[lbo-talk] Ravi, what is scientism why does the left love it so?

Andy F andy274 at gmail.com
Thu May 11 04:02:14 PDT 2006


Lots of worthy-sounding summer reading in this thread....

On 5/9/06, Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> I find there's a modified form of scientism at work in
> the computer field; call it cyberneticism. Jaron
> Lanier dissects this in his essay, "One Half Of A
> Manifesto" -
>
> <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_p1.html>

Blessedly, Lanier makes the too-rarely made point that this sort of viewpoint is embraced more often by technologists and philosophers than natural scientists. It's a maddeningly common confusion, and often results in angry attacks on and fervent defence of something that I imagine few scientists would recognize as their craft.

That said, I'm curious about how what was said about homeopathy fits into all this. It's hard to say anything about in the absence of some sort of account of what went on at Bell, but was it that the critique was from a purely theoretical stance? In the absence of evidence that it works, the theoretical complaints are moot, however entertaining they may be.

-- Andy



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