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News Briefs 26-04-2011

So, line up and shoot all the PhDs or just offer them a grant for a PhD in the Limitations of PhDs?

Quote of the Day:

Brains, like hearts, go where they are appreciated.

Robert S. McNamara

  1. All doors Open
    Re: The science of why we don’t believe science.

    One thing that… I think that mostly escapes us, is that we have been bred over the last half-century-or-so to doubt. This comes from many avenues. Things we see with our own eyes, things we hear with our own ears… we are told to deny.

    Thus, whether a iron worker or astronaut, garbage picker or pilot, bears no weight. One step from there comes the counter stroke… when we begin to question those who tell us to question ourselves.

    We are still not yet smart enough to say that we have all the answers to anything. The smartest man or woman is the one who admits this ignorance.

    Despite the best efforts of the blanket deniers, UFOs are still seen, irregularities to the accepted line of history are still unearthed, and man still seeks the heavens both for god and ET.

    The reason is now obvious; we are NOT as smart as we pretend to be.

    We do not have all the answers and science has not yet defeated God as the king of existence.

    All doors are still very much open.

  2. Why we don’t believe science
    So many reasons to question the “facts” science throws at us… The article cites a lunatic group to explain skepticism against science – how absurd a basis for an analysis. The article states,

    “Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. “They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs,” says Taber, “and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they’re hearing.” In other words, when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing…”

    Doesn’t that same argument/analysis apply to every scientist in history so married to their paradigm/theory/belief system they initially reject and even attack any new and contradictory evidence presented? Isn’t it true most new scientific theories do not universally replace the old theories on evidential basis but when the old theories’ proponents die off so no longer are defending their precious theories. Sorry for my cycnicism, I love science, but for as much good as science brings us, it also brings a host of miscaculations, mistakes, and problems, and so much of the criticism of the non-scientist’s skepticism and belief system also applies to the very scientists who supposedly are above such rationalistic prejudices…Science would do a whole lot better if it would take a huge gulp of humility…

  3. from the Desire-for-Riffing-Dept.
    What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.

    How someone communicates information says more aboot themselves than aboot what is being communicated aboot. I think that, whatever I experience is, as soon as it gets past all of the editing and such done by my the non-brain parts of my self, immediately get compared to my past experiences and that it takes training to try to keep that experience from becoming “Oh, THAT is what I experienced.”

    If people aren’t aware of this, then we get such things as the skeptic going “PSI???!! THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!” because it is immediately categorized in their minds as MAGIC or DEMONS or some uncomfortable blasphemy.

    Plus, I think that memory works like stories do — the act of making new connections, of finding things out are a PART OF MEMORY and not an example of ‘false memory’ or ‘faulty memory’.

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