[FRIAM] on Feynman, again

[gⅼеɳ ☣]

On 10/12/2017 03:25 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> 
>>   The Grandfather Of Alt-Science
>>   https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-grandfather-of-alt-science/
> 
> Like upsides to global warming, perhaps there are benefits to the irrationality of scientists, like Robinson's and others'.
> It suggests that science is an activity or an algorithm, that can be conducted in parallel with arbitrary if closely-held beliefs.  
> But I'm cynical.  I'm inclined to think the scientific method is just a weapon in the hands of a sufficiently wacko person to pummel the world into a form they think they can manage or profit from.   Better have more non-wacko people with the same skills to balance things out.   Sure, there is herd behavior in all kinds of people, even the science-policy elites in Washington.   Is there some harm being done by them other than to direct money in a worthy direction that happens not to be to him?   The contrarian needs to be clever to navigate these things and do more than complain.

I agree for the most part, especially given the false reification surrounding the scientific method.  Woo peddlers and conspiracy theorists rely on the real hermeneutical depth of real science as cover for their rhetoric.  The real benefit of thinking seriously about Robinson (or other pseudoscience like acupuncture, or even things like informal fallacies) is as a foil for learning what *to* do, from examples of what *not* to do.  If the Robinsons of the world were earnest failures, they'd be wholesome contributors to science.  But because they're deluded, blind to their failures, it is difficult to learn from them.

This post makes the argument nicely:

  The Case for Contrarianism
  http://quillette.com/2017/10/10/the-case-for-contrarianism/

from the post:
> So even if Gilley’s paper does as little to support its conclusion as its critics seem to think, it nonetheless might have provided a valuable service to the anti-colonial literature, by making a case at all. That would provide anti-colonial academics something to point to and say: “Here is the best case for colonialism available. It’s very bad, and so it’s reasonable to conclude that the case against colonialism is much stronger than the case for colonialism.” This helps actually to buttress the field’s theoretical foundations, especially as a pedagogical matter. Nor will it do for critics to say simply that the paper could find a place in a discipline with different foundations. If we hope to achieve with our intellectual inquiry even roughly objective knowledge of reality, we must go beyond having a field that assumes P and a field that assumes not-P – we must investigate whether or not P is actually true.

-- 
☣ gⅼеɳ