N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (GaryGaulin @ April 26 2015,16:34) | The following is a perfect description of my scientific work that has for many years kept me up late at night running experiments and reading the latest research information in order to help substantiate my explanation for how intelligence works:
| Quote | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
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Science teachers need to beware of the definition being taken out of context by those who believe the description of the theory writing process is instead describing a tribunal that dictates whether a theory is a theory or not. In reality a theory is either useful or it's not, and where it's just plain wrong it's a "failed theory" that remains a theory even where totally bogus.
There is no scientific need at all for any of the embellishments that are being argued are necessary. They are only necessary to those who want to make it appear that they have the authority to dismiss then discredit theory, before they even test it. Not being able to understand what I'm talking about while complaining about terminology they are not used to is only a good indication of their not being able to fairly judge the theory. |
Note: we aren't dismissing your ideas because they aren't a theory. It is true that they don't qualify as a theory, because they haven't reached any level of acceptance or even of being taken seriously, but this is only relevant to your wrong claims on the subject. We are rejecting your ideas solely because they give every appearance of being a pile of crap.
| Quote | | A scientific theory is a |
So far, so good.
Strike One. Nothing about your stuff is well substantiated.
Strike Two: your stuff doesn't explain anything. It just makes a bunch of assertions that appear to be wrong.
| Quote | | of some aspect of the natural world |
Alright, intelligence is natural (although you are still going to have to remove the hippocampi from your insects)
[quote]that is acquired through the scientific method [quote]
Strike Three: you have made massive violations of scientific methods, standards, and practices.
| Quote | | and repeatedly tested |
Your stuff is test-free - Strike Four
Hey, you are the one that wanted to apply this particular quote, so don't blame the messenger. Strike Five.
| Quote | | through observation |
Averse to ground-truthing your model and making sure that it is relevant to reality, so Strike Six.
| Quote | | and experimentation |
Modelling can substitute for experimentation, if they are carefully ground-truthed and made to align with reality. However, yours isn't, and your larger claims against natural selection, for the emergence of intelligence, for intelligence without neurons and brains, for fractal self-similarity, and for both emergence and intelligent design have nothing to do with your model or with any other observations or experiments that you have done, so Strike Seven, and back to the bush leagues you go.
| Quote | | The only thing you are now claiming is that a hypothesis does not even have to explain how something works, which is true. |
Read what I have said all along: the PBS version is fine for kiddies (you can have hypotheses that aren't explanations). It's just a bit too simplistic for professionals.
| Quote | | Your Buddy site says that an hypothesis is an idea that is testable. I'd modify that slightly to "a proposed explanation that is testable" ("I have an hypothesis that elephants can't fly" is less of an hypothesis than "I have an hypothesis that elephants can't fly because they can't flap their ears fast enough"), but I'm basically fine with the PBS definition and having been using "hypothesis" consistently for testable potential explanations. |
Note "less of an hypothesis" and "basically fine with". However, I showed that it is indeed common to add something about potential explanations, because hypotheses are much more useful that way.
| Quote | | And a hypothesis can be useful to know by having tested false (Water is most dense after having fully cooled to ice) but none of that requires embellishing the simple accepted definition of "An idea you can test". |
Have I said that disproving an hypothesis is not an advance? I stressed "potential explanation", not "proven explanation", because the whole point of an hypothesis is that one doesn't know the outcome ahead of the test. If you are doing it right with mutually exclusive hypotheses, 50% of your hypotheses have to fail. However, again, you haven't done ANY hypothesis-testing, so why you are telling me about it as opposed to getting your ass in gear and doing some is a bit of a mystery.
Your example is a case in point: simple observation shows that ice floats in water, so there isn't any particular need to test an hypothesis about ice being denser than water and there is nothing to learn from the disproof of that hypothesis. However, testing hypotheses about why ice was not denser than water led to some valuable advances in chemistry and mineralogy.
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