Reply #19: Big topic

[Squeech]

More than I can legitimately grapple with right now.

But consider this: I think it was Aleister Crowley, of all people, who said there were two kinds of magicians: those who desire knowledge, and those who desire power. And there comes a point in a magician's development that he has to choose.

The Nazis chose power, obviously, and one of the ways we know this is what areas of investigation they chose to work in: eugenics and "race science," plus military technologies. And they structured their "experiments" in race to confirm what they already believed. See also Lysenko and everybody else who lent a scientific gloss to Marxism under Stalin.

Increasingly, this is the kind of science we see coming to the fore: studies by industry-funded groups that "prove" that toxic sludge is good for you and that clear-cutting revitalizes forests and that the polar ice caps are evolving into a new, more responsive life form, but we aren't...

It occurs to me right now that the crux of the difference is, if you really want to *know* something, you actively embrace the possibility of being wrong-- you try to conduct experiments that will expose the flaws in your hypotheses. But if what you want is what Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science," you carefully construct experiments that will only demonstrate the desired results.