dec 16th
while one may wonder about the south korean scientist's ethics, what this case brings into sharp relief is the issue of how truthful and reliable the 'prestigious' journals of the white-dominated research scientific world really are.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Stem-Cell-Accusations.html?hp&ex=1134795600&en=fa8ade6d9803cc86&ei=5094&partner=homepage
the journals have long been a cozy cartel: you publish my crap and i'll publish your crap, old-boy-network, pointedly excluding people from outside the pale, that is non-whites (except japanese who were, interestingly enough, treated as honorary whites in apartheid south africa -- money talks, of course), women and people working in labs outside europe and the us.
so what gets published has always been highly censored if you will by prejudice.
in that sense, revealing these emperors' new clothes as fantasy is a good thing. this happened -- and i was glad it did -- to the new york times too, when it was shown its reporters were making up stories on occasion.
unfortunately, there has been a sustained attack on the wikipedia's credibility as well; i think it'll survive, but the freewheeling days are over. there will be more oversight and a lot more caution among the editors of the wikipedia. but again, the interesting thing was the suggestion that the wikipedia is on average (in the sciences) just about as accurate as the encyclpaedia britannica is.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69844,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6
i rather like the wikipedia, and i believe we should be making more use of it, authoring more stuff before they tighten up on who can post.
2 comments:
don't be so shocked, pennathur. indians have a tendency to idol-worship white-guy science, and this is just silly.
academic research is full of egos and fraud and ethics violations: this is true of the AAAS and the RS and all those other ivory-towers. just read about the politics in the AIDS research, with a frenchman and some americans doing all sorts of unethical stuff to claim credit. or the unedifying spectacle of one of the inventors of MRI alleging last year that the nobel prize for this went to the wrong people, or that he was unfairly excluded.
i suggest that we take all these 'prestigious' journals with a pinch of salt, as they are also run by humans with prejudices. and the white guys tend to view all people who are not like them with suspicion, and this is only natural. therefore they tend to not give credit to those not like them when they come up with something big. remember the guy at TIFR last year whose criticism of stephen hawking was suppressed by all these great journals, and he was ultimately proved right.
worshippers at the altar of 'science' -- like cricket, the religion of lots of deracinated indians -- like you need to start asking some questions and not swallowing stuff without scepticism just because it is printed in some white-guy journal. question authority! if you don't have the technical knowledge to judge these papers at least have a dose of healthy scepticism.
and remember the piltdown hoax; there are many others too, which were all considered the pinnacle of 'science' until they turned out to be practical jokes.
pennathur, if you don't understand you are blindly idol-worshipping some animal called 'science', i'm afraid i can't convince you.
what has iit madras and stanford got to do with anything? i don't know where you went to school, but if i were you, i'd ask them for a refund. you weren't at JNU by any chance, were you? that'd explain a lot.
your post is so full of logical fallacies that it's amusing.
1. 'poisoning the well' -- dragging stanford and iit/m into it and asserting that they are at fault somehow. what's iit and stanford got to do with it?
2. 'guilt by association' -- just because i talk about piltdown (a clear hoax) and intelligent design types (you claim) talk about it, you have insinuated that i am one of them. well, i may be or i may not be, but you have no data to conclude either way, and you are extrapolating wildly. this is like china saying that since the mongols ruled over both china and tibet, therefore tibet belongs to china. very logical. are you also asserting that piltdown was not a hoax? if you're so sensitive about piltdown, how about 'cold fusion', another fashionable hoax? and is shouting 'intelligent design' the current equivalent of shouting 'nazi', so that the other guy is supposd to immediately dissolve into a quivering mass of jelly?
there are more, but why should i waste my time educating you?
speaking of non sequiturs -- always a good tactic -- this business about rosa parks, ok, fine, if you provide me with facts, i change my mind. i thought rosa parks came before brown v. board of education. i was wrong. i am not omniscient. clever you, you get a gold star for knowing how to use google.
you are the one who's omniscient, aren't you -- asserting that 'these rituals' won't bring the gods down to earth in a previous post. so you can trash my faith, but i may not question your touching faith in 'science', a pseudo-religion that attracts blind belief. how very marxist of you: do you as you say, not as you do.
today's science is tomorrow's superstition. i am extremely sceptical of science's claims. the "AAAS" -- that's next to god, because it's americans, ie. white guys speaking, right? this is normal for someone who has just arrived in the us and is still full of wonder at the grocery stores and rental cars and so forth. grow up, will you? once you live there for a while you get very jaded. see, i can do FOB-bashing just as you can do pointless iit bashing.
and please dont pontificate about hindu traditions of scepticism, leave poor hinduism out of it. you and i are both ignorant about it.
i really won't get into a long debate with you because it's futile.
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