Disputing someone's first hand direct experience with googled internet facts seems moronic to me. I would point out that science is all about direct observation, and that if I can repeatably tell which water was boiled with bamboo charcoal in blind taste tests and identify it as sweeter and crisper ( I can, and others can too ) - then it is for me regardless of anyone's half assed scientific google copy/paste. In fact its scientifically determined to be sweeter and crisper for me.Smells_Familiar wrote:you seem to be on a roll. would you elaborate if it's not too far off topic?tenuki wrote:Knowing facts isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
I see a lot of that on teachat lately and find it disturbing and counter-productive to making good tea or having good discussions about it.
Another example would be the person who told me black spiral couldn't taste similar to sun moon lake and hadn't even ever tasted a black spiral, while my observation was made when drinking the two teas in question side by side. To mention that most black spiral lacks the wintergreen note in sun moon lake would have been valid (not in this case, but in general), but that isn't what was said initially. I do plan on doing a session with just black spiral soon to see if the wintergreen note is there as I remember it or if maybe it was there because I was tasting the two side by side that session. So that conversation eventually ended up in a productive place thank goodness.
As you know I'm not adverse to disputes and arguments, quite the opposite. But to value 'facts' found on the internet over direct personal experience is MORONIC and people who practice it are MORONS.
People who copy/paste info off the internet to the internet are also MORONS. If you want to refer to other material, link to it with attribution you fool, don't try to pass it off as yours.
Another common one is missing the context - the recent Imen / Roy Fong debacle is a good example. Both are clearly authoritative sources and both mostly right within their respective contexts. The problem comes when the assumption is made that there is only one answer and that someone being wrong means someone else is right and visa versa. I felt both of the original articles had good information in them and didn't necessarily compete for truth. The resulting flame war came from those other assumptions. Note Imen's 'closing' comments about people in authority needing to be careful to only publish 'truth'. So sadly wrong...
Summary:
Pay attention to actually making and drinking your FREAKING TEA people, stop putting so much store in gathering 'facts' on the internet - like as not that activity practiced exclusively or even preferentially will actually make the tea in your cup worse not better.
PS: IMO this is a deeper issue in society at large which is confusing 'scientific' with 'factual' instead of with the better idea of 'hypothesis/observation/falsification'. A 'scientific fact' as generally considered is not 'true', it is a 'hypothesis' that has not yet been proven 'false', which is a colossal difference. Data collected via repeatable experiment maybe could be considered 'true scientific fact', but that can even be disputed and in any event isn't 'fact' as generally defined as including a reason for the data. Many times in science the ability to predict behavior comes without any explanation as to 'why' it's behaving that way. Simply ask any scientist you know why quantum mechanics is true and you will get a confused shrug or one of many theories, yet it's been used to predict behavior since the turn of last century - well over 100 years.... They are building the supercollider in cern in part to maybe eliminate some of those theories, but even that will not create 'truth', just falsify some hypotheses and probably create a whole slew of new ones. That picture of science is deeply different than 'here is a fact I googled on the internet'.
Thoughts? Discussion?
However, I can wipe my butt and even maybe buy toilet paper without google.
