🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1221@uop.edu> todd@uop.edu (Dr. Nethack) writes:
>In article <2790@gryphon.CTS.COM>, edk@gryphon.CTS.COM (Ed Kaulakis) writes:
>> In article <5017@uwmcsd1.UUCP>, markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) writes:
>> > Read Omni instead of Scientific American.  It's much better because it has 
>> > all things Futuristic in it, be they science fact or science fiction (i.e.
>> > science yet-to-be-fact).
>
>You should have added, "with no distinction between the two"

The only distinction between much science fiction and science fact is the
distinction between past and future.

Science without novelty is ... well another oxymoron.

>
>> It's a world view based on a class of bullshit detectors...
>
>That is not a bad point. Those I know who read (and preach) Omni,
>advocate the removal of your common sense.

This is really cute.  Science demands the removal of your common sense
in many ways.  Another similarity? :-)

The story of bullshit detectors is the story of people getting burned for
saying never and then keeping others from disagreeing by unjustly using
their authority to cover for their ignorance.  Here are a few:

     (1) DeBroglie writes a two page thesis discussing the matter-wave
         duality.  It gets flatly rejected Physicists who really were
	 in no position to judge the paper's contents (with it being
	 only the mid '20's and all.)
	 It took Einstein having seen the paper for it to be rescued.
	 DeBroglie goes on to win a Nobel Prize for his work.

	 Even Einstein was never officially validated for his work
	 in developing Relativity.  No Nobel Prize here.  And even
	 today Physicists get around having to accept the implications
	 of the theory by the old trick: "well Newton was right to a
	 first approximation.", as if gun powder was a first 
	 approximation to a nuclear weapon; or "the engineers will
	 never know the difference.", like computers are made with
	 mechanical gears or something.

     (2) For two hundred years or so, historians rigidly maintain the
         stance that America has remained unknown to the old world
	 until Columbus.  They succeeded in ignoring perfectly valid
	 evidence which they were in no position to evaluate (knowing
	 nothing about old-world cultures or new world cultures, 
	 depending on which way they specialized.)
	 This was true until the mid '70's when the scripts on this
	 continent falsely attributed to the indigenous population
	 were finally deciphered.  This opened the floodgates and
	 all the other evidence dismissed up to that time was
	 finally given a proper evaluation.
	 Many historians still maintain the stance that no longer has any
	 support.  Some have shown there to be racism and Euro-centrism
	 here.

	 One can see why many people just choose not to learn their
	 history (I was not one, since it's one of my major interests)
	 And they still go on denying that the cliff dwellings out in the
	 Southwest could have the remotest connection to the virtually
	 identical dwellings in North Africa ... and the Pima still sing
	 Aesop's fables as they were learned by their ancestors from
	 Alexandrian North Africa,

     (3) For all the time that the bio-medical paradigm has been dominant
	 in the health fields, alternate methods were never considered.
	 Since many of these originated in non-European medical traditions
	 they were usually considered to be "primitive shamanism". One could
	 include here Acupuncture, which is now finally accepted as
	 a valid alternate method.

	 It has taken an anti-trust lawsuit by the chiropractors to finally
	 get it across that the medical establishment's arrogance is 
	 malevolent.
         
	 A stigma had been attached for a long time to the notion that
	 there could be a link between our mind and our immunity.  This
	 had gotten seriously in the way of an objective evaluation of
	 this possibility, again by people who knew next to nothing
	 about the human immune system.
	 And now, we have the "Growth Factors", which have been shown to
	 control the growth and specialization of cells, among other things.
	 In particular, the white blood cell count can be currently controlled.
	 The nature of the mind body link, as discussed by nobel prize winning
	 researchers in this field, may lie in a communication that is 
	 mediated by growth factors.

     (4) Tesla.  Need I say more. There's the famous story of the smear
         campaign by Edison to discredit his idea of AC power that makes
	 me almost want to throw away my lamps and buy strobe lights (like
	 they have in classrooms and institutions).

     (5) In the early '50's the best selling work "Worlds In Collision" was
	 banned by hard-nosed astronomers who knew nothing about what the
	 book was talking about, by their own admission.  Yet they chose
	 to initiate a slur campaign, solely because the man (Velikovsky)
	 threatened the paradign of Gradualism and because he dared to
	 question the Universal validity of Newton's law of gravity.
	 Never mind whether his hypothesis (or paradigm) was tenable or
	 not.  It did not matter.  One can easily see the prejudice
	 that many specialists have when they laugh derisively just
	 at hearing the very idea of worlds colliding.
	 Never mind that the very same kind of hypothesis has been 
	 invoked to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs.

   There's quite a few others, I just don't have the time to go on like this.

   What they all have in common is specialists lashing out at those who are
   threatening the sanctity of what they have spent investing so much time in
   (training).  Maybe if people would learn how not to learn so wastefully
   they would not need to focus their lifelong attention on one narrow
   field to the exclusion of all else.
   That's the problem: they've specialized, so they know practically nothing
   about anything else.  Hence they utterly lack the capabilities to 
   evaluate an outsider's claims on its own terms.

   Specialization is wrong, and also unnecessary.  People just have to learn
   to learn more efficiently to overcome the so-called information 
   explosion (which is really a communication breakdown.)

   Science is filled with bullshit detectors that have not used adequately
   on themselves.

   As the unwritten saying goes: "The current paradigm is never wrong, until
   a better paradigm overtakes it -- only after all of the old proponents die
   off."

    These are the underlying sentiments behind my postings.

    The only rule of science that I can accept is that:
    anything goes, subject to consistency with what actually is.
    Nothing less is acceptable.

    We may not know what actually is, but we sure know when it's consistent.

>Another fine point, science, or shall I say, existence, does not modify
>itself due to our opinions.  How we see it may change, how it is, apart
>from our looking is no different. 

One can go on endlessly speaking about the immutable "outer reality" that
none of us have direct access to.  It's irrelevant, because

(1) It might not be there,
(2) It does not NEED to be there, because we are doing just fine as it is.

... and because we have no direct access to it all of science reduces to
    convention.
    If our opinion changes, then so does reality.  Remember that what is
    real to us consists of the technology that we construct based on
    our knowledge.  As the opinions change, so does it ... then so does
    our reality.  TV's, witness, did not exist until Tesla.

>> That's why I think Omni is a sort of Trojan Horse for the marching morons.

Then I must be the first of the bunch, which is very strange since I'm known
to be highly gifted in many fields with knowledge that is both broad and deep.

And I don't even read OMNI that much, but I find it good.  Fact or fiction,
they are both equally good.  I'm really suprised at how much others are
lashing out a magazine which I think is pretty cool.

Here's one you did not know.  Newton, spurred on by his success in Physics and
Mathematics, then sought to probe into the realms of Astrology, Theology and
other esoteric domains.  The man never changed, but people's hypocritism
made it seem like he did.  I mean, what if he had failed in his Physics
in his Calculus?  Would he have been considered a crank for having 
investigated those Pesudo-Sciences (as they basically were then)?  I think
the question answers itself.

The very question of Astrology itself may lie on the existence of seasonal
mating cycles that are vestigal from our evolutionary ancestors. What kind
of person one is may depend in part on what part of the seasonal cycle the
mother is in during conception.  And yet, despite the fact that this shows
there to be nothing inherently absurd about Astrology, many scientists will
scoff just at hearing the very idea.  How dare they when most know next
to nothing about biology as it relates to the possibility raised above.
It's another case of prejudice leading one to inappropriately use his or
her (but usually his) authority.

>Indeed, I can't stand it's glossy national enquirer approach to the
>stuff it couches in scientific terms. Are we all going to be armchair
>scientific "experts" a-la-Omni?  Lets hope to God NO! 

Pardon me for the analysis, but I see a specialist who feels threatened by
outsiders impringing on his "Sacred" knowledge -- which is why he speaks
of them with such unwarranted hostility.
The mere fact that one specializes (an UNnecessary evil in this society)
is the problem.

>
>I spend more time trying to explain to friends why an article is not
>all that true, or mere speculation.  They keep thinking I am nuts, 

.. maybe they share in my analysis.

>And we wonder why American products and morale are down.. Some of us take
>pride in what we do, the rest seem not to care about anything but money.
>And the rest of us/life/truth/reality be damned.
>
>(hmm, suddenly I feel a soap-box under my feet, better get down before
> I catch cold up here)

Too late to worry about that now :-).