61–70 of 163 posts
(Note that running a gish gallop doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means you're intellectually dishonest.)
(I try not to pay too much attention to them, and I'm not super interested in refuting their bullshit, so this comment is going to be pretty unsatisfying. Sorry.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the work you are doing isn't reproducible, then it won't be cited as the building blocks for future work. The system is cleans itself out as a side effect. Therefore I prefer students to work on cutting edge research.
The point is that nobody knows if it's reproducible, because nobody's attempting to reproduce it.
Instead of a sisyphean refutation of every attack, wouldn't a better strategy be to research and prove the attacker's conflict of interests (and thus discredit them)?
Arguing against the speaker instead of the argument itself is bullshit too. Having a vested interest doesn't automatically discredit the things one says for their cause.
It serves not to disinterest the public, but the debater as it avoids the actual argument, with a side dish of confusion to the public.
It is however notable for often being used by those without actual arguments and thus should always be countered by an argument for your cause combined with one against theirs. But if left un-countered it might however get a life on its own and while this might be less true in science, it it killing in politics (see the electability 'arguments').
It can be a viable argument if bias is overly dominant in the research but is always supporting and never a single argument.
note: This is an opinion, like most 'arguments' are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the time those same students are doing the bulk of the legwork for those findings then attributed to a professor, who is under greater pressure to advance (not confirm) science, who may or may not have even participated heavily in the grunt work of that research. The professor then punishes the work under his/her name, with no credit to the work of the students.
> A lot of the time those same students are doing the bulk of the legwork for those findings then attributed to a professor, who is under greater pressure to advance (not confirm) science, who may or may not have even participated heavily in the grunt work of that research. The professor then punishes the work under his/her name, with no credit to the work of the students. It's important to note that though this seem…
I see an entire civilization confused by a ubiquous mass communication tool which they invented to do exactly the opposite: enlight them.
And then there is the bullshit that permeates from science research into bullshit blogs that later folk people use to guide their decisions (and editors/writers use to drive ad prints): what to eat or not according to recent research, how to raise children or not acording to recent research, how long a workout, how to be happy, how to this and how not to that. The bullshit then jumps from blogs into everyday conversa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that nobody knows if it's reproducible, because nobody's attempting to reproduce it.
Yes that may be true. Instead of trying to reproduce it, they attempt to build upon it. The projects which successfully build on previous projects become original research articles and the cycle continues.
Whether this "works" or not depends on how the previous projects enter into it. If the results of previous projects are used as assumptions to justify the methods, data, etc. of the subsequent project, there is no check and we risk the research becoming a house of cards which could collapse due to faultly, untested assumptions that were used.
If the subsequent projects are performed in such a way that they also test the previous results/assumption, this can be avoided. I can't tell from your wording which you are suggesting, though it seems to lean towards the former.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A lot of the time those same students are doing the bulk of the legwork for those findings then attributed to a professor, who is under greater pressure to advance (not confirm) science, who may or may not have even participated heavily in the grunt work of that research. The professor then punishes the work under his/her name, with no credit to the work of the students. It's important to note that though this seem…
I think it does vary a lot by discipline. In my area of mathematics I don't recall ever hearing of it. For whatever it is worth I even published papers without my supervisor being on them at all, if he hadn't been involved in that work.
It would be great if we could fund science purely for science' sake, and if scientists didn't have egos or careers or reputations or children, but despite the objections, I will expect a certain amount of bullshit to continue unabated. In the mean time, the author's most important point, IMO is "if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential." This is true, and always will be, regardless of how much bullshit is involved!
And then there is the bullshit that permeates from science research into bullshit blogs that later folk people use to guide their decisions (and editors/writers use to drive ad prints): what to eat or not according to recent research, how to raise children or not acording to recent research, how long a workout, how to be happy, how to this and how not to that. The bullshit then jumps from blogs into everyday conversa…
There was never a stream of pure, refined truth available, that just somehow lacked a distribution method. All there ever was was a confusing mixture of an uncountable varieties of different possibilities, theories, and facts of varying veracity. Now you can have more direct access to that confusing mixture, with all the attendant privileges and responsibilities.
There were things that claimed to be streams of pure, refined truth. Those claims didn't become false. They always were false. Now you can tell that better. It may not feel like progress, but it is.