Dear Skeptics- Scientific American Article

Davian

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Davian

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SeraphimSarov

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I'm not sure what this has to do with Christian apologetics, but as a skeptical agnostic atheist, I agree with most of the article. The cult of personality phenomenon is alive and well, even among those who claim to disavow such nonsense.
 
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Eudaimonist

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I honestly just see a lot of whining in this article. Skeptics don't cover the journalist's pet issues to his satisfaction, therefore problem! I don't get the impression that he has really proven anything about skeptic movements other than that he's unhappy with them.


eudaimonia,

Mark
 
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Davian

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I honestly just see a lot of whining in this article. Skeptics don't cover the journalist's pet issues to his satisfaction, therefore problem! I don't get the impression that he has really proven anything about skeptic movements other than that he's unhappy with them.


eudaimonia,

Mark
In my recent exchanges with MoJ, he was struggling with the concept of falsifiability. I can only hypothesis that he came across an article that alluded to a "problem" with theories that aren’t falsifiable, and posted it here to see if it gained any traction.

But, I guess we will have to wait for him to return to these forums to speak for himself.
 
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leftrightleftrightleft

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I find it somewhat ironic that a science journalist is trying to lecture people to not believe the crap that they read....which is largely written by science journalists.

Science journalists are, in my opinion, usually pretty horrible. They will sensationalize the crap out of a study and none of their readers will take the time to read (or have a subscription to) the original source article. How many times have I read a sensationalized pop science article and then read the source article and seen little connection between the two.

Also, another point of irony is that his article is supposed to combat big-S Skepticism and promote science but is at the same time poorly cited and completely self-referential. I cannot find a single link in his article that does not take me down a rabbit hole of self-referencing. Try it yourself. Click on a link in the article and it will take you to another Scientific American blog/article. And any link on that new page will take you to another SA blog/article. Where are the source articles for all these claims???


Of course, scientists themselves are also partly to blame as well as editors for journals. Journals tend not to publish neutral findings and would prefer either positive or negative findings. It is rare to find a scientific article that has null results and so scientists and editors toss away unpublishable information which might be useful to know. For example, maybe it would be useful to know that a study found that chocolate has no statistically significant relationship to cancer rates. Instead, we see studies on both sides claiming that chocolate both causes and cures cancer. The study that had a null finding won't get published.

I believe that whole journals should be devoted to publishing null and neutral findings. If such a journal was established, it would go a long way in correcting the biases currently present.
 
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devolved

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I really dislike the label of a "skeptic" mainly because it doesn't actually say anything beyond that someone is in doubt of something for one reason or another. One can be skeptical for wrong or right reasons, hence it doesn't and shouldn't say anything beyond that IMO.

Thus it's a poor label to describe any given group of people, because all of us belong to that category in respect to some claims.

Hence, I think that "researchers" or "scholars" would be a better characterization that's worth aspiring for, even in a minimal and private sense of these words.

Hence, skeptic to me is a "non-color" type of description. All of us have it, hence it's a matter of what we are skeptical of, and for which reasons.
 
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Oafman

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So, the author wants us to moan less about vaccines, and climate change denial, and astrology, and more about the multiverse and string theory?!

Also, I reject the idea that strings and the multiverse are unfalsifiable. We just haven't yet come up with a way of falsifying them. There's a chance we will in the future.
 
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