I'M SMARTER THAN THESE FUQKS dammit — Noble Dust

:lol: For sure!!

Don't worry. I'm still trying to figure out tim wood myself.

Don't get me wrong; I'm against stupidity as much as tim wood is! — Noble Dust

Oh not at all. It's obvious. What with the name Noble Dust.

:smile:

ntelligence is (ironically) complex and not unidimensional, and that there's no one way to measure it. — Noble Dust

Quite right! You can say measure again.

:meh: I don't watch tv.

Interpret that as you will — Noble Dust

Okay, cause when I read your post, the first thing that came to mind was you're a mensa-level stupid, but refused to join the club of stupid people. Sorry. I mean we're in the stupid thread after all. :blush:

My broader definition of stupid is unnecessary behavior that makes the world a worse place or has a potential for making the world a worse place, and that covers a very wide range of behaviors. — tim wood

Like the Chernobyl incident and Exxon-Valdez?

Thank g()d I'm mensa-level but choose not to join. — Noble Dust

:halo:

Your manifesto would be more meaningful to me if I thought what you consider stupid and what I do are the same. — T Clark

I haven't read through the entire thread, so I don't know if at one point, it's been defined here. But examples would be helpful -- I mean, is it stupid to be unaware of instances of stupidity? My example is when someone falls for scammers whose antics have been all over the internet or in news coverage.

I prefer love. Do you feel the same? — kudos

I do.

True.


Too many things to put together for the sake of decline theory. So, I'll leave this issue open for now.
I think the fact that Rosenfeld supported Bohr shouldn't muddle what those words say about his atomic postulates.

Ok but it is totally unclear how or why. I have no idea why complimentarity says something about the death of science. I can conjecture a Marxist 'death of science scenario', or an ecological one, but that does not seem to be your point. So right now I am at a loss :) — Tobias

Yeah, someone has to digest for us this idea of complementarity -- with an e, not i.
But don't dwell on this one example. We are trying to make a point here.

Could someone please break this down for us? @Newkomer? or @TenderBar?

@Gary M Washburn, could you help us out?

Thanks.

I found a Marxist defense of complementarity by him when I googled his name and Bohr. — Bylaw

I have a physical copy of his remark. I will type it here. Unfortunately, I think, online we won't find publications for free.

Here's the excerpt:

"The daring (not to say scandalous) character of Bohr's quantum postulate cannot be stressed too strongly: that the frequency of a radiation emitted or absorbed by an atom did not coincide with any frequency of its internal motion must have appeared to most contemporary physicists well-nigh unthinkable. Bohr was fully conscious of this most heretical feature of his considerations: he mentions it with due emphasis in his paper.....[Bohr's remark]"In the necessity of the new assumptions I think that we agree; but do you think such horrid assumptions, as I have used necessary? For the moment I am inclined to most radical ideas and do consider the application of the mechanics as of only formal validity.""

Here's an example. If you go to somewhere like sciforums or any other 'place' where people, including scientists, belief (current) scientific practice is the only route to knowledge, you may well (and I have) encountered people saying things like if (some form of Alternative Medicine) worked, it would be part of regular medicine. Which, implicitly, assumes the independence of the FDA, the objectivity and openness of research, the inablity of corporations to create the conclusions they want, how the incredibly high price of meeting FDA protocols requires patentability, the lack of current paradigmantic biases,.....So, what, yes, is a subset of current scientific research is actually not based on objectively carried out and objectively evaluated (by regulartory bodies or by scientist peers)
the future of any science is threatened, since humans are. I think there is a practical outcome threat. — Bylaw

Okay thank you. This is actually good! That is a critique of scientific methodology, which really is at the heart of the debate. I understand your point.

I did. Maybe you need to re-read my posts like, 5 times?

Can you actually address something I've said? — Bartricks

If you promise to read every damn response I've thrown at ya so far.

Once more: what risk are the unvaccinated posing to the vaccinated? — Bartricks

I did not actually cite that particular issue here -- the unvaccinated. After all, using the HP means employing it on a case by case basis. Slowly now -- it means, if it's about smoking, smoking is an activity that harms, then we go on and explain what the harm is, citing scientific studies. etc. Now when it comes to covid, I meant people who are careless, not wearing masks, or not washing hands, those sort of eeek things.

I see. Maybe you're one of those with no common sense.

@Bartricks note that JS Mill does not condone stretching the Harm Principle to ridiculousness or absurdity. It's called the Common Sense principle. We trust that people who use the Harm Principle are those who also posses common sense.

The Harm Principle -- others can restrict your rights to certain things or activities if those things and activities can physically harm them. Second-hand smoking inside a room with other people, for example, is one of those offenses. It's called negative rights -- one's freedom can be ethically restricted to prevent harm to others. For example covid infection.

@Bartricks
JS Mill's harm and offense principle might help here. In favor of @Xtrix due to the nature of harm being considered in this thread.

Just for convenience, and to make a point, please read the below snippet:

"BOHR’S complementarity principle, first announced by him in his Como
lecture,’ remains a challenge and a puzzle. In the history of scientific thought
it is hard to find another central contribution about which the opinions
continue to differ so sharply more than half a century after its inception. Some
physicists, such as John Wheeler and Leon Rosenfeld, consider complemen-
tarity as the most profound intellectual insight of the twentieth century, as a
pinnacle of physical understanding of nature, no less inevitable than ‘the
emergence of man himself as a product of organic evolution’.* Others criticized
Bohr’s complementarity as an obscure ‘double-think’ that impeded clear
thinking and scientific progress, or as a crutch that initially helped, but was no
longer needed.’
Remarkably, there was much more ambivalence about Bohr’s complemen-
tarity principle in the camp of ‘believers’ themselves than the published sources
disclose. As Dirac expressed it: ‘I never liked complementarity.. . It does not
give us any new formula. . . I believe the last word was not said yet about waves
and particles.’ " -- taken from The Birth of Bohr's Complementarity:...

and we have no way of knowing whether we are in the dawn of science or its dusk. — Tobias

Apparently they do.

I was simply trying out a different avenue, thinking of other ways of how science could cyclically rise and fall. — TheMadFool

Okay please read my post above to Bylaw. Thanks.

I am not sure what your idea is around cycles - perhaps a link? — Bylaw

Bylaw, could you perhaps search for Leon Rosenfeld, in his scathing remark to Niels Bohr's "On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules". It is Leon Rosenfeld we want to examine here first and foremost. Forget about the cycle framework for now, but just please try to read his point.

This request is also for @Gobuddygo -- please look up Leon Rosenfeld. Thanks.

One thing leads to another and these weapons are unleashed, exterminating 99% of the population, all scientists and other experts die in this mass extinction, and we are, voila, back to square one (some say we'll be sent back to the stone age). — TheMadFool

And what did you just try to explain? That scientists are mortal like normal people? We've touched on this -- violence kills, absolute violence kills absolutely! What now? A problem, yes! But hardly metaphysical in nature.

My concern is not at the meme level or even the cycle level. I see the threat to continued existence of those who might use science, as coming through what I batch labelled 'corporations'. — Bylaw

Please see my response to @Gobuddygo above. If you could somehow explain to me how corporations influence or change science -- besides the enterprising part or profiteering -- that would be great.

I am not sure what your idea is around cycles - perhaps a link?. — Bylaw

Please browse Oswald Spengler's writings. I don't have a link but you can look him up. Thanks.

And because of propaganda and a carefully developed education program. It's made more sexy than it is in reality, though it can be great fun, especially the physics of quantum fields and general relativity. And their combination. Or the science of a black hole and Hawing (not Unruh!) radiation. A realcstretch for the mind! Good morning brain excercise. — Gobuddygo

Yes, there is propaganda -- just to inject the uncertainty of quantum fields into the discipline. You are correct to attack the methodology.

An influential strand in the philosophy of science points out the political and economic nature of science. I think such a critique will hit science harder because it attacks the source of its legitimacy, its supposed purety and objectivity. — Tobias

Hi Tobi,

You can critique science on political and economic grounds. But that would be different from the arguments of cycle framework.

The way you desscribe it, to me it seems these criticisms come from an environmental perspective. — Tobias

No, it's metaphysical.

Sure. Naturally-occurring mutations are not brought about by direct manipulation by human scientists. Is that what you had in mind? — Wayfarer

Yes.

And I don’t think it is an artificial distinction. — Wayfarer

No, it isn't an artificial distinction. There's more to it. Please argue from the organic standpoint of evolutionary theory, where the environment provides the basis of life, which ultimately includes mutation.

If there's a use here, I'd like to see it argued for, rather than taken for granted on the basis of some kind of implicit intuition — StreetlightX

Hah! Like minds! I didn't see your post before I posted mine.

The moral qualm I have about creating synthetic animals, as that they are actually animals, not simply mindless Cartesian machines. They're beings, even if not rational, language-using beings. Not that a re-animated mammoth is going to wonder where the f*** it is, but still, something about it seems sinister to me. — Wayfarer

Yes, it is sometimes hard to articulate this notion. My intuition kicks in. Respect and care for animals should be the point.

If Science somehow "decays" as you propose, human beings might as well cease to exist. — TheSoundConspirator

Hi SoundConspirator, do you have a counter-argument against the decline theorist's argument?

No, that post I made is to clarify the point of this thread in general. To emphasize the argument.

I'd like to clarify a few points.

The critique against science, insofar as the decline theorists are concerned, has always been metaphysical. That is, they are arguing about the very essence of science. How else can something be destroyed, but through the demolition of its very essence. Science has qualities essential to it.

While influences outside it from different schools of thoughts or political thoughts, even economic, have been..well.. influential in shaping the scientific research and development, those are not the object of their criticisms. The scientific decline theorists are, after all, philosophers. And being philosophers, they try to maintain the proper parameter within which to attack science.

If you want to be taken seriously, play intelligently.

Another thing I want to stress is that these same theorists show a high degree of respect for disciplines such as the scientific psychology. They are pragmatists and empiricists. They recognize the delineation between the cultural, organic, and behavioral on the one hand, and the atomistic world on the other. And here we can understand why they reject the increasingly mechanistic view of reality. When everything and anything is reduced to bare bones formulations, with the occasional corollary here and there, one can start to wonder whether scientists and the natural world are now the casualty.

Science has always been about a clockwork, deterministic, universe and, from what I can gather, its main selling point is the precision (to the 10th decimal place I'm told) of its predictions. Science, if it could speak, is telling us, "surely, if my predictions are that precise, I couldn't be wrong." — TheMadFool

True. And let's be careful not to confuse precision or exactitude with mechanistic.

↪Caldwell
Corporate control of research. Corporate control of scientific journals. Corporate control over regulatory bodies (IOW poor science, biased science being approved by bodies that are not objective or independent). Corporate control of media - which then can marginalize ideas, research, criticism and scientific debate that might undermine corporate research. — Bylaw

While I don't deny this corporate reality, this is not what a true cycle theorist points to in their criticism of science. Maybe this comes as a surprise. Although, I agree that it does indirectly affect science.

Here is a response which captures the nature of the root of destruction that end-of-science theorists have been arguing about:

Speaking for myself, if I were an old-school scientist - the kind who are hardcore physicalists - I'd be worried about Quantum Physics and how it seems susceptible to pseudoscientific interpretations as can be found in books like The Tao Of Physics by physicist Fritjof Capra and also in the numerous books authored by people of the same ilk as Deepak Chopra. Quantum physics seems to be asymptotically approaching what scientists have gone on record to decry as woo-woo viz. mysticism Quantum Physics, if scientists aren't careful, will be the undoing of science. The decay has set in but can scientists do anything about this gangrenous limb that threatens to consume all of science itself? Time will tell. — TheMadFool

That is what we are facing when we are engaged in some sort of discourse against, or together with, the end-of-science theorists. Rule number one -- exactitude. If science were religion, a crippling doubt because we'd forgone causality and opted instead towards probability, is unholy.

Another source of complaint is the tendency to reduce everything and anything to equation. One that could possibly fit on a surface of a thumbnail. What does it mean? Reductionism and simplification. Keep in mind that cycle theorists believe in social sciences. And rightly so. What's good for the goose is good for the gander is false!

↪Tobias
The Parable of the Ulema; thanks for that. :up: — Banno

I second that.

"Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced." - Seneca

"Many unknowings are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been, eternalized." - Gus Lamarch — Gus Lamarch

:grin:

But am I defending total ignorance, complete retrocess? Not at all; I defend the "authenticity" of the human mind, and all its ideas, whether logical or illogical, religious or scientific, old and new. The decay of some method of study, due to its inability to give us a total and "true" answer to reality, is caused solely and fully by our resentment - the hatred caused by the incapacity; the awareness of the unconsciousness of existence before us; the lack of Man's "specialty" - towards our own limitation.

- And what would be the correct method then? Are we doomed to "unknowing"?

Maybe so, maybe not, and maybe, we're only doomed to what we're capable of deserving - we'll never know! — Gus Lamarch

We have everything we need to prevent the fall into ignorance. Very well enunciated! No one is truly anti-rationality. We will know when we get there. I am saying this because I trust the human mind.