I am by no stretch of the imagination a machinist. I own a HAAS TM-1 because I thought it would be a good idea to have one. Now I am climbing up the learning curve between what I can design and what I can make.
I only prototype for my own inventions. I make my living inventing things to solve some problem or another I trip over in industry.
A scientist today is a specialist usually in a very narrow field. A North American University education has been reduced to the giving and getting of credentials. For the most part students are rarely curious about much more than their grade and then primarily as a means to an end. If they want to go to grad school, they need a GPA of some level of another. Once in Grad school they rarely do much more than act as their advisor's slave and go to classes that have somewhat fewer participants than those they attended in undergrad. The other students in the class are more or less as bright as one another and less time is spent weeding out the real idiots.
If the system hasn't completely sucked the life out of them at the Masters level they will sign up for PhD work. It is now almost impossible to not be awarded a PhD if the student is willing to hang around long enough being his advisor's slave. The student will do some research, usually in aid of his advisor's field and will write a paper about the research.
The student will defend his paper by submitting to some annoying questioning by some more Professors who are trying to make sure that the student doesn't begin to think he/she is as smart as they are. The 'thesis' is usually close to unreadable; either because the field has an arcane code it uses instead of language or the writer cannot actually write in any known language. I get to read a few of them every once in a while and certainly for the past 10 years they are getting nothing but worse.
After awhile the student demands his PhD and the adviser forces the rest of the faculty to give it to the student because by then the student is no longer all that willing a slave.
This confers little knowledge on the participants.
In five years the PhD reads his once cherished thesis and laughs about how ignorant the ideas put forth were.
The result is more or less what "One of Many" has concluded.
Except the public thinks that anyone who calls themselves a scientist must know more about anything than they do. And the scientific community agrees with the public.
Politicians like to get re-elected so a topic like global climate change is a perfect means to that end. Whichever way public opinion goes on the topic the political class will claim to have the answer to it. Of course the politicians will also try to create an illusion of an authoritative source from which the public can base their opinion upon. The truth is rarely if ever considered.
Business knows that if the political guys are going to solve something, there is money to be made one way or another on it. Because any political solution is nothing more than a way to spend tax dollars and create little empires for the governing people.
Business then acts to help feed the publics fears about the topic, in this case Climate Change.
Scientists need money too, so they quickly catch on to the ride and begin to create reasons for research and attract the funds needed to do the research.
Of course, most 'scientists' don't really know how to 'do' science because they are merely accredited as 'scientists' not truly knowledgeable about the actual process unless by some sort of weird accident they studied the philosophy of science.
Incapable of proving much of anything, they try to achieve the next best thing, get a consensus about it.
In the case of Global Warming the public has mistaken a consensus by scientists to be the same as scientific proof. Most members of the public don't know the difference between a correlation and causality. It appears to me that most scientists can't really tell either.
So now we are engaged in the sort of debates on this forum, and I still hold firm on my point. The people who post on this particular forum are much less nasty than those I have seen on any other forum on the topic.
Cheers,
Bloefeld  |