- Hot
- New
- Categories...
- Producer's Lounge
- Producer's Vault
- The Gulch: Live! (New)
- Ask the Gulch!
- Going Galt
- Books
- Business
- Classifieds
- Culture
- Economics
- Education
- Entertainment
- Government
- History
- Humor
- Legislation
- Movies
- News
- Philosophy
- Pics
- Politics
- Science
- Technology
- Video
- The Gulch: Best of
- The Gulch: Bugs
- The Gulch: Feature Requests
- The Gulch: Featured Producers
- The Gulch: General
- The Gulch: Introductions
- The Gulch: Local
- The Gulch: Promotions
- Marketplace
- Members
- Store
- More...
Faraday and Maxwell did not refute Newton; they knew they were investigating new phenomena that Newton's mechanics made no claim to explain. The progress of science is an accumulation of knowledge as the scope and depth of the context of knowledge expands, not a succession of exploded fallacies.
You are confusing science with the philosophy of Pragmatism with its "tools" and truth as whatever "works".
The context of our knowledge expands and we learn more. Learning more with new discoveries does not invalidate the facts and principles we already knew unless a genuine mistake is uncovered. Electrodynamics did not invalidate Newton's mechanics. Newton's laws are just as true today as they were when he formulated them about the same facts of nature.
Science is objective, neither a mystical insight with assumed infinite precision nor a succession of exploded fallacies. Theology and Pragmatist philosophy are a false alternative.
Explanation is relational, integrating a body of knowledge with what is already objectively understood and known to be true, not an impossible infinite regress of causes of causes of causes of ... to a mystical ultimate. Rational understanding is objective, contextual, and finite, not either wrapping your consciousness around reality in an infinite mystic insight or the false alternative of skepticism.
Truth is a correspondence between statements and facts; it does not preclude improvement through expanded knowledge. Knowledge of what is true is a contextual absolute -- it is absolutely true in the context of what you know about to the degree of precision validated, which is part of the known context. Knowing what is true does not cut off questions about why, the search for the limits of the context, correction of errors, or argument about new discoveries; it makes them all possible. Without truth there is no basis for rational argument at all. Without truth you know nothing and can make no progress. Science is not a progression of exploded fallacies muddling in "half truths". Leave the Pragmatists to their own subjectivism and skepticism as they blindly wander through whatever they claim "works" at the moment as their sorry excuse for knowledge.
Those who fear "the Truth", as if it were dogma by nature, with no understanding of what truth and contextual knowledge are, or the basis for particular instances of knowledge, can have no rational understanding and therefore fear certainty of anything. Knowledge is understanding of facts through our conceptual faculty, it is awareness of reality, not a Kantian "model" in parallel with it -- which is the contemporary common form of skepticism and subjectivism as the false alternative to mysticism. Those who think in "models", fearing certainty of objective knowledge as awareness of reality, become rationalistic dogmatists or hopeless fragmented skeptics, or both, with no means of knowing as they trap themselves inside their own minds.
I'm curious if they're acting like that for a reason, but all I can do is listen to what they say.
Person A: [Ad hominem attacks and swearing about gender issues]
Person B: You said 98% of scientists say global warming is a major problem. This means there must be a list of qualified scientists and a subset of those who agree. That's LOGIC! (impressed with herself) Do you have a list!?
Person B: Science does not operate on consensus.
Person B: People can discover new things in science, e.g. that the earth is round. (I think she's contradicting herself, saying there can be a consensus, but it can be overturned by new evidence.)
Person B: The list of scientists who question that global warming is a problem is growing, but that doesn't matter because my mind's already made up regardless.
Person A: Here is a list of climate scientists you asked for.
Person B: Does it have every scientist who ever lived!? (She's just like my 6 y/o. LOL)
Person A: It's an inter-governmental panel...
Person B: That's governmental, not a scientific org?
Person A: Some panel members are from the EU. (nothing to do with B's claim)
Person B: So what?
Person A: EU has a great record on sustainable energy. (This is totally begging the question, using a form of what she's trying to prove in her proof. I think it's trolling.)
Person B: Spain has 20% unemployment! (LOL, nothing to do with this discussion)
Person A: Spain has good healthcare and nutrition programs. (LOL, absolutely nothing to do with the discussion.)
Person B: Ad hominem attacks
Person A: The US dollar isn't doing well. (Huh,WTF? USD is the reserve currency of the world.)
Person B: Only 1 person in a million (0.0001%) believes that, so it is not true. (Apparently she does believe in knowledge by consensus.)
The most interesting thing to me is anyone could listen to this and think, "That was a very interesting discussion." They yell at and insult each other, jump topics at random, are simply incorrect in half their statements, and don't make any cogent points.
I actually wonder if this is a satire of popular science in our time. Take an interesting topic. Yell and swear irrationally about a hodgepodge of unrelated issues. Slap the lurid title "Epic Takedown" on it as if it were anything more than people mindlessly yelling. Get 1.5M people to watch it.
It's important to note that there really isn't a discipline called "scientist." People who don't know much about science as a discipline throw the word around while having a vague mental image of someone like the Professor on Gilligan's Island, who could make a fusion reactor from three vines, a handful of sand and a coconut.
In reality the term "scientist" could and does encompass a whole range of specialties.
If you want information on climate, you talk to a climatologist.
If you want to discuss evolution, you talk to a biologist.
If you want to talk about nuclear fission or fusion, you talk to a physicist.
If you want to talk about stellar formation and the age of the universe, you talk to a cosmologist.
One of the biggest mistakes the media (and many, many people) is finding some knucklehead who has a vaguely science-y sounding degree and trotting him out as an expert on a whole range of issues. Like Bill Nye, for example, a mechanical engineer; there's no reason to think he knows his ass from his face about climatology, or biology, or physics.
I think that you might be a little too rigid. I think that most people knowledgeable about him would agree that Michael Faraday was one the best scientists of all time. He had not gone to school to earn a "degree". Still, he was one of the most influential scientists of all time.
I think that you have to agree that science, by definition, is the search about the facts of reality (or existence). It is the exponential growth of knowledge that imposed specialization. It is continuously necessary to know more and more to be able to advance a scientific field. Knowledge is required basis for advancement into new knowledge. And given the infinity of "things" and "phenomena" in that reality, "sky is the limit". Hence, bigger and bigger teams of scientists needed to make a new discovery. And discoveries get to be incrementally smaller and smaller.
Also, I do not think it right to exclude, say, a chemist from an intelligent, knowledgeable and productive discussion of climate. I can think of innumerable combinations of scientific fields where productive insights can be gained from inputs from different scientific "branches". In fact, "interfaces" among those "branches" are often the most fertile grounds for advancement.
Also, there are plenty of, is it ignorami? ;-), with fancy degrees from even fancier schools, just as there are many very knowledgeable people without any degrees. Isn't it very difficult to ascertain how much of what someone knows?
One last comment. Techne is Greek for art. I will quote Leslie Groves (who knows who said it before him?): "Engineering is ART OF THINGS THAT WORK." I find that definition simply beautiful. Engineers need knowledge from a number of scientific fields to do their thing. To design a new model they go to the most recent prior model that worked (most of the time). Then they have to gamble. No way you can test for 40 years a model that is expected to function ("work") 40 years. Takes guts.
Just my comments on the theme.
Stay well.
Sincerely,
Maritimus
Don't trouble yourself over it; it's a real-life nickname I've carried since the mid 1980s. My wife calls me Animal.
Your comments are thought-provoking and well taken.
But it is correct, if someone refers to person A as a "scientist," to object that this statement is inconclusive; the obvious reply is "what kind of scientist?"
The panel member then properly pointed out that the inter-governmental panel was not a scientific endeavor, but rather an ideological one. That's an accurate and entirely relevant argument to make.
The argument about the relative success on sustainable energy started as an attempt to establish the aforementioned bona fides of the inter-governmental panel by citing a statistic on renewable energy use. The audience member obviously sees that as a point in favor of recognizing the legitimacy of the panel and therefore bolstering her use of the conclusions of the IGP. The panel member pointed out, however that her metrics were critically flawed: that the only way to see the policy on renewable energy use as a success was to ignore the economic effects of that policy and others from the same government which have resulted in widespread poverty, astronomical unemployment rates, and high taxes. The audience member then responds that those are all acceptable to her ideology, to which the panel member then points out that they are temporary at best, pointing out the end results of these policies as demonstrated by Greece.
With regard to the strength of the dollar, there are potentially two arguments being made here and I actually think both participants are making separate arguments rather than arguing two sides of a different argument. I think both are right: the audience member is appropriately skeptical about the strength of the US Dollar in comparison to its historical strength. In that she is probably taking into account the US' massive debt and attempts at Quantitative Easing (which is quite ironic given her previous arguments). The panel member is looking at the strength of the US Dollar in comparison to the strength of the Euro as a follow-on to her assertion that the EU is a failing experiment. Anyone can look at the conversion rates and see that since the inception of the Euro its value against the dollar has dropped substantially.
Personally, I think that the panel member needs to respond less to the personal attacks (though she was absolutely correct in calling them out) and stick with the facts. The audience member clearly needs to do more homework, as she's presenting talking points as facts instead of coming armed with real science.
, Marx Bros and Jonathan Winters and a young Bob Newhart .
Once you have learned that fact you will better understand life.
Liberalism Sucks even worse than Gravity but has none of the benefits that Gravity provides.
I did laugh when those two guys got up to leave early on.
It reminded me how when talking heads on Fox News get excited and all start talking at once, I pick up my remote and start pushing buttons.
And I even have captions to read! They do trail behind, though, when people talk fast.
What is becoming clear lately is that the system, (solar, galactic or universal) is Not a gravitational one.
Gravity effects best that which it effects close. Kinda like the American government was supposed to work.
I have to laugh at those TV science guy idiots saying that gravity is nothing more than the weight of the atmosphere upon you...well, why is gravity different across the surface of the earth, why is gravity generally greater at the tops of mountains where there is less atmosphere above you?
Gravity would be greater at the top of a mountain due to the greater mass causing it or if gravity is due to a shielding affect from some particles in empty space then, too, there would be more gravity but atmospheric pressure would not work as that type of gravitational pressure would act.
What bothers me about those TV guys and gals who make such error filled statements both about science and other topics is that no one interviewing them has the guts to challenge them in any way on air. All the challenges seem to be in political shows with most likely similar error filled comments.
(You can limit conception many ways. Washing clothes is less amenable to primitive improvements. It took the industrial revolution.)
In fact, science does proceed by consensus. It takes a while for deep new truths to be accepted. If you have not read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, then you are missing a piece of your general science education. I confess that I have not read it many years, so I am not clear on whether this is an example from that, but we all know Ohm's Law. It is taught as obvious by simple measurement. Children learn it. But it was rejected when first offered, not in Galileo's day, but in 1827.
"When Ohm first published his work, this was not the case; critics reacted to his treatment of the subject with hostility. They called his work a "web of naked fancies"[10] and the German Minister of Education proclaimed that "a professor who preached such heresies was unworthy to teach science."[11] " -- Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm%27s...
Finally, the woman at the table betrayed her ignorance with the nonsense about "everyone thought the Earth was flat until one man..." No. Yes, the Earth is obviously flat to our common experience. Yes, the sky is "bowl" over the "flat" Earth, as best we figured 3000 years ago. However, by consensus, by 400 BCE the Greeks who cared about it pretty much agreed that evidence and logic (reality + reason = objectivity) lead to the conclusion that the Earth is a sphere. ... but of course they were wrong... It is an oblate spheroid (if you care). And the Earth does not "go around the Sun." That, too, is erroneous. The entire solar system (including the Sun) orbits a common and changing barycenter or centroid -- as if that matters when you drive from Alexandria to Memphis.
And climate change is real. Just ask the dinosaurs. And human activity does affect the weather: cities are warmer than the open land around them. Whatever else may be true seems open to debate and discovery.
The debate notion seems like a psychological defense mechanism (or maybe it's political; I don't know) against information we do not like.
We don't like the implications of evolution --> teach the controversy.
On vaccines, let's hear from doctors and anti-vaxers.
On GMOs,let's hear from scientists and from local/organic food advocates.
It works for reporters. If they just want to report the news, getting "both sides" of the story, even if there only is one real side, at least lets you avoid the controversy and leave it to readers. If their audience is people looking for an "epic takedown" video, then it really works. It doesn't even matter whether we're jumping from washing machines, to global warming, to nutrition programs, to the price of tea an China; as long as it's yelling.
Of course the church burned people. There's a place for science and a place for faith. Any man is certainly capable of having both. It's when the application of force gets integrated in when the screaming, bleeding and running starts...
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
Link to
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
Ohm's law is like the basis of everything.
For the all the common use of Ohm's law in circuit analysis for the very wide range of materials with linear resistivity to extreme precision and range, it isn't the "basis" of "everything" in electrical engineering. Speaking loosely on behalf of something so common and important is one thing, but it's misleading to those who don't know -- there are people who have been led to think that Ohm's law is the fundamental law of electricity, with no idea of the enormous importance, scope and impact of the real physical basis: the experiments, theories and equations of Maxwell and Faraday.