Science is what you can observe and on which you can carry out
reproducible experiments – everything that meets these criteria is the
science; and everything that does not meet these criteria – is not the
science.
It is important to note that many people have no clue whatsoever
about what the word “scientific” means. This is due to the simple
reason.
Universities have huge number of faculties which actually have nothing
to do with science. As for example, many universities have “faculty of
theology” or “faculty of literature”, and so on. And these “faculties”
issue diplomas with academic degrees like “master”, “doctor”,
“professor”, etc.
And what is the activity of such “professors of theology”, what do they
do? They study the superstitious writings called “sacred scriptures”
and then debate each other about what did Jesus/Muhammad/Krishna/etc
said and who is superior over whom – Jesus is superior to Muhammad or
vice versa. They can debate whatever they want, however this is not
science, this activity does not meet the scientific criteria. And then
such people from universities with academic degrees write books, give
lectures, talk on TV/radio, etc – they simply flood the society with
their claptrap material. When layman people read/listen to this
claptrap material they get the false impression that this material is
“science” – and this is due to simple reason: the authors of that
claptrap
material have scientific academic degrees. As the result of this,
the majority of the population are totally incapable to distinguish
science
from pseudoscience. As the result of this, they are totally incapable
to detect circular/recursive definitions and they are totally incapable
to understand that circular/recursive definitions are meaningless by
definition. That is a huge problem in society.
Human population contains quite a large percentage of all kinds of
artists/humanities/etc, whose activities have nothing to do with
science, however these people also want to eat.
And these people are faced with the technical question: how to arrange
things that society would feed them?
And the solution here is very simple: they simply need to mimic
“scientists” and the society will think that their pseudoscientific
activity is supposedly beneficial to society.
In order to achieve this goal, pseudoscientific humanities do not
reckon with the means: they flood the society with their claptrap
material, they rewrite/falsify the definition of the term “science” in
encyclopedias and Wikipedias, etc.
But all their pseudoscientific nonsense can be debunked very easily:
science is what you can observe and on which you can carry out
reproducible experiments – everything that meets these criteria is the
science; and everything that does not meet these criteria – is not the
science.
We will provide several examples.
Is psychology really a science?
Sigmund Freud is one of the most important authorities in psychology.
Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis is pseudoscience and does not
match the scientific criteria.
List of topics characterized as
pseudoscience
<...>
Psychoanalysis – body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund
Freud and his followers, which is devoted to the study of human
psychological functioning and behavior. It has been controversial ever
since its inception. Karl Popper characterized it as pseudoscience
based on psychoanalysis failing the requirement for falsifiability.
Frank Cioffi argued that "though Popper is correct to say that
psychoanalysis is pseudoscientific and correct to say that it is
unfalsifiable, he is mistaken to suggest that it is pseudoscientific
because it is unfalsifiable. […] It is when [Freud] insists that he has
confirmed (not just instantiated) [his empirical theses] that he is
being pseudoscientific.
Wikipedia
It is very easy to show that Sigmund Freud’s theory of
psychoanalysis is pseudoscientific claptrap.
Pseudoscientists use intensively terms (invented by Sigmund Freud): 1)
id, 2) ego, and 3) super-ego.
Id, ego, and super-ego are the
three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's
structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical
constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction our mental life
is described. According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set
of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical
and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that
mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. The super-ego
can stop one from doing certain things that one's id may want to do.
Wikipedia
Let’s raise simple questions:
1) Is there any laboratory test which can determine if the concrete
object X (man/animal/etc) has “id” or not? What is the list
of exact criteria (the list of exact features) which would allow
unambiguously determine if object X has “id”? As for example, does the
amoebae have “id” or not?
2) Is there any laboratory test which can determine if the concrete
object X (man/animal/etc) has “ego” or not? What is the list
of exact criteria (the list of exact features) which would allow
unambiguously determine if object X has “ego”? As for example, does the
amoebae have “ego” or not?
3) Is there any laboratory test which can determine if the concrete
object X (man/animal/etc) has “super-ego” or not? What is
the list of exact criteria (the list of exact features) which would
allow unambiguously determine if object X has “super-ego”? As for
example, does the amoebae have “super-ego” or not?
Pseudoscientists, who use the terms “id/ego/super-ego”, are
unable to provide the scientific definitions of the terms
“id/ego/super-ego”. Pseudoscientists are unable to provide the list of
criteria which would allow to determine if object X has
“id/ego/super-ego” or not.
It is interesting to note that the adepts of pseudoscientific claptrap
with the name “psychoanalysis” do not even know that Sigmund Freud was
“healing” his patients with cocaine, and that Sigmund Freud was cocaine
addict himself, and that Freud's psychoanalytical theory was a
by-product of his cocaine use.
As a medical researcher, Freud
was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as
analgesic. He believed that cocaine was a cure for many mental and
physical problems, and in his 1884 paper "On Coca" he extolled its
virtues. Between 1883 and 1887 he wrote several articles recommending
medical applications, including its use as an antidepressant. He
narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering
its anesthetic properties of which he was aware but had mentioned only
in passing. (Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, received
that distinction in 1884 after reporting to a medical society the ways
cocaine could be used in delicate eye surgery.) Freud also recommended
cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction. He had introduced cocaine to
his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow who had become addicted to
morphine taken to relieve years of excruciating nerve pain resulting
from an infection acquired while performing an autopsy. His claim that
Fleischl-Marxow was cured of his addiction was premature, though he
never acknowledged he had been at fault. Fleischl-Marxow developed an
acute case of "cocaine psychosis", and soon returned to using morphine,
dying a few years later after more suffering from intolerable pain.
The application as an anesthetic turned out to be one of the few safe
uses of cocaine, and as reports of addiction and overdose began to
filter in from many places in the world, Freud's medical reputation
became somewhat tarnished.
After the "Cocaine Episode" Freud ceased to publicly recommend use of
the drug, but continued to take it himself occasionally for depression,
migraine and nasal inflammation during the early 1890s, before
discontinuing in 1896. In this period he came under the influence of
his friend and confidant Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the
treatment of the so-called nasal reflex neurosis. Fliess, who operated
on the noses of several of his own patients, also performed operations
on Freud and on one of Freud's patients whom he believed to be
suffering from the disorder, Emma Eckstein. The surgery proved
disastrous. It has been suggested that much
of Freud's early psychoanalytical theory was a by-product of his
cocaine use.
Freud published journal articles
proclaiming cocaine was the cure. But he also had a more personal
interest in the drug’s effects.
<…>
Freud loved the way cocaine made him feel.
<…>
In the 1890s, after almost killing a patient while under the influence
of cocaine, Freud stopped using the drug.
Wikipedia
Another of the most important authorities in psychology is Carl
Gustav Jung.
It is very easy to show that writings of Carl Gustav Jung are the
pseudoscientific claptrap.
Pseudoscientists intensively use terms (invented by Carl Gustav Jung):
anima, animus, trickster, and so on.
Pseudoscientists claim that anima, animus, trickster are
hypothetical entities irrepresentable in itself.
Strictly speaking, Jungian
archetypes refer to unclear underlying forms or the
archetypes-as-such from which emerge images and motifs such as the
mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood among others.
<...>
Jung described archetypal events: birth, death, separation from
parents, initiation, marriage, the union of opposites; archetypal
figures: great mother, father, child, devil, god, wise old man, wise
old woman, the trickster, the hero; and archetypal motifs: the
apocalypse, the deluge, the creation. Although the number of archetypes
is limitless, there are a few particularly notable, recurring
archetypal images, "the chief among them being" (according to Jung)
"the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother ... and her
counterpart, the maiden, and lastly the anima in man and the animus in
woman". Alternatively he would speak of "the emergence of certain
definite archetypes ... the shadow, the animal, the wise old man, the
anima, the animus, the mother, the child".
Archetype
The inherited part of the PSYCHE; structuring patterns of psychological
performance linked to INSTINCT; a hypothetical entity
irrepresentable in itself and evident only through its
manifestations.
(Andrew Samuels, Bani Shorter and
Fred Plaut. A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, Routledge: New
York, 1986, pp. 26-28.)
<...>
the human psyche constellated in sub-personalities or archetypal
representations identifiable as Persona, Ego, Shadow, Anima, Animus,
Wise Old Man, Great Mother and the Self; finally, Individuation seen as
the process which in the course of a lifetime leads a person to a
unification of his personality which is expressive of his basic
wholeness.
(Andrew Samuels, Bani Shorter and Fred Plaut. A Critical Dictionary of
Jungian Analysis, Routledge: New York, 1986, pp. 21-22.)
C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago
Let’s raise simple questions:
1) Is there any laboratory test which can determine if the concrete
object X (man/animal/etc) has “anima” or not? What is the list of exact
criteria (the list of exact features) which would allow unambiguously
determine if object X has “anima”? As for example, does the amoebae
have “anima” or not?
2) Is there any laboratory test which can determine if the concrete
object X (man/animal/etc) has “animus” or not? What is the list of
exact criteria (the list of exact features) which would allow
unambiguously determine if object X has “animus”? As for example, does
the amoebae have “animus” or not?
3) Is there any laboratory test which can determine if the concrete
object X (man/animal/etc) has “trickster” or not? What is the list of
exact criteria (the list of exact features) which would allow
unambiguously determine if object X has “trickster”? As for example,
does the amoebae have “trickster” or not?
4) and so on.
Pseudoscientists, who use the terms “anima/animus/trickster/etc”, are
unable to provide the scientific definitions of the terms
“anima/animus/trickster/etc”. Pseudoscientists are unable to provide
the list of criteria which would allow to determine if object X has
“anima/animus/trickster/etc” or not.
Both Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud had been hearing voices in
their heads and had been experiencing hallucinations.
Famous People Who Hear Voices
Many famous and noted people have spoken about their voice-hearing
experiences in the media. We’ve included a few of these people below.
<...>
Sigmund Freud (Father of Psychoanalysis)
“During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city … I quite
often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved
voice. I then noted down the exact moment of the hallucination and made
anxious enquiries of those at home about what had happened at that
time. Nothing had happened.”
Famous people who hear (or have
heard) voices
<....>
Sigmund Freud (The founder of psychoanalysis)
“During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city … I quite
often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved
voice;
I then noted down the exact moment of the hallucination and made
anxious enquiries if those at home about what had happened at that
time. Nothing had happened.”
<....>
Carl Jung (Swiss psychiatrist)
Jung wrote about experiencing lots of different visions and voices. He
thought some of these were parts of his subconscious, but believed that
others were supernatural.
One of the voices he heard (Philemon) appeared to him when he needed
advice or guidance.
Voice Collective
When Carl Gustav Jung was 38 years of age, he began to hear voices in
his head.
In his hallucinations Carl Gustav Jung spoke with the old man biblical
prophet Elijah and with a young girl Jewish princess Salome, and also
he spoke with black boa.
Later biblical prophet Elijah transformed into a teacher spirit, which
Jung called as “Philemon”.
Below is the painting of Philemon painted by Jung himself. This
Philemon is exactly same teacher spirit with whom Jung was constantly
speaking in his hallucinations, and from whom Jung received all his
knowledge.
Jung wrote his hallucinatory visions into the diaries, which were kept
secret by Jung’s relatives even long after the Jung’s death, however in
year 2009 they finally dared to publish them.
The diaries of Carl Gustav Jung’s hallucinatory visions were published
in the book titled “The Red Book”.
The Philemon Foundation: Tending
to Jung's Legacy
Philemon
Jung's painting of Philemon, a recurrent presence in his dreams, from
his recently published personal journal, The Red Book.
"Philemon was simply a superior knowledge, and he taught me
psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. He formulated
and expressed everything which I had never thought." (C.G. Jung)
The Philemon Foundation is a non-profit foundation made of of an
expanding group of scholars, board members and donors dedicating to
preparing for publication the Complete Works of C.G.
David C. Hamilton, Jungian
Analyst, IAAP Burlington & Middlebury, Vermont
The Red Book is a red
leather‐bound folio manuscript crafted by the Swiss physician and
psychologist Carl Gustav Jung between 1915 and about 1930. It recounts
and comments upon the author's imaginative experiences between 1913 and
1916, and is based on manuscripts first drafted by Jung in 1914‐15 and
1917. Despite being nominated as the central work in Jung’s oeuvre, it
was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009.
In October 2009, with the cooperation of Jung's estate and after 13
years of exhaustive editorial work by Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book:
Liber Novus was published by W. W. Norton in a facsimile edition,
complete with an English translation, a comprehensive introduction
written by Shamdasani, three appendices, and over 1500 editorial notes.
Editions and translations in several other languages soon followed.
In December 2012, Norton additionally released a "Reader's Edition" of
the work; this smaller format edition includes the complete translated
text of The Red Book: Liber Novus along with the introduction and notes
prepared by Shamdasani, but it omits the facsimile reproduction of
Jung's original calligraphic manuscript.
While the work has in past years been descriptively called simply "The
Red Book", Jung did emboss a formal title on the spine of his
leather-bound folio: he titled the work Liber Novus (in Latin, the "New
Book"). His manuscript is now increasingly cited as Liber Novus, and
under this title implicitly includes draft material intended for but
never finally transcribed into the red leather folio proper.
Context and composition
Jung was associated with Sigmund Freud for a period of approximately
six years, beginning in 1907. Over those years, their relationship
became increasingly acrimonious. When the final break of the
relationship came in 1913, Jung retreated from many of his professional
activities to intensely reconsider his personal and professional path.
The creative activity that produced Liber Novus came in this period,
from 1913 to about 1917.
Biographers and critics have disagreed whether these years in Jung's
life should be seen as "a creative illness, a period of introspection,
a psychotic break, or simply madness." Anthony Storr, reflecting on
Jung's own judgment that he was "menaced by a psychosis" during this
time, concluded that the period represented a psychotic episode.
According to Sonu Shamdasani, Storr's opinion is untenable in light of
currently available documentation.
During the years Jung engaged with his "nocturnal work" on Liber Novus,
he continued to function in his daytime activities without any evident
impairment. He maintained a busy professional practice, seeing on
average five patients a day. He lectured, wrote, and remained active in
professional associations. Throughout this period he also served as an
officer in the Swiss army and was on active duty over several extended
periods between 1914 and 1918, the years of World War I in which Jung
was composing Liber Novus. Jung was not "psychotic" by any accepted
clinical criteria during the period he created Liber Novus.
Nonetheless, what he was doing during these years defies facile
categorization.
Jung referred to his imaginative or visionary venture during these
years as "my most difficult experiment." This experiment involved a
voluntary confrontation with the unconscious through willful engagement
of what Jung later termed "mythopoetic imagination". In his
introduction to Liber Novus, Shamdasani explains:
"From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same procedure:
deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state, and then entering
into it as into a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of
dramatized thinking in pictorial form.... In retrospect, he recalled
that his scientific question was to see what took place when he
switched off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the
existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this a
possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking mescaline."
Jung initially recorded his "visions", or "fantasies, or "imaginations"
— all terms used by Jung to describe his activity — in a series of six
journals now known collectively as the "Black Books". This journal
record begins on 12 November 1913, and continues with intensity through
the summer of 1914; subsequent entries were added up through at least
the 1930s. Biographer Barbara Hannah, who was close to Jung throughout
the last three decades of his life, compared Jung's imaginative
experiences recounted in his journals to the encounter of Menelaus with
Proteus in the Odyssey. Jung, she said, "made it a rule never to let a
figure or figures that he encountered leave until they had told him why
they had appeared to him."
After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Jung perceived that
his visionary experience was not only of personal relevance, but
entwined with a crucial cultural moment. In late-1914 and 1915 he
compiled the visions from the journals, along with his additional
commentary on each imaginative episode, into an initial manuscript.
This manuscript was the beginning of Liber Novus.
In 1915 Jung began artfully transcribing this draft text into the
illuminated calligraphic volume that would subsequently become known as
the Red Book. In 1917 he compiled a further supplementary manuscript of
visionary material and commentary, which he titled "Scrutinies"; this
also was apparently intended for transcription into his red folio
volume, the "Red Book". Although Jung labored on the artful
transcription of this corpus of manuscript material into the
calligraphic folio of the Red Book for sixteen years, he never
completed the task. Only approximately two-thirds of Jung's manuscript
text was transcribed into the Red Book by 1930, when he abandoned
further work on the calligraphic transcription of his draft material
into the Red Book. The published edition of The Red Book: Liber Novus
includes all of Jung's manuscript material prepared for Liber Novus,
and not just the portion of the text transcribed by Jung into the
calligraphic red book volume.
In 1957, near the end of his life, Jung spoke to Aniela Jaffé about the
Red Book and the process which yielded it; in that interview he stated:
"The years… when I pursued the inner images, were the most important
time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began
at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire
life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious
and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.
That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything
later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and
the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained
everything, was then."
Creation and physical description
Jung worked his text and images in the Red Book using calligraphic pen,
multicolored ink, and gouache paint. The text is written in German but
includes quotations from the Vulgate in Latin, a few inscriptions and
names written in Latin and Greek, and a brief marginal quotation from
the Bhagavad Gita given in English.
The initial seven folios (or leaves) of the book — which contain what
is now entitled Liber Primus (the "First Book") of Liber Novus — were
composed on sheets of parchment in a highly illuminated medieval style.
However, as Jung proceeded working with the parchment sheets, it became
apparent that their surface was not holding his paint properly and that
his ink was bleeding through. These first seven leaves (fourteen pages,
recto and verso) now show heavy chipping of paint, as will be noted on
close examination of the facsimile edition reproductions.
In 1915, Jung commissioned the folio-sized and red leatherbound volume
now known as the Red Book. The bound volume contained approximately 600
blank pages of paper of a quality suitable for Jung's ink and paint.
The folio-sized volume, 11.57 inches (29.4 cm) by 15.35 inches (39.0
cm), is bound in fine red leather with gilt accents. Though Jung and
others usually referred to the book simply as the "Red Book", he had
the top of the spine of the book stamped in gilt with the book's formal
title, Liber Novus ("The New Book").
Jung subsequently interleaved the seven original parchment sheets at
the beginning of the bound volume. After receiving the bound volume in
1915, he began transcribing his text and illustrations directly onto
the bound pages. Over the next many years, Jung ultimately filled only
191 of the approximately 600 pages bound in the Red Book folio. About a
third of the manuscript material he had written was never entered into
the illuminated Red Book. Inside the book now are 205 completed pages
of text and illustrations (including the loose parchment sheets), all
from Jung's hand: 53 full-page images, 71 pages with both text and
artwork, and 81 pages entirely of calligraphic text.
The Red Book is currently held, along with other valuable and private
items from Jung's archive, in a bank vault in Zurich.
Publication and display
During Jung's life, several people saw his Red Book — it was often
present in his office — but only a very few individuals who were
personally trusted by Jung had an opportunity to read it. After Jung's
death in 1961, Jung's heirs held the book as a private legacy, and
refused access to it by scholars or other interested parties.
After many years of careful deliberations, the estate of C. G. Jung
finally decided in 2000 to allow publication of the work, and
thereafter began preparations for the publication. The decision to
publish was apparently aided by presentations made by Sonu Shamdasani,
who had already discovered substantial private transcriptions of
portions of the Red Book in archival repositories. Editorial efforts
and preparation for publication were underwritten by major funding from
the Philemon Foundation.
On occasion of the publication in October 2009, the Rubin Museum of Art
in New York City displayed the original book along with three of Jung's
original "Black Book" journals and several other related artifacts;
this exhibit was open from 7 October 2009 to 25 January 2010. The Red
Book was subsequently exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles
from April 11 – June 6, 2010. It was the center of a major display and
conference at the Library of Congress from June 17 – September 25,
2010. Thereafter, the Red Book has been the focus of museum displays in
Zurich, Geneva, Paris, and other major cities.
As the founder of one of the
most influential schools of psychological thought — analytical
psychology — Carl Jung (also known as CG Jung) experienced what today
we might call a form of psychosis. It probably wasn’t a complete
psychotic break, because Jung still functioned in his daily life.
His psychosis began when he was 38 years old, when he started finding
himself haunted by visions in his head and started hearing voices. Jung
himself worried about this “psychosis” — things that today we’d might
say were consistent with symptoms of schizophrenia (a term he also used
to describe himself during this period).
Jung didn’t let these visions and hallucinations slow him down, and
continued seeing patients and actively engaging in his professional
life. In fact, he so enjoyed the unconscious mind he had unleashed, he
found a way to summon it whenever he wanted.
1. Jung actively induced his hallucinations and visions.
Most people who have psychosis or hallucinations seek to minimize their
symptoms, to drown out the visions and hallucinations. After first
experiencing these visions, Jung did just the opposite. He found the
experience so exhilarating and full of unconscious content that could
be further examined, he didn’t just wait for the visions to come on
their own. Instead, he encouraged their appearance throughout the day,
for years.
After dinner each night and inbetween seeing patients during the day,
Jung spent time in his study inducing the visions and hallucinations.
He did this not through the use of any kind of drug, apparently, but
instead through his own personal methods that allowed his unconscious
mind to become totally open and flowing forth.
2. Jung recorded everything from his psychosis.
Although modern recording equipment didn’t exist in 1913, when the
hallucinations and visions began, Jung nonetheless kept a meticulous
record of his psychosis. Jung would write down everything he saw and
heard in small black journals. He later transferred some of this
material into a large, red, leather-bound journal.
Over the course of 16 years, Jung recorded everything he experienced in
these unconscious journeys. Some of the material ended up filling 205
large pages in the red book. The book consists of intricate, colorful,
wildly detailed drawings and writings. “The Red Book,” as it was later
called, stayed locked up in a vault after Jung’s death. It was finally
published in 2009 as The Red Book and is now available for sale.
The New York Times describes the story told by the Red Book:
The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as
they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes
unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with
a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant
serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child.
3. Jung’s unconscious journey probably wasn’t the same as the unwanted
psychosis people experience today.
While Jung described his visions as a type of “psychosis” or
“schizophrenia,” those terms meant something different a hundred years
ago than they do today. Today, the terms describe a specific
constellation of symptoms, one of which is the meaningful and
significant interruption the disorder makes upon a person’s ordinary,
daily life.
Jung’s life, was by all accounts, not interrupted by his unconscious
thoughts. He continued experiencing them off and on for 16 years, all
the while traveling, speaking at various professional meetings, and
translating and publishing his writings in English.
Jung did suffer from isolation, but that was likely caused more by his
break from Sigmund Freud in 1915. World War I also negatively impacted
virtually everybody’s life at this time, including Jung’s.
Also, Jung reportedly found a way to bring on his unconscious stream of
thoughts and visions at will — something most people today who
experience psychosis or schizophrenia can’t do. Nor can they do the
opposite — make them go away by just willing it. If mental disorders
could simply be fixed by willpower, we’d probably have little need for
therapists or psychiatrists today.
* * *
It’s extraordinary to imagine one of the founders of modern
psychological theories experienced such visions, and used them in his
own way to form a creative work such as The Red Book.
3 Things You Didn’t Know About
Carl Jung’s Psychosis By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
By Sara Corbett
The New York Times Magazine. September 16, 2009
Scientific verification of “scientific” papers of psychologists has
revealed that at least 80 percent of the “scientific” papers of
psychologists are fakes and pseudoscientific nonsense.
This statistic clearly reveals the value of “authoritative scientists”
in psychology, and reveals the value of psychology as “science”.
Of 100 studies published in
top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social
psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the
replication test.
A major investigation into scores of claims made in psychology research
journals has delivered a bleak verdict on the state of the science. An international team of experts
repeated 100 experiments
published in top psychology journals and found that they could
reproduce only 36% of
original findings.
The study, which saw 270 scientists repeat experiments on five
continents, was launched by psychologists in the US in response to
rising concerns over the reliability of psychology research.
<…>
John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford
University, said the study was impressive and that its results had been
eagerly awaited by the scientific community. “Sadly, the picture it
paints - a 64% failure rate even among
papers
published in the best
journals in the field - is not very nice about the current
status
of
psychological science in general, and for fields like social psychology
it is just devastating,” he said.
Study delivers bleak verdict on
validity of psychology experiment results
The Guardian.
August 25, 2015
Science is the best thing that
has happened to humankind because its results can be questioned,
retested, and demonstrated to be wrong. Science is not about proving at
all cost some preconceived dogma. Conversely religious devotees,
politicians, soccer fans, and pseudo-science quacks won’t allow their
doctrines, promises, football clubs or bizarre claims to be proven
illogical, exaggerated, second-rate or just absurd.
Despite this clear superiority of the scientific method, we researchers
are still fallible humans. This week, an impressive collaboration of
270 investigators working for five years published in Science the
results of their efforts to replicate 100 important results that had
been previously published in three top psychology journals. The
replicators worked closely with the original authors to make the repeat
experiments close replicas of the originals. The results were bleak: 64%
of the experiments could not be replicated.
<…>
Probably the failure rate in the Science data would have been higher
for work published in journals of lesser quality. There are tens of
thousands of journals in the scientific-publishing market, and most
will publish almost anything submitted to them. The failure rate may
also be higher for studies that are so complex that none of the
collaborating replicators offered to attempt a replication. This group
accounted for one-third of the studies published in the three top
journals. So the replication failure rate
for
psychology at large may be 80% or more overall.
This performance is even worse than I would have predicted. In 2012 my
anticipation of a 53% replication failure rate for psychology at large
was published. Compared with other empirical studies, the failure rate
of psychology seems to be in the same ballpark as replication failure
rates in observational epidemiology, cancer drug targets and
preclinical research, and animal experiments.
Psychology experiments are
failing the replication test – for good reason
The Guardian.
August 28, 2015
Let’s look more closely: what are the activities of ethnographers, what
are they doing?
Ethnographers write articles/books/etc about the folklore.
These articles/books/etc are the collections of stories in the style of
“one granny said” – one granny said that the color of the brownie is
green, another granny said that the color of the brownie is
reddish-blue, and so on, and all these “one granny said” style stories
are collected into a book. The bottom line is that such collections of
“one granny said” stories, unfortunately, have nothing to do with
science, such collections of stories do not meet the scientific
criteria. And it does not matter that the authors of these writings
have some high titles/degrees – these writings do not meet the
scientific criteria.
Also, it is important to note that when the ethnographers collect the
folklore, the ethnographers do not go to young people with healthy
brains. Ethnographers look for the oldest people as old as possible
(who suffer from all sorts of brain damage, like Alzheimer, dementia,
etc.) because ethnographers assume that the older the old man, the
“better” folklore. Thus, ethnographers collect the stories from all
sorts of grannies, who suffer from dementia, and pile up all these
crazy stories into one heap and then present such collections as
“scientific works”.
Unfortunately, such articles/books/etc have nothing to do with science.
Is astronomy really a science?
Below are a several classic examples of scientificness of the astronomy.
Astronomers claim that the stars formed from gas and dust.
Star formation is the process by
which dense regions within molecular clouds in interstellar space,
sometimes referred to as "stellar nurseries" or "star-forming regions",
fuse to form stars. As a branch of astronomy, star formation includes
the study of the interstellar medium (ISM) and giant molecular clouds
(GMC) as precursors to the star formation process, and the study of
protostars and young stellar objects as its immediate products.
Wikipedia
Let’s raise a simple question: how did the astronomers find out that
stars are formed from gas and dust? Where did they get this
information? Who/what is the source of this knowledge?
Let's look more closely – where did the astronomers get the information
that stars are formed from gas and dust?
The source of this knowledge is Emmanuel Swedenborg, who claimed that
the souls of people living on Jupiter, Saturn and from farther places
told him during spiritualistic séances that stars are formed from gas
and dust.
And that is the source of “reliable knowledge” for astronomers.
The nebular hypothesis is the
most widely accepted model in the field of cosmogony to explain the
formation and evolution of the Solar System. It suggests that the Solar
System formed from nebulous material.
<…>
There is evidence that parts of the nebular hypothesis were first
proposed in 1734 by Emanuel Swedenborg. Immanuel Kant, who was familiar
with Swedenborg's work, developed the theory further in 1755, when Kant
published his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,
wherein he argued that gaseous clouds, nebulae, slowly rotate,
gradually collapse and flatten due to gravity, eventually forming stars
and planets.
Emanuel Swedenborg
(/ˈswiːdənˌbɔrɡ/; About this sound Swedish pronunciation (help•info);
born Emanuel Swedberg on 29 January 1688; died 29 March 1772) was a
Swedish scientist, philosopher, theologian, revelator, and mystic. He
is best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven and Hell (1758).
Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741,
at age 53, he entered into a spiritual phase in which he began to
experience dreams and visions, beginning on Easter weekend of 6 April
1744. This culminated in a 'spiritual awakening', in which he received
revelation that he was appointed by the Lord to write The Heavenly
Doctrine to reform Christianity. According to The Heavenly Doctrine the
Lord had opened Swedenborg's spiritual eyes, so that from then on he
could freely visit heaven and hell and talk with angels, demons and
other spirits; and the Last Judgment had already occurred, in 1757.
Swedenborg was a mining engineer
with a wide range of interests and also claimed to have psychic powers.
Historians and biographers seem to take him quite seriously and a
number of public incidents caused his fellow Swedes of Stockholm to
regard him as irrefutable. He claimed confirmation of his nebular
hypothesis from seances with men on Jupiter, Saturn and places more
distant.
Swedenborg's Nebular Hypothesis
(1734) — Emmanuel Swedenborg, the founder of
a
small church (the Church of the New Jerusalem), theorized in his book,
Principia, that a rapidly
rotating nebula formed itself into our solar system of sun and planets.
Swedenborg claimed that he obtained the information from heavenly
visitants in séance, but many think he got his theory from
devils.
It is highly significant that the germinal idea for the nebular
hypothesis—producing stars and planets out of gravitating gas—came from
a séance! His theory, obtained through spiritualism, was to become the
basis for a majority of the stellar and planetary origin theories which
followed—and the basic theory promoted today.
Task #4
Facts of the official science:
1) Stars form from the cloud of dust.
2) There are zero documented cases of the birth of the star in any area
of the sky and in any distance (distance == time measure backwards).
Task: based on the fact that the birth of the star was never registered
please show that stars form from the cloud of dust.
Or the other way around – based on the claim that stars form from the
cloud of dust please prove that the birth of the star will never be
registered.
Tasks for the development of
logical thinking
Another example of the scientificness of the astronomers.
There is one Russian occultist and psychic healer with the name Nicolai
Levashov (Николай Викторович Левашов), he is himself an interesting
personality, however, the story here is not about him, but about
astronomers-scientists.
Nicolai or Nikolai Levashov
(Russian: Никола́й Ви́кторович Левашо́в;
February 8, 1961 – June 11, 2012) was a Russian occultist and psychic
healer who wrote several books on life in the universe, Slavic history,
the origin of mankind on Earth and other topics.
Wikipedia
Levashov claims that Nibiru is a neutron star with a diameter of
3600 km.
“Scientists”-astronomers claim that Levashov says untrue because,
supposedly, a typical radius of neutron stars is 10-20 km, and a
neutron star with a diameter of 3600 km can not exist.
A neutron star is the collapsed
core of a large (10–29 solar masses) star. Neutron stars are the
smallest and densest stars known to exist. Though neutron stars
typically have a radius on the order of 10 km, they can have masses of
about twice that of the Sun.
Нейтронная звезда - сверхплотная
звезда, образующаяся в результате взрыва Сверхновой. <…>
Образовавшаяся нейтронная звезда имеет ядерную плотность (1014-1015
г/см3) и типичный радиус 10-20 км. <….> При такой плотности уже
при 40 км в диаметре такой объект по массе будет сравним с 3 массами
Солнца. А как известно, вещество нейтронной звезды способно удерживать
массы до 3 масс солнца. Нейтронная звезда диаметром в 3600 км просто не
может существовать и тем более вращаться вокруг Солнца, подходя к Земле
каждые 3600 лет как утверждает Левашов. <…> Отдельно хочется
отметить, что заявления Левашов о существовании нейтронной звезды в
3600 км, которую он якобы силой мысли развернул в сторону от Земли,
повторяются им неоднократно и не одну встречу. Так что этот его ляп
никак нельзя считать оговоркой, а только полным невежеством и
безграмотностью в области астрономии, физики и астрофизики.
It is important to note that no one has ever measured the diameter
of a real neutron star. There is absolutely no experimental evidence
which would prove the diameter of neutron stars due to simple reason –
the stars are too from the Earth and their angular dimensions can not
be measured using available tools, the stars are the point sources of
light.
A point source is a single
identifiable localised source of something. A point source has
negligible extent, distinguishing it from other source geometries.
Sources are called point sources because in mathematical modeling,
these sources can usually be approximated as a mathematical point to
simplify analysis.
The actual source need not be physically small, if its size is
negligible relative to other length scales in the problem. For example,
in astronomy, stars are routinely treated as point sources,
even though they are in actuality much larger than the Earth.
<…> In early optical
images, quasars appeared as point sources, indistinguishable from stars
<…>
Wikipedia
When astrophysicists write that the typical radius of neutron stars
is 10-20 km, this is only a theoretical estimate of the radius of
neutron
stars, however it is possible that these calculations are incorrect.
So far no one has ever reached the neutron star and nobody has ever
measured the diameter of a real neutron star, which means that these
dimensions are only a theoretical hypothetical conjecture, and it is
entirely possible that occultist Nicolai Levashov is correct.
This example with the dimensions of a neutron star clearly shows that
the qualification level of many “scientists”-astronomers is even lower
than that of occultist Nicolai Levashov.
Science is what you can observe and on which you can carry out
reproducible experiments – everything that meets these criteria is the
science; and everything that does not meet these criteria – is not the
science.
