I'm suggesting that rather than focus on whether the hypothesis is correct or not and how well it matches reality, we need to teach people about "all scientifically performed (empirical, peer reviewed etc.) experiments supporting it and, more importantly, of all scientific attempts to disprove it failing". What are these experiments? What are the alternate hypotheses that have been disproved? How were they disproved? Can we trust those results, and why? These are the right questions, and nobody is asking or answering them.
I'm not saying I have no idea. I'm saying it doesn't matter. Evolution happens to be a very effective model for reality. Arguing whether or not it's "true" actually distracts from the important part: the evidence. Because when it comes across to people that evolution is True because smart people said so, then instead of examining the evidence for themselves they immediately start arguing with the creationists that evolution is True and creationism is not. Some peoples' belief in evolution is no more well-founded than others' in a young Earth. That's really saying something since the young Earth idea isn't actually supported by the Bible anyway; it was manufactured in the early days of the scientific method when people seriously thought that the Bible contained cryptic mathematical codes and some of the greatest minds around were engaged in decrypting them. Yet most people who put saddles on dinosaurs have never examined where their beliefs came from. When these people argue with pro-evolution people with no understanding of the evidence, it just makes everybody mad. There's nothing to say except "I'm right and you're wrong".
Specs never mattered for anything. What matters is features. Can the phone do X without delay? If the answer is yes, who cares if they made it happen with 1 or 2 Ghz? Unfortunately, it takes a functional R&D department to come up with the next killer app. R&D suffering under the weight of idiotic management practices (as is the norm in the technology industry) won't be able to recognize its own good ideas or turn them into profits, so the best they can do is give Android some faster hardware to play with.
Maybe I’m getting old, and my eyes are getting worse. Or maybe I’m stuck in Apple’s reality-distortion field (help). But something strange happened this week. I started to like a phablet.
– Lauren Goode
This turn-around is nothing more than Apple's reality distortion field. Now that Apple has given in and is selling phablets, of course their entire marketing effort is focused on it. They will make us love it the same way they made us love everything else: the Apple fanboy rumor mill hyping the next big thing, hyping the big media event, where the Apple CEO stands up and tells us how awesome and exciting this is, describing in simple terms the design problems they were trying to solve and showing the solutions. An Apple keynote is basically a hyped up lecture on why the next Apple product is great, and if you buy one you get an A.
Sure, we might be ready to give in to huge phones, but it seems to me that the change is really that Apple has thrown in the towel. Traditionally they haven't given the customer what the customer asked for; they tried to figure out what's actually best for the customer and sell that. Apparently, some marketing trends are just unstoppable.
Alright, well looking at it again...the summary really is crap! I guess I just read it the "right" way because I already agree with the article. You're reading it the "wrong" way, because the summary does not make it clear that the entire "Capital-S Science...This leads us astray..." piece is characterizing what the author feels is wrong with how most people understand science.
It looks like you missed my last sentence. Even if your opinion is provably wrong, the fact that you hold it is worth something in and of itself because you are worth something, you affect society, your opinion affects society, and therefore, to understand society, your opinion must be counted. Even if's wrong.
Say the aviator you speak of loses part of the plane while flying. I'd say that aviator only has a scientific understanding of the airplane if he or she could use the underlying concepts of flight to stabilize the aircraft after accounting for how the new shape would fly. To be fair, we can assume lots of paper, textbooks, and time-stopping devices exist on the airplane;)
The ethical center could also be the family. For many people the ethical center involves some concept of justice or even karma. None of this needs to be religious or even intentional.
You're also ignoring that a shocking number of people nowadays actually are mostly narcissistic sociopaths. We call them assholes. Next time someone cuts you off in traffic, just think: What if that person believed at that very moment that a higher power will make them pay for inconveniencing someone else unnecessarily? Would they recognize they're being an asshole and stop?
Obviously you're not comfortable thinking you believe in magic. I know that the LED will light up because it said so on the box, and I have faith in certain marketed claims. I also have a pseudoscientific understanding that since LED bulbs have lit up for me in the past, they will continue to do the same if I perform the same ritual (connecting them to a power source, equally unexplained in my mind but accepted on faith anyway). And sure, it's comforting that someone else knows it will work. They did science so I don't have to! But I still have to have faith that the person did science right.
It's really best just accept that if you don't know how something works, it's magical to you. But it's OK. Somebody else made sure (with science!) that of all the possible chemicals you could put together, this one will safely make light when you power it up! Let's not pretend we did the science just because we're having faith that someone else did.
If you don't understand the summary, I take that to mean you don't understand what the article is talking about. Which means you don't understand the difference between scientific knowledge and scientific method. And if you don't understand the difference, you're probably talking about Science as though it reveals Truth about the universe. You probably "believe in" Science the way that Christians "believe in" God. So if you understand what this is all about, please don't tell people how awesome science is until you do.
Religion does not concern itself with ultimate causes. That is complete nonsense. It concerns itself with following an unprovable tenet [ftfy].
Science can tell us about everything the religion claims has an effect.
Religion is not some monolith that concerns itself with any one thing. I don't know what's up with this "ultimate cause" thing, but religion is generally about deriving rules for how to live. Sometimes the rules come from metaphysical explanations, sometimes from prophets (who may or may not have some heightened spiritual awareness, depending on the religion and the prophet), and sometimes from traditions (that themselves came from who knows where). As for whether science can tell us everything...can science tell us why it's good to not kill other people? Why it's good take a day of rest every seven days? Why it's good to say "thank you" for everything, even when the only one you can thank is God? Sure, science can tell us that the sun can't actually stop moving in the sky, and I don't personally care for the sort of person that's bothered by that. That story wasn't told because it was historically accurate.
He seems to thing science makes predictions. That is incorrect. There is a lot to science. In best case, it's make predictions. But gathering data is science, deriving forecast is science.
Science exists to...well, actually, there's a whole academic field devoted to figuring out just why science exists, what it's good for, and how to determine the value of a scientific explanation. Mr. Gobry thinks that science only exists to make "predictive rules" and not deal in Truth at all. And of course you have to run experiments (or other forms of factual investigation) to make those rules; that's Science too. But if there are no predictions to be made, you end up with string theory.
This article is making almost the exact opposite point of the Kirk vs. Spock one: there is no passion in science, there is no truth. Sounds awfully Vulcan to me. As for Tyson, well, he's very charismatic and I'm glad he's evangelizing for Science, but whenever he gets to the end of a scientific explanation and says "therefore it's true" (or similar), he's asking us to now believe something about the world. Belief takes faith, and why have faith in science when the whole point of science is to base your predictions on evidence alone?
I don't know how, but you've managed to get the exact opposite argument from the article. This is an article all about how the body of knowledge generated by science is not science, because science cannot define what is True. Mr. Gobry claims, essentially, that the critical thinking part is the sum total of Science. He further claims that treating the results as Truth, instead of as predictive rules learned through experimentation, leads people to believe that science is the same thing as magic. The article is not anti-science. It's anti- treating science as though it's something you believe because we tell you to.
That's not necessarily true. The people who can't be convinced are the parents. I have yet to see a 100% effective for getting teenagers to believe everything their parents tell them.
It doesn't matter what religion or anything else says caused the universe to exist, because science can't tell us what is True. Sure, we can hypothesize. We can apply the results of scientific experiments to our ideas and see which of them get disproven. But even though the scientific process gives us the Big Bang theory, it doesn't say that it's true. Science tells us, "Despite numerous attempts, the Big Bang (with its many easily falsifiable technical errata) is not disproven. If we assume it is true, then based on those technical errata, we can make more predictions about our universe."
No matter how wrong the creation myth you believe in, it is still more True to a truly religious person than what science can say. Because science can't say anything about Truth. Sure, we can learn a lot about the universe by studying the Big Bang and the physics behind it, but you don't ever have to believe it's true to do so. If you "believe in" the Big Bang 100%, well you're taking that on faith. I suppose you could pick worse things to have faith in than some really smart physicists.
All opinions are worth something. You don't actually think that 2+2=5; therefore, it is not even an opinion. It's just a strawman.
Now if you actually believed that 2+2=5, that opinion would be worth something. Mainly because now we know that there is someone who believes something wrong, and we need to know why so that we can prevent it from happening again.
...my apologies, that last paragraph was actually copied from another comment. It's aimed at people who don't understand the summary, not you who attempted to explain it.
I bring up God not as a statement of my own belief, but to say that telling a Christian that science makes God obsolete is exactly as asinine as a bible thumper telling you to accept Jesus or go to hell. Does the latter make you want to be Christian, or does it just make you think that all Christians are stupid assholes?
My signature exists to get others to think about their response more than thinking about what I said. Your response should be meaningful on its own, so if you want to refute what I have said, do it thoroughly, with a thesis of some sort, without assuming anything about the person you are refuting beyond that I said something specific.
...in this case, I have not done what I expect others to do, because the purpose of this comment is primarily the first paragraph.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't all gaming displays TN because the better technologies still introduce more lag?
You videoconference with the CEO while surfing slashdot?
I'm suggesting that rather than focus on whether the hypothesis is correct or not and how well it matches reality, we need to teach people about "all scientifically performed (empirical, peer reviewed etc.) experiments supporting it and, more importantly, of all scientific attempts to disprove it failing". What are these experiments? What are the alternate hypotheses that have been disproved? How were they disproved? Can we trust those results, and why? These are the right questions, and nobody is asking or answering them.
I'm not saying I have no idea. I'm saying it doesn't matter. Evolution happens to be a very effective model for reality. Arguing whether or not it's "true" actually distracts from the important part: the evidence. Because when it comes across to people that evolution is True because smart people said so, then instead of examining the evidence for themselves they immediately start arguing with the creationists that evolution is True and creationism is not. Some peoples' belief in evolution is no more well-founded than others' in a young Earth. That's really saying something since the young Earth idea isn't actually supported by the Bible anyway; it was manufactured in the early days of the scientific method when people seriously thought that the Bible contained cryptic mathematical codes and some of the greatest minds around were engaged in decrypting them. Yet most people who put saddles on dinosaurs have never examined where their beliefs came from. When these people argue with pro-evolution people with no understanding of the evidence, it just makes everybody mad. There's nothing to say except "I'm right and you're wrong".
Specs never mattered for anything. What matters is features. Can the phone do X without delay? If the answer is yes, who cares if they made it happen with 1 or 2 Ghz? Unfortunately, it takes a functional R&D department to come up with the next killer app. R&D suffering under the weight of idiotic management practices (as is the norm in the technology industry) won't be able to recognize its own good ideas or turn them into profits, so the best they can do is give Android some faster hardware to play with.
Maybe I’m getting old, and my eyes are getting worse. Or maybe I’m stuck in Apple’s reality-distortion field (help). But something strange happened this week. I started to like a phablet.
– Lauren Goode
This turn-around is nothing more than Apple's reality distortion field. Now that Apple has given in and is selling phablets, of course their entire marketing effort is focused on it. They will make us love it the same way they made us love everything else: the Apple fanboy rumor mill hyping the next big thing, hyping the big media event, where the Apple CEO stands up and tells us how awesome and exciting this is, describing in simple terms the design problems they were trying to solve and showing the solutions. An Apple keynote is basically a hyped up lecture on why the next Apple product is great, and if you buy one you get an A.
Sure, we might be ready to give in to huge phones, but it seems to me that the change is really that Apple has thrown in the towel. Traditionally they haven't given the customer what the customer asked for; they tried to figure out what's actually best for the customer and sell that. Apparently, some marketing trends are just unstoppable.
I think I'd rather hold a paperback novel to my head than a taco, though.
Alright, well looking at it again...the summary really is crap! I guess I just read it the "right" way because I already agree with the article. You're reading it the "wrong" way, because the summary does not make it clear that the entire "Capital-S Science...This leads us astray..." piece is characterizing what the author feels is wrong with how most people understand science.
It looks like you missed my last sentence. Even if your opinion is provably wrong, the fact that you hold it is worth something in and of itself because you are worth something, you affect society, your opinion affects society, and therefore, to understand society, your opinion must be counted. Even if's wrong.
(I meant to post this in response to reve_etrange, not myself!)
Fair point. I was unfair to Tyson for exactly the reasons you described. But the McCarthy analogy still stands.
Say the aviator you speak of loses part of the plane while flying. I'd say that aviator only has a scientific understanding of the airplane if he or she could use the underlying concepts of flight to stabilize the aircraft after accounting for how the new shape would fly. To be fair, we can assume lots of paper, textbooks, and time-stopping devices exist on the airplane ;)
The ethical center could also be the family. For many people the ethical center involves some concept of justice or even karma. None of this needs to be religious or even intentional.
You're also ignoring that a shocking number of people nowadays actually are mostly narcissistic sociopaths. We call them assholes. Next time someone cuts you off in traffic, just think: What if that person believed at that very moment that a higher power will make them pay for inconveniencing someone else unnecessarily? Would they recognize they're being an asshole and stop?
Obviously you're not comfortable thinking you believe in magic. I know that the LED will light up because it said so on the box, and I have faith in certain marketed claims. I also have a pseudoscientific understanding that since LED bulbs have lit up for me in the past, they will continue to do the same if I perform the same ritual (connecting them to a power source, equally unexplained in my mind but accepted on faith anyway). And sure, it's comforting that someone else knows it will work. They did science so I don't have to! But I still have to have faith that the person did science right.
It's really best just accept that if you don't know how something works, it's magical to you. But it's OK. Somebody else made sure (with science!) that of all the possible chemicals you could put together, this one will safely make light when you power it up! Let's not pretend we did the science just because we're having faith that someone else did.
(structural: Slashdot uses limited HTML formatting. A simple way to make line breaks is to write the following at the end of each line:
)
If you don't understand the summary, I take that to mean you don't understand what the article is talking about. Which means you don't understand the difference between scientific knowledge and scientific method. And if you don't understand the difference, you're probably talking about Science as though it reveals Truth about the universe. You probably "believe in" Science the way that Christians "believe in" God. So if you understand what this is all about, please don't tell people how awesome science is until you do.
Religion does not concern itself with ultimate causes. That is complete nonsense. It concerns itself with following an unprovable tenet [ftfy]. Science can tell us about everything the religion claims has an effect.
Religion is not some monolith that concerns itself with any one thing. I don't know what's up with this "ultimate cause" thing, but religion is generally about deriving rules for how to live. Sometimes the rules come from metaphysical explanations, sometimes from prophets (who may or may not have some heightened spiritual awareness, depending on the religion and the prophet), and sometimes from traditions (that themselves came from who knows where). As for whether science can tell us everything...can science tell us why it's good to not kill other people? Why it's good take a day of rest every seven days? Why it's good to say "thank you" for everything, even when the only one you can thank is God? Sure, science can tell us that the sun can't actually stop moving in the sky, and I don't personally care for the sort of person that's bothered by that. That story wasn't told because it was historically accurate.
He seems to thing science makes predictions. That is incorrect. There is a lot to science. In best case, it's make predictions. But gathering data is science, deriving forecast is science.
Science exists to...well, actually, there's a whole academic field devoted to figuring out just why science exists, what it's good for, and how to determine the value of a scientific explanation. Mr. Gobry thinks that science only exists to make "predictive rules" and not deal in Truth at all. And of course you have to run experiments (or other forms of factual investigation) to make those rules; that's Science too. But if there are no predictions to be made, you end up with string theory.
It concerns itself with following an unprovable tenant.
"He pays rent every month, but I've never actually seen him. I can't prove my tenant exists..."
This article is making almost the exact opposite point of the Kirk vs. Spock one: there is no passion in science, there is no truth. Sounds awfully Vulcan to me. As for Tyson, well, he's very charismatic and I'm glad he's evangelizing for Science, but whenever he gets to the end of a scientific explanation and says "therefore it's true" (or similar), he's asking us to now believe something about the world. Belief takes faith, and why have faith in science when the whole point of science is to base your predictions on evidence alone?
Almost. Science is the way by which we find things which are false.
Almost. Science is the way by which we find out things that may be true and things that cannot be true.
One level too deep. Now you're talking about computability, which comes down to math.
I don't know how, but you've managed to get the exact opposite argument from the article. This is an article all about how the body of knowledge generated by science is not science, because science cannot define what is True. Mr. Gobry claims, essentially, that the critical thinking part is the sum total of Science. He further claims that treating the results as Truth, instead of as predictive rules learned through experimentation, leads people to believe that science is the same thing as magic. The article is not anti-science. It's anti- treating science as though it's something you believe because we tell you to.
That's not necessarily true. The people who can't be convinced are the parents. I have yet to see a 100% effective for getting teenagers to believe everything their parents tell them.
It doesn't matter what religion or anything else says caused the universe to exist, because science can't tell us what is True. Sure, we can hypothesize. We can apply the results of scientific experiments to our ideas and see which of them get disproven. But even though the scientific process gives us the Big Bang theory, it doesn't say that it's true. Science tells us, "Despite numerous attempts, the Big Bang (with its many easily falsifiable technical errata) is not disproven. If we assume it is true, then based on those technical errata, we can make more predictions about our universe."
No matter how wrong the creation myth you believe in, it is still more True to a truly religious person than what science can say. Because science can't say anything about Truth. Sure, we can learn a lot about the universe by studying the Big Bang and the physics behind it, but you don't ever have to believe it's true to do so. If you "believe in" the Big Bang 100%, well you're taking that on faith. I suppose you could pick worse things to have faith in than some really smart physicists.
All opinions are worth something. You don't actually think that 2+2=5; therefore, it is not even an opinion. It's just a strawman.
Now if you actually believed that 2+2=5, that opinion would be worth something. Mainly because now we know that there is someone who believes something wrong, and we need to know why so that we can prevent it from happening again.
...my apologies, that last paragraph was actually copied from another comment. It's aimed at people who don't understand the summary, not you who attempted to explain it.
I bring up God not as a statement of my own belief, but to say that telling a Christian that science makes God obsolete is exactly as asinine as a bible thumper telling you to accept Jesus or go to hell. Does the latter make you want to be Christian, or does it just make you think that all Christians are stupid assholes?
My signature exists to get others to think about their response more than thinking about what I said. Your response should be meaningful on its own, so if you want to refute what I have said, do it thoroughly, with a thesis of some sort, without assuming anything about the person you are refuting beyond that I said something specific.
...in this case, I have not done what I expect others to do, because the purpose of this comment is primarily the first paragraph.