Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Was checking some old references and I came across an excellent critique of Scientism. I’m particularly fond of this passage…
Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett assert that “although scientific progress is far from smooth and linear, it never simply oscillates or goes backwards. Every scientific development influences future science, and it never repeats itself.” Alas, in the thirty or so years I have been watching, I have observed quite a few scientific sub-fields oscillating happily and showing every sign of continuing to do so for the foreseeable future. The history of science provides examples of the eventual discarding of erroneous theories. But we should not be overly confident that such self-correction will inevitably occur, nor that the institutional mechanisms of science will be so robust as to preclude the occurrence of long dark ages in which false theories hold sway.
The fundamental problem raised by the identification of “good science” with “institutional science” is that it assumes the practitioners of science to be inherently exempt, at least in the long term, from the corrupting influences that affect all other human practices and institutions. Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett explicitly state that most human institutions, including “governments, political parties, churches, firms, NGOs, ethnic associations, families…are hardly epistemically reliable at all.” However, “our grounding assumption is that the specific institutional processes of science have inductively established peculiar epistemic reliability.” This assumption is at best naïve and at worst dangerous. If any human institution is held to be exempt from the petty, self-serving, and corrupting motivations that plague us all, the result will almost inevitably be the creation of a priestly caste demanding adulation and required to answer to no one but itself. [emphasis mine]
Ya wanna really hit ’em where they live here, point out that on this concern Christianity is way ahead of what is commonly called “science.” It’s true. It has, if nothing else, the requisite humility, the acknowledgment that everyone descended from Adam is flawed.
One can bear that in mind, or not, but the beneficial understanding here is the necessity involved in doing so.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
A lot of America’s problems — perhaps the vast majority– could be solved if the Left half of our countrymen grokked that identities are contextual. For example, the Internet Tough Guy. Everyone laughs at them, even other Internet Tough Guys (which shows that everyone is capable of grasping the concept). That’s because we all realize, at some level, that the ITG will never actually encounter the ass he’s threatening to kick. And from there, we all — even the Left — assume that the ITG is just posturing, just projecting, and would of course run away from a real fight….
So why can’t they see it with every other social role?
A scientist isn’t just a Scientist, capital-S. He’s also a father, a friend, a taxpayer, a Jets fan, a rock-climbing enthusiast, a stamp collector, and a million other things. Not all of them are strictly compatible with each other, but it doesn’t matter, because people are good at compartmentalizing their identities — see the Internet Tough Guy, above. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that while the scientist may be (or thinks he is) dedicated to objective truth in the abstract, in his role of Scientist, he’s also a workaday joe with a wife and kids and a mortgage, just like the rest of us. So if he has every material incentive to “massage” the “truth,” and works among people with a proven track record of massaging the “truth,” and furthermore knows he will be lauded far and wide for massaging the “truth” (and vilified for not massaging it), then it’s reasonable to conclude — based on our knowledge of human persons and their quirks — that in this particular case, yes, he’s “massaging” the “truth.”
We must’ve gone 1,000 rounds with your idiot Cuttlefish collective on this point. They’d concede that scientists can make mistakes, be biased, etc., but could never manage to provide an actual documented instance.
- Severian | 08/17/2018 @ 08:20