Science Like No Other

[ScienceTruth]

off topic, deleted post.

[pamela]

okay now winter time sleeping, i am beginning to see red......

[ScienceTruth]

post deleted

[ScienceTruth]

post deleted

[pamela]

look here STD,
you have made your point and it has amounted to zero. So i would suggest you put away your clothing notions and focus on REAL science or another infraction will send you packing to the mall

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Jway

I'm just a little curious why the suggested test was not discussed as something to "put to the test?" To subject it to scientific method?

Although I think the claim that wearing white cloths, waxing your body hair and dying your head hair yellow or white will cause you to “reject everyones idealogy” make money, be immortal, and “time travel” is silly, the reason not to scientifically test this claim, as urged by ScienceTruth’s posts, or not to test any claim, no matter how silly it seems, inform us, I think, of some things important about science.

First, although they can be used to measure subjective experience, scientific experiments must be objective. This is to say, they must measure things that all adequately people can agree upon. Though ScienceTruth didn’t explicitly say how his claims could be tested, I imagine he intended a tester to dress in black and go to a busy mall, then dress in white and go to a busy mall, and report the experience of his “mind hurting”, “feeling free”, etc, very subjective (and, at least the “mind hurting” part, rather crazy-sounding) data. Although it’s possible to do such an experiment by measuring many peoples’ reported experience using survey questions and answers designed to avoid various biases, and being careful to “blind” both subjects and experimenters to the expected outcome of the experiment, what ScienceTruth seemed to suggest doesn’t take such an approach, so isn’t scientific.

Second, and IMHO more importantly, in science, one doesn’t perform experiments to support or reject a predicted measurable effect (hypothesis) without having at least a tentative, but scientifically sound, theoretical explanation of it. Although this arguably reduced the chance of one observing a valuable unexpected event, there are simply too many possible claims to spend much time and effort testing one for which one has no, or no sound, explanation. For example, the claim/prediction “in about 1 in 1,000,000 cases, incubating a chicken egg under a human’s arm while he or she thinks kind thoughts will result in the egg hatching a tiny human baby”, while clearly objectively testable, doesn’t justify enlisting millions of people to perform the experiment, because there’s no biologically plausible explanation of how the predicted event could occur, and a great deal of scientific explanation of why it can not.

ScienceTruth offered a theoretical explanation for the effect he predicted:

Originally Posted by ScienceTruth

… this
is because black colors ( or dark colors )
are pulling other humans imagination and bringing
them to close to you and you read it.
…
but when you WEAR WHITE CLOTHES..
the opposite is true …

This explanation, however, is scientifically unsound, because we know precisely how materials such as cloths absorb and reflect radiation, and know that humans don’t emit or absorb radiation that is affected differently by dark and white cloths in a manner that can communicate “human imagination”.

Could what we scientifically know be incorrect? Certainly. Experiments that were once considered not worthwhile because the predicted effect could not be explained, but are now performed because they can be, are commonplace. For example, the culturing of sampled microorganisms, once considered the promotion of useless or dangerous “rot”, is now an important tool in diagnosing disease, because we can better explain it. Before the theories that gave us these explanations existed, these experiments were not worth the effort needed to perform them.

Originally Posted by arkain101

Maybe some of us are just cracking some jokes. But I'd have to say when members respond in an insulting way it bothers me.

Me too.

I see strong similarities between the ridicule made of ScienceTruth in this thread and a teacher ridiculing a young child in front of the class. IMHO it’s not very effective, and reflects poorly on the character of those who do it.