Good News For Cows, Bad News For Science
You may recall my tweaked cow image. My brother had invented a way for their methane emissions to be controlled.
[Thanks to treehugger.com for the original cow image.]
Well, it now turns out that the methane problem is not as bad as we thought. Read this.
This whole Global Warming hysteria is particularly infected with pseudoscientific voodoo (PV for short.) A lot of common economic nonsense is similarly blighted -- ideas like "tax the rich," "raise the minimum wage," "nationalize health care," and "the Fed maintains proper control of the money supply."
Acceptance of junk science as gospel is probably THE biggest problem our world faces today, and I'd even put it right up there with terrorism. It is probably created by a lethal mix of public naivete, media coverage and junk science, much like that parallel explosive mix: public susceptibility, media coverage and terrorism. Neither terrorism nor GW hysteria could endure if it weren't for the media. I'm not blaming the media in either example; it's just a fact of modern life.
The sciences that seem to muck themselves up with a lot of PV are:
Climatology
Economics
Psychology
Anthropology
Sociology
Political Science
History
Jurisprudence
Linguistics
Interesting that with the exception of black-sheep climatology, these are all behavioral sciences. I'm not quite sure how climatology managed to slip in there. There seems to be no real reason, because it should be based on measurements and historical data. Perhaps because there is little data to work with?
So for whatever reason, perhaps (1) for lack of appropriate tools and (2) given the nature of most of these sciences (i.e. their subject centers around humanity, with the exception of climatology), progress in these fields is limited, and yet public thirst for information is great. Hey, that's only normal, it's about ourselves.
Given the vacuum created by our thirst and the lack of input, PV tends to fill up the void. With climatology? I guess it's just the vacuum created by lack of concrete data.
[Thanks to treehugger.com for the original cow image.]
Well, it now turns out that the methane problem is not as bad as we thought. Read this.
This whole Global Warming hysteria is particularly infected with pseudoscientific voodoo (PV for short.) A lot of common economic nonsense is similarly blighted -- ideas like "tax the rich," "raise the minimum wage," "nationalize health care," and "the Fed maintains proper control of the money supply."
Acceptance of junk science as gospel is probably THE biggest problem our world faces today, and I'd even put it right up there with terrorism. It is probably created by a lethal mix of public naivete, media coverage and junk science, much like that parallel explosive mix: public susceptibility, media coverage and terrorism. Neither terrorism nor GW hysteria could endure if it weren't for the media. I'm not blaming the media in either example; it's just a fact of modern life.
The sciences that seem to muck themselves up with a lot of PV are:
Climatology
Economics
Psychology
Anthropology
Sociology
Political Science
History
Jurisprudence
Linguistics
Interesting that with the exception of black-sheep climatology, these are all behavioral sciences. I'm not quite sure how climatology managed to slip in there. There seems to be no real reason, because it should be based on measurements and historical data. Perhaps because there is little data to work with?
So for whatever reason, perhaps (1) for lack of appropriate tools and (2) given the nature of most of these sciences (i.e. their subject centers around humanity, with the exception of climatology), progress in these fields is limited, and yet public thirst for information is great. Hey, that's only normal, it's about ourselves.
Given the vacuum created by our thirst and the lack of input, PV tends to fill up the void. With climatology? I guess it's just the vacuum created by lack of concrete data.
posted by Katy Delay at 7:28 PM
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