Awesome article on the nature of scientific knowledge

[MightyTiny]

Found this through Phill Plait's wonderful Bad Astronomy blog (http://www.badastronomy.com/). REALLY worth the read, I think:

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/04/11/what-i-believe-but-cannot-prove/

[KrazyHorse]

Why? It says only what any good scientist knows.

[Perfection]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
Why? It says only what any good scientist knows.

Yeah, but lots of people are idiots who don't understand science.

Still, I don't think thats a cool article.


Here's a cool article:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dennett06/dennett06_index.html

[Ecthy]

For KH there's only good scientists (people who agree with him) and total idiots (the rest) in this world.

[Whoha]

There are a lot of idiots in the world.

[MightyTiny]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
Why? It says only what any good scientist knows.

Yes, but most people are not good scientists, indeed, not scientists at all. Yet they still are bombarded with the spurious claims of pseudoscientists who, with their superficially scientific souding jargon sound "legit" to many uninformed laymen.

The article is awesome, because it pretty consisely and clearly explains the nature of true scientific knowledge to the intelligent layman.

After all it's not just idiots who fall for pseudoscientific ideas; in a way, intelligent people uneducated in what science is are just more adept in clinging on to pseudoscientific ideas once they are adopted.

[Meticulous Man]

http://www.galilean-library.org/feyerabend1.html

[LordShiva]

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html