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Please reassure or otherwise convince me, a science idiot, that the humanities, taken in their broadest sense as being everything outside the sciences and mathematics, are, through the efforts of the thousands of people who work in these fields, actually making progress. I appreciate this is going to differ between disciplines: in economics, despite constantly hearing that our models "failed", I assume (and have pretty good reasons to think that) these models are more accurate (and in larger domains*) than the ones of 20 years ago. On the other hand, I'm slightly disturbed by the "historical" approach to the study of philosophy: physicists don't read Newton, zoologists don't read Darwin, but apparently the exact (or translated) words of some people from the 1700s are still our best guides to some of the ideas that originated therein. Is this just something to keep undergrads busy? On the complete other end of the scale, I have literally (heh) no idea in what sense modern literary analysis is "better" than that of 20 years ago. (Although it must be, because people keep doing it). I know this reads like standard my-degree-could-beat-up-your-degree trolling, but I really am interested in the answers. Please tell me how these fields have moved forward in the last, say, 50 years. (*or simpler but just as accurate, you know, "better")
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Sep 5, 2015 15:49
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There is, mostly by incorporating newer statistical techniques and other STEM things. This is plainly true in economics but even fields like history, literature and so on have been using stats to solve some problems- there have been huge advances in NLP using machine learning for example. The problem with humanities and why they tend to be called 'worthless' majors is that we plain just don't need that many of them, yet it's where colleges/unis have been shoving a large percent of the huge growth in student bodies. I guess the general idea is that it's a lot easier to "dumb down" those classes than it is math/engineering/science, and in practice that pretty much does turn out to be the case. So while jobs in these areas have significantly declined, more people are than ever are graduating from these fields, making the value of the those degrees rather low.
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Sep 5, 2015 16:39
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TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:There is, mostly by incorporating newer statistical techniques and other STEM things. This is plainly true in economics but even fields like history, literature and so on have been using stats to solve some problems- there have been huge advances in NLP using machine learning for example. The problem with humanities and why they tend to be called 'worthless' majors is that we plain just don't need that many of them, yet it's where colleges/unis have been shoving a large percent of the huge growth in student bodies. I guess the general idea is that it's a lot easier to "dumb down" those classes than it is math/engineering/science, and in practice that pretty much does turn out to be the case. So while jobs in these areas have significantly declined, more people are than ever are graduating from these fields, making the value of the those degrees rather low. I didn't mention history or linguistics, as those things pretty clearly have something they're trying to get right and are getting better at it. (I'm not sure where you're going with this line about undergrad numbers; I'm more interested in what the actual experts are doing)
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Sep 5, 2015 16:47
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Dzhay posted:Please reassure or otherwise convince me, a science idiot, that the humanities, taken in their broadest sense as being everything outside the sciences and mathematics, are, through the efforts of the thousands of people who work in these fields, actually making progress. This relies on a faulty presumption- that all fields of study are essentially identical and so what constitutes knowledge in each one is the same, so that we can make this statement about "progress" meaningful. This is simply untrue. Ethics is unlikely to ever determine whether consequentialism, deontology, virtue, or nihilism is the "true" form of ethics, because knowledge in ethics isn't the same thing as knowledge in chemistry. Such progress as can be made in ethics consists primarily of finding holes in particular manifestations or making new formulations of existing ideas and questions. Secondarily, however, within the last fifty years, the field of population ethics developed from Derek Parfit's 1984 formulation of the Repugnant Conclusion and is extremely important when considering both public policy and individual actions. Of course, this is mostly, if not entirely, a "new formulation"- the basic questions it offers a perspective on are ones that are ancient in origin. So to go around to literary analysis, the fifty-year-cutoff you're using still covers the rise of structuralism and post-structuralism and Continental philosophy, followed by the retreat from theory in the 1980s and a focus on interpreting texts. In addition, this also includes feminist, postcolonial, ecological, queer, Darwinian, and cultural approaches to literary criticism, along with the majority of ethnic approaches, because these all arose within the last fifty years. However, this did not erase New Criticism-influenced thinking, which is still around, and study of canonical literature, despite the rise of these approaches, because knowledge is different within literary studies (this is why Allan Sokal's hoax was ineffective as criticism- it was built on faulty epistemology). To try to illustrate this, let's look at several different understandings of how a text functions. New Critics and other formalists argue that a text stands by itself, for the purposes of analysis, and meaning is contained within it. Reader-response theorists would argue that the text's meaning is created in the interplay between the reader and the text. New Historicists conclude that texts exist as discourses with other texts. Biographicalists view texts as expressions of the author's mind, as do some psychoanalytic critics. Structuralists analyze texts in terms of their relationship to broader structures within society. And so on. It would be facile to say that all of these are true, because not all of them are equally fruitful in all cases. But they are all true, in the sense that they all can produce understanding. They're also rare to find in pure forms. T. S. Eliot was one of the fathers of New Criticism, but understanding The Waste Land without some knowledge of the Grail quest (not to be confused with knowing all the references) causes a loss of meaning, even though that's a historicist way of looking at the poem, and someone outside of cultures where the Grail quest is reproduced will themselves produce different meanings of the poem when reading it. Similarly, although Harold Bloom is mostly known for his defense of the Western canon as a meaningful and useful concept, he's also known for his incorporation of post-structuralist ideas like deconstruction into his criticism. So if there is one thing to say about the humanities in this context, it is this: if we wish to make a central distinction between the sciences and the humanities, then the sciences would be defined by truth as a number line- there are shades of truthfulness, but they exist between a pure truth and an absolute untruth. The humanities, however, would be defined by truth as a plane, or a space. There are still untruths, but there are also multiple dimensions of truthfulness.
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Sep 5, 2015 16:55
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It may be difficult to understand, but the fact that it seems that the humanities haven't progressed is because the idea of 'progress' in the humanities is dumb as hell. There isn't a defined path of improvement that they have to follow, nor is there an experimental basis which scientifically proves what is the best way to go about things. Multiple valid methodologies and theories can exist simultaneously. They're just different ways of approaching a problem and each has their own upsides and downsides. Progress implies that everything now or in the future is an improvement on what came before, which is patently untrue.
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Sep 5, 2015 17:13
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I think it's important to have disciplines whose purpose is essentially to critically examine society. That's what separates Universities from technical or vocational schools.
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Sep 5, 2015 17:16
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Effectronica posted:[...] Effectronica posted:So to go around to literary analysis, the fifty-year-cutoff you're using still covers the rise of structuralism and post-structuralism and Continental philosophy, followed by the retreat from theory in the 1980s and a focus on interpreting texts. In addition, this also includes feminist, postcolonial, ecological, queer, Darwinian, and cultural approaches to literary criticism, along with the majority of ethnic approaches, because these all arose within the last fifty years. However, this did not erase New Criticism-influenced thinking, which is still around, and study of canonical literature, despite the rise of these approaches, because knowledge is different within literary studies (this is why Allan Sokal's hoax was ineffective as criticism- it was built on faulty epistemology). Effectronica posted:So if there is one thing to say about the humanities in this context, it is this: if we wish to make a central distinction between the sciences and the humanities, then the sciences would be defined by truth as a number line- there are shades of truthfulness, but they exist between a pure truth and an absolute untruth. The humanities, however, would be defined by truth as a plane, or a space. There are still untruths, but there are also multiple dimensions of truthfulness.
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Sep 5, 2015 18:04
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Dzhay posted:I think you have a funny idea of how some of the more abstract bits of science work, I would happily class this as "progress". Old models have been shown to fail under some circumstances and new ones introduced that fail in fewer or "further out" ways. The question of whether they agree in the regimes where you would expect both to be valid is an interesting one. I wouldn't generalize from physical models to philosophical formulations in this way, though. Formulations are also somewhat analogous to equations. quote:This seems less a disagreement over what is true and more a disagreement over what is the most interesting thing about a text to study... There are actually a number of critics, though a minority, who argue for scientific criticism and would view these as arguments over what is true in that sense. But words are just labels. quote:I feel my discipline (physics) is being misrepresented here. We have various ways of modelling or explaining physical phenomena, some of these work better in some places than others, but they cannot be ranked universally into "better" or "worse". I appreciate what you're getting at here, but I'm not sure it's a fundamental difference. Another way of looking at it is that the natural sciences are like sculpting with stone. You create the sculpture by paring away until the form is revealed. The humanities are like sculpting with clay- you create the sculpture by building the form up. In between, you have the social and applied sciences. That is, in the natural sciences you discover things that already existed, which shapes the approach to truth- we didn't invent the muon, it was always waiting for us. In the humanities, though, you are dealing with the creation of things which did not previously exist- Othello wasn't waiting in the ether for Shakespeare to write. So truth is subtractive in the sciences and additive in the humanities, generally speaking.
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Sep 5, 2015 18:17
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themrguy posted:I think it's important to have disciplines whose purpose is essentially to critically examine society. That's what separates Universities from technical or vocational schools. Yeah, a big element of the mutability of the humanities and the social sciences is that they have a reciprocal relationship with the present moment. New human problems are always popping up and in our desire to resolve the world into sense we return to old texts, thinkers, and ideas to gain perspective or propose alternatives. The humanities help us to think carefully about the world around us, and because that world isn't static in its premises and big questions neither are the responses to it. If it doesn't seem like literary studies or philosophy progress over time, then maybe the question you should be asking is whether or not it makes sense to think of cultures progressing over time. Critical distance and reflexive thinking add tons to how we understand what's happening to us at any moment. The kind of critical thinking you learn in history and literature is also pretty useful on the individual level in how it makes students thoughtful and rigorous in doing things like deciding what job to take or who to vote for. Reading Hobbes or Locke is useful not just for the ideas, but for the practice in getting the ideas out in the first place, and in knowing how to be comfortable with ambiguity. STEMlords who poo poo all over the humanities usually do it because they have parochial conceptions of progress, history, and civilization in the first place, and things like philosophy seem mistaken to them because they have never learned anything other than the naive positivism that the humanities can help students overcome.
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Sep 5, 2015 18:41
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Man, nobody ever includes history in the humanities! Maybe it's just because we're neither as fuzzy-wuzzy as linguistic criticism or as fake-hard as sociology.  We just like geeking out about old poo poo!
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Sep 5, 2015 20:00
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What are the criteria you are using here? What does 'progress' mean? Imagine that the field of philosophy really were progressing in the relevant way. How would you know? What would it look like? Philosophers certainly believe different things now than they did 50, 250, 2500 years ago. Is that progress?
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Sep 6, 2015 03:41
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Juffo-Wup posted:What are the criteria you are using here? What does 'progress' mean? Imagine that the field of philosophy really were progressing in the relevant way. How would you know? What would it look like? Philosophers certainly believe different things now than they did 50, 250, 2500 years ago. Is that progress? Onwards and upwards. A line with a positive slope on a cartesian plane. You know, positivist notions of progress!!!
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Sep 6, 2015 03:51
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Juffo-Wup posted:What are the criteria you are using here? What does 'progress' mean? Imagine that the field of philosophy really were progressing in the relevant way. How would you know? What would it look like? Philosophers certainly believe different things now than they did 50, 250, 2500 years ago. Is that progress? The neoliberal notion of progress. 
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Sep 6, 2015 05:17
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There's a vocal (and very credentialed) minority of economists who insist that economic models have not in fact failed in recent years, but that politicians deliberately choose failed models for intellectual cover for carrying out the policies they wanted to do anyway. And it's hard to argue with that view in some cases, like the Republicans who have been warning us about hyperinflation and calling for immediate and drastic Fed rate hikes for the last seven years, apparently unconcerned that the hyperinflation has never arrived. So saying that economics has failed us because of the poor recovery from the 2008 financial crisis is like saying that climate science has failed us because politicians refuse to do anything about global warming. Claiming that economic models have failed is little more than a fig leaf for decision-makers who ignored the standard economic models and don't want to admit it. I would bet that you will see politicians claiming the same thing about climate science if public opinion in the US ever comes around to punish climate-deniers, no matter how absurd. "Oh well the
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Sep 6, 2015 05:49
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If anything, I would say that Economics is a field that clearly has not advanced by the standards of "hard science", since Austrian and Chicago School adherents are still allowed to call themselves economists. But of course the fact that this is due to corporations and the rich buying respectability for their class-war politics ultimately puts the lie to this same notion of fields of study being defined by some sort of objective scientific progress.
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Sep 6, 2015 06:10
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Far be it from me to unduly limit the debate, but while OP did mention Economics, isn't it usually situated within the social sciences, rather than in the humanities?
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Sep 6, 2015 06:28
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Far be it from me to unduly limit the debate, but while OP did mention Economics, isn't it usually situated within the social sciences, rather than in the humanities? Most colleges place Economics in their Business or Social Science departments. When I think Humanities, I think of subjects like Philosophy/Classics, Ethnic Studies, and the Fine Arts.
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Sep 6, 2015 06:36
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I think it's pretty clear that, for example, structural functionalism is both a departure from, and a continuation of, functional structuralism.
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Sep 6, 2015 06:38
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Dzhay posted:Please reassure or otherwise convince me, a science idiot, that the humanities, taken in their broadest sense as being everything outside the sciences and mathematics, are, through the efforts of the thousands of people who work in these fields, actually making progress. Are you an undergrad? This reads like you're an undergrad. Absurd Alhazred posted:Far be it from me to unduly limit the debate, but while OP did mention Economics, isn't it usually situated within the social sciences, rather than in the humanities? So are sociology, history, geography, psychology, and I think a couple more that I'm forgetting? sugar free jazz fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Sep 6, 2015 |
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Sep 6, 2015 07:13
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Dzhay posted:Please reassure or otherwise convince me, a science idiot, that the humanities, taken in their broadest sense as being everything outside the sciences and mathematics, are, through the efforts of the thousands of people who work in these fields, actually making progress. I would like this to be a good thread and not a bad thread, but in order for it to not be a bad thread you need a really really specific definition of those bolded words there in order for this to turn into anything other than degreechat. Which is gonna be hard to do because those are some extremely general terms you used. And then its only gonna turn into Marxchat flavors about the derivation of notions of worth. Which should tell you a thing about your premise, tbqh. Because its the same premise as a lot of other threads like this but with extra, unnecessary steps. Dzhay posted:I think you have a funny idea of how some of the more abstract bits of science work, I would happily class this as "progress". I think women are generally acknowledged more equal to men than was the case 50 years ago, I would happily class this as "progress" Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Sep 6, 2015 |
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Sep 6, 2015 07:42
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But if only there were a library of discourse outlining how progress and value have been defined over time, and how what I think matters differs from what other people think matters, and why, and how that came to be! *turns around to see a massive Brutalist edifice supporting neon flashing letters: CRITICAL___THEORY Hrm... I wonder if the internet knows the answer...
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Sep 6, 2015 07:53
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Arglebargle III posted:There's a vocal (and very credentialed) minority of economists who insist that economic models have not in fact failed in recent years, but that politicians deliberately choose failed models for intellectual cover for carrying out the policies they wanted to do anyway. And it's hard to argue with that view in some cases, like the Republicans who have been warning us about hyperinflation and calling for immediate and drastic Fed rate hikes for the last seven years, apparently unconcerned that the hyperinflation has never arrived. I don't think that's a fair comparison. If climate scientists did what economists did leading up to 2008, they would've been dumping massive C02 in the atmosphere, saying it would help the environment, and then denying any responsibility when poo poo went down. The fact of the matter is that many respected economists (Rubin, Greenspan, et al) held key positions in the White House and used that to deregulate the market or front a part of their ideology.
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Sep 6, 2015 08:50
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Juffo-Wup posted:What are the criteria you are using here? What does 'progress' mean? Imagine that the field of philosophy really were progressing in the relevant way. How would you know? What would it look like? Philosophers certainly believe different things now than they did 50, 250, 2500 years ago. Is that progress? Could the philosophers of today convince those of the past, given the opportunity? Willie Tomg posted:I would like this to be a good thread and not a bad thread, but in order for it to not be a bad thread you need a really really specific definition of those bolded words there in order for this to turn into anything other than degreechat. Which is gonna be hard to do because those are some extremely general terms you used. Extremely general was kind of the point, I'm aware that this is a stupid and vague question, but I'm still interested in people's hopefully-less-stupid vague answers. I quite deliberately am not specifying what I mean by "better", despite what half the posters here are accusing me of.
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Sep 6, 2015 09:58
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Dzhay posted:Extremely general was kind of the point, I'm aware that this is a stupid and vague question, but I'm still interested in people's hopefully-less-stupid vague answers. I quite deliberately am not specifying what I mean by "better", despite what half the posters here are accusing me of. Let me translate that into scientific: Willie is saying your premise is the humanistic equivalent of untestable nonsense, you have to specify to the best of your understanding and accept the scope of answers will reflect your own prior knowledge.
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Sep 6, 2015 10:23
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Dzhay posted:Could the philosophers of today convince those of the past, given the opportunity? On a human level, some philosophers were and are stubborn shitheads unwilling to be convinced, but on a pure content level, yes. I'd like to imagine that Gettier counterexamples would have been convincing to Plato. Philosophy does 'move forward', in a lot of cases by finding counterexamples to theories we previously thought were coherent. Philosophy also always has taken into account the best science of the time, so as science (not just STEM sciences but every other field as well) evolves, philosophy incorporates that. In some cases, this means that philosophy has to re-evaluate - Kantian epistemology after the discovery of Non-Euclidian geometries, the philosophy of mathematics after Gödel, theories of causality after quantum physics and so forth. In other cases, it just means that new scientific advances allow us to come up with new theories about how stuff works, simply because we know more.
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Sep 6, 2015 11:08
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Dzhay posted:Could the philosophers of today convince those of the past, given the opportunity? Could physicists today convince Newton to give up on absolute space and velocity? The answer seems to depend on facts about Newton's psychology, and the rhetorical skill of his interlocutor. Which are weird criteria by which to judge the success of a field.
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Sep 6, 2015 15:52
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Juffo-Wup posted:Could physicists today convince Newton to give up on absolute space and velocity? The answer seems to depend on facts about Newton's psychology, and the rhetorical skill of his interlocutor. Which are weird criteria by which to judge the success of a field. Could we lend Newton our observations and technology for such? Or are we stuck with his technology in this attempt to convince him? Could we hand him an electron microscope?
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Sep 6, 2015 16:11
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:Could we lend Newton our observations and technology for such? Or are we stuck with his technology in this attempt to convince him? Could we hand him an electron microscope? And tell him what electrons are? And train him how to use it and how to interpret the results? And give him the theoretical framework under which they make sense? Yeah, I suppose if we transplanted an enlightenment thinker into a modern scientific paradigm, he could probably be persuaded to accept modern scientific ideas.
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Sep 6, 2015 17:20
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:Could we lend Newton our observations and technology for such? Or are we stuck with his technology in this attempt to convince him? Could we hand him an electron microscope? You could probably demonstrate it to him mathematically, since he was a good enough mathematician to have (co)invented calculus. You'd end up teaching him 200+ years worth of mathematical development, then have to figure out how demonstrate relativity and quantum physics to him using 17th century apparatus. Keep in mind that Newtonian physics is good enough to have got us to the moon and back, so poo poo like the motion of the planets and easily observable stuff like that are not good enough. Alternativly, like Juffo-Wup said, if we transplanted Newton to modern times, he'd probably be fairly easy to convince.
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Sep 6, 2015 17:24
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This seems like a weird definition of progress, as even the graybeards working in today's sciences regularly dismiss and ignore new possibilities, even when it constitutes a violation of their most cherished principles. Change in a discipline often requires young scholars with different backgrounds and experiences. How many actual discoveries sat ignored until somebody else confirmed them without even knowing the earlier work was there?
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Sep 6, 2015 17:30
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Job Truniht posted:I don't think that's a fair comparison. If climate scientists did what economists did leading up to 2008, they would've been dumping massive C02 in the atmosphere, saying it would help the environment, and then denying any responsibility when poo poo went down. The fact of the matter is that many respected economists (Rubin, Greenspan, et al) held key positions in the White House and used that to deregulate the market or front a part of their ideology. It's worth pointing out that Greenspan is not a respected economist among anyone except a very few any more, and calling him a respected economist in the '90s sidesteps the very point I was making -- who respected him? Politicians who wanted intellectual ammunition to do exactly what he was saying anyway.
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Sep 6, 2015 17:41
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Juffo-Wup posted:Could physicists today convince Newton to give up on absolute space and velocity? The answer seems to depend on facts about Newton's psychology, and the rhetorical skill of his interlocutor. Which are weird criteria by which to judge the success of a field. I think the technology that we have as a result of our science (and the science we have discovered as a result of our technology) would kind of be essential. To paraphrase Latour, science is argumentation allied with evidence. I think one way to blow his mind would be to show him a laser passing through a diffraction grating, showing that light interferes like waves; then lower the intensity until photon detectors light up one at a time, demonstrating that light is detected one quantum at a time. Then explain what time dilation is, and use very accurate clocks to show that it does happen. If he doesn't believe you, allow him to choose each time which clock to move and which clock to keep still. These are two big ways in which modern physics is different from Newton's, and should be convincing if he's willing to accept the evidence.
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Sep 6, 2015 17:41
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You're bringing false assumptions to the table here. The humanities, unlike STEM, can't be judged in a binary progress//stagnation lens. It's better to think of studying the humanities as entering into a long conversation. If you get a good education, you develop useful 'soft' skills in persuasion, rhetoric, analysis, blahblahblah. I always thought that most of the dumbasses in college study business and psychology.
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Sep 6, 2015 18:22
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Yeah, there is progress in the humanities, but what people in the humanities might mean by progress aren't necessarily what you might think of as progress in whatever science you're thinking of (and what different scientific disciplines view as progress; it's not uniform). But scientists don't get a monopoly on what 'progress' means. For example, I'd say there is progress in the study of Plato when we come up with new and clever ways to understand his views that haven't been done before, either because nobody saw it, or because the tools to understand it that way didn't exist back in Plato's day. You might think it's disturbing to care about the history, but a lot of philosophical questions are really general, so it's worth at least looking at the old dead guys to see what they thought. He has some cool ideas that even if not true (hint: they're not) can teach us a lot about the questions he's asking. There might be progress in, say, literary theory, when they make a new theory that gives us insight into both the text and, probably, ourselves and our time. Or in ethics, when people come up with clever new arguments for positions, or show how an old position entails something good/bad/???. I mean, I don't think that we'll ever figure out the True Ethical Theory (this is because ethics is extremely difficult and complicated), but when we get more considerations for or against a theory, that's progress as far as I'm concerned. I'm also not sure what it matters if the humanities don't make progress in one sense or another. Music doesn't progress, nor does art, but that doesn't mean they aren't valuable for its own reasons. It's valuable to enrich ourselves in these ways, which is good enough for me. Ghost of Reagan Past fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Sep 6, 2015 |
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Sep 6, 2015 18:37
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Ferdinand the Bull posted:You're bringing false assumptions to the table here. The humanities, unlike STEM, can't be judged in a binary progress//stagnation lens. Incidentally I've also observed that there are a lot of dumb undergrads in psychology, which is weird because psychology is a fairly important field and in order to have a real career in psychology you generally need to be admitted to fairly selective graduate programs.
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Sep 7, 2015 02:04
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Effectronica posted:However, this did not erase New Criticism-influenced thinking, which is still around, and study of canonical literature, despite the rise of these approaches, because knowledge is different within literary studies (this is why Allan Sokal's hoax was ineffective as criticism- it was built on faulty epistemology). wiregrind fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Sep 7, 2015 |
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Sep 7, 2015 05:41
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:
This is valuable in itself. People learn thinking the same way they learn survival in the wilderness. At first you learn the techniques of philosophical thinking in charted territory (re-think what other before you thought). You ask questions, come up with answers and read what answers other people have written to the same questions. It's also crucial to note, that the low hanging fruit of philosophy have been harvested a long long time ago, which in terms means that progress gets harder. An example to this might be the analogy of tinkering with gears and wheels: People where tinkering with gears and wheels for a long long time. To truly invent something new with gears and wheels would be way harder today then it would be 300 years ago. This is because progress seems to get harder on an exponential scale. To learn tinkering with gears and wheels, you would start off building simple mechanisms people have build before. Do we know everything you could possibly do with simple mechanical parts? I highly doubt that. Does humanity as a whole have a great understanding of mechanics, including mathematical models which let us describe and predict how those objects behave? I'm reasonably sure we do, otherwise many common things wouldn't be possible. We didn't become worse thinkers over the last 2000 years. Philosophy just got way harder over time.
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Sep 7, 2015 16:43
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Ogmius815 posted:Incidentally I've also observed that there are a lot of dumb undergrads Ftfy
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Sep 7, 2015 16:58
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Ogmius815 posted:Incidentally I've also observed that there are a lot of dumb undergrads in psychology, which is weird because psychology is a fairly important field and in order to have a real career in psychology you generally need to be admitted to fairly selective graduate programs. There are plenty of dumb professionals as well, diagnosing reactive attachment disorder left and right.
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Sep 7, 2015 17:00
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Dzhay posted:I think you have a funny idea of how some of the more abstract bits of science work, I would happily class this as "progress". Old models have been shown to fail under some circumstances and new ones introduced that fail in fewer or "further out" ways. The question of whether they agree in the regimes where you would expect both to be valid is an interesting one. I think you have a funny idea of how anything works, including your discipline (physics)
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Sep 7, 2015 18:48
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