undeather

About one month ago, the youtuber Formscapes posted a video called "How science became unscientific" - which is a critique of the scientific process, the philosophy of science, dogmatic tendencies & corruption. As a scientist myself, I found the video interesting but lacking in many important nuances and in general, a prettty fallacious misrepresentation of the topic as a whole. Anyway, some days ago, the science youtuber & debunker Professor Dave responded to his video in a 1 hour long takedown of Formscapes arguments. Dave makes some very good points but also lacks awareness (due to being hardstuck in stage orange) about some of the true shortcommings of this process we call science. That said, I think it's a pretty neat case study in scientific epistemology.

I can relate to this so much! Communities like this one, as much as I love it, tend to lock you into a certain paradigm (if you are not extremely catious). It's a bit like being an active member of an atheist/materialist subreddit - just on the opposite side of the ontological spectrum. Leo preaches the virtues of contemplation, questioning believes and studying onces tendencies or conditionings. Yet I would argue that you find at least as much ignorance on here as anywhere else!

Under Formscape's current video. I think you can. But you need to use the same rhetorical language though. Dave could never argue himself out of a well defined formal logic argument. Some of his takes are nonsense, and provably so - all it needs is someone epistemically equipped enough to deal with his gibberish. I hope he get's butthurt - that was the purpose of that paragraph Yes, I think residing to a sophisticated argument based on formal logic would be the best way to deal with his antics.

Dave sometimes interacts with comments under response-videos. Let's see - I would even debate him on that.

It depends. As a general rule, plants are way cheaper than meat or fish products. This margin even grows if you factor in food quality - cheap cuts of meat are usually cheap for a reason. Higher quality, organically raised animals usually cost a multiple more than the less costly variants. On the contrary, high quality plant products usually just cost a few percent more than their counterpart. This might change from country to country, but as a general rule, it's true! (for obvious thermodynamic and complexity reasons) But then, you could also go full californian-vegan as well. Fancy salads with avocdo, blueberries, macadmia-nuts, the latest beyond-meat product & various other tropical toppings. That shit will make you poor!

Interesting take. Does your heuristic allow the possibility to infer metaphysics through phenomenology and vice versa? And if yes, by which standards?

He is what an AI would come up when prompted with:"Create a male avatar of an esoterically heterodox thinker who looks exactly like the secret love child of Jeffrey Dahmer & Terence McKenna." lol

UPDATE: Formscapes response to the allegations

Hmmm - did you test your blood right after exercising or was it drawn in the morning with no relation to those symptoms?

Do your symptoms occur before your blood pressure drops?

Yes - I would even argue that problems like these are mostly due to mental health problems. But you mentioned in a previous post that you have extremely low blood pressure as well (as low as 90/60). This could play into this dynamic as well. We know that people with extremely low blood pressure tend to experience more symtpoms of anxiety and depression. This would make even more sense in your case cause blood pressure tends to get lower after exercise. (which is when you experinece your symptoms) This is just a hypothesis, but maybe something you want to look at.

Yeah. I think science as a whole would greatly improve if we incentivise the use of psychodelics & ontogological groundwork for young scientists. There is just something about getting blown wide open, comming down and integrating the experience which humiliates you like nothing else. That said, I think it needs to be balanced out with rigor and not fucking around. A point which is barely discussed in here is how bad a lot of the science released today actually is - integrity is at an all time low.

Maybe because I was that flabbergasted by your take on scientific rigor, which isn't even in the same issue-domain than scientists being close-minded But yeah, fair enough!

Why not say it like that from the beginning? There is so much truth in that.

Yeah, I agree for the most part. A healthy balance between resistance exercise training and some form of cardio (even though I think running is perfectly fine for most people) is propably the best for keeping VO2max and lean muscle mass high during later stages of life. BMI is a good point. If you are 50kg or more overweight, running might actually put unnecessary strain on your tendons & cartilage. That said, I dont think your body would have a problem with it since the whole joint-system itself, with all it's parts, tends to become more resistant to impacts if you train it regularly. That's the beauty of antifraglity. I don'T even know if allt hose studies did control for BMI and I am too lazy to look into it. But I think we mostly agree here.

The problem is that a lot of well designed psychology-studies don't replicate at all But yeah, I totally agree - medicine suffers from the same problems (just to a smaller degree) For the really interested - there are good and novel approaches of how to integrate the complex system dynamics of studying "humans" into our reserach methods: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jep.13814 This is one huge problem with theories of everything in physics. They become mathematically abstract to the point of not being testable. The Everettian Many Worlds Interpretation of QM has the same issue. But as Max Planck said - physics advances one funeral at a time. SO I hope that some of the younger and ontologically more open scientists make the jump. I think Markus Müller is one of those young geniuses. He was interviewed by Bernardo Kastrup some time ago:

That's right, anecdotes can prove any side of an arugment. That's why we need to look at the research. I tend to agree with you that cycling and especially swimming are propably one of the most joint-sparing exercises available. Fun fact: Professional cyclist are more likely to suffer from low bone density issues (even mainfest osteoporisis) because of the extremely low impact of the movement-pattern: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/why-cycling-is-bad-for-bone-density-and-how-you-can-improve-it/#:~:text=What the Research Shows,up with age and training. I talked with my friend Brady Holmer about this issue - he holds a masters degree in human performance and is an endurance athlete himself. He publishes a blog called "Physiologically speaking", which is a great source of medical infromation for anyone intersted. Here is what he had to say: "Most of the evidence indicates that running is NOT harmful for long term knee health/arthritis/knee pain. In fact, runners tend to report healthier knees. Of course, there are runners who will struggle with knee pain. But if someone were to ask me if I’d avoid running for the fear of developing knee pain, I’d say no. There’s not much evidence that it will *cause* knee pain if you don’t already have it."

I disagree - it's way easier to design studies in medicine than in psychology. It shows in the respective replication rates. Well designed drug trials show a >95% replication rate. But I think your general point is taht once you throw humans into the picture things tend to get much more complex regardless - which is of course true if you compare it to extremely hard sciences like particle physics for example. P-values of 5-sigma or higher are unheard of in medicine but basically the standard in hard sciences.

I am starting to lose my mind a bit right now. Yeti, have you actually read through the previous posts? I agree with almost everything you just said. I have more than once mentioned that this is not about putting science on a pedestal. You are fighting windmills my friend. In fact, I am the first one who stomps on ignorant secularists when they make hyperbolic arguments about the scientific process. All this nonsense is about one specific claim made by 2 members (including Leo), which just doesn't hold any further scrutniy - and the ignorant attempts they used to defend that ridicolous position without showing any substance. For the last time: The point of contention was that less rigor in the application of the scientific method might ultimately lead to better outcomes in the context of the experiment. Rigor meaning "the strict application of the scientific method to ensure robust and unbiased experimental design, methodology, analysis, interpretation and reporting of results". Negating the importance of this is absolute horeshit for obvious reasons. You don't get better data output by making the process more prone to known biases. You don't start controlling for less confounding-variables while studying a certain population - you want to increase that number. You want to adapt the complexity of your experiment, so that it mimics reality as close as possible. You don't want less sophisticated experiments - you want more sophisticated experiments. More thought-out, better suited to look the investigated phenomeon. You don't want the shittiest statistical framework for analyzing your data. You want to best available. This is what RIGOR in science is all about. It's about decreasing bad experiments. It's about becoming more sophisticated. This has nothing to do with the materialistic bias that definitely exists in todays scientific enterprise. Do you get that? Also, stop making assumptions about what I have or have not realized in the spiritual domain. You know nothing about me. You didn't even try to understand the argument properly and started your rage-rant regardless. ALL THOSE experiments are PERFECT examples of LOW rigor in science. You just proved my point. More rigor means taking the ethical considerations seriously. It means sticking to the method itself - as close as possible. Fabricating data or blatant ignorance towards experimental ethis is what comes from LOW rigor! It's really just another for for integrity if you ask me.

Yes, cycling is definitely lower impact - and to be fair, I do know some people who experienced similar complaints (like yours) after years of running. That said, I also know some guys, marathon runners, who have perfect knee health - even after multiple years/decades and thousands of kilometers. I am also an avid runner and my knees are perfectly fine. Hmmm, it's not really my area of expertise - so I can't even say what the reserach is saying about that! But I know exactly who to contact - I will ask him and share what he says.

I did mean exactly that. A more rigorous scientific process will generally lead to better outcomes across scientific domains (like medicine) than a less rigorous approach. This was the "contentious" argument this whole circus started with. People just didn't engange and deflected into absurdity. Sorry if it didn't come across that way. I completely agree with you by the way! This is the first post in here that actually has some tangible arguments. Thank you! Science doesn't automatically make the world a better place - it's an amoral method of investigation. Everything tends become better with more love, ethics and a higher level of consciousness across the population. In fact, I would even argue that this asymmetry is the one major issue with the scientific enterprise as a moment - as Edward Wilson put it:"We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology." - the collective wisdom of our species can't hold up with the challenges of an exponentially growing scientific progress-curve. AI and the ubquitous danger of biochemical warfare through bioprinters are existential threats to an extend we have not faced before. And there are many more examples! Science does play a role in this whole dilemma and I think it's a very fair and a good critique to point that out. That said, one has also factor in all the amazing benefits science has brought us! Both sides are true. Again, maybe you did not read all the previous posts - but I am completely with you. I have always been very open about the problems in and with science - first and foremost the dogmatic attitude held by some institutions and a lot of practicing scientists. Spirituality, consciousness and enlightenment are big parts of my life - consolidating these truths with science and daily life is literally my job. That said, what makes me angry are the mind-bendingly ignorant and stupid answers some of the previous members came up with. If you want to critique science, then at least know what the hell you are talking about. If you want to argue against the virtue of rigor in science, then give some examples and a tangible argument to work with. Yet everything decomposed into a feverish jabbering, some spiritual buzzwords and pure ignorance masquerading as contemplative insight. If they just did what you are doing, it would have been fine.

You mind giving us some data that running damages your knees?

You confuse scientific rigor with the implications of morality in the context of scientific progress. Science can tell is what is (in the relative domain), but not what ought to be done. You didn't even understand the premise, yet you call bullshit.

I couldn't agree more! Well said! Look buddy, I think there is some maturation work for you to do. You are a 23 old kid who lacks epistemic humility in any way or form. And to further prove this point, you are now posting a spiral dynamics-scheme - implying @zurew & I are stuck at some kind of rationalistic, lower level paradigm. Oh, what a great 2nd tier thinker you are. Don Beck is rotating in his grave right now by this platant misuse of his ideas. Do you even know who that is? Have you ever actually read the orignal works on spirtal dynamics? Or you are just parroting ? When you were 10 yeras old and still struggling with calculating fractions at school, I was already taking courses at the integral institute. Ken Wilber himself told me that I am pretty much a systemic thinker back then. This was 13 yeras ago. My whole medical practice is centered around the idea of "integral medicine", which is a second tier approach our current understanding of medicine. What I do day in, day out literally centers around integrating science & spirituality into better outcomes for my patients. So please stop being such a buffoon. In fact, in the past I have even coached people to grow their level of conciousness and see where they are stuck using spiral dynamics or Wilber's very similar model. I am nice today, so here is how to grow as a persson: Your developement status is called "pseudo 2nd tier". You have come into contact and kind of inherited higher tier concepts & expereinces like enlightenment, unity & god conciousness. What you suffer from is called a "tier 1 shadow" - meaning that you have not adequately embodied imporatnt stages of tier one. This is what hinders you from getting to a healthy integral perspective. Notice how you shun stage orange concepts like logic & science. The aim is to transcend & include those paradigms. You lack the inclusion part. Judging from what you uttered today, it's safe to say that you neither understand science nor logic. For you to get to the next level means to deeply contemplate/understand those concepts. You need to make yoruself clear that you actually don't know much about anything and that's okay. It will change your life for good. Being holistic means a deep embodyment of ALL stages. Take it or leave it. Anyway, I am not going to waste more time answering. Take care