Climate Mafia,Mediocre Mathematicians and the Mind Projection Fallacy
The strength of a government depends on the people’s ignorance.Moreover, he said, the government is aware of this and would therefore always fight against the people’s education
Tolstoy
The release of emails and other data exposing the mindset of climate scientists in resisting dissent by distorting or withholding of datasets, will bring questions,however the main uncertainty that needs to be asked is why global warming has stopped.
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.
- Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change
This is a clear case of the mind projection fallacy (My own ignorance) - (Nature is indeterminate)eg Jaynes Probability as Logic,
It seems that mankind has always been occupied with the problem of how to deal with ignorance.Primitive man, aware of his helplessness against the forces of Nature but totally ignorant of their causes, would try to compensate for his ignorance by inventing hypotheses about them. For educated people today, the idea of directing intelligences willfully and consciously controlling every detail of events seems vastly more complicated than the idea of a machine running; but to primitive man (and even to the uneducated today) the opposite is true. For one who has no comprehension of physical law, but is aware of his own consciousness and volition, the natural question to ask is not:What is causing it?", but rather:Who is causing it?"
The answer was to invent Gods with the same consciousness and volition as ourselves, but with the additional power of psychokinesis; one in control of the weather, one in control of the seas, and so on. This personication of Nature must have been going on for thousands of years before it started producing permanent written records, in ancient Egypt and Greece. It appears that the adult citizens of those times really believed very literally in all their local Gods This oldest of all devices for dealing with one's ignorance, is the firrst form of what we havecalled the Mind Projection Fallacy".
One asserts that the creations of his own imagination are real properties of Nature, and thus in effect projects his own thoughts out onto Nature. It is still rampant today, not only in fundamentalist religion, but in every field where probability theory is used Of course, we are not arguing against a scientist's practice of formulating hypotheses about what is happening in Nature. Indeed, we see it as the highest form of creativity { far transcending mere mathematical manipulative skill { to conceive the right hypothesis in any field, out of one's educated imagination. Copernicus, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Wegener, Einstein are our heroes for having done this The difference between an imaginative scientist on the one hand, and primitive man and religious fundamentalists on the other, is that the scientist clearly recognizes the creations of his imagination as tentative working hypotheses to be tested by observation; and he is prepared to test and reject a hundred different hypotheses in order to find the right one.
Indeed as see the interbreeding of ideas of a small community of very ordinary scientists,has seen a field stagnate into a toxic cesspool that controls peer review and browbeats editors and censors ideas plausible or otherwise as a heresy.
Tommy Gold spoke of this at Nasa.
Another area where it is particularly bad is in the planetary sciences where NASA made great mistakes in the way in which they set up the situation. NASA made the grave mistake not only of working with a peer review system, but one where some of the peers (in fact very influential ones) were the in-house people doing the same line of work. This established a community of planetary scientists now which was completely selected by the leading members of the herd, which was very firmly controlled, and after quite a short time, the slightest departure from the herd was absolutely cut down. Money was not there for anybody who had a slightly diverging viewpoint. The conferences ignored him, and so on. It became completely impossible to do any independent work. For all the money that has been spent, the planetary program will one day be seen to have been extraordinarily poor. The pictures are fine and some of the facts that have been obtained from the planetary exploration with spacecraft - those will stand but not much else.
Indeed the decrease of scientific diversity (interbreeding) is akin to an Appalachian mining town.
Clearly these limitations are skill based and one could conjecture that this western phenomena is a result of the antiscientific mathematical cnstraint as outlined by Vladimir Arnold.
In the middle of the twentieth century a strong mafia of left-brained mathematicians succeeded in eliminating all geometry from the mathematical education (first in France and later in most other countries), replacing the study of all content in mathematics by the training in formal proofs and the manipulation of abstract notions. Of course, all the geometry, and, consequently, all relations with the real world and other sciences have been eliminated from the mathematics teaching.
Define the multiplication of natural numbers by the long multiplication rule. The
commutativity of the multiplication (ab = ba) becomes then a difficult theorem, which
one can however deduce logically from the definition. Forcing poor students to learn such proofs, the left-brained criminals had inevitably created the present negative opinion, of society and governments, of mathematics.
But the left-brained ill people have succeeded in breeding generations of mathematicians,who understand no other approach to mathematics and are able only to continue to teach it the same way. The aversion to mathematics of the ministers who have suffered through the humiliating teaching of this type in high school is a normal and healthy reaction.
Unfortunately, their aversion to mathematics is acting indiscriminately on all of it and can kill it completely. One of the dangerous trends is to eliminate the proofs from the high-school mathematics.The role of the proof for mathematics is similar to that for orthography or even calligraphy for poetry. A person, who had not mastered the art of the proofs in high school, is as a rule unable to distinguish correct reasoning from that which is misleading Such people can be easily manipulated by the irresponsible politicians. Mass hypnosis and the disastrous social events may result.
The continuity of the dumbing down of mathematics and science is criticized in the Royal society of Chemistry on the UK examination standards.
The question ran: 'A solid cube has sides of length 5 cm. Work out the total surface area of the cube. State the units of your answer.'
Dr Pike said, 'The correct answer can be arrived at within seconds, by noting that the area of each face of the cube is 5 x 5, or 25 square centimetres, and there are six faces to a cube, so that the result is 150 square centimetres.'
He added, 'Two important issues emerge from this. Firstly, schools in the independent sector are moving increasingly to International GCSEs (IGCSEs), which are seen as more demanding, and prepare pupils more effectively for A-Level. This is creating a two-tier system in education, since these are not recognised in the state sector, and is further attractive to schools because the curriculum is relatively stable, unlike for GCSEs where some observers see the incessant modifications as principally an income source for those involved in producing educational materials.
'Secondly, it raises the questions: Who is in charge of GCSEs? Who monitors? Who challenges? Why is it that, with dozens of agencies, authorities, boards, institutes and quangos, these extraordinary outcomes still surface?
Dr Pike said, 'Until we all get to grips with this fiasco, with some tough talking, this country risks sliding down the road to mediocrity'.
The last word returns to Tolstoy.
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth, if it be such as would obliged them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
The strength of a government depends on the people’s ignorance.Moreover, he said, the government is aware of this and would therefore always fight against the people’s education
Tolstoy
The release of emails and other data exposing the mindset of climate scientists in resisting dissent by distorting or withholding of datasets, will bring questions,however the main uncertainty that needs to be asked is why global warming has stopped.
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.
- Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change
This is a clear case of the mind projection fallacy (My own ignorance) - (Nature is indeterminate)eg Jaynes Probability as Logic,
It seems that mankind has always been occupied with the problem of how to deal with ignorance.Primitive man, aware of his helplessness against the forces of Nature but totally ignorant of their causes, would try to compensate for his ignorance by inventing hypotheses about them. For educated people today, the idea of directing intelligences willfully and consciously controlling every detail of events seems vastly more complicated than the idea of a machine running; but to primitive man (and even to the uneducated today) the opposite is true. For one who has no comprehension of physical law, but is aware of his own consciousness and volition, the natural question to ask is not:What is causing it?", but rather:Who is causing it?"
The answer was to invent Gods with the same consciousness and volition as ourselves, but with the additional power of psychokinesis; one in control of the weather, one in control of the seas, and so on. This personication of Nature must have been going on for thousands of years before it started producing permanent written records, in ancient Egypt and Greece. It appears that the adult citizens of those times really believed very literally in all their local Gods This oldest of all devices for dealing with one's ignorance, is the firrst form of what we havecalled the Mind Projection Fallacy".
One asserts that the creations of his own imagination are real properties of Nature, and thus in effect projects his own thoughts out onto Nature. It is still rampant today, not only in fundamentalist religion, but in every field where probability theory is used Of course, we are not arguing against a scientist's practice of formulating hypotheses about what is happening in Nature. Indeed, we see it as the highest form of creativity { far transcending mere mathematical manipulative skill { to conceive the right hypothesis in any field, out of one's educated imagination. Copernicus, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Wegener, Einstein are our heroes for having done this The difference between an imaginative scientist on the one hand, and primitive man and religious fundamentalists on the other, is that the scientist clearly recognizes the creations of his imagination as tentative working hypotheses to be tested by observation; and he is prepared to test and reject a hundred different hypotheses in order to find the right one.
Indeed as see the interbreeding of ideas of a small community of very ordinary scientists,has seen a field stagnate into a toxic cesspool that controls peer review and browbeats editors and censors ideas plausible or otherwise as a heresy.
Tommy Gold spoke of this at Nasa.
Another area where it is particularly bad is in the planetary sciences where NASA made great mistakes in the way in which they set up the situation. NASA made the grave mistake not only of working with a peer review system, but one where some of the peers (in fact very influential ones) were the in-house people doing the same line of work. This established a community of planetary scientists now which was completely selected by the leading members of the herd, which was very firmly controlled, and after quite a short time, the slightest departure from the herd was absolutely cut down. Money was not there for anybody who had a slightly diverging viewpoint. The conferences ignored him, and so on. It became completely impossible to do any independent work. For all the money that has been spent, the planetary program will one day be seen to have been extraordinarily poor. The pictures are fine and some of the facts that have been obtained from the planetary exploration with spacecraft - those will stand but not much else.
Indeed the decrease of scientific diversity (interbreeding) is akin to an Appalachian mining town.
Clearly these limitations are skill based and one could conjecture that this western phenomena is a result of the antiscientific mathematical cnstraint as outlined by Vladimir Arnold.
In the middle of the twentieth century a strong mafia of left-brained mathematicians succeeded in eliminating all geometry from the mathematical education (first in France and later in most other countries), replacing the study of all content in mathematics by the training in formal proofs and the manipulation of abstract notions. Of course, all the geometry, and, consequently, all relations with the real world and other sciences have been eliminated from the mathematics teaching.
Define the multiplication of natural numbers by the long multiplication rule. The
commutativity of the multiplication (ab = ba) becomes then a difficult theorem, which
one can however deduce logically from the definition. Forcing poor students to learn such proofs, the left-brained criminals had inevitably created the present negative opinion, of society and governments, of mathematics.
But the left-brained ill people have succeeded in breeding generations of mathematicians,who understand no other approach to mathematics and are able only to continue to teach it the same way. The aversion to mathematics of the ministers who have suffered through the humiliating teaching of this type in high school is a normal and healthy reaction.
Unfortunately, their aversion to mathematics is acting indiscriminately on all of it and can kill it completely. One of the dangerous trends is to eliminate the proofs from the high-school mathematics.The role of the proof for mathematics is similar to that for orthography or even calligraphy for poetry. A person, who had not mastered the art of the proofs in high school, is as a rule unable to distinguish correct reasoning from that which is misleading Such people can be easily manipulated by the irresponsible politicians. Mass hypnosis and the disastrous social events may result.
The continuity of the dumbing down of mathematics and science is criticized in the Royal society of Chemistry on the UK examination standards.
The question ran: 'A solid cube has sides of length 5 cm. Work out the total surface area of the cube. State the units of your answer.'
Dr Pike said, 'The correct answer can be arrived at within seconds, by noting that the area of each face of the cube is 5 x 5, or 25 square centimetres, and there are six faces to a cube, so that the result is 150 square centimetres.'
He added, 'Two important issues emerge from this. Firstly, schools in the independent sector are moving increasingly to International GCSEs (IGCSEs), which are seen as more demanding, and prepare pupils more effectively for A-Level. This is creating a two-tier system in education, since these are not recognised in the state sector, and is further attractive to schools because the curriculum is relatively stable, unlike for GCSEs where some observers see the incessant modifications as principally an income source for those involved in producing educational materials.
'Secondly, it raises the questions: Who is in charge of GCSEs? Who monitors? Who challenges? Why is it that, with dozens of agencies, authorities, boards, institutes and quangos, these extraordinary outcomes still surface?
Dr Pike said, 'Until we all get to grips with this fiasco, with some tough talking, this country risks sliding down the road to mediocrity'.
The last word returns to Tolstoy.
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth, if it be such as would obliged them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
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