James Webb Space Telescope

[brian64]

As a layman I do typically seek out, defer to, and rely on "expert" (using that term loosely) opinion and insight into whatever topic, issue, question is at hand. It seems to me this is the reasonable and prudent thing to do when it comes to questions that require years of study and expertise.

This is supposed to be one of the major benefits of living in an advanced civilization. In theory, if not in practice, the institutions of "higher learning" are created and funded by the community for the betterment of everyone. Unfortunately, just like with politics, it has been highly corrupted in many ways.

I did learn to read and write (went to grade school back in the days when they still taught those things) and have sufficient reasoning ability to have made it through 6 decades without ending up incapacitated, maimed, dead or in prison. So I like to think I'm capable of understanding a little bit of stuff.

One thing I came to understand many years ago that is more true today than ever, is no matter the subject, the bonafide "experts" do not all agree. Never have and never will. And it isn't just one or two...it's typically many of them. So I simply have to choose which ones make the most sense to me and seem the least compromised.

IMO, one of the major problems with "modern science" in general is that it is way too compartmentalized and specialized. This is what I like about someone like LaViolette (author of the book I posted earlier in the thread). He passed in 2022, but he had an advanced degree in physics systems science / general systems theory, which seems to be rare. Most are highly specialized in one particular area (especially true in medical science) and just don't take a holistic approach, and never seem to get the big picture.

 

[karam]

One of the very popular sentiments we see in today's society is a belief that expertise doesn't really matter, that everyone and anyone is an expert and their comments of equal value, even that expertise is a bad thing. Good luck with that nanny nonsense.

I have nothing against elites based on merit and will give consideration to people who do the work over people who do not.

So true.

 

[Streeper541]

IBTL

 

[BarrelProof]

IBTL

I guessed 10 pages.

 

[sablebrush52]

MO, one of the major problems with "modern science" in general is that it is way too compartmentalized and specialized. This is what I like about someone like LaViolette (author of the book I posted earlier in the thread). He passed in 2022, but he had an advanced degree in physics systems science / general systems theory, which seems to be rare. Most are highly specialized in one particular area (especially true in medical science) and just don't take a holistic approach, and never seem to get the big picture.

Some of that is due simply to the expansion of complexity within specializations.

Using computer graphics as an example, since it's one I am most familiar with first hand, in the 1980's we couldn't produce realistic lighting, modeling, textures or animation. There were no advanced GUI's, most things had to be typed command line by command line.

Move forward 10 years and we had GUI's but the functions for lighting, animation, modeling and rigging, texture mapping, lighting were still pretty limited, so a generalist could still handle all of it. Different applications had different strengths and their coding made it difficult if not impossible to port that information and capability between applications. We needed coders to write bridge applications so that we could port models between applications.

Move forward a few years and we had fluid dynamic simulation, gravity and mass simulation, motion capture, improvements with texturing with more complications, camera tracking, meta balls, particle FX, lighting FX, more ways to model and rig, a lot more range and ability, but also a lot more complexity.

More forward a few more years and we had fractal based landscape capabilities, more complex rendering capabilities, more complex motion capture, more complex rigging, more complex lighting, more complex gravity and fluid dynamics simulation that could do much more than previous systems, etc, etc, etc, but which also required much more experience to exploit, and there was no way a generalist was going to be able to cover it, which is why specialists became the norm.

And as digital capabilities continued to be more refined and more powerful, even those specializations need to be split to be able to even hope to optimize what the applications offer.

It's no different anywhere else. The expansion of knowledge and technology requires specialization and that specialization may require more knowledge and expertise than what a generalist needed to know just a few years before.

 

[olkofri]

the bonafide "experts"

I only know that they know nothing.

 

[OverMountain]

Absolutely, especially with financial experts. I can't tell you how many times I've seen entirely contradicting projections given by "noted experts" in the financial field. If they're all contradicting each other I have to wonder what the standards are for their analysis. Often I believe it's tea leaves and sometimes chicken bones.

I think null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) with an appropriate confidence interval is the gold standard of “analysis” as far as I know. NHST is only possible with a dataset and a very controlled experimental and control group so it is hard to use it as a crystal ball without a deep dive into effect sizes in specific contexts.

Whatever you may be an expert in, all I can say is “trust your observation”. Your brain is an incredible pattern recognizer. What we call “gut intuition” is really years of pattern and outcome recognition.

If you want to look at something different sometime, check out “unconscious thought theory” and it’s criticism. Trust your gut and don’t get bogged down in “paralysis by analysis”. Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of the time for a deep dive.

 

[Winnipeger]

This was a very entertaining TEDx talk, with some very insightful and interesting parts and some absolute bullshit, especially Dr Sheldrake's list of 10 Dogmas. It does make for a lovely sound bite, but my experience with scientists really doesn't support it. Granted, my contacts, like the President (now former president) of the American Academy of Sciences, may be merely fringe figures in the scientific community, but I'd like to think that they are quite representative of it. And what this means is that they have inquiring, open minds, but also have standards and methodologies for investigating phenomena. They are not likely to agree with the black and white thinking, the "if part of something isn't solid then none of it is solid so let's throw out all of it" reactionary mindset, which is a closed one.

I agree there are "some very insightful and interesting parts and some absolute bullshit" but I don't think he's expressing a "let's throw it all out" "reactionary mindset." I get the sense he's just asking questions. Maybe the word "dogma" is loaded. I don't know.

I had an unfortunate experience with a member of the "scientific establishment" when I was a youngster. I was passionate about physics (from the time I was around 11 years old; my grandfather, a professional chemist, and a freethinker, got me interested in Cosmology among other things, but I'd always had an interest in Big (unanswerable?) Questions), but at a time (in high school) when I didn't have the tools or confidence to fight back or stand up for myself, I was told "don't think" "don't question". I was literally told "your math is good, but if you come up with the wrong answer [because the experiment sucked] you need to fudge the results [so they fall in line with the textbook]." All of which is to say, there are surely dogmatic thinkers littered throughout the education system and maybe some of that type of thinking trickles up, and is amplified by the high degree of specialization required by institutes of higher learning. Credentials don't say anything about what kind of a thinker you are. There are plenty of established roadblocks to honest, earnest enquiry in institutions. Maybe your experiences with the former president of the American Academy of Sciences, and with other elite, highly intelligent people, are not generalizable.

 

[OverMountain]

So true.

View attachment 205582

Don’t give elites in any field too much trust or respect. There’s a big difference in a Jonas Salk and Dr Fauci in every profession.

In this cartoon, one group wants to arrive alive just like the passengers, and another group wants to “take you on a ride”.

 

[sablebrush52]

I think null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) with an appropriate confidence interval is the gold standard of “analysis” as far as I know. NHST is only possible with a dataset and a very controlled experimental and control group so it is hard to use it as a crystal ball without a deep dive into effect sizes in specific contexts.

Whatever you may be an expert in, all I can say is “trust your observation”. Your brain is an incredible pattern recognizer. What we call “gut intuition” is really years of pattern and outcome recognition.

If you want to look at something different sometime, check out “unconscious thought theory” and it’s criticism. Trust your gut and don’t get bogged down in “paralysis by analysis”. Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of the time for a deep dive.

Yep. It's something long time practitioners in an industry refer to as "experience".

 

[sablebrush52]

I agree there are "some very insightful and interesting parts and some absolute bullshit" but I don't think he's expressing a "let's throw it all out" "reactionary mindset." I get the sense he's just asking questions. Maybe the word "dogma" is loaded. I don't know.

I had an unfortunate experience with a member of the "scientific establishment" when I was a youngster. I was passionate about physics (from the time I was around 11 years old; my grandfather, a professional chemist, and a freethinker, got me interested in Cosmology among other things, but I'd always had an interest in Big (unanswerable?) Questions), but at a time (in high school) when I didn't have the tools or confidence to fight back or stand up for myself, I was told "don't think" "don't question". I was literally told "your math is good, but if you come up with the wrong answer [because the experiment sucked] you need to fudge the results [so they fall in line with the textbook]." All of which is to say, there are surely dogmatic thinkers littered throughout the education system and maybe some of that type of thinking trickles up, and is amplified by the high degree of specialization required by institutes of higher learning. Credentials don't say anything about what kind of a thinker you are. There are plenty of established roadblocks to honest, earnest enquiry in institutions. Maybe your experiences with the former president of the American Academy of Sciences, and with other elite, highly intelligent people, are not generalizable.

Maybe so. People bring their prejudices to their professions and I've dealt with a lot of posers in my career, especially when a lot of my work was with advertising agencies. And there have been notable frauds, like the "cold fusion" bullshit that happened 30 odd years ago.
I can only go on my experience, which says otherwise, but I've no doubt that there are plenty of fakes. My uncle was a very hardcore empirical scientist, and he could be a wilting son of a bitch when dealing with lesser intellects, like mine, but that didn't stop him from being open to "other" possibilities. I'm happy to debunk science when I see a rigorously researched and presented reason to do so. So far, the vast majority of these presentations consist of woolly thought out BS made up of glittering generalities and placating syllogisms.

 

[mso489]

JWST will be juggling our intellects long after it is functional, which maybe be a long time or not, since it is beyond the distance where it could be successfully repaired within reasonable cost. It's too soon to start revising our opinions of science and expertise on account of the new puzzling data it generates. We're at the beginning of JWST 101 as it were, and the best astronomy minds will be slugging it out for decades trying to figure out what it's telling us.

If you are still a student and want to spend the next ten years getting advanced degrees in astronomy and publishing peer reviewed papers that can pass the tests of the best available minds on the subject, have at it.

Even after JWST burns out, and even without a replacement to continue the data stream, the profession will be grinding away understanding and interpreting what these images and spectroscopy means. If we don't foolishly and carelessly blow ourselves into oblivion in the meantime. Our choice. The stupid people may end us all in extinction, if you want to rail at something meaningless and wicked.

 

[greeneyes]

As a layman I do typically seek out, defer to, and rely on "expert" (using that term loosely) opinion and insight into whatever topic, issue, question is at hand. ...

IMO, one of the major problems with "modern science" in general is that it is way too compartmentalized and specialized. This is what I like about someone like LaViolette (author of the book I posted earlier in the thread). He passed in 2022, but he had an advanced degree in physics systems science / general systems theory, which seems to be rare. Most are highly specialized in one particular area (especially true in medical science) and just don't take a holistic approach, and never seem to get the big picture.

I hope I can make this post "before the lock."

Paul Alex LaViolette, fired in 1999 from the US Patent Office [LINK].

Holds a patent for a "Machine for slowing the flow of time and extending life" [LINK].

His work appears [HERE] on a website with which he's affiliated, much of which isn't peer-reviewed science. Much of it is "commentary." I'm still looking several of these up, one by one. The co-authors on several of them appear to be shadow-people, amateur "scientists", and persons with no degrees or institutional affiliation. Many of these papers were uploaded to 'Researchgate' which apparently doesn't check whether they're bona fide peer-reviewed papers. This one [HERE] is a good example. It's not an actual paper/publication, but presented as such. The first author, Brendan J. Darrer published once in 2015 and graduated in 2017; hasn't published anything real since and is not part of the LaViolette pseudo-physics echo chamber summarized [HERE].

I'm not sure how much of LaViolette's work is genuine, vetted science, but what I can discern from taking a couple-hours dive into his work is that he has built a sort of echo-chamber of shoddy credentials and websites to substantiate his unorthodox credentials.

He seems to be something of an L. Ron Hubbard in scientist's trappings, as a member of several pseudoscientific societies dealing with eccentric pursuits bordering on, or squarely in the realm of science fiction. One of these being "electrogravitics" on which LaViolette has (self-) published many works.

 

[greeneyes]

I meant "now" part of the echo chamber. Not "not". I have to believe these people make a living with book sales and talking gigs at conventions.

 

[Winnipeger]

Now I need to comment because I wasted 90 minutes of my Sunday to watch this, 90 minutes I won't ever get back.

This conference is deeply DEEPLY flawed. It includes three people, none of which is a biologist, all of which are anti-evolution, under the aegis of a likely partisan institution. But I came to it with an open mind, didn't look any of the people up until after watching it.

I won't lose any more time debunking all they're saying other than: they make the extremely false assumption that evolution can do everything, can make a cat turn into a dog and then into a fish. Evolution doesn't work this way. It requires going in a peaks and troughs: going up towards a peak (of evolutionary strength), reaching the peak and then staying there until conditions change. It cannot change once hitting a peak, and it has no reason to either. It can only go down by the organism failing - not surviving - under new circumstances. Then once an organism acclimates to new circumstances it can begin evolving towards a new peak.

David Gelernter's quotes used throughout would make even a first-year biology student cringe by their gaping lack of knowledge and understanding. He is talking about a protein being like a string of beads, and evolution rearranging the beads in tens of thousands of possible combinations. This is fundamentally flawed. Proteins have structural domains and functional domains. Think of it as having a building and deciding to change the doors or windows (functional domains). You can do that, evolution can do that. It CANNOT start changing the angles walls are built in (structural domains), or ripping out foundations, or trying to build a skyscraper from foam because the building (ie the protein) will not function, it will collapse. Similarly there are is no endless rearranging, there are very few viable potential adjustments that are made randomly through point mutations of the DNA sequence. If they are good for the organism they are retained, if they are not the organism never makes it and they are lost. And this doesn't happen in a single instance on a single gene, it happens continuously across hundreds of genes. I've actually directed the evolution of bacteria in the lab for my own fun, even predicted what would happen, and it did, like any sound scientific theory does.

He goes on to talk backwards about proteins and genes, ignoring the fundamental order of genetics and biochemistry: DNA <-> RNA -> protein. You can go from DNA to RNA and then back to DNA, you CANNOT go from protein to RNA, there's no biological mechanism to do so. DNA and RNA are similar and very regularly structured molecules, they are sequences of identical blocks with small differentiating regions, like a film reel. There are proteins which can read these reels and then construct what the image on the reel is. Think of it like a projector fed a film reel and then constructing everything shown on the film.

Total total bunk of an epic scale. Embarrassing really. But that's the best a planned polemic can do: take some people with real qualifications (to lend some weight and credibility) in fields other than biology (mathematics, computer science, philosophy), and real opinions on a subject they don't know much about, and understand even less about, and guide them (not that they needed a lot of guidance) to produce the desired result.

This is my last post on this thread.

Credentials: BSc, MSc in biology, PhD in biochemistry, 4 years academic research position.

@karam, since you haven't actually quit this thread as you said you would, I'm just curious what you thought of the assertion (in the video) that the Cambrian Explosion happened too quickly to be accounted for by Darwinian Natural Selection, and that the fossil record (with my own avowed caveat that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack) lacks evidence of sufficient precursors. Is their math just bad? Is their understanding of geology bad? Are they just complete and total morons? Because I didn't get that impression at all. Their questioning of Darwinian Evolution's accounting (or lack thereof) of the origin of life and consciousness, and of the geologic abruptness of the Cambrian Explosion, made me think — far from Creationism — of the theory of Panspermia. Impossible to falsify, but interesting. No?

I don't want to engage you in a debate per se, because I surely lack the expertise to do so. I'm just a deeply curious person. There was a lot that was obviously debatable about that video, but also a lot I found interesting. You've already stated you're a Dawkins-level atheist. Talk of "Intelligent Design" certainly smacks of Christian Apologetics. Is it possible your own bias is playing a role in your vehement denunciation of this video? You don't need to answer that, but I'm curious what you think about the former questions. I'm mainly interested in where life and consciousness come from. Not in whether or not Darwin was "Right", or whether "God" created heaven and earth.

 

[greeneyes]

Karam, since you haven't actually quit this thread as you said you would, I'm just curious what you thought of the assertion (in the video) that the Cambrian Explosion happened too quickly to be accounted for by Darwinian Natural Selection, and that the fossil record (with my own avowed caveat that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack) lacks evidence of sufficient precursors. Is their math just bad?

Their math is just math without consideration for biology. Who told them that mutational rates or speciation rates were constant? Or that rates of mutations in genes was a purely probabilistic calculation based on the number of bases? It only sounds like it makes sense. What is sounds like to someone who understands biology is something akin to a Three Stooges skit with a calculator as a prop.

 

[jguss]

I have to believe these people make a living with book sales and talking gigs at conventions.

Not, alas, LaViolette among them since he apparently died last year: Paul LaViolette Obituary (2023) - Schenectady, NY - The Daily Gazette Co. - https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/dailygazette/name/paul-laviolette-obituary?id=38517588.

I say apparently, since like L. Ron Hubbard (or Elijah before him) LaViolette may have learned to “drop his body” and progress to a higher plane of existence.

 

[Winnipeger]

Their math is just math without consideration for biology. Who told them that mutational rates or speciation rates were constant? Or that rates of mutations in genes was a purely probabilistic calculation based on the number of bases? It only sounds like it makes sense. What is sounds like to someone who understands biology is something akin to a Three Stooges skit with a calculator as a prop.

Ok Karam...so what is "biology"? Is it just Natural Selection?

 

[jguss]

Credentials: BSc, MSc in biology, PhD in biochemistry, 4 years academic research position.

But did you work in the patent office?

 

[BarrelProof]