One problem with this is preventing the qualification criteria from becoming corrupted. The definition of civil 'knowledge' would very quickly become highly politicized, since there is power at stake.
Another problem is there would be nothing to keep the smart, educated people from stacking the system unjustly against poor, ignorant people. Although any elite tends to equate their position with virtue, they also do a lot of rationalizing of various forms of upward redistribution, pretending that their wealth is the result of virtue when it has as much to do with an abuse of power. The poor and ignorant need political power to protect themselves, even if they use it unwisely.
That's how it is in the US if you're being investigated by homeland security, the existence of your case is 'classified'. I don't know how common this is, though the gag rule makes it impossible to tell.
Equipment costs have always dwarfed manufacturing labor costs in the IC industry. Government subsidized fab construction is a major reason it moved to Asia. And other production like assembling phones is cheaper closer to where the components are made.
They can try and dictate it, but the market always wins at the end, it's a law of nature, like gravity.
The same principle applies to something like sex slavery. Its true that the market always resists attempts to fight it. And its also true that when there's enough demand for something, attempts to control it become mostly futile. But it doesn't follow that people are utterly controlled by profit imperatives. The market doesn't prevent things like dumping toxic chemicals in communal drinking sources, and it doesn't prevent the squandering of easily accessible but non-renewable resources. Regulation can help with those things, even though regulation is less effective if people are disinclined to regulate honestly or respond to regulation honestly. The pretense that competitive advantage is the only principle that makes the world work is one form of that.
As I understand it, Occam's Razor says that if X and Y are sufficient to account for Z, then its better not to posit W, X, and Y to explain Z. In the context of algebra, this means you don't want more equations than you have unknowns. It doesn't say that everything in nature must be as simple as superficially conceivable. (It also doesn't say that the most unremarkable and widely accepted explanation should be preferred, though that's what most people seem to mean when they invoke Occam's Razor in philosophical arguments.)
In electromagnetics, minimal energy states are often non-zero, and the reason for this can be derived mathematically. Something is more stable than nothing. I don't see a reason to assume that this isn't likely in other areas of physics as well.
I'm not arguing that everything owes its existence to random chance though. And I think that to gain further understanding on this question it isn't necessary to have 'faith' in any undemonstrable assertions, or to give up on objective honesty. What is necessary is to relax one's faith in already having the solution, or one's faith that no further answer is possible or meaningful, and to keep asking questions. That opens the door for new insights and recognizing new possibilities that we are oblivious to otherwise.
I think that the anthropic principle is usually a cop-out. Where we don't currently understand the reason for some natural fact, and our existence is even plausibly dependent on that fact, it is assumed every possible alternative must happen somewhere else. The idea of randomness is like this also. Scientists currently understand the reasons for very many things that our existence depends on, and which from certain standpoints can be modeled well statistically. Its a good thing that 20th century scientists didn't just declare those things inherently random or invoke the anthropic principle and stop. Phenomena that can't be decomposed neatly into cause/effect and well defined probability distributions are commonly declared to be effectively unreal. But just because such things are really hard to study using existing mathematical tools, it doesn't follow that they don't have real and significant effects on reality. New ideas, like statistics, or negation of the parallel postulate, had to be invented for past scientific theories to be developed. Now we've reached a point where its hard to go forward with existing tools, and no additional tools are easily at hand. It requires a leap of faith though to assume that this is because we're near the end. The reason that existing theories seem to account for nearly everything is things they don't account for are rarely scientifically considered. If something can't be controlled well enough to be established and reliably repeated in a conventionally defined experiment, nobody wants to wreck their research career by running after it. At best only strawman stand-ins for these types of questions are studied, since it is assumed a priori that if the phenomena is real it must be amenable to conventional techniques. I guess this will change when enough people tire of feeling like masters of everything, and batting the same old theist vs atheist ball back and forth, and want to play in a bigger sandbox.
if you're in the US. A few years ago when Paypal stole $1200 from us our case was thrown out of small claims court, essentially because the judge didn't want to hassle with it. He argued that the small print in the Paypal user agreement means they can just take your money for no reason and you have no recourse. Two state Attorney's general helped us though. All it took was one inquiry from Ohio and Paypal gave us our money back, no explanation. Washington later followed up with us just to make sure everything was squared away. I don't think we had even contacted them, they had found out about our case somehow and were doing their own investigation.
I'm not sure if it will help you, but in our case the system worked the way its supposed to.
People like formality when they can use it to wield power while evading responsibility. Its not Joe that's stonewalling, its the Engineering Change Control Committee (which happens to be controlled by Joe). Also people like formality when it strokes their own egos. For example, Lebron James always refers to The Game of Basketball during interviews, instead of just calling it basketball, as if we would be confused otherwise. Likewise with Joe, who feels pretty special being in control of the ECCC.
Of course you have to compromise, and do things you believe are wrong. But to be worthy of any honest self-respect, you've still got to draw the line somewhere, make whatever kind of stand you're able to. In the long run people doing that is what keeps us from absolute barbarism. If you sold out for a bigger house or an earlier retirement when you didn't have to, then you're one of the people that made this shithole a shithole when it could have been a bit better. In that case its a cop-out to blame 'society': its not 'society', its you. Its almost exactly the same kind of cop-out that business executives do when they pretend that they have no choice but to "enhance shareholder value", while meanwhile shareholders pretend that they're not responsible for the behavior of the companies they own. Its a gigantic moral shell game. Like I said, its true that to some extent we have to compromise, and follow the rules well enough to survive in the environment we're in. But the power that circumstance has isn't total, we do have a small but significant ability to make real choices, and its dishonest to claim otherwise. I'm not saying you were claiming that, or that you haven't made sacrifices for what you think is right. I'm just adding something that I think is important.
I'm not the AC, but here's one scenario....You don't kill yourself because you hope you'll recover and have a happy life. Then when you're older you find you never healed, but its too late to kill yourself because doing that would harm other people, such as your own children who depend on you.
I'm not implying that sexual abuse is worse than death for all people, or even for most people. I'd guess that it isn't, and in some cases its probably not even that big of a deal. It depends on the abuse, how the person responds to it, and a lot of other factors. But for some people, yes, definitely, being killed would be better.
Physics doesn't scale by size either. Strength is related in different ways to length and to cross section, which is length (or breadth) squared. Mass is proportional to length (or breadth) cubed. That's not even remotely the same. Dropping a bug a meter is not like dropping an elephant a hundred meters.
Politics aside, their science has been mostly crap since at least the 1980's also. The magazine had more meat in the 1970's, but I was too young to judge how accurate it was.
I'd be surprised if the dog couldn't hear the ball rolling on the roof. Not that a dog wouldn't be able to do that trick without that, it makes it a lot easier.
Minor counter-example....5th order polynomials have exact solutions, but truncation and cancellation error makes calculation difficult when they are close together. A comparably well implemented interative solver is actually about the same speed, and more stable. Not that this invalidates the countless other situations where analytic solutions are better.
Any airline that operates charter plane services to the government isn't a commercial entity?
If they received a government contract to build the plane specifically for that purpose, its misleading to call the plane a commercial craft.
Big space contractors haven't had to compete with smaller, more nimble competitors to quite the same extent that has been necessary in other defense and security related fields. But to pretend that the smaller, nimbler competitors are engaged in a different class of economic activity is disengenuous.
I'm not suggesting that its a boondoggle. I'm suggesting that the use of the word "commercial" is misleading.
Government contracts I have worked on never went over budget, the contract size was fixed from the outset. But it was still mostly a matter of semantics and accounting that we were private and not government employees.
Lockheed Martin is a private company that has private customers besides the government. When the name NASA went on their products, this was political as much as anything. So why don't we call Lockheed Martin a private space company? Or General Dynamics or Alliant Techsystems? I'm not saying SpaceX is a bad company. I'm saying that the dichotomy between private and public space activity, as presented in the press, is largely though not entirely fictional, and that this clearly applies to SpaceX. Again I'm not denigrating SpaceX, they may be a great company. Its the spin that I'm commenting on.
If the money that's paying for it is coming from taxes, its not commercial.
NASA hardware has always been built primarily by private companies like Lockheed Martin.
In Washington jargon, when you give money to contractors instead of federal employees, its "commercial" or "free enterprise", so they can pretend to be in favor of freedom and against government. But one of the main reasons for it is its a way of evading controls on executive salaries. There's a revolving door where government program managers funnel lucrative contracts to private companies with ridiculously high overhead rates, then afterwards go to work at those companies. Its common to already have a hiring agreement with the company before awarding the contract.
I'm not suggesting what the situation is with SpaceX, I'm just commenting on "commercial" space development in general. Its commercial if its commercial activity, such as space tourism or putting up satellites that private companies pay for. Otherwise its double-speak.
In any case, congrats on the engineering achievement, I don't mean to detract from that.
I think you're projecting a fair amount into what it means to be a 'neighbor' in the modern world. From my standpoint, China is a neighbor in most of the ways that Mexico is a neighbor to you. Half my family members are from China, half my coworkers are from China, I visit Chinese web sites on the internet, and its a one day flight away. In principle I could walk, bicycle, or drive to Mexico, but in practice I would fly there also. And the Chinese and American economies are joined at the hip: what happens in one country has a huge impact on the other. Politically and economically China is less free than Mexico in significant ways, but China is no longer communist either in anything but symbol, and China is freer than either Mexico or the US in some ways. (In many ways its easier to do business there, or buy goods and services, without running into entrenched interest protecting regulations.) I speak Spanish better than I speak Chinese, by a wide margin, but I have far more opportunity to speak Chinese.
I'm not saying your perspective is illegitimate: there's nothing wrong with preferring to buy stuff from Mexico. I'm just saying that for other people the same kind of analysis would support preferring goods from China.
Except that 'when I look at mine', I don't have to 'send you that info', it happens instantaneously. Sending the hat is the only thing that takes time. That's a pretty big difference.
Like you, I can give many examples where experimental results were accepted as plausible and studied despite the absence of a proposed mechanism or model. It is nevertheless still a significant obstacle to overcome in many areas of study most relevant to the phenomena I mentioned (precognition, telepathy). If that hasn't been your experience in your area, that means that I didn't provide enough context for my statement. If your reflex is to regard things outside of your immediate experience as 'errors', then I think I'm wasting my time trying to talk to you.
The overwhelming majority of scientists in fields that I have first had experience with (electromagnetics, medicine), must convincingly argue for the existence of promising practical applications, and usually commercial applications, in order to get funding. Often their arguments are substantially bogus, and take advantage of the naivety of government program managers, but they still have to successfully make the arguments. I've written and won many grants - I know how the system works. That there are some physicists and others working in other areas who don't have this challenge doesn't make it a straw man for the rest of us. And the fields I mentioned are among those most relevant to most claims of paranormal phenomena.
I have objectively demonstrable precognitive and telepathic experiences that don't by any stretch of the imagination have explanations using known scientific laws. But there's no way I could pass Randi's challenge, its not even close. And I along the avenues that are open to me, there is no plausible way to obtain funding, or to obtain the cooperation of researchers who are in a position to get funding, mostly for the reasons I've mentioned.
If your supposition, based on the very limited information that I've provided, is that I'm lying or deluded, then that further illustrates my point.
From what I have seen, James Randi makes a living by selling the feeling of being smugly superior to superstitious people. He gives attention to the irrational and unsupportable of his opponents arguments (of which there are many), and ignores the others. If he was more inclined towards discover, he might learn something new.
The subset of phenomena that are scientifically provable is further reduced by the fact that all research has to be funded. And nothing gets funded unless it benefits the careers of those who are doing the funding, and is worth the risk for the institutions and individuals that are doing the investigating.
My opinion is that we're not close to developing new paradigms. The existing theories were developed to model the rigorously controllable kind of phenomena, and its a really big step to anything else. Even if you could demonstrate something like telepathy or precognition so that it were scientifically recognized as real, there's nothing in existing physics theory that's even remotely suitable for explaining it. There's not much that a scientist could do in this context except try to collect more data. That data would be extremely difficult for other scientists to reproduce, due to the difficulty of controlling the experiment adequately. And since the data would not be of a kind that could be modeled with slick equations as with cannonball trajectories or magnetic fields, it would be hard to impossible to get any traction on the theory side. And since you can't do much on the theory side, you have nothing to attach your name and prestige to even if you're successful - you're never much more than a spectator. And you're going to patent and monetize what? It looks to me like a career killer even if you could do it successfully. And by natural selection, scientists who aren't good at make high probability research choices eventually lose their funding, and are no longer scientists.
I think this seems more weird to people than it really is, because of connotations the word "knowledge" has which are actually peripheral to the phenomena. There is an ambiguity in the particle's path, and that ambiguity is reduced to the extent that it is forced by its interaction with other matter to commit to a more definite path. The observer/observation dichotomy (which you avoided, but most other people assume implicitly) seems to me to be a consequence of our mathematics and the way we decompose things into functions. The dichotomy is an essential part of our problem solving tool, but its not actually built into the physical system.
Not that I'm trying to argue that everything is easy and understood. I think the hardest phenomena are ones that can't be controlled in a scientifically rigorous way, and consequently aren't even studied. Physicists deal with uncertainty only where it follows a well defined distribution. Some scientists have argued that if a phenomena can't be modeled in a way that produces definite predictions, then for practical purposes it is not real. It seems to me though that phenomena can have a significant impact on the world without being amenable to manipulation in a lab or repeatable observation through manufacturable equipment. So my view is that the world is even harder to understand than quantum physics would seem to indicate.
Your experience here illustrates why I don't post on slashdot any more.
Nobody tried to engage honestly with what you actually said. Their ostensibly libertarian position is that anybody who wants something different for themselves than what they want for themselves is an idiot. It might have helped had you explained your reasoning, but I doubt it would have made a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
And why is religion special from anything else, in that it becomes poor form to criticize one after it graduates from being a cult?
Because people suck up to power. Hail ants.
One problem with this is preventing the qualification criteria from becoming corrupted. The definition of civil 'knowledge' would very quickly become highly politicized, since there is power at stake.
Another problem is there would be nothing to keep the smart, educated people from stacking the system unjustly against poor, ignorant people. Although any elite tends to equate their position with virtue, they also do a lot of rationalizing of various forms of upward redistribution, pretending that their wealth is the result of virtue when it has as much to do with an abuse of power. The poor and ignorant need political power to protect themselves, even if they use it unwisely.
That's how it is in the US if you're being investigated by homeland security, the existence of your case is 'classified'. I don't know how common this is, though the gag rule makes it impossible to tell.
Equipment costs have always dwarfed manufacturing labor costs in the IC industry. Government subsidized fab construction is a major reason it moved to Asia. And other production like assembling phones is cheaper closer to where the components are made.
They can try and dictate it, but the market always wins at the end, it's a law of nature, like gravity.
The same principle applies to something like sex slavery. Its true that the market always resists attempts to fight it. And its also true that when there's enough demand for something, attempts to control it become mostly futile. But it doesn't follow that people are utterly controlled by profit imperatives. The market doesn't prevent things like dumping toxic chemicals in communal drinking sources, and it doesn't prevent the squandering of easily accessible but non-renewable resources. Regulation can help with those things, even though regulation is less effective if people are disinclined to regulate honestly or respond to regulation honestly. The pretense that competitive advantage is the only principle that makes the world work is one form of that.
http://www.tvhistory.tv/TV-Lens.htm
As I understand it, Occam's Razor says that if X and Y are sufficient to account for Z, then its better not to posit W, X, and Y to explain Z. In the context of algebra, this means you don't want more equations than you have unknowns. It doesn't say that everything in nature must be as simple as superficially conceivable. (It also doesn't say that the most unremarkable and widely accepted explanation should be preferred, though that's what most people seem to mean when they invoke Occam's Razor in philosophical arguments.)
In electromagnetics, minimal energy states are often non-zero, and the reason for this can be derived mathematically. Something is more stable than nothing. I don't see a reason to assume that this isn't likely in other areas of physics as well.
I'm not arguing that everything owes its existence to random chance though. And I think that to gain further understanding on this question it isn't necessary to have 'faith' in any undemonstrable assertions, or to give up on objective honesty. What is necessary is to relax one's faith in already having the solution, or one's faith that no further answer is possible or meaningful, and to keep asking questions. That opens the door for new insights and recognizing new possibilities that we are oblivious to otherwise.
I think that the anthropic principle is usually a cop-out. Where we don't currently understand the reason for some natural fact, and our existence is even plausibly dependent on that fact, it is assumed every possible alternative must happen somewhere else. The idea of randomness is like this also. Scientists currently understand the reasons for very many things that our existence depends on, and which from certain standpoints can be modeled well statistically. Its a good thing that 20th century scientists didn't just declare those things inherently random or invoke the anthropic principle and stop. Phenomena that can't be decomposed neatly into cause/effect and well defined probability distributions are commonly declared to be effectively unreal. But just because such things are really hard to study using existing mathematical tools, it doesn't follow that they don't have real and significant effects on reality. New ideas, like statistics, or negation of the parallel postulate, had to be invented for past scientific theories to be developed. Now we've reached a point where its hard to go forward with existing tools, and no additional tools are easily at hand. It requires a leap of faith though to assume that this is because we're near the end. The reason that existing theories seem to account for nearly everything is things they don't account for are rarely scientifically considered. If something can't be controlled well enough to be established and reliably repeated in a conventionally defined experiment, nobody wants to wreck their research career by running after it. At best only strawman stand-ins for these types of questions are studied, since it is assumed a priori that if the phenomena is real it must be amenable to conventional techniques. I guess this will change when enough people tire of feeling like masters of everything, and batting the same old theist vs atheist ball back and forth, and want to play in a bigger sandbox.
if you're in the US. A few years ago when Paypal stole $1200 from us our case was thrown out of small claims court, essentially because the judge didn't want to hassle with it. He argued that the small print in the Paypal user agreement means they can just take your money for no reason and you have no recourse. Two state Attorney's general helped us though. All it took was one inquiry from Ohio and Paypal gave us our money back, no explanation. Washington later followed up with us just to make sure everything was squared away. I don't think we had even contacted them, they had found out about our case somehow and were doing their own investigation.
I'm not sure if it will help you, but in our case the system worked the way its supposed to.
People like formality when they can use it to wield power while evading responsibility. Its not Joe that's stonewalling, its the Engineering Change Control Committee (which happens to be controlled by Joe). Also people like formality when it strokes their own egos. For example, Lebron James always refers to The Game of Basketball during interviews, instead of just calling it basketball, as if we would be confused otherwise. Likewise with Joe, who feels pretty special being in control of the ECCC.
Of course you have to compromise, and do things you believe are wrong. But to be worthy of any honest self-respect, you've still got to draw the line somewhere, make whatever kind of stand you're able to. In the long run people doing that is what keeps us from absolute barbarism. If you sold out for a bigger house or an earlier retirement when you didn't have to, then you're one of the people that made this shithole a shithole when it could have been a bit better. In that case its a cop-out to blame 'society': its not 'society', its you. Its almost exactly the same kind of cop-out that business executives do when they pretend that they have no choice but to "enhance shareholder value", while meanwhile shareholders pretend that they're not responsible for the behavior of the companies they own. Its a gigantic moral shell game. Like I said, its true that to some extent we have to compromise, and follow the rules well enough to survive in the environment we're in. But the power that circumstance has isn't total, we do have a small but significant ability to make real choices, and its dishonest to claim otherwise. I'm not saying you were claiming that, or that you haven't made sacrifices for what you think is right. I'm just adding something that I think is important.
I'm not the AC, but here's one scenario....You don't kill yourself because you hope you'll recover and have a happy life. Then when you're older you find you never healed, but its too late to kill yourself because doing that would harm other people, such as your own children who depend on you.
I'm not implying that sexual abuse is worse than death for all people, or even for most people. I'd guess that it isn't, and in some cases its probably not even that big of a deal. It depends on the abuse, how the person responds to it, and a lot of other factors. But for some people, yes, definitely, being killed would be better.
Physics doesn't scale by size either. Strength is related in different ways to length and to cross section, which is length (or breadth) squared. Mass is proportional to length (or breadth) cubed. That's not even remotely the same. Dropping a bug a meter is not like dropping an elephant a hundred meters.
Politics aside, their science has been mostly crap since at least the 1980's also. The magazine had more meat in the 1970's, but I was too young to judge how accurate it was.
I'd be surprised if the dog couldn't hear the ball rolling on the roof. Not that a dog wouldn't be able to do that trick without that, it makes it a lot easier.
Minor counter-example....5th order polynomials have exact solutions, but truncation and cancellation error makes calculation difficult when they are close together. A comparably well implemented interative solver is actually about the same speed, and more stable. Not that this invalidates the countless other situations where analytic solutions are better.
So, let me know if i get this right...
Any airline that operates charter plane services to the government isn't a commercial entity?
If they received a government contract to build the plane specifically for that purpose, its misleading to call the plane a commercial craft.
Big space contractors haven't had to compete with smaller, more nimble competitors to quite the same extent that has been necessary in other defense and security related fields. But to pretend that the smaller, nimbler competitors are engaged in a different class of economic activity is disengenuous.
I'm not suggesting that its a boondoggle. I'm suggesting that the use of the word "commercial" is misleading.
Government contracts I have worked on never went over budget, the contract size was fixed from the outset. But it was still mostly a matter of semantics and accounting that we were private and not government employees.
Lockheed Martin is a private company that has private customers besides the government. When the name NASA went on their products, this was political as much as anything. So why don't we call Lockheed Martin a private space company? Or General Dynamics or Alliant Techsystems? I'm not saying SpaceX is a bad company. I'm saying that the dichotomy between private and public space activity, as presented in the press, is largely though not entirely fictional, and that this clearly applies to SpaceX. Again I'm not denigrating SpaceX, they may be a great company. Its the spin that I'm commenting on.
If the money that's paying for it is coming from taxes, its not commercial.
NASA hardware has always been built primarily by private companies like Lockheed Martin.
In Washington jargon, when you give money to contractors instead of federal employees, its "commercial" or "free enterprise", so they can pretend to be in favor of freedom and against government. But one of the main reasons for it is its a way of evading controls on executive salaries. There's a revolving door where government program managers funnel lucrative contracts to private companies with ridiculously high overhead rates, then afterwards go to work at those companies. Its common to already have a hiring agreement with the company before awarding the contract.
I'm not suggesting what the situation is with SpaceX, I'm just commenting on "commercial" space development in general. Its commercial if its commercial activity, such as space tourism or putting up satellites that private companies pay for. Otherwise its double-speak.
In any case, congrats on the engineering achievement, I don't mean to detract from that.
I think you're projecting a fair amount into what it means to be a 'neighbor' in the modern world. From my standpoint, China is a neighbor in most of the ways that Mexico is a neighbor to you. Half my family members are from China, half my coworkers are from China, I visit Chinese web sites on the internet, and its a one day flight away. In principle I could walk, bicycle, or drive to Mexico, but in practice I would fly there also. And the Chinese and American economies are joined at the hip: what happens in one country has a huge impact on the other. Politically and economically China is less free than Mexico in significant ways, but China is no longer communist either in anything but symbol, and China is freer than either Mexico or the US in some ways. (In many ways its easier to do business there, or buy goods and services, without running into entrenched interest protecting regulations.) I speak Spanish better than I speak Chinese, by a wide margin, but I have far more opportunity to speak Chinese.
I'm not saying your perspective is illegitimate: there's nothing wrong with preferring to buy stuff from Mexico. I'm just saying that for other people the same kind of analysis would support preferring goods from China.
Except that 'when I look at mine', I don't have to 'send you that info', it happens instantaneously. Sending the hat is the only thing that takes time. That's a pretty big difference.
It would only be a matter of time before we have to pay AND see ads in the OS.
http://www.dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-million-dollar-challenge
Like you, I can give many examples where experimental results were accepted as plausible and studied despite the absence of a proposed mechanism or model. It is nevertheless still a significant obstacle to overcome in many areas of study most relevant to the phenomena I mentioned (precognition, telepathy). If that hasn't been your experience in your area, that means that I didn't provide enough context for my statement. If your reflex is to regard things outside of your immediate experience as 'errors', then I think I'm wasting my time trying to talk to you.
The overwhelming majority of scientists in fields that I have first had experience with (electromagnetics, medicine), must convincingly argue for the existence of promising practical applications, and usually commercial applications, in order to get funding. Often their arguments are substantially bogus, and take advantage of the naivety of government program managers, but they still have to successfully make the arguments. I've written and won many grants - I know how the system works. That there are some physicists and others working in other areas who don't have this challenge doesn't make it a straw man for the rest of us. And the fields I mentioned are among those most relevant to most claims of paranormal phenomena.
I have objectively demonstrable precognitive and telepathic experiences that don't by any stretch of the imagination have explanations using known scientific laws. But there's no way I could pass Randi's challenge, its not even close. And I along the avenues that are open to me, there is no plausible way to obtain funding, or to obtain the cooperation of researchers who are in a position to get funding, mostly for the reasons I've mentioned.
If your supposition, based on the very limited information that I've provided, is that I'm lying or deluded, then that further illustrates my point.
From what I have seen, James Randi makes a living by selling the feeling of being smugly superior to superstitious people. He gives attention to the irrational and unsupportable of his opponents arguments (of which there are many), and ignores the others. If he was more inclined towards discover, he might learn something new.
The subset of phenomena that are scientifically provable is further reduced by the fact that all research has to be funded. And nothing gets funded unless it benefits the careers of those who are doing the funding, and is worth the risk for the institutions and individuals that are doing the investigating.
My opinion is that we're not close to developing new paradigms. The existing theories were developed to model the rigorously controllable kind of phenomena, and its a really big step to anything else. Even if you could demonstrate something like telepathy or precognition so that it were scientifically recognized as real, there's nothing in existing physics theory that's even remotely suitable for explaining it. There's not much that a scientist could do in this context except try to collect more data. That data would be extremely difficult for other scientists to reproduce, due to the difficulty of controlling the experiment adequately. And since the data would not be of a kind that could be modeled with slick equations as with cannonball trajectories or magnetic fields, it would be hard to impossible to get any traction on the theory side. And since you can't do much on the theory side, you have nothing to attach your name and prestige to even if you're successful - you're never much more than a spectator. And you're going to patent and monetize what? It looks to me like a career killer even if you could do it successfully. And by natural selection, scientists who aren't good at make high probability research choices eventually lose their funding, and are no longer scientists.
I think this seems more weird to people than it really is, because of connotations the word "knowledge" has which are actually peripheral to the phenomena. There is an ambiguity in the particle's path, and that ambiguity is reduced to the extent that it is forced by its interaction with other matter to commit to a more definite path. The observer/observation dichotomy (which you avoided, but most other people assume implicitly) seems to me to be a consequence of our mathematics and the way we decompose things into functions. The dichotomy is an essential part of our problem solving tool, but its not actually built into the physical system.
Not that I'm trying to argue that everything is easy and understood. I think the hardest phenomena are ones that can't be controlled in a scientifically rigorous way, and consequently aren't even studied. Physicists deal with uncertainty only where it follows a well defined distribution. Some scientists have argued that if a phenomena can't be modeled in a way that produces definite predictions, then for practical purposes it is not real. It seems to me though that phenomena can have a significant impact on the world without being amenable to manipulation in a lab or repeatable observation through manufacturable equipment. So my view is that the world is even harder to understand than quantum physics would seem to indicate.
Your experience here illustrates why I don't post on slashdot any more.
Nobody tried to engage honestly with what you actually said. Their ostensibly libertarian position is that anybody who wants something different for themselves than what they want for themselves is an idiot. It might have helped had you explained your reasoning, but I doubt it would have made a difference.