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Do clever people outsmart themselves?

David Mo said:
Such a broad concept of science can lead to quite a lot of confusion. That's why I specified that I was referring to scientific evidence (Joe says there is no other). I will specify more: I refer to the one that is obtained through controlled observation (test) and mathematically formalized quantification. It is the one taught in universities and published in scientific journals.
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So, again, your argument is that you don't understand what the scientific method is, so you just make up some bullcrap instead?

Because if you look at the actual definition of it, guess what? There is no condition for any of that extra moving the goalposts that you're doing.

In fact, what makes your redefinition outright retarded is that it would outright exclude any physics or chemistry experiment done in a school or even uníversity lab, for teaching purposes, as not science. Because nobody publishes what Timmy from class B measured in class.

At any rate, all you have is another of your arguments that ah, but word X would be confusing or have some other connotations -- even if you have to make them up. Guess what, silly? I don't give a flip. If words confuse you, that's between you and your special needs school teacher :p
 
HansMustermann said:
In fact, what makes your redefinition outright retarded is that it would outright exclude any physics or chemistry experiment done in a school or even uníversity lab, for teaching purposes, as not science. Because nobody publishes what Timmy from class B measured in class.
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I'm not saying that a research isn't scientific if it hasn't been published. Or that there can't be a non-scientific article that has slipped into a scientific journal. I say that the kind of scientific knowledge, characterized by controlled observation and mathematical form, is that which is published in scientific journals.
 
That's still your own moving the goalposts. It's no different from the guys insisting that there's a 9/11 conspiracy because the evidence doesn't fit their arbitrary criteria.

For a start, you haven't shown why my looking at a streetlight isn't controlled enough.

Controlled:

A) means within the best you can do. And

B) still gets the job done.

Everything could be a little more controlled, even at the Large Hadron Collider. But that's why you have an error bar for.

And B is actually the more important one. If I'm doing an interference experiment with lasers, then the exact wavelength matters, and isolating other light sources is important. If I'm an anthropologist studying how much more or less Germans are to not cross the street on a red light than the French, then I don't need the exact wavelength of the LED in their red light. It's enough that it's roughly speaking red and it's at the top of the streetlight.

Trying to impose an arbitrary one-size fits all standard is counterproductive and misguided.

Putting it into numbers, same deal. I'm probably one of the people who used maths the most in threads in this forum -- even for such biblical stuff as what energy would be released by the Borg cube in Revelation landing -- but not everything has to be in numbers and formulas. And most certainly not to be evidence.

The most trivial example is archaeology. Yes, the current historical method is for all practical reasons a variant of the scientific method, and there is no such thing as a theoretical archaeologist. Yet numbers are at best of marginal relevance, don't have to be exact, and formulas are non-existent. If you find 100 skeletons and 70 bronze weapons in a river, vs if you find 90 and 80, it makes no difference to the fact that there probably was a battle there.

Anthropology is another easy example.

But even in hard sciences like physics, sometimes the prediction or falsification thereof is simply at the level of whether something happens or not. The first validation of Einstein's GR was simply at the level of whether gravitational lensing produced the pattern he predicted or not.

So again, trying to impose some arbitrary one-size-fits-all standard is just plain bogus.
 
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HansMustermann said:
That's still your own moving the goalposts. It's no different from the guys insisting that there's a 9/11 conspiracy because the evidence doesn't fit their arbitrary criteria.

For a start, you haven't shown why my looking at a streetlight isn't controlled enough.

Controlled:

A) means within the best you can do. And

B) still gets the job done.

Everything could be a little more controlled, even at the Large Hadron Collider. But that's why you have an error bar for.

And B is actually the more important one. If I'm doing an interference experiment with lasers, then the exact wavelength matters, and isolating other light sources is important. If I'm an anthropologist studying how much more or less Germans are to not cross the street on a red light than the French, then I don't need the exact wavelength of the LED in their red light. It's enough that it's roughly speaking red and it's at the top of the streetlight.

Trying to impose an arbitrary one-size fits all standard is counterproductive and misguided.

Putting it into numbers, same deal. I'm probably one of the people who used maths the most in threads in this forum -- even for such biblical stuff as what energy would be released by the Borg cube in Revelation landing -- but not everything has to be in numbers and formulas. And most certainly not to be evidence.

The most trivial example is archaeology. Yes, the current historical method is for all practical reasons a variant of the scientific method, and there is no such thing as a theoretical archaeologist. Yet numbers are at best of marginal relevance, don't have to be exact, and formulas are non-existent. If you find 100 skeletons and 70 bronze weapons in a river, vs if you find 90 and 80, it makes no difference to the fact that there probably was a battle there.

Anthropology is another easy example.

But even in hard sciences like physics, sometimes the prediction or falsification thereof is simply at the level of whether something happens or not. The first validation of Einstein's GR was simply at the level of whether gravitational lensing produced the pattern he predicted or not.

So again, trying to impose some arbitrary one-size-fits-all standard is just plain bogus.
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Archaeology and anthropology are human sciences. They still have a long way to go to get full scientific evidence. Especially anthropology.

Controlled experimentation, the basis of the factual sciences, is not a game. It requires strict conditions of control and manipulation of the variables, which did not occur in any of the cases I proposed.

On the other hand, I am not saying that the lack of scientific evidence in our daily lives means that everything is the same and that any pseudoscience is worth. I am saying that our knowledge of facts is based on the authority of science. But not that it is irrational. It is rational to trust scientists to the extent that they express a consensus. But it is still the principle of authority.

Here is a summary of controlled experimentation. I find it useful: https://www.visionlearning.com/en/l...49/Experimentation-in-Scientific-Research/150

By the way, the Einstein case you comment on is a classic of controlled experimentation/observation: Such a theory in such circumstances will produce X. X happens, then the theory is confirmed or progresses toward its confirmation.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Controlled:

A) means within the best you can do. And

B) still gets the job done.
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Nitpick: Controlled means that the observer or experimenter gets to keep things constant while changing or observing the thing they wish to understand or figure out the effects of. It does not mean "within the best you can do". The word control has a meaning in this context.

I'm not sure where David Mo is going with this anyway. To say that he doesn't have evidence of his wife loving him because we were talking about scientific evidence and scientific evidence (according to him), which must include things like "mathematically formalized quantification" (a weirdly specific precondition to discussing whether or not there's evidence his wife loves him), seems to me that he's now arguing for the sake of arguing. I don't see his overall point.
 
JesseCuster said:
Nitpick: Controlled means that the observer or experimenter gets to keep things constant while changing or observing the thing they wish to understand or figure out the effects of. It does not mean "within the best you can do". The word control has a meaning in this context.



I'm not sure where David Mo is going with this anyway. To say that he doesn't have evidence of his wife loving him because we were talking about scientific evidence and scientific evidence (according to him), which must include things like "mathematically formalized quantification" (a weirdly specific precondition to discussing whether or not there's evidence his wife loves him), seems to me that he's now arguing for the sake of arguing. I don't see his overall point.
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He has a rather peculiar definition of science and what he will accept as science. For example because no one has a science paper published that is titled "zeus does not exist" science has nothing to say about Zeus's existence or none existence.

He is rather like a biblical literalist .
 
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This whole "Science doesn't has an opinion on X" stuff consistently comes out of people who define science wrongly.

Again if the exact terms bother (g)you fine, at the most basic, intellectual level if a fact is presented or an opinion is reached that didn't use concepts like collecting evidence under a certain set of standards, falsefiability, experimentation, and so forth not only is the fact/opinion not valid the question/problem the fact/opinion is presented as an answer to isn't valid in its current form.
 
JesseCuster said:
Nitpick: Controlled means that the observer or experimenter gets to keep things constant while changing or observing the thing they wish to understand or figure out the effects of. It does not mean "within the best you can do". The word control has a meaning in this context.
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Right. My poor choice of words. What I meant that when we say something is controlled, we mean controlled to the best that we can, not PERFECTLY controlled.
 
And what I'm saying is simply that "minimize" means just that: reduce as best as we can. It doesn't mean reduce to zero. And what counts as controlled enough is different for each experiment, rather than being a one-size-fits-all standard.
 
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JesseCuster said:
I'm not sure where David Mo is going with this anyway. To say that he doesn't have evidence of his wife loving him because we were talking about scientific evidence and scientific evidence (according to him), which must include things like "mathematically formalized quantification" (a weirdly specific precondition to discussing whether or not there's evidence his wife loves him), seems to me that he's now arguing for the sake of arguing. I don't see his overall point.
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I'm interested in the philosophy of science.
A classic problem of the philosophy of science is scientism. Scientific reductionism (scientism) affirms that science is the only way to know and that everything can be explained scientifically, including the rules for action.

This is idolatry. I have used my wife's hypothesis as an example. An example of a joke that illustrated my point of view. I am sorry that this caused your confusion. You can overlook it if you want. There were other more serious examples.
 
Darat said:
He has a rather peculiar definition of science and what he will accept as science. For example because no one has a science paper published that is titled "zeus does not exist" science has nothing to say about Zeus's existence or none existence.
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By Zeus! I haven't defined science as things published in a scientific magazine. Please, please, please. I just said that the safest way to know if science has studied a particular problem is to consult the scientific literature. It's not that hard to understand. I don't know what's wrong with you.

No. I'm not a biblical literalist. This is absurd. I have wasted my time explaining to you that the debate with religious people is not limited to literalism.
 
JoeMorgue said:
This whole "Science doesn't has an opinion on X" stuff consistently comes out of people who define science wrongly.

Again if the exact terms bother (g)you fine, at the most basic, intellectual level if a fact is presented or an opinion is reached that didn't use concepts like collecting evidence under a certain set of standards, falsefiability, experimentation, and so forth not only is the fact/opinion not valid the question/problem the fact/opinion is presented as an answer to isn't valid in its current form.
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Are you talking to me?
 
HansMustermann said:
And what I'm saying is simply that "minimize" means just that: reduce as best as we can. It doesn't mean reduce to zero. And what counts as controlled enough is different for each experiment, rather than being a one-size-fits-all standard.
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No one claims that the uncertainty of controlled experimentation can be reduced to zero. No matter how close it sometimes gets. And the fact that the ways of controlling are different does not detract from the definition of controlled experimentation and the fact it is one of the main requirements of science. Especially those of nature.
 
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David Mo said:
By Zeus! I haven't defined science as things published in a scientific magazine. Please, please, please. I just said that the safest way to know if science has studied a particular problem is to consult the scientific literature. It's not that hard to understand. I don't know what's wrong with you.



No. I'm not a biblical literalist. This is absurd. I have wasted my time explaining to you that the debate with religious people is not limited to literalism.
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"Rather like"
 
David Mo said:
By Zeus! I haven't defined science as things published in a scientific magazine. Please, please, please. I just said that the safest way to know if science has studied a particular problem is to consult the scientific literature. It's not that hard to understand. I don't know what's wrong with you.



No. I'm not a biblical literalist. This is absurd. I have wasted my time explaining to you that the debate with religious people is not limited to literalism.
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And you are fibbing again: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=12475507#post12475507

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=12475510#post12475510


http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=12475518#post12475518
 
David Mo said:
No one claims that the uncertainty of controlled experimentation can be reduced to zero. No matter how close it sometimes gets.
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Good. Then I trust you'll agree that when I deduce things like how far my car can drive when the fuel gauge says it's empty, or make predictions based on that, such as that I don't need to stop at a gas station tomorrow on my way to work, the conditions are controlled enough. It's the same car, with the same engine and mass and aerodynamics, on the same stretch of road I'm making the observation on, the same average speed, etc.

So remind me again, why that's totally exempt from the scientific method for you?

David Mo said:
And the fact that the ways of controlling are different does not detract from the definition of controlled experimentation and the fact it is one of the main requirements of science. Especially those of nature.
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No, that's still just you making things up. You need to control only in as much as it affects the results and, again, in as much as you reasonably CAN. If something doesn't throw the error bar much, or you're ok with the error margin, or you really can't control it, you don't HAVE TO.

E.g., if I measure gravity by throwing a lead ball off the roof, I literally have to control for NOTHING more than the height of the roof. Which is "controlled" only in as much as it's a given for this house.

And there are whole domains even in natural sciences, and indeed "hard sciences" where you can't really control anything other than your detector most of the time. E.g., astrophysics. You don't control when a star goes supernova. You don't control when two black holes collide. You don't control how far away it happens, either. Nor what the conditions may be in the signal's path. (E.g., whether it will get gravity-lensed on the way here.) You just set up your detector and hope to catch some signal. Then you do your best to deal with whatever unforeseen variables happened to be present.

You're mistaking something that is nice to have, for some requirement. Actually, no, you're just redefining the goalposts as you go, as suits your nonsense argument.
 
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David Mo said:
This is idolatry. I have used my wife's hypothesis as an example. An example of a joke that illustrated my point of view. I am sorry that this caused your confusion. You can overlook it if you want. There were other more serious examples.
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You made a terrible analogy and were called on it by several people. You're not doing yourself any favours by suddenly pulling out the passive aggressive "it was just a joke, it's not my fault you didn't get it" defense.
 
For Dave Rogers and Ian S

The following web site states that atoms are largely empty space, and its not the only page that says that.


https://education.jlab.org/qa/how-much-of-an-atom-is-empty-space.html

A hydrogen atom is about 99.9999999999996% empty space. Put another way, if a hydrogen atom were the size of the earth, the proton at its center would be about 200 meters (600 feet) across. While I wouldn't want something that big landing on my head, it's tiny compared to the size of the earth

Why does matter feel solid when atoms are largely empty space.

https://phys.org/news/2017-02-atoms-space-solid.html


https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-81786,00.html

I am not the only one who still thinks of atoms as miniature solar systems which are largely empty, there are plenty of sites which state this.
 
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