On Oct 4, 2008, at 7:59 PM, Bill O'Connor wrote:
Yes, that's what I'm saying. Scoffing at economists calling
themselves
scientists is just my way of throwing some cold water in their faces.
If you sniff your nose at evidence that refutes your models, you're
not
a scientist. The lowliest apprentice laborer has more sense/humility
than that.
what is "scientific thinking"? crucially, it involves skepticism and
the willingness to look at things from new points of view and to
consider new evidence.
If you're a "scientist" (especially an astronomer) and therefore used
to finding "evidence that refutes your models" with every new set of
data that arrives, you never "sniff your nose" at the data. Instead
you invent new, inherently unobservable, entities like "dark matter,"
"black holes," "gravitational lensing," "bigh bang," "dark
attractors," "epicycles," "dark energy," etc.that can "explain" all
the inconvenient experimental results that you want to explain away.
Economists have a much easier time--they can indeed ignore the evidence,
which is convenient, because they have so much less imagination than
astrophysicists.
Shane Mage
Shane Mage
"This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
kindling in measures and going out in measures."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 30
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