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To anybody reading this article, While Dr. Spencer does have real credentials, he is a know denier. I'm not saying that makes him necessarily wrong, but he is
by j1z0 13y ago
To anybody reading this article, While Dr. Spencer does have real credentials, he is a know denier. I'm not saying that makes him necessarily wrong, but he is extremely biased in his views, and often publish research to back up those biased views. So I think he's comments should be taken with a grain of salt.
- lotyrin 13y agoIndeed, had to look at the author after the poor emotionally charged writing made his biases immediately clear.
- corresation 13y agoMost people, once they've established a position, become incredibly "biased" in their views. Skeptical Science, which I mention because it is referenced some dozen times in here, is the sort of site that proselytizes to the converted. It has driven a stake in the ground demarcating its position, and everything has to be relative to that stake.
- gruseom 13y agoThe tell is the angry sarcasm, which releases chemicals of pleasure in the brains of the already-convinced, but turns off anyone else.
- nerfhammer 13y agoI had been grasping for a word for this phenomenon for so long. Thank you.
- freshhawk 13y agoTrue in the broadest sense I suppose. I'm personally fine with driving a stake into the ground at "the consensus opinion of scientific experts". That's a different type of bias than driving the stake into a specific conclusion because the other stake moves. Frequently. To be fair, I think this only because it agrees with my pro-reason bias.
- xenophanes 13y agoHow is "the consensus opinion of scientific experts" determined? Does that mean majority view, unanimous, or what? Is group voting really a good way to decide such things? But if you aren't talking about a type of vote, what do you mean? And who decides who qualifies as a "scientific expert"? Isn't that problematic?
- freshhawk 13y agoTo oversimplify a fair bit, when the vast majority of people who have spend years studying a subject and have the respect of the other people doing the same agree that's "consensus". There are plenty of subjects that do not have a consensus opinion, plenty of times a consensus fractures into multiple camps, etc. Who's an expert? Anyone who can convince other experts they are also an expert in a culture that glorifies reason and evidence and where the most status can be gained by disagreeing with everyone and then convincing them you were right all along. You definitely seem to want an algorithm for this kind of thing, but there isn't one. It's an exercise in applied philosophy involving building an artificial culture made up of irrational human beings. It's incredibly problematic from your perspective I suppose. People are inherently problematic from that perspective, as is dealing with the unknown. From my perspective I'll take it until there is something better, because right now this is the way to get the best chance of being right about any subject. If some cell biologist came in here and told HN that GOTO's were the only control structure you needed for programming, although he had never programmed anything but that doesn't matter because he's smart and he reads about programming a lot, people would tell him he's wrong and that this is pretty well established and universally agreed upon. If he responded with "What did you guys do? Vote on it? Who gets to vote?" you would see that there is a pretty big disconnect between reality and how this biologist thought the culture worked.
- xenophanes 13y agoI do not want an algorithm. My point was closer to: there is no algorithm, and so this approach doesn't work. What I actually want is a different approach that rejects authority.