Does studying science make you a better person?
That’s the implication of newly published research, which finds people who study science — or who are even momentarily exposed to the idea of scientific research — are more likely to condemn unethical behavior and more inclined to help others.
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/does_studying_science_make_you_a_better_person_partner/
Research that comes up with conclusions that agree with my own preconceptions is my favorite kind!
= new reply since forum marked as read
Science always attracted me, although I went in a different direction with my career. My father is and was one of the most logical people I've ever known. He was an auto mechanic by trade, and a brilliant diagnostician. He taught me the process he used to correctly determine what was wrong with a system. It was crucial to his making his auto shop successful.
So, maybe I inherited some of that, but I doubt it. I think an emphasis on logical processes is learned. So, yes, I was drawn to the sciences, and away from more intuitional pursuits, but I think it was a learned thing, rather than an inborn one.
I was the kid whose parents explained the difference between the concept of Santa Claus and the reality by the time I was three. Of course, that made me the kid who explained that in Kindergarten and got lots of people ticked off, too. 
Last edited Mon Mar 25, 2013, 01:27 PM - Edit history (1)
Permit me to make a bet on how he did this....and I do think this is a process that is extremely important, and almost totally neglected in educational institutions, and even with parents teaching kids how to think at an early age. I do believe that intuition is important... if coupled with at least some thinking skills that can be taught, and can before part of that person's "toolkit" for life. Children are not taught that their exquisite brains are tools and that the goal is to use our brains as effectively as possible so that they don't just make associations in a linear way, and good but are trained to develop thinking skills that regularly go outside the narrow path of linear thinking.
Lateral thinking is an actual area of study, a method, created by Dr. Edward DeBono. He was able to get the Brazilian government to teach it to kids before the age of six. If I was able to, I'd get this country to teach the method to kids in pre-kindergarten... when their brains are the most open and able to develop thinking habits.
Frankly I wish all Democratic Party leaders would take these courses and then practice them. It might even be fun and useful to develop a group here on DU that takes these courses online and then discuss them....and THEN....WE CAN CITE PROBLEMS THAT NEED TO BE SOLVED....AND SEE WHAT WE COME UP WITH. HOW FUN AND EXCITING MIGHT THAT BE???!!!!
http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/lateral.htm
http://www.debonogroup.com/?gclid=CO22qpmfmLYCFQ6ynQoddQ0A5w
http://www.lateralthinkingonline.com/Lateral_Thinking.asp?MerchantID=32667&AdID=579621&mm_campaign=5e44343120aa94d4c309a4b74ebb70e0&mm_replace=true&gclid=CKv0m5afmLYCFQ7znAodliAAzg
we do here. What your dad did in the auto repair business is similar to what we do here in the computer services business. That is to diagnose an existing system by referring to patterns that we are already aware of. Problems can be identified by using systematic investigatory protocols.
What I'm talking about is a bit different and pardon, but I should have been more specific. I've read a lot of your posts over the years, and have long thought that you are capable of lateral thinking because of the way you sometimes come at a problem from a sideways position...looking at the situation in a non-linear manner.
and the affiliations, conflicts, etc. of the scientists and researchers. It is astonishing how much research is conducted by those actually invested in a profit making venture having to do with the outcome of the research....i.e. drug research, chemicals, and medical devices.... a short list, but you get the picture.
The people who dig deeply into the fuller picture of the scientific research and its participants, are much more likely to dig into the truth of many things.
Fortunately, I know many such people.... and some of them are here on DU.
Hugs to youse guys....you know who you are!
Ivory tower vs. Real world!
of what are sometimes referred to as "chemtrails" (MANY people on DU don't think they exist...but keep your mind open and read Teller's own paper and article on that very topic below). He was RayGun's favorite scientist... probably because he was a strong supporter of his "Star Wars" agenda.
I think Teller was an exceptionally arrogant sociopath!
RE: "Chemtrails": In 1998 he wrote article for Hoover Institution where he was a fellow. It was originally called "Sunscreen for Planet Earth" but appeared later in the Wall St. Journal called under the title "The Planet Needs a Sunscreen." The idea was to reduce carbon's heat impact upon the earth by putting dumping particles such as aluminum oxide and other types, into the upper atmosphere.
Though he organized a science conference on this topic in 1997 in Erice, Italy, he would not admit publicly that global warming existed. He was very cagey about this. He didn't want to anger his political / economic supporters. When referring to global warming he would only say that "if it exists" one could mitigate the problem by releasing "small particles" into the atmosphere and that heat would be reflected back into the sky, and that the earth's temperature could be reduced by a small percentage as follows:
*****************************
"Sunscreen for Planet Earth"
http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/6791
EDWARD TELLER
Sunscreen for Planet Earth
GLOBAL WARMING IS TOO SERIOUS TO BE LEFT TO THE POLITICIANS. HEREWITH A SCIENTIFIC SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM. (IF THERE IS A PROBLEM, THAT IS.)
Society's emissions of carbon dioxide may or may not turn out to have something significant to do with global warming--the jury is still out. As a scientist, I must stand silent on this issue until it's resolved scientifically. As a citizen, however, I can tell you that I'm entertained by the high political theater that the nation's politicians have engaged in over the last few months. It's wonderful to think that the world is so very wealthy that a single nation--America--can consider spending $100 billion or so each year to address a problem that may not exist--and that, if it does exist, certainly has unknown dimensions.
SNIP.......
In 1979, physicist Freeman Dyson, in his characteristically prescient manner, proposed the deliberate, large-scale introduction of such fine particles into the upper atmosphere to offset global warming, which he thought even then would eventually become a human concern. Some of my colleagues and I have recently surveyed the current technological prospects for such an introduction. We estimated the costs involved and presented our results last August at the Twenty-second International Seminar on Planetary Emergencies. The most expensive such "geoengineering" option appears to be the one long ago proposed by Mr. Dyson, which may cost as much as $1 billion a year. More technologically advanced options along the same lines might cost $100 million.
SNIP
Yet if the politics of global warming require that "something must be done" while we still don't know whether anything really needs to be done--let alone what exactly--let us play to our uniquely American strengths in innovation and technology to offset any global warming by the least costly means possible. While scientists continue research into any global climatic effects of greenhouse gases, we ought to study ways to offset any possible ill effects.
Injecting sunlight-scattering particles into the stratosphere appears to be a promising approach. Why not do that?
Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal, October 17, 1997, from an article titled "The Planet Needs a Sunscreen." Used with permission. C 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Also available from the Hoover Press is the Essay in Public Policy Environmental Fundamentalism, by Thomas Gale Moore. To order, call 800-935-2882.
Edward Teller was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
His ideas on this topic were later badly reported by CBS News:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/01/15/archive/main264362.shtml
Teller co-authored a white paper with two other scientists on the topic of "scattering" particles into the atmosphere. No part of the paper can be quoted according to the authors, so to read any of it you have to go to the full paper accessed here in pdf file format:
http://rense.com/general18/scatteringEdTellerwithnotes.pdf
"Mad Scientist" gets a much deeper meaning when I think about Edward Teller.
True horrors can be created by such a mind. I would not describe Teller as a "good person"! So....noooooo..... studying science doesn't necessarily make you a better person.
There are some parts that aren't so cool - I could do without counting fruit flies. There was always someone who didn't chloroform them properly. 
But overall, yes, cool stuff. I miss it. (well, not the fruit flies. Or cutting up giant clams with green ooze...)
but, really, I think all are equally important for making a well rounded mind. Welcome to DU 
Because I am fully prepared to argue that a poet is just as important as a physicist.
Bobby Kennedy when he was in Indianapolis shortly after Martin Luther King was murdered, and when standing on the back of a flatbed truck, how he quoted the words of the great poet Aeschylus to calm the crowd. I would also comment that Kennedy's own words about his own brother's murder, had a poetic quality.
He said:
"For those of you who are black and are tempted to ... be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling," he said. "I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man."
He went on to say, "My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet is Aeschylus," "and he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
It has been written that while other American cities rioted and burned after King was killed, there was no violence in Indianapolis.
The poem by Aeschylus is on my fridge, and I always get goose bumpy when I read it.
write off eastern medicine as much of it is very effective, and a lot cheaper than Western style medicine.
"New Age quackery"? Some so called "New Age" ideas are astonishingly smart, effective, and very inexpensive.
Quantum Touch is a good example. Say you have crippling back pain. You pay the QT tech $50.00, and one hr. later throw the crutches in the back seat of the car and drive home with 95% of the pain gone. My own M.D. goes to this QT guy for severe back pain. So do my friends, and so do I. QT works!
The thing is, that anyone can learn the QT technique.... even a child. Nobody has any special "Powers"...but are simply technicians that learn the techniques and the discipline of "direction and intent" which directs healing energy into the body. QT is especially effective for back and bone pains.
Too weird for you? Go ahead and close your mind. If you ever have severe back pain however, instead of having a $30,000 back operation, why not fork the $50.00 and give it a try?
Astrology? It's survived for many thousands of years and has been used by millions of people who would disagree with you. Personally I think there's something to it. I hired an excellent astrologer years ago and she predicted exactly what my life would be like, and the kind of chronic illness I would suffer from later in life. Nothing in my life at the time ever suggested that this was possible, but it all came true. I know reputable business leaders and even scientists, who employ high quality astrologers and swear by them, and make decisions based on their advice.
The world and its extremely complex energies and forces are much more than our tiny minds can fathom... so don't be so quick to piss on them.
...is that correlation does not imply causality.
Here's an interesting blog on the topic Human Beings Believe in Cause & Effect as a Survival Strategy:
It is in this same realm that we often run into the confusion of pseudo-science that tries to pin everything on cause and effect or something else entirely. Pseudo-science almost always boils down to someone claiming cause and effect, where what they might be really be observing is simply an unexamined or unexplained relationship between two events or two occurrences. Part of the job of science is to provide a systematic methodology to tease out what these relationships are. In fact, science is aimed at mastering these observed relationships so that we can make “predictions.”
Thanks for the post, DD.
What is known is always relative to the context that produces it. Even what is known with a high degree of probability cannot be projected into other contexts except hypothetically until it is rationally demonstrated that it is known relative to other contexts too. And even then, no matter how often you "prove" something (and, technically, there is a preference for the word "support" rather than "proof"
you can never claim 100% because you can never actually test all contexts, the number of which, to all practical intents and purposes, is infinite.
I don't think OP was proposing that being made a better person is a zero-sum commodity associated solely with scientific understanding. One can infer, from OP, that becoming a better person, in addition to being the result of many other things, can also corelate with scientific appreciation of the world, including the many different kinds of people in it.
It's sort of like saying, "There are many different things that can produce light, of which, scientific understanding is just one."
I hope you don't mind me defending science this way; it is often misunderstood how essentially humble science actually is. People don't know that it claims no absolutes, not even itself, even at its very best, most scientific fineness, with its most certain results, it does not claim ownership/absolutes about anything, including the question you raise. Though it might produce an either/or cause statement in a specific situation, that's not it's predetermined objective and it doesn't assume that what it is describing is true of everything. That's its service to truth and that's why I find it delightful.
If you get that school book learnin you'll be led to dancing then human sacrifice !!!!!!!!!
and met some world-class scientists there who were really big assholes.
I also met some scientists there who were really decent people.
