Views on Science/Scientists/Scientism (Split from Is the MCO Real?)

[Sanity Check]

 

 

Has anyone read this?
 

I owned it since the 1990s and never got around to actually reading it.

 

 

[Taomeow]

1 hour ago, Sanity Check said:

 

 

Has anyone read this?
 

I owned it since the 1990s and never got around to actually reading it.

 

 

 

Yes, a long time ago.  And this one, also ages ago:

 

And this one

 

And a favorite:

 

[Nungali]

2 hours ago, Sanity Check said:

 

 

Has anyone read this?
 

I owned it since the 1990s and never got around to actually reading it.

 

 

 

Yes .    One of the original pop 'scientific'  east meets west  works  ( conceptually ), so you  might enjoy it .  It isnt a good source to learn modern physics though .... so you might enjoy it .    

[Taomeow]

5 minutes ago, Nungali said:

 

Yes .    One of the original pop 'scientific'  east meets west  works  ( conceptually ), so you  might enjoy it .  It isnt a good source to learn modern physics though .... 

 

Of course there's better sources to learn modern physics!

 

 

 

 

and so on.

 

The pop east meets west books aren't a substitute for a Ph.D. in physics should one pursue it.  Rather, they are a useful tool for setting some folks' skewed brains a bit straighter -- folks who've dislocated them by craning their neck to take a conceited view from the top of the ivory tower of "Real Science."  And much as I hate sounding woke, for the purposes of this sentence I have to, though I swear I mean something very different from what the true followers of the doctrine mean when they say those words:

Eurocentric/Western, and overwhelmingly white male as a default admission ticket for most of its developmental history, is what they really mean when they refer to "Real Science."  

 

 

[Nungali]

4 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

 

Of course there's better sources to learn modern physics!

 

... you chopped off my 2nd  ' so you  might enjoy it '   and the smile , thus removing the context   of your 'quote' . 

 

 

4 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

 

 

 

 

and so on.

 

Your images remind me of something .  Do you know what my prime motive originally was for enrolling at Sydney Uni (aside from the free education policy )  ?

 

It was because I loved the old buildings ( that some of  these pictures remind me off )     So, of course , all my lectures where in a different type of 'new'  building and surrounds   ( that look like the other pictures ) 

 

#

 

'Old' architecture is fairly rare in Sydney .....   I imagine myself  as some sort of student . chillin' out on the lawn and studying ........  something .. . ....  and being'cool' .    

 

 

but instead I ended up in some post 60s experiment in brutalist architecture surrounded by no nature and next to a major feed road  ....  

 

of course, that's all been fixed up now ..... 

 

 

 

[ We could run a similar thread on the development of Australian architecture .... something bad happened there post 70s as well !  ]

 

4 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

 

The pop east meets west books aren't a substitute for a Ph.D. in physics should one pursue it. 

 

Not a substitute at all ... an 'adjunct', perhaps .

 

 

4 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

 

 

Rather, they are a useful tool for setting some folks' skewed brains a bit straighter -- folks who've dislocated them by craning their neck to take a conceited view from the top of the ivory tower of "Real Science."  And much as I hate sounding woke, for the purposes of this sentence I have to, though I swear I mean something very different from what the true followers of the doctrine mean when they say those words:

Eurocentric/Western, and overwhelmingly white male as a default admission ticket for most of its developmental history, is what they really mean when they refer to "Real Science."  

 

 

 

There is that 'nature of reality'  question  again    

 

Its also not like that now , as far as overall  'admissions' go .... here since the 80s women enrollments significantly outnumber men  and regarding the 'white majority ' .... if you are indigenous , you are guaranteed a place  ; 

 

Since 2024, all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australia are guaranteed a Commonwealth supported place at a university of their choice for non-medical courses (and will be for medical courses from 2026).

 

. When I enrolled  my 'admission ticket'  depended on two things  then  ;   was 1. Australian citizen , 2. Over 28 .    That was it . 

[Taomeow]

3 minutes ago, Nungali said:

 

... you chopped off my 2nd  ' so you  might enjoy it '   and the smile , thus removing the context   of your 'quote' . 

 

 

Since "you" in your original post wasn't addressed to me, I removed it to minimize the recipient confusion, not to remove the context -- besides, it was a tautology, you said it twice and I removed it just once.  In any event, no harm intended.

6 minutes ago, Nungali said:

It was because I loved the old buildings ( that some of  these pictures remind me off )     So, of course , all my lectures where in a different type of 'new'  building and surrounds   ( that look like the other pictures ) 

 

#

   

With you on this one!  I would have loved to go to a school that looks like this!  A colleague of mine who went to the same school wound up teaching at the Edinburgh University and I'm not terribly prone to envy but god!  that work place of hers!  As for me, I graduated from a 13-floor parallelepiped.  

 

 

 

 

[old3bob]

8 hours ago, Taomeow said:

I had a horrible physics teacher in school, a horrible chemistry teacher, and a horrible math teacher.  Just my luck.  They were like that "if you don't eat your meat you can't have any pudding" teacher from The Wall.  Borderline psychotic, mean, vengeful, corrupt, you name it.  So all I did in school for those subjects was the absolute minimum I could get away with, if that.  But then for some 2 months we had a substitute math teacher from another school (a specialized math-slanted school where he was one of the teachers known as genius-makers).  He started giving us strange math problems of totally unfamiliar design that weren't hinged on whether you had memorized the formulas, and instead required something else, maybe pattern recognition, don't remember what exactly they were about of course.  And what a shocker! -- turned out I was a natural for those, and for two months I was treated by the teacher and my surprised classmates as a math star.   (We did have a resident math star, with many citywide math competitions victories under his belt, and he was sort of average with those strange different problems.  He managed, but not as spectacularly as he usually did with the usual.)  It was surprising and exciting.

 

That was the first time in my life when I discovered I may have something mathematical going beneath the surface...  sans the mathematical apparatus...  but those two months weren't enough for it to emerge, it just peeked out through the hole in The Wall...  And then our wall-building regular teacher returned and it was over.  

 

What I'm driving at is, there's not enough progress maybe at least in part because educational systems as we know them aren't catching those who could potentially facilitate it, and instead discourage some (many) potential "progressors."        

 

Not really related but your mention of seeing  "patterns" had a sort of example that happened to me early this morning when I looked up into the dark night sky from my back porch,  there were stars and constellations there that I had never seen before?  Wtf?  Anyway I kept looking and then realized that my mind had made or filled in that sight with the explanation of never before seen stars,  being that they turned out to be  just  reflections  from my nearby outside  lights on the few remaining and upper leaves on my tree where it was hitting at just the right angles to appear as stars was what I was really seeing. 

 

[Apech]

1 hour ago, old3bob said:

 

Not really related but your mention of seeing  "patterns" had a sort of example that happened to me early this morning when I looked up into the dark night sky from my back porch,  there were stars and constellations there that I had never seen before?  Wtf?  Anyway I kept looking and then realized that my mind had made or filled in that sight with the explanation of never before seen stars,  being that they turned out to be  just  reflections  from my nearby outside  lights on the few remaining and upper leaves on my tree where it was hitting at just the right angles to appear as stars was what I was really seeing. 

 

Easy on the bottle old3bob 😀

[Taomeow]

3 hours ago, old3bob said:

 

Not really related but your mention of seeing  "patterns" had a sort of example that happened to me early this morning when I looked up into the dark night sky from my back porch,  there were stars and constellations there that I had never seen before?  Wtf?  Anyway I kept looking and then realized that my mind had made or filled in that sight with the explanation of never before seen stars,  being that they turned out to be  just  reflections  from my nearby outside  lights on the few remaining and upper leaves on my tree where it was hitting at just the right angles to appear as stars was what I was really seeing. 

 

 

You did well with those stars -- first noticing them, then noticing the surrounding circumstances and arriving at correct rather than erroneous conclusions.  Part of the pattern recognition skill is to be able to first notice and then dismiss false or illusory patterns, the ones that appear to convince our senses they are there and fool our minds into believing in their existence -- or vice versa, convince our minds and fool our senses.  

 

In psychology, this fallacy of discerning a pattern that isn't there is known as apophenia, interpreting meaningless noise as meaningful.  Sometimes it is an early symptom of schizophrenia -- including society-wide mass psychoses induced by being continuously fed false/fake patterns by the media, the educational system, and assorted institutions.