On 11/05/2006, at 6:42 PM, Dan Minette wrote:
However, it is still testable. You can show to a high level of
confidence that Asking Jimmy works. And once you know that, you know
that there's SOME mechanism by which it occurs.
I would agree that, by far, the likely outcome is that a mechanism
would be
found. But, I thinking of a hypothetical case where there was a
magical
connection between the weather two months from now and Jimmy. There
is no
mechanism, it's as if Jimmy has the ability to read the Weather
Service's
observation page/radar plots from two months from now....but his
ability to
see the future is limited to only the weather in one city. This is an
implementation of Nick's "non-scientific method of testing". I
agree that
it is testable....and thus science is not immunized against
acknowledging
non-scientific methods of understanding the universe.
I understood the premise. I was just stating that knowing something
works, "proving" something works, and knowing HOW it works are
different things. Like gravity... it's been 400 years since Galileo
was dropping stuff and Newton got conked by fruit, they knew gravity
worked and managed to deduce a pretty good understand of what it does
- but they had no idea how. And we're not there yet. Asking Jimmy is
like that. If it's magic, we might never know HOW he did it, just
that he did it. (Animal navigation is another good one - it's taken
hundreds of years, maybe thousands if you're a wildebeast chasing
African, but we're still fairly clueless as to how it works....
magnetic senses are theorised - humans have a pretty good built-in
compass... - but HOW they work is not known).
Like the mobile phone thing. We've kicked around and argued a few
mechanisms by which a mobile phone *might* cause cancer, or by which
the behaviour of people who are high-users of mobiles might lead them
to other behaviours which are cancer-promoters. But really, unless
there are some studies that show a clear correlation between mobiles
and brain tumours, we don't even know if there's really a link or
not. So we can have some fun chats on possible causes (I disagree
with the good brain doctor that physics is irrelevant here!)
I think Zimmy was saying that, since the physics indicates that the
power
from mobile phones is not sufficient to affect the brain, he has a
heightened skepticism concerning the report of damage found.
Yep. But if the studies keep showing a correlation, then we know
*something* is going on. So there's either an as yet unknown
mechanism, or it's a co-correllation (like shoe size and reading
ability in school kids in any given year). Maybe having a brain
tumour increases mobile phone use!
but really it's only for fun (unless anyone here really *believes*
"phones cause cancer"?).
I'm pretty sure "The Fool" does believe this. I'd argue that the
reference
to other studies, the lack of a mechanism, etc., the critique of
methodology
are all part of the technique of science to evaluate the results
presented
by individual experimenters. We are using the normal mechanisms of
science
on the list to evaluate a claim of "proof by one groups results" by
the
Fool.
True, that.
Charlie
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