[Catalist] Catalist Digest, Vol 67, Issue 3
Vaille Dawson
vaille.dawson at uwa.edu.au
Fri May 4 09:25:09 AEST 2018
Here here, Yarra.
An elementary text for those who may wish to better understand the nature of science is chapter 1 of The Art of Teaching Science for preservice science teachers.
Vaille
Sent from my iPad
> On 4 May 2018, at 12:03 AM, "catalist-request at lists.stawa.net" <catalist-request at lists.stawa.net> wrote:
>
> Send Catalist mailing list submissions to
> catalist at lists.stawa.net
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://lists.stawa.net/mailman/listinfo/catalist_lists.stawa.net
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> catalist-request at lists.stawa.net
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> catalist-owner at lists.stawa.net
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Catalist digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. All In The Mind (Yarra Korczynskyj)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:01:50 +0800
> From: Yarra Korczynskyj <yarra.k at iinet.net.au>
> To: catalist at lists.stawa.net
> Subject: [Catalist] All In The Mind
> Message-ID: <918afd09-4030-8cde-5a4e-ff9e7231e19a at iinet.net.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"; Format="flowed"
>
> I would hate to restart any further discussion on religious belief and
> it's non-place in 'science', (indeed I very much concur with Brendan
> O'Brien's comments) however RN's 'All in the Mind' program, 'A Believing
> Brain' has some thoughtful commentary on belief which would obviously be
> of interest to several on this list, and which includes contributions
> from Brian Greene (at the start and then again in the last few minutes):
> http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/the-believing-brain/9667324
>
> And while I'm here ...
> While the issue of climate change is indeed complicated, conclusions of
> the vast majority of 'environmental' scientists, covering a broad range
> of such sciences, are NOT 'only based on computational models'.
> And the fact that 'There are senior scientists who ...' or that there
> are '... many Fellows who ...' (oh gee, even 'Fellows', must I
> genuflect?) ... is meaningless unless there is some relevant expertise
> in there. That the AAS has no position on the subject is a poor
> reflection on the geriatrics of the AAS and not much else. The IOP
> certainly do:
> http://www.iop.org/news/15/jul/file_65971.pdf
> And then there's the AAAS or the NCAR, NOAA or ... even NASA.
> And what scientist would express 'absolute certainty' about 'anything'?
> Is general relativity 'absolutely' correct and here for all time? How
> 'absolutely certain' are we about dark matter or energy (whatever they
> are?).
> And of all people why on Earth listen to Happer - because he's a
> Princeton prof? The guy's a looney tune. (I wouldn't normally 'go the
> man', but it seems that 'stature' is being used as a guide to veracity,
> so I think in this case it's justified ...?)
> I don't know what 'literature' is being referred to and I couldn't get
> the CNN link to work but there's a typical interview with Happer
> embedded in this article (by that nasty lefty publication, The Guardian):
> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2017/feb/21/trumps-potential-science-adviser-william-happer-hanging-around-with-conspiracy-theorists
>
> Unbelievable that there's a need for this discussion; bit like bloody
> religion!
> Cheers
> Yarra
>
>> On 02-Apr-18 10:36 AM, Igor Bray wrote:
>> Leon, may I assure you, with an exceedingly high degree of confidence,
>> that Science will never be a religion. It is a human activity, but its
>> culture is to critically analyse every message irrespective of the
>> messenger. Consensus plays no role in determining what is true and
>> what is not. Science is not a democracy, and most progress has come
>> from individuals who dared to question the status quo.
>>
>> The issue of climate change science is very complicated as it is
>> attempting to be predictive with only computational models in its
>> arsenal. This is a relatively new development made possible only due
>> to the immense growth in computational technology. There are senior
>> scientists who do not subscribe to ?anthropogenic climate change?. For
>> example, despite immense social/political pressure the Australian
>> Academy of Science does not have a position on the subject. I?m told
>> that there are sufficiently many Fellows who are not convinced. I have
>> been to several talks by proponents who have made a strong case, but
>> none expressed absolute certainty, or referred to consensus as a part
>> of the process. Instead, the reference is to risk-management. I have
>> also been to talks at highly regarded institutions such as Princeton,
>> by the emeritus professor William Happer who has given me very
>> readable literature that argues against the consensus view. He was
>> going to be used by Trump as a science advisor, but I think this has
>> fallen through. This literature, while arguing against anthropogenic
>> climate change, is also supportive of renewable energy and expresses
>> concern due to overpopulation and the associated environmental
>> degradation. CNN interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf3I_7-Nbpo
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf3I_7-NBpo>?gives a hint of the
>> emotion and complexity of the problem. Freeman Dyson, of Quantum
>> Electro Dynamics fame, is another contrarian who is a colleague of
>> Happer at Princeton. No simple answers here.
>>
>> Lastly, like others on this thread before me, I?d like to say that I
>> have no concerns about science being taught at WA schools, be they
>> public, religious or independent. Physics is going through a
>> delightful growth at both UWA and Curtin. I recently spoke to Jingbo
>> Wang, new Head of Physics at UWA, and she told me that they have seen
>> substantial growth in their enrolments. At Curtin we had a 50%
>> increase for this year on 2017, and we now have 50 first-year students
>> with a median ATAR of 95. Many of them come to us because of
>> recommendations of teachers from schools with a religious affiliation,
>> and they are delightfully bright with a strong scientific culture, and
>> will do their part to make the world a better place in due course.
>> Let?s us never forget that what unites us is far greater than what
>> divides us.
>>
>> With best wishes to all,
>>
>> Igor
>>
>> P.S. May I also respectfully suggest that you do not believe
>> everything you read in Nature. The pressure to publish in such
>> journals is so immense that ?overreach? is rather common.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 1/4/18, 22:19, "Catalist on behalf of Leon Harris"
>> <catalist-bounces at lists.stawa.net
>> <mailto:catalist-bounces at lists.stawa.net> on behalf of leon at quoll.com
>> <mailto:leon at quoll.com>> wrote:
>>
>> My concern in all this is that science doesn't become a religion. Or
>>
>> more correctly, that by labelling something as science, we cease
>> to keep
>> our critical senses active, and we facilitate the emergence of a new
>> priesthood. This priesthood would hold the consensus view, and would
>> silence alternate attempts to explain the world around us, including
>> those arrived at through the processes of the scientific method, but
>> which challenged orthodoxy and which had not yet had time to
>> accumulate
>> as much supporting evidence as the current view.
>>
>> We are vulnerable to this situation due to the limitations of our
>> minds,
>> and the heuristics that all of us must apply to get through life.
>> Our physical limitations make it near impossible to apply a fully
>> rigorous scientific approach to all the things that we believe to be
>> true. This means that we work in a kind of collective and social
>> space,
>> where belief in reputation stands as a proxy for scientific
>> method. Most
>> of the scientific views that I hold, I have arrived at through limited
>> personal thinking together with a belief in the quality of the
>> source it
>> came from. If I read it in Nature, I am more likely to believe it than
>> if I read it in The West Australian (or Catalist, for that matter!).
>>
>> For example, I am told that spacetime is being created between
>> galaxies.
>> I am also told that the frog spawn in the sky is actually
>> collections of
>> stars. Someone else has analysed the colours of the light from this
>> stuff that appears to me like distant frog spawn, and they tell me
>> that
>> if they look at it through an instrument that I can't afford, that
>> there
>> are bands of darkness similar to that which appear in light for
>> the sun.
>> When they don't match perfectly, I am told it is because those dots of
>> light are moving away from me. I am a simple kind of guy, I have never
>> touched a spacetime, and my senses only show me 3 dimensional space. I
>> rely on something in my head that gives a sense of the passing of
>> time,
>> although I don't know what time is - never having seen, touched, smelt
>> or tasted it.
>> To help me out of this situation, I have a body of lore collected by
>> western society. Guys like Igor Bray tell me about how if you
>> represent
>> the 3 dimensions of space and one of time as one entity, they behave
>> consistently, and this explains a number of paradoxes about light and
>> things happening at the same time. It all seems perfectly
>> reasonable to
>> me, and to the extent that I can fact check it, it is internally
>> consistent. However I recognise that I can't fact check it very
>> far, and
>> I rely upon Igor's reputation (and another bloke who married a serbian
>> mathematician and worked in a patent office - what was his name?)
>>
>> In science it is mostly the uncertainties that cause us a hassle. Such
>> as determining? which is more right, some of these 11 dimensional
>> string
>> theories, or the 4 dimensional theory of spacetime? How will I
>> know when
>> one of the former supplants the latter? For me, other than skim the
>> arguments, I am left relying on the reputation of the source of the
>> information.
>>
>> This is the wiggle room that science leaves us floundering. An idea or
>> theory may be brought to being, based on limited data. When do you
>> believe it? This is why scientific conferences sometimes have the most
>> intense fights between people often looking at the same data, but
>> interpreting it differently.
>>
>> As a consequence, the best scientific ideas at one time are frequently
>> wrong, sometimes with profound consequences
>>
>> Remember Paul Kammerer, the scientist who committed suicide because he
>> was hounded over his toad experiments that seemed to show Lamarkian
>> inheritance, and compare to the current discipline of epigenetics.
>> Here
>> is an example of high consequences that arise from scientific
>> consensus.
>>
>> There are a whole bunch of spayed Appalachians from West Virginia, as
>> well I dare say some aboriginal Australians in the same situation (as
>> late as the 1970s, I am anecdotally told), due to misunderstanding of
>> the science of genetics. In each of these cases, the label
>> "scientific"
>> has allowed travesties to occur.
>>
>>
>> So we need to come back to belief. I don't think it is useful to deny
>> that we all operate with it. I think it is a human heuristic, a
>> limitation (or a feature) of the hardware our minds run on. I
>> think that
>> it is critical to acknowledge beliefs ("State your assumptions")
>> and to
>> try to separate them from anything that you are trying to analyse.
>>
>> Maybe it is best if I don't believe you, if you don't believe me.
>> If we
>> had a better philosophy of knowledge, maybe a more formal tiered
>> system,
>> that allowed us to assign quality factors (1. that is true, proven
>> mathematically; 2. that is true in its current form but may be
>> part of a
>> larger truth (Evolution by Natural Selection is in this category); 3.
>> that is true within the narrow domain tested; 4. that is a likely
>> truth
>> as shown by extrapolation from a known truth; 5. that may not be true,
>> but as yet hasn't been disproven; 6. that is untestable; 7. that
>> is false).
>>
>> In writing this, I am largely unconcerned for the views of the
>> Christians among our profession. I see this submission as fighting for
>> the "souls" , or more correctly the integrity of those who wish to use
>> science as a belief system. The collected knowledge derived from the
>> application of the scientific method(s) can certainly be used as
>> such -
>> I personally rely on it extensively to form my world view. However
>> without acknowledging our limits, and the extent to which we can know
>> everything, we risk creating a new god, and entrenching falsehood
>> and myth.
>>
>>
>> The question of how to reconcile the honestly acknowledged limitations
>> of science, and compete against those of a closed mind who
>> dogmatically
>> state that they "know" is something I haven't fully figured out
>> yet. We
>> also live in a realpolitick.? What we are hitting up against here is
>> much like the age old conundrum of "to what extent do we tolerate
>> intolerance", or more generally, how do we engage in a dialogue for
>> which each side has different rules. I have no final answer, but I
>> don't
>> want to be part of a contest where to win I must take on the
>> attributes
>> of the side I am opposing. I don't want science to become a god. Too
>> much evil (tm) becomes possible.
>>
>> Finally, I agree with the points you have just posted Mike. Don't you
>> think that the complaints from the students, and your presence as
>> a HOLA
>> form part of a corrective loop that successfully prevented the
>> teaching
>> of Creationism in your school?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Leon
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Catalist mailing list
>> Catalist at lists.stawa.net <mailto:Catalist at lists.stawa.net>
>> http://lists.stawa.net/mailman/listinfo/catalist_lists.stawa.net
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Catalist mailing list
>> Catalist at lists.stawa.net
>> http://lists.stawa.net/mailman/listinfo/catalist_lists.stawa.net
>
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: <http://lists.stawa.net/pipermail/catalist_lists.stawa.net/attachments/20180504/6a6ddaf5/attachment.html>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Subject: Digest Footer
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalist mailing list
> Catalist at lists.stawa.net
> http://lists.stawa.net/mailman/listinfo/catalist_lists.stawa.net
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of Catalist Digest, Vol 67, Issue 3
> ***************************************
More information about the Catalist
mailing list