Hierarchy of the Grift

Maria, do you know the article “The Long Con” by Rick Perlstein (about the right-wing grift-industrial complex in the USA) ?
Also, there’s been a lot written about multi-level marketing businesses in the US, esp. among the Mormons.

I remember you’re not in the US, but rather in Europe. I am saddened to learn that this sort of thing is prevalent in Europe, too: I had always imagined that somehow Europe had managed to send all its shysters and grifters to North America, and so the people who were left were …. well, y’know, solid and stable. Ah, well.

I was assured, cause my lower half to become thinner and less lumpy. It would cost several hundred pounds.

I’m not completely sure where my “lower half” starts, but I would certainly like my gut to become thinner. (It’s not particularly lumpy, just… larger…thank I’d like. My legs are doing quite nicely, thank you very much.) However, several hundred pounds seems like too much to me, even if I was very sure it would work. Do you think there’s a discount option available?

I rarely see older ones working in those places
…hmmm…starts to think about whether this place might be able to provide some anti-ageing treatments, and do I need those? So far, I think I’m just becoming a bit “distinguished”, but do I want to go any further than this? And can I get any such treatments at significantly less than several hundred pounds, in local equivalent?

= = = At what level or in what contexts do they acknowledge that what they sell is bullshit, = = =

I have a coworker whose family has a successful business selling by subscription farm and rural living supplies of which half are generics of reasonably price and quality and half are products for the same market we could call “baloney” because while they aren’t quite bullshit they aren’t really legitimate to the skeptical eye either. They are generally intelligent and capable people, modulo their US political views. The thing is they actually believe in their baloney products – not crystal-level woo but supplements, nutriceuticals, food concentrate drinks and the like. Any attempt to point out the lack of any scientific or statistical outcomes basis for these products is met with a wall of “oh no no no, you see the 17% zinc in this supplement combined with the essence of hogwort in the drink causes…” – to me it is pure unadulterated salesmanship with no substance, but then again the most convincing salesperson is the one who really believes in what they are selling

I once knew someone at a small company quite like what you describe, though perhaps more up-market. In the business of anti-wrinkle creams and the like. Scented fatty creams with magic secret ingredients. Well respected company!

What I found interesting: for the far majority of the company, it just does not matter whether the products work. It’s not that they are consciously running a grift, it’s simply not their department to wonder if the product works. The production people produce high-quality product, on spec. The office people keep the books in order and the organization running. The owners take their cut. The (many, many) sales and marketing people only care that the customers are happy and buying. That’s really not so different from sales at a company that sells a working product. Everyone is genuinely is genuinely trying to do their specific job, it’s only at the aggregate level that their jobs might be pointless.

Perhaps, somewhere deep in the company, there are some lab people who fully understand how empty the claims are. Most people just accept the marketing claims at face value, as long as the customers pay.

I have concluded that Capitalist economies run on grift, marketing and advertising. Sell the sizzle, not the steak. But then, I am a cynic who sees the self-help industry as snake oil for the soul.

Hi Maria!
You have reminded me of the time quite a few years ago I visited a new hairdresser for a trim (I had long hair then.) She’s never met me before, but she tried to persuade me to colour the grey in my hair.

“There’s no point saying ‘No thanks, that’s bullshit pseudoscience and frankly insulting,’ because that would be rude. The only market signal permitted is ‘No thanks’.”

I did think it was insulting. I just said, “Why? Don’t you like it?” I think you might have got away with asking whether the stylist thought you were fat. Having a reply ready doesn’t, unfortunately, do a thing about all the beauty treatments on offer.

I’ve been going to the same place for quite a few years now, and I know this is the place for me: last time I was there the stylist complimented me on the white streak in front of my mostly-grey hair.

” I’m very curious if there are activities not mentioned but that have the same basic structure.”

For many years I tended bar and there were any number of magical properties attributed to the products I dispensed….on a good weekend night people lined up three deep to imbibe a potion that made them feel young, made them feel good, helped them solve problems, made them smart and funny and much, much more.

The amazing part was I never had to say a word to make it sell and no one ever, ever, ever asked for proof – unless they just wanted to know the ABV.

“I’m curious if the sucker identification point is constant across human activity.”

We typically don’t prey on those closest to us. And we are typically distrustful of total strangers. So the ideal pair are known to each other, distantly, or at least share some points of reference: they attend the same church, or had school-friends in common. Or, the grifter pretends that these things are true.
Hypothesis: suburban living provides the right degrees of familiarity-plus-anonymity to engender these transactions. Villagers are more careful not to destroy trust. City-dwellers are on guard against strangers.
I imagine that sociologists have looked at this.
Erik Prince, mercenary leader, and his sister Betsy DeVos, destroyer of education, owe their fortunes to the Amway scam.

The wraps and unguents are ridiculous but the things that ‘work’ are also somewhat ridiculous because they assume some movement towards an ideal no one can reach. So botox and juvederm are similarly a kind of scam.

Unfortunately, you may have to play along to get love, be respected at work or even find work in certain cases.

If you look a bit closer you can see it’s often capitalism creating a background anxiety about whether you are valuable as a person. It takes a gendered form but it’s always going to be an open question and there’s always more crap to assuage your doubts about that for a short time until you find there’s something else that needs to be fixed.

Do the endless, derivative crypto-currencies you see advertised on buses – a clear sign it’s way past time to get out …

Your reaction is mine, but contrariwise I saw an advertising poster for Bitcoin on a bus shelter which explicitly invoked the way in which the advertising was appearing as an indicator that it was time to buy in.

Francis Spufford: to riff a little more on what you wrote:

(1) in On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt explains that “in the end, sincerity is bullshit.” It’s really worth reading (very short book). The thesis can be summarized, I think, thus:

People have a tendency to infer from someone’s sincere belief in statement X, that statement X is more likely to be true. After all, people sincerely believe in only true things, right? So if you want to convince someone to believe statement Y, a great way of doing so, is to yourself sincerely believe in statement Y. So go about convincing yourself, eh?

(2) In enterprise software sales, there’s a saying (probably endemic to all in-person sales): “A good salesman doesn’t learn too much about the product; it gets in the way of being sincere with the customer.”

(3) once, in the middle of a six-month-long dumpster-fire cleanup at a big customer, one of my company’s sales team was talking to one of his colleagues about all the problems the customer was experiencing. He said, and I quote: “It’s really tough seeing all these problems; it makes it hard to be sincere with the customer.”

(4) Someone recently observed that MAGAts’ “beliefs” aren’t beliefs the way that we think about them, but rather “positions” that they hold until they’re no longer convenient, at which point they’re dropped. So a MAGAt can object to the covid vaxx on the grounds that it’s “experimental”, or nobody knows the 10-year-side-effects, but when they fall ill with covid, they’re OK with remdesivir, regeneron, and lord-knows-what-else, all of which is “experimental” and certainly not as well-understood as the covid vaxx. They’re just “positions”, used to score rhetorical points and signal to their fellow brethren.

In the end, sincerity is bullshit.

One philosopher remarked that all of Western philosophy was a series of footnotes to Plato. At the bottom is a conviction that there is a single ‘truth’ – the Reality throwing shadows on the cave wall. In matters of the physical world there is (or seems to be – it is certainly foolish if not lethal to assume otherwise) – which reinforces the conviction that it must be true universally. But for those in whom this conviction is not deeply embedded, there are multiple Truths, with no felt need to reconcile them. The world can be round as a matter of physical fact and flat as a matter of religious fact. Nor is this ability confined to the uneducated – in a good many of the social sciences there are a lot of things held to be uncontrovertibly true at the same time as the evidence refuting them is also acknowledged as true. My guess is even those at the top of the pyramid are in a real sense convinced that their claims are “true” even if not “factual”.

How do you know ‘disinfo’ from ‘info’, when on your own side it’s all politicized up the wazoo, any expression of skepticism is suppressed, and doubters (not to mention dissidents) are systematically purged out of the system?

As noted by Alex SL above, the existence of widespread religion proves our innate susceptibility to grift. Noah’s Ark? Parting the Red Sea? Pull the other one, as the Brits say. (Is that what they say?)

Which makes the discipline of science, broadly defined as rigorously investigating all claims as objectively as we can, our only long-term hope.

The alchemist in Chaucer’s Yeoman’s Tale is a cheat and a liar, but he uses the gold he makes from the marks to finance his doomed dream of actually being able to make gold from lead. Shaman and witch doctors, so I’m told, teach each other tricks to impress the natives such as the psychic surgery scam; but they also believe there is something real about what they or more skillful practitioners can do. The Amazing Randi’s integrity was exceptional, though, after all, he did figure out how to monetize his scruples. The explanation of fraud’s empire is kinda Kantian: as he wrote in the first sentence of the Critique, seeing through the illusions or even perpetrating them doesn’t make them go away. Or maybe it’s just that you have to be unreasonably susceptible to persuasion to be a good persuader.

I think the grift goes all the way to the top. It’s only the nature of the doublethink that changes. Trump believes what he is saying, at the time, even though he is aware he will soon say something different.

@Pittsburgh Mike–
reminds me of the thought about how you could make a tremendous amount of money if you went west during the gold rush — if you set up a business selling tools, food and other necessities to the miners.

More generally, I think Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland shows that perhaps that grift should be understood to be one of the basic pillars of American history and society, given that scams and making use of people’s weakness for what ought to be too good to be true seems to have been part of the country’s chemistry since before it was a country, starting even with John Smith.

I doubt your typical internist is competent to figure out the GPU requirements for crypto mining.

Your typical internist, despite having access to the Worldwide Web, might even fail to grasp the difference between a GPU and a CPU.

rsm: is Fauci sincere?

Sure he is, but that is not why we should believe him. We should believe him because
1. he has a track record of being right
2. this has resulted in him being a widely-acknowledged expert
3. and also thus-acknowledged by other widely-acknowledged experts

So a different way of putting it would be: “Sincerity should have no, no probative value”.

Obviously by #1 in my previous comment, I mean that the existing epicycle models were pretty bloody complicated, which allowed them to predict things accurately. Kepler had a much simpler model that achieved nearly the same accuracy, and over time, that is what won over astronomers.

There’s no point saying ‘No thanks, that’s bullshit pseudoscience and frankly insulting,’ because that would be rude. The only market signal permitted is ‘No thanks’.

Would it be rude to say ‘I promised my mother I wouldn’t’? (It would be rude for them to express disbelief.)

@44
This reminds me of a slogan I saw and heard probably a million times: “Учение Маркса Всесильно, Потому Что Оно Верно!” Translated as “Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true”. On the walls indoors and outdoors, on TV, radio, everywhere. Oh, and also of Thatcher’s famous “there is no alternative”. Same sort of thing.

Anyway. I’d be very careful with ‘trusted authorities’. Especially those that use their political power to zealously and relentlessly eradicate all dissent, making it impossible for you “to pick” any other authority. In fact, I feel that’s a sure sign that your trust is misplaced.

So epicyclists had a wrong theory which they used the scientific method, before it was later so named, to prove, and they made accurate predictions that kept sailors on course, thus epicycles were true before Kepler?

No, they didn’t. Epicycles were used in an attempt to explain the motion of the planets; sailors don’t navigate by the planets.

Are you all just saying the same thing I’m saying, that the scientific truth is arbitrary, fickle, social consensus?

No, I’m not saying that. Those are not words I used and I’m not sure I understand what you mean by them in this context.

@Gorgonzola 47

The motto you cite is an example of political propaganda.

Political propaganda generally exists on both sides, however you have to be able to distinguish propaganda (of both sides) from not motivated science; if you don’t and treat everything as propaganda you reach a point where it is impossibile to have a reasonable conversation about facts of the world, so to speak a situation where an assertion like “the sky is blue” is judged on whether it is politically convenient and if it isn’t, the sky is pink instead.

In that situation, the only way to solve disputes is who shouts louder, and if that is the case it is only natural that everyone will just try to shout louder than the others.

So it is quite important to be able to distinguish propaganda from non motivated reasoning: for example, did Biden win the elections or did Trump win? If there is no way to solve this question objectively, then the only possible solution is civil war.

J-D: perhaps you might look up navigational planets?

From https://360.here.com/2014/05/21/gps-romans-unravelling-antikythera-mechanism/ :

《Although the Antikythera device is portable, and the instructions suggest that it was designed to be used by someone other than its maker, it was probably not intended for shipboard navigation; it was too delicate, too complex, and too rare. Some of the data it could generate, such as eclipse predictions, had no direct navigational application, and salt spray would quickly corrode the gears. The machine’s computing power, however, would have enabled its user to generate astronomical tables with which navigators could calculate their position.》

MisterMr: did the sun go around the earth in Aristarchus’s day? Again, what use is science if it rejects correct theories based on some kind of “the ends justify the means” analysis? Did science tell us for centuries that animals have no emotions, and do we still act as if that is true to justify animal experimentation today? But pet owners know science was (is still) wrong?

Did any society capable of building the Antikythera have the necessary intelligence to figure out how to make heliocentric predictions accurate enough to use, but Aristarchus would have had to build models all on his own with no help or funding, due to arbitrary fickle social consensus?

It is often forgotten that “religion” is not only self-flattering claims about standing on the foundations of morality, genuine commitment to goodness, kindness to fellow man or however the high-minded like to phrase it. Religion is also about getting supernatural benefits in daily life.* The eternal after-life somewhere else is one but by no means is religion just about wishing away death. Religion is also about material benefits for health here and now.

Hence the very terms “witch doctor” and “medicine man.” Or Christian Science and Scientology. The prophets Muhammad and Ellen G. White and Joseph Smith enjoined novel dietary restrictions. Religion is to medicine as astrology is to astronomy and alchemy is to chemistry. Again, like them, it promises crassly material benefits in the here and now. Hygeia and Panacea if I remember correctly were Greek goddesses. But like a saint suspiciously similar to a pagan supernatural figure, they may still be with us.

It is not at all customary to hold religious beliefs, except minority religious beliefs, to any standards of rationality. There is only acceptable in polite company, versus not. Indeed the majority of the cultured pride themselves on siding with the religious—of course because they believe in standing on the foundations of morals or committing to being good or showing goodwill to those whose faith is contaminated by crass self-interest. Like disagreements over what is a cult and what is a religion (like disagreements over what is usury and what is interest,) disagreements over whether Hygeia and Panacea are truly part of the pantheon—however discreetly tacit their membership—will be inevitable. And so too will be the blatant reliance on non-rational “arguments” and anger at resistance.

When the noblest thinkers privilege religion in general, then arbitrarily deny those privileges, hoi polloi of a religious bent will spot the hypocrisy. Personally I think sincerity is the cheapest virtue of all, purchased wholesale by self-deception, but that’s me. Others think very highly of it. (And yes, religion is actually privileged in a genuinely meaningful sense, not the too-often imaginary sense indulged by angry people.) It is not consistent, to be sure, to commit to the non-rational to support religion then try to play the rationalist in other areas. Trying to be consistent is generally looked down as dogmatism, though.

rsm@34 “What good is science if it cannot reliably select among competing theories, for millennia even?” The brief but irrefutable answer is, the use that is made of it. It is common to distinguish science and technology but if you view science as the ways people have worked out to find out how things are, technology is a scientific tool. Measuring instruments are a glaring example still often overlooked. (J.D. Bernal noted this, as I recall.)

The other answer is also I think irrefutable and also short, but simply denied: It keeps you from believing in magic. Yes, there are people who love to prate about how science is probabilistic, that you can’t really say “There is no magic.” But if you claim to use probability, then you have to concede there are negligible probabilities, which means you are actually required to say “There is no magic.” Yet, that is rarely the case. There seems to be something fishy going on.

MisterMr@38 Dissection is an experiment. Examining the different stages of chick embryos by opening the shells is an experiment. Cutting nerves to see what happens is an experiment. All these were done in ancient times. Experiments disproved Aristotle’s notion of the brain as a cooling organ (though Aristotle was correct in wondering why so much blood flowed through the brain.) Cartoon notions about the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages are deplorable, but the truth is that much knowledge was indeed lost and much of what survived distorted for religious ends.

Chetan Murthy@42 claims heliocentrism was simpler. Absent a theory of gravity, it is not clear this is true at all. It is easy to confuse “simpler” with “using less words” or “having fewer parts.” But in science “simpler” I think should be identified with “using fewer metaphysical principles.” That is the sense I believe William of Ockham meant his famous principle. The geocentric models had unknown mover, spheres of some novel substance, poles anchoring them, holes for epicycles, and oh yes, equants (which at the moment I’ve forgotten what they even are!) In what sense is that simpler?

The heliocentric theory had the mystery of why sky objects move in circles. But it also had the grave problem that people couldn’t feel the Earth moving! I’m no longer certain we should think the most sophisticated thinkers actually took any of that literally. It’s not like they were puzzled by the absence of literal poles keeping the spheres centered on the Earth, no? Like modern scientists who think the wave function is merely a mathematical convenience, they just thought, shut up and calculate? The real impetus in accepting heliocentrism ultimately lay I suspect in the increasing belief in the unity of nature, that there wasn’t a quintessence in the sky, for example. Like plate tectonics suddenly letting geologists accept Alfred Wegener’s mere empirical facts, Newton’s law of gravitation made heliocentrism by replacing a host of mathematical conveniences with a material causality.

Chetan Murthy@44 notes that the “layman” relies on authority. This is not just true in science, of course. One of the most notable examples is the translation of Hebrew and Greek into English. The trust in the fidelity of the translation has been abused, as I recall. But as the otherwise inexplicable survival of the King James Version shows us, trust in authority can be a matter of familiarity. In practice, what I call “populism” holds that the equality of persons means the equality of opinions. I disagree but I am disagreeably dogmatic.

Most of what an individual believes is essentially based on authority. The thing is, science is not individual, it is collective, inherently so. Some philosophers attack science by deriding the “view from nowhere.” But the alternative is the view from somewhere special. This position I think is not really defensible.

Gorgonzola Petrovna@47 ignores that most people do not investigate, but accept “authority.” They may imagine they are independent thinkers who are not dogmatic but conjure it all up out of their personal experience, or something. Or they may just accept that the consensus in their personal milieu is common sense. There is a prejudice, as in Chetan Murthy above, that the true must be simple, intuitive, maybe even self-evident. Not so. That’s why science was so laboriously developed over the centuries. And why it had so many setbacks, too. The role of censorship is I think not nearly as prominent as the role of the megaphone, where mythology is promoted by volume, not so much by literally silencing others.

rsm@48 “So epicyclists had a wrong theory which they used the scientific method, before it was later so named, to prove, and they made accurate predictions that kept sailors on course, thus epicycles were true before Kepler? Are you all just saying the same thing I’m saying, that the scientific truth is arbitrary, fickle, social consensus?”

There is a famous insult, “not even wrong!” that comes to mind. First, “the” scientific method is not about predictions, not even falsifying predictions. That’s Mont Pelerin.
Second, there is no singular scientific method. Science and technology are about how things are (which by the way includes human beings.) The various methods devised to show this are very diverse, including such “ordinary” activities as measuring, mapping, classifying and so on.

Third, science is a collective enterprise. That is is therefore social is true but trivial. The thing is, not that the consensus can be (and has been many times!) wrong…but that the consensus is formed in confrontation with the world, not by fashion.

Fourth, the science in scientific method is not about finding some sort of essence that provides irrefutable proofs logically necessary proof inevitably produced from first principles. That’s Pythagoreanism/Platonism etc.

Fifth, one of the fundamental discoveries about how things are, slowly established by centuries of work, is that the world is natural. We collectively know too much about the universe to find a place for supernatural entities. This is no longer a hypothesis but a fact, in the sense that denying this fact is foolish. The supernatural is a negligible probability and must be neglected. That keeps the supposedly fickle social consensus tethered.

MisterMr@50 Two things come to mind. First, the real victory of heliocentrism I think came after Newton’s demonstration that elliptical orbits had a cause. There were still difficulties about the implicit notion of absolute time (as Einstein proved later) and about spooky action at a distance. But Newton simply disavowed speculations. The system of the world provided empirical unity to the universe. A material cause, even one that currently defies explanation, is scientific in a way consonant with the discoveries about how the world works.

Second, Kuhn if I remember correctly is trained in physics. Things work a little differently in the historical sciences and in the biological sciences. Seafloor spreading as a mechanism to cause continental drift fit in with our knowledge of how the earth worked, thus confirming Wegener. Historical sciences like geology and cosmology and biology of course do not work with arbitrarily limited models of laboratory science promoted by the likes of Popper. Social sciences of course are limited by the ideologically motivated refusal to conceive of people (individually or in aggregate) as determined. Old religious ideas are constantly being revived with jargon.

Or to put it another way, Kuhn needs to be supplemented with a structural theory of scientific counterrevolution. Evolutionary psychology I think would provide a superb example.

So given the data they had at the time, yes, they had the correct model.

That depends on the exact sense in which you are using the word ‘correct’, and also what distinction you intend between ‘the correct model’ and ‘a correct model’. What are the implications of saying they had ‘the correct model’ for the work of contemporary astronomers of China, India, and the Islamic world?

Their non-expert contemporaries would have been justified in relying on what contemporary experts said about astronomy on the basis of their practical successes; modern non-experts are justified in relying on what modern experts say about astronomy (including their rejection of the models of astronomers of earlier times) on the basis of their (vastly greater) practical success. Contemporaries of Copernicus would have been justified in accepting accounts of epicycles on the basis ‘That’s what the experts say, and they seem to know what they’re talking about’; that doesn’t mean that anybody today would be justified in accepting those accounts, because experts today say differently, and (in a practical way) they seem to know what they’re talking about much better than earlier experts.

On the other hand, nobody was ever justified in relying on what alchemists said, because alchemy never worked.

@55 “Gorgonzola Petrovna@47 ignores that most people do not investigate, but accept “authority.” ”

I don’t think I ignored that ‘most people accept “authority”’ @47. Of course they do. Normally, they choose different authorities (including “your bloody pastor”) in different situations, and accept them with different degrees of trust/skepticism. They’re also, as we all know, unconsciously affected by constant repetition of the same assertion, whether they trust the source of it or not. It’s complicated.

Those who are guided entirely by what they hear on CNN, and dismiss everything else as ‘disinfo’ apparently do exist, but that’s a minority. I think I saw polling results recently (if you can trust those!) where over 60% of the US population distrust the establishment media.

Your typical internist, despite having access to the Worldwide Web, might even fail to grasp the difference between a GPU and a CPU.

I would add to the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, & even the KGB to this list. They are appallingly ignorant about all the twists and turns of institutional tyranny in the USSR. And don’t get me started on their ignorance of the Okhrana!

You left out the MGB and the MVD, among others.

In computing, meanwhile, GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit, while CPU stands for Central Processing Unit.

J-D@57 asserts that alchemy never worked. It is the endless perversity of real life that eventually it destroys all conceptual schema, including the one where only the seventeenth century did science and everything before was useless superstition. Alchemists discovered elements like arsenic, antimony, zinc and phosphorus. Alchemists devised distillation and other laboratory methods. Transitional figures like Paracelsus and van Helmont were deeply influenced by alchemy.

Folk medicine, incorporated into religion, similarly “achieved” progress. The relationship may be clearer in Chinese culture?

The issue of pseudoscience, nonsense that dresses up as science, is largely about fraud…but then there’s another overlap with religion, with its faith healers.

@60,
To have serious arguments people have to disagree about something. You need a controversy. Otherwise, when any questioning of the party line is suppressed and skeptics are swiftly denounced, what you see is just a series of assertions inside the echo chamber.

I don’t necessarily attach a negative connotation to ‘propaganda’, by the way. There’s nothing wrong (in most cases) with preaching a point of view. But what’s going on now is so massive, methodical, coordinated, it’s overwhelming…

But it’s probably different in Italy. Although, youtube, facebook, they are global-scale media. Do they keep you safe from disinfo in Italian?

J-D wrote:《Charles Darwin’s third book, The Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals, was published in 1872 and has never gone out of print. You haven’t explained any justification for the conclusion that science told us for centuries that animals have no emotions.》

Have you heard of Darwin’s ironically-named bulldog, T. H. Huxley, who published “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and Its History (1874)”?

《The attempt to reduce the endless complexities of animal motion and feeling to law and order is, at least, as important a part of the task of the physiologist as the elucidation of what are sometimes called the vegetative processes. Harvey did not make this attempt himself; but the influence of his work upon the man who did make it is patent and unquestionable. This man was René Descartes, who, though by many years [201] Harvey’s junior, died before him; and yet in his short span of fifty-four years, took an undisputed place, not only among the chiefs of philosophy, but amongst the greatest and most original of mathematicians; while, in my belief, he is no less certainly entitled to the rank of a great and original physiologist; inasmuch as he did for the physiology of motion and sensation that which Harvey had done for the circulation of the blood, and opened up that road to the mechanical theory of these processes, which has been followed by all his successors.

《Descartes was no mere speculator, as some would have us believe: but a man who knew of his
own knowledge what was to be known of the facts of anatomy and physiology in his day. He was
an unwearied dissector and observer; and it is said, that, on a visitor once asking to see his library, Descartes led him into a room set aside for dissections, and full of specimens under examination. “There,” said he, “is my library.”》

Did Huxley conclude Descartes was right, and moreover human emotions too are simply reflex (thus why not do involuntary vivisection on human subjects, right)?

Was behaviorism very scientific and adamant that animal emotions were just anthropomorphizing (the interested reader is invited to investigate this claim themselves, using internet searches)?

Quoting Huxley again:

《Now if, by some accident, a man’s spinal cord is divided […] If the spinal cord of a frog is cut across, so as to provide us with a segment separated from the brain, we shall have a subject parallel to the injured man, on which experiments can be made
without remorse; as we have a right to conclude that a frog’s spinal cord is not likely to be
conscious, when a man’s is not.》

Why any scruples about cutting some random human’s spinal cord?

What comfort is it to the frog, or human, if I say “don’t worry, if the science I’m using to justify torturing you is wrong, it’ll be corrected sooner than natural philosophists would have?”

J-D: a model is correct when it fits the data, there is no other definition.

One issue with this is which data are included and which excluded; another is the degree of fit.

MisterMr 50: “the fight is not between two scientific theories but between political sides, each of them (but the right more than the left) trying to push “science” towards their own political, not scientific, aims”

On the one political side, we have fascists and their fellow-travelers promoting conspiracy theories (“Jewish space lasers”, “vaccination is a covert plan to chips the population”) and endagnering the lives of their supporters by inducing them to ingest ineffective and potentially toxic horse dewormer instead of taking a vaccine proven safe and effective in thorough clinical studies.

But wait, on the other political side, we have out of their mind woke librls denying the existence of Jewish space lasers and promoting a safe and effective vaccine against the serious scientific objections of a bunch of unqualified youtubers and fascistic Fox News talking heads, and showing their contempt for the rural working class by denying the effectiveness of horse dewormer paste as a Covid remedy.

So to sum up, serious people must conclude that Both Sides Do It, and MisterMr I’m not sure it’s fair to claim that the right does it “more than the left”. Probably, all things considered, the converse. You see, the maliciousness of the left is particularly highlighted by the fact that they advise their political opponents to take a life-saving vaccine, which practically leaves right-wingers no choice but to refuse the life-saving vaccine and die (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/breitbart-conservatives-john-nolte-vaccine/620189/).

rsm 67: Do you understand tghe difference between “Science tells us” and “some scientists believe/have believed”?

“One issue with this is which data are included and which excluded; another is the degree of fit.”
True, hence yay Kuhn!
But there is a more fundamental problem: we are not born with a magic and mystical knowledge of the world, so we have to learn about the world through experience (that is a more generic thing than science).
Experience means that we create a model of the world in our minds, but when we see that the reality outside our heads doesn’t correspond with the model in our heads, we change our model accordingly; but in principle we will never reach a point where we can be sure that our mind model is perfect, we will always be in the situation that, when new experience comes in, we might have to revise our mind model.
Therefore we cannot judge our mind model against “truth”, we can only judge it against the experience we had up to that point, that are the “data”.
This is really the simple idea that nobody holds an absolute truth, everyone will have opinions that represent approximations of reality.
With “science” we have the same problem: a scientific model is supposed to represent reality, but (in particular for social sciences) will always be a simplyfication of reality, and anyway can only be checked against that part of reality we already know, that is to say the data we already have.

I agree, but I conclude that it is more precise to say ‘People in the fifteenth century were justified in relying on models that used epicycles’ than to say ‘In the fifteenth century, epicycles were the correct model’. The evidence available now justifies people in concluding that the planets don’t move in epicycles and also in concluding that they didn’t move in epicycles in the fifteenth century and that when people thought they did they were mistaken.

@72,
If YouTube’s block of RT’s German channels is about ‘misinformation’, when will MSNBC & CNN be banned for Russiagate conspiracies?

By the way, I have a beautiful recent abstract painting, for only $500K. Are you interested?

Well, just to toss my own handful of grit into the conversation (which seems to be a bit removed from the thread now!):

I think I might say (colloquially and simplistically) something like “science is (at its best) the process of constructing the most accurate understanding of reality possible based on the available evidence – and to apportion confidence with respect to the supporting evidence”. Over time the epistemic methodologies have improved (we now have a slightly better idea of how to approach this task compared to 2000 years ago), as has our general understanding of reality. I think one of the important things to remember (which, admittedly, does often get glossed over) is that science is not about handing down Indisputable Truths, but rather about offering “models” which are subject to revision (however, it is surely also worth noting that for very well-established theories, these seem to be decreasingly found to be “wrong” and more likely to be found to be “incomplete” – and so such revision tends to be more about finding where those models break down rather than discovering they were completely wrong).

The distinction between historical and experimental science is an important, and frequently productive, one. However, like many attempts at categorization, it is rarely that simple in practice. While it is true that many of the phenomena are, for all practical purposes, beyond experimental reproducibility (such as the Big Bang), it is (I would argue) also possible to test validity to a certain extent (cf. Tiktaalik, radiometric dating, etc.). Moreover, it is also worth noting that Dodick et al. (2009) found that historical sciences seem to use a more nuanced comparison of levels of confidence in constructed explanations compared to their experimental counterparts – and I suspect it is not accidental that this is in keeping with general Humeistic principles.

Scientists are, by and large, not “superior intellects with genius management skills” (at least, I would say, no more than any other profession), but people who have training and the inclination towards performing that role. In principle, I think most people could probably carry out my role more-or-less as effectively as I do if they’d had the training and the experience (and were prepared to tolerate the conditions currently imposed upon those who do so). On the other hand, I would say that “if” is a non-trivial one – but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

I think it is certainly true that anyone can do science – but, to borrow from that great philosopher Anton Ego (2007), this does not mean everyone can carry out good science, but that good science can come from anyone. The social processes are important – not because they are strictly necessary or the final word, but because we have found that it helps with the quality of the work (and, though this is often neglected in discussion, these processes are ongoing too). And while it is certainly true that having credentials does not a scientist make, I would suggest this is true in the sense that “you don’t need to study medicine to offer sound medical advice” or “you don’t need to practice playing an instrument to be a good musician” are true. The process of training in scientific rigour helps you learn how to carry out science without falling into epistemic errors – and while by no means perfect, there is a reason that it exists. In short, I would suggest that while the orderly and rigorous exploration of reality does not require modern-day training, modern-day training does help one carry it out.

Of course, this is all a gross oversimplification, but in my defense it would take a little more than a blog comment to do the topic justice.

Science is not an arcane process where the elite engage in high-minded discussion or rarefied principles, but rather mostly normal people (I’ll leave it to others to determine if that means “people who are mostly normal”, or “most of the people are normal”!) carrying out the troublesome endeavour of problem solving to make incremental progress towards “knowing stuff a bit better”. And while (as I have long noted) there are many fair criticisms which may be made of how it is currently being carried out, the process and the methodologies seem to currently be the most reliable tools we have – but if someone has better, I’d certainly be interested in seeing them.

Of course, I’d recommend everyone take this comment with a mountain of salt – after all, I’m but a random person on the internet – and I would strongly encourage those interested in the topic to contact those with relevant expertise (not as final authorities, but more as helpful references). But regardless, progress staggers on (one funeral at a time, as the saying goes).

Gorgonzola Petrovna: [you argue that MSNBC and CNN are peddling conspiracy theories about “Russiagate]

Gaslighter.

There is ample evidence that your boy Shitler was open to aid from Russia, and that’s shown in both the Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report (chair, notable Communist Senator Richard Burr). And lots of other evidence.

Gaslighter.