Original poster: Paul Nicholson <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hi Matt, All,
Thanks for your comments.
We do seem to live in a disturbing post-modernist world, don't we?
Fellow coiler's and other 'science' hobbyists alike often have
impressive technical knowledge these days, but also, apparently,
very little appreciation of the processes by which that knowledge
was carefully acquired. So little appreciation, is seems, that
they are often quite happy to attack those processes, seeing them
as unnecessary restrictions on thought and ideas. It's almost
as if the popular feeling is that science has gone as far as it
can go and that we must relax the rules in order to continue to
push out the boundaries of knowledge. I wonder what sort of a
world this will lead to in decades and centuries to come.
I guess Stork is still a bit sore because his own replacement for
EM theory met with a similar response to that of Jared's. I wish
Stork and Jared understood that it's nothing personal! I don't
know these guys - they are just names on emails. I'm just
challenging the ideas put forward because they disagree with
observations, or contradict known physics, or are inconsistent
or just plain meaningless.
We have to do this if the list is to maintain its integrity!!
There's a good deal of high quality debate on this list and it's
a great example of amateurs treating a difficult subject (and each
other) with a rational, scientific approach. And it works too,
when you look back at the progress made, it's a pretty impressive
collective effort.
That doesn't happen by accident. It relies on everyone being
intellectually honest enough to welcome tough criticism and to
respond to awkward and incisive questions. By doing so, wrong
stuff gets discarded quickly, while useful and effective ideas
quickly gain strength and support.
But I'm not really sure what Stork wants us to do. His succession
of straw man arguments against scientific rigour don't seem relevant
to the issue at hand. I don't think Stork actually agrees with
Jared's theory, but at the same time, he doesn't want to see it
criticised. Where does that leave us?
The dilemma for the list to solve is how to treat posts from those
who don't want to play the scientific game. In those situations,
criticism of a post is met with no response (other than perhaps a
switch to the use of surnames). Our moderator is bending over
backwards to allow all views to be expressed, but this creates a
caveat emptor situation for the consumer. If someone asks for
advice, how can they tell, for example if that advice is evidence-
based or faith-based?
It isn't the moderator's job to filter posts based on correctness.
We have to do that ourselves by challenging faulty information.
In order to do so, he has to let critical posts through. Not to
do so would break the list's self correcting mechanism and we
would simply be left with a soap box, as for example the usa-tesla
group on Yahoo.
I don't know the solution to this dilemma. A temporary patch is to
simply post a warning or correction to mitigate the damage caused
by junk information, which is all I have time to do, these days.
But this can be very inefficient, especially as it usually triggers
a debate on relativity and quantum mechanics (for some reason!).
Inevitably someone will refer to, say the AB effect as justification
for why we should treat someone's elementary error as if it were a
viable competing scientific theory. It wastes such a lot of
precious time! There must be better way?
--
Paul Nicholson,
Manchester, UK.
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