Ignorance has been institutionalized as a national desideratum for years.
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/
Fed Dept of Ed anyone?
I think we have watched the Graph of Average IQ go from a BELL CURVE to more of a HOCKEY STICK.
One word: “irony”.
>> Edison clung to direct current long after the advantages of Tesla’s alternating current was known.
As if to suggest he was an idiot for doing so.
Whatever, Donovan. The art of discovery is inevitably a factor of dogged ignorance.
Hail the wisdom of the beneficiaries... /s
Methinks Galileo capitulated when confronted with the prospect of being burned at the stake.
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Selected Article © 1999 by the American Psychological Association For personal use only—not for distribution December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134
He doesn't mean the junk science of second hand smoke. That's funny.
In those days, even Galileo couldn't, and wouldn't, survive religious "wisdom." Neither could Joan of Arc.
Galileo didn't capitulate. He promised the bishops that he wouldn't publish anything controversial for a certain period of time.
Then he published a book saying that tides are caused by the earth spinning. He didn't believe that the moon's gravity caused tides in spite of the evidence.
This guy’s problem is confusing political science, social science and economics with science. These disciplines use scientific tools, but they address problems unsuited to solutions with the rigor typically associated with the “hard sciences” or what we know of as the traditional physical sciences.
Too many disciplines suffer from “paradigm envy” in relation to the “hard sciences” - they think if they can master statistics and other traditional scientific tools they can make conclusions as definitive and consequential as those associated with physics and chemistry. But they’re generally operating with data which is tangled up with enormous error bars and numerous confounders - and it’s in that sense that they need a good bit more humility.
“Any inquiry might be the search for a better metaphor. Indeed, what we often think of as “fictional” often does a better job with facts. There may be more truth in a single poem, play, or novel than might be found in a thousand tedious scientific papers; which probably explains why good art has so many repeat customers.”
I have trouble with this. Start down this path and you get I, Rigoberta Menchu (sp?), a falsified left-wing screed posing as a true story but known to be false and still taught in colleges because it is true in spirit.
Science may be tedious. But if done properly can reveal actual truths about the stuff we live in.
"Luther and Calvin promoted predestination, the devil's influence, and anti-Semitism at the expense of reason, choice, and free will."There are enough theological, philosophical and epistemological errors in that statement by itself to prove that G. Murphy Donovan himself does not know what he does not know.
Cordially,
It's a pdf but my Firefox 9 had no trouble opening it up.
It's a very important lecture on "consensus" in science and he does mention how it worked in the second-hand-smoke junk science debacle.
He criticizes the traditional brick building, or hypothesis based, approach to science and recommends more metaphors, more questions -- and more humility.
I wonder what the criticism is. A hypothesis is a question asked after making observations--is he recommending that we change the language? I'm not sure how metaphors would advance science, though. And I disagree that scientists need more humility. We try to make certain of our facts, but certainty is not arrogance (although some view it that way).