this is so good, I may just literally print it out and pin it to the wall https://t.co/rZpQjNBzDc
this is so good, I may just literally print it out and pin it to the wall https://t.co/rZpQjNBzDc
truth is a problem now for everyone, if the idea seems empty or useless in ‘the era of social media’, ‘science denialism’, ‘conspiracy theories’ and suchlike, maybe that just means that ‘everyone’ has caught up to where philosophy was in 1922.
Crispin Sartwell • Truth Is Real and Philosophers Must Return Their Attention to It
That day, in the lecture hall, none of us were serious. We were all doing a little pantomime on the theme of science. The speaker pretended to show us some results and the we pretended to think about them. As long as we all hit our marks and said our lines, the content didn’t matter—one week you’re doing “Guys and Dolls” and the next week you’re do... See more
Adam Mastroianni • Surely You Can Be Serious
But overall, both research efforts themselves (*cough* behavioral economics *cough*) and “debunking” efforts can be naive in this clueless way, causing infinite regress of levels of bunking/debunking that goes nowhere. Because reality is messier than you think and people are more malicious than you think.
Some of the resistance to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence boils down to conservatism, which many scientists adopt in order to minimize the number of mistakes they make during their careers. This is the path of least resistance, and it works; scientists who preserve their images in this way receive more honors, more awards, and more fun
... See moreAvi Loeb • Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth
I call this the deluge of crappy papers. A recent article in Nautilus comes up with a more visually-arresting term - “zombie science”. This is apt, because zombies eat brains. Zombie science also consumes brains, or specifically, brain’s attention. Scientist’s time is one of the most precious resources we have and more and more is being wasted cond... See more
Dan Elton • The deluge of crappy papers must stop
This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress (Edge Question)
amazon.com
A century ago, the philosopher Simone Weil admonished against this fragmentation of the problem of reality into parochial questions addressed by disjointed scientific disciplines — “villages” of thought, she called them — each too blinded by its own axioms to make headway on illuminating the whole. “The villagers seldom leave the village,” she wrot... See more
Maria Popova • The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which Is Life
I would also argue that this basic psychological difference is one of the reasons why an academic field that stops making active progress tends to turn mean. (At least by the refined standards of science. Reputational assassination is tame by historical standards; most defensive-posture belief systems went for the real thing.) If major shakeups don
... See more