4 ms·

The New Zealand Herald does a hit job on Dawkins

16 points by mckern 4y ago

version_five 4y ago
Funny how Dawkins went from fighting with Christians about their religious intrusion into science, to antagonizing "progressives" about their religious intrusion into science. Or put another way, how he stayed the same and the progressives regressed, like Elon Musk's sketch from a while back.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Illiberal zealots masquerading as liberal without understanding the meaning of it while shouting demands of victim worship with newspeak. People who think this way need to be laughed at. The liberals in academia failed to mentor the next generation, and so let the childish cuckoldry of reason make a mockery of academic rigor and everyone else with a grasp on reality.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    Worse than that, activists disguised as academicians tutored generations of students into ditching an objective approach to the pursuit for knowledge for a subjective assault on the scientific method and the concept of "truth". By twisting language until words have lost any semblance of meaning - take the abuse the word 'theory' has suffered as an example - and by replacing the pursuit of knowledge with a drive for political action these activists have sown the seeds of what might well be the destruction of academia. They're not alone in this, the institutions suffer under the relentless pursuit of profit by diploma mills as well but the assault from within is more damaging since it touches the core of Academia's reason to be, this being the objective pursuit of knowledge through application of the scientific methods.
potamic 4y ago
> accusing the whole New Zealand academic establishment—and the seven Auckland Uni professors who, in the infamous Listener letter, said that MM was not equivalent to science—of being riddled with racism. I was a junior when I first grasped the concept of repeatable experiments, and my career wasn't even in science. I remember being blown away by the profoundness of it. Such a simple yet powerful idea in order to reliably predict your surroundings. You would be hard pressed to find another way of doing so. It is a beautiful concept when you think about it, and arguably the greatest achievement of the human race. Now, how does someone with a PhD simply not get what the scientific method is about? Like every single thing you have studied, your entire career, your achievements are all based on the scientific method. Is it really possible to go through the ranks, even do a PhD, without really having a basic understanding of the philosophy of science?
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > Now, how does someone with a PhD simply not get what the scientific method is about? I am no Dawkins apologist but the one true scientific method isn't how science works. I've seen anti-science folks use that as a strawman to try to "disprove" science. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/understanding-science-101/how-science-works/ https://undsci.berkeley.edu/understanding-science-101/how-sc...
- eesmith 4y ago
  > when I first grasped the concept of repeatable experiments .. hard pressed to find another way of doing so Astrophysics doesn't have the luxury of repeatable experiments for their primary research focus. No one studying supernovae is able to trigger one to happen, much less repeat the explosion. It's still a scientific field, yes? That's why the philosophy of science tends more to say "testability of hypotheses" than "repeatable experiments." If you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method you'll see doubts about the universality of "the scientific method", like: "by the 1960s and 1970s numerous influential philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend had questioned the universality of the "scientific method" and in doing so largely replaced the notion of science as a homogeneous and universal method with that of it being a heterogeneous and local practice" and "historian of science Daniel Thurs's chapter in the 2015 book Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science, which concluded that the scientific method is a myth or, at best, an idealization". As I understand it, the argument, which I am not qualified to resolve, is that MM is a valid "local practice" of doing science, just like every field has its own local practices. There are certainly invalid local practices, as with astrology. But with Polynesians we know they made some very successful advances in, eg., sea navigation that were unequaled by the rest of the world. That is surely a successful practice of observation, hypothesis, and other factors we recognize as part of the scientific method.
  - potamic 4y ago
    One of the problems when people talk about the scientific method is that they treat it as a sort of a process or a formula to apply, but it couldn't be further from the fact. The point is the concept and there are different ways to realize the concept. You are right, it is more precisely about testability rather than experimentation, but the important point is that if your test shows otherwise, you discard the hypothesis. And that is where it differs primarily from traditional knowledge. Mind you, traditional knowledge is nothing to scoff at. It's the culmination of many many thousands of years of human experience, and no cultural group would have survived this long without a strong traditional knowledge. But does this mean this all traditional knowledge is science? That would destroy the whole notion of the scientific method. Are there some ideas in some traditional knowledge that were developed with the scientific method in mind? Most certainly, and we should treat them as scientific as long as we can verify them. But when you group all traditional knowledge as one body and claim everything under it to be scientific, then the scientific method will tell you, it is obviously unscientific.
1letterunixname 4y ago
Perhaps this is how an intellectual Dark Age begins, or at least shifts the center of gravity to other civilizations. Regression and decline into absurdity, unreason, and magical thinking. I wonder how many breakthroughs in hard science any of the illiberal victim white knights contribute to any field. Is there an h index for outrage and absurdity?

16 points by mckern 4y ago

Funny how Dawkins went from fighting with Christians about their religious intrusion into science, to antagonizing "progressives" about their religious intrusion into science. Or put another way, how he stayed the same and the progressives regressed, like Elon Musk's sketch from a while back.

1letterunixname 4y ago
Illiberal zealots masquerading as liberal without understanding the meaning of it while shouting demands of victim worship with newspeak. People who think this way need to be laughed at. The liberals in academia failed to mentor the next generation, and so let the childish cuckoldry of reason make a mockery of academic rigor and everyone else with a grasp on reality.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Worse than that, activists disguised as academicians tutored generations of students into ditching an objective approach to the pursuit for knowledge for a subjective assault on the scientific method and the concept of "truth". By twisting language until words have lost any semblance of meaning - take the abuse the word 'theory' has suffered as an example - and by replacing the pursuit of knowledge with a drive for political action these activists have sown the seeds of what might well be the destruction of academia. They're not alone in this, the institutions suffer under the relentless pursuit of profit by diploma mills as well but the assault from within is more damaging since it touches the core of Academia's reason to be, this being the objective pursuit of knowledge through application of the scientific methods.

potamic 4y ago

> accusing the whole New Zealand academic establishment—and the seven Auckland Uni professors who, in the infamous Listener letter, said that MM was not equivalent to science—of being riddled with racism. I was a junior when I first grasped the concept of repeatable experiments, and my career wasn't even in science. I remember being blown away by the profoundness of it. Such a simple yet powerful idea in order to reliably predict your surroundings. You would be hard pressed to find another way of doing so. It is a beautiful concept when you think about it, and arguably the greatest achievement of the human race. Now, how does someone with a PhD simply not get what the scientific method is about? Like every single thing you have studied, your entire career, your achievements are all based on the scientific method. Is it really possible to go through the ranks, even do a PhD, without really having a basic understanding of the philosophy of science?

drewcoo 4y ago
> Now, how does someone with a PhD simply not get what the scientific method is about? I am no Dawkins apologist but the one true scientific method isn't how science works. I've seen anti-science folks use that as a strawman to try to "disprove" science. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/understanding-science-101/how-science-works/ https://undsci.berkeley.edu/understanding-science-101/how-sc...
eesmith 4y ago
> when I first grasped the concept of repeatable experiments .. hard pressed to find another way of doing so Astrophysics doesn't have the luxury of repeatable experiments for their primary research focus. No one studying supernovae is able to trigger one to happen, much less repeat the explosion. It's still a scientific field, yes? That's why the philosophy of science tends more to say "testability of hypotheses" than "repeatable experiments." If you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method you'll see doubts about the universality of "the scientific method", like: "by the 1960s and 1970s numerous influential philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend had questioned the universality of the "scientific method" and in doing so largely replaced the notion of science as a homogeneous and universal method with that of it being a heterogeneous and local practice" and "historian of science Daniel Thurs's chapter in the 2015 book Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science, which concluded that the scientific method is a myth or, at best, an idealization". As I understand it, the argument, which I am not qualified to resolve, is that MM is a valid "local practice" of doing science, just like every field has its own local practices. There are certainly invalid local practices, as with astrology. But with Polynesians we know they made some very successful advances in, eg., sea navigation that were unequaled by the rest of the world. That is surely a successful practice of observation, hypothesis, and other factors we recognize as part of the scientific method.
- potamic 4y ago
  One of the problems when people talk about the scientific method is that they treat it as a sort of a process or a formula to apply, but it couldn't be further from the fact. The point is the concept and there are different ways to realize the concept. You are right, it is more precisely about testability rather than experimentation, but the important point is that if your test shows otherwise, you discard the hypothesis. And that is where it differs primarily from traditional knowledge. Mind you, traditional knowledge is nothing to scoff at. It's the culmination of many many thousands of years of human experience, and no cultural group would have survived this long without a strong traditional knowledge. But does this mean this all traditional knowledge is science? That would destroy the whole notion of the scientific method. Are there some ideas in some traditional knowledge that were developed with the scientific method in mind? Most certainly, and we should treat them as scientific as long as we can verify them. But when you group all traditional knowledge as one body and claim everything under it to be scientific, then the scientific method will tell you, it is obviously unscientific.

1letterunixname 4y ago

Perhaps this is how an intellectual Dark Age begins, or at least shifts the center of gravity to other civilizations. Regression and decline into absurdity, unreason, and magical thinking. I wonder how many breakthroughs in hard science any of the illiberal victim white knights contribute to any field. Is there an h index for outrage and absurdity?