Re: Official Trek XI Website Has Teaser Trailer

Jaxtraw wrote:
> 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.
>
>

Maybe people can be fooled for a longer period of time.
But if they try to use bad science to do something practical they will
find 
that reality bites.


-- 
www.woutervalentijn.net

www.nksf.scifics.com/nksfseries.html

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