Warp wrote:
>   You and your mythical "copious experimental evidence". The only evidence
> which you have mentioned is 

Or, or a better-written opinion on this concept...


http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/conjunction-con.html

"""
I emphasize this, because it seems that when I talk about biases 
(especially to audiences not previously familiar with the field), a lot 
of people want to be charitable to experimental subjects.  But it is not 
only experimental subjects who deserve charity.  Scientists can also be 
unstupid.  Someone else has already thought of your alternative 
interpretation. Someone else has already devised an experiment to test 
it.  Maybe more than one.  Maybe more than twenty.

A blank map is not a blank territory; if you don't know whether someone 
has tested it, that doesn't mean no one has tested it.  This is not a 
hunter-gatherer tribe of two hundred people, where if you do not know a 
thing, then probably no one in your tribe knows.  There are six billion 
people in the world, and no one can say with certitude that science does 
not know a thing; there is too much science.  Absence of such evidence 
is only extremely weak evidence of absence.  So do not mistake your 
ignorance of whether an alternative interpretation has been tested, for 
the positive knowledge that no one has tested it.  Be charitable to 
scientists too.  Do not say, "I bet what really happened was X", but 
ask, "Which experiments discriminated between the standard 
interpretation versus X?"

"""

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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