Comments on: There Is No Science

By: There Is No Science » Dig for Leadership - Stories that try to make the world a better place.

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:56:20 +0000

[...] to journalists talk about science … most of the translation to outsiders comes from non… carry on reading. AKPC_IDS += "1117,"; (No Ratings Yet) Loading … Posted in Leadership | Tagged Eric, [...]

By: Edward

Edward — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:57:28 +0000

Here is a perfect example of a very ambiguous enterprise

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklight_Power

It has all the trappings of a free energy scam, except for a few things.

a) According to the New York Times, they have raised 60 million dollars from respected CEOs with degrees in Chemical Engineering

b) They seem to have had independent verification from a university lab

c) They seem to have already made deals to license the technology to power plants

Yet, everything they are proposing contradicts fundamental rules of Quantum Mechanics, and they have a number of scientists who reject their claims outright.

As a layperson, I have absolutely no way of knowing if this is a huge crackpot scheme. The company’s papers and the papers that have attempted to refute them are using physics that is far beyond my comprehension.

By: Marilyn Reed

Marilyn Reed — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:42:56 +0000

Link in above should have been

“Authors of science denied access to data”

By: Marilyn Reed

Marilyn Reed — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:39:48 +0000

As a good Popperian, I would say that it is a lot easier to define what science is not, than what science is. You are making something that is easy, far too difficult. For example:

a) Failure or refusal to explain methodology makes it non-science.

b) Writing scientific publications where the supposed scientist does not have access to the relevant data (or where the sientist is denied access) is non-science

See these depressing takes of academia corrupted (and corrupt adademics) :

c) Refusal to supply raw data to another when reasonably asked to do so, makes it non-science by definition.

By: Granite26

Granite26 — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:12:38 +0000

I’ve been watching a lot of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit lately, and they’re particularly bad about it, despite the fact that I usually agree with their points already.

By: Silas Barta

Silas Barta — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:34:57 +0000

However, science is already very open, so “open-source science” isn’t an answer to the question.

Not really. Finding the information I listed behind hotly-debated topics (truth and policy implications of global warming for example) is already a tremendous chore to compile in one place, effectively closing it off to anyone not willing to invest a lot of time “rubbing elbows” with people already “in the clique” of the predominant ideology.

Now imagine how much harder it is for topics that *haven’t* received this scrutiny!

By: Matt Liggett

Matt Liggett — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:58:58 +0000

Cleanliness?

Surely there are too many good researchers with cluttered offices for this to be a good correlate.

By: Phil Goetz

Phil Goetz — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:33:51 +0000

Any computer models used to justify public policy should be open-source and downloadable

That is a great idea. Although, I fear that most public policy is made without paying much attention to (or even having) computer models. We have many elaborate climate models. We have no elaborate models of our economy or our transportation networks.

However, science is already very open, so “open-source science” isn’t an answer to the question.

By: Autumnal Harvest

Autumnal Harvest — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:34:25 +0000

I disagree with this 99.9% claim. In fact, in the field that I’m most familiar with (physics), I can think of very few major scientific theories that physicists have been confident in, lasted 20 years or more, and then turned out to be false. There are some examples, but by and large, most foundational theories in physics (Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, etc. . .) look exactly the same as they did 100 years ago.

And while I suspect that I’m on the same page as Doug, I wouldn’t even refer to Newtonian mechanics as “less wrong.” (I recognize that he used scare quotes.) Newtonian mechanics is correct for the orders of magnitudes of velocities, masses, and distances for which it was tested, which is all one can really ask of it.

By: Doug S.

Doug S. — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 04:03:23 +0000

There are degrees of wrongness. For example, Newtonian mechanics is "wrong", but it's lot less wrong than what came before it. If you use it to predict the motions of cannonballs, you'll get an answer that's accurate enough for just about any purpose you might care about.