I don't suppose there is a link to this essay, anyone? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <sharelong60@...> wrote :
Lawson, I remember when I stopped believing in scientific objectivity. Journal of Conflict Resolution. Research done on the Maharishi Effect, I think in Israel. A professor from Univ. of West Virginia on the journal's board. They published his essay along with the research. At the end of his essay he says, and I'm paraphrasing, that if such an idea can be supported by scientific method, then we need to question the scientific method itself. My interpretation: his world view was so shook by the research that he had to do something, anything to invalidate that research. Even if it meant he was invalidating all such research in the process! I wouldn't take quite such a dramatic position about it. It's not like it's a reasonable idea. By reasonable I mean it isn't sympathetic to any other ideas we have about society or psychology or physics. In fact we would have to ditch pretty much everything in order to accommodate it. So he's right to be wary, but without reading the article itself I don't know what he meant about questioning the method. With such a wishy-washy idea as the ME we might need to reinforce the SM in some way in case we are kidding ourselves with statistical fluctuations etc. My comment on the ME is that in order to say you have lowered the crime rate you'd have to know what the crime rate was going to be. It never looks to me when I look at the raw data that something magical has taken place, the crime rate goes up and down daily and the TMO never seem able to lower it more than the amount it usually fluctuates anyway! If it went to zero every time Nabby and the boys were in town we'd have to believe it but it's obviously open to interpretation hence the wariness in the Journals. They have to be wary, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As it is, I think the ME has been shown to be wrong because of the amount of courses that were supposed to be being monitored and the data never got released. Selective publishing is the worst science of all because if you can't see how many tails have been tossed, as well as the heads, then you can't draw meaningful conclusions. Since the pundit project started 10 years ago, it isn't like the world entered a period of peace and joy is it? Not in any way that I noticed. I think it's admirable that journalists and judges and scientists aim for objectivity. I also think that what's most admirable is to accept that we humans are never 100% objective and incorporate that idea into all our findings, conclusions and declarations. On Thursday, March 27, 2014 3:50 AM, "LEnglish5@..." <LEnglish5@...> wrote: Fred has asked some of the most prominent researchers into Buddhist meditation why they don't take the PC research seriously. The response is always along the lines of: show me a Western theory that suggests that it is important, and I will. Anomalous measurements that are consistently found in the right circumstances, apparently aren't of interest to "real" scientists -only stuff guided by theory. Of course, everyone knows the story of John Ellis, Director of Research at CERN, who, as a junior researcher at CERN, found some weird flaw in his cloud-chamber photographic plates, and rather than dismissing it outright, he went back and found similar flaws in other plates that he had missed. He then went around and fished many, MANY examples of similar flaws out of garbage bins, always happening in specific circumstances, and published. Everyone else had dismissed it as being of no interest because no Western theory predicted what was on the plates, so they assumed that it was trash. It got a write-up as the cover article of Discover, and made his career. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : --
