The rigor mortis of science: The war on measurement itself has commenced
| January 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Engineering, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, science education |
From Notes and Comments at The New Criterion:
If you are thinking of building a bridge, be careful if your engineer went to Purdue University. Donna Riley, the head of the engineering department at Purdue, has put the world on notice that “rigor” is a dirty word. In an article for Engineering Education called “Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit,” Professor Riley, who is also the author of Engineering and Social Justice, argues that academic “rigor” is merely a blind for “white male heterosexual privilege.” Yes, really. “The term,” she writes, “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.” There follows a truly surreal meditation on the existential and sexist depredations of slide rules—those hard, straight instruments that have traditionally been deployed by men…
More.
She then goes on to attack scientific knowledge itself as hopelessly sexist and colonial.
Unfortunately, there is no simple way of addressing this science-killer in the post-modern university environment that naturalism has spawned. Women who achieve in science will be portrayed as “selling out” because they are using methods developed by men, as if they were free to just go and invent new methods instead. Women who fail or just decide they aren’t suited to science will be portrayed are heroines or victims, not as people who simply chose to do something else.
Most science boffins so far are simply looking the other way, hoping to be destroyed last, instead of crying Shame! on such things.
But then they can’t, can they? Traditionally, science studied nature but was not naturalist. That is, scientists believed that there was an order of things that were really true. When they believed that, the value of qualities like objectivity and rigor was apparent to all. Tday, most probably believe that their consciousness is an illusion that enables their selfish genes to survive and nothing more. So they really have nothing to defend except their jobs.
See also: Scientific thinking patterns are for men only, say feminist profs
Can science survive long in a post-modern world? It’s not clear.
and
Can the rot of naturalism be stopped? Relating information to matter and energy might help
50 Responses to The rigor mortis of science: The war on measurement itself has commenced
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We have to recognize is that science is a good thing and these people are its enemies.
And as hard as it is for some to understand, that makes us — those who believe in absolutes like truth — the pro-science side.
tribune7:
Absolutely!
See my comment #285 here:
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-spliceosome-a-molecular-machine-that-defies-any-non-design-explanation/#comment-647693
Very well stated, gp.
I’m a little peeverd at The New Criterion for not getting it more accurately. The woman is the head of the “engineering education” department (whatever that is you might ask), not the dean of the engineering school. The only “engineering departments” I know of are at schools with pre-engineering programs to prepare students to transfer to university.
Several state universities around the country have established “engineering education” departments where they teach SJW’s who cannot make the grade in engineering. So they accept them into the “engineering education” departments where they teach them that science, math, and engineering are sexist and racist disciplines, and then teach them how to write papers to spew their polemics to the rest of the world.
Correction – there is actually a school of engineering education at Purdue and the woman is the dean. You go to the webpage and it is about as confusing as you would expect. They funnel their 1st year students into engineering but so far as an undergraduate course catalog for the “school” I can’t find it. They do teach some courses for people who want an engineering background but do not want to practice engineering.. Here is the page maybe you guys can figure out what they do: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE
Maybe they only offer advanced degrees in polemics or something:
https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/InfoFor/GraduateStudents
Unfortunately, this sort of nonsense is the price you pay for academic freedom. It doesn’t derive from naturalism, though, more like lit-crit and sociology of science perspectives.
Groovamos at 4 and 5, thanks for clarification. So there are still people studying engineering out there who think that engineering matters? Good. we use a lot of roads and bridges here where I live. Seversky at 6, no one is questioning her right to do this; many of us do not wish to fund it at the expense of real engineering or to in any way confuse the two.
Post-modernism is essential to understanding why she even IS funded. Modernists were often atheists but they have not tended to believe that nonsense is just as valid as any other form of self-expression.
While there may be no silver bullet for this variety of idiocy, there is one thing we can do: Don’t enroll at the schools where this nonsense is taught, don’t hire people who list credentials from these schools in their CV’s, and let our children know that if they want us to pay their tuition, they should avoid these schools.
News
Many posters besides myself have pointed out that ideas and worldviews have consequences. Postmodernism, philosophical naturalism, the jettisoning of absolutes,etc, will continue to lead to the sawing off the branch upon which science sits.
I’m not surprised by Riley’s position and I doubt you are as well.
Vivid
This creature destroys its/her/ves/ums/zirs own argument with the bizarre nonsense about “hard rigid” slide rules.
In fact slide rules are squishy and subjective, requiring several levels of HUMAN interpretation by the user.
Computers are hard and rigid. Students who learn engineering with computers are more distant from the soft human aspect of the structures or circuits they build. They are less tolerant and less empathetic toward human variation and human error.
News,
you do realise that being, ‘outraged’, by every stupidly outrageous claim, or belief, leaves you open to the accusation of being, ‘thin skinned’, or a, ‘snow flake’.
Be like us atheist materialists, and look upon all stupidity with a shrug, and a, ‘meh!’
You see, being an atheist materialist, puts you in the wonderful position of knowing how little you actually know. Thus we embrace our evolved stupidity, and are not, ‘offended’ by every little stupid person.
It also enables us to humbly accept new discoveries, that time, and time again, disprove the, “supernatural”.
Really?
Which discovery disproves “the supernatural” rv, and how did it do it? It seems like someone in science and/or philosophy might have heard of it.
I understand that academics has a tenure aspect. Even given that, the reason that you shouldn’t enroll in Purdue for engineering is that they don’t hang a sign on the window the way that Lehigh does about Mike Behe. Their website should say, “this professor is free to express her views, but the university does not endorse them in any way whatsoever.”
Any “pro-science” group that dishes it out harder to other schools and programs teaching creationism than they do to Purdue is simply full of crap.
I should preface the previous that this assumes that “The New Criterion” is presenting her views accurately. I don’t know that this is the case, and, given our own position, we shouldn’t assume that to be the case.
Thermodynamics, Gravity, Chemical Reaction, Atomic Force, Electro-Magnetism, and the utter undeniable fact, that these forces, and processes can not be breached, or gain said.
Your turn to waffle about beauty, redemption, Ephesians, salvation, and the Devil.
johnnyb @13,
good well made point. If Behe must carry a banner around his neck for holding absurd views, then the professors who hold views such as those shown here, should also be held up for ridicule:
I’m with you on this!
rvb8
What color is the sky in the alternate universe where you live rv? A-Mats are the most cocksure and hidebound people I have ever dealt with. You should get out more.
rv, I wouldn’t ask you about beauty or salvation even if you had something to say. I’m asking what discovery disproves “the supernatural”, and why no one has ever heard of it.
Barry,
the sky has no particular colour. That is, if you are expecting the answer, ‘blue’. This is the same kind of silly tautological phrase we used to get from the once great Bill O’Reilly, when explaining his indisputable philosophical approach to epistemology: “Sun comes up, sun goes down!”
No Bill! The earth rotates.
So Barry, as to your folksy, “What’s the sky colour…” Try to be a little more nuanced in your observations, questions, and answers. The, ‘one size fits all answer’, is no answer.
I revel in knowing little, (very, very, little), it enables me to, ‘imagine’, have ‘curiosity’.
I pity ID folk, because they already know everything. What a tiny universe you inhabit.
Upright BiPed @17,
what I consider beautiful is probably similar to you; an ocean sunset, a mountain setting, cats playing, children laughing, old people holding hands, music, art, etc etc..
We are probably very similar here.
Salvation!? If you mean physical, or mental salvation, for a heroine addict, drunk, wife beater, former communist, religious person, then I would say yes! Difficult but possible.
But I suspect you are talking about, ‘Spiritual Salvation’, are you not? There unfortunately you leave the realm of the possible, and enter the land of, ‘Nod’.
RV
“I revel in knowing little, (very, very, little)”
And yet you can’t seem to resist the urge to pontificate on practically every subject that gets raised in these pages. Odd that.
rv, I didn’t bring up the topic of “salvation”, you did. I’m asking you what discovery disproves (what you term as) “the supernatural”, and why no one has ever heard of it.
RV:
UB:
RV:
UB:
RV:
I am detecting a pattern here.
You are Barry, it’s called quote mining, the main source of ID research; cut and paste.
RV @ 23,
Perhaps you will answer UB’s question. Which discovery disproves “the supernatural” rv, and how did it do it?
By my count this is the third time you’ve been asked.
It’s ironic that an article attacking someone for writing an article about rigour not only manages to the job of the person they’re attacking wrong, they even managed to get the name of the journal wrong. Engineering Education hasn’t published since 2014 (it looks like it merged with a few other journals). The paper is actually in Engineering Studies.
RVB8,
Why do you persist in that worn-out slander?
Let me clip, just for corrective record — yet again (you have so studiously ignored that you have to be chalked up as willful on this):
KF
RVB8:
Actually, such atheistical materialism radically undermines the responsible, rational freedom required to know, have virtues such as humility and more. Haldane (co-founder of the modern Neo-Darwinian synthesis), in a nutshell:
I document in more detail in a moment, this is the in-short for those disinclined to work through a point by point argument.
KF
F/N: Evolutionary Materialism’s undermining of reasonable, responsible freedom and self-refutation by that means:
rvb8 thinks that describing behavior via a scientific model is the same thing as “proving” those patterned behaviors are not caused by the supernatural. So-called natural laws and constants don’t explain behaviors; they describe them. Nothing more. The name of the model is mistaken as the cause of the behavior in the minds of rvb8 and his ilk.
The tragic soap opera of materialist logic continues to unfold before us.
As groovamos notes above at 5, the situation with the discipline and the journals is quite confusing, so much so as to confuse my source, New Criterion and thus me. Maybe…
At any rate, I doubt that the confusion is an accident. It is part of a long-term decline that will make Engineering and Engineering Education ever more difficult to distinguish.
Professional designations were once jealously guarded. (I remember with what pride elderly women would once put “R.N.” [Registered Nurse] after their names.)
But post-modernism changes all that. Who dare say who is qualified for what?
The modern feminist wanted more women in real engineering. The post-modern feminist will destroy engineering such that success and failure are no longer recognizable or distinguishable.
On a career level, these programs allow intellectual parasites to create a smokescreen around the dismal performance of public education today, concealed by grade inflation and social promotion.
Public education was bound to be thoroughly rotten in many places by now because it combines compulsory attendance with compulsory funding. In short, there are no natural checks and balances.
Any reform must incorporate natural checks and balances such as parent choice, loss of jobs for incompetence, closure of failed schools and relocation of students, and criminal charges for those committing felonies, etc.
We need a Reformation in education, not religion, followed by a Council of Trent!
See also: Scientific thinking patterns are for men only, say feminist profs
Not only aren’t these gals kidding but there are lots of them out there. Remember, they have absolutely nothing to market but making a living off the destruction of still-healthy systems.
rvb8:
Is this what I’m seeing when some A-mat clings to some restroom session muttering of Darwin, Dawkins, or Hawking? As someone who believes rational thinking has some objective basis, what is the possible worth of your message to me, personally; other than perhaps the study of necessary compromises towards optimality in the design of the mind via malfunction?
By “disproving” do you mean “adopting”? As our concept of nature expands, it becomes inclusive of that which, previously, would be deemed as “supernatural”. I’m sure you’d now want to respond to this with constraints against the possibilities of future discoveries; but they will likely be, if not utterly trivial and vacuous, in conflict with the spirit of your claim, here.
BA to RVB8: “Perhaps you will answer UB’s question. Which discovery disproves “the supernatural” rv, and how did it do it?”
RVB8: [crickets]
Ah, yet again an A-Mat makes a bold sweeping claim and can’t even begin to back it up. It would be funny if it were not so sad and pathetic.
BA @ 16: “A-Mats are the most cocksure and hidebound people I have ever dealt with.”
Same for me.
Boys! Boys! Boys!! News has kindly posted on an event that we can all agree is idiotic ( and I hope is covered by the wider media) but you guys still figure out a way to argue about it!
RodW @ 34:
No we didn’t.
🙂
Barry, and UB,
I, and nobody else can prove or disprove the, ‘supernatural’.
This is because ‘proof’ requires ‘evidence’. Evidence is obtained from physical remnants, or proof by empirical experimentation.
As God, and his side kicks are remarkably gifted at leaving no remnants of anything, and experimentation is out of the question I, and everybody else, can not disprove the, ‘supernatural’.
But equally you can not prove it.
So I’ll stick with the, ‘no such thing as the supernatural’, as it appears to have weathered the test of time.
I have no idea what Kairos@ 26 means by, ‘worn out slander’?
Kairos the ‘supernatural’, can not be proved or disproved, but the evidence is severely stacked against the, ‘it’s true’, camp.
And for what it’s worth I’m a Dawkin’s atheist. 99.999999% sure there is no God, or supernaturalism. But hey, it’s a big universe!
rvb8 @ 11:
rvb8 @ 36:
Rarely do I see an A-Mat say something really stupid and then walk it back. Good for you rvb8.
Correct. So judgments come down to logic, reason, and physical evidence, which you’ve chosen not to engage.
That’s your prerogative, as is running from evidence. But it’s revealing that you come here to spit on people, telling them you have proof.
Barry, I like to think of myself as a person who holds up his hand when he has made a mistake, or contradicted himself.
I hold up my hand here, you are quite correct my two statements do oppose one another.
I will only say in my defence, that the ‘spirit’ of my first statement implies physical laws can not be broken, therefore things purporting to be beyond these laws, and forces are impossible, thus disproving the, ‘supernatural’.
But you are right I am wrong, in the perfectly litteral sense; I accept the admonishment.
Do you think anyone in the ID community has ever backtracked as I occasionally and quite rightly do?
Just a thought for the, ‘free enquiry, teach the contoversy’, community that is ID.
Upright @38,
bloody hell man, listen to yourself;
“so judgements come down to logic, reason, and physical evidence.”
Great; ‘logic’, “No man can ever float, come back from the dead, or multiply objects beyond what is physically present.”
‘Reason’, tells me that unless I am witness to the supernatural (not given second, third, and umpteenth hand accounts), I will not accept their validity.
‘Physical evidence?’ This is truly, truly, easy, you have none, we have lots.
Distractive drama, eh? Let me guess, you are about to shovel something, and you really need it to sell.
None of those things are among the evidence you avoid here, likewise, none of them are found in the arguments for ID either. Perhaps you thought this might go unnoticed.
Once again, the “supernatural” is not among the evidence you avoid, rv. It’s the physical evidence you can’t handle, which is why its absent from your list.
You are terrified of physical evidence rv. We (you and I) have already demonstrated this to be true. You begin to emote, and you have to force yourself to play stupid. You’re probably better off staying with the floating man thing and lying about having proofs. I don’t see you ever being able to handle actual evidence.
H’mm:
How do you KNOW such so confidently?
Science proves it, presumably — laws and all that.
But, scientific laws are inherently inductive and cannot eliminate rare exceptions. That’s what Newton pointed out in Opticks, Query 31, c. 1704.
As in, first principles of inductive reasoning.
And, the Creator of the world would be beyond its normal rules.There is no good reason to infer that he who called a universe into existence ex nihilo cannot repeat for good cause on a lesser scale.
Besides, food distills what is ever present in atmosphere, soil and sea around us, so why not speed up the process?
As for levitation, we see this all the time, it is a matter of invisible means of support (and no, not trickery with wires etc).
Coming back from the dead, oh, we have 500 witnesses where the actual observations are quite mundane. The miracle lies in the timeline.
And, no, the idea of overwhelming numbers of observations of the ordinary course does not even work in science: what happens when we push things to a hitherto unexplored limit and present laws fail? Do we challenge and dismiss the observations, or do we announce a new discovery?
It’s time to put some long past “sell by” objections out to the retirement pasture.
KF
How about these ‘physical laws’? What are they? What are they made of, if anything? Where do they come from? How do they cause things to happen?
Again, what are these laws? Are they “physical”? Rvb8 seems to think that they are. But what would a physical explanation of the laws of nature look like?
Frankly, I have no idea where to start. What I do know is that a bottom-up explanation runs into a serious problem. A bottom-up explanation, from the level of say bosons, should be expected to give rise to innumerable different ever-changing laws. Different circumstances, different laws. By analogy, particles give rise to innumerable different conglomerations. But this is not what we find.
Paul Davies again:
If, as Davies says, laws do not depend on physical processes, then it follows that laws cannot be explained by physical processes. IOWs there is no bottom-up explanation for the laws of nature.
But what does it mean for naturalism/materialism if there is no bottom-up (naturalistic/physical) explanation for the laws of nature? How does the central claim ‘everything is physical’ make sense if there is no physical explanation for the laws of nature? What if it is shown that the laws of nature control the physical but are not reducible to it?
I answer plainly and get psycho-analytical gobbledygook in response.
When, oh when, will a religious, or ID point of view become transparent, and clear. Someone please make it so. Dembski attempted it for a number of years and then, ‘ran away’. A number of other ID, ‘notables’, have also absconded (I have the names of all), and now we are left with the hard core.
Plainly: “Your Book is unprovable; science has nothing to say about it; physical evidence for evolution exists; second, third, and one thousandth hand accounts, are not evidence; word soup, is not evidence.. etc”
Apart from that, ID is a wonderful tale, and growing at an, “exponential”, rate?
Please, a post on current ID experimentation, or investugation!
It’s not ID proponents you really fear, rv; you come here and spit hatred and contempt at them at will, with your typical masturbatory regularity.
It’s the science you won’t touch — not even a little bit.
Upright,
quite nasty.:)
Good for you, the first sign of ‘spirit’ I’ve seen here. The usual is psudo-intellectualism, dressed up with bad philosophy.
However, if I’m accused of avoiding questions, and not providing answers, why are you exempt from the same accusation?
Where is ID’s most recent lab work, and experimentation?
rvb8 @46
Surely the recent Basener and Sanford paper, which falsifies Fisher’s Darwinism theorem, is an ID product. Falsifying neo-darwinistic claims is very much part of ID science.
Origenes – that paper doesn’t provide any lab work or experimentation. It also doesn’t falsify Fisher’s theorem, rather it shows that under a different set of assumptions, Fisher’s result doesn’t hold. Which we already knew.
Bob O’H @48
You are very much mistaken, but this is not the correct thread to discuss this.
rvb8:
Unfortunately for you reality demonstrates the opposite. You don’t have anything but lies and bluffs. You don’t even have a methodology to test your position’s claims. For example how can we test the claim that vision systems evolved via blind and mindless processes? No one knows, least of all you.
So do tell what is this alleged evidence that you think you have?