"Lies, Damn Lies and Counterknowledge"

[erithromycin]

I blame a lack of critical thinking skills and the absence of philosophy* from schools curricula. Exceptions prove rules, in the sense that smacking a breastplate with a hammer proves it. Occam's Razor is a matter of probability, not certainty, but probability's a useful tool. I think this would go away if folks had a grasp of the Scientific Method. Though I also blame the media, not least because I went and searched The Telegraph's MMR coverage.

The 'anti-Western' stuff really annoys me though. I don't think "Arabs" were responsible for 9/11, I think that a handful of members of a terrorist organisation did it. I also think that the British Government "was involved in some way" in the July 7th attacks, but that's because "in some way" could be argued to include provision of buses and trains for the cunts to try to blow up. I mean, John Smeaton was "involved in some way" in the airport attack. That, of course, and the whole exercise would appear to be an attempt to get folks to buy a book that appears to bear the same intellectual authority as a wikipedia article.

I think a lot of it's about folk being smart but not having the means to make use of their intelligence in a productive fashion. The difficulty with autodidacts is most folk are worse at teaching than they are at learning. There's a theory about Erich Von Daniken, which I am sufficiently amused by to endorse, that he knew he was smarter than his parents, and had wit enough to suspect that his parents were similarly smarter than their parents. So he rolled back a few hundred generations and determined the Ancient Egyptians were probably so stupid that they could scarcely conceive of a triangle, let alone assemble the Pyramids. I think some of it's the difference between "We don't know", "We don't know yet", and "We can't know exactly". Probabilistic certainty isn't as comforting as gospel truth.

I'm minded of the whole "the flight of the bumblebee has been disproved by physics" idiocy. The quote, such as it is, is derived from a French book, La Locomotion Chez les Animaux from 1934, and basically says "if we use the equations we have for flight, we can't explain how a bee flies", which is fair enough, because it's pretty fucking evident that a bee does fly, and that a bee flies differently to an aeroplane or a bird. Now, "not explaining" and 'disproving' are different. Admittedly, it took sixty two odd years, but now we know how bees fly so well. Link.
You can even see an evolutionary argument for the success of this mechanism of flight given its ability to cope with changes in wing loading, and (one way or t'other) the oddity of bee musculature favouring a given frequency for wingbeats.

*"What is Philosophy?" "A better response to solipsism than punching you in the face until you stop hitting yourself"

[MarkMono]

Sorry, what are you blaming who for?

[endless psych]

Originally Posted by erithromycin

I blame a lack of critical thinking skills and the absence of philosophy* from schools curricula...

Well thats all well and good except folks who have been taught about critical thinking, philosophy and the scientific method are as want to use such arguements and warrants. Watson (of ...and Crick fame) being a noticable example.

[LesMTS]

I agree with erithromycin that philosophy should be taught from primary school. I really feel I've missed out by not being properly taught the art of thought and having had to leisurely potter around the subject myself to not much real use.
I wasn't formally taught the scientific method until honours year of my degree. The scientific method should be the first thing they teach when they begin science teaching. Before convection/conduction/radiation, before protons, neutrons and electrons, before plasma membrane, cytoplasm and nucleus, before all that they should teach what scieoce means and its powers and its limitations.
Anyway, I am fucking plastered and I've done something daft with a friend and I need to reply to shit in this thread when my brain isn't all sideways and inside out.

[endless psych]

I reckon that alongside this new dawn of teaching philosophy to school children someone should seriously consider teaching the little 'uns how to present an arguement.

[Dario]

Originally Posted by endless psych

I reckon that alongside this new dawn of teaching philosophy to school children someone should seriously consider teaching the little 'uns how to present an arguement.

Smart-alecky children? No thanks.

If you find a way to teach them how to shut the fuck up in cinemas, however, then I'll approve.

[MarkMono]

The basic precepts of logic is my fond hope.

Don't see it happening anytime soon though, they're struggling enough with that pesky basic English and primitive mathematics.

[LesMTS]

Originally Posted by endless psych

I reckon that alongside this new dawn of teaching philosophy to school children someone should seriously consider teaching the little 'uns how to present an arguement.

Part one-don't be pissed

[endless psych]

Originally Posted by LesMTS

Part one-don't be pissed

Wasn't aimed at you. I just reckon that perhaps how to present an arguement could perhaps be a more important thing to learn at the start of ones education. Rather then something they just hope you pick up along the way.

[erithromycin]

Originally Posted by MarkMono

Sorry, what are you blaming who for?

Oh, I'm just blaming it in general. Here, I think, for The Telegraph piece (I mean, it's a shameless advert, and if you're interested the book's at 50% off on amazon right now), but the argument it advances is toss, and the arguments it's attacking are also, largely, toss. As a thing to blame it's useful in nearly any situation - it's like "a big boy did it and ran away" only people believe you.

The Scientific Method is amazing, and pretty easy to grasp. Anyone who says "it's just a theory" needs smacked, because they've conflated hypothesis with theory, for which I suppose I must blame the same people who have turned the word 'bid' into a synonym for 'attempt'. It always annoyed me in school where you'd come back after the holidays and they'd say "remember how we told you X worked? Well, it was a lie. It's actually like this". Chemistry did it a lot, but Physics was awful too. It's not unreasonable to say "there are different ways of looking at this, but in this frame of reference this is the one that makes the most sense, and produces the most useful results. Later on we'll look at those, but let's stick with this for now". Admittedly, I might just have had really bad teachers.

Anyway, yes, logic, philosophy, scientific method, rational discourse and presentation of arguments. All useful, all related, all not taught as well or as early as they ought to be. To refer to the original article, also, all discussed during The Enlightenment, but by no means created there - the real beauty of the Enlightenment was that it had a critical mass of critical thinking, with the benefits of communication through reliable international trade and domestic postal services, and reqular colloquia on all manner of topics of interest. That, and, arguably, the first information based economies, but I'll spare you that digression. What we've got now, arguably is a period where noise is swamping signal, and, tellingly, much of that noise is actually distorted echo. It's really annoying in some ways that English doesn't have grammatical forms of forward error correction (though it has some tricks for preservation through copying like alliteration and rhyme). Oh well.

[endless psych]

Originally Posted by erithromycin

The Scientific Method is amazing.

Its certainly the most 'robust' way we currently have to explore/explain the world aye. Assuming there are no major challenges to the philosophy that underpin it its also unlikely anything will replace it n'aw.

As long as your not equating the scientific method solely with positivism that is.

[MarkMono]

Which makes it the most currently reliable.

Could change any day.

[endless psych]

I dunno. The bits regarding evidence and the like are likely to fend off most challenges in the forseeable future. In all probability for a system to supplant the scientific method would require either near catastrophe or similar event or disproving the method using the method itself. (Under the influence of Palaniuks (sp? - probably) Rant I became briefly obsessed with the idea that time might not exist and could just be an accident of perception - but an accident of perception nessecary for 'intelligence' I'll stop typing now before I have some sort of schizoid embelezem...)

I may or may not be talking shite. (The bit in brackets is most likely shite)

[MarkMono]

Sounds like fear of the unknown to me.

Best fear there is.

[endless psych]

Originally Posted by MarkMono

Sounds like fear of the unknown to me.

Best fear there is.

Far better then being scared of spiders and libraries.