McIrvin's addenda to Clarke's Laws

[mmcirvin]

Arthur C. Clarke wrote down some laws. Here are some more:

4. When a distinguished expert in one field states that all the leading scientists in a different field are lying or making an elementary mistake, he or she is almost certainly wrong.

5. This goes double if the story breaks in New Scientist.

6. Triple, if it breaks in a popular book by the dissenting expert. (Matthew Nisbet stated this law as "Beware of Books". While I haven't read the specific book he was critiquing, the rule is a good one.)

7. Quadruple, if the question at hand impinges on partisan politics.

Comments

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

re #6: Since I got a thorough grounding in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this is very familiar: he says pre-paradigm disciplines are carried in books, while post-paradigm sciences have all the official communication structures of journals; a book begins with derivation from first principles (not always true, but Kuhn seems to think so), while journal articles can begin from the already-accepted common paradigm base.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And while there's always that off chance that the pre-paradigm thought is on to something, the reader really has no way of gauging that, especially if chapters 2 through 25 are bitter meditations on why the entrenched establishment is suppressing the theory.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Kibo reports that Law #5 goes double if the headline includes the word "penis".