Great talk and interesting proposal by Prof. Pollack.
The idea that scientific discovery is operating at the twigs/new growth level without examining whether the major limb is rotten may apply to some areas of science. Parapsychology springs immediately to mind ;)
I think Gerald Pollack diagnoses the ills of science very accurately. Never mind its approach to ψ, I think modern institutional science is in a real mess. Pollack was not talking about ψ, but just think how the problems he describes, have echoes in our experience. If science were working properly, we would have had a number of researchers desperate to reproduce or refute Rupert Sheldrake's work with dogs. In an ideal world, either outcome would be equally exciting.
David
Apparently there have been results suggestive of morphic resonance?
"Science was "better" in the late 19th/early 20th century when it was largely unfunded..... btw, I need... (little finger to corner of mouth)... One billion dollars!"I think Gerald Pollack diagnoses the ills of science very accurately. Never mind its approach to ψ, I think modern institutional science is in a real mess. Pollack was not talking about ψ, but just think how the problems he describes, have echoes in our experience. If science were working properly, we would have had a number of researchers desperate to reproduce or refute Rupert Sheldrake's work with dogs. In an ideal world, either outcome would be equally exciting.
David
Apparently there have been results suggestive of morphic resonance?
Pardon me, Sciborg. I didn't realize you were specifically referring to the 'dogs that know' thing.
Under your analogy, parapsychology is a new growth attached to a rotting branch that could be cut off and re-planted.The tree analogy may have some merit. The idea that scientific discovery is operating at the twigs/new growth level without examining whether the major limb is rotten may apply to some areas of science. Parapsychology springs immediately to mind ;)
"Science was "better" in the late 19th/early 20th century when it was largely unfunded..... btw, I need... (little finger to corner of mouth)... One billion dollars!"
Seriously though, how was science "better" in the old days? Pollack's yardstick is that it produced more revolutions (in his opinion, using his definition of a revolution). Is that really the case?
"Science was "better" in the late 19th/early 20th century when it was largely unfunded..... btw, I need... (little finger to corner of mouth)... One billion dollars!"
Seriously though, how was science "better" in the old days? Pollack's yardstick is that it produced more revolutions (in his opinion, using his definition of a revolution). Is that really the case?
Because we only have one such scheme (NS) (except for those that take ID seriously), we really can't make any such claim!
I think perhaps you misunderstand what "evidence based medicine" is. Why you would want to see a doctor who isn't focused on best patient outcomes is beyond me.Does anyone in this discussion deny that modern science is in trouble?
I think not, most of us realise it has somehow gone off the rails.
I recently came across the term "Eminence Based Medicine", used to describe areas of medicine where the facts don't really matter, and the 'experts' can continue to pass down their ideas regardless of evidence - sometimes simply claiming that lives will be lost if anything else is tried!
Short term profit may be part of the problem, but another seems to be that science has pretended to know a lot of things that it did not, and since it is funded by the public, it can't easily back down. It is rather as though the alchemists had been heavily funded by the populace. A man who came along with the idea of immutable elements (iron, hydrogen, carbon, lead, gold, etc) could only be seen as a threat by most alchemical researchers. You can almost hear the abuse, "Anti-Alchemists", "Deniers of Alchemy", "Recent progress has brought us close to converting lead into gold and we just need a little more research".
Thus if someone comes along with evidence that saturated fat isn't so bad after all (probably true, but consider it as an abstract example), it is almost impossible for science to process this sensibly, because, if true, it would discredit so many people.
Science has claimed to know beyond any doubt that evolution happened using mechanisms based on the idea of natural selection. This claim was obviously always nonsense, because we weren't there to observe evolution, and can, at best try to fit what is preserved into some sort of conceptual scheme. Because we only have one such scheme (NS) (except for those that take ID seriously), we really can't make any such claim!
Likewise, it has made fantastic claims to know the origin of the universe, right back to some minute fraction of a second after its origin. Again, all it could ever do, was to take such evidence as there is, and build fantastic mathematical models. Can people who have spent their working lives (and other people's money) creating General Relativistic models for galaxies and the entire universe, really evaluate the idea that the solution to the dark matter problem might simply be that gravitation does not operate via the inverse square law at large distances?
Can cosmologists possibly countenance the idea that light can be red-shifted by other ways than Doppler shifting, or that Hubble's law might not always apply, and can't therefore be used to turn the red shift into a distance measure? Some people think there is evidence that some red shifted objects are associated with much nearer objects - which is nonsense if red shift is proportional to distance - but one explanation for red shifted light, is simply that it has passed through very large molecular clouds (such as molecular hydrogen) and lost energy by Raman scattering! A cosmologist who accepts such a concept, is almost destroying his subject!
Faced with scenarios of those kinds, repeated mutates-mutandis in one discipline after another, I think science is in a hole!
David
I think perhaps you misunderstand what "evidence based medicine" is. Why you would want to see a doctor who isn't focused on best patient outcomes is beyond me.
My hunch (for what it is worth) is that science has undergone a sort of conceptual inflation in cosmology. It really hasn't got a hope in hell of looking that far back, and its mathematical models are almost certainly not unique, and may be quite wrong, because contradictions like the fact that galaxies rotate all of a piece (the same angular velocity at all distances) are explained away in a quite ad-hoc way. I mean, even if there is some dark matter, why should it accumulate in just such a way to produce this effect? One of the main criticisms of string theory is that there are a huge number of such theories.Interesting post David. Of note:
I don't really get the wagon circling involved with this issue, or promotion of multiverse mythology to avoid the possibility of observer-participancy & fine tuning.
Mainstream science's issues with all three is kind of amusing, since Josephson offered a way to use observer-participancy to explain fine-tuning without recourse to the dreaded deity.
Gosh. I need my reading glasses more than I like to admit :)Actually I referred to "Eminence based medicine". The originator of that expression was making a pun on "Evidence based medicine".
Are you happy with the state of science today?
David
Boy o boy, you do like stepping on toes.Gosh. I need my reading glasses more than I like to admit :)
Science is a sound model for finding stuff out. It most certainly isn't perfect, is carried out by imperfect apes ;), but it consistently outperforms other methods of discovering nature.
Your criticisms of science apply to the field of parapsychology too I take it?