Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Thursday, April 19. 2018

The Scientific Importance of Free Speech

 "This is a shortened version of a speech that the author was due to give last month at King’s College London which was canceled because the university deemed the event to be too ‘high risk’."


It includes a good quote:



 Science is not about finding the truth at all, but about finding better ways of being wrong. The best scientific theory is not the one that reveals the truth — that is impossible. It is the one that explains what we already know about the world in the simplest way possible, and that makes useful predictions about the future. When I accepted that I would always be wrong, and that my favourite theories are inevitably destined to be replaced by other, better, theories — that is when I really knew that I wanted to be a scientist.


Read the utterly innocuous but useful piece. How the idea of debating scientific theories could be "high risk" is beyond me. Or maybe the very phrase "free speech" triggers people. If so, I feel depressed.
Posted by The Barrister in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 13:56 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Science leads only to — closer approximations — of the truth.
#1 Richard on 2018-04-19 14:20 (Reply)
The risk of damage caused by pissed off, SJW and Antifa fascist is too great.
#2 Bill Adams on 2018-04-19 15:20 (Reply)
A few of related things:
1. There is a truth that cannon be known, only approximated
2. A corollary: That which you know is necessarily not the ultimate truth
3. All knowlege is subject to falsification, even (especially?) your own experience
4. Since the ultimate truth is unknowable, no single authority can be claimed as the source of truth, whether you call that source God and scripture or Marx and dialectical materialism or even Foucault and critical theory.

Progressivism is fundamentally (word chosen deliberately) anti-scientific, because it does not allow for the possibility that its own defining postulates are wrong.
#3 another guy named Dan on 2018-04-19 18:07 (Reply)
I can see why it is high risk. They know the answer is going to go against what they want.

If they thought the science was on their side they would club you with it. You have to read between the lines here.
#4 Assistant Village Idiot (Link) on 2018-04-19 20:21 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.