MichaelVassar comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 06:16PM

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Comment author: MichaelVassar 02 October 2012 07:16:36PM 13 points [-]

It's not that clear to me in what sense mainstream academia is a unified thing which holds positions, even regarding questions such as "what fields are legitimate". Saying that something is known in mainstream academia seems suspiciously like saying that "something is encoded in the matter in my shoelace, given the right decryption schema. OTOH, it's highly meaningful to say that something is discoverable by someone with competent 'google-fu"

Comment author: lukeprog 03 October 2012 10:55:20AM 0 points [-]

Agree with all this.

Comment author: DaFranker 03 October 2012 01:26:06PM 0 points [-]

It's not that clear to me in what sense mainstream academia is a unified thing which holds positions, even regarding questions such as "what fields are legitimate".

Strongly seconded.

Hell, some "Mainstream" scientists are working on big-money research project that attempt to prove that there's a worldwide conspiracy attempting to convince people that global warming exists so as to make money off of it. Either they're all sell-outs, something which seems very unlikely, or at least some of them actually disagree with some other mainstream scientists, who see the "Is there real global warming?" question as obviously resolved long ago.