Also, "provisional acceptance." To avoid the trap of Confirmation Bias,
we provisionallly accept impossible claims in order to test them.
Vortex-L is for those who see great value in removing their usual
mental filters by provisionally accepting the validity of "impossible"
phenomena in order to test them.
I'm just following Lewis Caroll's recommendation, spoken by The Queen...
“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe
impossible things.'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was
your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've
believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'
And also...
"It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet
hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young."
- Konrad Lorenz
Next, develop an internal metal “concept-testing sandbox” for yourself.
Then, rather than sneeringly rejecting every suspicious idea, or blindly
accepting them all, instead you build a dedicated test-lab region inside
your own head. There, the main rule is “provisional acceptance.” It’s a
place where you can store all the Untrusted Ideas. (Or maybe put a big
sticky label on incoming new concepts “possible toxin, not for internal
use.”) After all, we never can devote honest consideration to ideas that
we’ve already rejected before testing. With a separate ‘sandbox,’ you
won’t need to maintain a tightly closed scoffer/skeptic mindset in order
to protect yourself from all the loony ideas floating around out there.
Instead, you can welcome them all in …to your airtight testing chamber,
where your “pretend self” can become totally meme-infected, all the while
being observed by your real self in the observation booth behind the
one-way glass. Now you can honestly test all those crazy claims that
Conventional Science Has Rejected, while also having lots of fun at Flat
Earth meetings and crackpot physics conferences …playing with mud-pies
while wearing gloves. This is important, because hidden in all that sewage
are amazing diamonds.
On Fri, 2 Jul 2021, Alan Fletcher wrote:
Thanks! The page I was looking for is http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html
and the partly-remembered credo :
So, on Vortex-L we intentionally suspend the disbelieving attitude of those
who follow the stereotypical "scientific method." While this does leave us
open to the great personal embarrassment of repeatedly falling for hoaxes
and delusional thinking, we tolerate this problem in our quest to consider
ideas and phenomena which would otherwise be rejected out of hand without a
fair hearing. There are diamonds in the filth, and we see that we cannot
hunt for diamonds without getting dirty.
(((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) )))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair
Seattle, WA 206-762-3818 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
