Fake science, be careful what you believe

[4metals]

As far as science and technology have come, there is still an ugly part of the human genome that we cannot get past. And that seems to be something humans have dealt with in the past and will continue to deal with long into the future.

Best summed up by an American moral philosopher named Eric Hoffer when he said

"In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The unlearned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."

And now we have successfully transitioned from the brink of politics to philosophy. So you can sleep soundly Ralph!

 

[g_axelsson]

This discussion is a bit difficult as the term conservative have both political and a more general meaning.

To categorically saying that conservative thinking (in the meaning of status quo) is always wrong is also wrong. There have been a lot of scientific theories put forward that has been proved wrong, but since it takes some time to become an established and well known theory most are proven wrong before it enters the broader public.
In that situation it's often best to sit back, keep a conservative look at things and wait for a "winning" theory to emerge.

One theory that gained quite a lot of momentum until it was proven totally wrong was the aether that transmitted light waves. It was finally put to death by Michelson and Morley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment

Today we have a scientific community that is a lot more humble than before, many scientists have come to the conclusion that they are not married to their theories and if proven wrong they will accept that without a lot of fuzz. But most scientists are "conservative" in the meaning that even if a new theory seems to describe a phenomenon slightly better than an old, most would agree that more research is needed. Before a new theory becomes mainstream there has to be compelling proofs and verification.

Quantum physics is over 100 years old but we still hasn't reached a consensus about how to interpret the equations. Is it a collapsing waveform, many worlds or some of the over 20 other interpretations that exist that is the true nature of quantum physics? Conservatism in this case becomes stick with what works the best and then we can sort out the details later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics

I think that the best way to approach science is to have a conservative mind but to be open for new ideas until proven faulty.

I watched with great interest but skepticism:
- Cold fusion (false, never consistently repeated)
- Super luminous neutrinos between Cern and Italy (false, a loose cable)
- Martian fossil bacteria (false, geological artefacts)
- Viking lander detecting signs of life (false, peroxides in the surface soil released oxygen) This one I believed at the time, but I was young then.
- Echoes from the Big Bang detected in the cosmic microwave background by BICEP2 (later attributed to dust but new independent measurements rule that out, the jury is still out on this)
- Gravitational waves detected (true... so far)

Göran

 

[4metals]

Any scientist putting forth a scientific theory is to be applauded because he or she is presenting research and interpretations for the purpose of debate. But the article I posted to start this thread isn't really about science at all but it hides under the thinly veiled guise of science. It is put out there for profit or personal gain, not to advance science.

We will always have to deal with differences of opinion formed from different interpretations of facts or experimentation, that is just the way we humans are wired. But fraudulent misuse of facts is something we should strive to eliminate.

Now if i knew how to do that, I could likely get my own Nobel prize.

 

[Iggy-poo]

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/06/08/richard-feynman-caltech-cargo-cult-science/

Titled The Cargo Cult Science, his exquisite speech uses the Cargo cult religious practices of Melanesian and Micronesian societies — an anthropological curiosity wherein, after WWII, pre-industrial native tribes would simulate and imitate the objects and behaviors they had observed in American and Japanese soldiers, in hopes of bringing back the material wealth soldiers had brought to them during the war — as a metaphor to make an articulate case for integrity over righteousness and sensationalism, a message all the timelier today as the fear of being wrong has swelled into an epidemic and media sensationalism continues to peddle pseudoscience to laymen ill-equipped or unwilling to apply the necessary critical thinking.