Richard Dawkins

[padraig (u.s.)]

Gnarly tache, bro! Hella dope.

gnarly is hella 80s surfer stereotype bro. hella otoh is applicable to every situation in life. when unsure whether to use it the answer is always yes.

this has been a public service announcement from Know Ya Slang.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Bro, let a bro ironically revive outdated slang - you dig, bro?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

^I use hella + bro completely unironically tho. well bro started out a few years ago as a joke but its become very, very real. i've reclaimed it from frat d-bags.

as far as gnarly hang-ten whatever that's cool but you're on your own.

 

[comelately]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/02/a_mile_or_two_off_yarmouth.html

Although there is an Adam Curtis thread I know, I still think this belongs here:

Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality. It is naive to think that it is possible to live without the protective bubbles these stories create. But sometimes the stories can become terribly limiting and trap us, and prevent both individuals and whole societies from moving on into another kind of future.

One September night in 1945 three British mathematicians and astronomers went to see a new film at a cinema in Cambridge. It was called Dead of Night. It was a series of ghost stories told by a group of people gathered together in a farmhouse. The stories are linked by a device of a central character who is convinced that he has experienced the whole situation in the farmhouse before. In the end he murders another of the group - but then wakes up from this terrible dream.

That morning the telephone rings, he is invited down to the farmhouse, and the whole story, or dream, starts all over again.

The scientists loved the film, and they sat discussing its circular structure. One of them suggested that it could be the model for how the whole universe really worked. That, although the universe was expanding, it was also constantly renewing itself - to maintain itself in a steady state.

Out if this came what was called the "Steady State" theory of the universe. It was going to dominate scientific thinking for the next twenty years, and it would also make one of the three scientists very famous.

He was a very difficult and argumentative man called Fred Hoyle - and the story of what happened to him and his idea is odd and funny - and also shows how science can often add a spurious certainty to the stories that modern societies tell themselves.

 

[IdleRich]

But we couldn't be human and operate within those limits either.
So a natural question is: what happens in practice?

Vim - seemed as though you were leading somewhere with this and a few of the previous questions but then you went quiet. What was the point you were trying to make? Maybe I'm slow but I missed it.

 

[comelately]

I thought he was agreeing with me

 

[you]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/02/a_mile_or_two_off_yarmouth.html

Although there is an Adam Curtis thread I know, I still think this belongs here:

a story, about a story, about a story, of 3 guys, watching a story and then making up a story - brilliant. Yup, stories and only connect, that be how we anthropods roll - word.

 

[droid]

Exactly. Science is not an ideology (whatever some philosophers might say). It is, in principle, a totally amoral way of gathering and collating information and forming theories.

Bearing in mind that I agree that science is not a belief system.

Is the belief that science will, in time, explain/solve everything, not a kind of faith? Ive certainly held that belief, and I cant see how it can be described as anything other than faith.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Bearing in mind that I agree that science is not a belief system.

Is the belief that science will, in time, explain/solve everything, not a kind of faith? Ive certainly held that belief, and I cant see how it can be described as anything other than faith.

That's a good point, but I'm not sure the belief you describe is one held by all, or even most, scientists. Science in actuality is all about uncertainty, error and approximation. No experimental result is ever published without a margin of uncertainty or some kind of lemma or disclaimer; "We found evidence/found no evidence for [some hypothesis] at 95% confidence level". I think (though this is a hunch) that a lot of scientists believe something more along the lines that knowledge gradually becomes a better and better approximation to the truth - you could almost say that rather than getting better, our theories get 'less wrong'. But it's asymptotic; science converges on Truth but never quite gets there. There could well be aspects of the natural world that, even in principle, we can't satisfactorily investigate. A good example is physics at the Planck scale, which in order to probe directly in the standard collider paradigm would require a VVVVVLHC the size of the galaxy.

An unshakeable belief that science will one day explain everything sounds more like an attitude you might come across in lay 'science enthusiasts', rather than actual scientists. People who were all over the internet with their "OMG Einstein was wrong!!!" when the anomalous CERN neutrino results were published (or rather, released in a preprint), instead of thinking "Well, it would be fascinating if true, but it's probably miscalibrated instrumentation [edit: which it's now looking very much like] and doesn't mean much until it's been confirmed".

I don't mean to sound snobbish about this, I'm just saying that if your main source of information about science is Brian Cox on the telly and a shelf full of books by Hawking, Dawkins, Steve Jones, Brian Greene etc. then you might well think science is all about earth-shattering discoveries and paradigm-changing theories, without realising that 99% of the time it's about painstaking analysis, theoretical dead ends and the gathering and processing of lots and lots and lots of very, very, very dry numerical data.

 

[zhao]

Science is not an ideology (whatever some philosophers might say).

but it's not as simple as "is or isn't an ideology". as a methodology, as a system of discovery, as a way of gathering information -- it is of course influenced, sometimes deeply, as any human endeavor always is, by the dominant ideology of the day.

countless examples of scientists presenting their scientific discoveries in concurrence to the political agenda of their time, which only becomes more clear in hindsight. from Darwin's privileging of competition in his theories of evolution during the dog-eat-dog rise of industrial capitalism, to the obvious one of eugenics. And the vast majority of scientists agreeed with the Church that the earth is flat didn't they?

 

[droid]

That's a good point, but I'm not sure the belief you describe is one held by all, or even most, scientists. Science in actuality is all about uncertainty, error and approximation. No experimental result is ever published without a margin of uncertainty or some kind of lemma or disclaimer; "We found evidence/found no evidence for [some hypothesis] at 95% confidence level". I think (though this is a hunch) that a lot of scientists believe something more along the lines that knowledge gradually becomes a better and better approximation to the truth - you could almost say that rather than getting better, our theories get 'less wrong'. But it's asymptotic; science converges on Truth but never quite gets there. There could well be aspects of the natural world that, even in principle, we can't satisfactorily investigate. A good example is physics at the Planck scale, which in order to probe directly in the standard collider paradigm would require a VVVVVLHC the size of the galaxy.

An unshakeable belief that science will one day explain everything sounds more like an attitude you might come across in lay 'science enthusiasts', rather than actual scientists. People who were all over the internet with their "OMG Einstein was wrong!!!" when the anomalous CERN neutrino results were published (or rather, released in a preprint), instead of thinking "Well, it would be fascinating if true, but it's probably miscalibrated instrumentation and doesn't mean much until it's been confirmed".

I don't mean to sound snobbish about this, I'm just saying that if your main source of information about science is Brian Cox on the telly and a shelf full of books by Hawking, Dawkins, Steve Jones, Brian Greene etc. then you might well think science is all about earth-shattering discoveries and paradigm-changing theories, without realising that 99% of the time it's about painstaking analysis, theoretical dead ends and the gathering and processing of lots and lots and lots of very, very, very dry numerical data.

Sure, but what is the goal of scientific project, as a whole? To (eventually) produce a set of theories that can be said to be 'true'? I would imagine that sharing this goal (as presumably all scientists do) would create the mindset that this is something that is achievable, or that will be achieved at some point - hence, its a non-rational belief, or a faith - of sorts.

 

[Mr. Tea]

but it's not as simple as "is or isn't an ideology". as a methodology, as a system of discovery, as a way of gathering information -- it is of course influenced, sometimes deeply, as any human endeavor always is, by the dominant ideology of the day.

Perhaps, in some instances. In the Soviet Union there was an official ideological rejection of Mendelian genetics which led to an entire pseudoscience called Lysenkoism.

countless examples of scientists presenting their scientific discoveries in concurrence to the political agenda of their time, which only becomes more clear in hindsight. from Darwin's privileging of competition in his theories of evolution during the dog-eat-dog rise of industrial capitalism, to the obvious one of eugenics. And the vast majority of scientists agreeed with the Church that the earth is flat didn't they?

You've propounded your ideas about how the natural order of the world is cooperation rather than competition before and while it's a nice idea I just don't see it borne out in reality. By some estimates, more than half of all living species are parasites. Darwin didn't discover natural selection in order to justify capitalism, he discovered it because it's true.

Also, it's a modern myth than people in the Middle Ages (before scientists, in the modern sense, really existed) thought the Earth was flat. Galileo was persecuted for supporting a heliocentric cosmology, not for saying the Earth is round.

 

[vimothy]

Idlerich,

Sorry, do have more thoughts but moving house and preparing for a midterm--v. short of time at the moment.

One thing that I was wondering about, which relates to Tea and droid's conversation above, is what science can tell us about meaning.

 

[IdleRich]

"I thought he was agreeing with me"

Well yeah up to a point but also suggesting leading towards something more I thought.

"Sorry, do have more thoughts but moving house and preparing for a midterm--v. short of time at the moment."

I'm sure it'll keep.

"One thing that I was wondering about, which relates to Tea and droid's conversation above, is what science can tell us about meaning."

Yeah I sort of got that I think, just wondered if you had your own thoughts on the subject.

 

[droid]

I don't mean to sound snobbish about this, I'm just saying that if your main source of information about science is Brian Cox on the telly and a shelf full of books by Hawking, Dawkins, Steve Jones, Brian Greene etc. then you might well think science is all about earth-shattering discoveries and paradigm-changing theories, without realising that 99% of the time it's about painstaking analysis, theoretical dead ends and the gathering and processing of lots and lots and lots of very, very, very dry numerical data.

BTW, I work in a university. There is nothing you can tell me about the inherent and terminal dullness of science and scientists that I dont already know.

 

[zhao]

Perhaps, in some instances.

i would say to a larger degree than we realize, especially since we are still observing within the epoch, and thinking within the structure its ideological constructs ourselves.

 

[Mr. Tea]

BTW, I work in a university. There is nothing you can tell me about the inherent and terminal dullness of science and scientists that I dont already know.

Haha, fair enough - didn't mean to preach to the choir (so to speak).

 

[you]

One thing that I was wondering about, which relates to Tea and droid's conversation above, is what science can tell us about meaning.

AY yo, my man Descartes in tha house? He be doubting that empirical pshit - word.

 

[blacktulip]

I'm not ashamed to admit that I learned everything I know about the inherent and terminal dullness of science and scientists from Brian Cox.

 

[IdleRich]

Back in the real world we're seeing the chief popish priest of Scotland throwing his weight (such as it is) around and moaning about gay marriage. This is the kind of stuff that I'm sure we'd all like to see well and truly ignored and one of the practical aims of what Dawkins is doing is surely that - it may not be the main thrust of what he's about but it's the part that I am most behind. The more the church is dimished and the less its leaders can be reported when one of them tries to draw ham-fisted analogies between gay marriage and slavery the better.