Climate of Complete Certainty

Me too. I'm finishing up three degrees in atmospheric sciences, matter of fact.

"But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism."

Oh, indeed. What doesn't the ordinary citizen figure they don't have a right to do? What else is new?

So long as science provides new luxuries and comforts and better razor blades with five blades and new gidgets at CES to gawp over I see no indication Americans have any problem with sucking the last drop out of science's teet. So long as those eggheads are working for them I hear few complaints. The first world mostly tossed community and religion in the trash long ago in favor of suburbs, online shopping, social media and high-definition TV programs, nobody put a gun to anyone's head and told them to do that.

The ordinary citizen has no problem with any of science's pride when it works for them. But God help those eggheads and academics if they should ever say "What you're thinking is wrong." Over-weening? Saying "you're wrong" one time is "over-weening"? After the same scientific methods that was used to figure out why gave ya everything?

They thought science only worked for them, and for a long time that was true. It's a big shock I expect to find out it probably doesn't.

That is to say the "ordinary citizen" in America is a glomping personality-disorder case who in addition to very much disliking any critique of things they expect they have a "right to do" will also do just about anything for attention; just like being "pro-life" being a "skeptic" is an easy job. You don't actually have to do much of anything but say "I'm skeptical" and the gravy-train of attention flows in. Sure beats reading!

"I plowed through the 1550 comments"

As the author also seems to be aware of. Ka-ching!

"Shattered" is a fun book. Fatheads fail again.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Hillary wasn't the correct type of fathead was the main problem. Americans never got to know the real robot.

Americans buy the products that work, whether Scientists were involved or not. Often, they weren't.

The first world mostly tossed community and religion in

The first real electronic component, the vacuum tube, could have been conceived by a scientist, but wasn't. Science often follows invention, scribbles some related equations, and then takes credit.

Science gave us explosives and poison gas too.

According to climate science, we're all dead by now.

It's a beautiful, mild, clear day outside. I don't feel very dead.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Bullshit. But some show signs of brain death, when they deny what is happening. You seem to be a charter member.

Explosives were around long before science had much to say about them.

Poison gas did rely on chemistry to get the gases in the first place, and on science to find particularly toxic chemicals.

People can exploit science to any number of bad ends, if they know enough about it. John Larkin doesn't.

Not remotely true. It takes a complete ignoramus like John Larkin to come up with that kind of nonsense, and he probably got it from one of his denialist web sites, who are just as prone as Trump to invent nonsense about their opposition.

Intellectually, he's a zombie.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Somehow, Americans bought President Trump. It's not working.

As for 'scientists weren't involved', that's a hard sell. I'm reading these words on a plate of glass adorned with a few million TFTs, based on the science of Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley (Nobel prize Physics 1956), illuminated by LEDs (Nobel prize Physics,

2014 to Nakamura et al), through the medium of the Internet (US National Science Foundation) and worldwide web (from CERN).

Try "whether witches were involved or not. Often, they weren't" instead. I could believe that.

It is for the flyover folks. Enough to get him re-elected.

Check the employment stats.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"

Perhaps. The Russians are going to have to spend quite a bit more on posting pro-Trump propaganda on social media to get him in again.

The security services should be primed to do a better job of stopping them this time around, but Trump has probably fired all the competent people.

Sure. Bush ignored a house-price bubble, produced the Global Financial Crisis, and Obama spent the next eight years getting the economy back on track (with very little help from the Republicans) and Trump waltzes in and claims the credit.

He's an obvious creep, but some Americans are too dumb to notice.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Not just "somehow" - the guy's a master manipulator. He went "Boo!" at the Republican Party and by the time they changed their pants, he was the nominee. "Insane Clown President" covers this....

This was a master stroke, really.

Trumps' politics are an old strain that's been around since the Know-Nothing party.

There is a film, a documentary titled "Hollywoodism" that describes exactly how the two narratives of the Culture Wars emerged. It goes widely ignored.

Technology is a distant cousin to science. We'd have had no progress at all had Shockley not been dislodged. They were not called the Traitorous Eight for nothing.

In truth, thousands, perhaps millions of individuals created all this. We humans just like heroic narrative, much to our peril.

--
Les Cargill

What are you smoking? The vacuum tube was how science discovered the electron. A few other devices (crystal rectifier diodes) were known before that.

Useful vacuum tube amplifiers were designed by scientists, AFTER understanding the electron. Clinton Davisson's Nobel prize in physics (1937) was for explaining characteristics of a vacuum tube he repaired... while he was improving them for Bell Labs.

What science discovered were "cathode rays".

They had to pump their vacuum tubes down to remarkably low levels before they got to the point where the electrons emitted at the cathode could get all the way to the anode (and past it) without getting deflected by a gas atom.

After that they could identify them as "electrons" measure their mass and charge and so forth.

Lee De Forest inveted the triode in 1906, around the same time J.J. Thompson got the Nobel Prize in Phsyics for his 1897 measurements of the mass of the electron.

John Larkin's grasp of the history isn't entirely sound.

Of course Lee De Forest was an inventor rather than a scientist, and only had a limited understanding of how it worked, but once he had found something useful, lots of people got interested in exactly how it worked.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Trump is loved here in 'Trump land' Western NY. It's like nothing I've seen before. The Deli down the bottom of my hill sells Trump hats at the check out.

George H.

Oh I didn't read the NY times article. There is much that is kinda 'broken' in science that many on the left don't want to see. Take peer-review as one problem. Peer review can operate as a gate keeper for ideas, and not to get the 'best' science published. GH

The problem with being so certain is not just exposing your hubris, but can cause some embarrassment:

Never put a date on your doomsday predictions.

Makes sense. In the culture (and financial) wars, T is on the side of the working-class, not college indoctrinated, non-coastal folks. The ones who keep us alive.

The Electoral College, and representation in the Senate, are good ideas.

Exactly. In some areas of study, having an unorthodox idea can be career-ending. Peer review is one enforcement mechanism to suppress genuinely new ideas. Of course, the more a science is subject to experimental verification, the more tolerant it is of radical ideas.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"

Yes. But I think he clearly does not possess half the brains it takes to mastermind what happened. Who is the real puppeteer can only be speculated in a conspiracy theory mode of course (I do not think it was the Russians though they did some of the work, nor do I think it was anyone US based...), we are unlikely to know the truth in our lifetimes. I don't think Trump knows that himself either.

Makes perfect sense to me, though me too like "we humans" seem to like heroic narrative more than it is sensible. Well may be not that much nowadays but I did for most of my life. It has its positive impact... on society, makes you work harder chasing the dream :-).

Dimiter

The thermionic effect was discovered by Edison et al, the first practical vacuum diode was Fleming, the first triode was De Forest, the first research into what to _do_ with a triode that would make it more than a novelty was Edwin H. Armstrong, and much of the early research into vacuum-state electronics was formalized by Irving Langmuir.

Only one of these guys, De Forest, is the odd-man-out the rest almost certainly fit the modern definition of "scientist"

That's an oddly stilted view. The orthodoxy of 'an idea' isn't something that really matters, because you don't publish 'an idea' unless it can be applied to a puzzle, problem, or reality-as-we-see-it. String theory is often lambasted, because it DOES apply to a puzzle (what is the mathematical basis of a consistent theory of everything), but but does NOT apply in any clear way to our observations.

The replacement of planetary-motion epicycles with planetary-motion ellipses was certainly not orthodox, but went smoothly; peer review had no damping effect. The insertion of continental drift into planetary evolution was unorthodox, and was only slowly accepted, because the evidences were scattered (literally, all around the world) and a multiplicity of movement scenarios had to be evaluated before one of them was found to fit.

The problem nowadays is NOT peer review; the problem is funding for 'basic' researches, where a judgment call by a committee determines the future. It's impossible to make progress without a team and multiple-year effort, sometimes (there's no way to replace a Large Hadron Collider, for instance). Only a large chorus of interested voices could get that funding accomplished- the SSC in the US got shouted down in a Congressional session after a whisper campaign in the press, it was not peer review that did the career ending there. A few US researchers contributed to CERN's efforts, but not as members.

Peer review causing difficulty publishing is a common complaint, but there are journals that will take... almost anything. Those don't make good reading.

Works for me.

Hillary's team had a mountain of brains, and money, and lost.

He has common sense, a will to win, and luck.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com