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1. Annah (maiyannah@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Feb-2017 10:09:32 UTC Annah

   • Annah
   "The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status."
   - Carl Sagan
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   • Annah (maiyannah@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Feb-2017 10:06:05 UTC Annah
     To chip in my 2c on a debate flying by on the TWKN: science is not "majority rules".  Science is not an orthodoxy you must ascribe to.
     
     Science is a way of sceptically interrogating the world with a keen knowledge of human fallability, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.  Suppressing someone else's view as "unscientific" is, itself, inherently unscientific.  We do not winnow the facts down with the suppression of views.  This didn't work with Copernicus or Gallileo, and it doesn't work now. 
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   • Annah (maiyannah@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Feb-2017 10:06:37 UTC Annah

     in reply to
     If a view is wrong, explain why and how.  To simply say "because a bunch of people say so" is a logical fallacy - appeal to popularity.
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   • Annah (maiyannah@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Feb-2017 10:07:55 UTC Annah
     Someone questioning the world around them is science in action.
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   • Annah (maiyannah@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Feb-2017 10:10:40 UTC Annah

     in reply to
     "One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition."
     - Carl Sagan
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   • Annah (maiyannah@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Feb-2017 10:12:36 UTC Annah

     in reply to
     It is necessary that even the closest held scientific facts are held to scrutiny and scepticism.  We do not come fully equipped, and do not have all the answers.  Our understandings are as flawed as we are, and they constantly adapt and change, sometimes even previously-held truisms are completely shattered by science when we discover some breakthrough.  Nothing is written in stone, and we should not act like it is.  To do so has no place in science.
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   • Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Feb-2017 10:56:51 UTC Bob Mottram

     in reply to
     @maiyannah
     
     

     "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
     
     

     -- Max Planck
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