- #26
Pythagorean
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Shelter is more important than either (in a survival situation, anyway).
The Most Important Part of Science
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- #27
Evo
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It's a joke meaning scientists only care about what is meaningful, philosophers don't care if it's meaningful. And that's the nicer interpretation.
- #28
Borek
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Logical reasoning, the only way to prove she is a witch.
- #29
Pythagorean
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Yeh. I think that's hogwash though. Scientists are interested in a certain way of looking at things; it's by coincidence that most of a scientist's work is meaningful.
Scientific method is hogwash too (I'm speaking from the perspective of a single scientist, not the whole science community). We fiddle with systems and phenomena because we're interested in it. Meaningfulness and accuracy are byproducts of genuine interest, but so are misconceptions and grandiose ideology. It is at the community level that the scientific method becomes important, because in helps to wash away those misconceptions and grandiose ideology.
A single scientist has little understand of the whole reality in terms of direct personal exploration. Instead, it's the scientific community, like a partition of gases, that nudges each individual scientist's works into a uniform perspective of reality. We keep each other in check.
- #30
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Protection - Location - Acquisition - Navigation ( PLAN ). I think those are the most important things they teach in an army of this world for outdoor survival.
- #31
Pythagorean
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The Coast Guard in Alaska, in conjuction with the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association teaches the "Seven Steps of Survival" in order of importance:
Recognition
Inventory
Shelter
Signals
Water
Food
Play
RISSWFP... rolls right of the tongue...
- #32
diazona
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Ah, if only...
- #33
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What's "Play" standing for ?
- #34
Pythagorean
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It doesn't. Quite literally, the seventh step is play: have fun. Do things you enjoy, reduce stress levels, get good sleep. Essential to keeping your wits about you.
- #35
disregardthat
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Can you give an example of something meaningless that philosophers care about?
- #36
Pythagorean
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Meaning is subjective. Somebody could just as easily come up with something that physicists care about that is meaningless... to someone.
- #37
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Just about everything they do ?
- #38
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The most important part of science, to stick to it. Science only, no guts feeling, no ideals, no politics, No relaxation of standards when dealing with the attractiveness versus the correctness of any conclusion, no decisions about what 'the right balance is between being effective and being honest'.
The most important part of survival is health, get out of threatening situations and treath injuries first, seems not to play in RISSWFP
It may be hard to harmonize the most important part of science with the most important part of survival.
The most important part of survival is health, get out of threatening situations and treath injuries first, seems not to play in RISSWFP
It may be hard to harmonize the most important part of science with the most important part of survival.
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- #39
disregardthat
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Meaningless can be interpreted in many ways. Some more operational interpretations are; useless, impossible to understand, or genuine nonsense.
Either way, the fact that a group of people care about something, write about it and think about it automatically makes it meaningful. These same things might be meaningless to others, but surely; higher mathematics is meaningless to a 3-year-old, but that's not the point.
What I find is that many consider some or all philosophical problems and topics to be genuine nonsense or erroneous thinking, rather than only meaningless to their view (thus not granting it respect as a meaningful subject at all); a perspective which I think the joke portrays.
...
...Just about everything they do ?
I think you will find that that "gut-feeling" is an important part of being a research scientist. The same might go with attractiveness. To search for attractive simplicity and elegance is not irrational and anti-scientific just because it has it's roots in aesthetics (and it might have practical advantages). Of course these feelings only serve as inclinations, and not as reasoning.
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- #40
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That may be so, but it's not what I meant. I suppose scientists are no less prone to lousy ideas than philosophers are. But I perceive a difference in the way they react to those bad ideas. Scientists will toss them out.
- #41
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Right, the last sentence that's it. I think we agree. There is no doubt that "gut-feeling" (experience) can play an important part in processing and problem solving, but is that the science as intended?
What I intended to say is if science is the process of finding out how things work then it's conclusion should be about how those things work and nothing else. If it is found out that there are more ways that things could work, a selection/decision should not be made based on gut-feelings, aesthetics, occam razor, desirability of a pet-solution or we would still be dealing with a flat earth, phlogiston, aether and things like that. There has been a lot of gut-feeling going on trying to cling on to those erring concepts.
- #42