Part II: Explaining reason and science

We are supposed to be living in a scientific world. However, a large majority of people, while affected in their life by science and technology, are still ignorant of some of the main features of science.
Some features of science are widely known and/or can readily be found explained at many places (you can make a search...). However, I will present here some deeper aspects that are often ignored, especially by naive people, so as to resolve a number of widespread misunderstandings.

Some of the main characters of science

Let us sum up some of the main principles of science, that is the scientific approach to the truth and the search for the truth.

Accuracy : every concept involved should be as clear and well-defined as possible. The role of this criteria is to prevent risks for the reasoning to end up to false conclusions. To say this in other words, we can see this as the task of either being exact, or at least ensuring that the approximations made (not always quantitative, but also conceptual) will be small enough to not wrong the conclusion, as far as we are expecting this conclusion to be close to the truth on the issue being studied. If the issue in question is naturally clear and simple, the risk of wrong approximations may be low. However, on harder issues, it may become a major problem, thus requiring a lot of work and intelligence to be resolved. This may be because of the harder complexity of the issue, and/or because the right concepts by which a given aspect of reality would need to be analyzed for being properly understood, are not given in advance, and still need to be discovered, ifever it is indeed possible to discover any relevant concepts.

Logical Positivism : the truths that science normally searches for, can be roughly split into 2 kinds (though, in practice, many will be mixtures of them).
The conceptual reconstruction of reality : the means at our disposal (our senses) do not give us any direct perception of reality, but this sort of limitation is not a real limit to our understanding of reality. On the contrary, the very scientific reseach as we just specified (in terms of logical positivism), provides for an effective understanding of reality, or at least, of the aspects of reality that are of concern to us. This is operated by the work of formulating the logical expressions relating our perceptions (discovered as those which best distinguish the most probable series of perceptions, from the impossible or most unlikely ones), in their clearest, best understandable form. Indeed, such a clearest understanding (expression) of these logical structures requires to develop a number of key intermediate concepts. And these key intermediate concepts are what plays the role of the elements of reality as we can understand it. They are the image (translation, approximation), which we can form in our minds, of elements of reality which are outside it. (Example: when looking at the Titan pictures, there are many intermediate concepts involved in the interpretation of this perception, representing different elements of reality).

Non-essentialism : the way things behave, or the role they play, is not always a matter of what their deep nature is, or whether things indeed have a deeper nature or not. Indeed, consider a situation when something would have an essence or deep nature of a deeper level than what is being considered at a given step of understanding. Then, of two things one: either this deeper nature has observable effects on the behavior of this thing, in which case the observation of this external behavior can provide information on this deeper nature, so that, somehow, this deeper nature is observable (and the information from these observations can provide us with a scientific understanding of what it looks like, even if it is not a full understanding). Or it does not (getting rid of its consideration provides the best available approximations or predictions of its behavior). In this case, such considerations of a deeper nature, insofar as they could not help making more accurate expectations, are irrelevant to the understanding of these things, as if they were not an element of the reality of this world, but of another world disconnected from this one.
In other words, the understanding of something, is mainly not a matter of "what this thing is", but of how it behaves, what role it plays, which way it connects to other things around.

Pragmatism : scientists must adapt their research methods to the specific contexts of what they want to study, for which the most effective research methods are not always the same from a subject to another, because different aspects of reality cannot always connect in the same way to our means of investigation.
Also, naming some extensive list of guidelines for scientic research, would usually be irrelevant: scientificity is not about applying an exact list of principles fixed in advance, but about developing and training a more extensive form of commonsense. The work of the scientist cannot be replaced by machines. Machines can help the scientist by operating the repetitive application of some already well-established principles, but the work of scientists will always be necessary for providing a wider understanding of large conceptual systems, and leading research projects. This ability is highly dependent on the context of natural skills, personal training of intelligence and known facts. Most scientists did not (or not much) follow any course on the scientific method in the way philosophers imagine, but spend much more effort, either studying mathematics (proofs...) to train their thinking ability and gather some mathematical concepts that may be useful to them later, or gathering a wide range of specific information on their field of study.
For example, some fields of research have the possibility of making experiments, for observations to be more extensive and provide more complete information on the reality that is considered; while this is not (or less) possible in other fields like astronomy where stars and galaxies can only be observed and not be subjects of any experiment.

Plato's cave, rationality levels, and non-essentialism issues.

Many people already heard about the Allegory of the Cave, (as it is often taught in high school philosophy classes). Let us recall it in short [quotation from Wikipedia]

"Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners."

The story further explains how hard it is to try to free the prisoners, who considered the shadows they saw to be the reality, and first have a hard time adapting to the real things and getting familiar to them.

This allegory can be seen as an image of what science could finally accomplish, the way it could go beyond immediate experience and understand the deep structures underlying the things we can see, through the understanding of many other concepts far away from those naturally appearing and useful to everyday life.

Especially, Math and Physics are absolutely amazing, in how far deep they could reach in their respective domains of study. Unfortunately, and just as this allegory says, most of these subjects, and how wonderful they are, cannot be easily explained to the lay people.

Another solution, instead of trying to free someone from his chains, is to try to show him an image of the real things by projecting their shadow on the wall he can see. This is the work of science popularization: not a real presentation of things as they can really be understood, but sorts of metaphors roughly explaining how they look like in a way or another.
Some people in search of truth, when looking at these shadows of science that science popularization is, may complain that these shadows are not clear, will find inconsistencies there, and will want to criticize these images as not satisfying, not being the ulimate explanations. Somehow they are right that these shadows are not the ultimate explanation, but when complaining so, they are missing the fact that these popularized presentation are not the full account of the currently established scientific understanding either. Another usual wrong complaint is to make the mistake of essentialism (failing to understand the justification for the non-essentialism of science that we explained above). These misunderstandings can lead to dramatic consequences where some people may come to dedicate their life to trying to put forward alternative views in opposition to established science. This issue will be further developed later.

However, there is no absolute separation between teaching and popularization (between getting freed to understand the depth of things, or only seeing their shadow). No absolute separation, but still a difference (distance) between them, that can eventually be very big.
How can this be, you may ask, while all scientific understanding is operated by the same fundamental kind of rational ability of the human mind in its ordinary state, the same which is operated by lay people and lead them to so many mistakes ?

First, we can note that it does not matter how surprising or illogical this may sound: anyway it is a fact, so that denying it just based on its oddness, would lead nowhere.
Then, it can be understood as a non-essentialist truth: it does not matter what science is made of; what matters is the role it plays. The role played by science cannot be properly reduced to the question of what it is made of. It is the same kind of people in themselves, that can as well be prisoners only looking at shadows on the wall, or going out from the cave. Science plays the role of a way out of the cave, and this is all the best that ought to be expected from a vision of the truth on the world we live in.

So, how can it be, and what does its difference from the basic use of reason consist of ?
One of the main answers, is that it is a matter of complexity. Ordinary reason is enough to correctly solve simple problems of everyday life with sufficient accuracy or reliability for practical purposes, but it fails when faced with more complex or faraway problems, where the conceptual approximations made by an ordinary mind are not right, and inaccuracies are either too big or too numerous, so that they happen to add up into major mistakes in the conclusions. Also, some necessary key concepts for the understanding of some issues, may be completely missed by people who are not familiar with them. Some key concepts require a lot of work to be learned, going through a lot of preliminaries.

So, here again, the very concept of rationality needs to be understood in a non-essentialist sense: it makes no sense to qualify a person as either rational or irrational in the absolute, but only as a description of the role played by this mind relatively to the purpose of understanding a given problem or domain of reality.
The same person can happen to be rational towards some issues, and irrational towards other issues.

We previously saw another example how something's behavior can be very dissimilar with its deep nature: the case of spirituality with its essentialist conception of altruism, understood as an intrinsic quality of a person. Spiritual people are missing the fact that, in order to be really useful to others (rather than keeping one's altruism for oneself and then down to the grave), a real effective altruism needs to be understood as an extrinsic quality, made of the effective ways in which someone interacts with the rest of the world, and what consequences on others these actions finally produce.

Let us give some more details on the non-essentialism of science, with the case of how it goes for physics.
There is are a diversity of sciences which study different aspects of reality. This is possible as these different aspects of reality can be considered and understood more or less independently from each other (each can be somehow neglected in the study of others), even though they are aspects of the same global reality, and therefore also have connections between them. Physics is one of them; but it is itself divided into several theories describing each a different aspect of the physical universe. These theories can be understood more or less independently from each other.

Among these theories, some describe deeper aspects of reality (a deeper essence of things) than others.
For example, quantum physics is deeper than classical physics and chemistry, as it provides a common foundation explanaining both and how they can both describe aspects of the same reality. General relativity is deeper than Newton's law of gravitation. So, if we want to approach the understanding of the (relatively more) ultimate nature of the physical universe, then the deeper theories are those we should focus on. But if we want to understand some specific phenomena of concern to us, it often happens for less deep theories to be much more relevant, because they provide useful approximations that greatly simplify the problems and provide more direct and understandable solutions.

For example, the mass of the proton has been at last computed to a reasonable approximation, out of the known more fundamental laws (which had been understood well before already), by a supercomputer in year 2008. This hardness to obtain such a basic result as the mass of the proton out of the known more fundamental laws that determine it, suggests how desperate it may be to pretend that the understanding of any significant practical aspect of reality, should be best obtained by deducing it from any supposedly most ultimate first principles.
So, the point of the scientific approach is not to be for or against the research of more fundamental principles underlying given phenomena to better understand them: indeed, such a research of more fundamental principles has been successfully proceeded many times by science much better than by any other philosophy.
But it is about carefully adapting the orientation of the research on any subject, either towards deeper explanations or not, depending on what happens to be fruitful for the wanted purpose.

As a result of this non-essentialism, it is often said that science rejected metaphysics. In a way this is true, however it is not the whole story. What is true is that scientists rejected most of the works that philosophers had done on the issue, either because it was fuzzy (and generally irrational : we shall explain in further details what is irrationality), or because it was irrelevant to their work (because of the non-essentialism of science vs. the traditional essentialism of metaphysics). But this does not mean science would have no access to any metaphysical truth. The problem is that, usually, scientists focus on scientific truths, that is, accurate and verifiable truths, rather than fuzzy truths, so that they don't want to "waste their time" discussing on fuzzy ideas and explaining things in fuzzy terms. The result is that they kept their knowledge for themselves and hardly ever cared properly explaining it to philosophers and/or to the public. Also, as they are at ease with complex ideas, they don't see the point to try explaining them in simpler terms.

Science is knowledge, as opposed to faith

Another way to characterize science, is to define it as knowledge.
And, there are two opposites of knowledge, which are faith and ignorance.
But, this definition requires a clarification, to not mistake the meaning the word "faith" here, with some other meanings often given by religions. Indeed, religions usually define "faith" to mean either hope, trust in God, belief in afterlife, adhesion to some specific doctrine, or any mixture between these.
Here, for this definition of science, the involved meanings of the words are:
knowledge = justified belief = clarified belief
faith = unjustified belief = unclarified belief

Indeed, the very concept of unjustified belief is more or less based on its lack of clarification. This is because a belief normally consists in holding a claim as justified.
If someone fully understood the fact that his belief is not justified (including with his personal, unsharable experience), then this understanding "should" drive him to stop doing as if it was justified, thus stop believing in the claim and start considering it as a mere hypothesis waiting for future evidence for or against it later.
In other words, scientific inquiry can be described as being neither satisfied with an absence of belief (ignorance) nor with a presence of unclarified belief, but only with a work of examination of things which may lead to clarified beliefs. This may require to review a number of hypothesis without believing them at first, until, eventually, some may turn out to be justified.
This does not mean that a scientist has no faith or philosophy of life (indeed, there are too many issues in life, and it is not humanly possible to carefully check every belief that one needs to follow). But this means that the scientific work is a work that must care to be unaffected by one's possible faiths. This can be done because the scientific work is a specialized work, dealing every time with a precise question that can be solved independently from the rest of ideas that cannot be clarified yet.
Precisely, the point is not always to ensure that some given conclusion is free of assumption, but the point is to clarify which are the assumptions that a conclusion is based on. So, if a conclusion B depends on an assumption A while A is not well-proven yet, then the "real conclusion" of the work is that (A => B).
This makes it possible for other researchers, to either know that B is true in the case they first knew that A is true based on other justifications, or ignore the work as pointless (without "disagreeing with it") if they consider A to be false or unlikely.
Such a work of clarifying all the assumptions that a conclusion depends on (while only neglecting the mention of the assumptions that can't be subject to a "reasonable doubt"), can be a very hard work where mistakes may happen. But well, this is precisely why science is often a work to be reserved to professionals (another reason is the fact that each work may require many premises for drawing a conclusion, and only professionals may be familiar with the available body of knowledge which can supply for needed premises, and thus orient the kind of work that may be relevant).

There is not, or at least there should not be, such a thing as a "faith in reason".
Reason is the ability and efficiency of work towards a distinction of which belief is justified and which is not, as well as to develop works that have more chances to reach the point of providing clear, justified knowledge.
Whenever it succeeds to provide clear evidence for something, there is no point anymore to see there any "faith in reason", because it no more depends on any faith, but it presents full justifications for the conclusions. Of course, it depends on the assumption that one is not foolish enough to mistakenly see clear evidences where there would be none; but well, there has to be some limits to such a thing as Descartes' thought experiment of an "hyperbolic doubt", which leads nowhere (imagine if you started to doubt your ability to check how much is 2+2).

What about the time when a question has not been solved yet ? Indeed we can see a faith in the motivation to do the research: a hope, a belief, not yet fully justified, in the idea that the scientific search has a chance to succeed, that some verified knowledge can be obtained on the considered subject. This belief is not yet justified, because, well indeed, by definition of a discovery, it cannot be predicted. So, it is not always a knowledge, but it may also be a personal creed, which humanly stimulates the process of scientific research, but must not be mistaken as an axiom that could serve by itself to justify any claim in the scientific reasoning itself.

This can better be understood by presenting it the other way round: the opposite belief, claiming that the scientic research for a justified understanding on some specific issue would be hopeless, is usually not justified either.

Of course, there are exceptions: some knowledge could be obtained showing the (either absolute or most probable) impossibility to resolve some problems. It is for example absolutely impossibile to:
Other expectations of knowledge can be unreasonable too, such as
But, after all, we can now accept as empirically justified, the claim that reason is very powerful to discover many things in our universe, because we could observe and verify its success during the last centuries, and there is no reason to believe that this progress would suddenly stop now.

In fact, the character of logical positivism (describing the information on our perceptions), is very often the essential criteria (principle) after which to clarify whether a question, claim or theory is decidable by reason (or at least subject to scientific enquiry and possible progress of knowledge), and also whether it is of any importance (indeed this "frequent or approximate equivalence" between logical positivism, verifiability and effective importance, is itself a logical remark).

More empirical and other reliable justifications can be found (we shall present some in Part III), of some claims (and attitudes of many scientists) on the respective statuses of science and religion, and what an awful source of mistakes the religions most famous in the West often turn out to be.

Still, there are some unfortunate remaining forms of faith in the rationalist attitude of some scientists (which fortunately are not actually mistaken with scientific knowlege... at least not too much). Most of this can be understood as a reaction against religious claims (once observed how wrong on so many other issues, are the religions and other propagandists making such opposite claims):

The section on metamathematics ("Understanding infinity"), previously here and showing the non-algorithmicity of the mind, was moved.

The MBTI personality types

Let's be much more practical now for describing the mind. Principles on the nature of the mind do not explain the diversities between the minds of different people. All people are different, physically and mentally.

However, to find some order in this diversity, there is a famous method of classification, called MBTI, which basically classifies people into 16 types, defined from 4 binary data. Of course this is not an exact division: not all people precisely fit into one type, as there are as well people in between several types (for each of the 4 parameters, a person may be in intermediate positions between the two extremes - for general remarks about the practice of classifying people and how it is usually criticized, an interesting analysis was written by another author). Still, it can be relevant to many situations, for example for its correlation with the kind of job that fits every person. (A friend of mine reported he can understand and predict many things in behaviors and relationships around him, just by classifying them into these types).

Here are the 4 parameters:

I/E : Introvert / Extravert

N/S : mode of perception :
F/T: Feeling / Thinking (mode of judgement)
This duality has many aspects, for example:
T: search for flaws in an argument
F: search for points of agreement in an argument
Some feelers can't understand that not all people are feelers. As they don't like thinking, they assume that other people's thinking is an illness which is the cause of their unhappiness. Some feelers may even assume that anyone's claim of better knowing some subject, could only be an expression of pride, desire to feel superior.
The truth is that, thinkers usually aren't interested to compare themselves to others (even though, of course, there can be exceptions).

J/P : Judging / Perceiving (J= on the rules and plans / P = flexible, disordered, anticonformist)

Some spiritual people may make confusions between these different polarities, especially presenting a worldview as if N=F=P, in opposition with S=T=J. Especially they pretend that rationality divides people by nature, while spirituality would be the way for all to become one. Or when they pretend that the intuitions and breaking of convention at the basis of scientific breakthough, would be something else above rational logic, thus placing spiritual teachings above reason.
These assumptions are false, as shown by the diversity between people, and expressed by this typology: intuition is not opposed to logic: scientists use their intuition naturally, and never needed any assistance from whatever spiritual teaching to explain them that they should seek an intuition beyond some known rules for their research to progress.

To those who pretend to unify everything by rejecting reason, accusing reason of being a cause of division, while they focus on unifying everything: Can you make the difference between oneness and confusion ?

Some spiritual people pretend to teach the global, universal truth (N); and that this truth should be searched for by focusing on immediate perception and the present moment (S). Following the MBTI typology, this is a self-contradiction. They might reply to this: all is in all, so the whole universe can be found in the present moment. This may sound a priori plausible but for the same reason that all is in all, why could not universal truths be found in rational thoughts ? Indeed they can.

Socrates is usually classified as INTP. Indeed, Plato's philosophy and its mention of an access to the superior world of Ideas, is all about the INTP character: his Ideas are global, eternal (all the opposite of immediate perception), and rational. Note that he never pretended Philosophy to be accessible to any large number of people, but only a small minority. At least he did not pretend that all people should become the same and come to understand the same Truth. He saw it right to let everyone do what one does best: that the INTP (or at least some of them) search for the Truth, while other people manage their own other works.

(This reference to Plato does not mean any general agreement with Plato's philosophy).

Here are some quote from diverse Web sites:

A Young-Earth Creationist Christian wrote the following (here I only copy of the most important sentences):

"I am a Christian and a technologist.
I am alone and unwelcome in the American churches.
Anybody can walk into almost any church on Sunday morning and immediately see that there are more women than men, often more than twice as many...
Anybody can walk into any scientific or technology conference or science department in a secular university and find more men than women. What is in large numbers is the preponderance of atheists and non-religious practitioners, usually in far greater proportion than the population at large in America.

The American churches are hostile to kind of people who become scientists and technologists. We can come, but only by pretending or acting like somebody other than God made us to be. It's like trying to evangelize Africans by telling them to bleach their skin.
It really has nothing to do with gender at all, except that there is a significant gender discrimination in one MBTI dimension, and that one dimension also selects technology and science on the one hand, and the Christian religion as practiced in America on the other.

Feelers tend to criticize Thinkers for being uncaring, while Thinkers tend to criticize Feelers for hypocrisy. It's not that the Thinkers don't care about people, but they value truth and justice over affirmation. Everybody really wants truth to prevail -- especially when lies result in harm to themselves -- and most people are willing to ``live and let live,'' to allow other people the enjoyment of their own lives. This is especially so when people recognize that the tables could be turned, that they could be the recipients of comparable disaffirmation.

The conflict comes when the truth is disaffirming. People often need to know that they are part of the problem, so they can act to correct their participation in it. However, it is unpleasant to receive such criticism, and Feelers empathize with that unpleasantness. Thinkers, on the other hand, consider the truth more important than the fleeting discomfort. This is the fundamental difference between Thinkers and Feelers. Thinkers value the truth over affirmation, and Feelers value affirmation over the truth.

Science and technology, on the other hand, is about truth. Affirmation is irrelevant and generally counter-productive. The scientific method thrives on disaffirming the presuppositions of the status quo, and trying out new disruptive ideas. Technology works the same way, but focuses on new products rather than the laws of nature. Many of these new ideas don't work, but enough do succeed to make our culture the most prosperous in all of history. As a result, the vast majority of scientists and technologists are Thinkers. Again the labor marketplace reflects the reality of the work being done there.

There is a secondary social consequence of this particular distinction. Science drives technology, and technology drives the creation of wealth in this country and the world in general. Wealth in turn drives the power structure. This gives the Thinkers an unfortunate but significant boost in public stature over Feelers. Thinkers can afford to disaffirm the Feelers, because it is the Thinkers in the position of power, not the Feelers. The Thinkers themselves are less concerned with affirmation, but the Feelers mostly don't understand that, so they continue to lavish affirmation on the Thinkers in a subtle form of obeisance and homage.

Except in the arts and the churches. Successful artists and preachers tend to be Feelers. Preachers especially survive best by affirming their congregation.
Movies are a widely patronized art form. Their economic success is highly dependent on the tastes and whims of the public. There are a few movies that glorify science, but a much larger proportion of them paint the scientists and the industrialists as villains.
Science requires a Thinker perspective to succeed; most of the religious institutions survive by affirmation, a Feeler value. This is a recent distinction resulting mostly from the Feeler takeover of the churches. Science has always been a Thinker activity.
there is nonetheless a very clear and increasingly hardened division between the technologists on the one side, and the nontechnical domains (religion and the arts) on the other. Both parties are aware of the divide and both pay token homage dismay over it, but both sides continue to act in ways that solidify the division.
The Two Cultures coexist in one society with very little overlap. Mostly they look on the other side with disdain... Mostly the two cultures refuse to have anything to do with each other. Perhaps ``refuse'' is too strong a word. The scientists warily accept people of religious persuasion, provided that they leave their religion at home. Similarly the churches eagerly invite the scientists to their meetings, again provided they leave their scientific thinking at home.
The divide between C.P.Snow's Two Cultures is nowhere more obvious than in the churches. American churches are unashamedly and completely contained within one of those cultures. The church is operated by and for the exclusive benefit of Feelers. Thinkers need not apply. They won't tell you, but they expect Thinkers to leave their brain at the door.

The churches I grew up in (and continue to patronize) emphasize as part of their doctrine, that there is such a thing as absolute Truth and that God abhors lies. Then they turn around and insist that their ``Christianity is a relationship, not a religion,'' and (almost proudly) that ``the church is full of hypocrites, and if you find one that isn't, don't join it, because you'll spoil it.''

Thinkers are not hypocrites. The highest Thinker value is to tell the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. It is Feelers who are hypocrites, who value ``relationship'' (meaning affirmation) over truth, and are thus willing to hide the uncomfortable truth and to live a lie for the sake of pleasantry.

What this means is that the churches are implicitly (and often explicitly) promoting Feeler values and deprecating Thinker values. This is not just the conservative Bible-oriented churches, but all of them. Even more so the more ``liberal'' churches who make no claim to adhering to Bible absolutes. Absolutes are a Thinker value, but even the self-proclaimed absolutists give it second place after ``relationships'' (the Feeler value).

As a consequence, the Feelers feel affirmed in the churches, and the Thinkers are not. The proportion of women in the churches matches the proportion of women Feelers.
``Dan'' is another technologist married to a Feeler, but he has been successfully morphed into a Feeler by the church. He still insists that he tests out as a Thinker, but his religious conversation is about relationships. He tries to engage unbeliever Thinkers, but they brush him off with devastating put-downs like ``Everything you've given me as to why you believe is based on either emotion or credulity of unsubstantiated ancient texts... None of this even begins to prove that Jesus loves me.'' The educated Thinker needs truth and reason, not love and relationships.
People have started noticing the gender disparity in church. The Thinkers out there in the real world couldn't care less. It's not their problem. But the men in the churches feel outnumbered. Where are the guys? So they start new ministries to attract men into the churches, and to keep them there once they come. Thus was born the ``Men's Movement.''

The guys in the Men's Movement (MM) don't have a clue. They are all Feelers themselves, so they do not understand that all the guys who don't come have very different values than they themselves do. All of the MM stuff is about ``showing your inner feelings,'' in other words, becoming Feelers. Some of them try to bring in ``manly'' activity such as physical exertion, going fast, making loud noises and breaking things, but its focus is still on relationships and feelings, not truth and justice. "

Now, smaller excerpts from any other sites.

About peace making:

"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is represented in a realistic and well-known videogame, PeaceMaker.(...) Results indicate that the players' decision making personality is related to their performance in PeaceMaker. Players of thinking personality were more successful at reaching a conflict resolution in the game compared to the players with feeling personality, suggesting that those that are more assertive and impersonal, rather than affective and personal, are more successful in conflict resolution. Furthermore, this distinction is particularly important when the players' religions are those involved in the conflict."

As for the connections between MBTI and professions (example of a table of the main professions per type):

STJ includes: Management, Administration, Law enforcement

ESTJ: The Bureaucrat
Like ESFJs, ESTJs value continuity and order. They have outstanding organizational skills, and are meticulous and detail-oriented. Unlike ESFJs, ESTJs are followers and joiners; they are happiest when they belong to organizations, the larger and more mind-numbing the better. ESFJs often have an abnormal obsession with being normal at all costs.

"In US, overall cultural values favor ESTJ type"


Highest Average Annual Household Income
(From highest to lowest)

1. ENTJ (84,434)
2. ESTJ (76,238)
3. ESFJ (74,882)

Highest Education Level:
1. ENTJ (4.12)
2. INTJ (3.93)
3. ESTJ (3.83)
4. ISTJ (3.78)

Highest Percentage Married
(From highest to lowest)

   1. ESFJ (53%)
   2. ISTJ (51%)
   3. ENTJ (51%)
   4. ESTJ (50%)

Scientific or technical fields: INTP,INTJ, ENTP
(+ ISTP includes Computer Programming)

Teaching, education: EFJ, IFJ, EFP, (and eventually ESTJ, ISFP)

INFP: teacher, professor.., Clergy / Religious Workers
Religion: FJ, ENFP

Problem: (as spiritual people often complain) it is commonly assumed that the educational system is about teaching thinking skills to the young generation; and, among other things, to show them what is science. But the truth is that the personality types of teachers are nearly all F, that is, feeling value, the opposite of thinking value. This can be explained by the fact that Thinkers usually don't like to deal with pupils.
Also, among teachers there is more J than T, and more E than I, while many scientists are INTP.
We shall further develop the issues about the school system and its discrepancy with science later.

The INTP type is also called "Architect" in some naming of the types, as this is another possible favorite profession for this type outside science.

INTPs live in the world of theoretical possibilities. They see everything in terms of how it could be improved, or what it could be turned into. They live primarily inside their own minds, having the ability to analyze difficult problems, identify patterns, and come up with logical explanations. They seek clarity in everything, and are therefore driven to build knowledge. They are the "absent-minded professors", who highly value intelligence and the ability to apply logic to theories to find solutions. They typically are so strongly driven to turn problems into logical explanations, that they live much of their lives within their own heads, and may not place as much importance or value on the external world. Their natural drive to turn theories into concrete understanding may turn into a feeling of personal responsibility to solve theoretical problems, and help society move towards a higher understanding.

INTPs value knowledge above all else. Their minds are constantly working to generate new theories, or to prove or disprove existing theories. They approach problems and theories with enthusiasm and skepticism, ignoring existing rules and opinions and defining their own approach to the resolution. They seek patterns and logical explanations for anything that interests them. They're usually extremely bright, and able to be objectively critical in their analysis. 

They hate to work on routine things - they would much prefer to build complex theoretical solutions, and leave the implementation of the system to others. They are intensely interested in theory, and will put forth tremendous amounts of time and energy into finding a solution to a problem with has piqued their interest.

INTPs do not like to lead or control people. They're very tolerant and flexible in most situations, unless one of their firmly held beliefs has been violated or challenged, in which case they may take a very rigid stance. The INTP is likely to be very shy when it comes to meeting new people. On the other hand, the INTP is very self-confident and gregarious around people they know well, or when discussing theories which they fully understand.

The INTP has no understanding or value for decisions made on the basis of personal subjectivity or feelings. They strive constantly to achieve logical conclusions to problems, and don't understand the importance or relevance of applying subjective emotional considerations to decisions. For this reason, INTPs are usually not in-tune with how people are feeling, and are not naturally well-equiped to meet the emotional needs of others.

The INTP may have a problem with self-aggrandizement and social rebellion, which will interfere with their creative potential.  ...

If the INTP is not able to find a place for themself which supports the use of their strongest abilities, they may become generally negative and cynical. If the INTP has not developed their Sensing side sufficiently, they may become unaware of their environment, and exhibit weakness in performing maintenance-type tasks, such as bill-paying and dressing appropriately.

For the INTP, it is extremely important that ideas and facts are expressed correctly and succinctly. They are likely to express themselves in what they believe to be absolute truths. Sometimes, their well thought-out understanding of an idea is not easily understandable by others, but the INTP is not naturally likely to tailor the truth so as to explain it in an understandable way to others. The INTP may be prone to abandoning a project once they have figured it out, moving on to the next thing. It's important that the INTP place importance on expressing their developed theories in understandable ways. In the end, an amazing discovery means nothing if you are the only person who understands it.

The INTP is usually very independent, unconventional, and original. They are not likely to place much value on traditional goals such as popularity and security. They are strongly ingenious, and have unconventional thought patterns which allows them to analyze ideas in new ways. Consequently, a lot of scientific breakthroughs in the world have been made by the INTP.

The INTP is at his best when he can work on his theories independently. When given an environment which supports his creative genius and possible eccentricity, the INTP can accomplish truly remarkable things. These are the pioneers of new thoughts in our society.

They prize autonomy in themselves and others. They generally balk at attempts by others to convince them to change.

They also tend to be impatient with the bureaucracy, rigid hierarchies, and the politics prevalent in many professions. INTPs have little regard for titles and badges, which they often consider to be unjustified. INTPs usually come to distrust authority as hindering the uptake of novel ideas and the search for knowledge.

INTPs accept ideas based on merit, rather than tradition or authority. They have little patience for social customs that seem illogical or that serve as obstacles for pursuing ideas and knowledge. INTPs prefer to work informally with others as equals.

they can demonstrate remarkable skill in explaining complex ideas to others in simple terms, especially in writing. On the other hand, their ability to grasp complexity may also lead them to provide overly detailed explanations of simple ideas, and listeners may judge that the INTP makes things more difficult than they are required to be. To the INTP, however, this is incomprehensible; they feel they are merely presenting all the relevant information or attempting to crystallise the concept most clearly

INTPs are driven to fully understand a discussion from all relevant angles. Their impatience with seemingly indefensible ideas can make them particularly devastating at debate. When INTPs feel insulted, they may respond with sudden, cutting criticism. After such an incident, INTPs are likely to be as bewildered as the recipient. They have broken the rules of debate and exposed their raw emotions. To INTPs, this is the crux of the problem: improperly handled emotions, INTPs believe, can only harm. While INTPs experience emotions as an important part of their internal lives, and sometimes share their emotions with others, INTPs nevertheless believe that emotions must not play a role in logical discussions, or be expressed in a way that would put themselves at disadvantage.

[INTP] are rare - maybe one percent of the population - and show the greatest precision in thought and speech of all the types. They tend to see distinctions and inconsistencies instantaneously, and can detect contradictions no matter when or where they were made. It is difficult for an [INTP] to listen to nonsense, even in a casual conversation, without pointing out the speaker's error. And in any serious discussion or debate [INTP]s are devastating, their skill in framing arguments giving them an enormous advantage. [INTP]s regard all discussions as a search for understanding, and believe their function is to eliminate inconsistencies, which can make communication with them an uncomfortable experience for many. Authority derived from office, credential, or celebrity does not impress them. [INTP]s are interested only in what make sense, and thus only statements that are consistent and coherent carry any weight with them.

Have very high standards for performance, which they apply to themselves

Usually, the INTP has trouble finding and maintaining a love relationship. The INTP usually has relatively simple needs and expectations from their mates, and they're surprised and confused to find that their mates have more complex demands. They don't understand their mate's needs, and may feel inadequate to meeting them (...)

See also: Grigory Perelman, The man who refused a million dollars (extreme example that rational intelligence can be very far from greed, unlike what many Spiritual teachings pretend):

Perelman’s widespread popularity is easy to explain. His having proved the Poincaré conjecture clearly has nothing to do with it. Most Russians have no idea what that is. What they like is Perelman’s stubborn refusal to take the money. The money is being pressed on him, but he still won’t take it. Even now, in this most materialistic of post-Soviet times when everyone seems to be screaming in your ear: earn money, get rich, spend it, get all you can out of life! “I don’t need anything, I have everything I need,” Perelman explained to journalists through the closed door of his apartment. Yet the neighbors say Perelman lives not just modestly, but poorly.

“He is exceedingly punctilious. Sometimes he would see violations of moral codes where, in fact, there were none.” The mathematical community considers that Perelman solved the problem, but he says that Hamilton deserves the prize. We, his contemporaries, feel sure that a million dollars is the equivalent of happiness in life and that one shouldn’t refuse such presents. But Perelman has a different opinion. Do you catch his meaning? He simply has other criteria concerning what is moral and what isn’t, what is correct and what isn’t. It seems that he doesn’t just see “violations of moral codes where there are none”, but sees more than all of us put together. Perhaps that is what helped him solve the “unsolvable” problem. What are all the temptations of the world to him compared with that knowledge?

living with his mother in a humble flat in St Petersburg, co-existing on her £30-a-month pension, because he has been unemployed since December.

Keirsey defines what the four types want as follows:

SJ - Helpmate
SP - Playmate
NF - Soulmate
NT - Mindmate

But this is not an absolute:
"I find this classification cliched and a bit forced. As we grow older, we all develop (or at least are forced to develop) our weaker functions (...) As to mating, I would be the happiest to have a playmate, a soulmate, a mindmate, and a helpmate in one person "

More about religion:

"The character that the Bible teaches must be attained is that of the INFJs personality. By asking a reform of character, it is actually asking for a change from one type to another type.

Upon my departure form Christianity, my closest ministry friend, a very devout Christian, came to me in hopes of changing my mind. I tried to explain to him my stance by logic, but he wasn't getting what I was saying. I explained to him that I believed Christianity was taylored to the INFJs, just as philosophy to the INTPs and Music to the ISTP. I made him take the test and he indeed came out INFJ."

"I come from a Southern Baptist background and experienced the same "out of place" feeling that you speak of, but in my case the denomination is absolutely dominated by SJ's and mostly extroverted ones."

"I thought the Christian culture down south would be ExFJ based, if anything."

"It is very difficult to change personality, if at all possible, hence it is very difficult to follow Christianity to the letter of the word - if at all possible."

"An INTP has three likely ways of relating to religion. They can outright deny it as irrational. They can accept it as a philosophy and analyze it. Or they can accept the experience of others which might include the collective experience of a tradition.
An INTP can’t rely on their own experience. Even if they had a potentially spiritual experience, they’d be reluctant to trust it. This would be true of NTs in general."
"Another result, and this is just my opinion, is that there is no one to question the teachings, direction and whatnot of the church because the thinking types (like INTP's) have all left and become agnostics! Those who stay are not listened to. After all how can an anyone be a good christian if he or she isn't oozing with emotion?"

"The data demonstrated that higher dogmatism scores are most clearly associated with sensing rather than intuition. Higher dogmatism scores are also associated with extraversion rather than introversion, and with judging rather than perceiving. No significant difference in dogmatism scores were found between thinking and feeling. "

"Pastors with personaiïty types that were similar to the personality type of the congregation were shown to be more effective at providing support and guidance in a manner that the congregation appreciated. Congregationd members react best to religious guidance that is in keeping with their dominant personality type.
Kelsey (1982) described how children born into families that were of an opposite dominant personality type were treated as "black sheep"."

"My hunch is that those who attend church regularly are more likely to be ESFJ than are atheists"

"ENFJ - Extroverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging - "The Religion Teacher": Hard to figure out. Apparently their main skill is speaking in front of gigantic crowds charismatically, causing everyone to adore them. They will always promise great things for everyone in the future.

INFJ - Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging - "The Mystic" - prophets, monks, Jesus Christ: Wow, even more difficult to figure out than ENFJs due to their introversion. They are very private and spiritual, so the only thing you will be able to figure out about them is that they have strong opinions and strange values about obscure issues."

And some jokes:

"INFJ: "Messiah" Characterized by the burning desire to change the world, which desperately needs everyone to be NF."

"How unfair can life get ? Many INFJs here on this board are staunch defenders of the position that people should be accepted as they are (and we'll give you the MBTI theory of what any type is theoretically like, in case you don't know it already), and here we get accused of wanting everyone to be NFs. There is no justice in this world
- aww you INFJ's are so sensitive... cmon lighten up!! it's just a joke! "

and here (follow the link for the whole page with a list of preferred religions per type, to be taken with humor):

"Not only can the MBTI pick the perfect job and the perfect mate for you, scientifically performing vital tasks that used to be a matter of brute trial and error, it can offer critical guidance in other areas of your life as well. One such area which has not been sufficiently explored until now is the matter of choosing the right religion for you.
...
The result of the present state of affairs is that millions languish in religions that don't suit them, like square pegs in round holes. Similarly, churches are filled with dozens of people who don't fit in and just make trouble.
As a Myers Briggs type expert I am here to fill in this important void and publish a guide that will revolutionise society and contribute to human happiness by helping people avoid wasting years of their lives in religions that aren't right for them"

Irrationality and fallacious characters of doctrines

Let us now present a panorama of the main categories of obstacles on the search for truth, than can lead to errors and misconceptions. We shall call irrationalities such wrong ways of searching for the truth where more reliable ways exist; or such weaknesses of doctrines, insofar as their supporters fail to recognize these weaknesses as such and to lower the strength of their belief accordingly.

This list contains redundancies (different aspects of the same things) (and might not be complete though the items are general enough to include almost anything).

- The F character of MBTI, by which people would judge claims according to how they feel it (how optimistic, affirming or fair to people it sounds - while forgetting that feelings are often subjective, thus leading different people to draw different conclusions), rather than purely truth criteria. The F people can be nice in some ways, and useful in their own jobs, but they need to admit that it is not their job and ability to seek and discern most cases of general truths, those concerning the large-scale problems and solutions for society.

- Someone's insufficient intelligence (either from nature or from lack of training and experience in rational practice) to proceed the understanding on a subject (in other words, the subject is too complex for this person to be able to properly understand it). Some particular cases of this problem can be solved through computer assistance.

- General laziness of thought, or a priori disbelief in the relevance of thinking efforts. Apart from a lack of intelligence, this may proceed through a misconception or values system that draws the attention away from serious thinking work.

- The insufficient amount of observational data, against which to check the claims; this can include an ignorance of relevant observation, or lack of effort in its systematic gathering; or, on a personal level, the ignorance of already established knowledge, or of other people's experience.

- Hidden assumptions, often operated by focusing the attention on another step of an argument. This can include the act of considering a subject in the terms of a given conceptual framework or classification of possibilities, without proper justifications for the relevance of this conceptual framework for the field being studied (just ignoring other possibilities rather than refuting them).

- Vague concepts, that seem meaningful (informative) while in fact they are not (leaving the way open to any possibility or interpretation).

- Confusion (wrong identification) between concepts, or any use of vague concepts, that give the impression some claim would be a logically necessary conclusion from given premises, while in fact it is not, once the argument is examined more accurately.
Example: fuzzy ideas on what the essence of things should be, and confusion between this essence and behavior (an unability to understand interactions in their complexity, leading to a focus on essences of elements as a substitute for it), so as to either make wrong expectation of behavior based on assumed essences (assuming that focusing on becoming a loving person in oneself would be the right and only way to properly understand the truth and help others), or misjudge the essence based on observation (ex: claiming that those who did wrong things had bad intentions; if they did it in the name of a religion that "calls for goodness", that they were not faithful followers of that religion; accusing someone of having had wrong intentions if he did something wrong or reached a different conclusion).

- Failure to notice that the given view has internal contradictions or discrepancies with known observational evidence (that would give the chance to notice that the view is wrong, thus that previous reasonings that led to it must contain mistakes, thus obliging to search for where the mistakes could have occured). This may be caused by a values system that opposes any attention to the sort of consideration that might lead to display the contradiction.

- Unfalsifiability : when a set of claims about the world (or the universe) is developed, while the course of events that would be going on if these claims were false (in a hypothetical world not containing such things or kinds of determinations, but where people would believe in these claims), would fail to give the chance for the evidence of facts, to put an end to the perpetuation of beliefs in these claims. Causes of unfalsifiability can range from being "not even wrong", i.e. failing to satisfy logical positivism (it does not express any clear logical distinction between likely and unlikely/impossible observations), to different ways of ignoring any contrary evidence, that may occur in unscientific environments.
An unfalsifiable worldwiew should be discredited as being both irrelevant (if not even wrong, providing no information of interest about life), and deserving the highest suspicion (that people's belief in it, preserved and propagated by people, can be merely due to its unfalsifiability and thus is no decent sign of its truth).

- A variant or particular case of unfalsifiability, is the case of Pareidolia, or clustering illusion: finding interpretations (meaning) in past data that gives an illusion of explanation, while no such explanation is true.
For example, to claim something to be the cause of another thing, while the real causality goes another way (the other way round or from a common cause), or the conjunction of events may be a mere coincidence.
Doctrines can develop based on such things. This is especially convenient when the data is fixed once for all (ex: Bible codes; constellations at the basis of mythologies), but can also apply to an open range of observations, being perpetually reinterpreted, modified or developed to fit any new data that may come, always invariably claiming to be the Ultimate Truth and the only possible source of any truth, while not progressing in the reliability of predictions or discernement among opposing views on verifiable issues (and regularly turning out to be among the worst for these). Example: the unability of theologians to predict whether some biblical claims should be understood literally or merely allegorically...

To make a digital comparison, pareidolia would be like claiming to compress a specific file by giving a dedicated compression algorithm, where the sum of spaces taken by the algorithm and the compressed file is finally larger than the initial file. This goes unnoticed through underestimates of how complex is the interpretation, and how arbitrary are the "hidden causes" presented as explaining every particular situation.

See also Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases

Philosophers have a mania of arguing about differences between Popper's falsificationist conception of science and logical positivism, and that neither of these can resist to stand as any absolute and ultimate criteria for scientificity; that both should be replaced by still some other philosophy, or eventually that no general criteria for scientificity can ever resist. But the truth is that, unlike philosophers, scientists don't care about such debates which they see as unsignificant, irrelevant and "metaphysical" (= meaningless) : it does not change anything to the scientific practice, which is about trying to understand our universe, through studying specific theories that may fit with the specific data of observations in our universe. They are not concerned about making a general theory of the set all possible theories and their connection with the set of all possible universes satisfying any other theory with their respective observational data at any given time of the search, for defining any general measure of comparison of scientificity levels of every possible theory in every possible universe given every conceivable set of data at every time :-p

Examples of false reasonings

An example of irrational thought: claiming that conversion to Christianity (or any other religion) is a matter of free choice and how sincerely one searches for God.
This does not explain anything as it present an arbitrary set of data (who converts) as explained by another, as complex, arbitrary set of data (who is sincerely searching for God).
It is unfalsifiable, as no examples of people sincerely searching for God but not converting to that religion, can ever force the claimant to admit his error (since, for whoever did not convert, it is always possible to accuse him of not having sincerely searched for God).

We already saw some examples of unfalsifiable spiritual claims in Part I.

Let us see more examples of wrong reasonings.

The base principle of empiricism, also called inductive reasoning, is to infer some claims as being generally true out of their verification on observed cases.
For example, if we could see many ravens and found they were all black, we infer that all ravens are be black.
But this observation is progressive, so that

The observation of a black raven contributes to confirm that all ravens are black

Then, we can notice that an equivalent expression for "all ravens are black" is its contrapositive "all what is not black is not a raven". As this formulation has a similar form (A =>B) as the previous one, the same reasoning should be valid on it. The use of inductive reasoning to support this claim, is thus, for example

The observation of a white goat contributes to confirm that all ravens are black
(or, more generally, the observation of anything neither black nor a raven)

Now, spiritual people reading this might make fun of such a reasoning, seeing it as a mere crazy invention of people who think too much. Then, they would make the use of such an example to feed the same usual argument they usually raise with so many other examples, to argue that the use of human reason is invalid and misleads us, and that we should depart from it and convert to some spiritual ways, and rely on God (or any form of spiritual enlightenment) as the only reliable source of truth. Their argument is:

The observation of a human error, contributes to confirm that the only reliable truth is from God

(or: from "accomplished meditators" according to Buddhism, or any such equivalent in any other religion). But, how strong is this argument ? In fact, if we analyze in more details the reasons why the first case of inductive reasoning (observation of a black raven) is "more valid" than the second one (with a white goat), and apply these reasons to the third case, then this third case turns out to be no more valid than the second one.
More generally, spiritual people like to claim that "reason has limits". What does it mean ?
It is certainly true that science cannot solve every question. However, the existence of problems that science cannot solve (and we don't know which ones), which is arguably true, does not contradict the facts that:

1) The field of truths that reason can discover, is potentially infinite

2) The success of science for finding truths and its technological applications, is the living evidence that reason can success in finding a wide range of reliable truths very helpful to mankind

3) Scientific truths often happen to reach a maturity (once they are extensively confirmed, and mathematical theorems once proven) where they are extremely reliable (all risk of being mistaken is ruled out), while this reliability has nothing to do with any divine or other supernatural origin.
And ifever a mathematical proof might be suspected of containing a failure, there is now an available final solution to this risk: to check the proof with computer assistance (with an automated proof checking software). Computers are the only infallible beings under hand, that can provide us with absolutely reliable truths.

4) Despite the much larger number of people who explored spiritual paths, there has hardly been any evidence for the discovery of any general truth from any "mysterious" origin of any decent reliability (wrong teachings are widespread; if any genuine discovery occured, they are too scarce and not general enough to deserve any significant attention anyway) while rational abilities (in which I include common sense and any clear ordinary perception) can do much better works for such discoveries and checking.
In an overwhelming majority of cases, only local truths, with very limited interest (to the personal life of the people involved) could be obtained in "mysterious" ways; while more far-reaching claims made by "inspired" people, can be proven to be generally wrong (or at best meaningless), full of ridiculous nonsense (full of the flaws of spiritual teachings such as we already mentioned, and more aspects will be developed later).

The main claims of global truths that come from a sort of "not rational" way and that resist examination, are just a few: the couple of intuitions about the mind-matter duality, the existence of afterlife and that we should "be good"; but this is very poor information; it is given in a "natural" way, without effort, with no usefulness of any elaborate special searching method (except that, to those who did not spontaneously perceive this intuition, there is a chance to try to share it by a few arguments).
A few more global truth may be revealed during NDEs, but, as far as I know, they are very simple and limited too. This rejection of spiritual truth searching methods, is not a blind faith or dogma for rationalism, as factual evidence that "revelations" never went much further than this, will be presented later (part III).

As says a recent proverb : Insanity = to keep trying the same thing and expecting it to produce different result. In this sense, spiritual people are insane, insofar as they still pretend that the only way to change the world should be to keep following spiritual paths to "change oneself", while this has already been tried by billions of people for thousands of years, with no result yet (except a "change" in their personal life, which they took with them in their tomb); while science did change the world to a much larger extend with much smaller efforts.

5) More essential truths of fundamental importance for mankind are accessible to reason and just waiting for our initiative to make use of reason to reach them and let mankind benefit of them (we shall see examples later)

6) The abstract existence of problems that reason cannot solve, which is arguably true, does not inform us on which they are; there needs to be specific reasons for reliably claim that some specific examples of problems would be out of reach of a progress of knowledge by rational means. But problems that reason cannot solve are usually unimportant; Most useful problems can be solved, and if the possibility to solve a problem is not clear, the only way to try to discover whether or not reason can bring some knowledge to it, is usually... to try. 

7) Anyone who puts forward the claim that human reason has limits and may be fallible, as if it was an argument against it, is in fact dealing with nothing more than the limits of his personal rational abilities (and the usual ones of the fellow believers of the religion he tries to promote), which are very limited indeed, and which are anyway all the means he has for seeking any truth whatsoever (no matter if he pretends otherwise); such limits can be widely transcended by the rational abilities of other people.

In other words, putting forward "Reason has limits" as an argument against the use of reason, would be as stupid as :
- if the existence of optical illusions and the impossiblity to see through walls were a good reason for cutting our eyes off; 
- if the impossibity for transportation vehicles to go faster than light, was a good reason for going by foot, in case this might go faster.

A mathematician wrote the following joke, in a text on mathematical logics (and repeated it with slightly different words in another text). This is a variation of a logical enigma that, in French, is usually expressed as being about the "Baghdad Cuckolds", where every man is the only one to not know whether he is himself a cuckold, but must kill his wife at midnight ifever he discovers it. In English, the same logical enigma is rather expressed in other words.

The Houston cuckolds. They are only two, V. and W., they know everything concerning the other, and the fact that at least one among them is betrayed ; in fact there is only one cuckold, W. So W. knows that there is one cuckold, he knows that it is not V., but he draws no consequence, because he is. . . a bit slow. On the other hand, V. is very smart and made his PhD on the Baghdad cuckold ; he thinks "Gosh, if I were not a cuckold, W. would have concluded that it’s him and killed his wife". Therefore V. slays his innocent spouse ; morality, too much epistemic logic can damage your health.

This joke is interesting by the way it presents a concentration of several real sources of troubles:
- The wrong assumption that all people's rational abilities are the same
- The wrong assumption that all accessible truths of importance have been already accessed
- It may be profitable to be stupid, while it may be harmful to be clever
- An intelligent person may be a victim of the stupidity of someone else, especially if he is not aware of the difference of rationality levels between them.

All these troubles contribute to different aspects of the world's problems, in ways that we shall develop later.
In particular, they occur with Spirituality, in the following ways:
- Their democratic vision of the truth, that it should be accessible to everyone, so that nobody can claim to understand the truth better than what a large public came to beleive in, or that there would be no chance for more intelligent works to be ever more useful to the world than stupid ones.
- Their argument of the form "If there was any evidence against [my religion], it would be known" as a justification for not looking at any evidence against their religion ever presented to them; their blind assumption that apologists on their side have always been infallible beings (from their divine inspiration, but then rejecting any contrary example as irrelevant because Christians are mere humans making human errors that their holy Gospel is not responsible for) while people on the other side would have always been mistaken (just because they were humans); for example, to hold the story of Christian martyrs (that can as well have been distorted and not properly reported in context; the historical debate, including that the reason for killing Christians was not religious but their refusal of paying taxes, and atrocities made by Christians against non-Christians, can go far) as evidence for the truth of the Gospel, as if being put in front of a death penalty should have suddenly made Christians infallible beings in theological matters - what can we say about Muslim terrorist "martyrs then.
- To present their religion as true just based on the fact that it changed their life and brought them happiness, ignoring that this "advantage" can as well be the advantage of ignorance.
- To judge the virtue of their spirituality on the mere basis on what happiness it brought to them, ignoring how harmful to others their own spiritual behavior may have been.

More remarks and explanations about Christianity or other spiritualities will be developed in Part III.

Intelligence levels

Let us describe and explain in some more details the practical experience of how things are going on in science, what misunderstandings often occur about the nature of scientific understanding and its distance with the minds of less scientific people, and the troubles that this misunderstanding often creates during attempts of debates.

(My experience is about maths and physics, but most of this can apply to other sciences as well)
As already mentioned, the worlds of knowledge in mathematics and physics are so vast and wonderful, it's such a pity that not more people can understand and enjoy them. There are 2 causes for this trouble. One is institutional (the teaching system does not properly show the way). The other is natural: different people have different intelligence levels, and also different sorts of intelligence, oriented to different fields of interest (and for the society to work, it is indeed necessary to have a diversity of people with the different fields of interest that address different aspects of reality).

Now, once said that the issue of intelligence level is but one aspect of the big picture among others, we should not miss what it really contains.
As scientists are normally Thinkers rather than Feelers, it is not in their normal concern to deal with issues of personal comparison, and how intelligence levels can vary between people, despite the crucial importance of intelligence for the progress of scientific knowledge.
Moreover, intelligence is not something that can easily be measured and compared between people. Instead, the purpose of scientific research is to make discoveries and provide new understandings: for scientists, this is the very heart (value) of their intelligence (and similarly, for any job involving intelligence, the goal of intelligence is to properly do these jobs). As the point of a discovery is that it should be new rather than any automatic consquence of what was already known, done or classified before, it hardly makes any sense to compare them together, to say that the one is better than the other. It can even be argued that it would not be good to have all people with the highest skills, because such people would naturally come to compete for making the same kinds of discoveries, those of the hardest kinds of problems and pioneering the most far-reaching fields of knowledge, while so many basic necessary issues for the society would be left behind with nobody to deal with them, because they would be "not interesting enough" to deserve attention from the top thinkers.

There is a popular tool for lay people to try to measure and compare their intelligence: the IQ test.
A cricitism of this test was posted to the INTP forum:

"IQ tests are supposed to test your overall "potential". But I have found that they ask knowledge based questions too, which really do not test potential. Most INTP's don't like the test because time is factored into your score. The pressure makes us not perform to our full potential.
The tests online are also all bullshit. Don't bother taking them. The only online one even close to being "hard" is the one on the mensa website."

In other words, the IQ test can be used for somehow comparing intelligences among some majority of average people, but they cannot properly measure high levels of intelligence in the sense of what makes the true dignity of intelligence: its ability to resolve some hard, complex problem that humanity is facing (or not).
Now, without assistance from such fake "objective" tools, what can we say about intelligence levels ?
It turns out that the discrepancy of intelligence levels between different people, both between scientists and non-scientists and among scientists of a given domain (maths or physics), is litterally tremendous. Well, somehow people know this. Precisely, they know that science is "not for them", then reject it as an alien thing, something for strange, odd people.

A large majority of people are so far from any decent use of reason with respect to a number of non-trivial issues, especially if they are sticked to wrong views by some sentimental or ideological influence, that the properly rational understanding of these subjects is hopelessly out of reach for them.

Normally, among the small minority of civilized, maturely rational people who have the wisdom to know their own limits and the diversity of intelligence levels, this diversity does not create troubles: they have no problem to admit the possibilty for someone else to master a given subject better than themself. For example, I have no problem with the fact that some scientists can be much more clever than myself. When I hear people speak about a very high-level theory which I have no clue of, I can admit the possibility of its making sense from the way they tell about it. I consider this admirable even if it is "not for me" (sometimes because I cannot dedicate enough time for it, sometimes because it is really so hard as compared with my abilities).
Other times I happened to read some of such high-level works; and while there was not much of it I could really follow, it already made me feel amazed at how high these concepts are. Examples of amazing things I could have a glimpse of but I could not really understand:
- In physics: quantum field theory and supersymmetry
- In logics: I could already master some good points, but there are still quite higher things like "forcing", which I did not follow...
- In algebraic topology: Milnor's work, K-theory...

Globally, despite the fuzziness of the subject, and if we consider intelligence in terms of global efficiency for properly dealing with complex realities (thus, integrating the effects of natural intelligence, training, knowing the relevant information, and some wisdom or chance to know how to use intelligence in the best way), I think we can say without exaggeration that:
- The average of scientists (as well as some other people, like businessmen and other highly skilled professionals) is about 10 times more intelligent than the global average of the population
- The few top scientists can be about 10 times more intelligent than the average of scientists.
(with all possible intermediate levels between these, without any special separation of any group from others)

Don't misunderstand the claim here: this hierarchy only concerns a specific measure of comparison, which is about a specific type of human ability among others, the ability of discerning the truth on difficult, complex issues. Even this very concept is ambiguous as each person can have varying abilities between issues to understand (the same person can be clever in one field and ignorant in other fields); and diverse other kinds of human activities have their own worthy values too, such as art (see the different MBTI types that gives an sketch of the possible diversity of human abilities). So many diverse human abilities are necessary and complementary to form an harmonious world.

When debates go wrong

The problem comes when not maturely rational people enter (or worse, invade) the scene of the debate. That is, people who don't have the wisdom and/or ability to discern and acknowledge:
1) their own limits, i.e. their irrationality (as explained above in the "irrationality" section), their unability to properly understand a given problem which they want to judge
and/or
2) that some other people may be more qualified and able to access (or have already accessed) the truth on that subject

Especially, some people have a prejudice that they have the right to judge ideas as true according to how "simple" they seem. While it is true that an understanding which is not "clear" is usually not an accurate and satisfying understanding, and a clear and unifying view is usually a better success if only it is a true one, this forgets that:
- The truth has no duty to satisfy this criteria just to please us. Its duty is to be true, no more, no less.
- More complex truths can be mastered by some more clever people as clearly as less complex ones
- The similarity to everyday habbits and concepts that a majority of people are familar with (or the conformity to a conditioned way of thinking religiously learned for years), is no true criteria for simplicity either; very different concepts from the everyday ones, can be developed and become familiar, and thus simple, for scientists as well.

Generally, I have an experience of tries of debate with "normal people" on complex issues, either political or religious; and I observed that they are far from the necessary intelligence level for having a chance to properly understand and reach a reliable conclusion these subjects; still, they can't tolerate to not stand as judges for these subjects (or, at least, to not have as much "right" to do so as anyone else). Therefore, they cannot either tolerate any claim by someone else to know the subject better than them: they would see such a claim as automatically hubristic and insulting (no matter that these other views may be the mere truth, since they cannot tolerate such a possibilty anyway).

Still, they would usually not be visibly dogmatic or refusing rational debate (as such an attitude would be too easy to defeat and thus would be quickly resolved). Instead, they would often be requesting a "rational argument" why they would be wrong, and why the other would be right. The problem is that the missing elements of understanding, that the other would need to bring as a justification for making things clear, may happen to be too complex and subtle to be explained and shared in such a way and such a short enough amount of effort to be affordable by both sides and with decent enough chances of success. The result of the situation, is that the one who knows the subject, and who knows that the debate is hopeless, will be likely to give up.
And he may be right to do so, because anyway, no matter whether or not he keeps trying to explain the situation, the other will have no chance to understand it, but will keep the impression that the other has "no rational argument" for the defense of his position.
Indeed, what's the point to keep working on a debate if the goal (to let the other understand one's point) turns out to be hopeless anyway ?
So, it may be a mere fact, observed by the rational person, that there is no solution to the satisfaction of the ignorants, that is, to let them understand the truth as easily as they are requesting with their low intelligence level or other circumstances. Then, the problem develops when the ignorants are replying with accusations of pride, dogmatism or other foolishness, because, no matter how sincere they are or whatever anyone tries, they have no available means to interpret the situation otherwise.

So, the rational person will have to notice how unfair and hopeless is the debate (even though nobody ever willingly decided to make it so), and that the only expectable result of keeping tries at understanding each other, will instead be to exchange insults and negative judgements to each other over and over again. The next "problem" is that few are the rational people that may be fond of investing a lot of efforts in an activity that consists in navigating in a desperate mess of errors, and whose only expectable fruits will be to exchange a lot of insults and negative judgements with someone : to be perpetually despised for the "fault" of lucidity, and to have to fight back in a way that will fatally have to be disaffirming to the other (who strongly believes to be on the right track and invest all his person there too).

As the rational person cannot fail to notice that the other's irrationality is a major hindrance to the chance for the debate to progress, making it hopeless, how could he pretend otherwise, as if the other (or the course of the debate) was on the right track ? To be honest, he can hardly fail to mention the real nature of this obstacle, that is, the other's irrationality. But, the irrational person will fatally perceive this as an insult and an ad hominem argument, and will misinterpret the attitude of the rational person as a dogmatic, hubristic and insulting attitude with no rational basis. And indeed, there are good reasons for the rational person to be angry or harsch in such a situation. What else should he do ? Say amen to a process of pseudo-debate that will necessarily leave the irrational participants to reinforce their own errors and mock the rational view as stupid and undefensible ? Anyway, as this foolishness cannot be stopped anyway, the least evil solution can be for the rational person to just drop off and leave the irrational people alone in their errors, in order to keep his energy for more serious matters; and getting angry can be a good way to reach that point. And if the irrational people will interpret this angriness as a sign of irrationality, and use it to reinforce themselves in their view, then... it's their problem anyway.
Some people consider that a way to protest against the conditions of a vote, that they see as not really democratic, is to boycott it. I won't try to argue on this solution (which I'd rather be skeptical of, while it may depend on cases); but I observe a similar situation concerning debates in irrational circles: it is a fact that rational people may have to boycott some sorts of "debates" that do not let a chance for the truth to be understood and accepted.

Example of a situation I once experienced in a web forum:
1) I write an introduction to my ideas, and refer to my site for the necessary details
2) As these necessary details are very long, and the serious participants need time to read them to have a chance to know what it is about, thus these serious people are not writing any reply in a first time
3) Instead, reactions are coming from stupid people who decide to judge the issue without caring to read what it is about
4) I can't help from writing a reply, mentioning how stupid is this reply
5) The dispute goes on, while the people keep replying in a way that totally ignores what is the depth of the ideas witten in the site, but imagine something else instead (some favorite stupid cliché). They assumed that there would be nothing worth understanding about my ideas outside the usual caricature from their imagination. Because they did not expect the presence of any deep idea worth understanding (otherwise they would be taking their time reading it, instead of reacting so quickly).
6) The way the debate goes on with exchange of insults, disconnected from any deep idea, really gives the impression to everybody, that this is the whole debate going on, and that there is no more idea worth reading and caring to understand than what is being written and exchanged in the replies, before drawing conclusions.

In similar lines, Bertrand Russel wrote "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubt".
(But, while this is a possible phenomenon that can cause troubles, it cannot be used as a reliable criteria for wisdom either.)

Also, many people are interested with ideas they can easily understand (which are already familiar to them), but won't bother studying and understanding (and thus will naturally reject) any new idea that require any thinking effort - except, of course, if it is in their curriculum and requested for their exam.

The result of this situation, is that, in a world full of irrational people, the misfortune of being sane enough to know a subject better than those people and to be aware of this situation, turns out to be condemned as a sin (of hubris) that needs to be cured; and if someone does not "want" to "cure" this sin (just like if someone would "refuse" to stay "open" the possibility that 2+2=5), then it is condemned as a mortal sin.

Thus:

In a sane environment, that is, surrounded with peer maturely rational people, a rational person is free to live in peace and debate with others according to his deep nature, that is, in a rational, civilized, open-minded way, participating to opportunities of constructive, rational debates whenever the opportunity appears (which may not be very often because of the hyperspecialization by which, not many researchers can have a lot of peers working on close enough subject for having any common interests and ideas worth exchanging).

This is the famous Ivory Tower of Science, which is the necessary means to ensure to scientists a peaceful and constructive intellectual life where the quest for truth has its full opportunities of progression, protected from any harrassment from the unstoppable Forces of Irrationality that reign in many places outside it.

On the other side, in these much more widespread and very popular other places dominated by the Forces of Irrationality, the expression "critical mind" is defined to mean "questioning the dogma of 2+2=4"; "open-mindedness" means an enthousiam in examining large treaties of tens or hundreds of pages developing wordviews where 2+2 may be equal to 5, 9 or 13 (this is no exaggeration: I did read one blogger wanting to offer a new arithmetic rule where (-1).(-1)=-1 just to save us from the need to bother with complex numbers); and many more paradigm shifts are explored, such as visions of a future when mankind would have finally discovered that the Earth is flat and steady at the center of the Universe, or where pink elephants would routinely fly and thus become the main transportation means for the Third Millenium.

Such thought environments would be dangerous for the intellectual life of the true scientists, quickly transforming them into hardcore intolerant, hubristic dogmatists. But, as most of them don't naturally like to be any intolerant, hubristic dogmatists, this will naturally lead them to settle and keep developing their intellectual life in the safer, more peaceful environment of this fine and magnificent Ivory Tower of Science, moreover made quite more interesting by the abundance of magnificent intellectual treasures that their predecessors had the chance to discover, gather and expose there.

Let's illustrate some aspect of the situation through a metaphor. Imagine a mountain guide who has a large experience visiting a mountain region. He knows well all the paths in this region, all the best ways to reach the different summits, with the difficuties and risks in each path. He knows that many of summits in this mountain are quite hard to reach, and require a lot of skills, strength and training. He also has experience in guiding there many strong and healthy tourists who are used to running and climbing a lot, as they already made running and climbing visits to other mountains, and are now willing to pay a first visit to this one.
Then, imagine a paralyzed, epileptic person who ususally cannot manage to properly go to the toilet by himself, who hears this guide talk about these mountains, paths and summits, and does not believe what the guide is telling about his experience of the mountain. So, he replies to the guide by this request: "If you are really a good guide knowing the mountain and how to go reach the summits as you say, prove me that the mountain is really as you describe ! Bring me there !".
Then, what do you think this guide should do in reply ? Should he take this man and try to carry him on his back, up to these difficult summits ? Twenty meters further, the man will have an epilectic crisis, that will make him kick the guide and fall down on the floor, then accuse him of having taken him to the wrong direction because the summits were not reached yet.
Thus, the guide will have to give up and refuse trying anything more; so that the epileptic man will accuse the guide of telling lies and not really knowing the mountain, for lack of any credible means to figure out how things could be otherwise.

So: science is about crossing large distances in the world of knowledge without error. This world has many paths, and each scientist only knows a small region as compared to the whole set of what has already been explored, which would be much too big for a single person to completely visit (though some can visit more of it than others). Some errors can happen to be committed on the way, first by students, then still sometimes by reasearchers (fewer, or only because larger distances are crossed); then, other people may care to track any error that may have occured, in order to correct them until, hopefully, a path will be found and checked without error. As long as someone is good enough to manage well and not make more than a few errors on the way, others will be willing to help to track and correct these few errors that could be made, in hope to reach a conclusion that will be reliable, without error (even if there remains a small risk of presence of a remaining error : the point is that any remaining error would hopefully be detected and then fixed thanks to some next wise person that will check the way once more).
But, if there is just hardly anything right in the way someone goes, or if someone can only make a much smaller way than the one necessary to reach some chosen goal, then others will give up trying to help, because there would be anyway no hope to reach a decent result (a fully correct way to the chosen goal).

You could sum up this by considering the world of knowledge as a sort of capitalist world where only those who already have, will receive the assistance of others to get more. This may be felt as regrettable, but the truth does not care about efforts and justice. To reach a reasonably reliable knowledge about a large complex problem, reducing the number of errors that the conclusion is based on, would be worthless. The only meaningful effort is for the purpose of completely eliminating them all. As long as the fulfilment of this goal cannot reasonably be expected, there is no reason trying to start debating and pointing out this or that error either.
Still, there can be other sorts of hope and purpose learning and doing rational work. Beginners need to start with simple problems, to work on perfecting themselves and eliminating all their errors on simple, short paths, before risking themselves on longer, harder paths.

Let me explain how it feels like, for a rational person, to be faced with fallacious doctrines full of errors and nonsense, and having to deal with them through an obligation to try to explain things and convince some supporters of these fallacious doctrines. It feels like being jailed in place full of a very bad smell, with no hope to get rid of this smell. Then, guess what: it is everything for making someone angry. And people around insisting that "What problem do you have with this smell ? this is a very good smell !" will not help.

In such conditions, the irrational people have an easy game misleading themselves, by dismissing the view of the rational person as an expression of a bad character. They would be missing the fact that, if their view is rejected as utter nonsense, it is not the fault of the lucid person who noticed that it is utter nonsense, but the fault of the promoters of nonsense who are bringing their nonsense, which is an insult to truth and reason. It is (somehow) their fault if they are claiming nonsense and bringing ignorance, chaos and misunderstanding to the world; it is not the fault of the truth if their nonsense is nonsense. If they don't want to be condemned, mocked or ignored by rational people, it's just up to them to stop promoting nonsense and defending the indefensible. If only they stopped promoting nonsense, then this would release rational people from the necessity to get angry and to oppose them in this way, so that there would not be such disputes anymore.

So: irrational people may complain that rational people seem to have "no reason" in support of their position, as eventual tries of explanations could not be satisfyingly "convincing", as intelligence is personal and cannot always be shared that way.
If the irrational person says something and asks an answer from the rational person, the rational person will naturally be tempted to reply by saying the truth on the considered point as he sees it. The problem is that this element of truth will not be convincing, because many other elements of understanding are missing in the irrational person, for the understanding of this reply with all its justifications. So he won't be able to accept this reply as a rational one, but will interpret it as nonsense, dogmatic, unclear, or of any other irrational character(s). But, what else could the rational person do, to have a chance of being accepted ? Pretend that things are otherwise, and enter a long strategy of adapting to the mind of the irrational person to lead to a conclusion that remains acceptable ? Such strategic developments of how to convince an irrational person who cannot directly understand the truth, by not directly telling it, are the art of liars: how to navigate errors and irrationality towards a given conclusion.

Instead, the interest of rational truth-seekers is to focus on the truth (its proper understanding and justifications) and nothing else. They are not interested to navigate in the psychology of strong irrationality. Managing desperate cases of people lost in a labyrinth of errors, and/or who don't have the abilities to follow the proper understanding of some chosen aspect of reality in the way it really is, is not a normal interest of rational truth-seekers. Rather, it is something disgusting for them, because it is a desperate hell of nonsense and ignorance, an accident and a plague of nature which should rather not exist in the first place, and from which it is so hard to escape.

The rise of crackpots

So, it happens for many people to develop irrational views on scientific subjects, in a way cut off from science, and hopelessly unable of dialogue with scientists. For these people, all things looks as if their position was the only possibly rational one, while the scientific one was irrational. Their vision of the current state of science is reduced to some shadow of it, some popularized version of some pieces of information and conclusions that science could obtain.
They properly noticed that what they heard from science was not satisfying (because indeed it is not the full understanding of it). Then, they assume that it is a defect of science (as they have no means to interpret it otherwise), and they will dedicate their efforts to "solve the defects" in science, by reasoning on these defects and developing their own ideas and interpretations. So, they develop ideas that seem to them clearer than the (incomplete) account of science as they could see it. And they think that, in this way, they are making scientific discoveries beyond the knowledge of actual scientists. So they dedicate a lot of time to write their "theories", and try to let them known, sending them to as many scientists as they can, expecting from them careful attention and approbation, and accusing scientists of dogmatism and close-mindedness whenever this does not happen (that is, necessarily always).

In some scientific forum in French, there was such a discussion, when an astrophysicist quickly rejected a crackpot's view, then was accused of dogmatism in return. He then explained:

"By being so brief in my negative comment, I may have seemed arrogant or contemptuous, which is no way the case. But please understand that professional scientists receive, several times a week, whole files of amateur scientists (fine activity in itself) that claim, by two handfuls of Newtonian equations, to question one century of fundamental physics (relativity, quantum mechanics). And they think that the scientific "establishment" is thick-headed by not answering or by not being interested in what they do. It's very easy: let them send their theories to international scientific journals with referees, where their articles will be read, discussed, criticized or accepted ! I don't deny the existence of biases in the judgement of "peers"; I found lamentable the attitude of the medical establishment towards the "water memory" by J. Benveniste. But in "hard" sciences, the criteria of judgement are more objective."

Another example of a comment about crackpots
 
For each idea or theory that first happened to be rejected as crackpot but finally turned out to be true, there are hundreds or even thousands of other crackpot ideas that it is right to reject as crackpot because this is what they really are, in a more or less obvious way from a scientist's viewpoint, which lay people may not be able to understand. But you may not be familiar with this overwhelming presence of crackpot ideas that were rejected by scientists for very good reasons, because... precisely this made them unworthy of being recorded in history.
Indeed many people (an overwhelming majority of "people who care about the truth") are irrational : they cannot stop judging subjects that are important to them while they don't have the means to properly understand them. Thus, they will dedicate their life to promoting their "truth" about these subjects, and therefore bothering (persecuting) with their errors, whatever other voice that they would see talking about the same subject. 

In a way, the act of writing such stupid views and trying to let them known, can be seen as spam. Because it is just wasteful, misleading and/or bothering people (even if claiming to be otherwise, even sincerely). And even if such a qualification as "spam" could be seen abusive if considered as a work of only one person developing and sending wrong ideas to a few other people, it becomes very real once many people are doing the same. Indeed, if any recipient accepted to bother being polite and caring for one person's foolishness putting forward a foolish idea, where should the limit be put when the same or similar foolishness is practiced by thousands ?
Under such a persecution, reason and truth would have no chance to survive.
One life would never suffice to reply to them one by one. This behaves like spam, therefore it has to be treated, that is, ignored, as such.

It is right for them, when they see BS, to censor and ignore it rather than try to debunk it, because they consider the debunking work to be a pure waste of time, for 4 excellent reasons:

  1. For any sane other rational person (scientist), the fact this "alternative" idea is BS, is self-evident and does not need any explanation
  2. For the others, unable to see it by themselves (which may as well include over 99% of humans on this planet), no work of debunking, however clear and true, will ever suffice, because they are stupid and irrational anyway, and won't be able to discern the validity of any genuine argument that may be presented to them. Attempts at debate would lead them to mistake the scientist who would dare sacrificing his time trying to explain his reasons and debunking BS, for a stupid irrational and dogmatic person, which would be a very unfortunate illusion that the scientist wishes to limit by the method of silence.
  3. The explanations why it is BS, may be much too complex and too hard to explain in any reasonable amount of time. These crackpot authors are just scientifically illiterate, so that it is up to them to go to study and understand science if they can, or find another job otherwise, but scientists cannot help.
  4. Once a crackpot author would be debunked, he will automatically be replaced by another crackpot author with a "completely different" idea that will feel unconcerned with the previous debunking, so that the debunking work was vain and the problem comes back to the same point it started with.

Scientists cannot afford to pay significant attention to fringe ideas, to try to debunk them, or to give them a right of speech in their working space: their working space would be full of hundreds of nonsense for one truth, so that the voice of truth would have no chance to be heard anymore, and their quest for truth would be doomed to remain sterile. There could never have been a progress of scientific knowledge in such conditions.
Instead, censoring them out of their working space (ignoring them, stopping to read them after a few lines that smell like bullshit), is a matter of survival for the chances of their work to ever be "free" and productive for the development of more effective truth research and applications.
Cleansing their working space from any BS, is a normal "intellectual hygiene" practice that they need to follow, and which they expect fellow "worthy debaters" to respect as well.

What made it possible for reason and science to work and make a real progress to a scientific understanding of the world, was the presence, in a way or another, of a huge antispam system protecting the minds of scientists from the harassment of unreason.

One of the main usual antispam solutions has been to flee the common subjects of interest of irrational people, and take refuge far away, in more or less hyperspecialized subjects that don't attract such interest, where the wrong people won't come to bother.
Other solutions are the peer review process, and the administrative and professional selectivity, where scientists will only talk with collegues that have been previously selected by some institutions for their scientific abilities. But these are not always reliable, as we shall see later.

Typical Examples of cranky claims

1) "I discovered a new idea !"

Let's describe the situation by another metaphor.

Imagine a child on a beach, or some handicaped person that cannot go far, but remained all his life on the same segment of a beach. One day he discovers a shell there (metaphor for some idea). He is amazed: he never saw such a thing. Then he decides to dedicate the rest of his life claiming to anyone, up to trying to call the U.S. president about it : "See what I found ! Isn't this wonderful ? Maybe it is worth millions ! Maybe the secrets of the oceans can be found there !" and so on. This is understandable, isn't it ? One has only one life (as it may seem), and hopes that it makes sense. If the tip of one's life seems to be the discovery of this shell, then it would be so awful if it had no value.
But while , before examination, it might not be absolutely impossible, for this new shell to be special and a potential source of a breakthrough, the problem is that geologists already examined millions of shells a priori comparable to that one worldwide, among the billions of shells one can find; that some of them proved to be very interesting but there is no hint why precisely this one just would have something special; moreover, an expert's eye may have already found this out very quickly, much more quickly than this child who spent a lot of time focusing on it, so that the accusation of not having properly checked it before dismissing it, may just be untrue. Otherwise, the specific circumstances that led this child to find this shell and try to tell everybody about it, are not a relevant hint for its worthiness. Each specialist or research team, according to their research projects, have their own ways to orient and select the places to explore; these methods may have qualities and defects, but are probably better than a search at random or depending on the presence of such a person there to find it and have nothing else to make a sense of their life with. Namely, they have their submarines and travels to faraway places, that amateurs could not access, and that could lead to the most successful findings.

Moreover, about his new idea, the author will claim: "I proved that this idea is possible". But what he only proved in fact, is that he does not have the necessary knowledge to understand why it is not.
Still, from this "proof of possibility" he is strongly certain his idea is worthy of consideration and has a chance to be true. The problem is that, the certainty of the "maybe" is a certainty that may be relatively absolute, but this cannot prevent it from possibly being absolutely relative.
But it is not possible to provide him in reply the necessary knowledge to show him why his idea cannot hold. This can require a whole study of a lot of things. Several years of study are usually required to become a scientist. While this use of time in academia is not always as efficient as it could (we shall discuss this later), anyway a few minutes or even hours of explanations has hardly any chance to suffice to replace it, when hard subjects are involved that are usually reserved for higher study levels.
So, if he wants to understand why his idea is not possible, it's up to him to start studying the subject. This may take him months or even years, but that's his problem and duty if he wants to be serious about finding out what his idea is really worth. It is not the duty of scientists to pretend that the idea is right by ignoring what they know, if no other attitude can ever seem fair from that person's viewpoint in such conditions.

2) A crank can dismiss requests calling him to go to learn already established knowledge, because:

- he thinks he already studied the subject... but based on the wrong litterature. Usually, this is a litterature of popularization, rather than of science itself, and the person missed the fact that this is very different, and that popularization works are very insufficient, far from the real understanding of the established scientific knowledge.
That may be written by
- He may assume that he already knows what he needs from current science, that is "the ideas", while the deeper study of the mathematical contents would be irrelevant complications and technical details far from "the ideas"; this attitude can be wrong and cut him off from true knowledge.

- He may think that it is not his job to see how his ideas should be mathematically formulated or connected with the main body of scientific knowledge, so that he expects someone else to take his ideas and operate the work of formalizing them and connecting them to current knowledge; the problem is that when a scientist knows that the current body of knowledge already shows that this idea is invalid or worthless, the author will never tolerate this reply.

- Otherwise, if he can't study the subject for a reason or another... maybe what he really needs is a brain transplant to give him the missing elements of understanding ? Then sorry, this cannot be obtained by mere arguing.

3) The claim that one's own ideas are clearer than others'. The problem is that, by nature, everyone always feels one's own ideas as clearer than others', because otherwise... one's opinion would have already changed.

4) Some make abusive accumulations of quotations or other grandiloquent references of thinkers of high reputation in a way or another. And just by quoting them and approving them, one assumes this ensures to be on the same side, protected by their autority or reputation: assuming one is right and everbody must agree, just by agreeing on something with a reputed person that nobody can criticize either. But there are 2 problems here:
First, not all "reputed thinkers" agree, thus not all are necessarily right. Some can have based their reputation on the public's credulity and stupidity, while their teaching was wrong. Referring to such people and quoting them, does not ensure to be on the right track.
Second, the claim of being on the side of a "thinker" that one refers to, can be abusive; this famous thinker (usually already dead) is not here able to confirm or dismiss the interpretation of his words, and to generally approve or disapprove the whole position held by the people who quote them.
But... for those who like quotations, who think that they are right because they make a lot of quotations, while my ideas here would be wrong because I seem isolated and in disagreement with big thinkers that I don't enough refer to, here are some quotations from two famous scientists:

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Albert Einstein

"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this." ; 
"Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
Bertrand Russel

Now, let me explain my own attitude: when I make quotations, even from famous people, I don't mean that it must be true just because they say so. It's just a matter of illustration, that I'm not the only one claiming something, someone else already had that idea or observed that thing. I don't mean to use it as an authority. I may quote a claim by someone but disagree with him on other issues. So I don't mean to avoid responsibility for a claim just by quoting someone that says it.

A famous list of typical cranky claims has been written by the physicist John Baez, the "crackpot index". Examples from this list:

2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.

5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).

10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).

10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity.

10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.

10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".

10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.

10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".

10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".

20 points for talking about how great your theory is, but never actually explaining it 

This reminds me of spiritual teachings that spend their time repeating about the importance of their divine guidance, direct access to Reality or to the Ultimate Truth that would solve every problem, but not explaining what it is, is there any realiable way to it (or to obey it) and which one, and why would it change things in the announced way, with effective examples of fruits or truths that ever resulted or could be discovered from it (some claim to be witnesses of some sorts of miracles or other wonderful fruits; this will be discussed later)

50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.

Let's end with a last example :
The claim that a subject is not scientifically resolved yet but still a subject of controversy, while in fact it is not (or much less), because, either:

The risk for a science to be fake or of low quality 

A crackpot practice that grows big (a field of so-called knowledge that develops irrationally) takes some appearances of science, thus the name of pseudoscience.

When a public debate happens between a scientific view, and an opposed pseudoscientific one such as creationism or climato-skepticism, a naive public unfamiliar with the subtleties of science and with the existing body of knowledge, watching the debate, may be efficiently mislead into giving more credit to the pseudoscientific view: it can seem more rational (open-minded, critical-minded, rationally justified...) than the scientific view itself. This is because of the ignorance of the public, which makes it naturally closer to the pseudoscientific view also based on ignorance.

Indeed, the pseudoscientific view is precisely developed in such a way as to make the best illusion of scientificity from an ignorant viewpoint. Being based on ignorance, convincing the ignorants is the only purpose of the pseudoscientific view, and therefore it can be the best at it; while the scientific view is not free to say what is most convincing to the public, because of its duty to only say the truth. This duty is a possible source of "weakness" in debates, that may bring discredit to it in public opinion.

Is there any chance for the public to become wiser in discerning science from pseudo-science ? Somehow yes, by informing them on some of the subtleties of sciences, in contrast with the current usual unawareness on this issue. Still, I strongly doubt the possiblity for such an awarness to reach a satisfying degree of reliability. This is because, in order to really make a wise and reliable discernment, the public would need to become scientists themselves (thus, mastering the existing body of knowledge and getting intelligent critical thinking abilities), which they are not.

The difference between reason and irrationality is real and objective, but this is so only from an abstract viewpoint that would integrate all elements of understanding of all participants. The problem is that such a viewpoint is not the one usually accessed in practice by a third party that cannot read the minds of the participants but only has access to the words exchanged in the debate. Usually, debates are quite limited in time (a few minutes or hours), and thus in number of words. The words that can be exchanged there are usually limited and very poor compared to the full views that participants had developed years long before, and which they can base their claims on. So, a third party observing the debate without all this experience, will have very poor means to understand the depths of the issues, and can be as well driven to the wrong conclusion.

We can even say that, somehow the situation is rather symmetrical: the irrational person is somehow "rational" in himself. Because irrationality is not an essence, but a discrepancy of a view or a way of searching for the truth, with what the outside reality is, and with the methods that would be required to discover it. The irrational's view may be somehow more "rational" if it happened the same in a world that would comply to it, and if there were in human mind some possible foolishess processes that could produce these claims actually supported by the rational person, without them being true. The problem is: how plausible would such a world be ? In fact, many people do not care how mad such worldviews can be (as they don't examine that in details). Especially, some trends of fundamentalist Christianity have no problem to explain away any opposite view as a work of a sort of almighty Devil that can fool everybody (except oneself) to any tremendous extents.

Thus, much of the characters of the opposition between rationality and irrationality as we described them, if taken as criteria to try to distinguish who is rational and who is not, while they can work in some easy cases, may turn out to be insufficient in more tricky ones, if tried by people who don't have the necessary knowledge and intelligence.

For example, if the problem is that the irrational person does not understand the other view and does not make proper efforts for it, we can notice that the rational person would behave the same: he won't take much effort to know a lot of the other side, because he already has very good reasons why it would be pointless, just like it is pointless to go and read a book that aims to prove that 2+2=5, to find out whether that proof can be correct or not. So, it can be rational to ignore the details of the other view. Thus, for the other side... it can be very "rational in itself" to ignore the rational view as well. It is "rational in itself" but not rational in reality, because rationality is not an essence, but an extrinsic property of a view or an attitude: the property of fitting with the outside world.

You may ask : in such conditions, how can the rational person really know that he is rational ?
Well... this is a long story.
A lot of intelligence and careful work can be necessary to reach true reliability. This is precisely why science is not a work for amateurs nor for everybody.
Those who don't have the necessary skills and experience in this field, can be completely lost.
This is the case of many philosophers, who considered the question whether there is a criteria to distinguish what is scientific and what is not. Some relatively simple criteria may work in relatively simple cases. This is how Karl Popper noticed that scientific knowledge about our universe is often characterized by its falsifiability (the logical possibility for a given theory to be refuted by facts), while many irrational (pseudoscientific) views did not have this character. So, he proposed to take this a criteria.
But then another philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, discovered that this does clearly not apply to all cases. He then concluded that, during the emergence of a scientific consensus (about what is scientifically valid or not) that he could not explain after any simple and obvious criteria, that this consensus would be nothing more than an unjustified social phenomenon, a sort of democratic choice of belief among scientists or something like this.
But he is missing the fact that this relativity (undefinability, subjectivity) of reason and science, may be all what philosophers traditionally have access to, but it is only a superficial one. For scientists, really involved in the depths of the debates and arguments, things may be clear and conclusions may be reliable.

Then, in practice, how is it possible to find out whether a work is rational or not ?
The now widespread solution is peer review: the author should send it to a journal, that will forward it more or less at random to a reviewer, that is someone with the necessary skills and knowledg in the concerned field of research, for being able to properly examine the article and criticize it in relevant ways.
This aims to ensure an assessment that will not be influenced by the diplomas or reputation of the author of the article. Then, the reputation and academic position of scientists will be based on their production of works that would have been objectively recognized and published in such ways.

So, this method aims to be objective through anonimity procedures. It does not depend on the reputation and position of the author. Still, to make sense, it cannot be completely anonymous and impersonal, as it has to select its reviewers among scientists known for their skills and competence in that field. It cannot rely on incompetent, lay people chosen at random from the street, for doing the review, even if these would have convictions to express on the subject.

But for all this to work, it requires to assume that this selection of competent scientists for doing the review, was the right one. This selection was based on their reputation, which came from the previous acceptation of their own articles in peer review journals. So: if peer reviewers in a given scientific field were competent and properly rational during one generation, then there are high chances for this fortunate situation to be preserved to the next generation in that field.

But, what if they were not ? Then, there are high risks for this unfortunate situation to last long too.
Thus, the success of the peer review system for ensuring a high rationality level in some successful scientific field, does not mean that doing the same in other fields could ever suffice to ensure rationality levels to be similarly high there too.

And this risk is real. I will further mention specific examples of fields of study where full rationality is currently not in force, but irrational ideologies dominate instead, making it quite hard and desperate for true rationality standards to ever come up as long as institutional continuity is preserved.
The peer-review system is but an example  of a more general natural process that preserves the level of rationality or crankiness in a field, and that roughly consists in the fact that similar-minded people naturally forms groups, while dissimilar or disagreeing people naturally reject each other.

Still, such a difference between rational and irrational states of diverse fields, should not be taken in any essentialist sense either. There are possible intermediate situations, with doctrines that are somehow true but not with the depth, completeness or accuracy that could be reached with higher scientific professionalism. Also, situations can be mixed, letting some more rational views be developed aside less rational ones as a diversity of schools in the same fields.

As the Wikipedia article defines it, the name "pseudoscience" is usually restricted to irrational movements that wrongly claim to be scientific. However, I consider this criteria of whether a doctrine claims to follow the scientific method or to reject it, to be irrelevant. Instead, I'd include any movement that focuses on claims of "truth" and "knowledge", thus including most religions. Indeed, even inside a given religion, some movements claim their religion to be rationally justified and in agreement with science, while others claim to reject reason in the name of the same religion, and not much practical difference can be found between these two opposite trends. Anyway, both are ignoring the fact that much of the claims of their religion is in the reach of scientific inquiry (logical and/or observational), and refutable by it, as we shall develop later.

Now, while the rationality level of an individual view inside a given field of knowledge where scientific rationality is in force, can easily be assessed by peer review, it leaves unclear the question how to assess the rationality level of a whole field that includes the readily available "peers". This problem can turn out to be very tough.

Still, once big, there are some other possible hints to assess the rationality level of a discipline, even if they are not always reliable, such as:
- How fruitful it is ? could it discover any important and useful solutions for mankind, such as new technologies ?
- Does it progress towards more accurate knowledge and clearer evidence to support it ?
- Does it progress towards consensus on every specific issue that it is studying (a consensus may be towards either a conclusion or an acknowledgement that the issue is not resolved yet), or on the contrary, does it face long-lasting internal divisions between similar communities of belief that disagree on common questions, whose divisions can only be limited by some form of dictatorship ?

For example, in physics, there is only one theory of gravitation accepted as our established understanding of gravitation, that is general relativity; the classical Newton's theory of gravitation is still used as an approximation in many practical cases, without this being a disagreement. But every big religion has faced divisions into disagreeing movements: Judaism gave birth to Christianity and Islam; Christianity faced a proliferation of heresies at its birth, and divided into many denominations; Islam divides into Sunni, Shia, Sufism and others, as well as a diversity of national and individual interpretations and practices. Further divisions of religions was limited, at least by the common acceptance of a Holy Book that cannot be modified and that must be taken as the ultimate truth reference for being a member of the group; and sometimes also by some hierarchical structure with a leader defining what everyone must think.  How can a view be the absolute and reliable Truth, if it is either arbitrarily fixed (just as another option could have been chosen instead), or similar with other variations that also claim to be the Truth by similar methods ? How can it claim to be of importance if it does not bring any observable and undeniable benefits to mankind ?

In science, there is no leader; after a theory was discovered, it is usually rewritten, reexplained and developed by different authors, to no more depend on the specific approach and presentation made by the discoverer, while naturally (rather than dogmatically) keeping agreement among versions and with the previous discoveries (except of course if the information initially suffered of being inaccurate, but corrections are then accepted and do not give rise to long-standing disagreements). For example, astronomers and geologist naturally came to agree on the age of the Earth from different methods.

There has never been several coexisting ideologies which were altogether undeniable ways to truth or progress, and in clear conflict against each other.

(This is expectable, as the Universe is a consistent whole with many aspects but no contradictions; so the genuine understandings of its parts should not contradict each other either).

Looking for exceptions, I can just remember about Gandhi's non-violence method for the independance of India - but this is a very simple principle, not disagreeing with science by itself, not an elaborate or mystical research, it only opposed colonialism and not science; and its links to other aspects of the religious culture of India, are not, in principle, necessary.

Nowadays the only clear and undeniable way to truth and/or creative useful practice for mankind, is science (another important creative practice is the arts (music & cinema) but it only acts on the imagination rather than the real world order, and often carries stupid ideas with no effective claim on truth); possible benefits of any religion are balanced by drawbacks observed by others. Drawbacks of science can be observed but few people would be ready to live without any modern technology (ok, some do, let them do so).

Some philosophies or religions in ancient history could have been the way to truth and progress for their time while "differing" from our modern science, just because they were better than the rest of what dominated their time, and they did not have the opportunity of interaction with modern science.

Some forms of traditional medecine may be good while possibly "disagreeing" with modern conventional medecine, but modern conventional medecine is not up to the same scientific standards as most other natural sciences (see below). And there is not even a clear disagreeing either, as most claims of disagreement are made by "skeptic" groups who do not really represent science.

But there has never been inside science any long-standing opposed sides with each their progresses and sets of clear visible fruits.

On the other hand, you can see disagreements between science and religion. The question of whether science and religions do agree, is neither a matter of
but a matter of:
Among the different articles claiming for the harmony between science and religion, I rarely saw any attempt to argue for such hints of compatibility. The only such link (arguable) I heard of, was between Eastern religions (I forgot the details), and quantum physics, as Bohr, Shrödinger and other quantum physicists could suggest. See here a historical report on the links between modern science and Eastern religions, written from a Buddhist viewpoint. But Eastern relgions can be criticized too, as will be developed in Part III.

Let's just notice something: among the people who actively promote the thesis of an harmony between Science and Christianity, there are many more non-scientist christians, than non-christian scientists (and the same for every other religion). Guess why. 

(When I say "scientist" here, I mean someone who actively practices science, not just someone who believes in the existences of Big Bang, black holes, galaxies, atoms and electromagnetic waves, and the revolution of the Earth around the Sun in one year, and who uses computers and mobile phones; when I say "Christian" I mean someone in whose life faith plays a significant role, such as they spend time reading the Bible, praying and/or attending churches, not just someone who believes in the existences of God, afterlife and an historical Jesus, and who visits churches for tourism, concerts, baptism, Christmas, weddings and funerals).

Why is it that, despite the dire lack of popularity of science (people more often value for example Christianity than science in a moral scale; manier people value religion as "higher" than science, and manier people are christians than scientists in the above sense),
while, despite the widespread popularity and practice of religions,

?

It's of course because science turned out to be the only decent and self-sufficient source of credibility under hand. And, in itself, it does not support any religion.

But, these remarks were only drawn from superficial observations on public opinion. How truly reliable is science, finally ? I just recently saw a thread on an article showing a form of credibility of scientific procedures in the sense that criticism is at work, away from any conservatism. But another thread referenced another article indicating that, precisely, some scientific fields like psychology and medecine suffer from an overabundance of insufficiently verified breakthroughs, and therefore should be taken with caution.

Usually, religions while agreeing that science has its own field of validity, claimed their superiority over science. But these claims are always based on their own creeds, and only valid from their own viewpoint. You may ask, how is it possible to develop a purely rational viewpoint on these questions then ? We shall come back to this in Part III.

The case of Nottale's Scale Relativity "theory"

Let us illustrate and complete the previous remarks with a concrete example of a situation, that may be considered typical and unsurprising for scientists, but challenges some naive expectations of other people about science.

The one field of scientific research that may be the most highly valued by popular scientific magazines, philosophers of science and many other popular commenters, as well as "worked on" by a majority of cranks (a much larger proportion of them than of true scientists), is the quest for a "theory of everything" of physics, that would "explain the deep nature of things" by unifying both theories of fundamental physics from which most known physical phenomena are derived: general relativity, and the famous Standard Model of particle physics in the framework of quantum field theory.

So, there is a large public, thirsty and excited of reading any news on what's going on in this area, wishing the problem to be solved, maybe expecting the world to be quickly somehow enlightened and transformed with a revelation of the mind of God as a result of such a discovery (according to Hawking's conclusion of his Brief History of Time), disregarding the fact that they didn't understand in the first place these two established theories in need of unification.

Still, somehow uncomfortable between their ignorance of this established physics knowledge and their unability and/or laziness or lack of time to really learn it, they are quite fond of "popularized science" books which will give them the impression to understand it - no matter how illusory this impression may be.

One day, both dreams came to be realized in one book that quickly became a best-seller in France: "La relativité dans tous ses états" (Relativity in all its states). The author, Laurent Nottale, is an astrophysicist entitled with one of the highest official scientific positions in the French public science system : Research Director in CNRS (national center of scientific research)

Or, this title may sound more honorable than it really is, as there are between 4,000 and 4,500 other French scientists of all fields with this same title. But the public did not pay attention to this. They did not care how many other scientists with this title there were, and they even did not know any other scientist with this title. Of course, some other scientists with this title may have been heard of by the public, but they did not pay attention to this. This is because there was no reason to point out this title except for the case of Nottale, because Nottale was the only one of them who made any really interesting discoveries, and for whom it was really important to point out this title, in order to show how scientifically credible his extraordinary claims must be.

Roughly, the first half of his book was to give a popularized presentation of modern physics, and the second half was to introduce the principles of his own theory, "Relativité d'échelle" (Scale Relativity, that we will write as RE). He explained the fundamental principles of his own theory, as consisting of :

1) "Taking away the differentiability hypothesis" (on which, according to Nottale, mainstream physics was currently based), thus allowing for a "fractal space-time";

2) Introducing a "principle of scale relativity" (as an extension of application of the relativity principle), after those of Special and General relativity (which may be described as being respectively about relativity of speed and acceleration);

3) Deducing consequences, by drawing a parallel between the role of speed in special relativity and the role of scale in scale relativity. One of the first "consequences" was that, just as speeds are bounded by the limit value c (speed of light), so there would be limit values of scale too, from a lower extreme (the Planck scale), to a higher extreme (the cosmological constant). Another consequence, would be to explain the quantum behavior of particles as following "geodesics in a fractal space-time". Another consequence would have been to explain the distribution of planetary orbits as following a quantification rule like electrons in atoms. And many other claims of explanations, from particle physics with its constants, to evolutionary processes.

It would all be a continuation and new extension of Einstein's works and discoveries. Anyway, what is sure is that, consequently, this work also provided its author for a new extension of Einstein's popularity too.

Along the several years of his popularity, serveral articles praising his discoveries appeared in all the 4 main French popular science magazines.
One article was to present a list of the 4 main competing theories of everything (or research programs towards a theory of everything): String theory, loop quantum gravity, Connes'noncommutative geometry, and Nottale's scale relativity.

Pour la science (the French edition of the Scientific American) published in 1997 an article by Nottale, titled "Are we in a black hole ?", and in july 2003 gave 8 pages to be directly written by Nottale, claiming for experimental confirmations of his theory, after another popular science magazine published similar claims by another member of his team in 2002.

One of the most prestigious French higher educational institutions, is Ecole Normale Supérieure (there are 3 of them, I'm speaking about the most famous one, "rue d'Ulm" in Paris): entry is admitted from an extremely selective contest after a 2-3 years of very intensive training after high school; its students already receive a quite good salary from the state for studying, and are then easily accepted to research or teaching positions. The famous Bourbaki group (collective author of a large compendium of modern mathematics in the middle of the 20th century) is from there; but this school includes a large diversity of fields from science to litterature and philosophy.

This school had its famous regular seminar on the philosophy of science, called "Pensée des sciences". The litteral translation of this title would be "Thought of sciences". Is this clear ? How can we explain this title ? We may try to understand it by replacing there "sciences" by something else. Uh, what can it be ? Let us look for another sort of profession. So, what profession can we imagine to put there instead of sciences ? Well, sorry I would not like to offend any profession. So, I will take here, at random, the profession of garbage collecting (and I want to ask forgiveness from all scavengers if this choice may sound downgrading to them, as this is not my puropose here). So, we can understand that seminar's title by replacing "sciences" by "garbage collecting": this would be about making the difference between garbage collecting on the one hand, and the thought of (or philosophy of) garbage collecting on the other hand, in the sense that the latter would be spiritually higher than the former.
So, the purpose of philosophers coming to this "pensée des sciences" seminar, is to come and look at sciences from above, in order to provide them for a meaning.
And what happened, is that Nottale was a reputed member of that seminar. He held there several presentations of his views, was a good friend of the organizers and highly considered by them.

His popularity extended all over the web. If you made a web search on "relativité" at that time, you would have got manier entries about scale relativity (even among the first entries) than about Einstein's relativity theories. (I felt concerned about this because I had written about special relativity). A large number of Web sites, groups or seminars of science vulgarisation (such as clubs of astronomy), book reviews or philosophy of science. had an entry about scale relativity. 

The problem is, his popularity among amateurs of science, did not extend to professional physicists. These usually did not mention Nottale if they had a Web site. Nottale's research team remained quite small, as hardly any other physicist joined it. He had a few articles published in peer-reviewed journals, but he often faced rejection of his articles too. 
Of course, discussions had happened between him and other physicists. These discussions usually came to dead ends: either aporia, or harsch judgements with an impossibility to talk any further, suspecting that Nottale's ideas just had no meaning and no value, or could not be verified. But, as I could know of (and I made large web searches at that time), hardly anything from these debates was ever written down and published anywhere, except quite short reports in discussions.
By lack of peer physicists, Nottale tried to extend his team by accepting and leading Master or PhD students, but still had big troubles doing so. Some came, but most of them quickly gave up and went away for another subject, either because they quicky noticed that scale relativity made no sense and nothing could decently be made out of it, and/or for fear of not being accepted after this for a scientific job anywhere else if they worked on it then.

In front of this mad situation, I took a very bold decision: I started writing down a harsch (and even mocking) criticism of Nottale and his scale relativity, to publish on my web site.
Across all the web, I was (and I always remained) the only author criticizing Nottale's scale relativity in the form of Web pages (all other cases of online criticisms I know of were mere messages in newsgroups and web forums, except maybe one small page, quite less developed).
It was a very hard and painful task. It was made especially hard by Nottale's writing style. This style, which made virtually desperate any attempt to criticize him, consisted in the fact that, in a first approximation, he did not seem to write anything clear and precise that could ever be an object of a possible agreement or disagreement. In other words, his claims were usually not even wrong. Namely, much of his writings were but an endless play of introductions to themselves. It was so hard to identify there any well-defined claim that could be argued about, and the explanations of what was wrong with that, were beyong the reach of an expression in the usual language of popularized science. It required to explain in details how some usual introductory or popularized ways of expressing the known laws of physics, were not an exact image of the deep theoretical meaning of these laws as professional physicists are normally familiar with, and that these subtle misunderstandings are responsible for the fact that Nottale's claims seem to make sense (seem quite plausible and meaningful) for amateur physicists, but turn out to be definitely nonsense when considered from a professional physicist's viewpoint.

So I spent quite a time developing a first version of this criticism, which was then widely visited as it appeared (and still appears now) among the first links (first page of results) on keywords "Nottale" or "relativité d'échelle".
For example, I explained that the apparent similarities between both "relativity principles" for special and general relativity, as presented by Einstein in his famous book (relativity of speed and of acceleration), only hold for a popularized and introductory viewpoint on these theories, while it would be quite odd to try keeping such a parallel in the effective contents of these theories as any specific cases of a mathematically well-defined general concept of a relativity principle. For this and other reasons, just calling for a "new extension of the same principle" to the case of scales, can hardly mean anything in itself (while Nottale just assumed that this call must suffice to be making sense, without any further justification).

I reviewed many Web sites mentioning scale relativity and wrote to their authors to tell them about my criticism. I reviewed all possible online discussions that may have meaningful contents about scale relativity, and referenced them, to form a quite complete and exhaustive (including all sides of the debate) online list of references of opinions on the subject, much more than those given by Nottale and the other site promoting scale relativity themselves at that time.

And I got a diversity of reactions (but Nottale himself never wrote me, as he never wrote himself in online forums either, while he must have known about my criticism).

One of the things I heard or got in reply to my criticism, from people who closely knew him and his work, was that Nottale was a very humble person who did not make any big claim, but doing an honest pioneering of a research work that was far from complete, so that it would be wrong to expect from him any clear and solid conclusion; and he is therefore not responsible for his exaggerated popularity. Much more clarification work for his ideas would have to be done first.
But the problem here is the discrepancy between such unofficial claims of humility in private discussions with physicists, and the hubristic claims that he and his supporters publish in the media and online forums, and that remained uncontradicted by any of their other public claims.

One reader of "La relativité dans tous ses états" wrote on a Web site that this book must be reserved for advanced physicists. When I asked him why, he explained that, as a beginner, he has not the necessary background to properly understand it and do anything with the claims contained there. However my critisism of this book had been dismissed by one of Nottale's supporters by claiming, that, of course, it is normal that as a book of popularization, it should not be expected to provide any solid defensible contents for a proper assessment of the theory; thus he advised me to stop reading any book of popularization, and start reading Nottale's more advanced writings.
Problem: if it is neither good for beginners nor for advanced readers, how could this book ever be a best-seller as it was ?
Then, there is a "more advanced book" that one should read instead; I read the first chapters that were available online and I found there the same flaws.

For example, the "formulas" there were nonsense, as the symbols did not have any well-defined meaning, and there were no clear rules what to do of them.
Still, some defenders argued that this observation was not right, either because I would be ignorant of the concepts and the meaning of the formalism, or because anyway other mainstream accepted theories suffer similar weakness.

Indeed, it is well-known that Quantum Field Theory (the framework of particle physics) is quite ill-defined mathematically, based on formulas that do not make any direct sense but have to be "interpreted" through a large series of tricks transforming the initial formulas into other formulas that finally give better computable results. This requires some quite strange tricks, such as letting the physical constants that appeared in the initial formula, become variables depending on the size of the pixels into which the physical space is approximated.

However, such an argument cannot stand because, what really matters to physicists is a kind of intuition they develop about their formulas, that goes beyond the strict and immediate consideration of mathematical rigor for its definiteness, and that can assess whether some deeper meaning for formulas can still exist "out there".
And, while such an intuitive meaning does exist for the formulas of quantum field theory, no start of a meaning can be found for those of scale relativity.

Another reaction was, who am I, mere math PhD, to make such a harsch criticism of a scientist with such a high grade as Nottale ?

Someone (that seemed to be working on the philosophy of mathematics in Ecole Normale Supérieure) wrote me that I seemed jealous of Nottale's findings, and that at least he made an honorable effort (good try) towards the ultimate mysteries of the universe, while I was a failed scientific thinker looking for recognition while I could not make anything like this. I replied to him that, well, there is no one goal absolutely the best, and that other jobs such as garbage collecting can be honorable too. Indeed, the very task I was just doing, to dismiss Nottale's claims and try to clean up the public media of this nonsense, can be seen as a sort of intellectual garbage collecting, that may seem quite a dirty task, but for the intellectual hygiene of society there needs someone to do it too.

In online forums I read a message of someone who dedicates much of his life in many forums to promote the existence of the paranormal as well as every possible crackpot idea he can find under the sun, who reported to have written to Nottale in hope to receive from him support for his ideas, and then being shocked at Nottale's reply, which was a for him a devastating revelation that Nottale is a very materialistic person denying the existence of any paranormal phenomena.

Someone wrote me that Nottale had the bad practice to take for his own credit all results from his collaborators.

Wikipedia articles were made about Nottale and scale relativity. I tried my best to put a stop to this foolishness, by tring to make corrections, and, in the discussion page, replying on every pseudo-argument made by the main author of this wikipedia article (who was not a scientist but an amateur of science popularization, crazily enthousiastic of Nottale). It was an awful, exhausting fight. He reverted away my corrections of the article a number of times. It was desperate to try to convince him, as there was no possible cure for the strength and pride of his ignorance. This Wikipedia article was a shame of an article for Wikipedia, because any non-ridiculous introduction to scale relativity would have to obey Nottale's way of introducing his ideas, based on his disastrous misinterpretation of the situation of mainstream physics. So, there was logically no way under the sun for a Wikipedia article on the subject to ever both seem "neutral" and be really fair, as the official Wikipedia policy requires.

He said that Nottale has credentials as he did publish in peer-reviewed journals, while I do not have any such credentials. So he challenged me to make a scientific publication criticizing scale relativity in a peer-reviewed journal. Then, I asked someone for advice about this challenge, and got the reply that it was rather hopeless, both because
- Nottale has a high scientific position which I don't have (only highly reputed authors could afford to write such criticism, but they usually don't).
- Scientific articles must usually be about positive results, while, just explaining that BS is BS, which was already clear for most scientists anyway, is not a genuine form of scientific progress.

In fact, as was noted in other discussions, when looking more closely at Nottale's publications, it appears that no true peer-reviewed credentials for scale relativity articles can be found:
- Nottale had publications accepted in scientific journals but most of them are not about scale relativity. As for those on scale relativity, they cannot be used as a credit to it because
- Many did not have any such credentials: they were either mere preprints or made in contexts like symposiums that do not consititute a peer-review credential;
- Some were published in journals of astronomy where referees don't always have the necessary background in physics
- Some were published in the journal "Chaos, Solitons and Fractals" whose editor-in-chief of that time, El Naschie, is a famous crank with similar ideas too (unknown to the French public). According to RationalWiki,
"Several bloggers removed their posts about El Naschie and Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, apparently in the face of legal threats from the El Naschie's representatives"
So, we are in a legal system that somehow practices censorship against genuine scientific review, not letting scientists any full right to criticize cranks. This is serious.

Also, the author of the wikipedia article argued that my criticism seemed weak: according to my own words, it seemed that I did not really check what Nottale's ideas were worth, nor did I really understand what they were about, but I only made vague suspicions against them, so that my harsch conclusions were not based on any serious justifications.
From this, I took a serious, painful decision: I went on to sacrifice one more month of my life to rewrite and develop all my arguments against scale relativity, so as to make them much clearer and remove this impression of weakness or uncertainty.

I noticed that Nottale published an article in the journal "Commentaire" (and put it on his web site) precisely to criticize the peer-review system, based on the observation that his own articles about scale relativity were often rejected by reviewers, which he interpreted as an expression of conservatism of physicists who remain sticked to their dogmas and are not open to new ideas.

In fact, Nottale also once wrote the following about his life :
"Once I had this idea, I did not think (I was not yet in CNRS): 'Hey, I'll announce this as a research orientation in my CNRS application ! I will work on it'. I would never have done such a thing. I did not write in my CNRS activity reports, before the end of the 1980s, that I worked on that. I did that in parallel, as if it were my leisure time… I know it was not publishable. I knew I could not make a carreer or even simply have a position, if I mentioned such researches. If I announced I worked on this path, I'd have killed all possibility to have a research position, despite my 13 articles in  referee journals, my state doctorate, etc. Then, for ten years, I kept that as a background task, and it is, indeed when I was recognized for my work on lenses (the Digital prize and other rewards), that I wad nominated research director in CNRS, and I said myself : 'Now I take the risk'."

I kept referencing all possible comments found on the web about scale relativity.

One PhD was made under Nottale's direction. The result of this thesis was refuting a fundamental formula which was used everywhere in scale relativity calculations. The thesis report by the jury mentioned something like "The originality of this thesis is that the student happened to disagree with his director, and was approved there by the jury". This student was consequently rejected by Nottale after this.

One newsgroup participant reported to have been shocked at hearing a radio interview of a highly ranked specialist of general relativity, where an auditor asked for his opinion about scale relativity, and as a reply he "swept away the theory in one sentence, saying there was no ground in Nottale's books". This listnener's helpless report and comment, expressed his deep disappointment about that reputed physicist, who in this way appeared quite intolerant and conservative against new ideas in physics. But others disagreed with this view, defending this physicist against Nottale.

Other examples of comments:
 "Let's be serious, Nottale's theory interests only one person in the world, Nottale. I never heard any notable scientist of any nationality, that mentions him".
"As there are hundreds of thousands of young researchers in the world looking for a big scoop to be famous, ready for anything to publish and get a position, I guess if there was any small probability to draw anything from these fractal theories there would be many articles on hep-th. But it seems to be a complete silence. The problem of string theory is that it is very difficult (...), but telling anything about fractals, quantum chaos or the butterfly effect, would be in anyone's reach, and cranks don't miss this"
"I doubt any but Nottale know what he did"
"The name of Nottale tells you something ? he is professor in CNRS and Centrale [an engineer school], I think, he wrote brilliant books on relativity, brilliant books that, after analysis, turned out to be devoid of meaning. And these books have been sold like little breads"

A physicist in the newsgroup reported to have taken a lot of time reading Nottale's articles (much more than I did myself), without succeeding to find any sense in them, nor to find any supporter to give any explanations on their meaning (the only ones who replied were ignorant enthousiastic supporters of scale relativity who did not understand the articles themselves and thus could not give any explanations). He also tried to check whether, among all claims made by scale relativists to have had their predictions confirmed by experience, he could really find any such a prediction to have really been published before the experimental confirmation came out, and could not find any.
Then I invited him to read my criticism, to which he then replied:
"Excellent, really excellent. The criticism really expresses what I observed and the feeling I had when reading Nottale's articles. But it goes clearly deeper  (...)"

Only one Web site except mine contained significantly developed arguments against scale relativty. This was the forum of a famous French site of science popularization.

Here are some translated excerpts from this forum (not the arguments about high concepts of theoretical physics, but the simple ones), to show what can be a normal, rational argumentation and ultimate refutation, made by scientists against a popular theory written by a highly ranked scientist, that has been a best-seller of scientific popularization for a long time, praised by many philosophers of science, scientific magazines and many book commenters, and seemingly uncriticized by anyone else:

"Despite several hours of discussions with [Nottale], I could never understand the fundamental principle by which he obtained quantum effects..."

"However, one thing is sure : though one magazine recently made its headlines with 4 scientists implied with these theories, no theoretical physicists believes any least bit in [scale relativity].. the first 3 are serious attempts, but the latter is mere "calculational poetry" and it is nonsense to compare it to the others."

"The problem with his theory is that it predicts everything, and if we asked for it, it could even make coffee. It could have been a good idea, it did not work, the author insisted, it became a parascientific delirium."

"The scientific work does not consist in proving that all fuzzy claims are false. It's up to a new theory to prove itself valid. Nottale was unable to do so. If scientists had to spend their time proving that smoky theories are such, they could do it full-time !"
"All his seminars I saw were fuzzy, without any proof"

 [in reply to a RE supporter's message "I wish to bring him on the right track by reacting on some quotations about RE that seem very far from the scientific debate":]
"The main reason may be that RE is precisely quite far from science..."

"The problem of scale relativity is that it is NOT a theory. It is at best a modern poem. Scale relativity does not give any possibility to be falsified, and according to its author, it explains everything from the electron's mass to planetary orbits. But when you look a little at the mathematical framework behind the theory, there is STRICTLY nothing solid (...) Nottale is a good communicator and know to sell himself"
"like the bogdanov (...) they know how to use the media to make up an image of themselves in the public, by lack of a professional recognition. Nottale published more in wide public journals than publications (...) he gets predictions out of his hat while hiding technical problems at the foundation of his "theory"(...) it is not sane and goes away from the scientific method. All scientists with whom I could talk say it's [worthless]" (the French word here says "anything").

and here is the concluding message by a moderator:

"What a caustic humor !
But I still find terribly amusing to see that you don't notice the ridicule of your pseudo-defense of RE : among those 7 preprints, only one was published... I restricted my search to the theoretical physics part of arxiv, letting down the astro part.
Absurd theories don't deserve to spend time on them because they immediately appear so if one has a minimum of knowledge.
I agree that at least RE may seem from far away a minimum serious. I will conclude with some remarks but have no more time to waste with RE.

I know Nottale rather well and had many chances to see him and discuss his case. We (...) had no private talks, but he seemed very nice to me. I have strictly nothing against him personally. However, he seems to mainly be a sweet dreamer and a bit megalo-parano.

As for the value attached by the community to RE, two-three weeks ago was organized in Paris a huge international conference in the honor of Einstein and the 100 years of relativity, as well as the famous other articles of 1905.
As you can see on the site of the conference (http://einstein2005.obspm.fr/index.html)
very many researchers participated and many high researchers in relativity / fundamental physics were there.
Was Nottale there? Was there anyone to mention RE? Absolutely not. However, many ideas and speculative theories were presented, especially in the parallel session on "the structure of space-time".
And you want to know in all that what seems to me the clearest sign of the absence of value of RE as a candidate fondamental theory ? It simply is the fact that the laboratory that organized this conference is LUTH where precisely Nottale works, who was neither in the organizing comittee, nor among participants. I repeat, I strictly have nothing against Nottale, but there are times when a scientist must stay a minimum serious."

So I referenced these discussions, making them much more readily accessible to anyone searching for information on scale relativity. I also browsed many Web sites that spoke about scale relativity, to mention the work I had done. This resulted in a rapid decrease of Nottale's popularity. 

Of course I have written to the popular scientific magazines to mention my argumentation. None of them ever published any mention about it, and they even did not write me a private reply. 
The only reply I got was from Pour la science, at the time in between the two versions of my argumentation, as a justification for them to not publish any mention of a criticism of scale relativity:

"Indeed, we only publish articles already appeared in prime international peer-reviewed journals, so I suggest you to submit your article to one of them"

and in the next reply
"Dear Sir, PLS is not the best place for a debate of specialists. For this there are specialized journals. Let me just ensure you one point: the publication of a popularization article by Nottale in our columns does not suffice to give his theory a Gospel value, it would be giving too much importance to our journal. Our readers know it, and know that scale relativity is controversial. We also know it, as illustrated by our pluralist policy".

The only effect was probably a negative one: since that time, (if I didn't miss something) none of these magazines ever published an article about scale relativity anymore.

Long later, I got a thankful message from a physics faculty member who mentioned that, some years before, he had to check about scale relativity for taking a decision whether to accept a paper from one of Nottale's PhD students in the reports of a "Young Researchers" meetings. He thought that he should not, but could not convince about it the other members of the committee. So the paper was accepted. He regreted to not have seen my argumentation at that time, which may have changed the decision.

The work was done. The garbage was swept away from most of the public space.
A few of the Web sites that had referenced scale relativity before referred to me, but that's all, and all this quicky vanished along the years.

A number of unserious web sites of science popularization or human sciences, including a site of book reviews, are still positively referencing Nottale and his scale relativity at this time.
A number of cranks are doing it too:
The last academic work on scale relativity outside Nottale's team, is a work of philosophy and sociology of science, focused on bibliometric considerations, that is, the study of how many publications by Nottale could be accepted in peer review journals, and how many other scientists happened to get interested in it after this. I tried to write to him as well as a few other phisophy faculty members in the institution where he was working, and never got any reply.
So the subject of this work is to observe how a new theory away from the mainstream remains ignored, even if a couple of articles about it happen to be published in peer-reviewed journals. This is supposed to illustrate the dogmatism and inertia of the scientific community which is not open to new ideas. So, philosophers imagine that they are making sense of what is happening in science, by looking at it from the outside. But the reality is that they are remaining completely blind to the very object of their study, because, how can they draw any sane conclusion about the conservatism of the scientific community from a sociological measurement of the scarcity of references to Nottale's ideas, if they have no clue of the fact that, for anyone who knows about physics, there are indeed strong reasons to reject this thing that is not even worthy of being called a theory, because, indeed, it hardly has anything to do with science ?

Let's mention now a loud non-reaction on the issue. Once in this work, I wrote to a French skeptic organization that might be the most respectable one in France ("French association for scientific information" = AFIS), as the aim of its publications is to generally criticize all possible forms of pseudo-science around, with not as much focus on the paranormal issues as the more caricatural branches of French skepticism (Zététique).
I hoped they would be interested with my criticism work, because it is their very purpose to be the voice to draw the line between science and non-science, and to criticize pseudo-sciences that the public may believe in.
But they were not, as their reply to me just claimed that Nottale is a normal researcher in lack of collaborators.
Visibly, nobody really understand physics among them, so that nobody there can grasp the sense of opposing something that mascarades as a physics theory by playing on the misinterpretation of physics by the public.
In fact, their ignorance of physics clearly appears in the childish way in which they pretended, in one of their articles, that the known laws of physics exclude the possibility for paranormal phenomena.

This is not an isolated case

Other crancks have high scientific ranks in the institutions and are taken seriously by some scientific or popular media, though they remain intellectually isolated with respect to the other scientists. To just mention two clear cases:
One example was Maurice Allais, economics Nobel laureate who melt with physics and claimed to refute Special Relativity theory.
Another example is Gabriel Chardin, French physicist in the CEA (Atomic Energy Commission) with crazy ideas about antimatter (with an idea that antimatter would have negative mass and be gravitationally repulsive, which is just ridiculous nonsense for most other physicists) and a few other things.

Conclusions

Problem: while I did help many people save a lot of time, as they no more had to waste their energy studying this nonsense, I hardly got any reputation from it. Okay, it was basically not a self-interest work, but still, how to qualify such a long and tedious work for mankind, useful in the public sphere, that does not even bring any moral recognition to its author ?
But, less than a recognition, all what I earned from my selfless work of public information against nonsense (both against scale relativity and other crackpot ideas), was to get the presence of two web pages full of very dirty personal attacks against me, and immediately accessible by google on my name, one by a defender of RE, and another by another paranoid defender of crackpot ideas in general). The problem is, people who wish to check what kind of person I am, reading these pages, may not take the necessary time to check how absurd these attacks are, and how mad and devoid of any credibility are the authors of these pages, to conclude how irrelevant are these pages.

Such an absurdly selfless enterprise I undertook, may be called foolishness by some.

Now, just consider: if it might have seemed strange at first sight that Nottale's hubristic claims and reputation as a new Einstein could really be so false while it developed across a large public and seemed to stand as a scientific reference, never contradicted and even less carefully refuted "with rational arguments" by any scientist except the foolish myself, the reason for this paradox is now clear.
This reason, is that the care to explain the truth is soooooooooooo wasteful of energy, eating many weeks of hard, relatively stupid work, from a precious intelligent life, and does not bring any sort of advantage to the author of the criticism, but on the contrary, will likely be harmful to his reputation. How the hell can you honestly expect any sane rational and intelligent person to dedicate himself to this dirty task ?

In other words:

Scientists cannot be held responsible for the popularity of irrational ideas outside their own community. Neither a story of a new Einstein with high academic positions, nor the publication of these ideas praised and trusted in the name of science by popular scientific magazines, are a sufficient evidence of scientific credibility.
Not because of any conspiracy by hidden powers, but simply because the editorial policy of scientific magazines is to write what the public likes to buy and read.

The risk for the public to misunderstand science and buy something else in its place, is basically caused by some irresistible public's need to buy, praise and trust nonsense rather than genuine science. It is NOT a scientific problem, nor a problem with the scientific community which remains unconcerned with this collective foolishness.
It is NOT the responsibility of scientists to care for and ensure the correctness of public information, nor to proceed to any fight against any possible widespread nonsense, either by "argumentation" or by any other means that would go against the public's irresistible need to believe nonsense. Because the force of the public's need to believe nonsense may remain stronger than any attempt of correction by scientists anyway, and put the scientists who dare trying to oppose this trend, in danger of public bullying and discredit instead of a thanks.

A sort of new maturity from the part of the public, to have a more serious look at the scientific consensus, would be needed. (But still another solution can be developed, as will be explained in part IV).

Another aspect of the problem, is the failure of the institutions that do not have the necessary flexibility to fire a scientist that turns out to dedicate himself to crackpot productions which were not mentioned when he was recruited, in order to let a chance for more serious scientists to get this position instead. But you can guess how hard it would be to take such an exceptional, illegal decision (as recruitments to CNRS cannot be cancelled) for a public institution ruled by democratically elected representatives, to fire the man that the overwhelming majory of people believe to be the one new Einstein author of the most amazing (or, the only interesting) discovery of nowaday's science.

Finally, let's see what such adventures can teach us about religious and spiritual issues:

We mentioned what a desperate task it would already be to try making any "convincing" explanations about whether a "theory" makes any sense or not, to some cultivated but not expert public (cultivated enough to get interested with physics popularization), which should already be quite more intelligent than the overall public which religions are proudly wide open to. This happens in the context of a scientific world with an already established quite good understanding of the laws of physics. So, where the deep truth on the issue at stakes, is already rather well-known. And this established knowledge on a relatively modest question (the understanding of the mere physical world, which is, in principle, quite "simpler" than the spiritual one), was not enough to put a stop to the fame of a absurd doctrine across a relatively informed public.

In such conditions, how the hell can any sane rational person, expect the overall, less intelligent population of the world in average, to behave so much wiser when it comes to discerning the truth about the more obscure spiritual realities (harder to perceive, harder to understand, as in its way to transcend all physical realities, it may as well be beyond all possible human understanding), that the basic, chaotic natural communication and convincing processes across society would have any chance to do it right, while no start of a reliable foundation for the understanding of these realities was ever established yet ?

The academic institutions

So, we explained that the consensus among scientists in a field (especially in hard sciences) is generally the most reliable sign of truth (among all available means of inquiry in the same world at the same time) as concerns their research subjects. This is already interesting, but leaves many questions unanswered, because many important questions are not currently the subject of any serious scientificresearch.

Note that the trust expressed here towards the scientific consensus, is basically not a trust towards institutions, but a trust towards the global behavior of some community of people, based on how reason works, disregarding the admistrative structure that currently hires them. Hopefully there are many cases when official institutional positions properly reflect serious scientific findings, but there can be exceptions too. This can either be because
  1. the established official community working on the subject is not made of really qualified people (or: their training and the conditions of academic recognition they must follow does not favor the right form of discernment), or 
  2. the issue (subject of claims by an institution) is not directly the research subject of any established scientific community, but an aspect of the political forces and paradigms which determine the behavior of these institutions.
Instances of 1. will be listed in the below section. Now let us present an important instance of 2, the question: how should education be organized and which knowledge or skills should be taught at every level, from the curriculum contents to the practical management (admission requirements, schedules, pedagogical tools, types of interaction between students and faculty, obligations, exams and the administrative roles of exams and diplomas for the working of the curriculum and the insertion in the rest of society).

The situation and its assessment may depend on countries, viewpoints, types of students, possible diversity among institutions of each country (with marginally some very different systems from the norm), and goals and criteria for comparison.
For example, the scientific teaching level has often been quite higher in the Soviet Union and some Asian countries, than in most of Western European and U.S. countries at the same years and ages of secondary and high school. A higher teaching level for some age may fit some of the best students, but be very hard to others, while a lower teaching level can be awfully boring to the most clever students.
Still, in average, the most frequent situation is quite awful, especially in a way that can roughly be described as a dire lack of freedom for pupils and students: the rules to follow are, for many pupils, far from the most favorable circumstance to their development and fulfilment of any kind (compared to alternatives with similar costs).

The situation in this field is quite paradoxical because the teaching and academic management activities, especially in higher education, are an essential component of the official duty of a large majority of scientists, and are so crucial to the life and career of the next generation of scientists, but they happen to be so wrongly done in some ways, because the full question of the global design of how academic institutions should work and what tasks should scientists be hired for, was not actually developed as a genuine research subject.

In fact, the academic system as a whole is not a decided well-thought conception of scientists (but only, if I don't mistake, a thought of the Enlightenment philosophers modeled after the practices of religious academies and finally fixed by decisions of states, with no significant design update since then), and its role has never been to properly share and show what science really is. Its main role was to be a democratically and administratively stable way of managing a population, the overwhelming majority of which has no chance to really understand science anyway; to provide them with diplomas, hopefully (but not always reasonably) likely to let them chances to find a job (especially among public institutions themselves, to reliably avoid any genuine connection to reality, such as a free market would provide). Only little hints of real science were reflected there. Scientists have been the servants of this system, mainly because they hardly had any other option to keep their jobs.

In this context, many individual scientists do notice the problem, sometimes speak and write about it (unless some obligation of political correctness linked with their job prevents it), and eventually try to do something about it, but overall they remain rather powerless against it. 
Examples:

"Dead Lectures" (how the practical form of teaching/learning by "live lectures" is made obsolete by technology)
 
"The Role of the Professor" (which would consist in renewing of the curriculum contents: cleaning, restructuring and updating it to existing knowledge, serving as an intermediate between teachers and researchers; this role is actually neglected by the institutions, in favor of the 2 disconnected activities of teaching an research)

Research and teaching, article and long discussion on what is going wrong in the academic system; for example "in almost every field there are way too many students per prof"
In the same blog, ("spaces" article):
"Over and over I have found people who reject the notion of mathematics being a universal language, and who discard it as insufficient for reality. They are dead wrong to do so of course, but since I've encountered this attitude over and over again, I want to dedicate some paragraphs to what I believe is the origin of this divide.
At the very beginning is, of course, school education. Unfortunately, what's called mathematics in school has little to do with mathematics. It should more aptly be called calculation."

Homeschooling physicist
"we are not using any US public-school textbooks in those areas: science textbooks below the high-school level are often factually wrong. Even at the high-school level, many are disasters (check out the reviews from the Textbook League). And history texts for US public schools tend to be utterly boring and bloodless: how they manage to transmute the reality of history – heroes and villains, nobility and murder most foul – into stunningly unappetizing pabulum is a great mystery."
"the most important point that is distinctive about our approach is the emphasis on teaching significant content about science and history as early and as fully as possible. This would be very hard in the public schools because of the “urge to test.”"
More texts on homeschooling
More texts on education
For example:
Teaching Science the Harry Potter Way

Changing education paradigms

François Taddei (French biologist, founder of wiser-u):
"When my son was 6, he went to class like all children, his teacher told me: "This child is charming, but... he asks questions." Since that day, I ask myself questions on the educational system".
"If your job looks like chess, prepare to change your job"

Albert Einstein (who was INTP, and quite a bad pupil):
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
On graduate school and teaching: "The unfortunate thing is that the lack of value assigned to teaching seems very systemic, to the point of being embedded in the culture" - "High school has managed to convince many students that physics is a dogmatic, memorization-centered subject. As a result, they don’t have the skills necessary to solve real physics problems, because all that they have learned to do is to pattern-match and to plug-and-chug"

A famous example was the French mathematician Evariste Galois. He made some pioneering work in group theory (fixing the name "group"), as well as a whole field of algebra now named after him: Galois theory (about algebraic equations). He died in 1832 at the age of 20 as a final result of his unsustainable troubles with the world and the academic system, which happened to make life quite hard to him as a genius (hard inadequate school work and troubles to be accepted and find recognition).

A possible way to describe the problem is in terms of MBTI typology.
We previously mentioned that types are correlated with profession, and in particular, that the types of Teachers are preferably EFJ, and a few more types around it. But a very Fequently Unasked Question, is what is the right personality type for a very peculiar job: the job of the Pupil ? Now you can take it as an exercise to check the MBTI test (or from any other testing or describing page) and figure out the right answers which the Pupil should give to each of the four questions: what is the right personality type a good Pupil should have.
 
Are you done ?
Of course, the right answers come to form a unique type quite straightforwardly. Then you can go and check the description of this type, which will confirm that this is indeed the correct type qualifying one to be a good Pupil.
 
Now, remember a big claim of the school system: that it does everything to provide fair chances for all young people to succeed in society, without any discrimination.
Traditionally (at least in France), this paranoid concern for absolute fairness and equality of chances for all people, has been focused towards the exclusive ideal of breaking social boundaries by trying to cancel all possible correlation between people's careers (social positions, incomes) and those of their parents. To try to reach this goal, a lot of money has been invested in education, together with a very big focus on the care to "treat all pupils equally" by putting them together in the same classrooms and providing them the same lessons.
So, teenagers are jailed in schools to protect them from all possible influence of their parents (their respective social ranks, their cultures that might contaminate them), so that none will be "unfairly" favored as compared to others.
But it remained a big failure, as the correlations ("social boundaries") remained.

Our education ministers failed to notice that, if cancelling the correlation between the careers of children and those of their parents was really the purpose, then a much cheaper and more reliable solution was available: to use a lottery system for distributing diplomas.

More seriously, the basic situation is that there are a diversity of needs, interests and abilities between people who are diversely fitted for the many possible jobs needed by the economy to properly function, so that not all pupils need to do the same thing and follow the same curriculum for preparing to the jobs that best fit them. In such conditions, treating them all the same induces a hidden discrimination according to "how normal" every pupil is.

More specifically, this norm that school requires pupils to conform to and after which they are selected to succeed, is not an average (middle way) between all types of people, but it is a specific end of the spectrum: the system discriminates people according to how good ISTJ (or secondarily ESTJ, INTJ) they can be. School makes these types, first feel much better than others, then succeed best.

Do you wonder why social boundaries remain ? Well, if MBTI types are given by nature (possibly genetically inherited, at least partially), it is no mystery. The same with intelligence, which school requires to stay just in the middle, as too intelligent people cannot fit with the low level curriculum in force. But even if the types are not natural but given by education, this is no better: making everybody ISTJ with a limited intelligence and a life spoiled by wasting the precious youth years doing stupid school work, is no good solution for a sane economy which requires a diversity of skills for a diversity of jobs.

For example, what's the point of forcing pupils to obey a time schedule ? Why should it be better for the ones to spend the first hour of the day learning this subject, and the next hour that other subject, while it should be different for those who have been put into anothery group of pupils at the beginning of the year ? Why should it be different from a day to the next ? Why is it so important to start lessons every day at the same time, rather than to learn any other time of the day, regardless of how tired they may be ? Why should a lesson be stopped after exactly the same amount of time fixed in advance to switch to the next lesson, regardless of whether the issue was completed or not ? Why should every pupil hear exactly the same lesson at the same rythm as the next pupil, regardless of his troubles or easiness to understand it, and regardless of his curiosity to more closely examine a detail or ask any question ? Why should it be the same schedule from a week to the next ? How many jobs on Earth except school teachers, need to be structured in this precise way ? Okay, some do in a way, such as doctors; but even if some features can be seen as common, many other features are usually quite more different.

By the way, what are the jobs for ISTJ ? Their list of prefered jobs includes: Inspector, administrator, manager, accountant, school director, police officer and prison guard. ESTJ become managers and organizers. Things that can indeed be useful for society, but quite far from scientific research anyway, so that school does not properly reflect science (just as it hardly reflects the needed skills for any decent job in general). After being the ones feeling at school like at home and succeeding, they will work to ensure that everything remains the same.

Another problem with school, is the insane system of relationships between pupils induced by this common pot: why nerds are unpopular.
See also this analysis about autism (but autists and many other serious or uncommon people such as geniuses, are facing the same problem):
"As for blaming autistic people's difference for the cruelty we receive, that removes the accountability of the people who are being cruel to autistic people. It makes it sound as if autism is to blame for the harm done to autistic people by others, which makes no more sense than saying accent and skin color are to blame for racism. When a person is being discriminated against for a quality, it's not that quality that needs changing. Being bullied on the schoolyard is not the fault of the autistic person for "looking like an easy target", and being socially ostracized is not the fault of the social aspects or "quirks" of autism."

Let's go further: geniuses are generally accused of not properly adapting to the world.
Sorry, what are they required to adapt to ?
They are required to adapt to a system that has been artificially designed and built up by society for the service of the sort of pupils that is stupid and reluctant to learn. The very purpose why the school exist, is to force them to learn, through mental brute force methods destroying all possible freedom of thought, to get more knowledge than they would naturally do if their freedom of thought was respected.
The problem is that there are other types of pupils, (unfortunately a small minority, therefore with no chance to have their lives respected in a democracy), such that, if you let them just free, they would naturally learn much more than what school is teaching them. For them, school is an obstacle to their thirst of knowledge, so that they desperately look for the little free time it lets them, to start satisfying it.

How can this trouble be blamed on these intelligent pupils, how can they be blamed for their inadaptation to this system precisely designed, artificially built up and adapted for pretending that the best adapted pupils are this majority of dumb ones, who would naturally not learn (to adapt to a world of knowledge) and therefore need brute force obligations to reach an appearance of intellectual skills ?

In fact, for the true mentally sane pupils, serious enough to better learn in free time than at school, the best adaptation method would be to drop them out of this fools asylum as soon as possible. And either let them learn by themselves (with books, internet...) or in some specialized institution better suited to them.

Then, if you wish the question of how adapted to the real world they are, to start making sense, there would be, in principle, a rather more fair measure : to test them directly against the world of job market, rather than the world of bureaucratic standardized testing. But, there is one problem: many jobs, in particular scientific jobs, are provided by public administration and other quite bureaucratic organizations. As long as recruitments there will be a matter of diplomas that require to go through the mental torture of academic nonsense to be obtained, there is little hope for change.

But the domination of the cult of diplomas as a substitute for knowledge, is widespread. It is widespread among students, who usually prefer to dedicate all their work to diplomas without being really curious to anything or asking themself any deeper question on the subjects studied, or any question on the sense of their life ; and ifever some rare student would dare to think out of the curriculum, they would be strongly criticized for this by their teachers, and coerced into changing their mind, as any intellectual interest away from the race for diplomas would be a "waste of time" leading to a failure of life (as it wastes the chance to get a good job whatsoever).

But diplomas are not the only problem. Indeed, imagine an education system ready to recruit self-taughts as teachers. But, why would they even be interested to bother coming to work there ?
Why should the young anticonformist geniuses, even bother to search for any means to have their skills recognized by this awful system ? Recognized for what ? For getting the right to work for the repetition of this standardized, awful way of teaching ? This would be rather pointless, and even unbearable for some, not the way to the intellectual fulfilment they are seeking.

Let us explain what forces lead school classes and curricula to remain so boring, devoid of intelligence and imagination, full of errors, light years away from the wonders of true science.

First, it is hard to figure out any possibility of improvement in the teaching system: if you take the whole curriculum as it is, and inside it, take a precise subject, and wonder how to best present this subject at this level for students who followed the rest of the curriculum as it is, then indeed, not much can be thought of as a better way to do it. Instead, most genuine improvements would require a serious research work for a global redesign of the curriculum, which is harder to imagine, undertake or experiment.

Other necessities must be respected: be understandable by most of the students as they come, with the precise knowledge they previously acquired ; follow the official curriculum so as to let students "speak the same language" as any other students of the world; to prepare them to exams, and make their diplomas equivalent to those of any other institutions.
In such conditions, freedom and innovations in curricula are rather hopeless.

Thus, even INTPs who reached academic positions, cannot easily bring their INTP souls in their teaching. Indeed, their margin of freedom is both restricted by the administrators their job depends on, and the backgrounds and expectations of the Pupils filling the classrooms, who cannot accept to be required anything else than to remain Pupils. Teachers falling under these obligations, focus all the energies on distributing as many diplomas as possible, rather than sharing the light of any meaningful and interesting science.

The intermediate process between this mass arrival of ISTJ Pupils in undergraduate level, and the final PhD success dominated by INTPs,  can be compared to the arrival of a high speed train without brakes, to a series of obstacles ending at a wall, where each obstacle is designed and installed by an independent agent made fully responsible of the damage made by his own obstacle.
It is thus a slow but desperate failure of most Pupils, spread among the years of study, where each teacher is hit by a part of the failure, but is pressed by the different forces, to minimize this part of the failure by devoiding their lessons of any possibly meaningful and interesting content, therefore keeping their lessons so dull and boring, and forwarding a larger remaining part of the Pupils with their necessary imminent failure, to the teachers that will receive this population at the next level.

Apart from these obstacles, there is also a lack of incentive for scientists to rethink the teaching curriculum. First is a lack of institutional incentive, as scientists'career is determined by the specialized research work to the exclusive interest of other working scientists, not by the production of courses for students. Second, a lack of personal, intellectual interest.

Indeed, most mathematicians and physicists (I don't know about other fields) are usually not interested to think about the contents of undergraduate teaching in their field, because they see these subjects as "too simple" for them to think about, and quite boring in comparison with their own high-level research. Indeed it is boring and tedious, because it is so many hours just to present "simple" concepts and prove "simple" results. They went through this boring stuff as students, they had to accept it as such, and it was so tedious and boring for them that they don't want to think about it anymore. They just assume that this is the only way to do at this level, because this is the way everybody is doing.
They prefer to think about new subjects, and would not be interested to think again about what they already know, because they can't consider that the way they learned and to which they adapted, could have been far from the best possible way and deserved to be questioned. Anyway they don't expect it to be a chance for them to develop their creativity. It is not even a claim they are making, as they did not even start adressing the question (it would not be their job anyway).

We may consider that teaching institutions were necessary long ago, when there were very few places of knowledge, and poor communications methods, when there was no other practical way to access knowledge than being present at the same place with the professor who has this knowledge. Still, formal teaching is necessary for some parts of education, such as for most primary school pupils who need more the presence of adults for focusing on the lesson. The situation is more variable at higher levels, depending on the diversity of personalities among students, and specific aspects of their learning work.

The necessity of formal lessons already started being questionable long ago by the development of libraries, by which it would have been possible for many students to learn by themselves at negligible cost for society, making useless all the expensive fuss of organizing for them classrooms, schedules and teachers. A learning way restricted to such methods of negligible cost, would already have ended the justification to care about organizing all these exams that preselect who should be allowed as students (ifever they had a sense of self-responsibility), and therefore, the fuss of ensuring this selection to be fair.
As if tolerating a student to come and try learning something at no cost for society, while he is not officially known as being properly enough able to do it, was a wrong favor that should not be granted. Where is the value of freedom linked to a sense of self-responsibility here ?
What is this world of fools where some people should be forcefully denied for their own sake the right to satisfy their curiosity in some field of knowledge, just for fear they would later come back and make troubles because they mistook this right to satisfying their curiosity, with the "right" to later oblige some employer to hire them for the skill in this field they mistakenly thought they had ?
What is this world of fools where students are never supposed to be able to find clues by their own means on the question whether they are understanding something or not, so that they would all absolutely need someone else to judge them and forcefully decide in their place whether they do, and thus whether they should go on learning this or that ? Where nobody even considered to publish any self-assessment tool to help students take the responsibility of their own life, rather than have as now some teachers take the full decisions over it by some blind formal means ?

It remains a pitiful truth that very few students are really interested in knowledge, nor willing to take any responsibility on their own life. All what most of them want is diplomas. So, academic institutions are there to provide them diplomas disregarding whether the curriculum makes any scientific sense or not.

The pitiful situation is that every student's social struggle for exterior signs and administrative acknowledgement of one's knowledge (intellectual skills), has become for everybody (first for administration itself, then forcing this on students) a sort of exclusive concern and values system, serving as a substitute for the reality of knowledge. The administration manufactured, then forced on all the ideology according to which the hardest a student socially struggles for the recognition of his skills, the more knowledge this struggle will create in him. In other words, all possibility of a natural intelligence is banned and repressed, while only an artifical form of intelligence, defined as manufactured by an administrative dictatorship over all details of students'minds and lives, is tolerated by society as an acceptable form of intelligence.

In such conditions, the minority of gifted young people (naturally inclined for knowledge), for whom learning should have been easy and natural, are often confronted to a system that makes life artificially harder to them: their natural skills are repressed and mistaken for a form of hubris, and they are labelled as "ambitious". Against them, a fighting field is opposed where they are challenged to waste years of absurd efforts (absurd school classes and homework) as a precondition to conquer the right to officially become what they already were from the start. By pretending to provide for the development of the skills, the school system is (at least for some students) damaging and endangering it. It is both damaging for the life (by being hard, time-consuming and stressing), and for the intelligence (by being of a lower level than could be done in a free time, to conform to the lower average level of other students); and without a happy life, intellectual productivity may be damaged. This may be seen as a caricatural form of logical positivism where no intelligence has the right to exist unless it is administratively measured.

Geniuses are accused of being ambitious, and of being personnally responsible (especially in the eyes of spiritual people) for choosing the hassle that is put over them. But it may not really be their choice: it is not their "fault" if they are naturally clever and more thirsty of knowledge than others. Their real need, at least for some of them, is not as much a special expensive treatment, exhausting training and hard competitions, but to be let free to be what they are (which may have zero cost for society); but it may be beyond the mental ability of the System, to understand this need of freedom and tolerate geniuses for what they are. The System "needs" to be the official creator of every good thing that happens; and to be respected as such, it needs to first destroy any positive thing that previously existed in nature, and for which the System cannot be granted the merit. So it will divert the natural aspiration of geniuses into a fabricated ambition, requiring a hard artificial work, to conquer the right to be accepted into a higer meaningless social class whose role will replace the one of natural intelligence. This will require a harder artificial work for the ambition to conquer the right to enter the next grade, and so on. But this endless strive can turn out to be destructive of the very creativity and knowledge that it pretends to create.

Finally, while the System officially praises the genuises it trains as an elite (and may have positive effects on some of them), some of these geniuses not at ease with the System, happen to suffer this treatment as a sort of mental slavery, nonsense that destroys their time, life and creativity. It is a known fact that intellectual creativity erodes with age. Any harm or obstacle that limits the time and opportunity for young geniuses to find fulfilment and develop knowledge, is a terrible waste.

This situation has been recalled here:

"the human brain has it's best time in the early to mid twenties. Why do we waste these best years?"

A fabric of crackpots

As we said, the most disgusting thing for (at least some) clever people, is intellectual mediocrity.
This is both true for young genuises as for tenured scientists. These are two artifically separated sides of a population that would otherwise have naturally been one brotherhood, but whose chances to connect to each other are severely limited by this wall of adminstrative rule of intellectual mediocrity that is the school and undergraduate teaching system, separating both sides, and which repels each member of a side away from the other side.

Why are there no more serious attempts at communication and direct unions between networks or organizations supporting gifted people in desperate need of opportunities to fulfill their curiosity and develop their skills, and scientists that feel desperate at the statistics of the decreasing popularity of scientific studies in official institutions ? Or is there ? Of course some efforts are made at popularizing science in the media, in conferences, expositions, or science museums. But this is usually not done in a serious manner: this is not the full depth of science that is usually shared in these ways, but rather some oversimplified accounts or anecdotical aspects of science. The separation between scientists and those who wish to learn science, may seem to be reduced through such popularization works, but no real decent bridge seems to be currently in place.
Core theories that could be really more interesting, such as the main foundations of mathematics (set theory, model theory), linear or abstract algebra, tensors, electromagnetism, non-euclidean geometries, topology, classical mechanics, gravitation, special and general relativity, quantum physics, are hardly ever fully shared in such environments. (I am personally interested to contribute in communicating these subjects to gifted people who wish to learn them outside formal academic contexts, so please contact me if you know about any math&physics education network, either local or online, for skilled free students at undergraduate level).

Such an absence explains both the lack of popularity of scientific studies that many scientists officially deplore, and the proliferation of crancks that worsen the separation between scientists and the public. How can students be expected to seek scientific studies, if the academic system welcomes them there with the spines of a hard, tedious and boring work ? How can young geniuses not be tempted to mistake the scientific community with the mediocre appearance of it given by the academic system, which somehow really looks like crackpot ? This deprives them of the means to trust the intelligence of scientists, and thus leads them to believe that their own thought, just because it goes a little higher than the lessons they are attending, would be higher than mainstream science too. This is what is leading some of the young geniuses, who otherwise may have become good scientists, to become paranoid cranks instead.

A change is needed

The opposition of political forces is so naturally flawed between
  1. The ITP, introverted independent thinkers interested in things and ideas rather than in other people, who prefer to flee political conflicts
  2. The EJ (extroverted organizers) who like to rule the lives of other people and find it right to do so
Thus, while they are usually a free and reliable reference of knowledge inside their precise subject of research, geniuses and scientists may remain a sort of sheep in the hands of businesses and administration (and sometimes thoughtless intellectual fashions among their peers, as professional recognition is dictated by peer-review processes), as for the conception and orientation of the work they are employed for.
This is where the natural need of scientists to take refuge in the ivory tower of their specialized knowledge (while many speudo-scientists are much more eager to share their crackpot ideas to the public) to avoid the hassles of mental nonsense and political conflicts that reign in the rest of the world, reaches its weaknesses. This lack of political conciousness among those who may have been best able to understand society's troubles and invent possible solutions, is both damaging to many of their own possible intellectual peers, and to society as a whole.

Since long, hardly any justification remained for such a lack of liberty to the whole students population, especially the top fraction of them. But now the obsolescence of the system is even clearer with the development of the Internet, which gives everyone virtually all the best knowledge of the world at home for free. But this new field of opportunities still has to be further developed.

Scientists already started to revolt against publishers of scientific journals (whose main remaining role in the Internet age is to take as a direct profit most of the public funding of scientific libraries, with no real service in return), by developing alternative online peer-reviewed journals with free online access for all.

It may be time to make a similar revolution with education, to provide free or cheaper online higher education. Indeed, the methods of sharing knowledge are currently quite wasteful with this way of having to repeat the same lessons at precise schedules each year, while it is the same performance that thousands of professors are supposed to repeat worldwide from a university to another, with hardly any innovation effort actually done: this is far from any optimized use of the creative scientific abilities of professors, while a simple video broadcast of the best lesson of the world on each subject (just to be translated in each different language, and eventually to adapt once for all to a list of different skills and profiles of students), would sometimes do better and cheaper. Thus we need to consider

Other mismanagements of intellectual resources

Some research subjects in mathematics that initially developed with no pupose of practical applications, finally produced unexpected important ones (such as number theory that led to cryptography). However this is not a general case; and, while most fields of mathematics (as listed by the Mathematics Subject Classification) seem connected with possibilities of applications, some active research subjects (as I could see) can't be reasonably expected to be useful to mankind in the near future.

This uselessness is a general phenomenon that can take different forms. What was the usefulness of sending men on the Moon ? Some technical usefulness of the Apollo program exists (technological develoment, some scientific research...), but this alone would not have justified its huge cost (such new technologies could have been developed at a lower cost). The main "usefulness" was to make people dream (and to bring a bright reputation to the US worldwide). Hopes of clearer kinds of usefulness such as making it profitable to colonize the Moon in the short term, have been disappointed.
What is the usefulness of astronomy, except to warn us whether an asteroid threatens to hit the Earth and kill many of us ? To bring a knowledge of our place in the cosmos, to feed the imagination of an educated public curious enough to look after it. The advantage of astronomy is that it can be popularized in a way that preserves much of its wonder (and it is cheaper than the Apollo program). In terms of strict usefulness, just enough space research to send the useful satellites to observe, localize and communicate everything on Earth would have sufficed.
What is the usefulness of particle physics ? Progress in fundamental physics in the first half the 20th century has been tremendously useful. This usefulness was expectable because the physics underlying ordinary matter (to specify exactly what can be done with matter for practical purposes by affordable means) had not been fully understood before. However, this time has passed, as the laws of physics for ordinary matter are rather fully understood; what is not understood yet of fundamental physics and that is being researched in particle accelerators, clearly won't be technologically useful in a foreseeable future (as it can only bring information about the mess of particles produced in particle collisions from overexpensive, energetically wasteful particle accelerators; about the Big Bang and cosmology; and some pointless details on how cosmic rays can damage spacecrafts and the health of astronauts). Now, further discoveries in particle physics can only be useful to feed the dreams of... the small minority of particle physics that can understand such discoveries (as this field can't be popularized in a similarly meaningful way as astronomy).
Some mathematical research subjects are just as useless, only good to feed the dreams of a few specialists, where the news of any discovery can eventually not be popularized at all.

The mismanagement of intellectual resources is particularly striking in the case of string theory, to which a huge lot of work was dedicated with hardly any effective result (testable predictions), which led some to dismiss this theory as not even wrong (though interesting from a purely abstract mathematical viewpoint).

This does not exactly make it a pseudo-science like other pseudo-sciences. Unfortunately the debate has been polluted with some cranky claims of opponents to string theory (especially Lee Smolin), but I guess that a sort of agreement between most physicists would remain on the following points: that string theory is a somehow self-consistent mathematical theory (though this may not be so clear), that it has a chance to fit the real world but we cannot know. It is merely speculative with no practical prediction as it lets a much too wide range of possibilities that can't even be reasonably computed to compare them with the standard model, so that it largely fails in practice (under the limitations of our human deductive abilities...) to reach the status it initially promised, that is of a scientific theory for physics.

On the other hand, other possibly more useful research subjects for scientists are neglected, such as

Some references of criticism of the institutions

In this article:
"The assumptions and procedures of science in the West have long been shaped by military and commercial imperatives. The scientific establishment has accepted these shaping constraints, reluctantly or enthusiastically, but they have had little choice in the matter."
and in the New Scientist article Time to democratize science, linked from there:

"In the words of Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz:
"If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern."I am not sure economics even qualifies as a science any more. It is as though physicists spent hours pushing an elephant up the stairs of their department and then expressed surprise at what happened when they heaved it off the roof.
As a source of world-changing knowledge, the social sciences are as nothing when compared with the natural sciences.
...
The pharmaceutical sector, for example, has spent billions on copycat drugs and treatments for depression and anxiety that have few clear benefits.
....
There is no good reason I can see why science funding could not be made subject to democratic decision-making. Yes, it will hand power to non-experts, but so does the present system: non-experts in the state and private sector often have a decisive say in what scientists study.
"
Science and Democracy parts I, II, III.

List of false or low quality sciences

Let us now review a number of disciplines (communities of people with some sort of peer recognition) claiming to study a field of knowledge (focusing on matters of truth - unlike arts which are explicitly more a matter of taste than of truth), and assess their scientific value according to the previously explained criteria.

Philosophy 

It had its time of glory in the past. In ancient Greece, philosophy was not yet distinguished from the science of that time, thus we might say both were comparable in quality. Then they faced many centuries of near-absence during the dark ages of Christian domination, before resurrecting together and having their glory period in the time of Enlightenment.
Enlightenment philosophy signed its good new insights of truth, by some valuable practical accomplishments (usefulness for mankind, that can be compared with the technical usefulness of science):
However, the situation is now very different, as science made a tremendous lot of progress since that time, leaving philosophy far behind. Philosophy didn't make any comparable progress of methods or knowledge, and thus became a sterile discipline.

Some attempts of reform to remodel philosophy after science have been made, such as the development of analytic philosophy by Bertrand Russel who also contributed to the new foundations of mathematics (set theory). It may be acknowledged that analytic philosophy is a bit less irrational than continental philosophy.
But, apart from a few interesting clues such as his celestial teapot and other remarks on religion, much of the length of Russel's philosophy (such as his theory of the mind) remained of poor value (long developments on pointless details that cannot contribute to the progress of knowledge in any effective way).

For example, after the good fruits of democracy produced by the Enlightenment philosophy, what further political revolution did philosophy bring to mankind ? Well, it brought the Marxist revolution.
Despite its claims, Marxism is not rational. Most philosophers did not notice the problem, and thus welcomed Marxism in their field. Only Karl Popper developed famous writings showing the discrepancy between Marxism and science, by observing the difference between the marxist and the scientific way of testing a theory against experience (falsifiability), for example the way Einstein's general relativity made precise predictions to be tested.

Despite this, the community of so-called "intellectuals" (of humanities, not scientists) kept holding Marxism as a rational theory and valid philosophy. Of course if you measure a philosophy by its convincing power to the masses, then, Marxism is among the best, just in the same way religions previously were. In fact Marxism is itself a modern religion exploiting the newly fashionable claim of scientificity. But the success of a convincing power to the people (even to be taken as "scientific" by an unscientific class of self-proclaimed "intellectuals") hardly has anything to do with truth and rationality. 
Now you don't need anymore to study and examine it in much details to find evidence for its lack of rationality: just look at its fruits (the Soviet Union). The combination of its convincing power with its utter falsity, just means it is at the antipode of reason: it is powerfully misleading. We shall discuss this more closely in Part IV.

The irrational character of philosophy, can be infered from its unability to naturally converge to a consensus on given questions: many philosophers keep presenting opposite views on fixed issues, that remain unresolved for a very long time.

Paul Graham's criticism of philosophy
"When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep quiet. There's no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can't distinguish them from placebos.
And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy's claims. It's supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. "
(and many other arguments worth reading too)

Richard Feynman (physics Nobel laureate) made harsch criticisms of philosophy:

"After some discussion as to what "essential object" meant, the professor leading the seminar said (...) "Mr. Feynman, would you say an electron is an 'essential object'?"(...). So I began by asking, "Is a brick an essential object?"
Then the answers came out. One man stood up and said, "A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by an essential object."
Another man said, "No, it isn't the individual brick that is an essential object; it's the general character that all bricks have in common - their 'brickiness' - that is the essential object."
Another guy got up and said, "No, it's not in the bricks themselves. 'Essential object' means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks."
Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos."

"philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds"
(forgetting that, in fact, ornithology has been useful to birds in some ways...)

People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No, I’m not… If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it — that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers… then that’s the way it is. But either way there’s Nature and she’s going to come out the way She is. So therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t predecide what it is we’re looking for only to find out more about it. Now you ask: “Why do you try to find out more about it?” If you began your investigation to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can’t get an answer to that particular question just by finding out more about the character of Nature. But that’s not my interest in science; my interest in science is to simply find out about the world and the more I find out the better it is, I like to find out…
(The Pleasure of Finding Things Out p. 23)

From this Feynman's text on science:

"...what science is, is not what the philosophers have said it is, and certainly not what the teacher editions say it is. What it is, is a problem which I set for myself after I said I would give this talk.
After some time, I was reminded of a little poem:
A centipede was happy quite, until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg comes after which?"
This raised his doubts to such a pitch
He fell distracted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
All my life, I have been doing science and known what it was, but what I have come to tell you--which foot comes after which--I am unable to do, and furthermore, I am worried by the analogy in the
poem that when I go home I will no longer be able to do any research."

From this Feynman's interview:

"Philosophers, incidentally, say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive and probably wrong. . . 
My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza--and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these Attributes and Substances, all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now, how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there was no excuse for it! In that same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions and take the contrary propositions and look at the world--and you can't tell which is right. Sure, people were awed because he had the courage to take on these great questions, but it doesn't do any good to have the courage if you can't get anywhere with the question. 
It isn't the philosophy that gets me, it's the pomposity. If they'd just laugh at themselves! If they'd just say, "I think it's like this, but Von Leipzig thought it was like that, and he had a good shot at it too." If they'd explain that this is their best guess.... But so few of them do; instead, they seize on the possibility that there may not be any ultimate fundamental particle and say that you should stop work and ponder with great profundity. "You haven't thought deeply enough; first let me define the world for you." Well, I'm going to investigate it without defining it! "

Another Physics Nobel laureate, Steven Weinberg, wrote (Chapter "Against Philosophy" of his book "Dreams of a final theory"):

"The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers.(...) without some guidance from our preconceptions one could do nothing at all. It is just that philosophical principles have not generally provided us with the right preconceptions.

Physicists do of course carry around with them a working philosophy. For most of us, it is a rough-and-ready realism, a belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our scientific theories. But this has been learned through the experience of scientific research and rarely from the teachings of philosophers.

This is not to deny all value to philosophy(...). But we should not expect [the philosophy of science] to provide today's scientists with any useful guidance about how to go about their work or about what they are likely to find.

After a few years' infatuation with philosophy as an undergraduate I became disenchanted. The insights of the philosophers I studied seemed murky and inconsequential compared with the dazzling successes of physics and mathematics. From time to time since then I have tried to read current work on the philosophy of science. Some of it I found to be written in a jargon so impenetrable that I can only think that it aimed at impressing those who confound obscurity with profundity. (...) But only rarely did it seem to me to have anything to do with the work of science as I knew it. (...)
I am not alone in this; I know of no one who has participated actively in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers. I raised in the previous chapter the problem of what Wigner calls the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics; here I want to take up another equally puzzling phenomenon, the unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy.
Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more harm than ever they were of use.(...)
Mechanism had also been propagated beyond the boundaries of science and survived there to give later trouble to scientists. In the nineteenth century the heroic tradition of mechanism was incorporated, unhappily, into the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels and their followers (...) and for a while dialectical materialism stood in the way of the acceptance of general relativity in the Soviet Union
(...) We are not likely to know the right questions until we are close to knowing the answers.(...)
The quark theory was only one step in a continuing process of reformulation of physical theory in terms that are more and more fundamental and at the same time farther and farther from everyday experience.

homeschooling physicist

"But… many introductory books on philosophy take the tack that “philosophy is not so much a set of answers as a way of asking questions: the important thing about philosophy is not specific answers, but rather the philosophical way of thinking”
Yeah – that is because the answers that philosophers have come up with over the centuries have been almost uniformly bad!
(...)
Ethics is too important to be left to the philosophers.
(...)
children should also be taught not to think “philosophically,” in the manner of current and recent academic and professional philosophers. On the contrary, they should be explicitly told that, for at least the last two centuries, the philosophical enterprise as carried out by professional philosophers has been an obvious failure and that the vast increase in our knowledge of reality during the last several centuries has been due not to philosophy but to natural science."

In the same site: Is philosophy futile - more texts on philosophy
Physicists dissing philosophy:
"Science, philosophy, and religion all make claims to have a broad, integrated view of reality. But, the views of reality they arrive at differ dramatically.
It would be quite surprising if three such radically different approaches to confronting reality were to give compatible pictures of reality.
Of course, they do not.
...in some ways, both the creationists and the postmodernists deserve credit for seeing something that more sensible, moderate folks try to evade: in the long-term, science, philosophy, and religion cannot co-exist."

One philosopher acknowledges and sums up the importance and relevance of top scientists'harsch criticism of philosophy, so as to take lessons how to consequently reform the academic practice of philosophy.But other philosophers prefer to reject such criticism and keep justifying their flaws anyway.

More debates if you wish :
Weinberg's "Against Philosophy"
Why philosophize
Does philosophy make you a better scientist
Another discussion
Very long discussion which then diverts from the subject

Other philosophers try to justify philsophy's flaws through empty arguments:

How pitiful it is to observe how philosophers are not even able to give a decent answer to a simple question. 

They try to justify their unability of finding decent answers by claims such as : the value of philosophy would be to focus on asking the right questions (or eliminating the wrong questions) and eliminating some wrong answers (a sort of intellectual garbage collecting). But these are just blind unjustified beliefs, as the real effect of their work is just the opposite: to multiply and preciously accumulate wrong questions and wrong answers (intellectual garbage collectioning).
This reminds me the joke "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. They just define darkness as an industry standard." and other "It's not a bug, it's a feature".

Talk:Foundations_of_mathematics

"Anyone, a mathematician especially, who appreciates the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” and the “unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy" to scientific endeavors must recognize the dangers of letting "philosophy of math" ride roughshod over "foundations of math" and as a last line of defense, of letting "philosophy and foundations of math" ride roughshod over proper pure and applied maths.

Just look at the talk page for "philosophy of math"! What a mess. Note that some of these people actually believe the destiny of science can be mastered thru verbose semantics, concepts, schema, arguments, etc. The last time I looked, the language of science was still written in mathematics. Fortunately, bullshit had not yet taken over in the math journals.

Specialists in foundations and/or philosophy of math often over-estimate the importance of their work to those in other specialties."

Consider for example how philosophers of maths play the role of garbage collectioners of the failed/crackpot mathematical inspirations such as "Intuitionism" (= possibly interesting hints not properly clarified) or meaningless conceptual divisions that can be made obsolete by mathematical work (see about the completeness theorem in Part III) that they raise as highly philosophical just because it failed to be mathematically meaningful and thus does not interest any reasonable mathematician.

In reply to the criticism that philosophy lost its usefulness since the Enlightenment time, philosophers often react by glorifying themselves of their uselessness, by the straw man argument that, well, optimized financial productivity is not the right ultimate value, and thus should not be the exclusive purpose of public school curricula. 
But, while I agree that numerical measure of the short-term financial profit should not be the final and exclusive criteria of value for an intellectual discipline, the trouble is that philosophers seem to have no other evidently meaningful alternative criteria of value either, except the very negation of the usefulness criteria (together with their intimate but unjustified conviction). Namely, they seem to be raising wastefulness (uselessness) as their ultimate value, as if the very fact something brings no fruit, could serve as an evidence that it must surely be very spiritual. This reminds me the Shadoks'insights :

"I pump, therefore I am
It is better to pump even if nothing happens, than risk that something is going worse by not pumping...
their rocket was not highly developed, but they had calculated that it still had 1 chance over 1 million to work. And they hurried to fail the 999 999 first tests to ensure that the millionth works."

With wastefulness as their ultimate value, their work turns out to be universally wasteful, for whatever purpose including the development of the mind and critical thinking itself. The belief they must be good for the spirit or whatever undefinable ideal just based on the observation of their worthlessness for financial profit, is but a superstition among others. They may of course reject this criciticism as straw man too, as this description is not exactly their claim, But it does not matter what they exactly claim: this is what they are doing in practice anyway.

How to explain the failure of philosophy ? Well, apart from the crankiness of its members, an important cause is its traditional obsession for essentialism (focusing on the ultimate nature of everything - well, by the way, this is precisely a usual character of cranks), to be contrasted with science's non-essentialism that we described. Science has its own care for essences when needed; it is just not an obsession. Philosophy just failed to follow this model.
We might also describe the difference between science and philosophy in this way:
Science is the practice of rationality, while philosophy has theories of rationality. And these theories are usually disconnected from this practice, because, in fact, there is no better way to understand rationality, that by practicing it.
 
But... is this really awful if philosophy is dominated by cranks ? Well, not necessarily. After all, in order for cranks to stop bothering scientists, they need to go somewhere else and find another public. So, philosophy can be considered useful for its social role of a huge intellectual bin where cranks can gather, while science on its own side can stay clean.

OK, philosophy is so diverse that it is also possible to find there a minority of decent approaches: example.

Remarks on logical positivism and falsificationism

As philosophers can easily notice, there is a flaw in the way Weinberg takes the example of logical positivism and its unfortunate consequences for criticizing philosophy. Indeed, logical positivism was rather made by scientists themselves, precisely as a movement against philosophy, and was popular among scientists but not among philosophers, who quickly rejected it. Thus, philosophers cannot be responsible for these troubles.
Let's explain this issue in more details.

Once understood well, the statement of the principles of science we made at the start of this Part II, including the "logical positivism" principle, is not affected by Weinberg's criticism of logical positivism: the troubles only come from a caricatural form of logical positivism not balanced by the other principles we stated (conceptual reconstruction of reality).

The difference made by philosophers between verificationism (as stated by logical positivists) and Popper's falsificationism (that was later widely taken as a reference of scientificity) has to be dismissed.
Once analyzed well, these are more or less two ways of popularizing the same logical concept. Well, the details of the formulation of logical positivism can have been imperfect and deserve a few corrections. But the main difference is not about what they really mean, which is the same, but a difference of "how they feel", how they might be misinterpreted by irrational people.
To the eyes of a large public as well as many philosophers, Marxism and Psychoanalysis made an impression of being "verified", thus scientific. But this impression of "verification" was a mere illusion, obtained by devoiding of meaning the concept of "verification". Then, Karl Popper discovered that another phrasing, "falsificationism", was better suited and efficient to explain how marxism and Psychoanalysis are false sciences, as they do not stand to the practice of verification used in real science. This was okay, but then he went to wrong conclusions by mistaking this difference of usefulness (for irrational people to more easily notice the lack of scientificity of some ideologies) for a deep conceptual difference. The result is that he replaced the initial misinterpretation of the nature of science, by another misinterpretation, that does not carry the same risks of misuse but can carry some too.

As Weinberg said, the main possible value of philosophy is to refute some errors of other philosophers. So, Popper was good for warning against Psychoanalysis and Marxism as pseudo-sciences, while David Stove was good for warning against the irrationality of Popper and other science philosophers (Feyerabend, Kuhn...).

About clarifying scientific concepts

An example of a "philosophical subject"  is about noticing that modern theories such as relativity and quantum physics, failed to go through a work of cleaning up their fundamental concepts and vocabulary to a comparable extent as classical physics had succeeded before. So they are still often presented inside the language, intuition and even mathematical parameters of classical physics. This conflict between the modern intended theories and the classical intuitions and language still used to expressed them, brings these theories an unfortunate reputation of being counter-intuitive.

That's right, but: what's the use of making a philosophy about it ? This is not a genuine subject for philosophy. This is just a task for science professors to clean up existing knowledge. And this is an administrative problem to pay attention to this question, and provide incentives to:
- publish better courses cleaning up each possible subject, once for all in the world (or several times, of course, but each time caring to do better again than previously);
- For each subject where such a work was already done by someone in the world, take the new view and reform teaching after it.
 
Unfortunately, while such works exist (as I'm caring myself to do some), the education system is so conservative that the necessary changes are not done (because professors are usually so busy repeating over and over again the same old teachings in boring old ways, and are so "the best in their fields", that they have no time to seriously care whether a better way might already have been produced by somebody else).

But hopefully, in a future time when the cleaning up will have been done, what will remain of the philosophy whose thesis was to claim that the cleaning up is not done yet ? Rather do the cleaning up, than philosophize on its lack.

Postmodernism and "science studies"

A community of ideological flaws can be seen between Marxim, which dismisses its oppsing theories (economic liberalism) as a mere matter of social forces rather than of truth (so as to use ad hominem as an excuse to not bother arguing rationally), and the postmodernist "science studies".

Everyone should know about the Sokal affair, an episode of the Science Wars:
"The physicist Alan Sokal submitted the article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” proposing that quantum gravity is a linguistic and social construct and that quantum physics supports postmodernist criticisms of scientific objectivity. Social Text published the article in the Spring/Summer “Science Wars” issue in May 1996. Later, in the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in the article “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies”, Prof. Sokal exposed his parody-article, “Transgressing the Boundaries” as an experiment testing the intellectual rigor of an academic journal that would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”

However Sokal's hoax should not be overestimated, as it was only directed to a precise movement (postmodernism) that should not be confused with the whole of philosophy or social sciences: in this interview, Alan Sokal said:

"I should make clear that I don’t think my parody article settles anything. It doesn’t by itself prove much – that one journal was sloppy. So it wasn’t the parody itself that proved it, it was the things that I and other people wrote afterward which I believe showed the sloppiness of the philosophy that a lot of postmodernist literary theory types were writing. But again, I wasn’t the first person to make those criticisms. It was only after the fact that I went back into the literature and found philosophers had made many of these criticisms long before me. All I did in a certain sense was to find a better public relations method than they did."

But he also expresses his skepticism on the possibility for philosophy of science to fulfill its goal of understanding the scientific method:

"So I guess you’re right that I’m sceptical that there can ever be a complete over-arching theory simply because science is about rationality; rationality is always adaptation to unforeseen circumstances – how can you possibly codify that? But that doesn’t mean philosophy of science is useless, because all of these attempts that have failed as final codifications of scientific method nevertheless contributed something. "

Anti-Science Phenomenon
"Practitioners of the social sciences have not learned, in their own disciplines, much that is operationally indisputable, readily reproducible, and internationally agreed to; so they cannot easily conceive such a thing to be possible in any field. Knowing in their own discipline that ideology governs "knowledge" as well as theory, they presume that must be so in all fields."

Also, the end of the above quoted Weinberg's chapter "against philosophy" tells about the relations between science and "science studies" by sociologists.
Some interesting observations are without problem:

"For instance, Sharon Traweek has spent years with elementary particle experimentalists at both the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the KEK Laboratory in Japan and has described what she had seen from the perspective of an anthropologist. This kind of big science is a natural topic for anthropologists and sociologists, because scientists belong to an anarchic tradition that prizes individual initiative, and yet they find in today's experiments that they have to work together in teams of hundreds. As a theorist I have not worked in such a team, but many of her observations seem to me to have the ring of truth, as for instance: The physicists see themselves as an elite whose membership is determined solely by scientific merit. The assumption is that everyone has a fair start. This is underscored by the rigorously informal dress code, the similarity of their offices, and the "first naming" practices in the community. Competitive individualism is considered both just and effective: the hierarchy is seen as a meritocracy which produces fine physics. American physicists, however, emphasize that science is not democratic: decisions about scientific purposes should not be made by majority rule within the community, nor should there be equal access to a lab's resources. On both these issues, most Japanese physicists assume the opposite."

But other aspects present a strong opposition:

"It is simply a logical fallacy to go from the observation that science is a social process to the conclusion that the final product, our scientific theories, is what it is because of the social and historical forces acting in this process. A party of mountain climbers may argue over the best path to the peak, and these arguments may be conditioned by the history and social structure of the expedition, but in the end either they find a good path to the peak or they do not, and when they get there they know it. (No one would give a book about mountain climbing the title Constructing Everest.) I cannot prove that science is like this, but everything in my experience as a scientist convinces me that it is. The "negotiations" over changes in scientific theory go on and on, with scientists changing their minds again and again in response to calculations and experiments, until finally one view or another bears an unmistakable mark of objective success. It certainly feels to me that we are discovering something real in physics, something that is what it is without any regard to the social or historical conditions that allowed us to discover it.

Where then does this radical attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge come from? One source I think is the old bugbear of positivism, this time applied to the study of science itself. If one refuses to talk about anything that is not directly observed, then quantum field theories or principles of symmetry or more generally laws of nature cannot be taken seriously. What philosophers and sociologists and anthropologists can study is the actual behavior of real scientists, and this behavior never follows any simple description in terms of rules of inference. But scientists have the direct experience of scientific theories as desired yet elusive goals, and they become convinced of the reality of these theories.

There may be another motivation for the attack on the realism and objectivity of science, one that is less high-minded. Imagine if you will an anthropologist who studies the cargo cult on a Pacific island. The islanders believe that they can bring back the cargo aircraft that made them prosperous during World War II by building wooden structures that imitate radar and radio antennas. It is only human nature that this anthropologist and other sociologists and anthropologists in similar circumstances would feel a frisson of superiority, because they know as their subjects do not that there is no objective reality to these beliefs—no cargo-laden C-47 will ever be attracted by the wooden radars. Would it be surprising if, when anthropologists and sociologists turned their attention to studying the work of scientists, they tried to recapture that delicious sense of superiority by denying the objective reality of the scientists' discoveries?
Relativism is only one aspect of a wider, radical, attack on science itself. (...) These radical critics of science seem to be having little or no effect on the scientists themselves. I do not know of any working scientist who takes them seriously."

A delicious self-criticism article by Bruno Latour (worth full reading - a longer version is there), questioning the field of social studies he created himself, considering how it turned out to lead to conspirationism, denialism, and endangering our planet by the way it is used by political lobbys for denying scientific evidence on global warming:

"...I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact–as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past–but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we have now to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices?
..."

Economics

Economical and politicial sciences emerged out of philosophy, and made some way towards scientificity by taking some inspiration from mathematics and other applied sciences. They are not as flawed as philosophy, but still keep some of its flaws. For example, they keep fuzzy logic, can't work accurately enough to converge to the truth, as can be seen by their long-standing diversities of views on each subject. This is partly understandable as a difficulty, as its object depends on fuzzy human elements and irreducible complexities, so that the reductionist approaches of mathematics and physics cannot apply so well. However this is not a sufficient justification, since another scientific field (biology and the theory of evolution) could do a better job in spite of comparable difficulties.

Among people aware of the presence of large flaws in economical sciences, some analyze them as due to giving too much importance to mathematics (and mathematical modeling). However,  people coming from exact sciences (pure or applied mathematics, phyics) and having a look at the mathematical modelling used in economics, would observe that the problem with economics is not about doing too much mathematics, but about misunderstanding mathematics.

Indeed, mathematics does not just consist in writing and solving equations. Instead, true mathematics is a way of thinking. It is the skill of thinking logically and accurately, in an elaborate way in coherence with the context, so as to ensure the reliability of the approximations made. Mathematical concepts, and other concepts developed by a mathematical way of thinking, can be expressed as well in formulas or in ordinary language, depending on subjects or convenience; while illogical nonsense can be written in the language of formulas just the same.
The art of finding out good approximations and relevant modelizations, is omnipresent in physics and other sciences; and the art of modelization itself, in the sense of developing concepts, diversifying and selecting relevant viewpoints on a given subject, is present in pure mathematics too.
Another scientific tool often used in hard sciences which did not enter the culture of economists, is computer simulations.

Example of an article presenting the current flaws of economics:

The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics

(More references would be welcome; already the wikipedia article on Economics presents some criticism too).

Other important examples of the domination of nonsense in academic economics, have been the heavy presence of Marxism as well as Keynesianism, despite their lack of logical coherence. The disasters from Marxism are well-known. But Keynesianism also has a share of responsibility in nonsense politics too, by the misunderstanding it induced about the long "crisis" from 1973 to now (reduced growth and worsening unemployment without inflation), leading to a repetition of the fiscal and monetary measures (increased spendings) that worked to end the "overproduction" crisis of the 1930's (which can be analyzed as a monetary crisis) but cannot work now that the problem is different, and even worsens the situation : harming growth and running into more disasters (states going bankrupt) which can't be solved anymore.

How desperating it can have been for example in France during the 1980's, for someone who thinks logically, to hear on TV as well as by high school economics teachers, as if it was undeniably the only rational view, the perpetual repetition of the same nonsense, that overspending (by states as well as by people) woud be the best solution to every problem and for social justice, while austerity would be the worst evil of the world that only big bad wolves (capitalists) might support for obscure reasons.

As with philosophy, the obligations to swallow tons of absurd theories for anyone who would consider officially studying economics, also contributed to turn away from the subject most skilled thinkers that could have corrected it. Sure, the rationality level there is better than in philosophy, but most of the really good thinkers rather go to hard sciences rather than economics.

Note also how usually unquestioned are the basic features of the "infrastructures" in terms of which democracy, national states, currencies, administrations and policies are defined.

The omnipresence of technologies and other remarkable efficiencies of science to change many things in our daily life (in contrast with the vanity of religion) as well as the presence of an economical science full of mathematical tools, has given many people the false impression that science somehow dominates the world, despite its much smaller number of effective members (scientists) than religions.

In reality, science has never been in power. It cannot do what nobody wants it to do. Scientists never received the mandate to rethink and reorganize our political and economic systems so as to more truly serve the general interest. Our core political structures, as well as the root of decision (some political class vaguely representing a rather irrational population through rudimentary voting processes) hardly has anything to do with the well-designed kind of sophistication such as science would know to develop.

People always decided that scientists should exclusively work at the service of this unquestioned "liberal" or "democratic" system, to provide technologies to do what consumers individually like, and what our institutions want them to do. These institutions are rather a conventional construction that emerged long ago and were preserved by inertia or slowly evolved for easy corrections and adaptation for the pupose of growing and keeping their power, in a world where most people have a passive mind. The only choice scientists had, was between serving these institutions or staying jobless and excluded from society.

Then, how can anyone hold science responsible for the flawed decisions (individually useful but collectively irresponsible or under control by specific interest groups) made by a system of businesses and institions that decides everything and hires scientists, but that scientists cannot control in return (and most of them don't even care as they are just satisfied to build their ivory tower in a small corner there) ?

We whall review in Part IV some of the main economic concepts and features (either already known or not yet) that need to be understood, and new scientific tools to develop, for mankind to better solve its current (old or new) and upcoming problems.

Medicine and Psychiatry

Medicine benefited greatly of the development of biological sciences, but suffers the influence of the pharmaceutical industry's financial interests, that distorts the research results towards the highest possible social expenses it can take profit from; and there are so many substances and questions requiring lots of specific observations, that it is sometimes hard to check the truth on every question - and with laws set up by industrial lobbies, none else than this industry can "follow the procedures" to get the right to sell its products (no matter how far from a fair game of truth seeking are these procedures). While these aberrations are hardly a secret in general, this lobby's strong influence on political decisions makes it rather hopeless to try restoring a sane rational environment for the development of medecine as a science in the current system.

Also the relation with alternative medecine is not clear. Of course, a lot of caution is necessary in general as many charlatans prosper, but it is a pity to miss the tools to help select the possibly useful practices and practitioners. The lack of research in some methods may be due to the fact they do not sell any expensive chemicals, and therefore are not in the industry's interests.
For example, the effects of acupuncture are still controversial.

The situation is particularly disastrous in the field of psychiatry. While some serious research in psychiatry can exist, and some patients may indeed find help (healing some cases of depression or other troubles) in psychiatric treatments, much of the psychiatric practice fails to be scientific - and rather behaves as a totalitarian system instead.
Indeed, psychiatry is not falsifiable, with its easy game of interpreting any patient's disagreements with its diagnosis, as pathological (or sometimes, as a mere scientologist propaganda). This loophole (a general exagerated belief in people's foolishness, that opens the door to unfalsifiable fanciful ideas) is more or less the same with psychiatry as with psychoanalysis.
Another example of an antiscientific character of psychiatrists, is how fast, in a few minutes, they can make definitive judgements about whether their patient's views are justified or not. In the rest of science, it may take hours, years or decades of work by many scientists to debate a difficult question. Even many ordinary people can be lucid enough to not judge other people's life without taking some time to discuss and try to understand, or to acknowledge that they don't know. Psychiatrists, on the other hand, and just like religious fundamentalists, won't make any effort to try to understand anything in their patients'lives beyond how it sounds to them in a few minutes, but will give illimited trust to their own arbitrary, definitive judgement without any discussion (that is, immediately dismissing as pathological any opinion different from theirs).

As anti-psychiatrist movements have shown, psychiatric institutional systems are naturally oriented (as a necessary means for their own preservation and promotion) to see fools everywhere and to heal none. Rather, they destroy through poison, many lives that would otherwise not have been so bad.

Some people would dismiss criticism by putting forward some cases of people who really benefited from psychiatric treatment. Another argument pushed on someone who had a bad experience suffering from a absurd treatment from mad psychiatrists who make nonsense diagnosis (mistaking, for example, any orignal thoughts away from political correctness, as madness, and ordering devastating pills for someone who was in fact sane, or anyway whose problem had nothing to do with what is assumed), is to justify this madness by :
  1. claiming that anyway the patient is free and responsible for having freely accepted the devastating treatment ordered by the psychiatrist (no matter the formal obligations of obedience could be set up by a brainless administration; and how the psychiatrist lied to the patient in the, refusing to discuss the diagnosis with the patient's agreement, nor telling the truth about the effects; assuming, disregarding any other assessment of the patient's intelligence or rationality than the psychiatrist's intimate conviction, that the patient would be too mad to understand his problem, supposedly making it necessary to tell any lies to make him accept the needed treatment; thus decidedly letting the patient no chance of an informed consent).
  2. that if a psychiatrist takes wrong decisions, the patient just need to search for another one, because, as is assumed, there must exist good ones - disregarding that this is but a way to condemn the patient to have his health damaged again and again by further mad psychiatrists, because there is no available direct means to know which psychiatrist would be sane.
In fact, this "logic" as well as many other details of how many psychiatrists think and behave, is but an expression of total madness and absence of common sense.

Indeed, it would be a matter of common sense to realize that the claims of existence of people who benefited psychiatry, or existence of psychiatrist that made good orderings, should never been acceptable as a sufficient reason to "advise" depressed people to visit one and to follow treatments, because:
What if happy patients with a positive experience, were taking the responsibility for their testimony and advice for others to visit psychiatrists, by providing financial insurance from their personal funds, to give reparation to anyone that their advise would harm ? Such an insurance economy would help restoring justice, as well as comparing the harm with the benetits of psychiatry, and finding out which weights more.

I know that many politially correct people would discard such requirements as foolish, unrealistic or uncivilized.
But those who would discard such requirements are the mad ones. There could be no possible civilization without a form of law or practical means forcing people to take the full and real responsibility for what they claim expertise in. There would be no possible civilization if hungry people were routinely invited to restaurants, some of whom serve good food while many others routinely serve deadly poison, with no available means to make the difference or to complain afterwards.
In the present world, it turns out that even the right of speech inside hospitals, by patients who suffered wrong treatments, is denied.
This is but a character of totalitarian systems. In fact, it is known that psychiatrists were happy under the nazi and soviet regimes, to get any political prisoner to make experiments on; and this is a general intrinsic character of the psychiatric methods and mentality rather than a specific accident from the dominating political ideologies of the respective places and times, as this blind and barbarian behavior can still be observed in our present Western "civilization" just the same : today's behavior of psychiatrists is a result of a perverse training of psychiatrists oriented by misinformation from pharmaceutical industries into barbarian behavior, only hidden under a "soft appearance" (many psychiatrists can't just treat their patients like animals by force but they still think the same and try to do it by other means anyway).

In a sane and civilized world, it should be a matter of common sense that even a psychiatrist that would be "wise" with his own patients, not harming their lives, should rather be stopped as a fool and condemned as a criminal whenever he would tolerate the testimonies of his wise actions by his own patients, to serve as an argument to lead by "nice advice" some other unfortunate depressed people to follow damaging treatments of his unwise collegues.

There are currently laws against diffamation, that forbid any public accusation of some sorts against someone, no matter how true such accusation may be (without unrealistic obligations of judicial procedures, unaffordable lawyer expenses and so on, and that have no decent chance for the truth to be officially recognized anyway).
But precisely, this anti-diffamation law lets no reasonable chance for any positive quality of a wise and reliable person, to be known and trusted either by contrast.

Skepticism

To face the gaps between science and society and the proliferation of pseudo-sciences, some efforts are made in ordinary terms of teaching and popularization; but also, a special effort at explanation and promotion of science and criticism of pseudo-science, was developed by the "Scientific skepticism" movement.
In some ways, they did a number of good works.
 However, while this movement claims to represent science, and indeed has includes a number of scientists, this representation of science is not always faithful, their efforts often go to the wrong targets, and they sometimes deviate from scientific thought and practice too.
Most of their claimed principles of skepticism are usually correct; but the main problem is that they often fail to apply these principles correctly in practice, on effective issue of the paranormal. Or, they prefer to focus on the most ridiculous claims of paranormal in order to correctly dismiss them, while ignoring the more genuine, defensible ones.

Such a trouble is expectable, because, as we said, the normal scientific practice is normally based on dedication and isolation in the ivory tower of science. So, the lobbying and communication work done by skeptics, in an environment full of nonsense, and on subjects where scientific knowledge is not so developed yet, sometimes happens to deteriorate the rationality level of their claims and practices.
This eventually leads them to some absurd results, associating science with indefensible attitudes, making their efforts often counter-productive with respect to their goal of explaining and promoting science and rationality.

While rationality is indeed the right self-sufficient root of all credibility, how ironical it is to see it discredited by clumsy defenders trying to promote it as a religion, by irrational methods.

We already mentioned the scientific illiteracy of some of them. More aspects of their irrationality, incompetence and similarities with what they claim to oppose (religions, sects and pseudo-sciences), will be developed in Part III.

A debate on rationalism

One site (in French) was developed to criticize the skeptic movement identified with rationalism itself (since skeptics are the loudest people claiming themselves rationalists). I had an email discussion with the author for trying to explain how to avoid this confusion. Here is a translation. (My messages are in black, his are in blue.)

... I wondered what you meant by "Considering rationalism as an equally reprehensible dogma ..." and looked at your explanation [= defining "rationalism" as the belief in a fixed and universal criteria of scientificity, may it be inductivism or falsificationism, and always dogmatically classifying any phenomenon as explainable in materialistic ways...]. But this use of the word "rationalism" does not suit me. I think that although it can be seen as mainly a problem of terminology, this problem is deeply linked to core issues, that might be seen as details but they are important too. It is very important to put everything clear and position oneself correctly, first to better approach the truth, then to avoid being wrongly attacked. For if you want to oppose people who are in error, it is essential not to be misled by their mistakes in a way that would play their game, even if meanwhile you are less mistaken than them.

First, for the vocabulary problem: how to make sense of the word "rationalism" and on what basis to motivate this choice of definition? Your use seems based on sociological considerations, namely: to accept that the meaning of a word is defined by the majority or dominant use of the word in today's world (what is done in its name, the practices of those who use it).
Problem: is the current use of the word authentic or abusive? Does the usual practice of the word really fit with its original meaning, the one meant, claimed ?
Is there another interesting possibility or even effective practice already implemented, more consistent with what the word was supposed to mean, than the way this word is often officially used ?

Consider the battle over the use of the title of "blog zététique" that took place(*) I don't want to give away the label "rationalist" to the official skeptical movement, for the following reasons: Claiming oneself rationalist, is definitely not the same as being rational. There is a huge reality of rational practice, which is science, and whose actual process is usually very different, even opposite, from what I read from you. But the best description of science is the developed practice of reason in the form of scientific progress. So why not define "rationalism" as the promotion and / or participation in the progress of science and knowledge, as already done and can go further? Would not this be a quite different and more authentic meaning of this word, than the usual practice of so-called "rationalist" activist movements ? Furthermore, I explained in my site how important aspects of the zetetic movement are similar to postmodernism, thus opposite to the normal scientific rationality.

Otherwise, sorry if it sounds personal, but I can only classify my worldview as rationalist, even if I do not put this name forward. But it is quite different from the skeptics view, so I must disagree with the skeptics'picture of rationalism, that I see as caricatural.
(...)
[Also, the reference to philosophers (Popper as the "rationalist" vs. Feyerabend as the "irrationalist") is irrelevant, as philosophers are quite disconnected from the true understanding of rationality.]
(...)
Regards.

(*) the word "zetetic" was first introduced by Marcelo Truzzi, founder of CSICOP which was initially a more open-minded movement; but then this movement and thus the use of the word "zetetic" deviated from Truzzi's original intents towards more sectarian attitudes and materialistic dogmas, forcing Truzzi to leave the movement and abandon the word "Zetetic" to the copyright of SCICOP's new pseudo-scientific practices and interpretation. The French skeptic movement followed this trend calling themselves "zététique", and did not tolerate the use this word according to Truzzi's original sense by the group criticizing them. I wrote a quick review of the situation of the French skeptic movement here 
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Thank you for your letter, and references to your site I found very interesting.

First I must tell you that you're the first one I see condemning the "zetetic" approach while proclaiming rationalism (or so I understand your position) . For me rationalism indeed corresponds to extremism of the "zetetic" method that you condemn in the "skeptics" (what a mixture of words, moreover misused in my opinion). For you it just seems to be a good way to do science, that French "zetetician" are not doing. In a word, I think we tend to agree, and condemn the same things, but not with the same words.

Indeed, I think, perhaps like you, that most of the French "zeteticians" (except a few...) absolutely do not practice as they claim "the art of doubt" because their own method (what I call rationalism and you disagree) does not let them doubt: by claiming to use universal arguments/protocols (whatever they are, falsificationism, induction, the famous and so subjective "Ockham's razor "...) able to ruthlessly sort, precisely with no doubt, theories, explanations between "good" and "bad" and between "scientific" and "unscientific". It is often said that there is "a" scientific method (without ever specifying it, without ever really describing it), but I notice that there are several. They have been several over time, there will be others, because science is built, improved, refined, corrects itself, is constantly evolving. And there are also several at a given moment, because there is not really one better than another. Some are more or less suited to the study / discovery of a particular phenomenon. It's as you know what Feyerabend defended, and it's hard not to join this quite... realistic vision, arguing that we are far from the myth of science with its universally objective method as French "zeteticians" defend.

(I will use here one last time the term in quotation marks, recalling that zetetic (in the field of the paranormal) is the creation of Marcello Truzzi, a true American skeptic, in the right sense of the term, who really knew to doubt and abstain from deciding when missing an argument one way or another. French Zeteticians considerably usurp the term popularized by Truzzi (in his Zetetician Scholar) in the United States, and the American Rationalist (CSI, formerly CSICOP for example) rather describe themselves as "skeptics" (but do not doubt any further in their majority). Zetetics "taught in ancient times" was a philosophical school which advocated the permanent doubt, which French zeteticians are far from.

I even think that in your mention of a contradiction [skeptics'claim for democracy in scientific judgement, in contradiction with their absolute undebatable certainty and value judgement against the paranormal], you miss another contradiction: claiming that the study of the paranormal would aim to keep crowds in ignorance and thus under control. Obviously, on the contrary, the study of something aims to understand it, and by disseminating this knowledge (whether or not a new phenomenon), to free these crowds from mere beliefs, prejudices, etc.. They simply do not understand "study" when they read it, but "proselytizing" or "propaganda" for a given belief, without valid scientific vehicle.

To come back to the term "rationalism" that is the subject of your post, I did not invent the interpretation. It is a term that has an adopted meaning since some time now, and I do not see myself deciding to invent another sense, as French zeteticians corrupt today those of "zetetic" or even "skeptic" (I claim myself skeptical in Truzzi's sense and feel far from their thoughts). I recommend for example, if you have not already done so, to read the excellent book by Alan F. Extension Chalmers: What is this Thing Called Science? (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend), Discovery, 1976. The idea is indeed that of the existence of universal / timeless criteria for judging theories. One can understand this ideal, or even say that the French zetetician misapply it and that you (or others) could do it better but you understood, for me it is not a matter of practice or modalities, but a principle in which I do not believe. Again Feyerabend provides many examples in Against Method. Indeed as you say the idea of applying "reason" is not the prerogative of rationalism / scientism, but of any scientific method and, if I may speak bluntly, for me just a mat (cream pie) debate on the application of good scientific method.

I'll stop there (...) But I think for the moment that what makes you claim "rationalist" must typically depend on your position relative to the existence of test(s) of universal judgement of a theory. It may be that you are (and apply it better than French zeteticians for example) or otherwise you are simply a good "skeptic" in the true sense.(...)
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I see the "scientific method" as a style of spirit and research, which must be developed into multiple forms to adapt to multiple situations, and can not be reduced to a specific algorithm.
For me, the notion of "really best method" has no universal meaning, but should not be dismissed either, but must be understood as something vague, depending on the specificity of each studied problem and provisional understanding, and must therefore be reconsidered continuously from one situation to another.

In other words, the recognition of hypercomplexity and multifaceted nature of the world, should not be mistaken for relativism (a bland uniformity of values).
Well, again we are in substantial agreement with different words.

> what makes you claim "rationalist" must typically depend on your position relative to the existence of test(s) of universal judgement of a theory

No. Reason for me is a multifaceted general discipline, but nevertheless differs significantly from a certain practice of non-reason or intellectual laziness, in fact widespread in some areas ("spiritual" teachings in particular).
A bit like the distinction between human thought and animal thought, that does not need a clean break in the evolutionary history to be something real.
The fact that there is no clean and precise wall (recognizable by an idiot) separating what is rational from what is not, is not inconsistent with the clear superiority of the practice of reason (intelligence) over non-reason (stupidity). See also the beginning of the introductory text ("Rationality and Realism, What is at Stake ? by John R. Searle) on the issue of discernibility between what is rational and what is not.

I hope I was clearer this time ...
Sincerely.
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I think the misunderstanding is on the idea that "rationalism" is a general term for simply strive for reason, what is rational or not. It is not. What I am saying is that it is a well-defined school of philosophy of science, and therefore we can not use it for something else. If you want to define your approach as a search of the rational, and if you want to avoid confusion with this school, you should use another term.

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I still see no reason to let to some specific school of philosophy of science (which I did not care to study), the copyright on the use of the word "rationalism", and the right to fix there a pathological meaning, especially as it does not seem at all to stick with the use of that word in that text by John R. Searle.

Now with the wikipedia articles: the French one indeed seems to go in your way, or perhaps even a third meaning.
However, the introductory paragraph of the English article on rationalism fits with the interpretation I said.
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I don't forget our discussion. Maybe we are finally talking about the same thing but highlighting different aspects: while you insist on the virtuous use of "reason" as the only way to get to the truth, I insist on the fact that this doctrine can be both fuzzy (most people, whatever their theories about mysterious phenomena will agree with it) and very restrictive (the English Wikipedia cites, for example a definition by Bourke advocating deductive reasoning (which, strictly applied, is very unfortunate and even inapplicable, because the deduction requires the prior development of theories, usually based on observations - induction - etc. Of course deduction can be replaced by any other methods or tools of reasoning called "universal" but each have their flaws). And that is a characteristic of rationalism that I do not defend: the idea of a method / a universal tool to compare theories. This is also the paradox of rationalism to advocate a universal method of reasoning without describing which one it is (or only a very blurred one such as the application of " reason" so we can not, as you do during your battles with "skeptics", say who is more rational if not by an arbitrary opinion - a good way to maintain eternal discussions). For this, rationalism is to me rather a doctrine (there is a universal reasoning always valid, but I can not say which one) than a specific method (practice / technique).

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Have you read my texts ? (...).
I feel not.

I would describe reason as admittedly somehow fuzzy, but rather hypercomplex.
Namely, for me, because:  reason = intelligence.

Restrictive ???????????????
If you are only looking for simplistic definitions of reason, of course you will only find simplistic definitions.
It is absurd to require stupid definitions of intelligence.
For the reason is the same.

Of course, a wikipedia article is simplifying by encyclopedic necessity.
For me, reason is not something to be defined, but something to be lived.
From the wikipedia article I only pointed out the introduction, with which I agree: the primacy of reason over any other approach.
I did not see there the idea that rationalism would be the belief that reason would be reducible to a simplistic definition by the automated application of a tiny single method, I know not where you take that from, and I do not expect many people to interpet it so either. Of course there may be some small definition proposals in the air, to describe one aspect or another, but I do not see these as banners of simplicism that would claim to completely formalize and end what reason is.

To be honest, this is for me the first time I find someone who makes such an amalgam between rationalism and simplicism. I've never seen it elsewhere.

Even zeteticians, who develop a simplistic and degenerate version of reason, do not conceive reason as simplistic. For them too, reason is to deploy their thinking as far as they can. The only problem is that this deployment of reason which they carry out as much as they can according to the extent of their abilities, is limited by the narrow size their own brain.
Please do not blame rationalism for the narrow brain of its loudest defenders. This is just unrelated.

Ok, a definition, if one is necessary:

Rationalism = claim that scientific-like research (involving intelligence, with all its rich subtleties such as deployed in many sciences, not excluding other subtleties yet to be added to fit with more issues) is generally more likely to lead to the right discernment of the truth on most truth issues, than traditional religious ways like praying, singing, faith in Jesus or in Islam, nirvana or other "spiritual" meditation practices, the obsession of humility, or this or other feelings, reading the Bible or any other traditional sacred text, or the popular simplistic, fuzzy, immature sort of thought.

This is my definition of rationalism, which, as far as I know, does not seem any way at odds with its most common interpretations.

Need I remind you that this position of rationalism, is far from obvious for many people.
Indeed right now in the world, it seems most people are opposed to rationalism as I just defined. They firmly believe that the only way to truth is faith in Jesus and baptism of the Holy Spirit, or the Buddhist meditation, or the like. So if you do not agree with them that religious practices lead more surely to the truth than scientific research, then you're part of the small minority of rationalists on this earth, whether you like it or not.

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I have not read your texts more than last time, sorry.
It seems to me that there are misunderstandings of my position in what you say in your answers:
When I say fuzzy, I mean it is not at all accurate, it is too general (and thus a doctrine rather than a method). You can tell at length what is the application of science rather than non-science, but you still do not specify the idea. For me your definition boils down to "the application of reason is better" without saying why, how, etc. .. Because ultimately you cannot really define what means "scientific" apart through its results ("you see, it works better than the rest" - but why? And is this always true?). Because the border between science and non-science is not always obvious, and it is better defined by its methods (absent from a definition of reason) than by a general idea. This is not the application of the use of reason (say, doing science) that I find simplistic, but its definition (non-existent or vague / general / subjective). That is why, even if I consider like you, scientific explanations as more convincing than mystical explanations of the world, I do not claim any rationalism. For me what is important is to produce shareable things, in the sense of verifiable by everyone (so, the opposite of subjectivity), whether it be in a box "science" or not.

So I agree with the idea that rationalism mainly includes the idea of "every reason is good," but it does not bring much in itself (ie it is vague), and the real content that follows is a sort of "soft dictatorship" that imposes a /several universal method(s) * (which non-science would not have) without really defining them (no method specified). What is all this vagueness for ? I think, for rejecting what a priori scares rationalists (the mystical, etc..), so as to maintain this "great divide" between science and non-science (formerly non-science = popular culture, but it is reducing now), between "serious" people and others. Rationalists want to mark their acquired territory.

* Where do I take this from ? I've already said, the book is a source of Chalmers, "What is science?".

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(Not reading, deprives the discussion of chances to progress).

I remember the comparison:
It is impossible to define humans versus animals, but can one deny the ability of man to know the world better than animals ?

It would be wrong to require a stupid definition of intelligence, and to conclude that intelligence does not exist by lack of a stupid satisfying definition.

So, reason is fundamentally different from non-reason, insofar as the adjective "fundamental" is understood to mean something practical and contextual, that has NOTHING TO DO with that of "essential" = separate by profound nature, binary or things like that.

See more I wrote on essentialism

On the next remarks: I'm not sure what to answer specifically, or how it could change my previous statements, except to specify the following very important point:

In reply to:

"Because ultimately you cannot really define what means "scientific" apart through its results ("you see, it works better than the rest" - but why? And is this always true?). Because the border between science and non-science is not always obvious"

Sorry but I must contradict you there:
Indeed, what brings me to discuss science, is indeed that I am basically much involved in math and theoretical physics, and theoretical reflections on various topics from childhood, and I thus reached important achievements in these areas. One of my experiences, was my fervent evangelical faith that lasted a number of years, followed by a complete deconversion, after which I have done a tremendous work of restoring order to my understanding of this whole religious adventure.

All this gives me some very extensive and intimate knowledge of science and reason.

So for me, talking about reason is the opposite of something vague, but it's a gigantic universe that I know well, and it is only as an intimate knower of this universe, that I dare to talk about it.
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I do not doubt that you have an opinion on what is reasonable or meaningful ("scientific" say some, while there are a lot of scientific results or even methods that are wrong) and what is not (or worse, if we take the reference of your evangelical experience). I do not doubt that this opinion is based on considerable experience in these areas, and you speak knowingly.
However (and unfortunately), it brings nothing as long as it cannot be shared (hence the importance of publishing works in science, for example). Saying "I know very well to discern good from bad", the rational from the irrational or the unscientific from the scientific, is good for you, but it is incommunicable to others as such. There is no other scientific knowledge than a shared knowledge. To make it communicable requires to communicate something repeatable by others (typically via a description of a method to reproduce the knowledge you claim to have discovered). And this communicable, shareable description, still lacks in your speech that remains paradoxically subjective on science (from what I've read so far in our discussion).
Understand me well, I do not blame you for not providing such a universal description of what science is, or what method should be applied systematically to arrive at scientific truth, because I think it is not possible. To say that it is possible, is rationalism.
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Let's go further:
Indeed I can not verbally communicate intelligence itself, the source of insights that I developed.
Nevertheless, there are still very significant things I can produce and communicate verbally, especially some actual understanding of a number of specific topics. So I can communicate something of my reason in the form of examples, a lot of discussions and explanations on specific things.
And more specifically, on issues among the most important I could find.
Texts I wrote on the foundations of mathematics, on religion, on a number of myths that dominate the world, economy, etc..
And I think that, even though it will ever be the magic potion to discern for sure what is most rational from what is at fault among all movements and all teachings of the present or future world, at least it can make significant progress.

For even if reason itself is not transmissible, a good overview of a number of rational thoughts that can give some knowledge and serve as examples while refuting a number of currently widespread mistakes, pitfalls and obstacles to reason, can help inspire people in the right direction.

My own progress in the exercise of reason, came by practicing it and seeing what helps to go further and what does not, so that a success can inspire further success...
Thus, examples of well-conducted reflections can inspire others to think well.

To come back to the initial subject:
Yes, reason exists, it is a very real thing, even if, precisely the same way as many other subtle realities studied by science (dark matter, etc. etc.), it can be very difficult to capture or characterize.
And it's not because something is difficult to discern or understand, that it does not exist.

To try to re-explain things:

For me (and I think, for many others too), reason makes sense only insofar as it is actually useful to advance the understanding of reality. Therefore, what for should one claim to define and communicate reason in a pure form ? Indeed, reason truly becomes reason, only by its effective work on reality. It would not make sense to transmit reason separately from what it can be here for. The problem of skeptics, who uses the paranormal as an example, is that, while admittedly, somehow it would be good to present reason as applied to something, it is also necessary to do truly and sincerely, appropriately to the reality of the object at stakes. Because the real goal should be the object, reality, and not reason for itself. For, a reason that would be reduced to itself or seeked for its own purpose, disconnected from the reality that it is here to discover, even if some bits of reality would be used as an exercise, would simply not be reason anymore. (This remark does not diminish the rationality of pure mathematics, which is an effective knowledge of the existing world of mathematics, even if different from the usual world, rather than an empty methodology).

To use anything as an excuse or support to communicate reason, is already a diversion from reason. The real reason can exist and be transmitted only by being taken neither as an object in itself, nor even a priority, but by treating it fully and honestly as it should always have remained: a discipline subordinated to the study to its true goal which is knowledge of reality.

I therefore believe that the true rationalism must renounce trying to define reason as a definable object, in favor of its development as a reality, as a kind of sport that exists only through its practice.

So my main approach is to develop my own exercise of reason, and work to make it succeed in something. It would be absurd to try out a characterization of reason without having prior "evidence", experience of how this can effectively help the progress of knowledge. Finally, this "reason" by which I could finally discover reality, turns out to be neither simpler, more fundamental or transmissible than its fruits (knowledge). Thus it is just natural to me, in my rationalism (= desire of contributing to the development of rational understanding in the world) to attach as much importance and care to first exercise reason in myself and then share the fruit obtained, than models of reasoning that led me there.

Is this clearer?

Some further ideas that came to me afterwards:

One could say that the method is to science what means of transport are to travel.
Means of transport are required to travel, but they are not the travel.

Putting forward some scientific methods, may be useful to people who might currently have no method to progress but say still and only dream of travelling rather than really travel in the world of knowledge; who dream of knowledge but have none true and reliable. Or maybe, who develop some partial knowledge, but mixed with errors, and remain unable to sort them. Unfortunately, this is precisely a very common situation across currently widespread religions and spiritualities.

But the presence of some possible means of transport, does not exclude other useful ones. Some are genuine, others illusory. How do we know? Well that's a big problem, the answer is not always given in advance ... however, the point is that, fantasy and actual travel are two separate things, and the abundance of people who seriously imagine themselves on the moon while they are only there in dream, is a major problem. And the presence of a serious problem, does not mean that the mistaken ones would necessarily be "at fault" in any sense whatsoever, nor that any readily available solution must always be here under hand - but some possibilities of a few significant steps forward do exist, and need to be used.

Also, normally the high-level rational discussions are debates in which many specific questions can be addressed, but where the qualifiers of "rational" and other variations of this word, has no place because it lacks the necessary meaningfulness for the issues involved (it would sound like the battles of insults among children, away from the real debate). But there are also hopeless cases, where one debater is unable of reason; this lack of rationality turns out to be a major obstacle to any attempt at dialogue, letting no other option for the other, but to express this observation of failure in terms of irrationality ... while the other may have a similar impression in the other way round. Who is really right? Well, hard to say...

Also, I do not see the issue of rationality as a matter of "criterion for comparing theories". Reason is a dynamic for the constitution and development of any theory. Some theories are rationally developed, others less. There is no on the one hand, theories enjoying an independent reality in the world of ideas, then on the other hand, a rationality criterion falling from the sky that would give them good or bad marks. Reason was there in the first place to build theories presented, then it can come back and rework them, review them and modify the old ideas into new, clarified ideas (that may or may not be rigorously equivalent to the former version).


But, while a good form of skepticism is part of rationality, we cannot reduce rationality to it.
Genuinely rational skepticism insists on either rejecting or avoiding judgement for claims or phenomena where no evidence is present yet. While it is indeed necessary to not pretend to know something that cannot be checked, and we have no "right" to systematically demand or pretend having all the needed evidence for the truth on all questions we "need to know", this is not a satisfactory end of the story.
And, just as science's acknowledgement of its incompleteness did not prevent it from discovering a very good deal of knowledge, there are indeed many answers readily available to reason about the sense of life, which shall be presented in the next parts.



Part I - Part II - Part III

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