As new user, I feel obligated to bore you to death with my own frenetic wanderings in the land of id and ego, and I desire of your sojourns and journeys here as well, as related to the polling topic.
What misuses of common language drive you insane?
The first one off the top of my head is the misuse of the wordtheory instead of the rightful hypothesis .
Examples:
That’s my theory on politics.
That’s just your backwards racial theory.
What’s your theory on why Joe is wearing ice cream on his head?
It pisses me off. We all took at science class, and even before the inevitable “Significant digits” chapter was the “explain the scientific process” rigamoroll, usually in Roman numeraled pages.
The process went “observation-hypothesis-test-test many times- theory”.
What people are saying in the above statements is that they’ve conducted indepth analysis of many different situations using test subjects and control groups. What they’re really doing is pulling an idea out of their heinie as a statement of fact. Freud would be proud.
Darned hypotheses and their damn demands of scientific dogmatism.
I don’t want you to get discouraged, so I will place the blame on the Monty Python sketch about the brontosaurous. (Since the early 1970s even the brontosaurous as it were has become obsolete, but for some reason the term “theory” rages on.) The joke of this sketch is that Miss A. Elk’s theory about brontosauri was that they were very thin at one end, then very fat, then very thin at the other end. She concluded with “that is my theory, which is mine.”
And therin lies the root of your problem. My husband actually works for NASA and doesn’t even bother to correct that anymore. Sad but true.
people do work with their own “theories”.
whether they have adequetly (your opinion) “tested” their hypothesis is not known by you so you really have no basis for your assumptions.
What is an adequete “test” is a matter of personal opinion in the areas you use as examples.
I have lived 43 years and of that time about 20 years have been spent actively participating in politics and trying to keep myself relavant and current with changing ideologies. I have my own theories that you may consider a hypothesis, but to me they have been tested through history and my opinions and theories have been satisfactorily shown by that history as being accurate as far as I am concerned. Maybe an issue is still a hypothesis to you, but to me it may have very well been “tested and proven” to my satisfaction.
Get over yourself.
I don’t know why you’re so sensitive about this–apparently you feel your politics under attack. The fact is, “political theory” is a fallacy in using language. You can’t test welfare, free gun use, or nuclear power in a regular group and a control group with many different variations.
What you can test is, to use a nonpolitical point, is whether a group of people put into a room with ice cream will throw it around regularly. You can use all sorts of variations on this (people under extreme duress, people who are hungry, only males, only females, etc.) to dsicover a “theory” on human behavior with ice cream. You can then apply that to ice cream legislation–perhaps banning it among prisoners of war or students taking the SAT.
Of course, people might not want to ban ice cream–it tastes good, provides a comforting sugar high, and is familiar. Whether people will obey a law they don’t like might be a subject of another test-- imposing arbitrary rules on people that are unpleasant and unliked and seeing if they obey them, using variations (law is for their protecting, law is for tax purposes, etc.)
However, and I hate to push this, but 20 years of keeping “relevant and current with changing ideologies” does not mean welfare, free gun use, or nuclear power have been “proved”. What you may prove is that a law isn’t working or may be warranted–but that isn’t a theory. You could use testing of a hypothesis to support your own political views-- but it would only be a theory that could be disproven.
Please don’t insult me. I have a very thin skin, much like the Brontosauri.
I caught a ton of flack from a scientist friend on that subject myself. Now I have all but completely expunged the word “theory” from my vernacular in favor of “I think” or “in my opinion.”
Come to think of it, I probably should expunge the word “vernacular” as well. I’m using it properly (I think), but it sounds dorky. I’m keeping “expunge,” however. I like the sound of it.
I hate another misuse of the word “theory” which is the way that creationists use it: saying that evolution is just a theory. They fail to realize that evolution in itself is a fact, but they way that it occurs is a theory.
I understand how “evolution occurs” is a theory but I’m a bit confused at how “evolution” is a fact. I mean, couldn’t someone with a huge ego (cough cough) state that the world came into existence at their birth and will end if and when they die?
