the best of us

:laughing:

…this running commentary comes to you courtesy of having spent far too many hours watching ‘the horses’… courtesy of my father’s love of betting on ‘the ponies’. :slight_smile:

I can’t do the hand signals though :neutral_face:

Ah, now I get it. That pattern has become embedded in your brain, MagsJy. It was an instant image. Horses are awesome ~ such noble creatures.

I can’t do the hand signals though :neutral_face:

WendyDarling and Serendipper both now in 3rd place, with Karpel still out in front and Gloominary in 2nd place… subsequent votes permitting

Fixed and Pedro give good banter… did you put them out to pasture?

It’s me. Duh.

I voted for Wendy Darling, not just because we seem to share many of the same positions on SG&E, but she’s a pretty skilled, and relentless debater.

Carleas and Serendipper are also, very skilled debaters.

Karpel Tunnel said I’m nuanced.
I have to say the same thing about him, he’s one of the more nuanced, openminded and thoughtful people here.

I think everyone on the list brings something unique to the forum, tho I haven’t gotten to know some as well as others.

I think Silhouette deserves to be on the list.
He’s one of the more insightful and philosophically gifted people we have, and he’s a good writer.

In the main, I enjoy this forum, most of the regulars are capable of handling controversial topics in a reasonable, openminded and respectful manner, on everything from metaphysics, to SG&E, which’s what I look for in a forum.

Whoala, Wendy Darling has taken the lead!
We might be looking at a big upset folks.

The question from the poll: WHO IS ILOVEPHILOSOPHY.COMS MOST FEROCIOUS & OUTSTANDING MEMBER?

Yes and I feel the need to point something out . . .

It is clear that we are not necessarily looking for the most outstanding philosopher on ILP but rather the most ferocious and outstanding member or otherwise “top dog of this place”.

Just saying :laughing:

Top dog of this place…

It seems to me that that may vary at different times. Does it necessarily have to be written in stone? We are all like rivers ~ we ebb and we flow…but I may be wrong.

I remember a time when you, encode-decode, may have been considered to be the top dog, at least by me. We have our lives, our lives change, our jobs keep us busy.

This is all really subjective thinking anyway. But you, encode-decode, are brilliant. :mrgreen:

I do not know why Fixed Cross and yourself were not on that list.

I do not know why I was. LOL
:auto-swerve:

Gee, you know how to make a man blush don’t you? Yes top dog of this place does vary from what I have noticed and no it does not have to be written in stone but as someone pointed out it is a fun diversion from the norm. No you are not wrong, we do ebb and flow. I do like this diversion that barbarian has presented.

It is easy for us to dismiss ourselves Arc. I think you are one of the best of us.

Wendy is awesome too :smiley: then again - I like all the listed people and a number of unlisted people.

Rengel in politics, Serendipper in science: my 2 favourite posters.
Dippers deconstruction of infinity, Rengels views on geopolitics send out sparks straight from the forge.

If only these fellows could stop believing in the merit of consensus everywhere, and not just in the field they happen to be genius at, they could be real philosophers.

Will be. Might be.
Brilliant men even if still superstitious outside of their specialties.

Consensus is truly only for women. And only for cheap women.

Netwon had to invent differentiation and integration math in order to even express his insight so that rubbernecks could bend their heads over it and purrhups give it their precious consent.

Fuck rubbernecks, and fuck consensus.

Its only about power, the power to not be a rubberneck, to wield the fucking hammer and forge some iron steels.

It remains true that almost everyone who bucks the consensus is wrong. Lots of people can and do reject the consensus. The people that get remembered are the ones who identify where the consensus is wrong, and those people stand out precisely because the consensus is so generally right.

If never is most of the time then maybe.

Because not ever has a single scientific theory been attained by consensus.

The very essence of scientific conception is BREAKTHROUGH.

This is a caricature of how science works. There are pioneering papers published every year that have literally thousands of authors.

K: and how do we achieve this BREAKTHROUGH? Science is not done
as an isolated pursuit… Newton for example said about his work,

“If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants”

And Einstein stated he could not have done his work without
the current work going on in math and physics for example the work
of David Hilbert and Max Plank and Hendrik Lorentz… so you are
simply wrong… ALL science is done by consensus and working together…

Kropotkin

Nicely put, and I suppose I agree. One trick is, it is hard to falsify. Now, while I think that even if we somehow could count all the times people went against consensus and were right and this has not been recorded - cause they killed them, cause they were ignored, etc. - it still would be a minority. That’s my intuitive guess. My intuitive guess is also that not well recorded instances are much more numerous than we realize. That people are getting shut down with great regularity on political, paradigmatic and personal grounds. And how many backed off in the face of consensus, most without even knowing it. Perhaps our knowledge and perception have been evolving at a snail’s pace.

And I suppose some of them present theories, though generally on a small scale, filling in the gaps in already consensus-believed in models. Theories that change the way we view things probably are based on a few people strugging against current models.

Yes, obviously. We know this for a fact.

It is extremely offensive to me that people actually believe this consensus shit. What a stupid joke modern man is.

Democracy is a political system. If the Greeks knew people would go and try to claim science with it I doubt they’d have risked it.

Newton, Keppler, Galilei, what a caricatures of what science is. How dare they stand in the way of our thousand authored articles. Pah. They’re like, Sooo irrelevant, losers. Our Commission knows best because we Agree with each other.

It’s so warm we are all hugging. Newton, Copernicus, theyre just bums. We are Science. We voted and: we agree.

It sounds like you wish there were a consensus around how much shit consensus is. That’s weird.

OK, you’ve named three people in the history of science. Let’s go ahead and round up to say there have been 1000 Einsteins.

Compare that with the roughly 10 million scientists operating today, and you can see that most of science is not the lone genius shifting paradigms.

Moreover, as Peter points out, even the Einsteins weren’t operating in a vacuum. There was already a scientific consensus at the time of Einstein that luminiferous ether theory didn’t match observation. Einstein’s contribution was within that consensus, providing a theoretical model for the consensus about what we’d observed, and drawing on theoretical advances provided by others.