In another post, recent contributor TomMueller stated that GPS satellites use relativistic synchronization to match up their clocks with earthbound clocks. I explained to him that this was not so, even though its easy to believe, if you don’t think critically, that it is.
Tom followed my post to him with a litany of ad hominem, “Oh, you are a moron, you are a troll, creationist idiots, I read about it on a credible site, I talked to a physics professor about it…” and on and on he went with his insults and denial.
Now to be fair to Tom, if you just read mainstreams sites, like Wikipedia, or Wired or Salon, or even many science websites, this is the information you will find-that GPS satellites use Einstein’s theory of relativity to sync their clocks to earth clocks. Its written everywhere, surely it must be true. But I know why its not true, because I actually thought about it. At first I just had a hunch about it, but again, if you just google it, most sites will tell you its true. But it didn’t make sense to me, for so many reasons. What clocks are the satellite clocks syncing with, a GPS’s receivers clock? Huh? How precise are they? For that matter, how precise are any clocks. Its nearly impossible to ever get ANY two clocks to match.
I also read about the so called Haefele-Keating atomic clocks, where relativistic changes in clocks due to speed was tested and confirmed aboard airplanes going around the earth. Again, everywhere you looked online, they say its true. It was tested, it worked. And its bullshit. But how would one know, if all you did was read what is supposedly credible sources, written by academics and scholars and Wikipedia…
I wouldn’t even bother telling you how I learned it was not true. I wouldn’t even bother citing sources, because all skeptics do is try to spew the same old defense, “Oh, that source is for cranks, try MY sources, they are the best parrots for information.” I learned by thinking, skeptics will never understand that.
And so here’s the thing, I didn’t learn that things are complete bullshit, by just going to the vast amount of sources online that claim they are true, instead I thought about. But here’s what skeptics, as ironic as it sounds, tell you to do. They tell you to just accept the common wisdom. Accept that these science facts must be true, because someone famous says so. Accept that evolution is true, accept that GMO foods are good for you, accept that Oswald acted alone, accept that alternative medicine is all fake, accept that bigPharm is looking out for your best interests, accept materialism, accept that every time you hear about a study which contradicts strict materialism it must be wrong, accept that every time someone challenges the scientific consensus, then they are by definition quacks, and basically just stop thinking for yourself. The skeptical movement is founded on the exact opposite principle of be skeptical, instead it means to simply follow whatever the skeptic movement tells you must be right.
Its the same everywhere, on podcast like the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, or anything with Seth Shostak, or Michael Shermer, or Phil Plaitt, or Neil Degrasse Tyson or Bill Nye, or any of the whole community of people who identify themselves as skeptics, by virtue that they all believe exactly the same things. This toxic thought has seeped into virtually every source of information you can find, be it television, news, blogs, everywhere. They will claim they are deep thinkers, and this is how they found the answers, buts its a con game, they are anything but, they are sheep. They never have an original thought, ever. I think I even read Lawrence Krauss repeating this same crap line about relativity and GPS satellites-and he has a PhD in physics, for crying out loud. But don’t ask him to think, he prefers to just parrot the party line, its so much easier.
So nowadays where do you find truth, it sure as hell ain’t easy, thanks to these brainwashed preachers of the scientific consensus. Its what leads Allan to make ludicrous statements about what fitness means, its what leads parrots like Tom Mueller to say, “Oh, I read it about it, so how dare you say its not true! Moron!”
The skeptic movement is one of the biggest diseases to stifle learning that I can think of. They cloud every news article, and every attempt at understanding with their atheist based need to preach their worldview. Its just like Lynn Margulis said, they want to tell everyone what to think, by telling them to stop thinking. I despise these types of thought Nazis. They are the worst thing that has ever happened to academia.
Phoodoo, what you do here is take pretty much everything you don’t like–Big Pharma, evolutionary theory, atheism, a particular view about atomic clocks, etc., and claim that all the same people believe them, because, unlike you, they’re all sheep. You think about stuff, nobody else does–they just parrot.
It’s a nice, comfortable view for you, but what it really is, is a complaint about division of labor–in the sciences, particularly. If one actually studies something closely, one realizes the amount of time, diligence, knowledge of the past, and sometimes very expensive equipment one needs to become an expert in any subject matter. And that leads to a kind of humility. When that comes, there is a growing willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to (not trust implicitly) acknowledged experts in fields one cannot devote sufficient study time to oneself.
Maybe you’d prefer the 18th Century, when one person could come pretty close to mastering nearly every field of science. But without specialization today, there’d be no refrigeration, never mind cell phones. One 19th Century hero of mine, Samuel Butler, wrote books: criticizing evolution, refuting received wisdom regarding ancient Greek classics, providing a new kind of art criticism, and undid the history of Shakespeare’s sonnets. All that in addition to painting, writing philosophy, novels and poetry, sheep farming, and composing music (in the obsolete style of Handel).
The thing is, he didn’t actually make any lasting contributions to any study of science or history. He hated Darwin and his backers, like you do, for not paying any attention to his criticisms–but his understanding of the basic science wasn’t deep enough to make him worthy of anything but passing notice. Like you, he was an angry, disappointed dilettante.
Anyhow, you can continue to tell yourself that all the experts are wrong about everything you happen to disagree with them about, but right about those things you happen to agree with them about) because you are thinking thinking about these matters and nobody else is (or only those who agree with you are). But you should know that that it is just a comfortable, (and quite pompous) way of looking at the world.
You aren’t even close to addressing what I said. I said the skeptical movement-which is most certainly a movement. I didn’t say anything about experts (although finding out exactly who those people are these days is pretty hard) I said the people who identify themselves as skeptics.
They are anything but experts.
I was referring to your remarks about referring to internet sites by experts or to Wikipedia, which usually relies on such pages. There is nothing “skeptical” about GMO or big pharma backing. They just happen to be things you don’t like.
Your OP is basically a rant.
I’m not sure what is meant by “the skeptical movement”.
In your post, you express some skepticism. Does that make you part of “the skeptical movement”?
At one time, I subscribed to “The Skeptical Inquirer”. But I tired of reading it, and dropped my subscription. It was too repetitive.
Relativistic adjustment of clocks on GPS satellites? When you think about it, you realize that it doesn’t make sense. If that were done, you would still need to synchronize the satellite clocks with a ground standard clock. So why not just rely on that synchronization and skip the relativistic adjustments.
walto,
Wikipedia is written by experts? Did you read that on Wikipedia?
Pro- GMO is one of the hallmarks of the skeptic movement. They have an informal list, don’t you know?
I take phoodoo to be complaining that such humility is often missing.
Perhaps I should also note the lack of humility in many of phoodoo’s pronouncements.
The problem with the skeptical movement is that it doesn’t agree with phoodoo.
How predictable.
Glen Davidson
Yea, and do you want to know how many sites I can refer you to that claim they do? A couple hundred thousand I reckon.
Maybe you better inform Tom Mueller that he owes me an apology.
I am just a dumb rice farmer and I figured it out after all. But hey, I am so glad you figured it out AFTER I told you.
I figured it out, but they fucking didn’t. Maybe you can inform Ohio State. Or Stephen Hawking, Or Wired magazine, or, or…I am only on the first page :
https://www.wired.com/2011/06/st_equation_gps/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5253894/
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html
http://physicscentral.com/explore/writers/will.cfm
You should read my post again and see whether I actually said that wikipedia was written by experts. If that kind of “inference” reflects all the “thinking” that you pride yourself on in your OP, I think you need to do some revising of your self-praise.
And here’s a tiny sampling for you Walto, from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. They can tell you exactly how to think:
https://www.csicop.org/si/show/no_health_risks_from_gmos
https://www.csicop.org/si/show/we_are_all_gmos
https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/addressing_the_fear-based_narrative_around_gmos_with_natalie_newell
https://www.csicop.org/si/show/dont_fear_a_franken_public
https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/armed_with_a_misinformation_radar_interview_with_kavin_senapathy
Hey, never fear, we are all GMO’s Walto!
Except where it, you know, does. Then it’s not being skeptical, it’s being right. Kind of a weird coincidence!
I have no idea what “the committee for skeptical inquiry” is, but my suspicion is that they, like you, have a much too high opinion of their own views–and they put “skeptical” in their name–just as you’d put “anti-skeptical” in yours–because they think it attracts “the right-thinking folk.”
A little humility would do both of you a ton of good.
I love this OP. Phoodoo you are my favorite person on this site.
I’m skeptical that phoodoo actually exists. There’s nothing in Wikipedia about phoodoo to begin with
walto,
Oh, then about the Skeptic Society?
Or the Australian Skeptics?
Or the Center for Inquiry?
Or the Edinburgh Skeptic Society?
Or the European Council of Skeptical Organisations
Or the German Society for Fighting Quackery?
Or Guerilla Skeptics?
Or the Good Thinking Society
Or James Randi Educational Foundation
Or the Merseyside Skeptics Society
Or the Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasciences
Or the Young Skeptics
Or Skepsis ry
Or the Skeptical Circle
Or Science and Popular Enlightenment
Or the Round Earth Society
Or the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
Or the Rational Alternative to Pseudoscience – Society for the Advancement of Critical Thinking
Or the New England Skeptical Society
Or the Irish Skeptics Society
Or the Good Thinking Society
Or the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism
Or the Association against Quackery…
Ever heard of any of them?
This reminds me of a conversation I remember having way back in college. I was playing ping pong in the dorm with a mechanical engineering major named Hunter. I mentioned that I had learned that day about a virus that infects bacteria ( called a phage) that sometimes inserts its DNA in the host chromosome. Hunters said something similar to phoodoo: that by thinking about it he could see that it was not true. A virus would never insert its DNA into the host and the piles of overwhelming evidence must be wrong. His logic was that the virus’ only goal is to reproduce and inserting DNA wouldn’t accomplish that so it must be wrong and he chastised me for being so gullible. I quickly explained to him why he was wrong but I’ve never gotten over the shock of his thought process- his narrow minded arrogance and audacity. I think it would be a worthwhile pursuit for psychologists to figure out how one comes to think like this but maybe its just an extreme version of something we all do.
RodW,
Great story, very applicable, except for one small part. I happen to be the one who is right in this story.
In the Star Wars universe ‘phoodoo’ is the Tatooinian word for crap or feces.
RodW,
Interesting fact:
Rod is another name for a penis.
Yeah, some of them. So?
walto,
Well, you said a little humility would do BOTH of you a little good. I guess you meant everyone of them?
Or the Skeptical Point
Or the Skeptical Line
Or the Skeptical Plane
Or the Skeptical Square
Or The Skeptical Zone
Mung,
Its just a coincidence.
Okay, well then I guess it must be false. You thought about it, and you can’t be wrong of course.
Something as obvious as natural selection doesn’t make sense to you. This is itself evidence of how likely you are to be wrong.
Did you ask people who make GPS satellites? Can’t you just find the name of a company that makes GPS satellites and email them som questions?
I guess it can’t be done at all then. By anyone. Ever.
Okay. Why?
Yeah those terrible people who read stuff. Can’t they just figure shit out by themselves like you? After all, you’ve solved so many problems just by thinking about them.
Haha, that’s funny. You have your own sources, but you don’t even want to tell what they are, or they might get criticized, and that makes you uncomfortable.
I think it would be more correct to invert that: You will never understand skeptical thinking.
And you won’t tell us how you arrived at this conclusion, so we’re just going to have to take your word for it that it’s bullshit.
I’m going to go ahead and… be a bit skeptical about the merits of your conclusions.
No actually, I think skeptics generally say that you should read the primary literature if you can, and then think for yourself about what you read. I haven’t met anyone who really says you should just blindly accept and believe what everyone else believes. In fact I find that to be the opposite of what skepticism is about.
I have never EVER heard of any skeptic who says that. I don’t think you can find even a single example of that.
Yes, you should do that. but not because “someone famous” says so, or because it’s “common wisdom”. Accept it because of the evidence and the arguments that show it to be true.
Who even says “GMO foods are good for you”?
In the debate about GMO, the debate is whether they’re measurably harmful and what the causes of that is. One problem with the GMO debate is that two related but distinct problems are often times conflated. GMO foods are often modified with genes that give GMO crops resistance to common pesticides. This then makes it possible for farmers to use more pesticides, which then kills more pests. But it also causes the foods that reach the market to contain higher concentrations of pesticide degradation products, which are defínitely not helpful.
Some groups that oppose GMO foods take the results of studies that show GMO foods that contain higher levels of pesticides, also have more negative affects on health, to mean that ALL forms of genetic modification of crops and livestock are inherently bad and unhealthy.
But there can be other reasons to genetically modify crops, than to make them resistant to pesticides. A crop that has been modified to to more efficiently retain water in dry seasons, for example, cannot simply be assumed to have averse health effects just because it has been genetically modified. You have to look at each case individually.
I have no idea how views on that are even distributed. Probably because I’m not american.
Who even says that?
Who even says that?
Who even says that?
Who even says that?
Who even says that?
I’ll defer to the attached picture here:
There’s more where that came from.
This one’s always nice.
Funny how you never find skeptical institutions advocating similar views.
The GPS clocks also need the Hatch correction. Hatch doesn’t believe in General Relativity!
Hatch was on the GPS advisory board with one of my bosses at MITRE 10 years ago, Marty Faga and several of my co-workers. When I saw Hatch’s name on the list, I thought, WHAT! he’s a known anti-Einstein guy, but why is he there!
https://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/members/
I learned of Hatch through some YEC circles and John Sanford then told me he met Hatch personally and then Hatch related his accomplishments.
I studied General Relativity in grad school. It has a lot of evidence confirming it, but there was always that little paragraph that said where it’s problems lie.
Special relativity is reconcilable with quantum mechanics. In fact somehow the Pauli exclusion principle comes from this (I don’t know how). There is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry
But, quantum mechanics doesn’t agree quite so nicely with the GENERAL theory of relativity, on the SPECIAL theory.
With all that said:
https://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/members/hatch/
Soooo, there are and might be issues with General Relativity. I’m sympathetic to Reginal Cahill’s theories. He a professor emeritus at a pretty good school in Australia. He’s a well-respected physicist.
I myself was working on redoing some of Cahill’s experiments in my house. I built a laser interferometer according to his specs, paid for the experiments, but I could get the dang thing to stabilize!
Cahill has run some better experiments with some pretty expensive oscilloscopes (like in the 100 thousand dollar range). Dang if I could just get my hand on some of those!!! Bwahaha!
Anyway, here is a GPS expert himself, Ron Hatch explaining why he’s doesn’t believe Einstein:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGZ1GU_HDwY
So why am I a YEC today? I keep hearing about anomalies all over the place. When I studied Cosmology, anomalies were like all over the place starting with Quasars….
My professor of Quantum Mechanics 13 years ago, James Trefil in his book Dark Side of the Universe had the infamous chapter, “Five Reasons Galaxies Can’t Exist” pointing out the many issues with Galactic formation. For this and many other reasons, I’ve grew skeptical of so much of the mainstream views.
It didn’t exactly help to see witch hunts against my personal friends and acquintances like Caroline Crocker, David Coppedge, Robert Marks, Gunter Bechly, John Sanford, etc.
Ahh good ole Joyce Meyer never disappoints.
Another nice variation of it, just in case someone thought it was a fluke.
Doubt exists. Therefore the earth is only 6000 years old.
Rumraket illustrates why I hang around TSZ more than I do churches. I prefer the skeptical mindset vs. the gullible mindset so much in play in many congregations.
I get so embarrassed by other people claiming the name of Christ.
It’s painful to see these examples, but thanks Rumraket for posting.
Please give a single example of a skeptical institution affirming that position.
When and how was “the skeptical movement” founded, by the way? There must be a foundational document, like the Wedge Strategy, somewhere that we can go and check that you are right?
On a small range of topics related to science. Unsurprisingly, for a bunch of scientists.
When I go to work, I often times come to discover we all believe the lightest element is hydrogen, and that the theory of atoms is pretty much spot on. And so on and so forth. It’s almost like some things are established facts and educated people know about them. What horror.
You mean the toxic thought that we should all just believe uncritically what skeptics tell us to? Please give references to where this toxic thought has “seeped into” virtually every source of information you can find.
In fact give a single concrete example of just one self-described skeptical person who affirms it. Just one.
Give links or verifiable citations, to every person on your list, making the claim that they are “deep thinkers”.
What the hell do you even know of that, are you monitoring their every output and comparing it to everything else ever said?
Yes I remember seeing that too.
I also saw a panel discussion where an actual aerospace engineer who works for a company that makes GPS satellites repated the claim. I guess he was lying, or just wrong. I mean, it’s not like he’d be in a position to know.
Rather, I should just believe self-proclaimed non-skeptic and random internet nobody “phoodoo” when he says he’s somehow worked it out by application of thought alone, that it can’t be so.
How do you know he hasn’t thought about it?
Did she actually say that and did she then give actual examples of people who told her to stop thinking? I mean it’s pretty easy to just make up silly-sounding strawmen who sound unreasonable.
Yeah, by that standard how can Sal even be a YEC. As that’s doubted too.
LOL, what’s next? “If you can read this, your too smart to be saved”
Regarding GPS and general relativity, I published my views of the Michelson Morely experiment and some of the preliminaries of an experiment I have still been unsuccessful in replicating (which Dr. Cahill said may be due to temperature variation in my apparatus, but which I couldn’t stabilize even with lots of melting ice!):
http://www.creationevolutionuniversity.org/public_blogs/personal/anomalous_light_speed_variation_experiment.doc
NOTE: the 15,000 dollar quote was optimistic, the kind of Oscilloscope I need is more expensive. I could rent one or go to an optical lab, but I just haven’t had the time to put together another experiment. Maybe one day!
In lieu of that I built this experiment but couldn’t get the oscilloscope readings to stabilize. It was a pretty amazing interferometer however for detecting slight changes to optical fiber density!
http://www.orgonelab.org/EtherDrift/Cahill2007.pdf
Dr. Cahill e-mailed me and suggested his more modern set of experiments. Having studied General Relativity in grad school, he was about the only guy that showed me he had the actual level of physics knowledge to criticize Einstein, so many of the others are just pretenders. Cahill is for real.
The last time I worked on the project was January 2015. I wish I had time to re-visit it.
walto,
I think these are wise words but are you following your own advise?
Says the guy who claims to have done extensive scientific “research” and written “papers”.
No, Parasitic Social Justice Whiners (SJWs) like Doctor Professor Melissa Click are the worst thing ever to happen to academia. What was her PhD dissertation? “The Whiteness of Martha Stewart.”
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/10/the-9-most-preposterous-parts-of-melissa-clicks-absurd-resume/
Uh, I can see that with my own eyes, one doesn’t need a PhD dissertation to show Martha Stewart is Caucasian.
All the most shit-for-brains cranks have something to say about GPS and relativity.
https://medium.com/@GatotSoedarto/top-4-reasons-why-gps-doesnt-need-einstein-s-relativity-895cabc6e619
<blockquote.
Relativistic adjustment of clocks on GPS satellites?
Very very slight correction for orbital velocity, more correction for gravity.
The gravitational correction is discussed in the Pound-Rebka experiment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound%E2%80%93Rebka_experiment
Sure. Humility is good generally.
What do you mean? I think I generally defer to acknowledged experts in pretty much every field I haven’t studied extensively (and in spite of my age there aren’t many fields I know much about). You think it would show more humility if I agreed with you or phoodoo when your views differ from those experts? If so, I disagree. You guys are potzers.
That’s interesting. Why do they take an interest in that stuff?
Crank magnetism
dazz,
Hunh. I guess just the fact that it’s “anti-received wisdom” is enough. What’s appropriate is to be skeptical about just those things and no others.
{Don’t mention this, but I wonder if they know that there’s a pretty overwhelming agreement that the earth is not entirely composed of goat’s milk (Steiner notwithstanding). Kind of makes you wonder…..}
I think a skeptic is supposed to consider changing her mind when solid evidence or a convincing argument is presented. Phoodoo’s hyper-skepticism seems to be taken as a matter of principle, so not sure it deserves being called skepticism at all. It’s more like staunch dogmatism
Surely, scepticism is simply no more than not taking reported anecdotes at face value.
walto,
How do you determine who the experts are?
You have very strong political views. What experts are you appealing to in order to form those views?
BTW: I do admire your position on intellectual humanity and know from personal experience it can be hard to live up to.
I generally go with those with credentials, but don’t go constantly boasting about them
The ones who show an interest in advancing the field instead of destroying it.
The ones proposing ideas instead of those who just keep trying to shoot down others while unable and unwilling to provide alternative explanations.
There’s a handful of fallacies cranks use and abuse all the time. They’re really not that hard to spot unless you’re one of them
There simply isn’t enough time in a single human life, for any person no matter how smart they are, to learn every single field of science to the breadth and depth that is requires to really speak competently about both the history and current state of the field. This is true for pretty much any academic subject. History, philosophy, religion, literature, the arts and so on. No single person can know of all of it in depth simultaneously. And some subjects are really quite complicated and difficult to understand, so even if you have the time it “normally” takes for a reasonably intelligent person to understand it, chances are there are lots of people in the world who can never even come to understand it.
This means we all have to extend some level of trust to a body of people we recognize as experts. It is either that, or we have to live content with an across-the-board hyperskepticism versus any and all empirical claims. And if you want to do that, good luck to you in life, then you will have to believe almost nothing.
Skepticism, as was mentioned above, is generally about just not taking anecdotal claims at face value and believing them as if they were established facts. That would generally also apply to anecdotal claims made even by experts in some academic field. As a skeptic I don’t believe claims made by experts just because of what fancy titles it says in front of their name, or for how long they went to school. But because of the process by which a scientific conensus forms.
The trust I extend to scientists is not, generally, extended to individuals, but to the process of science as a whole. It is because of the nature of the practical application of the scientific method, that I provisionally accept the “consensus view” of scientists in some field. Because it has (usually) been through an extended period of experimental and observational testing, publication, review by competent people looking for flaws, further reproduced by other scientists and so on. In science you generally don’t just blindly buy into things the moment they’re published. Getting something published is really just the first of many hurdles. That just means it passed a review where some other people, ideally with the necessary qualifications, tried to assess the merits of the work and look for obvious flaws in reasoning. Then comes the long back and forth where other scientists attempt to replicate the results. This takes years. It is after this long process where other scientists test and debate the results that a consensus view can form.
All that said, the process is by no means infallible. Errors can happen for many reasons and the consensus can still be wrong. So the acceptance of the claims made by a scientific field as a whole is still essentially provisional. It is open in principle to being changed if the evidence against it becomes overwhelming. But that takes more than just someone saing it’s all bullshit.