I Don’t Trust Any Scientist Younger Than 200 Years Old
Also: At the heart of the Scientific Method you’re required to try to disprove other scientists’ theories, and of course your own as well.
Why do you think scientists are such equivocal wimps? The good ones are going to hem and haw because it actually can take a couple of centuries for their theories and methods to become accepted as correct.
Yes, this sounds twisted to non-scientists, but it’s a system that really, really works. Or did work, at any rate . . .
I’m an old-school classically trained scientist and I am paid by nobody. At my university (Portland State) I didn’t sign up for scholarships either — a university can sort of own you. I really distrust scientists who allow their employers to own them.
In college, studying maths and sciences, I didn’t waste my time actually attending classes unless the professor wanted me there to encourage other students. I found that generally for each of the three quarters in a school year I could read the necessary chapters in 6 or 8 hours and just take the midterm and final exams. My goal was to learn the material and pass. Well, by “pass” I mean 100% — there’s little value in being a scientist if you don’t know it well.
Which is a huge problem now — for scientists in general. The ones educated in the U.S. tend to have huge gaps in their mathematics, and apparently never were taught scientific method. Or they were, and don’t use it. If they were equivocal wimps, maybe that wouldn’t matter. But assertive scientists with these educational gaps who are quoted or published for consumption by the general public . . . (I won’t say what I’d do to them, but it’s PG-13 or worse.)
FRED
