The Encroachment of Fact-Free Science

G3ckoG33k writes "Fact-free science is not a joke; it is very much on the move, and it is quite possibly the most dangerous movement in centuries, for the entirety of mankind. One can say it began as counter-movement to Karl Popper's ground-breaking proposals in the early 20th century, which insisted that statements purporting to describe the reality should be made falsifiable. A few decades later, some critics of Popper said that statements need peer acceptance, which then makes also natural science a social phenomenon. Even later, in 1996, professor Alan Sokal submitted a famous article ridiculing the entire anti-science movement. Now New York Times has an article describing the latest chilling acts of the socially relativistic, postmodern loons. It is a chilling read, and they may be swinging both the political left and right. Have they been successful in transforming the world yet? How would we know?"

Comments

Re:Peer review is broken

[drolli]

Your comment is not even worth negative mod points.

a) define broken. Especially define then "not broken" and tell me about which review system you would not say that it is broken.

b) The "powerful cliques" are quite large for the more important Journals. PRL has 1000s of possible referees. I dont think they are good buddies with each other and converse about each paper.

c) As a scientist is don't know what consensus is. I just know how knowledge make the path from a freshly published article to small reviews to reviews of modern physics and then sometimes it was important enough and still not falsified after 50 years enters the textbooks. It would be very interesting to hear from you where a peer-reviewed topic "was wrong" on a significant scale.

And i would like to know when

Re:Before we start the flame wars

[commodore6502]

>>>there is a huge amount of evidence available to even a casual observer

Well my "casual" observation shows there was another global warming period during the time of Ancient Egypt (circa 3500 BC) and again in the Roman Empire (circa 300-1300).

Clearly those global warming periods were not caused by cars, so there's no reason to think the present period is either. We need to find the REAL cause for these three Warming periods, which are not man-made.

IMHO