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"Invisible" <voi### [at] dev null> wrote in message
news:4b0fa022$1@news.povray.org...
> Disproving a theory is every bit as important as proving a theory. By
> proving that the psychic phenominon does not exist, now nobody else
> needs to study it. This is beneficial.
If *nobody else* studying it is good, an unqualified *nobody* studying it is
even better, is it not?
Besides, the nature of paranormal claims is such that they can not be
conclusively disproven. There will never be a study to disprove that which
is not a theory.
> The *best way* to determine whether something is crazy or not is not to
> stand there and say "that's crazy", but to actually go out and do actual
> research and *prove* the answer one way or the other. THIS IS HOW
> SCIENCE WORKS!
Paranormal is by definition outside the scope of science. You cannot prove
"the answer the other way".
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On 11/27/09 17:18, somebody wrote:
>>> Newton, they laughed at Einstein..." doesn't work. There are millions of
>>> "Bozo the Clowns" for each Newton or Einstein.
>
>> The statement is irrelevant, unless you have a criterion for
>> differentiating future Bozos from future Einsteins.
>
> Exactly. Lacking evidence one way or the other, odds are, the person making
> extraordinary predictions is a Bozo.
Except that evidence wasn't lacking.
> In other words, odds are, all paranormal claims are nonsense.
Again, it seems you're merely defining "nonsense" to your tastes.
> To even
> *begin* investigating, there has to be some extraordinary supporting
> evidence.
Nope. To *confirm* it you need extraordinary evidence. To *begin*
investigating it you need very little.
>>>>> built right on a diamond mine worth a "billions and billions" of
>>> dollars,
>>>>> which nobody knows about. Should I start digging?
>
>>>> You've set up a strawman.
>
>>> How so?
>
>> Your diamond mine scenario is not even close to analogous with the one
>> we're talking about.
>
> Again, how so?
Because no one came to you stating that they had dug a little and found
reason to believe there is a diamond mine there. No one came to you with
a story about how 200 years ago, someone found a diamond there, or found
clues indicative of diamonds.
The only way your analogy is valid is if suddenly some researchers
decided to suddenly do research on psychokinetic activity without even
knowing that some people claim it exists.
> My argument (not feeling) is, there is a finite set of confirmed truths at
> any finite time, but potentially uncountably many falsehoods. Unless there's
> good evidence *before* we start, we cannot simply waste time investigating
> anything and everything. The onus is on who deem paranormal investigation is
Except no one suggested studying "anything and everything".
> worthy to show that the paranormal claim in question is somehow different
> than all these falsehoods.
Actually, no - unless you clarify what you mean by "all these
falsehoods" - keeping in mind that a number of these had not been
determined to be falsehoods.
> I am sure you get hundereds of Nigerian mail scams a month. Do you
> investigate any one of them? Maybe one of them is not a scam and is the real
> deal, could it be not?
It sure could be. Your point? I don't pursue them, because that's not
my area of interest. It's not exactly an academic activity, and if I
were to dig deep and find that some are legitimate emails, humanity has
gained nothing. Sure, I may get rich, but I didn't realize this whole
discussion was oriented towards /personal/ gain.
--
Q: What do you call a half-dozen Indians with Asian flu?
A: Six sick Sikhs (sic).
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There are many strange things in life. Some can be attributed to chance -
but all?
Many truths, things that are completely clear and self-evident, are
overthrown in time. Because some known fools, wastrels and heretics did do
some thinking and, later, some experiments.
Once it was known as true that the earth is a disc. Jerusalem was the center
of the earth, the sun and the planets were proven to revolve around the
earth. Look into the old theories of epicycles and hypocycles which were
used to explain the movements of the planets scientifically. Today we know
better.
Or let's look at more recent scientific turnarounds: just ten years ago it
was known to everybody in the medical sciences that the one sure treatment
for stomach ulcers was to cut them out. Only fools could believe that a
bacterium could survive the hydrochloric acid found in our stomachs.
Self-evident fact. Only a complete imbecile, an idiot and a charlatan would
believe otherwise. Research in this area was, of course, a complete waste of
resources, better to throw the money down the drain.
And along came the discovery of Helicobacter Pylori. Today we all know
better - the surgeons were the bloody fools, in the truest sense of the
word. Instead of cutting people open and mutilating them we now take a
combination of two antibiotics and, given a bit time, we are cured.
Who am I to know what is really possible and what not?
Nothing can be faster than the speed of light? Proven fact!
Well - sorry folks, but the statement above is actually false, as any
physicist knows. There are things like group-velocities and
phase-velocities: the group velocity can exceed c, no problem. So currently
the accepted lore is "no signal can be transmitted at speeds faster than
light". But who knows what the next fool will discover?
There may be things like dark matter and dark energy. Astrophysicists know
that either currently accepted theories are very false (which is highly
improbable but certainly not impossible) or that more than half of the
universe is made of an energy and a form of matter which nobody has every
seen or detected but whose existence can be inferred from experimental
results - if current scientifical theories are valid.
Finally there is the unknowable. What was before the big bang? How did the
universe come to exist? And where does it exist in? If fluctuations of
vacuum energy really did cause our universe to be, why was there a vacuum in
the first place and where was it in? If "branes" did collide, where did they
collide in and how did they come to be into existence, and how came the
place they did collide in come into existence? I doubt we will ever know the
answer to those questions.
But to matters at hand: yes, I do believe that most psychics are frauds. But
I cannot prove that all are. And maybe some are not... I do not know. I
never met the genuine article.
However: today we can detect brainwaves. We can communicate on an extremely
basic level by thought alone (e.g. simple yes-no answers) - granted, we need
a lot of equipment, but it works. And given enough time and research, who
knows what we will eventually discover and what will be proven fact in a few
centuries time?
I find the idea of telepathy or other psychic phenomena much more probable
than the idea of the existence of an abstract "god - being" in general and
the validity of any existing religion in particular. However, billions of
people think otherwise...
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Invisible wrote:
> Stefan Viljoen wrote:
>
>> Didn't both the CIA and the KGB at a stage seriously study psychokinesis,
>> "reading" and other types of "extrasensory" phenomena for possible
>> military applications?
>
> Hey, studying things is a valid way to determine whether there's any
> truth to them - provided you do the studying correctly and don't just
> try to dream up data that supports the conclusion you want to reach. ;-)
Point taken... I've often wondered just how many $ or comecon roubles went
into that before they scientifically decided "nawww..."
The idea of course being that there very likely isn't a more effective
device for making money disappear like a military research organization or
project! If it is for some pipe-dream project or something a lay person
could have told you was utter drivel beforehand, so much the better.
--
Stefan Viljoen
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> There was a time when all of humanity honestly believed the world was
> flat, and anybody who claimed it wasn't was *obviously* a lunatic.
AFAIK that's an urban legend. "Popular history" so to speak.
*Some* people believed the Earth was flat at some point, but it was not
as common as most people nowadays believe. The concept has been inflated
a lot because it sounds like a funny piece of historical anecdote. Even
at medieval times many scholars not only knew the Earth was round, but
had a relatively good estimate about its radius.
> (There are people who think that accupuncture is nonesense. But now
> scientists are finding that it causes measurable chemical changes in the
> body that do, in fact, do something. As crazy as that sounds...)
The placebo effect also causes measurable chemical changes in the body.
--
- Warp
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>> There was a time when all of humanity honestly believed the world was
>> flat, and anybody who claimed it wasn't was *obviously* a lunatic.
>
> AFAIK that's an urban legend. "Popular history" so to speak.
>
> *Some* people believed the Earth was flat at some point, but it was not
> as common as most people nowadays believe. The concept has been inflated
> a lot because it sounds like a funny piece of historical anecdote. Even
> at medieval times many scholars not only knew the Earth was round, but
> had a relatively good estimate about its radius.
I'm told the ancient Greeks placed sticks in the sand and measured the
difference in angle between the shadows of sticks seperated by great
distances, and thus came up with a pretty accurate estimate of the
Earth's radius. But I was under the impression that this information was
"lost", only to be rediscovered centuries later.
(Actually, the history of science and mathematics seems to involve quite
a lot of things being discovered, forgotten and then rediscovered, often
after a seriously large length of time.)
>> (There are people who think that accupuncture is nonesense. But now
>> scientists are finding that it causes measurable chemical changes in the
>> body that do, in fact, do something. As crazy as that sounds...)
>
> The placebo effect also causes measurable chemical changes in the body.
Sure it does. But, as I understand it, a placebo only works if you're
expecting it to work.
The way I heard it, damage to the body stimulates the release of natural
painkillers, and accupuncture has a similar effect. (It is, after all,
damage to the body.) Whether the diagrams depicting the best place to
put the needles have any validity is an entire other question,
however... ;-)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> Disproving a theory is every bit as important as proving a theory. By
>> proving that the psychic phenominon does not exist, now nobody else
>> needs to study it. This is beneficial.
>
> If *nobody else* studying it is good, an unqualified *nobody* studying it is
> even better, is it not?
The only way to scientifically determine whether a claim is valid or not
is to, you know, actually investigate it. If we wrote off anything that
sounded too weird, human kind would never have advanced anywhere.
> Besides, the nature of paranormal claims is such that they can not be
> conclusively disproven. There will never be a study to disprove that which
> is not a theory.
The experiment in question appears to be
"I can predict the future."
"OK, predict this."
"Um, I can't."
"OK, we'll be in touch..."
> Paranormal is by definition outside the scope of science. You cannot prove
> "the answer the other way".
Depends on who's definition of "paranormal" you use.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On 11/28/09 04:59, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> There was a time when all of humanity honestly believed the world was
>> flat, and anybody who claimed it wasn't was *obviously* a lunatic.
>
> AFAIK that's an urban legend. "Popular history" so to speak.
That's an urban legend if you're looking at "recent history". It
wouldn't surprise me if 10,000 years ago everyone thought this. And if
not then, keep going further back in time...
--
Marge: You liked Rashomon.
Homer: That's not how I remember it!
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On 11/28/09 07:02, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I'm told the ancient Greeks placed sticks in the sand and measured the
> difference in angle between the shadows of sticks seperated by great
> distances, and thus came up with a pretty accurate estimate of the
> Earth's radius. But I was under the impression that this information was
> "lost", only to be rediscovered centuries later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes#Eratosthenes.27_measurement_of_the_earth.27s_circumference
Perhaps lost to _them_, but likely some other folks elsewhere in the
world knew the Earth was round.
--
Marge: You liked Rashomon.
Homer: That's not how I remember it!
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> The experiment in question appears to be
> "I can predict the future."
> "OK, predict this."
> "Um, I can't."
> "OK, we'll be in touch..."
>
>
"I can predict the future."
"OK, predict this." WHACK!
"Ouch!"
"OK, we'll be in touch..."
--
Best Regards,
Stephen
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