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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (45349)	7/13/1999 12:41:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

[those] "Science" is a well established paradigm. You describe your methods so that everyone can repeat your work. You publish your calculations and your conclusions. You tell the truth as well as you can. You hide nothing. You answer all questions raised by other experts in your field. Whenever you discover a mistake, you publish that -- whether its in your work or someone else's. An expert is one who has studied all significant prior published work (work by experts who knows the techniques and experimental methods available). Every experimentalist or analyzer of data needs to know the statistical methods of his or her field. No reputable agency will finance research by someone who is not qualified or an expert. If the ideas are good, they will force experimental design consultants on the project. Once someone gets a tenured appointment at a university he is able to publish pseudo-science and quackery almost at will. Today, with the internet, its too easy. As to qualification as an expert, this is a straight-forward legal and literary process. Each court decides what experts from whom it will accept testimony. Each jury decides what it will believe from the expert. Each journal decides which articles and comments it will publish. Scientists are committed to having the truth out. Occasionally journals (e.g. Social Text) commit intellectual suicide. Occasionally universities survive having cranks (Harvard has a professor of psychiatry that believes in alien kidnapping -- Duke survived Professor Rhyne and CalTech survived a Nobel chemist who favored megadoses of Vitamin C). Some reputable universities employ professors who believe that Greek science was stolen from Egypt. etc). IMO, the Internet is going to require some authentication. Most people misquote, disremember, forget sources. Most people are imprecise and too often ill-informed. The average undergraduate term paper on the web is superior to most of the conversation (IMO) in terms of credibility and scholarship. In our "serious" arguements on this thread we are sloppy on subjects not our very own. (I certainly am). It's chatter not scholarship. When you write on Russia I tend to believe uncritically, I am sure you know more than I on that subject. But as we slide away from our specialties we grow more speculative and not so credible. I think I'll start placing ratings on my writing 1(I believe it true) to 10 (I am not positive that it is completely false).