User talk:FrankZappo

Read, understand, and obey Wikipedia:No personal attacks, otherwise you may find yourself blocked from editing. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:32, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

Your comment to me at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection is way out of line. I'm not your enemy. You need to read Wikipedia:Civility. Fernando Rizo T/C 18:23, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Categories

Hi, I am calling repeated addition of wildly tangential categories to prove a point, as well as deliberately adding reams of irrelevant and plain wrong inter-wiki links, to be vandalism. What do you call it? - Randwicked 05:39, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Falsifiability and Validity

I thought that my comment wasn't too appropriate in the Pseudoscience to Science of Questionable Validity voting thread, so here it is: it seems to me that a lot of people (including myself) in the pseudoscience debate are often confused about the logical distinction between the falsifiability of the claims of a scientific theory and its methodological validity.

Advocates of the so-called pseudosciences focus on their propositional contents and say that they have not been falsified. Since in falsificationism at least (which happens to be the philosophy of science that the majority of scientists supports), no hypothesis is ever confirmed, only either falsified or waiting to be falsified—possibly forever—all still unfalsified but falsifiable "pseudosciences" are as scientific in content as orthodox scientific theories. Hence all sciences are "questionable", and "Science of Unconfirmed Validity" category would not make sense—only "Falsified science" and "Science" would! Here, we win the battle.

However, detractors of the "pseudosciences" often point out that falsifiability is a necessary condition of scientificity, but not a sufficient one: a theory has also to be valid, that is, to have been built according the rules of the scientific method. To them, an invalid theory may very well be right, but still unscientific. But I don't see why they aren't satisfied with falsifiability. That the theory must be born in a well-known lab, grown out of previously orthodox theories, and have been peer-reviewed by a lot of important scientists, strikes me as irrelevant to scientificity—those are the rituals of a strongly political "organized science". As long as they insist on playing on that shaky ground, the "pseudoscience" category will remain ambiguous, and last. —Meidosemme 22:24, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

To me, the notion of "falsifiability" seems not stupendously useful in actual scientific practice. I think that it is a concept forged in the attempt to shoehorn a "philosophy of science" into a conceptual framework along the lines of the "philosophy of mathematics". It arose out of the intellectual fascination which philosophy developed, in the 1920s and 1930s, for the foundations of mathematics, and I don't think that it has much relevance or adequacy to the scientific process. And the way I see it, neither is it particularly relevant to the Wikipedia "war" concerning the category Pseudoscience.

I think that it is pretty clear what is involved in the scientific method. Its defining parameters have to do with the proper grounding of theoretical conclusions in properly conducted empirical observations. This includes requirements such as that the empirical observations should be reproducible; that they should support the conclusions; that the conclusions should not be at odds with earlier reproducible and reproduced empirical observations; that the conclusions should not simply proliferate interpretations of previously interpreted phenomena, but should have some explanatory or predictive power beyond the currently accepted interpretations, etc. The conclusions may still be wrong, of course - but if the research is conducted in accordance with the scientific method, it is science. And this is so irrespective of whether it is conducted at Lawrence Livermore Labs or on a desert island. It does not cease being science just because only very few people have heard about it. There is nothing in the requirements of the scientific method that says that the given activity has to have been reviewed or approved by some quorum of scientists.

So the way I see it, the problem with the Wikipedia category "Pseudoscience" is that, by definition, it is supposed to be applied to things that pretend to be science but do not follow the scientific method - whereas in reality it gets applied to every scientific claim that has not been accepted into mainstream science. There is absolutely no logical justification for jumping from the fact that something is not part of mainstream science to the conclusion that it does not follow the scientific method. In order to know whether or not something follows the scientific method, one needs to examine and understand its claims and their basis. I have never seen any sign that the Wikipedia "science squad" has examined or understood the claims and methods of any of the "dissident sciences" that they label "Pseudoscience". So if they have not examined and understood those claims and methods, they should have a special category that expresses precisely that. To, instead, label those endeavours as "Pseudoscience" - i.e. as not following the scientific method - is pure bias and misinformation. It implies that the claims and methods have been examined and found unscientific, when in fact they have not been examined.

That's my view of this problem, and I think it has very little to do with the notion of "falsifiability". FrankZappo 22:23, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Request for your vote

I saw that you voted against the adminship of William M Connolly. I reviewed said candidate's actions on the Cold Fusion article and determined them to indeed be very biased and uncivil. I haven't looked at WC's actions on the aetherometry article yet though. The vast support for WC is truly disturbing. I am a candidate for the arbitration council. William M Connolly is precisely the type of biased and uncivil person that I would fight against.

I request that you review my candidate statement and questions at: Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_January_2006/Vote/LawAndOrder , and consider voting for me, though only if you have suffrage for arbitration committee elections (registered before 9/30/2005, and have over 150 edits before 1/9/2006). The votes are vastly against me, so I will not win, but I have very few support votes, so voting for me will at least show that I (who is on your side) am less of a pariah. LawAndOrder 20:55, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Petition on Bullying in Wikipedia

Hi FrankZappa. I have compiled a petition to send to Mr. Wales with respect to my views on bullying on Wikipedia, which I think is a very grave problem on Wikipedia that Mr. Wales needs to address: User:Benapgar/Bullying. Please sign it if you agree, and if you can think of other people who might agree please let them know about it too. --Ben 01:58, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

WP:FRINGE

Hi there. The AFD/DRV debate about Aetherometry inspired me to try and hack together some proposed guidelines about fringe theories. I saw you were an active and thoughtful participant in that debate, and thought I would solicit your comments and hopefully suggestions and edits. At the moment the page is at WP:FRINGE for lack of a better name. Thanks for your time if you can lend any. --Fastfission 17:56, 20 January 2006 (UTC)