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Originally Posted by Chris Noble  This is just silly. The most respected and idolised scientists are exactly the ones who revolutionised our view of the world. There is nothing comforting in quantum mechanics or relativity. Every aspirational scientist would like to do the same.
A large percentage of papers are rejected because they lack novelty. The most "paradigm" changing papers are published in the highest ranking journals.
The idea that scientists are just sheeple is by and large a post hoc excuse to explain away the lack of acceptance for somebodies pet idea. I hear it all the time from HIV denialists, ID proponents, homeopaths and physics-kooks who claim that Einstein was wrong. |
Scientists, individually and collectively, strive for certain ideals -- including objectivity. Many people look at science and its ideals and have faith that those ideals are met in practice, except (they will generally concede) for a few minor, short-lived exceptions.
The fact is that scientists are people and its institutions are imperfect compromises of the ideals with non-scientific and non-rational goals. Science as an institution is a wonderful system that works fairly well in most areas most of the time, which makes it far superior to most human institutions. But most areas does not mean all areas and and most of the time does not mean all of the time.
Scientists delight in novelty is balanced by a commitment to the validity of their hard-won understandings, their own philosophies and challenges that endanger the status-quo which provides them with security and comfortable working conditions. Let us not forget how controversial SR, GR and QM were originally, and how much resistance there was to them. Yet these theories provided a great deal of insulation between themselves and scientists' day to day life and work. SR only effected things moving at huge speeds (even less attainable then than now), GR only effected things in intense gravitational fields or unimaginable accelerations, QM only effected things at scales at the lower end of what was then observable. QM eventually produced some more fundamental philosophical challenges, but these were not recognized for a long time, and were (and are) pretty abstract. None of these provided any kind of a challenge to the ongoing careers of more than a few narrow specialists (e.g., someone who had made their career on elaborate theorizing on the nature of the ether) whose main concern was that they might not be able to learn the new formalities well-enough to compete as successfully as they had in the past.
Psi on the other hand implies things about what is going on around each of us in our daily lives. It touches, in one way or another on many fields (consider the poor anthropologists who have spent their professional careers explicating the cultural reasons for the details of various "magical" rituals found in different societies, only to have to face the possibility that they are that way because they
work that way; they are faced with the psychological choice of endorsing this "new" discovery and embracing that their careers were mostly a waste of time and they have no significant scientific legacy or to cling to the belief that the research is flawed. It doesn't matter, of course, whether their fears are realistic, only that it might seem that way to them). In fact, psi challenges directly -- might even be said to be by definition a challenge -- to all experimental science. Experiments are based on the assumption that the experimental systems can be effectively isolated, shielded from such things as the intentions of people in the lab when the experiment is being performed. Parapsychology experiments are clear-cut demonstrations that this is not, in practice, generally possible.
Psi gets scientists where they live.
Is it a coincident that the one group in the scientific community that has been shown to be strongly resistant to the possibility of psi, is precisely that group with the strongest personal dependence on the status quo? Perhaps ... but I don't think so
One doesn't to personally witness some respected scientist reduced to a red-faced, screaming rage at the mere suggestion that their might be some evidence that psi exists to have a reason doubt the perfect, cool objectivity of scientists in the matter. An objective assessment of the way that parapsychology and its experiments is treated will do -- you don't need to accept that the evidence is valid or conclusive, just look at the arguments and institutional actions and see whether they are justified, objective and fair. The first step is to not assume that because the evidence for psi has not been publicly accepted by the mainstream scientific community that that evidence has been demonstrated, objectively to be flawed, nor that criticisms have been made and not retracted, that those criticisms are logically and scientifically reasonable or that they have not been thoroughly answered.