananas are yummy? Define "yummy." The brain's reaction to stimulus is measurable, so it is a scientific question if defined in the correct terms. The same is true of questions of justice.
And what of questions that can't be defined in a scientifically meaningful way? We can only conjecture as to the answers. We cannot gain confidence in the accuracy of the answers.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Well the OP obviously can't provide, so how about some evidence from you? No? None? I thought so. When you've got more than "lol ur a sheeple!", come back and try again.
What? Scientists aren't people too? They have families. They're concerned about the future for them. Don't they have as much right as anyone to express their views?
But in reality, for the most part what climate scientists are saying is the simplest and most effective way they know of to combat global warming is to reduce and ultimately stop net emissions of GHG's, primarily CO2. Just because you don't like the political and other implications of what they are saying doesn't mean they're wrong.
I second your recommendation of that article. It's excellent.
Of course there is a relationship between violent video games and violence. Violent people like violent things, for example, video games, torturing cats, beating up people etc. Some people like violent video games because they allow them to cause violence but without real world consequences (I can shoot a lot of people in a video game, but I would have problems shooting a real person who was not threatening my life even if the law allowed it), others play games for their story and play a mix of violent and nonviolent games (a violent game can still have a good story).
There is also a relationship between guns and murders - if you want to kill someone, using a gun is most likely the easiest/most efficient way to do it.
Now, whether violent video games can make nonviolent people (more) violent, that's the question. Young kids and some adults cannot perceive the difference between reality and fiction, so they could try to emulate the video game in reality, but little kids should not be allowed to play GTA and the aforementioned adults probably already are a danger to themselves and/or others. The question that remains is whether "normal" adults are affected and whether a video game can make a killer out of someone who, before playing the game, would not harm even a fly.
Yeah, and if you lived in Brazil, you would say "Well, it's just evolutionary fact that men fly into rages over their loss of honor and kill their wives.".
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
That's more or less Deism - God as the Cosmic Engineer whose creation is in essence defining the boundary conditions of the universe. In my opinion, this is somewhat at odds with the "Personal God" idea of Christianity.
I don't know much about religion as I have not studied it, however I have 'looked into' various religions as a layperson. With my limited understanding I would say you are quite right, Christianity appears to move in the direction of a finding one's Personal God. Eastern religions seem to have this in hand but also preach the concept of God involving everyone and everything, referred to by some as a Divine Dichotomy.
I've run out of time just now but I thought your comment was quite interesting and felt it deserved a response. :)
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
I understand completely, I was unaware of the sect until I was in my mid 20s. I took a world religions class and Baha'i was one of the faiths that we covered. Though I do not share their beliefs, I respect their balance of tradition and modernity.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I see your argument, but... the "goes around" phenomenon is the Earth-Sun system's effect on the Earth, not its effect on the Sun. Its effect on the Sun is "wobbles imperceptibly". :)
Though I'm sure that's unconvincing if you're seriously arguing
Sure it can. It's greatest flaw is that many rationalists believe that rational inquiry can eventually produce the complete truth about the nature of the universe, despite rigorous proof to the contrary (cf Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, etc etc).
Yes of course. And this always backfires too. When something comes up and science cannot (yet) explain it, the religious assholes start crawling out of the woodwork with that magnificent piece of baloney: "If science cannot explain it, it must be our (very-specific-and-he-has-a-name) god and/or our religious viewpoint that MUST explain it." In other words, when you set up the scientific method as the only thing that's valid as a method for discovering objective [i.e. reproducible, non-relative] truth (it probably is but we should try not to harp on that so much), then you run the risk of people actually taking that to mean that if science cannot explain it (yet), it must automatically mean that $your_gods_name$ is responsible for it.
While I agree with your conclusion (that we shouldn't deify the scientific method), I don't agree with your reasons. The theorems you mention above are possibly the most abused mathematical objects ever produced (with the possible exception of the rounded cylinder *cough*). For example, see here. I haven't seen an equivalent book for Heisenberg, but this give a general idea.
Just the fact that unprovable assertions can crop up in systems of logic does not imply that non-scientific proofs become valid. Nor does Heisenberg's principle say anything about scientific theories - it is limited to saying something about the the absolute minimum error in a physical measurement. It's only possible relevance to producing "the complete truth about the nature of the universe" might be that in empirical verifications of scientific theories, there will always be a minimum uncertainty in those measurements and in that sense a tiny ambiguity as to whether the theory is correct. In practice, competing theories differ in predictions by MUCH more than this minimum uncertainty so that while the uncertainty principle is useful (for many many things), it is effectively negligible as far as the question of science being able to explain everything is concerned.
If the scientific method fails (and that happens, nothing's done overnight - it takes time), 'talking out of my ass' (or from some long dead guy's ass - as is usually the case), is not an automatic substitute). This is the fallacy that is born when we make the scientific method (which is good working rule, no more, no less) into some cosmic, mystic gift from the heavens that will always work - the idea that when science fails at something, anything else can immediately take its place with no necessity for further analysis - because after all, only science has standards for truth - no other source of knowledge needs to, right?
(This is not in reply only to you in particular, but also to many other posts on similar topics in this thread.)
Many religious people make the argument (as this topic is all about) that certain subjects are not within the domain of science, that science doesn't answer those kinds of questions; and then, they assert that religion does answer those kinds of questions. The usual subject they make this claim about is morality or ethics. They say science only tells of about what IS or IS NOT, and says nothing at all about what OUGHT or OUGHT NOT to be. They then assert that religion is all about what ought or ought not to be, and so as long as science sticks to the "is" and religion sticks to the "ought", they can all get along just fine managing their respective domains.
Then others argue, as you do, that science can very well answer "ought" questions, and they usually follow up by noting that religion hardly restricts itself to assertions of "ought", but makes plenty of claims about what "is" too. They argue that the difference between science and religion is not about what kinds of questions they try to answer, but with how they go about answering them and the kind of justification they provide for those answers; that it's a difference of methodology, not of subject matter.
I am inclined to agree quite strongly on the point that religion is defined by its methodology and not it's subject matter, however, I also think the religionists have a good point about moral or ethical questions being outside the domain of science. But this does not mean that I think the religious methodology is the appropriate way to answer those kinds of questions.
I am a strong supporter of the "is"/"ought" or "fact"/"value" distinction, most famously articulated by David Hume, and I believe that scientifically-based attempts to answer ethical or moral questions, such as those you suggested, commit something like what G.E. Moore called the "naturalistic fallacy". You can pull out all the good, rigorous, well-done science you want, to show that THIS IS the case and THAT IS the case and that IF THIS IS the case THEN THAT IS the case, all these facts and relations between facts -- and certainly facts are highly relevant when making decisions of any kind -- but someone can always reply to your facts, even if they believe them thoroughly, with "so? why is that good?", or "why is that bad?" or "why should I care about that?". Science cannot, by itself, tell us what we should value; it can at best tell us what people DO value, or point out the consequences of things in an attempt to appeal to values we already hold. But science is not in the business of telling us what ought to be: it only tells us what is.
And that's not something that will be "fixed" eventually as new scientific fields develop and better data is collected and better theories formulated, because that is not the kind of question that science even tries to answer. And that's fine. It's not a shortcoming of science, it's not a fault, and it's not a problem, any more than my kitchen sink is faulty for not also cooking toast: it's not supposed to, and trying to use it to do so would be a backward, ugly hack that just wouldn't work at all, no matter how much steaming hot soggy bread it produced in the end.
But that doesn't mean I think that religion holds the answers to moral or ethical questions. Religion is defined by it's methodology. It's not just a belief in a god; if that were the definition, then Buddhism wouldn't count as a religion. It's not just "moral belief"; religions make plenty of factual, non-moral claims, and plenty of people make moral claims on completely irreligious (and yet not, strictly speaking, "scientific" either) grounds. If religion has any definition at all, besides some vacuous "those who identify as religious are religious" sociological one, then the defining characteristic of religion is faith. I mean that word in the sense of the absence of critical thinking, not the absence of pointlessly skeptical thinking. By the lat
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Sadly, I do agree with you. The thing that brought it home to me was the (fairly) recent establishment of a Scientific church or temple or something like that here in Berkeley. To them I can only say, "You're doing it wrong".
On an unrelated note, signing your name is good, but doing it twice reminded me of Stephen King's Desperation and its ... ah ... eccentric sheriff =D. I'm gonna have nightmares again =[
That is, I agree with you with some do make science into an ideology. I have nothing to say specifically about AGW (as later posts appear to show you as hinting at) - haven't looked into it enough. The guy who who responded to you in detail appeared to have some good points to make though.
It's more basic than either religion or ideology. It's just stubborn thinking habits. An inability to accept that one has been wrong. Religion and ideology are symptoms of that.
How does science tell you how you should behave in society, for instance? It doesn't. That's a question for ethics, which is a part of the field called philosophy.
Ethics doesn't either. Nor does philosophy. All they do is compare and contrast different ideas while carefully not choosing any one over the other, all in the name of relativism. So, we're back to your original question - 'what tells you how to behave in society?' Does anything really fulfill that purpose? Of course there's more to life than figuring out how the physical universe works. It is the inevitable bullshit that follows that assertion that I don't care for (not accusing you of anything, just going by experience). The idea of if science can't answer something, well obviously religion (or some such bromide) is the defacto alternative.
As for your government example, your ideas of looking at empirical evidence from history is a good start. Of course that's going to help. It's not enough, but it's the best we have. And why not? Nearly every horrible way of choosing (or more accurately, stumbling into) a form of government has been tried before. While empirical evidence from historical examples would not be a complete guide to solving your problem, the LACK of such evidence will definitely hurt your chances of doing so.
As far as determining if an action is ethical or not, the first I do is try to compute (approximately of course, but with conscious deliberation - and by compute I mean logically determine) the consequences of my actions. Without that, any morality is a shallow and meaningless one - the kind that gave rise to the old proverb about the path to hell being paved with good intentions. True, the scientific method does not tell me if a consequence is acceptable or not, but it is irreplaceable when to comes to breaking down the consequences of complex actions into simple archetypes ('this will lead to pain', 'that will lead to humiliation', etc.) that one can categorize as acceptable or unacceptable and even assign degrees of the same. As far as that core decision goes, it lies outside of science (and of religion as well). It is a personal decision and is usually based upon upbringing or culture or all those ambiguous constructs that religion falsely believes are her own domain.
In any case, we may disagree about that final core decision but I don't think it's a matter of opinion that the scientific is necessary (but insufficient) in most such matters that have traditionally been seen (inaccurately) as lying outside of science altogether (usually as a precursor to 'lazy moralizing' or as the first step towards justifying an argument from authority).
As in modern probability theory (Bayesian analysis for example), one always makes the distinction between calculating degrees of belief (or consequences of an action) and actually making a decision based on some 'loss function'. In other words, there are empirically favored decisions as well, but they are usually dismissed as 'robotic' or 'unfeeling'. Leavitt's Freakonomics or Sowell's Applied Economics provide some appalling examples of this attitude, where the need to appear moral trumps the need to be moral. Is an action moral unless it actually leads to consequences that have more positive as opposed to negative aspects? Isn't that an empirically verifiable statement (in correlation at least since causality is never considered fair game)?
I think you're right in this. I only bemoan the fact that once we agree that science is not relevant to issues of arbitrary morality, people invariably throw ALL rational thought out the window and solve the problem by simply picking a side for the stupidest possible reasons and sticking to it no matter what (in the abortion issue for instance).
Science may not be useful as the final arbiter in questions of morality but it is invaluable in progressing from assumptions on good and evil to consistently applying assumptions to the questions on hand. Since societies rarely address problems until they become urgent enough to cost money or lives in sufficiently great numbers, science may (sadly) catch up to these questions sooner than you think. In many cases, it is no more complex an issue than a refusal to agree on definitions and then wasting time arguing past each other.
Other people think that it's wrong to kill, even if someone is threatening to kill you, and that self-defense is not justifiable in any circumstance.
Easily verifiable empirically don't you think? =D
You seem to have misread much of my post. I have not said most of what you think I have said.
Indeed, that was my point. Positivism is not a scientific position, but it is held by many who think that it is. It is still not clear to me whether you fall into that category or not.
I am surprised. You seem to think that I reject the axioms of science, and reject that the universe is real. Not at all! Exactly the opposite, actually, and I apologize if this wasn't sufficiently clear.
I did state that both the axioms of science and the existence of a real universe are nonempirical claims. But my point was that these are knowably true without being empirical. Therefore:
Yes, we are agreed that one cannot prove axioms. Yes, we are agreed that we cannot reason without axioms.
But your conclusion does not follow. It is a false dilemma presented by positivism. On what basis do you adjudicate that no other axioms are justified except the axioms of science? Such a belief would be an axiom, and not a scientific one. In the same vein:
Your conclusion only follows if you also demand that "meaningful" be limited to "scientifically meaningful," which again is good ol' positivism.
And again, the canonical counterexample is the existence of the universe, a question that cannot be scientifically investigated. But I think the universe is real, and I reject the idea that we can only "conjecture" about that. If I understand you correctly, I think you reject that idea also. Therefore, there are at least some statements that are simultaneously: (a) meaningful, (b) true, and (c) not scientific.
Keep in mind that ridicule is not an argument. HTH!
If by "lying" you mean that I've made a factual error, you're welcome to claim that. If by "lying" you mean that I know better and have written a deliberate falsehood, I'd challenge you to present empirical evidence of such. =)
That said, you may have a point if by "Christian" (including the scare quotes) you mean the range of things that are taught in churches. So let me clarify by analogy: I trust that you do not consider "science" to be the range of things that are taught in science classes. Throughout grade school I knew more science than most of my teachers (I imagine you did also), and they were decidedly not receptive to being corrected. But that hardly prevented me from thinking that my own conclusions were correct.
So when I say that "Christianity teaches X," I mean that I've made an objective determination of what the primary source documents (the biblical texts) are stating, without regard to whatever anyone might teach. Of course I could be wrong, and anyone is welcome to examine my reasoning.
Now, perhaps you think that the interpretation of a text (especially a religious text) is necessarily subjective; I don't agree. Under most circumstances, the "one and only" correct interpretation of a text is whatever the author meant, and therefore we can often reasonably conclude
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
While a theorem may be abused and misunderstood, that doesn't affect whether it is a correct result. And obviously note the conclusions I'm drawing are "rational inquiry cannot explain the universe", not "God exists". If you want that kind of argument, read Descartes.
I am officially gone from
The lady doth protest too much.
In other words, you have nothing to respond with.
Fact remains: You are denying the results of science, I am not.
If explanations are required to be intuitively satisfying, then yes, rational inquiry cannot "explain" the universe. What can? And to which standards? And who decides those standards? And on what basis?
And no, I wasn't trying to put you in the false position of having to defend the god stuff. Just trying to explain why we shouldn't convert the scientific method into mystical bullshit - plays right into their hands.
I think you are logically incorrect in your original assertion simply because (even a flawed application of) Godel's theorem to this question would grant the mere possibility of there being more true assertions than rational inquiry can prove. It does nothing to prove that such truths MUST exist - only that they may exist.
So, your "rigorous proof to the contrary" (and as I explained, Heisenberg is only remotely relevant and Godel only slightly more so) can only go so far as to introduce the possibility that there might be more to the universe than we can explain (not that there necessarily is). I have no quarrel with that. As I said before, the scientific method is a working rule. A working rule is far superior to any article of faith and we must not desecrate said method by reducing it to such a disreputable state.
What if that ideology is rationalism?
Having rationalism as an ideology often leads to an irrational belief in the power of rational thought. That is, that rational thought can and should be used to solve every problem.
A perfect example of this is socialism. Today, many think of socialism as a movement towards social justice (irregardless of the means), but if we go back a hundred years, the core of socialism was social planning, that is, the idea that a society can be engineered from the ground up, using the power of the rational mind. The most important arguments for socialism were rational (like "production can be made much more efficient with central planning than the chaotic market can ever hope to achieve"), and the most important arguments against socialism were arational ("people have a right to freedom and their own lives regardless of the common good"). It wasn't until socialism had been tried in practice under a few decades it began to dawn on intellectuals that the chaotic, arational market was actually more effiecient than a rational, planned society.
That is not to say that rationalism leads to socialism. Depending on what assumptions you start out with, an exaggerated belief in the rational mind can lead to the opposite conclusion. Quite a few libertarians believe that it is possible to re-engineer society from the ground up without taking into account the arationality of man - that we are all guided by arational traditions, beliefs and morals, many of which are essential to the function of society.
A third example of the exaggerated belief in rational thought is the artificial intelligence research of the 1950's and 1960's. Leading AI researchers assumed that the essence of the human mind was rational thought, so they tried to model AI with formal logic and linguistics. It failed miserably, since so much of how we work is based on arational processes. For example, decision-making involves so much emotion, that if the centre of the brain that assesses the emotional impact of a situation is damaged, people become severely hampered in their ability to make decisions - even though they can rationally weigh the different alternatives for and against each other, they don't know when one alternative outweighs the others sufficiently to decide in its favour.
...it reinforces my belief about common people with scientific facts ! yay !
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
cf Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, etc etc
And just how did we derive those?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"So, your "rigorous proof to the contrary" (and as I explained, Heisenberg is only remotely relevant and Godel only slightly more so) can only go so far as to introduce the possibility that there might be more to the universe than we can explain (not that there necessarily is)."
And all evidence to date only goes so far as to support the possibility of evolution not that it necessarily is.
You do worse than ask the gp to support the god stuff here, you ask him to prove a negative.
To "posit" is to create a hypothesis.
That's an interesting definition of posit. I meant to assume or presume as per the definition.
Faith is, by definition, "[t]he confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, concept or thing." You must have some degree of faith in the simple idea of testability,
I need no faith. If I run a test and it always shows the same result, then I have empirical proof that the test works. If I can show that it fails in some way repeatably, then I have shown that the test is incorrect and I have learned something new.
No faith required.
I think the core concept you refer to is how some scientists, notably Einstein, couldn't accept the results of their observations and theory as it clashed with their personal beliefs/faith. Many physicists have faith that the world is ordered. Why? Because for some reason they need it to be. Quantum Mechanics opens doors in some of those areas and makes things less certain. Personally I'm happy about that otherwise the universe would be a boring place.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Those who THINK they are rational have a tendency to dismiss evidence to the contrary. They call this skepticism but often it is simple denial. They use phrases like 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' but there is nothing rational about how they define 'extraordinary' or about that double standard.
These individuals have simply decided that they know the truth and therefore any evidence to the contrary is either being misinterpreted or falsified.
Ok.
Here is a post from a friend that expresses pretty much the same thing I have come to realise after looking at the AGW theory closely.
By blqysmg:
---
I get beat up regularly for doubting the church of global warming. It tends to make me try to put my actual beliefs in writing. So many people accuse me of believing whatever big oil tells me. I started off completely believing the IPCC and global warming. I just wanted to understand the mechanism by which they claimed the world was heading into runaway warming that would cause so much harm.
They said manmade CO2 was the culprit. Then I read that the effects of CO2 were logarithmic in nature, with the largest effect happening in the very low levels of CO2. In fact, more than, I believe 90% of the warming effect that can be caused by CO2 has already been caused. Don't quote me on that one, it's done out of memory.
CO2 is responsible for around 5% of the greenhouse effect. Some sources put it as much as 10%. If we go with the 10% figure, that leaves 90% of the warming due to something else, right? Most of that something else is water vapor.
So, I started looking at the charts. They often start the charts at just before the year 1900, since reliable thermometers weren't invented much before then. When we look at the amount of CO2 mankind was producing and the amount of warming that happened between 1910 and 1945, the two don't square up.
If man is the ONLY rational explanation for the warming we've had since 1975, then what was the explanation for the VERY similar warming we had in 1910? Every time I ask that question, Greenfyre or Archisteel or another of the AGM cheerleaders calls me names and tells me I don't understand science.
Since that's the case, I've started reading. I read both sides. It's clear that we are burning WAY too many fossil fuels, and maybe upsetting the balance of CO2 in the world. It's also true that we have experienced warming, and we're at the top of the historical record.
The only problem is that in 1945 they could have said the same thing about the historical temperature record. We had just climbed six tenths of a degree in thirty short years. Did we cause that with the little bit of CO2 we were putting into the air? The IPCC does not make that claim, I don't think. They claim that rise was natural, but don't attempt to explain it.
We have two events that look very, very much alike. One of those events is coincidental with significant human impact on CO2 levels. The IPCC scientists point to the CO2 levels and say, "Smoking gun!" When we look at the earlier event and say, "What about that one?" they say, "Oh, that one? I don't know. It doesn't matter."
If this were an event in my home, say the house heats up to uncomfortable levels three days apart, with comfortable days in between, and on the second day my sister came to visit, I would not automatically blame her for the heat. My wife might well ask, "wasn't it this hot three days ago?" I could answer, "No, it was two tenths of a degree cooler!" She could say, "but your sister wasn't here three days ago." to which I'd reply, "she wasn't the cause of THAT time. She obviously is the cause, this time, because she's another person, and people produce heat. She's adding 98.6 degrees to the room."
I know, Greenfyre will eviscerate me for that one. It's just a silly example to show why I don't understand why the six tenths of a degree rise from 1910 to 1940 doesn't matter at all. Or why any other climate change doesn't matter.
They keep saying, "we've risen over a degree since the 1900" or whatever, but when you start talking about carbon emissions, they all want to start talking about carbon emissions in the last 30 years or so.
I keep asking questions, they keep telling me how I don't understand. They don't try to explain, mind you. Greenfyre will spam with with 150 pro global warming websites that "prove" everything. Most of them go into huge amounts of detail proving that the increase in CO2 is all, 100% m
Per Merriam Webster definition of ideology:
"2 a : a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture b : a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture c : the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program"
Of course it is. Science and the scientific method depend on the belief that the world is observable and that meaning and reality can be derived from those observations.
That is an ideology and it is self supporting.
The core principle, that the world is observable and that meaning and reality can be derived from those observations, is typically supported by proponents by pointing to their observations of the success of the method.
I've only heard this "science is an ideology" claim from cranks--the people who want to deny the moon landing, or global warming, or the effectiveness of vaccines, or evolution. It is just a rhetorical strategy, an attempt to distract from the fact that science is a technology--a technology of disciplined thought and discovery that has been repeatedly validated by discoveries that impact all parts of life.
These aren't faith, but working assumptions. Some working assumptions are shallow, they lead nowhere interesting--solipsism for example, or the assumption that there are no consistent laws of nature. It is very easy to follow those lines of thought to their end, and then you are finished. Once you've done that, you choose another one--one that leads somewhere more interesting. You don't have to faith in those assumptions to follow where they lead.
That sounds like a very deeply held faith there, Goaway :)
Take your time learning some humility, and realizing that you're human just like the rest of us -> that was really the point of TFA, even if you haven't gotten it yet. We're all in this together, and your cognitive dissonance is just as invisible to you as the cognitive dissonance you ascribe to others is in them.
One day you just might get it :)
I am well aware of the definition.
it really depends on what you're calling "Science". I refer to science as what results out of the scientific method. What some call "Science" really is an ideology, and I'd agree with you in that regard, because it is not science. It's unfortunate that particularly vocal groups have taken science, created various forms of ideological "Science" and politicized science for their own ends. This diminishes real science in incredibly damaging ways, depending on the group espousing their version of "Science".
Science in and of itself is not a body of concepts, it is an approach that builds a body of knowledge that is self-consistent with regards to that knowledge. Take evolution - it's still a theory despite the preponderance of evidence. However, there exists not a single shred of evidence to date that evolution is wrong. A single such piece of evidence would invalidate the theory, or modify it if possible to account for the new observation. That is science. Making grandiose statements that something is not so ... just because of baseless beliefs with no backing facts (but much faith) is not science.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
How does science tell you how you should behave in society, for instance?
Well, just as a for-instance, games theory shows that a simple tit-for-tat algorithm is one of the most effective strategies in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
But iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is such a small subset of "behaviour in society", that it is laughable you point this out. Even so, the only goal in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is to minimize one's prison term. In real life, there are many other goals too. And science surely doesn't help me define those goals.
Study of social insects, as well as herd and pack animals, reveals that cooperation among members of a species is a powerful evolutionary strategy
This only tells me that cooperation with members of my species will help my species survive. But who says I must help my species survive. Science definitely doesn't. Note that cooperation with members of my species from fear of prison term is not really ethics.
In fact, it's silly to assume that ethics can or should exist in a vacuum, with no scientific basis.
Not at all. Science can tell me the reason why so-and-so ethics were formulated (say, evolutionary reasons). But once formed, science surely doesn't tell me why I should stick to those ethics. Hence once formed, ethics not only can, but definitely do exist in a vacuum.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I'm not against nuclear power per se but you can't get it without massive government subsidies. No private insurance company is willing to insure it so the government has to. Private financiers are not willing to fund it without government loan guarantees. That's more of an impediment to nuclear power than all of the environmentalists protests in my view.
Your opinion that global warming is not a problem is not shared by the overwhelming majority of scientists studying the problem. Who am I going to believe, cbeaudry or scientists actually studying the problem?
Cap & Trade is merely a market based solution to reducing CO2 emissions. Increasing the cost of using fossil fuels will encourage the development of alternative technologies.
We don't even know whether space "pushes" against things or mass pulls on them.
Push and pull are just words in English grammar. It doesn't mean there is a difference between "space pushing against things" and "mass pulling on them". As long as no difference is observed/proved, science doesn't even attempt to differentiate between these 2 concepts.
In another language, there may not be 2 different words to explain this same thing. If you used that language, you wouldn't have had this confusion at all.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
fighting fire with fire, I get it, I just don't think much of either side
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
It's about being aware of "science falsely so-called." 1) "Scientists" have been wrong before, many times. Folks prefer to withhold acceptance of claims merely to avoid be tricked into believing a guy who ends up being wrong ten years later. 2) I've read many scientific articles, and too many of them blithely ignore the other explanation, the other hypothesis, in favor of their pet theory. Their pet theory isn't "proved" any more than another hypothesis is disproved. The "scientist" merely ran a poorly-designed experiment.
Cranky educator.
Science routinely makes new discoveries that contradict or invalidate old data. Keeping up require setting aside the time to read and understand all the relevant research. If the research is not personally or professionally relevant to me, this becomes more trouble than it's worth. So in most areas, I choose to believe whatever makes most sense to me, and disregard scientific data. If I'm ever in a position where my opinion/belief about something actually matters, then I take the time to actually do some homework. I don't see anything wrong with that; I'm much more appalled by the ridiculous notion that every layman should know all the latest scientific point of views and agree with it.
Still trying to rationalize it away, huh.
Nope, that article as about you, and you alone. It was quite specific about that. It is about denying the results of science, because you don't want to agree with them.
Once again, I am not doing that! I am happy to accept scientific results of all kinds!
You're not, though. You're the one accusing science of not working.
I'd have just as much luck convincing a creationist that Buddha put the bones there as I would getting them to accept evolution through natural selection.
Not sure if you are aware of this, but for the record - Buddhism is not opposed to natural selection. Buddhism is not history centric so it is not fundamentally based on what has happened in the past.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I share your thoughts on the barriers to nuclear power.
However, if the government would just put up to the money for the loan guarantees instead of throwing it away at useless AGW related studies (billions of dollars worth), then that problem would be non existent.
Now, about the "overwhelming majority", thats a made up propagandist term, used in the media and by those who are set to profit from these cap & trade schemes.
Seriously, since when do we use the terms overwhelming... so often when talking about science? You know when a scientific organisation makes a statement in support of AGW, do you honnestly think all 2500 (for example) scientists in that field (which usually isnt related at all to climatology) actually support AGW or isnt it possible that half a dozen to a dozen of people on the board of directors make the decision for the rest?
You make it sound like there are no dissenters. There are plenty, the problem is they have been shut out.
Without going into the details of the climategate e-mails (I dont like that name either btw), they do demonstrate a willingness to shutout dissenting views, to control the peer review process and to discredit those who would challenge the AGW theory.
Science is supposed to welcome scrutiny, not shun it. THAT is when science turns down the dangerous path of ideology. When it is used as a scepter of power and not as a tool for discovery.
Your simplified explanation of Cap & Trade is disingenuous at best.
"merely a market based solution to reducing CO2 emissions"?
How about a new trading scheme to generate money from every market sector on the planet and transfer it into the pockets of the traders (aka bankers).
If you cant see that, I think I can honestly call you blind. It is fraught with corruption. We know because its happening RIGHT NOW IN EUROPE. Sorry for the caps, but it seems people aren't paying attention.
Its a trillion dollar fraud.
Let me put your last sentence in perspective.
Increasing the cost of using fossil fuels will force energy companies to offload the those costs of doing business onto the consumers, who will have no way of avoiding said costs. Thus everyone will be in effect "taxed" for consuming, when the whole westernized world is pushing everyone into being super-consumers.
If you really want to encourage development of alternative technolgies, how about taking all the money that was, is and will be spent pushing the alarmist propaganda of AGW, the cap & trade schemes and other related useless ventures and poring that money into alternative energy research.
I keep hearing we need to do something, but I dont see the government actually doing something. Take a couple of billion dollars and do research.
Heck, they've been throwing billions here and there around, pretending to try to save the economy. Why not actually do something with it.
I'm sorry (or maybe not) but your attempt to deflect my concerns by oversimplifying and using kinder garden rationalization concerning Cap & Trade, as well as playing the " I defer to the intelligent scientists" card, does not make a point. It just goes to show, you have no idea what this is all about, you have not researched it at all, and you are just angry (I dont know why) that we dont trust without questioning, what we are being told.
The fact that their are pushing for carbon taxes or cap and trade shows me that something is wrong, yes.
Are you confusing climate scientists with politicians?
The climate scientists are saying "there is a serious problem and we must do something", and the politicians are replying "there is a perceived problem, we must do something to make us look like we're doing something, and that will line the pockets of our donors at the same time!".
The science folk find a problem, and it is up to us, the plebes, to decide what to do about it. Just because you hate a solution doesn't make the problem invalid. That was pretty much the point of TFA.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
of course it is. how do you think scientists got past the mind blowing inconsistencies quantum mechanics requires us to grasp.
What scientists? I didn't realize that geologists, biologists, and anthropologists (Oh my!) had to get past the whole quantum strangeness thing. If by scientists you mean a certain set of physicists, then there was some interesting and fun soul searching (See the Einstein Bohr debates).
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
But the monks etc... all start with a premise that they are absolutely not going to change then spend a lot of time defending that premise without allowing any empirical facts sway them. They will write whole books on theology, but no actual, real, empirical evidence can change their minds. They are thinking, but they are not doing science.
Science is not the correct tool to explore many moral topics. It may give insight into why certain moral beliefs make for more successful societies. But plain common sense makes all the many tomes explaining why god exists in the face of the "question of evil" unconvincing.
Anarchists never rule
Evolution has absolutely selected it for its capability to learn, and rationalize, which we have extended to include the Scientific Method. But we should not forget that hundreds of millions of years before that, Evolution also selected the more primitive parts of the brain, for their survival qualities. Those parts are responsible for emotion and feeling, and fight/flight responses.
I have a problem with this description, in that it makes it appear that the irrational parts of humans are separate from the parts that think and learn. Our thinking and learning processes are flawed in themselves - we don't need to become emotional to be irrational.
All faith is blind.
Anarchists never rule
Don't you think the OP is just a troll? It's a little too obvious.
Unfortunately, most atheists seem to know very little about religion. What they do know, mostly comes from Christianity, which they erronously attribute to religion in general.
For example, atheists routinely describe religion as "dogmatic". But that is a property of some religions, not all. Organised religion tends to become dogmatic over the course of hundreds of years, but religions which are loosely organised (like New Age or Hinduism) can be very anti-dogmatic.
Atheists routinely criticise religion for requiring "faith", where "faith" is taken to mean belief without (or even in the face of) evidence. But "faith" is a Christian concept (namely, the notion that belief in itself leads to salvation). In many Asian religions, it is practice, not belief, which leads to salvation, which means that an asian can at the same time belong to two religions with contradictory beliefs, but compatible practices.
Science also has a set of core assumptions which can't be questioned without abandoning science and starting something new, like the grand-grand-parent pointed out (g_adams27).
This doesn't mean that science and religion are the same, or that they are just as bad. It just means you haven't adequately explained the difference between science and religion.
You have no rational reason to abandon solipsism. You abandon it, precisely as you say, because it doesn't lead anywhere interesting, not because it can be shown to be false. In doing so, you are making assumptions about what is interesting, and also the assumption that the concepts you form about the world should be interesting. Can you question those assumptions rationally? If so, I'm impressed.
It's about control. Science says that the facts rule, not opinions, or beliefs. If facts rule, then many people fear their power is diminished. Also many people are impatient. They prefer an authoritative sound bite, to the details and the logic.
There is no evidence that number theory (the mathematical theory that deals with basic arithmetic, like natural numbers, addition and multiplication) is consistent. If it is inconsistent, any of its propositions can be false. Yet we believe in number theory, and use it as the basis for algebra and analysis, which in turn are the basis for natural sciences like physics.
Requiring evidence for every belief would be absurd. Some things we have to believe in because they are practical, or intuitively obvious, or because we don't even know how to stop believing in them.
Honestly. What you say seems logical at first glance.
But you know very well who pays those research grants for climate research. The govt.
Also, who has been pushing for the climate change studies? The govt. You only have to look as far back as the late 80's with Margaret Thatcher and other political figures pushing for those studies.
Its disingenuous to say that the politicians are using scientists findings to push their agenda AFTER the fact. Its much more accurate to state that they have been pushing the scientists in the direction they would like to then use those findings as they see fit.
The science folks didn't find a problem. They where asked to look into a problem before it could possibly even be assessed as a problem (I'm talking in the 80's). Doesn't that seem fishy?
I do hate the solutions. Because the only solutions being proposed is serfdom.
Stop the fucking wars. Stop the bullshit research grants (i.e. Mann's Malaria/Climate change research), stop spending money on the AGW propaganda and actually fund alternative energy research.
What a novel idea? ACTUALLY FUCKING FUND RESEARCH INTO ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES.
Not 10 million, 10 billion.
Its not like we dont have the money for Christ sake, the govt has been wasting 10 times that amount on frivolous endeavors.
If pragmatism isn't an ideology, what the hell it is?
Rethinking email
Why must one live in Brazil? The instinct of "status" can drive people to act irrationally in any context. It sounds like you believe it is all a social construction, and can be whisked away with the application of the correct ideology.
The fact that you think this is not applicable to all humans is hubris, pure and simple. Your assertion that you're somehow above this is exactly the point of TFA -> that kind of rationalization (oh noes, it couldn't possibly be me who is irrational) is what leads to cognitive dissonance.
Not at all, I'm merely stating that asserting that you somehow always stay on the side of science, while others you disagree with do not, is simply an assertion, not the truth.
Science works, but not everybody who thinks they're accepting scientific results really are. To think that you don't fit into that category is the perfect example of the rationalization of the irrational.
No, I no more make assumptions about what is interesting than I make assumptions about what is my favorite color. I perceive how much I like a color directly, thus as I directly perceive how much I am interested in a line of thought. I prefer to be surrounded by colors that I like, and I enjoy being interested in things. These are emotions, not assumptions. Perhaps somebody else enjoys contemplating solipsism all day. That is perfectly valid for them, although I'm unlikely to be interested in what they have to say.
Some form of spirituality is going to become more and more essential to keep the human psyche from freaking out in an endless series of myopic anxiety attacks. Either that or artificial brain enhancement.
Isn't it called the internet?
No, I don't exactly. But I do think that people frequently uncritically accept science that matches their cultural perceptions. And I'm certain that in Brazil, where it's tacitly accepted for men to kill women because of a perceived besmirching of their honor, that there would be evolutionary psychology explanations about why this is a regrettable natural behavior.
Maybe those explanations would have some element of truth to them, and maybe they wouldn't. It would be hard to say. But I'm certain that they would exist if there were enough of that sort of scientist in Brazil.
Separating out learned from instinctual behaviors in human beings is an extremely tricky business, and pat answers of any form make me suspicious.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Games theory shows us that tit-for-tat is a good strategy for maximizing payoff in interactions that can be modeled as an iterated prisoner's dilemma. But it doesn't tell us if maximizing payoff is the right thing to do.
The only "core assumption" of science is that there's something to be known that can be known.
So, for example, the assumptions that "nature is uniform and gravity and the speed of light, etc. have always operated the same way" can be abandoned without leaving science. It's just that there's no compelling reason to, as far as we know. But believe me, if there was good reason to suspect that gravity or the speed of light is different somewhere, you can be sure that scientists would jump at the opportunity to try to understand it and explain it.
But the main point I was trying to make is that it's silly to compare science and religion based on the fact that they are both based on "faith". The point is that science tries to explain things as best as possible. Religion's goals are completely different.
Science and religion only conflict when you try to make one interfere in the domain of the other. For example, Creationism clearly tries to apply "religious knowledge" to explain nature. Conversely, some people seem to want to give scientific reasons for why God exists or doesn't exist, or derive morals and ethics from science.
The problem is that scientists will call you ignorant or stupid if you stop believing every word they say just because you know there's a good chance of them saying something different in a short while.
No, they don't. They only start using terms like that if you engage in an active campaign to interfere with their work and research.
Religion on the other hand, rarely changes its story.
Which would make it great for rocks, mountains, and other objects that rarely change if it were true. But it's not. Religion is ALWAYS changing its story. It does so at a slower rate than science, but nevertheless it changes through time. For example, how many branches of Christianity are there?
~X~
You do worse than ask the gp to support the god stuff here, you ask him to prove a negative.
Nope. Just telling him/her not to make the mistake that just because there MAY be unprovable assertions in the system doesn't mean there necessarily ARE.
And all evidence to date only goes so far as to support the possibility of evolution not that it necessarily is.
I agree. Bit of a non-sequitur but *shrug*
You do worse than ask the gp to support the god stuff here, you ask him to prove a negative.
Nope. Just telling him/her not to make the mistake that just because there MAY be unprovable assertions in the system doesn't mean there necessarily ARE.
(reproduced the last one here since I replied to my own post a little while back *eyeroll*)
"I agree. Bit of a non-sequitur but *shrug*"
I think illustrating that one of the most well established theories in science suffers the same technical flaw that you point out in the point is the gp is fairly relevant. It is also a tad ironic.
"Nope. Just telling him/her not to make the mistake that just because there MAY be unprovable assertions in the system doesn't mean there necessarily ARE."
Indeed and just because Evolution MAY happen doesn't mean that it DOES. However, in both examples there is an overwhelming probability.
You're asserting people never get violent over their OS preference? This is Slashdot, I wouldn't bet on that.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You've punched someone over the internet? Please tell me how you did this. You're going to be a millionaire.
If it were truley imperceptible we wouldn't know of many exoplanets. Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving, revolving at 900 miles per hour...
Indeed and just because Evolution MAY happen doesn't mean that it DOES. However, in both examples there is an overwhelming probability.
Not at all. You repeat his/her mistake (hence my repeated assertion of the irrelevance of the evolution argument). Both of you appear to be talking about prior probabilities (or plausibility). The claim that there ARE (or MUST BE) assertions that cannot be proved in the logical framework of the scientific method (Godel's theorem applied to this situation) is flawed because I have seen no examples of such assertions from GP (or you). The claim that evolution exists starts off with a (say) probability of 0.5 and becomes highly probable once all the evidence has been incorporated.
So, evolution is probable because of the empirical evidence in favor of it. It is technically meaningless to talk about the probability of GP's statement because Godel's theorem has been shown to be valid only in the context of formal mathematical logic. And yet, I think it's fair to be somewhat charitable and grant its plausibility as applied to the scientific method (as I have continually done).
What the pseudo-Godelians have to do is show that there exist assertions expressible in a given formal system that have not yet been proved. This is the least possible evidence for backing up their claim. This would (for example) invalidate any religious assertions instantly since they suffer greatly from flaws like undefined terms and additional assumptions. Even the strong version of (shall we say) scientific optimism has only ever claimed to be able (someday) to explain the observed (and in principle observable) aspects of the universe. The idea that the theorems of Godel and Heisenberg (lol) constitute "rigorous proof to the contrary" is laughable in the extreme (the reasons for which I've already explained). It is a matter of deep personal sorrow for me that otherwise rigorous mathematical statements are frivolously applied out of context to anything that strikes people's fancy.
By the way, in addition to all this, I was responding to GP's reverse-arrogance that "rational inquiry cannot explain the universe". My request for a clarification of this absurd statement was not met. Note that no sane person would claim that the products of the scientific method are logically certain - this is empirical science we are talking about, not a closed system of pure logic with statements expressible (in principle) in binary statements.
The following is an amusing speculation on my part - make of it what you will (in other words, it wouldn't make sense to argue with me on the following stuff since I don't claim that it is rigorous in any sense of the word). As far as general considerations go, things may even better than that. Imagine a set of possible systems of logic (that is also somewhat useful for describing natural phenomena - so they must start out with similar assumptions, or at least assumptions that do not contradict observed reality). Each element of that set has associated with it a (further) set of all possible assertions within that system. Now, one can imagine that a phenomenon in nature to be (loosely) associated with an assertion in each system. An assertion that is not "provable" in one system may turn out to be otherwise in some other system.
But I do think that people frequently uncritically accept science that matches their cultural perceptions.
Which is of course why you invent straw man evolutionary psychologists, because until it came along, the prevailing psychology coincided with your moral and ideological preconceptions.
Thank you for this post, this is why I read /.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is valid. If you tell me there is an invisible dragon in your garage, you better have some damn good evidence to back that claim up. In a slightly more realistic assertion, if you tell me that vaccines cause autism, then you also better have some damn good evidence to back that claim up. Extraordinary claims cannot be treated on equal footing as an ordinary claim because taking extraordinary claims at face value can be far more dangerous.
To be fair to the AI researchers, they had no idea how the brain worked because neuropsychologists had no tools to figure it out back then. Now the psychologists have a slightly better understanding of how the brain works (though they are still in the dark about most things), and some of that has been put back into AI.
AI also wouldn't have seemed to fail so hard if not for Minsky and Papert publishing that there was no way a perceptron could solve the XOR problem, killing the field for ~25-30 years. Thankfully, it was solved by adding more perceptrons and reignited the field.
That's not actually true. It isn't a straw man. The 'just so story' of men going for quantity and women going for quality is oft repeated. It is, in fact, a story I bought until I thought more critically about it and realized there are many aspects of human sexual behavior it completely fails to explain.
Ascribing a whole suite of various motivations to me based on the scanty evidence of a few posts puts you firmly in the troll category, and so I no longer think you are worth paying attention to.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Science works, but not everybody who thinks they're accepting scientific results really are.
Yes, that certainly isn't a rationalization for not believing in scientific results or anything! Definitely not exactly what the article is talking about!
"certainly isn't", "not" - so what you're really saying, after applying demorgan's, is:
"That certainly is a rationalization for believing in scientific results or anything."
Which, was exactly what I'm saying, which is exactly what the article was talking about :)
Sorry, GW, you shot and missed again :)
So now we're down to you not understanding the English language.
Good job there.
People's understanding of issues is heavily determined by how they are framed. The frame sets the questions, which in turn point to the answers...Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity
Posts like this one make me wish that scores could be modded up to +6
Time and time again, I get sucked into the debate, without noticing that the way the whole issue has been framed is what is really at fault.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Oh, I understand it just fine, you're just not too good at using it :)
Think harder, it might help.
... itself, there is a huge difference.
If there is a huge difference, you will be so kind as to tell me of an experiment to determine whether :
1. a body X is being pulled by another body Y
2. space is pushing body X towards Y
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Be that as it may, it's still not a rational ground. If your decision to reject solipsism is a matter of personal taste, you can't argue that other people are wrong when doing the opposite.
Science may very well abandon the idea that light and gravity operates in the same way at all times and places, but the natural sciences will never be able to abandon the idea that there is a uniformity of some kind or another underlying natural phenomena. It is this assumption, among others, that underlies the requirement for repeatability.
Another assumption underlying repeatability is that science should be objective, i.e. not depend on who performs the experiment or observation, or on their specific viewpoints.
These assumptions are strictly adhered to in the natural sciences, but are not shared by sciences where it is not possible to make experiments or objective observations, for example, history or literary criticism.
Regarding faith, I do agree that a working assumption is not the same as faith. I do not believe, however, that a scientist's belief in his or her favourite theory is a mere working assumption. It is more often than not a belief that is held with conviction and passion, transgressing the bounds of rationality. I.e, a faith.
Now, this is difficult to prove, but you could argue that if all scientists were rational men and women who tried to maximise their own profit (in terms of money, social status, carrer, happiness, etc), nobody would pursue far-fetched theories like quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity or string theory. The pay-off if the research is fruitful may be high, but the chances of being the one who succeeds are pretty slim. Luckily for us, many of the best scientists seem to be driven by irrational passion and faith.
I do not believe that religious faith and a scientist's faith in their theory is equivalent, though. I'm not just sure the difference is that science is questioning its assumptions, while religion is not. To me, the main difference seems to be that science has chosen better core assumptions.
Except that I haven't "rejected" it. I merely accept it as a possibility that has failed to yield further insights that are of interest to me. I find the working hypothesis of an objective reality to be more interesting, so that is the one that I choose invest my time in.
You made it sound like QM was some sort of critical problem that science, as a whole, had to rectify in order to move on, or exist, or something equally drastic sounding. I was replying to this reading, if it was the wrong one I apologize.
I would say that the philosophy of science and theology are completely unrelated, except where both touch upon basic epistemology and logic. I haven't studied theology much, but have spent some time around the philosophy of science, and from my experience they have very little in common, their approaches are quite different. At least in a formal sense.
Theology (as much as it existed, which it pretty much didn't) and PoS are pretty much completely separate domains. I'm pretty sure theology has been mostly driven out of philosophy as a formal academic discipline.
A surface glance would show the topics, methods, and criteria of the philosophy of either would be significantly different than the other. Other than the fact that both hopes to discover foundational principles, and ontic truths, they have very little overlap.
No, the act of science isn't simple. And it is fraught with strange philosophical issues that most scientists mostly ignore, but it generally works. In a large picture view science is pretty damn good at fixing its problems, and working towards some decent picture of what exists. On shorter time-frames this can get very very sloppy, but one of the glories of science is that it is, by nature, self-correcting, and generally slowly (perhaps too slowly for comfort at times) works towards greater empirical understanding of the world.
As for quantum strangeness, as I hinted, this difficulty was pretty much worked out in record time. A couple people had issue with it, but they were a shrinking minority. Most scientists simply accept it now, since the alternative has pretty much been discredited.
I don't know why you got modded so far down the troll hole, btw.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Another assumption underlying repeatability is that science should be objective, i.e. not depend on who performs the experiment or observation, or on their specific viewpoints.
I disagree, I don't think this is essential to science. It's just that the universe (in our experience) so obviously works that way (i.e., it doesn't matter who performs the experiment) that it seems unconceivable to even accept doing science any other way. But it's not hard to imagine a world where (for instance) there's predictable difference in outcome when children or adults perform a given experiment. Science, I think, could conceivably study and explain that. If, on the other hand, there's no underlying regularity on the outcome of an experiment, then I don't think there's anything to be known. So, in my view, science would not apply.
Luckily for us, many of the best scientists seem to be driven by irrational passion and faith.
I agree that scientists, being human, are not driven only by reason. But I don't see how this is relevant.
To me, the main difference seems to be that science has chosen better core assumptions.
We'll have to agree to disagree, then :)
In the end, I think our disagreement is on what exactly science is. To me, science is the activity of someone who says "OK, I'll try to understand this thing. What's the best way of doing that?" and so on.
...Instead the thinking now suggests that the mass of the sun warps space-time and creates a curved 3-D surface...
That would be at least a 4-D surface, and IIRC, it's more like 7-D. 3-D is merely how it's presented on paper.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
... Heisenberg [Uncertainty Principle]...
You must, therefore, have faith that, even though we now know that methodical observation at best obscures and at worst alters reality,
Not at all. I merely have to figure out how to correlate what I observe with the effects of observation. And there is still that catch all waiting, the infamous "we just don't know".
As we delve into the world of quarks, things are becoming much more interesting, and what was previously "uncertain" becomes less uncertain but merely a bounded problem which can be tested and validated.
Then we move to Einstein who first of all did not agree with Heisenberg in 1926 and, secondly, worked diligently against quantum mechanics because he did not believe in its potential randomness. Einstein appears to be wrong on the second count as quantum mechanics appears to explain many many events that we cannot explain otherwise.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Einstein didn't make a distinction. He chose the bent space-time explanation because it explains more simply the other aspects of special relativity than just the simple gravitational attraction.
It is kind of like whether the Earth goes round the Sun, or the other way round. There is no distinction between the 2 situations. If body A goes round body B ; this means that at the same time body B also goes round body A. No experiment in the world can distinguish one from the other because there is no difference. But when we have to explain the movement of other bodies in the Solar System too, it is simpler to start with considering the Sun as the origin (and an approximate polar coordinate system at that, especially for rough illustrative calculations). So, it is just simplicity of further calculations by means of choosing one origin versus another that leads to the choice of Sun as the origin and not a discovery of some fundamental difference between body A going round body B and vice-versa. I repeat, there is no such difference.
(Note that for the explanation of solar and lunar eclipses, considering the Earth as the origin makes better sense.)
But if someone says that we do not know whether the Earth goes round the Sun, or vice versa - I would consider him ignorant of the basic issue at hand. Very similar to your own incorrect assumption that Einstein made a distinction - and slapping on a "reason" for making this "distinction".
My original point was that the example you considered proves that you are too ignorant of the basics of science to worry about the "general philosophical problem of trusting the scientific method ...". So relax.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
To me, "science" is the social phenomenon that people refer to as "science": an abstract set of principles and methods for inquiry, a system for peer review, a body of universities, researchers and journals, and so on.
Trying to use science as a basis of ethics is one of the most dangerous things we could do as a culture. We do it all the time - look at the debate over if vegetarianism is ethical due to the length of the human intestine, or studies of homosexuality in animals, or etc.
The reason why religion has led to the greatest ethical advance any human civilization has seen is because we hold certain rights to be inalienable, endowed by a creator.
In a purely scientific, materialistic society, there are NO inalienable rights. We're all collections of atoms, nothing more, and if my scientific theory of action says that I should kill you, wear your clothes, and impersonate you because Mynah birds can mimick people, then there's nothing stopping me from doing it.
Ethics, religion, and philosophy can be informed by science, but they can never be solved by science. Science deals in the world as it is, ethics/religion/philosophy deal with the world as it should be.
>>I can't think of a single scientific organization in the world that has researched the subject that doesn't agree with the IPCC findings
Let's assume you're ignoring all of the parts of the AR4 written by non-scientific interest groups like the WWF, and the various other issues with the glaciers and all that. You probably didn't know they were included in the report, but who cares?
The real issue is: How can you disagree with predictions? If the top people run some models and produce a collection of results based on different CO2 levels in the future, then how can anyone disagree with them?
It's been 20 years since AR1, so we can actually look back at their predictions and see that they predicted a temperature rise around 50% higher than what we got (Real Climate.org called the prediction "a bit warm"), but don't let me stop you from believing predictions are infallible. And it's not like the planet *didn't* warm up in the meantime (AGW is very likely true), but the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it.
They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.
Very well put, my friend.
>>It is more-or-less taught as the value of knowing truth emotionally rather than and in spite of science.
Not in my church. In fact, we rather look down on someone that can believe in something irrationally, against the evidence. Read your CS Lewis for a lot of thoughts along these lines... in essence he said that if you're firmly convinced God cannot possibly exist, then it would be quite stupid for you to become a Christian.
I'm sure you're telling the truth about your church - a lot of churches, especially fundie ones, teach it this way, and it's a real shame. But if you're setting out strawmen based on members of a group being ignorant, you can tar and feather anyone.
>>I personally have an axiom: people who knowingly reject the axioms of science are insane.
That's fine. I've met more atheists than Christians that are that way.
"Not at all. You repeat his/her mistake (hence my repeated assertion of the irrelevance of the evolution argument). Both of you appear to be talking about prior probabilities (or plausibility)."
It doesn't matter if he is claiming that the scientific method can't provide all the answers or that there are no unicorns. The burden of proof rests with those who claim the existence of the unicorns and the capabilities of the scientific method (and rational inquiry if that is the term he used).
There is no point in supplying any evidence of the negative because a negative can not be proven.
"Even the strong version of (shall we say) scientific optimism has only ever claimed to be able (someday) to explain the observed (and in principle observable) aspects of the universe."
I am not even certain what you are debating because in this statement you concede the point and admit that even the strongest "scientific optimism" doesn't claim the scientific method can be used to solve all assertions.
And what makes an invisible dragon an extraordinary claim? How is that different than say a color changing lizard or fire breathing beetle? What is the empirical metric used to define one as extraordinary and one as ordinary?
Why should the burden of proof be different? Either I can provide evidence of my claim or I cannot. Either that evidence proves what I claim or it does not. Shouldn't the claim and its evidence be evaluated on its own merit not filtered through the lens of subjective preconceived notions?
"Extraordinary claims cannot be treated on equal footing as an ordinary claim because taking extraordinary claims at face value can be far more dangerous."
That doesn't mean much without a metric for extraordinariness. Where would say an invisible dragon fall on the extraordinality scale and what instrument can I use to measure it?
The 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' is nothing more than a way to dismiss claims and their evidence when they (or their consequences) fall too far from our comfort zones.
If I claim an invisible dragon in my garage the burden of proof is on me who claims the positive and not you who claims there is no dragon. In the same token I place the burden upon you to prove there is such a thing as an extraordinary claim, that such a thing is both observable and measurable and therefore scientifically valid, and once you've properly defined them to prove that 'taking extraordinary claims at face value can be far more dangerous'. I don't mean an example of such a claim mind but actual proof a relationship between being extraordinary and dangerous.
Good luck with that.
I see the problem here. You use the terms "solve", "prove" and "obtain sufficient evidence to show beyond a reasonable doubt - which is what empirical science seeks to do" interchangeably. Again, your insistence on believing that the goals and procedures of science are precisely equivalent to those of formal mathematical logic are leading you to ignore every single thing I've said thus far. I can only repeat myself a few times before realizing that my carefully defined statements are falling through a coarse-grained filter. This is frustrating because one assumes at the start of a discussion that words retain their meanings in time.
For the last time, I will state what maximum reasonable scientific optimism can say: "we can someday hope to explain every single observed (and in principle observable) phenomenon in nature". 'To explain something' in science is usually to propose a(/several) mechanism(/s) for a phenomenon, all of which are equally plausible in the absence of any additional evidence and use empirically obtained evidence to raise and lower the probabilities that each is the correct explanation. In the physical sciences, these procedures have resulted in such a vast gulf in probabilities between the 'correct' and 'incorrect' hypotheses that we promote the correct ones to "Laws of nature" within the regimes of validity of those theories.
It is absurd to say that science will prove all assertions about the universe with the finality of mathematical (binary) logic - as "True" or "False". This is a frivolous straw man that is difficult to even get outraged over, so absurd is it.
However, OP's statement about there being assertions that can never be proved is equally absurd because (1) we do not "prove" things after the fashion of formal binary logic so that Godel is inapplicable here as a "rigorous proof to the contrary" and (2) until at least one example of such assertions can be found, even the simple plausibility of OP's statement comes into question.
As far as OP is concerned, I'll remind you what I wrote in the post you first replied to:
So, your "rigorous proof to the contrary" (and as I explained, Heisenberg is only remotely relevant and Godel only slightly more so) can only go so far as to introduce the possibility that there might be more to the universe than we can explain (not that there necessarily is). I have no quarrel with that.
Until something is discovered (and again, there are accepted meanings to that verb) that cannot be explained by the scientific method, it is ridiculous to state that "unprovable assertions" may exist. All I can say is, "Big deal. So what?" Thus far, in all the different spheres of meaningful inquiry, the scientific method has triumphed time and again. This is why I called it a "working rule" in that post and further why I cautioned AGAINST turning it into an article of faith (it is reasonable to say that the S. method has a very strong chance of being successful based on its record. It is meaningless to say that it WILL be successful in every possible circumstance that can ever take place - what am I, an armchair philosopher with delusions of grandeur? As I said then, "working rules" are what have furthered our understanding and are far superior to articles of faith and we should NOT degrade the S. method by lowering it to that disgusting standard.
Until we can agree on definitions however, I fail to see what possible purpose this debate could serve.
Are you this up in arms when it comes to attempting to use religion as a hammer to force another ideology upon a skeptical populace that will result in worsened economic conditions and reduced freedoms for that populace?
Not trolling; I'm genuinely curious.
--Jeremy
Who is "up in arms" here?
I don't think anything should be *forced* on the populace in general against their will, whether the perceived results by those proposing it might be overall good or bad. That is for the populace as a group to decide, both the thing in question and whether the result is "good" or "bad".
I took no sides as to what/which science/scientists or which ideologies or political viewpoints. I simply noted that there exists ideologically & politically driven science and scientists, for which I was speedily modded as "Troll".
Is this no longer true? Has basic human nature been fundamentally & massively changed in the last few days and I didn't get the memo?
I wasn't aware that the simple existence of scientists and scientific theories that are politically/ideologically driven was in debate.
Strat
"I strongly disagree"!=="Troll"
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
You're talking about "research and facts", so let's see what you've got to support your position. Otherwise, your troll moderation was wholly deserved.
There's plenty of research and facts that don't jive with the current AGW theories. There are enough that some at the CRU, according to their own emails, made efforts to prevent their publication in peer-reviewed journals by attempts to redefine what qualified as a peer-reviewed journal, as well as using the threat of doing so to dissuade journals. A quick Google search will return plenty of credible scientists and science that disagrees in whole or in part with current AGW theories. If you want it, go get it yourself. I'm not going to do your work for you.
It's funny how any scientists, even those with decades-long track records of solid science, who dare criticize the research in any way are suddenly redefined as "irrelevant", "unqualified", "biased", and their research, even if sound, is ignored at best and suppressed at worst. That's not the way science uses to validate the correctness of a scientific theory. That IS the way, however, that propagandists use to suppress dissent and debate.
There's also the inconvenient fact that even if we did away with cars, coal power, most everything that produces CO2 that we take for granted that sustains our modern society, the total global change in temperature and rate of rise would be insignificant compared to projected increases. Other countries such as India and China won't agree to anything that hurts their continued economic expansion, so the US going to pre-industrial levels still wouldn't result in even a meaningful slowing in global temperature increase.
The more data I see on solar activity correlated with temperature changes & CO2 levels, the more I'm convinced that solar activity owns the lions' share of responsibility for global surface temperature changes, particularly since a timeline shows the CO2 levels rose after the increases in temperature and solar activity, which tended to track together well.
With all the very credible (read: credible under standards accepted for most any other scientific topic of research) contrary data and research out there, calling things "case closed" on AGW EITHER WAY is illogical.
It's not that I refuse to accept that AGW is possible, only that the science hasn't proved it sufficiently to warrant the enormous costs in lost lives, drastic reductions in living standards, wealth, individual freedoms, and continued technological advancement.
I'm sorry, but causing the suffering of untold millions, even billions, worldwide by implementing the carbon-reduction targets proposed domestically and internationally (not to mention the wealth taken from economies by the carbon trading exchange(s), speculators, brokers, trading houses, etc that, by coincidence, have heavy ties to those pushing carbon trading) then you'd better have damn good, easily verifiable proof that it's absolutely vital and not another power and wealth grab based on bad science.
We haven't seen that yet.
Strat
"I strongly disagree"!=="Troll"
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
>>You accuse Gavin Schmidt of being a bullshitting deceitful hack who isn't really a scientist. I disagree
I disagree too, because that's not what I think of him. Gavin is not a "bullshiting deceitful hack who isn't really a scientist". I wouldn't bother being subscribed to RC.org for years if he was that bad. I'd ignore him like the other nuts. He's a political hack. There's a big difference.
What it means is that instead of outright lying about this or that (which is much more common in the anti-AGW camp), it means that he goes easy on anyone on his "side" (Al Gore, IPCC predictions) and hard on anyone that even slightly disagrees with him.
The absurdity I was pointing out was that even if we have no warming at all over the next decade (if you missed the time period, there it is), people like RC.org will say that the AR4 predictions are confirmed, but by implication this means that if we get too much warming... global warming is false. (So to speak. If you've read all of my posts on here, which it sounds like you have, you know that I know that scientific theories are never proven true or false, it's a sloppy shorthand I use.) No, I'm NOT saying there is a prediction of no warming - even if we shut off all anthropogenic CO2 production today, the earth would still (probably) warm.
In this thread I'm talking about the rather silly world of hypothesis confirmation, especially as it relates to AGW, nothing more.
>>But you repeatedly imply that scientific results which eliminate "lots" of error sources are "dubious" and "low confidence" and "hackish". Nonsense.
Did you actually read their methods? I'm curious how you can think they're anything but a bunch of heuristics. (And for the record, they can be hackish AND valuable at the same time.)
>>Tread carefully.
I don't believe I've ever contradicted myself on RC.org, though I suppose it's possible. Care to share? It's possible that you got distracted by my language (which is generally negative toward them and Phil Jones and others), so let me summarize for you. Please let me know if you agree or disagree on each point. Answering this summary will be easier than you dancing around through a bunch of different threads.
1) RC.org is a valuable website, but they have a very strong political bias, censor and edit posts heavily, and engage in biased behavior that borders on the dishonest, giving free passes to people that agree with them, and nitpicking heavily on people that disagree with them. I don't believe their core science is bad, though I take issue with how they present it sometimes.
2) Phil Jones and his merry band of climatologists engaged in bad behavior, using legally-questionable tactics to dodge FOIA requests. Most telling was his statement that he wouldn't share his data because they might use it to disprove his work. This is anti-scientific. In a field where all you really have are climate data and computer models, refusing to share them with the world is akin to a physicist claiming that he's invented Cold Fusion, but refusing to show exactly how (except perhaps to a couple of his friends). Gavin of course defended him saying that while maybe THEIR data wasn't available, HIS data was available, and so that made it all better. (Which it didn't - it rather just highlighted their shady behavior). However, I think that most of the rest of the Climategate scandal was completely misrepresented in the media, with absolutely horrid reporting by a variety of sources. The real story - which everyone ignored for red herrings like "hide the decline" - was Phil Jones mailing people (Gaving Schmidt included) talking about ways to dodge FOIA requests. I'd also take Jones to task for losing the data, but I've worked at universities before and know how disorganized they can be.
3) I think AGW is real, a serious threat, that parts of it are exaggerated, parts of it are under-reported (most significantly the acidification of the oceans) and that most of the mainstream solutions are horrible. The AGW community (painting a very wide paintbrush here) has a fascination with solutions that will kill people, destroy the economy, and be horrendously expensive, but refuse to look at geoengineering solutions that could be cheaper and more effective, and refuse to look at green technologies like nuclear because they're ignorant. Climatologists also tend to think that because they know the science of global warming, they're qualified to write policy.
4) Depending on how puckish I'm feeling, climatology could or could not be a "science". Science is defined by empirical observations, hypothesis generation, testing, and hypothesis confirmation or falsification. Climatology doesn't meet up to this full set of requirements to be science, so it, like a lot of other fields, fall somewhere in the middle of the science divide. Due to the prestige "science" acquired in the 20th century, most fields nowadays have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves, and I see this as being more of the same. It's also why I think that climate scientists are much more angry and defensive than, say, plasma physicists.
>>Note that I didn't respond to the neutral word "heuristics" and instead concentrated on the colorful (and inherently subjective) adjectives that you used.
You're not a computer science, guy, then. A heuristic IS a hackish attempt to solve a problem without mathematical elegance or rigor. It's just a nicer way of putting it than I did. Heuristics can certainly be effective (that's why I thought your criticism of my statement was rather silly), but they're really just educated guesses at solving a problem.
You were debunking strawnen that I didn't make. I bloody well understand what error means, but you completely missed my point on it, and so forth. Your references were wonderful, but also completely missing the point.
I just gave you a nice summary of my stances. If you can't give a simple agree/disagree after all the posts we've traded on the subject, I'm bound to suspect your honesty.
I can argue the same way as you. I can strawman your arguments, give extensive reasons why the argument (that you didn't make) are wrong, and then shut up when you present your points in a clarified manner.
That's why I'm doubting your honesty. Believe me, man, I understand about writing papers, but you seem allergic to actually answering anything I actually say.
Here's a quick one that you can answer in one sentence (or more, if you'd like): do you think Phil Jones acted appropriately?
>>You responded to a dozen pages of carefully referenced science without saying anything new
I'd also like to answer this. Most all of your links are to your own website, which abuse the nice, nested comment threads here on slashdot and flatten them. If you have something to say about a post on Slashdot, reply to me here. I'm not going to scroll through another mega-block of flattened text trying to pick out your non-existent thesis statements.
If you ever figure out how to do proper argumentation (thesis statement + supporting statements), please reply to this post here, and not on your site. It's annoying in the extreme to debate someone who doesn't know the proper forms of debate.
>>Another programmer has a similar habit of accusing me of making strawman arguments
I've also noticed you perhaps get me confused with other people.
>>Your error analysis seemed to repeatedly assume that climate models are empirical, not dynamical... among other mistakes which would be inexplicable for someone with a graduate or undergraduate (?) degree in physics.
Two years of physics as an undergraduate, perfect score on the SATII Physics Test, 5 on the AP Physics test, I taught methods in solving physics problems, etc., including an undergraduate quarter spent on error analysis. I also read a great deal. This is one of the reasons I get annoyed when you so blithely disparage people as non-physicists. The main reason, though, is that it's arrogant and rude. I don't assume that you don't know how to program a computer because of your field, except when I'm intentionally insulting you. =)
>>I'm only allergic to answering the same questions repeatedly
That's awesome for you. Except I think that I had never stated my stances in an encapsulated fashion before. Perhaps you're tired of answering them from multiple people? Because from my perspective, you just appeared to be dodging the subject.
>>And that's the second time you've accused me of being dishonest
Making a claim, then refusing to answer it, provide supporting evidence, etc., and then claiming to have already answered it is dishonest behavior. Now that you've actually given an answer to one of my four claims, I retract that statement.
>>And yet I don't share your obvious contempt for Phil Jones. I don't have time to link everything now, but here's the story: Phil Jones used to fulfill FOIA requests regularly. Then crackpots started flooding his office with too many requests to handle,
From what I understand, one of the anti-AGW M's filed one FOIA request a month, and only then because Phil Jones refused to ever answer a single FOIA request. This hardly seems like flooding his office, and his circumlocutions to hide the data reek badly in a field that needs openness to survive.
I do thank you for your answer on this, though. It's nice to see that we both agree on the core matter.
>>Another programmer with a similar debating style as you also recently accused me of being dishonest because he didn't want to do a lot of reading.
I don't mind reading. To the contrary, really - my wife thinks I have a reading problem. But linking to a hard to read flat thread is tedious in the extreme to work with.