Max

Brad,

There have been a lot of apocalyptic stories in the media about rising sea levels that would threaten to flood whole countries or at least a large part of them. But then I read in a recent (October 2018) report by the IPCC (not really an organization known for covering up climate problems):

Quote

 

B.2.1 Model-based projections of global mean sea level rise (relative to 1986–2005) suggest an indicative range of 0.26 to 0.77 m by 2100 for 1.5°C of global warming, 0.1 m (0.04–0.16 m) less than for a global warming of 2°C (medium confidence).

 

( https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf )

So, with a 2°C global warming, the expectation is some 50 cm, at least < 1m, sea level rise in 80 years, which is a period of several generations. I can’t see that as very threatening. What’s your opinion on this - am I missing something?

Let's ask the horse itself, IPCC Special Report, October 2018:

https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf

Model-based projections of global mean sea level rise (relative to 1986–2005) suggest an indicative range of 0.26 to 0.77 m by 2100 for 1.5°C of global warming, 0.1 m (0. 04–0.16 m) less than for a global warming of 2°C (medium confidence).

Doesn‘t sound so alarming to me, particularly because it comes from the IPCC.

14 hours ago, Max said:

Try to use the falsifiability system on evolution and see how far it gets you. It gets you the same results as falsifying religion. That is, nowhere.

Why should the notion of falsifiability you get nowhere in the case of evolution? The only people I know who raise the question of falsifiability and evolution are creationists - they maintain often that evolution is not falsifiable, of course as an argument against evolution. Biologists know that evolution is perfectly falsifiable, only it has never been falsified, to the great regret of the creationists. The links I gave are refutations of the creationist claim that evolution is not falsifiable, with examples of possible falsifications. 

10 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

This thing is shot through with errors

Could you please show us what some of these errors are? And please a bit more specific than just "mumble yada".

5 hours ago, Jonathan said:

If one isn't already thinking and focused, how does one "volitionally switch on" thinking and focus?

J

I've also always wondered about that. Stranger still that some people don't see the problem with that.

2 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Just as a curiosity, do you have a link or something? I have not seen anyone call Crews a raving lunatic and I find it hard to imagine. So I would like to see it if possible.

No, it isn't a literal quote, just my impression from the many negative reviews I found on the Internet.

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

This particular case you want to gotcha about involves causality and the law of identity. The concept that something cannot have a continuation without having a start is very simple. Resist it if you will. It will still exist.

I will not defend something so simple any further.

But what makes you think I'd disagree with that? I only say that such a triviality is not relevant in this discussion. You could as well say "A is A", well so what?

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Sounds like Ayn Rand with cigarettes causing cancer.

How do you condemn one without condemning the other? Certainly not with consistency of principle.

Of course I'd condemn both. So?

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Try to use the falsifiability system on evolution and see how far it gets you. It gets you the same results as falsifying religion. That is, nowhere.

Oh, but evolution could in principle be falsified. That this so far never has happened is very strong evidence for the correctness of the theory. You shouldn't believe what creationists say...

See for example:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falsifiability_of_evolution

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13675-evolution-myths-evolution-cannot-be-disproved/

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/what-would-disprove-evolution/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00045845

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

See, here is where we have a problem from different thinking systems. The bulk of your post is ad hominem (in the strict sense, not the rhetorical one generally thrown about). You condemn Freud as a quack. Period. That is your answer to all ideas about him. And you back it up with anecdotes and other items that throw his character in a bad light. The few ideas you discuss are ones nobody takes seriously anymore but even then, they are to show that Freud was a quack. OK. That's your opinion and way of reasoning about it.

What you call anecdotes are verified historical facts, many from Freud's own letters to his fiancée (quite revealing, and therefore longtime suppressed) , his publications, and letters and publications of contemporaries. It is no tabloid gossip, as sometimes is suggested. But, as I wrote before, the central point is that he either lied about his treatment of certain patients, or even made up stories out of whole cloth, but did use those stories as evidence for his theories. That is what makes him a quack, even if his theories might accidentally be correct (never mind that the probability of that is quite low). It may be good fiction, but it isn’t science. For that matter, Freud was certainly a gifted writer, his Die Traumdeutung and his Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens I’ve read many times, it makes fascinating reading, although I’d now have more problems with his tricks and deception. An artist, but not a scientist.

Jordan Peterson, that is the man who says that atheists deep down believe in God, even if they don't know it. He also says that everyone is religious, "everything you act out is predicated on your implicit axioms, and the system of implicit axioms that you hold as primary is your religious belief system". 

In other words, a scatterbrain and a religious nut.

On 8/12/2018 at 6:17 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

This is a sidestep. I asked a question you apparently don't want to answer because your premise is flawed.

Your premise? Something can have a continuation without a beginning.

But if something does not have a beginning, how can it have a continuation? In other words, if people did not originally take Freud's views seriously, how could they continue to do so? If people did not take Marxism seriously in the beginning, how could they continue to do so?

That’s beside the point. Your original question was: “So why do you think Freud's work has been taken seriously by so many people over the years?”, and not: “So why do you think Freud’s work has been taken seriously by his contemporaries?”, suggesting that a persistent appreciation would be an indication of the validity of Freud's theories. Well, in fact that appreciation in academic psychological circles has dwindled over the years, Freud adepts are today mainly found in the humanities, with some philosophers, some writers and other nebulous characters. But anyway, persistence of an idea is no guarantee for its validity. And the idea that something must have a beginning to have a continuation is just a red herring. It's of course trivial, but a continuation can have different causes from a beginning.

I can tell you my own experience: when I was young (long, long ago..) I read many books by Freud and naively accepted most of his theories at face value, although I had already doubts about some of his conclusions, but well, he lived long ago, so it wasn’t surprising that not everything had stood the test of time.

However, as I grew older and learned more about psychology and read books critical about psychoanalysis, my views changed. For example, I realized the unfalsifiability of many of Freud’s pronouncements: telling a patient what an element in her dream means, and when she disagrees, telling her that this of course as expected her resistance at work, which proved that Freud was right.

One of his patients had a dream that was not a wish fulfillment, contradictory to Freud’s theory. Aha, said Freud, that is because your wish is that I am wrong, so your dream is in fact a wish fulfillment!

Heads I win, tails you lose.

In later years also uglier details about Freud became known, that he had deliberately falsified his results, that he told fairy tales about treatments and successes that had never been realized. And then the ugly story about cocaine, championed by Freud as a wonder medicine. Now it’s perhaps understandable that he saw the new medicine as a hopeful remedy against several illnesses, but he was quite irresponsible when he wrote in a publication that it was quite safe and didn’t have any side effects, without having tested it, except that he took himself regularly a solution of cocaine. On the basis of one dubious publication, he gave it in large amounts to his friend and colleague Fleischl, who was addicted to morphine, as it was supposed to help overcome the morphine addiction. But as you might expect, Fleischl became now addicted to morphine and cocaine (and died later after terrible sufferings).

Now you would perhaps expect that Freud after this horrible experience (and similar stories about other cases) would retract his recommendation of cocaine, but no, he tried to blame others for the failure and contended that cocaine still was safe. When later the evidence finally no longer could be ignored, he kept silent and tried just to forget his previous publications about this subject.

The latter story I’ve just read in Crews’ book. So far my impression is not that of a raving lunatic, as some Freud adorers claim him to be, but of an objective reporter, who sometimes even shows some understanding for Freud’s behavior, but who lets the facts speak for themselves.

Don’t shoot the messenger. It was Freud who misbehaved, and the evidence is there for everyone to see. Unless you find the idea of criticizing Freud something like blasphemy, then you should of course look away.

You can observe something similar when someone dares to criticize some statements by Ayn Rand. The randroids then jump on him and call him a Rand basher or a Rand hater, tell him that he is irrational, a mystic, a leftist or whatever. A familiar spectacle.

Oh, and to come back to the question why Freud was taken seriously by his contemporaries. I think that was not so different from my own experience: lack of knowledge and sophistication. In the course of time people do learn new things, science advances, new insights and new information will become available. So it’s not so strange that fashions come and go. I don’t see what should be so difficult about that.

13 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Who indoctrinated the first peasants in the communist overthrow in Russia?

That was not the question, the question was “Why do you think religion or Marxism has been taken seriously by so many people over the years?” or your original question: “So why do you think Freud's work has been taken seriously by so many people over the years?”, implying that it must have some value if people have swallowed it for such a long time.

My question was a variant to show that longevity of an idea is no guarantee for its correctness.

13 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

That's an easy question to answer.

 Because they satisfy deep human needs (even Marxism does in its own perverted way).

Perhaps Freudianism also satisfied deep human needs. But that still doesn’t make it valid. Anyway, in modern psychology it is practically a dead horse.

Further, I’ve no ambition to save humanity, but when I see a quack I’ll point out that he is a quack. A modern version is for example Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent nonsense about vaccination and autism is still believed by millions of people, with disastrous results.

15 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

So why do you think Freud's work has been taken seriously by so many people over the years? Because humanity is nothing but stupid people who believe--and keep believing for long periods of time--lies merely if they are told by a cunning liar?

Why do you think religion or Marxism has been taken seriously by so many people over the years? I don’t think that has happened because humanity is nothing but stupid people (although there are no doubt many of those), but because many people have been indoctrinated from early childhood, absorbing the cultural ideas of their time and environment. That doesn’t tell us much about the quality of those ideas or of their originators and propagators (except perhaps that they were clever manipulators).

In America still 80% of the adult people believe in God, and 56% believe in the God as described in the Bible. Worse still: 38% believe in a young Earth creationism, i.e. that the Earth is at most 10000 years old. The fact that many millions of people in a modern western society believe something that is demonstrably false and contradicts everything in sciences like physics, astronomy, biology and geology, shows that the number of adherents to a theory doesn’t say much about the validity of that theory.

15 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

You say your evaluation is not based on presentism. So do you know of another school of psychology at the time Freud started that was solid enough to use as a standard to call Freud a quack?

The criterion for calling someone a quack is not whether his theories are wrong – any serious scientist can be wrong. But if you know that your data don’t support your theory but chose to suppress that knowledge and fake your results, if you make up your data out of whole cloth, if you insist in propagating your pet theory while you know or should know that the facts don’t support it, then you are a quack.

3 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I do want to mention something, though. As a general rule, be careful with presentism. This is a term used by historians for a certain form of anachronism. It means replacing ancient contexts with current standards, then judging the people of the time through the modern lens, usually blaming them for "being so stupid" or immoral or whatever.

For example, Galileo, Kepler and Newton not only believed in alchemy, they worked hard at it.

Calling them quacks because of this is a case of presentism.

The point is not so much that Freud was wrong about so many things, but that he has become famous by unscrupulous behavior, lying about his supposed "successes" (which were completely imaginary), while having great pretensions about being a scientist and innovator, so that is fame was totally undeserved. That is what makes him a quack, and to condemn him for that is not "presentism", as we have a good counterexample in Charles Darwin, who lived even somewhat earlier than Freud, and who was by all standards, also current ones, a brilliant scientist, even if he for example was wrong about the mechanism of heredity. Darwin: an honest, scrupulous scientist with great respect for the facts, Freud: a lying, deceiving charlatan who had little regard for the facts (and who had great contempt for his patients).

William, I just ordered Crews’ “Freud, the Making of an Illusion” at Amazon, thanks to your mentioning it and after reading the reviews there. Although I’m well acquainted with Freud’s many bad arguments, cheating and outright lying in propagating his “science”, not to mention his often otherwise reprehensible behavior, I think that a book with some 700 pages can still furnish me some juicy new details about the life and methods of the Viennese quack. Thanks for the recommendation!

Quote

 

Not one thing evolution asserts can be tested.

Not one thing evolution asserts can be demonstrated.

Since there are no tests for anything evolution asserts, they obviously cannot be repeated.

No assertion of evolution can be used to predict anything.

Evolution does not meet a single criteria [sic] for objective science.

 

What a nonsense. According to these criteria astronomy wouldn't be an objective science either.

Quote

 

“While fossils, some aspects paleontology, and DNA exist and can be studied objectively (and are), they are only physical evidence of what is, not how it got here.”

 

The same can be said of the stars, astronomers can only observe some photons arriving on earth. We can’t directly observe the evolution of a star, so the theories about such stellar evolution aren’t objective science either?