Re: Official Trek XI Website Has Teaser Trailer

Wouter Valentijn wrote:
> Anybody wrote:
>> In article <OBsmj.857$lU5.662@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>> "GeneK" <gene@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>>> "Wouter Valentijn" <liam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote
>>>> Closer to 'somethingism'
>>>
>>> My "something" is laboratory test results.
>>
>> Unfortunately those are easily faked, as has been done many times.
>> :-(
>
> Some have tried to falsify evidence yes. Think Piltdown etc.
> But they were found out.
> That's the beauty of science.
> It can always be repeated in another lab.

Ah, but there's the rub. You can only show that fakes were discovered in
cases where the fakes were discovered. If a fake has remained
undiscovered,
you will not know of the system's failure. Ergo, you've no way of knowing
how many undetected fakes there are. :oD

On a more general level, there's the problem of insitutionalised science,
like any other institutionalised process, descending into group thinking
and
self-delusion, particularly when large sums of money, careers and
institutions are at stake, particularly when dealing with hypotheses and
predictions which are in a practical sense unfalsifiable.

Suppose the Piltdown skull had had hundreds of millions of dollars riding
on
it, if thousands of careers had depended on it, if journals and
institutions
had staked their reputations on it, and if laws were being enacted on the
basis of its being genuine. Who would have been keen to expose it as a
fake?

Science is often portrayed as being as it is intended to be in a purist
sense, as a pure process above mundane politics and human behaviour. But
this is a mistake. It is the same as saying that because judges are
supposed
to be impartial, therefore all judges are impartial, or to say that
because
politicians are supposed to be honest, it follows that all politicians are
honest. Nobody would credit the latter two cases. Scientists are human
beings, operating under all the same pressures that affect humans in other
fields. It's important to remember that.

E.g. imagine just as ITER comes online, you're a physicist who finds proof
that a tokamak can never produce more energy than is put into it. How well
received is your paper going to be? Will the anonymous peer reviewers be
fusion physicists whose entire careers depend on tokamak research? Will
you
be accused of being in the pay of the oil companies? Will you find
yourself
a pariah in the fusion community? Will your paper be refused publication
in
the best journals, so has to be published in a lesser journal where it can
be ignored? How easy are you going to find it getting research grants in
future, when the people paying for those grants and awarding them have
been
made to look like idiots who wasted billions on a project that could never
work? Isn't it better not to publish, and hope somebody else realises it
and
takes the flak instead of you?

Back in the days of Piltdown Man, science was largely independent, the
preserve of scientists pottering around in their labs largely ignored by
the
outside world. Nowadays, it's a massive government industry, entwined with
governments, pressure groups and politicians. As such the pressures and
biases impinging on science, the method, because of science, the
structural
process, are immense. We really can't trust it to be self correcting any
more.


Ian

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