On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 02:14:31 -0700, "T.Alan Kraus"
wrote:

On 10/23/2011 7:04 PM, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:45:08 -0700, Hawke
wrote:

On 10/22/2011 8:10 PM, wrote:
On Oct 22, 10:48 pm, wrote:

. Yet he's got millions believing everything he says is true
even to the point where, as you said, they disbelieve people with
doctorates and instead believe the word of a man with no education at
all. If someone told you that you wouldn't believe it.

Hawke

You should always believe what makes sense regardless of a person's
credentials. I am willing to believe someone with no education if
what they say makes sense. I am not willing to believe highly
educated people when it is obvious that what they say does not make
sense.

Do you believe everything that William Shockley said?

Dan





Bad analogy, Dan. I'm saying if a nuclear scientist tells you something
about nuclear energy and a housewife with a high school education tells
you that he's wrong which one of them are you going to believe? That is
the situation we have with Limbaugh most of the time. He's got no
training in any field and is an uneducated man. He espouses views that
are consistently opposed to those of highly learned people, and he
argues with these people about what is in their field of expertise.

No person with a lick of sense would take the word of a layman over an
expert. So what about you? Side with the layman, Limbaugh when he tells
scientists they are mistaken about the climate?

Hawke


Your hypothesis sounds quite reasonable until one considers that:

Until the 19th century, it was widely believed that trains could not
travel faster than about 50 miles per hour because of the immense
tornado-like winds that would be created along their paths. Some
British scientists predicted air would be evacuated from railway cars
at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour, and all the passengers
would be asphyxiated.

Radio waves constructed as low-frequency light travel faster than
light. Ironically, physicists discovered this property of waves in an
ionized gas in the early part of this century, at the same time (1905)
that Albert Einstein was asserting that "velocities exceeding that of
light have no possibility of existence"

Some of the most enlighten philosophers of their times believed that
the earth was flat:
According to Aristotle, pre-Socratic philosophers, including Leucippus
(c. 440 BC) and Democritus (370 BC) believed in a flat Earth.
Anaximander (c. 550 BC) believed the Earth to be a short cylinder with
a flat, circular top that remained stable because it is the same
distance from all things. Anaximenes of Miletus believed that "the
earth is flat and rides on air; Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 500 BC)
thought that the Earth was flat. Belief in a flat Earth continued into
the 5th-century BC. Anaxagoras (c. 450 BC) agreed that the Earth was
flat, and his pupil Archelaus believed that the flat Earth was
depressed in the middle like a saucer, to allow for the fact that the
Sun does not rise and set at the same time for everyone.

One could go on but it is apparent that the fact that an individual
has received an education is not necessarily a factor in their amount
of knowledge.


--
John B.

Yet Pythagoras knew the earth was a sphere and Erathostenes had actually
measured its circumference quite accurately using basic geometry. In
every period there is a prevalent scientific belief opposed by a very
small number. It usually turns out that the very small number of
opposing opinion eventually becomes the prevalent paradigm.

cheers
T.Alan


You are correct of course but I was replying to Hawke's apparent
thesis that graduating from collage somehow means that you actually
know what you are talking about. My thesis is that everyone has areas
of expertise and ignorance and while one may well be a demon
basket-weaver ( for example) the fact that one holds a degree in the
subject doesn't qualify him to discuss Quantum mechanics (to use
another example).

..

--
John B.