Yep, yours is a simple case of red-faced bluster. Bluster away, pal.
That and all the rest of your delightfully simplistic and endearingly naive, sophomoric, far too full-of-yourself for a backwoods community-college student pseudo-pedantry?
How proud the hill folk must be! Why, you probably still have all your own teeth and everything!
Lol, you’re suppose to mix argumentative points and logic within your flaming; otherwise people will only see your hot air.
[color highlighting my own; the rest is as in the original]orcenio ; that it does. Sadly, it very much does indeed.]
I’m glad it did clear a few things up for you, I’m always willing to be helpful.
That’s tellin’ em’, boyo! You sure showed that 5’th grade scarecrow! Why, it will take, like, maybe a whole 3 minutes to put all that straw back in 'im! Woo hoo! You must have a Bachelor’s Degree… IN SCIENCE!!
Scarecrow? 3 minutes? You’re being unintelligible; my confidence is shrinking…
Your snide and abusive comments and arrogance did not much endear yourself to me, as you might have guessed by now. But you’ve got me pegged all wrong, junior. I’m no po-mo relativist or social constructivist nutjob, nor am I the naive little pseudoscience infant you’ve so ludicrously made me out to be. You might want to try to be a little more discerning and judicious in who you decide to attack in the future. Or not, as is your choice to make.
Hey pal, you haven’t seen my snide, abusive, arrogant side. I have it; and it hasn’t been brought out yet. I made/make no assumptions about you because I never cared.
I’m all ears…
The so-called “scientific method” is very nearly entirely mythical. To paraphrase the title of evolutionary psychologist and philosopher Jerry Fodor’s book refuting evolutionary psychologists’ “massive modularity” thesis (such as that held by Pinker and Tooby, et al.): “Science doesn’t work that way” .
Look pal, I’ll just stop you right here. If you’re going to wage a war against the “scientific method” (the method of inquiry for which all sciences, in all fields are based upon) you are hopelessly out gunned.
The “scientific method” is something we learn about in elementary and high school that presents a fabricated facade of a formal “method” of hypotheses and experimentation and so on that has little or no meaningful equivalent in the real world of science. It’s mere rote, liturgical nonsense. Working scientists laugh derisively at the kind of grandstanding spittle you’ve chosen to drown us all in with your arrogant posts in this thread. But I like your spunk, kid (he writes, figuratively patting orcenio on the head…)
:dubious:
There are a few popular writers (at least on the Web) who have made something of a career of debunking the bullshit we are so cluelessly taught in science and other primary and secondary school classes and textbooks (and some early college textbooks as well), such as Alistair B. Fraser’s Bad Science and William J. Beaty (I can’t reach the web addresses I have for his site at this time – perhaps the provider’s down for maintenance – or I’d include a link).
Your links do not support any of your assertions.
But since I can’t provide a link, I’ll make every effort to avoid breaking the fair-use provisions and quote his words on this specific issue reasonably sparingly [all bold emphasis is my own]:
Here’s a quotation from the great scientist Peter Medawar:
Here’s Beaty again:
So, you have quotes of people that praise “messing around” how does this negate or marginalize the scientific method? In fact I would also add “be creative” to “mess around” as scientific truths tend to be queerer than we can suppose .
You were saying, orcenio and DanBlather and Chum and Nametag and (sheesh) BigT – but mostly orcenio ?
Rejecting or even dismissing something on the grounds that it’s justifiably pseudo-scientific is one thing, but inventing your own arbitrary, smug, grammar school textbook-based hard-edged binary criteria for assertion that this is science but that isn’t is just plain puerile, supercilious twaddle. To call it “unsophisticated” is far too kind.
I invented nothing; what I am writing is neither new, nor surprising.
To the orcenio ’s of the world, a “science” pretty much springs full-born around the 18’th or even 19’th century, as if from the head of Zeus. One of the things you hear from such people is that before the common era, or at least before about the time of the Italian Renaissance or so, there was no astronomy / chemistry – it was all astrology / alchemy. In this infantile “model” of the history of science, since the ancient Egyptians weren’t following THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD , what they did couldn’t possibly be doing science, by definition orcenio that:
:rolleyes: Just because we now have a unified name/concept of scientific inquiry doesn’t make it a new thing. No one wrote that. Your interpretations are now taking on a surreal flare.
These are not taunts, but rational questions.
According to such a sophomoric view, Eratosthenes was just an astrologer.
So, you may wish to ask me, how do you define “science”? Like this, as I’ve done for decades (it’s my own definition):
Science is any set of empirical, epistemological heuristic methods that can be successfully employed to limit self-deception in reducing the error in our knowledge of the world (or whatever it is that gives rise to our sensory percepts)
(The parenthetical portion is a hedge against orcenio -hated ontological philosophers, of course).
“epistemological heuristic?” perhaps you can supply a less ostentatious definition? (I love me ten dollar words too)
A genuine new science can begin with a single thought “experiment”, even without “direct observation” or “hypotheses” or “falsifiable experiments”. I know it’s a tough word to say, little fella, but let’s try it anyway, okay? “S Y N T H E S I S”, pronounced “Sin, th’ Sis!” (something I suspect your might have encountered back in the hills). That’s the funny little word to describe “informed messing around” by cogitating on existing scientific theories and systems and observations and playfully engaging in thought experiments with the eventual plan of branching off a new science from existing ones. Kinda like “Your Evolutionary Biology and Natural Selection got in my Behavioral Neuroscience! Let’s sell candy!”
“informed messing around” sounds fucking wonderful, but eventually you’ll still get the same nagging questions in the end. What are your observations? What are your hypothesizes? Where is your proof. What were you methods? Mess around as much as you want, but at the end of the day you need to bring proof too.
orcenio and other smug scoffers, that delicious Reeses-like combination of Evolutionary biology and Behavioral Neuroscience and a few other scientific sub-fields is called “Evolutionary Psychology”. Papa is a science and Mama is a science and little baby is a science, too.
But no science is ever born full-grown and perfectly respectable! Lots of work and growth and internal debate and strife is going to occur before full adulthood is reached. You EP-scoffers are like someone looking at a 3 year old and saying: “Can’t cook, can’t clean, can’t even bring home minimum wage! What the fuck good is it!” It’s akin to saying that since Jabir ibn Hayyan didn’t create the Periodic Table or develop the Roothaan equations, he was just coming up with amusing, but unscientific, “Just So” fables of no account whatsoever.
Sheesh!
:rolleyes: Your rantings are barely comprehensible. Naysayers tend to want proof, the more solid the better.
Well, orcenio , you prolly got to get back to all them possum hides, so I won’t bother instructing you on all the sophomoric silliness I highlighted in blue when I quoted your posts above, but let me just say two things so I can get on with far more important things for now:
(1): You kept going on about “direct” observations, which is pretty damn funny. Yep, if’n ya’ cant seeum witch yer’ own bare eyeballs, 'dem Pie Messons 'n shit arnt’t scientific, donsha 'no".
lol, you have nothing else to say, but “hillbilly jokes!”
(2): There is no such thing as “proof” or “disproof” in science. The concept of proof is only valid outside of science entirely, such as in formal systems like mathematics and logic and algorithms.
But you new 'dat, didnsha.
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…And where did this “you are a hillbilly” thing come from?
Your entire post is pure bunk…