The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit

That's what bikamonki was saying.

jerf's comment was tangential to the central thesis of bikamonki's post, and stated "There were things that claimed to be streams of pure, refined truth. Those claims didn't become false. They always were false"

> You are talking about education and scientific rigor as a means of talking about truth

No, I'm stating directly that there exist educational institutions that, through educational programs, transfer truth from one person to another.

Today the MS & PhD are both supposed to prepare you to do novel research & science. Since reproducibility is a core part of research & science, it would make sense for you to reproduce another study as part of your learning process.

I know the feeling! Astro is great and I love it. But there's lots of other things I'd love to explore once I figure out galaxies :)

For example, a cited claim could be contradicted by the citation, or missing valuable context provided by the citation, and you'd need to look up the citation to discover this. Or the citation could be bogus, and you'd need to do further research. Or the claim could be a really trivial objection and its reply omitted, and again you'd need to do further research.

I'll accept that not all of these things necessarily make for a Gish gallop as such. But they do all seem to be in the broad category of "intellectual dishonesty through weak argumentation which is easier to perpetuate than refute". I'm not going to quibble about how to subcategorise that.

I'm reluctant to give specific examples, because that risks starting an argument about those examples. Hopefully this thread is now old enough to avoid that.

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So for example, we can look at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics (permalink in case of edits: http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Cryonics&oldid=159...). Just skimming it, the "engineering problems" section keeps referring to "freezing". Trivial objection: "freezing damages the cells!" Omitted reply: "yes, so we moved on from freezing". It does also talk about vitrification, but it makes no particular effort to distinguish between the two or to tell the reader that freezing is no longer current practice.

Elsewhere, "Alcor Corporation calls cryonics "a scientific approach to extending human life" and compares it to heart surgery.[8] This is a gross misrepresentation of the state of both the science and technology and verges on both pseudoscience and quackery."

What the citation actually says is: "Cryonics, like heart surgery, is a scientific approach to extending human life that does not violate any religious beliefs or their principles." They aren't making the comparison that RW wants to paint them as. They're sort of hinting in that direction, but they're not making any actual scientific claims here. (They do make scientific claims elsewhere. If they ever say that cryonics has the same chance of success as heart surgery, RW should feel free to call them on it. I'm pretty sure they never say that.)

Their citation for "Some advocates literally propose a magic-equivalent future artificial superintelligence that will make everything better" is not someone proposing that (later in the thread, he says nanobots would be sufficient but not necessary). You might want to read the citation for more replies to RW-level objections to cryonics.

I can tell you that "Belief in cryonics is pretty much required on LessWrong to be accepted as "rational."" is simply false, and probably wasn't true when it was written. The citation leads not to a survey of LWers opinions on cryonics, but to the opinion of the founder of LW.

Note that these objections are true, and reflect badly on RW, even if cryonics is complete bunk.

And also note that I didn't follow a single citation on that article and then decide "no, this seems fair". I picked things to follow according to what I expected to see, but I was never pleasantly surprised.

(In the interests of fairness, I'll say that I am pleasantly surprised they don't call cryonics a scam. RationalWiki: not quite as bad as it could be.)

And I've spent over an hour on this now, when I should have gone to bed. So I'm done.

Actually I think farming out replication to undergrads would be an excellent approach. Your final year undergrad project should be to choose an under-replicated study and repeat it, publishing your findings. Each individual study might be less reliable if done by an undergrad than done by a seasoned researcher, but if each study is repeated by say 5 undergrads and 2+ of them fail to replicate the results, that would be enough to indicate that the study warrants further attention.

> One student could spend their time working on a important result gaining tons of insight and expertise while another could be stuck replicating a task that turned out to be worthless bullshit and have very little to show for it.

The whole point of science is that we don't know what will turn out to be an important result and what will turn out to be worthless bullshit. No study is worth a damn unless it's been replicated but everyone is too busy trying to land-grab the next little piece of unexplored territory to actually validate anything that comes before.

If nothing else, we need to regain the perception that a negative result is just as important as a positive result - to paraphrase Edison, discovering 100 things that don't work is just as important as discovering one thing that does.