[WikiEN-l] Re: A Friendly Challenge to Sheldon Rampton

[Poor, Edmund W]

Sheldon Rampton brilliantly wrote:

>The very prestige that science enjoys, however, has also given rise to
>a variety of scientific pretenders--disciplines such as phrenology or eugenics
>that merely claim to be scientific. The renowned philosopher of science
>Karl Popper gave a great deal of consideration to this problem and
>coined the term "pseudoscience" to help separate the wheat from the
>chaff. The difference between science and pseudoscience, he concluded,
>is that genuinely scientific theories are "falsifiable"--that is, 
>they are formulated
>in such a way that if they are wrong, they can be proven false
>through experiments. By contrast, pseudosciences are formulated so
>vaguely that they can never be proven or disproven. "The difference between
>a science and a pseudoscience is that scientific statements can be
>proved wrong and pseudoscientific statements cannot," says Robert Youngson
>in his book Scientific Blunders: A Brief History of How Wrong Scientists
>Can Sometimes Be. "By this criterion you will find that a surprising
>number of seemingly scientific assertions--perhaps even many in which
>you devoutly believe--are complete nonsense. Rather surprisingly this is
>not to assert that all pseudoscientific claims are untrue. Some of them may
>be true, but you can never know this, so they are not entitled to claim the
>cast-iron assurance and reliance that you can have, and place, in scientific
>facts."
>      Judged by this standard, many of the "social sciences"--including
>the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung, and others--are actually 
>pseudosciences
>rather than the real thing. This does not mean that Freud and
>Jung were charlatans or fools. Both were creative thinkers with fascinating
>insights into the human psyche, but a research methodology that derives
>its data from the dreams of mentally ill patients is a far cry from the
>orderly system of measurements that we associate with hard sciences like
>physics and chemistry.

I beg you to donate this passage, which is from your book "Trust Us We're Experts" to Wikipedia, Sheldon. May we have your permission to incorporate it into the [[pseudoscience]] article? 

For that matter, what are the legal technicalities involved in the case where a published author wants to donate a tiny portion of a copyrighted work, to the public via the GPL? (I'm not saying Sheldon would want to do so in this case: this is brilliant prose, and he's entitled to make money off it; more power to him!)

Jimbo, Cunctator, do you know whether an author can simply announce something like the following?

* "I hereby license the following text under the GPL."

Or is it more complicated than that? I'd hate to have to spend an hour or two massaging Sheldon's brilliant prose into unrecognizeability just to evade copyright restrictions. And it wouldn't be brilliant any more either. :-(

exhaustedly,

Uncle Ed