Foxy,

In case you haven't noticed I'm the only one who has made a comment about your jokes

Dear Joe,

You wrote: “I could be wrong, but I don't think the Chinese have gone as far as the Stalinists with idiotic and blatantly anti-scientific theories like Lysenko's. But some of Trumpf's scientific propositions have the ring of Lysenkoism about them :)”

Trump is potentially worse than the Marxists in his attitude toward science. Fortunately, other parts of the US government are able to contest his nonsense. However what happened in China during Mao’s Great Leap Forward was far worse than the results of Lysenkoism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

“The Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1958 to 1962. Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes. Mao decreed increased efforts to multiply grain yields and bring industry to the countryside. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting "surpluses" that in fact did not exist and leaving farmers to starve. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. The Great Leap resulted in tens of millions of deaths,[1] with estimates ranging between 18 million and 45 million deaths,[2] making the Great Chinese Famine the largest in human history.”

Mao ‘advised’ peasants to put plants closer together to increase yield and gave other advice knowing little of agronomy. Consequently the yields were much smaller, and both peasants and agriculturalists knew the yield would be much smaller, but nobody dared challenge him.

Dear Foxy,

Your mention of interference with science is spot on. In Queensland planners were directed by government to ignore the predictions of sea rise level.

Not only do democratic governments, totalitarian governments and religious institutions ignore science, but scientists resist new developments in science. In the Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn expounds on this phenomenon.

Continued

Continued

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions

“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; second edition 1970; third edition 1996; fourth edition 2012) is a book about the history of science by the philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge. Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in science in which scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of conceptual continuity where there is cumulative progress, which Kuhn referred to as periods of "normal science", were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of "anomalies" during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms. New paradigms then ask new questions of old data, move beyond the mere "puzzle-solving" of the previous paradigm, change the rules of the game and the "map" directing new research.

For example, Kuhn's analysis of the Copernican Revolution emphasized that, in its beginning, it did not offer more accurate predictions of celestial events, such as planetary positions, than the Ptolemaic system, but instead appealed to some practitioners based on a promise of better, simpler solutions that might be developed at some point in the future. Kuhn called the core concepts of an ascendant revolution its "paradigms" and thereby launched this word into widespread analogical use in the second half of the 20th century. Kuhn's insistence that a paradigm shift was a mélange of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically determinate procedure, caused an uproar in reaction to his work. Kuhn addressed concerns in the 1969 postscript to the second edition. For some commentators The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced a realistic humanism into the core of science, while for others the nobility of science was tarnished by Kuhn's introduction of an irrational element into the heart of its greatest achievements.”

It took about 50 years for biologists to accept Darwinian evolution even though Darwin meticulously made his case. Scientists rejecting Darwin had to die out.

david f,

Did you know it was Kuhn who coined the phrase "A man with little knowledge takes a long time to tell you what little he knows."?

David, or anyone for that matter.

On the subject of scientists and taking everything they say as gospel, I have a question, and it is closely related to the Qld planners being directed to ignore the predictions of sea level rises.
And that is; what evidence or material facts do we have to make absolute decisions that can be enacted without question?
Another is, how do we know for certain that the stars are themselves suns, if we only have second or third electronic and scientific means of assessment.
In other words, NO-ONE has actually seen a star personally let alone come even close to one.
Unlike the Moon where man has set foot on it and touched it, even brought back samples of it.
Now Mars is clearly in our sights, but so far we have only seen pictures, which at least tell us that it must be there, but until it is confirmed by a human, it is still an unknown entity at the end of an electronic visual medium

Dear Altrav,

«what evidence or material facts do we have to make absolute decisions that can be enacted without question?»

We only have relative facts, but then we only make relative decisions, which we then keep questioning.

«how do we know for certain that the stars are themselves suns, if we only have second or third electronic and scientific means of assessment.»

We don't, nor shall we ever, but our relative and indirect knowledge of the stars is good and consistent enough for most practical applications.

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Dear Joe,

I am curious as to how you came to have four grandfathers.