Re: Psychology & Education ( was: the Zapno (tm) anti-static device and dishonesty)

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Fri, 2 Aug 2002, Mike Smith wrote:

> I really hope that this thread on business ethics and what constitutes a lie
> collapses under its own weight or goes private over the weekend.

This "psychology & education" thread?  I've been talking about the
impeccable ethics required of SCIENTISTS ever since the above subject line
was changed.  The thread is not about business.  These two papers below
have nothing to do with business, and everything to do with proper
behavior during discussions of controversial physics topics.  In my
opinion they apply directly to the hot-under-the-collar threads such as
"heat IS NOT like a substance", "energy IS TOO a substance", and "how do
airplane wings REALLY work"

:)

  Fallacy: one-sidedness
  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/inflogic/onesided.htm

  The clinical attitude during debate
  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/inflogic/clinical.htm

When discussions of physics topics get emotional, the temptation is great
to start using debate-winning strategies rather than truth-revealing
strategies.  That's what the above papers discuss.  Unfortunately many
debate-winning strategies to a greater or lesser degree are based on
lying.



I must note that one purpose of the subject line is so that users can
delete messages which don't interest them.  When I'm not interested in a
subject, I can:

  - delete all the messages unread
  - try to silence that thread by complaining

Of course if a non-science thread takes off and generates thirty messages
a day for days on end, then complaints of bandwidth-hogging are certainly
valid.  It's a pain to download a whole bunch of messages day after day,
only to delete all of them.   Maybe the "Zapno(tm)" stuff was approaching
the level where it's a big task for those not reading it to delete the
messages?


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William J. Beaty                            SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
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