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The four Mertonian norms (often abbreviated as the CUDOS-norms) can be summarised as: communalism: all scientists should have common ownership of scientific goods (intellectual property), to promote collective collaboration; secrecy is the opposite of this norm. universalism: scientific validity is independent of the…
Sounds like a "fuzzy set." Which comes into play when you try to categorize things that vary continuously into discrete groups. Can't be done without ambiguruity and bias. As a geneficist by the name of Pearl demonstrated when he had 15 scienfists sort the same 532 com kernels into yellow-starchy, yellow-sweet…
We are all good consumers. We buy countless products that we don’t really need, and that until yesterday we didn’t know existed. Manufacturers deliberately design short-term goods and invent new and unnecessary models of perfectly satisfactory products that we must purchase in order to stay ‘in’. Shopping has become a…
TRUST IN TRUTH Understanding, accepting, and knowing how to effectively deal with reality are crucial for achieving success. Having truth on your side is extremely powerful. While the truth itself may be scary—you have a weakness, you have a deadly disease, etc.—knowing the truth will allow you to deal with your…
Chinese internet firms are definitely interested, as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of ecommercegiant Alibaba, recently showed. To its popular app Alipay it added a new service which rated a person's credit worthiness on a scale of 350 to 950 points. This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also…
My own ongoing research among secular Americans — as well as that of a handful of other social scientists who have only recently turned their gaze on secular culture — confirms that nonreligious family life is replete with its own sustaining moral values and enriching ethical precepts. Chief among those: rational…
To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and…
I swear by Apollo the physician, by Asclepius, by Heahh, by Panacea and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture. To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when…
We have three principal means: observation of nature, reflection, and experiment. Observation gathers the facts, reflection combines them, experiment verifies the result of the combination. It is essential that the observation of nature be assiduous, that reflection be profound, and that experimentation be exact…
The Man of Science ought not to look at, or respect, any thing but the discovery and propagation of truth. Instead of respecting mischievous and erroneous establishments, he, of all men, is bound, by every honourable tie, to make an exposure of them, and to teach the people right from wrong. His knowledge and…
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and createth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men: therefore Atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men…
However, the subject need not be an esoteric one for a gedankenexperiment to be fruitful. My own favorite is Galileo’s proof that, contrary to Aristotle’s view, objects of different mass fall in a vacuum with the same acceleration. One might think that a real experiment needs to be conducted to test that hypothesis…
The game heavily relies on the "carrot on a stick" principle. All objectives appear to be increasingly possible, yet every goal point disappears moments before you achieve it. There also appears to be no reward for honesty, hard work, altruism, or loyalty.
Desire to Know. I refer to Curiosity — curiosity rationalized into Desire to Know. Desire to Know, while equally urgent for gratification, inherently lacks the undesirable and inappropriate qualities which render the other human Instincts unsuitable as organizing and strain equalizing factors in the social structure…
Making an evidence presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell. Thus consuming a…
Study 6. Study 6 extended these findings to actual cheating behavior. Participants played a “game of chance,” in which the computer presented them with one side of a six-sided die, ostensibly randomly, on five separate rolls. Participants were told that higher rolls would increase their chances of winning a cash prize…
The expression of empathy in humans requires that individuals have the proper experiences growing up. If children never witness adults behaving with respect tow)ward others, they are unlikely to learn how to do so themselves. Empathy, like most human traits. arises through a combination of our biological potential and…
We maintain that human values make sense only in the context of human life. A supposed nonhumanlike existence after death cannot, then, be included as part of the environment in which our values must operate. The here-and-now physical world of our senses is the world that is relevant for our ethical concerns, our…
We base our understanding of the world on what we can perceive with our senses and comprehend with our minds. Anything that is said to make sense should make sense to us as humans; else there is no reason for it to be the basis of our decisions and actions. Supposed transcendent knowledge or intuitions that are said…
The harsh, demystifying light of science has left the modern biologist with one last miracle, a miracle of organization. Somehow, back in the planet's youth, molecules organized themselves into a structure that could reproduce itself. Dust quickened, and into an inanimate world came animation. All the rest has…