There is a crisis in many corners of the social sciences: academics struggling to replicate research results. Michael Lind is a fellow at the New America Foundation and he says whole fields of research have simply lost their way. In a recent commentary, he calls for the abolition of the social 'sciences'.
He is correct, and he is confirming the strong criticisms that have been directed towards the institutional social sciences over the past half-century.
The philosopher-novelist, Walker Percy, described humans as triadic creatures - that is, sign-bearing and symbolizing. This perspective of man, borrowing from semiotic philosophy and Catholic Theology, criticizes the dyadic model (cause and effect) as it is applied to human selves. The methodology of the social sciences was directly borrowed from the natural sciences, and no matter how ramshackle the overall fit, the social sciences overturned and asserted itself over much older anthropologies, such as Greek rationalism or Christian humanism. This victory, in the academy anyway, was near absolute as social scientists could claim scientific objectivity in their empiricism, whereas the older empiricisms centred directly around theorizing about the self, and its purpose through the actual experience of the theorist, and his conversations with other people. The older empiricisms suffered from a lack of generality for the particularity, but in that way, probably captured a more accurate perspective of the human experience.
The problem, as Walker Percy, claims is that human beings possess too little self knowledge for objective experiments. The scientists conducting the experiments are not independent and autonomous brains orbiting, and monitoring the lives of the lesser subjects being experimented upon, but are more or less the same. The generalities arrived upon by social science cannot be replicated because of the artificiality of the circumstances in which they are conducted.
The pretense of the social scientist suffers from a total dislocation from the truth - that is, what is the self, and what is it here to do. The problem is, from the humanities perspective, is that we are probably nowhere near the truth than Plato was over 2500 years ago.
He is correct, and he is confirming the strong criticisms that have been directed towards the institutional social sciences over the past half-century.
The philosopher-novelist, Walker Percy, described humans as triadic creatures - that is, sign-bearing and symbolizing. This perspective of man, borrowing from semiotic philosophy and Catholic Theology, criticizes the dyadic model (cause and effect) as it is applied to human selves. The methodology of the social sciences was directly borrowed from the natural sciences, and no matter how ramshackle the overall fit, the social sciences overturned and asserted itself over much older anthropologies, such as Greek rationalism or Christian humanism. This victory, in the academy anyway, was near absolute as social scientists could claim scientific objectivity in their empiricism, whereas the older empiricisms centred directly around theorizing about the self, and its purpose through the actual experience of the theorist, and his conversations with other people. The older empiricisms suffered from a lack of generality for the particularity, but in that way, probably captured a more accurate perspective of the human experience.
The problem, as Walker Percy, claims is that human beings possess too little self knowledge for objective experiments. The scientists conducting the experiments are not independent and autonomous brains orbiting, and monitoring the lives of the lesser subjects being experimented upon, but are more or less the same. The generalities arrived upon by social science cannot be replicated because of the artificiality of the circumstances in which they are conducted.
The pretense of the social scientist suffers from a total dislocation from the truth - that is, what is the self, and what is it here to do. The problem is, from the humanities perspective, is that we are probably nowhere near the truth than Plato was over 2500 years ago.
Exactly. Why it's still important to read and understand Plato.
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KIC 8462852 is a star somewhat more massive, hotter, and brighter than the Sun. It’s about 1,500 light-years away, a decent distance, so it’s too faint to see with the naked eye. The Kepler data for the star are pretty bizarre: There are dips in the light, but they aren’t periodic. They can be very deep; one dropped the amount of starlight by 15 percent, and another by a whopping 22 percent!
Straight away, we know we’re not dealing with a planet here. Even a Jupiter-sized planet only blocks roughly 1 percent of this kind of star’s light, and that’s about as big as a planet gets. It can’t be due to a star, either; we’d see it if it were. And the lack of a regular, repeating signal belies both of these as well. Whatever is blocking the star is big, though, up to half the width of the star itself!
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
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<i>The astronomers found a star so odd, with behavior so difficult to explain, that it’s clear something weird is happening there. And some of the astronomers who did the work are now looking into the idea that what they’ve found might (might!) be due to aliens. But don’t let this idea run away with you (as it has with some folks on social media and, no doubt, will in some sketchier “media” outlets any minute now). The scientists involved are being very skeptical and approaching this the right way: more of an interested “Hey, why not?”
That's cool. I'd assume SETI will allow them to listen to the star... I mean... This is probably the best lead they've had in their history, despite it being quite far fetched.
That's cool. I'd assume SETI will allow them to listen to the star... I mean... This is probably the best lead they've had in their history, despite it being quite far fetched.
Can you imagine if we did detect a signal?
Ya, Trump would say it was an illegal alien signal and we'd have to build a wall around Earth.
Ya, Trump would say it was an illegal alien signal and we'd have to build a wall around Earth.
Maybe we're looking an alternate earth where Trump won and started to building the wall around earth in reactionto the alien signal which was discovered because he was building a wall to protect from his own alien signal like some sort of messed up time loop.
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On a distant planet, Astronomer Dudley Bose performs the first detailed observations of an astronomical event known as the Dyson Pair Enclosure. Two stars, located roughly 1,000 light years from Earth (750 light years from the edge of Commonwealth space), seemingly disappeared some time earlier. The theory is that they have been enclosed inside Dyson spheres.
Bose's investigations reveal that the enclosing of Dyson Alpha and Dyson Beta (as the stars become known) occurred quickly and simultaneously. These facts mean that the technology of the Dyson aliens, or possibly other unknown aliens, surpasses that of the Commonwealth; furthermore, did the Dyson Aliens enclose themselves, or did some other force enclose them? Was it for protection or to protect those outside the spheres?
To investigate, the Commonwealth builds its first interstellar ship, the Second Chance. Commanded by Wilson Kime, one of the first men to walk on Mars, using a self-enclosed 'flowing' wormhole for propulsion, the Second Chance travels to Dyson Alpha.
Just imagine for a moment, if they are advanced enough to be building that sort of stuff, and we primitives somehow detected it, they probably already know about us. That's what's trippy.
Just imagine for a moment, if they are advanced enough to be building that sort of stuff, and we primitives somehow detected it, they probably already know about us. That's what's trippy.
Hard to say - thats a long ways away; while they may have probes that have gone through here odds of it happening during humanity's window of existence thus far is slim to none.
Pretty insane to think that we're just discovering ways to hypothesize extrasolar planets by watching how much light Jd blocked as it passes by on its orbit .. And these fools are potentially harnessing the largest (and free-est) source of self sustaining nuclear energy we know of.
We are an ant farm
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Long time listener, first time caller.
Well in our defense, we know how to harness it too. We have solar panels in space.
Organizing a world wide effort and gathering the amount of material required and figuring out a way to actually build it is a whole different ball game. If technology continues it's exponential growth I don't think it will take too long (relatively speaking, generations of course) for us to get there.
Is a dyson sphere really needed for our civilization? Fusion should be plenty? I dont think that a civilization would build a Dyson sphere until there is a real need for it. Some sort of technology we can't even conceive of really.
And yes, you read that right: we're going to have to mine materials from Mercury. Actually, we'll likely have to take the whole planet apart. The Dyson sphere will require a horrendous amount of material—so much so, in fact, that, should we want to completely envelope the sun, we are going to have to disassemble not just Mercury, but Venus, some of the outer planets, and any nearby asteroids as well.
http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/...e-in-five.html
We may be over eight or nine years away, after which there will be another change in Western governments from Liberal back into Conservative, and money will be redirected from dismantling Mercury and back into building more prisons.
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"We don't even know who our best player is yet. It could be any one of us at this point." - Peter LaFleur, player/coach, Average Joe's Gymnasium
Though overpopulation in South Asia does come with the issues of a populace leaning too hard on its country’s resources, Galka remarkably doesn’t see it like that. “If anything, I see South Asia’s dense population as a positive thing. It is very efficient economically, socially, and environmentally for people to live in dense population centers,” Galka said to io9. “And a movement out of rural areas into cities is a trend that is happening everywhere in the world, even in India and Bangladesh. So in that sense, they are ahead of the curve.”
In reference to Troutman's earlier post about world population density, my new word for supporting something stupid that will eventually lead to the destruction of all of humanity is, 'pulling a Galka'.
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"We don't even know who our best player is yet. It could be any one of us at this point." - Peter LaFleur, player/coach, Average Joe's Gymnasium
Our most promising theory invokes a family of exocomets.
One way we imagine such a barrage of comets could be triggered
is by the passage of a field star through the system. And, in fact,
as discussed above, there is a small star nearby (∼ 1000 AU; Section
2.3) which, if moving near to KIC 8462852, but not bound to
it, could trigger a barrage of bodies into the vicinity of the host
star. On the other hand, if the companion star is bound, it could
be pumping up comet eccentricities through the Kozai mechanism.
Measuring the motion/orbit of the companion star with respect to
KIC 8462852 would be telling in whether or not it is associated, and
we would then be able to put stricter predictions on the timescale
and repeatability of comet showers based on bound or unbound
star-comet perturbing models. Finally, comets would release gas
(as well as dust), and sensitive observations to detect this gas would
also test this hypothesis.
However, could you imagine it is a dyson sphere being built... then every 10 or so years another star a bit closer to us starts exhibiting the same properties. Could be a galactic civilization rapidly expanding. Or.. most likely a the comet theory.
