Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
You know what, I never want to hear my fellow members of #GenerationX complaining about #Boomers ever again.
(source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls)
All too often, when I finally do learn what happened to them, it's permanent. I know this will only get worse as the years go by.
This goes in the same bin as #logical and #rational in my frequently used funny-sexy-cool test. Only other people can decide if you're #funny or #sexy or #cool. Not only do you not get to make that judgement about yourself, it's a terrible mistake to try—because the more you announce to people that you are that thing, the less likely they are to see you that way. Show, don't tell.
Many desirable characteristics, including #logic and #rationality and #empathy, work the same way. I *try* to be empathetic, and as far as I can tell from the reactions of the people around me, I succeed most of the time. And I trust many of them to tell me if I'm being a self-centered jerk. But being "an #empath" isn't an inborn characteristic. It's a *behavior*—and like all good behaviors, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
This meme has crossed my feed in a number of places lately. I'm sharing it for debate, not for approval or agreement. If you share from my post, please leave my commentary intact. This has been a public service announcement.
#Scientism is very nearly a straw man. I'm willing to concede that there are *some* people who treat #science like a religion, but their numbers are tiny and they have zero influence on the conduct of research AFAICT. Anti-science #zealots who come up with memes like this, OTOH, are numerous and disturbingly influential.
It's also amusing how the meme assumes #epistemology is a gold standard against which other intellectual pursuits must be measured. The author assigns to #philosophy the same unquestionable authority he accuses others of assigning to science.
So I'll stake my claim: scientific #methodology—in the literal sense of the study of methods—has done more to illuminate "how we know what we know" in the last couple of centuries than formal epistemology has done in millennia. If this be scientism, make the most of it.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
