rails against simplistic ideologies...says "it's all in this one book i read this one time"
Read book in 1994. Then read MANY other books. Read Voltaire. Read Plato. Read Aristotle. Read Thucydides. Read Euripides. Read Sophocles. Read Gibbon. Read Locke. Read Chomsky. Read Adam Smith. Read Marx. Read many others. Studied history. Studied logic. Read newspapers. Watched news. Watched documentaries. Thought. Observed.
Over the last eighteen years I have learned a great deal. I have seen first hand the impact of the ideologies that I criticize. I have observed managers in companies I knew and worked for. Saw what they did. Saw at least two implement their management ideologies and almost single handedly drive their companies into the ground.
I'm a scientist......especially when I've spoken with colleagues in climate research and they say the same: it is not yet clear how much of the recent climate change is due to humans.
Unless you are ready to give names and other verifiable information on this, I have to assume that you are full of **it. Don't make claims you can't support.
The authors of TFA probably live in North America. This would explain the comment that the warming was "twice as much as previously thought".
Why is this marked insightful???? It is in essence accusing without grounds PhD scientists who spend their lives studying these things with basing the entire thesis of a paper on grade school math errors. The author isn't supplying any quotations from the article supporting his assertion, other than a single number. It seems to me that the writer of this article is a peddler of misinformation. In the relatively recent past, he would be opening himself a libel suit. In the more distant past, the author would possibly in need of practicing his pistol aim and would need to find a second for his duelling appointment.
I bow before your well referenced rebuttal. You have eloquently shown the folly of the Enlightenment and have given a convincing point by point logical rebuttal to both the writings of Voltaire and John Ralston Saul's book.
Voltaire does not represent the whole Enlightenment, and I have not readen John Ralston Saul's book. I just wondered if toxic management could have something related to Voltaire's social opinions, which are well summed up in this citation.
If you believe that your unreferenced quote adequately summarizes the whole of Voltaire's thought, then you are an ignorant fool. Troll.
I'd argue that MBA is a by-product of US-style capitalism.
I would argue that our current malaise is largely a product of the willingness of our intellectual elites to fall into the trap of following simplistic ideologies, of embracing technocratic processes over sense and morals. Our civilization has become a mindless machine with no real purpose, no aim. The version of capitalism that we currently embrace is a byproduct of this.
Voltaire? The guy who said "A well organized country is that where the few make the thousands work, get nourished by them, and govern them" ?
I bow before your well referenced rebuttal. You have eloquently shown the folly of the Enlightenment and have given a convincing point by point logical rebuttal to both the writings of Voltaire and John Ralston Saul's book.
Amen. Read Voltaire's Bastards. I read it when it came out in the 90's, and over time I have become increasingly convinced of its accuracy. In essence, MBA's and their simplistic ideologies are driving our civilization into the ground.
Market failure indeed. Can you have true competition when by nature your industry is limited to three to five players in any particular area. This sounds more like an oligarchy than a free market. This a good argument for regulation in the public interest. In Europe they regulate their mobile providers and their rates and service are far better than ours.
The original 1987 NeXT workstation already used vector graphics (Postscript) to display virtually everything on the screen. When NeXT became OSX, they had to remove the Postscript because Adobe's licensing charges were too large.
Why don't we just admit it. Because we can't actually meet the people who post here, because we know almost nothing about their REAL background or history, we have no real way of knowing whether the poster is (a) a paid shill who makes his living posting well crafted propaganda, (b) a gullible idiot who reads and believes said propaganda or (c) a well meaning citizen who actually cares about scientific truth.
At least when I actually know someone, then they are accountable for what they say. If they say something idiotic, it will have consequences, both in personal and in professional relationships.
I'm thinking about a Lenovo T530 or perhaps something from zareason. They both have 1080p offerings for screen resolution (although with zareason, to get that resolution I'd be stuck with nVidia, since their intel graphics laptops have lower resolution.). I was wondering how well Linux deals with high resolution screens in regards to readability, font size and general appearance. I'm not even sure yet whether I will go for gnome, kde, xfce, or something else.
That kind of installation can already be built today, but nobody wants to do it on an industrial scale. (And industrial scale is the only way it makes any sense). Because when they do the cost analysis, its not really worth it. Cool ideas don't always make dollars or sense.
The near equivalent of a molten salt battery has already been built, all over the world, and on a massive industrial scale. They are called aluminum smelters.
We need portable energy, and molten anything is not an answer.
Its easy to give a Ted Talk, its a lot harder to offer up a practical idea. (Just look at how many TED talks are nothing but TED Talks).
You didn't watch the TED talk, did you. If you had, you would realize that they have already built several working prototypes, around the size of a pizza dish, plus or minus. You also disregarded the implied or stated purpose, that is to store electricity generated from daytime solar electricity generation, be it in a single house or more likely on a utility scale.
The idea of molten salt batteries sounds quite intriguing to me, especially for bulk utility level energy storage. In this TED talk, MIT professor Donald Sadoway details his designs and describes the models he has already built. In short, the idea is to have two liquid metals, one less dense and one more dense. In the middle is a layer of molten salt. The less dense molten metal floats on the top. In the middle is the molten salt, and at the bottom is the more dense molten metal. The molten salt acts as the electrolyte in the cell, and the two different metals pass electrons around due to their different electron affinities.
When building these cells, they would use common cheap materials, so that the cost of this type of battery would be trivial compared with the amount of energy it can store. The fact that the cell is molten is actually an advantage. We spend huge effort in our current electrochemical cells trying to keep them cool. This type of cell would thrive on heat...indeed the energy used in charging and discharging it would help keep the metals and the salt molten.
Clearly this type of cell would not be used to power your laptop or cellphone directly, but it could be used to store energy from solar panels on your rooftop, or to store energy from large solar power plants for use in the night. As always, I am sure there are bugs to work out, but really, this sounds incredibly promising.
IMHO, graphing calculators are largely an artifact of the past, except in the case of school examinations. Students need a calculator that is "dumb enough" to not write the entire exam for them and not be able to wirelessly share answers between neighbouring students. When a student enters the world outside school, the graphing calculator will be largely useless. If you are an engineer and you need "smart features" when doing a particular problem, you will likely use a proper computer and a dedicated software package tailored to the task. The only reason you might need a small calculator is to do quick calculations.
Myself, I'm a fan of the old HP 15C. No menus. Excellent key layout. Reverse polish notation. Everything you need, nothing you don't. Perfectly tailored to the task of doing quick calculations.
Overstated inefficiency of government organizations? I see we have never worked for one. I have. The difference between government and business is night and day. Breathtaking inefficiency, in areas I would never have considered inefficiency could exist. Seriously, it's quite creative.
And your single experience makes your argument completely true? I do not doubt the existence of government inefficiency. I have seen it. But I have also seen inefficiency in private corporations, especially when they enjoy a monopoly position. And I have seen very efficient government run organizations. My assertion wasn't that governments are always efficient, but instead that their inefficiencies are often overstated.
A good example is in the health care sector. By any objective standard, the private US healthcare system is highly inefficient. Healthcare in the US costs more per person than almost anywhere else in the world. And yet broad spectrum health outcomes are very poor. In addition, US healthcare doesn't cover a shockingly large percentage of the population. Contrast this with countries with public healthcare systems. Norway and Canada are excellent examples. They manage to cover the vast majority of the population, while their costs per person are far lower than in the US. And broad spectrum health outcomes in these countries are far better than in the US.
The difference is actually fairly simple to understand. In the US, the "institutional purpose" of healthcare companies is to make a profit. That's it. Their goal is not to make people healthy, but to earn a profit. And because the healthcare industry is an inherent monopoly or oligarchy, they use their power and dominant positions to overcharge people and/or deny them coverage. In doing this, they are merely fulfilling their "institutional purpose".
Contrast this with well run public healthcare systems. In such systems, the "institutional purpose" is to make people more healthy. Doctors are always taught to have this goal, and take the Hippocratic Oath, even in the US. The difference though is that in well run public healthcare systems, the managers above the doctors also share the desire to improve people's health, while in the US, improving people's health is secondary to the goal of maximizing shareholder return.
There are successful private systems elsewhere in the world (Switzerland for example), but even in Switzerland, the government has its boot on the throat of healthcare companies. They are simply not allowed to misbehave, as they are in the US. The inherent problem, which most of a right wing bent seem to ignore is that of monopoly. There are some industries that cannot possibly have real competition. And when you have a private monopoly, it the worst of all possible worlds. Monopolistic companies can behave as they want with impunity. If competitors arise, they buy them out or use their power to crush them. Customer choice is limited, and thus so is customer power.
I find the ideological division and characterization of private efficiency and public inefficiency is intellectually lazy, and ignores the subtleties of the complex real world. Ideologies are crutches for those who don't wish to really think.
And yet, if everyone respect the spirit of the law instead of finding holes in the letter of it, we as a society would most likely be a whole lot better off.
Then again, this would require such things as integrity and honesty.
The simple fact is that once barriers to capital flow across national borders were torn down, the modern social state was doomed. When money flows across borders with little restriction, organizations whose implicit purpose is to maximize profit will shift their resources to countries with the lowest possible tax rates. This creates a race to the bottom in terms of tax rates, especially when large organizations that are capable of physically or financially moving from country to country move large percentages of their wealth away from countries like the US.
I have begun to realize that right wing countries seem to do well economically largely because they have reduced their tax rates below that of other less right wing countries. This brings a temporary influx wealth and a temporary economic boost. However if the tax rates do not continue to decline, large organizations will again begin to leave, bringing large deficits and economic decline.
Let me emphasize this: I believe right wing economic policies work (temporarily) because lower tax rates bring an influx of capital, and NOT primarily because of the inherent efficiency of the private sector in managing resources. I believe that the claimed "efficiencies" of private corporations, and the claimed "inefficiencies" of government organizations are highly overstated.
The implication of this is that if we as a society wish to have the amenities of a great civilization, then we will have to find a way to restrict the flow of capital across borders. Otherwise, we will be doomed to an asymptotic descent towards a minimum level of civilization. The gap between rich and poor will continue to increase, and, seemingly paradoxically, the economy will slowly grind towards a halt, as the pool of middle class consumers evaporates.
My main document producing software is now LaTeX, using TeXShop on my Mac. It does everything I need, and the documents look pretty. Most especially, I love the ability of LaTeX to typeset equations seamlessly. Perhaps there is a slight learning curve, but it wasn't bad. And when I need to do something unusual, I use the google manual.
My kid sucks at chemistry and, like all pussy-ass parents today, I don't have the heart to tell him that he's not incredible at everything (and don't want to risk him finding out by taking a class where he doesn't get an automatic "A").
And then the kid will take economics and "management" courses through his education and become a manager who will likely have little or no appreciation for the reality of science. I've seen similar things personally: Managers who make scientifically impossible demands on R & D departments. When R & D doesn't deliver the impossible, smart honest people are turfed, and naive and inexperienced (but "energetic") people are brought in, and the company spirals into oblivion. I have seen two first-hand examples of this in two different companies. Both managers were MBA's. Both were eventually fired, but not before they did deep harm to their companies.
Again: what metaphysical assumptions is modern physics replete with? Just because lots of people are aggressively stupid, even many with college degrees, doesn't reflect on physics. Unless you're referring to physicists like those who are also avid Creationists, which also doesn't reflect on physics - it reflects on the limits of physics to reach the rest of a person's mind when it's lost to the cancer you refer to.
Ummmm...are you arguing with the wrong person? I didn't make the post about the "metaphysical assumptions". I generally agree with you actually. I gave the anecdote because I think that there are academics who right now think that the view of an uneducated buffoon on physics carries the same weight as that of a physics professor. Intellectual relativism gone crazy.
Yes, physics is a practice refined from "natural philosophy: thinking in an organized way about nature.
But what metaphysical assumptions is modern physics replete with? Other than necessary falsifiability and universal consistency?
Also, Vikings weren't the first people to arrive in America. Not even from across the Atlantic.
I agree that science is a branch of philosophy. My assertion is that it is constrained by the laws of the physical world.
As an aside about the growth of "scepticism" of science itself, which is apparent in some of the comments in this thread, I recently had a conversation with a PhD candidate in which he asserted that to some people, air has no mass. I responded that this might be so, but that I could explain an experiment to such people that would show that air did have mass, and that they could therefore be convinced. He responded with the assertion that this wouldn't be so, because such people aren't educated the same way I was. In essence, he was saying that such people were not educable, and that furthermore their view is equally as valid as a my own scientific view. I cringed, and smiled and nodded.
I think that the above anecdote is a natural consequence of the intellectual relativism that has been growing like a cancer in our institutions of higher learning over the recent couple of decades. It is sophistry, and a casual reading of Plato and Aristotle would make you realize that the ancient Greeks dealt with the same misguided views. I worry about the consequences of this, especially in our popular media culture of "truthiness".
The physicists have a model that explains their observation...
Yes. And thus their hypotheses are constrained by what they observe. i.e. The physical world. And the physical world is constrained by the laws of nature. The philosopher Kripke expounded on the idea of "possible worlds", i.e. worlds that don't exist, but could. We could imagine a world where Germany won WW2, but we can't imagine a world where 2+2=5 (assuming the same numbering system is used in both worlds). We could say that science is concerned with what is possible in this world, while philosophers are concerned about what is possible not just in this world, but in any other possible world.
Slashdot Mirror
rails against simplistic ideologies...says "it's all in this one book i read this one time"
Read book in 1994. Then read MANY other books. Read Voltaire. Read Plato. Read Aristotle. Read Thucydides. Read Euripides. Read Sophocles. Read Gibbon. Read Locke. Read Chomsky. Read Adam Smith. Read Marx. Read many others. Studied history. Studied logic. Read newspapers. Watched news. Watched documentaries. Thought. Observed.
Over the last eighteen years I have learned a great deal. I have seen first hand the impact of the ideologies that I criticize. I have observed managers in companies I knew and worked for. Saw what they did. Saw at least two implement their management ideologies and almost single handedly drive their companies into the ground.
Your comment is a trite cheap shot.
I'm a scientist... ...especially when I've spoken with colleagues in climate research and they say the same: it is not yet clear how much of the recent climate change is due to humans.
Unless you are ready to give names and other verifiable information on this, I have to assume that you are full of **it. Don't make claims you can't support.
The authors of TFA probably live in North America. This would explain the comment that the warming was "twice as much as previously thought".
Why is this marked insightful???? It is in essence accusing without grounds PhD scientists who spend their lives studying these things with basing the entire thesis of a paper on grade school math errors. The author isn't supplying any quotations from the article supporting his assertion, other than a single number. It seems to me that the writer of this article is a peddler of misinformation. In the relatively recent past, he would be opening himself a libel suit. In the more distant past, the author would possibly in need of practicing his pistol aim and would need to find a second for his duelling appointment.
I bow before your well referenced rebuttal. You have eloquently shown the folly of the Enlightenment and have given a convincing point by point logical rebuttal to both the writings of Voltaire and John Ralston Saul's book.
Voltaire does not represent the whole Enlightenment, and I have not readen John Ralston Saul's book. I just wondered if toxic management could have something related to Voltaire's social opinions, which are well summed up in this citation.
If you believe that your unreferenced quote adequately summarizes the whole of Voltaire's thought, then you are an ignorant fool. Troll.
I'd argue that MBA is a by-product of US-style capitalism.
I would argue that our current malaise is largely a product of the willingness of our intellectual elites to fall into the trap of following simplistic ideologies, of embracing technocratic processes over sense and morals. Our civilization has become a mindless machine with no real purpose, no aim. The version of capitalism that we currently embrace is a byproduct of this.
Voltaire? The guy who said "A well organized country is that where the few make the thousands work, get nourished by them, and govern them" ?
I bow before your well referenced rebuttal. You have eloquently shown the folly of the Enlightenment and have given a convincing point by point logical rebuttal to both the writings of Voltaire and John Ralston Saul's book.
Mod parent up. Great slideshow.
Amen. Read Voltaire's Bastards. I read it when it came out in the 90's, and over time I have become increasingly convinced of its accuracy. In essence, MBA's and their simplistic ideologies are driving our civilization into the ground.
Market failure indeed. Can you have true competition when by nature your industry is limited to three to five players in any particular area. This sounds more like an oligarchy than a free market. This a good argument for regulation in the public interest. In Europe they regulate their mobile providers and their rates and service are far better than ours.
The original 1987 NeXT workstation already used vector graphics (Postscript) to display virtually everything on the screen. When NeXT became OSX, they had to remove the Postscript because Adobe's licensing charges were too large.
Why don't we just admit it. Because we can't actually meet the people who post here, because we know almost nothing about their REAL background or history, we have no real way of knowing whether the poster is (a) a paid shill who makes his living posting well crafted propaganda, (b) a gullible idiot who reads and believes said propaganda or (c) a well meaning citizen who actually cares about scientific truth.
At least when I actually know someone, then they are accountable for what they say. If they say something idiotic, it will have consequences, both in personal and in professional relationships.
I'm thinking about a Lenovo T530 or perhaps something from zareason. They both have 1080p offerings for screen resolution (although with zareason, to get that resolution I'd be stuck with nVidia, since their intel graphics laptops have lower resolution.). I was wondering how well Linux deals with high resolution screens in regards to readability, font size and general appearance. I'm not even sure yet whether I will go for gnome, kde, xfce, or something else.
They seem to fail every other version.
ME - awful.
XP - usable.
Vista - awful.
7 - usable.
8 - awful
9 - usable?^c^c^c^c^c^c irrelevant?
FTFY
That kind of installation can already be built today, but nobody wants to do it on an industrial scale. (And industrial scale is the only way it makes any sense). Because when they do the cost analysis, its not really worth it. Cool ideas don't always make dollars or sense.
The near equivalent of a molten salt battery has already been built, all over the world, and on a massive industrial scale. They are called aluminum smelters.
We need portable energy, and molten anything is not an answer.
Its easy to give a Ted Talk, its a lot harder to offer up a practical idea. (Just look at how many TED talks are nothing but TED Talks).
You didn't watch the TED talk, did you. If you had, you would realize that they have already built several working prototypes, around the size of a pizza dish, plus or minus. You also disregarded the implied or stated purpose, that is to store electricity generated from daytime solar electricity generation, be it in a single house or more likely on a utility scale.
The idea of molten salt batteries sounds quite intriguing to me, especially for bulk utility level energy storage. In this TED talk, MIT professor Donald Sadoway details his designs and describes the models he has already built. In short, the idea is to have two liquid metals, one less dense and one more dense. In the middle is a layer of molten salt. The less dense molten metal floats on the top. In the middle is the molten salt, and at the bottom is the more dense molten metal. The molten salt acts as the electrolyte in the cell, and the two different metals pass electrons around due to their different electron affinities.
When building these cells, they would use common cheap materials, so that the cost of this type of battery would be trivial compared with the amount of energy it can store. The fact that the cell is molten is actually an advantage. We spend huge effort in our current electrochemical cells trying to keep them cool. This type of cell would thrive on heat...indeed the energy used in charging and discharging it would help keep the metals and the salt molten.
Clearly this type of cell would not be used to power your laptop or cellphone directly, but it could be used to store energy from solar panels on your rooftop, or to store energy from large solar power plants for use in the night. As always, I am sure there are bugs to work out, but really, this sounds incredibly promising.
Oh the horror! Millions of people won't see ads pushing them to buy products they will never buy. It will be a disaster! An economic collapse!
IMHO, graphing calculators are largely an artifact of the past, except in the case of school examinations. Students need a calculator that is "dumb enough" to not write the entire exam for them and not be able to wirelessly share answers between neighbouring students. When a student enters the world outside school, the graphing calculator will be largely useless. If you are an engineer and you need "smart features" when doing a particular problem, you will likely use a proper computer and a dedicated software package tailored to the task. The only reason you might need a small calculator is to do quick calculations.
Myself, I'm a fan of the old HP 15C. No menus. Excellent key layout. Reverse polish notation. Everything you need, nothing you don't. Perfectly tailored to the task of doing quick calculations.
Overstated inefficiency of government organizations? I see we have never worked for one. I have. The difference between government and business is night and day. Breathtaking inefficiency, in areas I would never have considered inefficiency could exist. Seriously, it's quite creative.
And your single experience makes your argument completely true? I do not doubt the existence of government inefficiency. I have seen it. But I have also seen inefficiency in private corporations, especially when they enjoy a monopoly position. And I have seen very efficient government run organizations. My assertion wasn't that governments are always efficient, but instead that their inefficiencies are often overstated.
A good example is in the health care sector. By any objective standard, the private US healthcare system is highly inefficient. Healthcare in the US costs more per person than almost anywhere else in the world. And yet broad spectrum health outcomes are very poor. In addition, US healthcare doesn't cover a shockingly large percentage of the population. Contrast this with countries with public healthcare systems. Norway and Canada are excellent examples. They manage to cover the vast majority of the population, while their costs per person are far lower than in the US. And broad spectrum health outcomes in these countries are far better than in the US.
The difference is actually fairly simple to understand. In the US, the "institutional purpose" of healthcare companies is to make a profit. That's it. Their goal is not to make people healthy, but to earn a profit. And because the healthcare industry is an inherent monopoly or oligarchy, they use their power and dominant positions to overcharge people and/or deny them coverage. In doing this, they are merely fulfilling their "institutional purpose".
Contrast this with well run public healthcare systems. In such systems, the "institutional purpose" is to make people more healthy. Doctors are always taught to have this goal, and take the Hippocratic Oath, even in the US. The difference though is that in well run public healthcare systems, the managers above the doctors also share the desire to improve people's health, while in the US, improving people's health is secondary to the goal of maximizing shareholder return.
There are successful private systems elsewhere in the world (Switzerland for example), but even in Switzerland, the government has its boot on the throat of healthcare companies. They are simply not allowed to misbehave, as they are in the US. The inherent problem, which most of a right wing bent seem to ignore is that of monopoly. There are some industries that cannot possibly have real competition. And when you have a private monopoly, it the worst of all possible worlds. Monopolistic companies can behave as they want with impunity. If competitors arise, they buy them out or use their power to crush them. Customer choice is limited, and thus so is customer power.
I find the ideological division and characterization of private efficiency and public inefficiency is intellectually lazy, and ignores the subtleties of the complex real world. Ideologies are crutches for those who don't wish to really think.
And yet, if everyone respect the spirit of the law instead of finding holes in the letter of it, we as a society would most likely be a whole lot better off.
Then again, this would require such things as integrity and honesty.
The simple fact is that once barriers to capital flow across national borders were torn down, the modern social state was doomed. When money flows across borders with little restriction, organizations whose implicit purpose is to maximize profit will shift their resources to countries with the lowest possible tax rates. This creates a race to the bottom in terms of tax rates, especially when large organizations that are capable of physically or financially moving from country to country move large percentages of their wealth away from countries like the US.
I have begun to realize that right wing countries seem to do well economically largely because they have reduced their tax rates below that of other less right wing countries. This brings a temporary influx wealth and a temporary economic boost. However if the tax rates do not continue to decline, large organizations will again begin to leave, bringing large deficits and economic decline.
Let me emphasize this: I believe right wing economic policies work (temporarily) because lower tax rates bring an influx of capital, and NOT primarily because of the inherent efficiency of the private sector in managing resources. I believe that the claimed "efficiencies" of private corporations, and the claimed "inefficiencies" of government organizations are highly overstated.
The implication of this is that if we as a society wish to have the amenities of a great civilization, then we will have to find a way to restrict the flow of capital across borders. Otherwise, we will be doomed to an asymptotic descent towards a minimum level of civilization. The gap between rich and poor will continue to increase, and, seemingly paradoxically, the economy will slowly grind towards a halt, as the pool of middle class consumers evaporates.
we all moved to LibreOffice
My main document producing software is now LaTeX, using TeXShop on my Mac. It does everything I need, and the documents look pretty. Most especially, I love the ability of LaTeX to typeset equations seamlessly. Perhaps there is a slight learning curve, but it wasn't bad. And when I need to do something unusual, I use the google manual.
My kid sucks at chemistry and, like all pussy-ass parents today, I don't have the heart to tell him that he's not incredible at everything (and don't want to risk him finding out by taking a class where he doesn't get an automatic "A").
And then the kid will take economics and "management" courses through his education and become a manager who will likely have little or no appreciation for the reality of science. I've seen similar things personally: Managers who make scientifically impossible demands on R & D departments. When R & D doesn't deliver the impossible, smart honest people are turfed, and naive and inexperienced (but "energetic") people are brought in, and the company spirals into oblivion. I have seen two first-hand examples of this in two different companies. Both managers were MBA's. Both were eventually fired, but not before they did deep harm to their companies.
Again: what metaphysical assumptions is modern physics replete with? Just because lots of people are aggressively stupid, even many with college degrees, doesn't reflect on physics. Unless you're referring to physicists like those who are also avid Creationists, which also doesn't reflect on physics - it reflects on the limits of physics to reach the rest of a person's mind when it's lost to the cancer you refer to.
Ummmm...are you arguing with the wrong person? I didn't make the post about the "metaphysical assumptions". I generally agree with you actually. I gave the anecdote because I think that there are academics who right now think that the view of an uneducated buffoon on physics carries the same weight as that of a physics professor. Intellectual relativism gone crazy.
Yes, physics is a practice refined from "natural philosophy: thinking in an organized way about nature.
But what metaphysical assumptions is modern physics replete with? Other than necessary falsifiability and universal consistency?
Also, Vikings weren't the first people to arrive in America. Not even from across the Atlantic.
I agree that science is a branch of philosophy. My assertion is that it is constrained by the laws of the physical world.
As an aside about the growth of "scepticism" of science itself, which is apparent in some of the comments in this thread, I recently had a conversation with a PhD candidate in which he asserted that to some people, air has no mass. I responded that this might be so, but that I could explain an experiment to such people that would show that air did have mass, and that they could therefore be convinced. He responded with the assertion that this wouldn't be so, because such people aren't educated the same way I was. In essence, he was saying that such people were not educable, and that furthermore their view is equally as valid as a my own scientific view. I cringed, and smiled and nodded.
I think that the above anecdote is a natural consequence of the intellectual relativism that has been growing like a cancer in our institutions of higher learning over the recent couple of decades. It is sophistry, and a casual reading of Plato and Aristotle would make you realize that the ancient Greeks dealt with the same misguided views. I worry about the consequences of this, especially in our popular media culture of "truthiness".
The physicists have a model that explains their observation...
Yes. And thus their hypotheses are constrained by what they observe. i.e. The physical world. And the physical world is constrained by the laws of nature. The philosopher Kripke expounded on the idea of "possible worlds", i.e. worlds that don't exist, but could. We could imagine a world where Germany won WW2, but we can't imagine a world where 2+2=5 (assuming the same numbering system is used in both worlds). We could say that science is concerned with what is possible in this world, while philosophers are concerned about what is possible not just in this world, but in any other possible world.