Big Whimper?

[Keith McMullen]

Have you ever taken a statistics class? There is no way scientists just 
stop and accept the refutation of their hypotheses. There is too much 
money and ego at stake. You simply reinterpret those non-matching 
numbers. There are a myriad of ways to fuck around with the results 
themselves, or change the variables and redo the experiment to get the 
desired confirmation. The methods for doing such are brazenly taught in 
any college stats class. Now before you scamper to the keypad to give 
me another generous dose of common sense, of course there are some 
basics that can be repeated and demonstrated and are just black and 
white and crystal clear and all of that. But, that's not the fun stuff. 
  Your allegiance to the clarity of the scientific method is a tad 
scary. Fundamentalism in rationalist garb. And as for art providing 
'meaning' in Alice's Humpty Dumpty fashion, since when is art about 
'meaning?' The best thing about art, especially Pynchon's, is its 
embracement of the futility of finding any fucking 'meaning.'

On 10/10/2005, at 2:46 AM, John Doe wrote:
>
> Incidentally, this kind of process is a sort of
> built-in Humbling Mechanism; in ART, and other areas
> of endeavor, one's ego can go full crank and
> "determine" the meanings of things...but in science,
> no matter how big you ego is, no matter how
> charismatic your personality, no matter how good
> looking or well-connected you are, if the numbers
> don't match in the end, your hypothesis is wrong -
> period. Good scientists understand this