Talk:Goals of science

The first pass of this was written in response to PJR's edit of. I would welcome PJR coming here and actually writing about what he feels the goals of science are and why he feels that evolution is atheism masquerading as science and how would would separate one from the other. I would hope that such a discussion could happen without people getting banned (no offense meant to PJR, but there are sysops at CP that feel that trying to reach an understanding of the material is "talk page pollution" which results in the talk page getting reverted, claims of last wordism and bans). Granted, I am not a sysop and don't have the ability to unblock a person but I do hope that people here can be more civil and not resort to abusing administrative abilities to "win" arguments. --Shagie 04:11, 13 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Maybe this would be better off as an essay? Not sure... mainspace article?  Peeps, mob, and lurkers, please chime in?  ħ uman  01:26, 3 September 2008 (EDT)

Sorry to barge in. I thought that this said the Goats of Science and I was interested. But. ......... Carptrash 02:04, 3 September 2008 (EDT)
 * Hehe :)  ħ uman  02:10, 3 September 2008 (EDT)

Human, you pissed me off, here....
That was a lot of work I did trying to shape a rambling bit of writing into something resembling an article. I'm not saying it was perfect, and as a whole the thing still needs work, but I'm a little pissed at you for reverting it wholesale with no discussion. RaoulDuke 03:47, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Seriously Human, undoing nearly 1000 characters of work without a comment? 03:48, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The illiteracy ("the pollinatorss", "Lie we saw with the flowers, animals that were most successful were the ones with the longest apparatus for getting at the nectar.") struck me hard, and digging through the diffs didn't help. So I rolled back.  Please try to edit in competent English, especially if you are going to rewrite a lot of an article.  03:52, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Nice fuckin' attitude. I make typos. Sorry. I'll try to rise to your level of perfection in the future. RaoulDuke 03:54, 25 September 2009 (UTC)


 * PS, "rollback" does not allow a comment. And all the diffs, as Trent has pointed out to me, are still there if we want to unearth them. Raoul, trouble is, your writing "looked" as poor to me as a lot of what you were replacing.  After clicking back through five or so diffs, I got tired of the mispellings and stuff.  I may have been wrong - I note you undid my rollback anyway, so what's the loss?  Where's the beef here?  Now, are you gonna spell and grammar check your additions?  03:57, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * By the way, despite your work, the article is still fairly illiterate. It could really use some headers, if there is indeed a structure inherent in this incoherent article.  04:29, 25 September 2009 (UTC)


 * It seems to me the article starts off with good intentions, and then mires itself in some stupid evo/creo wanking. Most of the last two-thirds could be deleted with no harm, IMHO.  04:31, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Usefullness
This article, if you rad above in the first talk section, was an attempt to argue with some cretinist. As such, it lacks focus - even meaning. That an article called "goals of science" starts wanking about moth proboscisi and such shows how there is no point really being made. Do we really need this, what links here, and what should it really say? 04:35, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Problem: Science has no goals. Scientists might, but not science.  Sterile 10:46, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Agreed. The whole concept of the article is flawed, & it's not clear what conclusions it's trying to put across, other than refuting a few moronic suggestions.   10:55, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

What are the goals and what are not?
The first paragraph talks about one goal of science and it says: "to best predict what will happen". I'd say this should be better worded as "To make falsifiable predictions that can be tested against an empirical reality", as our Scientific method article says. But that would rather mess up (perhaps debatable) historical examples of science in the rest of the paragraph.

All the rest of the article (presently the vast majority of the text) is devoted to talking about what are not goals of science. Given the thrust of the article perhaps it would be better titled: "What science isn't" or "Misconceptions about science".--BobNot Jim 10:29, 25 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Article starts by stating that "One of the principal goals of science is to try to best predict what will happen next given a set of situations" & ends by saying that "any worldview that can predict anything — or rather everything — has no predictive power at all". Huh?   10:58, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Surely the main object (not goal) of science is to go "Where No Man Has Gone Before"[sorry]. Science doesn't have a goal other than increasing the sum of human knowledge about the universe - rather too diverse an object to be a goal. Individual disciplines might have goals: finding the Higgs boson; finding a cure for HIV/AIDS; explaining climate change; etc. but science generally isn't goal led. 12:52, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The article was a huge mess before I started poking with it, and while I think I can understand the argument that the original author was trying to put forth (in part having to do with the fact that science predicts specific things based on observation, where religion has no predictive value because it can predict ANYTHING, or everything based on its own tenets....) I think in a lot of ways it's beyond, erm, redemption. And I'm still pissed at Human for calling me "illiterate." Is he always such a jerk? RaoulDuke 12:56, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Is he always such a jerk? 'Fraid so, but he's usually right too. 13:01, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Great. "Welcome to the wiki. We think you're illiterate!" RaoulDuke 13:07, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Thin skins are a handicap here. He'll probably apologise in a couple of days; or not. 13:10, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

curiosity
This section needs some basic help, but i'm torn in trying to change anything, even minor things, cause i don't really get it at all. I'm not sure if "what it's trying to say" is technical, so therefore should not be clear to use lay people - or if it's just bad writing. but there are missing verbs, agreement problems, etc at the basic grammar level. I'm afraid in this unique case, if i tried to fix anything, i'd make it worse by making assumptions of what it's supposed to mean.--En attendant Godot 16:46, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Sounds to me like another JimJast.-- 16:48, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
 * It's an interesting point, but probably needs better exposition. ADK ...I'll adhere your pumpkin! 17:15, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
 * There are different interpretations, meanings of term "science". For some people, science means a way to get foundation, employment in exchange to some promises to provide an excellent cosmic booster, or an extra harvest, or some "cold fusion", "torsion fields", etcetera. Such an interpretation leads just to the pseudo–science, frauds.
 * Another point of view declares "science" as way to satisfy the personal curiosity. In this case, in order to justify the expenses from the governmental budget, the strong restrictions are necessary. The axioms suggested provide such restrictions and such justification. From my point of view, the only second definition of science has deep meaning; the only curiosity may be serious goal of science; all the other "goals" lead to the pseudo–science, to the alteration of results of experiments and the attempts of the physical elimination of opponents and competitors, typical for the USSR and for the post–soviet Russia. The examples are the fake reports on "creation of life" by Lepeshinskaya, Lysenko and Oparin in biology, or the fake devices made in the Khrunichev research and production center.
 * As for the wording, it is taken from the publications cited in the first version of the section; it is difficult to improve it. Dmitrii Kouznetsov (talk) 16:45, 13 July 2011 (UTC)