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Simon Singh Talks With Wired About His Libel Battle
smellsofbikes writes "Wired has a short but pithy interview with Simon Singh about his defense against a libel suit brought by the British Chiropractic Association, in which he spent more than $200,000 and emerged victorious."
The interview touches on the possible trend of popular distrust of scientific expertise, but never mentions lousy pop-science headlines, slimey university PR releases (I won't name names like MIT), skewed incentives of private sector researches (e.g., suppressing all negative results), and the list goes on. Medical research, given all the interest and money involved, is probably the most egregious offenders.
Researchers need to look in the mirrors, too.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Not.
These two sentences are incorrect and could indicate why he got into so much trouble. "People start off with a belief and a prejudice..." actually people start off with nothing, gain education and experience, discover their own creativity, and make judgements based on that. Granted, in a very broad sense, belief could cover all those things, but there is so much more to it.
"The job of science..." is to discover fact. Truth is the realm of Philosophers and Priests. Facts are objective and provable, Truths are subjective and not provable. Facts are what is, Truths are our perception of facts. Once scientists confuse fact with truth, they justly become subject to the same criticism as any religion.
They seem to attack science, not to learn anything, but to merely shoot down their "adversary".
I really wish those people
Yeah! Because there's nothing like hating people that generalize by generalizing right back at them!
Also quick comment.
"People start off with a belief and a prejudice—we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth."
Yes and no. The job of science is to take a specific belief/prejudice and attempt to prove it. The *desire* is that science will put aside things that are (repeatedly) proven wrong and then try other things rather than wasting time and resources on something that already seems flawed. However, occasion has shown that science, rather than swapping instantly to what we now know to be the more right answer, attempts to prove their past view just as much as religion !
*COUGH**COUGH*Ptolemaic geocentric model vs. Copernican heliocentric model*COUGH**COUGH*
What the fuck epicycles and retrograde motion.
The last line as an assertion of opinion. What's wrong with it.
Qxe4