@amerika

I dunno, I think america has become the HQ for ideological quests in many ways. I generally see americans as being extremists in everything. Most americans are radically ideological, while others dont care much at all about ideological quests, there is very little middle ground.

Contrast that with europe where most people tend to be centrist with a small minority at the ideological extremes.

@arteteco

@freemo @arteteco

Only because "centrist" in the contemporary European definition is Leftist: market socialism + civil rights + democracy.

Americans are more prone to like that which demonstrates itself over that which is merely popular. It's an important distinction, probably impossible to explain.

@amerika

that has not at all been my expeirnce as someone who lives in both america and europe. Though it is what you hear most often.

The leftists in america in my experience are far more extremist than anything I’ve ever seen in europe. In fact most europeans I know who have spent any real time in america tend to mock american leftists for their absurdity. Same is true for our right leaning people, also generally considered extreme.

@arteteco

@freemo @arteteco

Relativity, what is it?

When the center is Left, extremes will appear either redundant or dangerous, as you note.

American Leftists are generally single people, crazy people, or minorities.

@amerika I'm not sure, I don't think I know enough about the US to speak, either by statistics or by personal experience. From the biased internet view, US seems more "ideologist" than most countries I know, arguing a lot about principles. If the matter was what works and what not, I'd see very different political debates, more based on science and facts

@freemo

@arteteco @freemo

I disagree that it's not. However, America seems to have woken up first to how corrupt the scientific establishment has become, a.k.a. the replication crisis.

Principles are fine if realistic; if not, they're ideological (like the drive toward "equality," a non-factual notion).

@amerika @arteteco @freemo I've heard of this replication crisis. Is it occurring much in actual real science, or more in the secularized Jewish -ologies? Is scientific fraud widespread or committed more by certain ethnicities?

@TradeMinister

The reproducibility crisis is a real concern but its mostly limited to psychology, it isn't a general issue in science. This makes sense considering the difficulties in create double blind objective experiments in psychology.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @amerika @arteteco Probably also in sociology too: they are both perfect for grifters, frauds, and Jews with agendas.

@TradeMinister

Hard to say, all the talk about it is around psychology and I havent seen it being an issue in any other science fields. But its possible I havent looked into sociology specifically, but its possible.

@amerika @arteteco

@TradeMinister

As freemo, I've also seen it mainly in psychology, never heard of it outside that field. It makes sense, it's complex and young and in my opinion still lacks a strong paradigm to guide it.

There is no relation to ethnicity, race, gender or whatever involved, afaik, just some experiments giving different results now than before

Another important matter is that society changes, and people change, so while with biology or geology you will rarely have this kind of troubles, many psychological mechanisms are very much related on the culture and quickly change with it, making the experiments hard to verify.

To be sure, is not a fraud, it's mostly an epistemological problem, ie a problem of the methods

@amerika @freemo

@TradeMinister @arteteco @freemo

In my view, it's likely hitting all fields

The need to "publish or perish" has a high cost, and much research being pushed through is cherry-picked and/or filtered.

@amerika

This isnt something you just have a personal view on on a whim. The replication crisis is well studied and born out with actual evidence by trying to replicate experiments at a later date and seeing how often they can be replicated...

I mean your welcome to have an opinion or speculate however you wish, but unless you have some actual evidence that shows it exists throughout science as a whole, and not just limited to psychology, then its really just noise.

Can you reference an actual professional well controlled studied that has shown there is a replication problem that is pervasive to science?

@TradeMinister @arteteco

@freemo @amerika @arteteco If memory serves, a lot of scientific fraud (China) and/or just plain incompetence (India) has come out of certain countries.

@TradeMinister

No one is claiming anyone who has ever said they were doing science was above board. You wont have any trouble finding the occasional bit of fraud or even incompetence. However largely when it does crop up the rest of the scientific community tends to catch it.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @amerika @arteteco That's what one hopes: the truth outs via peer review and so forth.

@TradeMinister

Yea and typically thats what happens exactly. The issue with psychology is mostly as arteco pointed out the nature of the field and not any dogma or other issues. We are talking about a new field where conditions change with the environment and thus experiments done later at time may not always reproduce earlier experiments whent he culture has changed in the time in between.

@amerika @arteteco

@amerika @arteteco @freemo There is that, and the self-perpetuating dogmas. I've read that if you're getting a degree in theoretical physics and want to work, you need to do string theory, not loop quantum gravity or anything.
Still, peer review and others reproducing hard-science should continually preen the knowledge base, if it works right.

@TradeMinister

there is an expectation that you know certain theories and schools of though before you go onto more obscure or complex ones for sure. but that isnt dogma. Studying a thing doesnt inherently create dogma for the thing.

I study religion in some depth and while there is plenty floating around in the way of dogma when it comes to religion I have never adopted that dogma because I only study the topic, I dont adopt the faith.

I also never experienced teachers pushing too much dogma. Generally they care if you prove your point using logic and data, they dont force your conclusions. Most teachers not just accept dissenting thought they encourage it and want you to try to disprove theories, they even tend to promote projects where you attempt to do so.

the only reason scientific thought tends to align is because we have all went through the science and tried to disprove it and ultimately found we were wrong and could not.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @amerika @arteteco Consider the case of the 1918 influenza and Bacillus Haemophilus, an excellent example of dogma wasting careers and a decade or so of research. I'm sure that still happens, and I expect it will happen to String Theory in the fullness of time: my (unprofessional) guess is it will not be fundamental even if it is accurate at certain energies.

@TradeMinister

Not sure that is a great example.. Your not talking so much about dogma or wasted careers as you are talking about observing scientific progress where competing ideas and theories are over time refined and confirmed.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @amerika @arteteco You should maybe read up on it. One eminent German scientist insisted for decades that that irrelevant bacteria caused influenza, so at least one career and decades of work were wasted trying to prove that.

@TradeMinister

One scientist was wrong, happens all the time and it's not a bug: it's a feature of the scientific method.

The replication crises regards a series of studies, you can read more about it on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
@amerika @freemo

@arteteco @TradeMinister @freemo

I would never use Wikipedia as a source for anything.

@amerika

Then you clearly have an unscientific bias going in. While wikipedia is NOT authoritative or a scientific source, nor does it claim to be, it does cite ample sources for any assertion it makes. The expectation in science is that you do not blindly follow ANY publication. The value comes from following the sources, reviewing those, and then making a case or forming your own opinion on the validity of a statement based on the quality of its sources.

To discount any source that thoroughly cites its sources out of hand shows up front either an inability or an unwillingness to actually evaluate the topic in an impartial and thorough manner.

@TradeMinister @arteteco

@freemo @TradeMinister @arteteco

Nonsense. I've watched Wikipedia censor and manipulate over the years.

@amerika

So? That doesnt make anything I just said nonsense. You still have the ability to follow the sources and verify if due diligence has been done yourself. Thats the beauty of citations, it gives you everything you need to argue against a topic even if its content happened to be bias or censored.

@TradeMinister @arteteco

@amerika @freemo @arteteco I was just recently reading about how completely Wikipedia is integrated with the rest of the technotalitarians. Apparently it is in actually controlled by a small closed inner-circle of editors who completely control politically important content.
It's useful for non-political scientific and medical info.

@TradeMinister
I am very familiar with it. Individuals have wrong theories all the time, and thats how science is suppose to work, thats how we learn we are wrong and ultimately what is correct.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @TradeMinister @arteteco

And every generation, we find out that settled science from the previous was nonsense.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html

@amerika @freemo @arteteco Which is a good thing and how science should work. Unfortunately the weight of Authority and control of funding mean that the scientific process is frequently impeded by old senile fucks who should have packed it in long ago but are Important so they control the funding and research: office politics wins again.

@TradeMinister

Sometimes funding can derail science and create some issues, no doubt.. A prime example of that is the whole autism vaccine nonsense where basically someone paid a bunch of money to a small minority of crooked scientists to produce a easily debunked paper. Even though the whole of the scientific community quickly rejected the paper its very existence was used as fodder by some for years to come. So yes a person with some money can certainly use psudo-science to cause some harm.

But these sorts of situations never get very far, they certainly dont pass any comprehensive peer review, and generally is not what we see from the majority of the scientific community.

@amerika @arteteco

@freemo @TradeMinister @arteteco

Lots of areas are not explored because they are politically incorrect.

Let's look at IQ research.

@TradeMinister @arteteco @freemo

Office politics -- careerism -- ruin everything.

Just another form of crowdism

@amerika

Well thats a whole heap of ignorance there... no what you find is every generation **some** (and overall a small portion) of science that a **few** people considered settled science comes into question. The idea that this somehow discredits science is very much the opposite of the reaction one should have to that. It means science doesnt hesitate to question even some of its more established theories and over time improves its stance on these issues. exactly what you would want to see.

@TradeMinister @arteteco

@freemo @TradeMinister @arteteco

No, the point is that "science" is not a consensus.

@amerika

At no point did anyone claim it was.

@TradeMinister @arteteco

@amerika

I think part of the disconnect here is that you view left, right, and center as relative terms. I wouldnt agree with that assessment.

While there is certainly a lot of variation and flavor in how right, center, and left might manifest I think that often becomes confused with implying relativity. If everyone is on the left then the left doesn't become the new center, everyone just agrees their on the left.

I see this in places where there is a clear left or right lean to their society. Even in societies where 95% of the population might be right leaning they would still identify themselves as right, and the majority of the population would. You dont really see a shift towards considering the right center in those cases.

I think we have pretty clear ideas of where the left most and right most points of this spectrum are and they are pretty absolute in their nature. The msot extreme left would be some flavor of communism, for example, and once your full on communism you cant go any farther left.

@arteteco

@freemo @arteteco

Leftism has always been clear: egalitarianism.

It's a relativistic universe, so everything is relativistic.

The point is that if your "center" goes Left, it is no longer "center," only conformity to the dominant paradigm.

That makes other things look less or more Left.

@amerika

While that may make sense in some situations, here I wouldnt say that applies.. Just based on actual examples int he real world.

If you were correct then in every society about 50% would consider themselves left and 50% would consider themselves right. Yet in societies that are relatively more right you actually see a larger portion of the population self identifying as right.. you never see the center "move" as you suggest.

@arteteco

@freemo @arteteco

Um, no, there's absolutely zero reason to think that half would choose Left and half would choose Right.

@amerika

If your assertion were true, and left and right were relative and the idea of center" shifts" relative to the societies perception then yes, that is exactly what one would expect, you would expect to see the center shift to represent the middle of the society and thus split the groups down the middle.

You are right there is no reason to think in reality there would be a 50/50 split, because left and right isnt relative but rather absolute and the center does not move with society at all.

@arteteco