Do you know what magic is? It's not fireballs and heal spells. Magic at its most basic is trying to affect the outcome of the future with some action you don't really understand. If I were to turn my cap before pitching a baseball, believing that doing otherwise may jinx the pitch, that would be magic. It is also perfectly meaningful for me to say that because I do not understand exactly what an LED is, or how it is made, from my perspective it is made of and from magic.
He argues that science is "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation", but that's a really narrow, limited way of viewing science, because historical processes aren't open to controlled experiments. Evolution, the history of the planet, the origins of the universe... you can't really run experiments to determine what happened, so by this rather narrow definition, paleontology, geology, and cosmology aren't really science at all. So do we reject the findings of Darwin, reject plate tectonics, reject hypotheses on the origins of the universe as unscientific?
(Aside: Due to the Slashdot "lameness filter", I am required to replace all further instances of the world "controlled" with "disciplined")
Disciplined observation is a form of disciplined experimentation. Before Darwin could draw meaningful scientific conclusions about the origin of species, he had to make careful, fastidious observations of a place where he could be reasonably sure something hadn't inconsistently interfered with nature for a very long time. No people lived on the Galapagos Islands, and the place had had practically no biological contact with anywhere else for many thousands of years. In contrast, if you went around England and studied all the animals, you'd come up with creatures that had been hunted, domesticated, and imported by humans for longer than recorded history. How are you supposed to find out that species X probably split into species Y and species Z twenty thousand years ago if species Y was hunted to extinction, species Z was domesticated, and species N, a distant cousin of species X, was imported by the Normans?
You're not wrong. The things you mention are all science! But it's because they are based solely on disciplined experimentation and predictions based on other disciplined experimentation. And we need to understand the limits of that knowledge. Yes, based on disciplined excavation of the Earth, it appears there was a mass extinction event caused by a massive asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous period. Based on that evidence, we can derive the prediction that if another massive asteroid were to hit in a similar place, we would probably experience another mass extinction event with the kind of conditions that the geological record indicates existed when it happened before.
Furthermore, the part that is science is limited. Science does not allow to make a factual statement like, "An asteroid most likely killed the dinosaurs." Science only allows us to say, "Assuming an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, these other things would happen, which we have now observed. These other things also appear to have happened at the same time, so they are probably related to the asteroid and the extinction event." The difference is that the first statement says that something is True, while the second statement is only concerned with the implications of that truth.
Ultimately this is about how when we aren't careful about how we talk about science, the people to whom we are talking will think it's just a kind of magic done by really smart people. If I say, "An asteroid killed the dinosaurs because science", what does that mean? It certainly doesn't mean that a bunch of people in the past collectively figured out through disciplined experimentation the composition of asteroids, the concept of geological stratification, the existence of dinosaurs, and then some other people used all of the resulting predictions to see if they match this scenario. It means that a bunch of smart people figured this out using unexplained methodology, which the reader can only figure out from context. It should be increasingly clear from people like Jenny McCarthy that it's very easy to get the impression that this unexplained methodology is just a bunch of ideas that fit together logically, and which some smart people have figured out right but others have figured out wrong.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Jenny McCarthy believe exactly the same thing about science. It's just that while Tyson "believes in" science like Pat Robertson "believes in" Christianity, Jenny McCarthy believes in science more like Osama Bin Laden believes in America.
Alternatively, it could be that some form of theism is inherent in the way humans have evolved.
One of the most interesting ideas I have ever encountered was that it is not just human individuals who have evolved, but entire human cultures. That from the invention of tribalism, memes (most importantly ideas about relating to other people, not internet jokes) have been going through millennia of evolution much like human genes. Therefore, many cultural, political, and even spiritual ideas may have become prominent today because they gave entire societies certain traits that made them more fit to pass on their memes than competing tribes, settlements, or nations.
Perhaps theism has become so prevalent because without any ethical center beyond ourselves, we would all be narcissistic sociopaths like the guy you described. If we truly believe there is no higher power than ourselves, we have no philosophical basis to believe that all the other people around us also think and hurt and have intent like we do. Theism is a very simple way to believe in a higher power, but it isn't the only one. It's also possible to believe ourselves less than our elders, the spirits of our elders, the natural world, or the political state in which we live. But theism may win out most of the time because a god is easy to personify and may take on any trait. This gives theism more adaptability, and therefore more potential for evolution to sort out the best kind of god in which to believe. Every society may believe in their own god that might prefer warfare, agriculture, the arts, or bureaucracy, and they instantly understand each others' concept of "god" even if it's different from theirs. The natural world, by contrast, is pretty much always the same, and serving the best interests of our local environment is actually very stifling to economic and technological progress.
Unfortunately, most people need God to tell them that other people are equal to yourself. Even more unfortunately, most people don't understand that concept. Take Matthew 22:36-40:
36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
If everyone could understand and internalize those two simple rules, then "all the law and the prophets" would be unnecessary. After all, Jesus just basically said that they are redundant anyway. But people don't understand that, hence we have the rest of the Bible trying to extrapolate those rules to all manner of practical situations, filtered through each author's social and cultural knowledge that actually had nothing to do with God.
Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.
This is an article about the definition of science. The fundamental point is incredibly sound, and explains a lot about anti-scientific culture by explaining something about pro-scientific culture: even the people who are pro-science don't really know what science is. Science is not the pursuit of truth. Science is, as he says repeatedly, "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation". Nothing more, nothing less.
Statistics is a dangerous thing that can prove anything. For example, running accepted statistics on the human population of Earth and population expansion rates (or the height of Twitter timelines) leads to the result that the human species will likely go extinct in about 800 years. And most people will never understand how that result happened, whether it seems to make sense or not. Do you know what magic is? It's not fireballs and heal spells. Magic at its most basic is trying to affect the outcome of the future with some action you don't really understand. If I were to turn my cap before pitching a baseball, believing that doing otherwise may jinx the pitch, that would be magic. It is also perfectly meaningful for me to say that because I do not understand exactly what an LED is, or how it is made, from my perspective it is made of and from magic.
As to whether "religious affairs are obviously beyond the realms of science, and are no obstacle in the quest for truth and understanding": real science, by definition, is outside the realm of religion. But the so-called "science" being criticized in the article is not. Science and religion are separate because science does not deal with Truth, and therefore no religious Truths are at risk. Even if we were to talk about something contentious like evolution, "science" does not tell us that evolution is True. Science tells us that we can ask the question, "Assuming that evolution is true, this other idea should also be true; let us find out". Asking that question has led scientists to predict practical applications (though not nearly as many as the laws of Physics and Chemistry).
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
RTFA. Mr. Gobry is (shortly) criticizing the attempt to "scientifically" predict the effects of specific climate change policies only as an example of a public policy debate that has the word "science" thrown around a lot even though nobody has done any real "science" on the proposals. He also criticizes Aristotle, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jenny McCarthy, the Brookings Institution, and Ezra Klein.
Mr. Gobry does not discuss opinions of his which are disputed by mainstream science. He discusses how people of all opinions are misrepresenting science regardless of whether he agrees with them. In fact, the closest we get to his opinion of anything is this:
The point isn't that McCarthy isn't wrong on vaccines. (She is wrong.) The point is that she is the predictable result of a society that has forgotten what "science" means.
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.
This is an article about the definition of science. The fundamental point is incredibly sound, and explains a lot about anti-scientific culture by explaining something about pro-scientific culture: even the people who are pro-science don't really know what science is. Science is not the pursuit of truth. Science is, as he says repeatedly, "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation". Nothing more, nothing less.
Granted, the rest of the article is a bit redundant to that point and wanders into unrelated territory. But at no point does Mr. Gobry actually rant about any of them. It may make you and I uncomfortable to see climate science ever mentioned unfavorably, but that's only because it's so hard to convince others to get their heads out of the sand that we don't (think) we need to give them more arguments against us. Sort of like how the many people who want stronger health care reform have to support the corporation-favoring Affordable Care Act because to not do so would be to support those who want to go back to the dark ages when sick children were refused coverage and people could easily end up with insurance policies that didn't cover the kind of catastrophe they were buying insurance to protect them from.
But specifically, he is (shortly) criticizing the attempt to "scientifically" predict the effects of specific policies only as an example of a public policy debate that has the word "science" thrown around a lot even though nobody has done any real "science" on the proposals. He is (shortly) criticizing Neil DeGrasse Tyson for promoting predictions made by science as indicative of a higher truth, the truth for which science supposedly strives. He also criticizes Aristotle, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Jenny McCarthy, the Brookings Institution, and Ezra Klein.
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
Netflix appeared before the Canadian broadcast regulator today, resulting in a remarkably heated exchange, with threats of new regulation. Blah blah blah, confidential data that CRTC may or may not have right to see but we won't tell you, blah blah blah, redundant stuff, blah blah, no more information, blah blah blah, click the link if you actually want to know what the fuck we're talking about, blah blah blah...
It's pretty much impossible to expect a reasonable discussion on Slashdot when the summary is such redundant tripe. After all, nobody around here RTFA. So all we have is basically, "Netflix and CRTC had a fight about something". I'm not Canadian, I don't know anything about the CRTC or why it has any regulatory authority over Netflix, or what these ominous-sounding "regulations" might be. And I doubt every Canadian could answer those questions either.
Although considering the article itself, maybe that's actually the best the summary could do. I learned more than the article had to say just by scrolling through the existing Slashdot comments to see if anybody else had already made the comment I'm making. These being Slashdot comments, however, I'm a little scared about the value of that information.
Cue Comcast (or its representatives, either by training or of their own hair-brained ideas) deciding that some kinds of traffic are not legitimate and refusing to stop downgrading them. Because if you're using X kind of web traffic, it must be for Y common illegal use of that traffic and not just because it's the best technology for what you're doing. According to most ISPs, there are no legal uses of peer-to-peer or fully anonymized web traffic. How nice the days must have been when those were the only kinds of traffic that really taxed their bandwidth, and they could get away with throttling them as some kind of internet vigilantes.
Like most legal decisions in the news, the reasons behind it are not immediately comprehensible. For one thing, the evidence itself is that the perpetrator was found to be publicly sharing a known child pornography file. People don't always understand that the Gnutella network (Limewire and others) advertises your shared files to everyone, including the cops if only they decide to take a look (and they can because it's a public space). So the evidence should be admissible. But it isn't, because this isn't ordinary law enforcement. As others with more legal knowledge than myself have pointed out, the exclusion of this evidence is based on the fact that NCIS, as a military law enforcement agency, is bound by law (Posse Comitatus Act) to restrict all of its searches to military personnel only. Because the search indiscriminately included civilians, it ran afoul of the law. Basically. Laws aren't always absolute, so there is still reason to believe this judgment was wrong. But again, like most legal decisions in the news, the reasons behind it are not immediately comprehensible.
In my experience it isn't the government mandates that are the problem. It's the administrators. There has been a lot of talk in the last twenty years about holding teachers accountable for test scores. But where's the accountability for administrators? Can a principal be fired is his school has consistently underperformed for the entirety of his time on the job? There has been a lot of talk about unions and tenure preventing bad teachers from being fired. But who does the firing? If a principal fails to fire a bad teacher for several years, it's not because the teacher is tenured. Tenure may make firing take longer, and ensure that it only happens for good reasons, but it doesn't just protect everyone forever. If a bad teacher has been at a school for many years, it's because the administrators like him. They have probably even cultivated the bad teaching practices.
The primary task of any school principal is to keep order and maintain the status quo. Order is good! But it has to be balanced with the needs and desires of students, who are best represented by their teachers. Even a bad teacher will know better than the principal what is best for his students.
It should be clear that the one group of people who have the most incentive to help students are teachers. So why is education reform so focused on taking power away from teachers? Busting unions? Handing more power to the least competent people in the chain with the least education training (school administrators)?
I agree with you. I do! But even if it's just to be pithy, calling science "correct", or as happens more frequently, claiming to "believe" science or scientific theories, suggests to the ignorant that science is equivalent to faith. If it were just a matter of what to believe, science and Christian literalism would be equally valid. But that's not the point. And since the ignorant are everywhere, we must always be more careful talking about science.
The Vatican, while obviously not representing all religions, but being a major one, uses the metric system, so I'm pretty sure that imperial vs metric has nothing to do with religion.
On the contrary! Imperial vs metric has everything to do with religion. Specifically, the Metric religion and the Leave Me Alone I Don't Care If I'm Wrong religion.
Unless he started smoking in kindergarten, I doubt he "never" tried very hard. Probably just gradually realized that besides a few basic rote skills, school mainly teaches us to hate learning and not think critically. So he gave in early. Less friction and more fun that way, I suppose.
You're definitely right that science is not the opposite of religion. There are too many atheists who don't understand that. But there are also far too many Christians who don't understand it either. Otherwise they wouldn't be getting all offended by evolution. I really don't understand why it's so important to some people that the first few chapters of Genesis literally happened. Does it matter? I thought it was just supposed to be parables about human nature.
Also, Proverbs may be part of the Abrahamic tradition, but you're ignoring eastern faith completely. There is no Book of Proverbs in Buddhism or Hinduism. I know that "most of" lets you weasel an implication that "most" people believe in God, but the world is more diverse than that.
Because more than anything else, powerful weasels like this like having lots of loopholes in the law. That way, the only winners are those with good lawyers. And good lawyers belong to the rich and powerful.
Interesting question. The atheists fighting the culture war are probably a lot to blame (haven't they ever heard of "don't feed the trolls"?). But I'd be very interested in an article on the history of scientific "fact" and "belief" as opposed to "theory" and "methodology".
I personally agree with Gatto, but I'd like to suggest a minor revision to what you are saying. The original purpose of the education system was to extend childhood and discourage critical thinking. Those were explicit goals a hundred years ago, but nobody talks like that anymore. And if you ask any individual teacher or administrator, you'll certainly not find those reasons underlying their motivation.
Yes, our educational system still does these things, but not intentionally anymore. It's just because of inertia: every teacher now grew up in this same system, internally justified every aspect of it as necessary to some noble cause, and now focuses on issues other than whether students should be separated by age/grade or how to cultivate a particular social atmosphere for their students.
Actually, a lot of that inertia probably comes from our current teachers and administrators...lacking critical thinking skills. How unfortunate.
FTFY. There are plenty of non-fundie mainstream religious people, Abrahamic and otherwise, that recognize the scientific method is meaningful.
FTFY. We can be pretty sloppy with language. It is English after all. So I just wanted to make your point clear and remove the sloppy things that make it easier to *ahem* crucify your argument.
(Science is not something that is "correct" or "incorrect"; it's a meaningful way of observing the world, reducing human bias of those observations, and making meaningful predictions. Focusing on the results as "correct" falls into the trap this law would inflict on our students: without the scientific method, evolution is just another idea with as much evidence, or maybe even less, than the Christian creation myth. As for "religious people", I just don't think that any organizations, not being people, could hold religious beliefs;) )
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know what magic is? It's not fireballs and heal spells. Magic at its most basic is trying to affect the outcome of the future with some action you don't really understand. If I were to turn my cap before pitching a baseball, believing that doing otherwise may jinx the pitch, that would be magic. It is also perfectly meaningful for me to say that because I do not understand exactly what an LED is, or how it is made, from my perspective it is made of and from magic.
He argues that science is "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation", but that's a really narrow, limited way of viewing science, because historical processes aren't open to controlled experiments. Evolution, the history of the planet, the origins of the universe... you can't really run experiments to determine what happened, so by this rather narrow definition, paleontology, geology, and cosmology aren't really science at all. So do we reject the findings of Darwin, reject plate tectonics, reject hypotheses on the origins of the universe as unscientific?
(Aside: Due to the Slashdot "lameness filter", I am required to replace all further instances of the world "controlled" with "disciplined")
Disciplined observation is a form of disciplined experimentation. Before Darwin could draw meaningful scientific conclusions about the origin of species, he had to make careful, fastidious observations of a place where he could be reasonably sure something hadn't inconsistently interfered with nature for a very long time. No people lived on the Galapagos Islands, and the place had had practically no biological contact with anywhere else for many thousands of years. In contrast, if you went around England and studied all the animals, you'd come up with creatures that had been hunted, domesticated, and imported by humans for longer than recorded history. How are you supposed to find out that species X probably split into species Y and species Z twenty thousand years ago if species Y was hunted to extinction, species Z was domesticated, and species N, a distant cousin of species X, was imported by the Normans?
You're not wrong. The things you mention are all science! But it's because they are based solely on disciplined experimentation and predictions based on other disciplined experimentation. And we need to understand the limits of that knowledge. Yes, based on disciplined excavation of the Earth, it appears there was a mass extinction event caused by a massive asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous period. Based on that evidence, we can derive the prediction that if another massive asteroid were to hit in a similar place, we would probably experience another mass extinction event with the kind of conditions that the geological record indicates existed when it happened before.
Furthermore, the part that is science is limited. Science does not allow to make a factual statement like, "An asteroid most likely killed the dinosaurs." Science only allows us to say, "Assuming an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, these other things would happen, which we have now observed. These other things also appear to have happened at the same time, so they are probably related to the asteroid and the extinction event." The difference is that the first statement says that something is True, while the second statement is only concerned with the implications of that truth.
Ultimately this is about how when we aren't careful about how we talk about science, the people to whom we are talking will think it's just a kind of magic done by really smart people. If I say, "An asteroid killed the dinosaurs because science", what does that mean? It certainly doesn't mean that a bunch of people in the past collectively figured out through disciplined experimentation the composition of asteroids, the concept of geological stratification, the existence of dinosaurs, and then some other people used all of the resulting predictions to see if they match this scenario. It means that a bunch of smart people figured this out using unexplained methodology, which the reader can only figure out from context. It should be increasingly clear from people like Jenny McCarthy that it's very easy to get the impression that this unexplained methodology is just a bunch of ideas that fit together logically, and which some smart people have figured out right but others have figured out wrong.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Jenny McCarthy believe exactly the same thing about science. It's just that while Tyson "believes in" science like Pat Robertson "believes in" Christianity, Jenny McCarthy believes in science more like Osama Bin Laden believes in America.
Alternatively, it could be that some form of theism is inherent in the way humans have evolved.
One of the most interesting ideas I have ever encountered was that it is not just human individuals who have evolved, but entire human cultures. That from the invention of tribalism, memes (most importantly ideas about relating to other people, not internet jokes) have been going through millennia of evolution much like human genes. Therefore, many cultural, political, and even spiritual ideas may have become prominent today because they gave entire societies certain traits that made them more fit to pass on their memes than competing tribes, settlements, or nations.
Perhaps theism has become so prevalent because without any ethical center beyond ourselves, we would all be narcissistic sociopaths like the guy you described. If we truly believe there is no higher power than ourselves, we have no philosophical basis to believe that all the other people around us also think and hurt and have intent like we do. Theism is a very simple way to believe in a higher power, but it isn't the only one. It's also possible to believe ourselves less than our elders, the spirits of our elders, the natural world, or the political state in which we live. But theism may win out most of the time because a god is easy to personify and may take on any trait. This gives theism more adaptability, and therefore more potential for evolution to sort out the best kind of god in which to believe. Every society may believe in their own god that might prefer warfare, agriculture, the arts, or bureaucracy, and they instantly understand each others' concept of "god" even if it's different from theirs. The natural world, by contrast, is pretty much always the same, and serving the best interests of our local environment is actually very stifling to economic and technological progress.
Unfortunately, most people need God to tell them that other people are equal to yourself. Even more unfortunately, most people don't understand that concept. Take Matthew 22:36-40:
If everyone could understand and internalize those two simple rules, then "all the law and the prophets" would be unnecessary. After all, Jesus just basically said that they are redundant anyway. But people don't understand that, hence we have the rest of the Bible trying to extrapolate those rules to all manner of practical situations, filtered through each author's social and cultural knowledge that actually had nothing to do with God.
Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.
This is an article about the definition of science. The fundamental point is incredibly sound, and explains a lot about anti-scientific culture by explaining something about pro-scientific culture: even the people who are pro-science don't really know what science is. Science is not the pursuit of truth. Science is, as he says repeatedly, "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation". Nothing more, nothing less.
Statistics is a dangerous thing that can prove anything. For example, running accepted statistics on the human population of Earth and population expansion rates (or the height of Twitter timelines) leads to the result that the human species will likely go extinct in about 800 years. And most people will never understand how that result happened, whether it seems to make sense or not. Do you know what magic is? It's not fireballs and heal spells. Magic at its most basic is trying to affect the outcome of the future with some action you don't really understand. If I were to turn my cap before pitching a baseball, believing that doing otherwise may jinx the pitch, that would be magic. It is also perfectly meaningful for me to say that because I do not understand exactly what an LED is, or how it is made, from my perspective it is made of and from magic.
As to whether "religious affairs are obviously beyond the realms of science, and are no obstacle in the quest for truth and understanding": real science, by definition, is outside the realm of religion. But the so-called "science" being criticized in the article is not. Science and religion are separate because science does not deal with Truth, and therefore no religious Truths are at risk. Even if we were to talk about something contentious like evolution, "science" does not tell us that evolution is True. Science tells us that we can ask the question, "Assuming that evolution is true, this other idea should also be true; let us find out". Asking that question has led scientists to predict practical applications (though not nearly as many as the laws of Physics and Chemistry).
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
RTFA. Mr. Gobry is (shortly) criticizing the attempt to "scientifically" predict the effects of specific climate change policies only as an example of a public policy debate that has the word "science" thrown around a lot even though nobody has done any real "science" on the proposals. He also criticizes Aristotle, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jenny McCarthy, the Brookings Institution, and Ezra Klein.
Mr. Gobry does not discuss opinions of his which are disputed by mainstream science. He discusses how people of all opinions are misrepresenting science regardless of whether he agrees with them. In fact, the closest we get to his opinion of anything is this:
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.
This is an article about the definition of science. The fundamental point is incredibly sound, and explains a lot about anti-scientific culture by explaining something about pro-scientific culture: even the people who are pro-science don't really know what science is. Science is not the pursuit of truth. Science is, as he says repeatedly, "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation". Nothing more, nothing less.
Granted, the rest of the article is a bit redundant to that point and wanders into unrelated territory. But at no point does Mr. Gobry actually rant about any of them. It may make you and I uncomfortable to see climate science ever mentioned unfavorably, but that's only because it's so hard to convince others to get their heads out of the sand that we don't (think) we need to give them more arguments against us. Sort of like how the many people who want stronger health care reform have to support the corporation-favoring Affordable Care Act because to not do so would be to support those who want to go back to the dark ages when sick children were refused coverage and people could easily end up with insurance policies that didn't cover the kind of catastrophe they were buying insurance to protect them from.
But specifically, he is (shortly) criticizing the attempt to "scientifically" predict the effects of specific policies only as an example of a public policy debate that has the word "science" thrown around a lot even though nobody has done any real "science" on the proposals. He is (shortly) criticizing Neil DeGrasse Tyson for promoting predictions made by science as indicative of a higher truth, the truth for which science supposedly strives. He also criticizes Aristotle, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Jenny McCarthy, the Brookings Institution, and Ezra Klein.
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
Netflix appeared before the Canadian broadcast regulator today, resulting in a remarkably heated exchange, with threats of new regulation. Blah blah blah, confidential data that CRTC may or may not have right to see but we won't tell you, blah blah blah, redundant stuff, blah blah, no more information, blah blah blah, click the link if you actually want to know what the fuck we're talking about, blah blah blah...
It's pretty much impossible to expect a reasonable discussion on Slashdot when the summary is such redundant tripe. After all, nobody around here RTFA. So all we have is basically, "Netflix and CRTC had a fight about something". I'm not Canadian, I don't know anything about the CRTC or why it has any regulatory authority over Netflix, or what these ominous-sounding "regulations" might be. And I doubt every Canadian could answer those questions either.
Although considering the article itself, maybe that's actually the best the summary could do. I learned more than the article had to say just by scrolling through the existing Slashdot comments to see if anybody else had already made the comment I'm making. These being Slashdot comments, however, I'm a little scared about the value of that information.
Yeah! Throw out all those old Star Wars tapes and just buy the latest "digitally remastered" versions! It'll be just like you remembered!
Cue Comcast (or its representatives, either by training or of their own hair-brained ideas) deciding that some kinds of traffic are not legitimate and refusing to stop downgrading them. Because if you're using X kind of web traffic, it must be for Y common illegal use of that traffic and not just because it's the best technology for what you're doing. According to most ISPs, there are no legal uses of peer-to-peer or fully anonymized web traffic. How nice the days must have been when those were the only kinds of traffic that really taxed their bandwidth, and they could get away with throttling them as some kind of internet vigilantes.
Like most legal decisions in the news, the reasons behind it are not immediately comprehensible. For one thing, the evidence itself is that the perpetrator was found to be publicly sharing a known child pornography file. People don't always understand that the Gnutella network (Limewire and others) advertises your shared files to everyone, including the cops if only they decide to take a look (and they can because it's a public space). So the evidence should be admissible. But it isn't, because this isn't ordinary law enforcement. As others with more legal knowledge than myself have pointed out, the exclusion of this evidence is based on the fact that NCIS, as a military law enforcement agency, is bound by law (Posse Comitatus Act) to restrict all of its searches to military personnel only. Because the search indiscriminately included civilians, it ran afoul of the law. Basically. Laws aren't always absolute, so there is still reason to believe this judgment was wrong. But again, like most legal decisions in the news, the reasons behind it are not immediately comprehensible.
In my experience it isn't the government mandates that are the problem. It's the administrators. There has been a lot of talk in the last twenty years about holding teachers accountable for test scores. But where's the accountability for administrators? Can a principal be fired is his school has consistently underperformed for the entirety of his time on the job? There has been a lot of talk about unions and tenure preventing bad teachers from being fired. But who does the firing? If a principal fails to fire a bad teacher for several years, it's not because the teacher is tenured. Tenure may make firing take longer, and ensure that it only happens for good reasons, but it doesn't just protect everyone forever. If a bad teacher has been at a school for many years, it's because the administrators like him. They have probably even cultivated the bad teaching practices.
The primary task of any school principal is to keep order and maintain the status quo. Order is good! But it has to be balanced with the needs and desires of students, who are best represented by their teachers. Even a bad teacher will know better than the principal what is best for his students.
It should be clear that the one group of people who have the most incentive to help students are teachers. So why is education reform so focused on taking power away from teachers? Busting unions? Handing more power to the least competent people in the chain with the least education training (school administrators)?
I agree with you. I do! But even if it's just to be pithy, calling science "correct", or as happens more frequently, claiming to "believe" science or scientific theories, suggests to the ignorant that science is equivalent to faith. If it were just a matter of what to believe, science and Christian literalism would be equally valid. But that's not the point. And since the ignorant are everywhere, we must always be more careful talking about science.
The Vatican, while obviously not representing all religions, but being a major one, uses the metric system, so I'm pretty sure that imperial vs metric has nothing to do with religion.
On the contrary! Imperial vs metric has everything to do with religion. Specifically, the Metric religion and the Leave Me Alone I Don't Care If I'm Wrong religion.
Personally, I'm not sure whether you mean he's using base 10 notation or base 10 notation.
I think he's saying that by "Imperial", he meant "Not Metric".
"In Soviet Russia..."
Unless he started smoking in kindergarten, I doubt he "never" tried very hard. Probably just gradually realized that besides a few basic rote skills, school mainly teaches us to hate learning and not think critically. So he gave in early. Less friction and more fun that way, I suppose.
You're definitely right that science is not the opposite of religion. There are too many atheists who don't understand that. But there are also far too many Christians who don't understand it either. Otherwise they wouldn't be getting all offended by evolution. I really don't understand why it's so important to some people that the first few chapters of Genesis literally happened. Does it matter? I thought it was just supposed to be parables about human nature.
Also, Proverbs may be part of the Abrahamic tradition, but you're ignoring eastern faith completely. There is no Book of Proverbs in Buddhism or Hinduism. I know that "most of" lets you weasel an implication that "most" people believe in God, but the world is more diverse than that.
Because more than anything else, powerful weasels like this like having lots of loopholes in the law. That way, the only winners are those with good lawyers. And good lawyers belong to the rich and powerful.
Interesting question. The atheists fighting the culture war are probably a lot to blame (haven't they ever heard of "don't feed the trolls"?). But I'd be very interested in an article on the history of scientific "fact" and "belief" as opposed to "theory" and "methodology".
I personally agree with Gatto, but I'd like to suggest a minor revision to what you are saying. The original purpose of the education system was to extend childhood and discourage critical thinking. Those were explicit goals a hundred years ago, but nobody talks like that anymore. And if you ask any individual teacher or administrator, you'll certainly not find those reasons underlying their motivation.
Yes, our educational system still does these things, but not intentionally anymore. It's just because of inertia: every teacher now grew up in this same system, internally justified every aspect of it as necessary to some noble cause, and now focuses on issues other than whether students should be separated by age/grade or how to cultivate a particular social atmosphere for their students.
Actually, a lot of that inertia probably comes from our current teachers and administrators...lacking critical thinking skills. How unfortunate.
FTFY. There are plenty of non-fundie mainstream religious people, Abrahamic and otherwise, that recognize the scientific method is meaningful.
FTFY. We can be pretty sloppy with language. It is English after all. So I just wanted to make your point clear and remove the sloppy things that make it easier to *ahem* crucify your argument.
(Science is not something that is "correct" or "incorrect"; it's a meaningful way of observing the world, reducing human bias of those observations, and making meaningful predictions. Focusing on the results as "correct" falls into the trap this law would inflict on our students: without the scientific method, evolution is just another idea with as much evidence, or maybe even less, than the Christian creation myth. As for "religious people", I just don't think that any organizations, not being people, could hold religious beliefs ;) )