On Sun, 7 Oct 2007, PHILIP WINESTONE wrote: > How about "refuse to tolerate all conscious dishonesty in ourselves"? > We all lie to ourselves - mostly unconsciously - about a myriad of > things... something I won't get into in detail, but perhaps worthy of > some thought.
But this is about being a scientist, not about everyday life. It's the Feynman philosophy from "Cargo Cult Science:" when being a scientist we must adopt a stance of extreme bend-over-backwards honesty... but it would drive us crazy to keep that stance all the time. And on the other hand, if we let the acceptible dishonesty of everyday life invade our science work, then we're transformed into crackpots who would rather win a fight than find out what's true. > My own view of life, including the LENR fiasco (back to LENR), is that > there's nothing worse than someone who is being CONSCIOUSLY dishonest, But to know this, you have to read their minds! All you can really see is their dishonesty. If you attack them for it, and it turns out to be unconcious dishonesty on their part, your attack will seem motivated by spontaneous malice (since your dishonest victim is relatively clueless about their dishonesty.) And so your attack will simply convince your opponent that you are an evil person. It will have no effect whatsoever upon their unconscious dishonesty. > who tries to sell this dishonesty to others, as honesty, by whatever > means and for whatever reasons. If their dishonesty is unconscious, then that person is not trying to delude others, instead they're simply trying to promote their beliefs, and they have little clue that they're actually spreading lies. All this is why we need to maintain lots of self-criticism and compassion. I DON'T mean that we should give up the fight. Instead I mean that, if we find our opponents disgusting, then probably we have some serious personal problems and should bow out of the fight. In other words, today it's no longer cool to hate ethnic minorities, or to hate people of different religions... but boy do we hate the CF Skeptics, and ascribe all sorts of disgusting malicious behavior to them. And they do the same thing: subtle hate-speech against CF supporters. They're barely even human, right? But only because we've dehumanized them... just like a racists and antisemites must dehumanize their victims. They've used "ethnics slurs" to dehumanize, calling us "woo woos," and we either adopt their slurs as our proud lables, or we try to construct our own dehumanizing slurs in return. Jed describes an anti-CF rally, where the group was delightedly talking about destroying the careers of CF people. How is this so different from a bunch of racist scientists happily fantacizing about destroying the careers of blacks or hispanics? It's not. They're using the same tools which were used against ethnic minorities. It's one group drumming up hatred for another. Heh. Those CF skeptics, you'd never let your daughter marry one, and if a bunch of them got jobs where you work, or if they moved into your neighborhood, you'd have to take action! (And many of the skeptics, they think the same of us: that we're not even quite human, that we're INTENTIONALLY DISHONESTLY supporting CF for malicious reasons, since all of us of course are certainly aware that CF is bogus, right?) That's where the compassionate stance comes in. It's hard to hate someone if you understand them. To avoid decending to the level of a "CF-bigot" we must refuse to view CF critics as an inferior group, a group where the world would be a better place if they could all somehow be removed or silenced. (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (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 425-222-5066 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (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 425-222-5066 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
