Saturday, March 9, 2013

NSF Audit Finds Numerous Cases of Alleged Plagiarism

Your argument is deliberately misleading. You are conflating scientists with science.

Individual scientists are often wrong. This is occasionally due to malfeasance, but more often it is just the state of the art. The truth is not always completely self evident and often multiple theories compete.

Science, as a human endeavor, makes progress because results are always being verified by multiple parties. Funding proposals and peer reviewed publication are only a part of the progress. The key operation is reproducible results. Other people use existing results as part of their own work. If the outcome differs from previously known work, it will be reported. This is normal and expected. Eventually there is a consensus and and the scientific community moves forward.

Bad behavior by individuals slows down the process, but it does not derail it. Resources and time are wasted, but as long as the scientific method is employed, the results are trustworthy.

Your positions is one sometimes taken by jealous members of the social sciences and humanities, particularity in academia. (This is one of my problems with Michel Foucault and postmodernism/structuralism.) They see the respect, status and money going to technical fields, so they try and reframe science as having no more validity then any other intellectual area. The existence of modern society proves this wrong, but since they reject the scientific paradigm they seem to have no trouble ignoring external facts. (Actually Foucault has a lot of value when his work is applied to culture and society, so I should not be quite so harsh.)

That's the long answer. The short answer is that you're a troll, and appear to short in mental stature and emotional maturity.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/vwhVB_eafAo/story01.htm

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