Excerpt from David Gelertner’s essay The Closing of the Scientific Mind:
That science should face crises in the early 21st century is inevitable. Power corrupts, and science today is the Catholic Church around the start of the 16th century: used to having its own way and dealing with heretics by excommunication, not argument.
Science is caught up, also, in the same educational breakdown that has brought so many other proud fields low. Science needs reasoned argument and constant skepticism and open-mindedness. But our leading universities have dedicated themselves to stamping them out–at least in all political areas. We routinely provide superb technical educations in science, mathematics, and technology to brilliant undergraduates and doctoral students. But if those same students have been taught since kindergarten that you are not permitted to question the doctrine of man-made global warming, or the line that men and women are interchangeable, or the multiculturalist idea that all cultures and nations are equally good (except for Western nations and cultures, which are worse), how will they ever become reasonable, skeptical scientists? They’ve been reared on the idea that questioning official doctrine is wrong, gauche, just unacceptable in polite society.
A long essay by interweb standards, but well worth reading.
h/t
Related: “Useful New Term: Catechism-Science“.
I’ve always liked the term “scientician” for those who wrap themselves in the mantle of science but don’t actually perform any.
I just suffered a pretty good example of this applied to a large senior’s organization to which I belong. A former chief scientist under environment minister David Anderson (Chretien era) was invited to speak to us about his experience in Antarctica, where he attended an international treaty conference. So far so good.
Though the guy was retired on his superannuated, super-duper fully indexed defined benefit, taxpayer funded pension plan, he took no time at all in defaulting to global warming, ocean rising, species at risk talking points. Before his hour was up he had condemned any pipeline project and claimed tankers would result in irreversible oil spills on the B.C. coast.
Then one of our members, a former civil servant in the aeronautics (Transport Canada) area, blithely inquired about “his experience in working as a scientist in today’s environment” – a soft ball question deliberately designed to invite the speaker to rail about the muzzling of gov’t scientists, cuts to research budgets and how none of this would improve until we “demand change” – polite code for getting rid of this government.
Normally I challenge this kind of clap-trap, but the conservative, polite side of me does not want to embarrass persons who have been invited to speak. But I had steam coming out my ears. I did speak (pretty harshly) to him after his presentation, telling him his expression of political views to a captive, non-partisan group was unprofessional and uncalled for.
I also challenged his professional integrity, pointing out that arctic ice as well as Antarctic ice is increasing, that there has been no indication of sea level rise anywhere and that global temperatures have been static for 15 years – all of which he failed to acknowledge during his presentation.
I also tore a strip off my fellow member who teed up the soft-ball question. Initially he feigned innocence, but then fessed up to knowing that he was opening a door which invited the guest to walk through. Finally, I wrote to both our president and speaker chairman, making it clear that we must not countenance guest speakers using our forum to further their own political agenda.
But that’s the thing about left leaning people – everything is political and they simply assume that any audience is both an opportunity and too often, a friendly support group.
No Guff, welcome to the results of the world of Marxist brainwashing for forty years. Our kids and grandkids have been fed this claptrap for decades. The brainwashing is no longer even hidden.
But that’s the thing about left leaning people – everything is political and they simply assume that any audience is both an opportunity and too often, a friendly support group.
That is why I boycott Starbucks. ( You desrve a Timmy’s card just for standing up and being counted. Good for you!)
Interesting rant, but most of the topics he touches on are non-problems. Kurzweill is brilliant but deluded. What most computer scientists do is to confuse the map with the territory. The bigger question is whether our brains will every understand in detail how the brain functions? Godel’s theorem was the basis of Penrose’s proof that one cannot simulate a brain with a Turing machine. If we want to push the brain as computer analogy further, then the brain is a quantum computer.
Every age tries to explain brain function in terms of common technologic articles present in the era. Thus, we have the mechanical models of brain function in the 1800’s, then it became electromagnetic once electricity became more widely used and now it’s the brain as computer. Understanding the brain is a classic blind men and the elephant problem with the majority of mechanistic thinkers having found the elephants rectum and crawled inside sharing their noisome discoveries with each other. There’s an electrical brain, a chemical brain, a connectionist brain and a very poorly understood quantum brain. The grandiose notion that we’ve come to the limits of scientific knowledge and all that’s necessary is to just build smaller and faster silicon chips and we’ll get a brain is very similar to the idea of physicists in the late 1800’s that all physical laws have been discovered and that scientific discovery in the future will merely be measuring various fundamental constants to finer and finer precision. This was the era of Laplace’s clockwork universe where, having determined the position and velocity of all particles in the universe, one could predict the past and future completely. Heisenberg was the first one to derail this grandiose claim and a more recent contributor to the laughable absurdity of such a prediction is found in chaos theory.
My personal belief is that the universe is far stranger than we imagine. As far as human-machine interfacing, I’d be quite happy to have implanted silicon in my brain to enhance brute-force calculations that wetware is not very good at performing. We’ll soon be tinkering with cellular machinery and I would welcome the existence of nanobots which would float around ones bloodstream dealing with cancer cells in a way that ones immune system can’t. That age is going to come but I suspect we’ll still be arguing over the nature of consciousness once we have widespread nanotech.
“confuse the map with the territory.”
My hat’s off to anyone who has read Alfred Korzybski.
“My personal belief is that the universe is far stranger than we imagine.”
Pretty far out on the limb, aren’t we, Loki? 🙂
“We’ll soon be tinkering with cellular machinery and I would welcome the existence of nanobots which would float around ones bloodstream dealing with cancer cells in a way that ones immune system can’t.”
Tinker: To make unskilled or experimental efforts at repair; to fiddle.
To all those who think there is a technological solution to Mankind’s discontent, I will quote Susan Ertz:
“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
Blackfox, Korzybski came up with quite a few profound ideas but he’s also hard reading. It’s quite obvious in Heinlein’s novels when Heinlein was in his Korzybski phase. Despite Korzybski, we’re still stuck with Aristotelean logic and Korzybski’s non-Aristotelian thinking hasn’t found much acceptance. Our acceptance of binary divisions as “natural” is probably rooted in our having two cerebral hemispheres.
As far as not knowing what to do with myself on a Sunday afternoon, I can’t imagine what that would be like. My problem is finding time to do all the things I want to do. Medicine was supposed to just be a first step to discover how to prevent aging and then I could do the stuff I really wanted to do. As far as tinkering goes, that’s the most fun part of doing things and I view it as a form of play. Some might find the notion of tinkering with cellular machinery a bit worrisome but I just view that as a sub-type of meatware hacking.
“It’s quite obvious in Heinlein’s novels when Heinlein was in his Korzybski phase. Despite Korzybski, we’re still stuck with Aristotelean logic and Korzybski’s non-Aristotelian thinking hasn’t found much acceptance.”
Heinlein was influenced by Korzybski when he was in his twenties and thirties but he was tremendous admirer of Ayn Rand – an Aristotelian, as am I – when he was in his sixties, that is to say: when he grew up.