Re: scientist ratings

Bobby Whalen (organix@hotmail.com)
Fri, 25 Jul 1997 12:18:46 PDT


Anton Sherwood wrote:

>Someone has proposed a scale of scientific credibility:
>
>> 10.0 Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr: The standards.
>> 9.0 Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking: No experiments, no 10.
>> 8.0 ?
>> 7.0 Carl Sagan: [...]
>> 6.0 ?
>> 5.0 Andrew Weil: [...]
>> 4.0 Hal Puthoff, Fleischman & Pons: [...]
>> 3.0 ?
>> 2.0 John Gray (Mars/Venus): Interesting ideas, thin on facts.
>> 1.0 ?
>> 0.0 L. Ron Hubbard, Creationists, Astrologers.
>
>The cosmetic ".0" suggests a crackpot who confuses precision with
accuracy.
>

This could be fun. I think an interesting experiment would be to create
an extropian web-based (cgi) voting scheme with user-authentication,
where we could rate scientists on both their scientific merits and
extropian relevance. For example the scientists responsible for the
cloning of sheep and the exowomb would be given high extropian ratings.
The results of this ongoing democratic survey could be displayed as a
2-d grid with extropian merit as one axis, and scientific merit on the
other. It might look something like this:

Extropy--0---1---2---3---4---5---6---7---8---9---10---->
Science
|
1
2 Jeremy Rifkin
3 R.A. Wilson
4 CSICOP Flieshman & Pons
5 Hal Puthoff
6 Andrew Weil
7 Edward Teller Carl Sagan
8 Freeman Dyson
9 Albert Einstein/S. Hawking
10 Neils Bohr Richard Feynman
|
|

Cheers,

Bobby Whalen


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