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>There is no such thing as "doom" or "pessimism" besides that in which humans perceive it. Yes, and we are humans, who discuss things in a human context. You c

• datashovel 12y ago
  That's a fair question. Ok, so let's take the following statement: true && true === true I would posit there's no meaningful, or reasonable way you can attach some human emotion to the above statement. And it is true whether or not humans exist. Similar with events that occur on earth. If humans weren't around to experience a mass extinction there would be nothing "pessimistic" or "doomsday" about it. It would simply be an event that occurred in the history of planet earth. Now let's consider scientific studies. Imagine the following statement: We have done a large scale study on the number of species on earth. We identified X total species in 2003 and we identified X-1000 total species in 2004. Every year since this date we have identified fewer and fewer total number of species in this study. There is nothing inherently "pessimistic" or "doomsday" about the above statement. It is simply a statement of a scientific study. When someone reads it, however, perhaps they infer or speculate on what this means to the human race and attach some emotion or feeling about the above statement, whereas the statement itself is completely void of these emotions or feelings. So I would say that it's not the case that you can "discard anything" in this same manner. In fact I think it's an important thing to point out because that's an enormous, unfortunate, and critical misunderstanding of popular culture about what science is and what scientists do.
  • EC1 12y ago
    Never thought about it that way, thanks.