There Doesn't Have to Be a Podium for There to Be a Debate

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Eddie

@Mercer

Your gross misrepresentations of science and scientists are the issue here.

I’d suggest that it is more likely that your conception of “science” and “scientists” …

I’d suggest that you are moving the goalposts in a most mendacious way.

Here’s the claim you are trying to defend with irrelevant quotes:

@Eddie

Your concession that “arguments about interpretation” do occur at conferences is all that I have ever been trying to say.

The context is conferences. None of your quotes are relevant to them. So I take it that you are tacitly conceding that you have no idea what happens at them, starting with our use of the term “meetings.”

@Eddie

…is shaped wholly by your experience of your own little corner of science.

You couldn’t be more wrong. I would bet that my publication record is the broadest of all who post here:

My Bibliography - NCBI

I’ve presented this to you before, so you have no excuse for making that false claim. You can click on that from anywhere, now that your fake excuse of lacking PubMed access has been deflated.

I’ll close with what I wrote and you predictably ignored in favor of constructing yet another straw man:

@Mercer

We debate grant application scores at NIH study sections. We debate whom to hire as new faculty at department meetings. Those are real debates. No one is standing behind a podium in either case. What you refuse to acknowledge is that when we do science, we have the obligation to test our hypotheses, so at meetings we are almost always presenting the results of debates we have already had with ourselves. That being said, there have been obvious failures to do so, the ENCODE fiasco being a familiar one to people here.

That’s the essence of the scientific method, and the failure to engage in it, emphasized by your misrepresentations, is the best marker for identifying pseudoscience.