On 10/20/2011 8:52 AM, Warp wrote:
> Saul Luizaga<sau### [at] netscapenet>  wrote:
>> Right, a Ph.D is gonna write crap on the Internet...
>
>    What a beautiful example of argument from authority. :P
>
>    PhDs aren't somehow immune to hearsay, urban legends and misquotes.
> It's perfectly possible that he's just repeating what he has heard,
> without actually checking its factuality. It's not like it's a quote
> of great importance and thus would require extreme care to be correct.
>
>    I still would like to see a reliable reference.
>
Actually, in some cases, the more specialized the PhD, the more likely 
it can be that nothing outside that field *will* be factual. lol

Its not too uncommon for people with a fairly precise specialty to say, 
and do, some spectacularly dumb things, in other fields. At the very 
least, its been studied, and shown, that often the level of care 
involved in verifying a conclusion in their own subject of expertise is 
all but abandoned, the moment they look at something else, even to such 
an extent that they fail to apply even the most "basic" level of logic 
to the other thing, in some cases. Its why you can, in the one more 
insane example I have seen, have a well known physicist actually 
believing that psychic phenomena might be real, and looking for an 
explanation for it, using a spirit medium, and the incoherent light 
flashes, produced by cells, during normal metabolic processes. Logic 
should have required a) examining if their was a better explanation for 
"talking to the dead", b) whether anyone else had looked at that light, 
and c) whether such flashes could be merely incidental (or had already 
been determined to be). But.. since nothing in either "spiritualism", 
nor biology, had been examined with the same rigor he would have used to 
evaluate, say, someone's claim that they had found a universal field 
theorem....

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