Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

VOXDAY’S NEOLOGISMS OF SCIENCE, THEIR EXPLANATIONS, AND MINOR CORRECTIONS. —“the great irony is that scientistry now stands condemned by its beloved scientodific metric. The New Atheists reasoned that religious faith must be false on the basis of presuming the eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence to the contrary being false, but now we actually know, we do not merely reason, that it is faith in science that is false due to irreproducibility.”— Well, that just means people are NOT in fact practicing science, but pseudoscience. Under falsificationism, we can’t claim something is true until we can’t possibly find a way for it to be false. All pseudoscience works by justification instead “it’s true because of x”, or it “would lead us to the conclusion x because of y”. Physicists, materials scientists(engineers), chemists, and most molecular biologists do in fact practice science. But it’s rather obvious that philosophers, sociologists and psychologists, and to a lesser degree economists, practice pseudoscience. ALthough I should point out that economists are not in fact in the pursuit of truth but utility, and as such largely engage in selection bias (cherry picking). And we can test this by the correlation between political intuitions, and subdiscipline self selection. For those that do not understand the neologism (new terminology) Scientody: the process (the method) Scientage: the knowledge base Scientistry: the profession —“The Alt Right is scientodific. It presumptively accepts the current conclusions of the scientific method (scientody), while understanding a) these conclusions are liable to future revision, b) that scientistry is susceptible to corruption, and c) that the so-called scientific consensus is not based on scientody, but democracy, and is therefore intrinsically unscientific”— Given my love for deflationary language I sort of approve, although for my purposes I don’t know if I’ll switch from using “Scientific Method” to “Scientody” quite yet. As for the Alt Right’s Scientific bias, the criteria a,b,c, are those of (a) poppers critical rationalism, (b) a consequence of popper’s critical preference, and (c) the increasing costs of marginal expansions of knowledge requiring increasingly granular investigations. This last “c” is where Popper went wrong, as nearly all philosophers go wrong, in that decidability is provided by the economics of the return: least cost, for the simple reason that nature cannot but choose the first, cheapest, option available. However, contrary to the OP, science is not based on democracy but *the market* for status signaling. The problem is, like any other status signal, status via publication within the scientific method requires high investment, and therefore those investments are often defended. So the market may change slowly and only after a paradigm shift caused by exhaustion of the market for signals either by market failure, or market replacement. (h/t: thanks to Bill Anderson, whose OP is not sharable ) Apr 20, 2018 9:16am

VOXDAY’S NEOLOGISMS OF SCIENCE, THEIR EXPLANATIONS, AND MINOR CORRECTIONS. —“the great irony is that scientistry now stands condemned by its beloved scientodific metric. The New Atheists reasoned that religious faith must be false on the basis of presuming the eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence to the contrary being false, but now we actually know, we do not merely reason, that it is faith in science that is false due to irreproducibility.”— Well, that just means people are NOT in fact practicing science, but pseudoscience. Under falsificationism, we can’t claim something is true until we can’t possibly find a way for it to be false. All pseudoscience works by justification instead “it’s true because of x”, or it “would lead us to the conclusion x because of y”. Physicists, materials scientists(engineers), chemists, and most molecular biologists do in fact practice science. But it’s rather obvious that philosophers, sociologists and psychologists, and to a lesser degree economists, practice pseudoscience. ALthough I should point out that economists are not in fact in the pursuit of truth but utility, and as such largely engage in selection bias (cherry picking). And we can test this by the correlation between political intuitions, and subdiscipline self selection. For those that do not understand the neologism (new terminology) Scientody: the process (the method) Scientage: the knowledge base Scientistry: the profession —“The Alt Right is scientodific. It presumptively accepts the current conclusions of the scientific method (scientody), while understanding a) these conclusions are liable to future revision, b) that scientistry is susceptible to corruption, and c) that the so-called scientific consensus is not based on scientody, but democracy, and is therefore intrinsically unscientific”— Given my love for deflationary language I sort of approve, although for my purposes I don’t know if I’ll switch from using “Scientific Method” to “Scientody” quite yet. As for the Alt Right’s Scientific bias, the criteria a,b,c, are those of (a) poppers critical rationalism, (b) a consequence of popper’s critical preference, and (c) the increasing costs of marginal expansions of knowledge requiring increasingly granular investigations. This last “c” is where Popper went wrong, as nearly all philosophers go wrong, in that decidability is provided by the economics of the return: least cost, for the simple reason that nature cannot but choose the first, cheapest, option available. However, contrary to the OP, science is not based on democracy but *the market* for status signaling. The problem is, like any other status signal, status via publication within the scientific method requires high investment, and therefore those investments are often defended. So the market may change slowly and only after a paradigm shift caused by exhaustion of the market for signals either by market failure, or market replacement. (h/t: thanks to Bill Anderson, whose OP is not sharable ) Apr 20, 2018 9:16am