Comment to skies on SDN:

Did a related website in the community go down? Come back up? Relocate to a new address? Install pop-up advertisements?

This forum is for discussion of these sorts of issues.
Post Reply
Jedi Master Spock
Site Admin
Posts: 2164
Joined: Mon Aug 14, 2006 8:26 pm
Contact:

Comment to skies on SDN:

Post by Jedi Master Spock » Tue Nov 27, 2007 3:26 am

skies wrote:Have you noticed how JMSpock always adds qualifiers to his arguments? He often states "it's indisputable", "without a doubt", "clearly", or some such.
Have you noticed how much flak I've gotten for using "probably," "maybe," "most likely," and similar qualifiers? I recommend you read a little more of what I've written.

I qualify my arguments according to the situation. I add terms like "clearly" when the evidence is substantially less ambiguous than average and the person I'm talking to seems not to have understood the nature of the evidence, and most particularly when they're using similar qualifiers when they aren't justified.

If anything, I use them less than my opponents. You might want to start counting qualifiers before you start making claims about what indicates a weak argument. I'll suggest you start looking on SDN itself. Although "obvious" outnumbers "probable" on the internet in general by a factor of only 2-3:1, its usage on SDN is about 9-10 times as frequent. (Source: Google.)

In fact, the word "obvious" is used very frequently on the main website, which I consider a textbook case of the phenomenon you're noting. It is, I agree, a very real tendency among those advancing particularly flawed arguments, although of course not definitive by any means.
If I came across with that sort of attitude in my work, my research would get rejected left and right at conferences and in journals.
In case you hadn't noticed, even the best analysis of VS debaters comparing the technology of Star Wars and Star Trek is pretty much unpublishable within the scientific annals of academia.

You might be able to get something published comparing the two of them in literature (film studies in particular), philosophy (some Star Trek ethics stuff has gotten out there), or anthropology, but not the physical sciences, no matter how carefully you qualify it.

IMO, your best bet to come close would to be addressing a physics education journal and demonstrating how this could be useful as a teaching tool in the classroom (ala "cartoon physics" and "movie physics"), but that's not precisely the same thing.

Post Reply