My readers hate me, and like to make me suffer. That’s the only way to explain why they would send me links to the ghastly Huffington Post. I swear, it’s becoming as insane as World Net Daily.
The latest screed is from some bozo named Dr Larry Dossey. The awfulness begins right away, as he quotes Jeremy Rifkin, the professional Luddite, on the scientific method.
[T]he scientific method [is] an approach to learning that has been nearly deified in the centuries following the European Enlightenment. Children are introduced to the scientific method in middle school and informed that it is the only accurate process by which to gather knowledge and learn about the real world around us … The scientific observer is never a participant in the reality he or she observes, but only a voyeur. As for the world he or she observes, it is a cold, uncaring place, devoid of awe, compassion or sense of purpose. Even life itself is made lifeless to better dissect its component parts. We are left with a purely material world, which is quantifiable but without quality … The scientific method is at odds with virtually everything we know about our own nature and the nature of the world. It denies the relational aspect of reality, prohibits participation and makes no room for empathic imagination. Students in effect are asked to become aliens in the world.
There is absolutely nothing in that description that fits my conception of the scientific method. It’s utter nonsense written by someone who doesn’t understand science in the slightest, but is familiar with cartoon stereotypes of the scientist as heartless robot. Seriously, has this guy never heard of Richard Feynman? Neil deGrasse Tyson? Roy Chapman Andrews? Any of the biologists I know? We become part of the world by understanding that world as it actually is, unwarped by the superstitious illusions people like Dossey want to impose on it.
As usual, the complaint is an indignant claim that scientists will tell you that science is the only “accurate process by which to gather knowledge and learn about the real world”, which is true. Instead of saying what it is not, though, just once I’d like to see one of these clowns tell me plainly and clearly what his alternative is. Dossey does not.
It’s probably just as well. His latest book is on the “Power of Premonitions”, and he’s also written books on the power of prayer. He’s a credulous magic man, in other words.
I’d add Carl Sagan to the list of people whom Dr Dipshite has apparently either never heard of or doesn’t understand or closed its eyes and went nyah-nyah-nyah-I-can’t-hear-you…
Insomnia, PZ?
I think it was Sagan who said he was always mystified that people would turn away from science, which is constantly showing the world to be more awe inspiring than anything we could possibly dream up ourselves, that they would prefer a smaller, less interesting story because it was familiar.
Show me a scientist who’s devoid of awe and I’ll show you someone who picked the wrong career. Most of the scientists I’ve known have a great sense of awe about how the world works that’s a major motivator for them.
There is madness in his (vision of the scientific) method…
Well it isn’t, but it is about the only way to know “physical reality” and whether or not a purported entity “exists.” Damn, you mean kids are taught the importance of evidence?
Not devoid of the “awesome,” clearly devoid of compassion and any evident purpose, save where evolved organisms effect it. How stupid is this person?
That’s why Jane Goodall and other naturalists observing organisms in the wild are/were merely a lie.
Yes, we are not organisms that observe patterns and make reasonable inferences about them, or do the math needed for “deeper understanding.” Oh, yeah, except that we do, you lying idiot.
Look, I don’t deny that excessive abstraction is a danger to science, and I think that the continental tradition manages a more phenomenological viewpoint than the typical Anglo-American understanding of science. But science evolved out of our very “natural capabilities,” and if it is not all that we are, it definitely is part of what we are.
And he simply perpetuates the worst of over-abstraction with his cartoonish portrayal of what science is.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
At least most of the comments are (effectively) calling him a fool.
…but please stop sending PZ links to HuffPo – I end up reading them, and my brain is considering an escape plan that involves saws and drills.
What utter rot. While I’m not a scientist, I do claim to have a scientific mindset. I’m also going to claim that I have awe, compassion and a sense of purpose in abundance.
I only have to look at the stars to feel awe. Trying to understand the distances that that ancient light has travelled before it falls upon my eyes is mindboggling.
I only have to look at the suffering in the world around me to feel compassion. The feelings I got when I get heard that the pope dismissed the complaints of sex abuse victims as “gossip” tells me my compassion is working just fine.
I only have to look at my child to feel a sense of purpose. We live in an unimaginably large and old universe that cares not one whit for our existence. Making my infinitesimally tiny corner of that universe joyful, loving and safe for my daughter is my most profound purpose.
So Dr. Larry Dosser, you can blow your vile accusations about my character out your ass. That is of course only if you can get your head out of it long enough to do so.
I wish I could say that I’ve never read anything that stupid before. I really, really do.
Middle school? I’m pretty sure I knew the scientific method when my class did our first science fair project in first grade. (conclusion: mom’s houseplants that were watered with salt water didn’t do as well as the ones watered with fresh water)
Also, Dossey, scientists are well aware of the observer effect. You didn’t come up with it all by yourself.
Dossey:
Clearly, he’s not aware of the Observer effect.
More generally, his implicit claim that scientists don’t think they’re within reality (that which is observed) is risible.
The scientific method is at odds with virtually everything we know about our own nature and the nature of the world
Does this make sense?! Everything we know is a result of using the scientific method, I wonder how he could comment on the nature of the world and our own nature without it.
Shit. Reading fail on my part. Ah well, my point still stands if I add that awe, compassion and purpose are all human traits, to assign them to the universe in general is asinine.
Does understanding the science behind the aurora borealis, the human body or distant galaxies make them any less awe inspiring? Dossey has no idea what he is talking about.
I’ve just been reading an article at http://www.anhcampaign.org/print/3002 which goes on about “scientism” and has a similar message to Dossey’s. It claims that “scientism” is all about bliving that only scientific knowledge is real knowledge and that science is the absolute and only justifiable access to the truth. However, these critics of science never provide any alternative methods by which they think we can understand the world.
This bizarre anti-intellectualism/anti-science thing we have going on here seems to be slowly showing itself as a simple case of “I don’t understand, stop making me feel stooopid!”
And then there’s the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Retards of the world, unite (in front of a rapidly traveling bus)!
One of the greatest joys of getting my BSc was the fact that my mind was able to grasp the truly amazing, wondrous, awe-inspiring nature of the smallest molecule and the infinite Universe to an extent that it hadn’t been able to before. Far from a small and inexplicable world, I was given the tools to see how DNA could unfurl from a single cell to an astonishing organism, and portraits of galaxies far, far away.
Being able to revel in the wonder of biology filled me with compassion for all fellow travellers and hardened my purpose to fight as hard to preserve the natural world as I could. Not just because each part of the world deserves preserving in and of itself, but because humans are part of that world and to lose the option of enjoying the existence of any single, astonishing, startling, complex, amazing species is a loss too great to bear.
Apparently, that means I am doing science wrong. Who knew?
A
“Waaah! Waaah! You’re taking away my fairies and leprechauns! I don’t feel special anymore! I hate you! Waaaaah!”
I thought such things happen only in fiction. Reminds me of the “second handers” as mentioned in Ayn Rand novels. The things he says are so like them. Does he actually mean any of what he said?
I think most of us are already familiar with Feynman’s flower video. The whole interview is wonderful.
I think the sentiment encapcillates americaN understanderness quite neatfully.
What’s your problem PZ?
Why are youp always a pane in the ass?
I feel a premonition coming on:
His book is going to make money for him.
Why? Because he is yet another charlatan, tapping into the wishful thinking of the gullible many. The Huffpo piece is really only a vehicle for promoting his books.
I think the sentiment encapcillates americaN understanderness quite neatfully.
What’s your problem PZ?
Why are youp always a pane in the ass?
Like when you pee on the bottom side of the toilet bowl it cancels the Auora Coreallis, which hardly not anybody even knoews about .
The scientific method is at odds with virtually
everythingthe fairy stories weknowlike to believe about our own nature and the nature of the world.Fixed it for you.
oops – del tag FAIL above. sorry.
My husband got us the boxed set of Cosmos a few weeks ago and we’re still watching it. After so many hours of Carl Sagan’s distinctive and very relaxing voice waxing passionately on everything from beach sand to supernovae, I have no idea how Dossey’s description of science fits in with reality.
A’course, I don’t think he’s very much in tune with reality to begin with, with all that woo about premonitions. But I have a premonition that he would disagree with me if I ever told him that.
Devoid of awe???? What universe is this moron living in? We are surrounded by awesomeness.
Every time I look at sunset fading to the night sky I’m moved to awe. Every time I stop to think about the chain of circumstances over billions of years that led by chance to my existance, I am moved to awe. Hell, every time a new scientific discovery is announced I practically break into a happy dance.
I have to pity someone with such a limited imagination that he can only view the world in terms of old fairy stories and cannot see beyond the end of his nose.
Can Larry Doozy go get himself mauled by a brown bear? That would be awesome, the credulous may consider it a compassionate act of nature (sparing the rest of us this Doozy), and I’ll bring the popcorn and bacon to celebrate (isn’t that a fitting purpose).
The good news about this is, at least people other than deluded fools who fall for this nonsense are catching it, and talking about how deluded and nonsensical it is. No one would ever take Dossey’s post seriously who didn’t already agree with him, and some that DO take him seriously might even follow a talkback here, or anywhere else all over the internet that’s calling this guy out for the ignorant fraud that he is.
I wish. I fucking wish!
ScienceBlogs posts can be published at a pre-set time, not necessarily the time they’re written. PZ uses this a lot.
Dawkins has written a whole book about this:
Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow. Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, Houghton Mifflin 1998
It isn’t “del”, it’s <strike> or <s>.
Excuse me, but isn’t HuffPost a rationalist left wing site, I hear about it all the time from Keith Olbermann and Maddow.
How come this nonsense gets published there, has anyone wrote to the editor?
Yeah, that’s totally the sense I get whenever I watch Cosmos. Just Carl Sagan spewing facts and figures, almost robotically.
Jillian, the sentiment is good, but it is surely cruel to actual mentally retarded people to compare them with these assclownshoes. I’ve been trying to push “auto-retard” but it doesn’t seem to be taking on. Maybe assclownshoes will.
@scooterKPFT#21, nice troll, you almost had me there ;)
as for the author, Dr. Larry Dossey, he’s aparently the “Former Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital” and author of “The Power of Premonitions”
I wonder how much of what he has written in his books has any relation to the “Former” part of what he flaunts.. Scary that someone who is apparently taught the scientific method as a medical practitioner can turn to prayer and gibberish at a later date. Goes to show no-one is safe from dangerous memes.
Funny, this sounds more like people who believe in souls, that our minds are fundamentally separate immaterial entities that are merely driving around meat puppets for a little while.
@Fortknox: Huffington Post is left-leaning, but it’s not rationalist. There’s plenty of woo on the left. I doubt Olbermann and Maddow are citing its “science” articles.
I am totally getting on this bus. “Assclownshoes” is much more descriptive anyway. I’ve used “soup sandwich” in the past, but I always think I need a buzzcut to say that – and I haven’t had one of those in years.
Ok, did anyone else actually read the article, or did everyone just stop at the quote?
Maybe it’s because I just woke up, my brain is still asleep, and I’m burnt out from doing calc homework until holyshitit’sthatlate in the morning…but his actual article raises a few good points. Granted, there are parts of it that are silly, but for the most part it seems to be a commentary on how science often intimidates people, causing people who would otherwise be interested in various fields to be put off.
And he’s right about that, most people don’t actually know what scientists do or how they work, and many many people are intimidated by courses that they might otherwise be able to handle if they were introduced to it a different way.
I’m not sure what his comments about the scientific method have to do with the bulk of the article, they seem to be almost non sequiturs. Unless I’m totally missing something, he’s actually encouraging a more hands-on approach to science, showing children exactly what it is that scientists do to give them a more accurate idea of what goes on. To pull another quote he uses:
“We as a culture do a very bad job of telling our children what scientists do. Young people have an image of scientists as eccentric old men with wild hair, smoking cigars, deep in thought, alone. Basically, they think of Einstein. We need to change that image and give our children a much richer, nuanced view of who scientists are, what scientists do and how they work.”
Can any of you honestly say that’s wrong? I remember the first time I was ever exposed to a laboratory, it was a real eye-opener for me. Yeah, the author seems pretty woo-tastic, his comments about the scientific method are stupid and detract from the rest of the article, and that whole paragraph about native Americans was weird; but is the overarching message terribly off? By all means, if my sleep-addled brain has missed something, point it out.
Dossey is the executive editor of EXPLORE, a repository of woo and quackery that publishes about “distant healing” and all manner of nonsense.
Of late, he’s been paling around with Deepak Chopra and others trying to get woo inserted into the health care reform bill:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/01/the_three_musketeers_of_woo_attack_scien.php
Here’s the sort of stuff that EXPLORE publishes:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/03/dr_emotos_water_woo_metastasizes.php
When did ICP start working for HuffPo?
That being said lufkin does have some useful points on how young females are driven away. Now, I disagree with the females are social trope. I wasn’t. I’m not collaborative now.
Sorry bozo, prove it.
But… the girls can’t hack math/science thing kept me from ever taking a course in either until I was prettymuch finished with an undergraduate degree. Why would I waste time with something I’m just going to fail at?
Etc.
I almost don’t see the connection between the last two paragraphs and the first two (one of which is a quote).
We have the same problem in music!
Haha… Sorry. I meant Dosey above. I think I made some kind of portmanteau of their names.
@Matrim: I did read the article. It’s a collection of poorly connected complaints, with nary a solution offered. The overarching message may be correct, but it’s lost in the fog of a poorly written essay by a guy who really isn’t helping with his own books.
Right. Allow me helpfully to supply some alternative, more honest endings to this paragraph:
‘… whereas, here at HuffPo, we vastly prefer to deify ‘just making shit up’ as our approach. Which is so clearly so much better.’
‘… which, to put it bluntly, were it actually respected as a message in any real way ‘mongst my audience, would kinda suck for my book sales. So I’m hereby going to commence to whine about it, and bang on at typically confused length with the standard airheaded contemporary insinuation that actually basing your view of reality on such base and ignoble things as mere observation and reason is somehow inferior to just making shit up…’
‘… which, where it is true, can prove somewhat annoying for me. Since, speaking frankly, I have about as much interest in actually dealing honestly with my audience as does the average carnival grifter…’
(/Your equivalent phrase goes here.)
You know, in HuffPo’s defense, it is a huge web site. It’s ranked 39th in the US in traffic, and is quite expansive in its content. Look at all the categories at the top of the main page: Politics, Media, Entertainment, Sports, Comedy, Business, Living, Style, Green, Tech, World, College, Impact, Books, Food, Religion, etc., all of which are updated regularly. That’s a lot of content. You can go there and browse just the Politics, Business, Tech, and World categories, for example, where you won’t be exposed to pseudoscientific nonsense. They DO have a religion section, but that’s a small part of the overall site. You could read HuffPo all day without encountering the woo stuff. If all you read is the direct links to woo that are sent to you, then you’d have an observational bias of the site.
One of the common claims of creationists is that science is too narrow and doesn’t allow for Other Ways of Knowing.
1. Which is false. There is no science police. Anyone can do science any way they want. It is a free country.
2. So what has Theistic Science or Christian centered Science ever discovered? AFAIK, nothing in the last few thousand years. Zero, zip, nada, nien.
We use the techniques of methodological naturalism in science because they work and work well. We built the modern Hi Tech 21st century civilization with it. Long lives, feeding 6.7 billion people, telescopes in orbit, robots around Saturn, cheap computers etc..
“just once I’d like to see one of these clowns tell me plainly and clearly what his alternative is”
Exactly–idiots who denegrate established methods of doing anything (“not natural!” “not real!” “not valid!”) never offer any valid alternatives. They usually tell you to “go with your feelings” (which has always been my bitch about the entire Jedi concept).
This is just bafflegab, nonsense, words strung together without meaning. I would try to parse it but why bother?
Dossey is free to immerse himself in “realtional aspects of reality”, “participation” (in what???), and indulge in “empathic imagination” all he wants. It is a free country, and none of that seems to violate any laws.
Science is a system of knowing about the world. It has no police or armed forces preventing anyone from doing anything.
As to what he has ever discovered, who knows? He claims to be able to use magic (prayer) to control part of the world and be able to foretell the future. Countless people make those claims of being wizards, warlocks, witches, mages, fortune tellers, or sorcerors all the time. There is never any real proof.
I haven’t gone and read the article, but I’m glad Matrim pulled this quote, as it supports what I thought when I first read the article. I teach nature classes for elementary school kids at a nature center and run science-oriented summer camps, and what I see is kids who have checked out of science at a VERY young age precisely because they’ve learned this:
This has nothing to do with actual science, of course, but it comes from being taught science by people who don’t love science and are really really tired of their jobs, from being inculcated with anti-science nonsense at their churches, and generally from being taught science as a series of facts rather than a way of life. Also, the scientific method, as taught, leaves out my favorite part – the “noodle around in the world with an open mind and notice stuff” stage.
When I talk with kids about the scientific method, I always present it as a circle – beginning and ending with the “noodling around” part and talk about how kids can use the scientific method informally in their real lives (e.g. what kind of breakfast is better for my basketball game?). Also it would help if teachers could convey the elegance and importance of replication of results instead of just presenting the basic chemistry type of experiments as “we’re going to do this because it’s in the book,” which is certainly what I recall from middle school science class.
I always tell kids about the time I asked EO Wilson what he thought was the most important thing to teach kids about the natural world and he said that the most important thing was to allow kids an “unmediated experience of nature,” without adults to keep them on the path, direct their attention to whatever’s on the lesson plan, etc. So all of my camps include ample amounts of UMEON, with me standing around with field guides, a camera, and a field microscope. Sometimes I’ll even plan activities but then give the kids a choice between X and UMEON – they almost always choose the UMEON.
I think the other source of this sort of alienation from the scientific process is, paradoxically, television documentaries. When I talk with kids about nature, they often seem to think that science and nature happen somewhere else and that because they live in a suburban condominium, they don’t experience nature in their daily lives. So we talk about insects, weeds in the sidewalk, etc., and by the time we’re done, they’re more awed by seeing a spider eat a cricket than they were seeing a lion eat a zebra on tv.
So Dr. Dosser may be an idiot, but he may be on to something, even if he doesn’t express it well. And I’ve never read Rifkin, but when I’ve heard him on various NPR programs, he’s seemed intelligent and thought provoking, even if I don’t always agree with whatever he’s said. Now that I’ve heard him described as a professional luddite, I’ll have to go read him so as to form a more informed opinion. Great, another book on the to-read list.
Totally right! Science is exactly like downloading porn while masturbating furiously!
I stopped being surprised by seeing this kind of drivel in wide distribution when I came to a couple of realizations several years back:
1. ‘Spirituality’ sells… in this country anyhow, and does so almost as well as sex. There is almost no sure-fire “get rich quick” scheme as efficient and effective as spewing forth a ‘feel-good” book with some meaningless and vacuous connections to some other-worldly consciousness. Oprah, Deepak, and other daytime TV birdseed-filled talking heads make their (very substantial) living on manipulating an audience that will lap up ridiculous claptrap. The famous phrase should be updated to say “There’s a sucker born every minute, and another million watching Oprah every day”.
2. A common tactic in marketing your product (in this case, spirituality), is to vilify the competitor (in this case, rationality, reason and science). The Republican party does this with aplomb. They market themselves as the representatives of “real America”, the common man, the worker. The reality, of course, is that it is a party made up primarily of wealthy, middle-aged white people that have hardly done a hard day’s labor in their lives and whose basic tenets are in direct opposition to the interests of the common working-class American. But they sure make themselves sound like they relate more to the average American. It’s the same in the spiritual woo business. People like this huckabee (my new favorite insult for woo-soaked charlatans… like it?) know full well that the general American public, being a highly religious lot, are nicely pre-programmed by christianity to swallow preposterous codswallop without a thought. So spiritual mumbo-jumbo of any type is just more “spike” for the punch, and to make sure the average low-intellect consumer knows how wonderful it is, one must vilify the reasoned logic and rationality that is the scientific method, and paint it as a polar opposite to the wonderful, pillowy, pink and fluffy magical way of “knowing things that can’t be known” that is spirituality.
So, ultimately people with a little bit of charisma and the ability to speak even remotely eloquently realize the math:
Spiritual hooploop + vilification of drab, boring science + book + widely distributed op-ed pieces coddling religion and deriding science = $$$$.
It’s an oft-used formula that is becoming more and more common.
Matrim #37 wrote:
Oh yes, I did read the article, first off, and was reading down our comments before I tried to make the point you’re making here. But I see this division between reasonable and unreasonable as a further demonstration of Dossey’s intellectual dishonesty, not exculpatory evidence. This is just the standard bait-n-switch tactic of the pseudoscientist. Take a statement with several radically different interpretations — one true but trivial, one extraordinary but false — and introduce them together, as if they were part of the same continuum. That way, the unreasonable assertions gets to pass critical scrutiny by riding on the backs of the reasonable assertions.
It seems to come down to this basic claim: “Many positive aspects of science are getting short shrift in the public understanding.” Okay, what does this mean? Science is being sold as a solitary, male pursuit, and much of the joy of discovery and community is being left out; Science is being sold as a cold, objective pursuit and the magical, mystical, spiritual truths and ways of knowing are being left out. Those statements do not mean the same thing.
Dossey is being a sly, tricky little toad here. He hopes to appeal to the warm and rational side of his liberal audience by pushing all the right buttons when he goes on to “explain” what he means by his anti-scientific rant. He even brings in what colonialists did to native Americans. Could the demagoguery be more blatant?
Look at this statement: it’s supposed to be his thesis. But scientists who reject his addled forms of woo do not deny that science is a “relational, embedded, networked way” of viewing the world. That’s the very reason his magical ways of thinking and knowing are rejected! The scientific community is collaborative, and gaining a consensus is a very, very high standard. People telling personal anecdotes in uncontrolled studies are not going to pass muster.
And the model of reality has to fit together. You can’t claim some new form of “energy” or whatever and pretend that the physicists haven’t accepted it because it’s outside of what they currently know about physics. You can’t insist that subjective experiences connect you to the universe and give you special revealed knowledge which must then be included in the scientific model.
Because modern science isn’t confirming Dossey’s warm, personal, subjective view of reality — where mind has real power and consciousness is central to everything — he’s trying to say that the problem is that scientists aren’t being honest about the need to collaborate. They do collaborate, Dossey. But you don’t play by the rules necessary for honest debate, demonstration, or science, and that’s exactly why they won’t and can’t work with you.
Pseudoscientists hate science’s standard of working together to achieve consensus. It is their enemy, because they need special rules. They are stuck off in their own worlds of subjectivity, where they just ‘know’ things because they experienced them directly.
Sweeping intellectual dishonesty on his part. And the fact that he makes many good points makes his essay worse, not better. The good points, scientists have already been making, in the name of defending good science. They are not issues that only those with supernatural, paranormal beliefs will have the insight to discover.
Jesus, can’t even wait until it finishes downloading?
‘Cept it actually works in the Star Wars universe.
I suppose your concern is the way it encourages bad habits in the viewer, but honestly, if you’re taking advice from fictional hermit monks with laser swords seriously, then perhaps you’ve already gone around the bend.
This illustrates one of the least understood aspects of the nature of scientific inquiry (I have come to avoid calling it a “method” as that entails some problems, see Feyerabend for more if you’re interested). Science as understood and practiced in the sense we mean today is very counter-intuitive. I suspect that many practicing scientists and people who read this blog had an easy time grasping the essential concepts or perhaps grew up in a family that encouraged certain modes of thought or you were born with a particular personality that made grasping the counter-intuitive bits much easier for you. I had to work for it, and it did not come to me easily.
The writer in question does not sound like a complete idiot, unlike some of the gumbies that PZ has featured before. Maybe if he read’s Book 2 of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and some other seminal works in science (and not the simplifications which most people read) then he may realize what he’s missing. It’s only when the ignorance sounds willful that I come out with fangs and claws.
That said, the eNeMeE’s comment about reading Huffpo then your brain starts making escape plans made me LOL, my first one for the day, thank you.
Hey now, stop that…
I mean, while I laud the clear intent to get people actually to do science, I’m afraid if we get them into it at that level of participation and enthusiasm, the fecund* rate of advancement in our society’s cosmological savvy and knock-on effects in technological capabilities might accelerate to such a pitch we’d have school-age children building new universes of their own as weekend projects by sometime next decade…
… and fuck, it just seems to me that might get crowded or something. Think of the risks, man!
(*/Adjective chosen very consciously, natch.)
I had a good mental laugh when I saw the first “related blog” on that HuffPo article!
It’s just a Deepak Chopra clone.
Different name, same bullshit.
Just one word: money!
Okay, well, one more word then: disgusting!
“You could read HuffPo all day without encountering the woo stuff. If all you read is the direct links to woo that are sent to you, then you’d have an observational bias of the site.”
Bias, schmias. Woo is woo. Whether it be the site’s entire content or a small portion, it’s woo. Those most likely to be taken in by HuffPoo’s woo may never approach the non-woo content, so the argument that there’s lots of non-woo is a thin defense at best. This thread isn’t discussing the web site but one instance of woo presented on it.
I’ll see your co-creator of the universe and raise you a Copenhagen interpretation.
BigMKnows | April 26, 2010 8:57 AM:
HEY!! It’s ok, ’cause it can do lots and lots of damage, instead of just a little bit of damage.
.. and then you turn around and pull the same stunt on the readers who HAVEN’T yet been subjected to forementioned ghastly Fluffington post?
MEANIE!
Terry Pratchett has pointed out (in Hogfather) that compassion, mercy, and justice exist only if we believe in them. They only happen inside us. The universe is cold and uncaring. We (or at least most of us) are not.
@Sastro & Celtic Evolution
QFT! Thanks for helping me organize my future career as a pseudoscientist!
Well there is the placebo effect, which Lewis Thomas said was something that deserved far more investigation. But as far as the mind influencing the behavior of the earthworms in my garden, no, not confirmed. It’s sort of like the religions that view god as totally powerless in the world except insofar as people make decisions based on what they think “god” would like – so if I go add compost to the beds and help the earthworms, you could say that “mind” is influencing earthworm populations.
So that’s how the technological singularity will happen!
Is this along the lines of the “empiricism refutes itself argument?” Because we all know that all useful information cannot only come from empirical inquiry. For example I believe polio was eradicated when Jonas Salk did some sort of metaphysical mind meld with the universe and the blueprints for the vaccine were transcendentally linked to his aura.
science is the only “accurate process by which to gather knowledge and learn about the real world”, which is true.
Why does everyone always leave out logic?
1. If A then B
2. A
—————-
3. B
There, no science involved.
@zeromh: But where is “Profit!”?
I think the best part would be the ‘public information’ Reefer Madness-type films aimed at preventing the scourge, myself…
FATHER: (looking, unsurprisingly, much like Ward Cleaver, standing outside door, pounding on it) Johnny, you open this door this minute! You’d better not be doing science in there, young man!
JOHNNY: (voice muffled, heard thru door) No! Don’t come in! I’m… Umm… Downloading porn, that’s all! Honest, Dad!
I don’t disagree with everything he has to say.
He’s right about the world being a cold and uncaring place. Why that means we can’t have awe I don’t understand.
Much of what he said seems to be unparseable word-salad so I can’t say whether I agree with it or not.
Also, asking students to become aliens is in many contexts excellent advice. For example, in cognitive science, people need to set aside a lot of their intuitions about how minds function. In effect, it is in some ways more efficient to ac like you are an alien trying to understand a different species.
@67: if your A and B have anything to do with the real world, you need to know A empirically. Hello, science. Logic is a method, not a destination, and only empirical input can get you from the conditional “if A then B” to the conclusion that B is true.
Actually the world is neutral, neither caring nor uncaring. Or both caring and uncaring. Assuming that neutrality means “cold and uncaring” reveals a narcissistic cognitive bias. Not surprising, actually.
Obviously has never spent any time in Charleston during August.
It is uncaring. It can’t care. The world is hostile to our existence and the universe is almost completely uninhabitable to us.
The scientific method is at odds with virtually everything we know about our own nature and the nature of the world.
And how, pray tell, do we know about “our own nature and the nature of the world?
What are the odds he uses pictures from the Hubble when trying to make his points?
QFT. Although I guess it is uncaring, as in it does not care either way because it does not have a sentient mind to care or not care with.
That’s an anthropomorphic projection in addition to the cognitive bias of “cold” as well.
An artist once instructed me not to tell her how rainbows form. She said that if she understood the science behind rainbows, that knowledge would kill her “innocent enjoyment” of rainbows, that she would forever be thinking of them as some sort of experiment in a lab. Fucking odd how some people don’t want to give their brain a chance to function at its best.
She may be an artist, but that fact has nothing to do with the fact that she’s also a ninny.
Artistic =/= lacking knowledge and understanding of reality.
@71: I see what you’re saying, but if someone comes up to you and says “My mom goes food shopping at the supermarket for an hour every day at 6 pm. It’s currently 6:30. Is my mom at the supermarket now,” would you say you’ve done “science” when you give the correct answer of “yes”? Sure, the information that you were provided with originally had an empirical source, but all you did was apply logic to it.
I agree the universe4 is indeed cold and uncaring and without awe. These are human emotions, we feel awe from our experience of the universe. Knowing the crystal structure of ice does not make a snow crystal any less beautiful. “Awe” is not a property of the universe that we “detect” through ignorance, but an emotion we project onto the universe.
To all these Rifkins in the world the universe is little more than a “magic trick” where knowing how it is performed “spoils it”. They don’t seem to get that understanding the “magic” of one phenomenon just presents us with more “magic”.
Lynna says, “An artist once instructed me not to tell her how rainbows form.”
Let me guess, your friend wears a fucking beret, right? Do me a favor. Ask your friend if she can tell you under what conditions (e.g. time of day, meteorological conditions, etc.) she should look for the best rainbows. Ask her if she’s ever seen nacreous clouds; a halo around the shadow of a plane she was riding in; glories, sun pillars, and on and on. Do you have any idea of the number of people–especially artsy-fartsy types–I’ve introduced to the phenomenon of nacreous clouds? It’s because I 1)know about them; 2)know when conditions are right for them; 3)take time to look at the sky; 4)care.
Here’s an idea of what she is missing:
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/highsky/nacim0.htm
This is an interesting point, as the perpetrators were nearly always religious zealots, as in the ultimate bastards, – missionaries and/or preachers.
omg that guys view of science is the worst thing I’ve ever heard of- what a retard
No. Nor would you be giving a correct answer, necessarily, since being able to confirm that your mom actually is, in reality, at the supermarket would require some observable, testable element.
Interesting angle. Can I look forward to the hardcover edition of The Semen-Haunted World: Science as a Tissue in the Dark anytime soon?
As an artist the last thing I ever needed was an “innocent enjoyment” of anything. What a ditz.
But as an artist I suppose she also has no interest in the formulation of pigments, mediums, etc.
I always enjoyed the technical aspect of creating paint from pigment, fats, binders, etc.
Re #79, and ‘would you say you’ve done science’, generally, no, but…
… but there is a natural and significant continuity between what you did there and what science does.
And this is a critical point: science is not some abtruse concept from some other world. Far from it: it’s a natural and variously systematized version of something everyone does all the fucking time. Observe, reason, form your picture of the world using that reason, act accordingly: you’re doing that all the time, when you so much as turn on a tap in your home, turn over on your bed because your muscles are sore. And the only real difference between what a microbiologist identifying a pathogen from his gels is doing and what a hunter-gatherer tracking an animal by its track is doing is in the equipment. Otherwise: it’s very, very much the same thing.
This, to me, is much of the lie and the hypocrisy behind what assholes like the clown who wrote that article and Chopra are doing: they’re always trying to portray science as something artificial, otherworldly, at odds with this world, when it’s precisely the opposite. Science is of this world, concerned with this world, and gives you a better shot than anything else at actually getting this world right (tho’ there are, of course, no guarantees) precisely because it’s a natural extension of something we do rather innately, and must do. And I find it very, very unlikely they’re really so incredibly stupid don’t know this perfectly well. (And thus, I tend to conclude: they do know, but such honesty does not sell the kinds of books they believe themselves, in their limited imaginations, capable of actually writing.)
Seen in this light, I’d add, the various philosophical ‘revolutions’ of the previous centuries, up to and including the much-maligned Enlightenment disgusting clowns like these guys do like to try to smear, were not so much the supplanting of something old with something new as the restoration of something older. The odd notions that there were other ‘ways of knowing’ beyond empiricism and reason have probably been around as long as there’ve been medicine men, but the notion fostered by powerful institutional religions that grew along with mass societies that these should have some sort of privilege excluding mere reason and observation–that there were special spheres you had to keep your grubby, sensible, and (relatively) reliable (or at least: least unreliable) habit of thinking it over away from and let them ‘explain’ things to you, possibly in direct contradiction to the very evidence of the world–this was rather newer, I expect…
So in this light: the Enlightenment and the tremors that followed were mostly just people noticing that what works for tracking an animal or cooking a meal does work for working out the orbits of the planets, too–that there’s no one privileged out there who gets to tell you how things work without giving an explanation of how he knows that eventually comes back to verifiable observation and reason.
That came out a bit lengthy; my apologies. More in short: there is rather less of a gap between science and mere common sense than idiots like Dossey like to imply. It may seem hard to see this, sometimes, especially when the systems that are studied are extremely complex, mathematically, or behave (again, ultimately, at observation) in ways our human ‘intuition’–deflected as it often is by our own cultural background, and possibly even innate biases–might not have expected. But it is so, all the same.
Those people flabbergast me. Of course, one wonders if showing them proof of ownership would similarly destroy the wonder and surprise when they arrive to take possession at the bridge I want to sell them.
Nacreous clouds! Now, that’s my kind of porn. (Well, the other kind is as well.)
I keep a pair of binoculars at my desk, as I’ve got a office-tower view of the river valley, and every so often something interesting will happen and one of my coworkers will come to my desk to borrow them to identify a coyote or a deer or something like that, but I keep an eye on the clouds.
One day I saw some that looked like Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds, though I can’t be sure. (I took this with a cell phone camera, so excuse the terrible photograph.)
re 87:
In an episode of Cosmos Sagan blames Plato and his school of philosophy for doing immense harm to the scientific method for centuries. I think it was Demothenes who presented a much more empirical view of the world that was “defeaated” by Plato’s world of “ideal forms” of which we experience just shadows.
@SteveM: The example of Plato’s philosophy is exactly why I disagree with zeromh’s assertion in #67 that logic alone can be a substitute for science. Logic is a necessary tool for science, but it’s not much use on its own. You need to feed accurate premises into your syllogism.
Exactly.
Also, I detest the base canard that science is somehow ‘dehumanizing’. Formal science is one of the few things that we humans do (as far as we can tell) better than any other type of animal. Other animals are capable of critical and logical thinking, of course. But when it comes to spending time, effort and energy on the pure pursuit of knowledge for the its own sake, nobody else can hold a candle to humans.
Science is one of the things that makes us human, and allows us to be human (for good or for ill). To deny this importance of science for humanity – not just the technological products, but the actual practice – misses a great deal of what makes us human, and what makes being human worthwhile.
Sad.
Here is a perfect refutation of the idea that science presents a “universe without awe”.
Dossey may have had some valid points about how science is presented to the next generation, but I think he made a huge blunder quoting Rifkind for a definition of the scientific method.
…
It’s not that she was an artist, it’s that she was comforted by her ignorance and was afraid of the consequences of filling her inanity with truth. So, knowing that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen prevents her from enjoying a cool glass on a hot day? The less you know. the happier you are, or the more creative? That must be why the fundies are uniformly so happy and well-balanced whereas scientists are in general such a miserable lot.
And lay off the beret jokes! I mean it!
Brownian,
Ooh, nice waves! It always amazes me how much these goddamned Lord Byron wannabes ignore nature. If their experience of the mystical cannot survive the light of reason, it is merely a daydream. If reason enhances the mystic, then it’s science.
The awe-less, dehumanising canard of science is so off-the-wall stupid it barely warrants a response. People whose awe is dependent on their ignorance are the same people this poster refers to.
@Cath the Canberra Cook
Assclownholes sounds like a perfect diminutive. I’ll try to make use of it.
@84: The answer is correct given that the premises are true. If the premises aren’t true, then there’s nothing that logic or science can do for you. You have to have some information to work with.
@87: I agree on there being a continuity. I just feel like saying “science is the only way to know” potentially leaves out a lot. Like when you take someone’s arguments to their logical conclusion to prove that their ideas are actually bullshit – correct me if I’m wrong, but no one calls that science. And yet it is a valid way of deriving information that is based on the logical process alone.
@90: Careful with your words, please! I didn’t say logic could substitute for science. Science is logic, plus experimentation. What I’m saying is that you can use logic to gain information even without experimentation, under the right circumstances. I mean, what would you say much of the field of mathematics is?
In the medicine and health sections, my estimate is that at least 40% of what’s posted on HuffPo is woo, and that’s probably a generous estimate. When it’s anything about vaccines, the percentage goes up to at least 90%, as HuffPo has been a bastion of antivax quackery since its very inception. In any case, the high level of woo at HuffPo should not be surprising given that its “Wellness Editor” Patricia Fitzgerald is a homeopath and practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. She’s known for writing stuff on detoxing and other nonsense.
@mikee (#13) — how surprising that several of the “references” in the http://www.anhcampaign.org/print/3002 piece lead to dead links.
I have a profile on the Huffington Post dating back to October 2005, with over 800 comments. My opinion is that HuffPo was quite instrumental in the success of the Democrats/liberals in the 2006 midterm elections, with blogospherical after-shock repercussions that eventually led to Obama’s resounding victory in November 2008.
But PZ is correct: now HuffPo SUCKS nearly 90% of the time. (Former Republican Arianna never had any political integrity anyway.) Her dreamsite is fast becoming the biggest internet trollop: a new National Enquirer. A moderated rag.
Stephen Hawking, for instance, just yesterday posted an article saying we should be cautious about attracting “alien” attention to our planet. In response I posted a completely clean, funny, tongue-in-cheek comment, about the Judeo-Christian God stepping in to “protect us” from the Vogon’s attack with his “Burning Bush Laser Blast from Mount Sinai.” And if Yahweh was defeated, Allah would come to Earth’s rescue with “a pile of stones and a rocket launcher on-loan from Dick Cheney.” Failing this, Brahma and Vishnu entered the fray “wielding Curry Powder Bombs and Ganges Grenades.”
The comment appeared briefly, and then was moderated/deleted within seconds. HuffPo is truly a religious accommodationist nightmare in the making. An internet soapbox for the most loathsome of apologists, including the despicable charlatan Deepak Chopra.
I’ve lost the majority of my respect for HuffPo.
“An artist once instructed me not to tell her how rainbows form. She said that if she understood the science behind rainbows, that knowledge would kill her “innocent enjoyment” of rainbows”
There’s a difference between artist and imbecile.
I hasten to add that in her frenzy to avoid the MAGIK SECRT OF RAINBOWS, she’d have to avoid knowledge of the light spectrum, light prisons, and well…Color theory is skirting dangerously close to the forbidden eldrich lore. Personally, unless she only works in B/W I don’t have much stock in an artist who has a revulsion to the color wheel.
@55
I like ‘scientific inquiry’ as opposed to scientific method, but can you elaborate on why you think the scientific inquiry methodology we practice is counter-intuitive? It seems very intuitive to me. As for why people become scientists – that’s a fine question…and I think a good answer to it would lead to insights about the rise of the current Reality by Declaration movement. I’m a scientist because…I like puzzles; I find thinking fun; nature is the most compelling part of the world I know.
When I was 14 yo, I asked for a telescope for Xmas. Receiving my first 3″ refractor, I set the thing up in the middle of our quiet street that cool December night (we were in the Deep South). I proceeded to turn the scope to the brightest object in the sky, which just happened to be Saturn, tilted so perfectly that I saw the rings.
I had no idea that the very first object I cast my gaze on would be the most beautiful object in our solar system. I was so stunned that I had tears in my eyes.
35 years later, my love of astronomy has never waned. As our knowledge of the known universe has expanded, so has my awe.
THAT, my friends, is what this is all about. Those who have no idea what awe is are those who have never looked up or looked within.
I absolutely agree, PZ. This idiot has little to no comprehension of science. As H. Russel Bernard stated in his work “Research Methods in Anthropology: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches” (if anthropology had a bible, this would be it), science is not just about numbers. Science is knowledge, and must be approached both quantitatively and qualitatively in all fields of sciencitific enquiry.
I wish these Huffpo morons would at least open a text book before spouting nonsense about which they clearly know next to nothing about. But then that would require doing some honest work, which is probably what these guys fear the most…
So the dissection-happy Michelangelo was doing it wrong, I suppose.
When those occurred, I had the entire office staring out at the window while I explained (to the best of my limited meteorological knowledge) what Kelvin-Helmholtz instability was, what that said about the atmosphere that day, and how those clouds could tell us all that. (I may have emailed around some skew-T log-P charts from soundings that day.) If there is any aspect of the universe in which our mundane understanding is completely and utterly blown out of the water by science, it’s meteorology.
Most people see the atmosphere as some sort of thin soup of air with clouds in it. Sure, it gets windy sometimes, and other times it rains, and if you’re lucky enough to live in a thunderstormy region, you know how completely the sky can dominate on certain days. But it’s through meteorology that one realises this airy soup is by no means homogeneous, and that complex physical and chemical interactions are occurring minute-by-minute.
I don’t care how much time you spend meditating on your ba hui while inhaling warm thoughts, you’re not going to intuit the Clausius–Clapeyron equation.
Oh you’re so doomed. I just followed you on that twittery thing.
I’m stunned. If someone can’t or won’t read books, they’re the ones with the problem.
My coworker just sent me these Hubble images.
Because the images were created by scientists using technology, I’m afraid you won’t find anything of awe or beauty in them. However, if you look at the images while thinking about how they’re all just an elaborate backdrop for God’s little exam in which he counts up the number of times we stick our dicks in something we shouldn’t (or stick things we shouldn’t into our various hoo-hoos) so he’ll know whether or not we’re worthy to sit on a cloud strumming a harp with Grampa Frank and Gramma Lorraine, you’ll be able to see the awesome beauty behind it all: you!
Oh, sorry: that’s the old, unsophisticated theology. I meant “so he’ll know whether or not we’re worthy to sit on qi discussing quantum with Grampa Frank and Gramma Lorraine…”
Man, left myself open to new faitheist criticism for a second there.
Uh-oh. I’d better start tweeting more regularly. (Seriously, twitter is what I use to try out one- or two-liners I think are in taste too poor for Pharygula. You have been warned.)
Sounds about my speed
Anti-science BS does not just come from the right.
Actually the world is neutral, neither caring nor uncaring.
This is the same semantic claptrap that leads morons to think atheism is a belief rather than the lack of one.
Neutral IS uncaring. The absence of a thing is not a thing, it is a null set.
I signed up to Huffpo to leave comments on articles like this one your talking about. I found a real stinker about 2 weeks ago and tried my hand at debunking it. Each point was fairly easy to refute. It was the same tired discredited arguments that anti-science types always use.
So i went through point by point and dismantled the argument. It took me about 30 minutes but i considered it good practice. I submitted the comment and waited for it to post, to see if anyone had anything to say about it. (it was a moderated story….hmmm) I waited….and waited…..and guess what! My comment which handily refuted the whole article, was not allowed to post! They censored me.
So not only does Huffpo put up terrible anti-science articles, they also actively stop people from debunking those articles. I deleted the account and moved on with my day. Huffington Post sucks ass.
Neutral IS uncaring. The absence of a thing is not a thing, it is a null set.
Yes, “Actually the world is neutral, neither caring nor uncaring”, is like saying “the absence of light” is something different from “darkness”. Dark is not a thing in itself, like a negative charge versus a positive charge. Dark is simply the absence of light, not the radiation of a “darkness source”. Augustine argued this about good and evil. Evil, he said, was the absense of good, not a force from its own source. (refuting Manicheeism) There was no Satan opposing God, their was just God’s “light” in the darkness.
mswzebo #103 wrote:
This question wasn’t directed to me, but I also think that the practice of science is a discipline which doesn’t come easily to us, and goes against the grain of how we usually arrive at conclusions. It has to be learned and taught. If not, we naturally tend to explain things through the use of loose association and subjective validation. The methods of science instead force us to be analytical and objective.
What you’re talking about, I think, is common sense pragmatic technology — getting things to work, and predicting what they might do. Science is a bit more than this — it involves forming overarching, interconnected models of explanation in order for us to make predictions which aren’t obvious.
Alan Cromer, in Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science, puts it this way:
“Science, which asks us to see things as they really are and not as we believe or feel them to be, undercuts a primary human passion.
All nonscientific systems of thought accept intuition, or personal insight, as a valid source of ultimate knowledge. Indeed, the egocentric belief that we can have direct, intuitive knowledge of the external world is inherent in the human condition. Science, on the other hand, is the rejection of this belief, and its replacement with the idea that knowledge of the external world can only come from objective investigation – that is, by methods accessible to all.”
People are always trying to put some form of magic back into the scientific method, in order to re-enchant the world. I recommend Cromer’s book.
Don’t be silly. Would we be sharing these goodies with someone we hated?
Brownian #85: That book title wins the thread.
Raven #47, I think I disagree with your point 2 about theistic science. I think about 250 years ago, it proved that it was inconsistent with observations and should be abandoned. :-)