CablexDeadpool wrote:Sorry I am all over the place. But what I am trying to say, using the standard scientific method, the prediction, observation etc, without using qualitative elements or blind elements yields extremely biased opinions which is then just spewed all over as fact.
Others have already chimed in, but I do feel compelled to say that when you talk about "the standard scientific method", you're already off on the wrong foot. "the standard scientific method" is something taught to middle school kids that is so simplistic that even at the high school level the teachers are banging their head against the wall due to the over-simplistic mindset.
Different scientists have to work in very different ways in order for it to actually make any kind of sense, and throughout all of it there is a community of other scientists who can score points if they find flaws with what you're doing.
Fundamentally the idea of science is also a recognition of limitations: correlation is not causation. We can prove things false, but we cannot prove things true. If he get theories that can be tested with predictions that keep proving correct again and again we'd be fools not to make use of the theories, but that's all we're doing.
Yes, on a basketball board the formality is typically not kept. This isn't a scientific journal, and if people insisted on treating it like one, no one would want to come here to have fun. So I'm not going to preface every post with "in my opinion" or "based the theory that...", but it's supposed to be a given that no one has a monopoly on explaining causality.
Of course as I say this, as I said before, we can prove things false, and if someone else is saying something that simply doesn't fit with facts, it has to be reasonable to bring up those facts. People asking, "If Wilt was so dominant as a scorer, how come his team offenses didn't do better?" are asking something that clearly should be asked when so many people simply assume certain things.
I'm sure that part of the problem here, is that what started out as simply asking the questions that needed to be asked let to productive discussion and analysis, and long periods of time that leaves people no longer phrasing things as a question. So now someone comes in with a "Wilt is the GOAT scorer" belief system, and people respond in the most succinct way possible. They simply cut to the end of the discussion that's already been had, and give their answer with a few bullet points for reasons. The answer then is sometimes too far away from the new poster's belief system and he comes to the conclusion that there's a village of crazy people here, and begins to extrapolate their moral failings.
To a certain point, there's nothing to be done. If a group of people are having a conversation where they discuss A, B, C, D, etc, and every few minutes someone new comes in and says, "What about C?", that group is going to lose patience. Of course if that new person said, "I'm getting stuck on C, could one of you help me when you get a chance?", people in the group are going to work with the guy. More often though on RealGM, the new person will actually say, "The answer is C. What's wrong with you idiots?"...oh, and sometimes, that new person isn't new, he's been banned before because he calls people who don't agree with him "idiots".
And heck, even if people had the patience of saints, and did use proper scientific terminology to prevent ignorant people from assuming that causality is known, where would that get them? After being the victim of a hit and run one time, the DA made a point to "coach" me to talk more like a normal person because he said that me using precise language about what is absolutely known would make normal people assume that I wasn't sure what I saw. It's really hard for me to imagine someone being anti-"scientific method" themselves speaking strictly in scientific terminology that makes explicit what the minor doubts are.
