No one has denied that, but you are only showing a huge lack of perspective.
Churchill once quoted a politician from his past like this:
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
Likewise I have to say that science has issues and some that have no perspective may think it is the worst form of human activity, except that those same guys are not aware of how woo woo has hampered progress and how costly ignorance really is.
As it happens I’m aware that in the issue of humans causing the current warming by their emissions the folly is coming from many humans that are willing to follow ignorance and woo woo and to not make the efforts to stop using our atmosphere as a sewer.
It was scientists who actually warned us more than 70 years ago, not the philosophers contemplating their navels.
That’s not the impression I’m getting. The impression I’m getting is that scientists are paragons of virtue nobly battling the surrounding superstitious darkness. At least in the minds of some.
The folly was in the development of fossil fuels in the first place, global warming is the result of a massive scientific effort lauded as progress. Partly this is true, of course.
But given that Arrhenius gave the first warnings 100 years ago, the scientific community cannot say it was not warned, but it went ahead anyway. Perhaps they were ignorant, perhaps they were seeking a decent wage, perhaps they were bullshitters.
You can go to Wattsupwiththat for more if you want.
And this false distinction between “scientists” and “philosophers” doesn’t really reflect the world we live in, or the people that have developed both. Descartes was on my philosophy syllabus and my science one. Descartes, of course, was educated by Jesuits. And science, philosophy and religion have always been simultaneous interests in many of the top minds.
Missing the point spectacularly, the scientists did warn everyone, it was industry and many politicians that did ignore it and continue to do so; the point stands, people kill people and they are the ones that are responsible for the greed, ambition and selfishness.
Science is only a tool. And like any tool it can be misused, and you have to be informed that you are following woo woo.
And mentioning Wattsupwiththat is like reaching for answersingenesis in an evolution discussion, you lose any credit you had.
Piffle, this only shows that you are not aware that not all philosophers are created equally, or I should say, they are not all respected the same.
Like Joseph Campbell would say religion has to follow the knowledge a society has in order to remain relevant, and so it goes for philosophy IMHO, depending on the philosopher he or she will make the wild guess as Richard Feynman used to say, but then you have to experiment to find out if the guess points to a new law or a branch of science.
If it doesn’t match observed phenomena, then the idea was wrong. It does not matter how smart one is, or how respected a philosopher is, if it does not match observations then the idea is wrong.
What I can see nowadays is that many are abusing philosophy or are fake skeptics like Anthony Watts.
But we are drifting from the main issue. The main point I make is that woo woo is not bound to give us progress in this issue about using quantum states as a way to get something from this business of having life after death.
One just have to remember that it was more philosophy than observation that guided the early scientists on many dead ends that some only blame science for, I do not think that is fair for science and the philosophers that do not reject science.
IMHO what I see here is similar to the philosophers that found about the motion of microscopic particles like pollen, many thought that it was evidence of the “life force” but by then science was not willing to let philosophers have all the fun or to continue going on a dead end.
Scientists investigated further and later Einstein found the explanation and it lead to show the atomic nature of matter. And that the “life force” was not needed as an explanation.
It is one of the reasons why modern science has all but abandoned the idea of putting esoteric energy in places where is not needed, but it has not stopped some from continuing to do so, not much respect for the ones doing that nowadays until extraordinary evidence is found for their extraordinary claims.
You said that : “But given that Arrhenius gave the first warnings 100 years ago, the scientific community cannot say it was not warned, but it went ahead anyway.”
No, the scientific community did warn all, the ones that did go ahead anyway willfully ignored the warnings.
Than you typed:
“Perhaps they were ignorant, perhaps they were seeking a decent wage, perhaps they were bullshitters. You can go to Wattsupwiththat for more if you want.”
I read that in context and only conclude that you are still insisting that it was scientists the ones that are doing that; no, Anthony Watts is not a climate scientist and neither are many of his contributors.
The scientific community warned all ? A few concerned scientists started to catch up with Arrhenius in the 1970s. Even now most scientists are busy thinking of ways to consume resources and spew more CO2 - even with the now-impossible-to-ignore warnings. If they didn’t the global economy and industry would halt. It’s the business as usual scenario found in so many climate change discussions.
Scientists engage in plenty of bullshit. Just consider all the psychologists involved in political and military propaganda, and advertising. Fields of golden bullshit swaying in the wind.
Many WUWT contributers aren’t scientists, and as you know many of them are. And, like millions of other scientists around the world in all sorts of fields, they don’t really care about much anything but padding their bank accounts.
…and let’s not forget that a good amount of new age woo comes from scientists employed by the intelligence services, providing a good living for other professional debunker scientists.
Intriguing, I wonder how many social scientists are involved in modifying religions and beliefs, including all sorts of woo woo, for governance purposes ? I suppose we could be mean and say social scientists aren’t real scientists. Still, there’s a question.
Ah, a book about the Psychological Strategy Board, and -----
"The PSB released two major reports in May 1952, one estimating the efficacy of psychological operations and the other establishing a future strategic framework… the PSB suggested a direct attack on the Soviet faith… The State department took these findings seriously. It operated 165 “information centres” around the world… Ample quantities of the Bible began arriving… The Voice of America enlisted the aid of US religious leaders, who broadcast messages into the nations under Communist control. While VOA focused it’s religious propaganda on the masses, the PSB decided to target the communist elite. …the agency initiated the US doctrinal program to “create confusion, doubts and loss of confidence in the accepted thought patterns of convinced communists…”
I think it’s a safe bet that scientists around the world are busy working on how to make religion more seductive, harder to leave, more confusing etc.
How much of that is New Age woo ? Dunno, probably some, not all.
You’ve included enough waffle in your statements that they are likely to be true, even if only to a tiny extent. Any statement starting “Scientists are studying…” will probably be true - there are a lot of scientists in the world of varying levels of capability and honesty, and the odds that someone somewhere is studying a given topic is high. Hell, there are probably scientists still trying to extract sunlight from cucumbers somewhere.
That doesn’t mean that a significant number of scientists are studying the things you mention, nor that those scientists are reputable, honest, scientifically rigorous or indeed know what the hell they’re doing.
This and all the rest that you wasted only shows that my point stands.
You are only telling us the same thing I said. You are describing ignorance, it does happens at the scientific level too, (and I also made that point) but again: Ignorance and woo is worse indeed as you tirelessly found evidence for it, but it does not take away what I said, nowadays philosophy is still valuable when we are at the cutting edge of science, but eventually all the bullshit that you are attributing to science was overcome and uncovered by other scientists, not the philosophers.
Hence the point I made that still stands, science can be terrible but still beats any other systems or processes that it it is clear that you are trying to pass as being as valid as science.
What we can see is that even among the fossil fuel industry scientists that worked for it told the owners that indeed spewing all that CO2 into the atmosphere was not going to come with no consequences.
Again it is the greed of the owners that makes them ignore even their own science.
And with the issue at hand the ones thinking that there is something there about the quantum life after death are clearly not wasting their time looking to find evidence for their ponderings.
Glad to see this realism. Not so realistic about the effects of their work, but as nobody seems to have even considered that their religious and new age enemies may be there for a scientific reason let’s not expect miracles. There’s a course for those, BTW.
So, let’s say you’re a social scientist, and the government wants you to fuck with the minds of a rival country by pushing religion on them - how would you go about it ?
The recent Exxon thing, true enough, but right now there are thousands of scientists and engineers busy maximizing extraction. Some have the will to go against the grain, most just get on with the job.
News to me. What is this system or process ? All I have are questions about the dualism involved in materialist views of consciousness and science. Not uncommon - hard problem and all that.
What I find remarkable is the way that if you do simply open a few such questions up, other people immediately start to write their own pet peeves into it. It’s quite paranoid, reminds me of anti-communist paranoia, or even of seeing the devil in every misfortune. I like the irony of supposed hard-headed critical thinkers jumping at every shadow that they think is shaped like “woo”, I half expect them to start splashing holy water around and crossing themselves.
Again, you are only describing the problem. And let me tell you, I have dealt the matter so much that I can tell you that indeed what you are talking about are mad engineers, not mad scientists.
Oh you guys thought I was going to talk about the ignorance the people has regarding what the vast majority of experts thinks about climate change? No, in this case I also participated in threads where many did notice that indeed in fiction and real life many of the people that we call mad scientists are in reality mad engineers.
Oh you guys thought I was going to talk about the ignorance the people has regarding