Here: “The Nobel Disease: When Intelligence Fails To Protect Against Irrationality.” They fret that Nobel Prize-winning scientists ditch critical thinking and embrace unorthodox views.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doesn’t agree. In reality, he says, unorthodoxy helped the unorthodox scientists win the Prize.
The “Nobel Disease” isn’t a paradox. Scientists who reject consensus, who think for themselves, are often the ones best prepared to make major scientific discoveries. The top rank of scientists is full of mavericks—Galileo, Newton, Semmelweis, Einstein, and Watson and Crick, to name just a few—who made outstanding contributions not despite their unorthodoxy but because of it…
This is not to say that every “out of the box” idea is right—most are wrong—but a scientific culture that welcomes unorthodox ideas and encourages theories that fall outside of the “consensus” is indispensable for genuinely good science and for major scientific advances.
Michael Egnor, “Thinking outside the box is not a disease” at Mind Matters News
If you enjoy reading about creativity in science, you might also like these informative pieces by Robert J. Marks:
Should AI hold patents? the flash-of-genius answer. Robert J. Marks: To understand why AI cannot independently invent, let’s look at how famous inventors have actually done it. Like Excel, AI assists programmers in their design work. AI can search through trillions of possibilities, using data from a million sources, to find a successful design. But the structure of the search and the source of the data is the choice of the programmer. A look at how famous inventors developed products that changed the world sheds some light on the process.
and
The creativity needed for successful command is beyond the capability of AI. AI sifts enormous amounts of accumulated data. But successful military strategy often depends on creating a new approach to a problem, one that lies outside the historical data available to the opposing forces. Muhammad Ali and Hannibal were famous for using such strategies.
Would an AI ever respond to a request to surrender with the word “NUTS!”?
The article in “skeptical” inquirer has four co-authors. Tells me all I need to know. Tenuritis is the real disease, and Nobels have been Confirmed Cases of Tenuritis for a long time.
Galileos and Newtons are few and far between, but cranks are a dime a dozen.
Weeding out the cranks is where consensus helps.
Not if the mainstream consensus is full of cranks…
There’s nothing wrong with thinking outside the box. It can be good… or bad. Isn’t part of science finding out which is which?
Sev; “There’s nothing wrong with thinking outside the box. ”
Says the man who refuses to ever think outside the box of his Darwinian materialism:
https://media.istockphoto.com/illustrations/think-inside-the-box-illustration-id97232619?k=6&m=97232619&s=612×612&w=0&h=N2IdcDp-nXxjbt_tAkzFtT5CJRrszkiTTtc2wK40PZI=
Bravo, Ronvanwegen @1.
There is immense insight in what you write.
In a real sense, McAuliffe is right there with St. Thomas More and the great roll call of men and women we call heroes who put other considerations beyond materialistic ones into a decision.
(Hope I spelled his name correctly)
I think McAuliffe and the men of the 101st Airborne defending Bastogne also knew that it was going to take something pretty solidly material to stop German tanks.
Bornagain77 @ 6
I’m happy to think outside the box. I’ve no problem considering multiverses, backwards in time causation, a holographic universe or life on Earth seeded by ET (Not our one. That’s a kludge too far) But I’m not going believe any off-the-wall idea just because it comes from some contrarian maverick speculating outside of their area of expertise.
‘I think McAuliffe and the men of the 101st Airborne defending Bastogne also knew that it was going to take something pretty solidly material to stop German tanks.‘
You don’t get it, Seversky. You never will. There are things beyond your crackpot materialism.
Belfast at 10,
Or as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet,
Minor correction to Seversky’s post at 9,
There you go Seversky, all better! 🙂 No need to thank me. I’m glad I could help!
In fact, in his book ‘Origin”, instead of any actual experimentation or mathematics, (in fact Darwin found mathematics to be ‘repugnant’), Darwin instead relied mainly on flawed theological argumentation in order to try to make his case for evolution
Bornagain77 @ 12
I’ve thought about God a lot, probably more than you have, and I find the Christian concept has some problems
And you hate the multiverse theory because it undercuts the fine-tuning argument which, you think, points towards your God.
I’ve never tried to avoid quantum entanglement.
You know, it’s a tad ironic that you castigate Darwin for his theological references in Origins while you spend much of your time trying to twist quantum theory and phenomena into providing support for your personal religious beliefs.
How do you know you aren’t? Your God could quite easily have created you yesterday complete with false memories of your life and you would have no way of knowing any different.
I’m not saying I would prefer them but they’re slightly more plausible than your God.
I’m not avoiding belief in God, I’m just not seeing any good reason to believe in such a being.
Darwin studied theology at university. He read – and admired – William Paley. His comments on theology carry greater weight than a wedding photographer’s or an English teacher and journalist’s critiques of Darwinian evolution.
Sev responds:
I, and others on UD, have interacted with you for years, KF and StephenB in particular have done an excellent job over the years of refuting, in detail, all your theological objections to Christianity. You have not raised any ‘theological problems’ with Christianity that I am aware of that are in the least bit fatal to Christianity. Moreover, as far as I can tell, all your so called ‘problems’ with Christianity are of a personal, emotional, even angry, nature, rather than of a scientific nature. Whereas the problems I have with Darwinian evolution, which are indeed fatal to the theory, are overwhelmingly of a scientific nature.
In fact, ‘science’ was born out of Christianity in medieval Christian Europe. Whereas, on the other hand, atheistic materialism is about as antagonistic to modern science as any philosophy can possibly be to science. (i.e. denial of free will, denial of self, denial of reliable cognitive faculties, denial of etc.. etc…)
Sev goes on:
Actually, I‘ve come to really like the multiverse theory since it completely concedes the necessary premise to the Ontological argument for God, (the premise that it is possible for God to exist in some possible world), in order for the argument to be successful. As I stated the other day,,,
Sev goes on:
Well actually, ‘backwards causation in time’. like hidden variables, is a (materialistic) attempt (however far fetched) to avoid the ‘spooky’ non-locality present within Quantum Entanglement, So yes, whether you realize it or not, you actually were trying to avoid ‘spooky’ quantum entanglement.
Sev goes on,
LOL, the theistic implications from quantum theory literally scream at you from every experimental confirmation of quantum theory, and certainly require no ‘twisting’ of quantum theory on my, or anyone else’s, part in order for the Theistic implications of God to be readily apparent to anyone. For instance, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
Scott Aaronson, of MIT, put the obvious theistic implications of such experiments this way, “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists,,, But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”
Sev goes on:
Actually, only if Theism is true, and God is really real, can such catastrophic epistemological failure be avoided and we can believe our cognitive faculties to be reliable.
Moreover Sev, your argument that we cannot trust what we are seeing because you believe that (your conception of) god could be fooling us of reminds me very much of Descartes’s ‘argument from doubt’ for the existence of God, in which he held that an evil demon could be deceiving him about what he was seeing:
Might I remark, (since your conception of god is that He is no better than Descartes’s fictional evil demon who is out to deceive you by any means possible), then that goes a VERY long way towards explaining why you fight tooth and nail against God?
Might I further suggest that your conception of God, (as an evil demon who is out to ‘get you’), is a completely wrong conception of God? After all, what demon would possibly die for your sins so that you might inherit eternal life? Indeed, as you yourself conceded, demons would much rather deceive you into sinning than delivering from your sins.
Moreover Descates’, following his ‘method of doubt’ to its logical end, Descartes then concluded that he was able to doubt the existence of all things save for the fact that he himself existed to do the doubting. i.e. “I think, therefore I am”
From Descartes’s conclusion that he could only be absolutely certain of the fact that he himself exists, Descartes then went on to use that conclusion as a starting assumption to then argue for the existence of God,
Thus your argument that god could be deceiving you Seversky actually backfires on you in that Descartes has turned that entire line of reasoning into an argument for God. (the ‘argument from doubt’)
Sev. then goes on
“Slightly” more plausible? Really??? I would like to see your math!
Sev states,
Actually, studies now indicate that atheists, (directly contrary to their claims that they see no evidence for design), actually do see ‘good evidence” for design and have to constantly mentally work against their innate design inference,
I hold the preceding studies to be confirming evidence for Romans 1:19-20
Sev finishes with this
Well actually, I find Darwin’s theology to be severely convoluted. Moreover, to repeat what I pointed out at the end of post 12, Darwin used his convoluted theological argumentation in place of any mathematics and/or experimentation in his book ‘Origin’. And as I further pointed out in post 12, besides being castigated by leading scientists of his day, Darwin himself admitted that his theory was unscientific:
Thus Sev, you are basically left with a unscientific theory that is based primarily on bad, indeed convoluted, theological argumentation.
Basically, at the foundational level, your argument for Darwinian evolution turns out to be something like this. “I don’t like the false conception of God that I have constructed in my imagination, so I prefer Darwinian evolution to be true to what I have falsely imagined about God no matter what the scientific evidence may say to the contrary”.
Hardly an enviable position for you to be in Sev!
Verse:
Bornagain77 14
No, you have provided rebuttals but not refutations.
Science can only deal with any claims about the observable nature of the Universe.
Science is not necessary, however, to undermine Christianity. The faith’s own internal inconsistencies and contradictions, as they stand, are sufficient to threaten it with catastrophic theological failure.
What we now call science branched out from natural philosophy a couple centuries back but natural philosophy can be traced back at least to the ancient Greeks. What we would now recognize as science was also practiced in ancient Egypt, India and China. It is only un-Christian hubris that tries to arrogate the origins of science to itself.
The ontological argument founders from the outset on equivocation on the meaning of ‘greatness’. Attributes such as weight, height, speed or strength, for example, are measurable so it’s possible, at least in principle, to find an individual in any population who is the heaviest or tallest or strongest or fastest. Even considering those attributes, however, it is highly unlikely you will find one individual who is, at one time, the heaviest, tallest, strongest and fastest.
‘Greatness’, however, is not an objective and measurable property. Like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. It is possible that in every universe in a multiverse, there is one being that the entire population of that universe agrees is the greatest but that would be just a collective opinion and there’s no reason to think that it will be the same individual in each universe.
Again, I accept that quantum entanglement is a demonstrated phenomenon of the quantum domain but not that it has any necessary theological implications.
The only theistic implications that arise come from cherry-picking quotes or passages from the literature that can be twisted into supporting your a priori theological assumptions. For example:
Even at the quantum level, the claim is not that nothing exists until it is observed. That would be absurd. If nothing exists until you observe it then what are you observing in the first place?
… which is what I argued previously. And, if you concede that your Creator could be that deceitful, that has catastrophic implications for your faith.
Actually, if some of the Old Testament accounts are true then you worship a deceitful and untrustworthy God and have no reason to believe that He endowed you with reliable cognitive abilities.
Personally, I believe we have evolved sensory and cognitive faculties which, while not perfect, are good enough for navigating this world and have proven to be highly adaptable to studying and trying to explain its nature.
I see no reason to think your God exists so there is nothing for me to struggle against – except the purblind denial of the obvious implications of the Genesis accounts. For example:
1) Adam and Eve were created by God. If they were capable of acting sinfully then that is how God – who is omniscient and omnipotent – created them. Since God does not make mistakes, He designed them with the capacity for sin built in. He could have done otherwise but He didn’t so the only alternative is that He intentionally designed them with the capacity for sin.
2) God feigns outrage on learning, apparently for the first time, that A&E have been tempted into eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yet, God is omniscient according to Christian tradition which means He must have known in advance what A&E were going to do. So either God was being deceitful when He pretended to be surprised by what had happened or He genuinely did not know, in which case we are no longer entitled to assume He is omniscient.
3) In light of the above, in what way is it just for Him to punish A&E for behaving exactly as He designed them to behave.?
4) In light of the above, even if you concede that A&E deserve to be punished for their alleged transgressions, by what standard of justice is it warranted that their descendants should be punished in perpetuity?
Why should I be denied eternal life for a sin committed by my distant forebears, not by me?
Bornagain77 15
We the same appearance of design as you do but we also know that appearances can be deceptive. It’s unwise to take them at face value.
Not as convoluted as the contortions forced upon theologians trying explain the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Biblical accounts.
Primary requirements of a scientific explanation are that it accounts for what is observed and that it is <I<testable at least in principle. There is plenty of observational and experimental evidence to support evolution, including mathematical modeling.
Darwin would not have spent 20 years of his life working on such a major project if he really thought it was unscientific. He was being typically modest in his correspondences with other eminent scientific figures of the period whether or not, with hindsight, they deserved such respect. Agassiz, for example, espoused what we now call creationism and scientific racism.
No, you can strip out all the theology from Origins and still be left with a perfectly serviceable scientific theory. That you have such a strong need to undermine evolution says more about your faith than any weaknesses of the theory.
I don’t like that Christianity continues to promote a conception of their God that is so much at odds with the image that emerges from the Old Testament accounts. I think the faith needs to either revise their understanding of the nature of God to be more consistent with the OT accounts or it needs to discard the OT accounts as unreliable.
Sev 16 and 17,
I considered StephenB and KF’s responses to your theological arguments to be informed refutations, not merely rebuttals. You disagree. I don’t care that you disagree.
Sev goes on:
If atheistic materialism were true then ALL of our observations of reality would be illusory, (See Donald Hoffman), and therefore atheistic materialism undermines science itself and therefore cannot be considered scientific in any meaningful sense of the word.
Sev goes on:
First, Christianity gave us modern science. Second, Atheists have tried to undermine Christianity since its inception. Yet, Christianity is still very much alive and well and has a very rich apologetic history that is unrivaled among all of the great religions of the world.
Sev goes on:
That is pure unmitigated poppycock:
Sev goes on,
Nope, they predicated the argument on the fact that ‘contingent being’ is a lesser ‘great making property’ than ‘necessary being’ is, not on any equivocation. Moreover, you go on about properties being measurable yet you have not one measurement for your imaginary multiverse.
Moreover, what is to prevent a heavenly paradise or a hellish eternity from existing in your ensemble of an infinity of imaginary universes?
Sev goes on:
Glad to see you finally reject ‘hidden variables’. Instantaneous, beyond space and time, actions have no possible explanation within your materialistic worldview, yet fits hand in glove with Christian presuppositions of a beyond space and time God who is ‘holding’ this universe together:
Sev goes on:
The experiments are what they are. The experiments themselves require a cause that is beyond space and time. For crying out loud, that is what the fight over quantum non-locality has been about for all these decades:
Sev goes on:
Prior to measurement and/or being observed, the particle exists in a quantum wave state that is mathematically defined as a infinite dimensional Hilbert space. A infinite dimensional Hilbert space that mathematically requires an infinite amount of information to define properly. As should be needless to say, this ‘infinite dimensional/infinite information’ mathematical definition fits hand in glove with the Christian’s presupposition of omnipresent and omniscient God sustaining this universe in its existence.
Sev goes on:
That statement makes no sense from the Scott Aaronson quote that you cited immediately prior to it. Moreover, I answered your ‘deceitful god’ objection by referencing the Boltzmann brain paradox as well as referencing Descartes’s ‘method of doubt’ which he ultimately used as an argument for God.
Sev goes on:
Again, your theological arguments have been addressed and refuted in detail by StephenB and KF. You disagree. I don’t care that you disagree. Moreover, to try to argue theology in face of the scientific fact that, if atheistic materialism were actually true, then our cognitive faculties would necessarily be unreliable, is, to put it mildly, disingenuous to the evidence at hand. Again, only if Theism is true can we trust our cognitive faculties to be reliable
Sev goes on:
You may ‘believe’, (i.e. imagine), that with all your heart, but you have not one shred of real time empirical evidence that such a scenario is even remotely feasible.
Sev goes on
LOL, 🙂 , LOL,
Says the man who has been ‘struggling’ against God for years right here on UD. LOL 🙂 You just can’t make this stuff up.
Sev goes into the Theology of Adam and Eve. Might I suggest you take theology up with StephenB and KF since they are much more qualified than I am in that area?
Now if you want to argue the scientific evidence for a real Adam and Eve, I’ll try my best to help you out.
Sev goes on:
Are you saying that you have not sinned yourself personally? Moreover, if atheistic materialism were true, then Adolf Hitler himself did not ‘sin’ when he killed millions of people since there would be no objective moral standard to judge by. So you got a couple of issues that are fatal to your supposed objection.
Sev goes on:
You have no real time evidence to support your claim that it is merely an appearance of Design and that it is not really design.,,, It is ‘unwise’ for you to live in constant denial of what your own eyes are telling you. In fact, ‘denialism’ is classified as a mental illness’
Sev goes on:
Not in my opinion. And again, I refer you to KF and StephenB if you want to get into theological details.
Sev goes on
LOL, you can’t even produce any real time evidence for one protein being transformed into another brand new protein, much less do you have any evidence for one species transforming into a brand new species,
Your claim that mathematics supports evolution is a joke. Among a endless litany of examples that I could supply, I simply I refer you the Wistar symposium where MIT mathematicians told Darwinists that their theory wasn’t even scientific. See Murray Eden – “Inadequacies of neo-Darwinian evolution as a scientific theory.”
Sev goes on:
I don’t care what you think about what Darwin thought about his own theory. I only care that he used no mathematics, nor experimentation in his book, Thus, by definition, his theory, as he presented it, was not scientific, And as I pointed out, even by his own admission he honestly admitted that his theory is not scientific.
Sev goes on:
Well actually this ‘experiment’ of stripping out the theology from Darwinian literature has been done and, contrary to what you claim, the supposed ‘science’ for Darwinism suffers dramatically:
Sev finishes with,
In terms of archaeological evidence. I find the OT to be reliable, For instance,
And again, if you want to argue Theological details, I refer you to KF and StephenB who have been masterful over the years in addressing your theological arguments.