What do you find the most great scientific accomplishment ?

[PMc]

Well, let me rephrase myself here... First-hand experience is a good start, but it does need to be verifiable and reproducible.

I don't think that makes much sense. Any creative act cannot be reproducible, due to it's very nature.
Reproduction is by definition the contrary/complement to creation, so by requiring reproducibility, you exclude creativity.

I think this reproducibility demand is just a capitalist flaw. With handicraft everything is somehow creative. But those in power do not want to do manual work themselves, they want to tell other what to do and then just count the money - and therefore one needs reproducibility.

Take the very existence of whales - most people only know about whales from books like Moby Dick and accounts of people who have actually seen whales in person. But to see the whales in person is actually one hell of an undertaking - you gotta know how to get to a good spot, have a good camera, etc. Fortunately, the experience is reproducible, there are commercial tours that advertise that kind of experience on the Internet - pay for the ticket, show up at the harbor, board the boat... and come back with tales of having seen a fish that is bigger than your house.

Exactly, here again: this needs to be reproducible so that one can make a business of it and earn money.

I for my part never had dealings with whales, and also I don't want to pay for tourist stuff. I always thought it much better to be on the side of those who get paid than of those who pay; not because of the money, but because then you are with those who create and shape the experience, not with those who merely get it fed and consume it.
So, if I were interested in whales, I would try to live with people who are naturally dealing with them.

Believing in your own experience is great, nothing wrong with that. It creates positive memories for you.

Well, not really. More important is, it creates proof.
Example: on Sep 11, 2001 was an event to redesign the New York skyline. Since I got notice to prep for evac, six hours beforehand, from my superiors (due to non-expendable), I can know for certain that this was organized upstream.

In your case, a speedy recovery for you and your loved ones. Thing is: That is of limited value beyond the group that you and your loved ones belong to.

Absolutely. There is also limited reward, so why should there be more than limited value?

Just because the group recovered, there's no guarantee that a different group will recover with the same extent of success.

Absolutely. As this is a creative act, it is just not possible to repeat it in the same way elsewhere.

But, You say, science should describe the nature of our world. How can it do that, when by paradigma it excludes all creative acts already beforehand?

And mainstream medical establishment, with its ability to verify treatments as reliable (or not), moves the needle of probability of successful recovery from 50% to like 90-95%... Not to mention that in the mainstream medical establishments, information gets curated and organized to a much greater extent than faith-based healing.

What makes You think there is an interest in "successful recovery"? Wouldn't that be stupid from a business view? Wouldn't it be more feasible to use that fine-grained statistical data to target for improved illness, so that more medicine can be sold and more profits being made?

Also, concerning statistical data in general, we often had this discussion here with harddisk failure rates, and it was shown that for individual cases the statistical data is mostly useless - only if you have a large set of entities it gets relevant.
So this medical data is mainly of interest for owners of a great number of people: with these tools they can optimise how much their people should be ill and buy medicine, and how much they should be healthy and buy other things, in order to over-all optimize economic figures.

I think that 'psychological warfare' is inaccurate here - it's more about using propaganda to affect morale and motivation of people, rather than merely changing their minds about something.

And how would You pinpoint that difference in reality?
Example: Germany has a government owned broadcast. Payment for this system is extorted from the people with the help of a special law (alongside with many well paid positions for renowned political supporters).
If you look into wikipedia, you find a lot of blabla about democracy, but no information about how this radio service originally came into existence.
But if you know, before the current German government was Nazi dictatorship. And they had already a public broadcast: Goebbels propaganda radio. When you look up that one in wikipedia, you find that in 1945 that radio service was taken over by the US-american office for psychological warfare. (There is no notion that this ever changed.)

And first-hand experience - sometimes, it's just difficult to obtain. You gonna blow your money on a ticket to Hawaii just to see whales in person, or are you content with reading about whales and watching them on Youtube?

Yes, it appears difficult - because people have become very decadent and unwilling to leave their comfort zone (which usually is sitting somewhere and staring onto some gadget).

If I were interested in whales, I would not go for whalewatching tourist parties; I would rather see to get real first-hand experience. like living a while with the Inuit, or getting onto a Russian exploration vessel.

Also, some countries have actually prohibited access to Wikipedia, and implemented firewalls to enforce that - I wonder why?

I don't. Some countries might want to have a different kind of brainwash than the one wikipedia presents.

The way I see it, faith-based healing is popular in gaming (because it's easy to implement as game code), but that does not translate very well to reality.

Sadly, I never ever did any gaming. But I perceive a trend that things which people are too ignorant to really look into, do nevertheless appear in show&play contexts like fantasy, LARP, or gaming.
This is not only true with PSI/magick/healing, but also with much more hard-core stuff like e.g. space travel.

Example: as it seems, there are now engines that could be run from a nuclear power plant and that might allow us to go beyond Jupiter. But the guy who invented it has to build it on his own in the garage, as nobody seems interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_field_oscillating_amplified_thruster

As it seems, the general interest in spaceflight is now reduced to making money by hauling satellites into orbit which then can be used to make money by spilling propaganda down onto the people. Or something along that line.

It's hard to trust a book written by a faith-based healer - what works for one practitioner may turn out to be deadly in the hands of another, with no good way to really verify and reproduce what happened.

Some things cannot be bought, and some things cannot be read in books.
As I said, it is now all only about staying in the comfort zone and doing nothing, with lots of feeble excuses.

 

[astyle]

I don't think that makes much sense. Any creative act cannot be reproducible, due to it's very nature.
Reproduction is by definition the contrary/complement to creation, so by requiring reproducibility, you exclude creativity.

Let's stick to the topic of medicine here, faith-based healing vs. traditional science. When it comes to medicine, you kind of have to be able to have reproducible treatments. It's not even about profits, it's about knowing what works and what doesn't, and having a very good handle on it. Once you have a good handle, then you can get creative and try unconventional approaches like changing ergonomics of furniture. Even those unconventional approaches have to be reproducible, otherwise they will fizzle out as failures.

People kind of want to be able to reproduce success for themselves, and are usually able to put forth some effort. And I disagree with the idea that by requiring reproducibility, you exclude creativity... Consider the FreeBSD development project - on these very Forums, we require ability to reproduce technical issues in order to come up with creative ways to resolve them. Even with Perl, there's more than one way to do it, as per Larry Wall.

Well, not really. More important is, it creates proof.
Example: on Sep 11, 2001 was an event to redesign the New York skyline. Since I got notice to prep for evac, six hours beforehand, from my superiors (due to non-expendable), I can know for certain that this was organized upstream.

Are you even serious??? The event was a reflection of resentment on a global scale, not something as small as redesigning some town's skyline. By contrast, redesigning Dubai's skyline with the Burj Kalifa tower was pulled off without a need to evacuate, I wonder why? And, why is no

If I were interested in whales, I would not go for whalewatching tourist parties; I would rather see to get real first-hand experience. like living a while with the Inuit, or getting onto a Russian exploration vessel.

body questioning why that shit even happened?

What makes You think there is an interest in "successful recovery"? Wouldn't that be stupid from a business view? Wouldn't it be more feasible to use that fine-grained statistical data to target for improved illness, so that more medicine can be sold and more profits being made?

You and your loved ones have an interest in successful recovery. And no, that is not stupid from a business point of view, either. If you know that a treatment works reliably, that is valuable knowledge that can be monetized - as in a famous example of penicillin: it's a well-known antibiotic that's actually derived from mushrooms. Not everyone can make it, but everyone knows it works. Business opportunity right there - set up a facility to reproducibly, consistently make quality stuff and sell it to the medical establishment.

And how would You pinpoint that difference in reality?
Example: Germany has a government owned broadcast. Payment for this system is extorted from the people with the help of a special law (alongside with many well paid positions for renowned political supporters).
If you look into wikipedia, you find a lot of blabla about democracy, but no information about how this radio service originally came into existence.
But if you know, before the current German government was Nazi dictatorship. And they had already a public broadcast: Goebbels propaganda radio. When you look up that one in wikipedia, you find that in 1945 that radio service was taken over by the US-american office for psychological warfare. (There is no notion that this ever changed.)

oh? You're talking about this?

It's really a matter of being willing to look on Wikipedia, even if you see downsides to using it as a reference. There's a famous quote, "It's amazing what you can find on the Internet". Now on to the quote from that Wikipedia page:

Listening to foreign stations became a criminal offence in Nazi Germany when the war began, while in some occupied territories, such as Poland, all radio listening by non-German citizens was outlawed (later in the war this prohibition was extended to a few other occupied countries coupled with mass seizures of radio sets[5]). Penalties ranged from fines and confiscation of radios to, particularly later in the war, sentencing to a concentration camp or capital punishment. Nevertheless, such clandestine listening was widespread in many Nazi-occupied countries and (particularly later in the war) in Germany itself. The Germans also attempted radio jamming of some enemy stations with limited success.

Now that is 'psychological warfare' that demoralizes whole countries. And, how do you think we got to this point? We started with discussing what is faith-based healing vs. what it is NOT... and evolved into figuring out what it takes to change somebody's mind on the matter.

 

[astyle]

If I were interested in whales, I would not go for whalewatching tourist parties; I would rather see to get real first-hand experience. like living a while with the Inuit, or getting onto a Russian exploration vessel.

If you want, there's plenty of research vessels based in Pearl Harbor, and they don't have to go far to see whales. But to get on those, you have to be willing to mop the decks and sleep in shaking cots onboard, and that's in addition to being willing to take notes and sharing knowledge and verifying it. Is that not the 'first-hand experience', too? And commercial tours frankly just piggyback their business on the coattails of that verifiable scientific research...

I don't.

why not? something wrong with being curious about what lies beyond what you know?

 

[PMc]

Let's stick to the topic of medicine here, faith-based healing vs. traditional science. When it comes to medicine, you kind of have to be able to have reproducible treatments. It's not even about profits, it's about knowing what works and what doesn't, and having a very good handle on it.

Okay, lets stick to the facts. As I said, the doctors wanted to start cut things away from me, and then I talked to a friend on the telephone, she is a witch, and she figured that there is a specific anxiety which my father had (my father is dead for many years and she never met him and lives in another country, but she was right), and that was the cause of the problem. After detecting that, everything healed immediately, within hours.
Have fun generalizing that.

Once you have a good handle, then you can get creative and try unconventional approaches like changing ergonomics of furniture. Even those unconventional approaches have to be reproducible, otherwise they will fizzle out as failures.

I'm not interested in reproducibility, I'm interested in things that work.

People kind of want to be able to reproduce success for themselves, and are usually able to put forth some effort. And I disagree with the idea that by requiring reproducibility, you exclude creativity... Consider the FreeBSD development project - on these very Forums, we require ability to reproduce technical issues in order to come up with creative ways to resolve them.

Not necessarily. Logical verification does just fine: if the code says the same as the observation shows, then I don't need to reproduce it.

Are you even serious??? The event was a reflection of resentment on a global scale, not something as small as redesigning some town's skyline. By contrast, redesigning Dubai's skyline with the Burj Kalifa tower was pulled off without a need to evacuate, I wonder why? And, why is no body questioning why that shit even happened?

No, I just wonder why those in charge warn us non-expendables six hours ahead, and let all the others die.
But I wasn't concerned, I was on big game hunt in Africa anyway.

You and your loved ones have an interest in successful recovery. And no, that is not stupid from a business point of view, either. If you know that a treatment works reliably, that is valuable knowledge that can be monetized - as in a famous example of penicillin: it's a well-known antibiotic that's actually derived from mushrooms. Not everyone can make it, but everyone knows it works. Business opportunity right there - set up a facility to reproducibly, consistently make quality stuff and sell it to the medical establishment.

And that is why penicilline no longer works. Because they monetized it, and the bacteria learned and got resistant.
Nature is not designed for reproducibility, nature is conscious and learns.

oh? You're talking about this?

Not really. Rather this:

The Information Control Division (ICD) was a department of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) during the early part of the post-war American occupation of Germany following World War II focused on controlling and altering German media to promote democratic values and to move Germany away from Nazism. Formed on 12 May 1945 from the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (PWD/SHAEF)...

Information Control Division - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(probably more of an anti-communist operation)

If you want, there's plenty of research vessels based in Pearl Harbor, and they don't have to go far to see whales. But to get on those, you have to be willing to mop the decks and sleep in shaking cots onboard, and that's in addition to being willing to take notes and sharing knowledge and verifying it. Is that not the 'first-hand experience', too? And commercial tours frankly just piggyback their business on the coattails of that verifiable scientific research...

As I said, I am not particularly interested in whales. And I did similar things in SE-Asia for the matters I am interested in - mainly ethnological, with the man-eaters (You know, these people who cook missionaries in the boiling-pot... )

 

[astyle]

Okay, lets stick to the facts. As I said, the doctors wanted to start cut things away from me, and then I talked to a friend on the telephone, she is a witch, and she figured that there is a specific anxiety which my father had (my father is dead for many years and she never met him and lives in another country, but she was right), and that was the cause of the problem. After detecting that, everything healed immediately, within hours.
Have fun generalizing that.

Ever hear of Barnum effect, the fallacy of personal validation?

It's the same basic idea as removing external stressors - like getting away from a stressful, micromanaging boss is what it takes to relieve yourself from constant migraines, rather than using pills to treat stress-related symptoms like headaches, upset stomach, you name it.

And I did similar things in SE-Asia for the matters I am interested in - mainly ethnological, with the man-eaters (You know, these people who cook missionaries in the boiling-pot... )

Like the North Sentinel Island? Hawaii is a pretty tame place compared to that.

Not really. Rather this:

Information Control Division - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(probably more of an anti-communist operation)

Surprisingly enough, the two wikipedia pages do not refer to each other (verified by ctrl-f on both of them). It does take some creative and critical thinking to notice that and connect the dots on the basis of dates mentioned in both.

And that is why penicilline no longer works. Because they monetized it, and the bacteria learned and got resistant.
Nature is not designed for reproducibility, nature is conscious and learns.

Plenty of counterexamples out here: Motorized electric wheelchairs, crutches, use of plastics as opposed to natural rubber for drip IV tubes, and the like. Business evolves, too. Just because one treatment no longer works, that's no reason to stop paying attention to what works (or does not work) now.

 

[PMc]

Ever hear of Barnum effect, the fallacy of personal validation?

Yeah, that's about tabloid horoscopes etc. - has nothing to do with here.

It's the same basic idea as removing external stressors - like getting away from a stressful, micromanaging boss is what it takes to relieve yourself from constant migraines, rather than using pills to treat stress-related symptoms like headaches, upset stomach, you name it.

That's the baseline, almost everybody can do that. Then there are more delicate things. Some are tackled via Family Constellations - I'm no fan of these, but some believe they work. This one is even more delicate - I went to a workshop (kind of investigation into fringe subculture), I got marginally injured, usually that's no problem, but this time it didn't heal, and started to infect surrounding tissue. Now get a connection from some group dynamics within that workshop, to things my father considered back when he was not willing to study medicine, which only my mom and me know - and I didn't want to know.
And the witch didn't know my father, neither the workshop, but she's a truthsayer, and she just felt that there is something I don't want to remember, and locked onto it and started asking questions.

Like the North Sentinel Island? Hawaii is a pretty tame place compared to that.

No, not that tough.
And SE-Asia is a wonderful place. Tens of thousands of islands. Beautiful underwater worlds below that endless green bathing-tub (unless when there's a Tsunami). Strange beer, strange whiskey, strange mushrooms and fresh fish.

Surprisingly enough, the two wikipedia pages do not refer to each other (verified by ctrl-f on both of them). It does take some creative and critical thinking to notice that and connect the dots on the basis of dates mentioned in both.

As I said: PsyOps is not normally taught in the evening school.

Plenty of counterexamples out here: Motorized electric wheelchairs, crutches, use of plastics as opposed to natural rubber for drip IV tubes, and the like. Business evolves, too. Just because one treatment no longer works, that's no reason to stop paying attention to what works (or does not work) now.

Yeah, sure we do! We're not the crazy one's who want to go back to the middle ages. But awareness is needed, because not everything is just fine.

 

[astyle]

That's the baseline, almost everybody can do that. Then there are more delicate things. Some are tackled via Family Constellations - I'm no fan of these, but some believe they work. This one is even more delicate - I went to a workshop (kind of investigation into fringe subculture), I got marginally injured, usually that's no problem, but this time it didn't heal, and started to infect surrounding tissue.

There's plenty of stories like that from the mainstream medical establishment. Good medical schools usually also teach about drawing conclusions from such stories... there's a 1940s quote from Dr. Theodore Woodward:

When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.

It basically means that given a collection of symptoms that require medical treatment, a doctor should think of the obvious things to check for, but not dismiss the statistical possibility that something else is afoot.

A good example would be someone looking like they have some kind of mental illness, and not functioning well socially - only to discover that it's really an inflamed appendix that needs to be removed. A competent doctor will check for that. A faith-based healer is unlikely to have the education to even imagine that this is even possible.

And the witch didn't know my father, neither the workshop, but she's a truthsayer, and she just felt that there is something I don't want to remember, and locked onto it and started asking questions.

Yeah, she knew how to talk to someone and get them to start asking questions and agree to strange stuff. We all fall for stuff like that from time to time, it even happened to me (story for another time), it's like entering the ocean from a tropical beach. The difference is when you wake up and realize you got in too deep to be safe. Well, sometimes, you swim around, get what you want, and come back with the results you wanted.

 

[PMc]

There's plenty of stories like that from the mainstream medical establishment. Good medical schools usually also teach about drawing conclusions from such stories... there's a 1940s quote from Dr. Theodore Woodward:

When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.

Which shows that he has not much clue of biology either: a zebra is a horse, for almost all practical regards of survival.

It basically means that given a collection of symptoms that require medical treatment, a doctor should think of the obvious things to check for, but not dismiss the statistical possibility that something else is afoot.

I already told You, the doctor folks decided to cut things away.

A good example would be someone looking like they have some kind of mental illness, and not functioning well socially - only to discover that it's really an inflamed appendix that needs to be removed. A competent doctor will check for that. A faith-based healer is unlikely to have the education to even imagine that this is even possible.

That might actually be true for those advertising themselves as faith-healer or such. But that's not my point - I don't say: get around and find yourself a faith-header - because I can already guarantee you'll find a scammer.

Yeah, she knew how to talk to someone and get them to start asking questions and agree to strange stuff. We all fall for stuff like that from time to time,

Yeah, I liked her, only she was crazy...

it even happened to me (story for another time), it's like entering the ocean from a tropical beach. The difference is when you wake up and realize you got in too deep to be safe. Well, sometimes, you swim around, get what you want, and come back with the results you wanted.

Point is, I'm used to that, and you cannot as easily mindfuck me with confidence tricks. And that time I got what I wanted, and beforehand I didn't even know I could get it - I was just worried because I don't like pieces cut away from me.
And that's the point: I didn't know that's possible, but it did happen. So this should be better understood: how can a merely physical problem, originally resulting from injury, be strongly connected to some mental stuff not even of me, but of my father? And as it is connected, how much else is also connected in such a way and could be treated from that side?

 

[astyle]

Which shows that he has not much clue of biology either: a zebra is a horse, for almost all practical regards of survival.

That was a metaphor, meaning that a 'regular horse' represents common occurrences, while 'zebra' represents other, very uncommon occurrences. Point was to not dismiss uncommon occurrences out of hand.

And yes, all zebras are horses, but not all horses are zebras... the doctor had a pretty good handle on biology and statistics to coin a useful phrase like that.

Point is, I'm used to that, and you cannot as easily mindfuck me with confidence tricks. And that time I got what I wanted, and beforehand I didn't even know I could get it - I was just worried because I don't like pieces cut away from me.
And that's the point: I didn't know that's possible, but it did happen. So this should be better understood: how can a merely physical problem, originally resulting from injury, be strongly connected to some mental stuff not even of me, but of my father? And as it is connected, how much else is also connected in such a way and could be treated from that side?

The answer is genetics, those 4 nucleotide bases in a helix that encode all the physical features of you, including predisposition to certain medical conditions. It's very likely that your dad had the same condition you did. You got half of your DNA from your dad, half from your mom. Your dad most likely had some kind of predisposition to a physical condition that affected his way of thinking - and yes, that kind of thing gets encoded into DNA, and passed onto kids. In kids that gets expressed as dominant or recessive gene, depending on corresponding genetic material from the mother.

How much else is also connected - hard to say. But DNA does not mix all that randomly, those nucleotides have rules but no oxygen. A competent doctor would have a good explanation off the top of their head, and not everyone can keep such rules and details straight. Those who can, they do finish medical school.

And yes, human genome has been sequenced - that IS one hell of a scientific accomplishment (ooh, ooh, I managed to stay on topic for this thread! Whee! )

 

[LibreQuest]

Air conditioning.

 

[JT42]

The P-N junction.

 

[meaw229a]

I think the invention of sliced bread should be mentioned in this thread.