Who and what you serve matters. If you serve the secular world, there's no reason at all why your research should pursue truth. It's far more likely, as we're seeing with the corruption and degeneracy at Scientific American, that research will be pursued in order to provide rationalizations for doing whatever powerful people want done. Without an objective basis for a moral order or even belief in the existence of an objective moral order, there are no guard rails to prevent you from claiming absolute nonsense like that above.
I've been ranting for a long time on this blog that the Catholic Church is the last barrier to out-and-out illogical chaos. This story, along with reading Scott Hann's excellent Rome Sweet Home, where he and his wife followed logic back across the Tiber, made me see all my ranting in a different light.
Without an objective moral order, why wouldn't you expect to see science degenerate into superstition and charlatanism? There's nothing to stop it. One glance at the mountains of funding being poured into climate science to the starvation of other fields is enough to convince you that money, even in science, follows political power. In the absence of an objective moral order, one you live under, but did not create, it's only natural that a scientist would prioritize his well-being and that of his family over any notions of serving "truth."
If you can earn $190,000 generating one more study telling us the world is going to end from Global Warming Climate Change, but you can only earn $105,000 studying astrophysics, which one are you going to choose? Those power boats don't buy themselves, you know. Only a chump would forgo a payday to pursue truth when we can't really be sure there is such a thing as truth.
It's not that Scientific American and our education industry have become corrupt, it's that they have left the spiritual nature of the world behind. Their corruption was a natural byproduct of that.
"If you serve the secular world, there's no reason at all why your research should pursue truth."
ReplyDeleteI am going to take serious issue with this statement. If a company is sponsoring research, it is because they want to use the result to make money. That means the result has to be derived from real observations and actual data, so that when the company tries to apply it they will get the predicted results.
In other words, research has to pursue truth, otherwise it cannot be used. And if they can't use it, the sponsoring company can't earn their money back.
Yes, there are "researchers" who think that their job is just to make up a bunch of crap and try to bamboozle people into funding them. And there are "research sponsors" that are looking to create propaganda, and dress it up to look like research so that people will trust it, at least briefly. But this is fraud, not research, and it usually winds up biting them in the end.
Tim / KT,
ReplyDeleteThis is a topic I could write tons about. Let’s start here: you two are, as I see it, on the same side. Neither of you think that fake research is anything but fraud. When science is under the thumb of ‘outside influences’, be it religion (see ‘Europe and Dark Ages for example) or politics or commercial interests (see today), then Science becomes (as KT says) ScIeNcE. ScIeNcE is inherently untrustworthy. Science is also plagued with errors (humans being fallible), but it is also capable of self-correction and therefore is trustworthy (on balance). No result should be accepted on faith. There needs to be real debate. Today that has become less common.
And that’s what I see as the true meta-lesson of our time.
What is your motivation for seeking the truth? In a world where each successive generation is more secular than the last, how do you know that you're not just coasting right now on the last drops of objectivist fuel from the Church? When that runs out completely and only the dyed-in-the-wool Catholics remain, holed up in a handful of bunker-churches, what will prevent you from revisiting Lysenkoism?
ReplyDeleteIn this post, I tried to figure out what would lead an organization based on science to come out and say that fluids secreted from a man's nipple after a devil's brew of drugs were given to him was equivalent to a mother's breast milk. You disagree. Fair enough. You must have a hypothesis that is superior. I'm all ears.
See also: phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, puberty blockers and all the racial twaddle coming out of Scientific American. My hypothesis covers all of these.
I put down my cards. What do you have?
"What is your motivation for seeking the truth?"
ReplyDeleteI am seeking the truth because I want things to work as planned. I don't want to expect one thing to happen, and have a completely different thing happen instead because my plans were based on lies. This doesn't have anything to do with religion or spirituality, I can be furious with cheats and liars perfectly well without appealing to religion.
As for this:
"what would lead an organization based on science to come out and say that fluids secreted from a man's nipple after a devil's brew of drugs were given to him was equivalent to a mother's breast milk."
Quite simply, someone asked them to check it out, so they did. And they found that human mammary tissue, in response to stimulation with the hormones that prompt human mammary tissue to produce milk[1], did in fact produce a fluid that is chemically within the range of compositions for normal human milk. This should not surprise anyone. The presence of mammary tissue is a human trait, not an exclusively female trait. Men have perfectly normal mammary tissue, just not very much. It's like your nipples. They aren't as big as women's nipples, but they are there as an inescapable consequence of being mammals.
Now, is it a cost-effective way to feed a child? Not likely. Hormone therapy isn't cheap, and infant formula is both inexpensive and readily available. Plus a male doing this is unlikely to be able to produce enough to feed an infant adequately, because they simply don't have enough mammary tissue. Should we be encouraging men to lactate? Again, probably not, since it doesn't really solve any burning problems and makes feeding a child way more complicated than it needs to be. But the fact that men can, with some difficulty, produce milk, appears to be perfectly true, and I don't see why it should be controversial.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/infant-and-toddler-health/expert-answers/induced-lactation/faq-20058403
If you put your lens close enough, you can make anything morally ambiguous.
ReplyDelete"You just shot that man!"
"No, I just pulled a lever. There's nothing wrong with pulling levers. I was asked to pull a lever and I did so."
There's no way on Earth the researchers didn't know it was in support of the transgender movement which is harming tens of thousands in pursuit of a lie.
"If you put your lens close enough, you can make anything morally ambiguous."
ReplyDeleteThat's the whole point of the "The world isn't black-and-white, you simple-minded yokel" mantra, isn't it? Put the lens so close that everything is out of focus and one can (pretend to) no longer distinguish the 'yes' from the 'no'.
But, in fact, the world *is* black-and-white. It is *utterly* black-and-white; at the proper resolution, with the properly phrased questions, there is no grey at all: there is "Yes", "No" and "We Don't Yet Know". "We Don't Yet Know" is *not* "Yes-and-No".