pouët.net

are think the CERN folks are full of it, come help me build a an accelerator like theirs, so we can check out if they arent just blowing smoke out of their ass, or do you think we can borrow theirs? What you state is only true in theory!

My point is, preacher...With the exception of humanistic "sciences", todays science has become so costly that layman can't just "check it out" for himself. Not only are most of, if not all the chemicals he could be interrested in for studying the claims of e.g chemistry (phluoride is good for you, aspartame is healthy etc,..) illegal and impossible to obtain, some will land a person jail time for posession of them.

I would like to study the chemistry of kavalactones more indepth, I know how to, I can get the required gear. Im not allowed to import the fresh root because im not an official reseacher. I don believe in the claims of big pharmacy, and their asslickers in the public health ministry, that the kavalaktones are hepatotixic in any way. The reason I dont belive this claim of theirs is because the raw kava drink has been consumed for atleat a millenia in places like venuatu, the Fiiji Islands and they havent all turned yellow, even though they drink it in amounts that are as much as 100 times as high as the proposed point of hepatotoxicity. Someone is lying, and what is worse, someone is using the official channels of science and government to uphold an obvious LIE to protect financial interrests. In other words, science and its truth value is for sale as much as the next joe, and people who fail to understand this, are indeed the devout followers of a science who can blurt out that we can "always check out the claims for ourself"...no, no we cannot, even those of us who wants to are not allowed to due to various laws preventing it.

Not the act it self, that would be too obvious but...you wanna check ou tthe claims of big pharmacy and their state monkeys, well too bad for you, everything down to the solvents is illegal for you to posess without proper clearance....so youre just going to have to take our word for it ...hmmm where have i heard those words before?!

decipher I meant...

no.

Since you are using a computer, the internet, most likely a mobile phone, cars, trains, etc. you seem to have actually a lot of faith in science?

If you hate science so much please go live in cave somewhere and pray to that invisible man in the sky that loves us so much. Please, never go to a doctor when you need it. Just pray and let it heal by the mighty god.

Also, you living in a cave would make pout.net a nicer place.

*pouet.net, goddamnit.

Your emotional defense of science only serves the argument; noone said anything of hating science.

Funny for you to talk of a 'nicer' atmosphere on pouet with your derogatory attitude.

Look, it's a PRIST!!! (sic)

spitfire: I assume you are not familiar with eebliss and his trolling history?

FREE. SAUSAGES.

No I'm not, but regardless, I think this is a valid argument to have without getting offensive.

or is the word debate? Always get those two confused...

eebliss: Still there are certain exceptions. Sure, it's hard to check it yourself nowadays due to costs and stuff, but when there are papers published there will always be peer reviews or a scientific body will conduct the experiment, as in hundreds if not thousands of scientists. I am not sure if I could say your good ol' pal, God's Word is peer reviewed. Well it has been manipulated / corrected for damn sure but that's not what peer review is. I think the probability of all those scientists lying is way less than the probability of your little friend God (as defined by most of the major religions) existing -- which is about 0 as the definition contradicts itself, at least definitely for Qur'an (think of justice and mercy, the God can't possess all the adjectives as you guys claim it does, thus it is imperfect which doesn't make it a god anymore).

Also you are missing another point. You are free not to believe in the results of the scientific experiments or the theories that are proven to work (e.g. evolution), you can also say "fuck this" and come up with a better explanation of why a certain phenomena occurs. There are tons and tons of papers out there; the science is open-source, everybody can reach those papers and build on them, themselves. You can't do this with religion, if you don't believe in the damn deity you end up burning alive, someone impaling you, getting hung or at least you end up gaining the hatred of half of the world for no reason. On the other hand, science, unlike your God's Word, never tells you "x is y"; it's an iterative and recursive process, it just gets closer and closer to the perfect understanding of how something happens. You can, at all times, refuse the scientific method and say "my invisible friend does it for the lulz" and we'll just smile back at you, but we won't burn, impale or behead you for it.

You wouldnt get impaled today for refusing religion. The past was just a much more brutal period, it wasnt only religion people got slaughtered for. The reason there are so many diferent religions today is precisely because someone said 'fuck this' and did it their way.

If we have to judge the system by the probability of the people supporting it to lie, or the number of people who support it, then once again this shows how fickle our basis for trust in science is.

spoken like a true believer...

@decipher...us guys? I am an intellectual deist that studies all religions. because of my personal run in with the faith of islam it became my primary point of focus in my studies. You are posting a religion vs. science arguement, were im not. And as far as your peer-review thing, this is only true in it's intended function so far. If a lie has been made kanon allready, anything that disagrees with it, will be scorned by the community by default. Dont say that this does not happen, scientific history is littered with "sudden rewrites" of what we know force through when the official oppinion could not be upheld anymore. I know how science is supposed to work ideally, just like I know how religion is supposed to work idealy, what I have found is that neither actually works as their devout followers and believers are led to believe. have i by this said that all science is bad? if you get that from what I write, I encourage you to read it over again, as many times as you need to.

thread start:...haw haw, I wonder what eeblis has to say about this...

You can actually carry out these tests. It's just that you need to be a part of a skilled team with proper technology. I don't think there's much wrong in prohibiting that you blow up your apartment with your chem hobby research. So get your PhD and find a job at a local NGO research lab or customer protection agency.

Also, if you're not into chem but have doubts about asparthame etc., just donate some of your income to a sympathetic NGO that's doing related research, and follow their results.

Science paper: written by a team, based on evidence they've collected and checked. Reviewed by others to check it works out. The experiments get repeated by other teams in other countries to make sure they're repeatable. If all that works out, it's taken as probably true, but if a better theory or an issue crops up, it's rejected and replaced with something new.

Religious book: written by a man, based on what he claims to have been told by something that doesn't have any actual supporting evidence at all. Reviewed by people who believe it to be true and find alternative meanings when it doesn't quite work out. Not really tested to see if it's true, but now and then a government or powerful group will edit it or change parts so it fits their views or ambitions. If something better turns up, it can fuck off and start it's own religion.

isn't that a pretty snotty position? Some of the finest unregulated drugs on the marked are made (sometimes even invented) in someones basement, and God bless these fine scientists too.



Like the folks like the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research?. The Mellon Institute was a leading defender of asbestos, and backed up the asbestos industry in the plethora of lawsuits which dealt with the mountain of health concerns, and cases of mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure. For generations, the Mellon Institute produced research which claimed that mesothelioma was caused by something other than asbestos. or how about Heartland Institute that gives us nuggets like these:

"Anti-smoking activists give smokers a stark choice: Stop smoking or die! In fact, there is a third path: Reduce the harm by shifting to less-hazardous kinds of tobacco products. For example, moving from unfiltered to filtered cigarettes, and from regular to “low tar” cigarettes, both appear to reduce the risk of lung cancer......No victim of cancer, heart disease, etc. can “prove” his or her cancer or heart disease was caused by exposure to secondhand smoke." - Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast

These are the same fine people that invite us to International Climate Change Conferences btw.

I am sorry , but I don't think I am qualified to figure out which NGO's are actually working for the betterment of the public, and which are but talking heads for the chemical industry.

You can test many otherwise untestable things on a different scale. You just have to be imaginative.

It's interesting how the pioneers in any field never really seem to have received a formal education in the field they're only just inventing, whereas the people who are later educated in that field somehow can't take credit for inventing it. Did you know Einstein was never taught relativity in school? I know, it's weird!



This is like saying open-source software could be full of hidden spyware because not everyone takes the time to read through all the source code. It's nonsense.

Plus, a large part of any scientific education is repeating experiments for which the results are already considered "certain". This is to familiarise the student with the methods, but has the added benefit that all results get checked and checked and rechecked a million times over. The peer-review process means practically only sound science is published in the first place, and anything unsound that might slip through is immediately attacked by competing scientists who want to prove you wrong, or by people who are trying to build on your research and can't get results from what you've done. You can even score points for proving yourself wrong.

If you do find any scientific finding suspicious, just repeat the experiment. If you don't have the training and background knowledge to do that, get an education. Unlike in a religion, you're not simply supposed to take some prophet's word for it. Everything is documented and repeatable.



Yes, some science costs a lot of money. It's good that we're finally coming to terms with that. If we had been willing to fund some of Tesla's more expensive projects, we might have had wireless electricity by now. How cool would that have been! Think about it - electric cars, portable equipment without batteries.. but no, Tesla was demonised by jealous competitors, sensationalist media and a paranoid public, and we were stuck with wired power grids, chemical batteries and combustion engines for a hundred years. Which sucks.

Never the less you're still free to repeat the experiments conducted at CERN, at least in principle. However determined you are, you simply can't demand verification of prophecy or revelation. And that's the principal difference between science and religion.

You could also redo the science that justifies building the CERN monstrosity, to see for yourself why it's interesting to smash particles together, and confirm that the way the machine is designed it does indeed smash particles together. In the process you may become a distinguished scientist, maybe even part of one of the many, many research teams from all around the world who use the collider for their various experiments. Then you can come tell us all about the conspiracy.



In many parts of the world you would. Especially if you belonged to a group of people that the dominant local religion tries to oppress (women, typically, or homosexuals).



No, the reason is that humanity has been spread pretty thin in the past and not clustered into large societies the way it is today. Each separate group needed its own framework for the powerful to oppress the weak and for primitive men to describe what they didn't understand, and eventually as these religions began to collide, it was precisely the unscientific nature of religion that made it impossible to reconcile the differences. Had religion been more like science, all these different traditions would have learned from each other and merged into one.



The religious attitude in this case is maintaining that second-hand smoke is dangerous without actually being able to document it, and dismissing anyone that says "maybe it's not" without checking out the underlying research.

Even so, if indeed the Heartland Institute is spouting bullshit, the problem is not the bullshit itself, because that will be transparent to anyone who bothers to check how they arrived at their conclusions (you know, all the science behind it). The problem, rather, is that decisions are ultimately made by politicians, and to politicians, science is just a tool for backing up an opinion, just like polls are all about asking the right questions to the right people to arrive at the figures you've already decided that you want.

doom, I agree fully with that, and want to add to it that financial interrests properbly play a larger role than the eternally gullible politicians. My point with the examples above was merely to demonstrate that even respected institutes are for hire with the highest bidder, and I have no way of deciphering whom are genuine and whom is genuine to the point of being promised grants or services in exchange for biased research. I guess it is stating the obvious, that scientists are people and they have their share of bad apples in the basket.

None of this however removes how the large majority of people experience science only though what they are told to be correct. In the above 2 institutes alone youll find a good case pro, that this trust may not be well earned. America is atm. largely fluoridated, meaning that they put this chemical in the drinking water (strangely enough mellon pops up again when you take a look at it). There are scientist upon scientists over there aswell as abroad who argue how this may be the source for the growth of attention disorders and nerve damage in young children, and the track record of the chemical in question suggest that this may not be completely off the wall. So far atleast 2 people that I know of (G.Waldbott, P. Mullenix), have had their careers destroyed for questioning the official canon on fluoride.

So i repeat, I understand how science ideally is supposed to work, and my oppinion is that it is just not so. And those who refuse to face this, are little but followers of a cult where they assume that their pristhood are telling the truth at all times simply for the good of everybody and nothing else.

I think its nonsense to assert that this is impossible. I could make such OSS right now, and could never be certain other OSS is clean without checking it myself. But I will assume it is.

Wether science itself is sound or not isnt the debate.

There's a huge difference between science and religion though when it comes to 'what you believe'.

For most science stuff, it's either easy enough to check yourself, or it's not really important (does it really matter what happens at the end of the particle beams at CERN?) For the important stuff like asbestos and second hand smoke, you're free to believe what one side or the other is saying, and you're free to challenge it. Go ahead, get a group of volunteers together to sit and inhale asbestos dust, wait 20 years, publish the death rates. Or, just assume that if some people think it's dangerous and others think it's safe, there might be some risk involved, and decide whether to sit in a smoky room all day or not yourself.

With religion, you have to believe pretty much all or nothing (otherwise you're just making your own religion up, just like the people who made up all the other religions. Unless they're all true of course..) You can't really go out and check for yourself that any of it is true, because you're taking somebody's word that something once happened, and a god you can't see, hear or in any way detect at all made it happen.

Where are all these gods supposed to have come from originally anyway?