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From: rdnelson@tucson.princeton.edu (Roger D. Nelson)
Subject: Re: Why scientists popularize premature speculations?
Message-ID: <1994Nov29.044228.10139@Princeton.EDU>
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Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 04:42:28 GMT
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In article <3bd8s0$1q2@pobox.csc.fi> grohn@finsun.csc.fi (Lauri Gr|hn) writes:
>In <3bd47o$c07@ixnews1.ix.netcom.com> sarfatti@ix.netcom.com (Jack Sarfatti) writes:
>
>>>>We are doing more than physics here.
>>>
>>>	Yes pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy and marketing
>>>it to great public. Very unethical.
>>>
>>Go tell it to Murray Gell Mann! :-)
>
>	Why? Why should one write books for great public about premature
>hypotheses and speculations? The matter is even more unethical if
>the writer is a well known scientist, even Nobelist. Good examples
>are e.g. Josephson, Prigozine...
>
>If you afraid (as new ages do) of loosing some "big ideas" by
>not writing about them to the great public have you any examples?


Yours is one of the most bemusing attitudes yet expressed on
sci.skeptic.  The usual skeptic opines that some "new" idea or speculation 
or claim is factually wrong, whereas you appear to believe that even 
talking about such notions is wrong = unethical.  It is a challenge to
try to imagine what you would regard as ethical, but it seems likely 
to be vastly uninteresting.  Sarfatti is exactly right:  public discourse
on ideas is an ultimately effective, self-policing, error-correcting
process.  

As for examples, unless you have totally ignored your education,
practically everything you have learned in science was first a
conjecture, unsupported by much beyond intuition, and very often
disputed vigorously before eventual insertion into your textbooks. 
-- 
     Roger D. Nelson, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR)
         C-131 E-Quad, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
               voice: 609 258-5370  	fax: 609 258-1993
                 email: rdnelson@phoenix.princeton.edu   
