Thousands of years of practice... 2
angry doc was hoping to take a break from blogging this weekend, but Today had to publish an interview with a biomedical research scientist with an interest in fengshui...
(excerpt)
Q: Are Western science and fengshui truly incompatible?
A: I don't think there's any inconsistency between science and fengshui at all. It's just that fengshui acts on intangible energy and science can't explain or measure qi. It's wrong to say fengshui is unscientific as, to me, science is about formulated, systematic knowledge attained via empirical means — that is, experimentation, observations, so on. Fengshui knowledge has been attained through 5,000 years of observation and recording — 5,000 years of empirical evidence!
Cow dung.
angry doc doesn't have anything against scientists who choose to believe in fengshui in their 'private' capacity, but it's sad to see a biomedical research scientist who either cannot distinguish between science and non-science, or is trying to pass off non-science as science.
Labels: alternative medicine, in the news
posted by angry doc at
12:50 pm
6 Comments:
she's not a scientist. just a consultant. whatever that means
By
Anonymous, At
November 12, 2006 12:38 pm
Hear hear. Fengshui cannot be dressed up and passed off as science simply because both rely on empirical observation - implying somehow that is all that Science is. The core tenets of Fengshui were not determined by experiment, and the results of Fengshui are not falsifiable by experiment, which makes it distinctly non-Science. To argue that Science cannot measure "intangible" qi is to concede that there is nothing scientific about Fengshui. I'd happily accept Fengshui if it stayed on the other side of the line, but all these attempts to lend credibility to non-Scicence by either window-dressing it as Science, or by implying that Science fails to explain certain phenomena, are just irrational.
By
wahj, At
November 13, 2006 11:10 am
Agreed. Wahj has it right.Feng shui isn't even on the battlefield here.
And angry doc, don't let that goon put you off (bio)medical students. Some of us are very nice people.
And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go put a golden frog on a pile of coins in the northeastern corner of my room.
By
Anonymous, At
November 13, 2006 11:18 am
Make sure that thing doesn't have an anus though. Otherwise all the accumulated wealth 'qi' will just pass out from the other end...
By
angry doc, At
November 13, 2006 5:04 pm
HAHA!!
Anyways, angry doctor, I've a question for you. Which one is more important - Science or Technology?
By
Anonymous, At
November 15, 2006 7:54 pm
Interesting question.
I guess to answer that question I need to know how you would define 'important'.
In practice the two are usually indivisible - technology is the practical application of knowledge gained through the scientific method.
By
angry doc, At
November 15, 2006 9:20 pm
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