I believe in privileges… That is to say everyone should enjoy privileges. That is to say that everyone should have a good life and you should own as much as everyone else. Thus privileges should not be exclusive but inclusive —and privileges would be eradicated like squashed colourful bugs… Things don't work as simply as this because we feel we have a distinct role to play, in accordance with what we know — or think we know...

Privileges should not destroy the planet. This is where sciences come in — to evaluate how much energy one uses to live… But sciences are always under attack from pseudo-scientistic analysis and religions. Even today, a friend of mine emailed me an image of a "female scientist" wearing a hijab demanding cash for what should be a secular scientific organisation. It stink despite the very tasteful picture THAT DOES NOT MAKE any SENSE, by trying to be "inclusive". As I have expressed many times on this site, sciences and religions DO NOT MIX. I know scientists who are Christians and they are the pits of confused bods, even if they are efficient at whatever. 

The scientific method has been under strain. I know there has been many “philosophical” articles about the rotten value of "the scientific method":

It’s probably best to get the bad news out of the way first. The so-called scientific method is a myth. That is not to say that scientists don’t do things that can be described and are unique to their fields of study. But to squeeze a diverse set of practices that span cultural anthropology, paleobotany, and theoretical physics into a handful of steps is an inevitable distortion and, to be blunt, displays a serious poverty of imagination. Easy to grasp, pocket-guide versions of the scientific method usually reduce to critical thinking, checking facts, or letting “nature speak for itself,” none of which is really all that uniquely scientific. If typical formulations were accurate, the only location true science would be taking place in would be grade-school classrooms.

Read more:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-scientific-method-is-a...
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But this bullshit is to be expected. Sciences are not a dogma. Understood. Dogmas are ridiculous. Capiche? We have to accept the flux of scientific exploration and reject the ignorance of religious beliefs. Do I repeat myself often enough?

This problem is nor recent:

In August 1948 through the initiative of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) a "World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace" was held in Wroclaw, Poland.[1] This gathering established a permanent organisation called the International Liaison Committee of Intellectuals for Peace—a group which joined with another international Communist organisation, the Women's International Democratic Federation to convene a second international conclave in Paris in April 1949, a meeting designated the World Congress of Partisans for Peace (Congrès Mondial des Partisans de la Paix).[1] Some 2,000 delegates from 75 countries were in attendance at this foundation gathering in the French capital.[1]

A new permanent organization emerged from the April 1949 conclave, the World Committee of Partisans for Peace.[1] At a Second World Congress held in Warsaw in November 1950, this group adopted the new name World Peace Council (WPC).[1] The origins of the WPC lay in the Cominform's doctrine that the world was divided between "peace-loving" progressive forces led by the Soviet Union and "warmongering" capitalist countries led by the United States, declaring that peace "should now become the pivot of the entire activity of the Communist Parties", and most western Communist parties followed this policy.[2]

In 1950, Cominform adopted the report of Mikhail Suslov, a senior Soviet official, praising the Partisans for Peace and resolving that, "The Communist and Workers' Parties must utilize all means of struggle to secure a stable and lasting peace, subordinating their entire activity to this" and that "Particular attention should be devoted to drawing into the peace movement trade unions, women's, youth, cooperative, sport, cultural, education, religious and other organizations, and also scientists, writers, journalists, cultural workers, parliamentary and other political and public leaders who act in defense of peace and against war."[3]

Lawrence Wittner, a historian of the post-war peace movement, argues that the Soviet Union devoted great efforts to the promotion of the WPC in the early post-war years because it feared an American attack and American superiority of arms[4] at a time when the USA possessed the atom bomb but the Soviet Union had not yet developed it.[5] This was in opposition to the theory that America had no plans to attack anyone, and the purpose of the WPC was to disarm the US and the NATO alliance for a future Soviet attack.

Read more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Peace_Council

Still going on and on and on...


See also: https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b283-i001


The CIA (barely formed, 50 U.S.C. § 403a — 1949) was soon placing its boot on it:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00926A001100030004-4.pdf


At this stage we don’t care if this sausage is longer than the salami. What we’re about is dunking religions in the toilet bowl and flushing, while using sciences relatively properly to manage a hairy situation which is the human condition on planet earth: evolution and change. 

So how about using the scientific method?

Amid the turbulence of the 20th century's civil rights movement and sexual revolution, the philosophy of science was undergoing its own radical transformation. Suspecting that the scientific method was less straightforward than scientists claimed, philosophers had started challenging the idea that deductive logic was the best way to reveal truths about the world. Against Method (1975), by philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, played a key role in bringing such arguments to maturity. Forty-five years after its publication, the book continues to offer valuable insights to scientists confused by the public's ambivalence toward hard scientific truths.

Most modern scientists would agree that the scientific method provides the best route toward an ever more cohesive understanding of the world around us. Feyerabend did not think it was so simple. He believed that within the landscape of all discoverable knowledge, the scientific method offers a path leading to only a fraction of all knowable facts. This is because it encourages researchers to begin where well-established theories leave off, keeping them aligned with existing scientific paradigms. A path set forward by classical physics, he argued, will not lead to quantum mechanics.

Feyerabend thought that new scientific paradigms could only be reached by radical methods. Indeed, given that new paradigms sit outside existing knowledge structures, there cannot be a predefined method on how to discover them. Anarchistic thinking, spiritualism, irrationality—all must remain on the table.
As proof of principle, Feyerabend elegantly demonstrated that a strict adherence to the scientific method would have forced Galileo to give up his hypothesis that Earth orbits the Sun. Not only did the existing evidence support the idea that Earth was stationary, the practice of science in the 17th century was largely entrusted to human perception. This meant that not being able to feel Earth moving would have been considered by many to be sufficient to falsify Galileo's theory. Feyerabend asserted that Galileo needed to break the existing scientific paradigm by presenting a new one and that he only succeeded in doing so by going beyond what rational argument allowed, drawing upon, for example, ad hoc hypotheses and emotional language.

Against Method was divisive. After publication, Feyerabend was called the “worst enemy of science” in Nature (1) and a “breath of fresh air” in Science (2). Many scientists thought that the book presented a type of philosophy that could be easily weaponized (3), not least because it provided a shield for nonexperts promoting unsubstantiated or malicious arguments. Some also worried that by weakening the boundaries of what counts as bona fide scientific research, science itself might come to be considered just another type of cultural practice.

But this is not quite what Feyerabend sought to inspire. Instead, he wanted to generate curiosity about what happens when we try to live within the rules of our current scientific paradigms. Is it always desirable, for example, to treat mathematical harmonies and statistical abstractions as the best reflections of reality? Consider empirical research on the state of American democracy, which largely relies on random sampling and quantitative metrics. By discounting narratives of police injustice as anecdotal, some have argued that political scientists long remained blind to the extent of racial authoritarianism (4).

Against Method hints that there must be a middle ground between one extreme, in which all views are equally valued, and the other, in which the limits of current scientific paradigms are never tested. This casts the role of today's scientist as more ambiguous than perhaps many would like, but such ambiguity could help scientists strengthen their relationship with the public. By loosening the framework within which scientists may operate, Feyerabend gives them permission to enter the political arena, a realm that many researchers have historically deemed outside their jurisdiction, but one in which their participation is sorely needed.
Read more:
Moving beyond the paradigm

• Joseph Swift
Against Method Paul Feyerabend New Left Books, 1975. 339 pp.

Science  13 Nov 2020:
Vol. 370, Issue 6518, pp. 771

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So… What to make of this? Well, this may point us to improve the scientific method, but mainly preventing it from falling into the cesspool of the arcane and the stupid.

Some people, unscientifically went beyond this curtain and if they did not call science a fraud, it’s because sciences do not claim to be the answer of the lot, while the biggest fraud comes from beliefs and the religious dogmas.

Here comes another dude from a few years ago: Micah Amd… 

A Book Review on
Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work and Pretends to Work


John Staddon, (Routledge; Taylor & Francis Group, London), 2017, 158 pages, ISBN: 978-1138295353.


This book aims to disinfect egregious practices in social science by illustrating errors commonly made by many social scientists, including some with Nobel prizes. Professor John Staddon (JS) is one of those rare individuals held in equally high regard for his seminal works in experimental and theoretical Psychology (Staddon, 2001), and readers stand to greatly benefit from the litany of suggestions borne of JS's experience. One notable highlight is the author's long-standing criticism of static (time-independent) theorizing in Psychology, which generally requires some “executive control” system to initiate operations (cf., Bandura's self-system—p. 63). The author suggests that psychological scientists incorporate time as a constitutive element within their explanatory models, fortifying his thesis through examples of complex behavioral systems, such as a child's expectation of punishment following a display of aggression (p. 66), without reference to some intervening all-knowing homunculus. Professor JS is among the forerunners of the silent behavioristic renaissance (Staddon, 2014) and readers may be surprised to know how this once maligned science of “muscle twitches” and “glandular squirts” (Bower, 2014) evolved into a compelling alternative to buttress against the excessive “surplus meaning” underlying information processing approaches in Psychology (Amsel, 1992).


Read more:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02260/full

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Okay… Okay… F-OFF! Errors have been made, are made and will be made… Psychology is basically a study of human nature which in itself is based on deceit for survival. Thus even someone like Freud could be off course, and Freud knew most of the pitfalls of this craft. Understanding and analysing lies are most difficult because of their own definition. Psychology is a scientific oxymoron, but it has some value in trying to make us see the difference between what is and what we hope to fudge.. 

Meanwhile, if the scientific method was so poor, your plastic smartphone would be a lump of stone. Is this simple enough to understand? 

For example, we’ve already tackled the America’s Cup in an article with more than 7,000 reads by now…  So what has this to do with sciences? Well when sciences are brought into technologies, there is an understanding and manipulation beyond magic. Here, The next AC is about to be played out in Auckland Harbour, New Zealand. So far so good. The Cup will be decided between a challenger out of three boats (UK, US and Italy — they’re the rare syndicates that could afford the privilege) and a defender. Despite the American boat being called American Magic, these sailing boats have nothing magical about them. It’s about smart technologies being scientifically used to the max.
How can such sailing boats go at 50 knots in an 8 to 10 knots breeze? Ridiculous! Well, first we have to understand the concept of differential pumps and speed. That is to say we have to understand the conversion of speed into a different form of speed by using maximum possible energy conversion. 

If your sails are small like a dozen handkerchiefs, you will go at about two knots. Your energy conversion factor is too small. If your sails are about 400 square metres, you will capture a lot more wind energy. So, how do you convert this wind speed (energy) into a much bigger speed while using as much as possible of the energy from the wind? There is a compromise. Should there be no wind, you won’t move. Should there be too much wind, your boat is going to break into bits. In between these extremes there are windows of opportunity to use about 90 per cent of the wind energy to propel your boat faster than the wind. Here comes the mathematics, the sciences and the technologies. No voodoo.

Now, there has been a lot of improvements made to the technology of boats since I first sailed in my small soap box in the 1950s. Bigger and lighter boats have been made possible by the “invention of carbon fibre”. Carbon fibre is a scientific/technological advancement that also allows for the creation of massive wind turbines blades to generate electricity. New devices, including aircrafts’ wings, have also been invented to exploit the amazing lightness and strength of carbon fibres. Sails from AC75 are also designed like aircraft wings to create a “suction” differential.
For the past few years, the America’s cup has been fought between boats that, not only were made of carbon fibre, but were also using “foil” technology. Basically, the idea is to transfer the wind energy which occur in a flexible medium, air, into a different energy in another medium, water. This is not new. This has been used since the first sailing craft were made out of reeds, say 6,000 years ago. By being clever, humans soon observed that some of the resistance of the water can be transferred into a forward momentum if the shape of the boat is specific. If the boat offers no resistance in the water, it will drift sideways like a dead leaf… What’s new in the past few years, has been more efficient resistance of boat hulls by using foils (made of carbon fibre) to increase the amount of energy from the wind, into a better forward momentum, while reducing friction. It works…

At present, the AC75 boats are at the maximum specifics of wind energy conversion without breaking up. I won’t go into the details of the engineering and of the wind energy conversion here, though I could bring you a few equations and diagrams, etc… I build my first foil in the early 1960s as a fishing device. With a couple of ropes attached to its flaps, I could make it go deep or make it surface to trail a lure behind at the depth the fish would hopefully be. At one stage, for fun, we even placed a fake shark fin on top... It scared a few punters... I blame my cousin. He was the wicked one...




For the AC75, the foils are stunning. They are an engineering marvel combining the brute strength of the pedalling crew, mostly sailing novices with plenty of brawn to pump the giant foils into action. Like in most America’s Cup, the boats have been designed to suit the conditions. These AC75 would last 11.7 seconds or less in the Fremantle Doctor (30-35 knots with choppy seas), then break up. In Auckland Harbour, the prevailing wind is at a lovely 8 to 10 knots (except during storms), while the sea is mostly flat. One can be very adventurous with ideas. 
It’s like planet earth, it’s poised at a particular set of conditions: temperature, water and air supply which operate in a range of presently comfortable values. Change some of these parameters and we quickly run into trouble. The scientists can measure trouble before it happens. Like the engineers who devised the nearly 7 tons boats flying on top of giant foils, they can calculate the limits when the boat will capsize or break up. These “tipping points" can happen in a jiffy. And our planet’s global warming is tipping. No matter how you despise the scientific method, you better believe the scientists. The serious scientists are shitting themselves. And this has nothing to do with god’s religious dunnies.

Image at top: The number one New Zealand boat "flying above the water", now superseded with even faster number two.