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Look, Reflect on this: there are at least 200 factual errors on the front page comment sections of Hacker News. Do you nod along while you read it being entert
by ErotemeObelus 7y ago
Look,
Reflect on this: there are at least 200 factual errors on the front page comment sections of Hacker News. Do you nod along while you read it being entertained, or do you pinpoint the errors?
I'm not even talking about nigling details. I saw one comment about relativity with a huge scientific howler right in the middle of it. And people upvoted it sky high.
The people who upvoted it were being passive. The users of this site receive a passive experience and generally speaking are too childish to handle asserting their own mind. Even comments are largely passive. People don't even reflect on the subject-verb agreement of the sentences that they write. They are so childish that asserting themselves by the tiniest amount on their writing is not trivial nor has it reached the point of automaticity.
How does science work? It's largely like reading Hacker News. Scientists download research papers, understand them, and test them... and occasionally come up with new directions and ways (equiv 2 commenting on the newslink).
None of that are assertive. When an assertive person presents himself on a subject, he causes a PARADIGM SHIFT. He doesn't go along with the presuppositions: he creates his own presuppositions. This is Thomas Kuhn's "groundbreaking" thesis on scientific progress: some people internalize other people's presuppositions until they are fossilized in their brains resulting in them kicking and screaming on their death bed when it's time to admit it was a bad idea... or some people are like creative genius Thomas Hobbes who said he didn't bother reading all the failures before him because he was too busy thinking his own presuppositions.
- gjm11 7y agoYou seem to be arguing different things in every comment. As I understand it, your thesis now is that most scientists most of the time accept things they hear from other scientists. That's probably true. And it's part of how science works -- which it does, rather impressively on the whole. But the paradigm-shifting stuff is also part of science, and a vital part at that, so if this is meant to connect somehow to your earlier remarks about science being passive, "scientism" being passive-aggressive, and "intuition" being assertive, you have more work to do to justify that connection. (And, once again, if you want to claim some sort of superiority for "intuition", you need to show not only that intuition purports to assert things more definitely than science does, but also that it does so correctly. Mere overconfidence is not an intellectual virtue.) Thomas Hobbes was a smart guy. But when he tried to do science and mathematics, the results were not good. The most infamous example: He thought he'd accomplished the so-called squaring of the circle and duplication of the cube. He hadn't. (They are impossible.) So far as I can tell, none of Hobbes's scientific work turned out to have any lasting value.