The miscalculation of Science

There are those who strongly believed that scientist are always right in their
calculation, while there are others who feels strongly about the miscalculation
scientist makes every so often, which gives them the right to be skeptical on
certain predictions etc.

Another aspect we could also look at is history, historians have been known
to exclude contents that they think is not important, some can argue that is not the
case, but there are folks who believed Jesus was black and there are others who begs
to differ, see my point.

Now lets look at recent events - Haiti and Chile comes to mind, focusing on all the
scientific and electronics equipments available to mankind, yet scientist where unable
to give an accurate prediction as to when, where and how these events will occur, but
people are to accept the explanation given after the occurrence of these disasters without
questions.

Yes one can make the argument that you get better result after an event, if thats the case
why vilify those that are impervious to science? why castigate their attitude toward science.
I don't believe anyone can fully explain what is happening, especially the sudden burst of
constant disasters, but looking back at history, one can see where the disparage from
people comes from as history have shown disaster occurrence has been minimal compared to what is
happening now, some might say it's global warming as that is seen as the 800 pound gorilla, but
my values does not change because I have a different opinion.

:shrug:

not make blanket claims when there is an abnormal confluence of them. I think.

The Cascade subduction zone is going to slip and cause a catastrophic mag 9 event that will devastate the Pacific Nortwest and cause a Tsunami that inundates Japan.

Could happen tomorrow- or in 2110.

On the other hand, people paying attention KNEW that New Orleans would be drowned by a hurricane. Scientists and engineers warned about it and tried to get funding from the Republican congress throughout the 90's and 00's to beef up the "defences." We even had frighteningly accurate modelling- and a dry run the year before Katrina.

I was trying to decipher what I thought the op meant. Thanks for the map!

to the nth power.

'bout sums it up.

The scientific method can be abused and people are imperfect in their knowledge but do you really want someone who is confidant of their own opinions but ignorant of medicine operating on you?

and since I have been 'saved by science' on several occasions, let's just say that I know going into it that there could very well be errors but the overwhelming odds are good based on their professional training and experience. When I need anecdotal encouragement I go to a breast cancer support group, but they aren't going to help me make a good medical decision which my surgeon or onc would help me do. Things have gone wrong before when the body didn't respond as we'd hoped, but then we try another proven, scientifically-researched method.

There are no guarantees, but if the flood is rising then I'm taking a real boat not something thrown together with duct tape by MacGuyver wannabes.

which is my point exactly, using your doctors analogy as an example, one
would think that a doctor would be the last person you would want making
mistakes.

Having that in mind, do you think it's wise to accept diagnostics from
1 doctor?

Heard a lot about it in the last 40 years.

...and failing miserably. The best translation I'm able to offer is

1. "Science can't currently predict some incredibly difficult to predict specific things, therefore you're not allowed to criticise pseudoscience and quackery"

2. "OMG! Look how many disatstrers are occuring today! It's like WAY more than ever before."

Both of which are ridiculously absurd. I'm sorry, but there is nothing abnormal about the current frequency of various natural disasters and current inabilities for science to do some very difficult things does not somehow validate... honestly I'm not even sure what the hell you're talking about with that "impervious to science" line, but I'm going to guess... new age nonsense? Ghosts? God? something else...? Whatever.

at least with science, you HAVE something to measure. With faith, there is a humongous leap to rationalize what the world is and how it got here, but there is NOTHING which is reducible to fact.

Except for the howling fundies, there is/are NO religious faiths who are not able to reconcile fact with fiction (i.e. faith)--even the pope believes in evolution.

As far as a divine entity is otherwise concerned, people have the right to believe whatever they want to believe, but science in the classroom should NEVER be replaced by creationist hokum.

For those who believe in creationism, there is little doubt in my mind that most of them are willfully ignorant, as until these holier-than-thou morons began their campaign to castrate science, most of them WERE taught about evolution, even if it wasn't in great detail. My ex-friend had her MASTERS and still went over the deep end in believing that kind of shit.

probability is still only really a probability with some chance, perhaps a relatively remote one, but a chance nonetheless, of an exception to that probability.

Exceptions may be seen as random, or, depending upon your perspective, as miracles, but in scientific rationale, they are really only the result of factors, perhaps very remote indirect factors, that have not been studied and identified yet.

to study everything in the multi-universe in every combination with every other thing in the universe in relationship to the question at hand.

"I don't believe anyone can fully explain what is happening, especially the sudden burst of
constant disasters, but looking back at history, one can see where the disparage from
people comes from as history have shown disaster occurrence has been minimal compared to what is
happening now."

Gee, d'ya think that might be because worldwide communications have exploded since the Bronze Age, and that we find out about disasters on the other side of the planet as soon as they happen? D'ya think that maybe, just maybe, there have been "constant disasters" on this planet since Earth time began for the simple fact that we live on a planet that is still cooling even after billions of years of existence, but that people in the past weren't aware of such things because most people didn't know what was happening 25 miles from their home, let alone what was happening on another continent?

Natural disasters aren't occurring at any greater frequency than they ever have. We just happen to know about them now, whereas we were blissfully ignorant of most of them in the past.

And you do realize, don't you, that the entire concept of an earthquake being a "disaster" is predicated on whether or not it impacts man? No one thinks a tsunami is a disaster if it only kills 30-million cockroaches. The potential for a great rise in human disasters goes along with the Earth's burgeoning population and the fact that people today will KNOWINGLY live in areas that we know are just awaiting a disaster, like LA & SF, for starters.

"Now lets look at recent events - Haiti and Chile comes to mind, focusing on all the
scientific and electronics equipments available to mankind, yet scientist where unable
to give an accurate prediction as to when, where and how these events will occur, but
people are to accept the explanation given after the occurrence of these disasters without
questions."

And the Bible's record on predicting the Haiti earthquake was...?

And, of course, you are DEAD WRONG about the predictions. Scientists have identified fault lines around the world. They KNOW where earthquakes are going to take place. The predictions are extremely accurate. It's no surprise an earthquake occurred in Chile, and it's no surprise that said earthquake produced a tsunami.

The "accuracy" that you seem to demand is a false claim for accuracy. We know that it's going to rain and snow sometime during the year, because we know what the weather patterns are on earth, we know about the jet stream and we know about moisture coming up from the Gulf of Mexico that feeds moisture events. But we don't ask weather scientists to "predict" in July whether it will snow 12" on February 27, 2015 at 6:45 am in Detroit.

And, BTW, why aren't you demanding the same level of accuracy for predicting such things from the Holy Books, or from the "holy men" around the world who commune with "god" on a daily basis? Why isn't god giving them a heads up that an earthquake is on the way? And if you believe that the Bible predicts the end of the world, you need to be consistent and criticize the Bible for not giving you the absolute date and time for such an occurrence. Maybe you'd even demand that it give accurate dates for events that happened 2,000 years ago, but it can't. The fucking Bible can't even get the date and year right for the birth of Jesus. It lists two different years separated by a decade.

Your argument is pathetic and is based on a lack of logic and a DISDAIN for science that one would expect from a fundie-church-educated kindergartener.

(especially my non-too intelligent friends, the fundies), Nostradamus's predictions are all coming true! I remember all the idiotic babbling about Nostro predicting 9/11!!

And then there is the even more idiotic nonsense about the coming "Apocalypse" "end times" or Revelations or other pablum and it being predicted in the bible. I guess people are still WAY too gullible even now, 2 millennia later. :crazy:

including the History Channel, which is predominantly Jesus, end times, JFK conspiracies, Hitler and UFOs for 90% of the time.

okay the next time Mt. St. Helens blows her top you can be one of the ones who says I'm going down with the ship. As for me, I think I'll heed the warnings. I live near Mt. Ranier and she could blow anytime. If the scientists told me to evacuate I would and if she didn't blow even after I evacuated I would say thank you and be glad I still had a home to sleep in.

:crazy: :crazy: :crazy:

I think it's about global warming causing earthquakes.

Did anyone read the thread about global warming causing earthquakes?

The OP posited that global warming caused earthquakes. Needless to say, the thread was locked.

Did it have any thing to do with the amount of rudeness in many of the replies ?

Sadly, this is the second time in as many days as I've had to make this exact post in GD. Let's hope tomorrow is a better, or at least a more rational day.

Dear DU: Please do everyone around you a favor and put down the bong before you pull up to the keyboard. Thanks. :think:

I haven't been around much, so it's news to me. But we've always had some element of incmprehensibilty around here. It just usually ends up in the Lounge. ;)

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nothing to add, but thanks for kicking.

actually more illuminating.

can help you with illuminating.

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looks like some good shit

They revel in their ignorance. They mislead and dupe the unfortunate. They squandered the free public education they were offered.

Maybe you should watch Pat Robertson misquoting TWC with words to the effect, "Oh Lord, please let the winds of this hurricane diminish to 70 mph by the morning..."

Notice it's not "Oh Lord, get rid of this hurricane and smite it from the Earth. And please help me get another Mercedes Benz."

never have, never will, this has nothing to do with his lunacy.

you giving away my secret.


















:sarcasm:

where the adults are talking and it just makes a sort of "whah whah-whah whah" noise?

Yeah.

When you post something you think is brilliant and profound, and you get thirty responses that are all telling you that your post was incoherent at best, the problem is with your post, not the thirty people who told you it didn't make any damned sense.

Plz lrn 2 English. Kthxbai.

Where do you get such an idea?

We are all more connected now, get instant news, see all the grizzly pictures from dozens of various media outlets, get inundated with details of everything that happens around the clock nowadays, so perhaps it seems to you that there are more bad things happening. Maybe it is that there are more people on earth now which means more people in the way of natural phenomenon which is causing you to believe there are a "sudden burst of constant disasters"?

The apocalypse is not coming, global warming does not cause earthquakes, science is not perfect, those reject science are choosing to be willfully ignorant, etc, etc.

Not really clear on the point your post was trying to make.

Please forgive me for this post, but I am not trying to diss you or anything. I understand your desire to get your question posted, and some answers to what is, for you, an important question. I hope, in my own previous reply to it, that I helped in some way to do so.

I think what people might be having trouble with is that your OP seems to be trying to make a point that science might, in one form or another, be just as flawed as religious folk talking about such things as "the end times" and whatever.

However, many of us, myself included, equate one side of that argument strictly to the fundies, and to those people who might not have an education, which, in many countries is always a possibility. However, most of us look at the results which science can offer as a hedge to that stance, regardless whether we are religious or not. Religion is faith, and not a form of concrete evidence, unlike it might have been so many years in the past. It was people who observed the same results year after year who finally began to work out that observation of anything, showed a series of "rules" which weren't thrown out of whack by religious mumbo-jumbo, and that was the beginning of science and the scientific method.

Back in the really old days, almost all of the civilizations did have their own series of gods, some of them who were supposedly so fickle that they might send up a volcano explosion, just because they were having a bad hair day, and it was that mindset which formed behind the Jewish faith and that of the Catholics and the Christians (and even, yes, to Islam). Their belief was in a single god, who had his plate awfully full, I guess, who sent down prophets and only sons, etc., to help out on occasion. The Jewish folk still have the one god, but they are still waiting for the savior.

People in this world now, are educated to a point where faith and science can still exist together, unless they are from a third world country where education is not widespread, and many of these people are as uneducated as the folks in ancient civilizations. They still believe in many things which have been disproven or explained by science and other school subjects, and this is one of the things we need to correct, is to help educate these people better. As for the fundies, as I said someplace else, they are largely willfully ignorant, and that's their own problem. We shouldn't need to tolerate such shit in our classrooms, for example, by trying to teach creationism instead of evolution. It is the people who never had the opportunity to learn anything--ever--who we can help raise up by teaching them about such things as history, math, science, etc.

So while we all hear someone who might say, "It is the Lord's intent...." we have to examine the source. If it's a fundie, ignore them--they have no point. In fact, they use whatever science they need and try to ignore all the rest. I've had these fundies using fertilization means to suit their purpose, and you have idiots like the Duggars who just want to repopulate the country with their little robots, who don't have any point, except at the top of their heads. If it's an uneducated person who has no idea of the scope and reality that the rest of us live in, they should be allowed to have some leeway in the situation. WE know that there are fault lines all around the world, for example, and we know enough from previous disasters to predict what could happen if there was an earthquake so big it could wipe out a whole country. But we're still learning--science is dynamic. We can't stop where we are now and think we've learned everything there is to learn. If we did, we would, as a civilization, stagnate and die. Some people are actually surprised to learn that we haven't learned everything yet. :)

But I hope I have shed some light on why some people, including myself to some extent, have a smart-aleck response to your original post. I just think it's not worded where everyone can understand which point you were trying to make to begin with.

:rofl: