The Political Discussion Thread

[Giantevilhead]

Yeah I know. The whole crux of my posts on the subject is that Science and individual scientists, with more and more frequency these days, seem to be relying on their bias and indeed their faith...even blind faith...when it comes to what they are doing. Which is often what a lot of people accuse religion of. I have learned that both religious faith and science and scientific faith is not so clear cut.

And where is your evidence?

[Col.Foley]

And where is your evidence?

Climate Gate for starters.

Not to mention all the things I have laid out in rescent posts.

[Giantevilhead]

Climate Gate for starters.

Not to mention all the things I have laid out in rescent posts.

So you've read all the peer reviewed studies and have done your own studies to refute them?

Scientists can say whatever they want but they have to have the research to support their claims. As mentioned before, in order for research to be published in a peer reviewed journal, it has to include enough information for the study to be replicated by someone else. Not only that but the people who conducted the study have to show their data upon request.

If you're not satisfied with a scientist's claims, you can look at the research that scientist is using to back up their claim. If that research has not yet been supported by other research and you don't think it was conducted properly, you can request to see the data and look for discrepancies or mistakes. If you are still not satisfied then you can redo the study yourself. If your replication of the study produced different results, then other scientists will investigate and conduct their own replications.

The scientific process takes time and it isn't perfect but it is a self correcting process. Scientists are always trying to disprove each others' hypotheses and theories. That's the point of science.

[Ben 'Teal'c would WIN!!' Noble]

Foley, the whole climate gate thing was blown out of proportion those emails where 10 years old and the graph they were talking about was not meant to be taken as gospel. Yes they could have been more open about their data but they were not guilty of dishonesty.

Watch this video from 1:50 on and it will show what the scientists were actually doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab9EiJpCaR4

[KEK]

Because there tends to be a more liberal bias in these institutions, they can deem what is intelligence and what is not intelligence, and then you are either forced by law to go to these institutions some of them, or that again by law you have to teach it in a certain way and teach certain things, and then you are further shunned if you found your own way in life.

Why are there more liberals in these institutions though? And how do you know they were liberals when they joined? Also, I'm very sceptical about your theory on how testing somehow shows bias toward liberalism. I'm really not sure how an IQ test could have liberal bias given that all of the questions are objectively right or wrong, and tests in collage don't test intelligence at all, they test if you know the subject matter.

which is why I a weary of getting a college education. I do not have the time or the resources. And which is furthermore contrary to the plain old and fundamental fact of life, you can get an education anywhere.

In the UK a college education is state funded until you're 19, and after that you pay, unless you're unemployed and then you can go for free on job seekers allowance. University you can either pay for yourself, or you can get a state loan that you don't pay back until you've finished your degree and are earning over a certain wage. It's a very social liberal system, and probably the reason why we have more young people earning degrees than any other country per captia.

There is a certain faith in science:

You have to have faith that you are right, faith that the information that you absorbed from another scientist has not been manipulated, stolen, or abused. You have to have faith in your work that it is good and just, faith that your facts and theories are right. And your own biases, feelings, and even your own agenda can sometimes make it just as blind as someone who is so bigoted to all other religions that they have to kill them in the name of God.

That's simply not true. In fact scientific method depends on you holding no bias, and actively trying to prove theory wrong. It's only when that proves impossible that you have proof that you were right, and it's only when your work is peer reviewed for errors in your method that your work is accepted by the scientific community. The goal is truth, not your truth, so proving yourself wrong is just as exciting for a scientist as proving yourself right. Also, a scientists knows the work that his work is built upon is solid because they can see the method their self, they also know that it has been rigorously scrutinised the same way their work will be.

Again this is all beside the point though, as you're still talking about the scientist, not the science.

[Ben 'Teal'c would WIN!!' Noble]

In the UK a college education is state funded until you're 19, and after that you pay, unless you're unemployed and then you can go for free on job seekers allowance. University you can either pay for yourself, or you can get a state loan that you don't pay back until you've finished your degree and are earning over a certain wage. It's a very social liberal system, and probably the reason why we have more young people earning degrees than any other country per captia.

KEK I think you should make it clear our college is not equivalent to a US collage .

As UK collages are where you get extra or further qualifications to supplement your the ones you got (or didn't get) in high school. In the UK compulsory schooling ends at 16 where you do examinations called GCSE's. With a certain pre-requisite number you do A-levels at a collage or stay on an extra two years at high school. You then get into your chosen Uni based on your A-level results.

I don't mean to step on your point KEK .

[jmoz]

How is science based on faith?

ffs, why is gateworld so slow, sorry complaining how slow this reply quote thing took to load.

To answer your question and I guess a lot of people's question and some people's badly reasoned answers:

There are two kinds of reasoning, inductive and deductive reasoning. All deductive reasoning takes some premises and make some conclusions which is what science does for the most part. And all those premises are build on inductive reasoning.

Essentially, inductive reasoning takes some observation (by observation I mean all subjective data, i.e. senses and whatnot) and draw a conclusion. Now the first thing wrong with inductive reasoning is our reliance on our observations. Bad reasoning is when you have a circular argument in some form. How do we test out reliance on our observations? By using those same observations. A circle. Essentially faith about the reliance of our observations.

Second thing wrong with it is that we draw conclusions using a finite set of observations or in science, a finite set of data.
A crude example of this:
A person finds a bunch of swans. He labels them.
Swan A is white.
Swan B is white.
Swan C is white.
.
.
.
Therefore, all swans are white.

I'm sure you can use your imagination to come up with the scientific version of this:
X1 displays property B.
X2 displays property B.
etc.
Therefore, all X have property B.

As you can see this is pretty bad reasoning because it's based on a finite set of observations. And there were black swans discovered in Australia reversing that conclusion.

The third thing that I've learned in class that's wrong with our form of deductive reasoning that's faith based is this: How do we theorize scientific concepts or essentially all our concepts and methods of thinking? We attempt to rationalize things with this and that concept. How do we rationalize those concepts? In the end of a long chain of things, the thing that comes out on top is logic. But how do we know that our logical methodology is correct? Do we use a circular argument where we use logic to verify the validity of logic? Or perhaps, a higher form of logic? But say we do accept that it has some higher form of logic. How do we rationalize that higher form? Another higher form? This leads to an ad infinitum situation.

[Giantevilhead]

ffs, why is gateworld so slow, sorry complaining how slow this reply quote thing took to load.

To answer your question and I guess a lot of people's question and some people's badly reasoned answers:

There are two kinds of reasoning, inductive and deductive reasoning. All deductive reasoning takes some premises and make some conclusions which is what science does for the most part. And all those premises are build on inductive reasoning.

Essentially, inductive reasoning takes some observation (by observation I mean all subjective data, i.e. senses and whatnot) and draw a conclusion. Now the first thing wrong with inductive reasoning is our reliance on our observations. Bad reasoning is when you have a circular argument in some form. How do we test out reliance on our observations? By using those same observations. A circle. Essentially faith about the reliance of our observations.

Second thing wrong with it is that we draw conclusions using a finite set of observations or in science, a finite set of data.
A crude example of this:
A person finds a bunch of swans. He labels them.
Swan A is white.
Swan B is white.
Swan C is white.
.
.
.
Therefore, all swans are white.

I'm sure you can use your imagination to come up with the scientific version of this:
X1 displays property B.
X2 displays property B.
etc.
Therefore, all X have property B.

As you can see this is pretty bad reasoning because it's based on a finite set of observations. And there were black swans discovered in Australia reversing that conclusion.

The third thing that I've learned in class that's wrong with our form of deductive reasoning that's faith based is this: How do we theorize scientific concepts or essentially all our concepts and methods of thinking? We attempt to rationalize things with this and that concept. How do we rationalize those concepts? In the end of a long chain of things, the thing that comes out on top is logic. But how do we know that our logical methodology is correct? Do we use a circular argument where we use logic to verify the validity of logic? Or perhaps, a higher form of logic? But say we do accept that it has some higher form of logic. How do we rationalize that higher form? Another higher form? This leads to an ad infinitum situation.

And science acknowledges that it uses inductive reasoning. That's why it uses statistics. As I said before, science is probabilistic. It never proves anything. All it does is say that based on available evidence, the chance of a phenomenon being caused by a certain variable is either extremely high or extremely low but it can never be 0% or 100%.

[jmoz]

That wasn't the point, you're saying the conclusions using those two methods of reasoning have those probabilities. I was talking about further up, how it's based on evidence and methodology that have no rationalization or at best circular reasoning. And another note, science is subjective in the end, it bases things initially on a subjective level and determines behavior that's only verifiable from a subjective viewpoint.

But eh doesn't matter. Religion is more faith based than science is in the end. And you're right, science predicts probabilistic things and has verifiable conclusions through observation which is more than religion is able to deduce.

[shipper hannah]

Climate Gate for starters.

*facepalm*

[Giantevilhead]

That wasn't the point, you're saying the conclusions using those two methods of reasoning have those probabilities. I was talking about further up, how it's based on evidence and methodology that have no rationalization or at best circular reasoning. And another note, science is subjective in the end, it bases things initially on a subjective level and determines behavior that's only verifiable from a subjective viewpoint.

But eh doesn't matter. Religion is more faith based than science is in the end. And you're right, science predicts probabilistic things and has verifiable conclusions through observation which is more than religion is able to deduce.

The evidence and methodologies have rationalizations as they can be replicated and they have predictive value.

In terms of subjectivity, it is subjective in that it cannot be generalized beyond the human race or the reality within which we reside, but that's really the limits of objectivity. As for observations being subjective at first, that's why we have experimentation and that's why we have tools that are much more accurate and consistent than human senses. Just because something begins as a subjective observation does not mean it cannot be objectively studied.

[Joachim]

Foley, I am amazed. Like, giggling amazed. Giggling profusely. I can't even respond to the whole "intelligence" matter, I can't. I wouldn't know where to begin, and I certainly wouldn't be able to find where with all that giggling. The only thing I can respond to is a small aside you made in that paragraph.

Actually I thought from a lot of liberals that I have talked to that our education system is messed up and it needs to be more like Europe.

Finland has had the best track record thus far.

You have to have faith that you are right, faith that the information that you absorbed from another scientist has not been manipulated

It requires no faith, because the fundamental backbone of science is that of peer review and replication. The point of science is that if the conditions can be replicated, so too can the results.

Climate Gate for starters.

Climate Gate was horribly overblown and, contrary to popular belief, did not really show or disprove much of anything.

[Giantevilhead]

Finland has had the best track record thus far.

It's actually not that difficult to fix the education system. There is already a ton of research on how we can effectively teach our children. Unfortunately, most of that research is ignored in the policy making process.

There are three major problems with education in the United States and they all start at the elementary school level. The first problem is that schools rarely take into account the wide distribution of student skills. It is simply assumed that a kid who's in the third grade has third grade reading skills and third grade math skills. In reality, there are a lot of kid who are not like that. They might have a fourth grade math skill and a third grade reading skill or a second grade math skill and a fourth grade reading skill. Then you get kids put in a class where their reading skill may be too advanced but their math skill is behind. As a result, you get this different distributions in different classes with the teacher teaching towards the middle and you have the more advanced kids getting bored and the struggling kids getting left behind.

The second problem is that teachers are not taught effective teaching techniques. The most basic technique that teachers should be taught is to reinforce good behavior. You cannot simply tell kids to behave and then ignore them when they behave. You actually have to periodically reinforce them for behaving in the right way if you want to increase the frequency of that behavior. That's one of the biggest problems with how teachers deal with troubled kids. They ignore the troubled kid when they are behaving and then give them attention when they're misbehaving. If you want a troubled kid to stop acting out, you have to reinforce them when they're not acting out. Studies done back in the late 60's and early 70's showed that you can reduce the disruptive behavior of troubled kids by 70% just by praising them when they were good and ignoring them when they were bad, all without the use of any kinds of punishment.

The third problem is that the way testing is conducted is completely flawed. I'm not just talking about standardized tests. I'm talking about all tests. In order to get the best results from testing, you have to give immediate feedback. You cannot give a test one day and then give the answers the next day. If you do that then people, not just kids, are more likely to remember the wrong answer they put down rather than the right answer that they later learn. When you give a test, you have to go over it right after the test is over. That greatly increases the chances of a person's ability to learn which mistakes they made and what the correct answers are. Additionally, it teaches the person to review the subject after testing, which also aids in consolidating memory.

[Ben 'Teal'c would WIN!!' Noble]

Jmoz the typical philosopher posits a question lets us do some head starching tells the answer and then says its inconsequential anyway .

[jmoz]

The evidence and methodologies have rationalizations as they can be replicated and they have predictive value.

That's not a rationalization for the two processes of rationalization. If that was, philosophers would have stopped searching for that answer long ago. Think you're still talking about why it has value to scientists which doesn't validate the process used by the scientists. It's kind of like the truth value table of a logical statement:

A --> B

Three different things have truth values in that, A, B, and the whole statement if A then B. If we accept B as true, which in the scientific case is the results/conclusions of scientific experimentation, that in now way entails the truth of the whole statement, nor A. But disregarding that, the results of such a method in no way rationalizes the method nor the validity of the using of those logic rules or truth tables. I'm saying you can't determine rationality by using rationality, that would be circular. Granted there are some in between steps like observation, causality, predictive behavior, whatever, it still comes back to a circle no matter how intricate or large it is.