On 18/09/2007, Ronald Chmara ron@opus1.com wrote:
On Sep 18, 2007, at 12:22 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
Ray; With all due respect, quite a number of these "theories" are never sufficiently credible to be properly called scientific in the first place.
That's applying to-day's hindsight to the limited knowledge of former times.
Uh, no.
Velikovski's fundamental ignorance of Science from the 16th century *on* is what made him so bafflingly ludicrous.
400 years of ignorance.
Judging the theories as not credible even before the hypotheses have been tested is just as unscientific as your characterisation of the proponents.
Science does not move forward every time somebody hypothesizes a new kind of space turtle, or Atlas, by retesting 400 years of experiments. Velikovski would have been a charlatan and a crank in the 1800's, 1900's, and still is, to this very day.
"Brains falling out" is not scientific language. A fair treatment of Velikovsky's ideas is best done without preconceptions.
This is analogous to saying that "fair testing" requires *total* ignorance of existing knowledge.
So, for the totally ignorant, I will grant that his ideas have merit.
This seems to be the case.
Space turtles for everybody!
Science is a process. We also do them a disservice when we do not give them the opportunity to draw their own conclusions.
'Drawing one's own conclusions' is totally ignorant of the scientific process.
Science isn't about about seeking an *individual's* conclusions. That's Religion.
Rubbish! Science is 100% about drawing conclusions! Funnily enough the conclusions must be verifiable (according to Popper, that is, not WP policy) to be considered scientific. Once the conclusion has been verified enough times it becomes part of what most people misconceive as 'science' - if it fails the (scientific) verification process it is discarded or modified.
Using the above arguments we should remove all that garbage on God / Jesus and all that other nonsense that people happen to believe for one reason or another. (I'm joking).
I think the arguments here has been put very well by a number of different authors. The consensus seems to be that the existing policy is good. It requires that views are not overstated and that the majority view is clearly stated. Additionally, it seems clear that too many people are too keen to remove content that they feel is somehow wrong or unimportant, which has certainly been my experience. Just because a topic is specialist, nutcase or Asian doesn't mean it should be treated as garbage.
-Bop
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