Joe Brinkley is a racist scumbag

[Dominarch's Hope]

Literally all you do is flame me. Rarely have you ever actually addressed the points.

You are basically the only one who does this, Metahive.

[Straha]

This is why fields can drop in and out of the realm of legitimate scientific inquiry (see, in the most extreme case, eugenics), it's not because the scientific method has changed significantly, or at all, but because the cultural determination of what constitutes science has changed over time. In your answer to this both here and below you only touch on the surface level question and never answer the second level analysis that needs to be done to prove that science can be 'objective' (hint, it can't except in the most barebones terms of analyses.)

Science isn't absolutely 100% perfect, nor 100% immune to culture. However, significant minorities saw the problems around the eugenics issue even the majority couldn't.

I don't know what you mean by second level analysis in this case, but I suspect it's bunkum.

I think the entirety of the problem with your posts can be summed up with this one exchange. Your response to 'what it means to be scientific is fluid and changes due to exterior concerns' is to miss the forest (science can't be objective from the outset) for the tree (eugenics has dropped in and out of scientific inquiry multiple times) and then respond with a bottom of the barrel response that isn't actually responsive to either point. You follow it up quickly then by not engaging with something you don't understand and instead dismiss it out of hand. Pro-tip: If you're going to engage in conversation with someone over a point of contention it is worthwhile to pay attention to what they're saying and try to understand them because otherwise A. you don't learn anything from the conversation on your own and B. you look real foolish when you show you don't understand a damn thing that's been said to you.


Rather than keep on clowning you on the line-by-line I'm just going to break down what's been going on really simply and then address a couple of the more nuanced points. You are claiming scientific inquiry can be objective, that is free of any outside constraints. I am saying that is an impossibility. In order to win that science can be objective you need to win two things before the possibility can even begin to be entertained:

First, that human brains and consciousness can transcend their biological limitations and imagine a world absent those constraints. It's not a question of the world being illusory (though that does seem to count as an implicit third thing you need to prove), but a question of can the human brain imagine a chair that is not being imagined by the human brain. Put another way, can the human brain remove itself from the thought processes it engages in. In the world where it cannot then we can never have access to a purely objective understanding of the world, that understanding will always be prismed through the medium of our consciousness and senses and our understanding of those senses will be blindered by biologocial constraints we cannot even conceive of, much less see past.

Second, that human inquiry can transcend cultural and linguistic understandings of the world. You keep straw-manning linguistic to mean a question of translation between different spoken/written languages. It doesn't. It means that we conceive of thought and inquiry using words that have meanings. As long as meaning, and metaphysics in general, is tied to language then our understanding of the world or inquiry therein will never be able to be objective and will always have irremovable biases over inclusion and exclusion of data.

An anecdote: an old professor of mine had an anthropology Professor/mentor who did fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. This man flew into a deep part of the jungle on a plane to go to a tribe that had previously been contacted. On arriving a bunch of tribesmen came out and started poking around underneath the plane, when asked why they explained they were looking for its genitals. It turned out that the tribes had two categories for things that flew through the air under its own volition, birds and clouds and obviously this wasn't a cloud. When we approach the world we are all those tribesmen with arbitrary and artificial categorizations whose limitations we are unaware of and which cloud our judgment on a day to day level without us realizing it, and we create new limitations based on our history and contemporary uses of language as every second ticks by.

Cultural limitations are much the same. To go back to your original post, racial difference is a social construct. Historically the requirements to belong to any particular 'race', or what it means to belong to any 'race', have been socially constructed and then foisted onto science as a means of categorization and analysis that then turns up results biased by the social construction in the first place, leading to a vicious feedback loop. This is hardly the only such scenario, non-human language and 'innate' gender differences are both mired in a history of this. Your only defense against this, and it is defense at best, is that science is 'getting better' at removing those barriers, but if anything that serves as a concession and a point against the objectivity of scientific inquiry because that means both that science has always been up to now tainted in such a way to prevent objectivity and, more importantly, that contemporary science is tainted fundamentally in a way that it cannot currently understand. In the world where this is true we're left with literally no outlet to objectivity for human understanding and are instead stuck with what you so derisively try to label 'subjectivism'.



This is what I mean by second-level analysis. You do a lot of leg work to try and prove that science qua science can improve without ever dealing with the epistemological foundations that are necessary for objectivity, much less scientific objectivity, to be a possibility in the first place. It's like designing a penthouse without considering the building it's going to be a part of. Cute, but pointless.

Most journalists do a little research on their topic- that isn't strong evidence admittedly, but given that probability I assumed that he had done some degree of research (or at least that the probability was high enough to shift evidence very slightly).

It worries me that all it takes for you to be convinced that there's evidence towards a position is for someone to make an assertion. Very scientific of you.

Sure.

One part of the scientific method used in ideas created by physicists and ultimately made into reality by engineers is the idea of testing a hypothesis. As we would agree on, the concepts the physicists use must be correct or at the very least close to the truth on the relevant scale- otherwise, they wouldn't work.

There is a fundamental disconnect here. I don't disagree with you, for instance, that torque is torque or hydrogen fuses to release light to make the sun 'burn'. The articulation is not so much with certain, admittedly bare bone, 'facts' but rather with the way that this system that determines these facts is constructed, and how these facts are then determined according to pre-existing social constraints. Luce Irigaray deals with this question regarding how pre-concieved gender norms help to determine which avenues of physics are worthy of study and which aren't at quite some length, for instance. In the world where these barriers exist, even when we can understand certain 'facts' about the universe, the system that produces and understands these facts can never be objective.


EDIT: Fixed some grammar.

[Metahive]

Literally all you do is flame me. Rarely have you ever actually addressed the points.

You are basically the only one who does this, Metahive.

Dude, you just admitted that using freakin' Google for a very simple query is beyond you. Frankly, you should be happy that I even deign to mock you, you"re hardly worth even that.

[Guardsman Bass]

uce Irigaray deals with this question regarding how pre-concieved gender norms help to determine which avenues of physics are worthy of study and which aren't at quite some length, for instance. In the world where these barriers exist, even when we can understand certain 'facts' about the universe, the system that produces and understands these facts can never be objective.

You mean that bizarre argument that fluid mechanics were a neglected field of physics compared to solid mechanics, because "fluid" is supposedly feminine compared to the "masculine" solids?

[Straha]

uce Irigaray deals with this question regarding how pre-concieved gender norms help to determine which avenues of physics are worthy of study and which aren't at quite some length, for instance. In the world where these barriers exist, even when we can understand certain 'facts' about the universe, the system that produces and understands these facts can never be objective.

You mean that bizarre argument that fluid mechanics were a neglected field of physics compared to solid mechanics, because "fluid" is supposedly feminine compared to the "masculine" solids?

That's cherry-picking from the book and a really horrific mangling of what she says (which is why Sokal and Brichmont use it for their book screed). Her argument is that fields of study become associated with specific gender identities (especially when a number of these fields are grammatically gendered in other countries) and that these identities shape the desirability of study within these fields.

In a world where we accept that one of the main reasons women are underrepresented in the sciences is because of gender norms, or that white skin was associated with beauty and nature in contrast to black skin, why is this such a 'bizarre' argument?

[Guardsman Bass]

EDIT: Never mind. My criticism was going to be overly narrow, about why I don't think it applies in the case of fluid mechanics (where there is a long history of research, and the biggest issue was actually being able to model it before and after computers). I'm not sure I disagree with the more fundamental point, although I would tend to phrase it more that the established body of scientists tended to be dismissive towards contributions coming from lower-status individuals in the past, not that areas of science were considered fundamentally inferior because they were associated with women and minorities.

[Dominarch's Hope]

Literally all you do is flame me. Rarely have you ever actually addressed the points.

You are basically the only one who does this, Metahive.

Dude, you just admitted that using freakin' Google for a very simple query is beyond you. Frankly, you should be happy that I even deign to mock you, you"re hardly worth even that.

I used it.

Its too damn cluttered nowadays to be worth a shit unless you already know where your looking.

Fuck off.

[Carinthium]

For the record, delaying my response because I feel when dealing with Straha like I'm a medieval Christian from England trying to deal with a medieval Muslim from Persia- we might be able to communicate, but there's a massive amount of culture shock.

[Metahive]

Literally all you do is flame me. Rarely have you ever actually addressed the points.

You are basically the only one who does this, Metahive.

Dude, you just admitted that using freakin' Google for a very simple query is beyond you. Frankly, you should be happy that I even deign to mock you, you"re hardly worth even that.

I used it.

Its too damn cluttered nowadays to be worth a shit unless you already know where your looking.

Fuck off.

I put "snakes in korea" in Google and the uppermost result is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reptiles_of_Korea

giving me a handy list of all the snakes in Korea.

I put "nation without snakes" in Google and the uppermost page is this

http://de.answers.yahoo.com/question/in ... 701AAZ3ARO

which, funnily enough tells you it's IRELAND that's famous for lacking snakes!

Wow, so damn cluttered and confusing!

There's being lazy, there's being incompetent and then there's being you. You're truly a marvel of utter ineptitude.

*slow clap*

[Dominarch's Hope]

I mentioned and said I searched "PEST" in Korea. Snakes was simply a suggestion because I wasnt too sure if it was snakes or something else.

The rest of my post generally point to this. ....dumbass.