Posted by finelinebob on August 17, 2006, at 21:53:04
In reply to Three Down, Two to Go, posted by Poet on August 17, 2006, at 14:55:20
Most people in the business call themselves inventors tho, because all it takes is one success and you're doing telemercials at 3am on cable.
Did you know that scientists are professional failures, too? Science these days is based on the principle of falsification. In other words, 100 million successes can be undone by a single failure. So, the general idea is that you say what you think should be, then you go about proving how every other explanation fails where yours, well, doens't fail. For the moment. If you fail at demonstrating that you are a failure, you can succeed quite well as a scientist.
Science is also based on underdetermination. In other words, whatever you THINK you know, you'll never know enough.
WOW. Talk about dysfunctional. Here I was, for years blaming my parents when really it was my science teachers who should have been taking the heat.
poster:finelinebob
thread:676622
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/esteem/20060725/msgs/677589.html