we had to do read some papers out of the ieee archives. Man o man, those papers were poorly written and not very well argued.

If there are no people left to be wrong, does that mean that everything is right with the world?
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That's what I always say about you, boz, you have a good memory for random facts about pussy. -- joh3n

I think you're a dick!

Which is why I, too, love you.

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You can build the most elegant fountain in the world, but eventually a winged rat will be using it as a drinking bowl.

hell, even mathematicians are only versed in the basics, except those few who specialize in the subject. logic is pretty much useless for the most part anyway.

anyway, i know you're godless, but things are a little clearer to some people. for example, when some people see a "megachurch" erecting an idol thrusting national symbols into the place of worship, you don't need "logic" to see there's something very wrong in america.

what were they thinking as the inscribed the first commandment on those tablets? did they even bother to read what they were writing?




[t]rolling retards conversation, period.

One fascinating result in cognitive science is that it is pretty easy to set up experiments that show that the reasoning that people give for doing/saying something can be completely unrelated to why they do/say it.

In some cases, epilepsy gets so bad that it can only be treated with a type of brain surgery. Essentially they cut the nerve bundle that connects the right and left brains. (Perhaps they no longer do this...I have no idea.) People treated this way were able to function fairly well but when experimented on in laboratory conditions, interesting things were discovered. They would show these people two pictures, one in either eye, and ask them to say the name of the object and also point to a picture of it. They will say the name of the object seen by one eye and point to an object seen by the other eye. What is really fascinating is that patients will give long, detail explanations as to why the object they named does not match the object they pointed to.

There's a real sense that our descriptions of our own behavior are after-the-fact guesses.

Another relevent bit concerning how the brain works is this: Senses aren't one way. That is, the naive idea, that light hits the retina, and is analyzed until a picture forms in the mind, is completely incorrect. Instead, the retina sends a signal inward while the brain sends what it expects to see outward and what we actually perceive is the interaction between those to things. That is, what we perceive of the world is deeply influenced by what we expect to perceive in the world. This is something that pervades the brain at all leaves.

Also an interesting feature of neural networks is that the more they learn, the harder they are to teach. (There's a name for this effect that I cannot recall.) "New" networks readily take up new information, but older networks have to be battered with contrary evidence before they'll change.

Most scientific advances are made by relatively young scientists because young scientists are not as wedded to the conventional wisdom. And, in fact, when you see examples of older scientists making breakthroughs (i.e. Darwin) it is usually in a period where no one has any sort of decent alternative.
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_{ウセーバラケダ}

I think that might be just a North American thing, rather than a western countries thing.

Here in the UK, the divides are so narrow you could barely get a cigarette paper between them. On the European continent, with their proportional representation systems, it doesn't really apply either.

Where is your blog anyway? Your user page seems to link here but I can't see much content. Do you have an RSS feed?
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"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise." -- Bertrand Russell

That's why we have peer review. Of course it doesn't work (there is a field of psychology that studies scientists and the scientific process. surprisingly, most studies have flaws. Not all fatal of course...)

But yeah, your main point is right. If the people that ostensibly are trained in rational, evidence based argument can't "get it right", than what hope are there for the rest of us? It is a problem that strikes me quite often -- I have to force myself to remember that the other side really does believe what they are saying and that (possibly) they are right and I am wrong. It makes it very hard for me to be publicly political.

Rachael

"There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." -- Eliot

Because once something has been prooven by a scientist, or life has been made better by a politician, there's nothing left to do and they're out of a job. If problems are left unsolved, the money keeps flowing. And who the hell wants to pay scientists to discover stuff that won't benefit them personally? No one. That is why most trivial scientific research is funded by government.

"Why does your research have holes in its logic Mr. Scientist? Why won't you answer any of my questions Mr. Politician.?"

"Well that's a good question Timmy. You see its because...hey is that a rabbit over there?"

Ka-ching!

And all the followers take the answers spoon fed to them without question. Ain't no use debating with morons. Morons will argue against your facts with heresay that they treat like facts. Stubborn as unmoveable mountains. Stubborn and useful to the ones feeding them bullshit.

"Stabbing someone in the head with a pitchfork is rarely beneficial to the relationship." - MereKat

It feels good to be right and it feels bad to be wrong. Consequently, the human brain works overtime to prove itself right, even if the owner of that brain doesn't consciously seek to do so. Add in a big ego that actively seeks to do so and the problem gets even worse.

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There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic

It has an agenda.  Normally that agenda is money.  Sometimes that agenda is "answers," typically to "questions" that no-one actually needed the answers to, but it costs a lot of money to find them.

Sometimes, the information produced is useful to humanity.  That information is typically purchased and copywrittenm by a pharmaceutical company ASAP.

Sometimes, the information explains the cosmos.  That information is typically used in warfare.

Science is human, it is not free of desire.
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Taken out of context I must seem so strange - Ani DiFranco

See, once there was a grasshopper, and he hopped about merrily in his field, thinking everything was right in the world. Morgan, (For this particular grasshopper's name was Morgan) had never heard any of these theories about dinosaur extinction. He was, essentially, a blank slate with regards to this specific area of research. Then, one fine day, when the sun was shining, and the grass was blowing and the wind was green, Morgan's friend Robert hopped into his field, and told him, "Hey man, Morgan, we're all going to die in a fiery explosion like the dinosaurs did!"

And Morgan got very afraid, because he had no idea what a dinosaur was, but he didn't like the idea of death via explosive combustion. So Morgan decided he'd travel to the city (Phoenix, Arizona, in case you were wondering) and ask some scientists what was up with all that, that he may allay his fears. So Morgan tried to hop a train. (Get it? "hop"? He's a grasshopper, remember.)

But the train hit ran him over on accident.

Because Morgan was a fucking grasshopper.

Years pass, things change, you end up living in Kansas. But the bag of dicks never leaves your side... - blixco
--top hat--

If a bunch of scientists trained in logic with very little at stake in the argument beyond personal pride can ignore evidence and come to a false conclusion...

I think you "misunderestimate" personal pride and the human desire - even subconcious desire - to be right. Being wrong sucks, you don't like being wrong, and the easiest way to be right is to ignore things that make you worry about being wrong.

Now, I'm not talking about deliberate, concious manipulation of the "facts" - I'm talking about a subconcious, even "autonomic" filtering function of the human mind.

If you want examples, you can cite much more than mass extinction theory - look at how the theory of plate tectonics was treated in the decades before the mid-ocean trenches were discovered.

Heck, look at second hand smoke and global warming - in both of these, proponents of each side of the debate demonize their opponents and make appeals to authority and consensus - but it is also clear that a careful reading of the raw evidence shows (a) support for the proponents of each argument but (b) much smaller effects than they claim.

I particularly like the current bruhaha over second hand smoke - with people like the surgeon general claiming that even one lung full of someone else's smoke boosts your chances of cancer significantly but the papers he refers to say no such thing.

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Faith, and the possibility of weaponized kissing?

One of my biggest personal issues with some science is that as you described many theories about things that happened a long time ago are based on what seem like educated guesses supported by interpretations and so on and so forth.  When you people admit they are wrong and change their theory it is because one leg of their theory was proven to be wrong or shockingly frequently the exact opposite of what they thought it was.  Then a new theory pops up . . . with no more support than the last :(

I think sometimes people try to hard to put things together in tidy packages to explain things.  Same goes with politics.

There was a good show on a year or so ago about how these complex ideas where developed about early man and how a particular type of early human was so much more advanced than another type.  Yet one of the scientists who disagreed pointed out that their entire theory balanced on some misc. bones, some evidence found in various caves (did these people even know each other?), and some crazy theories about how X early humans used more complex tools than Y humans based on the rocks they found.  The whole thing was very creative, but ridiculous also.

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