The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' - Isaac Asimov
Deafening Silence has up an excellent post on ClimateGate, examining the parallels - and divergences - between climate science now and the study of physics at the turn of the last century. And, like me, she’s wondering about ghosts.
Go, read.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Posts
Posts
...to have done the best things in the worst times and to have hoped them in the most calamitous
Profile
- Elise
- New Jersey
- I'm a retired - or on sabbatical, I haven't decided which yet - applications programmer. My formal education was in Quantitative Analysis and Research Design and Methodology in Political Science. That was a long time ago but I still enjoy dissecting polls, statistics, and sweeping generalizations.
Subscribe To
Posts
Posts
Categories
- 2010 Midterms (7)
- Abortion (3)
- Ad Wars (3)
- Administrative Overhead (45)
- AIG Bonus Kerfuffle (8)
- Auto Bailout (1)
- Baseball (4)
- Brain Plasticity (1)
- BUB (7)
- Campaign 2008 (57)
- Candles (1)
- Catastrophic Comparison (7)
- Charity and dignity (1)
- Christmas (2)
- Contraception Mandate (3)
- Cri de coeur (6)
- Death Panels (3)
- Debates 2008 (2)
- Democratic Convention 2008 (2)
- Democrats (2)
- Deregulation (1)
- Dual Federalism (11)
- Earmarks (3)
- Economics (39)
- Edmund Andrews (2)
- Edwards Imbroglio (2)
- Energy Policy (2)
- Ezekiel Emanuel (2)
- Feminism (24)
- Five Health Insurance Issues (8)
- Food (1)
- Fourth Wave (2)
- From There To Here (3)
- George W. Bush (1)
- Global Warming (15)
- Great Minds (1)
- Grim Polygamy (6)
- Guantanamo (1)
- Health Policy (90)
- HHS Mandate (2)
- Hillary Clinton (3)
- HR1586 (3)
- Hubris (19)
- HuffPo (2)
- I Hate Bullies (2)
- International Relations (5)
- Invocation (1)
- Iran (1)
- Isms (35)
- Israel (2)
- Jornolist (1)
- Language (2)
- Lies Damn Lies and Statistics (13)
- Life (7)
- Lifelong Endowment (2)
- Links I Like (11)
- Lobbying (1)
- Make It So (1)
- Maslow's Hammer (1)
- Me And 1233 (6)
- Med Stories (6)
- Media (60)
- Movies (3)
- My Head Explodes (1)
- Nailing Jello (3)
- National Security (1)
- New Jersey Politics (1)
- Newsweek (1)
- Obama Birth Certificate (5)
- Obama Presidency (32)
- Obamacare Arrives (40)
- Oprah Winfrey (1)
- OWS (1)
- Palin Jeopardy (11)
- Patriotism (5)
- Pet Peeves (1)
- Position Papers (12)
- Reading Mamet (3)
- Recipes (2)
- Redistribution (4)
- Religion (5)
- Republican Convention 2008 (1)
- Republicans (4)
- RFK June (2)
- Same Sex Marriage (1)
- Sanford Soap Opera (1)
- Sarah Palin (26)
- September 11 (3)
- Shutdown 2013 (2)
- Small Government (13)
- Snake Oil (3)
- Social Security Solutions (4)
- Sotomayor (1)
- Sports That Aren't Baseball (1)
- TARP (2)
- Taxes (6)
- Tea Party (1)
- Television (2)
- The 111th Congress (8)
- The Bandar-log (1)
- The Code of Hammurabi (11)
- The Constitution (8)
- The Great Divide (31)
- The Loyal Opposition (12)
- The Recession (6)
- The Sooth (2)
- The Wars (8)
- TNPVIC (3)
- Um. No. (9)
- Usable History (1)
- Voting rights (4)
- Weight (7)
- Yes. But. (4)
5 comments:
How eerie that we should both be thinking of ghosts.
Perhaps they really do walk among us.
What do you imagine Asimov would have made of ClimateGate? Perhaps he's discussing it with Crichton as we speak.
Holy crap! My Google identity worked! Now I *know* there's a ghost in the machine....
Perhaps he's discussing it with Crichton as we speak.
Perhaps so. When I was doing my post on seahorses and heresy, I found this quote from Asimov in the Wikipedia entry on heresy of all places:
Isaac Asimov distinguished between two types of scientific heretic: "Endoheretics are appropriately credentialed scientists. If the person is outside the scientific community or at least outside of his specialty, he is an exoheretic. If a person is an endoheretic, he will be considered as eccentric and incompetent, whereas if the person is an exoheretic, he will be regarded as a crackpot, charlatan, or fraud."
Of course I immediately thought of global warming.
That's extremely interesting. Maybe you ought to just post that quote and point it toward the climategate discussion.
It's like the Bohr quotes: you can bluff the public, but working scientists know the true score, and that doesn't change with passing fads.
You are either oriented toward the scientific method, or you aren't.
Richard Feynman on “Cargo Cult Science”:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
"I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.”
-- Texan99
Post a Comment