Exposing the Warm Mongers
J. Neil Schulman - I love the phrase "warm mongers". I'll start using it. But the most important part of this essay was the reminder that no scientific question is ever "settled", at least not in the mind of a real scientist.
No real scientist would ever, ever, ever -- under any circumstances -- declare that a question has been answered finally and that a scientific debate is over, once and for all. Ever.
That's just not how real scientists think, or talk.
Science is a process -- a set of tools to test knowledge for validity -- and whenever you hear someone declare that scientific debate is over and a particular conclusion is unquestionable, not only has he given strong evidence that he never grasped the scientific method, there's a good chance he has identified himself not as a scientist but as a political operative, an ad man, a religious fanatic, a con man, and possibly a gangster in a lab coat.
The scientific method always gives its conclusions as provisional and always subject to correction by additional facts, better observations, later experiments, newer theories, more relevant paradigms, and -- every once in a while -- a genius turning everything we thought we knew upside down by asking a question nobody until then had thought to ask.
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