Updates made to The Millenium Project in January 2019

Happy New Year, everyone. Welcome to the last odd numbered year until 2021 and the last year divisible by 3 until 2022. It is something special.

The Millenium Project will be coming back at full strength in March, but meanwhile …

I thought I'd start the year off by writing in Australasian Science magazine about science.

But is it science?

Recently there has been a succession of scientists, some quite famous, claiming that philosophy is dead and has been replaced by science, with particular disdain for the branch of the discipline named Philosophy of Science. (I saw a comment by a university professor where he said that philosophy had absolutely no relevance to his teaching of the scientific method. I think he was missing the point completely.) One criticism of philosophy of science is that the philosophers try to say what scientists do and this doesn't describe what actually goes on in laboratories and research establishments. This is more missing of the point, because the philosophy is really about what science is as distinct from other forms of human activity rather than how it is actually done.

This is not the place for a robust discussion of philosophy of science because, as a famous mathematician once said, the margin is too narrow to contain it. One principle, however, which helps to define what science is and how can be distinguished from pseudoscience or nonsense is Popper's idea of falsification. This is often misconstrued as meaning that Popper suggested that scientists spend their time trying to falsify existing hypotheses or theories but that's nonsense. What the principle really means is that for a theory or hypothesis to be considered part of science it must be possible to think of an experiment or a test which can prove it to be false. Put another way, you might not be able to prove that something is universally true but there must be the possibility that it could be proved false.

Delve deeper into my thoughts here.

Kind And Gentle kicks off for 2019 (28/1/2019)
The very first Kind and Gentle email for 2019.

To: admin@truthlibrary.info
Subject: Welcome!
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2019 14:47:15 +1100

Hello Bernie,

I'm in the process of resurrecting my Millenium Project site at https://ratbags.com/rsoles/ and of course I am eager to find new sites to add to the various lists there. Truth Library has been added to the lists for medical fraud, anti-vaccination liars, pseudoscience, buffoonery and general liars (I have found it a useful heuristic to assume that any web site with "truth" in its name will contain little of it).

I might add a commentary about your site one day, but for the meantime inclusion in the various lists will have to suffice.

Thank you for your efforts.

Bernie replied. You can see it here.