Red Pilled America ( The fake science behind the hockey stick climate graph)

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Scientific "Correctness" vs. Scientific Progress | Space News
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Published on Mar 9, 2019 In this adaptation of a recent Thunderbolts Picture of the Day article, author Mel Acheson explores how a phenomenon he calls "scientific correctness" can ultimately impede scientific progress.

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But there are things that obstruct this process. One I’ll call “scientific correctness”: The (proper) concern that a theory is “correct” or “right” or “true”, that it “fits” or explains the relevant data, becomes confused with a pseudo-religious “Right” or True” that exceeds the cognitive domain of the paradigm. All other ideas come to be judged by the standards of the one. “Crackpot” becomes a term of dismissal rather than one of mere differentiation. The process of discovery gets lost in defensiveness.

A recent example of this is the behavior of the astronomical establishment toward Halton Arp. His observations of connections between quasars and galaxies put the brakes on the expanding universe and exploded the Big Bang hypothesis. But instead of saying, “Here’s an interesting observation; we don’t have time for it, but let’s see what he can make of it,” the reaction was, “Deny him telescope time and refuse to publish his findings and crop out quasars on photos of galaxies.”

Contrast “scientific correctness” with the concept of “domain of validity”. The former assumes that its paradigm is “right” and that all further observations can be explained, requiring at most tinkering with the details. This assumption of continuous cumulation of knowledge becomes absolute and straitjackets further discovery. It leads to stasis and intellectual death. With the latter, science is seen not as the establishment of a catechism but as a process of discovering the borders. It assumes the continuous cumulation of knowledge within a paradigm will reach a limit. The cup of the paradigm will fill up, will reach a limit of explanatory power, and observations will spill over, that is, will be ill explained or unexplained. A new, bigger cup will be needed, a paradigm with a larger domain. In deference to Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge, this could be called “punctuated cumulation”.

Thus, one mark of a good paradigm is that it leads to its own replacement. This is the effect of Popper’s criterion of falsification. It means “true” knowledge is, in this larger sense, ultimately “false”. That doesn’t mean the knowledge isn’t useful for its time. It merely means we need to maintain a sense of humility in the face of our, and our theories’, mortality. Scientific correctness rejects old paradigms as “wrong” and their proponents as stupid or evil. There can be only one “right” paradigm. With domains of validity, many paradigms can be accepted as true within their limits. Their intelligibility and the intelligence of their innovators can be appreciated. Science becomes a tool box with many tools (paradigms) that can be chosen according to their appropriateness for solving particular problems: geocentrism for siting a house, heliocentrism for sending a robot to Mars, something yet to be worked out for explaining quasars.

Scientific correctness masquerades in the dress of science, but it’s only a mannequin without the vitality of science. In contrast with the three aspects of cognition, scientific correctness refuses to look at new observations, refrains from considering new ideas, and disdains to verify new insights. It’s essentially anti-intelligent. It confuses verification with conformity; it replaces the innovations of intelligence with the parroting of dogma; it lacks the provisionality that keeps science always on the move. It’s a tyrant of stasis.

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