In general, opinion of experts matters from intrinsic perspective only. But just because experts are specialized to narrow area of their private interest, they're not overmuch qualified in judging of their opinions in wider context - on the contrary, they tend to occupy their stances rather blindly - the more, the more they feel being an experts in given area. In this context the reading of articles The era of expert failure by Arnold Kling, Why experts are usually wrong by David H. Freeman and Why the experts missed the crash by Phill Tetlock (in Czech) may be useful not only for Lubos Motl.
Niels Bohr: "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field".
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Stigler's law of eponymy is a process proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in his 1980 publication "Stigler’s law of eponymy". In its simplest and strongest form it says: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.". Stigler attributes its discovery to sociologist Robert K. Merton (which makes the law self-referencing).
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Actually it's not so surprising, because people, who are thinking intuitively (and actually inventing stuffs) are rather bad in formalization or realization of their ideas - so they're not presenting their finding in a way, which is accepted by mainstream science, at least in the time, when this idea was originally proposed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_Stigler%27s_law
Be wary of the righteous rationalist: We should reject Sam Harris's
claim that science can be a moral guidepost
There is an old paper by Luigi Foschini about the problem of interpretation of quantum physics which has raised a discussion about the effectiveness of science and its limits:
Is Science going through a critical stage? (PDF)
The bias for positive results is a complete shame - future scientists will laugh at us..
Here are two journals that publish null results, the second being more established than the first.
http://www.jasnh.com/
http://www.jnrbm.com/
Scientists tend to publish positive, rather then negative articles (these denying existing theories the less)
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010271
As the result, scientists tend to publish unoriginal research (with many references to earlier work), rather then new, potentially controversial research (with few references to earlier work).
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100813/full/news.2010.406.html
Why they're doing so? Because they're payed for references, not for the originality of research. As the result, the physicists are refuting to work on the topics, which don't play well with their existing theories and they tend to research topics, which are supporting them. The Wired article demonstrates it well for the case of cold fusion research:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/coldfusion_pr.html
It's basically the same selfreinforcing mechanism, like this one disputed here:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-ut-professor-economic-inequality-self-reinforcing.html
Every large community postulates its own rules, which are enabling it to grow faster despite the rest of society. The laws developed politicians are primarily protecting the government, the principles of scientific work and grant system are following the interests of scientists, not the rest of society.
The current publication system is slowing down scientific innovation, but not only this.
1. It discourages the replication of results due to a lack of novelty, although replicability is considered to be a fundamental pillar of modern science.
2. Many journals tend not to publish papers which contradict previously published results, since this may question the editorial process. If controversial contributions are not rejected by the editorial desk, they are often stopped by the referees.
3. Most journals do not publish commentaries or methodological contributions which could point out weaknesses of current results and questions (“grand challenges”) which should be addressed.
4. It is almost impossible to publish negative results, i.e. studies that did not deliver the results one was looking for. However, describing a model or experiment that failed would avoid similarly fruitless attempts and could help to identify successful variants more quickly.
Trolls are like longitudinal underwater waves, forming annoying noise at the water surface, whereas the strictly formally thinking experts are like transverse waves spreading along water surface. At the distance these waves converge mutually, so that the every sufficiently farseeing genius is indistinguishable from cretin.
Frank Poe's law: "Any sufficiently fundamentalistic stance becomes indistinguishable from its parody" (examples)
Arthur E. Clarke's law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from medieval magic"
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
The Poe's law (in which every sufficiently fundamentalistic stance becomes indistinguishable from its parody) and/or Asimov's law (in which every sufficiently advanced theory or technology is indistinguishable from ancient medieval magic) are not accidental at all - but a theorems of AWT model.
For example, with increasing level of formalism the advanced theories of string theorists are becoming as fuzzy and untestable, like the incomprehensible implications of modern philosophers (Martin Heidegger). AWT just explains, why is it so and why both group of thinkers converge to the same outcome undeniably, although they're using completely different tools for it.
At the water surface the strictly causal background independent transverse waves (which are representing strictly formal approach here) are gradually becoming as fuzzy, as the underwater longitudinal waves (which are representing holistic approach of philosophers) and their spreading converges into fuzzy noise from sufficient distance from observer. This can serve as an illustrative physical model of the dichotomy in evolution of human understanding.
Why anthropology is ‘true’ even if it is not ‘science’.
"The opposite of ‘science’ is not ‘nihilistic postmodernism’, it’s ‘an enormously huge range of forms of scholarship, many of which are completely and totally committed to accuracy and impartiality in the knowledge claims they make, thank you very much’."
The same applies to another area of science, for example physics, which is very dogmatic too, because of the lack of reliable data for verification. The symptomatic aspect of this intellectual crisis is, young scientists are becoming more conservative, then these elderly ones, because their conformist thinking is carrier driven.
Albert Einstein: "The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer".
In 1977 Michael Mahoney found that journal reviewer evaluations depend on a paper’s conclusion, not just its methods:
75 journal reviewers were asked to referee manuscripts which described identical experimental procedures but which reported positive, negative, mixed, or no results. In addition to showing poor interrater agreement, reviewers were strongly biased against manuscripts which reported results contrary to their theoretical perspective.
It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
Abstract
An article on the "decline effect" in science. How research might initially favor grandiose claims only to latter discover they're unsubstantia
As cold fusion events demonstrate, modern science is ruled by conformity, not the search for scientific truth
"It all reminds me of the discovery of cold fusion in 1989 by Fleishmann and Pons, who were widely ridiculed by the arrogant hot fusion researchers who tried to destroy the credibility (and careers) of cold fusion researchers. After the very idea of "cold fusion" was attacked and demolished by these arrogant scientists, it soon returned under a new name: Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR).
LENR has now been verified as true by none other than the U.S. Navy -- along with hundreds of other researchers around the world (see link above). And yet, even today, the conventional scientific community still insists cold fusion doesn't exist and cold fusion researchers are frauds.
Time to democratise science + Sabine's comment
The incoming GOP majority has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets Americans propose government programs for termination. YouCut's first target was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation.
In praise of scientific error
Excessive caution more damaging to science than mistakes
The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time.
Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.
Does Peer Review Work?
Peer review is important for professional scientific community, as it should prohibit earning money with complete BSs. But for truly innovative and independent scientists its just a brake of evolution, as Einstein already noted. BTW Most of string theory publications were presented just at ArXiv, simply because of lack of independent reviewers.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/43691
Peer review cannot work well under the situation, when the density of informations and the degree of specialization increases up to level, only experts which are very close to authors can judge their article in qualified way. It violates the anonymity of referees and their objectiveness undeniably. The problem is, scientific community needs to decide about grant and money flow faster, then the completely objective process could enable. In general, I'd recommend, the works of independent researchers shouldn't be a subject of peer review. Only if scientists need a money from the rest of community for their research, they should accept rules of this community. The more public money is involved into research, the more strict should be its rules for publication.
For example, I'm developing AWT in my free time, I don't require money of tax payers for it - so it's solely in my competence to decide, where and how I will present it. Of course, professional scientists don't like it, because of my dumping price policy, but this is a life. Every community needs a competition from outside, or it will degenerate in less or more distant future. Actually I'm helping to increase effectiveness of scientific work for my own money, thus helping whole civilization.
John Allen Paulos - The Decline Effect and Why Scientific 'Truth' So Often Turns Out Wrong.
In AWT (dense aether theory) this phenomena can be real emergent nature and it manifests like switching into dual opinion, when the density of facts increases certain level. It's analogous to dispersive spreading of waves at the water surface, which is switching its character with distance from longitudinal into transverse waves and back into longitudinal waves again. It corresponds the layered fractally nested character of Universe and observable reality.
For example, from terrestrial perspective the epicycle model of solar system appears relevant. With increasing scope this model has been replaced with heliocentric model but now the evolution of galactic arms can be described with epicycle model again. It's just the number of observable objects, which makes epicycle or heliocentric model more relevant.
After all, the acceptation/refusal of aether model is of the same emergent evolution. Before some time old Greeks believed in Aether, later (Newton) this concept has been replaced with concept of absolute space. In 19th century the aether based models were quite popular again, but they're were replaced later with relativity model of space-time. Now the aether model is returning into physics again with model of Higgs field, which is responsible for particle mass.
http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-ancient-physics-was-reborn.html
Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles.
Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments
Maybe journalists cannot guess the scientific truth, but you can!
arXiv vs. snarXiv game
The Science of Right and Wrong
Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science: based on a review of the past data ... some of these claims are no longer valid and can delay understanding of contemporary women's underrepresentation.
"When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in confederacy against him."
Jonathan Swift
When people can learn what others think, the wisdom of crowds may veer towards ignorance
Efimov states are example of anyons, which are still searched with mainstream physicists, because one half of physicists apparently doesn't understand, what the second one does...
www.livescience.com/9776-strange-physical-theory-proved-40-years.html
www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-acrobatics-anyons-elusive-fundamental-particle.html
Is modern physics rotting?
Crazy Research The U.S. Government Is Funding
An essay by Freeman Dyson on the missed opportunities in science: "The progress of both mathematics and physics has in the past been
seriously retarded by our unwillingness to listen to one another."
Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit, Do Physicists Make the World a Better Place?
Physicists could indeed make the world the better place, but they're failing to do so. Most of their activities is serving for physicists itself and they tend to ignore really useful findings (cold fusion, antigravity, room superconductivity, ZPE devices) on behalf of useless and even redundant concepts (Higgs boson, WIMPS, gravitational waves, string theory). They're driven with tendency to continue in research, rather than to reconcile their theories, as R. Wilson (a former boss of APS) pregantly expressed in his famous memo.
Therefore I'm not really sure, if physicists are really doing world better, than the people of other occupations (politicians, lawyers, people of big pharma companies), which are indeed important too, but overly motivated with interests of their own community
When math and science rule the school In his article “Dehumanized,” Mark Slouka argues that the US
education’s focus on math and science and the neglect of the humanities spell the demise of democracy. The American education’s “long running affair with math and science”
is “obsessive, exclusionary” and “altogether unhealthy.” And that is because the ways of science are “often dramatically anti-democratic.”
Albert Einstein: "The greatest obstacle to understanding reality is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge." (Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit, 1901). Then he rejected the quantum mechanics.
It's no secret, the peer-review process is in crisis by now. I do perceive it as a structural problem of information explosion. Due the high specialization the peer-review cannot be anonymous anymore, which leads into formation of hidden coalitions and/or blind negativism at the case of competition. Because the mainstream science is payed from research from public money, it definitely needs the feedback to avoid open frauds. I just believe, this feedback must be more opened and public too. It will enable not only to check submitters, but their reviewers too. It would require, all informations must be published at preprint servers first to remove the priority problems. It would lead into lost of influence of mainstream journals, because most of information will be possible to find outside of them. Apparently, just the existence of these journals which guarantee the quality of peer-review process is the largest brake of its further improvement.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin (Feb. 1998) "When you're one step ahead of the crowd you're a genius. When you're two steps ahead, you're a crackpot."
reason versus utter crap (source)
Albert Einstein: Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. (Zdravý smysl je hromada předsudků, kterou hromadíme do osmnácti let.)
The Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist
"Also, one last thing. Don’t compare yourself to Galileo. You are not Galileo. Honestly, you’re not. Dude, seriously." Just because I'm not a Galileo, such comparison is available for me. If I would be a Galileo, I couldn't compare to myself.
We should warn against science journalism, a make-believe world where every story is a breakthrough and every upcoming result is an "answer."
Michio Kaku: How physics got fat (and why we weed to sing for our supper)
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, (Feb. 1998): "When you're one step ahead of the crowd you're a genius. When you're two steps ahead, you're a crackpot."
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860): "All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident."
We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research
Infographics: S.O.S. - Stop Out-of-Control Science. If we can have three Asimov's laws of robotics - why couldn't we apply them to scientists? Aren't the scientists supposed to serve their civilization less reliably than the robots? After all, the robot's can be financed with private companies - but the scientific research is mostly payed with tax payers directly.
It's no secret that graduate education, in the United States at least, has become little more than a Ponzi scheme, where less than half of graduate candidates find gainful employment after their PhD's.
The New Yorker: That the Smarter People Are, the More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive Bias
Carlo Rovelli: Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking.
Consider Yourself an Expert? Think Again
In accordance to recent study having children tends to slow the career progress of women physicists but not that of their male counterparts. To generate the data that produced this graph, a global survey analyzed responses from some 15 000 physicists to compare their career progress with that of their colleagues.
How/whether science blog posts should be cited in academic journals.
Features of crackpot science
All crackpottery is foundational. Crackpots do not go for the small problems
Most physics crackpots are engineers. As this may be the only kind of cursus that provides one with enough math background to understand the equations and formulae in the textbooks without actually studying maths and physics.
All crackpots are male. There used to be the one lady valiantly posting ‘quantum physics disproved’ webpages but she recently died. Perhaps this extraordinary sex-ratio is explained by point [2] above.
Crackpots ignore other crackpots. In the crackpot’s worldview, there is ego with an enormously important discovery vs. the monolithic community of “establishment physics”.
The crackpot theory is invariably more intuitive than the standard one.
In the same way, the crackpot alternative is, almost universally, less mathematically challenging than the standard account. Tensors and other complicated tools of SR are replaced with college-level calculus.
The crackpot theory is based on textbooks. Most of my cranks cite virtually no recent publications in physics. The reason for this obsession with particular studies is that those are invariably cited by textbooks where the cranks get their scientific training.
Science journalism: Let's talk about sex: examples 1, 2
Social rejection can fuel imaginative thinking
Terry Rudolph on Nature versus Nurture - story about how a paper was partly rejected by Nature, because it had been posted previously on the ArXiv
Polling the experts, you might want to check out the YouTube documentary, "The Trouble with Experts"
Scientists, journals, and science journalists behaving badly
Zen . . . And the Art of Debunkery Crackpot index Anticrackpot index (Wiki)
Brian Josephson lecture: Limitations and Pathology in the Scientific Process
Teaching Science with Pseudoscience
“Split chores cause divorce!” rooting out sensationalism in science journalism..
The US Supreme Court has recently been wrestling with the issues of the acceptability and reliability of scientific evidence. In its judgement in the case of Daubert versus Merrell Dow, the Court attempted to set guidelines for US judges to follow when listening to scientific experts. Whether or not findings had been published in a peer-reviewed journal provided one important criterion. But in a key caveat, the Court emphasized that peer review might sometimes be flawed and therefore this criterion was not unequivocal evidence of validity or otherwise. A recent analysis of peer review adds to this controversy by identifying an alarming lack of correlation between reviewers' recommendations.
M. Crichton: "Today, the methods for exacting consensus have changed but the result could be the same: The death of the spirit. The use and abuse of "consensus science" is at least partially responsible for the current crisis in the scientific and medical peer review system. Although peer review may be considered one of the sacred pillars of the scientific edifice, it has been under fire for some time now because peer review controls access to publications and funding, thus bringing the problem into sharp focus." "...consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E = mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way"
Galileo Galilei: "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. "
Gilbert Keith Chesterton: "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." For experts the subject of their interest is often selfreferencing and therefore without problem. Such a problem arise only in confrontation with another theory or phenomena, not described with their pet theory.
Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword: Why mathematicians and scientists don’t like philosophy but do it anyway.
Online comments hurt science understanding, study finds
Crowd funding for crank physics: A new design for bicycle cranks violates basic principles of physics, but that's not stopping the inventor of Z-Torque cranks from trying to raise thousands in start-up capital through crowd funding.
A survey of leading thinkers shows that they are as far as ever from agreeing on the nature of reality: quantum computer expectations
Dean Keith Simonton fears that surprising originality in the natural sciences is a thing of the past, as vast teams finesse knowledge rather than create disciplines.
As Mark Twain said: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.". Are you under the spell of media hypnosis? Take this simple test and find out - Mike Adams goes on to show how the media uses hypnotic methods to get people to along with the "official story."
Roland Benabou in "groupthink: collective delusion in organization and market" and "patterns of denial" describe a good model. Or course, a good denialist will bend the conclusion to reject inconvenient fact and justify others delusion... No hope. As usual all will be done by the market, neither by science community, nor by government. This is coherent with the innovator theory of Norbert Alter, with real history of steam engine, plane, radium. No reason to blame anybody except our naiveness.
Believe it or not; pseudoscience provides the perfect launch pad for logical thought, says Dr Paul Willis.
It's not accidental, because most of pseudoscience is actually a protoscience, which just tries to explain the existing phenomena logically instead of with using of formal numerical regression of abstract theories. Because these theories don't often mean less or more, than the extrapolation of experimental facts with some kind of curve (no matter how complex it is), which has nothing to do with actual understanding of these facts. In dense aether model the intuitive understanding is dual to the formal one and it corresponds the mediation of information in form of longitudinal waves trough casual space instead of transverse waves. Both types of waves are complementary in particle environment (the system of many facts serves here as a scalar tautologies in causal space, i.e. like the particles).
[url=http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/02/debate-science-literature-false-fraud-error]Chemistry World editorial encourages scientific debate[/url] about ‘Bad Science’ and cites cold fusion during it. Scientists are behaving like priests saying "trust me im a scientist" and similarly pontificating about their certainty...and denegrating any who disagree. Scientists are behaving like priests saying "trust me im a scientist" and similarly pontificating about their certainty...and denigrating any who disagree. In many cases such a skepticism just a manifestation of primitive fear of competition from the side of more insightful people. They want to deny, not just to disprove the uncomfortable opinions.
The cult of genius, Scientific genius is extinct, Why no new Einstein
Study finds an bias against accents
Aldous Huxley: about consistency
Does “Science” Make You Moral? The Effects of Priming Science on Moral Judgments and Behavior
"It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom." // "I'd rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right." -- Albert Einstein
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." The name refers to Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the general concept is much older. The observation has also been called "Davis' law" or just the "journalistic principle."
Many findings of recent era are closed into treasuries, just because they're useful and not least of all, weaponizable (1, 2, 3)
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller
Why is Science Behind a Paywall?
Feynman: Take the world from another point of view (transcript).
Bankrupting Physics: How Today's Top Scientists are Gambling Away Their Credibility, Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth
I personally disagree. As Werner Braun once said , "the basic research is when I am doing what I don't know what I am doing". Once you know it, then it's not a research anymore, but a stamp collection. Or do you believe, that the research of superconductivity or dark matter is impossible, just because we still have no reliable theory for these phenomena developed yet? In addition, it's not a true, that the cold fusion has not theoretical support - the problem actually is the quite opposite: we have too many theories for it in this moment. http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/Theories/LENR-and-Cold-Fusion-Theory-Index.shtml
"It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom." // "I'd rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right." -- Albert Einstein
An attempt for vindication of incompetency of mainstream health science: It is risky to oversimplify science for the sake of a clear public-health message
Albert Einstein: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."
The problem with reductionism, Laughlin says, is that it’s susceptible to “Dark Corollaries”, which obscure the inconclusive nature of many experiments. One of these corollaries he has dubbed ‘the Deceitful Turkey’, to describe the phantom breakthrough that feels so tantalisingly close but will always be beyond one’s grasp, no matter what computer power or technology is at hand.
Average physicist life-cycle (original)
Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
Armstrong formulated what he called "the author's formula", a set of rules that authors should use to increase the likelihood and speed of acceptance of their manuscripts.
Authors should:
(1) not pick an important problem,
(2) not challenge existing beliefs,
(3) not obtain surprising results,
(4) not use simple methods,
(5) not provide full disclosure, and
(6) not write clearly.
Armstrong, J. S. (1982). Barriers to scientific contributions: the author's formula. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5, 197-199, referenced by http://vixra.org/abs/0907.0020
The professors now protesting the onset of the Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) have a lot in common with the Luddites two centuries ago. Luddites were 19th-century
English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” – Richard Feynman
G. Pollack lecture: Why/how does the scientific enterprise discourage radical ideas?
How 'big science' stifles discovery
The Case against Public Science The society should bribe the scientists so that their discoveries are more likely to be used to benefit the society and not against it. If we realize, that the actual findings and practical application come just from private research - if not garage scientists - (cold fusion) and the results of basic research rather conserve one hundred years misunderstandings, then I'm rather inclined to defund public science as a whole.
Psychologists say 'group-level narcissism' linked to negative attitudes toward immigrants: The community of physicists (and whatever else experts) doesn't like the free thinkers and similar outsiders from the same reason: it's too immersed in its narcissistic perception of its own qualification and level of expertise.
A new study co-authored by an MIT professor suggests that many people are, in fact, heavily influenced by the positive opinions other people express online—but are much less swayed by negative opinions posted in the same venues.
Another problem of anonymous public voting is, the filter based on it affects the visibility of posts for all other readers, so that the spamvoters can manipulate with accessibility of posts by their pleasure. What I recommend instead is to implement the filter of posts and posters at personal basis. It essentially means, when you downvote someone, then his comments will remain hidden just for you. This not only would make the situation for voting trolls more difficult, but it will even eliminate their main motivation for their occasional mass downvoting of selected users. Of course, the other users (newcomers) could still use the black/white lists of trustful users as their default. IMO such a voting system would reflect the actual intersubjective opinion about quality and significance of posters for voting community a much better, so that even the site providers and admins could benefit from more relevant data about posters.
Caveman Science Committee Concludes Fire Does Not Exist (copy), Cold Fusion, heavy criticism of independent tests: Interview with Bo Höistad, it defends the tester E-Cat
Haters gonna hate, study confirms: people who have many negative opinions about things they know were more likely to have negative opinions about things they have not yet encountered.
Science Is Not Your Enemy - but its still enemy of your pocket.
S. Mo Jang of the University of Michigan set out to answer questions: Do people who claim to have a strong understanding of science challenge their views? Do people who claim religious affiliation read scientific studies that oppose their worldview?
Comments can be bad for science. That's why some sites like the PopularScience.com, are shutting them off. Popular Science is owned by the Bonnier Corporation while Popular Mechanics is owned by the Hearst Corporation. Popular Science is a part of the new Cult of Scientism, a dogmatic circle jerk of intellectual bullies, who insist the only "science" that's true is their own selected brand of corporate-sponsored science. All legitimate science is excluded and attacked if it dares question the core beliefs of the Cult of Scientism. Those beliefs include some real whoppers, such as, "Corporate science is the only science that counts," and, "GMOs are safe, even without long-term testing, because we say they are." In this cult "Bad science," is anything that "has failed to convince many mainstream scientists of its truth." This, of course, is nothing more than "mob science" which isn't really science at all. If new science were only recognized once all the existing scientists were convinced of its truth, then science would never have advanced. According to PopSci, then, in 1616, then, the idea that the Earth was spherical would have been considered "bad science."
A thought-terminating cliché is a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance. Though the phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissent or justifying fallacious logic is what makes it thought-terminating. The term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his 1956 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Lifton said, "The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis." In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional constructed language Newspeak is designed to reduce language entirely to a set of thought-terminating clichés. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World society uses thought-terminating clichés in a more conventional manner, most notably in regard to the drug soma as well as modified versions of real-life platitudes, such as, "A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away." Political examples:
"Opposition at any cost!" (Bare assertion fallacy)
"That's racist/sexist/homophobic/heterosexist/anti-semitic!" (Poisoning the well/Begging the question attack).
"That’s just a (liberal/conservative/libertarian/communitarian/etc.) argument." (Association fallacy).
"Socialism or barbarism!" (False Dichotomy)
"'Anarchist organisations', isn't that an oxymoron?" (Equivocation)
"Love it or leave it." (False dichotomy)
"That's a conspiracy theory." <-- This is you.
"Fascist arguments need no comments." (Weasel words)
"You're either with us, or against us."
"Political correctness" or "PC"
"It's political correctness gone mad!"
"It's for the good of the public."
"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" isn't just a maxim for shady politicians and journalists. One study indicates that there may even be a "backfire effect," which happens when you show people facts that contradict their opinions.
Shut up and let me think. Or why you should work on the foundations of quantum mechanics as much as you please
Individualism: the legacy of great physicists It's sorta cheating of system of valuation of scientific work based on citations. The more authors the article has, the more scientists can get their citation. The co-authorship is a common social currency in scientific society.
Science Marketing needs Consumer Feedback
Unfortunately many of today scientists seem to be ignoring the lessons taught to us by Einstein. They chose to look for reality only in terms of abstract mathematics instead of
the physical imagery given to us by the reality of what we can see and touch.
Regarding my recent blurbs about emergence of scientific theories you may find relevant this: “In physics, the complications all condense into an emergent, simpler description,” Sethna said. “In many other fields, this condensation is hidden – but it’s still true that many details don’t matter.”
Predicting academic success in higher education: what’s more important than being smart? Conscientiousness is the best predictor..
Honey bees selectively avoid difficult choices
Method for predicting future h-index comes under fire: Divinations of academic success may be flawed
The role of reality in science: The universe's most powerful enabling tool is not knowledge or understanding but imagination because it extends the reality of one's environment.
Science needs to be more dangerousIn short, scientists need room to propose ideas that could seem too far-fetched or controversial at first glance.
Wired writes about it in connection with cold fusion research:
"In a huge, grandiose convention center I found about 200 extremely conventional-looking scientists, almost all of them male and over 50. In fact some seemed over 70, and I realized why: The younger ones had bailed years ago, fearing career damage from the cold fusion stigma. I have tenure, so I don't have to worry about my reputation," commented physicist George Miley, 65. "But if I were an assistant professor, I would think twice about getting involved." This generation shift trend is supported even with Nobel prize statistics - the elderly physicists are today more successful than these young ones at the beginning of the last century.
Carver Mead: "It is my firm belief that the last seven decades of the twentieth will be characterized in history as the dark ages of theoretical physics."
Was Feynman cognitively lopsided and illiterate?
How to Burst the "Filter Bubble" that Protects Us from Opposing Views Much social research shows that people prefer to receive information that they agree with instead of information that challenges their beliefs. This problem is compounded when social networks recommend content based on what users already like and on what people similar to them also like. This the filter bubble—being surrounded only by people you like and content that you agree with.
Creative Thinking Is Too Often Absent From the Chinese Classroom, a typical lesson in a Chinese classroom
Isaac Asimov who suggested that the cue for discovery in science is not "Eureka! I have it!", but "That's strange..". It seems recently that "That's strange.." is always interpreted as "That's dubious..". It is right that scientists should be skeptical, but pure skepticism is a sterile state.
Michael Brooks: “It is the intuitive understanding, the gut feeling about what the answer should be, that marks the greatest scientists. Whether they fudge their data or not is actually immaterial.”
Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions. Enter Elsevier, stage left. Bioinformatician Guy Leonard is just one of several people to have mentioned on Twitter this morning that Academia.edu took down their papers in response to a notice from Elsevier. Here’s a screengrab of the notification
How the Flawed Journal Review Process Impedes Paradigm Shifting Discoveries
You can order the scientific community to do it whether they wish to do it or not
McArdle, an economist, recently wrote that a substantial fraction of PhD programs really shouldn’t exist. McGowan goes further by pointing out that there is little demand for science and technology PhDs. I can only agree.
Even in a field like computer science, 55% all new PhDs go into industry, rarely landing a research position while less than 7% end up with a tenure-track position in a doctoral-granting school. Yet between 2000 and 2010, in the US, the number of STEM graduate students grew by 30%. Why?
A Data Scientist Explains What Makes A Viral Reddit Post
What scientific idea is ready for retirement? (via Woit's blog) The conservatives are typical by their hypocritical attitude: although they've mouth full of noble ideas about how to falsify the theories, but when their pet theory faces falsification, they just seek for excuses why not to do it. The SUSY and string theory has been falsified so many times in recent past, but what we are listening is just the "narrowing of parameter space".
Should physicists stop looking for fundamental laws?
The Metaphysical Baggage of Physics Lee Smolin argues that time is more fundamental than physical laws.
People show prejudice-based aggression when it’s easily deniable, study finds
The people who are "disengaged" from science are the most likely to think that it creates more problems than it solves and that we should depend more on faith.
The moderators of web discussions have found the troll labeling increasingly useful shorthand for labeling anyone who publishes remarks with which they do not necessarily agree online I'm facing this situation quite often. In particular, the proponents of mainstream physics are getting upset, when they describe the same things, like I did before few years, which they did oppose wildly. It's not surprising, they're trying to cover the evidence of their ignorance. In many cases the scientists are just trying to keep their informational monopoly.
An interesting aspect of this is that most scientists are very good people, very smart, logical, big well developed left brains who tend to have underdeveloped intuitive brains,
which undermines their creativity. Many have no clue about their biases and think they are "logical". Recent neurological science results
are revealing. Not surprisingly, many of the underappreciate the creativity.
In an effort to get a better interaction between speaker and audience, organizers at a biweekly forum on the LHC at Fermilab
banned the use of any Powerpoint presentation by the speaker. My stance is, the interesting physics is interesting with slides or without it.
A study: An optimistic language is a predictor of poor performance of economy.
The phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" in fact originated with Marcello Truzzi. For the record of this record, Truzzy actually did use this quote in exactly the opposite meaning, than Carl Sagan routinely did, i.e. as an common example of fallacious arguments used with pseudoskeptics. His argument was, whereas any number of evidence can serve as proof of theory, just a single experiment is sufficient to disprove it. This stance is supported explicitly with Feynman in his famous address about Cargo cult, where he just said: "It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated."
So if some opinion could threat an established theory, then such an opinion should be considered seriously just because of it, not ignored instead.
Max Born on truth "I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science. On the other hand, any assertion of probability is either right or wrong from the standpoint of the theory on which it is based. This loosening of thinking (Lockerung des Denkens) seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world."
Contrarians bully journal into retracting a climate psychology paper
Early rejection, late ignorance : Trust the data, not the consensus
The power of silence: Nicola Tesla knew it
Einstein [url=http://old.post-gazette.com/healthscience/19980406bstern1.asp]advised the 24 year[/url] old Sternglass to pursue physics on his own and take a “cobbler’s job”. Einstein said that he had made a mistake in going from the patent office in Bern to the University of Berlin, where he had no formal duties.
Why climb the greasy pole?
Getting a job at a top university will not make you a better researcher?
Feynman: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"
Study shows strongly held incorrect beliefs often cannot be changed by disputing facts. Instead, appealing to the sense of self can allow people to be more open-minded.
“Theoretical Physics is a Quest for Simplicity” This blog post is very idealistic if not downright naive.
The contemporary physicists have lotta reasons for to avoid a simple solutions and unification: if nothing else, they're losing perspective of further job with it. The more complex theories we handle, the more theorists can keep their jobs. And as the medieval priests and shamans knew quite well, the complexity deters laymen public from meddlesome feedback of their actual work.
As the result, many theorists adore complexity explicitly. When physicist Leonard Susskind gives talks these days, he often wears a black T-shirt proclaiming “I ♥ Complexity”. In place of the heart is a Mandelbrot set, a fractal pattern widely recognized as a symbol for complexity at its most beautiful.
Logical falacy poster
The phenomenon of smart people being stupid is documented in Robert Sternberg’s Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, which is an excellent but somewhat technical book.
This study fits the above topic quite well: The wisdom of crowds breaks down when people are biased. Now researchers have discovered a simple method of removing this bias–just listen to the most confident. Do I appear confident enough? Do the people who just downvote angrily without arguments appear self-confident? Isn't it just their ego, which appears threatened by now?
The hypothesis of a Hierarchy of the Sciences, predicts that, moving from simple and general phenomena to complex and particular, researchers lose ability to reach theoretical and methodological consensus The bibliometric results suggest, that the Hierarchy of the Sciences provides the best rational framework to understand diversity of scientific disciplines.
Essay about how academics must get used friends when moving elsewhere
Why smart people are stupid
Harry J. Lipkin: Who Ordered Theorists? "I have no patience with social scientists, historians, and philosophers who insist that the “scientific method” is doing experiments to check somebody’s theory. The best physics I have known was done by experimenters who ignored theorists completely and used their own intuitions to explore new domains where no one had looked before. No theorists had told them where and how to look".
Enver Halilovic: Feyerabend's critics of scientism (PDF, in Czech)
Misuse of the Journal Impact Factor and focusing only on citations sucks.
"Philosophical superficiality has harmed physics" according to quantum gravity expert Carlo Rovelli
"Scientists today think deeply rather than clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Todays scientists have substituted
mathematics for experiments, and they wander through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no basis in reality." – Nikola Tesla, 1932.
I think, he would be surprised today with progress, which physicists made in this direction
Is there a creativity deficit in science?
What "scientific consensus" is and what it actually means
Guidelines for respectful, constructive, and inclusive philosophical discussion
Median Lifetime Earnings, by College Major
Quotes against skepticism
>*"Two recent results from other experiments add to the excitement of Run II. The results from Brookhaven's g-minus-two experiments with muons have a straightforward interpretation as signs of supersymmetry. The increasingly interesting results from BABAR at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center add to the importance of B physics in Run II, and also suggest new physics. I will be shocked and disappointed if we don't have at least one major discovery."*
Joseph Lykken, a particle theorist, in an [interview to the Fermilab press office](http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/run2.html), 2001. It is maybe redundant to note that the Tevatron experiments did not produce any major discoveries in Run II...
It would be very useful, if also deeply depressing, to collect all of the statements made by prominent theorists about what various machines were supposed to produce. It could be part of the training of young theorists. He who cannot remember the past is condemned to look like an idiot.
Apparently the mainstream physicists are governmental lobby like any other - when they're expecting investments, they're full of promises. Nobody denies that the mainstream physics evolves, but is such an evolution really faster than the blind trial & check approach? Even the Holy Church accepted the Big Bang, when it exhausted all other options, how to ignore it. How the physicists searched for Higgs boson? They just did scan the whole GeV energy spectrum available. The search for WIMPs or gravitational waves follows the same scenario - when no heavy WIMPs were found, the search continues at other energies as if nothing would happen with existing theories. The gravitational waves are now searched at the GHz scale, when all attempts to detect them at lower energies failed.
Nicola Tesla: "The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments and they wander off through equation after equation and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."
Understanding and accounting for relational context is critical for social neuroscience
Don't Become a Scientist!
Robert Millikan experts 1, 2
The pathology of organized skepticism
Compare also the SciMag article The not-quite-stated, awful truth: Doing a postdoc at a university is a lousy idea because it will neither result in an academic job nor otherwise advance one’s career.
Max Planck: "New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.”
There were five blind men who tried to understand what an elephant was. The first touched the nose, and said that it was like a soft tube. The second touched the big ear, and said it was like a fan (ancient Chinese fans are made of a big piece of palm leaf). The third touched the big leg, and said it was like a pillar. The fourth touched the body, and said it was like a wall. The fifth touched the tail, and said it was like a rope.
The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
Feynman: Knowing versus Understanding
Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people."
Eleanor Roosevelt
US diplomat & reformer (1884 - 1962)
The Internet creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information.
Maybe English isn't their first language. You really don't know. The real question is why do you care so much if it still conveyed meaning and you still understood what it said. But nah, let's be a pedantic grammar nazi, because that's totally not any less annoying than the original grammar mistake.
Charles Kettering, former head of General Motors "First they tell you you're wrong and they can prove it; then they tell you you're right but it isn't important; then they tell you it's important but they knew it all along."
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Becker's Law
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