On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 6:13 PM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: > >> > What I'm trying to say is that I believe you do not distinguish: >> A) Science the method of inquiry >> from >> B) Science the human institution > > > > And I am saying is you do not understand that only one of the following is > true: > > A) Science can sometimes make predictions better than the law of averages > would allow. > > B) Science is the only way to make predictions better than the law of > averages would allow.
Assuming we can agree that only A is true, why do you assume I don't understand that? And what's your point? > And it is physically impossible for me to personally perform every > experiment that I'd like to, so I have no choice but to look to the human > institution of science to help me out, but that would be useless to me > unless I have reason to trust that the experiment was actually performed as > described, Agreed. > and that's where the web of trust comes in that you get from > journals like Nature and Science. The web of trust comes from PhDs from accredited Universities. That is the deal that everyone accepts. The Nature/Science restriction is a bizarre extreme that I have never hear anyone profess apart from you. Nature/Science have no magical powers to verify if experiments were performed correctly. Their target is "research with generic appeal". A lot of good research does not get published there because it's in a very specific niche. Most of the articles I read are not from Science or Nature, because they do not cater sufficiently (by any stretch of the imagination) to my niches. It's not worse or less credible. I still don't think you understand what Science/Nature are. > When I read about some shit that somebody > I've never heard of typed onto a obscure part of the internet that I've also > never heard of about This is getting tiresome, but I feel you should not get away with repeating this lie. It's also very nasty towards a lot of people that worked hard on honest research. It took them years of their lives to produce that research. It takes you 30 sec to attack their characters gratuitously. Maybe this research is wrong or flawed. Maybe it is dishonest. That's always a possibility. Nobody has magical powers to prevent that. You really like status, that's all. About PLoS: - PageRank 8/10 - Wikipedia page in 12 languages - Citation index > 4 (way way above average) - Nobel laureates yada yada (and no, they don't send them trivial notes. They send them real articles about real shit like curing AIDS) - Listed in 14 major scientific databases including PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science It turns out that NYTimes just published an article about pseudo-academia: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html Here's what they have to say about PLoS: "Open access got its start about a decade ago and quickly won widespread acclaim with the advent of well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals like those published by the Public Library of Science, known as PLoS. Such articles were listed in databases like PubMed, which is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, and selected for their quality." This is not an obscure website by any stretch of the imagination. Or maybe NY Times is also an obscure website, I don't know. > revolutionary experimental results that would change > everything if true No they would not. You didn't even read the article. It's about weird cognitive phenomena that take place when you're about to die. That's all. They don't draw any extraordinary conclusions. There are no ghosts or life after death claims. But they point at stuff that cannot really be explained by current theory. There's a lot of stuff like that. People that follow the science of religion instead of being actually scientific like to ignore these things, including their own consciousness -- the only thing they can really be sure about. Another thing is that we don't really need to maintain a perfect network of binary beliefs in our heads. We can entertain conflicting possibilities. Our brains are equipped to deal with that. I suspect creativity becomes impossible if you don't allow for this. > there is no web of trust and thus I am not in the least > impressed because I know how to type too. You will be a whole lot happier if your worry less about impressing and being impressed. Cheers Telmo. > John K Clark > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
