tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post2590291823015043852..comments2024-03-19T07:48:54.021-06:00Comments on Gus Van Horn: Persuade Me to ListenGus Van Hornhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-22393231532263966792012-06-09T02:03:49.206-06:002012-06-09T02:03:49.206-06:00I like that, and perhaps the answer you get can he...I like that, and perhaps the answer you get can help gauge whether someone is second-handed, or at least how ingrained the notion of God is to someone.<br /><br />Most people have this notion drilled into their heads from an early age, which explains why most people even have it. But some will dare to look at the idea in the same way they look at any other, and question it. (Your question might help them and even earn you thanks.) Others will refuse to do this at all. (They are the ones who are beyond any immediate help.)Gus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-76676882559826210222012-06-08T17:57:27.642-06:002012-06-08T17:57:27.642-06:00Gus, good question. It reminded me of a related on...Gus, good question. It reminded me of a related one I've often asked of religious folks - why would anyone ever come up with the idea of a God (or more generally, the supernatural) in the first place? What set of facts, logic or data would make you need or want to think up that concept to try to explain them? Why not try something (anything) else, first.Steve Dnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-53802317640242824192012-06-07T13:23:44.012-06:002012-06-07T13:23:44.012-06:00Mike,Your account of linguistic supremacists remin...Mike,<br><br>Your account of linguistic supremacists reminds me of Gus Portokalos' "derivation" of <i>kimono</i> in <i>My Big Fat Greek Wedding</i>. Perhaps we can re-name the approach of this type of crank the "Gus Portokalos School" of linguistics.<br><br>Steve,<br><br>Indeed the challenge in such experiments lies well beyond finding data. Why would someone even run a test <em>without</em> having (or giving) a good reason to think he'd get results?<br><br>GusGus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-37822761019260908062012-06-07T11:09:05.524-06:002012-06-07T11:09:05.524-06:00What he is saying is something I have been poundin...What he is saying is something I have been pounding on for quite some time. There is more to science than just data. You also need a good explanation (that means a logical mechanism for the data) as well. Your theory should mesh with the prevailing theories of how the world works; theories which have been built by mountains of data over decades; even centuries. If it doesn’t, then you’ve got some ‘splaining to do’. You will need a lot more data, a lot better data, a good explanation for the discrepancy AND a whole lot of time for people to mull it over and accept it.<br /><br />A good example of this is the research into possible psychic phenomena. If you look at the data carefully you can pull out tiny statistical effects which seem to ‘prove’ remote sensing and other non sensory methods of taking in information from the environment. But the effects are tiny and hard to reproduce and most importantly there is NO known mechanism to account for them. So, most scientists would rather believe that other factors are contaminating these experiments, and leading to these effects, thereby producing only an illusion that ESP exists.Steve Dnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-71581119290701268622012-06-07T05:26:35.058-06:002012-06-07T05:26:35.058-06:00Heh, this is something I run into often enough in ...Heh, this is something I run into often enough in linguistics. Of course, there's a wide range of linguistics cranks, since language is very important to people. So first you get the chauvinists: Most common, or at least loudest, are Sanskrit supremacists, Turkic supremacists--not helped by the fact that in the 1930s the Turkish government supported the crank "Sun Theory" for ideolgical reasons--and Greek supremacists (I remember one of them shouting in writing that Proto-Indo-European was an excrescence of anti-Greek bigotry that was also revealed in the fact that the United States refused to give Greece a few thousand neutron boms so they could re-establish the Byzantine Empire in Anatolia and the Balkans. Yes, really, and contrary to the stereotypes the guy was a hard socialist with strong Communist sympathies...hmm, what's Greek for "pestiferous scum"?). But I've even encountered Nahuatl supremacists (the language of the Aztecs and of some of their bitterest blood enemies) who point to such coincidences as "Michigan" sounding much like the Nahuatl for "place of fish" as evidence the Aztecs made it all the way to the Arctic and by right own the Americas.<br /><br />Then you have the cranks who are more into <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-History-English-Language/dp/193363331X" rel="nofollow">grand paranoid theories of everything</a> and damn the academics.<br /><br />Those are easy to avoid. Then you have the harder problem of working through stuff that looks good at first glance but doesn't end up meaning anything. One example is a paper I read in a seminar on speech perception in which the fellows who wrote it ran four separate perception experiments, but varied <i>two</i> experimental parameters between each experiment, so the paper ended up being almost useless since there was no way to know which effects were due to which factors! Then there was a paper I read and reported on for a seminar in language typology that at first glance seemed like very interesting results about what consonants you can expect languages to have given other classes of consonants in them...but it turns out, if you went back to the original source they took their data from, they had without realizing it simply reclassified the classifications of the data, mucked about with statistics, and recapitulated the work of the original, and ended up with 100% correlations! The result was true by the definitions in the original source, if you dug into the details of what they did, and one suspects someone had put off writing his paper until the night before and fooled himself.Mikenoreply@blogger.com