UKBouldering.com

SCIENCE!!! (Read 125731 times)

SA Chris

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 29220
  • Karma: +630/-11
    • http://groups.msn.com/ChrisClix
#25 Re: SCIENCE!!!
September 16, 2013, 09:10:03 am
In my opinion science needs to stop whining about creationists and MTFU and focus on the really cool stuff. Like teleports.

Damn right. we have loads of great minds wasting their time developing shit things like dozen of smart phones, each one no better than the other, only a bit different. And shit apps which earn them buttons, or researching stupid shit like if people like themselves more when they are drunk, or think they are drunk, or if polar bears are lefthanded. There's loads of really cool things to develop, and you could make a shitload money for your efforts.

andy_e

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 8836
  • Karma: +275/-42
#26 Re: SCIENCE!!!
September 16, 2013, 09:22:42 am
Science isn't about making money, it's about learning and discovery, which both directly and indirectly may help to advance society, or may not feed back in to technology at all but build a base of knowledge which future discoveries necessarily sit upon.

Stubbs

  • Guest
#27 Re: SCIENCE!!!
September 16, 2013, 09:33:24 am
A lot of the best mathematicians and physicists are now working in the city and earning a shitload writing algorithms that do very scary things on the stock markets!  Why work on teleporters and tech for the future when you can make big dosh now?!

http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

tomtom

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 20282
  • Karma: +641/-11
#28 Re: SCIENCE!!!
September 16, 2013, 10:44:54 am
Science isn't about making money, it's about learning and discovery, which both directly and indirectly may help to advance society, or may not feed back in to technology at all but build a base of knowledge which future discoveries necessarily sit upon.



More sherioushly though..
I debate about science, why we do it and its role in society would be great.. and I'd love to contribute - but I have 100 emails to deal with :(

SA Chris

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 29220
  • Karma: +630/-11
    • http://groups.msn.com/ChrisClix
#29 Re: SCIENCE!!!
September 16, 2013, 11:16:51 am
Science isn't about making money, it's about learning and discovery, which both directly and indirectly may help to advance society, or may not feed back in to technology at all but build a base of knowledge which future discoveries necessarily sit upon.

Still, if you make something really cool, sell loads and make a potload of cash out of it, it's got to be a bonus right?

andy_e

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 8836
  • Karma: +275/-42
#30 Re: SCIENCE!!!
September 16, 2013, 11:23:50 am
Not to everyone!

psychomansam

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 1179
  • Karma: +66/-11
#31 Re: SCIENCE!!!
September 16, 2013, 06:32:05 pm

Of course it would probably be easier to make a (molecular/atomic) scan of someone at location X, destroy them, send the scan data to location Y and reconstruct them.

Which also happens to be the basis of myriad philosophical thought experiments, i.e. would it be teleportation, or would it be murder and the creation of a clone? What is personal identity? Does it depend on physical matter, structure, some kind of continuity or something else?

Back to essay writing!

 :coffee:

Actually...

(And here the wine might be kicking in).


This would surely provide definitive proof of the existence of the "soul".

Or not...

Should a human be destroyed and reconstructed in this way.

And should that resurrected human have all the memories, personality traits, etc, etc, of the original.

Then those features would, and could only be, products of the physical state of the body.

And therefore.

The soul cannot exist...

More wine please.

That is, roughly speaking, one of the intentions of the thought experiment.

I presume this isn't something you're agonizing over, more that you're hoping you could disprove to religious types that their putative souls exist. The problem is that you're thinking rationally.

In the case of zealots (I used to be one) you need to realise that such an event would probably strengthen their faith. They would rejoice having been blessed by the Almighty with a chance to resist the deceitful devil-sent lies of science. Even the more bog-standard types would have little problem with it. They'd quickly come up with some church doctrine to explain the seeming problem, backed up by scripture etc.

Bear in mind that their was once a prominent belief that mind and body were separate and unconnected, such that mental causality was an illusion caused by god enacting physical events in the world in tandem with our thoughts. I doubt they struggle to cope with the idea of god moving the soul with the matter, or even creating a new soul (perhaps a duplicate one, who knows).

Here's my attempt:

Deuteronomy 4:29
"But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul."

'As the Looooord has shown us, when the physical heart is transported from one position to another, the soul accompanies, for to god, space and time are no restriction, just dimensions he created in which to manifest his will, praise be to Jeeesus.'

Don't get me wrong though, I'm still up for building the damn thing!  :great:


slackline

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 18863
  • Karma: +633/-26
    • Sheffield Boulder
#32 Re: SCIENCE!!!
September 25, 2013, 05:55:24 pm
Is most science false

Well worth reading the articles and discussion this blog post links to if you can be arsed (most should be open access).

slackline

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 18863
  • Karma: +633/-26
    • Sheffield Boulder
#33 Re: SCIENCE!!!
September 30, 2013, 01:21:17 pm


 8)

slackline

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 18863
  • Karma: +633/-26
    • Sheffield Boulder
#34 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 08, 2013, 08:55:41 am

Muenchener

Offline
  • *****
  • Trusted Users
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 2692
  • Karma: +117/-0
#35 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 08, 2013, 09:13:55 am
I think you meant Fusion reactor breaks even  8)

In which case - fuck me, this is potentially huge news.

slackline

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 18863
  • Karma: +633/-26
    • Sheffield Boulder
#36 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 08, 2013, 09:29:15 am
Yes I did, cheers (used the wrong buffer when pasting).

slackline

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 18863
  • Karma: +633/-26
    • Sheffield Boulder
#37 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 22, 2013, 09:50:45 am
..or the bullshit that is common in psychology

Great write-up of a Masters student debunking the bullshit quantification of "positive thinking ratio" in an article cited >350 times with help from Anders Sokal (of post-modern bullshit fame).

Duma

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5751
  • Karma: +226/-4
#38 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 22, 2013, 10:48:27 am
excellent

Stubbs

  • Guest
#39 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 22, 2013, 11:45:31 am
That is interesting, although I had assumed that anyone who graduated in Computer Science at Cambridge in the 80's would be driving around in a gold car with platinum robots to do their bidding!

johnx2

Offline
  • ***
  • obsessive maniac
  • Posts: 353
  • Karma: +18/-0
#40 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 22, 2013, 05:19:37 pm

psychomansam

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 1179
  • Karma: +66/-11
#41 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 22, 2013, 06:20:06 pm
..or the bullshit that is common in psychology

Great write-up of a Masters student debunking the bullshit quantification of "positive thinking ratio" in an article cited >350 times with help from Anders Sokal (of post-modern bullshit fame).

Great stuff, but I hardly think this thread needs the usual bullshit of science Vs science bashing. Your claim 'common in psychology' appears to pejoratively imply that such howlers are more common in this science than others.

If only it were so.

John Gillott

Offline
  • **
  • addict
  • Posts: 157
  • Karma: +8/-0
#42 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 22, 2013, 09:27:52 pm
..or the bullshit that is common in psychology

Great write-up of a Masters student debunking the bullshit quantification of "positive thinking ratio" in an article cited >350 times with help from Anders Sokal (of post-modern bullshit fame).

Alan's long lost Danish brother?

johnx2

Offline
  • ***
  • obsessive maniac
  • Posts: 353
  • Karma: +18/-0
#43 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 23, 2013, 10:04:51 am
..or the bullshit that is common in psychology

Great write-up of a Masters student debunking the bullshit quantification of "positive thinking ratio" in an article cited >350 times with help from Anders Sokal (of post-modern bullshit fame).

Great stuff, but I hardly think this thread needs the usual bullshit of science Vs science bashing. Your claim 'common in psychology' appears to pejoratively imply that such howlers are more common in this science than others.

If only it were so.

I sort of take the point. But this story partly shows how open science actually is - and confirms that psychology is science*. An MSc student calls emperor's new clothes and the field has to react. Homeopathists or whatever would just close ranks.




*COI kind of ex psychol with a sociology phd. I must have done serious bad in a past life.

Jerry Morefat

Offline
  • **
  • addict
  • Posts: 140
  • Karma: +7/-0
#44 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 23, 2013, 11:52:20 am
But this story ... confirms that psychology is science.

Have a missed something? How did you come to this conclusion? I'm not saying psychology isn't science btw, I just can't see how you've inferred it is from this story.

Jaspersharpe

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • 1B punter
  • Posts: 12344
  • Karma: +600/-20
  • Allez Oleeeve!

slackline

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 18863
  • Karma: +633/-26
    • Sheffield Boulder
#46 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 23, 2013, 12:09:35 pm
Your claim 'common in psychology' appears to pejoratively imply that such howlers are more common in this science than others.

If only it were so.

Its the lack of coherent paradigm in psychology (as suggested by Khune) which is the source of many of its problems, compounded by the attempt to be quantitative in its analysis when its squarely in the realm of qualitative research, as mentioned in the article itself and the whole point of the criticism of the claimed 2.9:1 ratio.

From a statistical point of view, psychologists I've met have a huge hang-up on p < 0.05 which is misguided, and have a pretty poor understanding of statistics in general.

I don't see physicists or chemists using qualitative methods to study their quantitative subject matter, but if you've any citations of such practice please do link to them.

johnx2

Offline
  • ***
  • obsessive maniac
  • Posts: 353
  • Karma: +18/-0
#47 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 23, 2013, 02:03:58 pm
why debunking shows pychol is science?

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.

Karl Popper, from Ch. 1 "Science : Conjectures and Refutations" makes up for in sense what it lacks in smileys.


Lots of of psychology  is quant as it goes – psychometrics, cognitive, neuro, evolutionary psychology, artificial inteligence etc etc. It’s a level of understanding. You don’t need to know about how electrons move in silicon or whatever to design an effective first person shooter.  Knowing about the molecular structure of the rock, or about tectonic movement is not where you’d start for working out how to get up a hill. Scientific disciplines are just appropriate maps for getting at different aspects of the universe. 'Psychology' is the map for understaning behaviour of inteligent systems - human, animal, AI.

Christ am I defining ‘science’? (As disciplined inquiry using replicable methods/producing falsifiable findings into the universe, its contents and how they work). And then saying that as psychology does this stuff of course it is one?

Slackline - I agree of course that it lacks high level theory (like evolution is a high level theory in biology).
On the p=0.05 issue: Google ‘Bem’ and telling the future if you want to see this taken past funny, A paper by a respected psychologist in a real journal, which shows that people can foresee at better than chance level when they’re going to be shown a pr0nographic image. Or summat. I may dig this up if I get a minute.


edit: here we go - refs here. Fill yer boots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Bem
« Last Edit: October 23, 2013, 02:20:28 pm by johnx2 »

Lund

Offline
  • ***
  • obsessive maniac
  • Posts: 442
  • Karma: +85/-12
#48 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 23, 2013, 02:55:00 pm

Lots of of psychology  is quant as it goes – psychometrics, cognitive, neuro, evolutionary psychology, artificial inteligence etc etc. It’s a level of understanding. You don’t need to know about how electrons move in silicon or whatever to design an effective first person shooter.  Knowing about the molecular structure of the rock, or about tectonic movement is not where you’d start for working out how to get up a hill. Scientific disciplines are just appropriate maps for getting at different aspects of the universe. 'Psychology' is the map for understaning behaviour of inteligent systems - human, animal, AI.


Sorry, need to get involved here.  Your paragraph reads as saying "psychology" is a science, refuting an attempt to disqualify it as such, defending an attack due to a lack of low level understanding of principles.  As part of making this argument, you draw parallels with other things, and the lack of low level understanding being reasonable.

The things you're drawing parallels with aren't science either.  There is no science of walking up hill, nor of designing an effective first person shooter.  You argument makes no sense!

I'm not saying that psychology isn't a science BTW.  I'm just saying your argument is rubbish.  :-)



johnx2

Offline
  • ***
  • obsessive maniac
  • Posts: 353
  • Karma: +18/-0
#49 Re: SCIENCE!!!
October 23, 2013, 03:33:25 pm
the point was about paradgims and pointlesness of reductionism. I could have said biochemistry's not the best way to understand migratory habits of swallows. (Unless of course it is, what would I know?) Anyway, the more I'm refuted the more scientific I get. According to uncle Karl anyway.


Wanna make something of it?




 

SimplePortal 2.3.7 © 2008-2024, SimplePortal