Is psychology a science? (Page 2)

StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

Oh ... okay, let me make a quick modification with my statement ...

"That strikes me as such a statistical improbability that it's not worth considering. What are the odds that a large number of people researching something, all working in the same discipline, are all afflicted by the same nuttiness, and as a result, all arrive at the same nutty conclusion?

That should work ...



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CoIin
CoIin: Much better. Now what if it's a worldwide conspiracy? Just saying..... Should they be considered to be doing "science"? Anyway, I hope the point is clear....Let's move on.
(Edited by CoIin)
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StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

It IS a conspiracy. Buncha Christian wackos that want to indoctrinate school children to Creationism.

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CoIin
CoIin: well, here's another juicy bone to chew on.... Getting back to SETI. If they receive a promising signal, how will they know that it's from intelligent life and not some heavenly body? Complexity perhaps? Getting nervous now? Who else goes on about complexity? You got it.

They've used this argument themselves. So do we kick out SETI as pseudo-science or do we admit the Creationists as scientists? Told ya it was a jungle out there.
(Edited by CoIin)
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StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

As I said before, SETI is not conducting research.

They're conducting A search. They have no preconceived notion of what the result of their search will be. They're just searching to see if they find anything. That's not really research, scientific, or otherwise. So it's not an apt comparison.

But it's an interesting question., and if they've actually used that argument themselves, I'd like to see the reference ... please.

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CoIin
CoIin: ooooh, then I'd have to go searching. And it's nap time. And you need the exercise more than me anyway.
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CoIin
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StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

What!?!? You think I'm gonna read all that shit?

Yeah, I'll read it. But not right now.

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CoIin
CoIin: LOL
(Edited by CoIin)
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Geoff
Geoff: I feel I must apologise at this point. The question that originated this thread was intended to be a rhetorical device.

I'm sceptical about my own knowledge of psychology (mainly because of the age of the sources), and my own opinion of it. I am reading other's posts with interest.

On the subject of SETI - no, the search itself is not science. Just as the hunt for fossils isn't really science, the science comes in once you've found something.

And complexity isn't necessarily what they are looking for. Although the infamous LGM signal turned out to be a pulsar, it would have to be something simple to be recognised as an 'universal hailing signal'. Perhaps a progression of mathematical constants (prime numbers has been suggested).

Science does play it's part when anything is discovered that is non-random. So science does play an important part in SETI, but not so much in the hunt itself.
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CoIin
CoIin: @ SITS and Geoff -- from Wiki (SETI)

"SETI has also occasionally been the target of criticism by those who suggest that it is a form of pseudoscience. In particular, critics allege that no observed phenomena suggest the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and furthermore that the assertion of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence has no good Popperian criteria for falsifiability"

@SITS, you asked about criteria. This is an example. Let's say we make falsifiability a necessary condition in order to exclude astrology from the science club coz we all know that the "predictions" of astrology tend to be too vague to be either verifiable or falsifiable. But see what happens? Astrology goes, but SETI goes too, along with a host of other stuff that we'd like to keep in.

Why does this matter? Well, funding for one thing I guess. And as SITS said, what gets taught in schools in the USA.

@Geoff - Yeah, we got a bit carried away from psychology but at least it hasn't dissolved into another science vs creationism battle yet LOL
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StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

What makes SETI worth the effort is the importance of the find, if it occurs.

I just personally like the idea it, and the fact that it balances the reality of the fact that there's absolutely no evidence of ET life whatsoever with the romantic thrill of what would happen if such evidence is found.

I might be disappointed by the World's reaction to such a find, but I like to think that it would change everything.

Also, compared to may of mankind's pursuits, SETI is pretty damned cheap.

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oh_good_laughs
oh_good_laughs: Many Christian may accept Evolution, just as they would accept basically any 'Scientific explanation', for the simple sake of eluding a drivel argument.. There was an explosion and coincidently everything came into existence from it?, yea, sounds good.. but hey look at the time.. i gotta run and do.. important things.
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CoIin
CoIin: Quick!! Grab him!
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StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

(laughs)

Take that, you fake, inferior Christians that would consider evolution to be a valid concept! You're no better than those other non-Christian infidels that would besmirch the TRUE, literal wording of a document that was written by guys several thousand years before they figured out the world wasn't flat.

risen has spoken!

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CoIin
CoIin: @SITS - you asked (from space.com) .....


What many readers will not know is that SETI research has been offered up in support of Intelligent Design.

The way this happens is as follows. When ID advocates posit that DNA--which is a complicated, molecular blueprint--is solid evidence for a designer, most scientists are unconvinced. They counter that the structure of this biological building block is the result of self-organization via evolution, and not a proof of deliberate engineering. DNA, the researchers will protest, is no more a consciously constructed system than Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Organized complexity, in other words, is not enough to infer design.

But the adherents of Intelligent Design protest the protest. They point to SETI and say, "upon receiving a complex radio signal from space, SETI researchers will claim it as proof that intelligent life resides in the neighborhood of a distant star. Thus, isn't their search completely analogous to our own line of reasoning--a clear case of complexity implying intelligence and deliberate design?" And SETI, they would note, enjoys widespread scientific acceptance.

If we as SETI researchers admit this is so, it sounds as if we're guilty of promoting a logical double standard. If the ID folks aren't allowed to claim intelligent design when pointing to DNA, how can we hope to claim intelligent design on the basis of a complex radio signal? It's true that SETI is well regarded by the scientific community, but is that simply because we don't suggest that the voice behind the microphone could be God?

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StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

But you only copied/pasted PART of the article.

Here's the rest:

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Simple Signals

In fact, the signals actually sought by today's SETI searches are not complex, as the ID advocates assume. We're not looking for intricately coded messages, mathematical series, or even the aliens' version of "I Love Lucy." Our instruments are largely insensitive to the modulation--or message--that might be conveyed by an extraterrestrial broadcast. A SETI radio signal of the type we could actually find would be a persistent, narrow-band whistle. Such a simple phenomenon appears to lack just about any degree of structure, although if it originates on a planet, we should see periodic Doppler effects as the world bearing the transmitter rotates and orbits.

And yet we still advertise that, were we to find such a signal, we could reasonably conclude that there was intelligence behind it. It sounds as if this strengthens the argument made by the ID proponents. Our sought-after signal is hardly complex, and yet we're still going to say that we've found extraterrestrials. If we can get away with that, why can't they?

Well, it's because the credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we're not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality. An endless, sinusoidal signal - a dead simple tone - is not complex; it's artificial. Such a tone just doesn't seem to be generated by natural astrophysical processes. In addition, and unlike other radio emissions produced by the cosmos, such a signal is devoid of the appendages and inefficiencies nature always seems to add - for example, DNA's junk and redundancy.

Consider pulsars - stellar objects that flash light and radio waves into space with impressive regularity. Pulsars were briefly tagged with the moniker LGM (Little Green Men) upon their discovery in 1967. Of course, these little men didn't have much to say. Regular pulses don't convey any information--no more than the ticking of a clock. But the real kicker is something else: inefficiency. Pulsars flash over the entire spectrum. No matter where you tune your radio telescope, the pulsar can be heard. That's bad design, because if the pulses were intended to convey some sort of message, it would be enormously more efficient (in terms of energy costs) to confine the signal to a very narrow band. Even the most efficient natural radio emitters, interstellar clouds of gas known as masers, are profligate. Their steady signals splash over hundreds of times more radio band than the type of transmissions sought by SETI.

Imagine bright reflections of the Sun flashing off Lake Victoria, and seen from great distance. These would be similar to pulsar signals: highly regular (once ever 24 hours), and visible in preferred directions, but occupying a wide chunk of the optical spectrum. It's not a very good hailing-signal or communications device. Lightning bolts are another example. They produce pulses of both light and radio, but the broadcast extends over just about the whole electromagnetic spectrum. That sort of bad engineering is easily recognized and laid at nature's door. Nature, for its part, seems unoffended.

Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological constructions have lots of superfluous and redundant parts, and are a long way from being optimally built or operated. They also resemble lots of other things that may be either contemporaries or historical precedents.

So that's one point: the signals SETI seeks are really not like other examples drawn from the bestiary of complex astrophysical phenomena. That speaks to their artificiality.

The Importance of Setting

There's another hallmark of artificiality we consider in SETI, and it's context. Where is the signal found? Our searches often concentrate on nearby Sun-like star systems - the very type of astronomical locale we believe most likely to harbor Earth-size planets awash in liquid water. That's where we hope to find a signal. The physics of solar systems is that of hot plasmas (stars), cool hydrocarbon gasses (big planets), and cold rock (small planets). These do not produce, so far as we can either theorize or observe, monochromatic radio signals belched into space with powers of ten billion watts or more--the type of signal we look for in SETI experiments. It's hard to imagine how they would do this, and observations confirm that it just doesn't seem to be their thing.

Context is important, crucially important. Imagine that we should espy a giant, green square in one of these neighboring solar systems. That would surely meet our criteria for artificiality. But a square is not overly complex. Only in the context of finding it in someone's solar system does its minimum complexity become indicative of intelligence.

In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors. It is the context of the cave that makes this assumption far more likely then an alternative scenario in which I assume that the random grinding and splitting of rock has resulted in this useful geometry.

In short, the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we're on the lookout for very simple signals. That's mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA's chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.

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http://www.space.com/1826-seti-intelligent-design.html



(Edited by StuckInTheSixties)
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CoIin
CoIin: I didn't want to take up too much "space"
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StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

Well, shit! The last paragraph is the punch line.

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CoIin
CoIin: Ah, I see. I stand corrected. I thought they were looking for a more complex signal.
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StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

As I've stated numerous times, the main purveyors of Intelligent Design, the "Discovery Institute," are cynical and dishonest. They have an agenda: weaken science in American schools. Their true purpose: to further the belief in fundamentalist Christianity.

Science stands in their way, so it must go.

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Harlet
Harlet: ^^^^^^ didn't that dishonesty start, back in the day when a grade school education, became federally mandatory,and folks here in Texas,decided too incorporate strict moral codes of conduct and what all else into,how too educate the masses,
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smoke4ever
smoke4ever: intelligent design is a cowardly way of using the creation belief.
I say, don't sway
from the bible
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StuckInTheSixties
StuckInTheSixties:

That's a very intelligent, perceptive comment ...

Oh ... wait ...

It's not 2000 BC ...

Nevermind ...

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smoke4ever
smoke4ever: nothing has changed except technology
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