Re: The Question Gerrit Won't Answer

"Gerrit Hanenburg" <G.Hanenburg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:q946s35io05frasl90u1o3gi6j1c3fdegh@xxxxxxxxxx

There is a huge problem of ignorance in
the profession and most of it comes from
sets of quite unexamined, semi-crazy beliefs
(which nearly all practitioners regard as
'knowledge')

There you go again, throwing your own preconceptions around as if they
are the truth.

The OED defines 'preconception' as

"a conception or opinion formed and entertained
prior to actual knowledge; a prepossession,
a prejudice; an anticipation."

My arguments are manifestly far from this.
They are conclusions slowly arrived at,
after years of careful study and thought

Utter nonsense. When was PA ever
of real use -- producing results of value?
When did you last see a scientific
prediction made in PA journal? What
article can you reference which is not
purely descriptive? When did you
last see anything theoretical -- which
was not transparent rubbish.

When was the last time you read a PA journal and compared it to
journals in other disciplines?
Tell me the difference between JVP
http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-archive&issn=0272-4634&volume=27
and JHE http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00472484, in
particular why the latter would be so much worse (i.e. unscientific)
than the former.

You are easily fooled. You could readily
get articles from the 'learned journals' of
any of the fake 'sciences' and ask the
same sort of question. (I trust that you
do accept that there are fake sciences?)
The whole point of such exercises is
that they adopt the FORM of genuine
sciences, and their aim is to fool. (The
practitioners of these fake sciences are,
of course, the most fooled.)

In PA (as is common in fake sciences)
the strategy is to focus in on detailed
factual issues or on some 'experiments'.
No wider question is ever discussed.
The 'experiments' are carried on, the
detail is 'investigated' but no one ever
asks why. There is never any attempt
to fit the work into a wider context.

There is never any deep or radical criticism
of the activity (or any part of it) -- as there
must be in all real sciences. No one ever
asks "Are we on the right track?" or
"Is the entire direction of this research
misconceived?".

In fake sciences such questions are the
'elephant in the room' and can never be
raised. The practictioners are invariably
quite unaware of this, and those
questions would not occur to them.

The notion that there could be a Nobel
prize (or something roughly equivalent)
in such 'sciences' is inconceivable.
There never are any discoveries, or
anything that could change the way
in which we look at the world. There
has been nothing of that nature in
PA since Darwin.

I suppose that it's theoretically possible
that there were HE equivalents of the Kung
San -- although it's not a case I'd like to
argue. They might have had fire, dogs,
bows and poisoned arrows, the ability to
cut stakes and bushes and make palisaded
enclosures, or something similar. But even
then, their numbers and density would have
been low (with little or no need of language).

Since when is language something that was needed?

The selective advantages of better
language development needs to be
explained.

(Language was no more needed than wings in birds)

Your humour here escapes me.

They could not be seen as the ancestors of
all later hominids.

I don't see why not.

In the first place, they would have
needed to exist (and I have yet to
see a case arguing for that).
Secondly, they are too specialist,
and an evolutionary dead-end.
Those who got better at 'endurance
hunting' could only try to find more
desert and semi-desert to practise in.
Also, as I mentioned before, there
is no scope for more advanced
social structure, language or other
social institions.

The only reason they are chosen
as the model for ancestral hominids
is that PA people can think of
nothing else.

"Wahrheit ist die Art von Irrtum, ohne welche eine bestimmte Art von
lebendigen Wesen nicht leben könnte. Der Wert für das Leben
entscheidet zuletzt." Friedrich Nietzsche

Sorry, but my German is not up to that.

"Truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living
beings could not exist. Ultimately the value for life is decisive."

I don't get ' . the kind of error . . '.

Could be interpreted as evolutionary epistomology.
After all, our cognitive apparatus is an evolutionary product, evolved
to deal with knowledge that made our ancestors survive and reproduce
(that's why we can't handle relativistic concepts such as spacetime on
an intuitive level, because our cognitive apparatus didn't evolve in a
relativistic environment).

There are different kinds and levels of
'cognitive aparatus' and most of the
restrictions on it are cultural. Soldiers
are trained to obey. Poorly educated
PA people (e.g. Mikey) -- and PA people
are necessarily poorly educated -- are
taught to admire their superiors as good
(even great) scientists. Any form of
critical thought is a forbidden mode.

There was no reason in our evolution
for the encoding of an ability to change
our ideas radically (on any issue) within
our own lifetimes. This is the great
impediment to scientific advance, and
the reason that major steps can only be
made by newcomers (usually the young)
to the discipline.

Evolution encoded another behaviour:
-- to be sheep-like, and 'think' what
everyone else appears to think. This
determines most human 'thought' and
is the only effective mechanism in PA.


Paul.


.

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