One difference between most engineers and most scientists is that our work is constantly and quickly experimentally verified. "The Black Swan" posits that most experts are usually wrong, but graciously exempts engineers.
You are remarkably angry and intolerant. That is neither scientific nor spiritual. It's just nasty.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Why not? Everybody's opinions are of equal value and validity. (Aren't they?)
google physics and social justice
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
So you believe science is about opinion? Facts are optional? Or maybe you believe there are no true facts?
-- Rick C
There are all sorts of beliefs out there, spiritual and otherwise. Some people believe the Earth is flat. Some people believe we live on the inside of a hollow sphere. Some people believe in a time cube.
That I don't go out of my way to accommodate those beliefs or want them taught in public schools as factual doesn't mean that I'm intolerant. It doesn't mean that I'm not, either. I also don't stockpile firearms and threaten to shoot if I don't get my way.
On 07/02/2017 01:40 PM, John Larkin wrote: \
Life is not Burger King - you can't always have it your way. The school board is not Burger King - they're not paid to always let you have it your way. The fact that non-Burger King employees often don't let you have it your way doesn't necessarily imply they're intolerant, or even "bad" people.
It depends on whether you are referring to TrueFacts, GoodFacts, or AltFacts.
My opinion is that the moon is made of green cheese is just as valid as the opinion that it is made of rocks.
And since the moon landings were a hoax, there's no proof otherwise. Unless, I suppose, you can ask the alien still interned in Area 51 ;}
Modern American conservatism has a strong mystical bent. It often feels less like what European Conservativism was historically (the name certainly predates America) and more like some hodgepodge of Ayn Rand, gnostic knowledge, "free market" and "invisible hand" prestidigitation, anarcho-capitalism, ambiguous notions of "freedom" and "tyranny", the occult, and a bit of self-righteous atavism and nihilist fantasizing sprinkled on top.
It seems like a philosophy more suited for reality television than the real world. That would make sense.
That seems to be a reasonable summary :( Riddikulus.
Yes, everyone is entitled to their opinion. That doesn't say anything about facts.
-- Rick C
Unfortunately, your statement is why I no longer support a major promoter of science education in US public schools, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE,
Originally the NCSE was formed to combat efforts to teach creationism in K-12 classrooms. Having grown up in a part of the country where this was the norm, I was glad to help them fight back as an adult. However, in recent years, NCSE has shifted its focus toward "climate education," evidently having concluded that a two-front war against ignorance is easier to win than a one-front war. I'm far from an ACC denialist but NCSE's position was basically the flip side of your coin, that these sciences are on equally-solid footing. I don't agree with that at all.
The fact is that we are not going to wake up one morning and decide we were wrong about the basic principles of natural selection. There is no way that can possibly happen, any more than than we're going to conclude that we were wrong all along to teach Newtonian physics at the K-12 level. If the core ideas behind evolution don't meet your definition of "settled science," then neither would F = ma.
On the other hand, I fully expect us to wake up one morning and realize that our existing climate models are grossly wrong, biased, or otherwise lack the predictive power that some advocates insist on assigning to them. It's happened before -- "Uh, where's all the excess heat going? Oh, right, it's in the oceans. Silly us." It will happen again, or at least I hope so. That's how science is supposed to work. But climate modeling is still a wide-open area of research, and high school teachers shouldn't be placing computer models on equal footing with natural selection. This will lead to endless politicization and charges of "whataboutism" when one area of science requires more revision in the future than the other one will. NCSE disagrees, so we had to part ways.
Point being, just because the "secular liberals" are indulging in intellectual hubris when it comes to one topic doesn't mean they're wrong about the other. This isn't a political newsgroup, and I don't own any Rigol gear, so that's all I'm going to say about either. But your post really hits a personal hot button. I've frequently second-guessed my decision to pull support from NCSE over this, and you've reminded me why I did it in the first place.
-- john, KE5FX
But nowadays your TrueFact is my AltFact, and may or may not be a another entities' GoodFact.
Mix and match entities and *Facts, as appropriate.
Yep, and if wishes were horses beggars would ride.
And you can ride the "We don't have enough data" or "the models could be flawed" or "maybe it's all a big conspiracy" objections to absolutely anywhere. Like creationism, someone, somewhere, will always remain unconvinced.
The neo-Darwinian ideas of random mutation and natural selection make no sense. Any species that relied on a mechanism that dumb is long extinct, just a light snack for the things that worked better.
The real beauty of science is that we can always expect to be amazed by the things we will learn. Well, some of us.
Science has historially been mostly wrong. And a lot of it still is. But little bits of rightness manage to survive and improve, and that's civilization.
If you want some fun, read a sociology textbook.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
_Scientists_ have mostly been wrong, even the big names usually publish/published a decent quantity of stinker papers, and cranks and crackpots are a dime a dozen. Ptolemy, Lamarck, and Tesla don't themselves constitute "science"
What are the good parts?
Idiot. Leftist losers, like you, *want* imperious (if not imperial) leaders. You want/need to be told how to wipe your ass.
We do, idiot. You get one vote for a slate of electors. It's a remarkable system, in fact.
We should listen to all people, yes.
You should have directed that at LittleBit.
I guess you are defining "science" as only those products of accepted science that untimately turn out to be right. But then you'd still have to accept some things as being absolutely locked-down right.
I wouldn't want to spoil your fun.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
I do need to be careful to clarify that point: just as Newton's models were wrong in that they didn't account for relativity, there is plenty of wrongness in Darwin's work too. But we still teach F = ma, which at some level is true, and we still teach that random mutations play a role in natural selection, which at some level is also true. Both are necessary simplifications of complex topics. If high-school teachers droned on about epigenetics and thermodynamic ratchets and the debate between punctuated equilibrium and phyletic gradualism, would that change anyone's mind?
The only people who call physics "Newtonism" are weird and wrong, and the only people who call evolutionary biology "Darwinism" have a religious axe to grind. You will find neither term in many scientific papers -- well, maybe in sociology, I guess -- but at the K-12 level it's a distinction without a difference. Nobody bothers to object to "Newtonism" in public schools because it doesn't refute the doctrine of original sin. That's probably why Newton gets all the breaks despite being kind of an asshat.
-- john, KE5FX
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