Science is Broken
 

1. Science is in a state of decay due to corruption.
Science sets the standards of rationality for society.
What happens to science will happen to all of society.
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2. Engineering and technology are not science.
They produce a product which tests the result.
The only product of science is knowledge, which is
too abstract and illusive to resist corruption.
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3. Here's how junk science works.
It's analogous to Joe and Sam growing potatoes.
Joe wears brown shoes, and Sam black shoes.
Joe gets five kilograms per square meter, and Sam gets six.
Therefore, wearing black shoes will produce a better yield than wearing brown shoes.
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4. The latest fraud in Washington is outcome-directed science.
It destroys discovery research, because discoveries cannot be dictated.
Real progress stems from finding new ways of acquiring information,
and the results are not predictable and cannot be directed.
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5. Corrupters promote fraud for the sake of fraud, because they can arbitrate fraud,
and it destroys the rationality needed by more competent persons.
You control people through fraud, not through truth.
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6. Science is being corrupted by putting end results above standards.
Getting an end result is not the purpose of science.
Producing objective standards of measurement is the purpose of science.

Much much more on;
The Science of Global Warming
Energy Misdefined
Prions as Junk Science
The Biology of Anthrax
The Truth about Relativity
Big Bang Theory
Phenotypic Variation
Intelligent Design
Asteroid and Dinosaurs
ATP Theory
Cancer and Evolution
The Cause of Heart Disease
The Stealth Diseases
Geology of Soil Origins
Heat in the Earth's Core
The Cause of Tornadoes
Windmill Efficiency
Transgenic Crops
Fluoride in Drinking Water
Morel Mushroom Evolution

Nice site. Does this have anything to do with the triumph of professionalism over amateurism?

Bruce is starting a rumble. :) This could be amusing.

Meanwhile, in Brazil recently, a team of scientists reported that they discovered tick saliva kills cancer cells while ignoring healthy cells.

Something they stumbled across while doing other experiments with tick saliva, and decided to investigate more deeply.

I thought the punchline was going to be that this was written by the Unabomber or something.

so. magic anyone?

My mother drinks orange juice.

This is how my friend and I remembered, in Psych 100, the four requirements for a science. It must be materialistic, mechanistic, deterministic, and objective.

That's all I know.

... and orange?
Oh wait, I get it. It's something to do with juice, right?

Yeah...wait...whut? :confused:

Nor is medicine a science, a fact that routinely evades notice.

It's interesting to me that both medicine and engineering have well defined methods of their own, and benefit from not being confused with science, just as science benefits from being understood on its own terms, and yet the confusion persists.

I think much of the confusion stems from scientifically illiterate managerialism and the marketing of a profitable but incorrect idea of science to the public.

On Intelligent Design, I also think there's a degree of fundamentalism in the atheist camp. I think Richard Dawkins might be an example. However, I understand the frustration of biologists when confronted with the duplicitous and obfuscatory tactics of Creationists.

But I think there are deeper grounds for a scientific rejection of ID than that of distinguishing randomness from predictability. That's a mathematical problem anyway. What makes ID unscientific is the principle of parsimony, and also the problem of who designed the designer? Darwin's dangerous idea by Daniel Dennett is the best exposition I know of on this subject.

On my own agenda, here's a recent example of the suppression of science that rivals the trial of Galileo.
Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman: Politically Incorrect - Scientifically Correct

re: #s 4, 5, and 6:

Have you met Dr Nathan Null?

Pah! I love Dawkins. I find him fascinating and compelling.


@ V: that's damn funny.

There's too much of politics and profit involved for pure science to exist anymore. Politics, be it relgious politics, social politics, or even scientific politics, starts with the desired end, then tries to cobble up "evidence" to bear out the goal of the vested interests. This is *not* the same as having a hypothesis, and then testing it dispassionately. There's damn little recognition anymore of the fact that, when you do pure science, you eventually come up with something that can be commoditized, socialized or theocratized anyway.

It's all backwards. Everything is backwards these days.

Don't get me wrong. He's a genius.

And yeah, so is Trudeau!

I can understand anybody feeling that way, but I think it's a little pessimistic. I know a lot of scientists, and despite their constant struggle for funds, most manage to do real science and remain driven by curiosity rather than agenda.

While I don't disagree with Richard Dawkins' ideas related to science, I think he is as bad as the religious fundamentalists that he criticises in terms of intolerance and this makes me furious.

He is fighting an uphill battle in which religion gets a free pass. Bear in mind he comes from a country in which all state schools must, by law, be 'run along broadly Christian principles' and in which religious studies are an obligatory part of the syllabus. At the same time, fewer and fewer children are electing to take sciences in their post-14 options. Meanwhile, along with the spread of evangelical Christianity (it is the only branch of Christianity which is growing in the UK) our government has handed the direct running of many of our secondary schools to 'external sponsors' the largest of which is the Church of England.

I didn't know that. :mad:

Dawkins rocks. He has some of the best interviews I have seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vHZvjxdIx0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25j...layer_embedded

http://www.richarddawkins.net/forum/

True tho. Of course it helps that the Church of England is a religious organisation based primarily on tea, jam and scones :P


@ Merc: that first one says the vid has been removed. Loved that second one.

As much as I have any heros, he's one of mine.....Dawkins, not Merc (sorry Merc:P)

Also worth noting that our state-owned broadcaster (BBC) is under obligation to provide/show a certain amount of religious/spiritual broadcasting; this is meant to cater to a variety of religions but naturally in a broadly 'Christian' country this tends to be mostly Christian with some other stuff to balance it out.

My favourite radio station is BBC Radio4: Sunday mornings there are broadcast services, and 'spiritual messages' such as 'Thought for the Day' and spiritual programmes such as 'Something Understood'. I don't know for sure without a bunch of googling, but I believe science and nature come under the obligation to broadcast educational material. Religion and ethics gets its own separate obligation.

Our Head of State (Queenie) is also our 'Defender of the Faith.'

The House of Lords contains spiritual as well as temporal 'Lords' as it has done ever since it was conceived. This is an active branch of government.

We've had this discussion before, but it's always intrigued me that, whilst we have religion and in particular the Church of England fundamentally entwined in our State, we are nonetheless a peculiarly irreligious bunch. Yet in America, which has a separation of Church and State as a fundamental facet of their nation, is nonetheless a far more religious/spiritual country.

I would be interested to know if there is a country in existence in which science is given that much influence/power, or in which the scientific community is treated with as much inherent and legally sanctioned respect as is a religious body. I have yet to hear someone like Dawkins sound anywhere near as aggressive and shrill as some of the religious lobby. The two are not comparable: Christians who live in a country that is peculiarly theirs adopt the guise of a beleaguered and downtrodden people. Atheists who live in a country that is fundamentally hostile to their views are painted as extremists if they so much as raise their voice.

From

Earlier I posted a link to a discussion of the Rind et. al. controversy. This paper is a much better read in the context of this thread:

When Worlds Collide: Social Science, Politics, and the Rind et al. (1998) Child Sexual Abuse Meta-Analysis
Lilienfeld, Scott O., American Psychologist, Volume 57(3) March 2002 p176–188

One reason why I responded to Cloud's question on paedophilia is that issues that affect me deeply are routinely presented as fact free appeals to emotion and prejudice, even at the highest levels of discourse. I took the opportunity to relate some of my own perspectives and experience in the hope of balancing some perceptions here. As with the authors of these papers, I do not interpret the findings of Rind et. al. as legitimizing or condoning adult/child sex.

I found this comment by Lilienfeld interesting, not least in relation to another thread on this board.

I think Dawkins' determination to locate his critique of religion in scientific terms of reference is closely allied to a defence of consequentialist as opposed to deontological ethics, because he explicitly rejects the role of personal and social belief in reasoning about the world. For example, Kant's metaphysics may not be explicitly religious but it is a transcendental idealism of a kind incompatible with Dawkins realism. Interestingly, Dawkins has also expressed his impatience with exaggerated claims concerning the intrinsic harmfulness of paedophilia.

My own view is that personal and social beliefs and subjective realities exist and are part of the world, and therefore can't be discounted on realist grounds. That is also the basis on which I accept taboos around sexual activity with children. This is a relativist position, contingent on the accident of my social environment. Therefore if I were living in a society that strongly favoured child sacrifice, I expect I would have to defer to that as well...

...or would I? :D

re:Bruce's link - I found this part interesting as well.

.

Of course adding CO2 to the air can be considered environmentally friendly. The short term CO2 cycle on Earth is that plants suck up the CO2 from the atmosphere and store it. Then, when these plants die (or transferred to other animals which eventually die), the resulting decay will release the carbon back into the atmosphere. Since CO2 is needed for plants to grow, it would be somewhat analogous to saying that more food on the planet can be considered human friendly. No shit.

Of course that report may be considering something different but since it is so vague, I must assume the most basic reason.

Also, it is easy to try to disprove "mainstream" ideas because usually mainstream ideas are not entirely correct but just close enough for everyone to understand the concept. For example, from the Science is Broken site....

I am not sure where these statistics are from but this probably has to do with the short term and long term carbon cycles. Decay (assuming the stat is correct) accounts for 97% of the added CO2 but since decay comes from plants that have already taken CO2 out of the air to grow, the overall increase in CO2 is zero.

Humans, on the other hand, take carbon out of the ground, which would be considered the long term carbon cycle because the process from air carbon to coal carbon back to air carbon takes millions of years.


http://nov55.com/logic.html

No legitimate scientist would EVER say that we are in a fixed state. The Earth is constantly changing and many different fluctuations occur ranging from the temperature rise and fall between day and night to the million year long continent cycle. But, Earth is constantly in an equilibrium. That is a fact because equilibrium is always necessary.

But the problem is that the Earth is extremely nihilistic. It won't care if 95% of the species get wiped out because they will inevitably be replaced by new ones. That means, if Earth's conditions are changed enough, then the new equilibrium could produce an environment that is greatly hurtful to human existence.

That being said, the human increase in carbon from the ground to the air could cause a change in the equilibrium, which could be hurtful to humans.


Note: I am not using that as an argument for human caused global warming but just showing how many logic holes are present in that web site. Many of them just "disprove" statements that are not necessarily held by the scientific community. Essentially, a strawman.

Ok, where can I sign up? :rolleyes:

(On second thought, I'll bake my own scones.)

No, not a strawman. Disproving statements that have been fed to the public, through the media, by the greenies. Shit, even advertisements are full of carbon footprint/global warming reminders. If you repeat a lie often enough... :rolleyes:

I was just going to say the same thing!

He is a fanatic in the other extreme and that is a fact.

If this site is reactionary to mainstream beliefs and not beliefs held in the scientific community, why is the site named "Science is Broken"? The entire point of the site is trying to show that the scientific community is corrupt and has an agenda while trying to disprove beliefs held by the public, not the scientific community. That is an argument flaw and a strawman. If the site was trying to disprove common misconceptions about global warming, I would agree that the arguments are not strawmen, but since it is an attempt to disprove the scientific community with public misconception, it becomes one.

The common misconceptions about global warming are stemming from broken science, "scientists" with an agenda, that honest scientists can't refute without risking their funding and careers.

Cake or death?

Every time I see this thread title, I get that damn Cat Stevens song in my head.

Well said Bruce - To that end, what if the media decides what "science" will be newsworthy...

You hear "morning has broken", I hear "silence is golden"
What makes you say that support for global warming is "misconceptions" from "broken science", and infer that the scientists who interpret data that way are dishonest? I haven't seen irrefutable proof either way.

Thats the point, I believe. There is no irrefutable proof, yet many people are acting as though there is. Why is that?

That has more to do with our media setup as a whole instead of science because that is applicable to politics, economics, etc as well. Legitimate political analysis share very little with the views being spewed by CNN or FOX News, which would be considered mainstream. Economics works the same way as well. While I won't disagree that political forces influence environmental science, the biggest problem is that the mainstream gets their news from second or third hand sources and not first. So, if a scientist writes a paper that goes against the common misconceptions, it just won't pick up steam because the people with agendas (people with money and power) won't publicize it to a mainstream audience.

While skimming the website, the only name I saw was Al Gore. That would be like blaming the entire US political science field because Bill O'Reilly has the largest influence. As I said, I won't disagree that their are large flaws with agendas and science, but the largest problem I see is the communication between science and the mainstream, not the actual science itself. And that website does not address that issue at all.

I wish they'd quit the bullshit and just say we've got to develop alternative energy because we're going to run out of oil. When that happens the price of energy (and everything else) will skyrocket, and wars will be fought for what's left.
So we should use oil only for what's essential, like NASCAR. :haha:

Fuck NASCAR, they can switch to these.

So if they take off the electronic governor, what's the top speed? And this is the first generation of the Tesla.