Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Everything You Know...

...Has a half-life.
Who Will Debunk The Debunkers?
When looking very deeply into dogma, be prepared for what you might find.
"This loose behavior, Rekdal wrote, made the transposed decimal point into something like an “academic urban legend,” its nested sourcing more or less equivalent to the familiar “friend of a friend” of schoolyard mythology.

Emerging from the rabbit hole, Sutton began to puzzle over what he’d found. This wasn’t just any sort of myth, he decided, but something he would term a “supermyth”: A story concocted by respected scholars and then credulously disseminated in order to promote skeptical thinking and “to help us overcome our tendency towards credulous bias.”

[...]

It seems plausible to me, at least, that the tellers of these tales are getting blinkered by their own feelings of superiority — that the mere act of busting myths makes them more susceptible to spreading them. It lowers their defenses, in the same way that the act of remembering sometimes seems to make us more likely to forget. Could it be that the more credulous we become, the more convinced we are of our own debunker bona fides? Does skepticism self-destruct?
And as for Darwin?
"Sutton’s allegations are explosive. He claims to have found irrefutable proof that neither Darwin nor Alfred Russel Wallace deserves the credit for the theory of natural selection, but rather that they stole the idea — consciously or not — from a wealthy Scotsman and forest-management expert named Patrick Matthew. “I think both Darwin and Wallace were at the very least sloppy,” he told me. Elsewhere he’s been somewhat less diplomatic: “In my opinion Charles Darwin committed the greatest known science fraud in history by plagiarizing Matthew’s” hypothesis, he told the Telegraph. “Let’s face the painful facts,” Sutton also wrote. “Darwin was a liar. Plain and simple.”
Darwin has elsewhere been charged with outright theft of some 60 pages of Wallace's text, specifically the 60-odd pages which contain the actual "theory" of evolution. Maybe Wallace stole it from Matthew first.

But most noted ideological skeptics won't ever be skeptical of their hero; Darwin makes Atheism seem legit. If you don't... can't question it, that is.

4 comments:

Steven Satak said...

Bill Nye thinks you should be imprisoned if you deny Climate Change (r).

Wonder what he thinks should be done with folks who deny Evolution (r)?

Anonymous said...

Maybe the same.

On another note, I found this:

Wikipedia: Free Will-Experimental Psychology

Allegedly, Social Psychologist Daniel Wegener has evidence that human perception of conscious control is an illusion (I found this link on a site that I found while Googling Alex Jones Scam).

Stan said...

JBsptfn,
I saw that study. It is bogus for the following reason: the people who were subjects over-estimated their detection rate for an optical cue. This was INTERPRETED to mean that they had no free will (because the actual decision was made "before/without conscious action"). That is the short form.

What was neglected is that humans are notoriously bad at estimations of anything. That has nothing to do with free will. The conclusion was asserted as fact, when it was a circuitous rationalization. Bogus science.

Anonymous said...

Must have been someone that was paid off to find the "proper conclusion". Unfortunately, that is what science is these days. This country is getting more and more retarded.