BTY **wiredbadger **the fact that I do have a decoder ring does not mean that you should not do some cleanups, really, not finding what capital letters or paragraphs are makes me doubt that you are a scientist.
The effects of them are big, but not likely to be a factor against the current gigatons of CO2 that we humans are releasing into the atmosphere.
All the paleo climatologists I know:
So stick to human paleontology, what you demonstrated here in last tirade is that you did not see the video I posted on the experts that jump to assume that they alone know better than experts in other fields.
One caveat is that we sometimes interpret data differently, so the science may well be “fact” but the conclusions are to a degree polluted by the commentator.
omg jackie i forgot about that book!! yes, it was quite eye opening. reminded me a lot of the bantering of the early psychologists still trying to recover from ego shock. the structuralists and the individualists and the behaviorists and whatever else. i remember thinking to myself why don’t they just merge it all together.
but you know , that is an interesting fact you point out that surely lends to science being viewed as an opinion.
there is plenty of that in anthropology. especially when trying to figure out what caused various pre-humans to disappear or more familiar is the out of africa or multi-origins.
a common one is the first eve problem. where mtdna shows that there is no Neanderthal in us, but last year they claimed that all humans outside of africa had 5 or 4 percent Neanderthal in them. (myself i figure that since we are human and so is Neanderthal, when we began to live like them, after leaving africa it makes sense that some genetic changes would be similar. i mean that is what i would work on.but whatever..you see, it is a nonstop argument lol).
in theoretical physics i can only imagine the heated debates. so maybe you are on to something there. maybe people mistake the process of science, debates as it were or arguments as being a backbone of that science?
how strange. really it is not as far out there as it seems. like take for instance the fact we can see stereoscopic. it is a primate cladistic or something i can trace to primates from lemurs to ourselves. the three theories are it enabled us to braichiate or tree leap easier, this other guy had some idea about seed eating . but then this one guy argued a good counter to both. he said that squirrels and other tree dwelling animals have no problem speeding through the trees and they had their eyes on the side. further he points out that largely only predators have their eyes closer to the front of the face to overlap so they can sense depth. the plant eaters have them to the side more so they can have a great range of vision, like almost see behind themselves. so he reasoned we became stereoscopic to hunt insects. the debate is still on but it doesn’t disqualify the main thing, which is that humans are stereoscopic. maybe you are right though maybe people see the debate as proving that science is an opinion (sounds ridiculous in this example but in other ones i can actually see that being the case)
good point thanks for the post.
Yes. There’s a popular notion of “The Scientist” as this completely objective, ideologically untainted being who is unaffected by circumstance or social context, and who resides on a different plane from mere mortals. Essentially, as a non-human. That’s a childlike notion many adults seem to cling to.
Moreover, the processes of science themselves, while theoretically objective, are ALWAYS conduced by humans.
Of course it’s true, and you’d be naive to think it weren’t. That doesn’t mean that the people who engage in “science” can’t strive towards transparency by participating in the larger process of peer review. But this, too, exists as social organization, so to think that it somehow will always lead to some kind of pure objectivity is equally as childlike.
And you are right, but only to a point, eventually the ones that are telling us that most scientists are not objective have to show their evidence, and when spectacular failure comes from the ones that claim that, one then should follow the experts that do follow the best evidence, it is not just childlike ideals that tells us that we should trust the experts, it is that many times the experts deal and experiment with what is currently the best evidence that they have so far.
Wow, you know that has some interesting possibilities. Consider for instance the Luddites and the religious antagonists both working against the newly found freedom of thought. I suddenly get this vision of dadaists reciting the periodic table, attempting to free themselves from the conforms of reality.
Anyways, positivism certainly had some effect. but i am wondering, do you think maybe that the anti industry of the Luddites lent to some of this fear of letting go of tradition?
Because I can vaguely see this graduating into different camps and then science and its revenue producing technology. Where opinion becomes money and then something really crazy happens and people don’t pick it up for its true meaning. like the genome patenting or even understand the ramifications of such practice . How it inhibits true science and ultimately hurts the individual by restricting what practice are done on individual diseases, depending on whether or not the owner of that particular genome patent allows it.
See this too is a strange part of what is happening i think with the science is an opinion view of the media influenced public. i could never imagine this to be true or believed it possible before now.
Well, you know. I am old to this stuff. It is easy to find out how good a board is. The first trick is use poor grammar. The significance is usually not important to those who are interested in real conversation. Something I learned from talking to other languages. What they are saying is more important then how they are saying it. So, first you look to see how many jump on the grammar train. What follows is the people who usually feel empowered by the first criticism to start derailing the posts by only reading two sentences and then retorting in a condescending matter. Usually there are legitimate people who do respond, demonstrating hope for true dialect but ultimately the bigots and the ignorant types make themselves more of an entity in a person’s post. What was an honest attempt at trying to talk about something has now became yet another bash the new stranger fun fest. To even suggest banning someone because of grammar when I have tolerated abuse on my character from your own words is unspeakable. Seriously, you people who participated in that need some serious help.
For those of you that honestly participated in my topic thank you very much. I rather enjoyed it.
Oh yea, notice how grammar is easily done?
It means that I can change and adapt because i truly wanted to communicate. Notice how your abuse wont stop? silly little monkeys.
I was the first person to post to this thread. And I commented that I thought the topic(s) you were bringing up were interesting and worthy of discussion. However, I found it very annoying and difficult to try to actually read what you had posted; due simply to careless punctuation, spelling and lack of capitalization. It struck me as a post composed by a person who put no real effort in clearly and coherently communicating his ideas. If you really had wanted to engage the board in the topics you had brought to your thread, you would have at least made that thread legible.
If you want your audience to respect you, first respect your audience. Don’t jerk them around by making your posts difficult to follow. When you speak other languages I assume you work at being as clear as you can be, and appreciate it when they make an effort to be clear to you.
My second point is that you should assume your readers know less about the topic than you do. Lead us gently to wisdom by being clear about your ideas and the support you have for them. Then we can eviscerate your ideas while knowing what they are, rather than eviscerating you because you come across as if you were a punk being deliberately obtuse. You aren’t playing T-ball anymore.
So welcome to the SDMB. I’m sure your time here will be profitable for us as well as you, once you stop thinking that a tendency to throw wild pitches is a virtue.
The extent to which science is fact vs. opinion depends on the science. Physics and chemistry tend towards the former, anthropology and psychology tend towards the latter. And. really, how could it be otherwise, given the limitations on the data available to each field?
For the OP, Gene Cochran has published many controversial theses. Are these fact or opinion?
BTW, as regards the hijack on grammar and spelling, I agree with the critics. Expecting the audience to do the work of extracting your message is lazy and selfish.
I don’t care about the supposed science against him. I care about the consensus of actual climate scientists. Gore is a publicist, which, because the decisions are being made by politicians who respond to public pressure and lobbying far more than science, is very important.
Journalists and the like will never get the science right, but that isn’t an attack on journalists. I’m an expert in a fairly narrow field and I’ve done interviews. The reporters who interviewed me went off to interview someone else in another little segment next, and I think it is amazing that they can get it very nearly right.
But it isn’t science. And I don’t care if the general public thinks it is. They probably also think that scientists wear lab coats, have funny hair, glasses, and beautiful daughters.
I don’t wear lab coats, so there.
I suspect Hawking wouldn’t submit a paper on that to a journal, and I trust the journal wouldn’t accept it if he did, unless it had real merit. Journalists are particularly bad intermediaries, since they don’t have the room or the time to learn the subjects. I get the Times, and the science reporting there is rather better, since they now have a practice of asking an expert in a field unassociated with a discovery about its importance. But they get stuff wrong also. Popular fields get books, but some things need to be announced that wouldn’t sell lots of books. Have a better method of letting the public know?
Hell, Tracy Kidder had a book about designing a computer. He spent a long time with the people, he won a Pulitzer Prize, he did a great job, but he still didn’t really understand what they were doing. Reporting is not science, and it will never be.
Some psychology is squishy, but some attempt to rigorously test hypotheses. My daughter is a grad student in psychology (and business) and her favorite gift one Christmas was a MatLab book. Just sayin’.
IMHO the OP’s attitude is one of ‘don’t think for yourself, don’t question things, just accept my god called science’, then when questioned further you came up with psychobabble about how you have ‘facts’ which are different. You sound like a religious zealot to me who can’t deal with questioning their beliefs.
The history of science has been itself proving itself wrong and the collection of ‘facts’ to make a opinion, which then are ‘adjusted’ when evidence proves them wrong.
As mentioned above, the apparent dichotomy one can come to by looking at nature and saying that there is a creator vs. looking for natural processes is not a dichotomy but a search of how the creator may have done it. So those are on different levels and different disciplines. A creator making stuff or even guiding stuff does not disqualify finding out the natural laws (that the creator has crafted to design nature) that produced whatever the study object is.
