Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Philosopher argues with a skeptic

Philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci writes a rant:
Yet another frustrating conversation: why talking science to “skeptics” is a hopeless endeavor ...

First, let me remind you that Curiosa is a smart, well read, and genuinely curious person. She ain’t no country bumpkin, so to speak.

Second, precisely because she reads widely, she can’t help herself putting what I write — or what truly eminent evolutionary biologists, like Stephen Jay Gould, write — on the same level with the sort of fluff ...

Fourth, Curiosa has fallen for the well known technique of spreading doubt on mainstream science, enough that people cannot genuinely make up their minds about what is going on. This was the deliberate strategy of the tobacco industry in its absurd (and lethal, for many people) denial of a link between smoking and cancer, ...
Yes, I have had frustrating conversations with skeptics also, but philosophers like Massimo are the worst offenders.

Stephen Jay Gould was a truly eminent evolutionary biologists, but he was also also a leftist-Jewish-Marxist kook who wrote a lot of silly fluff and wrong science. His most famous book is based on faked science to support a leftist ideological view.

No one denied a link between smoking and cancer. The question was whether there was a causal link. But Massimo himself belongs to a school of philosophical thought that denies causality.

Massimo does not seem to realize that real scientists look at him the way he looks at Curiosa. Yes, he is smart and well-read, but he has been taken in by goofy philosophy ideas and has a crippled view of what science is about.

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