Science is close-minded

[Glenn Lyvers]

I don't think science is closed minded. Of course, as others have pointed out, some scientists can be. Science itself is not. It is one of the few things which is pure, the seeking of knowledge. Of course science can lead to wrongful conclusions sometimes, but it is not in the "closed mindedness" that such an event usually happens. It is in bad testing or bad results, either way - it is seeking real answers and that's a noble thing.

I loved reading the posts in this thread. Some cool people here for sure.

Glenn

[maddog]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

No, I think it means the Virgin Mary was a hermaphrodite

Not to sway too far off topic. This is Really a novel theory I have never heard speculated
before.

However, If I remember that the night Gabriel came to Mary and told her she was with
child. Until then she did not know she was pregnant. Wouldn't she [Mary] have "connected
the dots" if in truth she was doing herself with herself (i.e. in hermaphroditic way).

Sorry for the off topic remark -- You can now view the rest of this thread already in
progress...

maddog

[maddog]

I must admit that I agree with the sentiment as expressed by Dr. Richard Feynman that
Science is "close-minded" to the results, yet open-minded to the expression of ideas.
I feel strongly in this as well.

We can hypothesize away yet we will always be measured in the crucible of Results!

maddog

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by maddog

Not to sway too far off topic.

Not at all; you have nailed it.

Originally Posted by angry canine

This is Really a novel theory I have never heard speculated before.

However, If I remember that the night Gabriel came to Mary and told her she was with
child. Until then she did not know she was pregnant. Wouldn't she [Mary] have "connected the dots" if in truth she was doing herself with herself (i.e. in hermaphroditic way).

maddog

While it is entirely possible that the J-man and his momma were hermaphrodites, neither it seems could have self-pollinated in spite of any activity toward that end. To whit:

Hermaphrodites Avoid Self-Fertilization: Scientific American Podcast

Originally Posted by Karen Hopkin

Hermaphrodites Avoid Self-Fertilization
If you’ve ever given any thought to the lifestyle of the hermaphrodite, it’s probably occurred to you that being both male and female doubles your chances of having a date on a Saturday night. Yeah, it’s an old joke, but it’s sort of true. Because most hermaphrodites do have to date. In other words, they can’t simply fertilize themselves. (If they could, I’m sure they would.) So what actually stops them? ...

Mary (or possibly Marty ) obviously used Gabriel as a convenient cover for her/his dalliance(s), and she/he sought these promiscuities knowing full well from years of trying that she/he needed outside help getting a bun in the oven. Rather than the devil made me do it , the head angel said it was OK.

[KickAssClown]

Open Mindedness

Watch and you shall grok.

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by KickAssClown

Open Mindedness

Watch and you shall grok.

Couldn't agree more.
http://hypography.com/forums/philoso...tml#post260423


Thanks for sharing it... again.

[Glenn Lyvers]

Excellent video. Very informative and logical.

Thanks for sharing.

[KickAssClown]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

Couldn't agree more.
http://hypography.com/forums/philoso...tml#post260423


Thanks for sharing it... again.

Pardon, I missed that by one page. I had skimmed the first three pages and omitted backtracking because the last thing posted was about a hermaphroditic Mary.

[Kriminal99]

I agree that science as an idea is not close minded, but I think that the average scientist is. For every REAL scientist who is capable of creative thought, has a mind containing a network of concepts, etc. there are tons of people who just thought it sounded cool to be a scientist but are socially oriented at their heart (and mostly generalize from their experiences using metaphors).

Such people may be necessary to flesh out all the details and applications of other's work etc, but when they are given too much power over the system serious problems result. Sadly this is inevitable because there just isn't enough of the other type to go around. No matter how many paradigms of knowledge seeking the creative minority create, there will never be one that is forever their own.

They may be able to take bodies of knowledge that other people hand them and learn them detail by detail, but they could never create one. Knowing this, they come to the conclusion that science is only created piece by piece by tons of scientists figuring out one little thing at a time.

Thus, whenever someone too creative comes along, they are angered and unobjective about it. "Who does this person think they are?" is the kind of crap you hear from people like this. In addition, though they may be able to work with a body of knowledge created by someone else, if there is anything left out of that body of knowledge that was just "known" to the person who created it, it may be violated by these types. For instance, they may violate a general principal of all human knowledge because it seemed like a valid manipulation or extension of a mathematical system.



Although technology may be advanced by these people working out different applications, science is advanced by people who are extremely creative. Just about anything signifigant one of these drones could figure out, the last creative person would have.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Kriminal99

I agree that science as an idea is not close minded, but I think that the average scientist is. For every REAL scientist who is capable of creative thought, has a mind containing a network of concepts, etc. there are tons of people who just thought it sounded cool to be a scientist but are socially oriented at their heart (and mostly generalize from their experiences using metaphors).
...
Although technology may be advanced by these people working out different applications, science is advanced by people who are extremely creative. Just about anything signifigant one of these drones could figure out, the last creative person would have.

I think Krim is saying about the same thing Kuhn was in his famous 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I’d paraphrase, but don’t think I could do better than this, from a synopsis in The wikipedia article on Kuhn:

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR), Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Thus, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper's refutability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science.

In Kuhn’s formulation, however, revolutionary science is doesn’t result inevitably from work by a “REAL scientist who is capable of creative thought”, nor normal science inevitably from the work of “drones”, but both from swings in the mainstream consensus by many people, not only working scientists, but critics, commentators, artists, and nearly any kind of interested people.

A major criticism of the key ideas in SSR is that it understates the frequency with which scientific revolutions take place, viewing them as always widespread and separated by generations (30+ year intervals). It’s possible, and IMHO so, that the pre/normal/revolutionary cycle may occur with periods as short as days, and extent as small as within a single professional shop or academic department. It may even scale down to the individual, and be reflected in typical human learning processes.