Science is very nice, but a large part of it will not benefit general population in the near future. Sometimes it looks like scientists make research only for the sake of knowledge itself. Knowledge is a noble goal even without application, but modern research is pretty expensive, so sometimes you should think twice before spending billions of dollars to build a particle accelerator or a nuclear fusion experimental reactor when this money could be used to feed all the homeless people of Europe and America put together or establish hundreds of schools in third-world countries.

If I had a million dollars to give to someone, I'd rather divide it amongst a thousand families in Sudan than donate it to the NASA for an expedition to Mars.

The answer to that is twofold:

1. Research funding, if reallocated, could not

. It's not enough. In fact, scientists are always complaining about how they don't get enough funding. Nations spend orders of magnitude more on defence than they do on science: why not take the dollars that you will miraculously use to solve world hunger etc. from where they would otherwise have been used to make bombs and guns, if you want to construct such an exercise in economic wishful thinking?

2. Science provides the tools to solve problems that just throwing resources at them can never solve. The whole of modern medicine (vaccination, antibiotics, anaesthetics, basic hygeine, etc...), public transport infrastructure, electricity, computers, etc, etc - the list is much, much too long even to summarise. Without these things, our quality of life would be astronomically lower. And none of them (well, maybe one or two, but this is a giant point) were discovered or invented by pointing a scientist at some political problem and saying "solve it". Scientists uncover knowledge for its own sake, and then it can be applied.

Like most things in life, the reality is much different

Millions of Dollars is given to Africa each and every year, however much of this money does not acctually reach the people as a result of Corruption.

To give the people of Sudan for example, a better life, it would involve rebuilding the economy, providing renewable resources and generally investing in the economy. While the money invested in science improves the life of the people in that society. If it wasnt for science we would not have any of the luxuries we enjoy today.

Yes it is greedy to invest totally in science, but like Chilli said, Defence is invested in far too much, paying money to send people to their deaths for Oil in foreign countries.

I dont really know why particles would be ramned together.....

Still, thats for the Physicists to explain ^_^

Science and technology give us a good life in rich countries, but they didn't reduce the overall amount of misery. If all Africans had access to free vaccination and cultivated genetically-modified vegetables, they would undoubtedly be in much better health and much better fed, but unfortunately it is not the case.

I really appreciate what science and technology do. But some problems simply cannot be solved by science; that's why people who study in non-scientific fields are just as important as scientists. The Red Cross is not a scientific organization, but it is much more useful for Mankind in general than a hundred CERNs.

It's true, though, that the military waste a shocking amount of money. But sometimes a lot of money that goes to the military is used for science: the US space program, for example. Sometimes I wonder if there is a real need for the International Space Station, knowing that its maintenance cost could feed several third-world countries. Do you think people who starve in Bangladesh give a damn about how worms reproduce in weightlessness conditions?

I know, we're drifting away, but arguing is just so much fun...

but science doesn't exist for those reasons. There are a lot of arguments on this forum that reduce to "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE AFRICANS: THIS DOESN'T HELP THEM!!!!!!!111!". In the long term, science might help them (GM crops are a good example), but science is pretty much self-sufficient (in the same way as sports, or whatever else is a 'waste' of the african's money).

By that I mean, scientific research is funded by the unis, or the big companies that will make money back from it. There's noone saying "I can either feed africa, or I can smack particles together", because science isn't a charity in that way. If someone is doing any research, they expect a monetary return at some point.

Also, throwing money at the problems of starvation won't solve the problem. It is far more complicated than that, since if westerners send over shiploads of food for free, it would crush the local economy (since a poor person would much rather take food for nothing than buy it off their neighbours, or grow it themselves). This would make them reliant on aid shipments, and ensure the starvation problems will never be solved.

Lies, lies and ignorant slander. Consider life in a third world country without condoms, a knowledge of the germ theory of disease, vaccinations, antibiotics, internal combustion engines, aircraft, radio, telephones, water purifiers, etc, etc. (again, the list is too damn long). Then bake your words into some kind of confection, possibly a danish pastry, and eat them.

'Cos otherwise this

is a lie.

Swordsalot points out very aptly that this is a cloud-cuckoo-land scenario. It's not science's 'fault' that its benefits are not applied even-handedly to the whole world. Blame the economy. Blame politicians. But don't blame the scientists. There is more than enough money around for us to help Africa, or Brazil, or any impoverished nation or continent of your choice: America's porn dollars per year add up to more than the total national debt of Sub-Saharan Africa. If you want to reallocate funds, don't take them away from science, which is vital for the future and has to fight to get them in the first place.

It's thanks to the past CERNs of this world that the Red Cross is able to operate. Without the laboratories of Pasteur, Jenner and Fleming, to name but three, they would be spitting into the wind.

Who knows what knowledge we will unlock as we probe quantum theory? And who knows what technological benefits might eventually result? If, in 2100, you are watching your kids wing their way off to their holiday in Alpha Centauri, but know that you will still be able to communicate with them as if they were sitting in front of you thanks to faster-than-light quantum computers (and also thanks to the fact that medicine has kept you alive and healthy well beyond your 'natural' span of years), won't you feel a little silly?

Do you think that the point of view of an uneducated peasant living hand-to-mouth on a frequently flooded delta is the best one around which to build long-term policy?

There would have been an argument for 'help people now, don't go off prodding at the universe for no immediate benefit' in the Renaissance, too, but if you imagine trying to solve the problems of today with science that had not progressed beyond that of the Tudors, you can see how ridiculously fallacious the argument is. And if you want science and progress to work, you have to trust good, motivated scientists, who will be more interested in the questions themselves than any benefits that result from the answers.

"A lot of porn there, god bless 'em"

I can't believe Chili has resorted to Bill Bailey quotes to support his argument!

Cheers,
DLJ

Ssh! No-one needs to know!

Sorry if there's a misunderstanding: I'm not attacking science or saying that it's useless. I'm just trying to point out that the rest is just as important. Mankind would not have gone far without science, but it would not have gotten much further without language, humanities and even arts and philosophy.

I study in humanities, so I feel that it's my duty to take the defense of my field...

I still don't understand your point. What benefit has the study of literature or arts, for example, brought to people living on the breadline? Arts subjects genuinely achieve nothing practical: while I wouldn't say this means they're worthless, science beats them into the ground when evaluated on grounds of the tangible benefit to the species it generates.

A fictional civilisation with no regard for history, arts, or literature but a powerful science programme would be far more advanced than the reverse.

You'll need an example, then: metallurgy was, at the beginning, developed for art. The Celts, the world's best blacksmiths in their time, would not have gotten metallurgy to such a high level if they did not have any concern for art.

Another example: when the Roman Empire collapsed, most of the scientific knowledge was lost and the only ones who made any effort to retrieve it were the Arabs. When interest for the 'science of old' came back, partly due to a renewed interest in Antiquity, historians went to great libraries in the Middle East to read ancient Greek and Roman texts. Europe could have stayed stuck in the erroneous dogma of the Church and Aristotle if no one had cared about history.

Even religion helped science a little, for example by its contribution to the advance of philosophy. But all in all, religion probably hindered science more than it helped.

Hey, now it's ironic: you seem to think that humanities are not so useful, but when we talk about how civilization advances, we're doing humanities. And what we're doing here is pretty important: we're talking about what civilization should focus on. As a history student, I can say that the focus of a civilization is what makes it a great or a meaningless civilization. And pure and accurate knowledge is not the only thing a civilization should focus on: the Roman Empire was far greater than the Greek Empire, yet Roman science was not as advanced as Greek science.

Maybe, though I strongly doubt it. But even if it were true, would such a civilization be desirable? Would it be the best one to live in? Would it be the most stable or the most durable? I don't think so. A society without any interest for history could make dreadful mistakes in its political structure or its economical system, for example.

Your hypothetical society could be dominated by a tyrant, still have slavery and always be at war (and we know that wars grow even fiercer as technology progresses). It could be communist, or anarcho-capitalist. It could be short-sighted and go straight towards self-destruction. Or it could simply be a cold and uninteresting place to live in.

Both these examples date from before the birth of what I and most others would regard as modern science. Neither Aristotle (you may have heard about how the Greeks believed that men had more teeth than women without ever bothering to take a skull and count them) nor traditional metallurgy used the scientific method: they can just as productively be compared to traditional folk knowledge as they can be compared to systematic, empirical science.

Nevertheless, as far as Aristotle/metallurgy et al. were absorbed into the general body of scientific knowledge: no-one preserved Aristotle’s treatises because they were interested in the history of Aristotle’s Greece: they provide no insight on that matter. Someone who saved such a text would be saving it out of an appreciation for its factual content, which is unchanged regardless of whether it is the first ancient scroll on which it is written or the back of an envelope that I jot it down on at this moment.

Furthermore, commenting on your last sentence: the return to that ‘science of old’ was what founded the monolithic and ultimately counter-productive fusion of Aristotlean ideas and Church dogma. It was people doing experiments and making observations at the dawn of the Enlightenment (think of Galileo or Copernicus) that began to break that hold, and began to develop the modern scientific method.

The second clause of your sentence I deny. I can think of no religious contribution to the advance of philosophy (and indeed, I would deny that religion has ‘advanced’ philosophy as a whole – rather, cluttered and polluted it) that impinges on science, except in an obstructive, destructive morass of faith-based denials of empirical findings.

I myself am talking about the usefulness and excellence of science. The philosophy of science. Which is a part of science, whatever way you slice it.

Substantiate. As far as I can see, the idea of a civilisation that focuses on some grand goal is a bizarre fiction: civilisations are units made up of thousands of individuals, most of whom do not look far beyond the next meal, and even less far beyond their own personal goals.

Also, I’d really like to see which civilisations you are about to dismiss as ‘meaningless’ due to their lack of ‘focus’.

1. Greek Empire? I know there was Alexander, and the Macedonian Empire, but I never heard of a Greek Empire – just a bunch of frequently warring city-states.
2. Greek Science? As I’ve said before, the ‘science’ of the ancient Greeks was much too abstract and divorced from empiricism to qualify as real science – it was the first buddings of philosophy towards science, but it never got there. Aristotle would be ripped apart by real scientific peer review.

As far as I see it, we have continued to amass history for over over two millennia and yet the rate at which leaders make mistakes has not declined. The Russian Revolution followed the dictates of a historian who claimed to derive all his knowledge from the study of history, and I can’t think of many political mistakes that were bigger than the Soviet Union. In contrast, scientific knowledge shows definite signs of continuous progress: electricity will never be decided ‘not to work’, and all lightbulbs thrown away, because someone put a new interpretation on Kirchoff’s Law.

Mainly because interpretations of such subjects are so subjective: views on Richard I would be very different in the 20th and the 18th century, and yet we have no way of discerning that the change was a definite transition from incorrect to correct, as in science. No progress, only unending intellectual turbulence. I don’t deny that it’s interesting, but useful?

In this paragraph, you describe many different situations that describe many real-world societies… all of which had history students, and arts students, and humanities departments.

So if the job of these disciplines is to curb the cold, soulless trespasses of science, the question must be asked – are they simply incompetent, or is the proposition false?

I too have to take a stand for humanities. I´ve studied things like sociology, psychology and pedagogy (those were not even counted as sciences in the beginning!). Their methods are not quite the same as used by the naturalscience. They are hard to compare.

Science is not bad at all, but if we concentrate too much on it we will lose ourselves in it. Science has taken giant leaps the last 100 years, can we keep up? Habermas has written a lot on these subjects and is well worth reading ^_^ .

I don't have the time to answer everything you said, but I'll say shortly and frankly that the belief that science and technology alone can build a civilization and keep it going is completely absurd. Until almighty technology allows us to build an AI computer that can run the government, administer justice and keep the economy stable, civilization needs humanities. Don't look down on people who believe in something other than science: a lawyer is not less useful than a scientist.

I grant you that science is the most useful tool Mankind has, but I'll never allow you to say that it is the only tool Mankind needs without a very, very long argument that I'll drop only out of exasperation and not by defeat.

I don't know if you implied that we only need science to build civilization. If that wasn't what you meant, all apologies. I know you meant it as a joke when you used the word 'diletante' to qualify non-scientists, but I automatically switch to defensive mode when someone brushes arts and humanities aside, even jokingly.

That's all I was looking to make you say. I hope I made clear by my repeated qualifications of what I was saying that I wasn't trying to dismiss anything as worthless. Just that science is the best :P. 'Cos earlier, you said

...and that's where I disagreed. A difference of degree, rather than absolutes, but still a difference.

---

When did this change?

I remember an almost identical discussion, some time ago, unfortunately before the crash (and thus forever lost). The problem is that people engaged in 'social sciences' tend to use a different definition of the word 'science' than those engaged in 'hard' or natural sciences. But to the vast majority of natural scientists (who, I might note, invented modern science), the vast bulk of the fields you mention are not scientific: while they may have scientifically-leaning tendencies, they simply don't consistently satisfy the rigorous conditions of the scientific method. Of course, people engaged in those disciplines want to unconditionally label them as 'science', because the word science brings with it a certain aura of objectivity and truth - but the reason that it has that reputation is because of the rigour of the scientific method, which is compromised when you widen the net of what you call 'science'.

That is indeed true :). It´s like, same same but still different.

Inventing a concept does not mean that you have exclusive rights to it. Also, social sciences dont use the same methods (well, they use some) as the natural sciences simply because it´s a totally different field of science. None of the answers given in social science are definite, they are definite until proven otherwise. In natural science you prove something, if it works: great! If it doesnt then it´s invalid. Please correct me if im wrong, dont really now much about natural science :P.

One should not brush away social science as nonsese simply because it doesnt follow the rules of "true" science. It helps us understand who we are as human beings, what makes us tick, why we do as we do. In jobs that includes helping people, and not just medically, you need an understanding. Not just like a doctor: "here´s your meds, you´ll be allright". There´s more to a human being that just the anatomy.

I really like these discussions but my vocabulary prevents me from taking as much part in them as I´d like :P. The dictionary is my new best friend :D .

It does kind of give you the right to define it.

To put it in playground terms: imagine if you were the original inventor of the game of football (this is real football we're talking about, not American football). You and your friends get really good at it. Then another gang of kids come along, and start playing, but they pick the ball up with their hands and run with it. You were there first: it seems fair that your game should be the one called football, and they should come up with a different name for their football (like American Football, or Rugby). If they insist that they're playing football too, but just doing it in a different and equally valid way, things get confusing and irritating.

Add to this the fact that the original, natural scientist definition of science carries connotations of academic rigour and objectivity unattained in any other fields, and that social sciences don't adhere to these standards but still want to use the scientific label, and it begins to be a problem of actually weakening the power of the word as well.

I don't brush aside social science as nonsense: I merely dispute its claim to ever call itself science without sticking a 'social' or 'soft' in front of the word. In fact, I would prefer it if it was called social studies, or something similar. So my response to this

would be that using different methods from the natural sciences disqualify social sciences from being a different field of science, because the method is what makes it a science - the Scientific Method which I am always banging on about.

Allowing for 'different fields of science' to use different methods of science opens the definitional floodgates and allows everyone from creationists to crystal healers to start touting their works of intellectual suicide as valid 'science'.

Science and humanities may have different degrees of importance, but both are vital for modern civilization. Air may be more important than water (after all, you can survive without water longer than without air), but water, too, is necessary for life. Even if you have air, it's almost meaningless if you don't have water too.

Anyway, humanities were invented before science.

I'd like to see you try to practice science if a government had not built schools to teach you the basics. Or try to communicate the results of your experiments without language or writing. Or try to fund your research without money. Or try to patent an invention without law.

You might be right: science may be more important than humanities. But a scientist is in no way more important to society than a lawyer, a police agent or even a historian.

Guess I'm just tired of swollen-headed science students at my college...

Well, saying someone is more important than someone else is something I'd not want to say regardless of their academic discipline.

Never denied that other subjects had their own importance. In fact, I emphasised it in the post before last.

:huh:
Where does this come in? Spears were invented before nuclear warheads, too.

This seems to be getting a bit silly to me. The humanities are the study of these things, not the things themselves. On the same principles, appropriating my subjects from the natural sciences, I could say that I'd like to see you try to see what you were reading without photons. Or to communicate your ideas without lungs. Or to get to your library without gravity.

Again: when you say this, I am happy. I need go no further: I do not believe that other fields of study are worthless. Merely that my field is nicer, with greener grass, and flowers, and bigger cows.

That means that there once were civilizations with humanities and without science.

If you don't study the law, you can't become a lawyer. If you don't learn a language, you can't speak. If you don't know basic economics (like keeping your budget stable), you'll end up in the street pretty fast.

On the other hand, if you don't study science, photons will still allow you to read and lungs will still allow you to speak. Nature can manage itself; society cannot. That's exactly why civilizations can exist without science but not without humanities.

I never said there weren't. You seem to be arguing with an invisible man.

There would have been a kind of law before courts: the kind of law where, if you wrong someone, that person wrongs you back. Law is merely the civilised extension of rough and ready social justice and negotiation, which would have existed long before courts and lawyers.

Learning a language isn't the same as studying it. Otherwise, every toddler is a shining humanities student. Do you really want to reduce the subjects you're defending to the status of hand-painting?

The amount of basic economics a person like you or I needs is called 'maths'. Which, I think you'll agree, is not a humanity.


Hmm. I seem to have ended up rebutting your post, while trying to convince you that you're arguing against a case I'm not trying to support. Let me clarify.

1. I do not believe that science is vital for the survival of civilisation. I have not argued this. I merely argued earlier that science was a more powerful and important intellectual method than any other field of study.
2. Neither are humanities or arts vital for survival. Both science and other subjects are academia, the results of living in a civilised society rather than the prerequisites for that society to become established. It is clear to anyone who thinks about it that there were human social groups before either the invention of sciences or humanities, and while language, oral story-telling histories, songs and (cave) art may go back a long, long way, there is a long time that passes between their beginning and people actually beginning to study them. For most of us, the uneducated and the scientific, we think about language no more than we think about breathing: the fact that we are not and have never been linguists or students of literature does not prevent us from using it to almost the same extent.

I like science.

Im just gonna let Chili say the rest because he is a much more eloqouent speaker and can portray his ides better then I can.

But I have to say, that the answer for the major world problems, wont come from the humanities department at university. It will come from the science one.

Burro Boskov

Ah. Then I guess we reached a common ground, Chili. ;)

All I wanted to do at the beginning was trying to explain that humanities are just as 'noble' and 'useful' a field of study as science; and that not using calculus does not make one a dilettante, since society needs a great deal more than just scientists. It is true that science is, as you say, a "more powerful and important intellectual method", but it doesn't make scientists superior in usefulness to people who do humanities.

I think you need to come to clear definitions of importance and usefulness before I can say whether I agree or disagree with you any more. To me, you seem to contradict yourself now, saying something is less important but equally useful - on what grounds do you evaluate importance and usefulness?

As for the 'nobility' of a field - that seems to me a rather meaningless adjective.

This is the phase of the debate that starts to get boring. And pointless.


Well... let us just say, then, that science and humanities are both vital for any form of advanced civilization. I guess we can agree on this.

As for 'nobility': I meant that a lawyer, a historian or even an artist deserves as much respect as a scientist. I say this because I often see science students who think that all other fields of study are below them.

This is hardly a contentious point. Although, to be pedantic, one could probably imagine extreme forms of civilisation that lacked academic interest in either science or the arts. I suspect we would differ then of which of these two extreme alternatives were advanced, as 'advanced' is another term you have not defined. I, for example, would put things like life expectancy and technological development near the top of the checklist, whereas I imagine you would have considerably vaguer and more subjective criteria.

Anyone as an individual deserves as much respect as anyone else, plus that which is due for their personal achievements. Thus I respect you and Burro equally (because I am not aware of any personal achievements in either of you that would heighten my respect for you), less than Richard Dawkins (who to me has achieved things worthy of additional respect), and more than Ted Haggard (who has earned negative respect). I hope that makes my opinion on respect for individuals clear.

But what I have been arguing is not about lawyers and chemists, but about law and chemistry. And I will unequivocally state that I respect the field of chemistry more than I respect the field of law. Law seems to me to provide less satisfactory answers to less interesting questions, using a less effective method, than chemistry.

So my response to this:

...would be - below me? Certainly not. Arts and humanities students have equal worth to myself - anything else would be a disgusting statement of elitist prejudice. But below science, the proper comparison (individual-to-individual, and field to field) - yes. Yes indeed. Because science does its job so well in comparison to other fields.

Imagine two labourers. One has to climb a tree to pick apples, the other has to dig a ditch. You, the overseer, leave them in a field with an apple tree and enough ground for the requisite ditch, go off, and come back at the end of the day. The apple tree has been systematically shorn of apples, and the apples are stacked neatly in barrels at the base of the trunk; the ditch-digger has dug three rather haphazard ditches, each using a different digging technique, and abandoned a third of the way along its intended length. When you say that you wanted the ditch to be three times as long, the ditch-digger says he understands that, but he cannot decide on which method of ditch-digging to use, and his ditch-digging friends all have their own opinions about the best way to dig a ditch. When you compare his work to that of the apple-picker, he sulks, and complains that apple-picking is qualitatively different to ditch-digging: you could have as many apple-pickers as you liked, but your ditch would never get dug. This does not mean that the apple-picker is not a better worker. In fact, it should be plainly obvious that he is.

This is how I see the comparison between science and other fields. Yes, applying the scientific method in all fields of study (particularly arts) would be counter-productive. Science can't do art's job. But that doesn't mean that science doesn't do its job better than arts and humanities do theirs: it achieves objectivity where others remain subjective, it achieves observable progress where others run in circles or tangle themselves in relativism, and it achieves rigour and accuracy where others hide behind loose definitions and untestable propositions.

I disagree once again. After the big guns have been fired, after rebuttal and counter-rebuttal, when you whittle each other down to the core of what you are trying to say and start noticing which points have fallen by the wayside, is the phase of the debate where a productive result can be achieved. Whenever I have changed someone's mind, or had my own mind changed, or observed someone's mind changed, it has been in the later stage of a discussion, where they are forced to examine the inconsistencies and dishonesties of their own points, and agree on shared meanings for what they are saying. Pulling out after the first clash abandons the chance of ever pinning anyone down, and reduces the argument to a contest of greased eels - whoever can wriggle the hardest will appear to win, regardless of the real validity of their points.

Okaaay, I didn't expect such a long reply in an almost finished debate...

Everything started when you said that, according to the Chili dictionary, a dilettante was someone who didn't have to use calculus in their degree. Since it was a joke, maybe we just created a debate about a non-existent divergence. I had somehow gotten the feeling that you thought of humanities as superfluous and of science as the Only Thing Really Worth Living For.

I've already admitted that science, being based on objectivity, experiments and natural law, comes closer to the Unquestionable Truth than history, politics, psychology and other "non-objective" fields can ever dream. If you are aware that Unquestionable Truth is not the only thing Mankind needs to reach new heights, going further in this debate is a waste of time since there is no actual divergence to speak of.

Your hypothetical civilization that has only science and no humanities could not exist anywhere except "in theory": as I mentioned earlier, nature can manage itself, but society cannot. Whatever you may say, I will not move one inch on that matter.

On purely philosophical grounds, science is superior to humanities, just as objectivity is superior to subjectivity. But in Real Life (not something to be neglected), humanities are in no way inferior to science. That's my last word.

Sez you.

Agreed, but both are academic disciplines, and thus rather more concerned with philosophical questions than Real Life^TM. On the criteria of Real Life, farmers soar above all academic disciplines in importance, yet I doubt any of us would feel motivated to come to the defence of farming. Furthermore, even factoring in the Real Life consideration you set up, we seem to have reached a consensus that we can, for the sake of argument, assume that science and the humanities have equivalent practical virtue - summing the practical and philosophical virtues, science comes out ahead, since practical value_science = practical value_humanities and philosophical value_science > philosophical value_humanities, by your own admission.

This, I think, is the only point on which you and I differ. So yes, what I said was a joke, and yes, humanities and the arts are worth defending: you, on the one hand, cleave to this idea of different methods of evaluation making the two fields incomparable, whereas I try to judge them against each other, and find science to have the higher net value.

Oh yes, and Unquestionable Truth is something science doesn't do. It's a common misconception that I think I saw said somewhere else by Tyrion (something about 'once you've proved something, that's that'). Science progressively approximates truth, but the way it does so is all about questioning and testing the current body of knowledge. The difference between science and humanities is that when a scientific theory is found to be flawed, the discovery of the flaw allows the 'next step' to be built on top of it, whereas when an idea in the arts or humanities is decided to be flawed, on subjective grounds, it is merely re-interpreted or replaced.

GRAHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*firey-sword'd*

There you go, split topics... you may continue.

P.S. Feel free to change the title Chili, this one isn't adequate.

Title changed.

[Luc]Interesing Choice...[/Luc]

Thats, for some reason, worrying.

Whenever I read this debate, I basically read Chili's side and realize that is exactly how I feel, but just put in actual words, rather than not totally formed thoughts in my mind.

I have to say though, I think Warhammer Palace could have a world class debating team. @ztech and Chili as captains, we could go for the gold!

Burro Boskov

Time for Godwin's Law to prove itself true...

There we go:

Science is evil because Doctor Josef Mengele, a nazi scientist, conducted horrible experiments on Jewish prisoners!


Kiddin' :P . No, science is awesome. I don't like doing science in class, but I'm very interested in the results. When I wikipediate my way through scientific articles, I can stay addicted for a long time. Astronomy, especially, fascinates me. Once I even got stuck for hours on microbiology articles.

These days I have a great deal of interest in the terraforming process. What are they waiting for to drop millions of cyanobacteria on the surface of Mars to turn the carbon dioxide into oxygen? Or to nuke the Martian ice cap to liberate gases?

That would be much more useful than the Space Station...

I can think of many reasons not to throw bacteria at mars. I haven't read that wikipedia article, but we must consider consequences before doing things like that. Who knows what would happen?

However, the main problem is: why would we bother? It would take thousands (probably millions) for bacteria to have a significant effect on the martian atmosphere (I assume you want O2 about 21% concentration like on earth). Bacteria are built to minimise energy use, you want them to go nuts breathing in a new environment. Also, like I said before, science needs economic reasons to progress. Perhaps it is a flaw in science (perhaps the pursuit of knowledge should be enough), but in the end, the only reason to do this, is to prove we can. We have bent a whole planet to our own (eventual) ends, just to show we can ?

I'm not sure it is possible though. Remember, humans are programmed to think we're asphyxiating at a slightly elevated CO2 level. You want us to breathe air which is at best 20% oxygen, and probably of a lower pressure than earth air (can't check now, but I assume so). Also, how would you deliver such bacteria in sufficient quantity to ensure they can begin multiplying?

And in the end, this comes back to the great question: why?

Hehe, not trying to rip you to shreds, but it is fun to think about these things to me

... :blink: ...

That's quite an impressive non-sequitur. Does any of it have any connection to what we were talking about before?

Nevertheless...

You know that it doesn't work if you introduce it in the name of introducing it, right?

Astronomical (no pun intended) levels of funding, the political will for the world's most expensive project ever which will not benefit anyone who is alive today, some reasonably resource- and cost-effective method of shipping large numbers of colonists safely to Mars... and just, generally, you know, scientists to take over government and turn the world into a giant scientific playpen.

Also, who are 'they'? The secret wizards who run the world?

Do you even understand the uses of having an inhabitable space station?

One thing that is particularly ironic about this argument is this.

Another Bill Bailey quote! Aaaargh!

On the terreforming note, has anyone ever platyed SimEarth? There was a scenario where you terraformed Mars. It's been an awful long time since I played it, but this discussion has got me wondering if there is any feasibility at a technological level to the tools you were given to terraform with...

Cheers,
DLJ

You should have seen the hypothetical science/humanities societies I was considering constructing as a rhetorical exercise... the Insect Nation and the Human Slaves.

For fun and good times, and also because @ztech was flamingly wrong in some of his earlier points, I shall post in this discussion. I'm not going into as much detail as I'd like. Given that I did an entire course this semester on medieval 'science,' I think it's only fair that I'm brief.

I'm back, baby.

Please don't sully the rest of us in the humanities with this nonsense. The study of art and literature does not take humanity anywhere. It is the study of what we are, and this may lead to an understanding of where we are going, or at least an understanding of underlying traits or what have you.

There is nothing uplifting to gain from studying history, no quantum leap forward for humanity buried in the intricacies of language theory. There is just a greater understanding of what we are. That is a worthy goal in its own right, but it is not comparable with science. Science seeks other things, which Chili outlines himself.

This argument sounds like post hoc, ergo propter hoc to me. I would say that celtic metallurgy techniques were developed primarily for 'scientific' reasons; growing crops, hunting and war. The artistic benefits are a side benefit, not the primary reason for their development. After all, a well-forged sword has clear benefits in Iron Age Europe; a pretty broach does not. The pretty broach can develop after the sword has ensured peace for one's natio.

[I would also like a citation on your claim that the Celts* were the best blacksmiths of their time for a) which time period and B) why you would place them above the Romans who were certainly better engineers at least. I'm not a classicist, so I could be wrong- so I'd like a citation.]

While true as far as you go, the 'scientific knowledge' you are talking about is NOT scientific in modern terms by any stretch of the imagination. Besides, the knowledge was lost because people had stopped reading Greek, not because the texts themselves were destroyed. It's complicated and fascinating to study, and you are oversimplifying to the point of obfuscation.

[Look at me, not taking issue with the term 'collapse of the Roman Empire,' a flawed statement in its own right.]

Er, Aristotle was one of the texts that you're talking about. And Aristotelian 'science' was held to be true, although with modifications based on Christianity, until the rise of the newer philosophies during the so-called Scientific Revolution.

And historians didn't go to the great libraries in the Middle East- the texts were mostly brought to them, through Spain for the most part. They were then translated into Latin and disseminated throughout the West. Very few Christians went into the empire of Islam.

They weren't 'historians' anyway, they were what would be scientists if we were stretching for a 20th century parallel, but I wouldn't call them that either. [Because that would be wrong.] They were astrologers and doctors of theology and law and so forth. They wanted to know how the world worked, and they sought texts to tell them and they imported the texts that they did not have at hand.

Sheesh. Where do you learn this stuff?

DUH. But, 'science' doesn't exist during the Middle Ages. There is a reason why what we call 'science' now is called 'science' now; it isn't what we had before. What we had during the period was something else we might as well call scientia because I am a Latin nerd. Scientia does not look at the natural world for truth, but relies instead on authorities to explain the world. It looks to the Bible, and Aristotle and Ptolemy and the like, looking to explain how and why the world works as it does, and through this explain God's Will.

Religion and this kind of philosophy are the same thing. This natural philosophy was simply a way of viewing the world as a means to greater understanding of the divine.

Funny kind of history you're learnin' there, boy. To label a civilisation 'great' or 'meaningless' (or even a 'civilisation' at all, if you want to get tricky) is not the purpose of the historian. We are here to study it, and attempt to understand it. Leave labelling to people making soup-cans; we are attempting to know.

What makes you think Roman science was less advanced than Greek? Rome conquered Greece. Rome developed aquaducts. Rome built roads that are still the foundations of major highway systems in Europe. Rome also spoke and read Greek; Roman 'science' was Greek 'science.'

Well, you'd be wrong. Occam's Razor was developed by a monk, after all. There are several other important philosophical arguments that were influenced by medieval theology, but I'm not really in that field. The example of Occam's Razor defeats your case anyway.

*grins* I'm not wholly on Chili's side here.

Chili addresses the 'historian as arbiter of truth' thing quite well, citing the example of Marx. However, I'm curious as to what makes you think an historian necessarily knows anything about economics?

Economics is a different field for a reason.

===

I'm not going to address the argument about 'social' vs 'hard' sciences. Suffice it to say that I agree with Chili for the most part, but that his definitions of 'science' are constantly under review by philosophers of science. His broad point is true, but the finder details are fiddled with. *shrugs* It's an intense academic argument, though, and one that actually has no bearing on this conversation. For the purposes of our discussion, he is correct.

He is incorrect, however, in his implicit assumption that there was a sudden uprising of modern science, and that the natural philosophers of the time invented it and the terms to go with it. 'Modern science' is a development stretching from the late 16th/early 17th centuries and is itself a development from even earlier than that.

===

True but irrelevant.

...yes, so? These are the things which develop around a civilisation. The humanities are the study of those things. A civilisation develops history regardless of whether someone studies it. The STUDY of said history is a humanity; the existence of it is not.

Your point is immaterial.

Chili addresses this well, but I didn't notice that before I wrote this. I'll post it anyway.

===

I'd like to defend my corner of the humanities. While mainstream history gets bogged down in digging three ditches and abandoning one, I myself -along with medievalists in general, who are a conservative bunch- prefer to stick with solid evidence. I find myself uncomfortable arguing a point when there is no or little evidence to defend it, and I get irritated at historians who make broad claims based on conjecture.

This means, for example, that the academics writing an argument for Newton's alchemical studies get points from me- for they stick close to the evidence, which is ample. Those who claimed he merely glanced at it, or that his vast materials on the matter are a coincidence lose points, for they are ignoring the evidence.

Because history is discussing people, however, a certain amount of theory must be applied. Nonetheless, one can remain close to the primary evidence and avoid as much of the pointless meandering as possible.



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*A term for a linguo-racial group that is frought with problems on its own.

...Well, I'm open to the idea that I could be wrong on that assertion (which, of course, is flagrantly, shoutingly partisan), but the example that 'defeats my case' is a horrible, horrible example. 'Occam was a monk, therefore religion contributed to philosophy' is of the same order as 'Hitler was an atheist, therefore atheism is evil'.

You as a medievalist must know (and most likely much better than I) that in those times, someone with an academic bent had little choice but to go into the clergy. To claim individual thinkers' contributions as points for Christianity or any other religion is something I'm not going to accept unless you build a case for how their Christianity was vital in developing that idea. And while you could argue that pre-Darwin, Occam's razor didn't eviscerate the concept of God, I'd say it's definitely not something that a religion that believes in a detailed roster of unnecessary saints, miracles, divine interventions and fictitious historical events is going to lead you towards.

Also, I think I recall that 'as a whole' was important in the context... was I not saying that religion's net contribution was not there? As in whatever it had contributed (because saying it never contributed anything just looks intuitively wrong) had been cancelled and gone beyond by what the Inquisitions and Witchfinder Generals and so on had taken away.

Nevertheless, to a scientist, the important point is where it assumed its complete (or near enough) modern form, not its development.

Occam's Razor is valuable for more than just eviscerating the idea of God, silly boy. But your point is well-made, and noted. I could write you the essay pointing out how the religion helped philosophical developments, but I really, really cannot be bothered. I realise this is intellectually lazy of me, but I've got no real interest in making the point.

As for in the context, also noted. Religion, on the whole, is unproductive for intellectual development. But several philosophical points have been made thanks to the western religious tradition, and to ignore that is, as you say, to be flagrantly, shoutingly partisan. Not to mention ahistorical.

True as well, but to make it sound like it grew from nowhere is to stray dangerously close to false premises. You should be cautious about letting your argument give the wrong impression, lest dishonourable opponents build a straw man out of you.

Letting dishonourable opponents do stupid things sets up more targets for the good guys! It's fun.

I never said it wasn't, silly... naked dinosaur-riding... person (who's sillier now?). I was merely pointing out the conflict between the complex mythological architecture of the church Occam was a part of and the principle he came up with, and thus arguing that it was improbable that his religio-philosophical context actually helped him devise it. Thus, no points for Jebus.