At 08:35 AM 10/26/2000, you wrote:
> >
> >>Chris
> >>To be fair to Bertvan, I think she's talking about the political
> >>shenanigans at Baylor, not any alleged "science" that may be involved.
>
>Richard:
> >No, I think Bertvan was trying to cast aspersions on the value of the
> >scientific work of academics generally. All scientific work involves
> >interpretations. If the public accepts Bertvan's assertion that the
> >interpretations of scientists cannot be trusted, then public understanding
> >of science will become a free-for-all, where people pick and choose whatever
> >bits of science or pseudoscience suit their personal prejudices. This what
> >Bertvan does, and she wants others to do the same.
>
>Bertvan:
>You are absolutely right, Richard. Many people believe whatever the
>"experts" tell them to believe. You'll find them in Doctors waiting rooms
>eager to ingest the latest "happy" pill the drug companies have for sale.
>They paid a fortune for psychiatrists to investigate their mysterious ID, ego
>and super ego, and damaged psyche with which " psychiatric science" had them
>convinced they were afflicted. Having been convinced by "science" that they
>have no free will, they became the victims of their genes and their
>environment. Even rapists relax convinced their behavior is the logical
>result of random mutation and natural selection. Great numbers of women who
>believed the "experts" suddenly retrieved repressed memories of sexual abuse
>that occurred before the age of one year. They had their appendixes and
>adenoids removed and underwent hysterectomies for no reason. They fed their
>babies bottled milk, rather than nursing them. They were bled by leeches.
>They accepted social Darwinism, and sterilized people in the name of
>eugenics. They recognized meteorites as a hoax. (How could rocks fall from
>the sky?) They accepted the scientific judgement that women were mentally
>inferior to men. They used cocaine to treat morphine addiction, heroin to
>treat cocaine addiction and methadone to treat heroine addiction. They are
>confidently waiting for a treatment of methadone addiction. They give Ritalin
>to hyperactive children, confident the drug companies will discover a
>treatment for Ritalin addiction. They were told that that masturbation,
>condoms and suppressed sexual fantasies cause impotence, consumption,
>paralysis, seizures and insanity. They were told homosexuality was a mental
>illness caused by a dominant mother and an absent father. Thousands of
>people were unknowingly subjected to harmful, government-sponsored,
>scientific medical experiments. Surgeons performed thousands of lobotomies
>before anyone noticed the harm they were doing. For a while the tobacco and
>pesticide industries had no trouble hiring scientists who assured the public
>their products were safe.
Chris
Well! Pretty good listing, though others could be added, I'm sure. And, I
agree that we need to be cautious about accepting scientific claims as of
any other kind of claim. However, I don't agree that what people ordinarily
call common sense is an adequate basis for evaluating scientific theories.
What *is* a (more nearly) adequate basis is education in what science is,
what it does, how scientists work, what scientific theories and hypotheses
are, how they are validated/tested/corroborated, and, when they do
contradict "common sense," why they do so and why, in some cases, they may
still be better than common sense. The ability to rationally analyze ideas,
concepts and theories is also needed.
"Common sense," even more than scientific work, is notoriously subjective,
variable, and unreliable, and it is "common sense" that got many people to
accept such theories as scientifically validated facts to begin with, in
many cases.
Further, many of the "scientific" ideas you listed were hardly scientific.
They were sold as science, but lacked some or all of the basics of a
scientific theory in some cases. In other cases, they were the type of
theory that could be scientific, but they were not scientifically validated.
Richard's suggestion that public understanding of science will become a
free-for-all, is, unfortunately, a "postdiction" of the way things are.
Without adherence to hard reason, with the acceptance of ideas not
according to reason but according to "common sense," with junk science
being routinely accepted in courtrooms, with grotesquely flawed "research"
being touted as scientific proof of this and that, and so on, such
"free-for-alls" are to be expected.
Your own suggestion of "common sense" skepticism is better than complete
general gullibility, but only marginally, because it produces its own kind
of gullibility. Your acceptance of design in the Universe is an example.
You don't like naturalistic evolution, and you show little sign of even
understanding it or how it's supposed to work (other than at the cliche
level), so you can't give a coherent explanation of why you think it's not
acceptable. But you belly up to the bar of design theory without any
apparent "common sense" qualms. The double standard here is fairly obvious,
and yet, I gather, you have gone for years and years without noticing it.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Oct 26 2000 - 15:18:23 EDT