From: Rafael Anschau (anschau.ez@terra.com.br)
Date: Fri Jul 19 2002 - 04:21:12 MDT
You've placed your finger right one it. The ideal way of learning is to
have solid fundamentals and refine from then on towards what is working.
But that would require wayyyy to many brain cycles, and too much time.
Therefore, we have to rely on shaby math functions and graphs that show
that "Unemployemente & inflation are linear". And so on. We have to
understand it abstractly because we can't afford the time and brain
cycles to understand it intuitively.
[]'s
Woody
>
> [Rafael Anschau]
> Well, you have to make sure that people are trying to refute your hypothesis, instead of whatever they may have came up with.
>
> The need to rely on peer's review is not science weakest link. But the need to rely on peer's BIASED review is.
>
>
> [rhinoceros]
> This is fair. I think the price we have to pay because of the necessity to rely on peer review is that we have a little bit more conservative approach to new ideas, but an added bonus is that it helps weed out some "ideas" coming from specific interest groups (e.g. in sciences such as economics and history). Then again, one should expect that the established ideas are also biased towards the dominant cultural staus quo.
>
> But there is also another aspect I had in mind when I posted this. Science has reached a point where it is absolutely necessary for making some kinds of decisions and at the same time it is tecnically impossible for the average person or even the specialist in some particular field to have tecnically valid and usable scientific knowledge of other fields. People have to rely on popular versions of scientific knowledge in the form of maxims to make decisions, such as "economic inflation and unemployment go together".
>
> How can people know what is peer reviewed science and what is propaganda, especially when the peer reviewers are actually journalists? In a sense, it is not so much different from the priesthood of ancienty Egypt.
>
>
> ----
> This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS.
> <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25695>
-- Rafael Anschau <anschau.ez@terra.com.br>
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