Re: Simple Parser

From: Gerry Quinn (gerryq_at_DELETETHISindigo.ie)
Date: 06/02/04 

Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 10:53:03 +0100

In article <f5dda427.0405270442.e94eebe@posting.google.com>, spinoza1111
@yahoo.com says...
> gerryq@DELETETHISindigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote in message news:<7AZsc.532$Z14.383@news.indigo.ie>...
> > Which predictions? Howe were they tested? Where is the paper pointing
> > out that since the theory makes false predictions, it is incorrect?
>
> Freud's model was tested by his successors in clinical practice. They
> discovered that it was inapplicable both to non-bourgeois family
> relations and to women, and, they changed the clinical praxis.
>
> Do your own goddamn homework on the history of psychology. This

We're referring to psychoanalysis here. Any reference to psychology is
as tangential as a reference to astronomy in a discussion of star signs.

> information is available to any educated person. Of course, scientific
> Fundamentalists aren't well-educated. This is why they demand "cites"
> and "papers"; they've substituted a reified ersatz for a nonexistent
> culture and this is barbarism.

Bluster doesn't substitute for proper science. Papers as such may not
be necessary to science, but the confrontation of conflicting ideas is.
This is where the pseudosciences fall down; they accept 'research' so
long as the 'researcher' is on a valid spiritual path, so to speak. The
contradictions in their conclusions are never examined, and the 'field'
turns into a gigantic sack of garbage. Even if there are nuggets of
truth they are indistinguishable from the rest of the ***.

> Clinical praxis, however, has most of the features of experiment
> including clear criteria for success, and, clinical praxis can falsify
> and verify theory, and this is what happened.

So what's the scientific status of the example you mentioned, the
"Oedipus Complex"? The statistics? The predictive value?

> In the case of Marxism, tragically and mistakenly, the experiment was
> carried out on the population of the USSR and abandoned by Gorbachev.
> This means that Marxism was NOT "nonfalsifiable".

At the very most, this could mean that Marxism was not proved non-
falsifiable by the experiment.

> In fact, what the vulgar Marxists did was nothing more and nothing
> less than what "hard" scientists do when they invest in a paradigm.
> Rather than sacrificing their investment, initially, they changed less
> important parts of the theory, a perfectly responsible scientific
> practice which happens all the time.

Again, the important thing is that the theories must be analysed and
placed against real world data in the same ways. It's not good enough
for Prof. X to say "A fixes my theory" and Prof. Y to say "B fixes my
theory" unless they fight over A and B.
 
> Prior to relativity, responsible physicists of the late nineteenth
> century hypothesized the "ether" prior to relativity. Keplerian
> scientists likewise revised their theories to preserve its central
> theses when Kepler's astronomy was proven to generate false
> predictions. Today, scientists maintain central paradigms and
> sacrifice details in the same way as Marxists and psychoanalysts, but
> in a different key for the very good reason that the subject matter of
> the latter two disciplines is humanity.

The ether was a rough dynamical model of hypothetical fundamental
structures that was considered unnecessary after the advent of
relativity, and that does not sit well with most modern interpretations
of quantum theory. (Though if you're a Bohmian, you can still quite
legitimately have a crack at such a model.) As for Kepler, I don't think
he really had anything that could be called a theory in the modern
sense, although he made some good observations and found some formulae,
some wacky and some useful.

As for humanity, there are sciences that seem to be able to cope with
the unpredictability of the experimental subjects, or at least to not
jump to unsupported conclusions from observations that are susceptible
of too many interpretations. These do not, as far as I can see, include
Marxism and psychoanalysis.

[--]

> > >The "object" of study reserves the right to engage in a dialog with
> > >the theory to such an extent that the theory is continually in play in
> > >a way in which a "hard" scientific theory is not.
> >
> > But this kind of stuff is common to astrology, homeopathy and other
> > pseudosciences too. You're digging your hole deeper.
> >
> There is no question, of course, that astrology is a pseudoscience.
> You've made a crude rhetorical gesture, trying to snidely associate
> psychoanalysis and Marxism with "astrology and homeopathy". It fails
> as I have shown.

On the contrary, the lack of scientific rigour is the same.

> > The question is not of whether challenges are allowed - it is whether
> > they are *compelled*, which is a defining characteristic of science. As
> > for Kuhn, I don't know that he can be considered to have 'shown'
> > anything at all in the scientific sense, but it is certainly true that
> > new or unpopular old ideas can get trampled on when big (usually
> > government) money is involved, or the state attempts to remake science
> > along the principles of a pseudoscience such as Marxism, as in the
> > Lysenko affair. The conduct of science is often imperfect, but a
> > situation in which ideas are savagely attacked is in fact the opposite
> > of the phatic stroking found in pseudoscience.
> >
> Get a clue. The big money for big science today is NOT governmental
> money it is corporate money, and for this reason, much scientific
> research is dedicated to the needs of the wealthy for cures for
> fashionable syndromes, and genomic definitions of what they define as
> deviance. Meanwhile, the earth has warmed to the point where almost
> simultaneously an unprecedented swarm of tornados has devastated the
> American midwest, and 1000 people have died in Haiti.

I'm not sure what percentage of resources going into science today comes
from governments, companies, charities, or other sources, but all invest
huge amounts. Naturally they have different priorities, but a datum is
a datum. Your talk of climate change is a red herring, lots of
resources are being devoted to research in this complex area. And
people have died of bad weather since there were people. Probably some
places will have nicer weather and some places will have worse weather
than if we didn't emit industrial CO2 and agricultural methane (it's
been speculated that the latter has been causing a significant
greenhouse effect for a thousand years or more). It seems to me that a
variation of this kind is intrinsically neutral, and ecosystems are far
less stable anyway than ecologists like to pretend. Climate research,
or history, or both, will no doubt clarify these issues.

> Had enough government money been dedicated to hard physical science in
> the USA in the last ten years, instead of finding cures for baldness,
> cures for impotence and ways for stupid rich slobs to live forever, we
> would not be facing what is already the irrevocable alteration of the
> earth's climate.

Tripe. The hard physical scientists wanted to spend billions on a big
collider to generate Higgs bosons. Maybe. (Incidentally, do you know
there are gaps (small gaps, admittedly) in the astrophysical evidence
that 'shows' that experiments to create quark-gluon plasma won't produce
negatively-charged strangelets that will eat us all up, and the solar
system with us?)

And the Earth's climate is on a drunken walk, and always has been.

> > You will have to distinguish, I think, what you call "the genome
> > narrative" from the science that measures to what extent genetic factors
> > influence our natures. One can easily find cases where the somatic
> > infuences of genetic factors are exaggerated, for political reasons
> > or as a result of researcher exuberance - but it is no less easy to find
> > cases in which they are dishonestly minimised or denied, usually in the
> > service of a political prescription. Science progresses, and data
> > accumulates. Peas are bred, skulls are measured, genomes are sequenced
>
> "Skulls are measured?" Yeah, right. Continually, eugenics and the
> preclassification of entire populations is returning, a Fascist praxis
> made respectable by scientific Fundamentalism.

Don't like the results - get your calipers. Science is open to
correction. A billion dollars of bull*** can be contradicted by a
cheap experiment.
 
> > - any or all instances of these may be blighted by experimenter
> > manipulation, inadequate statistics, or dubious technology, but sooner
> > or later, even if they go out of fashion for a while, more data and
> > more knowledgeable interpretations will form a more complete picture.
> > The science of genomics is proceeding quite effectively, as far as I can
> > see - clearly your concerns about its lack of objectivity are overblown.
> >
> "As far as I can see". The purpose of scientific public relations is
> precisely to obscure your vision.

That's why, unlike you, I'm interested in the papers, the abstracts, the
measurements. The public relations don't count.

- Gerry Quinn