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Your characterization made me grin, as someone who is on the other side to you. >That intellectual ideal is seen as something by and for the powerful old white

• closeparen 10y ago
  > what evidence do we have to believe that we haven't made some of the same mistakes in classifying pseudoscience in the present? None. I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific, we ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments. And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing have some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set of perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and discredit more of the bad ones. We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it better. Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room. To be clear, the side I'm on is the liberal/academic/technocratic orthodoxy, where smart people engage seriously with ideas, arguments, and data (including devil's-advocating positions they don't agree with) to discover the truth, and formulate policy prescriptions based on the truth, i.e. what's romanticized on The West Wing. I do believe in reality's well-known liberal bias and on most policy questions I am pretty much indistinguishable from an "SJW." As far as getting to those policy positions, though, it was clear I would not have been welcome in my campus's left-leaning political scene.
  • tomlock 10y ago
    It is clear to me from reading your previous comment that you've made an effort to understand the arguments made. That's a breath of fresh air. >Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room. Student politics just suck. But, I don't think they're representative of some of the underlying ideas they are based on. I've met some incredibly intelligent and well-read anarchists - but I wouldn't think anarchy was a system with that thought behind it if all I'd met was the loudest proponents of anarchy. I think one of the problems currently we have in discourse-at-large is its really easy to find the egregious and ridiculous arguments people make, and paint the rest of the whole ideology with it. Perhaps the only partisan movement in politics today? :) >I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific, we ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments. >We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it better. I think the problem has been that in the past (and still today) women and PoC were hampered by their inability to even get stuff published. If people begin in a position where suspicion is immediate, its harder for them to get a foot in the door, even if the gatekeepers hypothetically would allow in a person they are suspicious of. As a result, some people still feel like one of the few levers they can successfully pull is the protest lever. Some protests suck. >And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing have some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set of perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and discredit more of the bad ones. I think we agree on this - and I think we agree that there's the possibility of bias in science as it stands. Where I'm going next with this: The idea then is that science internally sucks at making choices to correct this bias. Therefore establishment science needs to be externally influenced. That's not a dismissal of the scientific method, that's a claim that the scientific method never existed in an unbiased form in the first place.
• sinxoveretothex 10y ago
  > what evidence do we have to believe that we haven't made some of the same mistakes in classifying pseudoscience in the present? The uncomfortable thing is that this can cut both ways. Things can and do get rejected because it doesn't fit the ideology. Feynman called it Cargo Cult science: We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease. But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis. As you say, it takes a lot of faith to believe that we're now clearly on the path where the truth can only go one way. For example, given that history will always be discriminatory, is there a situation where it will be clear that societal discrimination now reversed to be against, say, white men? After all, even if it was in some hypothetical future, people could still point to history as a justification for why women or other races are actually the oppressed (it's essentially the argument you just made, I don't see why it'd be any less valid in 50 years or whatever).
  • tomlock 10y ago
    If after 50 years we have clear evidence that men aren't getting published or hired in science in relatively similar quantities as women of color we probably won't consider all history as being discriminatory against women. However, all the evidence we have now points to a long history of discrimination.