| | While not the poorest of neighborhoods in Austin, mine is well known. (Off hand, I mentioned that it is not safe to bicycle in because of the heavy traffic and lack of bike lanes, to which a colleague replied, "It's not safe to live there." Myself, I am an urban sort of guy, so I have blue collar sensibilities. Nonetheless, I wrote up my neighborhood on my blog here as an example of the roots of poverty.
That said, I was surprised by Prof. Machan's assertions which seemed to admit to an analytic-synthetic dichotomy:
Everything is not subject to the experimental method--for example whether faking research is ethical isn’t.
... never mind that no natural science can show there is anything amiss with faking research, with distorting anyone’s views, etc.
History can be a science because you can posit a general rule for one place and time such as Ptolemaic Egypt and test your hypothesis against a different place and time such as the Olmugee culture of American Georgia.
Many experiences can be trotted out to show the consequences of faking research. From numismatics, I offer the so-called "Western Assay Bars." These fakes not only were reported in The Red Book, they made their way into the Smithsonian. When the fraud was discovered, that museum shut down its display of US Numismatics and threatened to put the entire display in the crates as seen at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dr. Eric Poehlman was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for defrauding the National Institutes of Health. His study resulted in estrogen being prescribed for menopausal women, though, ultimately, this was a false diagnosis.
In fact the essential validity of the scientific method is that it is self-referential. Strict empiricists and strict rationalist both deny that validty. But objectivism is rational-empiricism and there are no dichotomies. The moral is practical, the empirical is rational.
SW ... now is the time, more than any other, for a morality that is rational, that is independent of religion, that is based upon reason, and taught in our schools ...
Go for it. Create a program and sell it, Steve. I write letters all the time to private schools, charter schools, etc. No takers, so far...
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