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The Human Condition

Human Consensus: or the lack thereof
02/04/2019

It is estimated that there are over 100,000 different identifiable religions in our world today, and what is blatantly obvious is that almost no one, if anyone, is in a majority on any serious or significant matter or issue.

Some would shrug that off as being somewhat understandable and largely irrelevant as long as the religions are not too extreme and troublesome, and as long as the participants don't try to force others into their religious beliefs.

Isaac Asimov said in "CP", Analog, October 1974, p. 41, "The religious orthodoxy had, at its disposal, the stake, the rack, and the thumbscrew....But scientific orthodoxy - why, it is the weakest and most powerless orthodoxy ever invented." Asimov is profoundly wrong in his sentiment. The most powerful factors for orthodoxy are psychological and political pressure, not "the stake, the rack, and the thumbscrew." If these were so powerful we would all be Roman Catholics. Asimov may have been a good storyteller, but was sometimes blind and wrong.

Fractured disciplines

What very few see is the bigger picture wherein there are deep raging controversies in literally every scientific discipline and important line of thinking. The intellectual and academic world is fragmented and fractured in the fields of:

B.C.E Chronology C.E. Chronology Climate change Cosmology and origin of the universe Ecology Human Origins Human development Human Destiny Language origins Philosophy Theology Psychology Geology and Geophysical history

Diet Health Ethics and Values Aesthetics and Art Morality Politics and Government History Sexuality Dating methodology and validity Energy that powers the universe Astrophysics Particle physics Paranormal realities

Legitimate research requires relentless skepticism, a humility about conclusions, and a willingness to examine preconceived assumptions. Science isn't a scroll of revealed knowledge, or a discrete body of approved facts. It's a process by which we can gradually, incrementally understand how the world works.
     A brilliant 2016 essay by William Wilson in First Things catalogs just how wrong much of what we think we know can turn out to be. Wilson cites a 2015 study by the Open Science Collection that did something never before attempted: researchers re-created one hundred peer-reviewed psychology studies in the field's three most prestigious journals to see whether their results could be replicated. The findings were grim: 65% of studies failed to replicate. Of those that did many had far less conclusive results when they were re-created.
     Psychology is a soft science, at best pseudoscience at worst, so Wilson pushed deeper. How did the hard sciences hold up to scrutiny?
     Not well. Pharmaceutical companies now assume that about half of all academic biomedical research is false Wilson cites one experiment in which scientists at the drug company Bayer attempted to replicate 67 drug discovery studies that had appeared in top journals like Science and Nature. Bayer's scientists were unable to replicate the published results three quarters of the time. - Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools, Free Press, New York, page 233

Is there anything of importance or that matters that is not included above? Hardly! We largely live in our own cocoon in our own culture ignoring this predicament, and try to ameliorate the absurdity of this situation by celebrating our diversity where and when we can.

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