Author Topic: Exposing Scientific Dogmas  (Read 342 times)

Ron

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Exposing Scientific Dogmas
« on: January 20, 2023, 09:14:56 PM »
https://youtu.be/sF03FN37i5w

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Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biology as a Fellow of Clare College. He was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. Sheldrake has published a number of books - A New Science of Life (1981), The Presence of the Past (1988), The Rebirth of Nature (1991), Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994), Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home (1999), The Sense of Being Stared At (2003), The Science Delusion (Science Set Free) (2012), Science and Spiritual Practices (2017), Ways of Going Beyond and Why They Work (2019).

Rupert gave a talk entitled The Science Delusion at TEDx Whitechapel, Jan 12, 2013. The theme for the night was Visions for Transition: Challenging existing paradigms and redefining values (for a more beautiful world). In response to protests from two materialists in the US, the talk was taken out of circulation by TED, relegated to a corner of their website and stamped with a warning label.

For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity, that they may be without excuse. Because knowing God, they didn’t glorify him as God, and didn’t give thanks, but became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

lee n. field

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Re: Exposing Scientific Dogmas
« Reply #1 on: January 20, 2023, 09:58:03 PM »
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At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biology as a Fellow of Clare College.

Will watch sometime.

I took a developmental biology class in college.  The teacher was a bit of an odd duck.  We used his own textbook, and he was more than a bit of a mystic.
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230RN

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Re: Exposing Scientific Dogmas
« Reply #2 on: January 21, 2023, 12:05:37 PM »
Free inquiry is the life blood of scientific endeavor.  He is right there, but I see the "freedom" largely inhibited by the necessity for financing research.  Darned few grantors are willing to spend money on the will o' the wisp ideas.

There are a few parapsychoogical institutions which do, but they are rare and, "incidentally," limited in their own funds.

While admittedly not viewing the whole vid, it seems to me that what he is saying was said a hundred years ago by William James on science in general.

Basically, nobody wants to stick their scientific nose out.  Science, like medicine, while highly vaunted, is still.... a business.

Terry, 230RN


Ron

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Re: Exposing Scientific Dogmas
« Reply #3 on: January 21, 2023, 03:10:33 PM »
We are in big trouble. The pursuit of true science in imperiled.

https://archive.is/RarKS#selection-115.0-117.959

The cult of "Science!!" has feet of clay, who would have guessed?

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The problem with ­science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.
For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity, that they may be without excuse. Because knowing God, they didn’t glorify him as God, and didn’t give thanks, but became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

RocketMan

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Re: Exposing Scientific Dogmas
« Reply #4 on: January 21, 2023, 10:13:44 PM »
We are in big trouble. The pursuit of true science in imperiled.

https://archive.is/RarKS#selection-115.0-117.959

Quote
The problem with ­science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.

The cult of "Science!!" has feet of clay, who would have guessed?

Psychology is science?  I'm surprised.  Who woulda thunk it was science?
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Ron

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Re: Exposing Scientific Dogmas
« Reply #5 on: January 22, 2023, 07:25:16 AM »
The cult of "Science!!" has feet of clay, who would have guessed?

Psychology is science?  I'm surprised.  Who woulda thunk it was science?

The scary part is that the corruption has spread into the hard sciences. Drug studies are failing to be reproducible for example.
For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity, that they may be without excuse. Because knowing God, they didn’t glorify him as God, and didn’t give thanks, but became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

230RN

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Re: Exposing Scientific Dogmas
« Reply #6 on: January 22, 2023, 10:53:32 AM »
Well, I hate to say this, but the social sciences are still in the "alchemy" stage.  They're nowhere near the certainty of how fast a pebble will be going when it hits the ground, but they're trying, with results stated as probabilities, rather than certainties.

There are a lot of undefined variables in the social sciences by virtue of the fact that you don't have one pebble weighing thus and so falling X meters in a gravity field of 32 feet per second per second.

Except for identical twin studies (which have their own variables as well), any sociological "experiment" is rife with unassessed (and unaccessible) variables from the length of their noses to the acuity of their vision.

Soooo.... results have to be "statistical" in nature rather than precise, and I hate to say it, but most investigators do not have a real understanding of the statistical methods they use.

As an example, stating that there is no significant difference between two experimental groups does not mean there is no difference.

I corresponded with Linus Pauling back in the  eighties with respect to the "Vitamin C Issue" and we agreed that the naysayers were wrong in their application of the "no difference" concept.  I had taught inferential statistics twenty years before, and while statistical methods have advanced, unfortunately the users and interpreters thereof quite possibly have not.

Hence the discrepencies cited above in repetitions of the "experiments."  You are not dropping that one pebble in that particular gravity field with thus-and-so air resistance.

You're "as it were" dropping a sample of all the pebbles in the  universe without realliy knowing each individual pebble's (as it were) air resistance and other possible variables and therefore have to use statistical methods to infer results for the whole population of pebbles in the universe.

Hence the deficiencies in this "alchemy" that is the social sciences.  They are inherently dealing with the general pebble and not this particular pebble --or even the pebbles in a different sample group.

You are not dealing with the proverbial "round chickens in a vacuum."

Or "round pebbles in a 32ft/sec/sec gravity field."

Science is the acquisition of knowledge.  Sometimes the acquisition is faulty.

Terry, 230RN

REF:
https://www.imdb.com › title › tt1127390 › trivia
"The Big Bang Theory" The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization (TV Episode ...
Leonard ( Johnny Galecki )'s spherical chicken joke (which Penny ( Kaley Cuoco) doesn't get): "There's this farmer, and he has these chickens, but they won't lay any eggs. So, he calls a physicist to help. The physicist then does some calculations, and he says, um, I have a solution, but it only works with spherical chickens in a vacuum."

« Last Edit: January 22, 2023, 11:37:53 AM by 230RN »